Something brushed her hair and Evi snapped awake. Her hand had struck out before she was fully aware of what was going on.
According to her time sense, she’d been sleeping for four hours.
Diana was perched on the end of a coffee table, backlit by a streetlamp shining through the growing snowstorm. Evi had reflexively grabbed her wrist. Diana’s fingers were barely touching her hair.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.” Evi could see Diana’s flush as a slight infrared pattern in her face. The combination of blush, red hair, and reflected light from Evi’s borrowed kimono gave Diana a rose glow, as if an internal fire illuminated her.
The black lipstick was gone.
Evi slowly released Diana’s wrist. “Old reflex. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No,” Diana said. She was looking down at her lap and had let her arm fall to her side. All she wore was an oversized satin pajama top.
Evi sat up and looked at Diana, who had perched herself on the edge of the table, long legs crossed under her. The pose showed off her calves. More rounded and shapely than Evi’s legs. Something to be said for more than four percent body fat.
Evi realized that the silence was stretching out to an uncomfortable length. “Is something the matter?”
Diana looked up and shook her head, rippling her hair. “I don’t know.”
That was another thing Evi envied. Long hair was a liability in her line of work.
Her former line of work.
Diana was staring into her eyes.
No!
Evi’s hand shot out toward the coffee table and grabbed her sunglasses.
“Evi?” There was a quavering note in Diana’s voice.
Damn, damn, damn! The eyes, why did it have to be the eyes? No one was ever going to be able to relate to her normally because of the damn eyes. Evi put on the sunglasses in a vain hope that Diana hadn’t seen them.
She was still putting them on when she felt Diana’s hand on her own.
“Your eyes—”
Go on, say it. I’m not human. I’m a goddamn frankenstein—say it.
Diana slowly pulled her hand down, along with the sunglasses. She didn’t bother resisting the pull. Diana kept staring into her eyes.
Evi wanted to scream.
“Why do you hide them?” Diana’s voice was barely a whisper. “They’re beautiful.”
She stared for a fraction of a second, leaning forward. Then, with a gasp and a violent shake of her head, Diana turned around and fled to the window. Evi was left sitting on the couch, confused, sunglasses halfway to her face.
Did she hear right? All of a sudden she felt very warm.
Diana was standing in front of the windows, arms clutched around herself, staring out at the snow. The white top she was wearing took on a glow from the streetlight. No fires raged now. She looked like an ice sculpture.
Diana’s shoulders were shaking.
Evi put down the sunglasses and walked up to the window. Diana was softly crying, leaning her forehead against the glass. Evi put a hand on her shoulder, forgetting that Diana knew she wasn’t human. “What’s wrong?”
“I shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Doing what?”
Diana gave her a look telling her she should be perfectly aware of “what.”
She supposed she was. “I really don’t mind.”
Diana turned around and sat on the floor, back to the window. “I do. You said you didn’t have any intention of ‘crossing the median.’”
She had, hadn’t she? Even so, there was no denying the way her pulse was accelerating. It could be despair, fatigue, or the fact she needed someone, anyone . . .
But explaining it didn’t make it go away.
Evi shrugged, hurting her shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to change my mind.”
“You have no idea.” Diana was shaking her head. Moisture on her cheeks threw back frozen glints from the streetlight outside. “I knew this guy once. The sleaze took pride in seducing and ‘initiating’ poor, naive, young college kids. He bragged about the kind of damage he did.”
“I’m not a poor, naive, young college kid.”
“One of those kids couldn’t live with it. He shot himself.” Diana shook her head. “I’m never going to be like that man. That evil bastard.”
“You’re not—”
“You can’t. If someone isn’t prepared. Not sure.” Diana stopped talking and just started shaking her head.
Evi stroked Diana’s hair with her good hand. It was fine, silky, similar to how Evi imagined that satin pajama top might feel. “I know.”
They stayed like that for a while. Then Diana said in a low voice, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Evi liked the feel of Diana’s hair. It had been too long since she’d been close to anyone. It felt good simply to touch another person.
“Diana, what did you say about my eyes?”
“What?”
Evi slid her hand to Diana’s shoulder and knelt in front of her. “Tell me about my eyes.”
Diana sniffed. “I’ve never seen anything like them. They, they glow—”
Evi leaned forward and stroked Diana’s cheek, silencing her. “I’m not going to be hurt.”
Evi placed her lips over Diana’s partially open mouth.
She felt the blood rush to Diana’s face as well as her own. Evi’s metabolism forgot it was supposed to have a low thermal profile. Diana’s sharp intake of breath sucked the air out of Evi’s mouth, pulling her tongue after it. Evi tasted the remnants of Diana’s toothpaste and a slight cherry flavor from some lip balm.
Over everything was the rich, warm scent of jasmine.
The ice sculpture melted.
It was a warm, wet, hungry kiss, and Diana seemed to lie back in a state of shock throughout the experience.
