“Liar!” Caro’s hand lashed out, and the slap sounded louder than a gunshot.
Gredel looked up and stared at her, too overwhelmed to raise a hand to her stinging cheek.
“I see you everywhere—everywhere in my life!” Caro went on. “You tell me what to do, how much to spend—I don’t even have any friends anymore! They’re allyour friends!” She reached for the shopping bags that held their purchases and hurled them at Gredel. Gredel warded them off, but when they bounced to the floor, Caro picked them up and threw them again, so Gredel snatched them out of the air and let them pile in her lap, a crumpled heap of expensive tailored fabrics and hand-worked leather.
“Take your crap and get out of here!” Caro cried. She grabbed one of Gredel’s arms and hauled her off the sofa. Gredel clutched the packages to her with her other arm, but several spilled as Caro shoved her to the door. “I never want to see you again! Get out! Get out!Get out!”
The door slammed behind her. Gredel stood in the corridor with a package clutched to her breast as if it was a child. Inside the apartment she could hear Caro throwing things.
She didn’t know what to do. Her impulse was to open the door—she knew the codes—to reenter the apartment and try to calm Caro.
I didn’t take the money,she protested.I didn’t ask for anything.
Something hit the door hard enough so it jumped in its frame.
Not the Fleet. The thought seemed to steal the strength from her limbs. Her head spun.I have to stay here now. On Spannan, in the Fabs. I have to…
What about tomorrow?a part of her cringed. She and Caro had made plans to go to a new boutique in the morning. Were they going or not?
The absurdity of the question struck home, and sudden rage possessed her, rage at her own imbecility. She should have known better than to press Caro on the question, not when she was in this mood.
Gredel went to her mother’s apartment and put the packages away. Ava wasn’t home. Anger and despair battled in her mind. She called Lamey, and he sent someone to pick her up. Then she let him divert her for the rest of the evening.
In the morning she went to the Volta Apartments at the time she’d arranged with Caro. There was a traffic jam in the lobby. A family was moving into the building, and their belongings were piled onto several motorized carts, each with the Volta’s gilt blazon, waiting for elevators. Gredel greeted the doorman in her Peer voice, and he called her “Lady Sula” and put her alone into the next elevator.
She hesitated at the door to Caro’s apartment. She knew she was groveling, and knew as well that she didn’t deserve to grovel.
But this was her only hope. What choice did she have?
She knocked, and when there was no answer, knocked again. She heard a shuffling step inside, then Caro opened the door and blinked at her groggily through disordered strands of hair. She was dressed as Gredel had last seen her—bare feet, naked under her dressing gown.
“Why didn’t you just come in?” Caro said. She left the door open and withdrew into the apartment. Gredel followed, her heart pulsing sickly in her chest.
There was litter inside the door. Broken bottles, pillows, packages, and the shattered remains of porcelain cups, the cups with the Sula family crescents on them.
There were more bottles lying on tables, and Gredel recognized the juniper reek that oozed from Caro’s pores.
“I feel awful,” Caro said. “I had too much last night.”
Doesn’t she remember? Gredel wondered. Or is she just pretending?
Caro reached for the gin bottle, and the neck clattered against a tumbler as she poured herself two fingers’ worth. “Let me get myself together,” Caro said, and drank.
A thought struck Gredel with the force of revelation.
She’s just a drunk. Just another damn drunk.
Caro put the tumbler down, wiped her mouth, gave a hoarse laugh. “Now we can have some fun,” she said.
“Yes,” Gredel said. “Let’s go.”
She had begun to think it might never be fun again.
Perhaps it was then that she began to hate Caro, or perhaps the incident only released hatred and resentment she’d already felt, but had denied, for some time. Now, she could scarcely spend an hour with Caro without finding new fuel for anger. Caro’s carelessness made her clench her teeth, and her laughter grated on Gredel’s nerves. The empty days that Caro shared with Gredel, the pointless drifting from boutique to restaurant to club, now made Gredel want to shriek. Now, she resented tidying up after Caro, even as she did it. Caro’s surging moods, the sudden shifts from laughter to fury to sullen withdrawal, brought Gredel’s own temper near the breaking point. Even Caro’s affection and her impulsive generosity began to seem trying.Why is she making all this fuss over me? Gredel thought.What’s she after?
But Gredel managed to keep her thoughts to herself, and at times caught herself enjoying Caro’s company, caught herself in a moment of pure enjoyment or unfeigned laughter. And then she wondered how this could be genuine as well as the other, how the delight and the hatred could coexist in her skull.
It was like her so-called beauty, she thought. Her alleged beauty was what most people reacted to, but it wasn’t herself. She managed to have an inner existence, thoughts and hopes entirely her own, apart from the shell that was her appearance. But it was the shell that people saw, it was the shell that most people spoke to, hated, envied, or desired. The Gredel who interacted with Caro was another kind of shell, a kind of machine she’d built for the purpose, built without intending to. It wasn’t any less genuine for being a machine, but it wasn’t herself.
