I look at my watch. I’m to meet the rabbit at Aristotle Park at two in the afternoon, and it’s already pushing one. Cyra and Dano wanted me to make the plant on the girl the first day out. They worried I wouldn’t be charming enough to ensure I’d see her again. Too many variables, they said. Cyra knows computers, and Dano knows angles, but leave the human condition to me.
We kept correspondence since I last saw her. It started facile. Sharing little jokes, musings on the superciliousness of Luna’s jewel-bedecked denizens. It was a bore at first. She was just a child realizing she could mock the world. I expected the vitriol to continue to pour out. But the more comfortable she grew, the kinder she became and the heavier the black, gnarled weight in my stomach grows. In some ways she reminds me of Trigg. Small-town, good heart waltzes into the big, rotten city; and here I am, the welcoming party. Some people just have shit luck.
I look at my watch again, annoyed.
“Kobachi. Almost done?” He doesn’t answer. “Hey, gecko, I’m talking to you.”
Kobachi starts and peers up at me, his eyes magnified by the lenses. “Quite. Quite. Come have a gander.” He shuffles to the side to make way for me. I pick up the small metal drone from the table, turn it over in my hands and match it with the Bacchus pendant already around my neck. Perfect replica, but a bit heavier. “The face is just as you requested. Sweet and gentle, lively and compassionate, but the devil’s behind the eyes, eh?”
“Will it work?”
“I bet my reputation on it.”
“Not just your reputation, Kobachi.” I pat him on the cheek and slip the pendant around my neck, shoving the other into my pocket. I head to the door. “The Syndicate will cover the expenses.”
I change into Philippe’s clothes in Kobachi’s lavatory and fix his beard to my face. I apply the makeup for my fake scars and insert the blackmarket retinal forges, which turn my eyes a gray so pale it could almost be white. I twirl an extendable cane out before me in front of the mirror and work my face through the gamut of emotions to check for creases in the makeup and resFlesh scars. “A pedestrian’s penchant for circumambulatory locomotion is the pedantic paroxysm of a pleonasm of peremptory drivers and sometimes leads to imperfectly preventable parricide.” I repeat the phrase four times till I have Philippe’s pretentious multisyllabic-adoring accent down pat. Satisfied, I check the Bacchus pendant one last time and tuck it away. The cool metal slips under my shirt and waits against my skin. It’s uncommonly heavy. Will she notice? I stare at myself in the mirror. My pupils huge in the low light. I sink into the darkness in them, remembering how the Gold spit Trigg with her razor. Holiday’s words slither back.
What would he think of me now?
I reach for the zoladone dispenser and activate the blighter on my collar.
—
After catching a taxi to Aristotle Park, I find the rabbit waiting for me underneath an old sycamore that’s seen at least five Sovereigns. She’s watching squirrels chase each other along the boughs. “Finally!” she says, bursting to her feet and looking up at me with those big rusty eyes. Her hair is more fashionable now. Straightened and hanging to just below her ears. I liked it better the other way. In the reptilian chill of the zoladone, I vivisect her. The city is already changing the girl. The hair, the silver nail polish, the faux-leather black jacket she wears with purple lights on the sleeve—eroding the romantic rustic mystique I built around her. The city never infected Trigg, except for those coral earrings and that sad jacket. Least she still talks like she’s from a mine, for now. “?’Lo, geezer, I was startin’ ta think you’d been hit by a bloodydamn train. I’m almost an old maid here.”
That’s not what she was thinking. She was thinking I’d ditched her. That’s what you always think when you’re alone. That you’ll always be alone, and any present company is an aberration.
Cold inside, I feign a smile and touch my leg. “A thousand apologies, love. No, a million! My leg, the old limb, has been the black death of me today.”
She pales and looks at my cane. “Oh Jove, I’m sorry…was only a jest.”
“You couldn’t know.”
“You should have messaged me. I could have met you….”
“An old tinman’s rust should never jeopardize a lady’s enjoyment of an afternoon as splendid as this.”
“You should have told me,” she says crossly. “We don’t have to walk the park….” We’d planned to stroll the park and take a taxi to the wharf to see the water of the Sea of Serenity—an idea I couldn’t get her to drop. But to go to the water, we’d have to cross through a security checkpoint, and checkpoints have advanced sensors and my Philippe credentials are hardly unimpeachable. Say what you want about the Republic, whoever created their ID system was a razor-smart bastard.
“We could find a café if that would be easier for you,” she says. “Or maybe go to the stalls and get a picnic on the grass?”
“No, the wharf would be lovely!”
“Philippe…” She crosses her arms. Subborn little rabbit.
“Well…only if you insist.” I emphasize a sigh of relief. “I believe you’ve saved my life this time. The water makes my leg ache so. Are you sure you don’t want to walk? I could grin and—”
“We’re having a picnic,” she concludes. “And that’s the end of it.”
“Then I insist on shopping with you, paying for everything, and escorting you properly as I do it. Young Lyria…” I proffer my arm. She smiles, delighted by the courtly manners and how dashing she must look in her new black jacket; she slips her arm in mine. We cross the park, where lowColor children fly their kites through the twilight sky—slate blue stained with fingers of whorehouse pink—and my sight lingers on indiscreet lovers who lie in the deep shade. The rabbit’s eyes seek out families playing and lounging along the edge of a pond.
In the market, we amble through stalls of foods from four planets and ten continents. Fatty strips of beef bubble over charcoal grills. Seafood simmers in oil. Squid steams in marrow vapor. Vegetables, flash-frozen and shipped from Earth, like all the rest of it, glimmer wetly in clear plastic. The air is soupy with the scent of cloves and Martian cumin and curry, making my mouth water. We choose two foils of Pacific sweet fried cod, a plastic bowl with olives swimming in oil, European Gruyère cheese wrapped in South American prosciutto and baked in a flaky pastry, and for dessert a pint of jasmine ice cream and custard-stuffed dates. We lay the spread on the grass and eat while watching the children’s kites bank in the sky.
“I like watching them,” Lyria says about the children.
I mutter something neutral.
“All they know is that their parents love them and they like kites. Do you like kites?”
“Who doesn’t like kites?”
“I don’t imagine the Sovereign likes kites.”
“No?”