Kelley Eskridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

had to get away. He had tried to kiss
her as she was leaving and she had stopped him without a word, even
when he looked confused and followed her out into the hall, calling,
“Jackal, what's wrong? What did I do?” And from then on it was bad
between them, just as it was between her and her mother. It was the
moment when the world began to rot.
    Jackal said, “Nothing happened…I mean, we
finished, we got up off the floor, I left. End of story.”
    “Was the sex bad? Did he hurt or frighten
you?”
    Jackal began to worry with her teeth at a
shred of skin beside a fingernail. “It was fine, there's nothing to
tell. Really.” She could feel the heat in her face.
    “Then why have the two of you become
increasingly hostile to each other over the last weeks? Today's
incident is extreme, certainly, but it's by no means isolated from an
overall pattern.”
    Jackal stayed silent and hoped her face
did not show how trapped she felt.
    “Perhaps there's some guilt there? Does
Snow know about the sex with Tiger?”
    “Snow and I are fine, thanks.”
    Chao's turn to be silent.
    “Yes, she knows.”
    “If I asked Snow why you would happily be
having sex with Tiger one day and scrubbing his blood off your hands
five weeks later, what do you think she would say?”
    Jackal imagined Snow in the womb chair
under Chao's surgical gaze. She bit hard enough on her finger to draw
blood. “She'd probably say she has no idea. Why should she know? I
don't even know.”
    Chao said “I think you do.” It wasn't a
challenge so much as a plain acknowledgment, and a promise to return.
“But we'll leave it for now,” she continued. “We'll talk more in a day
or two. I want you to do two things: first, you need to believe that
I'm here to help you. I'm completely in your corner. I'll do whatever
is necessary to make you all that you should be. Second, no more
hitting people. I recognize that you're under stress, but today was a
very serious breach of acceptable behavior. If someone is a problem,
come to me. I'll fix them.”
    “No one's a problem,” Jackal said, her
mouth dry, imagining Chao turned loose on her mother. “I'm tense about
the investiture and I drank too much and made a stupid mistake then and
another one today. I'm sorry about it. There's no excuse. It's a web
matter, we'll sort it out there.”
    “Fine, if that's what you want. In the
meantime, we'll schedule a stress management refresher for you. You'll
get an e-mail.”
    “Fine,” Jackal said, with an inward sigh.
She hated those classes; they were silly and obvious and only made her
more angry. But if it was the price to keep this woman off her back,
then she would pay.
     
    After the calm of Analin Chao's office, the
lobby of the executive building seemed stuffed with people; thousands
of them, moving purposefully in their business costumes as their
footsteps and voices ricocheted off the flagstone floors and the
six-meter-tall glass windows. Home was a half-hour ride across the
island. Jackal stopped, wondering if her bike was still in the park.
    “Ms. Segura.” The guard had come up in her
blind spot. His polite, professional voice matched the shuttered face
and the body armor and the Ko Security insignia. “Dr. Chao has asked
that you be given an escort to the destination of your choice. If
you'll come with me.”
    By now he would have registered her
swollen eyes and the brown blotches on her shirt. He had probably even
noticed her bleeding hangnail. He did not touch her, but gestured
across the atrium to a set of doors on the far wall. “There's a shuttle
van in the west parking lot.”
    He stepped back slightly to let her walk
in front of him. It was important, that difference between following
and leading. In Al Iskandariyah she would follow a security escort,
depending upon them for her sense of location until she was fully
acclimated into the structure of the Earth Government. Then the balance
of power would shift so that she would only receive guidance