Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Read online

  She bristled defensively—wasn’t he supposed to be the one doing that? But the last thing she wanted was his pity. “Who is Maris?”

  “A Culture Advisor, and your closest friend for many generations. She’ll want to know you’ve resurfaced—”

  “No. I don’t need any more strangers staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to magically transform into someone I’m not.”

  His eyes clouded over, and he studied the rumpled sheet beneath him. “We can talk about it later.”

  She reached out and urged his chin up, forcing him to meet her gaze. “No, we can’t. You have my answer, and you can confidently assume it continues to be my answer unless or until such time as I tell you it has changed. Are we clear?”

  “…we’re clear.”

  She released his chin but didn’t relax the challenging stance she’d adopted…naked, in his bed, but challenging, dammit. “What? Was the previous version of me not quite so assertive?”

  “Oh, you always got what you wanted. But you were a diplomat, so your methods were often more…subtle.”

  “Well, now I’m a rebel, and rebels have no choice but to demand what they want, then take it if they must.”

  “I’m starting to get that sense.” He frowned and reached over to run his hand through her hair. “So, what do you want?”

  The portentous tenor of his voice wasn’t required to imbue the question with significance, but it did nonetheless.

  “To find out who’s behind the augment virutox and put a stop to it.”

  “You don’t want to find out who’s behind your psyche-wipe and make them pay?”

  “Of course I do. But it’s a personal vendetta borne of a past I can’t change, while this virutox is endangering the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent people as we speak, including the life of someone who’s a close friend of mine today.”

  “Is that how you discovered it?”

  “Yes. One of our people bought the augment and installed it. Within days his entire personality changed, and he was arrested for burglary and attempted theft. He’s sitting in the Justice Center detention wing right now, and I’ve yet to be able to find a way to get him out.”

  Dashiel scratched at his head in what seemed like consternation. “And I thought the theft of the augments was a disaster…but if they were taken specifically to use as a delivery mechanism? It just got so much worse.”

  Abruptly he straightened up. “All right. Adlai—Advisor Weiss at Justice—is already investigating the theft. He needs to hear about the virutox. It’s an important piece of the puzzle and will help focus his investigation. Plus, he can get the product off the streets before more people are infected.”

  “The man from the party. Can you trust him?”

  He shot her a swagger of a smile as he climbed off the bed and pulled on a shirt. “I told you—I don’t trust anyone, though he’s low on the list of people I would ever suspect of anything nefarious. Regardless, it’s time to kick some nests and see what breaks loose.”

  He started to head to the lavatory door, then stopped and came back over, crawling on his hands and knees across the bed until he reached her, where he propped on his elbows beside her. It was sexy and adorable and both at once, and her cautious, wary heart did a little pitter-patter dance in her chest. Godsdammit, this was not good.

  “Nika, I realize this is all…complicated. But whatever else is circling around us, we are going to make things right.”

  Something about the glint in his eyes and the way his voice quavered over ‘things’ sent her earlier defensiveness flaring into full bloom. “You mean make me right, don’t you?”

  He huffed a frustrated breath. “I only—”

  “No, you didn’t ‘only.’ I’m beginning to think you never ‘only’ anything. But I’m not a doll you can mold to your liking.”

  “Of course you’re not—but you are Nika Kirumase. Don’t reject generations of experience and deliberate refinement that molded you into who you wanted to be.”

  “I’ll reject whatever the hells I want to reject.” She grimaced. “All this drama is so much fun that I hate to put it aside, but we need to concentrate on the virutox. Let’s get something done, then maybe we can argue over what my taste in music or dessert should be.”

  32

  * * *

  Nika paused in the entry anteroom, struck by a wave of hesitation. Indecision piled on to turn the brief pause in her step into paralysis. Was she visiting The Floor first, which she almost always did on returning home unless a crisis awaited her, or was she sneaking upstairs to either face judgment or hide, depending on where Perrin and Joaquim currently were?

  The last vestiges of the buzz from morning sex had worn off, leaving the previous hours feeling like an elaborate simex at best, if not a mere dream. Standing here on the threshold of her real life, she couldn’t help but feel like a traitor to these people and their cause.

  Why? Because she’d worn a designer outfit? Because she’d spent a day and night pursuing her own interests rather than the interests of NOIR? Because she’d slept with—and slept over with—the kind of wealthy and powerful man who epitomized the system they fought against? Because it turned out she’d once been the kind of person who epitomized the system they fought against?

  Eh, she was being unfair, to NOIR and to herself. Their fight wasn’t against the wealthy per se—everyone deserved to enjoy what they earned. It was just that there existed a lot of overlap between society’s elite and the true targets of their fight, which were those who used their power to restrict the freedoms of those without it. The Guides, their Advisors and the government Divisions implementing their policies.

  On second thought, drawing a distinction didn’t really help her out much. She had still once been the kind of person who epitomized the system they fought against, and he still was.

  She took a deep breath and walked in.

  Her presence earned a few waves and nods, with a merciful absence of scowls and scythes. She started to relax.

  “Where the bloody hells have you been?” Joaquim grabbed her upper arm.

