Volume 8: I'll Be Watching You
Chapter 3
Every Night
Chapter Summary
In which Bors gets even creepier.
Chapter Summary
In which Bors gets even creepier.
In which Bors gets even creepier.
Bors was pacing the thread-bare carpet of Int/Sec Director Gelmedyn’s office; he couldn’t help it. “Just two ten-days, Fir’n Director. That’s all I ask.”“I cannot authorize you to surveille Vera Linnett’s apartment,” said Gelmedyn. A tiny husk of a woman with the bleary eyes of a night creature, she appeared to be examining her ramen for defects, lifting and sifting each spoonful before swallowing it. “Not without much better cause, anyway. She and Bronn are probably just fucking.”“But her record!” Bors pointed at the director’s screen; she’d barely scanned it. “For five whole years, from secondary through University, Vera Linnett and her brother were part of a band of Hargists. They wore incorrect clothing, defaced walls and buildings, exposed themselves to the cold!”Gelmedyn’s face was half in shadow, because whoever had designed her two-story office had given it yellow mood lighting, in striking contrast to the acres of merciless fluorescence outside. But Bors thought she rolled her eyes as she said, “We don’t concern ourselves with Hargists here. Bored kids acting out aren’t Dissidents.”“But sometimes Hargists become Taugists, who have a historical association with acts of terrorism.” Bors searched the article he wanted on his handheld—then put it down, realizing she didn’t care. No one ever cared about his research. No one listened to him, and he’d been staring at screens for the past twenty-four hours and his eyes hurt despite the glare-blocking glasses and he just needed this one thing.He tried to overwhelm her with facts. “And Hargism is hardly a harmless past-time. Eight years ago, Valgund Linnett—Vera’s kid brother—and his friend Angar Lindahl walked three miles straight out of the city. Lindahl died of hypothermia. Valgund Linnett remains in moral rehab to this day.”Gelmedyn continued to peruse her soup. “That’s a misfortune for the Linnett family, but Vera’s had a clean record ever since. I don’t see anything odd or untoward about her having a little dalliance with her grandfather’s former kettle boy. Frankly, I don’t understand your obsession with Tilrey Bronn.”“Ranek Egil had long, unmonitored conversations with him! Egil helped Celinda Valde escape, probably to Harbour! Bronn and Valde were friends!”Bors had to struggle not to shout in his eagerness to shatter the director’s impassivity. She refused to pay attention to any lead that wasn’t part of a long-standing investigation, especially when it came from him. And if he did shout, she would just advise him to get some sleep or some exercise with that patronizing smile that said, Silly Drudge.Part of being an Upstart was keeping your emotions under control at all times, and he would.“I’m not ‘obsessed,’” he finished, knowing it was time to cut his losses and go. “I just think there’s ample reason for concern. And if you won’t sign off on audio surveillance simply because the suspect is named Linnett . . .”He let the words hang in the air like a threat, but Gelmedyn snorted. “Are you accusing me of favoring the high names? I couldn’t care less that we’re talking about a Linnett, Borsha. You’re an exemplary analyst, but sometimes you don’t know your boundaries. Now, please, go home and get some sleep.”Bors was shaking as he bobbed his head and walked back across the carpet to the door. “Yes, Fir’n Director.”The door swung behind him, and abruptly he was back in the cavernous, windowless, painfully bright room that constituted most of Int/Sec, surrounded by humming voices, buzzing printers, and screens.He crossed the central cubicle farm in a daze and veered off into his usual domain: the glittering room covered floor-to-ceiling with surveillance monitors, which everyone called the Blinding Tank. The screens made his eyelids twitch, and he rubbed them, averting his gaze as he trudged to his desk to gather his belongings.He knew what he’d see on the screens: passages, foyers, tram interiors, cafeterias, common rooms, bathrooms, libraries—virtually every public space in the city. All over Redda, Upstarts and Laborers were going about their business, tracing gleaming paths from monitor to monitor that were probably innocent but might not be.When Bors was freshly rested and caffeinated, the sight energized him; he imagined he could process terabytes of visual data at a glance and spot the one thing out of place. Right now, though, he wanted to hide from it all. He didn’t even care whether Bronn was back at Linnett’s place tonight. (Bors had lost his bet with himself about that first night, as Bronn had gone home after a few hours, but since then the two of them had had two overnights together.)Kranik, part of the night screen-minder crew, turned to flash a pretty, mocking smile at Bors. “Who’ve you been after today, Fir Dartán? The kettle boy again?”