She looked at Bella’s face, half in shadow, and caught herself searching for echoes of the XenoGen genesets. Was that smooth curve of forehead too smooth, too round to be entirely Caucasian? Was that striking combination of pale skin and vaguely Han features pure accident or a self-conscious echo of not-so-distant history? She wondered what Sharifi had looked like to Bella—what she herself looked like.
Perfect front teeth bit a perfect lower lip. Perfect hands twisted each other’s fingers into nervous lovers’ knots. “Who killed her?” Bella whispered.
“Who told you Sharifi was murdered?”
“Does it matter?” Beautiful, jarringly unnatural violet eyes bored into Li’s eyes. “Everyone knows.”
“What else does everyone know?”
“I… I don’t speak to many people. Except Haas.”
Bella’s voice was surprisingly low, and she spoke with an accent, a halting here and there to search for the proper word. When she said Haas’s name, her voice dropped even lower.
“I don’t know who killed her,” Li said. “That’s what I’m here for. To find answers.”
Bella leaned forward, and Li heard a little catch in her breath. “And when you find them? What then?”
Li shrugged. “The bad guys get punished.”
“No matter who they are?”
“No matter who they are.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say after that. Bella sat like a stone. She looked ready to sit there forever. Certainly until Haas returned.
“Do you have a last name?” Li finally asked, just to have something to say.
“Just Bella,” the witch answered. She said the name as if it were a mere label, nothing to do with who she really was.
“You’re on contract to AMC, right?”
Bella’s mouth tightened. “To MotaiSyndicate. AMC is the subordinate contract-holder.”
“I’m sorry,” Li said. “I don’t know anything about… how that works. I probably just said something stupid.” She looked up to find Bella staring at her. “What?” she asked.
Bella pressed a hand to the pulse at the base of her own neck in a gesture that Li recognized with an eerie flash of déjà vu. It was the same biofeedback manipulation technique she’d seen Syndicate soldiers use. “Nothing,” Bella said, dropping her hand back into her lap. “You just… remind me of someone.”
“Who?” Li asked, though of course she already knew the answer.
Bella smiled.
“How well did you know Sharifi?” Li asked. “Did she talk to you about her work?”
“Not well.” Bella rubbed nervously at the rash behind her ear, then snatched her hand away like a child caught picking at a scab. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I really don’t know anything.”
“I’m sure you know more than you think,” Li told her. “It’s just a question of putting the pieces together. Tell me what you remember about the fire. Maybe I can make the connections.”
“I can’t tell you,” Bella said. “I don’t remember.”
“Just start at the beginning and tell me whatever you do remember.”
“But that’s just it. I don’t. I don’t remember anything.”
And then she started to cry.
She cried silently, tears sliding down her cheeks like rain running down the carved face of a statue. Li leaned her elbows on her knees and watched, feeling awkward and useless. She had never seen a grown woman cry like this. It was as if something had come unraveled inside her, as if she had lost whatever obscure sense of shame made people cover their faces when they cried. Lost it, or never had it in the first place.
Li cleared her throat. “What about before you went down? Or on the way down. You must have taken a shuttle. Maybe talked about going? Something.”
“No,” Bella said fiercely. “I told you. Nothing.”
She stood up so abruptly as she spoke that she knocked her coffee cup off the table.
Li reached for it without thinking. She got her hand under it just in time. The spoon fell to the floor. The saucer landed in her palm. The cup rattled but stayed upright. Nothing spilled. She set the cup back on the table and leaned down to pick up the teaspoon.
When she looked up, Bella was staring at her, slack-jawed. “How did you catch that?” she whispered.
Li held out her arm and showed Bella the network of filaments running just below the skin.
Bella looked at it like she’d never seen a wire job before. Worse than that, her face was filled with the fascinated revulsion of someone looking at a circus freak. “What—how do they put it inside you?”
“Viral surgery.”
“Like Voyt,” she said, and a shudder twisted through her slender body as she spoke the dead man’s name. “In the Syndicates, you’d be a monster.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re not in the Syndicates.”
Bella put her hand up to touch the cranial socket. “Even this is… a deviance.”
“Well, you need to access the spinstream if you’re going to work in the UN worlds. It’s how business is done here. How we communicate.”
“Communicate.” Clearly Bella had never thought of applying that word to what she did instream. “I grew up in a crèche of two thousand. I never looked in a mirror because my face—the crèche face—was all around. I never thought about who I was because I knew, every time I looked around me. I never thought about being alone because I knew I’d never have to be. And now I’m here. I don’t understand anything or anyone. I watch them talk at me, around me. I’m the deviant. And there’s no way out.”
“There’s always a way out,” Li said.
“Not for me. Not even the euth ward. I thought I was… all right. Before Hannah came. But when I meet someone like her, someone like you.” She wiped her face, pushed the heavy hair back from her forehead. “I can’t help wanting to talk to you. Wanting to feel that I’m not alone for a minute. And then you show me… that. And I don’t know what to think.”
“Sharifi was raised by humans,” Li said. “So was I.” It was as close as she’d come in fifteen years to admitting she wasn’t human.
“Does that make such a difference?”
“I guess it does.”
Bella wiped her eyes and spoke again. “I remember the day before the fire. I worked with Ha—with Sharifi. We talked about going down the next day, but we decided nothing. Not definitely. And the next thing I remember is waking up in the mine after the fire.”
Her hand crept to her neck again, and Li could see the pulse fluttering under her fingers like a bird in a hunter’s snare.
“It was dark. I—they were gone.”
“What do you mean, they were gone? Was there someone else with you before that?”
“No. Maybe.” She looked confused. “I don’t know.”
“Where were you when you woke up?”
“In the glory hole. It took me a long time to figure that out. The lights had gone out and I didn’t have a lamp. I… I crawled back and forth looking for the ladder. That’s what I was doing when I found Voyt.”
“Voyt?” Li asked, surprised. He should have been on the level above, at the foot of the stairs up to the Wilkes-Barre. “Are you sure it was Voyt?”
“I felt his mustache,” Bella said, and again Li saw that shudder of… what? Fear? Revulsion? “I never found a light though. And… there was another body.”
“At the foot of the stairs.” That would have been Sharifi.
“No. At the ladder. With Voyt. In the glory hole.” Bella put a hand to her mouth. “It was Hannah, wasn’t it?”
Li nodded. It had to have been Sharifi; no one else had died down there. But assuming Bella was telling the truth, someone had moved both Voyt and Sharifi up to the level above and left them at the bottom of the main stairs into the Trinidad for the rescue crews to find. Why? And who had done it?