Tea From an Empty Cup (6 page)

The perspective had slipped back behind Shantih Love. Konstantin tapped the forward button rapidly; now she seemed to be perched on Shantih Love’s right shoulder. The gathering on the beach reminded Konstantin of the sort of ragged, disorganized cocktail party that her ex had loved to attend. She was disappointed. Was this
really
all that anyone in AR could think of doing?

Shantih Love whirled suddenly; after a second’s delay, the perspective followed. Konstantin felt a wave of dizziness and the images on the screen went out of focus. When the focus cleared, Konstantin saw that the figure was standing on top of the barrier, poised to jump. Shantih Love backed away, turned, and began stumbling through the party crowd, bumping into various people, some less distinct than others. Konstantin didn’t have to shift the perspective around to know that the creature was chasing the androgyne. Now the pov seemed to be only inches in front of the creature’s face; she had a fast glimpse of bandage-wrapped arms and hands with an indeterminate number of fingers as it staggered into the party after Love.

The pov began to shake and streak, as if it were embedded in the pursuer’s body. Frustrated, Konstantin pounded on the forward key, but the pov didn’t budge. They called this custom editing? She fumed. Even worse, now that she was among the party crowd, almost every attendee was either so vague as to be maddeningly unidentifiable or so broad a stereotype – barbarian, vampire, wild-child, homunculus – that anonymity was equally assured.

Shantih Love broke through the other side of the crowd two seconds before she did and ran heavily toward a stony rise leading to the sidewalk. S/he scrambled up on all fours, a heartbeat ahead of the pursuer.

Love vaulted the low barrier and ran along the middle of the street, looking eagerly at each wreck. There were more wrecks here, some ablaze, some not. Something moved inside each one, even those that were burning. Konstantin realized she was probably alone in finding that noticeable, much less remarkable – living in a bonfire was probably the height of AR chic. This week.

She tried pushing the pov ahead again and this time gained several feet. Shantih Love looked over his/her shoulder, seemingly right at the pov. The androgyne’s expression was panic and dismay; in the next moment, s/he fell.

The pov somersaulted. There was a flash of broken pavement, followed by a brief panorama of sky, a flip and a close-up of the androgyne’s profile just as the pursuer pushed his/her chin up with one rag-wrapped hand. Perfect skin stretched taut; the blade flashed and disappeared as it turned sideways to slash through flesh, tendon, blood vessels, cartilage, bone.

Blood flew against the pov and dripped down, like gory rain on a window. Wincing, Konstantin tried to erase the blood trails; nothing happened.

Shantih Love coughed and gargled at the sky, not trying to twist away from the bandaged hand that still held his/her chin. Blood pulsed upward from the artery in an exaggerated display. The creature pushed Love’s face to one side so s/he stared dully past the pov and then bent its head to drink.

Konstantin had seen similar kinds of things in shock videos, including the so-called ‘slay-ride’ video that had supposedly been circulating underground (whatever ‘underground’ meant these days) and had turned out to be so blatantly phony that the perpetrators should have gone down for fraud, or at the very least, false advertising.

But where the blood spilled in that sort of video had looked more like cherry syrup, this looked real enough to make Konstantin gag. She put a hand over her mouth as she froze the screen and turned away, breathing deeply and slowly through her nose, willing her nausea to fade. At the same time, she was surprised at herself. Her squeamish streak was usually conveniently dormant. In twelve years as a detective, she had seen enough real-time blood and gore that she could claim to be somewhat hardened.

Still, there was something about this – was it the blood, the noises coming from Shantih Love, the sound of the creature drinking so greedily? Or the knowledge that the real kid was going through virtually the same nonvirtual ordeal?

Konstantin collected herself and tried jabbing fast-forward to get through the vampiric sequence as quickly as possible. It only made everything more grotesque, so she took it back to normal running time, just at the point where both the creature and blood vanished completely.

