Page 37 of Throwing Fire

“I don’t know.” She lifts one shoulder. Looks so miserable I lean in to kiss her, but she loops her arm around my neck and draws me down so she can press her forehead to mine. “If she says anything awful to you, I’ll kill her. But I want her to see-I just want her to seethat Mods are like everyone else. Just people. Good and bad. You’re one of the good ones. I want her to see that.”

I’m not one of the good ones, but I’ve always liked that Kez thinks I am. And I don’t care what her mentor says to me. If it’s important to Kez for me to meet the woman, I’ll meet her. The why, how, and what happens next don’t matter.

“Then we’ll go. Together.” We’re not getting separated again. Not until I’m sure Kez is no longer a mark. Maybe not even after that, since I’m finding I really like having Kez around full-time.

She smiles a little. “That bothered you, didn’t it? Last night. What happened while I was getting drinks?”

“Yeah. I’m still not sure whether or not drummer-boy sold you out. But what I do know is that we walked straight into a trap.”

Kez turns her head so she can look down the street at the tall white gates of our destination. “Do you think this is a trap?” she whispers.

“Go through life figurin’ everything’s a trap, kitten, and you’ll spend mosta the time bein’ pleasantly surprised.”

She chuckles. “That’s one way to look at it.”

“C’mon.” I turn her to face the gates, put my arm around her. “Let’s get this done.”

We approach the four-meter gates unhurriedly, giving the A-Eye time to flick its red beam over our faces. The gates roll open without a sound.

Beyond the gates there’s a long, white-shell drive. Carefully raked into a herringbone pattern. It winds in and around islands of greenery that obscure the low, white mansion perched on the edge of the cliff. Each turn in the drive is designed to give a different view of the house. The turn to the south reveals an infinity pool that snakes through a huge glaz atrium and disappears over the cliff.

The turn to the north reveals a ten-meter, blackened crater in the north-western face of the house.

“Shit,” mutters Kez.

“Pretty sure that ain’t part of the original design,” I say.

She nods.

We walk over to the hole and look down into it. Whatever blew took out the north and west walls and collapsed the upper floors into the basement. Metal and glaz wink in the late morning light, shining through polycrete dust and rubble. Lots of broken tubing. Part of a shattered stasis tube peeks from under a collapsed column. Looks like Kimpler did his cloning at home.

I circle the north end of the house, examining the blast damage. PB-Ex, or something close. Military grade explosives. Catastrophic damage, very specific, very controlled. There’s a ring of dust on the blackened lawn, but none of the debris you’d expect from a blast that took out ten meters of house. There’s not enough rubble in the hole, either. It was vaporized. “This wasn’t someone getting in,” I observe quietly to Kez.

“It could have been Erin getting out,” she says.

CHAPTER 15

Her head snaps up and I follow her line of sight to an undamaged window on the west wall, overlooking the ocean. A shadow moves behind the polarized glaz, and as we watch, the window-wall snicks open.

A tall, dark-skinned woman, carefully and expensively dressed in red holosilk so tight it limits her movement, steps through the opening and picks her way through the rubble towards us on heels even higher than Kez’s killer boots. She’s got one of those broad faces, everything rounded like it’s been smoothed by a sculptor’s hand. It’s a face made for smiles, but she’s not smiling at the moment. Her expression is closed, neutral, not giving anything away.

She stops ten meters away and bows over her clasped hands. A mass of tight braids slithers over her shoulders.

“Mister Snow, Miz Kerryon, welcome to Halcyon House.”

Kez bows back. “Payton.”

I nod at her. Bowing’s really not my thing.

“May I offer you refreshments?” She gestures at the opening she’s just come through.

I reach out to Kez, put my hand between her shoulderblades. She doesn’t flinch or protest when I touch her scar, but I know she doesn’t like it. So I cup her back above the scar, and guide her toward the house, gesturing for Payton to precede us. Payton may not have any training, according to her file, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna turn my back on her.

Inside, the window-wall is about the only thing that’s undamaged. The interior dividing walls, which were fancy patterned glaz, are shattered. Jagged pieces still cling to their metal frames. Shock-wave. Someone’s made an effort at cleaning up: there’s no glaz on the floor. But the clean-up crew didn’t remove the soot from the walls, or the charred carpet from the floor. It crunches underfoot as Payton leads us through the empty, echoing house to the atrium that houses the infinity pool. She gestures to a glaz-topped table set with three chairs, sitting in an arbor of greenery. Grass and flowers underfoot. Native cer-cer grass, only a little singed, screens the blackened walls. Overhead, a canopy of native flowers offset the lingering smell of smoke and polycrete dust.

“Please.” Payton gestures to the chairs. Her movements are graceful; her manner’s gracious, but there’s no mistaking the taut set of her shoulders, or the tension that cuts faint lines into that broad, brown forehead.

A quick survey shows there’s no good place to sit. Either I’ll have my back to the cliff, so someone can get the drop on me from outside, or my back to the house, so someone can sneak up on me from inside. I hand Kez into the chair facing the cliff, and I sit down across from her facing into the house. Not ideal, but we’ll keep each other covered, and my kitten can enjoy the view.

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