Chapter Seven
Coreni
The Blue Fancy was exactly the kind of place Coreni avoided when she had a choice, which tonight she did not.
Dark blue walls, silver trim, music loud enough to function as a second atmosphere.
The crowd was shoulder-to-shoulder and getting friendlier by the drink, and the whole space smelled of expensive implant polish and someone's poor decision to wear too much scent.
She stood in the entrance for a moment and reminded herself that she was here for two things: to keep her editor from filing a formal complaint about her disappearance, and to listen.
Parties were, in her professional experience, one of the more reliable places to hear things people hadn't decided to say yet.
Edi-Veen stepped in behind her and the noise hit him like a physical thing.
He didn't flinch — she was beginning to think flinching wasn't in his vocabulary — but something in his posture adjusted, recalibrated, the way a very precise instrument adjusted when its readings suddenly didn't match expectations.
"How many people," he said.
"About two hundred. Give or take." She glanced up at him. "Breathe. You're scanning exits again."
"There are four. Two are inadequate."
"That is not the point. The point is to look like you're enjoying yourself."
He looked at the crowd. The crowd, for the most part, looked back. He was difficult not to look at — the height, the stillness, the quality of contained attention that read as intensity even through the noise and the dark.
"They are staring," he said.
"They're curious. Smile at someone."
"You told me not to speak to anyone."
"Smiling isn't speaking."
A pause in which he appeared to genuinely consider this distinction. "I will attempt it."
"Please don't say attempt. Just —" She took his arm the way she had in the ele-tube, because it had worked then and because it gave her something to do with her hands. "Follow my lead. Nod occasionally. If anyone asks, your name is Evan and you're visiting from the Carrow settlement."
"Evan," he repeated, with the careful neutrality of a man cataloguing an alias.
"It sounds like your name. You'll remember it."
"I will remember it regardless." He looked down at her hand on his arm, then back up. "You do this when you are in uncertain social situations."
"I do what?"
"Take my arm."
She let go of it. "I do not."
"Twice now."
"I'm being strategic. Don't make it strange."
"I did not make it anything," he said, which was technically accurate and somehow worse.
She walked into the party and didn't look back to see if he followed, because she could feel that he did.
Draka found her in four minutes, which was actually impressive given the crowd density.
"You came!" She materialized out of the press of bodies with the energy of someone who had been watching the door.
Her implants were new — a delicate filigree along her cheekbone, purely cosmetic, catching the blue light in a way that suggested she'd chosen the venue specifically to show them off.
Coreni suspected this was accurate. "I was starting to think you'd bailed again —" Her eyes moved to Edi-Veen and stayed there. "Oh."
"This is Evan," Coreni said. "He's visiting. From Carrow."
"Carrow," Draka repeated, still looking at him. "Right. Hi, Evan."
"Good evening," Edi-Veen said.
Draka's eyebrows performed a small private celebration. She pulled Coreni in by the elbow and dropped her voice to the register she used for information she considered urgent. "Where did you find him and how quickly can you introduce me to his friends?"
"He doesn't have friends here. He's visiting, I said."
"Coreni. He is —" Draka gestured at him with the particular economy of motion that conveyed an entire sentence without using one.
"I'm aware."
"Are you? Because you look like you're pretending not to be."
"I look like someone who needs a drink and hasn't found one yet. Where's the bar?"
Draka, accepting defeat with the grace of someone who fully intended to revisit this later, pointed toward the far wall and dissolved back into the crowd. Coreni turned to find Edi-Veen watching the exchange with the expression of someone who had understood most of it and was filing the rest.
"Your friend," he said.
"Colleague. Mostly."
"She finds me conspicuous."
"Everyone finds you conspicuous. That's not the problem. The problem is you find everyone else interesting in a way that reads as surveillance." She steered them toward the bar. "Look bored. Look like you've been to a hundred parties and this one isn't your favorite."
"I have never been to a party."
She stopped walking. "At all?"
"The Chancellor attended formal government functions. Those are not parties."
"What's the difference?"
He considered this with the seriousness he appeared to give everything. "At a government function, everyone is trying to get something from everyone else and pretending otherwise. This appears to be the same, but louder."
Coreni looked at him for a moment. "That is possibly the most accurate description of a party I have ever heard."
Something almost like satisfaction crossed his face. She turned away before she could react to it.
Her editor found her at the bar.
Pell was a compact man with extensive cranial plating and the energy of someone who had been aggrieved for so long it had become his natural state.
He materialized at her elbow with a drink already in his hand and the particular expression that meant she was going to hear about this for several weeks at minimum.
"Two days," he said. "No message. No location ping. Nothing."
"I was working a story."
"Without authorization."
"The best ones are always without authorization."
"Coreni." He said her name with a specific exhaustion that told her she was, despite everything, not actually in serious trouble yet. Pell was many things, but he knew what she brought in. "What story?"
She had prepared for this question. She had a version that was true enough to be convincing and vague enough to protect what she didn't yet understand. "I had a source with information about the Chancellor. I was running it down."
Pell's expression shifted — the aggrievement not gone, but something behind it sharpening. He glanced, briefly, at Edi-Veen. "And him?"
"Visiting. From Carrow."
"He's been looking at the room like he's memorizing it."
"He's thorough. It's charming."
Pell made a sound that reserved all judgment for a later date. "The Chancellor story. What do you have?"
"Not enough yet. Give me a week."
