Tea From an Empty Cup (22 page)

Konstantin sighed again, at a complete loss for something to say, anything at all. So, which is worse – murder, or the things that let the victims live to regret? Damn it, it just wasn’t fair, when she was trying to handle one to have to be confronted with the other.

You can’t save the world; you can only channel-surf it
. Something her ex had said once, or at least quoted. Back when they had still been showing each other compassion.

‘Look,’ she said, gently removing her hand from the girl’s. ‘I’m in here for a – a special purpose, I’ve got to find someone …’ Her voice trailed off. The girl stood looking up at her.

You just couldn’t win, Konstantin thought unhappily. If she walked away, she’d never know if she’d heard a tragedy-in-progress or an outrageous fish story. Either way, the soul behind the facade of those eyes was someone who needed
some
kind of help. In spite of everything, she wouldn’t be able to square it with her conscience if she walked away simply because the problem wasn’t one of those listed in her job description.

Okay. Think of a better reason to walk away
, urged her more cynical side.
Try the billable time thing
.

‘
Or
maybe you can help me,’ Konstantin said quickly, taking the girl’s hand again. ‘Do you know anything about someone named Body Sativa?’

The girl only continued to stare up at her in silence.

‘Okay. How about Shantih Love?’

The girl frowned. ‘I have something at home that might help you.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘It’s just a few blocks away. If you take me home, I can show it to you,’ the girl promised, her voice faintly hopeful.

Konstantin nodded resignedly.

‘Home’ turned out to be a tiny basement efficiency in what seemed to be an otherwise abandoned building, although the girl assured Konstantin that it was not. When Konstantin asked her who else lived there, however, she only shrugged. ‘It depends, I guess,’ she said, working four big locks with a well-practiced hand before crossing the room to plant herself in the middle of the double bed that dominated the room. Except for a television sitting on a crate, it was the only furniture in the place. It was covered with a red-and-black plaid blanket; between the two pillows, a stuffed penguin stood like a tuxedoed sentry. The girl unselfconsciously folded her legs into a half-lotus and hugged the penguin to her chest. ‘This is Fairbanks. He keeps an eye on things for me.’

‘If you’re safe here, why do you leave and go to the park?’ Konstantin asked her.

‘I don’t. The park is where I get logged in all the time, and I have to figure out how to get home safely. Sometimes I can’t and I just stay there, because nobody really likes to go there. But I have to be careful when the saucer comes around.’ She rested her chin on the penguin’s head. ‘Have you ever been taken up by the saucer?’

Konstantin shook her head. ‘Have you?’

‘That depends on what you mean. And what you believe. And if it’s the same saucer every time. I don’t know if it is.’

‘Good point,’ Konstantin said, more to herself than to the girl. ‘What is it that you said you had that could help me?’

‘What kind of help do you want? Refresh my memory.’

Konstantin sighed. ‘Okay. To refresh your memory, I asked you about Body Sativa and Shantih Love –’

‘That’s right.’ She turned the penguin around to face her. ‘Fairbanks, do you know anything about Body Sativa and Shantih Love?’ Konstantin had to force herself not to make a face as the girl put the penguin’s bright orange beak to her ear. Every so often she nodded slightly.

‘So does the bird know anything?’ Konstantin asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

‘Shh,’ the girl told her.

Bored, Konstantin looked around. The walls had been bare when they had come in, but now posters were fading into existence on them, arty things with lots of nudes. No doubt the girl would tell her that they had been there when she had first come here and she couldn’t get rid of them for some reason.

‘Okay,’ the girl announced. ‘Now I know.’

Konstantin turned to her and was startled to see she was now dressed in a frilly little nightie, too obviously over nothing. Understanding swept through her immediately. ‘Oh,
Christ
,’ she said, standing up and backing away.

‘What’s the matter?’ the girl said, putting a finger to her mouth cutely. ‘You don’t have a dirty mind, do you?’

Konstantin attacked the locks but they wouldn’t budge for her. Frustrated and furious with herself for allowing the girl to lead her wide-eyed and innocent into the setup, she leaned against the door and took a long careful breath. It didn’t help. ‘All right. What do you want?’

‘What’ve you got?’ the girl asked cheerfully.

‘Precious little, and I need every bit of it.’

