Chapter 16
The wind-driven, chaotic rain matched Renner’s mood as he walked through the alley that looked like a dead end. A chaos cauldron of emotions had driven him out of the townhouse on a past-midnight neighborhood patrol.
Their improvised scenario to deflect the auditor had been simple enough. The cleaner, whose name Renner never asked, erased the auditor’s recent memories. Renner loosened the armature, then bashed the auditor’s head with it hard enough to draw blood.
Akaramides and the cleaner had looked faintly queasy. Charrascos gave him an approving nod as she helped arrange the auditor’s limbs on the floor.
He and the cleaner went back to the office with the monitoring station. They were just in time to watch two concerned women helping the groggy auditor to his feet. Charrascos blustered brazenly. Akaramides fluttered with flustered grace.
The auditor left to tell his team to stand down because Akaramides was the victim.
Charrascos had lured Akaramides to the space station on false pretenses for a supposed standard records interview with an ex-Jumper, then pounced.
Since the CPS had recently banned her and her media company, she’d had to resort to ambush tactics to get anyone to talk to her.
Really, Charrascos had asserted unrepentantly, it was the CPS’s own fault.
While Renner watched the action play out, the cleaner manipulated the body parlor’s records to support the scenario.
The payroll now included an ex-Jumper as an occasional fill-in, and the business records now had a comms trail that suggested Charrascos paid the man to get Akaramides to the space station.
The ease and speed with which the cleaner did so suggested superior skill.
Of much more significance, the cleaner had known a great deal about Renner.
While waiting in the lobby for Charrascos, Renner had turned on his percomp and pretended to read as a cover for monitoring her and anticipating threats.
Almost immediately, a fully cloaked and veiled person carrying multiple energy weapons had entered the shop. The person caught Renner’s eye and invited him to come along with a tilt of his head.
After considering risks and options, Renner powered off his percomp and followed the veiled figure into the office. Security displays on the wall showed the lobby and the shop’s front and back doors.
The person gave a slight bow. “As you likely surmised, I’m the cleaner. I’m told you are telepath-immune, but I’d like to verify that.” The expressive, tenor-range voice spoke English with no discernible accent.
Renner stilled. “Immune?”
“Yes.” The cleaner’s eyes crinkled in amusement.
“You featured often Dixon Davidro’s journals.
” Long fingers fanned artfully. “And you may thank Neirra Varemba. She asked me to save her friend, but I was too late.” One shoulder lifted in a shrug.
“Regrettably, the lethal, mad-dog enforcer named Renner was a confirmed casualty last spring after a vicious urban turf battle between criminal crews.”
Renner had no trouble inferring the underlying threat.
He knew zero about them, and they knew everything important about him.
If he betrayed their secrets, they’d gift-wrap him for the CPS.
They probably guessed that would be much worse than just ejecting him out of the nearest space station airlock.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Verify away. I can’t stop you.”
The cleaner’s head tilted, and his eyebrow twitched with amusement. “Imagine my shock if you could.” The eyes took on a distracted look for several long moments. “It’s true. I feel your presence, faintly, but I can’t touch you.”
Renner made his shoulders and back relax. He’d withstood probes and attempted manipulation by every one of Davidro’s various telepaths, but he’d hated the tests. If he’d ever failed, he’d always planned to self-terminate rather than be Davidro’s puppet.
The cleaner eyed him speculatively. “Did Neirra ever heal you?”
Renner ignored the question. Games irritated him.
The cleaner glanced at the clock display on the wall and frowned.
“I ask because she had a trick of leaving information packets in people’s minds, keyed with nonsensical word sequences.
I’d always assumed she used her telepathic twister talent, but now I wonder if it wasn’t her healer talent instead. Or in combination.”
Renner had been saved from answering by the unwelcome entrance of the CPS auditor.
He’d done as the cleaner asked and created a hasty distraction.
It felt good to use that part of this talent again.
However, he’d only agreed because Faraday Brenner was ostensibly on the planet below and thirty thousand kilometers away from minder with the unique ability to cause a localized power outage at will.
After that, Charrascos got selected memories erased and instructions from the cleaner on using the shields. Then it was shuttle and autocab rides, changing clothes, and slipping her back into the Novo-G building. At midnight, they’d headed for the townhouse.
