Which was exactly why she noticed.
"Biology," she said. "Genetic systems. That sort of thing." She stopped at the nearest transport and pressed her palm to the entry panel. "Get in."
He folded himself into the transport with rather less elegance than he did everything else — it wasn't built for someone his size — and she settled across from him and gave her address to the nav system and looked out the window and did not look at him.
She was thinking about the question he'd asked.
She was thinking about the fact that it hadn't felt like small talk.
She was thinking, as she had been thinking since she'd woken up in a room with no door, that whatever was happening to her had not finished happening yet, and that the man sitting across from her knew considerably more about it than he was going to tell her.
The transport hummed into motion. Outside, the docks slid past and gave way to the city proper, and Coreni watched it go and began, very quietly, to plan.
Chapter Six
Coreni
Her apartment was on the twenty-third floor, which meant the ele-tube, which meant standing in a small enclosed space with a Fraluma warrior for approximately forty seconds. Coreni had survived worse in the last sixteen hours. She told herself this firmly and pressed the call panel.
The tube arrived. They got in.
They were two floors up when the doors opened again and an elderly couple stepped aboard — one of her neighbors, a woman whose name Coreni could never remember but whose opinion of everyone in the building she expressed freely and often. The woman's eyes went immediately to Edi-Veen with the particular attention of someone doing arithmetic.
Coreni took his arm.
It was reflex, mostly — the social math was simple, a woman and a man in a building where everyone knew everyone's business — but the moment her hand closed around his forearm she felt the solidity of him, the contained stillness, and had to concentrate on looking at the floor numbers ticking upward instead of at him.
He didn't react. Or rather — he went very slightly more still, which in someone already that still was its own kind of reaction.
The elderly woman smiled at her with an expression that communicated approval, conspiracy, and a complete misreading of the situation, all at once.
The doors opened on twenty-three. Coreni let go of his arm, stepped out first, and did not look back to see if the elderly woman was still watching.
She was definitely still watching.
Before she had the door fully open, he was past her.
She stood in the doorway and watched his shadow move through her apartment — checking corners, she understood, cataloguing exits, doing whatever it was that fifteen years of protecting someone's life had trained him to do automatically. He was thorough about it. She was going to need to get used to that.
"Lights," she said to the room, and the apartment obliged.
She called up the temperature and the music — something low and ambient that had nothing to prove — and crossed to her couch and sat down and played her messages.
Her editor's voice hit first, loud enough that she was glad Edi-Veen was in the other room. The summary was: where was she, she was not on approved leave, call him immediately, and he would be using significantly more colorful language in person. She deleted it.
Her father's voice came next, quieter. Coreni, call me when you get this. Four words of information, nothing else, which from him meant he'd been worried enough to call twice already and was trying not to show it. She felt a small familiar pull of guilt and filed that too.
The third message was from Draka — a colleague she tolerated and occasionally liked — reminding her about a company event that evening at a venue called the Blue Fancy. The message was bright and relentlessly optimistic in the way that only people who genuinely enjoyed parties could sustain. Coreni had forgotten about it entirely. She was now remembering that she had promised to go.
She sat with that for a moment.
Edi-Veen emerged from the back of the apartment, moving without sound across the floor covering. "The space is secure."
"I live here," she said. "It's generally secure."
"Generally is not the standard I work to."
She looked at him — standing in the middle of her living room in civilian clothes and fake implants, perfectly composed, occupying the space with the same quality of absolute presence he'd had on the dock and in the chamber and in the transport, like he had never in his life been uncertain about where to put his body. It was, she thought, deeply inconvenient.