“That’s none of your affair,” Bors said severely, gathering his tablet and notes. The word on Kranik was that he’d blow anyone for a vial of sap, which made his lack of respect all the more galling.Everyone who worked here, from the director to the cleaning crew, knew Bors had been born a Drudge, and most of them probably knew how he’d managed to be Raised. Not through exceptional talent or achievement, as Whyberg decreed, but because his mother happened to be a very pretty woman who was very dear to a high Admin who cared very much about making her happy. And so, although Bors’s test scores were no better than eighty-five percentile among Laborer-born children, he had received the Notification coveted by all of them. And he would spend the rest of his life being second-guessed, envied, and despised.He didn’t regret being Raised—how could he regret anything that allowed him to be of greater service to the Republic? But he glowered fiercely at Kranik and said, “While you sit here chatting with me, someone on one of your screens could be passing a message that leads to the destruction of a supply depot.”This was a worst-case scenario; no shirkers had actually blown up anything for nearly a quarter-century. But Kranik smiled again, showing off his full, cock-sucking lips and his dimples, and said, “Of course, Fir. On it, Fir.”Bors was tired, so he let the thinly veiled sarcasm go.On his way out, one of the Thurskein analysts rose from her cubicle and intercepted him. “Fir Dartán?”Her name was Something Glommer; they’d had lunch together a few times, and she’d talked of nothing but silly office gossip. “Yes?” he asked impatiently.“You’re still looking into the Bronn boy, right? The Councillor’s secretary?”He came awake all at once. “That’s still active, yes.”“His name came up in one of my subordinate’s field debriefings.” Glommer handed him a print-out. “One of our assets happened to mention knowing him—bragged about his inside track on Councillor Gádden. Bronn visits Sector Six because his mother’s the Supervisor there, you know.”Bors did know, and he was tempted to snap at Glommer for wasting his time. “And did the asset say Bronn was doing anything suspicious?”Glommer stiffened at his tone. “No, but my subordinate didn’t know the right questions to ask. I thought you might want to talk to the asset yourself. You’ll see his data there—Sollentaal, Malkien. We used to use him to keep an eye on Supervisor Fernei, and lately he’s been helpful in rooting out nests of Hargist schoolboys and that sort of thing. I’m going down to ’Skein in two ten-days, if you’d like to tag along and get a face-to-face.”What’s the point? But Bors nodded, because no lead was too slight to pass up. “Send me your travel data. I’ll make my own arrangements.”He nearly fell asleep on the tram, only waking before his stop because some idiot raw-boned factory drone, telling his friends a story, elbowed him in the ribs. Bors rose, rubbing his martyred eyes again, and followed the crowd onto the platform. He lived on the outer edge of Ring Four, where Upstart and Laborer apartment buildings overlapped, but he didn’t mind. An inner Ring wouldn’t have felt like home.One of the strangers on the platform made him pause for a second look. Narrow, dark face; keen eyes—Ranek Egil? No, the jawline was different, and anyway, Egil had gone to the Wastes four years ago. Bors needed to stop seeing him everywhere.It would have been easier if he hadn’t had to get so close to Egil to trap him. He remembered their first encounter all too well, because it was a day like this one, when Bors was frustrated with everything.He was not quite twenty-five then, and not yet an analyst; they still had him on screen-minding duty with the Laborers. Egil stopped in the Blinding Tank to order surveillance on a suspect, and Bors treated the junior interrogator with the appropriate deference, suggesting further cam checkpoints that Egil hadn’t considered.On his way out, Egil said, “You should put in a request for promotion, lad. You’re too smart to be burning your eyes out all day.”Bors bristled, too aware that a born-Upstart his age would have been promoted by now. “I supervise my quadrant of Drudge minders,” he said, as if that made a difference.“It’s because of your birth-Level, isn’t it?” Egil glanced around quickly, then lowered his voice. “Sometimes it’s shameful how much these things matter.”Bors’s temples were starting to throb. “I don’t question the decisions of my superiors.”