She’d been distant and quiet after leaving the space station. Maybe it was her annoying habit of hiding hurts. Or maybe she was stewing about sacrificing her straight-shooter journalist reputation to protect Akaramides, or being forced to become entangled with a cause she might not believe in.
He wasn’t sure he believed in it, either, but Neirra had, and she was the best long-tail strategist he’d ever known. If Neirra’s machinations wounded the CPS, then he was her willing weapon. He owed her that and more.
After confirming the security team was on duty again, he’d grabbed his rain cloak and gone for his own patrol. Jumbled thoughts brought bad dreams that made sleep impossible.
The cleaner’s question niggled at him. Neirra Veremba had healed him too many times to count, especially after Davidro stopped seeing Renner as a person.
She’d also made him memorize random strings of multilingual words and told him it was for his benefit. Since he’d assiduously tried to forget entire years of his life with Davidro, he’d assumed she was teaching him to be more selective in what he remembered.
Now he was rethinking that. But if they really were keys, like the cleaner suggested, Renner couldn’t guess what they unlocked. He also couldn’t fathom why Neirra gave them to him, of all people.
He’d expected to die when Davidro did. He wasn’t even cosmic debris on a forecaster’s chessboard. Nor was he a filer with a perfect memory. His version of long-tail strategy was adding a timer to a cube of explosives. Or figuring out how to keep himself and Charrascos alive for another week.
They’d both seen too much and had dangerous memories, her new shields notwithstanding. Renner suspected they were now both tagged with “kill if necessary” in the cleaner’s databank.
For that matter, he probably had the same tag in the minds of the conspiracy group. Per a rumor Haseem picked up, Renner’s refusal had convinced the fanatical Be’un he was a naak, an info broker with few loyalties and many paying customers.
He and Charrascos both needed to vanish for a few days to let tempers and tensions die down. Too bad her idea of lying low was spending a few hours in her office while sending and answering pings.
It was like Neirra had often said. Freedom that’s free isn’t worth the price. The cost of Ayorinn’s forecast would be astronomical.
The neighborhood alley that looked like a dead end actually had a narrow slot between building walls.
A series of dark grates covered one of the major neighborhood runoff ducts that shunted excess rainwater into Ridderth’s massive system of storm tunnels.
Signs threatened fines and detainment for walking on the grates.
Had it been a less upscale neighborhood, the grates would have been stolen years ago.
The slot shortcut took him to within a few meters of the back gate of the townhouse complex. He slipped into the dark shadow along the wall. Since he was alone, he sent tendrils of his talent out as far as he could.
Power lived everywhere. Static, ephemeral, in motion, or quiet in batteries, waiting for his talent’s touch to set it free.
He’d recently read a basic-school textbook that compared electricity to plumbing, but kept saying it was “like water, but not,” without further explanation.
It made him glad he’d jetted out on basic school.
Twin tiny surges of power entered his detection zone. They felt like flying spy eyes, or maybe advertising bots. Irritable Renner used to zap their delicate innards whenever he had the chance, but ordinary Faraday Brenner had to let them be.
Besides, Faraday should be inside the townhouse, soaking up the warmth from the solardry, not standing in the cold rain with the ghosts of his past and dilemmas of his present.
He wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain with Charrascos. He found it impossible not to like her. He’d been grateful that she hadn’t used her extraordinary gift for friendship on him again, but he envied the camaraderie that blossomed in her sphere of influence.
After only a short time together, Tōn Ko, N’Dwama, and Minan were already a cohesive unit, supportive and aligned in their mutual goal of keeping their charge safe.
The studio’s martial arts students not only welcomed Charrascos’s unpredictable visits but also had become more engaged with each other.
Coworkers at Novo Granica orbited her in ways he doubted they noticed.
Far more disconcerting was his physical attraction to her. Pleasure-addict and twisted exhibitionist Davidro had forced Renner to be the audience for a near-constant parade of sexual encounters. He’d ruthlessly trained himself not to give Davidro even a micrometer of response.
After rehab, his new, healthy body no longer obeyed him as far as sexual arousal. It had been easy to dismiss it as nature’s instinctive physiological function until he’d begun sharing the townhouse with Charrascos.