Herself hated Caro. She knew that now.
If Caro detected any of Gredel’s inner turmoil, she gave no sign. In any case, she was rarely in a condition to be observant. Her alcohol consumption had increased as she shifted from wine to hard liquor. When she wanted to get drunk, she wanted it to happeninstantly, the way she wanted everything, and hard liquor got her there quicker. The ups and downs increased as well, and the spikes and valleys that were her behavior. She was banned from one of her expensive restaurants for talking loudly, and singing, and throwing a plate at the waiter who asked her to be less noisy. She was thrown out of a club for attacking a woman in the ladies’ room. Gredel never found out what the fight was about, but for days afterward Caro proudly sported the black eye she’d got from the bouncer’s fist.
For the most part, Gredel managed to avoid Caro’s anger. She learned the warning signs, and she’d also learned how to manipulate Caro’s moods. She could change Caro’s music, or at least shift the focus of Caro’s growing anger from herself to someone else.
Despite her feelings, she was now in Caro’s company more than ever. Lamey was in hiding. She first found out about it when he sent Panda to pick her up at Caro’s apartment instead of coming herself. Panda drove her to the Fabs, but not to a human neighborhood: instead he took her into a building inhabited by Lai-owns. A family of the giant birds stared at her as she waited in the lobby for the elevator. There was an acrid, ammonia smell in the air.
Lamey was in a small apartment on the top floor, with a pair of his guards and a Lai-own. The avian shifted from one foot to the other as Gredel entered. Lamey seemed nervous. He didn’t say anything to her, just gave a quick jerk of his chin to indicate they should go into the back room.
The room was thick with the heat of summer. The ammonia smell was very strong. Lamey steered Gredel to the bed. She sat, but Lamey was unable to be still: he paced back and forth in the narrow range permitted by the small room. His smooth, elegant walk had developed hitches and stutters, uncertainties that marred his normal grace.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said. “But something’s happened.”
“Is the Patrol looking for you?”
“I don’t know.” His mouth gave a little twitch. “Bourdelle was arrested yesterday. It was the Legion of Diligence who arrested him, not the Patrol, so that means they’ve got him for something serious, something he could be executed for. We’ve got word that he’s bargaining with the prefect’s office.” His mouth twitched again. Linkboys did not bargain with the prefect, they were expected to go to their punishment with their mouths shut.
“We don’t know what he’s going to offer them,” Lamey went on. “But he’s just a link up from me, and he could be selling me or any of the boys.” He paused in his pacing and rubbed his chin. Sweat shone on his forehead. “I’m going to make sure it’s not me,” he said.
“I understand,” Gredel said.
Lamey looked at her. His blue eyes were feverish. “From now on, you can’t call me. I can’t call you. We can’t be seen in public together. If I want you, I’ll send someone for you at Caro’s.”
Gredel looked up at him. “But—” she began, then, “When?”
“When…I…want…you,”he said insistently. “I don’t know when. You’ll just have to be there when I need you.”
“Yes,” Gredel said. Her mind whirled. “I’ll be there.”
He sat next to her on the bed and took her by the shoulders. “I missed you, Earthgirl,” he said. “I really need you now.”
She kissed him. His skin felt feverish. She could taste the fear on him. Lamey’s unsteady fingers began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse.You’re going to die soon, she thought.
Unless, of course, she paid the penalty instead, the way Ava had paid for the sins of her man.
She had to start looking out for herself, she thought, before it was too late.
When Gredel left Lamey, he gave her two hundred zeniths in cash. “I can’t buy you things right now, Earthgirl,” he explained. “But buy yourself something nice for me, all right?”
She remembered Antony’s claim that she whored for money. It was no longer an accusation she could deny.
One of Lamey’s boys drove Gredel from the rendezvous to her mother’s building. She took the stairs instead of the elevator because it gave her time to think. By the time she got to her mother’s door, she had the beginnings of an idea.
But first she had to tell her mother about Lamey, and why she had to move in with Caro. “Of course, honey,” Ava said. She took Gredel’s hands and pressed them. “Of course you’ve got to go.”
Loyalty to her man was what Ava knew, Gredel thought. She had been arrested and sentenced to years in the country for a man she’d hardly ever seen again. She’d spent her life sitting alone and waiting for one man or another to show up. She was beautiful, but in the bright summer light, Gredel could see the first cracks in her mother’s facade, the faint lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth that the years would only broaden. When the beauty faded, the men would fade too.
Ava had cast her lot with beauty and with men, neither of which were reliable in the long term. And Gredel knew if she remained with Lamey, or with some other linkboy, she would be following Ava’s path.
The next morning she took a pair of bags to Caro’s place and let herself in. Caro was asleep, so far gone in torpor that she didn’t wake when Gredel padded into the bedroom and took her wallet with its identification. Gredel slipped out again and went to a bank, where she opened an account in the name of Caroline, Lady Sula, and deposited three-quarters of what Lamey had given her.
When asked for a thumbprint, she gave her own.
NINE
