These Lifeless Things Page 13

  I glanced around in automatic alarm. The security I had expected, her assistant Rutger, who first of all didn’t like me, and secondly was about twice as big as me on every axis, was nowhere to be seen. The two dark-suited people behind her were unfamiliar—stiffly alert, watching me with Rutger-caliber disdain.

  She followed my gaze. “He’s back at the hotel. Wanted to review some data. You know Elizabeth and Wayne.”

  I nodded as if I did. While I waited to see which of my various sphincters had either fused shut from shock or were on the verge of letting go, she complacently made a tiny burrito out of a pancake, some smoked salmon, a scoop of caviar, and pickled onion. “Here. Eat this.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Buffet at the back,” she said, expertly wrapping up another one. “Asked the caterers for it. Can’t stand that little-shit-on-sticks situation.”

  I glared downwards. Her boyish, Gap-commercial haircut had been recently touched up; the ends seemed fresher, brassier, like fine wire. If she’d done her own makeup, she’d done a piss-poor job of it; the gold glitter on her eyes had escaped into her eyebrows and even her nose and chin. Under a weirdly short but long-sleeved sweater, her knee-length black dress was belted with a chain of Oreo-sized golden discs. It made me think of ancient Greece: a famous vase, maybe, or a picture in one of the kids’ books.

  Her eyes, steadily meeting mine, were the same as ever: that sinister green, the green of a Disney villain’s eyes, if anything more yellow than I remembered. Sickly, even inhuman. Like an animal. I reached inside myself, felt for the old love, the new hate, and felt only revulsion, the instinctive recoiling from a monstrous stranger who had stolen a beloved face, a familiar voice, and now wore them proudly, showing them off to the horrified survivors.

  “Okay, listen,” I said.

  “Listening.” She took my champagne glass and drained it, then handed it to a passing server without looking.

  Something warm slid through my arm and grasped my wrist, and this time I yelped out loud and jerked backwards into the wood panelling. The thing clung like a tentacle, but in the split second before I drew my fist back (good God: to do what, exactly?) I realized what was happening and tried to recover, picturing how it must have looked—the squawk, the sluggish flinch and twitch, the noise (had I imagined it?) as my head hit the wood. I hoped no one had been filming us.

  Face hot, double-0 status revoked, I crooked my elbow where Sofia had taken it, and managed something that I hoped looked like a smile. She was a shimmering presence at my side, like a mirror, or those polished refractor things the ancient Greeks or whoever aimed at ships during wars to burn them up; I couldn’t look directly at her.

  “Sofia!” Johnny said. “What a nice surprise! And holy shit, your earrings. And your dress!”

  “Thank you! I just bought it this afternoon, especially for tonight!”

  “Glgk,” I said.

  Sofia went on, smoothly, “And thank you for being flexible about the guest list! Security is so important these days.”

  “Yeah, can’t be too careful. Any sort of riff-raff might just wander in.”

  To her credit, Sofia didn’t even glance at me. “I agree, you do not want questionable people at something like this.”

  As they chatted, I slowly put it together: two Society members were supposed to have been here tonight, but couldn’t make it (I wondered if Sofia had pushed them into the ocean). Sofia had been sent unexpectedly at the last moment instead, but Louis had been unable to make it.

  “Everyone was very insistent that the Society be represented tonight. It’s an historic event! And you were kind enough to ensure we got in. And of course,” she added, squeezing my arm, “I hope you do not mind that I used the other ticket for my love here, even though he is not with us! I was hoping we could get some photos while we are all dressed up.”

  “Of course I don’t mind. Two surprises for the price of one. Oh, you should go pose with the armour!” Johnny pointed back at the alcove she’d been in. “The light is still set up, the photographers are paid all night, and you get the painting too. You’ll just have to wait for... who is that, is that the Princess of Monaco?”

  “No, that’s her sister.”

  “Doesn’t that make her a princess too?”

  “Not after what happened last week.”

