Chapter 5
Renner leaned a shoulder against the wall next to a high-top table in the shadows of a busy, pleasant pub he’d never been in.
The transitional neighborhood bordered the Canals but aspired to respectability.
The perfect place for people from different social spheres to meet after a day shift and be unremarkable.
Which was undoubtedly why Arco Charrascos, the semi-famous journalist who’d found him in the rubble, had chosen it. Clever red angel.
The edge of his outstretched talent told him she was headed in his direction, and from somewhere overhead and to the north, in what felt like a flitter.
The steady progress likely meant the traffic control system was in charge until she arrived at the rooftop airpad.
She was alone in the flitter, so her advance security team was likely already in the pub, watching him.
He considered it safe to use the part of his talent that looked for electrical signatures. Any nearby high-level sifters could detect his activated talent, but not the nature of it. Only those who’d been snared by Davidro over the years would recognize it, and they were all dead.
From Charrascos’s first visit to the medical center, he’d recognized her unique pattern, but couldn’t remember having memorized it.
He hadn’t even known her name until she’d introduced herself in the medical center, then told him his new name and the cover story she’d invented to cover his “accident.” The staff actually believed her improbable tale about him being an unlucky freelance construction consultant with few galactic government records and no fixed address.
He’d lost whole days from his memory, as if a minder cleaner had brain-wiped him. Since he was immune to that kind of telepath, the gaps more likely came from head trauma and oxygen deprivation.
From what he’d seen of his medical data, he was lucky not to remember having a building collapse on him and being trapped in the wreckage for ninety-some hours.
He was also lucky not to remember being slowly strangled by Davidro’s motherfucking analog collar that had been around his neck.
It galled that he’d forgotten the critical, obviously life-changing events that led up to it. He had a million other memories he’d rather have lost instead.
Charrascos came from the lifts in the building’s center. He didn’t need to look up to feel her come in, but he did anyway, so he could take in her new appearance. Deep brown, tightly curly hair in rosettes, brown eyes, tan skin, fuller cheekbones, and a wider nose.
No one else but the pubtenders noted her entrance. Charrascos ignored them.
He’d initially assumed the regular surface appearance changes pleased her sense of style, but came to realize they kept her safely distanced from the pale-skinned, red-haired avatar she used for broadcast visuals.
And the changes were easy to do, especially in Ridderth, home of the best bodyshops in the galaxy.
It only took her one visual sweep of the pub to zero in on him. He wasn’t sure she’d remember him. Since his body had to be rebuilt from the bones outward anyway, he’d taken the opportunity to get a full body redesign during the rehab, the first one he’d ever had of his own choosing.
For free, too. Unlike the shadowy fugitive named Renner, “Faraday Brenner” was an ordinary, upstanding citizen of the Central Galactic Concordance who got free basic appearance reconstruction as part of his medical recovery.
He’d simply told them what he wanted, as if that was what he’d looked like before. And since this was Ridderth, he got it.
He’d last seen Charrascos four months ago, the day he’d finally been released from rehab.
She’d gifted him the raincoat and shockproof percomp he now wore and thrown in an anonymous cashflow chip with enough to live on for a year.
He couldn’t figure out why she’d visited him sporadically during his recovery. He’d been afraid to ask.
When she showed up for his release day with the gifts, he’d told her to get lost. She had, until yesterday’s message.
Tonight, she wore a puffy scarf and a long, shapeless storm coat that could have come from the used-goods store he’d been at a few hours earlier.
She caught his eye, twitched an eyebrow as she looked him up and down, then walked toward him. She ignored the stool and leaned against the wall next to him, close enough for him to sense her energy field without trying.
The one thing she rarely changed was her height. Even wearing thick-soled boots, she was shorter than average. It hardly mattered. Her charisma could mesmerize a whole ward of medical personnel.
“The gold-brown skin still looks good,” she said quietly, then smiled. “Hair turned out to be too much trouble?”
He’d forgotten that he’d originally asked for hair on his head like normal people. The first and only time he’d used his full talent after getting out of rehab, he’d fried half of it off. He’d gone back to bald the next day.
As she had from day one in the recovery unit, she teased him like he was an old friend. It pissed him off that he didn’t remember meeting her, but they couldn’t have become friends in that short a time. He didn’t have friends back then.
“Yes.” He bluntly cut to the core. “What’s the job?”
She turned to him with a bright smile. “Want to see my new flitter?”
He pushed off the wall. “Sure.”
Obviously, she wanted privacy for their discussion. That suited him.
Silently, he followed her to the lifts and into a capsule. They rode to the roof, where a chilly wind blew, but the rain had let up. He pulled up his hood anyway.
She stepped to the kiosk and entered a code so the flitter stacker would release hers. His talent said no one else waited in the shadows or followed in the lifts. “Where’s your security team?”
Her animated expression faded. “Dead or close to it. Four days ago.”
He frowned to cover his shock. “All of them?”
They’d been with her in the various times she’d visited him in the medical center and the rehab facility. From what he’d seen, they’d been competent and professional. Once they decided he wasn’t a threat to Charrascos, they’d quit monitoring him so closely.
