THERE ARE PEOPLE stacking chairs in the hall, transforming the space from one in which people sit and stare at the front to one in which they stand and stare at the floor. A few are already doing that, shivering and holding cups of something steaming, tears still running down their faces.
I haven’t been to many funerals and all of the ones I’ve attended were as part of my job. As in all of those, I find myself standing at the edge of the room, watching the faces of the mourners, working out their relationships with the deceased and those left behind, only this time it’s as much to stop thinking about my own relationship with him. I can spot the women who were Alejandro’s lovers and the men who wanted to be, the ones he saved and the ones who are panicking at the thought of life without him.
Selina soon arrives and guides her friend over to another who’s serving the warm drinks to distract him out of his distress. She comes straight over and the feeling of being actively minded grows. A few people start to approach me, only to have her practically intercept and deflect them. Has someone told her to make sure I don’t speak to anyone properly? Or has she just decided to take it upon herself to keep me on the outside?
In some ways it’s a relief. Small talk is hard enough, but at a wake it’s even worse. I’m given a coffee and a tiny sandwich made with real bread and thick-cut, fresh ham. It’s gone in two bites. Wordlessly, Selina beckons the person with the tray back, and without shame I take four more and shove another in my mouth as she watches. Then Travis Gabor walks in.
He heads straight for me as soon as Selina is taken up with steering someone else away.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he says, white teeth gleaming against his tan.
Behind him, Selina turns and I see a flash of worry in her eyes as she realizes someone got past her.
I muster a smile after I swallow the last of the second sandwich. “I can’t say the same.”
He winces theatrically, like a busted teenager who’s been hiding a pile of empty condom packets under his mattress and is actually pleased I’ve discovered what a stud he is. “I want to apologize.”
“Is everything okay here?” Selina asks, her voice a little too high.
“Oh, it’s perfect,” Travis says, crisping his accent up a notch for the American ear to enjoy. “Could you give us a few minutes? I have something I need to talk to the nice policeman about.”
Selina hesitates, caught between wanting to deny him and not being able to think of a good-enough reason. I start on the third sandwich, wanting to eat them before I talk with Travis. “I’ll just be over there,” she says to me, as if I’m a new intern at a scary office.
I eat the fourth too fast and suppress a belch. “The ‘nice policeman’ is listening.”
“I’m sorry I messed you about. Really. You must think I’m such a . . . a . . .”
“Desperate man?” It’s a risk, making him think about why he left, but if I want to keep my options open, I need him to trust me.
The performance smile falters and a glimpse of the real Travis can be seen at last. “It wasn’t a happy marriage. I suppose you guessed that. Being a detective and all.”
“That’s why you had the chip removed,” I say. “You knew that if you left him with that still in your skull, he’d track you down.”
He looks down at his shoes and nods. His head snaps back up. “But that’s not the only reason. I did it so I could come here.”
I fold my arms and raise an eyebrow, a silent invitation to try to convince me.
“Seriously!”
“You don’t strike me as a god-fearing man, Mr. Gabor.”
“Don’t call me that. And why do you say that? You don’t know anything about what I believe.” He searches my eyes for some sort of response but I don’t give anything away. “I’m where I’m supposed to be now. And he can’t do a bloody thing about it.” The grin that spreads across his face is devilish. “And I bet he is going absolutely insane about it.”
I remain silent.
“So, when did you realize I was gone?”
“While you were being driven to Heathrow. I went to your room and found the tablet you programmed. Cute.”
“Did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell anyone. It was none of my business. I’d eliminated you from the investigation by then. I was only going to interview you so he’d stop giving my boss an earful about keeping you at the hotel.”
He looks genuinely touched. “Thanks. That was what I was most afraid of: you finding out before I was on the plane and telling him. He would have been able to ground it if he’d known I was on it.”
“I know. Truth be told, I wanted you to get away from him.”
He blinks and leans closer. There’s something so desperate about him, so vulnerable. The first hint I may be on his side and he’s hungry for more. “Why?”