“Of course not.” The interrogator smiled disarmingly, as if to take the sting out of his earlier words. “I’m sure your merit will be recognized soon enough.”Later on, when Bors reported Egil to the director and Karishkov, he would claim to have only a short acquaintance with the traitor. That was a lie, one of very few he’d ever allowed himself.In fact, he and Egil had been talking by then for nearly a year, usually in the dead of night when Bors was the only person minding his designated screen quadrant. Egil also kept late hours. He’d drop by with tea or rice cakes and praise Bors’s work ethic, and then he’d lean on Bors’s desk and chat.Bors was glad of the company. At first, he couldn’t tell Egil was tempting him toward sedition, because the interrogator knew how to play on Bors’s weaknesses. His favorite tack was insisting that Bors shouldn’t be ashamed of the manner in which he’d been Raised.“So, family connections were involved. Do you know how many of the Upstarts in this Sector got where they are because of family connections? If you emptied the building of everybody who has reasons for being here besides personal merit—” Egil made a sweeping gesture with his tea mug— “we wouldn’t have a government.”He told Bors stories of high-named Admins and other officials who didn’t deserve their positions—barely functioning sap addicts, people who couldn’t do simple math, people who visited the gym and the Sanctioned Brothel during work hours. Bors listened open-mouthed.Then one day Egil showed his hand by saying, “Fellows like us can’t be kept down forever.” It was the presumption of the “us”—as if they were the same!—that made Bors realize Egil was working on him, chipping away at his trust in the system. The man was a dangerous renegade.He still needed proof, so he watched and waited and let Egil court him ideologically. He expressed outrage when Egil expected it and pretended to be cautiously receptive to reform. Meanwhile, he found ways to chat surreptitiously with some of Egil’s Laborer subordinates. That was how he learned that Tilrey Bronn had been interrogated off the books, and that the video of Celinda Valde’s exile had mysteriously vanished.Once he’d collected all the evidence, Bors took it to Karishkov, and things proceeded quickly from there. Wearing a wire, Bors coaxed Egil into admitting he had intimate knowledge of a Dissident movement, if not direct contact with one. Laborers are starting to figure out that following the rules isn’t in their interest. Do you realize how many of our assets in Thurskein and Karkei are actually working with shirkers? That one rhetorical question was enough to condemn the man.But it had all happened way too fast, and Karishkov and the director had bungled it. Too eager to punish Egil himself, they’d insisted that his claims about shirkers lurking in the cities were hot air, pure fantasy. And Egil’s precious intel—he obviously knew more than he’d said—had disappeared into the Wastes with him.As he pressed his index finger to the keypad outside his apartment, Bors admitted to himself that sometimes he missed Egil for reasons besides that intel. Most of his fellow Upstarts treated him like his Laborer blood was a communicable disease. Ranek had never done that.It was a strategic show of equality, Bors reminded himself, not the real thing. Upstarts, even when they were shirkers, would never see the Drudge-born as their equals. Maybe Egil had spoken to Tilrey Bronn the exact same way.The one-room apartment stank of cleaning fluid and boasted few personal touches. Bors rarely did more than sleep there. And he should sleep now, but the new Thurskein lead and the Egil lookalike had set his nerves jangling.He changed into sweats, brushed and flossed his teeth, and put drops in his eyes. He drank a powder that was supposed to relieve stress. Then he turned off all the lights and brought his handheld to bed.His shadow stretched across the ceiling in the eerie screen-light as he opened an encrypted folder. He hit “Montage 1,” and a video file opened, spilling images over the screen.They were short clips from surveillance footage that Bors had copied and pasted together. Here was the corridor outside Councillor Gádden’s office in the Sector. The door opened. As the Councillor stepped out, he paused to ruffle the hair of his secretary, who was half-visible through the cracked door—a pair of shoulders and a grin.Here was the R11 garage near the Sector roof. A car stood idling, trembling and steaming. Bronn opened the door for the Councillor and steered him inside with an almost possessive hand on the small of his back.Since Bors had no authorization to surveille Bronn in private spaces, the clips of his interactions with the Councillor were all chaste. A hand-clasp outside the steam room; a kiss on the cheek in the Restaurant. Nothing they wouldn’t have allowed the world to see. And yet, when you