Chapter Six
Coreni
Her apartment was on the twenty-third floor, which meant the ele-tube, which meant standing in a small enclosed space with a Fraluma warrior for approximately forty seconds. Coreni had survived worse in the last sixteen hours. She told herself this firmly and pressed the call panel.
The tube arrived. They got in.
They were two floors up when the doors opened again and an elderly couple stepped aboard — one of her neighbors, a woman whose name Coreni could never remember but whose opinion of everyone in the building she expressed freely and often.
The woman's eyes went immediately to Edi-Veen with the particular attention of someone doing arithmetic.
Coreni took his arm.
It was reflex, mostly — the social math was simple, a woman and a man in a building where everyone knew everyone's business — but the moment her hand closed around his forearm she felt the solidity of him, the contained stillness, and had to concentrate on looking at the floor numbers ticking upward instead of at him.
He didn't react. Or rather — he went very slightly more still, which in someone already that still was its own kind of reaction.
The elderly woman smiled at her with an expression that communicated approval, conspiracy, and a complete misreading of the situation, all at once.
The doors opened on twenty-three. Coreni let go of his arm, stepped out first, and did not look back to see if the elderly woman was still watching.
She was definitely still watching.
Before she had the door fully open, he was past her.
She stood in the doorway and watched his shadow move through her apartment — checking corners, she understood, cataloguing exits, doing whatever it was that fifteen years of protecting someone's life had trained him to do automatically.
He was thorough about it. She was going to need to get used to that.
"Lights," she said to the room, and the apartment obliged.
She called up the temperature and the music — something low and ambient that had nothing to prove — and crossed to her couch and sat down and played her messages.
Her editor's voice hit first, loud enough that she was glad Edi-Veen was in the other room. The summary was: where was she, she was not on approved leave, call him immediately, and he would be using significantly more colorful language in person. She deleted it.
Her father's voice came next, quieter. Coreni, call me when you get this. Four words of information, nothing else, which from him meant he'd been worried enough to call twice already and was trying not to show it. She felt a small familiar pull of guilt and filed that too.
The third message was from Draka — a colleague she tolerated and occasionally liked — reminding her about a company event that evening at a venue called the Blue Fancy.
The message was bright and relentlessly optimistic in the way that only people who genuinely enjoyed parties could sustain.
Coreni had forgotten about it entirely. She was now remembering that she had promised to go.
She sat with that for a moment.
Edi-Veen emerged from the back of the apartment, moving without sound across the floor covering. "The space is secure."
"I live here," she said. "It's generally secure."
"Generally is not the standard I work to."
She looked at him — standing in the middle of her living room in civilian clothes and fake implants, perfectly composed, occupying the space with the same quality of absolute presence he'd had on the dock and in the chamber and in the transport, like he had never in his life been uncertain about where to put his body.
It was, she thought, deeply inconvenient.
"You should go," she said.
"I was assigned to —"
"I know what you were assigned to. I was there for the relevant portion of the conversation." She hadn't been, technically, but he didn't know how much she'd heard through the floor. "I'm home. I'm safe. You've checked the corners. Mission accomplished."
"My assignment does not end at your door."
"Does it end anywhere?"
"When you are no longer at risk."
"And who decides that?"
He looked at her steadily. "Currently — me."
She wanted to argue with that. She was quite good at arguing and had a number of directions she could take it. She looked at his face, at the particular quality of settled certainty there, and chose a different approach.
"Fine," she said. "Then you can be useful. I need a shower and I have approximately one hour before I have to be somewhere. If anyone comes to the door —"
"I will handle it."
"Don't handle it in any way that leaves a mark on my hallway."
Something shifted very briefly at the corner of his mouth. "Understood."
The hot water helped.
She stood under it and let the dock smell leave her — the cold brine of it, the particular grime of plasteele in wet weather — and let her thoughts run where they wanted to for the first time since the wave had hit her in the back and upended the last sixteen hours.
When we find the women, we will find the key.
Which women. She was a journalist. The question had been sitting in the back of her mind since the dock, patient and insistent, waiting for the noise to die down enough to be heard.
The Chancellor was looking for someone — more than one someone — and whatever they represented was significant enough to meet about in a loading dock in the middle of the night instead of in his office in the middle of the day.
And then there was the Fraluma. Standing over her on that container, looking down at her with those blue-green eyes, and doing nothing.
He could not have hurt you, Dremma had said. Not chose not to. Could not.
And then the word. The one she didn't know.
The one that had hit her like something remembered rather than something heard for the first time, which made no sense, and which she was going to need to find a rational explanation for because the irrational one was not something she was prepared to entertain.
Cremmilek.
She turned the water off.
She was a journalist. She found things out.
That was the entire mechanism of her life, the one skill she'd refined beyond any other, and she was very good at it.
Whatever was happening, she was going to find out what it was.
She was going to use the tools she had — her contacts, her access, her press credentials, and the fact that she apparently now had a Fraluma warrior in her living room who couldn't lie to her about everything.
She was going to ask better questions.
Starting tonight.
She came out of the bedroom dressed for the party and stopped.
Edi-Veen was in the center of her living room, upside down.
