I can’t pay for a room somewhere without accessing my accounts, which he’s got to be tracking—using the stolen jewelry to buy my way in would throw up red flags in a respectable place and paint a target on my back in the rest. There are a number of free hostels and shelters here that don’t require ident verification or retinal scans to access, but Gideon will be searching those. He’ll know I’m too smart to use either the Alexis ident chip or Bianca’s, and he’ll assume I’ll go somewhere I can be anonymous. So I head for one of the police-monitored stations. It’d be mad to go to a place where the identities of all residents and tenants immediately go into the government system—even more easily accessed by a skilled hacker than the privately owned hostel systems.
Normally I’d hang around until I found a likely target to sneak me in—someone just desperate enough to be taken in by big eyes and a smile—but I can’t remember how to do it, how to gauge people. The faces that I pass are alien, their expressions written in a language I don’t know how to read anymore. So instead I head around back and wait until the fire exit opens a crack—a girl with a shaved head and fluorescent yellow earrings ducks out of it to smoke, wedging a platform boot in the doorway to keep herself from getting locked out.
I abandon everything and just shove a string of pearls into her hand. “I need to get in,” I rasp. “Quietly.” She stares at the pearls, then at me. She doesn’t know if they’re real. Any second she’s going to tell me to go screw myself and slam the door in my face.
But instead she licks the tip of the joint to extinguish it and stuffs both it and the pearls down the front of her shirt, then kicks the door open. She doesn’t say anything, though her eyes stick to me as I move past her. When I look over my shoulder, she’s already gone, shoulders hunched as she half jogs up the alley to vanish into the crowds beyond.
Inside, the gloom is as thick as in the alley outside. Steel-framed bunk beds line the room, topped by bare mattresses. A few heads lift when I come in, but if anyone notices I’m not the girl who left, they say nothing. That’s why I chose this place. Half of these people are felons checking in for parole, and the other half are headed that way in a few years. They don’t care who they sleep next to. The occupancy scans that sweep by every half hour or so don’t check IDs, as long as the number of people in the rooms matches the number of people who went through checkin.
I find a bottom bunk in the corner, vacant but for a few candy bar wrappers. I avoid the large stain toward the foot of the mattress, unidentifiable in the meager light, and crawl in against the wall until I’m hidden in the shadows.
I will my body to stop shaking. Tell myself I’m safe now. That he can’t find me. That out of sight of the security eye in the center of the ceiling, not even a thorough facial recognition scan through every security camera in the district could find me. But now that I’ve stopped, it’s not fear that’s making me shiver.
Eyes burning, I try to block out the smells, the noise, the scratchy mattress and the odor of mildew wafting up from the fabric.
Here at the bottom of the city, no one cares when you start to cry. Half the people in this room are suffering from some kind of withdrawal or another, and the rest know to leave well enough alone. You don’t come here seeking comfort. You come here to disappear.
The squalor should make me long for the penthouse. I should be imagining the cocktails the SmartWaiter can produce, remembering the feel of Kristina’s soft sheets, closing my eyes and seeing the false stars emerging on the windows in my mind’s eye.
But instead the only thing I can think of, the only thing I hear as I muffle the sounds of my weeping against my arms, is the Butterfly Waltz playing over and over in my mind.
When morning comes, my eyes are dry again. Sleep, if only in drips of a few minutes at a time, has brought me back to myself. I recognize last night’s storm for what it was: a panic attack. I haven’t had one for months, but they used to leave me shattered and empty all the time in the weeks following my father’s death. But even shattered and empty, I can keep moving.
I have to get onboard the Daedalus tonight. Nothing’s changed because of Gideon’s betrayal except that now I have nothing to lose, nothing sparking even a scrap of guilt. Even if he decides to go to the Daedalus on his own, to disable the rift without me, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the rift I’ll be aiming for. Gideon will be watching, certainly, waiting to see if I show up, but I don’t care that he’ll know where I’ll be. He’s proven that it doesn’t matter where I go, who I become—he’ll always find me. Whether he’s working for LaRoux Industries or has his own sick reasons for hunting me across the galaxy, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if he finds me on the Daedalus, because by then I’ll have my shot, the moment I’ve been working toward since I fled the orphanage shuttle that took me from my home.
Tonight I’ll be in the same room as the man who murdered my father. And if the Knave finds me there on the Daedalus, so be it. Nothing he can do to me could be worse than watching my father die. Let him take me. Let him kill me if that’s his ultimate goal. I’ll be dead by the end of the night anyway, one way or another. If I’m caught, LaRoux Industries will have my existence quietly erased from the world. And if I succeed, if I get my moment, the security guards will kill me anyway.
Because tonight I’m going to put a bullet in Roderick LaRoux.