After half a minute Evi drew back, smiling so widely her cheeks ached. Diana just stared at her with a red-eyed expression of disbelief. “I thought you weren’t a lesbian.”
A small part of Evi’s brain was just as disbelieving. What was she doing?
“I’m not.” Evi kissed her again, before Diana could object. This time she embraced Diana with her good arm and rolled. Diana wasn’t fighting, so she ended up pinned under her.
Evi’s combat training was useful for things other than infighting.
Once Diana’s lips were unrestrained, she managed to sputter, “But—”
“Objecting?” Evi unhooked Diana’s neck and got to her knees, straddling Diana’s hips. Not entirely by accident, the kimono fell open.
“No.” To emphasize the point, Diana sat up herself and hugged Evi, giving her own gentle kiss. Diana was uncertain, probing, as if still not quite sure she was welcome.
During the lingering embrace, Evi’s skin was caressed by Diana’s satin top. Every brush ignited a flash of warmth that sank down to the core of her body. Evi wasn’t satisfied with the tentative contact and wrapped her good arm and both legs around Diana, pulling her toward her.
Diana’s breasts pressed against her, and Evi could feel Diana’s nipples harden against her own skin. The satin separating them had become a sheet of silken fire.
They came up for air, and Evi could feel Diana’s hands behind her, finding the collar of the kimono. Diana nipped at Evi’s earlobe and whispered, “Why?”
While Diana fumbled off the left side of the kimono, being careful of Evi’s shoulder, Evi’s right hand slipped under the pajama top. She was asking herself the same question. “I’ll give you a list.”
Diana helped Evi lift her top over her head. Diana’s pale skin glowed from both the reflected streetlight and its own internal heat. Evi kissed her cheek. “I’m lonely. I need you. Badly.”
Evi kissed the hollow between Diana’s collarbone and the nape of her neck while gradually easing them both back to the ground. She lifted her head and traced Diana’s jawline with her right hand.
“You helped me . . .”
They were lying side by side now, skin touching. Diana was beginning to breathe heavily. Evi slid down and kissed Diana’s left breast, lingering, sliding her tongue around the nipple while her right hand gently brushed its twin.
Diana arched her back and Evi rolled on top of her. Evi glided down further on a slide of Diana’s perspiration. She kissed Diana’s navel, sliding her mouth around her abdomen. Evi could smell that Diana was becoming very wet. She looked up. “Most important . . .”
Evi slid down the rest of the way.
“You liked my eyes.”
Evi lowered her head between Diana’s legs and began to kiss Diana under the silky red hair she found there.
The conversation died after that.
They remained locked together for the better part of two hours. Somehow they managed to avoid breaking anything or popping Evi’s shoulder out of its socket.
It was hard to place exactly when the lovemaking evolved into a simple embrace. But that’s what it was when the sun began to rise. Evi rested her head on Diana’s shoulder as they sat on the floor in front of the couch, wrapped in Evi’s blanket. The table had been pushed aside, and Evi was looking past the comm, out the window.
Sunlight was just catching the tops of the buildings across the river. The snow had stopped, leaving the sky a crystalline blue. Somehow, the world looked worth living in again.
Evi felt Diana’s hand brushing her hair. “Awake?”
“Yes.”
“How do you feel?”
How did she feel? Damn confused, really. Not that she hadn’t wanted to. What was strange was that she wanted to in the first place. It was unnerving to realize that she couldn’t predict her own behavior.
She did have to admit that sex with Diana had been more gratifying than the sex Evi had had with any number of men. Evi didn’t know if that was because she really was a lesbian or because she never gave a shit about the men she’d slept with.
Maybe it was because Diana was the first lover she’d had without the benefit of those damn contact lenses. All the others had been Chuck Dwyers waiting to happen.
“Better,” Evi finally told her. And she did feel better. She had needed someone for a long time, since long before all this started.
There was a long pause before Diana went on. “Tell me something about yourself.”
Evi closed her eyes. “A lot of it you wouldn’t like . . .”
“Do you have a family?”
“No.”
“No one?”
Evi thought back to Israel. “I had a family of sorts. About four dozen sisters, one father.”
Diana stroked her hair. “I’m an only child. That many sisters sounds like quite a family.”
Evi let out with her silent laugh. “We were Japanese-engineered humans, batched in a Jordanian experimental facility, and we were all captured by a Mossad commando raid. I was raised in something between a boarding school and boot camp.”
“You said you had a father?”
“Colonel Chaim Abdel. He ran the place where I was raised.”
“What happened to them?”
Evi shrugged. “War broke out. We lost.”
“That was a long time ago. How old were you?”
“When they nuked Tel Aviv, sixteen.”
Diana didn’t respond for a long time. After a while she said, “I hoped it would be a long time before I heard stories like that again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, back in the forties I helped a lot of moreaus into the country. Especially after the riots when the borders were closed.”