  She jerked away and spun to face him, where she found the dreaded scowl and metaphorical scythe. “I was—”

  “Fifteen hours without a single ping. You should have—”

  She returned the uninvited physical intrusion by planting a firm hand on his shoulder and whispering through gritted teeth. “Not down here. If you have something you want to say to me, let’s take it upstairs.”

  He glanced around, presumably noticed how they were starting to garner attention, and nodded tersely.

  The trip upstairs gave her a minute to prep for the looming confrontation. She didn’t use the time particularly well, however, as the loudest voice in her conscience seemed to believe she deserved his ire.

  As soon as they reached his room, he closed the door and whirled on her. “Well? What’s your excuse?”

  She met his furious glare with resigned calm. “I don’t have one.”

  “For all we knew, you were lying in another alley somewhere, psyche-wiped yet again and waiting for someone new to come along, hoping they would be as charitable as we were.”

  “We—?”

  “Yes, ‘we.’ I’m not who you need to be apologizing to—not that you’re apologizing. Perrin has been worried sick about you. She pinged you all night, and you know what she got back? Nothing.”

  “I do know, and I am sorry. The truth is I…had no idea what to say. How to respond. It was a challenging and…” she recalled Dashiel’s words from earlier this morning “…complicated night.”

  “ ‘Getting my brains fucked out, will check in later’ would have sufficed.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Joaquim.”

  “I’m serious. I don’t care what you do with your free time—wait, actually, sometimes I do. When it affects NOIR, you better believe I care. Listen, I hope you find the answers you’re looking for about your past. But these people here have already
lost one person important to them. They are hanging on by a thread, and whether you’re in charge or not, you don’t have the right to put them through more turmoil simply because you’re busy with your own particular problems and pleasures.”

  Guilt feasted on her gut…but it wasn’t like Joaquim to have his finger so keenly on the pulse of The Floor’s state of mind. “Are you talking about the people downstairs, or Perrin?”

  “Both. When we asked you to take over running this show, you insisted that we hold you accountable. This is what holding you accountable looks like.”

  She conceded the point. What else could she do? He was right. She’d ignored the pings because she’d been…afraid, then confused, then drowning, then…occupied.

  “I agree. I got caught up in my own headspace, and I forgot there were people who cared about what happened to me. It was selfish of me, and it won’t happen again. I’ll apologize to Perrin and do anything else I need to do to make it up to her, I promise.”

  He stared at her for several seconds before dropping his shoulders. “You certainly know how to defuse a righteous tirade.”

  She half-smiled. “You can keep yelling for a while if you want. I’ll weather the abuse.”

  “Nah. It’s not worth it unless you’re fighting back.” He leaned against the workbench. “So, what about Ridani? Did you learn anything from him?”

  What about him, indeed. They’d parted company under a cloud of frustration but agreeing to focus on tracking down the source of the augment virutox, and thus left a thousand hard things unsaid.

  “He doesn’t know who erased me. He says I was investigating some disappearances on exploratory worlds, but I disappeared myself before I was able to tell him what I’d learned.”

  “And you trust him?”

  She nodded slowly. “When it comes to this, I think I do.”

  “I think that’s uncommonly dumb of you.”

  He was still spoiling for a fight. Most days she’d be game for a good sparring match, but right now she wasn’t in the mood to give him one. “I recognize it looks that way. But there are factors.”

  “Oh, I’m sure there are.”

  She gave him a closed-mouth smirk. Smug Joaquim was far and away the most irritating Joaquim. “Okay, well. I’m going to go apologize to Perrin now. I hope to have several new leads on the virutox soon. I’ll update you when I do.”

  She spun and left before he could disparage her questionable life choices any further.

  33

  * * *

  Nika found Perrin in the dedicated testing room off the northeast corner of The Floor with Ryan, Maggie, Dominic and Cair. The door was open, and she quietly rested against a nearby column and focused her aural functions on the doorway to listen in.

  Cair was demoing an internal defense routine on the Punching Bag—what they’d dubbed the virtual Asterion they used to safely simulate and test routines before deploying them in living bodies.

  “Ryan discovered that the standard defensive protocols we use don’t do a very effective job of keeping the virutox out of someone’s OS. It takes a little while longer to worm its way inside, but eventually it succeeds. So we needed to come up with a more robust solution.

  “What this does is instantiate a closed sandbox inside a branch node of the individual’s OS. Once a new package has passed all the standard scans, it’s deployed in the sandbox, where a monitoring routine watches it play out. It can detect any problematic activity that wasn’t evident in the packaged, non-live programming.”

  Maggie jumped in. “It’ll mean a couple of extra hours before a user can activate their new toy, but after what happened to Parc, nobody here is going to complain about a short delay in implementation.”

  Perrin beamed at them. Her hair was a mess of opalescent white curls today—lightness and frivolity to combat the darkness. “This is brilliant! You’re all brilliant.”

  Maggie tilted her head in Cair’s direction. “It was mostly Cair’s idea. Ryan and I just helped out on a couple of the subroutines.”

