Black Marion

12

If the hours in the apartment dragged, at least Sasha's time at CyberSec was compact. There was no time to think about anything except what she needed to prepare: false cover scripts, monitor overrides, reliable routes through the thick domain security, all under the façade of a good State architect. Perhaps because she had done it before, the stringent process came to her like instinct.

She worried that someone among the staff would notice her disproportionate time in the private work spaces, doors walled supposedly for concentration. Sancotte did scold her for it once, but the director swept it off, stating that Sasha could do as she needed to as long as it yielded results. That had come with a cold-eyed warning, but she was grateful for the director's confidence. Demari likely knew about her Tag. Likely, as Vaughn did, he relied on the System script to keep her from trying anything subversive.

Friday, the necessary measures were in place. Ghosted in the domain while false script showed her working in a separate workspace, she ran a search through the hanging willow leaves for a match to her own genetic code. The Astrid code was unreadable, but the ID markers of the Tags were plain, should the State ever wish to pick a life for snipping. Sasha's first search turned up no match. On her second search, she prodded for irregularities in the branches. The first irregularity she found was a scrambled Tag, which she deciphered easily enough. It was not hers; neither were the six other similar ones. The eight irregularity was thickly walled.

It took her twelve minutes over an hour to deconstruct the walls. She knew this time because at 10:34, twenty minutes in, she had glanced at the clock and started counting seconds. She was so strung by the time she matched her code to the unscrambled Tag that the definitive agreement was nearly a relief.

It was almost comical to see her life as a pretty green thread hanging from a branch. Sasha shut her eyes, suppressing the urge to laugh, or to vomit. When she opened them, she managed to assess the script with a surgical detachment. Aside from the ID marker, the rest of the Tag had all the appearances of being operational, but with the System code indecipherable, any true internal irregularity could not be detected. As long as it kept providing locational feedback to the handlers—the Council and directors—no one would know that its memory functions were frozen.

Unless Sasha slipped in her acting.

Vaughn was the threat there. Since Saturday, she had shut off a part of her mind when she was near the Regent, attempting to maintain her tamed and compliant mask. But the man was sharp, and things between them didn't feel as smooth as before. More hesitation between their sentences. More quiet, sidelong gazes. More sweet words dropped in conversations, as if Vaughn knew he had his share of charming to do. Sasha could not say why, but then again, instinct went beyond the perceptible things.

Friday evening she called Haneul and scheduled the operation for Monday because she could not surreptitiously access CyberSec over the weekend. But three days was a precarious number, and she was nervous about it.

Saturday night, Vaughn took her to dinner and a play.

In an upper balcony of the theatre, Vaughn slid a hand over her thigh. The touch seemed sweet, not sexual, yet in the aftermath of last weekend, she could only feel the chill in her spine at any contact. For sanity she tried to reason that those words might have been the unintended product of anger—that Vaughn never had, never would, do such a horrific thing. That maybe Vaughn Scio was as bound by the demands of the State as anyone else, title be damned. Maybe the Tag had been implanted against Vaughn's will. Maybe he wasn't the villain.

In the play, the villain was the least invested player, and the rest were victims of bad judgement and human nature.

It was a dark and violent story. Vaughn had murmured, before the curtains spread, that it was a story that had survived many centuries of time, a relic from the long gone past, an examination of human brutality—because in their era, in the Skyworld, blood and gore to the extreme mimicked on the stage were not common realities. Cathartic, he said it was supposed to be, the recognition of our capability for such things in the safety of art.