Regeneration (8 page)

Gaela turned back to the others, feeling mildly relieved.

“Sorry,” Aryel said. She sounded troubled. “I could've just messaged you, but even though Herran's got me covered with the heaviest encryption there is . . .”

“I think we're all happier if some things aren't trusted to the streams.” Bal refilled her cup. “And don't apologize. Eve's going through a strange stage at the moment.” He returned the pot to the hob. “At least, I hope it's just a moment.”

“I haven't seen her in a while—too long. After yesterday I wanted to catch up in person.”

Gaela swallowed past the constriction in her throat. “So, catch us up. Although going there was beyond the call of duty, I think.”

Bal came to sit beside her by the window, glancing out himself as he did so, then wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulders. “How was she? Not happy to see you, I'll bet.”

“No, but she had to agree to it. There was that awareness underlying the hostility. And you know what Zavcka's like: she could never allow herself
not
to be hostile.” Aryel also looked toward the row of windows facing the garden, although she couldn't have seen Eve from where she sat. Her gaze was on the breeze-blown branches of a chestnut tree, its leaves mostly brown now, and falling. “She was arrogant and angry, but also a bit . . . sad. Diminished. I think the reality of having to play by the same rules as other people hasn't just pissed her off, it's shocked her. She doesn't quite know who she is in a world where something like a criminal conviction and prison can happen to her.”

“So she's having to deal with being the same as everybody else. It's about time.”

“I wouldn't go that far. She still sees herself as different. Better. Distinct from the rabble.”

“Which she is,” Eli said. “Different, I mean, and by a number of objective measures, whether we like it or not. And now that wealth and status don't elevate her anymore, what will she turn to?”

Bal's jaw tightened. Gaela said, “You think she's going to be . . . looking for something?”

“I think she'll need to,” Aryel replied. “She said she was planning to go home, ignore the world, and wait out her sentence. I didn't believe it for a minute, and apparently the psych reports don't suggest that either. I gather they're troubling, but not definitive enough to keep her in high security.”

“What do we need to do?” Gaela could feel a buzzing behind her eyes; the stress would lead to a headache if she wasn't careful. She took a couple of deep, steadying breaths, and leaned into Bal's solid bulk. “Aryel, you need to tell us: should we leave again?” She felt Bal tense up.

“Absolutely not.” Aryel's response was reassuringly firm. “She'll still be confined for many years, and I doubt she'd stroll around the Squats even if she could. You don't need to do anything other than continue to keep a low profile. You and your children, along with Rhys and Callan and a few others, are among the topics redacted from her stream access, but she doesn't have a list of what's forbidden. She knows it'll include victims and their families, and the trial established Gabriel as one of those victims, so even if she notices a Gaela-, Bal- and Gabriel-shaped hole, she won't put it down to anything more than that. Public figures like Mikal and Sharon can't be redacted, though, so you're right to keep Eve away from Misha and Sural when they're in the spotlight.”

She ruffled her wings slightly and walked over to look down at the garden. “I'm not saying she won't use whatever means are at her disposal to search. She's already tried, even though she knows it's pointless—she'll never be allowed to reclaim the child Ellyn carried. I think she's had enough of feeling frustrated. My suspicion is that
she'll focus her energies on something that gives her some gratification.” She turned away from the window. “And maybe lets her believe that one day she'll be able to try again.”

“How?” Bal had relaxed a little as Aryel was speaking, but his voice was still tight around the question. “She won't be able to deceive her way back into the kind of position she had before. Mind you, she's got a bunch of followers waiting for a leader—think she'll try to hook up with them?”

“I'm not sure. I pressed her on it, but it didn't sound like she takes the Klist Cult seriously. I know”—as Eli looked skeptical—“she's perfectly capable of hiding them in her pocket while pretending they're beneath her notice, and I did get the impression she'd thought about them more than she was willing to let on. She changed the subject, which is odd for someone so narcissistic.” She perched again, this time on the arm of Eli's chair. “There was also the fact that, apart from a couple of snide remarks, she didn't want to talk about Bel'Natur—she didn't try to get any information out of me, although she'd ranted about not being allowed to engage in business. That surprised me.”

