Lydia awakens to find she’s still on Fitz’s sofa, wearing her clothes from yesterday, and the final pages of inkout are stuck to her face. She has drooled on them. They slowly come detached from her face and fall on the floor. This, she feels, is not how real detectives handle important evidence. What time is it? Where are her glasses? She wonders if she’s alone in the house or—
There’s a noise in the kitchen. Someone’s moving around.
Then she hears: Are you awake yet? Inevitably, it’s Madison.
Er, yes, Lydia replies. Her eyes dart to the scanner—a pile of inked-out code still lies on its out-tray. A larger pile of already-scanned paper is on the floor. She can’t remember how much was left to scan when she fell asleep last night. She has a not inconsiderable hangover from talking to Fitz.
Madison steps into the doorway. Lydia feels the waves of disapproval and anger coming off her before she speaks. Where did you go yesterday?
I had things to do.
You said you were stepping out for some fresh air and never came back.
Oh god. She did say that. She felt quite drunk at the time, and then loads of stuff happened and it all went hazy. Yes—sorry. I had to meet someone very urgently.
And you couldn’t have informed me of this?
There wasn’t time. Sorry.
I messaged you repeatedly.
Lydia now recalls blocking Madison’s messages yesterday morning. Really? I didn’t get them. I don’t know what happened there.
You were gone all day. I needed you.
Lydia can feel her future employment prospects, already very low, vanishing to a dot on the horizon. I really am sorry, she says because she doesn’t know what else to say. The worst part is, it’s not true: She is not, in fact, sorry. She just wishes it hadn’t happened, which is a different thing.
Why were you sleeping in here?
Although Lydia can’t lie about this, it may be possible for her to pick her way around the truth. The danger is if she hits a point where she can’t, it’ll be obvious she was being less than honest with her previous answers. I didn’t mean to, she tells Madison. I was up late reading. Her best hope is Madison simply doesn’t care enough about Lydia and her life to inquire further, or ask about the pile of paper on the floor.
What’s that pile of paper on the floor? Madison asks.
Someone gave it to me yesterday. Lydia tries to make this as offhand as possible: she’s not being evasive, it’s just not worth going into. They wanted it out of their way. It’s hitting her now that not only is she hungover, she’s also incredibly, incredibly tired—not just from the physical exertion of walking around the city all day but also the multiple deceptions, the encounter with Hari, talking to the police, and on top of all that the constant whirring of her mind. She needs a day off from this and she’s not going to get one. Maybe she can deflect the conversation on to Madison instead. Where were you last night?
Madison considers whether to reject this as none of Lydia’s business. At the embassy, she says. To discuss the latest developments.
Right—Hari. Of course.
I hear it was you who found him. Well done.
He found me, really. It’s not like I was out there combing the streets for him.
No, you were dealing with this emergency of yours, weren’t you.
I didn’t know anything about him being in New York, you know. Not until the police told me.
So I understand. Madison steps over to the paper on the floor and points at it. Could you move all this out of the way? The word this resonates with strong hints of junk.
Of course, Lydia says, lurching forward to pick up the paper—and her head throbs from the sudden movement. She pushes through the pain and gathers the inkout before Madison can get a good look at it, though Madison won’t be able to read them, will she? Or even recognize what the documents are? But she can’t be sure of this. She searches for the box the inkout came in: it’s not where she expects it to be. So you were at the embassy all night? she asks, a fairly empty question employed to distract Madison from thinking about the paper.
It went on late. I used one of the rooms there.
So what are they saying about the arrest?
I can’t talk about that.
Of course not, sorry. Lydia dumps the paper back in the box, and to her alarm realizes she has no idea if it’s still in order. Er, I think that’s all of it, she says.
Thank you, says Madison. She steps onto the sofa, kneels against the back and starts running a flat-ended tool around the edge of the broken canvas.
What are you doing?
Fixing this. I don’t need your help right now.
Lydia wasn’t offering her help. She is surprised to see Madison doing manual work though: She doesn’t seem the type. Maybe she couldn’t get a technician from the embassy to come and fix it. Maybe she’s got a reason for wanting it fixed quickly.