  I wondered if this was death, if my soul was even now leaving my body, floating up into the ceiling, passing through it sadly into the sky (or, let’s be realistic, down into the Earth’s core to be incinerated). How was I supposed to figure out what Sofia was doing now? Louis wouldn’t care that I’d been set up somehow, or by who. He’d just kill me. If you could kill someone who was already dead, which…

  Sofia surreptitiously pinched my wrist, producing a bolt of pain from my fingertips to my ear. “Sounds good,” I croaked.

  “Well, you both look like a million bucks,” Johnny said, reaching out surreptitiously to tug up one side of my cummerbund. “You should totally get some nice pictures. Especially you, Nick; you’re always on the wrong side of the camera, you got all those photos of the kids and none of you. Your mom deserves at least one nice shot up there somewhere. Like, one.”

  “Mmpt.”

  “And maybe Sofia has a comb you can use?”

  “Eckff.”

  “I’ll see what can be done,” Sofia chuckled.

  Belatedly—possibly because, as far as I could tell, I was dead—Sofia’s absolute conniving cleverness dawned on me. How else would you explain me being there? Her, you could explain. She wasn’t a Society member, but she was a representative all the same; in fact, Louis had always tried to keep her as far from their business as possible. She was just the eternal and permissible coworker’s kid, allowed at their events and parties since she had been little, the way the dealers and bartenders had fondly looked away when Mom used to bring me to her shifts at the casino.

  I realized that I had been expecting, for at least a couple of minutes, to see something resembling irritation or jealousy on Johnny’s face, and then was annoyed at myself, and then was annoyed that I was annoyed. I tried to freeze my face into an expression of pleasant unsurprise.

  Sofia announced, “Let’s go see if the photographer is free!”

  But a moment after we wandered away, the smile dropped off her face with an audible thud. “What are you doing here, Nicholas?”

  “Uh, having a panic attack.”

  “Oh, God,” she groaned. “You can always trust boys to have the stupidest answer out of a choice of millions... I recommend you try again. And fast.”

  “Are you about done? Jesus. Your dad sent me. Obviously.”

  “What? Why?”

  I blinked. Had I not said obviously? I was sure I had. “Because he was worried about you. Because he called campus, and they said you dropped out. Why do you think?”

  “I assumed you were here for her. Why wouldn’t you be?”

  “Lots of reasons,” I said.

  “My father has no need to send... nannies after me. I’m not a child.”

  “Nobody said you were! Calm down. He’s worried, he says you were lying to him. About being in school. The school said you dropped out. He was going to come find you himself, but he couldn’t make it. What are you trying to pull, anyway? They’re not gonna do anything to you, but who even knows what they’ll do to me?”

  She blinked, having clearly stopped listening to me halfway through my rant. The anger drained away from her face, leaving a terrible uncertainty and betrayal, the expression of a kid promised something only to have it suddenly yanked away. A moment later it was gone, and she was all business again.

  Somehow, even in formalwear, she looked businessy too: the long, silvery-blue dress was cut like a suit at the top, and she was wearing heels so high we were eye to eye. Makeup too, dark lipstick and eyeshadow, metallic on her deep brown skin. Her long hair was tied back, the curls in front ferociously bobbypinned; the crisscrossed metal resembled a secret
language. A cuneiform curse, no doubt.

  But her face. Don’t lose track of that. Saying into the silence: He sent you? After all I did to rig it so that he would be here tonight?

  I said, “He said he was going to send his new... what do you call it. Secretary?”

  “Assistant.”

  “Yeah, Sherwood or whoever. Is that his first name or his last name? Anyway, Louis thinks he’s too new. So he sent me. So it would be less weird.”

  It’s still weird, her sneer said. “Let’s look over here instead!” she announced, pulling me further towards the perimeter of the room, then hissed, “I’m on spring break. I’m allowed to go on holiday, you know!”

  I shook my arm free. “Look, are you going to tell me what you’re doing or not?”

  “Nothing! This is unbelievable. He sent you all this way, and you—you said yes, you agreed to come all this way! To what, spy on me? It’s nothing, I got a cheap flight, and I had plans with friends, they did not work out this week, then I decided I would still come by myself.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You know. For the weather. Which is so nice. In Scotland. In February.”

