Page 40 of Scion

Yeah.

“That bad, huh?”

“You see my damned name on the way in?”

She snorts. Nods. Punches in some details on the pad, and spins it back to me. “What are we looking for?”

“Anything on the file involved in this Pactum. Source, potential copies. That sort of thing.” I type in the agreement number. “As well as any recent chatter even vaguely related to Jasa de Alwes.”

“The lifer woman? The first Ten-O-Ten? Wasn’t she from Tethys?”

Chandra’s golden eyes are on me. Curious. She’s isolated up here. Smarter than me. And it will help if she knows what the hell she’s looking for. “Yes to Tethys, but not so Ten-O-Ten, as it turns out. She hired me for protection.”

“What?”

“Yeah.” I draw out the word. “Protection from the Keres, as it happens.”

“What?”

“Turns out she’s actually been working for them for the past fifteen years.” I pause but Chandra has, apparently, run out of exclamations. “So don’t tell anyone?”

She stares at me in disbelief. “You think, Azure? You think?” She stares at the table between us for several seconds as if trying to discern something vital from its scarred surface. “S’pose I’m adding the Keres to the scrape too?”

“Um… yeah. Yes please. Especially anything about ops or agents in the city. That’s… actually kind of what I need the most, to be honest.”

“ ‘Acquaintances’ is getting very bloody generous at this point, you know.”

“If I didn’t tell you—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Her throaty acknowledgement is understanding, if still extremely displeased. “This isn’t us being even, ’Zure. You owe me after this.”

I tap the pad with the number of tokens she’s just earned.

“Can’t spend it in the bloody afterlife.” She’s calming, despite the words. Always was quick to panic and quicker to recover.

I tap the pad again, purposefully this time. Opening a file for her. She examines it with those glowing eyes, memorising the details.

“This’ll reach you any time?”

I nod. “You need me, I’m here.”

She stares at the details a little longer before deleting them. Knows I sent it across even before she agreed to help. “Better. A few years late. But better.” When she looks up at me again, there’s finally the question I knew was coming eventually. “What happened?”

“I was up here too much. Atti started asking where I was spending my time.” The simple truth.

“So we hang out less often. Link up on Q-net to say ‘Hey, I’m alive,’ now and then. Hell knows you know how to avoid being tracked when you want to.” She sounds more sad than angry, which makes it worse. “What happened to Landry weren’t because you were his friend, Azure.”

I stare at her, then laugh softly and nod. Always straight to the point. Always seeing straight through me. “Sorry.”

“Me too.” She flicks her earpiece, slides off her seat and busies herself over at the DeGov terminal that sits in the corner. It’s not a big part of Themis’s DeGov infrastructure that sits up here. Just one of a dozen different backup systems. But housed as it is in the Plate, it’s the only installation that requires human intervention to keep running.

That doesn’t give Chandra access, of course. No one has that. But she can run limited test data. Scrape just enough off the raw that it can be used by the very enterprising and very connected. Or, in my case I suppose, the very desperate.

How long? I sign it at her.

She’s focused on tapping away but clearly sees me. Finishes what she’s doing and then waves her hand in an uncertain gesture. Saying twenty-two hours. Could be more if a flag’s raised.

Damn. Can you send me it when it’s done?