GUNSLINGER GIRL
"My Name is Legion"
By
Robert Frazer
"All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism"
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Guihono is a middling town in north-eastern Piedmont that you can find upon a broad steppe of land as the Lepontine Alps lap and fold down into smooth green foothills. While really of no great size, Guihono still struggles to puff up its girth, inching out and wriggling every finger of street to cover the whole of the broad terrace where half a dozen streams babble down from the higher valleys and pool together. The river is invisible, though, muffled by a blanket of grey slate and red brick; you can only espy a long line of jet, a damp trickle following the runnel of the grouting, which from the air would be no different from the asphalt roads running along and over it.
It might only be a peculiar trick of light and perspective from that photograph that the comune council has posted up on its website, but you cannot help but see – with a bit of the tip of the head and half an ounce of poetry – that the buildings of the town seem all to look uphill. It is as if the gaze of Guihono's citizens snag on the fast flow of the straightened river running through it, and are spun round, unbalanced, to face back upstream; there, they see the glittering sapphire threads of streams, the brightness of the energy that so moved them, highlighting the contours of the mountains above – and they resent it.
Those mountains do not so much tower over Guihono as an act of conscious will, rather exist in a fundamental set state of grandeur. Looming intimidation could be easily dispelled, countered by plucky determination, dogged defiance and other common platitudes; but the mountains are a print of quiet, unreachable grace, painted on the ceiling of the sky, and people can only paw towards them as they would wave vaguely at the clouds beneath Heaven. Most would be content to leave something at such a long distance – because it is certainly nowhere near in this Italy – as an idle fancy, but Guihono has the dubious distinction of being half a head over the crowd – not high enough to gain any new perspective, but enough for it to be noticed above the parapet. The town is too low for a ski resort and well off the tourist trails, but still close enough to the A4 to send quarrystone and light machined goods to Milan and Turin. Guihono is isolated enough to have established a firm local identity, but close enough to neighbours to feel the need to assert it; high enough to look down on towns in the Po valley, but low enough to feel drowned in the long shadow of the Alps above it; falling into the gulf between the heady cosmopolitan beat of the plains cities and the calm stature and continuity of the mountain towns. Guihono's civic identity has an itch, but not the means to scratch it, and so it can only try to elbow its neighbours aside and make room.
True enough, braced with the clear mountain air, Guihono has a well-deserved reputation for sporting endeavour. Endeavour as opposed to success, it must be said, because the local soccer team can't boast much in the way of silverware – but it's not the winning it's the taking part the counts, right?
Clara yelped as another face crashed against the screen of her shield, the flat head of a sledgehammer studded with blazing eyes and gnashing teeth. The furious roar of distended rage slapped around her shield from the impact, washing over the edge and drenching her in the anger of the crowd – she would have screamed and scrambled back, bodily flung by the weight of the emotional wave, but the interlocking shields of the other riot police on either side of her cuffed her to the line, so that she only felt the clenching pain of tension and resistance.
Soccer games are foci for localist sentiment. This frequently assumes a political character which, fuelled by post-match drinking, comes to be expressed violently.
Her shield was scuffed, scratched and starred into a grey mist by half-bricks and bottles. It shielded her from the sight of the broiling mass of the mob further down the street, limbs moving in and out of the shadow of the mucky yellow sodium street lights like tongues of flame pushing through the choking smoke of a fire on the horizon, but the blistering fury churning in the crowd still burst with missiles that speckled her with the sting of hot ash.
Representations have been made for Guihono's matches to either be relocated or to have spectators banned from the grounds, but these have been dismissed by FIGC as impractical to organise.
If anything, Clara's fogged shield made things worse, smearing the mass of rioters into one congealed, swollen monster that could lurch forward without warning, its awful, broken visage of a hundred ill-fitting bodies bursting through the mist with crushing, rolling girth. Hands and fingers, faces and teeth, all swamped her vision, writhing with frustrated force against the shield, painting it with sweat and blood.