Anyway Lydia shouldn’t hang around here, she should take full advantage of the distraction. I’ll get out of your way, she says and walks quickly towards the study door, wondering if Madison can tell she’s hiding anything. She has little experience of this: she never had cause to mislead Fitz.
I may need you later, says Madison.
Fine, replies Lydia. It isn’t, but whatever.
When Lydia reaches the relative safety of her room she looks in her niche: The scanner has copied its output there in the form of a textfile, which she checks against the inkout. There were four boxes of code, of which she’s done two and most of a third, and she’s worried now that the third box isn’t in sequence anymore. She might be able to scan the rest with her glasses, but it’d take ages and be far less reliable—if the light bounces off one page in a weird way the whole thing might be fucked. But who knows when she’ll get another chance to use the scanner?
She peels off yesterday’s clothes and mulls it over in the shower. She’s not sure whether Fitz can see her in there: he seems to be able to see things. She drifts off into wondering how you can see if you have no form, since the optic nerve is a physical thing that reacts to light. Maybe he doesn’t “see” as such, but senses what’s going on via ripples in whatever state he’s in, or something? To be fair she doesn’t exactly know how her own eyes work, so arguably it’s unreasonable for her to expect a dead alien to know how his ghost eyes work.
She uses the tilepad next to the shower controls to check the feeds, but since the reports of Hari’s arrest there’s been no actual news about the murder.
@THE_LAST_SLICE / OPINION: Why the Fitzwilliam murder has been a long time coming—and should have been foreseen / TR77
@FACTS4FRIENDS / Leaked CIA comms reveal new arrest in Fitzwilliam case is “agent of foreign power” / TR49
@ WHAT_ARE_YA? / Wake up! “Fitzwilliam” “murder case” is pure distraction—he never existed and his usefulness was at an end / TR23
There are people who think you never existed in the first place, Lydia remarks.
It’s a shame my murderer wasn’t one of them, he replies.
The deadpan joke takes Lydia by surprise and she laughs, accidentally breathing in water from the shower in the process and suffering a coughing fit.
It doesn’t surprise me, Fitz adds. There are plenty of humans who think my entire civilization is a hoax.
Lydia is more than familiar with this notion. In fact, when she messaged her dad to say she’d got into LSTL, he replied with a ted that went into the theory in detail. She wasn’t sure if he believed it or if he was just negging her like always. Anyway she never bothered getting in touch with him again, so that’s the last she heard from him.
Did anyone ever try telling you that to your face? she asks Fitz.
Yes—someone once asserted I was a puppet.
A literal puppet?
Or some kind of mechanically engineered thing, or a hologram. I’m not clear why they believe your governments would collude on this—it would involve enormous effort, and for what benefit?
Lydia has spent quite some time thinking on this, and never got around to talking to Fitz about it while he was still alive. I guess they think it’s like how people in power used to use gods or, like, the idea of gods, to back up their decisions. It’s a way of passing on responsibility. You know what I mean?
No.
That’s because I’m not explaining it very well. She steps out of the shower. People in power often find it useful to have a higher authority, or some outside element they can blame for anything that’s unpopular or goes badly, right? Once they’d have blamed the gods. Then they moved on to other countries, so the Americans would say it was the Russians’ fault and the Russians would blame the Americans. Or the economy, like we have to cut this and get rid of that for the good of the economy.
So people think we were invented by your authorities as an all-purpose scapegoat.
It sort of makes sense.
Does it?
Well, not really, but I can see why people think it. Things were really falling apart before your lot turned up, y’know. Major countries descending into chaos, wars breaking out like forest fires. And also, actual forest fires. Then you got here and it was all about pulling together to take the opportunities on offer, and that dictated a lot of what we could and couldn’t do, and politicians do kind of use that as a way of passing the buck.
Ah, I think I see. So people believe it was a ploy to deflect criticism and create unity.
Yeah, some people believe that. But some people just don’t want the world to be bigger than it is. Freaks them out. It’s easier to believe it’s an elaborate conspiracy.
Is it?
For some people it is, yeah.
She puts her glasses back on and finds a note from Ondine.