couldn’t shine her shoes without getting a heel in your eye,” he said. “Leave her alone. Get the post-mortem data. That’s all.”
The Cleaner rose, shook down his pant legs. “Sure,” he said. He turned and walked away. He didn’t waste time, and neither did the General.
But as he put his hand on the doorknob, Durk spoke. “Wait,” he said. The Cleaner did so.
“Are you already cleaning her for someone else?” Durk asked bluntly.
The Cleaner kept his hand on the doorknob, didn’t turn around. “Do I kiss and tell?”
Durk grunted, and his wooden hand went tap tap tap on the desk. “If that’s your job, you’re in deep shit. Better men than you have tried and failed.”
The Cleaner shrugged. He’d heard that about her. It didn’t bother him. “Maybe better,” he said, “but not smarter. And I have the best toys.”
He opened the door and left the office.
One of Durk’s guards, standing outside the door, watched him leave, and then was surprised to hear a sound not often associated with the General.
From within the office, he was sure he heard that man laugh.
* * * *
Planetoid One
The shuttleport on One was noisy with the motion of machinery, goods, and people. Jaguar stood inside it, listening to the announcements of arrivals and departures, to the low and constant hum of the ventilation system, the cacophony of voices that always sounded louder here.
She stared up at the translucent ceilings, then around at the people walking by or being driven in the shuttleport carts. They all looked busy, many working their cellcoms or pressing one hand against an ear and speaking rapidly to whoever was on the other end of their earpieces. Most of them wore suits and carried briefcases, a very different fashion sense than that on Planetoid Three. She sighed and picked up her bags, scanning for the sign pointing to Tunnel 10, which led to the bubble dome housing she’d be staying in. When she found it, she walked.
She’d last been here six years ago—or was it seven? Seven years. Not, she decided, long enough.
She saw a flash image of herself, a memory from when she’d first arrived, new at the job but with a head full of her own ideas about how to manage prisoners. She’d been prepped for her work by both the intense Planetoid training and by the work she’d done with Jake and One Bird, her guardians and mentors after her grandparents were killed during the Serials. They’d worked her harder than the Planetoid ever could, putting her through a series of sweat lodges, testing her empathic boundaries by every means possible. They knew the risks she’d face, and knew her well enough to realize she’d go beyond even the ones they could imagine.
She’d done so more than once, and she supposed she would again. That much hadn’t changed, though other things had.
Now she carried more confidence and a great deal less pain than the young woman who’d walked these corridors seven years ago. At that time the first person to greet her was Diane Lasher, who came up to her, extended a hand and said, “Dr. Addams? Welcome. Glad to have you with us.”
She clasped Jaguar’s hand firmly, smiled as if she meant what she said. Jaguar, doing a quick read on her, realized she did. She had very little dishonesty in her, and even less complexity. She was as she presented herself—warm, enthusiastic, high energy.
Her native warmth went far to thaw Jaguar’s naturally cool exterior, and her capacity for laughter reminded Jaguar that happiness still existed in a pure form for some people. Diane had been with her historian parents in the protected boundaries of a small village in France during the Killing Times, helping them research the Little Ice Age of the 1600s while Jaguar was struggling to survive on the streets of Manhattan. She was the first person Jaguar knew who was unscathed by that event, unscathed by the world in any real way. All she’d ever known was love and support, and that was what she extended to others.
Diane, whose light she drank like a promise, offered the possibility of other truths than the ones she’d lived. Through her friendship she’d been taken under Regina Hawthorne’s broad wings, and her soothing influence worked its magic as well. They had changed her. They had, she thought, been more than friends.
Jaguar’s mother died in childbirth, and she’d been raised by grandparents. When they were murdered, she’d gone to the New Mexico village of Thirteen Streams, where Jake and One Bird, contemporaries of her grandparents, had taken over her guardianship. But Regina was more of an age to serve as a mother figure, which was different. And Diane had become the sister she’d never had. They were, she thought, the closest she’d ever get to a nuclear family. Unfortunately, they reached critical mass, for all the wrong reasons.
Diane’s betrayal came as a physical shock, the hand that always supported her knocking her flat instead. Even worse, she knew Diane was acting in accord with her most deeply held principles, part and parcel of who she was. Jaguar couldn’t hate her for being exactly who she was after she’d learned to love her for that same reason. To this day what she held in memory of Diane was a sense of her light, which had given her hope. Because of that she’d returned to Plaentoid One. But a different Dr. Addams was here today.
Planetoid One was also different in some ways. When she was last here they didn’t have half as many mutoids, and the work programs were still just a concept Regina was trying to realize. Now most of their population was classified either mutoid or criminally insane, and the work programs were central to their operations.
However, their attitude toward empaths remained the same. The regulations that once prohibited hiring Teachers with empathic capacities were gone, but Planetoid One still strictly enforced the rules against use of psi capacities with prisoners. On Three and Two the unwritten rule said a skilled empath could do their job as they saw fit, if they didn’t make a noise about it. That, Jaguar knew, was largely because of Alex, the first Supervisor to quietly allow his Teachers to use the arts, always backing them in their choices and discreetly offering his own empathic skills in ways that proved too useful for the governing entities to give up.
That wasn’t the case on One, where they stuck to psychotherapeutic and medical programs, their people trained in using neural probes and medications more than anything else.
“Technotoys and drugs,” Jaguar mumbled to herself. “New names. Same old shit.”
Of course some prisoners needed medical intervention. They had more illness than fear. But the Planetoids weren’t the place to treat them, and the home planet didn’t need more excuses for not dealing with them. Planetoid One was becoming a warehouse for the unwanted, exactly what the system was supposed to prevent. Soon they’d be stocking up on empaths so the home planet wouldn’t have to deal with that issue, either. Maybe, she thought, they were starting with her.
She followed the pink glow of surveillance lights to the entrance of her bubble dome, and at the gate she put her face to the retinal scan and waited. The station guard read it and told her someone was coming to meet her. She should stay put. As if, she thought, there was anywhere she could go.
She gazed up at the translucent dome above her, feeling the waves of micro and radiant energy it took to maintain the structure, the laser fencing surrounding all facilities. It made her neurons crackle, made it impossible to establish empathic contact outside its boundaries, disturbed her perceptual field in subtle ways. She wasn’t good at dealing with massive energy incursions.
