Age of X01 - Gameboard of the Gods (16 page)

They certainly seemed to have a high opinion of Justin’s skills—well, Francis Kyle did, at least. The guy had looked like he’d wanted Justin’s autograph. She
almost
couldn’t blame him. Justin’s reaction to the video and his analysis of the murder stats had been fascinating. There’d been no womanizing addict there. He’d been so intent, so completely consumed by just this brief introduction to the case, that she’d found it easy to believe he was the star servitor Francis and even reluctant Cornelia had claimed.

Mae’s ruminations were interrupted when she reached her stop in the theater district. Here, the night was brilliant and alive, a far cry from sedated suburbia. Streetlamps and bright screens painted everything with flickering, colored light outside, chasing away the evening’s darkness. Even on a weeknight, this area stayed busy with theatergoers and those seeking nightlife in the many restaurants and clubs. Mae navigated through the crowds and crossed the street on a sky bridge a few
blocks away, which led her to a bar whose window screen proclaimed that lavender martinis were on special tonight.

She had tried to act like she was conducting important business on her ego earlier, but really, she’d been arranging a bar meet-up. Her eyes easily adjusted as she entered the dark establishment, which had no overhead lights. All the illumination came from purple neon underneath the tables and bar’s edge. It cast a ghostly glow on the trendy customers as they sat at high glass-topped tables, chatting among themselves while also scoping out newcomers. It was one of those see-and-be-seen places. Watching the bartenders scurry and make drinks reminded her of Panama and the antiquated drink machine. They’d been popular in the RUNA once, but “real people” were in vogue now.

Val and Dag were already there, having taken over a table by the front window. They were in casual mode, jeans and T-shirts, which earned them a couple of disapproving looks from the more elegantly dressed patrons. At least they hadn’t worn their uniforms—which they did on occasion, simply to create a scene and disconcert those around them. The last time they’d done it, their waitress had been so intimidated that she’d dropped a tray of drinks—twice. Mae had felt obligated to leave a generous tip by way of apology.

Dag whistled when he saw her. “Look at you,” he said. “Going to the country club?”

“They wear dresses to country clubs,” chastised Val, as though she were some kind of expert. “Our girl looks more like she’s been giving boardroom presentations.”

“You’re both wrong.” Mae sat down and immediately brought up the table’s touch-screen menu and ordered a mojito without even checking out anything else.

“Well?” asked Val. Both she and Dag were watching Mae expectantly. They hadn’t seen her since the funeral. “Where
have
you been? Not in detainment, obviously. We thought maybe they’d lent you out to the police. Or had you giving tours of the military museum.”

“Well, that may be yet to come,” Mae said. “But this week I’ve been in the provinces.”

Her friends looked impressed. “You were in action already?” asked Dag.

Mae decided beating up those backwoods thugs didn’t really count as action. “I was, uh, running an errand in Panama.”

A waiter came by with her mojito, as well as another round for Val and Dag. They were only social drinking tonight, or else they would’ve had at least ten drinks in front of them. If you could take down several drinks within a couple of minutes, you could briefly keep ahead of the implant’s quick ability to metabolize alcohol. It achieved a very, very short-lived buzz that was usually over in ten minutes. Prætorians called it “slamming the implant.”

Justin and Tessa’s presence in the RUNA wasn’t something that could be kept secret, so Mae gave them a quick—and extremely edited—rundown of her Panamanian adventures and glossed over the murders, simply saying she was working as Justin’s bodyguard. Judging from her friends’ faces, Mae wasn’t the only one who found those events bizarre.

“What the fuck did he do that was bad enough to get exiled?” asked Dag.

Val traced the rim of her glass, dark eyes lost in thought. “And yet apparently wasn’t bad enough to keep him from coming back.”

“They don’t tell me stuff like that,” Mae said, trying to act like it didn’t bother her. “I’m just the messenger.”

Dag brightened. “Still, a lot more exciting than monument duty. Not as honorable, of course.”

That caught Mae by surprise. “Monument duty? What are you watching?”

“The National Gardens,” Val said. She knocked back half her drink. Maybe she wasn’t slamming the implant, but she wasn’t really holding back either. Mae was tempted herself, after drinking that Panamanian swill.

