Spin State - Chris Moriarty [85]
“Viral surgery.”
“Like Voyt,” she said, and a shudder twisted through her slender body as she spoke the dead man’s name. “In the Syndicates, you’d be a monster.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re not in the Syndicates.”
Bella put her hand up to touch the cranial socket. “Even this is . . . a deviance.”
“Well, you need to access the spinstream if you’re going to work in the UN worlds. It’s how business is done here. How we communicate.”
“Communicate.” Clearly Bella had never thought of applying that word to what she did instream. “I grew up in a crèche of two thousand. I never looked in a mirror because my face—the crèche face—was all around. I never thought about who I was because I knew, every time I looked around me. I never thought about being alone because I knew I’d never have to be. And now I’m here. I don’t understand anything or anyone. I watch them talk at me, around me. I’m the deviant. And there’s no way out.”
“There’s always a way out,” Li said.
“Not for me. Not even the euth ward. I thought I was . . . all right. Before Hannah came. But when I meet someone like her, someone like you.” She wiped her face, pushed the heavy hair back from her forehead. “I can’t help wanting to talk to you. Wanting to feel that I’m not alone for a minute. And then you show me . . . that. And I don’t know what to think.”
“Sharifi was raised by humans,” Li said. “So was I.” It was as close as she’d come in fifteen years to admitting she wasn’t human.
“Does that make such a difference?”
“I guess it does.”
Bella wiped her eyes and spoke again. “I remember the day before the fire. I worked with Ha—with Sharifi. We talked about going down the next day, but we decided nothing. Not definitely. And the next thing I remember is waking up in the mine after the fire.”
Her hand crept to her neck again, and Li could see the pulse fluttering under her fingers like a bird in a hunter’s snare.
“It was dark. I—they were gone.”
“What do you mean, they were gone? Was there someone else with you before that?”
“No. Maybe.” She looked confused. “I don’t know.”
“Where were you when you woke up?”
“In the glory hole. It took me a long time to figure that out. The lights had gone out and I didn’t have a lamp. I . . . I crawled back and forth looking for the ladder. That’s what I was doing when I found Voyt.”
“Voyt?” Li asked, surprised. He should have been on the level above, at the foot of the stairs up to the Wilkes-Barre. “Are you sure it was Voyt?”
“I felt his mustache,” Bella said, and again Li saw that shudder of . . . what? Fear? Revulsion? “I never found a light though. And . . . there was another body.”
“At the foot of the stairs.” That would have been Sharifi.
“No. At the ladder. With Voyt. In the glory hole.” Bella put a hand to her mouth. “It was Hannah, wasn’t it?”
Li nodded. It had to have been Sharifi; no one else had died down there. But assuming Bella was telling the truth, someone had moved both Voyt and Sharifi up to the level above and left them at the bottom of the main stairs into the Trinidad for the rescue crews to find. Why? And who had done it?
“I stepped on her.” Bella looked sick. “I didn’t even stop.”
“She’d been dead a long time by then,” Li lied. “There was nothing you could have done for her.”
Bella started to speak, but as she opened her mouth Haas’s voice rang out in the front office.
“I should go,” Li said.
“No! Wait.”
Li had stood up to leave, but now she crouched in front of the woman, looking up into those impossible eyes, searching the perfect oval of her face for a clue, an answer, anything.
“They got away with it, didn’t they?” Bella said, still speaking in a harsh whisper. “They killed her. And no one’s going to punish them.”
Li was close enough to smell her now. Close enough to see the bitter lines around her lovely mouth, the bruised pallor of the flesh stretched across her cheekbones. Bella looked like a fighter who had taken a