Katrinka, last name still unknown, looking so serious. She was Jordie’s mother? Nina wondered if Ewan knew that. Or if it mattered. After another second, she wondered if she’d known it before and had since forgotten. It felt like she had, but she had no way to be sure, and it nibbled at the edges of her patience.
“Who were you talking to?” Jordie asked with a gesture toward Al, who’d gallantly taken her date the drink.
Nina stared at Jordie. “A friend.”
“Looked pretty intense. What were you talking about?”
“It was a private conversation,” Nina said, not giving a damn if this kid belonged to someone important. She didn’t have to play nice with him.
Jordie gave her a slow, broad smile. “Yeah. Sure. Of course it was private, that’s the kind of conversation you have with a friend, Ms. Bronson. You should have friends, right? Everyone should have friends. I have friends, lots of them. Some of them my mother doesn’t even know, what do you think about that?”
“I’m sure she’d prefer to have some idea about the company you’re keeping. Mothers usually do,” Nina answered, still assessing him. She couldn’t quite get a handle on him. He might not be a physical threat to Ewan, but something about Jordie was certainly not quite . . . right.
“Do you have kids, Ms. Bronson? You don’t look old enough.” He shot her a grin he must have thought was charming.
Onegod, was Jordie flirting with her? “I don’t.”
“Oh, sure, yeah. Right on. I bet if you did, you’d be a hyper icy mom. You’d care who your kid was friends with. If my mother paid attention to me, I’m sure she would, too. Are you enjoying the party? Oh, wait, I know, I know, you’re only here to make sure that nobody tries to hurt Mr. Donahue, right? After all that business with those protest groups, it’s a good thing for him to be careful. You wouldn’t want him to get hurt.”
“Neither would you, Jordie. Would you?” Nina watched him carefully as he answered.
“Lots of people wanted to get to him. That Wanda Crosson, you know, she was bad news. Brilliant mind, but bad news.” Jordie ran his tongue along his teeth and looked beyond her. Nina noticed that he had not actually answered her question. “I need something to eat.”
“In a minute.” Nina’s voice was authoritarian enough to stop him, a fact that seemed to surprise him enough to actually keep him from moving away from her. “What do you know about Crosson?”
“She’s in prison,” Jordie said quickly. “Where she belongs, right? For trying to kill Mr. Donahue. She used to work with him. The way I do, I guess, right? Except that I’m not bad or anything, not like her. I mean, I’m not um, you know, I have ambition and stuff, I definitely want to make something of myself. But not like, enough to kill anyone over it. I wouldn’t do that.”
Nina studied him. “I guess that’s good to know.”
Jordie’s laugh rang false. “She’s in prison, anyway.”
“I know that,” Nina said. “Where she belongs.”
“She’s allowed to correspond via written methods, hyper antique. But not viddy comm,” Jordie said as he rocked on his heels, hands shoved deep into his pockets. He fixed Nina with a sudden fierce look far steadier than any of the others had been. “Did you know that?”
“I did not. How did you?” she asked.
Jordie shrugged, twitching again. “I’m a font of useless trivia, Ms. Bronson. I mean, I bet you didn’t know this whole party was planned by my mother so that Mr. Donahue could make his big announcement.”
“I was not aware of that. No. What’s the big announcement?”
Jordie sighed and did that odd thing with his tongue again. He pulled a small tin from his pocket and shook out several brightly colored tablets that he popped into his mouth to crunch between his teeth with a grimace. “Candy? It’s the sour kind. Really good. Terrific, as a matter of fact. Turns your tongue blue, that’s hyper icy.”
“No, thanks. Hey, Jordie.” Nina stepped forward to take both his shoulders in her firm grip. Not hurting him, but letting him know she could, if she wanted to. “Can you look at me, please?”
Candy took only a few minutes to hit. He’d be re-sugared soon. Right now, he blinked rapidly and honed his gaze on hers. It took an obvious effort.
“Yeah? Sure thing, Ms. Bronson.”