‘Do you also need everyone to know that you’re a paedophile?’ The girl giggled. ‘Kinky for the kiddies?’

‘I’m logging all this,’ Konstantin said, hoping she was. ‘That’ll prove –’

‘Nothing,’ the girl said, smiling sunnily. ‘My log will look as real as yours.’ She drew her knees up, reached around her bent legs and grabbed her toes. It was such a child’s posture, Konstantin could have laughed and cried. ‘Of course, maybe you’re of a more liberated sort of mind. Maybe you feel that if there’s no such thing as paedophilia in here – and there isn’t – then there’s no such thing as an unthinkable thought, and it’s okay to contemplate anything. Even if it makes you look like the wretched refuse you secretly are.’

Konstantin sagged a bit in relief. ‘You’re not a child.’

‘I could be a precocious child,’ said the girl. ‘I could also be an undercover cop disguised as a chicken dinner.’

‘If you’re a cop, I want your badge number,’ Konstantin said briskly.

‘I could give you a number, but if it’s a fake, there’s nothing you can do about it,’ the girl said. ‘You couldn’t prosecute me for being a bad cop, or being a bad impersonator. Or didn’t you read your –’

‘I read it, I read it a billion times.’ Konstantin jerked a thumb at the locks. ‘Just let me out of here, or you’ll be a
battered
precocious child chicken cop dinner impersonator.’

‘What kind of batter – original recipe or something on the extra spicy side?’ The girl grinned. ‘Either way, I bet you can’t do it.’

‘Well, let’s see about that.’ Konstantin strode over to the bed, grabbed the girl by the front of her nightie and lifted her up, drawing her other fist back. The girl smiled up into her face as if Konstantin were offering her a piece of candy. Konstantin squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.
It’s not a kid. It’s some kind of lowlife, probably some banana slug who gets his kicks by tormenting lost souls too shattered to defend themselves
. She drew her fist back a little further and opened her eyes.

The girl’s face was practically beatific with happiness. Konstantin imagined what it would be like to let fly at this point, what the girl would look like. Would there be blood? Or would her fist suddenly smash into an invisible shield inches from the girl’s face, and instead of blood there’d be a thundering pain that went all the way up her arm to her shoulder while the girl laughed at her and said something like,
I
told
you you couldn’t do it, why didn’t you listen to
exactly
what I said?
Yeah, that wasn’t too hard to imagine. That, or maybe the girl turning into an alligator at the last minute and chomping down on her arm.

But what if there was no shield, no trick; what if her punch sent the girl ass-over-teakettle and what if she turned out to be real child after all? It wasn’t impossible. Maybe not the kid-forced-into-the-hotsuit scenario the girl had given her, but maybe an older kid, just starting puberty, say, out to blow off some steam with some mean-spirited fun?

And regardless, was she ready for the sight of what an unrestrained punch could do to a child’s face, especially an unrestrained punch that she herself delivered? Even if it
wasn’t
real?

Konstantin let go and lowered her fist. ‘Let me out of here,’ she said heavily.

The girl’s smile never wavered; she said nothing.

‘Please,’ Konstantin said, sickened by the begging note she could hear in her voice.

The girl held her hand out, palm up.

‘I don’t have anything you’d really want,’ insisted Konstantin.

The girl’s smile became an irritated sneer; she snapped her fingers twice rapidly and jabbed the air with her hand, palm up again.

Konstantin shrugged and sat down on the bed, leaning back on one elbow as if she were making herself comfortable. ‘I told you, I don’t have anything you’d want. Now, if you waste all your billable time trying to get me to cough up what I don’t have, I don’t care. I slipped in here on somebody else’s credit and I’m not watching the clock.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said the girl, but Konstantin could tell by her tone that she wasn’t as certain of herself now.

‘That’s the one lie you
can’t
tell in here, isn’t it – billable time. Can’t fake that billable time, can you.’

The girl tried to stare her down. Konstantin laughed in her face and lay back with her arms folded behind her head, hoping she looked far more casual than she felt. Her midsection was tense; she expected the girl to hit her or jump on her. But nothing happened for close to half a minute. When she sat up again, the girl was gone, and the door was wide open.

Maybe, Konstantin thought, satisfied, she should take up poker.