pieced all those moments and gestures together, an intimate tale emerged.The way they glanced at each other in groups, as if checking in; the way they sat when they were alone together; the fleeting smiles they shared—all these things suggested two hearts and wills moving in synergy. Bors knew something about whores, and these two men were not a whore and a patron. They were lovers.What would Gádden do if Bronn turned out to be a traitor? The Councillor was a man of merit, an exemplary public servant; Bors could tell just by looking at him that Dissidence would never tempt him. Gádden would be devastated. But for now, oh for now, how happy they were—He slid his hand inside his sweatpants and began jerking himself off, staring at the frozen image on the screen as the montage ended. He felt Bronn’s hand on the small of his own back, warm and firm and guiding. He felt the softness of that dark-golden hair between his fingers.With his free hand, he clicked open an image file.This was his most prized possession, though he’d never have admitted so to Karishkov, who had sent it to him as a joke. This should satisfy your hard-on for Bronn, lad, the Councillor had written. Verán had these made back when he was the Island’s kettle boy, and we all passed them around.The image was pornography of a tasteful kind, Bors supposed. He knew nothing of art, but he could see the artfulness in the way the photographer had posed Bronn by a tall window, so his body was half lost in the blue interior dimness and half splashed with the bleak radiance of a snowy day.Though younger, Bronn was clearly recognizable in the photo. He was naked, of course, but only partly turned toward the viewer, so you felt like you were catching him unawares as he gazed outside with a look that was—wistful? Sad? Shut-down? More than anything, to Bors, the boy looked trapped.He moved his hand faster on his cock, close to coming now, as he imagined sidling up behind the sad boy in the photo. Running a hand down the muscled flank, smooth as marble. Pressing his lips to a jutting shoulder blade. Cupping an ass-cheek.Then the boy would come to life and turn around, into Bors’s arms, and the boy would wrap his own strong arms around Bors and bend until his hair grazed Bors’s forehead, the way Bors had seen him do with Councillor Gádden. It would tickle, and Bronn’s breath would be warm and healing against Bors’s ever-itchy eyelids, and that baritone voice would whisper in his ear, “Where’ve you been all this time, love? I’ve been waiting for you.”
Bors was pacing the thread-bare carpet of Int/Sec Director Gelmedyn’s office; he couldn’t help it. “Just two ten-days, Fir’n Director. That’s all I ask.”
“I cannot authorize you to surveille Vera Linnett’s apartment,” said Gelmedyn. A tiny husk of a woman with the bleary eyes of a night creature, she appeared to be examining her ramen for defects, lifting and sifting each spoonful before swallowing it. “Not without much better cause, anyway. She and Bronn are probably just fucking.”
“But her record!” Bors pointed at the director’s screen; she’d barely scanned it. “For five whole years, from secondary through University, Vera Linnett and her brother were part of a band of Hargists. They wore incorrect clothing, defaced walls and buildings, exposed themselves to the cold!”
Gelmedyn’s face was half in shadow, because whoever had designed her two-story office had given it yellow mood lighting, in striking contrast to the acres of merciless fluorescence outside. But Bors thought she rolled her eyes as she said, “We don’t concern ourselves with Hargists here. Bored kids acting out aren’t Dissidents.”
“But sometimes Hargists become Taugists, who have a historical association with acts of terrorism.” Bors searched the article he wanted on his handheld—then put it down, realizing she didn’t care. No one ever cared about his research. No one listened to him, and he’d been staring at screens for the past twenty-four hours and his eyes hurt despite the glare-blocking glasses and he just needed this one thing.
He tried to overwhelm her with facts. “And Hargism is hardly a harmless past-time. Eight years ago, Valgund Linnett—Vera’s kid brother—and his friend Angar Lindahl walked three miles straight out of the city. Lindahl died of hypothermia. Valgund Linnett remains in moral rehab to this day.”
Gelmedyn continued to peruse her soup. “That’s a misfortune for the Linnett family, but Vera’s had a clean record ever since. I don’t see anything odd or untoward about her having a little dalliance with her grandfather’s former kettle boy. Frankly, I don’t understand your obsession with Tilrey Bronn.”
“Ranek Egil had long, unmonitored conversations with him! Egil helped Celinda Valde escape, probably to Harbour! Bronn and Valde were friends!”