“I saw the way he treated you in the restaurant.”
He smiles, this time with a hint of the flirtatious. “You wanted to rescue me?”
“I didn’t want to get in the way of you rescuing yourself.”
The smile fades and he just stares at me, uncertain how to play this. I wonder who the real Travis is. It’s not the coquette and it’s not the primping dandy that his husband shaped him into. Neither role has fully fallen away yet. I suppose he doesn’t know who to be yet either.
“Did you bribe a doctor to give you the reason to have the chip removed?”
“I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.”
“I’m just curious. Sorry. It’s my training. I hate loose ends.”
After a pause, he nods. “I couldn’t tell Stefan I needed it removed to come here. I couldn’t tell him I was planning to leave him either. It took months to arrange. And it all worked perfectly, apart from . . . well. I hoped to fly back here with Alejandro. I wanted to have a real conversation with him, without worrying about Stefan.” He looks down, frowning. “So awful. That Theo just seemed a bit of a man-child, not a lunatic.”
There’s the real Travis. I suspect he’s more of an introvert than perhaps even he appreciates. “Can I ask you a question? It’s personal and not part of any case. Just for my satisfaction.”
He looks back up at me. “All right. Go on, then.”
“How did you end up with Stefan? I . . . I just don’t see it.”
“The age gap, you mean?”
“The humanity gap.”
The intensity of his gaze borders on the erotic. I find myself wondering if he’s going to kiss me as he searches for something in my eyes, and with a detached curiosity I find myself hoping he will, just to see what it feels like.
He leans back and breaks eye contact to take in the room, as if he’d forgotten about it. “Let’s go outside.”
Travis leads me through a side door as mourners are still coming in through the main entrance. The carport is in sight and that desire to run returns, but where would I go? How could I survive? I’ve clawed my way out of being a nonperson before and I don’t know if I have it in me to do that again. If I take Travis back to his husband, I could get a message to Delaney, forge a relationship with hir that could lead to real freedom. But can I bring myself to do that to this man, someone who has escaped himself?
Travis rests a hand on the small of my back and guides me round the corner to a bench with a view of the crops swaying in the breeze.
“It’s very peaceful here, isn’t it?” he says as we sit on the bench.
“If you like that sort of thing.”
“Is it true that you used to be here when you were a child?” After I nod, he asks, “Why did you leave?”
I frown. “I’d rather talk about you.”
He laughs. “You don’t have the monopoly on curiosity. You tell me why you left and I’ll tell you how I got involved with Satan on Earth.”
I shift, unable to find a comfortable position. I don’t know how to frame this conversation. It has the fumbling awkwardness of a first date, not the tail end of an investigation or the preamble to a kidnapping. “My dad brought me here with him when I was eight. He . . . he hadn’t been well for a long time. He’d had a nervous breakdown and stuff wasn’t great, and, anyway, long story short, Alejandro found him and brought him to be in the Circle and I had to come too.”
“What about your mum?”
“She wasn’t around.”
“Is she dead?”
I snap my head to look at him. “I’m not a fucking NPC in a mersive.”
His mouth opens and his eyes widen as the blush returns. “I’m so sorry. That was . . . I’m sorry.”
“She left on Atlas. With that Pathfinder woman. She left us behind.”
“That was you!” He must have seen the documentary. His hand rests on my arm and I stare at it, paralyzed in the place between wanting comfort and hating his pity. “That must have been hard.”
I shrug, as if that dumb movement can brush it all off. “I was a baby. I never knew her. Dad was the one it was hard for. He applied to go too, got through to the last round and didn’t make the final cut. They had a policy of no preferential treatment for married couples, which is fucking cold, when you think about it, but I guess the mission was more important than feelings, so that’s the way it was.”
It’s the most I’ve ever spoken about it and it leaves me breathless and wanting to kill alien robots or something equally violent and free from consequences.
“She must have been . . .”
“Selfish.” I don’t wait to state a judgment I’ve already made.
