“I have to be careful. If the King finds out, I…”
He doesn’t want to say it, but the look on his face communicates his fears well enough. At the very least, the King would put a stop to my father’s illicit purchases, just as my mother and I put a stop to his drinking.
“Where’s the envelope?”
Suspicion is etched deeply in his eyes, but he intuits that I’m in charge today. Besides, his pocket is hardly the most brilliant hiding place.
I rise and walk to the window, separating one patch from the others and holding it up to the light. Even through the white backing I can see the thin layer of shimmering specks that caught my eye last night. “What are you?” I whisper. Then, returning the patch to the envelope, I address him again. “You’re certain the rest of the nobility doesn’t know about this?”
“And you must not tell,” he pleads, laying one hand beseechingly on my arm. I’ve never seen him so afraid; the thought of losing access to his little adhesive friends has set him to trembling.
I finger the velvet purse looped around my wrist and begin pacing. “How do you get it?”
“A man—”
“Of course,” I say. “The man from last night.”
“He comes to my rooms, dressed as a servant.”
That throws me off a bit. Most of our servants are bots. About forty years ago the board decided that serving among the upper class creates jealousy and aspirations that could tear down our society, just as the class divide of the 1700s led to the French Revolution. So they replaced humans with bots wherever possible. Beyond the historical facts, I’d never particularly noticed nor cared.
The number of things I’m discovering I neither noticed nor cared about before is growing uncomfortably large.
Still, there are a fair number of real people on staff—it wouldn’t be difficult to add another servant to the mix, not with my father’s credentials. “You have a prearranged time?”
“We exchange notes.”
I consider that. The obvious answer is to be present during one of these meetings, but I’m not certain I want to wait six more days.
“Could you deliver a note for me?” I ask. One note. I’ll trust him with one note and then I’ll never have to put my faith in him again.
“For you? But why?”
“You don’t want to know, nor do I care to tell you.” I sweep from the room, my skirts swishing against both sides of the doorframe as I nearly run to the desk in his study. A quick search of the top drawer yields a small supply of stationery and a ballpoint quill. I scribble a few lines, then reach into my well-hidden purse and carefully count out ten thousand euros.
It hurts to look at the stack on the desk.
Six hundred euros my father paid for one batch of patches. Six hundred. At first glance that seems hardly worth noticing—the gown I’m wearing is probably worth two or three thousand. But of course it wasn’t paid for with euros. It was paid for with credits, the unimaginatively christened scrip Sonoma pays its employees and accepts at its various commercial outlets.
Credits can theoretically be exchanged for euros, or dollars, or yen, but the rate is beyond abysmal. Outside Sonoma’s sphere of influence, credits might as well be the plastic chips children use when they’re learning to play piquet. The meager contents of my cash box are already worth dramatically more than the credits in my bank account. And this stack of bills represents a not-insignificant percentage of my precious savings.
My hand shakes as I tuck the money into a fresh envelope. A token of good faith, reads my freshly penned missive. More like a token of desperation.
I turn to find my father standing in the doorway, studying me, confused. I’d be confused too. But I gather my composure and take small, graceful steps toward him, every centimeter the lady I pretend to be. “For your criminal man,” I say sternly. “And do not take so much as a single bill from this envelope.”
The packet falls into my father’s palm with a faint smack. He stares at it, then me, then it.
“If,” I say harshly, “that note and the money inside reach its destination, I will”—I swallow hard, then force the words out—“I will take over paying for your patches.” Though take over is misleading at best, as I’ve technically been paying for them all along.
The look he gives me is a confusing mixture of apology, resignation, and shame. He says nothing. After a moment, he simply nods.
“Today,” I add firmly. Not only for my own designs, but it’s best to remove temptation from my father’s grasp as quickly as possible.
“I’d better go,” I say, taking a few moments to reinsert my Lens and pull on my gloves. “Dinner plans.”
“It’s midafternoon,” my father protests, and for the first time since I arrived—the first time in weeks—I get the impression he wants me to stay.
It’s not possible, of course. “When one is dining with the devil himself,” I mutter, “a vast amount of preparation is in order.”