  “People don’t travel for the weather, Nicholas.”

  Johnny was wandering back towards us, the blonde head bumping through the crowd. Like the shark from Jaws, but little. I held down a laugh that I knew would come out in a donkey screech.

  “Now knock it off or I’ll tell her everything,” Sofia whispered, and smiled again, brilliantly, as she took my hand.

  “Me? You’re the one who—”

  “Yeah, and on top of the bull,” Johnny was saying even before she reached us, “we’re actually being audited by the IARE too. It started off as just a health and safety thing, but they’ve got the entire ethics department involved now. They think multiple facilities are falsifying and publishing data. Can you believe it?”

  “Incredible!” Sofia shook her head.

  I pursed my lips. She’d been audited before, though mostly for safety stuff; it was both horrifying and unsurprising how many accidents she’d had, apparently thinking that safety standards were something for other people. They hadn’t found anything at her facilities, as a result, but at a minimum I knew she’d been burned by acid, had a few solvent inhalation incidents, got blasted with one of her early particle accelerators (luckily at low power), been on the sharp end of ten or twelve explosions—I’d lost count—poisoned herself, fallen off ladders, cabling, catwalks, rigging, and bookshelves in her ridiculous house-slash-laboratory, been electrocuted about six times, and Chem-Bot had accidentally sampled part of her arm once. And that entirely left out the dozens of incidents where genetically-screwed-up insects and plants had escaped ‘containment’—usually a carelessly-lidded plastic tub, as I’d discovered more than once while scavenging for a snack.

  She ran her empire in roughly the same fashion as ancient kings insisting on going to war personally rather than staying in the castle and moving pieces on the map with a wooden stick. But that was something. The audit... why would the Society be here for that?

  “There’s a completely private one for my personal guests,” Johnny was saying when I tuned back in. My watcher-wounded hand had started to hurt for some reason, quietly building, as if ice were forming from some tiny core within it. “Down that hallway, and you’ll see a guy in a dark green suit? Tell him I sent you, and say ‘Independent review.’”

  “What?”

  “You’ll see,” she laughed.

  Sofia disentangled herself, gave me a peck, and slipped through the crowd, her dress a trickle of mercury through all the dark fabrics. Where her lips had touched my cheek felt like a cigarette burn.

  “Let’s go get some more food.” Johnny wriggled out of her sweater and handed it to Wayne, who folded it neatly to the size of a paperback book and placed it inside his own jacket pocket.

  The crowd parted almost frantically around us. Her touch phobia, which to this day I wasn’t sure was real or staged, was well-known, in fact had literally been the subject of a documentary once, and although many palms hovered in congratulations over her bared shoulders, people probably knew they would have set off, at best, a crying jag and a swift retreat, or, at worst (and it had so often been worst) a couple of swift blows ending in broken collarbones, fingers, or jaws. Even a dislocated shoulder once, I remembered. An older man had touched her from behind and… bad angle. Bad land. She struck out like a bee, not strategizing, just looking to jam in her sting and flee. It had disappeared after the Anomaly, or her stubborn maintenance of the act had slackened off, but no one else here could know that.

  Near the fireplace, the room was stifling; sweat gathered in my hairline and crawled down my face. I heaped up plates of random food in the low scarlet light, handed one to Johnny, and, although I was beginning to suspect she was already a little drunk, let her get two more glasses of champagne. Or no, what was the word…?

  “Flutes, Nicky,” she said airily, as if I had projected it from my head like the lightshow outside. “Chug, chug. It won’t go flat right away but it’s kinda gross when it gets warm.”

  Her tone was affectionate, familiar. If I hadn’t spent so long remembering and recreating everything she had done to me, it would have been so easy to just... tell her everything. Fall back into the deep permanent me-shaped rut that she wanted me to see was still there, and still perfectly intact, even though we were both so different now. Look, she was saying. I won’t treat you any differently. Everything you miss is waiting for you. Everything you’ve been missing during this long, cold self-enforced solitary sentence. See, I don’t even mind your girlfriend, or you not telling me. Because we’re best friends. Blood brothers. Aren’t we?