“Driven,” he says. “It could have been worse if she’d stayed. She might have resented you and your dad.” He waits for me to respond but I’m keeping my mouth shut, appalled by how much I’ve said already. “So, you came here when you were eight. Why did you leave?”
“Why are you so interested?”
Now he shrugs. “I find you hard to fathom. You don’t give much away. I suppose they train you well in the MoJ.”
I almost tell him I learned it before I even got there, but what is this? Some fucking interview? I stare back out at the crops. “I wasn’t happy here,” I finally say.
“But you didn’t want to stay and find out if—” He stops himself. “Hang on. When did you leave?”
“When I was sixteen.”
“Oh. Right.” He nods to himself, as if I’d answered another question as well as the one I’d heard. He bites his lip, weighing something up. “And then you joined the Ministry of Justice in Norope?” His tone has changed to breezy curiosity again. I’ve missed something here.
“I didn’t want to stay and find out what?”
His smile is fake. “Whether it would get better. I suppose teens don’t think that way though, right? Shame really.”
He’s not going to give me more. Something changed here after I left, that much is already obvious. Something about that change is what he thinks I should have stayed for, had I known about it. I file that away to dig at later.
“So, the Ministry of Justice,” he says again. “How on Earth did you end up there?”
“It’s a long and not-very-interesting story. Your turn.”
“Well, that’s fair,” he says, leaning back to cross his arms. “I’ve been married to Stefan since I was twenty-two. He was forty-three.” The perfect curve of his upper lip distorts as he thinks back with obvious disgust. “I’ve always hated him. It wasn’t ever a love match.”
“Money, then?”
“God, no. You think I’d marry that slug for bloody money?”
“Lots of people would. Money and power. Never having to be afraid.”
“That only works if you’re not afraid of your spouse. Look, I suppose I’m going to tell you the whole sordid affair, but please don’t take any of this back to the MoJ.”
“I won’t. Civil matter, remember? Out of my jurisdiction.”
“I studied at Cambridge. While I was there I met some people . . . through my don. They liked me, I liked them and, well, one thing led to another and I got myself a real education at the real university. The one that’s been there for hundreds of years.”
“You’ve lost me.”
He smiles. “You know that the gov-corps and subsidiaries dictate what’s on university syllabi, don’t you?”
“I can’t say I’ve ever given it much thought.”
“Well, they do. Paris has the only university in Europe that sets its own curriculum. Oxford held out for a while, but when things got really bad during the riots, they caved. Cambridge lost independence fifty years earlier. The tabs always were a cowardly lot. At least, that’s what they wanted everyone to think. But there’s a network there, like a university within a university, where they actually teach real stuff. Not just the gov-corp-approved bullshit. That’s where I learned how to think properly.”
I twist round to watch him as he speaks. What I thought was the real Travis was only empathy. This is a different man altogether. Someone fiercely intelligent who’s been hiding it for years.
“It’s where I learned how to hack. And I’m not talking about that bollocks you see in the mersives, with some nerd—or some really sexy girl with a pixie haircut and attitude—frantically typing away on a v-keyboard. I mean the real thing. A hacker looks like an orchestra conductor when he’s working. It can be a beautiful thing to watch.”
“Yeah, all that crime can be so elegant.” I make no effort to hide my sarcasm. “There’s no victims, right, when it’s—”
“Look, if you’re going to be a twat about this, I’ll shut up now.”
“Sorry. I just don’t think it’s romantic to hack. As you said, it’s not like the mersives.”
“And it’s not just like the propaganda you read in your Ministry files either. Oh, there are wankers in the hacking world—of course there are. But that wasn’t the sort of stuff we were into.”
“And what was that, exactly?”
“Exposing corporate injustice.”
I try not to laugh. “The what, now?”
“It isn’t funny.”
I hold up my hands. “No, you’re right. It’s not funny. But corporate injustice is just . . . it’s the way things are now. Who are you going to expose it to? There are no people who aren’t already in it. And those who say they’re independent just don’t know who owns them.”
