Monday morning quarterbacking was bad for morale. That was the consensus. Better to celebrate what went right (most of it at the noncom level and below) than to dwell on what went wrong (most of it still alive and wearing stars and striped trousers). And if Li thought that this meant buying morale at a pretty high rate of interest, she’d soon learned that saying so didn’t earn her much love.
Of course, as one of the few Gilead veterans who was in the enviable position of being both a hero and alive, Li was one of the main beneficiaries of the hurricane of spin swirling around the bloody campaign. Not that she was even sure it was spin. All she had to set against the UNSec-washed spinstreams was a nagging feeling of déjà vu and a conviction that her mind had once held a different version than the one UNSec called reality.
It was impossible to explain to civilians what jump amnesia did to you. The jagged holes it punched into your past and your identity. The reflexes, violent ones included, that came at you from nowhere, then sucked back into some subterranean place you couldn’t remember your way down to. The sickening vertigo of having a second set of memories superimposed on the real ones. The gut certainty that what your own brain remembered and the history books and the newspins and the politicians and your next-door neighbors said was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
That must have been how Turner had drawn her into his web. He must have dangled in front of her the one thing she couldn’t refuse: proof. Proof that she hadn’t done those things on Gilead. Proof that she wasn’t the kind of person who could do such things.
She saw now that she had been chasing an illusion. She would never know the Catherine Li who had dropped into Gilead’s gravity well half a lifetime ago. Even if Andrej Korchow descended from the sky in glory to tell her she hadn’t shot those prisoners, he still couldn’t tell her what else she’d done…or been capable of doing.
She would never know her past self even in the illusory, self-justifying, half-fictional way that unaltered humans knew their past selves. All she could know—all she ever would know—was the person she was now.
And the really rotten piece of luck was that just as she was finally beginning to see a way to live with that, it was starting to look less and less like she was going to get a chance to live, period.
It was her own damn fault, of course.
She had known it was a bad idea to try to escape. But what was she supposed to do? Nothing?
And when her tormentors finally slipped up, she was waiting for them. With a scalpel that she’d managed to pilfer with the hand whose fingers still more or less worked.
The first guard’s neck broke with a crunch that made even Li’s stomach churn. She dropped him and drove forward to the next target, still hooded, moving on sound and feel. Her hands were useless, so she used her legs, her feet, her training, her hate.
She had her hood off almost before the second guard hit the ground. The room was dark, thank God, not too difficult to adjust to. But she still made the mistake of thinking she was alone.
The fact that the other person in the room with her was standing very still was only part of her confusion. The real problem was that the woman was covered from head to toe in dusty green cloth.
Wasshe a woman? Was she even an Interfaither? Or merely someone taking advantage of a disguise that blended all too conveniently into Jerusalem’s thronging streets these days?
Li seized the veiled figure. And then she did something she would never, not in a million years, have done if she’d been anywhere within spitting distance of thinking straight.
She grabbed the green cloth and yanked.
“That was unwise,” Ashwarya Sofaer said.
Li just stood there, swaying slightly, poleaxed by memory.
“It was you,” she whispered. “It was you I went to, not Turner.”
Ash shrugged. “I was a bit surprised at how well that took. Your brains really are scrambled, aren’t they?”
“Then it was all a false flag operation? You were never talking to UNSec at all?”
“Oh I was talking to UNSec.” Ash smiled her lovely masklike smile. It occurred to Li, in some relatively lucid segment of her brain, that Ash wasn’t as scared as she should be. “They just weren’t the only people I was talking to.”
“Turner—”
“Does it really matter? It’s not like you’re going anywhere. Before there was a chance. Now…” She shrugged.
“Oh, we’re going somewhere,” Li said…
…and the next thing she knew she was on the ground, her head throbbing with the aftereffects of some nerve agent, and Turner was standing there big as real life looking down at her.
“Well now,” he said, shaking his head like a country bumpkin getting his first eyeful of the bright lights and the big city. “You really are a lady who likes to do things the hard way.”
Ash stood just behind Turner. And she had her veil on again. “Why don’t you take that ridiculous thing off your head?” Li told her.
Ash’s hand emerged from the shadows, rose, hesitated. The veil came away with little more than a light twitch of her long fingers. But instead of removing it entirely she merely settled it around her head and shoulders so that only her face was showing.
That was when Li understood. The veil was no disguise. The veil wasAsh’s true face: the face of an Interfaither who had turned her mind over to the men of God and violence.
That was the reality Li had glimpsed behind the beautiful but impersonal mask that Ash presented to the world. The white suits and the perfect makeup and the self-serving careerism were all nothing but the subtlest kind of protective camouflage.
Li had seen the real Ash just once: in the stretch marks that said she’d gone through natural birth and pregnancy, something only a vanishingly small number of Ring-siders still did. But she’d written that off as meaningless trivia. How could she have been so blind? And what better proof could there be that she herself wasn’t human, had never been human, would never understand humans no matter how long she lived among them?
“How long have you been working for the Interfaithers?” she asked Ash. “And when did you and Turner decide you wanted the Novalis virus?”
But instead of an answer, Ash had another question for her:
“Left hand or right hand?”
Cohen looked very much the worse for wear when he finally answered to Gavi’s knock. Rumpled and unshaven. Dark circles under his eyes. And around his left hand an immaculate white bandage.
Gavi stepped into the luxurious living room of Cohen’s hotel suite. “What happened?” he asked, pointing at the bandage.
“I stuck Roland’s hand through a window,” Cohen said in a voice that distinctly did not invite further questions. “What do you want, Gavi?”
Gavi raised his eyebrows. “Bad time? Should I come back later?”
Cohen slumped into a chair and rubbed his hands across his face. “No. Sorry. Things just…aren’t so good at the moment.”
Gavi looked around. No sign of Li. How to broach the unbroachable question? Well, blunt was always an option. “Is Li around?”
“No. So show me this new source code you’ve cooked up.”
Gavi sat down, repressing the guilty sinking feeling that lying to Cohen gave him. It wasn’t a lie. It was self-protection. No, better than self-protection: the protection of two people who were in deadly desperate need of protecting.
They talked around the subject for a few minutes, skimming over Gavi’s programming ideas, the false starts he’d made, what he’d learned from them, the current state of his work on and thought about his so-called golem…all the while edging cautiously toward the dangerous topic of the other golem, the one of flesh and blood that was sitting in Gavi’s living room.