Spin State - Chris Moriarty [124]
Li caught her breath. “So you’re a free woman,” she said, and bit her tongue again. She couldn’t put a foot right tonight.
“Free,” Bella repeated without a trace of a smile. “I have never understood what humans mean when they use that word.”
Dinner was good, though Li didn’t have much appetite. She felt like she was in a play, the stage already set, the lines already scripted. Eating Haas’s food on Haas’s china. And across the table, Haas’s . . . what? Mistress? Employee? Indentured servant? One thing was certain: this wasn’t headed for a happy ending.
Bella talked, mostly. She seemed desperate to talk, terrified of the charged silences that hung between them. She talked about her childhood, her schooling, her life before the contract. None of it was what Li had expected. She had expected one of those mythical constructs you heard about in OCS classes and mission briefings. Brilliant, single-minded, every speck of individuality trained and programmed and disciplined out of her from the instant her tank’s umbilical cords were severed. Instead, she heard a lonely young woman stranded a few hundred light-years from her home planet.
Bella described the same things Li had seen during the Syndicate Wars. Gestation tanks, crèches, study labs. But she described them as home, spoke in words that made Li wonder if she’d seen what was really there on Gilead, or just what she wanted to see.
“The night I came here was the first night I spent alone in my life,” Bella said. “I couldn’t shut my eyes. I heard voices, noises. I thought I’d gone mad.”
“Did it get easier?”
“No.”
“Then why stay?”
“It was my part.”
Li blinked, thrown back to the interrogation rooms on Gilead, to the D Series soldiers she had seen mouth those same words. My part, they always said, as if the phrase had been stamped into them. My part to serve. My part to kill. My part to die. She felt a sudden, unwilling kinship with Bella: a murky intuition that, war or no war, the Syndicate soldiers she’d spent nearly a decade killing were closer to her than the Ring citizens it was her duty to defend against them.
“How did you end up with Haas?” she asked, seizing on the first change of subject that came to mind.
“With—? Oh.” Bella’s eyes dropped. “It just . . . happened.”
“You make it sound like a spilled drink.”
“It’s in my contract.”
“Your contract requires—?” Li couldn’t bring herself to voice any of the possible endings to that question.
“The contract doesn’t require anything. But . . . he told me he would be displeased if I didn’t. And that if he were displeased, he would terminate the contract and ask for a replacement. I . . . I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t be one of those. Terminated.”
“Having an affair with your boss seems a little above and beyond the call of duty, Bella.”
“It’s not an affair,” Bella said sharply. When Li glanced up her face was flushed, furious. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m not . . . I’m not abnormal.”
Abnormal. Li considered the word and the peculiarly ominous ring it had coming from a Syndicate construct’s mouth. She wondered what the source of Bella’s shame was. That Haas was foreign, unplanned, male? All three things? “You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” she told Bella. “You’re a long way from home here. You wouldn’t be the first person in history who adapted to survive.”
“No,” Bella said. “You don’t understand. You can’t understand, coming from . . . where you come from. It was a privilege to be sent here. All of us who were chosen knew the risks, the hardships. Even the Ds. They told us it was the most important thing we would ever do for our home Syndicates. I can’t fail after that. No matter how bad it is.”
“And how bad is it?” Li asked.
Bella’s fork lay forgotten on her plate rim. She picked it up, made a halfhearted attempt to eat something, then gave up entirely. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would