“You think she's going to try and find a way back in?”

“I'll bet she's already working on it.”

“So she's not concerned anymore with—?” Gaela looked toward the window. She could not bring herself to say her daughter's name.

“No, that's not what I'm saying at all.” Aryel looked down at her hands resting on her knee, as though an answer she preferred might be found there. “The fact is, she's desperate to know.
Desperate.
It was the only thing she genuinely seemed to care about. Remember, she doesn't see herself as the villain in this—as far as she's concerned, we're the ones—no,
I
am the one who's done her wrong.” She gazed around the room, catching everyone's eye in turn. “But even that's not straightforward, because in addition to everything else, I do think she is horribly, horribly lonely, though I suspect she'd rather die than admit it, even to herself. But although she was hostile and the conversation was fraught, although I know she reckons me an enemy, I couldn't shake the feeling that my going out there
meant
something to her. I think it gave her a sense of connection, talking
to someone who has the measure of her. Someone she can match wits with.”

“Someone with whom,” Eli said quietly, “she has so much in common.”

“She'd sooner give up her fortune than admit that.” Aryel sighed and stretched. “And I'm not crazy about the comparison myself. But yes.”

Eve cast a swift glance up at the window. Aunty Aryel had only stood there for a moment and she was gone now, but Eve could see the flame-red and indigo shimmers of her parents' heads, side by side on the little couch where Mama often sat to read. You always had to assume Mama was about to turn her head and scan the garden, and take precautions accordingly.

Eve had no idea why her mother checked on her so much, even when they were at home. It was like she thought Eve might disappear if she wasn't looking. She was sure Aunty Sharon didn't watch Mish and Suri that hard when they were in their own house.

She hunkered down in her little cave under the shrubs, holding her battered tablet so it was covered by her sweater. She was fairly sure Mama couldn't see it, not as long as she held it like this. Not that there was anything
wrong
with having it out here, or anywhere else, as long as she was using it in the approved manner. She was restricted to the children's newstreams, so that meant stories and games and puzzles; and schoolwork, articles, and vids on the school's firewalled pupil network, where she was also allowed to have streamchats with Mish and some of their classmates. Apart from that she was not allowed to post anything, or set up a profile, or have any onstream life at all. Many of her friends could do what they liked and she resented being excluded.

So when one of the older girls who'd left school last term sent her an invitation, a link to a private stream where the cool, clever kids could talk to each other without their parents butting in or harassing them, she'd jumped at the chance. She did wonder for a moment why Dorah's account was still active even though she'd gone to a different school, and why she hadn't said anything before she left. But by the time the explanation came back—that accounts were left open for
a short time so that good-byes could be exchanged, and that Dorah had really liked Eve, but had been too much in awe of her to reach out before—she no longer cared; the new socialstream was full of the kind of sarcastic, self-regarding chatter that she didn't normally encounter, nor was allowed to indulge in. Eve knew full well that even if she wasn't breaking the rules by being onstream there in the first place, her new stream-friends were not the kind of kids her parents would approve of.

They thought so too, and had given her lots of tips for avoiding attention.

Other than Dorah, now known as @dorok235, Eve had no idea who any of them were in real life, but that part didn't much matter: everyone was anonymous here. She'd gotten a real thrill out of coming up with her very first alphanumeric handle, and felt grown-up and important every time she ventured onstream under her new secret identity. And she wasn't an idiot,
everyone
knew how essential it was to keep that secret;
everyone
knew stream-friends weren't the same as
real
friends, and that even on children's streams you could never be sure that someone was telling the truth about who they were and that you must never
ever
say who
you
really were, nor
where
you were. Her secret friends might live across the street or on the other side of the planet, for all she knew. She didn't know their real names and except for Dorah, they didn't know hers.

