“What’s our budget?” Macnamara asked.
“Remember, we wantanonymous. ” Sula considered. “I’ll go above three a month for someplace that’s got a lot of advantages, but otherwise try to stay within that.” She gave them each ten zeniths in change. “Remember, you can’t whip out a ten-zenith piece and just hand it to someone. People don’t carry that kind of money in cash, not if they’re…the kind of people who are above suspicion.”
She sensed resistance in Macnamara as his hand closed over the money.
“Yes, Patrick?” she said.
His tone was stubborn. “I don’t like the idea of you being alone in this neighborhood,” he said. “Or, uh, Ardelion, either.” He used Spence’s code name, presumably because he’d lost track of which alternate ID she was supposed to be inhabiting at the moment.
Sula laughed. “We’ve just been through acombat training course, ” she said. “It’s the rest of the neighborhood that has to watch out forus. ” And as his troubled expression didn’t fade, she patted him on the arm. “That’s a good thought, Patrick, but really, we’ll be all right.” And then, as she felt the powerful muscle in his arm, another thought occurred to her. “You grew up in the country, yes?”
“Well. A mountain village. But yes, more or less.”
“Did you learn any handicraft skills? Carpentry, say, or plumbing, or…?”
Macnamara nodded. “I’m a fair carpenter,” he said. “And I can stick pipes together.”
Sula smiled at him. “So you can build, say, secret compartments.”
Macnamara blinked. “I suppose I can,” he said.
“Good,” Sula said. She looked around the apartment again, this time with a new eye.
Perhaps they weren’t done fitting out this place after all.
The old and new apartments soon boomed to the sounds of saws and hammers, and the air was laden with the scent of glue and varnish and fresh paint. Useful items were secreted here and there, in furniture, in cabinets, and under floors, where Action Team 491 could lay hands on them at need. Sula, who was not so filled with the majesty of an officer that she disdained the use of her hands, learned some useful carpentry skills.
In another couple days Sula found her own apartment in the new neighborhood, a small room with a toilet, a shower, and an alcove for her bed. She subjected the room to the same merciless regime of scouring and painting that she had the other places, and carried to it some furniture that Macnamara had modified. In the furniture’s hidden compartments she hid the same useful items she had stored elsewhere.
On the first night, as she lay on her narrow, newly purchased mattress, her neighbors obliged her by having a screaming fight. Through the thin, prefabricated walls she heard the sounds of bellowing, of shrieking, of furniture being hurled against walls.
How many nights, she wondered, had she lain awake as a child, and listened in fear to the shouts and screams and rage in the next room? The thunder of a chair being smashed into the wall, the crack of a shattering bottle, the smack of fist against flesh? Now in the darkness she listened to those childhood sounds again, and found her heart strangely calm.
Physical violence no longer frightened her, and it wasn’t because she’d just spent the better part of two months learning how to disembowel people. It was well before the course at the Villa Fosca that she had learned how to deal with that particular fear.
She had dealt with her fear by smashing him in the head repeatedly with a chair leg, then having him tied to a heavy object and thrown in the Iola River.
It wasn’t violence that frightened her now. What she feared was failure, and exposure, and the truth. The truth that lay in those samples of human DNA in the Peers’ Gene Bank, and the truth that had been in the print of her right thumb before she’d burned it off—the truth that her name had once been Gredel, and that she’d grown up on Spannan, in a prefabricated apartment building just like this one, where she had lain in the dark and listened to violence thunder against the fragile wall between herself and her own fear.
The next day she left to meet her team at the other local, communal apartment. As she stood on her building’s stoop blinking in the morning light, she heard a suggestive voice at her elbow.
“Hello, beauteous lady.”
She turned to find a young man lounging against the wall of the building, a catlike smile on his face and a crumpled velvet hat on his head. He had the most brilliant, liquid, suggestive black eyes she had ever seen, and she decided there was no reason she shouldn’t bask in their attention for a few moments more.
“Hello, yourself,” she said.
He straightened slightly. “I haven’t seen you here before, beauteous lady.”
“I’ve just come down from the ring.”
“You lost your home then, hey?” He sidled toward her and stroked her hand in what was supposed to be sympathy. “You need One-Step to show you around Riverside, don’t you? I’ll take you to all the nice places, buy you some pretties.”
“You’ve got a job, then?” Sula asked.
One-Step narrowed those remarkable black eyes and held out both hands in protest. “I’ll spend my last minim on you, beauteous lady. All I want is to make you happy.”
“Why’s this neighborhood called Riverside? I haven’t seen a river.”
The young man grinned and tapped the pavement with one platform sole. “River’s under our feet, beauteous lady. They built the neighborhood over it.”
Sula thought of cold, slow water moving in shadow beneath her feet, dead things rolling in pale silence on the turbid bottom, and she gave a shiver. If she’d known about the river she might well have heeded her team’s doubts about the neighborhood.
One-Step sensed her change in mood, and once again stroked her hand. “You’re from the ring, hey, you don’t have any rivers up there, I understand. Don’t worry about falling in the water, everything’s safe. Flood happens, they blow the tocsin.”
Sula smiled and liberated her hand. “I’ve got an interview,” she said.
“Well hey, I’ll walk you to the train.”
“I know where the train is.” She spoke the words with a smile, but with finality. One-Step gave up his attempt to recapture her hand.
“Good luck with the interview, then, hey,” he said. “You want me to show you around, just come here to my office any time.” He threw out his hands to indicate his piece of pavement.
“I will. Thanks.”
Sula felt herself relaxing as she moved down the streets that had become almost familiar.You can disappear into a neighborhood like this. She could disappear into what she had once been, and forget the long, grinding impersonation that had been her life.
Early on Martinez’s first morning aboardIllustrious Perry arrived with a breakfast of salt-cured mayfish, fruit pickled in a sweet ginger sauce, and a fresh muffin. He had worked out an arrangement with Lady Michi’s cook: the two shared the squadcom’s kitchen and the duties of cooking for both officers. As he lingered over his coffee, Martinez called up the tactical computer and began creating an exercise for Chenforce based on encountering an enemy force at Aspa Darla.
The exercise, run the next day, was a success. However obscure the workings of his mind, Fletcher knew his job: Illustrious performed throughout with efficiency and precision, and so did the rest of the squadron. Martinez found himself envying Chenforce’s trained, disciplined crews, and wished he’d had these people aboardCorona when he was in command.