Startled, Konstantin rewound and ran it again in slo-mo, just to make sure she’d seen it right. She had. It wasn’t a fast fade or the twinkling deliquescence so favored by beginning cinematography students but a genuine popper, which usually happened by way of a real-time equipment failure or power-out. Common wisdom had it that the jump from AR to real-time in such an event was so abrupt as to produce extreme reactions of an undesirable nature – vertigo, projectile vomiting, fainting, or all three.

Or a slashed throat? That was about as undesirable as you could ask for, Konstantin thought. Of course, that was assuming that anyone did ask for something undesirable. She tried to rub her forehead smooth.

She reran the sequence once more and then again in detestable slo-mo, watching the blood disappear right along with the creature, leaving Shantih Love behind. Konstantin called up the record of the kid’s vitals and found that, as she had expected, they had quit registering at the moment the blood had disappeared.

Konstantin took her finger off the pause button and let the action go forward. On the screen, the Shantih Love character sat up, its elegant fingers feeling the ragged edges and flaps of skin where its throat had been cut, mild annoyance deepening the few lines in its face. As Konstantin watched it working at pinching the edges of skin together, she tried to see what was different in its expression and its posture. What was driving Shantih Love now – a robot, or a very human hijacker? If there were signs, what the hell were they?

She could watch the video over and over for the next three hours and see if anything became any clearer to her. Instead, she decided to talk to people she was reasonably sure were human before she took in any more adventures of a dead kid’s false face pretending to be alive in a city pretending to be dead.

The figures on the screen were ridiculous.

‘Over how many years?’ Yuki asked, wondering uneasily if she were being conned.

Joy Flower almost smiled. ‘Very funny. But what you need to know here is that I have a very poor sense of humor, and it is not a good idea to make many jokes with me. I’m just that way. Some people are.’ She swiveled the screen back around to face her where she was sitting on the other side of the desk. Yuki decided that someone had an obsession with the past; the whole office was appointed like a nostalgia exhibit. All the wood was highly polished, dark with gold overtones. The chairs were enormous ersatz-leather monsters with backs that rose up high and wide enough to conceal even the largest person. The brass-colored buttons dimpling the upholstery were supposed to suggest cushioning, but Yuki’s own chair was as hard and unyielding as a board.

Not that there was much danger of her getting too comfortable here; this wasn’t a place where anyone went to feel comfortable. Even Joy Flower looked stiff, as if it weren’t really her office, just a place she was allowed to use from time to time.

Yuki cleared her throat. ‘When do I start?’

The woman glanced down at her wrist. There was nothing on it that Yuki could see. ‘Half an hour ago.’

‘And I guess you want me to live in?’

‘I knew you were clever.’ Joy Flower’s preoccupied tone seemed about to acquire an edge. On the edge of an edge, Yuki thought; a very uncomfortable place to be. ‘My stuff, back at my apartment –’

Joy Flower gave her a sideways look. ‘Already taken care of for you.’

Yuki shifted slightly in the chair and the ersatz leather gave an authentic creak. Her new boss rested one arm on top of the monitor. ‘You know that old saying about how you should ask questions because how else are you going to learn? I personally don’t have time to waste with anyone who hasn’t learned already. This means that I use the time I would have burned answering questions to do something more important. You know what I mean?’

Yuki started to answer but the woman turned away from her in such a final way that a spoken dismissal would have been inane.

Outside in the heavily carpeted, sound-deadened hallway, one of the thugs was waiting for her, a beefy man in a reddish black turtleneck sweater and black trousers. The trousers had extra pockets up and down the legs. A look that aspired to military associations. Professional bodyguard pants, designed to project the image of the matter-of-factly lethal mercenary. He looked down at her through surgically altered eyes. His face had a certain flatness that she could tell was natural, so the classically Oriental shape of the eyes didn’t look so out of place. The bright blue pupils, the straight blond hair spilling over his shoulders and down his back – those looked out of place.

‘How about you?’ Yuki said without preamble. The walls seemed to swallow each word; she had the sensation of being trapped in a cotton ball. ‘Do
you
answer questions?’

‘If I must.’ He looked down at her as if from a great height. ‘I’m supposed to take you to your quarters. Your things have arrived, or will arrive soon.’

