“Where is your coat?” he asked.
Of course. She’d forgotten it upstairs. That was why she was suddenly so cold. Hwa examined him. Wherever he’d come from, he’d left in a hurry. “Where are your socks?”
He stood and pulled his coat off and draped it over her shoulders. Hwa watched his fingers doing up the toggles. She didn’t recognize his pants. They were too loose for running, too casual for work. Just a t-shirt on top.
“You were sleeping,” she said.
“Yes.” He folded down the collar of the coat and gently pulled her hair free of it. “Prefect woke me. You were in close proximity to officers of the law, and your heart rate spiked, and you weren’t answering Prefect’s pings. Those are the criteria for that particular alert.”
“But you didn’t come upstairs.”
“I spoke with a Mr. Rivaudais, who assured me you weren’t being detained.” Síofra hugged his bare arms. “He told me what happened. Hwa, I’m so—”
Hwa held up a hand. He silenced. She shut her eyes. She clenched her fists. She made herself hold it all in until the wave passed, until all she could feel was the rain trickling down her scalp, and then she made for the train. Síofra followed.
*
He followed her all the way home. At her door, she thought about warning him about the state of the place. Then she decided it was his problem if he didn’t like it—not everybody had spent the past ten years filling their wallets with Lynch’s blood money. But when they pushed through, he just stared at the heavy bag, and the reflex bag, and the trophies with Tae-kyung’s name on them.
“Where are yours?” he asked, finally.
“I kept getting disqualified,” Hwa said. “Illegal moves.”
“If I stay, will you kill me?”
Hwa opened and closed her fists. Tested their strength. One was already weaker than the other. She couldn’t hurt him even if she wanted to. “Not tonight.” She thought of the profile in Zachariah Lynch’s office. Dates and times and locations and heartbeats. His miraculous transformation, like that of some martyred saint, from broken to fixed, vulnerable to invulnerable, all on the Lynch dime. And why? Just because they felt like being generous? No wonder he was so loyal. “If you stay, they’ll know.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m well aware of that.”
She showered and changed. When she finished, Síofra was shutting off the kettle. He fetched down two mugs and started digging in the tea cabinet.
“How’s your stomach?” he asked, without turning.
“Not great.” Hwa pulled a pillow off the bed and sat on it in front of her display. She hunched forward. “Prefect.”
“Ready.”
“Gather all available surveillance from the Aviation bar in Tower Four, over the past three hours. Find Layne Mackenzie, female identified, twenty-five, white, pink hair. Show me every appearance.”
“Visual, audio, data, bio—”
“Everything.”
Síofra set down a mug of something steaming in front of her. Turmeric-ginger-chamomile. The same hangover cure she herself would have chosen. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “Not right now.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I kinda do.”
Síofra nodded. He stretched out on the floor beside her, propped on his elbows. As he crossed his ankles, his trousers rode up a little. The freckles on his inner left ankle formed a perfect circle, like a fairy ring.
To stop staring, she focused on the display. “Is there a camera behind the bar?”
“Several. The clearest feed is the one from the bartender’s right eye.”
“So it was live while Layne and I were there?”
A pause. “According to the end user licence agreement, recording during work hours appears to be a condition of employment.”
“Show me.”
The bartender switched between filters of vision as he worked. Thermal vision was pretty handy for knowing exactly when a martini was icy enough. The shaker always turned a special shade of purple before he poured out its contents. Layne and Hwa weren’t always directly in his line of sight, but he did keep glancing at Hwa, toggling between filters as he tried and failed to focus on her face.
It was odd, seeing herself the way augmented people saw her. The bartender couldn’t turn his eye off, so he always got an adulterated version of her. First there was the Stop Staring version, where her face was a real-time render of what it would have been had Sunny made different decisions as a mother. Then there was the thermal version, where her left side was just slightly brighter than her right, on account of all the tangled nerves and blood vessels. But he spent the most time in the iContact filter, as the focus-detection algorithm in his eye found everyone in the crowd around the bar who was trying to catch his eye, and ordered their faces into a queue for service. Hwa’s face didn’t show up in that filter. She was just a dark, empty blur, like a shadow. Like a ghost.