But @dorok235 and a couple of the others were always there for her when she was angry or upset, and it always made her feel better when they told her how special she was, and how much they hoped to meet and become real friends one day. They got excited whenever she let slip the tiniest thing: that she was adopted, that she was blond, that she was eight, that her parents never let her out of their sight. Her stream-friends asked lots of questions about that, agreeing that it was bitterly unfair, and Eve's sense of injustice swelled.

She didn't think it was at all surprising that they found her so interesting: they told her all the time how clever and important she was.

The festivities were well under way by the time Aryel Morningstar swept in, folded her wings and touched down on the quayside in front of Thames Tidal Power, landing between the stage and the airlock through which visitors were being escorted for tours of the power plant's control room. The dignitaries had not long concluded their speeches, and the press corps, only just beginning to disperse, all swarmed back to cover her arrival, angling vidcams to catch her falling gracefully out of the sky, then rushing forward, microphones ready to capture whatever pithy comment she might have for them today.

Agwé, recording the proceedings from a vantage point near the Child's Play tent, shook her head in admiration. “Sink me, she's good—late enough not to interrupt, early enough to get lots of attention, casual enough for them all to feel it was pure luck they were still around when she got here.” She glanced down at Gabriel from her perch on the stepladder that enabled her to see over the heads of the crowd. “She plans it all down to the last detail, doesn't she?”

“No—I mean, it's not quite that contrived, Ag.” He floundered, caught off guard by Agwé's penetrating observation. “Not usually,
anyway. She has great timing, but it's more like an instinct than a plan.” Realizing that he was in danger of batting away the question, he stopped himself. Agwé's own instincts had recognized a deeper truth about Aryel, and he needed to try and explain his aunt's actions in a way that would neither puncture nor propagate her mystique. “She's trying to
not
be the center of attention so much anymore, especially now that there are others like Pilan and Mikal who can represent us. She never wanted to be such a big deal in the first place. She didn't have a choice back then. But she can't just disappear, either. She's too famous.”

“So what you're saying is, she's pulling away slowly—”

“I guess so—”

“—letting herself become a footnote to the main story while the spotlight settles on other people. Passing the torch, so to speak.”

“That's about right, I think. I mean, I've never heard her say that in so many words, but yes.”

Agwé indulged in one of her voluminous eye-rolls, and Gabriel conceded an embarrassed wince. They both knew that what he heard people actually
say
wasn't likely to be the full sum of his knowledge.

“So, to repeat my
earlier
point,” she said firmly, “Aryel knows
exactly
what she's doing. And
damn,
is she good!”

He grinned up at her. “I'm not going to argue with any of that.”

“You better not. I hope Pilan, Mikal, and everybody else she's stepping back
for
are taking notes.” She clambered down the ladder. “Nothing else to see from up there. I should go and be a proper journo, join the crowd.”

“Uncle Mik is pretty good at that stuff,” Gabriel observed, holding the ladder steady as she swung her equipment clear. “He's got his own style, of course. Pilan . . .”

The eye-roll this time was mutual.

Agwé chuckled. “
Style
is one word for it. Coming?”

“Nope. Aunt Aryel and me in frame together is always an excuse for someone to bring up the story about how I was kidnapped and I'm not having that distract from Thames Tidal. Not today.”

“Fair enough.” Her expressive face was suddenly deeply thoughtful. “You work these things out kind of the same way she does, you know that?”

“Who do you think I learned from?”

She thumped him companionably on the shoulder before making for the forest of bodies, in the thick of which could be glimpsed huge bronze-and-gold wings. Aryel would be shifting and moving there, the gestures apparently unconscious but in reality calibrated to maintain enough clear space around herself so as not to feel too unbearably hemmed in. The vidcams would love it.

Agwé would probably work out the nature of that compromise too.

Gabriel turned away, thinking that his famous aunt was better at this game than even Agwé could guess. He would talk to her later, when the furor had died down a bit; for now, he'd go and find his parents. Aryel's arrival on the main quay would have been their cue to slip unobtrusively into Sinkat.

