You’re just in time, says Madison when Lydia returns to the residence to find her completing the repairs on the canvas. Press your hand there. She indicates a spot near where the bullet hit: she seems to have laid a new layer over the top of the entire canvas. Lydia has never touched the canvas before. She splays her hand on the surface: it looks like glass but feels like very stiff paper, the kind you’d use for painting watercolors. Press down harder, says Madison. Use both hands. Lydia obeys. Then Madison runs that blunt tool all around the edge of the canvas again, and steps back.
Can I stop pressing down now? Lydia asks.
Slowly. Take one hand away at a time.
Lydia takes her left hand away, then her right hand—and the canvas returns to life, colors springing to its surface.
Good, says Madison.
Lydia steps back to stand next to her and they watch the image on the canvas take shape. It’s a pastoral scene: a field with a barn on the horizon, rendered in an almost naive style. But in the foreground is a secluded ditch, muddy at the bottom, and Lydia’s eye is drawn to it even though it’s the darkest part of the image. It’s like a bog that sucks in your gaze.
I’ve never seen it look like that before, says Lydia.
It’ll take awhile to pick up on the mood of the room. This will be whatever image it was showing when it was broken.
Lydia is startled by this casual remark. You mean when Fitz was killed?
Well, yes.
But it might be important, surely?
You mean it might tell us who killed him?
Maybe.
It doesn’t work like that, Lydia, says Madison with a gently patronizing air. It reacts to emotions, he won’t have left a message in it during his dying moments. Anyway look at it—I can’t see any clues in there, can you?
Lydia peers at the canvas, searching for something to prove Madison wrong. But the scene is empty of anything significant, as far as she can tell, and all it’s giving her is a sense of unease. She tells her glasses to save the image, then goes to leave the study.
Where are you going? asks Madison.
Upstairs.
I told you I needed your help.
I thought you just meant with that, says Lydia, pointing at the canvas.
No, there’s much more I need you for.
While Lydia was out, Madison has amassed fresh questions about Fitz’s calendar, about funding allocations, about projects to which he’d given tentative support but hadn’t yet committed. Lydia has to muster the patience from somewhere to deal with all this, hoping that the faster they get through it, the faster she can go upstairs and talk to Fitz. But each matter they resolve seems to give rise to several more, and it’s extremely hard to pay attention what with everything else that’s going on and how drunk she feels right now.
Please could you stop spinning on that chair? says Madison irritably.
Y’what? says Lydia.
The chair. You keep spinning on it.
Yes.
Could you stop it please?
Why?
I find it distracting.
Sorry. It’s just, I’m a bit …
Yes, I can see—Look, what’s this devised theater event about? Why are we sponsoring this? Madison holds out an inkout that’s written in Logisi and Lydia lets her glasses scan the code in the corner, so her scroll pulls up the relevant English version from Fitz’s files.
Oh, says Lydia when she sees what it is. That’s the thing Anders Lewton is doing.
The man you assaulted?
That’s the guy, yes.
I see. Madison looks down at the document, then puts it to one side. I think we’ll review that.
Lydia starts with alarm. But you—
Madison looks up. But what?
It’s just, sponsoring his event was part of the agreement that he wouldn’t press charges over the, er, incident. The main part, really. So if you pull out—
I realize that, Lydia, and I sympathize—but I’m afraid Fitz and I differed on this issue. I don’t think this is how we ought to conduct business.
I’m so sorry, says Fitz.
It’s my own fault, Lydia replies, lying facedown on her bed. You didn’t punch that guy. You didn’t even tell me to.
She’s being very harsh. Not just on you, but on me and the event. I didn’t support it only because of what happened with you. I rather resent the suggestion I’d put my name to an unworthy project.
I could go to prison because of this, Lydia responds testily, appealing for perspective.
Sorry, yes—of course. Maybe if you find out who killed me, that might earn you a little credit, and they might reconsider? Did you learn anything useful from this person you went to meet?
Oh … possibly. I didn’t like him. I need to look into some other stuff first.
She has a note from Ondine. The police don’t have any record of Jene’s body being found—but Ondine has reported her missing, which should speed matters along.
Lydia wakes to find it’s dark. She checks her fitstats and discovers she fell asleep at 19:28. It’s now 02:14. She turns over and prepares to go back to sleep, but then it strikes her—is the study free?
Fitz? she says, because maybe he knows. But there’s no reply. Maybe alien ghosts need sleep too.
Lydia heads downstairs, treading as lightly as she can, with a box of inkout under her arm. If Madison, or anyone else, sees her, she was just going downstairs to get herself a drink. With … a box full of paper. She passes the guest bedroom and thinks she detects Madison’s presence behind it, but can’t be sure. She continues down the stairs—
And the study door is open and the lights are off. As Lydia slips inside the study, she sees a cop is still stationed on the porch. She wonders what would happen if she told the cop there was an intruder and led him to the room where Madison is. Get him all hyped up and jumpy first. Make sure she can play it as an honest mistake on her part, and they’d write it off as an accident. That cop’s probably itching for an excuse to take a pop at a Logi. They hate having to be deferential to anyone, you can tell. Maybe she could engineer it. Wouldn’t make all her problems go away but it’d sort some of them out.
This train of thought clatters through her head at great speed and is gone. She can’t do that. Not just for moral reasons, though there is that. She doesn’t think she could carry it off even if she wanted to. She dismisses it as a tangent of a tired mind in the middle of the night, and enters the study.