Spin State - Chris Moriarty [185]
“There are some things you can’t take care of, Cohen.”
“Then what?” he asked, his words muffled by a fierce gust of rain outside.
“We go forward. We make the intraface work and we go through with it. And when it comes to the point—the real breaking point—we do whatever the hell it takes to walk out alive. Can you do that?”
“Can you?”
“I can damn well try.”
“All right, then.”
A drop of rain slipped through a cracked panel seal and fell next to Li with a sharp plink. She leaned over, stubbed her cigarette out in the water, and smeared it around into a dirty, sooty mess.
“Catherine?” Cohen touched her shoulder, as if to turn her attention to him.
She looked around. He was close, very close, and he sat so still it was hard to believe Ramirez’s heart was beating.
He touched her cheek, and she felt his fingers slide across drying tears. Then he curved a hand around the nape of her neck, and drew her head down onto his shoulder.
She relaxed into his arms, letting her body shape itself to his, letting her breathing slow to match his. A safe comfortable warmth spread through her. She was tired of hiding, she realized. Tired of fighting. Just tired.
Gradually, so gradually she didn’t at first notice it, the comfortable warmth gave way to a different kind of warmth. She began to notice Cohen’s particular smell—or Ramirez’s smell. She began to feel, through the link, how she smelled to him. The sensation of his fingers on the back of her neck took on a new focus and urgency. An image took shape in her mind: herself, raising her head, parting her lips, offering her mouth to him. Did it come from her mind or his? Was it her desire or his she felt? Did it matter?
“Cohen,” she said, but her voice sounded so blurred and muffled in her ears that it seemed as if a stranger were speaking.
He raised her face toward his, brushed away a last tear, ran a soft fingertip along the curve of her upper lip. He looked at her. A soft, defenseless, questioning look. A look that demanded an answer.
The blanket swished in the airlock and someone stepped into the room, moving quickly. Cohen pulled away. Li looked down, her pulse hammering in her ears, and saw Bella staring up at them.
“Korchow wants you,” Bella said. Li could see her eyes shifting back and forth between them. “He wants to try another run.”
Shantytown: 7.11.48.
She knew where she was going when she slipped out of the safe house that night, even though she didn’t admit it to herself.
It was embarrassing really to see how little her life had changed her. She was still hiding, still lying to herself, still playing the same games she’d played in these streets as a scabby-kneed ten-year-old.
Don’t walk in front of a black cat or a white dog. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Throw salt over your shoulder and the mine whistle won’t blow. And, of course, the main rule, the unbreakable one. Don’t admit what you want, even to yourself, or you’ll never ever get it.
She couldn’t believe she found the house. It unnerved her to see her own feet take her there as if this street, this turning, this particular crooked alley, were etched into her body with something more tenacious than memory. The way seemed so natural, so familiar in the darkness that she wasn’t sure she would have known it in daylight. Why was it that she only seemed to have walked this street after dark? How many times had she half-run past these doors, eyes riveted on her hurrying feet lest she look up and accidentally see some terrible sight that would stop her heart before she made it to dinner on the table and the lights of home? And how many of those times had been after she was already working underground and far too old to be scared of the dark? Or at least too old to admit it to herself.
The alley took a last turning and dumped her out into a narrow laundry yard. If she’d stopped and looked around, she might have lost the thread of memory she was following. She didn’t. She kept her head down, crossed the yard, and turned in to the third doorway as unerringly as a homing