The Guihono comune council has refused to alter the alcohol licensing for shops and tavernas in the town, describing such proposals as misdirected and excessively punitive on fair and open business, instead criticising the police for their lacklustre inability to maintain order.
Repeating her briefing in her head didn't help settle her, it only added yet another voice to stir and froth the incoherent clamour further still. The police were shouting, the mob was bawling, and it was all noise – each yell and scream another blow beating her senseless, regardless of the angle that it came from. She wasn't part of a rigid line penning the riot in – she was just another molecule in the mass, a tiny little thing yawing violently one way or the other to the vagaries of invisible, anonymous forces.
Intense policing in other comunes has prevented disorder from being spread during away games, but unless this is handled with comparably final action in Guihono itself it will only result in the amplification of frustration.
Molecules can be swept away by more powerful interactions, too. Clara lurched unsteadily, caught off-balance as the police line trotted forward, removing the interlocking pressure from her neighbours' riot shields. The muddy whorls of dark colour that churned into a suffocating sludge ahead of her were bridged by a wall of blue and white advancing ahead of her, before everything became fogged as it advanced beyond the sight of her scratched helmet's faceplate. The relief overwhelmed her, a surge of liberated euphoria blossoming out where the press of bodies around her had formerly hemmed it in, pushing away the noises, and the voices shouting at her to move forward and close the gap, in a serene pool – one which darker figures began wading through, mind-blinding rage making them lope through with a hunched gait as they slopped through back into sight.
All law enforcement officers are now required to attend compulsory crowd control training before graduation.
Clara's trauma was not extended further by having to respond to the broken line. Everything streaked into an indistinct blur as her head whipped from side to side, needing to focus on advancing rioters but too fearful to allow her eyes to settle on one. When something snatched at her shield, it was a clarifying help – she had to pull back away from it. When there was pressure against her nightstick, to let go of it was a relieving release of weight.
Then, the concrete block heaved off the roof of the building beside Clara cracked her helmet like an egg, pulped her skull like a fruit, smashed the sight out of her eyes and spared her from witnessing any more.
It wasn't the first dead body that Marcel Lehman, provincial Chief of the National Police, had seen in his life. That had been a trip to the city mortuary at the age of sixteen – as work experience went, he supposed it was more instructive than a week making coffee and clearing boxes out of the back-room. It wasn't even the first policeman that he'd seen dead - that had been a principled officer of the law at Lehman's precinct who declined the Mafia's backhander and received the gratitude of the city for his incorruptibility, in a solemn ceremony held a few days after he had been given another free gift of thirty-seven stab wounds. It wasn't even the first woman that he'd seen dead – that had been a suicide after a messy divorce, with young children and money involved.
Even so, back once again in the provincial mortuary, this body, over all the others, affected him.
Woman Police Constable Clara Lamio, a fresh-faced female not yet twenty-five, now would never be. Lehman, himself well into his fifties, imagined that he could say some words about eternal youth, maintained in the perpetual summer of her loveliest bloom, a warm flower that now would never wilt – but when the colour had been leached from her pallid face, one that he could still pick out from the memory of last year's passing-out parade, and matted her auburn hair into a black sludge, the cant seemed particularly pathetic, the meagre token of consolation, a thin paper chit whose value was not worth the effort of going out to redeem it.
Lehman glanced away from Clara's face, his eyes moving to the tray beside her head. Her helmet rested on it – it was something already scuffed and dinted from substantial use, and several shards of the cracked lid were arranged into neat rows beside it in almost apologetic tidiness, a belated gesture of presentability that was consciously futile, but the mere fact of its effort helped to distract from and blunt the edge of tragedy.
There was a shifting fold of cloth behind the helmet, and Lehman followed the movement, his eyes tracking upwards to the diener, the mortuary technician who had been there to greet him when he arrived in Novara earlier that night. He was relatively younger than Lehman, in his mid-forties, and thin with a bald crown and greying hair at his sides coating his cheeks and jawbone with a thin beard. He wore a green apron over office clothes, and square-rimmed glasses – the bright lights of the mortuary's examination room reflected off of the lenses so Lehman could not discern anything from the diener's eyes.
