Behind them, Joel gasped. “Silas!”
“It’s okay,” Hwa said. “My mom is a whore.”
“See?” Silas smiled. His teeth were huge and perfect and white. “I was just saying what everybody was thinking.”
“Yeah, having her raise me really introduced me to a lot of assholes,” Hwa said. “Professional assholes that pay their taxes and everything, but still assholes.”
Silence. Hwa directed a grin at Silas. It was more like a baring of her teeth.
“But, you know, as we say in the business: the bigger the asshole, the smaller the cock.”
Silas opened his mouth to say something, when another set of facets opened up and allowed a woman in. She had Joel’s dark hair and eyes, but an entirely different nose and jaw.
“Dad, we need you to sign off on the—who’s that?” Lynch’s daughter stared at Hwa’s face. That, she had said. Like Hwa wasn’t even in the room. Like only her stain was there.
“Katherine, this is Joel’s new bodyguard,” Síofra said.
“I’m really not,” Hwa said. She made for the elevator. “I haven’t agreed to anything. And it was lovely meeting you and all, but—”
“She can’t be hacked.” Síofra said the words a little too loudly. He stared at the elder Lynch as he spoke. “She has no augments. So there’s no recognition algorithm in her eyes that can be rewritten. There’s nothing in her pancreas that can foul up and send her into diabetic shock. She has no neural implants. She can’t hear voices or see visions or be made into someone’s puppet. She doesn’t have legacy code floating around under her skin, waiting to be exploited. She’s…” He trailed off. “Pure.”
There was an awkward pause. Everyone was staring at Síofra, even Joel. The air started feeling heavier and heavier. A terrible sinking feeling opened up in Hwa’s stomach. He had stuck his neck out. She’d kicked him in the face and he’d stuck his neck out. Shit. Even if she didn’t want the job, she didn’t particularly want him to look bad in front of his boss. At least, no worse than she’d made him look by mouthing off to someone he clearly didn’t have much respect for anyway. She cleared her throat to say as much—maybe make an excuse about how he clearly still had a concussion from the force of her kick—but the elder Lynch held up a single finger, forestalling her.
“Once again, Daniel, you have found exactly what I need.” His gaze shifted to Hwa, and his lips pulled back to expose false, perfect teeth. “Let’s see how pure you really are.”
*
The walls closed in on her. Literally. The facets of the room shifted once more, and it was just the two of them in a tiny space: Hwa and Lynch. As Hwa stared, the walls shimmered and clips swam across their surfaces. They were of Lynch in younger years. Lynch at state functions. Lynch shaking hands. Lynch with his competitors, arguing silently over some talking point or another.
“I’m a powerful man,” he said, “but you already knew that.”
He waved a hand. The clips changed to static scans. Notes. Packages. Texts. Mutilated animals.
“For men like me, death threats are a sign of success.”
“Yeah?” Hwa winced as blood filled the mirror. “Maybe you should quit while you’re ahead.”
Lynch coughed a laugh. He waved all the images away, then picked something out of his pocket. It looked like a Christmas ornament. At least, what Hwa had seen of Christmas ornaments. Sunny could never be bothered with anything seasonal, unless you counted bikinis. Holidays reminded her of the passage of time.
“What’s that?” Hwa asked.
“It’s a crystal ball. Do you know what that is? It’s something that shows you the future.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“You have to hold it, for it to work. With your bare hands. Hold them out.”
Something inside told her not to do it. She was about to pull her hands away when he dropped the ball into them. It was cool on her cupped palms. No, not cool. Cold. Very cold. Like she’d grabbed a causeway rail on a winter morning after a long and brutal run. She wanted to let go. Couldn’t. The cold stiffened her hands and then her wrists and then her arms.
In the crystal, she saw her brother.
In the crystal, Tae-kyung was the same age Hwa was now. He was running beside her. It was a nice day. Blue skies. Summer. She remembered those sneakers. The lucky red laces. She remembered because he was pausing to tie them, again, and she was running ahead, completely unaware, and he yelled something as she got further away, about how
“You shouldn’t run where I can’t see you!”