“Wow. Were you this jaded before you joined, or did the MoJ do it to you?”
“What has all of this got to do with Gabor?”
“I hacked him. I followed some threads back to him when I was at uni, so when I left I got a job at one of his many, many companies so it would be easier to get deeper inside. It just didn’t work out the way I wanted it to.”
“So you weren’t as good as you thought you were and got caught?”
He smirks. “No, I was too good. The hack was easy. It was what to do with the knowledge afterward that was the problem. That’s where I fucked up. And to cut a very long story short, as you’re fond of doing, Gabor outplayed me and gave me a choice.”
I scratch the back of my neck, not seeing how he could get from hacking to unhappy marriage. “Hang on. He gave you a choice to marry him or—what?—ruin him. This isn’t making any sense.”
“The choice was to be owned or to be killed, Mr. Moreno. Perhaps if I were a more courageous man I would have chosen the latter, but it wasn’t just my life in the balance. He said he would kill my family too. He’s done much worse. So I said I would be bought off. Bought, I should say. And, lucky me, being a handsome man that he took a fancy to meant that it wasn’t just a standard corporate-indenture arrangement that he could have forced through the courts. He made me his husband and kept me close. At all times. I hacked for him then. For years. Screwing over competitors left, right and center and making my jailer even more rich and even more powerful. He put a new chip in me, one he thought would stop me being able to screw him over too. But he underestimated me.” He gazes out at the horizon, a subtle smile flickering in and out of existence. “He got complacent. I made him think I fell in love with him. It wasn’t hard; he’s such a fucking narcissist it fit with his worldview. I found a weakness in the security on my chip, got in touch with some old uni friends and planned my escape and here I am. Free at last.”
“But what about your family? Aren’t you worried about what he’ll do to them?”
“Oh, they’re all dead now. Dad was old when I was born, so he went first. Mum drank herself to death, and my sister was killed in the nuclear accident out in Shanghai last year. So there was only me left to fight for. He didn’t let me get close to anyone else, after all. You could argue I brought it all on myself, and I’d agree. But I wasn’t a gold digger and I wasn’t some weak man marrying for comfort and security. I made a mistake when I was young and didn’t know how the world worked and I have paid for it. Many, many times over.”
I let the silence sit between us. He is one of the few people I know who would understand the mess I’m in now. I could tell him, perhaps, ask for his help to escape too. But somehow the words don’t make it out of my mouth.
“Wait. If you’re so good at hacking and all that, why didn’t you take more care with your search history? It took the MoJ AI milliseconds to pull your searches on Alejandro.”
He laughs. “Oh, that was there because I wanted the Ministry to think I was stalking him once Gabor flagged up my disappearance. If I didn’t get away before he noticed, I hoped an investigator would take pity on me and let me run off with my religious savior. And it was evidence in support of my religious application to the States immigration department.”
“So, if it wasn’t an obsession with Alejandro that brought you here, what was it?”
He looks at me then, a distance in his eyes, as if he is looking at me on the other side of a bridge he won’t let me cross. “You’re so easy to talk to. I shouldn’t have said all I have. All I will say is that the reason I’m here is bigger than Alejandro, bigger than any one man ever could be. But you don’t need to worry about that. You’ll finish up here and go home in time to watch the capsule being opened and soon forget about me.”
He stands, deciding the conversation is over, no sign of that desperate need to connect ever having happened.
“Won’t you want to know what’s inside it?” I ask, standing too. “You’ll miss it all, being here.”
He turns to face me, eyes sparkling. “Oh, I already know what’s inside it. And if I hadn’t been such a cock in my early twenties, I wouldn’t have lived through hell and the world would already know too. What was it Cillian Mackenzie said when they announced that Atlas was planning to follow those coordinates the Pathfinder knew? Oh yes: ‘Don’t believe anything on the news feeds. It’s all just a circus for the masses.’ The capsule is just part of that circus, Mr. Moreno. And even though Alejandro is gone now, the show must go on.”