The diener looked over at Lehman from across the other side of the trolley on which Clara had been laid. "The pathologist won't be here until the morning so there's been no autopsy yet, but while I can't give you a certificate to prove it I can reassure you that there's no other conclusion than massive cranial trauma. If she was not killed outright she would have been rendered unconscious immediately. There would have been no pain." He paused for a moment. "That's a consolation." He added helpfully.
Lehman wondered whether the diener's measured and slow tone of ennui was an attempt at genuine calming sympathy clumsily executed due to the social maladjustment of his ghoulish profession, or a drip of mordant humour, for the very same reason. Either way, Lehman did not want to deal with him at this hour... or in this situation.
"Can you please leave the room for a while? I have to make a few phone calls."
The diener shook his head slowly and gravely. "I beg your pardon, sir, but regulations state that I must remain with an exposed body at all times, to prevent interference with the cadaver."
Lehman scowled. "I'm not a suspect trying to pour acid over fingerprints!" He snapped hotly. "I'm the Chief of Police!"
"Then you will understand the importance of abiding by the regulations that you actively oversee, sir." The diener was unmoved.
"I also oversee your salary review." Lehman intoned darkly.
The diener emitted a long, reedy sigh, as a drowned corpse might when releasing its gas. "Be that as it may, sir, it remains that case that we are in the basement of a stone building with a lot of metal and mechanical equipment in close proximity. You will not be able to find a signal down here."
Lehman twitched, struggling to resist the reflexive instinct to check the bars on his mobile. "Isn't there a landline?"
The diener nodded gravely, as if he was acknowledging the tearful confession of a serial killer. "There is a telephone over there," he pointed to a bulky beige plastic device mounted on the wall at the end of a rank of cupboards, "but it is for internal calls; it only connects to the front desk, the head technician's office, the rear delivery entrance, and the galley."
If it can't serve my purposes, why did you even bother mentioning it? Lehman fumed inwardly. The diener's imperturbable manner projected a mask of outward deference, but beneath it Lehman was sure that he was snickering gleefully. It seemed that, appropriately enough for someone who laboured in the cellars, the diener could only undermine others. Lehman was already off-put by the whole miserable episode and however desensitised the diener might be, to play his games while there was a body cold on the table beneath him went beyond crassness. Lehman was sorely tempted to slap the diener with a summons to a discipline tribunal right then and there – that might tease out a more direct reaction from the odious cur. He hadn't done anything overtly insubordinate, though and as ever it was the curse of the police to be bestowed with great power, but to be bound from using it.
Lehman blinked. He reached down and gripped Clara's trolley, momentarily dizzied by the liberating burst of clarity escaping him. Something seemed to vibrate in him, concentrated like wind whistling through a hollow cut in a rock, providing sight to the other side. He pawed along the bar at the trolley's edge until its corner turned him away from Clara's body, leaving him facing the double doors leading up to outside.
"Sir?" For the first time a high note of consternation interrupted the diener's studiedly neutral middle ranges.
"That will be all, thank you. Please prepare W.P.C. Lamio's body for the pathologist." The rubber draught-seals of the doors were already wheezing shut behind Lehman.
The street outside the indistinct concrete block of the mortuary was fading out of shadow, with the sky painted a violet watercolour by the dawn, dripping colour down onto the kerbs by the road and across the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The air was cold but slowly warming as the day stirred, giving it a cool, smooth texture that wafted past Lehman's cheeks and slipped down his throat easily, like a bolt of silk.
As Lehman walked over to his car, a patch of dye dropped into the pool of ink that was the wall of the building opposite, spreading like a film until it had filled out the silhouette of a man clad in a thick fleece and a woollen hat as though it was the dead of winter. His breath misted in front of him, but that was only because he was so overheated already.
"Chief Constable Lehman? Aggio Montere, Alpine Intelligencer. Do you have any comment about last night's events?"