“Both of you are in the gardens?” she asked. Her friends nodded together.

“There are a bunch of Scarlets there right now.” Val ticked them off on her fingers. “Whitetree, Mason, Chow, Makarova…”

“Lucky,” muttered Mae, not voicing what the others were thinking.

If they’d assigned a Scarlet team to the capital, she might have been in it—if not for recent events, of course. The most celebrated prætorian
posts were in places with active fighting, like the provinces and borderlands. Those were around-the-clock missions and also the ones prætorians died in. Prætorians were also rotated through the capital, however, to guard senators and important national monuments and buildings. It was relatively sedate work for soldiers like them, but there was power in it. The prætorians were a symbol of the RUNA’s strength and perfection. Putting prætorians on display in Vancouver reassured citizens of their country’s superiority, even if it also sometimes frightened them. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, though. Capital duty had shifts like ordinary jobs, meaning prætorians received a lot of time off. Having a significant amount of one’s cohort on hand was an unusual perk since they were normally split and scattered around the world.

Val and Dag were fully aware that they’d landed a very sweet assignment, but Dag diplomatically tried to make Mae feel better. “I’m sure you’ll see cool stuff with a servitor. Maybe you’ll get to take down some crazy cult. I saw this one on the news that was sacrificing animals and having naked moonlight dances.” He turned wistful. “I wouldn’t mind a little of that. The naked part, that is. Not the animal part. I heard they tried to stone the servitor.”

Mae gave him a smile for his effort. “Cults usually get taken down with paperwork instead of brute force. They only show the sensational ones on TV.”

“Well, just remember, it could’ve been a lot worse for you.” Val’s voice was light, but there was a warning note in it. Nobody was mentioning the funeral, but they were all thinking about it. “And hey, how crazy is it that you’ll be with a mysterious exile and a provincial girl? That’s drama right there. You can’t make that stuff up.”

“No,” agreed Mae, thinking back on what she’d seen. “You really can’t.”

“Is he cute?” asked Val, with a look Mae knew all too well.

“Don’t get any ideas.” Mae wasn’t going to breathe a word about what had happened with Justin. There’d be no living with Val or Dag then. “I don’t need you showing up at his door.”

Val’s eyes lit up. “Ah, he
is
cute.”

Dag shook his head. “Ignore her. She hasn’t been laid in, like, a week. It’s a wonder she’s still alive.”

He was joking, although prætorians did tend to have particularly active sex lives. It was another side effect of the natural physical responses that the implant kicked into overdrive. Justin had been Mae’s first sex in almost six months, an astonishingly long span for prætorians, but after Porfirio, she hadn’t really felt up to it right away.

Val elbowed Dag for the joke, but at least Mae had the answer to a question she’d wondered about. Val and Dag were constantly on-and-off-again, making it hard to keep track of their current status. Apparently they were off right now. That always made Mae a little sad, but at least the two stayed friendly.

She glanced at the time and finished her drink. As much as she loved her friends, she suddenly longed for some downtime. “I’ve got to go, guys. I’ll give you a drama report the next time I see you—unless you see us on TV first.”

“Where’re you off to?” asked Val. “Hot date? Wouldn’t hurt you to get laid either, you know.” If only Val knew the truth. “You’re cycling back to that castal stiffness of yours.”

“That never goes away,” Dag said. “But you do need to relax, Finn.”

Dag had started calling her that back when they’d first been assigned to their cohort and begun prætorian training. He’d never been able to remember her last name, but he could remember that she was Nordic, hence the nickname he and eventually Val had both started using. Everyone could tell she was castal, which had made for some rough adjustments in the military. Val and Dag had bonded with her immediately and unquestioningly, maybe because they needed her as the straight man for all their jokes.

“I can’t relax,” said Mae, standing up and swiping her ego to pay for the drink. “I’m not the one on vacation. I mean, monument duty.”

“Ha ha,” said Val. She rolled her eyes but was obviously relieved at the turn of events, and Mae felt a small pang of guilt for not getting in touch with them sooner. They’d had no idea what had happened to her after the funeral and had probably assumed the worst. They were closer to her than her biological family.

“Hey…” Mae hesitated and rested her hands on the back of her chair. “Do you guys know how Kavi’s doing?”

