Orphan's Triumph

FORTY-THREE

I SPENT THE EVENING IN A STUDIO in the consulate’s subbasement, along with Jude. The Spooks holo’d us reading, walking around, climbing stairs. Then we did it all again wearing different clothes. The next morning the Spooks snuck us out of the consulate using a Cold War shell game with hats, dark glasses, and similarly clothed doubles. The surveillance Ferrents, who, like other Tressens, were barely accustomed to tintype photographs, would see our holos through windows or in the courtyard and be fooled into thinking we were still in the consulate.

Disguised as a fishmonger, authentic down to the smell, I arrived at a tenement apartment in the old town before Jude. The apartment was furnished with one bentwood chair and an equally talkative, stubbled Iridian resistance bodyguard armed with a kitchen knife.

Ten minutes later, Jude, in coveralls over his civvies, carrying a merchant’s basket of bread, stepped through the apartment door. As the silent Iridian stepped around him to leave, Jude held out the basket. “For your family.”

The man stared at the basket, then at Jude. “If my family was alive, I wouldn’t risk this. You two stay put and shut up.”

Jude frowned as he watched the man go.

“Still think the RS is just restoring order?”

Jude double-locked the door, then stepped alongside me. After a minute, he wrinkled his nose. “You stink.”

After sunset, another resistance fighter, this one, young and holo-star handsome, gave us coats to wear, then drove us toward the coast in the backseat of a custom-bodied phaeton, top up against the cool night. Sometime in the next couple hours we would cross what had until the Armistice been the Tressen-Iridian border, and would thereafter roll through what had until recently been the Unified Duchies of Iridia. I nodded off, leaning against the phaeton’s padded-leather door frame.

Two hours later, brake squeal snapped me awake.