Not that she always did. Some days, Holden put himself in what he hoped would be her path and wound up spending hours reading old adventure novels or watching censor-approved entertainment feeds. Not news. He had access to the state propaganda feeds, but he couldn’t bring himself to watch them. Either they’d make him angry, and he couldn’t afford to be angry, or through simple repetition they’d start to seem true. He couldn’t afford that either.
Today, he picked a little pagoda set by an artificial stream. The plants there were local varieties. The leaflike structures were darker than the plants he’d known growing up. Blue black with whatever chlorophyll analog Laconia’s evolutionary history had come up with. Still wide, to catch the energy of the sun. Still tall to get above everything they were competing with. Similar pressures yielded similar solutions, just the way flight had evolved five different times on Earth. Good moves in design space. That’s what Elvi Okoye had called it.
He took out his handheld, and for almost two hours let himself sink into an old murder mystery set on an ice hauler in the Belt before the gates opened, and written by someone who had clearly never been on an ice hauler in their life. The first sign that he wasn’t alone was the barking. He put down his reading just as the old Labrador came galloping around the hedge, grinning the way only dogs could. Holden took the sausage out of his pocket and let the dog eat it from his palm while he scratched the old girl’s ears. There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.
“Who’s a good dog?” he said. The dog huffed once just as the girl came around. Teresa, the heir apparent. Princess of the empire. She was fourteen, and in the phase of adolescence where every emotion spilled down her face. He barely had to glance at her to know that something had wrecked her.
“Hey,” he said, the way he always did. Every time the same, so that the pattern of it became familiar. So that he became familiar. Because things that are familiar aren’t a threat.
Normally she answered with Hello, but today she broke the pattern. She didn’t say anything at all, just looked at her dog and avoided Holden’s gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark smudges under them. Her skin was paler than usual. Whatever was going on, it was personal to her. That narrowed the options down.
“You know what’s weird,” he said. “I saw Dr. Cortázar at breakfast, and he was in a big rush. Normally he’ll stop, chew the fat for a little while. Today, he skinned right out of there. Didn’t even bother to whip my ass on the chessboard.”
“He’s busy right now,” Teresa said. Her voice was as ruined as she was. “He has a patient. Dr. Okoye. The one from the Science Directorate. Her husband too. She got hurt, and she’s here at the State Building so she and Father can talk. She isn’t hurt badly. She’ll be fine, but Dr. Cortázar is helping to take care of her.”
At the end of the speech, she nodded, like she was reviewing what she’d said and approved of it. It was a small gesture. The kind that would lose her a lot of money if she ever started playing cards.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Holden said. “I hope she gets better.”
He didn’t ask what had happened. He didn’t dig for information. He should have left it at that. From a tactical point of view, anything more was a mistake.
“Hey,” he said. “I may not be the guy you want to hear this from, but whatever it is? It’s going to be okay.”
The girl’s eyes went wide, and then they went hard. It didn’t take a second.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, then turned and stalked away, slapping her palm against her leg to call the dog. The dog looked from her to Holden, regret in the dark-brown eyes. The hope of more sausage weighed against the distress of her person.
“Go,” Holden said, nodding at Teresa’s retreating back. The dog barked once, a friendly sound, and galloped away again.
Holden tried to go back to his book, but his attention kept wandering. He waited for almost an hour, then put the handheld away and walked. A cool breeze was starting up. He thought about going back to his cell and getting a jacket, but decided not to. Something about being a little uncomfortable was right for the day. Instead, he made his way to the mausoleums.
Garlands of flowers rested in the corner where the stone met the ground. Red and white and a lavish purple. Some were native Laconian plants, some were out of a hydroponics tank. They’d be replaced until the order came to stop replacing them. If the people in authority forgot, there might be fresh flowers at Avasarala’s grave forever.
The woman herself looked down at him from where she was etched in stone. It was probably just his imagination, but she seemed amused. Like now that she was dead and not actually responsible for fixing any of the vast and secret shit show that was human history, she finally got the joke. He looked up at her, remembering her voice, the way she’d moved. Her eyes, bright and intelligent and pitiless as a crow’s.
“What is going on here?” he asked, softly. “What am I looking at?”
It didn’t matter if they heard that. Without the context of his thoughts, it wouldn’t mean anything.
He was seeing Teresa, devastated. The State Building vibrating with banked anxiety. Cortázar—entitled, narcissistic, protomolecule-obsessed Cortázar—quietly gleeful. Another bout of strange consciousness and lost time, this one at least in Laconia system, and maybe beyond. Elvi Okoye’s return being used as a cover story for Cortázar’s presence at the State Building. Because he needed to be there, was happy to be there, and someone wanted to hide the real reasons why.
Put like that, something had happened to Duarte.
If it was true, Cortázar’s hands were freer. Which meant his plans to vivisect and kill Duarte’s daughter would probably kick into high gear. And also Elvi was back from her missions in the other system, so Holden’s plans could move forward too. It was a race now, and he had a strong suspicion that he was behind. That was too bad. He had hoped to have more time.
Don’t be a whiny little cunt, Avasarala said in his imagination. Hope in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first. Get to work.
First he chuckled, and then he sighed. “Fair point,” he said to the dead woman. This time she didn’t answer. He turned and walked back toward the buildings as the first genuinely cold rush of air came and stirred the ground cover that wasn’t quite grass. There would be a storm by nightfall, he was sure of it. Maybe snow. Snow was the same everywhere.
He had to find his next step. Maybe Elvi. Maybe her husband, Fayez. He’d always liked Fayez. Maybe Teresa. Maybe it was time to go to Duarte, if it wasn’t already too late. If only there had been more time . . .
This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Naomi
Naomi had lived long enough to see history change more than once now. In the reality where she’d been born, Earth and Mars had maintained an alliance built to keep their boot permanently on the neck of Belters like her. The idea of alien life had been something for scientific speculations and thrillers on entertainment feeds. Some changes had been so slow it was almost possible to miss that they were happening. The change of Belter identity from underclass to the de facto governing party at the height of the Transport Union’s power had spanned decades. The rebuilding of Ganymede after its collapse also. The others had been sudden, or had seemed that way. When Eros moved. When the gates opened. When the rocks fell on Earth. When Laconia came back.
The sudden changes, as different as they were, all followed the same pattern. After it happened—whatever it was—humanity went into a kind of shock. Not just her and the people around her, but the whole vast and varied tribe of people. For a moment, it was as if they were all still primates on the fields of Africa going silent at a lion’s roar. All the rules they’d lived by were suddenly open to question. The inner planets have always been my enemy, but are they still? The far reaches of the solar system are as distant as humanity will ever be, but can we go farther? Earth will endure, won’t it?
Naomi didn’t like the feeling, but she recognized it. And more than that, she saw the power in it. Moments like these were opportunities. They could bring new alliances, new empathy, a new and broader sense of being together in a single human tribe. Or they could be the poison that ran through human minds for decades to come and welcomed ancient wars onto new and bloody battlefields.