“Me, too.” Caro said it with a brave little laugh, but she gulped down the remains of the wine in her first glass, then took a sip from the second. She looked up at Gredel.
“You heard of them maybe? The Sula family?”
Gredel tried to think of any of the linkages with that name, but couldn't. “Sorry, no,” she said.
“That's all right,” Caro said. “The Sulas were big on Zanshaa, but out here in the provinces they wouldn't mean much.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why do they call you Earthgirl?”
Gredel put on her Earth accent. “Because I can talk like I'm from Earth, darling. I do the voice.”
Caro laughed. She finished her second glass of wine, then got two more from the pyramid and drank them, then reached for Gredel's. “You going to drink that?”
“I don't drink much.”
“Why not?”
Gredel hesitated. “I don't like being drunk.”
Caro shrugged. “That's fair.” She drank Gredel's glass, then put it with the others on the side table. “I don't like being drunk,” she said, as if she were making up her mind right then. “But I don't dislike it either. What I don't like,” she said carefully, “is standing still. Not moving. Not changing. I get bored fast, and I don't like quiet.”
“In that case, you've come to the right place,” Gredel said.
Her nose is more pointed, Gredel thought. And her chin is different. She doesn't look like me, not really.
I bet I'd look good in that jacket, though.
“So do you live around here someplace?” Gredel asked.
Caro shook her head. “Maranic Town.”
“I wish I lived in Maranic.”
Caro looked at her in surprise. “Why?”
“Because it's… not here.”
“Maranic is a hole. It's not something to wish for. If you're going to wish, wish for Zanshaa. Or Sandamar. Or Esley.”
“Have you been to those places?” Gredel asked. She almost hoped the answer was no, because she knew she'd never get anywhere like that, that maybe she'd get to Maranic Town, if she was lucky.
“I was there when I was little,” Caro said.
“I wish I lived in Byzantium,” Gredel said.
Caro gave her a look again. “Where's that?”
“Earth. Terra.”
“Terra's a hole,” Caro said.
“I'd still like to go there.”
“It's probably better than Maranic Town,” Caro decided.
Someone programmed some dance music, and Lamey came to dance with Gredel. A few years ago, he hadn't been able to walk right, but now he was a good dancer, and Gredel enjoyed dancing with him, responding to his changing moods in the fast dances, molding her body to his when the beat slowed down.
Caro also danced with one boy or another, but Gredel saw that she couldn't dance at all, just bounced up and down while her partner maneuvered her around.
After a while, Lamey went to talk business with Ibrahim, one of his boys who thought he knew someone in Maranic who could distribute the stolen wine, and Gredel found herself on the couch with Caro again.
“Your nose is different,” Caro said.
“I know.”
“But you're prettier than I am.”
This was the opposite of what Gredel had been thinking. People were always telling her she was beautiful, and she had to believe they saw her that way, but when she looked in the mirror she saw nothing but a vast collection of flaws.
A girl shrieked in another room, and there was a crash of glass. Suddenly Caro's mood changed completely: she glared toward the other room as if she hated everyone there.
“Time to change the music,” she said. She dug in her pocket and pulled out a med injector. She looked at the display, dialed a number, and put the injector to her throat, over the carotid. Little flashes of alarm pulsed through Gredel.
“What's in there?” she asked.
“What do you care?” Caro snarled. Her eyes snapped green sparks.
She pressed the trigger, and, an instant later, the fury faded, and a drowsy smile came to Caro's lips. “Now that's better,” she said. “Panda's got the real goods, all right.”
“Tell me about Zanshaa,” Gredel said.
Caro lazily shook her head. “No. Nothing but bad memories there.”
“Then tell me about Esley.”
“Sure. What I can remember.”
Caro talked about Esley's black granite peaks, with a white spindrift of snow continually blowing off them in the high perpetual wind, and the shaggy Yormak who lived there, tending their equally shaggy cattle. She described glaciers pouring in ageless slow motion down mountain valleys, high meadows covered with fragrant star flowers, chill lakes so clear that you could see all the way to the bottom.
“Of course, I was only at that mountain resort for a few weeks,” Caro added. “The rest of the planet might be burning desert for all I know.”
Lamey came back for more dancing, and when Gredel returned to the sofa Caro was unconscious, the med injector in her hand. She seemed to be breathing all right, though, lying asleep with a smile on her face. After a while, Panda came over and tried to grope her, but Gredel slapped his hands away.
“What's your problem?” he asked.
“Don't mess with my sister when she's passed out,” Gredel told him. He laughed, not exactly in a nice way, but he withdrew.
Caro was still asleep when the party ended. Gredel made Lamey help her carry Caro to his car, and then got him to drive to Maranic Town to her apartment. “What if she doesn't wake up long enough to tell us where it is?” Lamey complained.
“Whatever she took will wear off sooner or later.”
“What if it's next week?” But he drove off anyway, heading for Maranic, while Gredel sat with Caro in the back seat and tried to wake her up. Caro woke long enough to murmur the fact that she lived in the Volta Apartments. Lamey got lost on the way there, and wandered into a Torminel neighborhood. The nocturnal Torminel were in the middle of their active cycle, and Lamey got angry at the way they stared at him with their huge eyes as he wandered their streets.
Lamey was furious by the time he found the apartment building. He opened the passenger door and practically dragged Caro out of the car onto the sidewalk. Gredel scrambled out of the car and tried to get one of Caro's arms over her shoulders so she could help Caro get to her feet.
A doorman came scrambling out of the building. “Has something happened to Lady Sula?” he demanded.
Lamey looked at him in surprise. The doorman stared at Gredel, then at Caro, astonished by the resemblance. But Gredel looked at Caro.
Lady Sula? Gredel thought.
Her twin was a Peer.
Ah, she thought. Ha.
Lady Sula?
She wasn't even Lady Caro, she was Lady Sula. She wasn't just any Peer, she was head of the whole Sula clan.
Lamey's fury faded away quickly-it did that, came and went with lightning speed-and he picked Caro up in his arms and carried her to the elevator while the doorman fussed around him. When they arrived on the top floor, the doorman opened Caro's apartment, and Lamey walked in as if he paid the rent himself and carried Caro to her bedroom. There he put Caro down on her bed, and had Gredel draw off the tall boots while Lamey covered her with a comforter.