"You have three days before I assign it to someone else."
"You won't. You know I'm the only one who can run this."
He drank from his glass and looked at her in the way he sometimes looked at her — weighing, calculating, arriving at conclusions he didn't share. "Three days," he said, and moved away into the crowd.
Edi-Veen appeared at her shoulder. "Your superior."
"My editor."
"He noticed me."
"Everyone notices you. I told you." She picked up her drink. "What he said was that you look like you're memorizing the room."
"I was."
"I know. That's the problem."
"Is it a problem if I see something worth noting?"
She looked at him sharply. "What did you see?"
"The man near the upper terrace," he said, without moving his gaze from the middle distance, casual as a comment about the weather. "He has been watching you since we arrived. Not the way your colleague watched you, or your editor. A different kind of watching."
She didn't look. She'd learned that from three years of dock stakeouts — never look directly at a thing until you know you're ready to act on it. "What does he look like?"
"Average height. Standard implants, nothing distinctive. Dark clothing. He has not spoken to anyone in the room and he has not stopped looking at you."
She took a slow sip of her drink and used it to turn slightly, casually, the way anyone turned when the music changed and the crowd shifted. She found the upper terrace.
She found the man.
He was looking at her. When their eyes met he didn't look away — he held it, just a half-second longer than a stranger would, just long enough to make certain she knew it was intentional.
Then he turned and moved through the crowd toward the exit, unhurried, and was gone.
"Do you know him?" Edi-Veen asked.
"No."
"But he knows you."
"Apparently." She set her drink down on the nearest surface. Her hand was steady. She was proud of that. "How long has he been here?"
"He was here when we arrived. I noticed him in the first minute."
"You noticed him in the first minute and you're telling me now?"
"I was establishing whether he was a threat or merely curious. The eye contact was the confirmation."
She turned to look at Edi-Veen fully. He looked back at her with that steady blue-green gaze and did not appear to find anything unreasonable about the sequence of events he had just described.
"Next time," she said, keeping her voice even, "you tell me in the first minute."
He considered this. "Understood."
"Good." She picked up her bag. "We're leaving."
"The party —"
"Is over for us." She was already moving toward the door, her mind working through the image of the man on the terrace — the deliberate eye contact, the unhurried exit. That wasn't curiosity. That wasn't coincidence. That was someone making sure she knew she'd been seen.
The Chancellor was looking for women.
Coreni was beginning to think he might have found one.
She didn't sleep.
This was not, in itself, unusual. She had never been a reliable sleeper — her brain had a habit of treating the dark as an invitation to finish conversations she hadn't started yet, to follow threads she'd set down during the day when other things required her attention.
She had learned, over the years, to work with it rather than against it.
Some of her better stories had been built in the hours between the moons rising and the first sun.
Tonight the thread was: a man on a terrace who had made certain she knew he saw her.
She lay in the dark and pulled it apart the way she pulled everything apart — methodically, without flinching, starting from what she knew and working toward what she didn't. He had been there when they arrived, which meant he had known where she was going before she got there, which meant either her comm had been accessed or someone in her network had talked or she was being watched closely enough that her movements were predictable.
None of those options were good. The middle one was the worst.
She thought about Amir, which she always eventually did when things went badly on a story, and she thought about what the Chancellor's people would offer someone like him, and she thought about the look on the man's face — not threatening, not aggressive, just deliberate.
I see you. I want you to know I see you.
That was a message, not an action. Which meant she wasn't in immediate danger.
Which meant they weren't ready to move yet.
Which meant she had a window, and the question was how wide.
From the other room, nothing. Not a sound, not a shift of weight.
She had checked twice since she'd come to bed and both times she could hear only the building's ambient noise — the climate system, the particular creak of the third floorboard near the kitchen that she had long since stopped hearing as anything but background.
No sound of breathing, no sound of movement.
If she hadn't known he was there she wouldn't have known he was there.
She knew he was there.
It was not discomforting, which was the part she kept arriving at and not knowing what to do with.
She had lived alone for four years, and she had been fine alone, had in fact been better than fine — had preferred it, the specific quality of a space that was entirely hers to fill or not fill as she chose.
She had expected a Fraluma warrior on her couch to disrupt that in ways that were obvious and several ways that weren't. It had disrupted it, but not the way she'd expected.
What she felt in the apartment now was not claustrophobia.
It was closer to the opposite.
She turned over, pulling her blanket with her, and stared at the wall.
When we find the women, we will find the key.
Which women. She was back at the beginning of the thread, which meant she had run it as far as it would go for tonight and her brain was starting to loop.
She recognized that too — the particular feeling of a story that had more shape than she could yet see, where the edges didn't connect yet because she was missing something in the middle.
She needed the archives. She needed the physical records, the ones that hadn't been cleaned the way the public files had been cleaned. She needed to get into the press building and find what someone had decided not to digitize, which was always where the useful things were.
She needed, more immediately, to sleep.
She did not sleep.
The first sun came up gray and quiet through her window and she watched it from where she lay, not moving yet, listening to the city decide to wake up.
At some point she heard him in the kitchen — not clumsily, barely audible, but there — and the specific small sounds of her caffe maker being figured out.
He had made her caffe.
She was going to have to think about what that meant. Later. Along with all the other things she was storing there.
She pushed herself up, pulled her hair back, and went to the desk before she could talk herself into another hour of lying in the dark not sleeping.