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“Can you stop it?” her father asked. “Can you get the evidence before the press? The disciplinary council has to clean house, Lila, but we can’t do that with the press involved and a thousand workborn threatening the gate. It would break the trust of the mob. We have to keep that at all costs.”
“Do we?”
“Do you want anarchy, Elizabeth? Every play has consequences. Your mother and I taught you better than that.”
Her father was right, of course. Protests and riots and revolution were all well and good in theory, but the history books never wrote the stories of the innocents caught in the melee. They never read out the names of those who starved or the casualties of battles that didn’t need to be fought. They didn’t write the stories of the orphans or the old who lost their pensions or life savings when the banks tumbled and fell. It rarely balanced in the end, no matter what the protesters believed.
It could be avoided. It must be avoided.
“I might be able to stop it.” Lila did not offer any more information than that. The information she’d gained from the second dead man’s switch had become her ace in the hole, though she hadn’t finished going through half of it yet. She did know one thing, though. Not all the senators on the disciplinary committee had gotten their positions fairly, and quite a few of their siblings and cousins would hang.
If La Roux could pull their strings, she damn well could too.
Chapter 5
Lila sat on the couch drinking a glass of chocolate. Cold chocolate, rather than hot, for Dixon had cranked up the heat as soon as they’d returned to the apartment. She’d changed clothes around noon, donning one of Dixon’s old purple t-shirts and a pair of his shorts, for she’d not taken any warm weather gear when she fled the Randolph estate. Every few moments, she lifted the laptop off her thighs to keep from overheating.
It made reading through the oracle’s message a bit more difficult and time-consuming, but there hadn’t been much to read. She’d sent it only ten minutes after Lila had exited the courtroom.
Clearly, her parents hadn’t been the only ones bugging the room.
According to the oracle, her older sister, Kenna, had put together a second list. She’d considered every person with regular access to their compound and written down the names of those she found the most suspicious. The oracle claimed Kenna was an excellent judge of character, almost preternatural in her assessments, and requested that Lila take her impressions seriously.
Lila intended to do just that after she finished reading through the transcripts. She’d managed to work her way through half the folders while Dixon flitted in and out of the room, checking on tasks downstairs and attending meetings with workborn contacts and spies. By three o’clock, she paused to check the age progression software. It still chugged away in the back of the room. The fact that it hadn’t finished yet didn’t surprise her.
By the time she’d scanned through another quarter of the transcripts, her age programs had finished compiling the data for the empire. Lila copied the file to her laptop and set the computer to begin its work on the Allied data. Nibbling on chocolate chip cookies, she wrote a short program that pulled biographical data for each name on Connell’s list from the official registry. Everyone had a few pictures in their public files, for their government ID, for school, work, and the library, as well as various licenses for the net, driving, marriage, and children.
When the program finished pulling all the photos, she loaded the facial-recognition software onto her laptop and wrote a quick program to compare both sets. She used a low tolerance, unconcerned with false positives. Too many hits were preferential to a match being lost due to a too-sensitive filter.
It took the matching program a few hours to run. Thirty possible matches had been tossed into a new folder while she skimmed through more transcripts. Lila tossed out half as false positives and scrolled through the biographical data for the remaining fifteen. Connell and the oracle would have to investigate them without her.
For the rest of the evening, she finished reading through the serum transcripts, paying a great deal of attention to the questions Connell and the oracle asked of the mercs.
If she had to let Bullstow inject her, would her interrogator be so blunt and unforgiving?
Chief Shaw would be careful about what he asked her, but there were no guarantees he would be in the room. The senate might choose someone else, for everyone now assumed they had some sort of professional or personal relationship.
Dixon brought her Chinese for dinner, and she read through the files she’d flagged as they ate. She skimmed through more of the transcripts while she chewed, her eyes straying to the door every five minutes as she listened for a pair of boots on the staircase.
It wasn’t until ten o’clock that she heard them, heavy and measured on each step.
Tristan sighed heavily when he saw her. Not the sigh of satisfaction he’d given a thousand times as he settled between her legs, nor the sigh of contentment as he nuzzled her neck at the end of a hard day—not even the sigh of a tired man plopping down on the couch.
It was a sigh of disappointment.
Plans canceled, chores undone, the thousandth excuse.
An ex-lover lingering on your couch, unwanted.
“You’re still here,” he said evenly, moving to the kitchen sink to wash his hands.
“Yes. You once said I could stay here. Has that changed?”
“As I recall, a lot of things were said,” he muttered, turning on the water. “I meant that you haven’t been hanged. I told you they wouldn’t. They don’t hang heirs.”
“They might. They haven’t decided yet.”
“So I heard. Three cheers for senate theater.” Tristan grabbed a towel to dry his hands, then tossed it away on the counter. He sat down on the sofa chair near the couch and steepled his fingers. “I want to make something very clear, Ms. Randolph, because I do not want you to misunderstand me and be disappointed later. Whatever sentence they pass tomorrow, Dixon and I can’t help you. There is far too much press. Your face will be too well known to hide, and it would put my people in danger. More to the point, your bounty will be far too high. Someone might be tempted to turn you in, and I won’t be able to guarantee your safety. Don’t involve us.”
