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"Understood," says Toby. "I'd have done the same." He's made it sound like a seduction of convenience, but they both know there was more to it than that. Diaphanous pink negligees are their own excuse for being.
Lucerne was bad luck in some ways, said Zeb. Though she was good luck in others, because you couldn't deny that she -
"You can skip that part," says Toby.
"Okay, short version: she had me by the nuts, more ways than one. But I hadn't ratted on her that time in the washroom, and she was inclined to return the favour as long as I was attentive enough to her. Then she got hooked on me, and you know the rest: nothing would do but an elopement with a mystery man first spotted when wearing a nose of a pig.
"I moved us around inside the deeper pleeblands, which she found romantic at first. Luckily no one - no one in the CorpSeCorps - was much interested in her disappearance, because she hadn't stolen any IP. Wives did skedaddle from the Compounds out of sheer boredom, it wasn't unheard of. The CorpSeCorps regarded such defections as private, insofar as they regarded anything as private. They didn't bother with them much, especially if the husband wasn't agitating. Which it appears that Lucerne's husband did not.
"Trouble is, Lucerne took Ren with her. Cute little girl, I liked her. But it was way too dangerous for her in the deeper pleeblands. Kids like that could get snatched for the chicken-sex trade just walking along the street, even if they were with adults. There'd be a pleebrat mob scuffle, some SecretBurgers red sauce tossing, an overturned stand or solarcar - in other words, a honking big misdirection - and when you looked again, your child would be gone. I couldn't risk that."
Zeb got a few more alterations done to his ears and fingerprints and irises - they'd know by now he'd been up to no good on the HelthWyzer computers, they'd be looking for him - and then ...
"And then the three of you turned up at the God's Gardeners," says Toby. "I remember that; I wondered from the first what you were doing there. You didn't fit in with the rest of them."
"You mean I hadn't taken the vow of whatnot and drunk the Elixir of Life? God loves you, and he also loves aphids?"
"More or less."
"No. I hadn't. But Adam had to put up with me anyway, didn't he? I was his brother."
Edencliff
"Adam already had his ecofreakshow up and running by that time," says Zeb. "At the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. You were there. So were Katuro and Rebecca. Nuala - wonder what happened to her? Marushka Midwife, and the others. And Philo. Too bad about him."
"Freakshow?" says Toby. "That's not very kind. Surely the God's Gardeners was more than that."
"Yeah, it was," says Zeb. "Granted. But the pleebland slumfolk tagged it as a freakshow. Just as well: best to be thought of as harmless and addled and poor, in those parts. Adam did nothing to discourage that view; in fact, he encouraged it. Roaming around in the pleebs wearing the simple but eye-catching garb of a lunatic recycler with his choir in tow singing nutbar hymns, then preaching the love of hoofed animals in front of SecretBurger stands - you'd have to be lobotomized to do that, was the street verdict."
"If he hadn't done those things I wouldn't be here," says Toby. "Him and the Gardener kids grabbed me during a street brawl. I was working - I was trapped at SecretBurgers at the time, and the manager had a thing for me."
"Your pal Blanco," says Zeb. "Third-time Painball vet, as I recall."
"Yes. Girls he had a thing for ended up dead, and I was next on the list. He was already at the violent stage, he was working up to the kill; you could feel it. So I owe a lot to Adam - to Adam One, as I always knew him. Freakshow or not," she says defensively.
"Don't get it wrong," says Zeb. "He's my brother. We had our disagreements, and he had his way of doing things and I had mine, but that's different."
"You didn't mention Pilar," says Toby to deflect the conversation from Adam One. It's uncomfortable for her to listen to criticism of him. "She was there too. At Edencliff."
"Yeah, HelthWyzer finally got too much for her. She'd been feeding inside stuff to Adam, which was useful to him - he liked to know who might jump ship from a Corp, come over to the side of virtue, which was his side, naturally. But she said she couldn't stay there any longer. With the CorpSeCorps takeover of so-called law-and-order functions, the Corps had the power to bulldoze and squash and erase anything they liked. Their addiction to making a buck was becoming toxic for her: it was poisoning, I quote, her soul.
"The cryptics helped her put together a cover story that allowed her to vanish without inspiring any trackers: she'd had an unfortunate stroke, with instant shipment to CryoJeenyus in a Frasket, and presto, there she was on top of a pleebland tenement building, dressed in a cloth bag and mixing potions."
"And growing mushrooms, and teaching me about maggots, and keeping bees. She was very good at it," says Toby a little ruefully. "Convincing. She had me talking to the bees. I was the one who told them when she died."
"Yeah. I remember all of that. But she wasn't bullshitting," said Zeb. "She believed the whole sackful, in a way. That's why she was willing to run the risks she did at HelthWyzer. Remember what happened to Glenn's dad? She could have gone off an overpass, like him. If they'd caught her; especially if they'd caught her with that white bishop and the three pills."
"She held on to those?" says Toby. "I thought she was going to have them analyzed. After Adam gave them to her."
"She decided it was too dangerous," says Zeb. "For anyone to open them up and maybe let out whatever was inside them. They didn't know how to get rid of them. So that bishop stayed right inside HelthWyzer Central as long as she was there. She brought it out with her when she left, and slipped those pills into her own white bishop, in the set she hand-carved. We played with that set of hers, you and me, that time I was recovering. From getting sliced up on one of those pleeb missions I was running for Adam."
Toby has an image of it: Zeb in the shade, on a hazy afternoon. His arm. Her own hand, moving the white bishop, the death-carrier. Unknown to her then, like so much.
"You always played Black," she says. "What happened to that bishop when Pilar died?"
"She willed her set to Glenn, along with a sealed letter. She'd taught him to play chess, back at HelthWyzer West, when he was little. But by the time she died, his mother had married the guy she'd been fooling around with - so-called Uncle Pete - and they'd been upgraded to HelthWyzer Central. Pilar kept in touch with Glenn through the cryptics, and Glenn was the one who arranged the cancer tests for her, found out she was terminal."
"What was in the letter?"
