After we caught our breath she said, “How long has it been?”

“What do you mean?”

“Since you did it with somebody who isn’t a Tau.”

“Honestly? A few years.”

“Who was it? I mean the last one who wasn’t in your Affinity.”

Jenny Symanski. “Just a girl I knew.”

“Like me.” She kissed me again. “Now I’m a girl you know.”

She got up, left the room, came back with a joint and a lighter. I liked the way she moved, unselfconsciously naked, fluid, her body more wave than particle. The bed creaked when she climbed back in. We shared the joint: some generic weed Amanda would have turned up her nose at, but it did the trick. We settled into a measured second round.

The next thing I noticed was the fading light from the bedroom window. Because this was a basement apartment the window was high in the wall but low to the street. Sunset turned the curtains scarlet. We listened to the sound of footsteps passing on the sidewalk outside. Strangers coming home from work. Shadows of unfamiliar lives. The murmur of voices. “Might rain tonight,” Rachel said sleepily.

“I wish I could stay, but—”

“I know. It’s okay. I have to go get Suze.” Suze was at her grandmother’s, where she often went after school.

“Need a drive?”

“Easier to bus it, but thank you for asking.” She cleared her throat. “So … is this just a happy afternoon, or can I call you?”

She meant it casually but I heard a hitch of tension in her voice.

“Of course you can call me. More likely I’ll call you first.”

“That’s a nice thing to say. Are all Taus as nice as you?”

“In their way. Uh, maybe not quite as nice.”

I used the bathroom before I left. There was a row of brown prescription bottles on the shelf over the toilet. I resisted the temptation to read the labels, and I congratulated myself for respecting her privacy. Or maybe I just didn’t want to know what was wrong with her.

*   *   *

I stopped by the building where we worked to pick up some papers and to see if there was anyone I could recruit for dinner company. I ran into Amanda, who was hurrying down the hallway. She noticed me, stopped, did a double take, and drew an instant conclusion about where I’d been and what I’d done. I couldn’t help it: I blushed.

“Well,” she said. “Well.”

“I, uh—”

“Uh yeah. So I guess she didn’t ask for money, huh? Or did she?”

“That’s not fair. And no, she didn’t. Where are you rushing off to?”

“Meeting. With Damian. You’re invited.”

We joined him in one of the building’s newly renovated conference rooms, nothing inside but a trestle table, a dozen folding chairs, and a faint haze of plaster dust. Just the three of us. If Damian had any thoughts about what might have happened between Rachel and me, he didn’t bother to share them. He had bigger issues.

Meir Klein was dead.

Klein had died in his big house in the Okanagan Valley. “Staff found him,” Damian said, “when he didn’t get up this morning.”

“His cancer,” Amanda whispered.

“Actually, no. According the police, he died of a ligature injury.”

In other words he had been strangled. Or had strangled himself: maybe an autoerotic strangulation gone wrong, unlikely as that sounded given Klein’s fragile physical condition. The evidence was ambiguous, the coroner was performing an autopsy, but until the report was finalized, the police were betting on foul play.

*   *   *

Amanda knocked on the door of my hotel room a few minutes after midnight, and it didn’t take Tau telepathy to figure out what she wanted. She pressed herself hard against me. “Now fuck me,” she whispered, “like you fucked your tether.”

I didn’t like the word “tether.” It was what some Taus called the lovers they took outside of the Affinity. It was a term of contempt, like shiksa or shegetz. As in, Don’t let that tether of yours drag you down. But this was Amanda. It was not in my power to refuse her. Which is to say, I didn’t want to refuse her. And she knew it. “Let me shower first,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Now. While the smell of her is still on you.”

CHAPTER 8

Amanda and I met Damian at the office the next morning, an hour before the research teams arrived, early enough that the light of dawn through the east-facing windows made the motes of plaster dust in the air sparkle like diamonds. Amanda slumped in the nearest chair, her eyes still bruised with sleep. Damian stood at the head of the table, looking grim. “I’ve been talking to some contacts in the Vancouver Police Force,” he said. “The RCMP is investigating Klein’s death, not the cops, but I managed to learn a few things. Almost certainly homicide. A couple of hard drives are missing from Klein’s office. So we can assume that whoever killed him knew he was in possession of valuable data.”

“InterAlia’s data,” Amanda said.

“You’re picturing some goon ransacking the place and murdering Klein on orders from corporate headquarters. And maybe that’s a reasonable assumption, but unless someone was unforgivably clumsy there won’t be any evidence linking the murder to InterAlia. What we have to ask ourselves is, if InterAlia is behind this, what’s their next move? Especially if the drives they stole contain anything that would connect Klein to us.”

I said, “Somebody wants to keep Klein’s data from going public, they have money to spend on hired thieves, and they’re apparently willing to kill for what they want. If they suspect Klein passed us the data, we’re the next logical target.”

“Maybe. But only as long they figure they have something to gain by intimidating us.”

“So if they’re going to act,” Amanda said, “they have to act soon.”

“Right. So we need to be able to protect ourselves. We have two teams here, twenty people in the building during daylight hours if you include the three of us, and any or all of us could be targeted. How do we afford protection to twenty people, either here or when they’re moving freely around the city?”

“Warn them, obviously,” I said. “House them in one place, even the ones who live here in the city. And we need help. People who know how to do real-world security.”

Damian nodded. “I’ll get on T-Net this morning and set it up.”

T-Net was the hidden webspace where sodality reps interacted with each other. A tech guy had once tried to tell me how it worked. All I remembered was that the explanation involved words like “serial/parallel encryption” and “onion routing.” Basically, it was a space where sodality-level Taus could exchange information with minimal risk of surveillance. Through T-net, Damian could put out the word that he needed volunteers with security and military experience who lived in the area or could get to Vancouver on short notice.

“Okay,” I said. “But are we the only ones at risk?”

“What do you mean?”

Amanda said, “He’s thinking of the guys who questioned his new tether, Rachel Ragland.”

“I doubt she’s in any danger,” Damian said. “They’ve talked to her already, they didn’t learn anything.”

“Depends on whether they know I’ve been seeing her.”

“Well, that’s easily fixed,” Amanda said. “Stop seeing her.”

Damian said, “The guys who came to see her, did she describe them?”

“Only vaguely.”

“Do you think you could get a better description from her?”

“I don’t know. I could try. Why? Do you think they’re the same people who went after Klein?”

“Could be. It would help if we could give our security guys some faces to look out for.”

“You mean, like a sketch?”

“Yeah,” Damian said. “Like a sketch.”

I said I would get on it.

*   *   *

The first of our new security team showed up that afternoon, a local guy named Gordo MacDonald. Gordo was ex-military, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, chest like a rain barrel, abs so defined you could count them through his t-shirt. Shaved head and one glittering gold earring. I would have flinched when we shook hands, but the look passed between us. The Tau look: a wry curvature of the mouth, something indefinable about the eyes, but it was as if all the threat went out of his face. He gave me a sheepish grin, and I gave him one back. “Hey, bro,” he said.