“Still hospitalized,” said Dag, sobering. “Well, that’s what the rumors say. The Indigos aren’t really talking to us.”

That queasy feeling Mae got whenever she thought about Kavi returned. “I guess that’s normal. It hasn’t been that long.”

Prætorians were hard to hurt, but for most injuries, they healed like ordinary people. There were always whispers of stem cell treatments or other biological breakthroughs to facilitate prætorian recovery, but the RUNA’s policies against biological and genetic manipulation were still too harsh, even for its prize soldiers. Medical research was one thing, but no one wanted to risk abuse that could lead to another virus-caused Decline.

Val stood up and hugged her. “It’s not your fault.”

“I broke her leg,” Mae pointed out. “If it’s not my fault, whose is it?”

“She was asking for it,” said Dag loyally. He rose too and gave Mae a crushing hug of his own.

“She was just upset about Porfirio.” Saying his name brought about that familiar pain in Mae’s chest. “We all were.”

“Holy shit,” said Val. “Did you hear that, Dag? I think she acknowledged having some human emotions.”

Mae wished she had the courage to ask them the burning question that still lingered in her mind:
Why was Kavi so slow?
But she knew they’d have no answers. They’d reiterate what Gan had said about her simply being better than Kavi, except they’d use more profanity.

“Let’s head out too,” Val told Dag. She finished her drink in a gulp. “That Amber party should be starting.”

That was one thing you could count on with prætorians in the city: There was always a party going on somewhere. Val and Dag invited her to join them, but Mae declined. Her ambiguous status had left her glum. She wasn’t active in combat, nor was she really part of the ceremonial prætorians. It felt weird to go out with them, and she didn’t want to be reminded that she’d missed a chance to be assigned with other Scarlets.

Val and Dag’s party was on the way to the subway station, and the three of them set off into the crowded streets. In the short time since Mae had been out earlier, the partiers and pleasure seekers had nearly
doubled. Some were only starting their adventures, while others had just left the theaters and restaurants and were calling it a night. The three eventually parted ways, and Mae had the good fortune of having her train pull up right when she reached the platform.

When she reached the stop a few blocks from her home, she emerged and found a much quieter scene than the theater district. Although it was still very urban, there were no flashing screens in this residential neighborhood. Live oaks had been strategically planted to complement the neat brick town houses lining the street, interspersed with ornate streetlamps that cast dim light and created new shadows. When she was nearly to her door, she sensed a presence near a tree and spun around, gun in hand.

“Damn, you really are fast.” A man stepped out of the shadows, holding his hands up in a placating gesture. “Easy.”

Mae didn’t lower the gun as she took him in. He was no one she’d seen before. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, he appeared close to her age and to also belong to some northwestern-European caste. He might very well have been Nordic, but it was difficult to make out too many regional specifics in the dim lighting. Despite his ostensibly nonthreatening attitude, there was something about him that set her on edge.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and smiled, perfectly at ease. “You can call me Emil, prætorian.”

Mae didn’t blink or ask how he knew who she was. “And? What do you want?”

“You,” he said bluntly. “You had to have known we’d send someone eventually.”

“Oh, yeah? Are you some kind of bounty hunter sent by my mother to drag me home?”

“Somehow, I don’t think that would be too easy a task.” He chuckled. “But it’s funny you mention your family, because I do have something that might be of interest to you—something that’s a sign of our goodwill and desire to welcome you.”

Adrenaline flooded her. She kept her face perfectly still, refusing to
let on that she was completely clueless about the context of this visit, seeing as he seemed to think she should know it. Revealing her ignorance would be a weakness.

Emil reached toward his pocket, and Mae’s finger tensed on the trigger. “See if this looks familiar.” He produced an ego and casually scrolled through until he found a picture. Holding it up, he showed it to Mae.

Again, she made sure her expression gave away nothing, though this time, keeping that control was much harder. “I’ve never seen her before.”

The girl in the picture was about eight years old, wearing a bizarre, homespun dress made of a drab brown fabric. A white kerchief covered her head, but wisps of sunny blond hair escaped it. She stood outside in a grassy area that had no other identifying features.
She looks exactly like Claudia,
Mae thought.
Well, a prettier version, which would make sense.