Carnival

His tone was arch and dry. She matched it. “Keep it in your pants, Robert.”

“I’m not wearing any pants,” he said reasonably.

Somewhere, she found the energy to snort. “Anyway, if Mother finds out I’ve been letting you read history, she’ll—”

“Have your hide for a holster. I know.” His caresses became more personal and she rolled over, looking up through the dark. He touched the tip of her nose. “What are you going to do?”

She shrugged, and sighed. “I’ll know tomorrow. If we miss the meeting, it’s not like we’ll get another chance—”

“No.” He kissed her. “Not in time for Julian, anyway.”

Kusanagi-Jones was long past feeling guilt about lying. Conscience was one of the first things to go. If he’d ever had much of one to begin with, the job had burned it out. So it was with a certain amount of amusement that he identified the emotion he was feeling over telling the truth—as guilt. Well, a limited sort of truth, with the limitations carefully obscured, but still. Unmistakably the truth.

The fact that he was doing it selfishly didn’t enter into it, he told himself. The fact that Vincent was right, and what he really wanted was to punish—

Of course, Vincent only knew that because Kusanagi-Jones wasn’t bothering to hide it. Pretoria had probably picked up on it, too, but with luck she’d think it was jealousy, male games.

Oh, hell.

An omission was as good as a lie, and he had told Vincent he’d chosen the therapy. He was justifying. Justifying, because if Vincent didn’t think Kusanagi-Jones cared for him anymore, that was one less way Vincent could hurt him. Justifying, because if he hadn’tcared, if he was doing his job, then he was a much better actor than this. Justifying because he, Kusanagi-Jones, deserved Vincent’s loathing and anger for other reasons entirely—reasons Kusanagi-Jones was too good a Liar for Vincent to suspect, even years later.

Justifying, and it was the sort of thing, the sort of self-delusion, that got you killed. He knew it.

And so did Vincent, apparently, because Vincent pushed against his hand and looked up, leaving an arc of moisture cooling on Kusanagi-Jones’s skin. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Or else I’m more out of practice than I thought.”

The dry tone, brittle enough to break an edge and cut yourself on. It still worked, too; Kusanagi-Jones laughed, an honest laugh. Startled into it, though nothing Vincent said was surprising. It was just very Vincent,and Kusanagi-Jones had been so deep in his own bout of self-pity that he’d forgotten.

“Tired,” he said, not bothering to hide the fact that it was a lie.

Warm hands stroked his thighs. “Mmm. You were the one who said you didn’t need rest; you had chemistry.”

“Rub it in.” It could only be fraught if he let it. He was a professional. And Earthneeded what they had come for. The Coalition needed it; the Governors were ruthless in balancing population and consumption against their programmed limits. Even wind farms and geothermal caused impact. Action, reaction, as incontrovertible as thermodynamics. And—seemingly abrogating those laws—clean, limitless New Amazonian energy could change the fate of two dozen worlds.

And Kusanagi-Jones needed their mission to fail. Or more precisely, heneeded a win—because he wasn’tVincent Katherinessen, and he wasn’t getting any younger, and accepting therapy had kept him his job, but it hadn’t done enough to lift the cloud after their last awful failure, the mess on New Earth. Kusanagi-Jones needed a win.

And meanwhile, ethics and—sod it, humanity—demanded he take a fall. Just like New Earth. But a win here was the only way he could count on staying alive. The only way he might be allowed to stay with Vincent. It left him cold from throat to groin to think of losing that again.

Vincent had always been worth paying attention to in bed. And Vincent had noticed that he still wasn’t doing so. “Angelo,” he complained, “you’re thinking.”

“And that’s supposed to be your job?” Not quite Vincent’s dry snap, but enough. “Really want to know?”

Vincent nodded, his depilated cheek smooth on Kusanagi-Jones’s skin. “I’ve no right to ask.”

Somehow, in their own private language, it was possible to talk. “You never came,” Kusanagi-Jones said, as if his betrayal hadn’t happened. And as far as Vincent knew, it hadn’t. “I know. Unrealistic expectations. You couldn’t have come. Couldn’t have found me, and there was nowhere to run. Doesn’t help.”

Kusanagi-Jones felt Vincent flinch. “I failed you.”

“Didn’t—”

“I did,” he said, as if he needed to. “But you took the therapy.”

“I did,” he said. Six months of biochemical and psychological treatments. Kusanagi-Jones wouldn’t call it torture; they’d both experienced torture. Profoundly unpleasant. That was all. And he wouldn’t let his hands shake talking about it now. “They said I was a model patient. Very willing.”

Vincent tensed, shoulder against his thigh, the long muscles of his body tightening. “If this is—”

“Vincent,” he said, “I don’t want to lie to you.”