“That’s true,” Hwa said, before realizing just how true it really was.
They were within sight of the exit doors, now. Joel was waiting. Síofra slowed his pace without completely stopping. He lowered his voice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What they wrote. On your mirror.”
It seemed like such a long time ago. And so trite. So amateur. Beaudry and the others had had some buddies wreck her place while she wasn’t even there. It was intimidation, but nothing like what she and Joel had just witnessed in Whitechapel. Only maybe they were really all part of the same thing. Maybe that was how murders like that started. One day you were telling some woman how you were going to rape her and a few years later you were cutting her tits off and eating her kidneys.
Judging by the look on his face, Síofra already believed this to be true.
“Didn’t seem important,” Hwa said.
Now Síofra did pull up short. It took Hwa a step or two to realize this, and when she turned around to face him, his face looked unbearably sad. “Not important?” he asked. “Not important?”
“Aye. Not really. Not in the grand scheme.”
“The grand scheme.”
Hwa shrugged. She looked at the floor. “Aye.”
On the floor, she saw his shoes come closer to hers. His had blood on them. So did hers. “Look at me.”
She looked. It was hard. She didn’t know why it was so hard, only that meeting his gaze felt like keeping her eyes open in a snowstorm. It stung.
“Who was it,” he asked, “that taught you that something like that, that a threat to your life, wasn’t important?”
And just as though she were staring unblinking into the winter wind, Hwa’s good eye filled with tears. She blinked them away. Shook her head. Pulled her lips back into a grin. “What’re you at, eh? You gonna do this dance again, if I tell you?”
“No.” Síofra took another step forward. When Hwa tensed up, he paused and backed away a little. He pitched his voice even lower. “No. I wouldn’t do that. I don’t hit women.”
Unbidden, Sabrina’s face rose in her vision. And Layne’s. And Calliope’s. Was her mother next? Hwa squeezed her eyes shut. Master control room, she reminded herself. Press the buttons. Flip the switches.
“New security protocols?” she heard herself ask.
“Oh, that.” He cleared his throat. “I brought Joel’s suggestion to his father’s attention. You’ll be living with them from now on. And we have a brief you need to read, about the Homecoming dance.”
*
The dance took place on a viewpoint level of Tower Four. Each hour, the whole floor would make a single revolution, so couples at tables could see both the city and the ocean. This was by far its lowest-tech feature. The Synth-Bio Club had engineered all manner of plants and animals just for the occasion: grabby little tentacular vines that climbed up the walls, twirling maple keys that danced and spun in the air like pixies and spiralled up from whatever surface they touched, butterflies that dampened signal by flapping their Faraday wings.
None of the students really noticed. They were too busy miming anal on the dance floor.
“A Homecoming at New Arcadia Secondary.” Hwa stood on a balcony overlooking the action. She waved expansively at the crowd. “You may never find a more wretched hive of—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it.” Joel smirked. “We agreed to hate this equally, remember? Let’s go upstairs.”
Upstairs was the corporate event. The music was quieter, and it came from instruments played by human hands. The guests weren’t really dancing so much as clustering as far away as possible from the dance floor. Partners and investors and developers of interest to the Lynch family had all been invited to see how this whole experiment in urbanism was getting along. When Hwa toggled over to one layer of vision, all she saw were brand identities communing with each other over tiny egg tarts sprinkled with chives.
Zachariah had a big announcement planned. Hwa had no idea what it was. When Joel had asked, his father only replied with the coy “That would be telling.” Most likely it had to do with Project Poseidon. Why else would Zachariah have invited so many people, and many media presences?
“Zachariah’s really done something special, here,” Hwa heard a woman say to a group of robots who looked like Dr. Mantis, as they entered the other party. Emerald green feathers appeared to grow from her scalp. Hwa had no idea if they were real or not. “Shame he won’t be around to see it all come to fruition.”
Hwa steered Joel away from the conversation. “Whose flesh do you have to press?” Hwa asked.
“Well, the designer of my implants is here,” Joel said. “I should probably say hello.”
“Fine. Let’s do that. Where is he?”