looked warily at him.
Trouble said, still looking at the screen, “If he’s using the Mayor’s routines, the Mayor sold or gave them to him. I’m sure of that.”
Cerise nodded, but her eyes were still on Mabry. Mabry smiled, turned away from the couch, and leaned in over the screen set up below the media center. “How is your list set up?” he asked.
Cerise followed him, frowning now. “By profession, technie stuff first, then by age and number in household within each category.”
“Run me a search, will you?” Mabry asked. “By co-lessor or primary leaseholder, probably the leaseholder. The name is Eytan Novross.”
Cerise lifted an eyebrow, but did as he asked, saying, “Who’s Novross?”
Mabry smiled, not pleasantly. “Eytan Novross is the Mayor of Seahaven.”
Trouble set her machine aside and came to join them, resting one hand on the back of Cerise’s chair. “I thought nobody knew who the Mayor was, realworld.”
“We’ve known for years,” Mabry said. “We just couldn’t—can’t—prove anything against him. The space that Novross runs is perfectly clean, or has been every time we’ve gained access. But it is Seahaven, and he’s the Mayor, there’s no question about it.”
“Do you think he’d be stupid enough to have an obvious connection with newTrouble?” Trouble asked.
“It’s worth a try, at any rate,” Mabry said, and there was something in his voice that made Trouble look sharply at him. He knew something, all right, something that he wasn’t telling—
“Got it, by God,” Cerise said. “Look there.”
The record filled the screen, drawn perhaps from census, perhaps from the tax forms, the record of owner and inhabitants of one of the Headlands apartments. Not the most expensive of the buildings, Trouble saw without surprise, but not the cheapest, either. And even the cheapest of those flats were worth more than she could afford. Eytan Novross was listed as the owner, a further screen indicating that he paid taxes and mortgage promptly and without complaint; the occupant, however, was listed as James Tilsen, student. “He’s seventeen,” she said aloud, and Mabry shrugged.
“We figured he was young.”
Not that young, I didn’t, Trouble thought, not really, and bit back the words because they weren’t—quite— true. She had been seventeen when she first made a name for herself in the shadows. It was more that she had forgotten, as she herself had gotten older, just how young the competition would always be. It was hard not to feel a little guilty when you slapped down a rival, if you thought too much about their age…
“You really think this is newTrouble?” Cerise asked.
Mabry nodded again. “Yes. I’m sure of it.”
It was there again, in his voice, the certainty. “You knew this,” Trouble said aloud. “You knew there was a connection.”
Mabry looked at her, heavy face empty of emotion, and Cerise said, “Ah. I think you’re right, Trouble.” Her voice hardened. “Give, Mabry.”
Mabry hesitated a moment longer, grimaced. “We knew that Novross—the Mayor—was paying to house and feed this kid, a kid, anyway. We looked into it pretty thoroughly, of course—the boy was well underage—but everything was scrupulously aboveboard. Novross lives elsewhere—he’s on the move a lot, but he rents in Harborside or by the Parcade, anyplace he can get power for the hardware—and does not, absolutely does not, sleep with the kid.”
Cerise lifted an eyebrow at that, and Mabry scowled, looked fleetingly ashamed. “Do you think that wasn’t the first thing Treasury—and us, too—checked out? They thought—it would have been a good arrest. Tilsen was fifteen when he moved in.”
Trouble looked away, torn. Fifteen was too damn young, most of the time, ninety percent of the time, but she resented the certainty that it would have been the queer relationship that made a conviction certain. If newTrouble had been a girl—if it had been me, she thought, with a sudden chill—it would have been a different matter.
“You mean he’s just being paternal?” Cerise asked, and the disbelief was plain in her voice. “The Mayor?”
Mabry shrugged, looked even more uncomfortable. “There was a sting set up, too, nice young-looking guy. He said Novross nearly panicked when he said he’d sleep with him, told him no in no uncertain terms. Said he was above all that, above sex, but our man thought he was too scared to do it. So, paternal or not, I don’t think he’s sleeping with the kid.”
Trouble looked at him without affection. This was the part of a syscop’s work that she disliked—but that, she told herself, was pure sentiment. NewTrouble, whatever his age, whatever his relationship with the Mayor, had done his best to destroy her and steal her name and reputation. That, in the end, was all that mattered. Still, at the moment, her victory felt a little hollow.
“What happens now?” she asked, and Mabry shrugged again.
“I get a warrant, and go see Tilsen,” he said. “With any luck, he brings down the Mayor as well.”
That wasn’t in the bargain, Trouble thought, but Cerise’s eyes were on her, and she said nothing.
“Do you think that’s likely?” Cerise asked, and heard the ambivalence in her own voice.
“Look,” Mabry said, “the Mayor is the source of half of what’s illegal in this sector of the nets—on the nets in general. Seahaven, his Seahaven, is worse than the City of London for data laundering. Do you have a problem with shutting him down?”
The two women looked at each other, each one knowing better than to speak for the other, and then Cerise gestured impatiently. Trouble said, “I suppose not. But it’ll be a weird world without Seahaven.”
Cerise nodded.
“Maybe,” Mabry said. He turned away from the media center, stopped again with his hand on the door controls. “One thing, though. If you screw up this arrest, the deal is off.”
“You don’t need to threaten me,” Cerise said.
“It wasn’t you I was talking to,” Mabry answered, and was gone.
When the door had closed behind him, Cerise looked back at Trouble, one eyebrow rising in question. “You weren’t thinking of warning him, were you? NewTrouble, I mean.”
“No, not really,” Trouble said. She sighed, and walked back to the couch, began shutting down the system there. “It’s just—it makes a difference, knowing his name.”
Cerise nodded. “I know.”
“And I never wanted to close down Seahaven,” Trouble said.
“Christ, no.” Cerise took a deep breath. “Except I never liked the Mayor…”
Trouble smiled. “No more do I. But—” She broke off, shaking her head, coiled an errant cable around her fingers. “Damn it, I don’t like the way the net’s changing. I don’t trust these guys who come in out of the bright lights and plan to fix everything, clean up the mess—who knows what they’re going to shut down next, the arts links?”
“You’re overreacting,” Cerise said, and made herself sound certain because she wasn’t sure at all that Trouble wasn’t right.
“You don’t think so.”
“No,” Cerise admitted, after a moment. “But it’s already changed. It changed when the law did, back when you said, when you had the sense to leave. This is just mopping up.”
Trouble nodded, slowly, looked down at the components strewn beside her on the couch to hide the old, still-fierce pain. Cerise was right, of course: that had been why she herself had left the nets, left Cerise, because the virtual frontier had closed, its shadows bounded and mapped by the new web of laws that allowed the realworld to exert its authority. Once, there had been a chance that the nets, the virtual world, might expand to contain and control the real, but that had ended. All that was left for them was to try to preserve the good things of the nets within the confines of the realworld. “So what do we do now?” she asked, meaning afterwards, and Cerise smiled, deliberately misunderstanding.
“What about a last walk on the wild side?” she asked, and Trouble smiled back, grateful to have her question deflected. “Care for a trip to Seahaven?”