  I took the glass and we wandered away from the fire into relatively cooler air. I’d play along, no more. Couldn’t she see, she who had known me all my life, that I wasn’t hers anymore? That she had thrown me away by telling me the truth? At the very least, could she not fucking tell that I had a higher mission now than being her pet?

  Anyway, I’d put something on her plate that I hadn’t put on mine, and I wanted it. “What’s that?”

  “Stuffed mushroom, I think.”

  “Stuffed with what?”

  “Haggis.”

  I frowned, and stabbed it with my tiny fork. “I thought a haggis was a whole... thing. Like I’m picturing an animal the size of a volleyball.”

  “I think that’s a weirdly common misconception.”

  I drained my flute, the bubbles crackling between my teeth. The second glass of champagne, I decided, was better than the first. More like fine-grit than coarse-grit sandpaper. But it still left me desperately thirsty. “What’s in this stuff?”

  “I know, it does the same thing to me. I think it’s a rich people conspiracy to sell more champagne.”

  “You’re a rich people.”

  “No, I just have money. They’re rich.” Her apparently casual gesture at the crowd somehow managed to hand off her empty glass and swap it with a full one; she gave it to me. I wiped my face with my sleeve again. My left hand hurt so badly it was taking an increasing amount of concentration not to clench it into a fist, and break the delicate glass.

  “So,” she said. “You and Sofia.”

  “Uh.”

  “Is that what you were going to tell me earlier?”

  “No.”

  She smiled, a careful selection from her arsenal, one I knew well: sly, self-satisfied, slow, only wavering for a second when it seemed I wouldn’t react to it.

  “I thought it was so romantic,” she breathed, “the way she came in half an hour before you did.”

  “What? No, she didn’t.”

  From her belt she unclipped a phone case I hadn’t noticed, black leather with a glittery unicorn sticker on it. “So, the station up front where you got your wristband? That laptop is synced up with my records. Neat, huh? And so nice to see that you… managed to reunite after meeting once? It’s like something from a movie. Li
ke Cinderella. You Prince Charming, you.”

  You know what? You’re one to fucking talk. You were sneaking around behind the scenes for my entire life, making sure anyone who might have loved me or even liked me suddenly had to move away or switch schools, got fired from their jobs or transferred to another country. You think I’ve forgotten? Or you’re forgiven? Looking up at me like that, so innocent?

  But we couldn’t talk about it. Still. Never.

  The room swam with heat and pain as I tried to focus on a real response. Of course Johnny thought we’d only met once. In Fes, when Sofia had appeared out of nowhere, saving both our asses. What was the obvious...? “Okay, not that it’s any of your business, but yeah, she did find me afterwards. It wasn’t like you made me hard to find. We talk a lot on ICQ and stuff, this is the first time we’ve seen each other in… listen, the main thing is, we have to keep it on the down-low from her dad. He doesn’t want her to date while she’s in school. He’d be pissed. Pissed, she says.”

  “Totally hear you,” Johnny said. “He used to say it all the time. Even when she was little. You know. No boys. Keep your eyes on your books. Boys are evil. Only after one thing.”

  “Yeah, you get it.”

  “Mm. So that must be why she took you to this party,” she went on, jerking her chin at the room. “A big, public event, with scientists and celebrities and politicians and royalty. Where you’d be filmed together. And photographed together. And that the Society’s had two tickets to since last September. Makes perfect sense.”

  “None of my business,” I said again. “I got nothing to do with those weirdos. I’m here for the free food. And what’s that over there?” I said, gesturing at the pedestal in the middle of the room.

  “Nice subject change. Come look at my pride and joy,” she said. “You may as well, since you came all this way just for... the party. I’ll show Sofia when she comes back from the bathroom, too. Not everybody is getting the personal tour, you know.”

  “Poor them.”

  It wasn’t an ice sculpture as I had thought, but a glass dome over a tiny model of a building, perched atop an island the size of a paperback book. It might have been made out of paper-thin folded metal. “What is this, a reactor for ants?” I said.