Carnival

The air dragged at her wrist, thickened around stiff fingers. The hand was slow, the fingers inflexible; they didn’t hook the butt of the honor and glide inside the trigger guard as they should. The weight was wrong, the balance off—

Her honor skipped from her hand, spinning, and hit with a thud butt-first on the carpetplant, tottering a moment before toppling onto its side. The crutch skipped, and Lesa hit a split second later, down on one knee, her right hand slamming the floor with all her weight behind it.

The pain was asphyxiating. She fought for breath—diaphragm spasming, the gasp more like a whine if she was being honest—and blinked until her vision cleared. And then she picked up her honor, holstered it, found the crutch left-handed, and forced herself up, to face the mirror again.

The twenty-fifth attempt was no more successful than the third.

Pain couldn’t force her to stop, but eventually the bleeding and nausea did. She holstered her honor one last time, resettled the crutch under her armpit, and hobbled to the balcony. Julian was still down there with the other boys, running and laughing. The echoes of his voice carried to her room before she stepped outside, and she found a smile for that. The only thing he loved better than handball was his numbers.

Lesa hitched to a stop a few steps shy of the railing. She stared down, at the running children, at the watching tutors. Her gouged hand tightened on the crutch; she barely noticed.

She took two steps back, into the frame of the doorway. “House,” she said. “I need to speak to Julian. Please have Alys send him down.”

When Lesa summoned them again, even Kusanagi-Jones could tell she had not been resting. Her color was worse, her hair tangled and the knees of her trousers stained with chlorophyll. And then there was the matter of the slender dark boy curled on the seat before her terminal, pecking at the keys with concentrated precision.

“Miss Pretoria?”

She gave him that eyebrow, but stepped aside to allow him into the room, Vincent at his heels. The door clicked as it contracted shut behind them, and Kusanagi-Jones paused and glanced over his shoulder. Vincent caught him looking, of course, eyebrows quirked and the faintest hint of a smile—an expression that slid through Kusanagi-Jones’s heart like a skewer. He would have sworn he could feel the muscle contracting around penetrating metal, trying to beat and only managing to shred itself a little further.

Three months, on the Kaiwo Maru. Three months they could have had. And he had been too much of a sodding coward to even reachfor it.

Then Vincent’s half-smile turned into a real one, as if he knew exactly what Kusanagi-Jones was thinking, and loved him for it, or in spite of it. And Kusanagi-Jones smiled back.

So it went.

Kill or be killed.

Vincent took him by the elbow and steered him into the room. “You have the look of a woman with a plan,” Vincent said, and the corners of Lesa’s eyes crinkled, an expression that made Kusanagi-Jones homesick.

“Can you shield this room?” she asked.

“Shield it from what?”

“Electromagnetic monitoring.”

Vincent glanced at Kusanagi-Jones, who looked right back, silently. “Yes,” Vincent said. He touched his watch. “The whole room?”

“It’d be more convenient. I’ve already isolated it from House.”

“Angelo?”

Kusanagi-Jones nodded, and slaved his wardrobe to Vincent’s. Between them, they had enough foglets to manage a Faraday cage, since their wardrobes—given time—could manufacture more as needed.

The process took a few minutes, and Lesa said nothing further throughout, which seemed an indication for communal silence. “There,” Vincent said when it was done. “I’ve added eavesdropping countermeasures.”

Lesa didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at Kusanagi-Jones and asked, “Did you download Kii’s medical program?”

“He did,” Vincent answered.

“Do you still have it?”

Julian, who hadn’t spoken, came up beside Lesa, close enough to feel her body heat without the childish admission of actually touching her or stepping behind her. Kusanagi-Jones looked at him, not at Lesa, and held up his left arm, stripping the sleeve off the forearm to show the status lights on his watch. Only one blinked green now, the slow flicker of the nanodoc condition readout. The rest glowed red or dark amber, for critical infection.

There was more amber than there had been an hour before, and not just because Kusanagi-Jones had grabbed a nap.

“I need that,” Julian said.

Kusanagi-Jones let his arm fall, and his sleeve drop over it. “The program?”

“A copy of it.” He shuffled forward, forgetting that he had been half hiding behind his mother, and grabbed Kusanagi-Jones’s wrist to pull him toward the terminal.

Bemused, Kusanagi-Jones was about to step forward and follow, until Julian froze and turned back, gazing up at Vincent with stricken eyes.

Vincent, sod him, was waiting for it. He smiled at Julian and waved him away, Kusanagi-Jones included.