She let go of his shoulders. “Thank you. Can you please tell me what this big announcement is all about?”
“I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.” Jordie’s smile turned sly. Calculating. Part of that was the candy kicking in—he’d be ultra-focused for a while. “Considering how important it would be to you.”
Nina had had about enough of this kid and his hints. A slow rage had started boiling around her edges, creeping closer and closer to completely consuming her. Each breath slipping in and out of her lungs was meant to calm her, but it wasn’t really working.
“How about you tell me, instead of making me beat it out of you?”
Delivered with a smile and hint of a laugh, her threat could have been passed off as a joke. Jordie didn’t take it that way. His eyes narrowed immediately, suspicious. His upper lip curled, baring his teeth for a second before he relaxed.
“I don’t like any of the people here. You have a friend here. I don’t. These are all my mother’s friends. They talk a lot, you know. About making the world a better place. About working together, but they really don’t care about anything but what benefits them. Whatever’s trendy, that’s what they worry about. It doesn’t really matter to them, deep down. What matters is what they can get out of things. I mean, people go to prison for things these people here wouldn’t think twice about doing, because they know they’ll get away with it no matter what.”
Jordie clearly had issues that went deeper than Nina cared to dig. She tried again, her voice a little harder this time. She wanted to reach out and yank him forward by the front of his jacket, but didn’t. “The announcement, Jordie.”
“You don’t need me to tell you,” Jordie said. “He’s about to tell everyone about it. See? Up there. Right next to my mother.”
Nina turned to look at the stage and podium at the back of the room. Sure enough, Ewan and Katrinka were up there. She was beaming, waving at the crowd. Ewan looked . . . uncertain. No, it wasn’t that. Not nervous, either. Nina couldn’t quite figure out his expression.
Ewan’s eyes searched the crowd and found her.
Katrinka was introducing him with lots of adjectives, mostly about his generosity. His dedication. His belief in trying to make the world a better place.
Dev, Nina thought with an internal gasp of relief. Her last name was Dev.
“I told you,” Jordie whispered from beside her. “They talk a lot, but really, they’re all excremental sphincters.”
Nina frowned and nudged him away from her. “Shut up.”
Ewan stepped up toward the microphone. He smiled out at the crowd, clearly an expert at working them. The applause was thunderous, never-ending. By the time he was able to speak over the sound of it, the room hushing, a chill, anticipatory sweat had broken out in Nina’s armpits.
“All of you here tonight have worked tirelessly to support campaigns designed to bring to light abuses and misuses of tech. Many of you were behind me in pushing for the Enhancement Repeal Act, because we truly believed that the tech implanted in those fifteen brave soldiers, while intended for noble purpose, nevertheless ended up causing more harm than good. Many of you, like me, worked to make sure that the soldiers who’d been enhanced were not going to be used to cause harm, but more importantly, that nobody else could ever be forced to accept tech that so specifically and detrimentally brought them the potential of harm.” Ewan paused to look out over the crowd, which had fallen silent. Once again, his gaze found Nina’s. She’d stepped into a small circle of light, so he had no trouble seeing her. He smiled. Looked back at the crowd. “We worked hard for our convictions, my friends, and I would never say that anything we did was wrong. But times have changed. We kno
w more than we did then. We know that the tech implanted in the enhanced is degrading at a far more rapid rate than had been anticipated. We know that it’s causing the enhanced real, true distress and harm to them both physically and mentally. We know that in the past few years, there’ve been such refinements in the tech that we could offer upgrades that would improve and extend their lives. Keep them healthy and without pain. We know now that we could upgrade the tech with better, more secure methods against hacking or unethical usage. So it’s time to revisit the Enhancement Repeal Act, to make sure that we change the law to allow our enhanced friends the rights they should never have been denied. The right to full, long lives.”
Nina did not stagger. She didn’t cry out. She didn’t waver for even the briefest of seconds, not even when she felt her breath rush out of her. Her fists clenched hard enough to dent her palms with her fingernails, but only then for the time it took for her to blink, before she relaxed her grip.