Bors had to struggle not to shout in his eagerness to shatter the director’s impassivity. She refused to pay attention to any lead that wasn’t part of a long-standing investigation, especially when it came from him. And if he did shout, she would just advise him to get some sleep or some exercise with that patronizing smile that said, Silly Drudge.
Part of being an Upstart was keeping your emotions under control at all times, and he would.
“I’m not ‘obsessed,’” he finished, knowing it was time to cut his losses and go. “I just think there’s ample reason for concern. And if you won’t sign off on audio surveillance simply because the suspect is named Linnett . . .”
He let the words hang in the air like a threat, but Gelmedyn snorted. “Are you accusing me of favoring the high names? I couldn’t care less that we’re talking about a Linnett, Borsha. You’re an exemplary analyst, but sometimes you don’t know your boundaries. Now, please, go home and get some sleep.”
Bors was shaking as he bobbed his head and walked back across the carpet to the door. “Yes, Fir’n Director.”
The door swung behind him, and abruptly he was back in the cavernous, windowless, painfully bright room that constituted most of Int/Sec, surrounded by humming voices, buzzing printers, and screens.
He crossed the central cubicle farm in a daze and veered off into his usual domain: the glittering room covered floor-to-ceiling with surveillance monitors, which everyone called the Blinding Tank. The screens made his eyelids twitch, and he rubbed them, averting his gaze as he trudged to his desk to gather his belongings.
He knew what he’d see on the screens: passages, foyers, tram interiors, cafeterias, common rooms, bathrooms, libraries—virtually every public space in the city. All over Redda, Upstarts and Laborers were going about their business, tracing gleaming paths from monitor to monitor that were probably innocent but might not be.
When Bors was freshly rested and caffeinated, the sight energized him; he imagined he could process terabytes of visual data at a glance and spot the one thing out of place. Right now, though, he wanted to hide from it all. He didn’t even care whether Bronn was back at Linnett’s place tonight. (Bors had lost his bet with himself about that first night, as Bronn had gone home after a few hours, but since then the two of them had had two overnights together.)
Kranik, part of the night screen-minder crew, turned to flash a pretty, mocking smile at Bors. “Who’ve you been after today, Fir Dartán? The kettle boy again?”
“That’s none of your affair,” Bors said severely, gathering his tablet and notes. The word on Kranik was that he’d blow anyone for a vial of sap, which made his lack of respect all the more galling.
Everyone who worked here, from the director to the cleaning crew, knew Bors had been born a Drudge, and most of them probably knew how he’d managed to be Raised. Not through exceptional talent or achievement, as Whyberg decreed, but because his mother happened to be a very pretty woman who was very dear to a high Admin who cared very much about making her happy. And so, although Bors’s test scores were no better than eighty-five percentile among Laborer-born children, he had received the Notification coveted by all of them. And he would spend the rest of his life being second-guessed, envied, and despised.
He didn’t regret being Raised—how could he regret anything that allowed him to be of greater service to the Republic? But he glowered fiercely at Kranik and said, “While you sit here chatting with me, someone on one of your screens could be passing a message that leads to the destruction of a supply depot.”
This was a worst-case scenario; no shirkers had actually blown up anything for nearly a quarter-century. But Kranik smiled again, showing off his full, cock-sucking lips and his dimples, and said, “Of course, Fir. On it, Fir.”
Bors was tired, so he let the thinly veiled sarcasm go.
On his way out, one of the Thurskein analysts rose from her cubicle and intercepted him. “Fir Dartán?”
Her name was Something Glommer; they’d had lunch together a few times, and she’d talked of nothing but silly office gossip. “Yes?” he asked impatiently.
“You’re still looking into the Bronn boy, right? The Councillor’s secretary?”
He came awake all at once. “That’s still active, yes.”
“His name came up in one of my subordinate’s field debriefings.” Glommer handed him a print-out. “One of our assets happened to mention knowing him—bragged about his inside track on Councillor Gádden. Bronn visits Sector Six because his mother’s the Supervisor there, you know.”
Bors did know, and he was tempted to snap at Glommer for wasting his time. “And did the asset say Bronn was doing anything suspicious?”
