“That’s a bit of a turnaround,” he pointed out, with a trace of his usual coolness returning to his voice. “Last time we had a heart-to-heart, you thought I was the bad guy.”
“I’m not that dense. And I understand what you’re going through. Probably better than anyone you’ll ever get a chance to talk to about it.”
He looked away, rubbing his temples.
“What happened between you and Astrid Avery?” Li asked, suddenly realizing that she really wanted to know.
Llewellyn made a curious movement, almost a flinching away from the name. As if the mere thought of Astrid Avery had the power to burn him.
“What’s she like?” Li prompted.
Llewellyn let out a sharp chuff of breath that should have been a laugh but sounded more like the gasp of a man who’d just been sucker-punched. “Unstoppable.”
“What did she do?”
“She sold us out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t know. I can barely even believe she did it. If I live a thousand years I’ll never understand it.”
“Was it for the ship?”
Llewellyn let out a howl of laughter.
“I meant, for command of the ship. She did end up with a captain’s commission and command of the
Ada
.”
“I know what you meant. It’s just an extremely unfortunate turn of phrase.”
“Not
the
Ada. And you can drop the italics, too. I can hear them every time you say her name.”
“What?” Li asked, thrown as much by the feminine pronoun
she
as by anything else he’d said.
“Don’t you get it? You of all people? Ada wasn’t like the other ships I’ve served on. She was like him.”
“Your ship went sentient?”
“Went? Open your eyes! They’re all sentient, every last ship in the fleet, or the Syndicates would be wiping the floor with us! She was sentient from the day I took command, and I knew it, and I figured it was just our dirty little secret out here, and when they called us back into dry dock for a refit I didn’t think twice about it. If I had, it would have been different. She would have had a chance. She wouldn’t have been a killer—the killer
I
turned her into. She could have cut a deal, at least tried to bargain with them.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“You’re so goddamned sure, are you? Must be nice to have all the answers.”
“I don’t have the answers. I just—” She stopped in mid-sentence. “Wait. On the raid. The Dark Angel. That was Ada, wasn’t it? I met her.” She thought of the rotting, pulsating, claustrophobia-inducing womb and a slow shudder worked its way through her innards. “I was
inside
her.”
Llewellyn flinched again, in an uncanny echo of the movement he’d made when she first spoke Avery’s name. “What’s left of her.”
“She’s insane, Llewellyn. You can’t possibly—”
“
She’s in Hell!
And I put her there. I promised I’d keep her safe. And Avery turned me into a liar and turned her over to the techs. Knowing they were going to cycle her hardware. Knowing they were going to murder her!”
Something inside Li shrank away from the plain truth of his words—or maybe from the raw self-loathing in his voice.
“And that’s what you can’t forgive yourself for. You trusted Avery. Because you were in love with her.”
He buried his face in his hands.
“And you’re still in love with her.”
“No!”
He’d been staring into his beer, but now his eyes flicked back toward her, dark and glittering and feverish.
“No,” he said after a long pause. “No, it’s not love anymore. I don’t know what it is.”
Li didn’t have anything to say to that. And since Llewellyn was in no condition to speak, the conversation lapsed into a grating, nerve-racking silence.
“What about you?” Llewellyn asked at last. He had recovered some degree of control over himself, but now there was an edge in his voice—as if he were looking to pick a fight so he could have an excuse to extract payback. “Do you still love Cohen even though he deserted you?”
“He didn’t—”
“Yes he did. And you know it, too. I’d never have thought you could be such a coward about it.”
“Yes.”
“Yes you know it? Or yes you still love him?”
“Both, I guess.”
He looked darkly at her. “You wouldn’t if you knew everything I know about him.”
He stood up abruptly, shaking off Avery, Cohen, Ada—the whole impossible tangle. “Come on, Li. I’m falling-down tired. And I dursen’t get any drunker onshore.”