They were by the food kiosks in the tented dining area; Bal had already deposited fresh provisions with Delial—who usually waited tables, but was on loan from the café today—and was grinning broadly as he reviewed the morning's takings. Horace, who normally worked in the grocery, was serving teas and hot chocolate to a norm family with two little girls who looked just a bit older than Eve. They were staring with fascination from Gaela, with her cascade of glowing red hair, to Bal's short indigo glimmer, to Eve's nonluminescent blond curls. Gabriel decided the parents had noticed, but had chosen to ignore their children's naked curiosity; they had that slightly furtive, tense, nothing-to-see-here look about them, as though they were desperate to get their drinks and leave before one of their offspring asked an embarrassing question.

Luckily for them, Eve was paying the girls no mind whatsoever—if she'd appeared at all interested, Gabriel thought, the younger one, now squinting at some strands of her own straight black bob, would have taken the plunge. But Eve's studied indifference was like a damper field, a curb not just on sound but on the very impulse to communicate.

Eve looked up at her brother, expressionless, as he stepped close enough to ruffle her hair and give their mother a hug.

“Hi Mama, Papa, Evie,” he said, “hey Horace, Del.” His voice was casual, but loud enough to carry. Hellos were returned. Bal reached a large hand over to touch his son's face in greeting, as he'd done ever since Gabriel was a small child.

Gabriel glanced at the customers. The older girl's mouth had dropped open and they were both staring at his hair now too, visibly trying to work out how sandy brown fit in with blond, and fiery red and indigo. The father hastily pressed a credit tab to the reader. Horace thanked him when it pinged acceptance. With a palpable air of relief the parents herded their children back onto the quayside, but Gabriel could see the questions starting to batter at them as they headed around the perimeter of the basin.

“Hey,” he said to Eve's upturned face.

“Hey,” she replied, still deadpan, but with a note of approval. They knocked fists together. The routine was too well worn to require further acknowledgment.

Gaela, watching, chuckled, then asked, “How's everything going?”

“Really well. We've had even more coverage than we expected. I'm monitoring,” he tapped at the cranial band, “so I might have to slide off if something needs taking care of, but so far it's fine. Aunty A just arrived; she's doing her thing.”

Gaela smiled, their eyes meeting in shared understanding.

“Did you see Misha and Suri and Aunty Sharon and Uncle Mik?” Eve demanded, pulling at his arm.

“Yep. Uncle Mik made a speech, and then I think he was going to do an interview with one of the newstreams. Aunty Sharon and the boys are probably still around there somewhere.”

He wondered why his mother looked slightly pained. Eve drew breath to say something, but Gaela stopped her with a look. “We'll go and find them in a moment, Evie.”

Surprisingly, she stayed quiet.

“That's excellent,” Bal was saying to Horace. “Looks like I'll need to send more supplies down for lunch. Any problems I should know about?”

“No, none at all.”

Delial, briskly replacing empty tubs with the full ones Bal had brought, snorted. “Not unless you count Horace having to explain a
gazillion
times that actually, yes, you
can
have green hair and
not
be a gillung. Even if they'd overheard him telling someone else, the next person in the line
still
found it necessary to say something.”

“I don't mind,” Horace said. He had a mournful face, and always managed to sound a little anxious, as if the subject at hand, no matter how mundane, might at any moment become fraught. “They don't know. It's not their fault.”

They should, and it is.
Gabriel knew as surely as if he'd sensed it that his parents shared the same thought; he saw the way his father's jaw twitched and his mother's eyes slipped off Horace as though needing something else to look at just then. Delial, who came from the same school of expressive eye-rolling as Agwé, shoved the last of the supplies into place with a particularly eloquent thump.

Eve was oblivious. She yelled, “I
see
them!” and pulling away from Gaela, she ran out into the blustery sunshine and pointed. Sharon, Misha, and Sural were heading their way, but there was no sign of Mikal.

Maybe he's still in that interview,
Gabriel thought,
or another one, or he's been cornered by Pilan.

Gaela sighed. “Finally,” she said. “If those kids didn't know what to make of her before, they'd be beyond confused if they saw her now.”

