Spin State - Chris Moriarty [188]
“Mrs. Perkins?”
She lit a cigarette, cupping her hand over the flame so that Li could see the missing joint on the first finger—and the new ring on the third finger. “It’s not Perkins,” she said. “I remarried.”
Li’s heart skipped treacherously as if it had slipped on a patch of black ice and almost gone down hard. She’d never thought about her mother’s remarrying. Certainly never imagined her having other children. Somehow, in some part of Li’s mind, it all stopped when she left. Her present went on, but her past stayed put, sealed in amber, always there for her if she really needed it. She should have known better.
“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Mirce asked coolly.
“Major Catherine Li, UNSC.”
“Can I see some ID then?”
Li fished in her pocket and handed over her fiche. Mirce took it in both hands and stared intently at it, glancing back and forth between Li’s face and the ID holo several times. Li swallowed. “Can we go somewhere and—”
Mirce shook her head, a barely visible gesture, so brief that Li could have imagined it. Her pale eyes slid toward the barkeep wiping down glasses a few feet away.
Li hesitated, trying to read the undercurrents of this not-quite-conversation. Remarried, she had said. That meant a new husband. Were there new children too? Was that girl she’d seen in the door one of them? Did they even know about Li? Was that what Mirce was trying to tell her? That she had been doing her own share of burying and forgetting over the last fifteen years? Li swallowed. “I . . . uh. I came because I had a message for you.”
“From?”
“A friend.” She gathered steam, knowing what she wanted to say. “Caitlyn.”
“Oh.” The corners of Mirce’s mouth twitched upwards ever so slightly. “I see.”
“Um . . . she can’t make it back on this trip, maybe not for a while, but she wanted you to know that she’s fine. There was more, but I . . . forgot. You forget a lot with the jumps. Not just small things.”
Mirce slid her eyes toward the barkeep again, but he’d been called away by a customer. “That’s what the doctors said would happen.”
“It happened.”
Mirce gave a little what are you going to do about it shrug. It was the gesture of a hardheaded woman who hadn’t learned anything the easy way, and suddenly Li knew—absolutely knew—that she remembered her.
“I’m sorry,” Li said.
“Sorry?” The word sounded stilted and unnatural on Mirce’s tongue, and her eyes glittered with some hotly felt emotion Li couldn’t put a name to. “Sorry for what? It’s what we wanted, what we worked for. Just go home, or wherever it is you’re spending the night. And watch your back. Your kind isn’t safe here.”
After Mirce walked away, Li just sat there, clinging to her barstool with numb fingers, waiting for warmth and feeling to come back into her body, for the white noise around her to start making sense again. She went back over their conversation, word for word, looking for clues, grasping at brittle unreliable straws of memory. She thought about the look that had crossed Mirce’s face just at the end. Hot, fierce, almost angry. She knew that look. It was triumph.
It was raining hard by the time she left. Night rain, laced with sulfur from the tailings piles and the red dog slides. She scanned the shadows on either side of the street, thinking about getting rolled for her internals, about the late-night barracks tales of soldiers who left some colonial port bar with a pretty girl and woke up the next morning in a backstreet clinic’s defleshing tanks. But the shadows looked empty, for the moment. She turned up her collar and started toward the safe house.
She looked into the bright front window of the Molly as she passed by, but there was no sign Mirce had ever been there.
Korchow was livid. “What exactly did you think you were doing out there?” he asked in a voice that would have chilled any sensible person to the bone.
“None of your business,” Li said, and pushed past him.
“I think it is.” He followed her into the back corridor. “It’s my business when you endanger this mission. It’s my business when