It was surreal, listening to that. For a long time after Evi made it into the country and was more-or-less forced into the Agency, her job had been busting people like Diana. Talk about strange bedfellows.
“When did you come to the States?” Diana asked.
“Forty-five.”
“How’d you manage that? The INS is still uptight about engineered humans.”
Evi thought about the round-faced State Department official at her debriefing. He had said that no franks were being let into the country. It was the first time Evi had heard that word. However, if she agreed to work for the government, perhaps he could work something out.
“I had to make a few concessions,” Evi said.
“I’ll bet.”
Evi felt dishonest. She should be telling Diana the whole story, but Evi was suddenly afraid of losing her. How exactly could she tell this woman that she had spent the last twelve years working for the government?
She was also still very tired.
Evi sighed. “I still need to finish that good night’s sleep you interrupted.”
“Oh.” Diana got to her feet and gathered up her top. “Good night—morning.”
Diana began walking to the stairs that led to the loft and Evi cleared her throat.
Diana turned around. “What?”
Evi stood, holding the kimono in her good hand. “After all that, I sleep on the couch?”
• • •
On noon of New Year’s Day. Evi woke up. She got out of bed carefully, to avoid waking Diana, and went down to the kitchen.
After she’d heated some leftover tofu, she took the ramcard from the library out of her backpack and slipped it into the reader for the comm. The comm took a second to warm up. She dug around and found the remote. It had been kicked under the couch sometime during the night.
A commercial station came on the screen, Nonhuman League Football. The game was halted for an injury and she briefly heard something about a twenty-yard penalty for illegal use of claws.
Evi found the database function on the remote and called up the information on her ramcard.
The N.Y. Public Library logo replaced some unnecessary roughness on the first down.
“Japan,” she said to herself, wishing Diana had some more complex functions on her comm.
She spent a few hours going over what she already knew. Assassinations, car bombs, downed airplanes. Sometimes, however, a detail or two could catch her attention.
For instance, at least half of the assassinations the Nippon Liberation Front claimed responsibility for were in some way involved with the Office of Science and Technology. The NLF hit hardliners, but a few of their targets were distressingly liberal. Some victims had actually been reformers who wanted to grant some limited independence to occupied Japan.
The NLF also had little tolerance for rival organizations. They were particularly gruesome to anyone who purported to speak for the Japanese people.
From Evi’s point of view, she was looking at an organization that, despite its rhetoric, had a vested interest in the status quo.
That didn’t mean anything in itself. Any organization was vulnerable to bureaucratic inertia and power games. Even terrorists, especially terrorists, could get so caught up in it that they lost sight of their original goals.
However, while the NLF’s strikes were doing nothing for the liberation of Japan, they were very efficient in slowing technological development throughout the entire Pacific Rim. Especially in areas where Japan had excelled. In fact, she thought that it wouldn’t be far-fetched to presume that the NLF was responsible, in large part, for the Asian scientific community becoming insular and paranoid.
As effective as the aliens’ pet congressmen were in passing counterproductive legislation.
That brought her mind back to a line of thinking she’d been on earlier but hadn’t followed to its ultimate conclusion.
The U.S. hadn’t been the only country capable of interstellar probes. Before the Pan-Asian war, both India and Japan had been far ahead in their space programs.
Before the war.
That war was one of the ugliest chapters in world history. Close to a hundred million human dead. No one knew how many nonhuman. Two decades of fighting. And all the wrong countries won.
Could that have been caused by—
“No.”
She didn’t want to think about it. Past was past. What she needed now was some line on the NLF that could tell her if it was the Nippon Liberation Front after her, and if so, give her some idea why.
Money.
Finances always struck near the heart of the matter. It was the money trail that finally brought down that cell in Cleveland. If she found who put money in the NLF, she might be able to sharpen her focus. She needed specifics, not broad generalities.
Specifics . . .
She manipulated the control while she heard Diana awaken in the background. Text flew by as she listened to Diana shower, dress, and fix a pot of coffee.
The coffee smell closed on her, and she felt Diana sit down by her.
“Morning.”
“Three-thirty in the afternoon, really,” Evi responded.
“Picky, picky. I notice you left off the sunglasses.”
Evi automatically put her right hand to her face, nearly bashing the remote control into her nose. The database stopped scrolling.
“What’s on the comm?”
Evi set down the remote and looked at Diana. Diana was wearing an oversized sweater that hung on her very well. “Trying to find out who those Afghani mercenaries were working for.”
Diana sipped her coffee and asked, “They work for Nyogi Enterprises?”
“Huh?” Evi looked at the comm. It had stopped on a U.S. News-fax article about a ten-grand-a-plate dinner held by the board of Nyogi Enterprises. The text with the picture insinuated that the Japanese relief effort the dinner was raising money for was really the NLF in a very thin disguise. The article itself was rather low on facts and high on innuendo.
But as far as Evi was concerned, the picture was damning. Sitting at one of those ten-thousand-dollar plates was a face that Evi would never forget.
The peeper.