Continuance (15 page)

“Trust me.” Jason took her by the
shoulders and guided her back toward the main floor. “And make sure you don’t
let him know I’m here. It’s a surprise.” Jason finished by sending a large bill
her way. She glanced at a tiny photoscreen embedded in the inside wrist of one
of her gloves. With a final skeptical glance, she turned and sauntered from the
little room.

She crossed the floor toward the
main stage, changing colors like a chameleon as she passed through alternating
pools of neon and black light, then leaned down to whisper in Alex’s ear. He
liked whatever she said, because his smile widened. They exchanged a few more
words, and Isis slipped one of her gloves off, draping it around his neck. She
turned and headed toward Jason’s room, pulling Alex behind her with the glove like
a bridle. Jason used the time to queue up some music to his smartglasses. He
turned the volume up, holding them ready in one hand. The instant they stepped
through the one-way photoscreen, their muffled laughter became crystal clear.

“… surprise, honey? You know I
love surprises…” Alex’s words died. From the look on his face, his love of
surprises didn’t extend to finding Jason in the room. He spared a quick glance
at Isis, and then glared at Jason. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Isis looked like a cat caught
between two growling dogs, wary and not at all pleased. “Don’t worry,” Jason
told her, keeping his eyes on Alex. “We’re just going to chat a minute while
you sit back and enjoy some music.” He held his smartglasses out to her. “Then
we’ll let you get back to work. Easy money.”

She hesitated a moment before
slipping the glasses on, then sat in the corner with her arms resting along the
backs of the intersecting benches. With the volume up, she wouldn’t be able to
hear his conversation with Alex. She crossed her legs, idly kicking a heeled
foot in the air as she stared past them to the main floor.

“Let me guess,” Alex said. “Back
in the stone ages, or whenever the hell you come from, ‘Stay away, and lay
low.’ actually means ‘Come straight here and find me so we can share a lap
dance.’” He shook his head. “Remember that stuff I said about how I wanted to
find out your potential? See what you could do with lifetimes of experience,
and all that BS? Well, I take it back, because that retread brain of yours is
more worthless than my first AP.”

“Alex, I just need — ”

“Don't you get it, kid? They're
shutting me out of all the SLIDes. Tracing them down and locking me out, one by
one.” Alex turned his back, facing the riot of lights and muted noise outside
the room. “In a few weeks, the network I built will be gone. Toast.” His voice
grew distant. “I can’t help you anymore. I’ve got a job lined up that’ll keep
me in the green for a while, but right now, I need to worry about helping
me
.”

Jason had no time to speak before
Alex turned back around, his anger finding new momentum. “What the hell’s wrong
with you, anyway? You tried finding your girl, but it didn’t work. Any sweet
little skirt you could possibly want is yours for the taking. Pick one. Hell,
pick
two
. Go and live a happy life. This is
over
.”

Jason’s reply was quiet.
Resolute. “Not for me, it isn’t.” He held his AP out so the other man could see
it clearly.

Alex glared at the screen, jaw
working silently. Realization struck, and he jerked his head to look at Jason,
then back to the screen again, then snatched the AP from Jason’s hands for a
closer look. With a sigh, he plopped down on the leather bench, his anger
seeming to drain away. Isis gave him a guarded look before resuming her bored
study of the floor outside the room.

“Over a year digging through this
stuff, and you have to pick
now
to get a hit? This is her?” He ran a nervous
hand through his hair.

“I was on my way to meet you with
that when the spiders showed up. I’m not asking you to get involved again. All
I need is the GPS for that SLIDe. I can handle it from there.”

Alex shook his head. “Not likely.
Is this the only hit that came up?”

“Yeah. I think it’s from one of
your new additions”

“It is. But this just tells you
she’s out there. You’ll need more to have any chance of tracking her down. A
camera feed for this SLIDe, or one close by. Or more hits so we can triangulate
a center of activity for her.” Alex pulled out his own AP, manually keying in
the information on Jason’s screen.

“We?” Jason asked.

Alex stopped what he was doing,
peering at Jason like a puzzle. “I’ve never asked you. Why do you want to find
this Michelle so bad? What’s so damned special about her?”

Jason glanced out at the man in
the brown jacket. He was glancing at their room more often now, growing
impatient for Alex to return. On his left, the heel Isis kicked in the air
seemed to have gone up a gear – she wouldn’t keep long either. But Alex
deserved an answer.

“Nothing,” Jason said.
“Everything.”

Memories flooded back to him then,
but not the old, worn-out versions Patrick had known, faded and full of holes.
The same memories for Jason were like an endless gallery of restored paintings
on new canvas, the details crystal clear and sharp.

The silky feel of Michelle’s hair
as she fell asleep beneath the strokes of his fingertips that day they’d met on
the bus. The intoxicating taste of her lips when he’d finally worked up the
courage to kiss her in that tiny Mirage. The euphoria of the months they’d
spent together afterward, and the equally crushing ache as she grew distant during
his illness, shutting down in self-defense.

An unexpected sunset shared with
her so much later. The blink of an eye later.

Emotions warred
on Michelle’s face as they sat beside the statue, the setting sun bathing the
violinist in shades of gold.

“It doesn’t
matter. We don’t get second chances, Patrick.”

“I know. But if
we did, would you have wanted things to turn out differently?”

He’d been
surprised to see tears welling in her eyes then. To see her swallowing hard as
she struggled to speak. Or not to.

Alex was studying him from his
seat on the leather couch, and Jason tried to find the words that would
convince him. Something spectacular and extraordinary. He realized he couldn’t.
He could only tell the truth.

