Kelley Eskridge (22 page)

“Which one are you?” Crichton asked, with
no particular inflection.

“Ren Segura.”

“Ah,” Crichton said. “Ko. Of course. I'll
look forward to our little chat later, Ms. Segura. Come along, Irene.”
They moved along to Gordineau, who scrawled across the signature line
without any comment, and then settled back into her chair with an
exaggerated sigh as Crichton and Miller moved to the next row. She
turned her head to look at Jackal sideways, like a bird. The sparkle
that Jackal did not like was back in her eye.

“

Très
intéressant
,” she said. “What did you just do?”

“I just reminded them that pressuring
anyone into a bio-research contract is illegal. Everyone's entitled to
a five-day review period during which the offer status remains open.
Once your name's on that document, they have to hold the position for
you until you turn it down or the time stamp expires. They also have to
give you a two-day remorse and rescission period if you sign.”

“So you have just gained five days to
figure out how bad it really is.”

“Right.”

“And if it's bad, what then?” Another
silence. “How else will you live?”

Jackal said finally, “I don't know.”

“Hah,” Gordineau chuckled. “You are young
and amusing,

petite soeur
. Sign and
be done, and use their money to buy the knife that you will cut their
throats with in the future.”

That killed any impulse Jackal had toward
conversation. She sat wrapped in her own thoughts for some time until
Crichton appeared in the front of the room again and said, “You'll be
brought back here in groups of ten, in alphabetical order. You will
participate in follow-up tests to determine any variances from your
pre-VC baseline. Then we'll have a consultation. The results of your
tests may require us to assign you to twenty-four hour residential
status in the program facility for any length up to the duration of
your probationary commitment. If that's the case, you'll still be
reimbursed at the usual stipend rates. Any questions? Good. Behave
while you wait.”

Crichton left by a door at the back of the
room. The guards rounded everyone up and herded them back to their
cells. To amuse herself, Jackal did the math and worked out that given
the probable alphabetical distribution of last names of the prisoners,
and assuming an eight-hour total schedule of tests with time built in
for the testers to eat and sleep, her turn would come at about two

P.M.
the day after tomorrow.

Gordineau was moved out right on schedule,
about six hours later. Jackal lay on her back on the bottom bunk,
staring at the molded mattress platform above her, enjoying the psychic
silence that Gordineau left behind when she took away her disquieting
laugh and her dangerously bright eyes.

She didn't want to think: about herself;
about the NNA, whose convoluted regional governmental system and
inconsistent, issue-reactive legal structure had provided innumerable
case studies throughout Jackal's educational career; or about what she
would do if the tests showed enough variances that they decided to keep
her here for a year while they probed and prodded and maybe, finally,
turned a corner in her brain and found an empty cell with Ko Island
beyond. No, better to drift, the only noise in her mind a quiet
background hum through which she noticed everything and responded to
none of it. She knew when the man across the hall resumed his pacing,
and when he was taken away in one of the groups. She knew that an
unseen prisoner was weeping in a choked and desperate rhythm. She knew
when someone slid a tray through a slot in the bars, and later when
someone came back and retrieved it, untouched. Her nose told her that
the dinner she had not eaten was vegetable soup and cornbread and
something caramel-sweet. She lay in her bed and her brain hummed,
hummed, and eventually she became aware that the groups were still
being marched out although it was well into the evening now. Apparently
no one on the processing team was getting a break; the guards continued
to take prisoners out all through the night. The noise on the hall
dwindled and muted with their departures, until Jackal could hear her
own breathing and the slow drip of water from the tap in the sink next
door.

Late the next morning they took her.

