His shower was tiled with river stones, smooth and beautiful. The water was always warm, and the soap was scented with sandalwood and lilac. The towels were soft and thick and white as fresh-fallen snow. He shaved in a mirror that was heated to keep condensation from forming on it. His Laconian uniform—real cloth, not recycled paper—was pressed and clean in his footlocker. He dressed himself, humming a light melody he remembered from his childhood because someone was listening.
He had come to Laconia in a much less pleasant cell. He had been questioned in a box. He’d been beaten. And in the early days, threatened with worse things than that. In the later days, tempted with the promise of freedom. Even power. It could have been much, much worse. He had, after all, been part of an attack that had crippled Medina Station and ended with the agents of the underground scattering to systems all around the empire. Someone had even managed to steal one of Laconia’s early destroyers out from under them. Holden had known a lot about how the underground on Medina functioned, who was involved with it, and where they could be found. He was alive and had all his fingers with the nails still attached because he’d also known about the dead space that had appeared on the Tempest when it used its magnetic field generator in normal space. And the dead spaces like it in all the systems besides Sol. He was the one person in the whole of humanity who had—escorted by the enslaved remnants of Detective Miller—been inside the alien station and seen the fate of the protomolecule’s builders firsthand. And from the first moment they’d allowed it, he’d been shoveling everything he knew about that at them. Calling him cooperative on the subject would have been a vast understatement, and with every passing week, his knowledge of the underground was more out of date. Less useful. They didn’t even bother asking him about that stuff anymore.
Duarte was a thoughtful, educated, civilized man and a murderer. He was charming and funny and a little melancholy and, as far as Holden could tell, completely unaware of his own monstrous ambition. Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it. Even when it was the push for his own personal immortality—and then his daughter’s—before slamming the door behind them, Duarte managed to cast it as a necessary burden for the good of the species. He was above all else a charming little ratfuck. As Holden grew to respect the man, even to like him, he was careful never to lose sight of the fact that Duarte was a monster.
There was a lock on his door, but he didn’t control it. He put the handheld he’d been issued in a pocket, walked out into the courtyard, and closed the door behind him. Anyone who wanted in could go in. If they wanted for some reason to lock him out—or in—they could. He put his hands in his pockets and strolled down a colonnaded walkway. The ferns in the planter came from Earth. Maybe the soil did too. Some minor functionary of the state came out of a doorway before him, turned and breezed by him as if he hadn’t been there. He was like a fern that way. Decorative.
The commissary was larger than a whole deck of the Rocinante. Pale, vaulted ceilings and an open kitchen with three cooks on duty any time of the day or night. A few tables by the windows, a dozen scattered in another courtyard at the back. Fresh fruit. Fresh eggs. Fresh meats and cheeses and rice. Not too much of any one thing. The elegance came from the labor and deference of the people, not from conspicuous waste. Loyalty valued over wealth. It was amazing what you could learn about someone by sitting quietly for a few months with what they’d built.
He got a carved wooden tray and a plate of rice and fish, the way he usually did. A smaller plate of melon and berries. A light-roast coffee in a white ceramic cup the size of a small soup bowl. Cortázar was sitting alone in an alcove at the back, looking at something on a hand terminal. Out of discipline, Holden grinned and went to sit across from the sociopathic professional vivisectionist.
“Good morning, Doc,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Universe treating you gently?”
Cortázar closed whatever file he’d been reading over, but not before Holden caught the phrase indefinite homeostasis. He didn’t know what it meant exactly, and he couldn’t look it up without someone knowing he had.
“Things are fine,” Cortázar said, and the glimmer in his eyes meant that was true. Which probably meant they were terrible for someone who wasn’t Paolo Cortázar. “Very good.”
“Yeah?” Holden said. “What’s the good word?”
For a second, Cortázar teetered on the edge of saying something, but he pulled back. It was a confirmation of his good mood. The doctor liked knowing more than the people around him. It gave him a sense of power. The times he was most likely to let his guard down were when he was angry or annoyed. Or drunk. Drunk and complaining Cortázar was the best version of the man.
“Nothing I can talk about,” he said, and rose from his place even though his food was only half-eaten. “I’m sorry I can’t stay. Schedule.”
“If you get time later, track me down and we can play some more chess,” Holden said. He lost a lot of chess to Cortázar. He didn’t even have to throw the games. The guy was good. “You will always find me at home.”
Left alone, Holden ate his breakfast in silence and let the atmosphere of the room wash over him. Another of the things he’d learned during his time as a dancing bear was not to search for clues to anything. The effort of the search actually made him overlook things. It was better to be passive and notice what was there. Like the way the cooks spoke to each other, scowling. Like the speed of the dignitaries walking into and out of the commissary, the way their shoulders were tight.
Ever since the most recent event—the weird shift in his perception, the lost time and consciousness—the atmosphere in the State Building had been like this. Something was going on, but Holden didn’t know what. No one had even mentioned it to him. And he didn’t ask. Because someone was always listening.
When he was done, he left his plate to be cleared away, got his usual two cups of fresh coffee in takeaway mugs, and tucked a half link of sausage into his pocket. He walked out toward the gardens. It was a little cool. Seasons were longer on Laconia, but the autumn was definitely starting to get its roots into things. High above, one of the weird jellyfish-looking cloud things sailed through the air, the blue of the sky showing through its transparent flesh. The guard post was little more than a bench with a square-jawed young man who looked like he might have been one of Alex’s cousins.
“Good morning, Fernand,” Holden said. “Brought you a little something.”
The guard smiled and shook his head. “I still can’t accept that from you, sir.”
“I understand,” Holden said. “It’s a shame, you know, because the coffee they serve at the VIP commissary is really good. Fresh beans that they didn’t roast like they were hiding evidence. Water with a little bit of minerals, but not so much that it tastes like you’re drinking a quarry. It’s excellent stuff, but . . .”
“It sounds wonderful, sir.”
Holden put one of the takeaway mugs on the bench. “I’ll just put this here so you can dispose of it safely. And this one that Lieutenant Yao can dispose of too. It has a little sugar in it.”
“I’ll let her know to get rid of it,” the guard said with a smile. It had taken weeks to get that far with the kid. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing. Every person in the State Building who saw humanity in Holden, who shared a joke with him, or who had a pattern in their day that he could be a part of, made him that tiny bit harder to kill. No one thing he did made a difference. All of it together might decide between mercy or a bullet in the back of his skull somewhere not too far down the line. So Holden chuckled like the guard was a friend and ambled out into the gardens.
There were patterns in the life of the State Building. Everyone had routines, whether they knew it or not. Here at the heart of the empire, with thousands of people making their way into and out of and through the buildings at the source of authority and power, he could have spent lifetimes tracking them all. It was like sitting and watching a termite hive until each insect stopped being itself and turned into an organ in a much larger, older consciousness. If he lived as long as Duarte intended to, he still wouldn’t understand all the subtleties of it. For his present purposes, the smaller patterns were enough. Things like Cortázar enjoyed winning at chess and the guard lieutenant liked sugar in her coffee and Duarte’s daughter went out into the gardens in the late morning, especially when she was upset.