‘Oh. Good.’ The look on that face, she realized, was not disdain but the absence of expression. He turned away abruptly and began walking up the hall.
My Master says for you to walk this way. – Okay, Igor, but it’s going to take some practice
. She followed at a slight distance, wondering if she had lost her mind as well as her friend.

No, Tom was more than a friend to her. But not vice versa. Grandma Naoka would have contemplated this with some concern.
Old Japan was never kind to those who loved – those usually being women. But then, the country itself was not kind to anyone. Life was not a right but a privilege. Honor meant more than love
. Yuki had often wanted to ask her if honor had really just been easier to come by than love but the question felt too impertinent even for Naoka’s favorite granddaughter to get away with.

She had expected the guy to lead her through a long and twisting maze of hallways to something like a techno-Buddhist monk’s cell. Instead, they went down one flight of stairs at the end of the hall and halfway along another quiet corridor to a door she estimated was directly under the office she had just left.

He caught her looking up at the ceiling, and said, ‘Yes, it is.’

She turned to him, stubbornly maintaining a casual air. ‘Right under her office, you mean?’

‘Exactly underneath.’

The better to walk all over you, my dear
.

‘Put your hand on the plate,’ he told her, gesturing at a white plastic square stuck onto the door at slightly above her eye level.

She obeyed. There was a moment of mild heat and the sensation of the plastic crawling or writhing under her touch. She heard a soft chime and the door clicked, opening about an inch.

‘The lock is now keyed to you. Only you, and her.’

Was that supposed to be reassuring, Yuki wondered. He pushed the door open and turned on the light. Instead of a cell, there was a generously large apartment that seemed to have been furnished by a random-choice generator. The couch was a puffy white thing with pillows that looked as if they would bounce wildly if she threw them on the shiny hardwood floor. The two chairs matched neither the couch nor each other – one was another ersatz-leather monstrosity like the ones in Joy Flower’s office. The other was smaller and lower, upholstered in a nubbly fabric printed with large, faded cabbage roses. They faced a very good copy of an old-style church pew that she presumed was supposed to function as a love seat. None of the stuff was hers. Yuki frowned and turned to the guy.

‘Are you going to show me around?’

The guy made a short, breathy noise that might have been a laugh. ‘It’s
your
place, you live here. Look around all you want.’

‘But –’

‘The only thing you have to remember,’ he said, raising his voice to talk over her, ‘is not to sleep naked.’

Yuki shut up, startled. He nodded at her once and walked out, closing the door behind him. ‘Naked,’ she said after a moment, and then turned to look at the hilariously mismatched living room furniture.
Didn’t know what you liked, so we got you one of everything they had
. Too funny.

There was one doorway in front of her and one to her left. The one in front took her to the big kitchen where she found that her small, blocky wooden table and its single chair from her one-roomer had been installed. If the sight was supposed to be reassuring, it had failed. In the setting of the shiny black cabinets and the absurd mirrored floor, the table and chair looked out of place, alien and lonely.
Like me
.

And a
mirrored
floor. A mirrored
floor
. How crazy could it get? She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to sit down and eat in a room where she was reflected from below. It was almost too bad that the decorator hadn’t gotten
really
extreme and mirrored the ceiling and walls as well. Then the room would have been not only unbearable but impossible even to look at.
After all, why do things by halves?

No windows, just simulated scenery and artificial light from one pretend window over the sink and another on the far wall. She supposed that these were the source of the recommended amount of daytime light during the appropriate hours – no darkness-induced depressions to interfere with Joy Flower’s schedule would be tolerated here – but it was nighttime now, so the soft light spilling in over the sink was probably simulated moonlight. Or maybe just a streetlight. She’d have to check later to see if the environment were urban or rural. She hated the rural shit. Some things were
too
fake.

Like your relationship with Tom?
whispered an acid little voice in her mind.

Oh, stop it
, she told herself and marched through the living room to the bedroom.
Just because a relationship isn’t on
my
terms doesn’t mean that it isn’t a relationship
.