The first thing was a cursory medical
examination: she thought dourly it was probably only to certify that
she was fit to make it out the door on her own, no matter what happened
after that. A bleary-eyed doctor listened to her heart and took her
blood pressure and temperature, and then gave her an equally sketchy
neurological exam: she touched her fingers to her nose, walked
heel-to-toe across the room, closed her eyes and stood on one leg. He
noted her responses in his palmtop, announcing them for her benefit:
“Normal. Mm hmm. Okay, fine. Normal. Good.” He removed the bandages
under her left arm and inside her left thigh, and behind both ears,
where the machines had entered her body. “Routine physical reclamation
from VC. No obvious physical anomalies. Reflexes normal. The percentage
of muscle mass you've lost is within acceptable parameters. None of the
invasion scars should be too noticeable unless you decide not to grow
out your hair. You may have episodes of insomnia and rapid-onset
fatigue for a few days. Don't operate any heavy equipment until your
sleeping patterns are re-established. Next.”

The tests that followed were in many
respects the same as her VC screening test, but much less thorough. No
one strapped her down, but they didn't feed her either, and she became
surly and dehydrated as the day wore on. The technicians were
indifferent and sloppy; one gave her a bad needle bruise. The equipment
was less sophisticated, and there wasn't the same sense of excitement
that she'd felt from the program staff in Al Isk.

Her group was shunted from one room to the
next. There was plenty of waiting time while people disappeared one by
one into some new and unexplained experience. No one spoke much,
although as the day went on, and the group became more familiar, they
began to communicate through looks and body language; wrinkled noses,
scowls, shrugs, shared expressions of contempt for the process and the
people managing it.

They finally came to a waiting area where,
when someone left, they did not return to the group: whatever this was,
it was the final stage. Jackal sat next to an older man with tribal
scars on his face; he must feel very lost, having no one to recognize
his lineage and help him find his place here. On his other side, a
younger man who had spent the day chewing his upper lip ragged said,
suddenly and to no one in particular, “I'm scared.”

No one answered. Jackal sat back in her
chair and didn't look in his direction. She wasn't scared. She didn't
really feel much of anything at all, except that ongoing sense of mild,
detached interest. She should be thinking about what to do next, but
she couldn't seem to care. She understood with some backroom part of
her brain that she was simply removing herself as much as she could,
like the first day in her VC cell when all she wanted to do was sleep—

“Segura,” a light voice said, and she
stood with a sigh and let her escort shuffle her down yet another
corridor, into a small windowless room with stale air and greasy walls
that turned out to be Crichton's office.

Crichton looked at home, her feet propped
up on a metal desk, hands cradling a mug with an obscene cartoon and
steam that smelled of coffee and cinnamon. Stacks of paper files
threatened to slide off the desk's edge to join the piles on the floor.
Jackal assumed Crichton had been at this without a break: there were
grooves running from her nose to the sides of her mouth that hadn't
been there before, and her skin puffed underneath the red eyes; but she
showed no sign of mental fatigue, and her muscles were relaxed, without
the swelling and apparent stiffness that Jackal associated with
exhaustion.

Also in the office was a man in a lab coat
and a badge. He did look tired, and out of sorts. “Do you have the
results on this one?” he said testily as Jackal came in.

“Nope, just the baselines.” Crichton
answered. “We'll just have to sign her out and bring her back if you
find something interesting when her test data finally gets into the
system. Don't start with me, Bill, the bright idea of bulk processing
these people came from your shop, not mine.” She was staring at a point
on the wall, and didn't turn her upper body to acknowledge Jackal's
presence until Jackal was seated and the guard had left.

“Segura.” Crichton drank a deep swallow
from her mug and then put it down. “Aren't you a little young to be the
silver medalist?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, Gordineau is still the heavyweight,
of course, but four hundred thirty-seven in one fell swoop is almost a
Steel Breeze record. Hah, fell swoop, not bad. Do you get a ribbon or
something?”

It was a kick in the stomach.

Bear, Mist, Tiger. Mirabile
. It
poked
right through her smooth detachment. Her throat clenched and she ground
the words through it, “My web was in that elevator and you don't know
what the fuck you're talking about.”

There was a moment of silence. “Maybe
not,” Crichton said, and made a long arm to retrieve the top folder
from the leaning stack. The man clucked disapprovingly.