Mikal Varsi was being neither interviewed nor harangued just at that moment, though he suspected he had earlier been roundly, if silently, cursed. He'd been standing beside the stage, talking to a technology journalist from UrbanNews, when he'd seen Pilan pushing toward him through the throng, speaking too quickly—and probably too curtly—to the succession of reporters he was working his way past. On his other side he could see the energy minister, Jackson Radbo, concluding his own interview, while Rob Trench stood nearby, hands in pockets, beaming munificently.

Mikal had acknowledged Rob, shifting his stance to make it look as though he were just waiting to finish so that he could join the two
men, but glanced across at Pilan to catch his eye as well. One benefit of being head and shoulders taller than everybody else was being able to see them all in a crowd, even when they could not see each other; it was one of the few advantages of his gem anatomy, and Mikal had no qualms about using it. So when Pilan arrived he came face to face with Rob and Radbo, approaching from the opposite direction.

Mikal clapped his double-thumbed hands together with, on reflection, perhaps just a bit too much relish. “Isn't this excellent? I haven't made it inside yet, Pilan, and I'm sure Mr. Radbo is looking forward to a tour.”

“Jack, please,” said Radbo, as Pilan pasted on a smile and led the way. “It's good to finally meet you, Councillor—”

“Oh, just Mikal. The pleasure's mine. I imagine”—raising his voice slightly—“that you and Pilan are already acquainted?”

“We've met,” said Pilan, managing to sound gracious instead of grumpy. The head of Thames Tidal Power might not be much of a diplomat, but he was also not a fool.

“My office isn't allowed much contact during application and development—that's to ensure the process remains independent,” the minister explained with a politician's practiced smoothness. “Now that part's over, I'm looking forward to becoming
much
more engaged.”

Pilan glanced back at that. Radbo fell in next to him as he led the way toward the control room, Mikal following along with Rob, noting with satisfaction that a number of the journalists were now filling the corridor behind them.

The entire group ended up in the control room on the second level, with a polite and increasingly enthusiastic Pilan describing the system to a senior minister with newstream crews on hand to witness their easy rapport. Pilan's political instincts, Mikal thought, were not sharp enough for him to realize that he was publicly undermining his own argument about the need for a separate political party. He injected a comment or question from time to time to keep the conversation moving, and felt vindicated by the sight of them getting on famously.

“You're too clever by half, you are,” Rob grunted out the side of his mouth in the middle of an animated discussion about grid upgrade strategies. “Get them in here and they're just a couple of energy geeks.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Mikal muttered back. “Work with me, Rob. This is your problem I'm trying to solve.”

“I get that. D'you think it'll be enough?”

Mikal leaned forward in an undignified slouch to bring his mouth closer to Rob's ear. “If your guy can persuade him the UPP are really on board, that they'll support aquatic settlements and take the issues that matter to him seriously, then maybe. He's stubborn, but he's also practical.”

Rob nodded his understanding. “Pilan's rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But maybe now that they can actually
talk
to each other . . .”

“Exactly.” Mikal straightened up, his voice coming back to regular volume as Radbo turned toward them. “Impressive, isn't it?”

“Very. I'd like to see—” He broke off, staring out through the clear biopolymer to the quayside below, where everyone's gaze had suddenly lifted skyward. Half a heartbeat later, Aryel Morningstar dropped lightly onto the bare space next to the stage where they had all been clustered just a few minutes before. There was a moment's stillness, and then the jostle of people and vidcams moving in toward her as though her presence was some sort of vortex. The journos who'd followed them inside all came to an instant and unspoken decision and headed for the exit, while other visitors piled up in front of the window. In a matter of seconds the politicians had gone from being the center of attention to virtually ignored.

Mikal sighed inwardly. It was not—had never been—Aryel's fault.

“I wonder,” said Radbo softly, “if we might speak in private?”

He was talking to Pilan, but his eyes flicked to take in Mikal and Rob as well. Mikal shot Pilan a look filled with as much meaning as he could fit into it. Pilan moved toward the doorway as though they too might be heading back outside, but instead he turned left, leading them through another door and into a small meeting room
on the opposite side of the building, away from Aryel, Sinkat Basin, and the TideFair.