"I will be making a public statement some point this afternoon – the time has yet to be determined. Further information will be supplied to the press associations later this morning." Having already resolved upon a course, Lehman replied to the buzzing intrusion quite calmly and politely, with an ease that surprised even himself. For his part, the journalist nodded and stepped back, accepting that he was already casting a very long line being the lone figure hoping for a scoop outside the mortuary, and understanding that he was not likely to get more given the circumstances.
As Lehman drove off, he reached across into the glove compartment of his vehicle and pulled out a cheap mobile phone that had been confiscated off of an arrested mugger about six months ago. While waiting at a traffic light he dialled a number from memory, and turned away from the road to Guihono's central police station to amble around residential roads while he made the call.
"...who the fuck is this? It's five-fucking-thirty!" a groggy voice groaned, breathing heavily into the receiver, after the phone rang for a good half a minute.
"Early to bed, early to rise, Costanzo." Lehman spoke with a private smirk.
"Aw shit, Marc—uh, Guiseppe." The voice became distant for a moment. "Sorry, honey, business. Do you mind-? OK, OK, I'll do it in the hall..." More rustling. "Alright, Guiseppe. What have I done wrong now?"
"Well, there's the matter that you've been underreporting the number of migrant workers on your gangmasters' books for three years now, and you have as many as sixteen crammed into each house, which I'm not sure abides by local fire safety ordinances."
"Great, I guess that you want money for that now?" Costanzo spoke with a tired sigh.
"You besmirch my integrity, Costanzo. I make it a point of pride that I have never taken a bribe in my life." Lehman pronounced airily.
"No, you just exact tribute in kind instead of cash. How medieval." Costanzo muttered.
"And as lord of the manor, noblesse oblige leaves me dedicated to the protection of my tenants and clients," Lehman was unfazed by the criticism, "and indeed, that's why I'm calling."
"Oh?" Costanzo's curiosity was piqued.
"Do you know that the Piedmont regional parliament is planning to pass a resolution demanding that migrant workers are paid the national minimum wage?" Lehman changed tack abruptly.
"Eh?" Costanzo was baffled at the seemingly unrelated question. "Yeah, of course I know about it – fucking Reds, ideologues would rather us go out of business and put everyone out of work than yield one fucking point."
"Actually, it's a right-wing initiative." Lehman nodded his head knowledgeably, even though there was only an empty road in front of him with no-one to see the gesture. "The logic being that if the mud-slimes are no longer cheaper, you'll pack them off back to Albania and help redress Italian unemployment instead."
"Then they're fucking idiots too." With what Lehman knew of Costanzo, all the swearing only meant that he started the day as he meant to carry on. "Italians go and get pissed in the taverna once the weekend comes. That's no good to me when peas have to be picked within two days before they spoil. Maybe the Albanians all look like they've been smacked in the face with a shovel and they talk like fucking Neanderthals, but at least I can rely on them to get up in the morning."
"At least you're helping to redeem the Italian reputation with your alertness at this early hour." Lehman said dryly. "Either way, it's coming – so how would you like an opportunity to trim your wage bill?"
Costanzo was quiet for a moment. "Go on."
It came to pass that the National Police received a tip from a proven and reliable informant about a Padanian active-service cell preparing a major operation in the Novaran town of Guihono. The provincial commissioner, Marcel Lehman, protested that he lacked the resources for his DIGOS antiterrorism detachment to properly investigate this concern, and so referred it to other security forces. After a moment's shocked bewilderment that anyone would ever pass up an opportunity to claw a juicy honour to his breast, the Carabinieri, the Finance Guard, and AISI fell over each other to take charge of the investigation. Even the National Forestry Department submitted a proposal on the basis that its officers were underemployed and could support observations. Multiple counter-claims only proved that each organisation would need to transport staff from other regions to establish a taskforce, an implausible proposition in a north that was increasingly fractious and suspicious of outsiders, and so the gem slipped through all of their clutching and grasping fingers to land in the relaxed, open palm of Section One (Public Safety) of the Social Welfare Agency.
