Page 55 of Honey Cut
And if I can see it, Mark can see it.
Hopefully, Mark thinks it’s all for him, the envy and the yearning. And who am I to suppose that it’s not, anyway? To wish that Tristan’s suffering is for me?
To wish that I’m not the only one who can’t forget salt-soaked kisses?
God help me, I can’t forget it. The touch of the only good person in this den of serpents. The touch of someone earnest and honest and pure.
And I’m just as bad as Mark because I’m a lion too, thinking lion thoughts, and I’m terrified that one of these days I’m going to pounce.
twenty
ISOLDE
An opening appearstoward the end of my second week there—a small parting of the sea that is Lyonesse’s security.
A storm rolls over the Beltway, the kind that turns the streets into rivers and stitches the sky with lightning. From my office window, I see the buildings on the district shore lose power, low, hulking shapes against the dark afternoon sky. But Lyonesse merely flickers once and then resumes its usual glow—generators, I presume.
An idea strikes me then, and I go to close my office door. When I return to my desk, I sit—wincingly, Mark really worked my bottom over last night in the hall—slide my phone closer, and pull up the app I use to listen to the small recording devices I’ve left around the club.
I’m no hacker; I know code about as well as I know Hungarian, which is to say just enough to get me in trouble. But I’m familiar enough with security to know when it’s better to wait and learn more rather than force my way in. Early on, I treated myself to a quick but thorough tour of the security offices—a Monday morning, when only a single person was on duty—and then of Mark’s office when he was having a lunch in the city.
Aside from an electronically locked safe hidden behind a picture, Mark’s office gave me nothing—the kind of nothing that would be unsettling if I didn’t know what he used to do for the CIA—but the security offices revealed a few important things.
One, that the server vaults can only be accessed by Mark, Andrea, Goran, and Dinah.
Two, that even they can only access the vaults with a thumb and retinal scan—and without those scans, the floor around the servers is alarmed for any kind of unauthorized presence.
And three—most irritatingly—all of these systems were given an overhaul after Mark was attacked and these server rooms were broken into. Any weaknesses I might have been able to exploit have been discovered and remediated.
However, new, untested strengths can be their own weaknesses too, and that’s what I listen for now, hoping that Goran and Nat think like I do—at least a little.
“…reboot because of the generators?” Goran is asking. I can imagine him in the security room, staring at the screens with an amiable but puzzled expression.
“I used to drive a tank,” Nat replies, her voice barely audible. She must be on the other side of the room. “I only know enough about computers to know when they’re broken.”
“We’ll have to ask Lox to look at the system again,” Goran says unhappily. “She scares the shit out of me.”
“Does she scare the shit out of you or doesRafe de Lacyscare the shit out of you? Because those are two different things.”
“Fine, they both scare me.”
“You weigh as much as the two of them put together. I’m pretty sure you could pick up Lox with one hand.”
“Not the point,” comes Goran’s grumble. “I don’t trust them.”
“Just because they used to be CIA? Mark used to be too, you know. Plus Lady Anguish trusts them. That’s good enough for me.”
Lady Anguish. She was at the bedding ceremony with a tall submissive man behind her, elegant and dark eyed. It had taken me until the next day to place her submissive—her husband—because while my memory for faces is generally dependable, former presidential advisor Merlin Rhys hasn’t been relevant to politics for years now.
But Merlin wasn’t the reason I’d been preoccupied with Lady Anguish that night. I’d recognized her.Viscerally and immediatelyrecognized her.
Not from real life—we’d never met before that moment—but from the dream I’d had after my wedding. She’d been a little older in the dream maybe, her hair threaded with silver, but it had been her all the same. Standing in a circle of stones with a braided cord in her hands. She’d seemed sad in the dream; in real life, she wasn’t sad at all. There’d been a knowing kind of smile on her mouth, softening whenever her husband took her hand, which was often.
How could I have dreamed her when I’d never met her? It feels a little late to acquire the gift of prophecy.
It turns out that Lox is not an easy person to get a hold of. It’s later in the day when Goran gets a call back from her, and she sounds like she’s just been woken from a deep sleep. I listen to her grumble at him while I open a folder of high-resolution pictures of a small icon discovered in Georgia, a Christ Pantocrator with remarkable depth of color and marked asymmetry. I’m listening to what’s happening in the security room through a wireless earbud, so if anyone interrupts me, I’ll look like I’m listening to music while I work.
“The only way the power gap would have affected the system would be if there’s a hard-wiring failure,” Lox is telling Goran, and I can tell by Goran and Nat’suh-huhs andhmms that they’re only understanding about half of what she’s saying. “But I’m portaled in now, and I don’t see anything that would?—”
