“I want you to understand that we, the co-op as a whole, will do whatever we can to cooperate with the Treasury’s investigation.”
“Make sure you fill out the reward form correctly,” Trouble said. “But remember to clear out your personal systems first.” She had meant that as a threat—she had dealt with plenty of grey-market programmers for the co-op, trying to get good programs at prices the artists could afford—and she was pleased when Alvarez looked away.
Lofting ignored her, looked around the room, visibly gathering her delegation. “That’s all we came to say. I appreciate your time, India.”
“Not at all,” Trouble said, and bit down hard on a profane response. It wouldn’t work—wouldn’t impress Lofting, wouldn’t anger her, would merely be what she’d expected, and Trouble wouldn’t give her that satisfaction. She walked them to the door, moving with care, and was surprised when Merric hung back at the doorway, glancing over her shoulder as the others moved away into the growing dark.
“If you need it,” she began, scowling, and then her tone changed abruptly. “If they come down on you, India, remember, you don’t have to talk to them. Even if they arrest you, you don’t have to talk to them without a lawyer, and we have a contract with my old firm.” She reached into her pocket, the movement screened from the others by her body, and came out with a thin piece of pasteboard. “The callcode’s there, and our account number. You’ll still have access.”
Trouble took the card wordlessly, and knew from Merric’s shiver that her fingers as they brushed against her hand were as cold as ice. “Thanks,” she said, and was remotely pleased that her voice remained steady.
“I hope to hell you don’t have to use it,” Merric said, and turned away.
Trouble shut the door quite gently behind her, and went upstairs to her bedroom. There was no point in putting it off, and no point in staying here any longer; with Lofting firmly ranged against her, the rest of the co-op would soon fall into line. Which meant she needed the toolkit right away, and the new implant as soon as possible, and the machines downstairs would no longer be safe… She put those thoughts aside, recognizing incipient panic, and began methodically to pack.
It didn’t take her long. She had accumulated more things than she’d realized, clothes and books and disks and the plain-but-decent furniture, but most of it would have to stay behind. She collected what she could carry, what would help her in the weeks ahead—Trouble’s clothes, the best of her pieces, costume from the old days and the few new things that matched that image—and then went downstairs to break up the system. Some of the hardware would have to stay—she couldn’t risk having the node simply vanish, tempting as it was to deprive the co-op of its connection to the outside world—but she stripped the more portable machines away, reaching awkwardly around the shelves to unhook dusty cables. She had done this before, and shied away from the memory, suppressing the thought that Cerise would say it served her right. She sneezed, startled, and went back upstairs for a rag, cursing herself for her carelessness. She’d never stayed in any one place long enough for that to be a problem. Finally, however, she had everything broken down; she folded the last cable neatly into its housing, took a last look at the net monitor obligingly blinking on the main screen—everything was green, most of the house machines shut down for the night, a single blue-toned icon that was Mineka Konstenten, working late on one of her designs— and turned away. It had never been particularly hard to leave, before. Even leaving Cerise had been easier.
She paused in the living room, set the system carrybag on the floor beside the lighter backpack that held her clothes. It was a strange thought, not something she’d really considered before. It wasn’t so much that it was hard to leave the co-op—though, given the choice, she would have stayed, and that was startling—as that it had been, well, easy to leave Cerise. Not that I wasn’t right to do it, she thought, but still… She could remember packing that day, loading the machines and the clothes haphazard into the only bag she had, wrapping the delicate brainbox at the center of a cocoon of jackets and shirts, packing the storage blocks in underwear, hurrying because she couldn’t stand the thought of arguing anymore, because Evans-Tindale had become law and she’d known Cerise wouldn’t see reason, because if she hurried she didn’t have to think too much about what Cerise would say, coming home to the empty flat. No, easy wasn’t the right word, but she hadn’t felt this same regret, a nostalgia, almost, for the time she’d spent. It had been fear then, certainly, and anger. She was angry now, too, but she hadn’t expected the co-op to support her. She had expected Cerise to come with her, in the end.
