Seconds ticked by. On the tri-d, the image shifted, the footage of President Ramirez replaced by a sea of marching men.
“You see this?” Shannon asked, her voice tightly controlled. She opened a cabinet, took down a glass, and splashed bourbon in it, the bottle shaking only slightly. “They keep replaying the same loop, but I can’t seem to turn it off.”
“Shannon—”
“Here.” She pushed the drink to him, tapped it with her glass. “To the New Sons of Liberty. Tough bastards, I’ll give them that. Audio on.”
Cooper started to protest, but caught himself when he saw her look. There’s only one way to end this, and that’s making your decision, right now, and meaning it.
God help him, he just couldn’t. Feeling a little dizzy, he picked up the drink, swallowed half of it in a go.
The tri-d had reacted to Shannon’s voice command, the pirate announcer picking up mid-sentence: “—crew of wankers about five miles past the Rawlins fence line.” The shot was a high-angle, but even so, it was packed edge to edge, a living carpet of tiny figures trudging across Wyoming scrubland. A voice he recognized as Patricia Ariel’s, Epstein’s communications director, boomed out a warning, telling the militia that they were not welcome, that the Holdfast would defend itself. For a moment, everyone on the ground hesitated, and then a cry went up, the New Sons’ cheer, “This ends now! This ends now! This ends . . .”
“Attaboy, guys,” the announcer continued, “very catchy. Maybe in next week’s lesson we can work on words with more than one syllable. Oh, good, truck horns, add those too, nothing quite as scary as tooting. But then, wait for it, wait for it . . .”
The image cut off in an instant. An electromagnetic pulse, Cooper knew, to fry the electronics. He’d read details of the battle on the way to the airfield.
When the footage returned, it was clearly an hour or two later, after whichever news organization was closest had managed to scramble another camera drone. In this one, the landscape was devastated, the trucks torn and toppled, the scrubland turned into a ruined battlefield littered with corpses.
“Oh, da-yam! Well, you know what they say,” the announcer continued. “It’s all fun and games until someone launches a drone strike. Sorry about that, kids, so much for the Charge of the Dumb Brigade . . .”
Nice try, Cooper thought. But what you’re seeing, my smug friend, is an army setting up base camp.
“Audio mute.” Shannon shook her head. “What I don’t get is why Epstein stopped hitting them. News says about a thousand killed, another couple thousand wounded or fled. Which isn’t bad, I guess, but the Proteus virus took down like fifty times that. What’s the angle in mercy at this point?”
Apparently the romantic discussion had been tabled. He thought about raising it again, but didn’t really see what he could add. Better to let things cool off. “It wasn’t mercy. He just ran out of bombs.”
“You think?”
“The government wouldn’t allow the NCH to have offensive weapons. Erik bought some on the black market, built some on the sly, but he couldn’t risk having many. I’m not theorizing, I know it. I was DAR, remember?”
“You never let me forget.”
Don’t rise to it. She’s got a right to be pissed. “Anyway, he’s not worried about the New Sons. No matter how many men they have, they won’t get past the Vogler Ring. It was built to protect the Holdfast from villagers with pitchforks.” He shook his head. “It’s Smith that concerns me.”
Before, even as they watched the aftermath of a battle, her attention had been split. She’d put up a good front, but it was easy for Cooper to see that a front was all it was. But now all thoughts of their romantic future were cleared away. “Tell me.”
“He beat us to Abe Couzen.”
“That’s not good.”
“It gets worse.” He filled her in, starting at their separation. She listened attentively, asked pointed questions. It was a safe space for them, analyzing a situation and figuring out how to respond. It was what they’d done instead of dating. About the time he got to Abe’s lab, she finished her drink and poured another; as he filled her in on his conversation with Soren, he emptied his own, and she slid the bottle his way with unconscious ease. “By the way,” he said, “thanks for bringing Soren here. That couldn’t have been fun.”
“He wasn’t much company. Spent the last two days in the trunk of the car.” She flashed her half smile. “You really think he can help you?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“John is his best friend. He’s not going to give him up easily. Are you going to . . .”
“I don’t see much choice. Smith has been maneuvering the whole world to this moment. I still don’t know why, but I know he doesn’t start fights he can’t win.”
“Is there something you can offer Soren? A carrot instead of a stick?”
“Like what?”
She moved to the window and stared out. Flurries chased each other in a gust of wind. “You could talk to Samantha.”
“Who?” The name was familiar in a vague sort of way.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember her.”
Why are you looking at me that—oh. He remembered, all right. Shannon’s friend, pale cream and spun gold and dripping sex appeal. She was tier one, a sort of reader, only with a bent empathy that meant she could pick up on anyone’s desires, and then emulate them. “She and Soren know each other?”
“Biblically. Since Hawkesdown Academy.” Shannon grimaced. “One messed-up relationship.”
You ain’t kidding. He’d only met Samantha once, but it had been easy to see that her addiction to painkillers was actually the lesser of her compulsions. Between her gift and her past—seduced by an academy mentor at thirteen, then turned out as a prostitute—she drew her entire self-worth from being needed.
Who could need her more than a temporal abnorm who lived every second as eleven? The intensity of his attention must have felt like heroin to her. And her ability to sense what he wanted without requiring all the social trappings he was incapable of must have made her unique amongst women.
“Can you imagine,” Shannon continued, “how the world feels to him? He can’t have a conversation. Can’t watch a movie. He gets drunk, the hangover lasts for like a week. Hell, sex has to be one of the only things that does work for him. Especially with Sam.”
“Does she love him?”
Shannon nodded. “Almost as much as she loves John.”
“Ah.” He’d had some notion of playing to her feelings, convincing her that she could save Soren. But he’d forgotten that Smith was the thread that united them. It was Smith who had killed her mentor and pimp. There was no way she’d betray him.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” Cooper sighed. “I saw Millie today. Remember her?”
“The little girl with green hair.”
“It’s purple now. Anyway, she told me she couldn’t read Soren, that his perception of time screws things up. I thought maybe stress would change that, but instead, she ended up reading me.”
“Poor kid.”
He made a face at her. “Actually, she said I was pure.”
“She doesn’t know you like I do.”
“Ha-ha. Afterward, we were talking, and I screwed up, said the dumbest thing: that Soren was a freak, his gift had ruined him, put him outside society. And I no sooner said it than I thought about how the same could be said of her.”