“He should have told you first, huh?” Jordie said into her ear, and Nina, not thinking about anything except the fact that he’d gotten too close without her knowing, reacted at once.
She punched him in the throat and knocked him down. Jordie wheezed, unable to cry out. He hit a platter of empty champagne glasses on the way to the floor, knocking them to the ground with a crash of broken glass. Everyone in the room turned to look at her.
Everyone except Ewan.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The ride home in the transpo after the gala auction had been a million years long and colder than the surface of the butchered moon. Ewan had wisely not tried to make conversation with her, and although Nina had found herself with a dictionary’s worth of words to say to him, she’d been unable to form a single sentence because of how hard her jaw was clenched. They’d gone immediately to their separate rooms and she’d lain awake for so long it had become evident she wasn’t going to get to sleep.
So, pancakes.
“I’ve been craving them since we got back,” she said now without turning. She’d heard the soft pad of Ewan’s bare feet in the hallway outside the kitchen doorway a few minutes ago. Wisely, he hadn’t tried to come in or say anything to her. “They’re what my mother always made for me when I was a kid and stayed home sick from school. Middle of the night, it didn’t matter. She’d make me these pancakes, and no matter how bad I felt, I’d feel better.”
“Do you feel bad about something, Nina?”
She thought she’d toss out a flippant answer to keep him off guard, but instead her shoulders hunched. She slipped the last pancake off the griddle and onto the plate, then turned off the burner. She didn’t turn to face him. She didn’t say anything.
His body heat warmed her from behind, and she wanted to turn, to bury her face against the side of his neck. She wanted to kiss him, and the thought that she never would again punched hard enough to push the breath out of her. She waited for Ewan to touch her, but he didn’t, and she supposed she ought to thank the Onegod or some other deity, but she was simply too sad to be grateful for anything.
“Did you make enough for two?” Ewan asked.
A choked laugh slipped out of her, and she wiped at the single tear that had managed to escape her eye. “Yeah. Sure. Do you like pancakes?”
“I like your pancakes.”
“You . . . do?” She’d forgotten that she’d made them for him. She wasn’t going to say so, though. “Could you please set the table?”
It wasn’t fair how well they worked together. How easily. She finished cooking and set it out while Ewan found the plates and flatware. They took seats opposite each other. He poured her coffee from the carafe.
Nina was tired of trying to keep silent. “What made you decide not to keep a serving staff?”
“I guess I got used to it at the cabin.” Ewan dug his fork into the platter of pancakes. He served her first, surprising her, although if he noticed he didn’t say anything about it. “There’s something relaxing about being in a house that’s not full of people whose sole purpose is to do things for me that I can easily do for myself. I don’t even send my clothes out to be cleaned anymore.”
She paused with a bite halfway to her mouth. Her eyebrows rose. “No way.”
“Yes.” He grinned. “Imagine that. I’m actually self-sufficient.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes. Once, his bare toes nudged hers beneath the table, but he moved them so quickly she didn’t have time to react. He dragged a bite of pancake through the rich, thick syrup and chewed it slowly.
“You should have told me,” Nina said finally, when she could no longer bear the burdensome quiet.
Ewan paused, then licked the sweetness from his lips. “I thought it would be a surprise.”
“A puppy is a surprise. Someone jumping out of a birthday cake? Surprise. What you did to me,” Nina said, “was selfish, and it’s not the first time you’ve been that way.”
He frowned. “That’s unfair.”
Her temper flew out of her like bats from a cave. Darkness against the moon. Nina got to her feet. Pacing. Fists clenching. She whirled on him.
“You lied to me! For weeks and weeks in that cabin. You had every chance to tell me the truth about your involvement with the enhancement tech. How easily you could have offered the upgrades, because you were the one who’d programmed them in the first place. What you did was worse than keeping the tech itself a secret, Ewan, because you kept it . . . from me. This huge, big secret, and you kept it from me.” She paused to catch a breath, expecting him to interrupt her in self-defense, but Ewan remained silent. “Now, you’ve done it again. Kept something from me that so easily could have been shared. Why didn’t you just tell me what you were going to announce at the party? How could you take me there, knowing what you were going to say, and not give me some kind of warning?”
