One day a merc came to my room.
“She’s suspicious,” whispered the merc, whose name was Tone. “Andromeda is, I mean. She told me to keep an eye on – ”
I held a finger to my lips.
“No,” I said. “Not here.”
I lifted my jacket from its hook and pulled it on. One of the sleeves had a tear in the vinyl, and my thin, yellowed arm poked through the hole like a worm.
“I’m gonna leave, but you stay here,” I said. “Just for a few minutes, so we don’t look obvious. I’ll meet you in the fire district. Give it a half hour. I’ll be outside the auction tent.”
Tone nodded.
I left the room, took the stairs down to the ground floor, and stepped out of Andromeda Tower. I tried not to retch as the city’s stench poured into my nostrils. My eyes watered.
The gate guard saw my discomfort.
“Haze is awful thick today, sir,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. I coughed. “Seems like the more time you spend in the tower, the harder it is to re-adjust out here.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. I’ve never been inside.”
A half hour later in the fire district, I stood with Tone at the dirty auction railing. We both stared into the tent ahead, pretending to be fascinated by half-hearted bidding wars over cancerous dazzlebirds and rusty spiderbots.
Neither of us dared to look at the other.
“What did she say, Tone?”
“Well, she . . . she’s not sure what you’re up to. She can’t figure you out. She’s not sure what your motives are, but she says her intuition tells her she can probably trust you.”
“Her intuition tells her wrong,” I said.
In the distance, the auctioneer’s voice, brash and obnoxious.
“One hundred credits! Do I hear one hundred-ten? One hundred-ten credits?”
I leaned against the railing, testing its strength with my weight, seeing if it would budge. It didn’t move.
“Did she mention the cabal, Tone? Does she think I have cabal ties?”
“No. I’m not sure she knows we exist.”
“What makes you think that?”
“She’s never mentioned the cabal. Not even once.”
I said, “She’s just not letting on all she knows.”
Tone said, “So what are we gonna do?”
“What are we gonna do?” I let go of the railing. “I’ll make her comfortable with me. I’ll do whatever it takes. Meanwhile, you tell her what you need to tell her. Tell her I seem clean, normal. Tell her I spend most of my time in the wind district browsing antique shops. Tell her whatever you want, as long as it’s what she needs to hear.”
“Okay.”
Three weeks later, I told Andromeda I loved her.
Andromeda responded to that lie with what I assumed was a lie of her own: she told me she loved me, too.
Though Andromeda was perhaps not as suspicious of me as I was of her, she was still a little suspicious.
But what was the degree of her suspicion? Was she worried that I was a simple con man, or did she know the extent of what was going on? How much did she know about the cabal? Did she know my orders were to kill her?
When Andromeda and I spent time together, it was at the top of her tower. Her penthouse living quarters were richly, lavishly decorated. The carpeting, for example, was so white and so fluffy that just looking at it made me feel like I was suffocating.
The people of Vorn had given that carpeting to Andromeda. She had bombed a neighboring town but had left Vorn unscathed, and the seaside village folk were so grateful that they’d stitched that carpeting together from the pelts of fifty dead snowdivers and had it sent to Andromeda Tower with the border patrol.
Her coffee table had a similar story behind it. It was solid and shiny, a gift made by a lower-class craftsman who’d carved it out of light-ore and given it to Andromeda as his way of thanking her for not killing her family, for letting them live as water district slaves.
When Andromeda and I spent time together, we tended to position ourselves the same way. She would stand with her back to me, looking out at the six districts through one of her long, thin windows. Me, I’d lie back on her couch, feet propped against light-ore coffee table, watching her.
Andromeda looked out the window even if she was talking, and she was talking most of the time.
I only saw her face at periodic intervals, when she turned to look at me, asking, “Am I boring you?”
“Oh, of course not,” I’d say. “I’m always listening to you.”
And it was true. I listened hard. I memorized as many of her words as possible. I wrote them all down as soon as I left Andromeda Tower, and I gave those written reports to the cabal, because Andromeda was a dictator, and Andromeda had to be stopped.
Andromeda told me everything there was to know about herself. I started to wonder: had I really been lying when I told her I “loved” her? She was very attractive – particularly if I ignored the stump she had for a right hand.
But she even told me how she’d lost that hand, eventually. It happened one night after we shared a harsh, overcooked dinner.
(She’d been apologetic about that. The food, she said, was spoiled. Everything in the warehouses was dry and stale. Weeks ago, Andromeda had shut down all the food factories and diverted their electricity to the construction zone where she was having the starspine built.
She said she would reactivate the production lines “soon.”)
After we ate, I sat back on her couch, as usual. Grease was glued to my throat. I was powerfully thirsty, but two bottles of sharkohol had done nothing to satisfy me. I was cradling a third, though I had little hope that it would help.
Andromeda was looking out the window again. Typical Andromeda.
And then she asked, “Have you ever wondered what happened to my hand?”
Of course I had wondered. Everyone had wondered.
“No,” I said. “Never really crossed my mind.”
“Well – I’ve never really told anybody, but . . . it was a long, long time ago. I was a little girl, living near the city’s outskirts. It was before everything. Before the reformation. This was a different place then.”
“My mother ran a trading stall. That’s how she made her money, you know? Farmers came in to sell their crops. We didn’t have hydroponics, then. Didn’t have the food factories, didn’t have warehouses. I’m sure you remember that.”
“One day, there was a dispute with one of the farmers. I don’t know what it was, exactly. Something my mother did enraged one of them. He growled at her, told her that he’d be back soon, that she’d be sorry. He walked off into the night and I was scared, and so was my mother. She was trembling. I was so worried that something might happen to her. Something did happen to her.”
“That’s . . . that’s how I lost my hand. You know, I don’t want to go into any more detail than that. I don’t know if I can, if I want to. But I remember the explosions, the way the trading post went up in that plume of fire. I remember the ash and the cinders, the way they dragged her away.”
“I don’t know what happened to her, exactly. She might still be out there somewhere. She probably isn’t.”
She turned around and looked right at me.
“Do you know why I told you that story?”
“Uh . . . no,” I said.
“I don’t know either, but I know this: that’s the day I decided what I’d be when I grew up. I wanted to protect people, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Hence the shock troops, I guess. Hence the border patrol. Hence the starspine.
I never understood the point of the starspine, but Andromeda obsessed over it. It was going to be our ticket to survival. She and I and a handful of her most trusted advisors – we’d escape this planet and make a new start of things. Only the creme de la creme of the gene pool would make the climb.
“But I’m not the creme de la creme of the gene pool,” I said. “Look at me. My body’s falling apart. My skin’s peeling. My muscles are dissolving. My lungs are collapsing. I don’t think I have more than a couple of years to live. I grew up breathing the haze in the city. I didn’t grow up in your tower.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Andromeda said. “I love you, you know.” She may not have been lying.
The night before she was to give the order to turn the starspine on, the cabal blew it up. A million little chunks of reinforced steel fell over the city like a sharp, deadly rain.
A week after that, we killed Andromeda.