She checked the kitchen controls a final time, making sure the household systems had spooled down to standby, set the environmental system at fifteen degrees, then left the remote conspicuously in the center of the table. She pocketed the old-fashioned keys, and let herself out the sliding door, locking it carefully again behind her. She hesitated then, weighing the keys in her hand, then turned not toward the gate but into the compound, walking back along the row of houses, skirting the pools of light that spread from the porches. At Konstenten’s house she hesitated, but made herself step up onto the porch, and tapped gently on the reflecting glass. For a moment she thought the other hadn’t heard her, that she’d been too immersed in her work to hear, but then the mirror-image rippled, the line of trees, her own brighter shape wavering, and the door slid open a few inches.
“What is it, India?” Konstenten asked, and slid the door open the rest of the way. She was a tall woman, chestnut hair held back by an embroidered scarf; threads clung to her T-shirt and the legs of her jeans. Behind her, light gleamed on her quilting frame, spotlighted in the center of the room. “Or should I ask?”
“I’m leaving,” Trouble said. She held out her keys, and Konstenten took them mechanically, stood holding them still with her hand up, as though she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with them. “I may be back—I hope I’ll be back, but I wanted to ask if you’d keep an eye on my stuff.”
There was a little silence, and then Konstenten said, “You’re leaving me responsible for your place. And whatever’s in it. All with Treasury breathing down your neck, and the talk everywhere that you’re going to be busted any day now. Fuck you, Indy.”
“There’s nothing in there that could get you into trouble,” Trouble said. “They think I’m a cracker, you’re not involved in that.”
“Fuck you,” Konstenten said again, and threw the keys at Trouble’s feet. They landed with a splash of metal against concrete. “Why do you even bother telling me you’re going?”
Because I didn’t tell Cerise, Trouble thought. But that was not an answer that Konstenten would understand. She said, “Because I thought I owed you.”
“Because you needed my help,” Konstenten answered. The keys lay gleaming at Trouble’s feet.
“Fine,” Trouble said. She shifted the bags on her shoulder, took a step backward, letting the keys lie where they’d fallen. “Yeah, I could’ve used some help, but it’s OK. Leave it, let the committee, whoever, deal with it. But I wanted to let you know.”
She turned away, started walking fast into the shadows, heading toward the edge of the standing trees and the path that led to the main gate. Behind her, she heard a scrape of metal against concrete, but did not look back to see if Konstenten had picked up the keys.
She caught the night shuttle into Irish Point, the train chugging down the center of the flyway that gleamed like an oil slick in the headlights and the silver glare of the rising moon. To the south, the city lights filled the horizon, the distant buildings little more than shadows behind the broken geometry of their lights, further distorted by the scratched windows. She watched them, trying not to think too much, until the flyway split away to either side, ramps spiraling down to the ground roads, and the shuttle itself dipped toward the terminus. She had made sure that Jesse’s still existed, was still in the same ratty storefront where he had always kept shop; that was all she could do, and she put her worries and the anger aside for later.
She took a trolley from the terminus into the town center, got off at the familiar end-of-Main stop. Main Street was less crowded here, toward the edge of Irish Point’s shopping district, fewer cars in sight. Less than two miles away, the street ended at the concrete of the sea wall, and Trouble could see the lights of the Coast Guard tower rising above the distant buildings. She made her way past the closed storefronts, their windows protected by metal grills or heavier solid shutters. Here and there, someone had tried to pry one of the barriers away, leaving a corner curled up, and everywhere red and green pinlights glowed in corners, signalling wideawake security systems.
There weren’t many people on the street, either—a young woman hurrying past, who vanished through the locked door that led to an upstairs apartment; a couple of middle-aged men who walked slow and unsteady, arguing about something in an unfamiliar creole; a twenty-something man in jeans and a too-tight T-shirt, hands in his pockets, scowling—and Trouble felt vaguely that she ought to be afraid. She was too angry for fear,