Glommer stiffened at his tone. “No, but my subordinate didn’t know the right questions to ask. I thought you might want to talk to the asset yourself. You’ll see his data there—Sollentaal, Malkien. We used to use him to keep an eye on Supervisor Fernei, and lately he’s been helpful in rooting out nests of Hargist schoolboys and that sort of thing. I’m going down to ’Skein in two ten-days, if you’d like to tag along and get a face-to-face.”
What’s the point? But Bors nodded, because no lead was too slight to pass up. “Send me your travel data. I’ll make my own arrangements.”
He nearly fell asleep on the tram, only waking before his stop because some idiot raw-boned factory drone, telling his friends a story, elbowed him in the ribs. Bors rose, rubbing his martyred eyes again, and followed the crowd onto the platform. He lived on the outer edge of Ring Four, where Upstart and Laborer apartment buildings overlapped, but he didn’t mind. An inner Ring wouldn’t have felt like home.
One of the strangers on the platform made him pause for a second look. Narrow, dark face; keen eyes—Ranek Egil? No, the jawline was different, and anyway, Egil had gone to the Wastes four years ago. Bors needed to stop seeing him everywhere.
It would have been easier if he hadn’t had to get so close to Egil to trap him. He remembered their first encounter all too well, because it was a day like this one, when Bors was frustrated with everything.
He was not quite twenty-five then, and not yet an analyst; they still had him on screen-minding duty with the Laborers. Egil stopped in the Blinding Tank to order surveillance on a suspect, and Bors treated the junior interrogator with the appropriate deference, suggesting further cam checkpoints that Egil hadn’t considered.
On his way out, Egil said, “You should put in a request for promotion, lad. You’re too smart to be burning your eyes out all day.”
Bors bristled, too aware that a born-Upstart his age would have been promoted by now. “I supervise my quadrant of Drudge minders,” he said, as if that made a difference.
“It’s because of your birth-Level, isn’t it?” Egil glanced around quickly, then lowered his voice. “Sometimes it’s shameful how much these things matter.”
Bors’s temples were starting to throb. “I don’t question the decisions of my superiors.”
“Of course not.” The interrogator smiled disarmingly, as if to take the sting out of his earlier words. “I’m sure your merit will be recognized soon enough.”
Later on, when Bors reported Egil to the director and Karishkov, he would claim to have only a short acquaintance with the traitor. That was a lie, one of very few he’d ever allowed himself.
In fact, he and Egil had been talking by then for nearly a year, usually in the dead of night when Bors was the only person minding his designated screen quadrant. Egil also kept late hours. He’d drop by with tea or rice cakes and praise Bors’s work ethic, and then he’d lean on Bors’s desk and chat.
Bors was glad of the company. At first, he couldn’t tell Egil was tempting him toward sedition, because the interrogator knew how to play on Bors’s weaknesses. His favorite tack was insisting that Bors shouldn’t be ashamed of the manner in which he’d been Raised.
“So, family connections were involved. Do you know how many of the Upstarts in this Sector got where they are because of family connections? If you emptied the building of everybody who has reasons for being here besides personal merit—” Egil made a sweeping gesture with his tea mug— “we wouldn’t have a government.”
He told Bors stories of high-named Admins and other officials who didn’t deserve their positions—barely functioning sap addicts, people who couldn’t do simple math, people who visited the gym and the Sanctioned Brothel during work hours. Bors listened open-mouthed.
Then one day Egil showed his hand by saying, “Fellows like us can’t be kept down forever.” It was the presumption of the “us”—as if they were the same!—that made Bors realize Egil was working on him, chipping away at his trust in the system. The man was a dangerous renegade.
He still needed proof, so he watched and waited and let Egil court him ideologically. He expressed outrage when Egil expected it and pretended to be cautiously receptive to reform. Meanwhile, he found ways to chat surreptitiously with some of Egil’s Laborer subordinates. That was how he learned that Tilrey Bronn had been interrogated off the books, and that the video of Celinda Valde’s exile had mysteriously vanished.
Once he’d collected all the evidence, Bors took it to Karishkov, and things proceeded quickly from there. Wearing a wire, Bors coaxed Egil into admitting he had intimate knowledge of a Dissident movement, if not direct contact with one. Laborers are starting to figure out that following the rules isn’t in their interest. Do you realize how many of our assets in Thurskein and Karkei are actually working with shirkers? That one rhetorical question was enough to condemn the man.
