Heartening that it doesn’t always have to be war, that there are still functional—even rigorous—institutions, so much so she briefly wants to cry. “Please do,” she says. “And thank you.”
When she rings off there’s already an email from the bank with an attached security-camera video of a boy stepping into a bland foyer with the leather couches that looks like the foyer of every Nuage branch in the world. The boy looks uncomfortable, like the room’s moderate elegance oppresses him; she notices the dark stains on the knees of his pants, and his earpiece, and then she recognizes him—it’s Kern, who stole the phone that Cromwell desires so intensely. She wonders how he got her account number and passcode, and even though she was deep in Cromwell’s counsel it strikes her that she’s still missing something, that there’s someone else who has her information.
*
She wakes to a knocking at her door. It’s day. Just whiteness out the window.
The security screen by the door shows Philip standing dazed in the hall, roll-aboard behind him. She remembers telling the desk to let him up.
When she opens the door he says, “I’ve stayed here a dozen times and didn’t know this wing existed.”
She hugs him, though for years they’ve barely touched.
She sees him look at the minibar, then look away, and remembers Iliou’s plane. “Drink,” she says. “Compared to the room, the booze is free.”
He sits on the bed, seems to fold himself around his whisky, forcing himself to stay awake as she tells her story.
“Cloudbreaker,” he says, when she gets to that part. “It’s interesting, but the worst people use that. The worst people. I wish you’d left it alone.”
“I think I do too,” she says, and almost tells him what Cloudbreaker did to her but decides to keep it to herself.
He becomes very solemn when she gets to the attack on the villa and though it seems like that happened a long time ago she realizes there’s not much left to tell.
“So what are we going to do?” he asks, blinking to keep his eyes open as he lies back on the bed.
“Take the initiative.” She explains her plan to go to the node in Tokyo, break in, feign to offer Cromwell Magda’s life. “In the best case, it works and Parthenon gets to him,” she says. “In the worst case, we learn something about whoever he’s bargaining with, or maybe just offend them, and hopefully fuck up his life.”
“I can think of worse cases,” Philip says as his eyes close. “This is fucked. I applaud your initiative but this is much too … opaque. I can’t tell what’s in play, but it’s evident that you’re not safe, and that nothing is under control. You have a new passport. A diplomatic one, for Christ’s sake. You could bail, go live quietly until it blows over. There’s little to like in Cromwell, but I will say he’s rational. He’ll forget about you when it’s in his interest to do so. This will pass.”
The suggestion is both reasonable and practical and she could in fact go live somewhere off the grid and, say, read all the classics of every culture in the original and take up some harmless, donnish hobby—the cultivation of rare orchids, say—to keep her occupied while her life winds down, for she’ll have no money for the Mayo, and after the first year there’ll be no going back, and every night she’ll go to bed wondering if this is the night she wakes to find assassins smirking down at her—she remembers Corporal Boyd’s gauntleted hand fumbling for a hypodermic and Cloudbreaker’s predatory joy as it tore through her history and says, “No.”
“All right,” Philip says into his pillow. “I said my piece. This is fucked, but all right.”
The couch seems far away. It’s easier just to lie down beside him.
She waits until his breathing changes and she’s certain he’s asleep before she says, “Thank you for coming with me.”
*
When she wakes it’s night and she must have been moving in her sleep because the security screen by the door is illuminated; in its faint blue glow she sees Philip asleep on his back, arms folded over his chest like the marble effigy of a medieval knight, and as beautiful, like the boy he was.
He’s inches away. She’s aware of his heat.
So yes, he’s engaged, but they go back a long way, and he came all this way to see her, and whatever his commitments he’s a man, and men are simple creatures, and all she has to do is slide her hand down the front of his pants and she’s reasonably certain he’ll be entirely in the moment, and she’s about to do this when she remembers the earnestness behind the irony with which he’d spoken of his new and more settled life, and, really, it’s little enough to give.
There should be a sword to separate them, but all that’s to hand are his empty whisky miniatures, which she lines up down the middle of the bed. Probably the first time whisky kept someone chaste.
She kicks off her pants and socks, gets under the covers, disappears into sleep.
59
Telemetry Irreconcilable
It seems like Kern has always been on the ship.
In the fleet he’s come to see a purposefulness—whatever it is that they desire, they desire it absolutely, and it has, he is sure, nothing to do with him. In this, somehow, they’re good company. He imagines them racing forever over the seas, circling the world.
He studies the sea from the shade of the missile pods, bathes in the pools in the deck’s declivities, sleeps for hours in the sun. At dusk he sits on the sloping prow, his hands just visible in the slight luminance of the bow wave, watching for the lights of other ships. Akemi never speaks, but he feels that she’s present.
He tries to find his GPS, but just gets an error message—CODE 391—TELEMETRY IRRECONCILABLE.
When the sun sets he lies on the deck, taking in its fading heat, ear pressed to the nubbled black ceramic, listening to the subtle harmonics of the hull. The sound varies, slightly, from minute to minute, like it’s the ship’s song, one of hunger, distance, hatred, mourning.
60
What They Really Wanted
Motion behind Thales on the yacht’s deck. He turns, and there’s the urbane old man from the videos—Cromwell, he thinks—perched on the transom, surrounded by candles.
A ghost, he thinks, then smiles.
As the rain flattens his hair the old man says, “I consider it my duty to lay it out clearly.”
The old man and candles vanish.
In the cabin, Akemi is watching the monitor where Kern is pacing a black ship’s deck. (They’re drone subs, he somehow knows, which the AIs have been stealing and using as transports for years.) Thales wonders just what Kern hopes to get from this adventure, hopes it isn’t Akemi’s love.