When had he started calling her Li instead of Catherine? Was it a way of separating himself from Cohen, of signaling to her that he was speaking as himself alone—or that he liked her for herself alone and not just for Cohen’s memories? When had he started it? After the raid, she realized, when they were standing around the captured bridge in the glow of victory. It was a courtesy between comrades in arms, she decided, a way of signaling to her that they now shared some history … and perhaps even a little loyalty.
They walked the long curve of the docks, picking their way between stacked cargo and skirting around drunks and spin addicts.
“It’s strange,” he said, looking at a broken-down addict sprawled on the ground like a rag doll, her legs half out of her shelter of packing crates. “I’ve always despised spin junkies. It always seemed to me like an easy way out. But now look at me. He’s killing me. And I’m letting him—worse than letting him—I’m practically begging him to do it. He’s burning me down, and all I want is more fire.”
“Then stop it. You can always—”
“Let’s not talk about it,” he interrupted, touching her arm in a gesture that was half peremptory, half pleading. “Just for tonight let’s not talk about it.”
They walked the rest of the way back to the doss-house companionably, as if that momentary weakening hadn’t happened. Llewellyn talked about nothing important, more relaxed and open than she’d ever seen him. When they reached their floor he was in the middle of some complicated story about a shipyard parts raid gone laughably
wrong, and he leaned his lanky self against her door frame to finish telling it. Li leaned on the other side of the door, not really thinking about much, pleasantly drunk, and intensely aware of their almost intertwined legs.
Suddenly Llewellyn stopped talking and looked down at her with a dark, guarded, sideways gaze. “Cohen wants me to sleep with you,” he told her.
“You say that like it was news.”
“It is to me.”
“You’re shocked?”
“A little.”
“What, you’re not that kind of boy?”
“Not usually.”
Li bit back a smile. “But you’re thinking of making an exception in this case?”
“I’m not
thinking
at all. That’s the problem. He’s so … confusing. And he’s a manipulative little shit, too.”
Li let the smile show now. “I always thought that was one of his more endearing qualities.”
Llewellyn scowled at her, eyes narrowed, lips pressed into a thin, disapproving line. He drew breath to speak, and for a moment Li actually thought he was going to lose his temper and start yelling at her. Then he snorted in disgust. “You two deserve each other.”
Li looked up at him, but she could barely see anything in the darkness. “Does he—does he talk to you?”
“He did at first. Now it’s more like … I don’t know. It’s getting harder and harder to tell who’s talking.”
He rolled his eyes in her direction, showing the whites like a spooked horse. She could feel the tension in him. His muscles were taut, corded, thrumming with an energy that was going to break out in violence, or worse, if she didn’t find some way to defuse it. Something had happened between him and Cohen, something that had pushed him to the edge of panic. He was wavering on a clifftop, and he wanted her to pull him back but didn’t seem able to find the words to ask for help.
“That sounds terrifying,” she tried.
“You’d think it would be. Wouldn’t you?”
She knew what he meant. Because of course she’d been there, too. But never as deep in as Llewellyn was. Never to the very brink of the abyss, where terror turned into desire and the fear of self-loss burned off in the annihilating supernova of Cohen’s needs, Cohen’s desires. Cohen’s passions.
What would be left after you took the fall? She didn’t know. She didn’t think Llewellyn knew. She wasn’t even sure Cohen knew.
She peered up at Llewellyn. They were so close that she could have kissed him just by standing on her toes. Her nose was full of his warm human smell, and the faint scent of gun oil that seemed as much a part of him as his own skin. She couldn’t really get a good look at him in the dim light. And she didn’t want to make things worse by staring. “William?”
His eyes locked into her at the sound of his first name. “That’s what he calls me.”
“Do you like it?”
“No.” He shuddered. “But I’d like it if you would.”
Uh-oh.
She cleared her throat and took a cautious step back so that she could look up at him from a more appropriate distance. She tried to assess his age—an exercise she always found difficult with natural-born humans. She’d just had a really uncomfortable thought, and she wanted to get a handle on it. “How old are you?”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Oh for God’s sake, do we really have to play the guess-my-age game? Okay, fine. Mid-thirties.”
