Chapter 20
THE PLATE, AS I AM reminded as I navigate its innards two hours later, is not a nice place to live.
Concrete and metres-thick reinforced steel shakes and shudders and clatters and moans around me as if it were considerably thinner layers of tin.
It’s only my revs that allow me to balance as I walk the painfully narrow metal corridor that doubles as a maintenance shaft for the vents.
It’s hot. Searing, scalding, lava-as-a-better-alternative hot.
A heatmat provides a way to walk without melting my shoes and then pretty soon after, my skin.
The one concession to anything approaching being human up here.
After a few minutes of watching my perspiration evaporate before it can hit the ground, I finally make a turn into a poorly lit side passage. It’s still a cacophonous, thundering rage of elements tearing at Themis’s permanent sun hat. But a marginally cooler one.
Another minute and I come to Chandra’s door, such as it is.
Pretty much as I remember it. Just a solid slab of steel with a slot at eye height, and a lever next to it.
I grab the latter and put a reasonable amount of my revs behind pulling it downward.
With an excessive amount of reluctance, it moves.
Nothing for thirty seconds. I consider pulling the lever again.
The slot opens and a familiar pair of bright yellow eyes glare through. Examine me for a second or two too long, then vanish as the opening slams shut.
The door groans ponderously aside, until it’s open enough for me to see the girlish figure blocking the way in.
Could have given me some more notice. She signs it at me. Not deaf, but the buds that by necessity live in her ears make her functionally so. Almost didn’t spoof the cams in time.
Really? You used to be better. I sign it back. Far from fluent, but I spent plenty of time up here, once.
She shows me her middle finger. I shrug. She shows me her other middle finger. I make an acceding, apologetic gesture. She ushers me inside.
Chandra seals the door again, hauling with all her weight on the mechanism until the din from outside eases to something approaching a normal torture chamber. She looks across at me, cheeks flushed from the exertion, and raises an eyebrow.
You look well, I sign nonchalantly.
She stares at me. Five foot four, dark skin, completely impractical waist-length curly hair that I swear has to get caught on all the mechanical stuff in here at least a dozen times a day.
It’s her eyes that are by far her most striking aspect, though.
Golden and glowing faintly in the dim. Three years.
And a bit.
Her eyes narrow but the edges of her mouth creep upward, ever so slightly. Good sign. She gestures brusquely to the sole table, nestled against the shuddering wall and roofed by uncomfortably low steel cupboards. I slide into a seat, ducking my head.
Immediately, the audible assault stops. There’s still something. A faint echo of thunder, a whisper of violence that lingers on the ears. But for the first time since the long ride up here, the air around me feels unpolluted.
“Oh! This is new.” I look around appreciatively as Chandra slides into the seat across the table, and turns off her buds. There’s a slight shimmer to the air around our heads. “I approve.”
“Don’t tell anyone.” Her voice is a hoarse growl.
I’ve never known whether it’s from years of trying to shout over the noise up here, or always been that way.
“Found enough shielding for the tech to stay up for about an hour at a time, but DeGov would strip it if it knew.” She studies me and then smiles, showing perfect white teeth, before reaching across and patting my hand.
“Azure. Bloody hell. Azure. Heard you were dead.”
“Close. Still working off my debt. Who went and fed you that nonsense?”
“Little Dan.”
“Well there’s your problem.”
The corners of her lips curl again. Just slightly. “Yeah, but even Little Dan don’t screw around with acquaintances dying.”
“Acquaintances?”
“Three years?”
I concede the point. “How is Little Dan?”
“Dead. Vent breach ’bout… two years ago.”
“Damn.” I liked him. “Andre?”
“Faulty suppression system, ’bout six months after Dan.”
“Jenna?”
“Good god. Jenna.” She says the name as if she’s dredging it from some back corner of her mind. “Weren’t she dead last time you were here?”
“I don’t think so. Not during our conversation about weather patterns, anyway.” I sigh. “Anyone except you who isn’t dead?”
“Mick.”
“Oh.” I cluck my tongue. “Well that’s unfortunate.”
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “Life. So. Much as I enjoy seeing your pretty face, gotta assume this isn’t social.”
“Why does everyone say that?” I feign hurt.
“Three bloody years?”
“Right.” I sigh. “How’s your access?”
“Same as always. Skimmer’s still active. No way to centralise or organise, but give me some parameters and I can give you a raw dump. Atti should be able to sort out—”
“No Atti.”
“Oh.” She pauses. Looks at me for a very long few seconds, those yellow eyes of hers burnished in the quivering air. “Oh.”
“Yup.”
Silence as Chandra takes it in. It’s been a while, but her eyes have always been expressive. Confusion. Suspicion. Then worry—for me, I think, rather than herself.
“Expensive to run an off-net filter,” she says eventually.
I bring out my pad and tap in a few details. Slide it across.
She looks at the numbers impassively. “I think you hit an extra zero.”
“Nope.” Not my whole cut from Manuel’s, but a decent chunk.
“Huh.” She makes a small, absent motion with her hands. You sure?
Yeah.
“That bad, huh?”
“You see my damned name on the way in?”
She snorts. Nods. Punches in some details on the pad, and spins it back to me. “What are we looking for?”
