Spin State - Chris Moriarty [84]
Perfect front teeth bit a perfect lower lip. Perfect hands twisted each other’s fingers into nervous lovers’ knots. “Who killed her?” Bella whispered.
“Who told you Sharifi was murdered?”
“Does it matter?” Beautiful, jarringly unnatural violet eyes bored into Li’s eyes. “Everyone knows.”
“What else does everyone know?”
“I . . . I don’t speak to many people. Except Haas.”
Bella’s voice was surprisingly low, and she spoke with an accent, a halting here and there to search for the proper word. When she said Haas’s name, her voice dropped even lower.
“I don’t know who killed her,” Li said. “That’s what I’m here for. To find answers.”
Bella leaned forward, and Li heard a little catch in her breath. “And when you find them? What then?”
Li shrugged. “The bad guys get punished.”
“No matter who they are?”
“No matter who they are.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say after that. Bella sat like a stone. She looked ready to sit there forever. Certainly until Haas returned.
“Do you have a last name?” Li finally asked, just to have something to say.
“Just Bella,” the witch answered. She said the name as if it were a mere label, nothing to do with who she really was.
“You’re on contract to AMC, right?”
Bella’s mouth tightened. “To MotaiSyndicate. AMC is the subordinate contract-holder.”
“I’m sorry,” Li said. “I don’t know anything about . . . how that works. I probably just said something stupid.” She looked up to find Bella staring at her. “What?” she asked.
Bella pressed a hand to the pulse at the base of her own neck in a gesture that Li recognized with an eerie flash of déjà vu. It was the same biofeedback manipulation technique she’d seen Syndicate soldiers use. “Nothing,” Bella said, dropping her hand back into her lap. “You just . . . remind me of someone.”
“Who?” Li asked, though of course she already knew the answer.
Bella smiled.
“How well did you know Sharifi?” Li asked. “Did she talk to you about her work?”
“Not well.” Bella rubbed nervously at the rash behind her ear, then snatched her hand away like a child caught picking at a scab. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I really don’t know anything.”
“I’m sure you know more than you think,” Li told her. “It’s just a question of putting the pieces together. Tell me what you remember about the fire. Maybe I can make the connections.”
“I can’t tell you,” Bella said. “I don’t remember.”
“Just start at the beginning and tell me whatever you do remember.”
“But that’s just it. I don’t. I don’t remember anything.”
And then she started to cry.
She cried silently, tears sliding down her cheeks like rain running down the carved face of a statue. Li leaned her elbows on her knees and watched, feeling awkward and useless. She had never seen a grown woman cry like this. It was as if something had come unraveled inside her, as if she had lost whatever obscure sense of shame made people cover their faces when they cried. Lost it, or never had it in the first place.
Li cleared her throat. “What about before you went down? Or on the way down. You must have taken a shuttle. Maybe talked about going? Something.”
“No,” Bella said fiercely. “I told you. Nothing.”
She stood up so abruptly as she spoke that she knocked her coffee cup off the table.
Li reached for it without thinking. She got her hand under it just in time. The spoon fell to the floor. The saucer landed in her palm. The cup rattled but stayed upright. Nothing spilled. She set the cup back on the table and leaned down to pick up the teaspoon.
When she looked up, Bella was staring at her, slack-jawed. “How did you catch that?” she whispered.
Li held out her arm and showed Bella the network of filaments running just below the skin.
Bella looked at it like she’d never seen a wire job