“I’ve got an idea. You remember the last time I was revived?”
“Uh… yeah.”
“Those people weren’t legitimate, were they? That revival was off the books.”
I squirmed a little. She was talking about the time Etta had gone nuts and killed her, then stuffed her into the trunk of a tram. We’d gotten help from Turov—a connection to a back-entrance group at Central that would do dirty revives for a price. Floramel had never gotten over that experience, and I didn’t think she ever would.
“I remember,” I said in a neutral tone.
“Why don’t you take him there?” she asked.
“Well… uh… I don’t know those people personally. I pulled a few favors myself to get you back and breathing again.”
She stared at me for a moment. “What happened that night, James? The night I died, I mean. You’ve never told me the truth. What made you kill me? What did I do?”
“Damn, girl! I didn’t kill you. I told you that.”
“Okay, okay, then tell me who did do it. Why not tell me the truth? At this point, how could it matter?”
I squirmed on her couch. If I told her Etta had done it, my daughter would be fired at the very least—deservedly so. “I can’t say. I’m sworn not to.”
Floramel looked down and nodded. “That’s what I thought. It was Turov, wasn’t it?”
“Uh…”
“I went back there a few days later, you know. I talked to everyone there. They avoided me, and they tried to chase me off, but I persisted and used my official credentials. Eventually, they admitted to me that Galina was there that night. That she left before the revival process had been completed.”
Oh shit. That thought was bright and sharp in my mind. It was true, Galina had been there. But she’d been helping me out, she hadn’t killed anyone. Not knowing what to say, I swallowed hard.
Floramel nodded as if her darkest suspicions were confirmed. “I owe you, then. Both an apology and a life. It never made sense to me that you’d performed that murder. We were supposed to go on a date. You had everything to lose and nothing to gain by my death.”
“That’s true.”
“So, Galina had me killed… but why? Out of jealousy?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes, rocks are best left unturned. Don’t go poking around under this one.”
She nodded again. “She killed me, or had me killed, then you talked her into reviving me. That witch…”
I heaved a relieved sigh. Floramel had built her own truth, and that kind of truth is always believed, whether it’s right or wrong. Feeling like a fish that’d slipped off the hook, I took a big gulp of coffee.
“You got anything to eat?”
She pointed vaguely at the kitchen. I got up and made myself a lame snack out of yogurt and cranberries and crap like that. When I turned around, I was surprised to see Floramel standing right behind me—standing close.
“I’m so sorry, James,” she said. “I’ve mistreated you and misjudged you.”
“Oh well… don’t worry about it. Say, do you want to go to breakfast? I’m kind of hungry.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
We walked out and made a nice morning of it. After I’d found a hash-slinging diner and downed their four-egg special, I was feeling really good. The rising sun outside the bay window showed the highway at the bottom and the bright, cheery sky above. I was almost glad I’d skipped right past March and April.
“…and we’ll go together,” Floramel said. She’d been talking for a while, but I hadn’t heard much of it.
“Uh… go where, exactly?”
“To the revival place, of course.”
“Oh… oh yeah. We’ll do that.”
“Maybe we should transfer Raash’s body scans and engrams onto a disk, first. That way, it will seem less odd.”
I blinked at her a few times.
“Uh…” I said, because I’d forgotten to tell her something important.
Reaching a hand down under the table, I touched my jacket pocket. Sure enough, a hard, oblong object was still in there. It was greasing-up the interior of my pocket pretty good by now. Just thinking about it made me grit my teeth.
“Floramel? There’s something else I’ve got to tell you…”
-12-
Floramel’s face was filled with both horror and incredulity.
“You have Raash’s claw?” she demanded.
“Yep. Got it right here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that right away?”
“Well, I guess it kind of slipped my mind…”
Floramel chewed me out for a while after that, but pretty soon I stopped listening. Eventually, she got around to the obvious.
“So, we don’t have a real body-scan? His engrams are in your tapper, but what good is a mind without a compatible body to load it into?”
“Not much,” I admitted.
“What are we going to do? We can’t just go down to the backdoor at Central with a million credits and ask for a revive on a burnt alien finger. They’ll laugh us off the property—that’s if they don’t call the MPs.”
“Uh… did you say something about a million credits?”
“Yes. When I went there before—I told you this, weren’t you listening, James?”
“Sure-thing I’m listening! I always listen, girl. It’s just that I don’t remember all the details sometimes.”
“Well, as I said before, I asked what it cost for a revive like the one they gave me. It was an even million credits. Hegemony money only, of course.”
“Of course… damnation.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just that… well, I didn’t know that Galina had spent that much on you the last time around.”
Floramel looked at me oddly. “So, she spent the money? Not you? She must have been feeling guilty, or something.”
“I guess so.”
She looked at me for another suspicious minute. As a cunning dodge, I put on my