It took her a moment to fully process what she was looking at.
He was balanced on one finger — one finger, on one hand, resting on something small — inverted, perfectly still, legs extended toward the ceiling with the geometric precision of someone who had practiced this until the unreasonable became mundane.
Sweat tracked down his face into his hair. His eyes were closed.
On the floor beneath his hand, a small crystal ball caught the light.
She stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched him for a moment longer than she intended to.
"Meditation?" she said.
In a single motion, fluid and unhurried as water, he was right-side up. The crystal ball rose with him, landing in his palm as if it had decided to be there. He wasn't breathing hard. She would have been breathing hard.
"Yes," he said.
"On one finger."
"The physical challenge focuses the mind."
"Right." She crossed her arms. "There's sweat on my floor."
"I will clean it."
"You will." She looked at the crystal, sitting quietly in his palm. It was the same kind of object as the one in the underground room — small, clear, slightly luminescent. A detail she filed carefully. "Is that standard equipment?"
"It assists with certain meditative practices."
"That's not a yes or no."
"No," he said. "It is not."
For the first time since she'd come out of the bedroom, he actually looked at her — not the professional assessment he gave every room and every person in it, not the cataloguing of threat and exit.
Something else. His eyes moved over her once, briefly, with a quality she hadn't seen from him before, and then returned to her face with the careful neutrality he wore when he had decided something was not information he was going to share.
"You look —" he started.
He stopped. Reconsidered. The crystal sat in his open palm, doing nothing in particular.
"You are dressed differently than usual," he said finally. Precise. Contained. The word choice of someone who had elected not to say the first thing that came to mind and had landed on the safest available alternative.
She looked at him for a moment. "That's what you're going with."
Something shifted very briefly at the corner of his mouth. "It is accurate."
"It is extremely accurate," she agreed. "And entirely unhelpful."
"You look," he said, with the specific deliberateness of someone choosing each word individually, "as though you intend to be noticed."
She held his gaze. He held hers. There was something in the blue-green of it that was not the professional distance, not the careful management — something that had been there and contained and was now, briefly, less contained than usual.
"Good," she said. "That's the point."
She turned before either of them had to do anything with that.
Stars forbid he have to give her a compliment. He had sounded actively pained getting to you intend to be noticed, like the sentence had cost him something he hadn't budgeted for.
Ugh, men. Fraluma, apparently, were no different.
She wasn't looking for flattery. She wasn't. It was just — it wouldn't have hurt.
She caught her reflection in the small mirror by the bedroom door, patted a strand of hair back into place, and took a breath that was entirely about composure and not at all about the expression she had just caught on his face before he put it away.
She glanced back at him.
He was watching her with the careful neutrality. Of course he was.
She looked away first.
"I have to go out," she said. "Company event. I can't get out of it without losing a professional relationship I need." She watched his face, waiting for the argument. "You're coming with me."
His expression did not change. "I had assumed so."
"You'll need to blend in more than you did on the street."
"I am capable of adaptation."
"You're going to need to smile."
A pause. Brief, but real. "I will endeavor to."
"Endeavoring isn't the same as doing."
"No," he agreed, with the air of someone who had made peace with a great many things. "It is not."
She went to make the call to her father, because she owed him that before the evening swallowed her. Edi-Veen retreated to clean the floor without being asked twice, which was either training or consideration — she wasn't yet sure which, and wasn't sure it mattered.
"Hi Dad."
"Coreni." Her father's voice did the thing it always did when he'd been worried — went carefully steady, the way a person's voice went when they'd been practicing calm. "I've been trying to reach you."
"I know. I'm sorry. It's been a strange night."
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I'm home."
A pause on his end. "I had the most terrible dream last night. That you were in danger somewhere cold and dark."
She was quiet for a moment. She thought about the dock. The cold, the dark, the water. His face, which was what she'd thought of when she'd been certain she was about to die.
"It was just a dream, Dad."
"Of course," he said, but the steadiness in his voice had shifted very slightly, in a way she recognized. Her father lied badly and rarely. When he did it, he went too calm.
"I actually wanted to ask you something," she said.
"Oh?"
"About my implants. The rejection — have you ever found anything that explains it? Any new research?"
Silence. Longer than it should have been.
"Nothing definitive," he said. "You know how these things go. More data needed, always more data. Why do you ask?"
"Someone asked me about it today. Made me realize I've stopped thinking about it."
"Someone," her father repeated. Another beat of that careful quiet. "Anyone I should know about?"
"Not yet," she said. "I'll explain when I understand it better myself. Are you free for dinner this week?"
"For you? Always."
She smiled. It was the right answer, and he always gave it, and it was one of the more reliable things in her life. "I'll comm you tomorrow. Get some sleep, Dad."
"You too, little one. Be careful."
She took the earpiece off and held it for a moment before setting it down.
More data needed, always more data. In twenty-six years, he had never once said that to her. Her father collected data the way other people collected certainties. He always had a theory. He always had an answer, even if the answer was provisional.
She filed that too, in the growing catalogue of things that didn't quite fit.
Then she picked up her bag, checked her fake implant in the mirror, and went to collect her Fraluma.