“Because I needed to be sure it was all going to be put into place!” Ewan shouted loud enough to set her back a step. “Without Katrinka Dev’s support for this initiative, I knew it would never get off the ground. I was still persuading her right up until I gave that speech. She could have changed her mind at any minute. You don’t understand what it takes to change laws, Nina. You need people like Katrinka, or they don’t have a chance.”
Dev. That was the woman’s last name, and the bitch of it was, Nina knew she’d forgotten it at least once already.
The public opinion about the enhanced was that they were reset after every job, their memories completely wiped, but the truth was that after her full recovery and release into the private sector, Nina had only been reset twice. In her experience, the rich and powerful usually felt they were too far above the law to worry about her sharing their secrets. She’d never cared about losing any of those memories, because it had never mattered to her what any of them had done or whether or not she could remember it.
She cared very much about the stars going out, one by one.
“The first time I woke up with memories missing, I was in a hospital. There’s no telling if my partial amnesia would have happened anyway from my injuries, and to be honest, I didn’t really notice much of it until later, when they started testing me. So I might have lost them before that. But they did target specific things. Mostly memories of how I ended up there in the first place. Probably so I couldn’t remember that I’d been sent to do something illegal, that’s what I always thought. They wanted to be sure I couldn’t come back and sue them for killing me.” Nina hesitated, hating the way her voice threatened to crack. “Later, they tested the tech by deliberately targeting specific sections of memory. Once it was what I’d had for breakfast just an hour or so before. Do you know how that felt, Ewan, to try and try to remember something so simple, and not be able to?”
“I can’t imagine it.” Ewan got to his feet and stepped toward her, one hand out as though to touch her. At the last second, he stopped.
His clear hesitation slid another blade into her already stabbed heart.
She shook her
head. “No. You can’t begin to. It was horrifying. Degrading. More than that, it was embarrassing in a way I can’t describe to you. Imagine reaching for something you know you should be able to grab, and it isn’t that it keeps slipping out of your fingers. It’s simply not there. Maybe it was never there. Maybe you’ve only been fooling yourself. When they took away the memories, Ewan, they stole pieces of our self-confidence.”
“I never wanted that for anyone.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said. “I know that’s why you erased the records to hide the tech. I know that’s why you worked so hard to make it illegal. I even understand why you didn’t tell me at first, why you kept it a secret. But how could you let me love you, knowing I didn’t know the truth? How could you do that to me?”
He crossed the room to her in a few long strides. She tensed, her reaction automatic. He should know better than to grab her unexpectedly. What she’d done to poor, twitchy Jordie Dev at the party tonight should have reminded him, if nothing else did.
She did not expect him to drop to his knees on the floor in front of her. It wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted him to yell at her. To fight. To keep her angry so she could stop wanting him.
“Get up,” Nina said in a choked voice. “Don’t do this.”
“It would have been better if you’d forgotten me,” Ewan said, head bowed, shoulders hunched. “I could live with myself if I knew you just didn’t remember me, Nina. But I can’t live this way, knowing you do recognize me, and that you hate me.”
Her fingers threaded through his thick dark hair. Her anger fled, leaving her empty, room to be filled with another rush of emotions. Swirling, biting, stabbing at her, she could barely distinguish one from the other.
“Oh, no, baby. No. I don’t hate you. How could I ever hate you?”
It was the truth. She was as much a liar as he’d ever been for telling herself otherwise. She tugged his head backward so she could see his face. His agonized expression tore at her. When his mouth twisted at the way she pulled his hair, Nina couldn’t stop herself from stroking her fingers over his mouth. Ewan’s lips parted at the touch. She slipped her thumb inside the wet cavern, pressing lightly on his teeth.