  Cair shook his head vigorously. “Maggie’s exaggerating. I couldn’t have put this together without their help and ideas. And I haven’t forgotten about the relational algorithms for the Board—I’m working on those, too. And this.” Cair jerked as Ryan’s spiderbot pet bumped into his foot, then offered a nervous cough. “The pet even helped out a little.”

  Ryan scoffed. “If anyone was indispensable here, it was PeterBot.”

  Perrin laughed. “Oh, I’m sure. Cair, don’t forget what Nika said about getting proper rest. It’s not your responsibility to do everything.”

  He bounced on the balls of his feet. “I know. I don’t mind. I can’t really sleep while there are all these puzzles to solve.”

  Perrin studied Cair for another second, then smiled and gazed at each of them in turn. “You all get double gold stars. Not that we have gold stars to pass out, but if we did.” She extended her hands, palms up. “As it is, I’ll give you what I have to give—the fullness of my appreciation.”

  The others touched their fingertips to one another, and to hers on either side, and everyone’s eyes closed. Nika sensed the added electrical charge in the air, and her eyes closed to bask in it as well.

  Regardless of the events that brought them here, almost everyone who joined NOIR did so at root because they believed in the right of each individual to control their own life, programming and property—and because they believed the government had forsaken what it claimed as its core tenet to the point where it had become a farce of itself.

  Ironic, perhaps, that once here, NOIR’s members so often shared freely of themselves with others. They shared their custom routines, cheats, and slicing and diverging techniques; their knowledge gained and efficiencies learned; their tools, clothes and food. Sometimes, like now, they simply shared their respect and admiration for one another by opening themselves up to and laying themselves bare for their comrades.

  Arms wrapped around her neck, and Nika’s eyes popped open in surprise.

  “You’re back! You have stories, right? Tell me your stories.”

  She laughed and returned Perrin’s hug, but drew back wearing a frown. “You’re supposed to be angry with me.”

  “Talked to Joaquim first, did you?”

  “I wasn’t given much choice in the matter.”

  Perrin nodded knowingly and gestured toward the stairs. “Of course he ambushed you. Want to go find some privacy?”

  “Definitely.” She glanced back towards the testing room. “How’s Cair doing after his up-gen? He seemed a little spastic.”

  “He’s more talkative, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe I should have gone with him to the clinic and helped him set the parameters for the up-gen.”

  Perrin shrugged. “You’re not his guardian. They were his decisions to make.”

  They reached Nika’s room, and Perrin promptly collapsed on the couch. “Joaquim projects entirely too much. He’s angry with you. He prefers to keep his emotion processes simple and straightforward, so he assumes anger is the order of the day. I, as a more complex and nuanced individual, have vacillated between anxious worry and eager excitement twenty or thirty times since you left. Now that you’re back, I can abandon the worry and just be excited.”

  It was a good spiel, delivered in vintage Perrin form, but Nika knew her friend well enough to see through the colorful but flimsy act. “I’m so sorry. I feel like a terrible boss and a worse friend. I made you worry, and it was wrong of me. I should have let you know I was safe.”

  “Probably. But important shit was going down. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah….” She nudged Perrin’s feet out of the way and squeezed onto the couch. “Hours later, I still have no idea what to make of things. Everything is all jumbled, as though I got slammed by a tidal wave and all the puzzle pieces reassembled themselves out of order.”

  “So Ridani did know you before?”

  “He did. According to him, I was an
Advisor-level diplomat in the External Relations Division. I was skeptical, obviously. I can’t imagine being that person or living that life. But then I simexed one of his memories—saw my former self through his eyes, knew what he knew about her. And…it was me, yet not any me I recognized. Looking at yourself and seeing a stranger? It’ll screw with your head something fierce.”

  “I bet. But you know what? I buy it.”

  “You buy the idea of me as an elite diplomat?”

  “Yep. You have this way with people. No matter who they are or what their situation is, you find a commonality with them and use it to put them at ease. You make them feel like you understand.”

  Nika made a face. “It’s merely instinct.”

  “No, it’s not—at least not an instinct most people have. It sounds like a diplomat to me.”

  “Well…it’s not an act. Just because someone has a life experience that’s different from mine, it doesn’t mean I can’t empathize with them.”

  “And this is why it works. You’re the real deal, babe.”

  “But rubbing shoulders with foreign dignitaries and Advisors at high-concept cocktail parties? Wearing silk and jewels? That’s not me.”

  Perrin studied her curiously, nose scrunched up in amusement. “You’re adorable. You get that, right? Five years ago you woke up in a ridiculously crappy situation, fell in with a crowd of weirdos because it was your only choice, and within a few weeks you had adopted us as your own. You became one of us—and don’t get me wrong, I believe in your squishy heart of hearts you are one of us.

  “But there’s always been something which sets you apart—a sophistication, a sort of…inner confidence—and it’s kept most of the mud and grime off of you. When you had no credits and a pitiful pile of ragged, torn clothes, you still wore those clothes with an air of elegance I couldn’t project if I had a mountain of silk and jewels to work with. So, no, I’m not surprised in the slightest to learn you come from the rarefied heights of society.”

  Wow…she needed to spin some clock cycles in serious contemplation of what Perrin had said, but it would have to wait. “Are you calling me a snob?”