“We loved each other.” It had
been long years since Jason had given voice to the thought aloud. It felt
strange to be doing it here now, in this place. It also felt good. “Is there
anything more or less special about that than the billions of others who could
say the same? I guess not. No more than a single orbit of the Earth compared to
the countless orbits before it, or the birth of a single child among the
myriads ever born. No more than the transformation of a single caterpillar into
one butterfly among millions.”

Isis started to rise, but Alex
held up a finger, pinning her back in her seat.

“But taken individually, each of those
things is miraculous,” Jason said. “That’s how I think about Michelle and me. It
just happened that for us, life and our own choices got in the way, wrecked
whatever chance we may have had to be together.” A current of intensity crept
in to his voice as he went on. “But we never stopped loving each other. And
now? Maybe we
do
have a second chance. I told myself a long time ago
that if I ever did, I’d take it. I think she felt the same way. I think that’s
what she wanted to tell me before…” Jason shook his head, letting the words die.
That train of thought led to the one memory of Michelle he was unwilling to
relive.

Alex waited for more, but when
Jason said nothing further, he nodded his head, seeming lost in thoughts of his
own. “I left Chrysalis after that first run-in at the Spire. And for good
reason. But like an idiot, I stayed connected on the fringe, playing hired gun
when I should have gotten completely uninvolved. I should never have started
feeding you those bioprints, no matter how well you pay. I intend to fix that
mistake.”

Alex stood, a corner of his mouth
giving way to that familiar half-smile. “
After
we find your girl. Come
on. Let’s get ourselves out of here.”

“I owe you, old man.” Jason
extended a hand.

“Damn straight you do.” Alex
clasped Jason’s hand, then glanced at the blond beside him. “I was really
looking forward to spending some time with Isis tonight.”

Jason checked his AP for new messages as
he headed down the hallway toward Chariot’s Imaging Control. Nothing from Alex
yet, but it was still early. He’d been nervous about coming into the lab today,
some part of him afraid DIA agents would be waiting to swarm him at the
entrance. But security had passed him through as usual, and by the time the
SLIDe outside IC slid the door for him like an old friend, he was high spirits.

Alex should have something for me on
Michelle soon.

Jason found Stuart sitting at one of the
workstations with his AP in his hands, brows furrowed. He sat with one leg
tucked beneath him, the other protruding from beneath the tails of his lab coat
to dangle on the floor, showing synth-denim jeans and a black running shoe.

“Hey, Stu.” Jason took the seat next to
him, holding up a fist.

Stuart set the AP down on the console
and brought a friendly fist down on Jason’s. “Look who decided to show up
today.” His voice sounded friendly too, but there as a distracted cast to his
eyes.

“You guys have fun without me
yesterday?”

Stuart gave a dismissive sniff. “If you
consider unconscious merry-go-round rides in a black unitard fun, then yeah. We’ve
been having a blast here.” He nodded toward the circular platform inside the chamber.
“We had two more sour imaging runs while you were out yesterday, and I’m
supposed to be prepping this thing for another try now.” He sighed and angled
his chair toward his workstation, tapping few keys. “I’m starting to think
maybe they should send this whole setup back for a refund.”

Jason parked himself in front of the
station next to him. “What checklist number are you on?”

Stuart gave Jason a sidelong glance.
“One.”

Jason thought about asking what Stuart
had been sitting around doing before he came in, but bit his tongue. “Okay,
let’s get started then. I’ll spin up the emitters.”

A low hum and the glow of violet light filled
the control room as Jason powered up the first array, running it through the
self-diagnostic while Stuart busied himself checking out other components. The
pre-flight didn’t call for it, but after what had happened during that first
run a few days ago, he decided to check the alignments as well. Having the
scans fail served his ends, but if they encountered some catastrophic failure, he
ran the risk they’d table the experiment altogether to look into the problem.
That would cut off his access to Arkive as fast as success would. Until he
could follow up on the bioprint from Michelle’s SLIDe hit, he still wanted to
keep looking here – something of an insurance policy in case things didn’t turn
out the way he hoped.

“Any progress with our resolution
issue?” Jason asked.

“The prof says so, but the improvement
was minor.”

Good.
“You guys feed any more
biorecords in?” Jason noticed the emitter was a few microns out of alignment,
so he made a note for the lab tech.

“Fairchild said she was going to have
you do it, but I think she took care of it.”

Maybe that was why she had asked to see
him in her office. Jason didn’t relish the thought of treading thin ice with
her.

“She asked where you were yesterday, by
the way,” Stuart said. He ran his finger along a control slider, and the center
platform started to rotate. “I guessed you were taking care of that paper you
missed, but I told her you were sick. Figured it’d be better not to look like
you were blowing her off for another assignment, right?  I guess you got that
all worked out?”

As Jason started in on the next emitter,
he smiled inwardly, thinking back to his encounter with Stuart and Ivory the
morning before, the excuse he’d made to cover his excitement. With everything
that had happened since then, it seemed like a long time ago. And things did
seem to be working out.

“I ended up getting a reprieve,” he
said. “Lots of worry for no reason.”

 “Great, then.” Stuart gave him the
ghost of a smile and stole another glance at his AP.

What’s eating him today?
Jason powered
down the emitter he was working on, turning to Stuart. “Hey. Everything okay?
You seem a little out of it.”

“I’m fine.”

“A fine liar. Come on. You’re moping
like a dog that just swallowed his neuter pill.” He went to work on the next emitter,
waiting for Stuart’s reply. This one was out of alignment as well.
Odd.
He made another note.

Stuart sighed, switching off the chamber’s
support field. “A week isn’t supposed to be long enough for a girl to get
clingy, right?”

After what Jason had been through the
last couple of days, it felt oddly jarring to be confronted with something as mundane
as girl trouble. He welcomed the change. “You guys fighting?”