It may have been a coincidence that there was a cab parked at the curb outside. Behind the wheel, the driver was browsing the news on an in-dash screen and listening to music with lots of syrupy violins.

‘You must be the cab I was going to call,’ Konstantin said.

The driver turned to look at her. He was Japanese, perhaps in his early thirties. ‘Actually, I’m a coincidence,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘Statistics indicate the average player experiences between one and three coincidences per five billable hours. Of course, statistics breed coincidences.’

Konstantin considered this with her hand on the door. ‘Is that anything like familiarity breeding contempt?’

‘If it is, that’s a coincidence, too. Where to, sir or madam, as the case may be?’

‘Body Sativa. Wherever she is.’

The cabdriver frowned slightly. ‘You got that kind of cab fare?’

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘Then get in.’ He jerked his thumb at the backseat.

The people lining either side of the street exuded such a sense of danger that Konstantin knew to read just the settings on her ’suit.

‘Better?’ the cabbie asked her, a hint of amusement in his voice.

She met his gaze in the rearview mirror and was startled to see that his eyes looked far more tense than he sounded. ‘Much better, thanks. Maybe you’d regard that as cheating –’

‘I don’t regard it as anything, sir or madam as the case may be. I’m a cabbie. It’s my job to drive a cab, not to regard.’

‘Oh. Well, good.’ Konstantin laughed a little nervously. ‘What’s going on out there, anyway?’

‘Someone’s left a tribal warfare module going. It’s most likely a promo by a new parlor, trolling for customers. Extra Sitty-based module for no extra charge, that sort of thing.’

‘At
this
hour of the morning?’ Konstantin said, yawning.

‘It isn’t
this
hour of the morning everywhere, sir or madam as the case may be.’

‘Touché.’

‘And even where it is, it isn’t for some people. The time zone can be a thing of personal preference.’

Pretty forthcoming for a cabbie, Konstantin thought, trying to catch the driver’s gaze in the rearview mirror again. ‘Have you ever had Body Sativa as a fare?’ she asked.

‘Not that I know of. She’s not my speed.’

‘Whatever
that
means,’ Konstantin muttered, barely realizing she was speaking aloud.

‘You’ll find out. She’s not your speed, either.’

He made a sharp right, drove up some stone steps and across a piazza, negotiating a route around and through enormous fragments of broken statuary and wrecked machines to the base of a skyscraper. Where the entrance had been was only a huge, gaping hole, guarded by what seemed to be a couple of werewolves.

‘Well,
their
hair is perfect,’ said the cabbie.

‘What?’ Konstantin said, bewildered.

‘Nothing. Don’t worry about them. Show them your pass and they’ll let you go in.’

‘How do you know I’ve got a pass?’

‘You’d have to. Otherwise you wouldn’t have known to tell me to take you directly to Body Sativa.’

‘Oh.’ Konstantin found her cab fare and handed it over the front seat. ‘If I find you again, will that be a coincidence?’

‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’

She found herself standing on the cracked stone of the piazza, watching the cab drive away to disappear around the side of the building. Steeling herself, she turned to the werewolves guarding the entrance. Their hair really
was
perfect, she realized; they seemed to be closer to were-lions than wolves, gracefully muscular in artful tatters of clothing, and definitely the sort of creatures that Shantih Love had found attractive, according to the ’suit. They looked at her with large-pupiled eyes rimmed in amber and she had the feeling they were amused. No more amused than she was, Konstantin thought. Who would
pay
to be a night watchman? Or watchwolf, as the case may be.

‘I’m here to see Body Sativa,’ she told them, sounding a bit more defiant than she had meant to.

‘What you
can
see, you
will
see,’ said the wolf on her left.

‘Well, then, I’m going in.’ Konstantin looked from him to the other one on her right. The other one was female, she realized, as the wolf licked its chops. ‘Tell me, is this what you both
like
to do? Spend your time here guarding a hole in a building?’

‘Nosy, aren’t you,’ said the female, but in a genial way.

‘Yes, I
am
nosy. I figure – why not.’ Konstantin smiled. ‘Now, really. Is this how you two spend your time?’

‘Stay alert and maybe you can barter, too,’ said the first werewolf. He waved her into the building.