Carnival

“Good,” Vincent said, aware that he sounded petulant, and not caring. He was seeing stars now—literally, sparkles in front of his eyes—as the adrenaline wore off. “My nose hurts.”

“And your back?” Lesa asked.

“My back,” he said, with tight dignity, “hurts more.”

Vincent looked gray, the blood draining from his face as he sat stiffly upright on the chair, his leg stretched out before him to ease the knee. Kusanagi-Jones slipped his hand across the gap between chairs and took Vincent’s, squeezing, hiding the action with their bodies. Vincent sighed and softened a little, his shoulders falling away from his neck, though he had the sense not to lean back. Shafaqat handed Vincent a wet towel while Elder Austin was still talking. He took it right-handed, and didn’t release Kusanagi-Jones’s hand with his left while he dabbed at the crusted blood on his lip. “At least my nose isn’t broken.”

Kusanagi-Jones widened his eyes and spoke in an undertone. “It’s supposed to look like that?”

“The Christ, don’t make me laugh.” He winced, and then flinched, as if the act of wincing hurt.

Vincent handed the bloody cloth back to Shafaqat and glanced at his watch, and Kusanagi-Jones knew he was thinking about upping his chemistry and dismissing the idea. He was still idly checking readouts when Austin’s speech came to an end, a study in deceptive inattention, but when he glanced up, his eyes were sparkling. They stood when everybody else did, herded by security agents, and filed down the steps and through the crowd again. Kusanagi-Jones covered Vincent as much as possible, varying distance and pace within the crowd, and for the first time was actively angry that all of the New Amazonian security was female and that Vincent was taller than any of them and all the New Amazonian dignitaries. And, of course, taller than Kusanagi-Jones. There was nothing to block a head shot, if there was another shooter somewhere in the crowd.

Which meant relying on the agents assigned to crowd coverage and Vincent’s wardrobe to get them through safely. And Kusanagi-Jones thought that just possibly, he would rather have severed his own fingers with a pair of tin snips than made that endless, light-drenched walk. Though the crowd was calm, respectful, their attention oppressed Kusanagi-Jones like the weight of meters of water, cramping his breathing.

He managed a free breath when they stepped out of the square and into the cool shade of the gallery lobby. A brief bottleneck ensued as politicians pulled off shoes and hung them on the racks, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Only the dignitaries, security, chosen observers, and a small herd of media would travel past this point.

When he looked up, Kusanagi-Jones found himself on the periphery of a glance exchanged between Elder Kyoto and Vincent that Kusanagi-Jones would have needed all of Vincent’s skill to interpret. Lesa caught it, too, and by her frown she understood it far better than Kusanagi-Jones—but she said nothing.

Now that he had a plan, the wait was nauseating. He knew how Vincent, having formulated his strategy, would be behaving in Kusanagi-Jones’s shoes. He would already have assessed the possible ways in which the subject might react, and he’d have a contingency for each. He’d have alternates mapped and a decision tree in place to deal with them, with counterplans in the event of failure or unexpected consequences.

Kusanagi-Jones had only one idea, and it involved doing something he hadn’t willingly done in his adult life. And he was basing it not on facts, probabilities, and meticulously calculated options, but on three entirely illogical factors.

The first of these was Kii. Kusanagi-Jones didn’t know what to do about the Dragon’s ultimatum. He was as torn as Hamlet; Kusanagi-Jones did not, in all impartiality, consider himself capable of making the demanded choice. He wasn’t a decision maker. He would do anything possible to avoid being placed in that position of responsibility.

It was a strength in some ways. One of the things that made him an accomplished Advocate was his ability to argue both sides of a predicament to exhaustion. But he’d been able to rely first on Vincent to make the tough calls, and then, after Vincent, on the fact that he was limited by scandal to unimportant missions to prevent it from becoming a weakness. It was Vincent’s job to decide, and Kusanagi-Jones’s job to back Vincent up.

Except when he was betraying him over politics, but that, while ironic, was orthogonal to the argument.

The second factor was Vincent himself. Kusanagi-Jones couldn’t face stepping away from him again. He’d done it once, ignorant of the cost, as the price of something he had thought more important than either of them. He stillthought it was more important. But he wasn’t sure he would live through it twice.