“Anything on the file involved in this Pactum. Source, potential copies. That sort of thing.” I type in the agreement number. “As well as any recent chatter even vaguely related to Jasa de Alwes.”
“The lifer woman? The first Ten-O-Ten? Wasn’t she from Tethys?”
Chandra’s golden eyes are on me. Curious. She’s isolated up here. Smarter than me. And it will help if she knows what the hell she’s looking for. “Yes to Tethys, but not so Ten-O-Ten, as it turns out. She hired me for protection.”
“What?”
“Yeah.” I draw out the word. “Protection from the Keres, as it happens.”
“What?”
“Turns out she’s actually been working for them for the past fifteen years.” I pause but Chandra has, apparently, run out of exclamations. “So don’t tell anyone?”
She stares at me in disbelief. “You think, Azure? You think?” She stares at the table between us for several seconds as if trying to discern something vital from its scarred surface. “S’pose I’m adding the Keres to the scrape too?”
“Um… yeah. Yes please. Especially anything about ops or agents in the city. That’s… actually kind of what I need the most, to be honest.”
“ ‘Acquaintances’ is getting very bloody generous at this point, you know.”
“If I didn’t tell you—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Her throaty acknowledgement is understanding, if still extremely displeased. “This isn’t us being even, ’Zure. You owe me after this.”
I tap the pad with the number of tokens she’s just earned.
“Can’t spend it in the bloody afterlife.” She’s calming, despite the words. Always was quick to panic and quicker to recover.
I tap the pad again, purposefully this time. Opening a file for her. She examines it with those glowing eyes, memorising the details.
“This’ll reach you any time?”
I nod. “You need me, I’m here.”
She stares at the details a little longer before deleting them. Knows I sent it across even before she agreed to help. “Better. A few years late. But better.” When she looks up at me again, there’s finally the question I knew was coming eventually. “What happened?”
“I was up here too much. Atti started asking where I was spending my time.” The simple truth.
“So we hang out less often. Link up on Q-net to say ‘Hey, I’m alive,’ now and then. Hell knows you know how to avoid being tracked when you want to.” She sounds more sad than angry, which makes it worse. “What happened to Landry weren’t because you were his friend, Azure.”
I stare at her, then laugh softly and nod. Always straight to the point. Always seeing straight through me. “Sorry.”
“Me too.” She flicks her earpiece, slides off her seat and busies herself over at the DeGov terminal that sits in the corner.
It’s not a big part of Themis’s DeGov infrastructure that sits up here.
Just one of a dozen different backup systems. But housed as it is in the Plate, it’s the only installation that requires human intervention to keep running.
That doesn’t give Chandra access, of course. No one has that. But she can run limited test data. Scrape just enough off the raw that it can be used by the very enterprising and very connected. Or, in my case I suppose, the very desperate.
How long? I sign it at her.
She’s focused on tapping away but clearly sees me. Finishes what she’s doing and then waves her hand in an uncertain gesture. Saying twenty-two hours. Could be more if a flag’s raised.
Damn. Can you send me it when it’s done?
She nods absently. Returns her attention to the terminal for a few more seconds, then taps off and sits back across from me. “Gotta go babysit Jasa de Bloody Alwes, destroyer of civilisation as we knew it?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s she like?”
“Two, maybe three millennia old. Slow. Fragile. Irritating. Weird.”
She cocks her head to the side. Surprised. “You like her.”
I glower. “That’s what you took from that sentence?”
“Can’t remember the last time you reacted to someone with anything except apathy.”
“Maybe I’ve changed.”
She grins. “ ’Zure, when I saw you on the cam I knew exactly why you were here and exactly how this whole thing would go.” Stands, leans over the table, and kisses me on the cheek. “Other people change. You just are. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
She sits again, and we look at each other silently.
“So I should go,” I say.
She laughs, this time, and I smile back. It always was easy with Chandra. I wish I could stay longer.
I activate my revs and slide out into the shocking-even-when-expecting-it audible assault of the Plate. Let her haul the door mechanism—she always got annoyed when I did it for her—and step out into the already-too-hot hallway. Turn back to her.
Wait a sec. She disappears briefly, then returns to toss me a Plasma blade. Old, but typically of Chandra, well taken care of. Know you like them. And looks like I can afford a new one.
I indicate a very real appreciation as I pocket it. Much better than a Ceramic. So. See you in another three years, then?
More than three months, and I will be making friends with the Keres.
Better make it three months then.
Bloody right. She gives a sharp, satisfied nod. Almost shuts the door, then hesitates. I raise an eyebrow. She grimaces. DeGov poll later today. Ten-Two-Thirty. AI filtering, content bubble nonsense. Just make sure your friend doesn’t vote, even with a clean Slab.
Why? Genuinely confused.
The Keres might be able to use it to scan for her.
But they don’t have access to DeGov systems. I study her. Right?
It’s advertising-adjacent. Fair use under Seven-O-Six.
It’s a marker they can use to narrow down the search.
She looks uncomfortable. They’ve been chipping around the edges for a long time, Azure.
They don’t have the same access as me, yet, but they can scrape legally and they can feed it straight to Atti.
My mouth twists, but I nod a heartfelt thanks. Risky, for her to give me that much.
Thanks. I’ll tell her. But there’s no way they’ll find her where she is right now.
I squeeze her arm, and leave.