But it had all happened way too fast, and Karishkov and the director had bungled it. Too eager to punish Egil himself, they’d insisted that his claims about shirkers lurking in the cities were hot air, pure fantasy. And Egil’s precious intel—he obviously knew more than he’d said—had disappeared into the Wastes with him.
As he pressed his index finger to the keypad outside his apartment, Bors admitted to himself that sometimes he missed Egil for reasons besides that intel. Most of his fellow Upstarts treated him like his Laborer blood was a communicable disease. Ranek had never done that.
It was a strategic show of equality, Bors reminded himself, not the real thing. Upstarts, even when they were shirkers, would never see the Drudge-born as their equals. Maybe Egil had spoken to Tilrey Bronn the exact same way.
The one-room apartment stank of cleaning fluid and boasted few personal touches. Bors rarely did more than sleep there. And he should sleep now, but the new Thurskein lead and the Egil lookalike had set his nerves jangling.
He changed into sweats, brushed and flossed his teeth, and put drops in his eyes. He drank a powder that was supposed to relieve stress. Then he turned off all the lights and brought his handheld to bed.
His shadow stretched across the ceiling in the eerie screen-light as he opened an encrypted folder. He hit “Montage 1,” and a video file opened, spilling images over the screen.
They were short clips from surveillance footage that Bors had copied and pasted together. Here was the corridor outside Councillor Gádden’s office in the Sector. The door opened. As the Councillor stepped out, he paused to ruffle the hair of his secretary, who was half-visible through the cracked door—a pair of shoulders and a grin.
Here was the R11 garage near the Sector roof. A car stood idling, trembling and steaming. Bronn opened the door for the Councillor and steered him inside with an almost possessive hand on the small of his back.
Since Bors had no authorization to surveille Bronn in private spaces, the clips of his interactions with the Councillor were all chaste. A hand-clasp outside the steam room; a kiss on the cheek in the Restaurant. Nothing they wouldn’t have allowed the world to see. And yet, when you pieced all those moments and gestures together, an intimate tale emerged.
The way they glanced at each other in groups, as if checking in; the way they sat when they were alone together; the fleeting smiles they shared—all these things suggested two hearts and wills moving in synergy. Bors knew something about whores, and these two men were not a whore and a patron. They were lovers.
What would Gádden do if Bronn turned out to be a traitor? The Councillor was a man of merit, an exemplary public servant; Bors could tell just by looking at him that Dissidence would never tempt him. Gádden would be devastated. But for now, oh for now, how happy they were—
He slid his hand inside his sweatpants and began jerking himself off, staring at the frozen image on the screen as the montage ended. He felt Bronn’s hand on the small of his own back, warm and firm and guiding. He felt the softness of that dark-golden hair between his fingers.
With his free hand, he clicked open an image file.
This was his most prized possession, though he’d never have admitted so to Karishkov, who had sent it to him as a joke. This should satisfy your hard-on for Bronn, lad, the Councillor had written. Verán had these made back when he was the Island’s kettle boy, and we all passed them around.
The image was pornography of a tasteful kind, Bors supposed. He knew nothing of art, but he could see the artfulness in the way the photographer had posed Bronn by a tall window, so his body was half lost in the blue interior dimness and half splashed with the bleak radiance of a snowy day.
Though younger, Bronn was clearly recognizable in the photo. He was naked, of course, but only partly turned toward the viewer, so you felt like you were catching him unawares as he gazed outside with a look that was—wistful? Sad? Shut-down? More than anything, to Bors, the boy looked trapped.
He moved his hand faster on his cock, close to coming now, as he imagined sidling up behind the sad boy in the photo. Running a hand down the muscled flank, smooth as marble. Pressing his lips to a jutting shoulder blade. Cupping an ass-cheek.
Then the boy would come to life and turn around, into Bors’s arms, and the boy would wrap his own strong arms around Bors and bend until his hair grazed Bors’s forehead, the way Bors had seen him do with Councillor Gádden. It would tickle, and Bronn’s breath would be warm and healing against Bors’s ever-itchy eyelids, and that baritone voice would whisper in his ear, “Where’ve you been all this time, love? I’ve been waiting for you.”