IT TAKES ME A FEW days to get a new security code for my door, and even longer to comb my apartment for bugs carefully enough to be certain my guest didn’t leave anything of his behind. I pore over the footage from my security camera, watching where he goes while I’m in the shower. It’s better to let visitors believe they have time where they’re not being watched, because they’ll do whatever underhanded thing they plan on doing straightaway. If you don’t offer them a blatant opportunity they’ll be sneakier, hiding it, possibly well enough that I wouldn’t be able to pick it up on camera. Back on Avon, this sort of thinking just wasn’t a part of my life—I specialized in sweet-talking extra supplies and inside information out of the guards, not in living an elaborately faked life in someone else’s world. I learned to give visitors a little carefully monitored alone time on my third stop out from Avon, a freighter called the Alanna. Seeing what they did in my tiny quarters when they thought I wasn’t looking told me which crew members I could trust far quicker than anything else would.
He goes over my photos—I think he guesses that they aren’t real—flicks through my browser history, inspects the packages waiting by the door for Kristina when she gets back from the health spa she’s been at for the last month. He stops to look at the Miske multimedia works on the wall, probably the most expensive things in the apartment, but he leaves them alone. I don’t see him plant anything, and I don’t see him do anything shiftier than a bit of snooping.
I check my messages four, five times a day—but there’s nothing from Sanjana Rao, the woman I was supposed to meet at LaRoux Industries Headquarters before the entire holosuite went mad. I can’t afford to lose her after all I’ve been through to find someone with a high enough security clearance to have the information I need, and a reason—whatever it may be—to give it to me. LaRoux proved on Avon that he has powers and defenses far beyond what a normal man possesses, and unless I find a way to neutralize his whispers, I’ll never get close enough to him to repay him for what he did to my father.
I dictate and delete half a dozen messages to Dr. Rao before I decide I can’t improve upon the language, and try to screw up the courage to send it. She’s spooked, no doubt, after the security scare. For all I know, she’s vanished into the woodwork completely, and I’ll have no chance of getting her to trust me again.
That mess last week was just a case of poor timing, my message reads, and had nothing to do with me or you. Please say you’ll meet me again. You can name the time and place, you can take whatever precautions you need to feel safe. Please. Alexis.
I blink at the “send” button and the screen chimes to inform me that it’s done. The address she gave me is gibberish, but it’s how I contacted her before—it’s not her official address, but she’d have been mad to give me anything that could be traced back to her. Not if she wanted to keep her job. Or her sanity.
It’s taken me nearly four months to get this close to LaRoux. Four months, spending every night researching LRI employees who might have the connections I need, following them to learn their interests, inserting myself into their lives, making them trust me, like me, just long enough for them to introduce me to my next mark. Four months before I caught even a whiff of information about the mind-control experiments and abuse LaRoux was perpetrating on Avon.
And I lost it all in a single day.
It’s three days after I sent the message to Dr. Rao—eight days after I met Gideon—when my inbox finally dings to tell me something’s arrived beyond the usual newsletters and spam Kristina gets. I’m fresh out of the shower, finishing up with the pack of disposable skin-patches and the concealer I use to hide my genetag. Over the past year I’ve made hundreds of thousands of galactics, pulling jobs here and there to support myself, putting every single credit I can spare into tattoo-removal treatments. But it’ll take two or three more before it’s faded enough to be illegible, and half a dozen before it’s impossible to tell there was ever anything there branding me a native of Avon. But hopefully I’ll get my chance to get near LaRoux before then, and it’ll all be moot anyway.
When I hear my inbox chiming, I wrap a towel around my torso and bolt out into the office, shedding water as I hurry over to the screen. For a moment, my heart’s racing so quickly I can’t focus long enough to work the eye-trackers. But once the message opens, my heart sinks.
It contains only four words—no signature, no code, nothing I can use.