CHAPTER 2 #3
He does not say liar. He does not say I caught you.
He says that is interesting, and in the second and a half it takes me to follow his hand back to his hip, I understand that I have been read and that he is choosing, for now, to keep what he read to himself — taking the lie I told because it is useful enough to carry downstairs and unfinished enough to come back and close later.
The corridor at his back runs cool gray.
The blast door at the far end is shut. One cobalt floor-strip threads the length of it, pulsing slow.
Somewhere on the other side of that blast door are two men I have not yet met, also negotiators of one kind or another, and one of them will vote on whether I live before I know there is a vote.
The decision was already made when the bolt slid home above the hatch. The corridor is just the route.
"I'm going to take you to my colleagues," Marcus says.
"They will want to read the drive themselves.
You can come willingly, or you can come unwillingly.
Both options end at the same door. The willing version saves us the inconvenience of carrying you, which I would do, with apologies, and which Adrian would do, without. "
"Adrian," I say.
"You will meet him. You will also meet Luca.
Luca will like you on sight if you do not smell of citrus solvent — he'll see you have not been near his workshop, which means you are not a Vexis plant.
Adrian will not like you on sight; he does not like anyone on sight.
He will decide whether to like you over the next forty-eight hours and the decision will not be sentimental.
I am the only one of the three of us who likes people on sight, and only because it makes my work easier. "
"You like me on sight."
"Darling. I like you on sight. That is data. I have decided to take it as data and not as a feeling. The feeling, if there is one, would be — I would imagine — quite inconvenient to all parties. Let's keep it in the data column."
He turns.
He lays his hand on the corridor door handle.
He keeps his eyes off me as he does it; his glance runs the length of the steel throat and prices every meter of it, a corridor he has walked a thousand times and still counts.
His hand is gloved — fine black leather, thin enough to read a touch through, thick enough to leave no print on the handle.
I had not caught the glove until it closed on the door, and catching it now is a late instruction from my body that the man across from me has been three steps ahead since the antechamber opened.
The glove is the only soft surface on him — everything else is the slate of his slacks, the oxblood of his shirt, the gold of his hair — and it tells me he came down from the bunker dressed to handle a stranger.
He came down dressed for me.
The brewery smell from the bar room is still threading under the NEON door behind me. I can taste it now, copper and yeast at the root of my tongue, and beneath all of it, faint, the amber-cardamom of whatever he is wearing, carrying from his collar across three meters of cool gray air.
"Quinn."
"Cade."
He glances at me.
"Marcus."
"Cade. For now."
"For now. " His chin lifts off his chest; the throat-scar shifts under the bar-strip light, briefly visible against the olive-warm skin and then gone. The corridor door eases an inch under the pressure of his glove. "I'll take what I can get. Walk with me."
I stand. My right shin throbs once where the fire escape ate me; the bruise has settled in and is now part of how I move.
I cross the antechamber to the corridor door.
I pass within twenty centimeters of him as I do.
He holds his ground, easy, unhurried, neither leaning in nor giving way.
The amber-cardamom of his collar comes off him the way warmth comes off a banked fire, and the throat-scar keeps its thin straight line under the bar-strip light.
I stop a half-pace short of the threshold.
He stands with his gloved hand on the door handle.
The other hand is flat against his hip, pill-case pocketed.
The corridor beyond is the last open question in this bar; the antechamber is decided; the hatch is bolted; Senna is upstairs with her clove-cigarette smell and her don't lie about the weather; and the man at the door has his glove on the handle because he has not decided whether to push it for me or to wait.
He is waiting.
He is waiting on me to take the half-step.
He has known I am lying for ninety seconds and has not yet decided if it matters. The only currency I have to spend in the next ten minutes is a usefulness fast enough to outpace the truth he has not yet asked for.
I take the half-step.
The glove creaks once at his knuckle as he swings the door the rest of the way.
He does not turn his head; he steps back a courtly half-pace to let me through ahead of him, ceremony worn so smooth it is almost invisible, the manners of a man from a world that ended before either of us was born.
The corridor takes the sound of the latch. The cobalt floor-strip pulses on.
And the blast door at the far end holds its line the way a closed door holds a secret — patient, indifferent, certain it will be opened on its own terms and not on mine.