Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 5.5 | Girls would turn the colour of an avocado

alphaDana slowed the car and leaned across Colin to grab the door handle while he frantically hauled on the seat belt buckle. He thrashed against her like an articulated fish. "You're on their side!" he howled. "You knew all along!"

"I don't know anything." She hooked her fingers around the handle and yanked it shut.

Colin scrabbled frantically at her bare arm snarling, "let me out, let me out!" The car slithered across the pavement toward a long steep slide. alphaDana let go of the door and spun the wheel hard, hard. Colin threw up his arms to bolster himself and the car shot down the parkway faster, faster, leaving rough black marks in its wake.

"Stop it or I'll kill us all," she rasped. If he didn't believe her, at least he stopped.

"Is it true?" he said. The car crested hillside and suddenly there were bright neon city smears all around, and long rivers of asphalt girdling. "Did they really make a deal?"

"If you run now you'll never find out."

"Aren't you afraid of them?"

"What's to be afraid of?"

"You think they're just going to forgive us after everything we've done to them?"

"I don't know what there is to forgive."

"Oh," he said. "You're one of those."

"One of what?"

"You think we acted innocently so we shouldn't be considered guilty, no matter how much harm they say we did."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know," he said. "I have nightmares. Not because I did anything exceptional. I'm no guiltier than anybody else! Vlad, you know, he's a lot harder into that than me. Sometimes I think I should have killed him when I had the chance. I don't think he believes they're really alive. I think he thinks it's a big scam. Somebody using psychological tricks to try to get him out of the business."

"Are you sure it's not?"

"How can I be sure?"

"What hotel is Vas at?"

"The Chateau Laurier."

alphaDana turned onto the Alexandra bridge. "Find his passkey," she said.

Colin leaned over the backseat and frisked out a Chateau Laurier signe. alphaDana swerved through the Market and presented the signe to the Chateau parking scanner. She parked, and together she and Colin walked a semi-awake Vas into the zap tube. "What room, honey," she whispered in his ear. "What's your room number?"

"403," he mumbled, hanging slackly between them.

A moment later they were in Vas's suite built of imported Italian marble and filled with imported French furniture. A drug kit marked with the Luna circle sat half-opened on a polished cherrywood bedside table. Real wood, real linen sheets. alphaDana dropped Vas on his queen-sized bed smeared with ochre silk and then emptied his fruit basket into a pillowcase.

"Now," she said, sitting crosslegged on a curlicued mahogany loveseat upholstered with fleur de lys-covered green and taking an apple from her pillowcase, "I told you mine. What did you guys want with me? What," she said with hopeful recklessness, "did you want Vas to see when he downlinked my day?"

Colin looked a little surprised. "The Magaz, of course. The one at the corner of Sparks and Laurier. What else?"

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Posted by gtaylor at May 10, 2002 11:32 AM