“Twenty-seven.”
Christ, Cohen. Did you really have to pick this one?
“How does anyone become a ship’s captain at twenty-seven?”
“Twenty-five, actually. It was a wartime commission.”
“There’s a war on?”
“Out here there’s always a war on.”
She looked up at him. His face was half hidden in the shadows, but
even so, he looked unbearably young to her. And what she and Cohen were doing to him seemed suddenly unforgivable.
“Well, listen. You want some advice, go wake up Sital and screw her until you can’t walk straight. And try to fall in love with her if you can possibly manage it. I think it would be good for you.”
He laughed softly. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“I know I am. It’s only Cohen that’s making you think any different. You need to download him, William. You need to get him out of your head.” She felt a terrible twinge of guilt at what she was about to say and pushed through it anyway. “He’s … he’s bad for people.”
“Was he bad for you?”
“That’s different. And anyway, it’s my problem.”
“Is it.” It should have been a question, but somehow it didn’t come out that way.
He bent over her, leaning in for the kiss. She saw the faint flush on his cheeks. She saw the red toxin line—even fainter, but still there if you knew enough to look for it—spreading up his neck where the wire job snaked toward his skull. It was the clear sign of an immune system under simultaneous assault by Navy synth and immunosuppressants and a galloping wild AI infection.
She recoiled instinctively in a reflexive reaction to a life-form officially classified as a life-threatening bioplague. She reminded herself that plenty of AI cultists and Uploaders—and even many regular, if illicit, users—were walking around Ring-side every day with wild AI coursing through their veins. It was illegal, but it wasn’t infectious under normal circumstances. It wasn’t like she could catch it by shaking hands with the man.
And then she realized what she was thinking—and cringed. Llewellyn wasn’t just running AI in the blood. He was running Cohen, whom she loved and had come halfway across the known universe to find.
And she
had
found him.
And she was treating him as if he were some communicable disease.
She turned away and tried to open the door, fumbling with the key
and sending it skittering along the decking. She crouched down, cursing under her breath, hunting for the key in the near darkness. “Catherine—”
She found the key. Finally. “I’m going to bed. I don’t even know what we’re talking about. This is pointless.”
But he was at the door before her, with his arm put out to bar the passage. “I know what you’re thinking, Catherine.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“What am I supposed to call you?
I remember
. I remember everything. With
his
memories. AI memories. Do you have any idea what that’s like? Humans aren’t supposed to remember like that. How can you ever move on in life if your memories are more real than your reality?”
“I wouldn’t know. I have the opposite problem.”
Llewellyn laughed softly. “Yeah, I know that, too.”
She met Llewellyn’s eyes for the first time since their almost-kiss, and was guiltily relieved
not
to see Cohen in them. Somehow she couldn’t have borne that—that some strange mingling of the two would look at her like Cohen looked at her.
“What would it take for you to let him go?” she asked.
“Nothing much. Just finding a way to stay alive without him.”
Later Llewellyn lay in his bed, alone, and thought about Astrid Avery. Li had asked him what she was like. And what had he said? He could barely remember. That was the power that the mere thought of her still had over him.
Unstoppable. Had he called her that? Well, it was the wrong word, and he’d known it even as he spoke. The truth was he didn’t have the right word. He looked back on their time together as a sort of insanity. A permanent and fatal crisis—like being caught in a burning building where every exit was locked and no help was on the way.
She had loved him. He was certain of it. She had probably still loved him when she decided to betray him. She might even still love him now.
Yet still Nguyen had managed to turn her against him.
He still couldn’t understand it. And he still couldn’t let go of it. Because even now, three years later, the only thing that brought him peace and sleep was the memory of her cool hands moving over his skin, and the way her long, lithe body had surrendered to him back when he thought her love meant something.
Nguyen didn’t turn her, William. She was against you from the beginning. I can see it in your memories. Why can’t you see it?
“Oh Christ, not you again,” he muttered exhaustedly.