Chapter 79: Where?

"The bar," Caleb said.

The Hacker’s smile did not change. Her head stayed tilted at the same angle. The crushed-orchid scent stayed where it was, in the air and on her skin and in the lining of the suit she had bought him.

"Lead the way," she said. "I haven’t had a drink."

She did not move out of his path. Her body angled next to his and let him take the first step. Her hand brushed his sleeve at the elbow on the way past. The brush was small enough to mean nothing and specific enough to mean she had been planning it.

Caleb walked.

The man with the eyes from his father’s office had been standing near the toast platform thirty seconds ago. The toast platform was on the way to the bar. The geometry was helpful and that was enough.

The Hacker matched his pace exactly. Her shoulder kept a steady distance from his that was either polite or rehearsed.

"You walk like you read the room before you entered it," she said.

"I do."

"Most of them don’t."

"I know."

"You don’t ask me my name."

"You haven’t offered it."

The string quartet shifted to a slower piece. The crowd’s center of gravity drifted with the music, drifting toward the dance floor near the platform. The man with the eyes was no longer where he had been. The bar was eight steps ahead.

The Hacker’s hand brushed his sleeve again. Her fingers stayed there a half-beat this time, at the bend of his elbow, before falling away.

"Most of the men in this room came here to be looked at," she said. "You came here to look. I find that more interesting than I should."

"That’s a generous reading."

"It’s a true one."

Six steps from the bar, Caleb saw the man.

He was past the platform now, near the edge of the floor where the service staff filed in and out of an unmarked door. His back was angled to the room. The empty glass stayed level in his hand. The bartender on that side of the floor placed a fresh drink near his elbow, and he did not take it. His attention was on the door.

Caleb kept walking.

"Mercer."

Kikaru cut between them.

She had crossed the floor without rushing. Her dark green dress moved with her instead of around her. The neon-green streak in the Hacker’s hair caught the chandelier light at the same angle Kikaru’s silver earring did, and for one half-second they were the only two people in the room in Caleb’s field of view.

"The Director wants the new recruits on the platform for a photograph," Kikaru said. Her voice carried the corporate clip she used in any room with cameras. "Two minutes. Now."

The Hacker turned her head toward Kikaru without moving her shoulders.

"Of course," the Hacker said. Her smile reached her eyes a beat after her mouth, as it had the first time. "Find me later, Caleb."

She stepped back into the current of the crowd without looking at him again.

Kikaru did not look after her. She put her hand at the small of Caleb’s back and steered him toward the platform. Her palm was steady. Her breathing was not. The dress hid most of the medical bracing on her ribs, but Caleb had walked next to her enough times to feel the difference.

"Five seconds," Kikaru said under her breath, eyes on the platform. "Director’s a vain old man. He wants a hero shot. Smile or don’t, but stand there and let him have it."

"Did you see that?"

"Yes."

"Did you know she would do that?"

"I knew somebody would. Smile or don’t, Caleb. The cameras are on us right now."

The platform was three feet of polished wood with a brass railing and a Director who looked like every Director Caleb had ever seen in a recorded broadcast. Silver hair. Soft hands. Decorative medals. The Director said something about the Seventh Division’s casualty bracket and the courage of new blood, and Caleb did not catch most of it. He stood at the right shoulder of the platform with three other recruits whose names he did not know and let the cameras have him.

He scanned the floor.

The man with the eyes was gone.

The service door at the back of the room swung open and shut twice during the photograph. Staff coming and going. A waiter with an empty tray. A bartender carrying a crate. The man with the eyes had not been one of them. Caleb’s view of the door had been blocked for a stretch of about ten seconds, somewhere in the middle of the speech, when the Director gestured toward Kikaru and the cameras pivoted.

The photograph ended. The Director shook the recruits’ hands in turn. Caleb’s hand was the second to last. The Director’s grip was firm and brief and left a smear of cologne on his sleeve.

Caleb stepped down from the platform.

A waiter passed him a folded napkin between two fingers, the way a card was passed at a table. The waiter did not look at him. He kept walking.

Caleb opened the napkin against his palm without lifting his hand from his side.

*The same people watch us both. Don’t approach me. I’ll find you.*

The handwriting was in a hard slope, old-fashioned, the kind of script people learned when penmanship was still graded. He had seen the script once before, in the bottom corner of the photograph in his father’s office, on a signature that had not been his father’s.

Caleb closed his hand around the napkin.

Kikaru appeared at his elbow.

"You’re the right kind of pale right now," she said quietly. "Try to look bored. The Director’s people are still tracking us."

"I need a minute alone."

"Two minutes. The west alcove is unwatched. Service corridor. Not the kitchen. The west one."

She stepped away from him before he answered, joining a cluster of corporate sponsors who all turned to her with the kind of attention money paid for. The cover was clean. He moved.

Caleb crossed the floor at a steady pace. He did not look at the dance floor. He did not look toward where the Hacker had stepped into the crowd. The crushed-orchid scent had stayed in his suit; it would not be the way he found her again, and that was a different problem.

The west alcove was a short hallway off the main ballroom. A waiter and a coat-check attendant stood at the far end, talking to each other in low voices about a delivery. Caleb stopped halfway into the alcove and pressed his back against the wood paneling.

He uncurled the napkin against his thigh and read the line again. The handwriting had not changed.

His head turned toward the ballroom.

Across the ballroom floor, near the service door the man with the eyes had been watching, Hassek stood with one shoulder against the frame.

The bandage on his neck had been changed again. The new gauze was clean.

He was looking at the service door, not at Caleb.

Waiting for someone to come back through it.