“Segura,” Crichton said again, reading
this time. She tapped the fingers of her left hand against the desk as
she read, stopping every few sentences to draw a breath and peer at
Jackal over the top of the file. “Former Hope of Ko, convicted of
terrorist activities against a Member State, premeditated murder of
four hundred ten citizens. Presumably people from non-member states
don't get murdered, they just get in the way. Oh, also conspiracy,
fraudulent use of governmental status, and destruction of property. No
prior convictions or arrests. No prior known criminal associations.
Best defense that money can buy. Guilty by reason of voluntary
confession.” She regarded Jackal expressionlessly as she took a sip of
coffee.

“Doctor Bill has some questions for you
that you are required to answer, after which we will complete our
interview and you may proceed to the convicts-want-to-be-free portion
of today's schedule.”

Jackal was recovering some of her
equilibrium. She enjoyed Crichton's sly impromptu riffs on
business-speak. It felt companionable.

Hah
,
her internal voice said, sounding unnervingly like Crichton for a
moment,
don't get stupid. No one here
is your
friend
.

“Oh, fine,” Bill said. “We'll just cover
the basics.” He fished a palmtop out of his coat pocket, plugged it
into a network port on the top of the desk. “Crichton, where's that
file? Oh. Uh huh. Please describe your cell.”

There was a pause. Crichton said, “He's
not talking to me.”

Jackal rubbed her eyes. “Sorry. Okay, the
cell. It was square…” She talked him through it, carefully and with as
much mundane detail as she could muster, watching his response closely
as she talked. He seemed to be waiting for something. Finally she said,
“Maybe you could give me an idea of what you're looking for.”

“Anything atypical.”

Now she was nervous; she was positive that
kicking down the wall and running around on Ko Island for a virtual
year would be considered atypical.

“I don't know what atypical means in this
context,” she told him with a completely serious face. “Can you give me
an example?”

“Faces coming out of the walls.
Unexplained noises. A feeling that the air is leaking out of the room.
Bleeding food.”

“Ugh. Somebody's food bled?”

“It was a very interesting anomaly,” he
agreed. “And of course, we have continuous EEGs on all of you, and we
try to match these kinds of anomalies with pattern variations in the
data.”

Oh, now she understood where this was
going. She imagined the needle had probably gone off the scale when she
broke through her cell. But no, on second thought, he wouldn't be so
casual about this if her EEG line had been too spectacular. Or would
he? Was he smarter than he looked? She thought quickly about what to
tell him. Her voice wanted to tremble a little. She let it.

“Nothing weird happened except…stuff I did
myself. I got a little…I think I got a little unstable. Sometimes I
tried to, um, pound my head unconscious against the wall. Maybe a
couple of times I tried to hurt myself other ways.”

“Did you manage to damage yourself to any
extent?” he asked with interest.

She shook her head, not trusting herself
to answer.

“Hmm. Well, that's in line with what some
of the others have reported. And your confinement data isn't really
that far outside of the average baselines.” He stood. “I don't think we
need to spend any more time on this. If you have any interesting
pattern spikes in this round of tests, we'll bring you back in. Make
sure Crichton knows where you are. Crichton, I think we should assume
that we won't have results available today on the rest of the group, so
I'm going to get back to work. Get the data to me as soon as you can,
will you?” And he was gone in a flurry of white, muttering and looking
irritably at the time readout on his palmtop.

“Asshole,” Crichton said dismissively. She
stretched, watching Jackal. Jackal shifted, rolled her shoulders. She
was good at the silence game, but she was very tired and it was better
to let Crichton win.

“Are we done?”

“Not quite.” Another silence. Jackal
waited. “So, what are your plans?”

“Plans for what?”

“Life. A job. A hobby. Learn to play the
violin. Build a fusion bomb with four or five friends. I don't know,
that's why I'm asking. What are you going to do with yourself?”