She nodded once. The noisy stacker mechanism ground to a halt and ejected a nondescript, mid-size air flitter. “I was already down to three. No replacements yet. I came here straight from the bodyshop.”
Now he saw where this was going. He crossed his arms. “I’m retired from security work.” He snorted. “Besides, I can’t pass a corporate background check.”
She gave him a sardonic look. “Janitorial work that fulfilling, is it?”
“Keeping a tracer on me?” He should have known she would.
She twitched one shoulder. “I owe you.” She unlocked the flitter and opened the center sliding door, then tilted her head toward it. “Want to hear the offer?”
Despite his determination not to be the universe’s pawn again, one of his weaknesses was curiosity. He’d managed to hide it from Davidro for nineteen years, but wily Neirra had noticed it, and clever Charrascos had discovered it almost immediately.
He blew out a noisy breath, then stepped into the flitter. He could listen.
She followed, sealing the door behind her. She sat in the pilot seat as he sat in the passenger seat.
Instead of powering the flitter, she turned her seat to face him.
“I want to hire you as my personal security. You’ll have to stay in my new rental townhouse and go everywhere with me for the first few days until Novo Granica can help me put together another team.
I’d be hiring you myself via private contract.
I’ll pay the customary rate and meals.” Her irrepressible smile quirked a corner of her mouth.
“You already passed my security check. I probably know Faraday Brenner’s background better than you do. ”
She ought to. She’d invented it. She’d even called in a favor to arrange new official records based on Brenner’s fictional life.
“What do you owe me for?”
Her head tilted slightly. “No more recovered memories?”
Right after the first two weeks of reconstruction surgeries, tissue printing, and vat-grown organ replacements, the medics had temporarily awakened him to check his cognitive functions.
He’d barely remembered coming to the planet with the rest of Davidro’s independent contractors to chase people whose continued existence threatened Davidro’s latest special project. Hell, he’d barely remembered his name.
After the major surgeries and cloned body-part integrations were over, more memories of what he’d done in Ridderth had returned, except the last stubborn few.
The medics said it might take years, if they came back at all.
The therapy telepaths couldn’t treat him because of his immunity to telepathy.
The talk therapists tried to help, but he couldn’t trust them, either.
Faraday Brenner didn’t exist, and Renner’s experiences were nobody’s business but his own.
“No more memories.” He didn’t count the dreams.
She took a deep breath. “I owe you because when I found you in the townhouse, you asked me to kill you. I refused.”
That was it? “And?”
She frowned. “The medics assumed you wanted to live. I didn’t tell them you wanted to self-term.”
He felt his eyes widen in surprise. She’d been resolutely silent about the other lost days, but he thought she’d told him everything about the day she’d found him mostly dead.
“Was this before or after your fixer got Davidro’s collar off me?” The fixer had to have been nova-class, or the collar’s multiple failsafes would have killed everyone in a five-meter radius.
“Before. I rehydrated your mouth. You said ‘kill me.’” Her thin tone sounded tense. “I owe you for taking that choice away from you.”
He shook his head. “Davidro took the choice from me.” He clenched his fist to keep himself from touching the now-flawless skin of his neck. “I didn’t want to die from the motherfucking collar. You freed me.”
The slight shake of her head said she didn’t consider herself absolved.
Rehab had given him plenty of spare time to read and watch a lot of her work, but he didn’t know shit about the woman herself or her personal life, other than she’d traveled a lot, and justice was important to her.
He did know she was stubborn. He wouldn’t win that battle for now. “How did your team die?”
“Assassination attempt in a public transport station. A high-level supposedly ex-CPS telekinetic impersonated a new hire. He’s dead.
Only Marcan survived. She’s the one whose beamers you kept draining the last few times I visited you in the rehab center.
She went to her family home to recuperate after a spinal column rebuild.
” Her recitation was objective and professional, as if she were narrating a news holo, but her too-still body language belied it.
He’d seen her tease and laugh with all her team, and she’d obviously respected them.
He eyed her skeptically. “You’re a star with a fame quotient. Hire a private squad of ex-Jumpers.”
“I’m not a star, I’m a journalist.” She smiled in momentary amusement. “I’m too short to work with Jumpers.”
“Why me?” He quelled the impulse to ask if she was calling in his massive debt to her. Not everyone, it seemed, kept score.
Her expression became determined. “Because the CPS doesn’t know Faraday Brenner from an Andromeda alien spy, and you hate them.
Because you have an ace up your sleeve that no one expects.
” She splayed and pulsed her fingers, her sign language for his minder talent.
“Because you know how this city works. Because in rehab, you could have set me up for a target, or fried me and everyone else, but you didn’t.
” She looked him straight in the eye, but her expression hardened.
“Because you don’t like me well enough to die for me. ”
The corollary was that she didn’t like him well enough to care if he got killed, either. He didn’t know if he was relieved or irritated, but it was good to know where he stood.
The edges of his talent alerted him. “Three people coming up the lift.”
She flattened her palms on the arms of her seat. “Where to?” she asked, tilting her head toward the console map display.
He realized he’d made his decision the moment he stepped into the flitter. He’d merely been delaying the inevitable, pretending the universe didn’t have a plan for him.
“Your townhouse.”