Section One spent a fortnight tugging at leads and seeing what they tripped up, establishing a pattern of Padanian movements, and that they indicated that the threat was credible and imminent. After Section One submitted their observational report, there came the matter of arranging an operational response. The Tuscania Regiment immediately volunteered but their involvement was vetoed by the Cabinet, still leery of what people would infer from involving uniformed military units in a situation that they had for years officially dismissed as mere 'criminal enterprise'. If the Tuscania Regiment couldn't claim the laurel, then there was no chance that it would let the pipsqueaks in its little brother, the GIS, dash forward from between its legs; Tuscania's colonel invited several Piedmontese parliamentary representatives to a social function and impressed on them, after their judgement was suitably clouded by a few bottles of rosé, that black helicopters lurking over their constituencies would create dread and anxiety and dissatisfaction and lost votes in an election year. AISI was unwilling to risk exposing its field agents with an action yet was willing to dispatch a private posse to despatch the threat, but cooled on the idea when the Director of the Bank of Italy stressed that he wouldn't release emergency funds to pay for the attack. Strangely APTI didn't have this problem, but nonetheless they submitted no plan – scuttlebutt that the Finance Guard had received a notification from the Mafia through the Carabinieri's ROS that becoming too active would result in an incinerator meeting some of the paper trailing the crucial Neroglotti Family prosecution were strenuously denied. NOCS, the National Police's SWAT unit, would have stepped forward to fill the gap but a health and safety risk assessment concluded that there was a chance that they might experience combat; that would entail an unacceptable risk of injury or use of their weapons.
So that was how Guihono came to be visited by a detachment from Section Two (Special Operations) of the Social Welfare Agency.
Michele remembered one time that he had been skiing. A cable-car sat at an intermediate station would take skiers up to the very top of the mountain, but the attendants manning it would only set it in motion when the gondola was full to capacity. This left him, his then-girlfriend, and a clutch of other skiers all huddling together like penguins in a high wind on the station's exposed metal gantry when the lower lifts had developed technical faults, stopping other people from coming up to meet them. They all resented the attendant, who was probably power-tripping out of jealousy considering his own experience of Alpine splendour amounted to pressing the 'GO' button once every ten minutes or so, but they were too conditioned by social deference to uniforms and stupefied by leisure to have the wit to do more than grumble about it. As he glanced again through his binoculars at the town-house that the Padanian cell had occupied, Michele felt something of a similar sentiment stirring in his breast. The peak, and the prize, extended out before him in impressive array, but he could only bat his hand emptily at a flat and unreachable backdrop until other factors manoeuvred to propel him there.
Luckily enough, this time they did. Michele watched the front door of the town-house click shut, like the turnstile at the base of the cable-car. "That's the last of them" he spoke into his walkie-talkie. "I can confirm that all of the cell members have entered the target building."
The operation moving forward another step towards initiation was celebrated with a sudden chorus: "From the dark end of the street, to the bright side of the road, we'll be lovers once again, on the bright side of the road..."
Michele turned back from the window to discover the source of the noise. Most of the handlers were seated around the table, absorbed in a card game (and from their studied expressions it looked as though they wanted to finish the round before they were called to muster) and Brian was stood facing the wall adjusting the straps on his ballistic vest, standing beside the rank of the handlers' weapons which were laid out on a cloth sheet against the skirting board. Avise was laid out fully on the room's settee, his head against one of the armrests while his shoeless feet dangled over the other, ankles rotating in a swaying beat as he sang to himself.
"Into this life we're born, baby sometimes, sometimes we don't know why, and it all goes by so fast, in the twinkling of an eye..."
"You seem very... insouciant, Mancini." Michele observed.
"We'll be lovers once a-hahahaha!" Avise laughed, not getting up but craning his neck around on the armrest to catch Michele in the corner of his eye. "You were a military man yourself, Pagani, you know how to mix the nine-to-one boredom cocktail. There are only so many interminable hours before missions that you can spend sternly-set in sombre solemnity, fixing your steely glare into the middle distance pond'ring the irresistible hand of fate and the artful mysteries of man's inhumanity to man, before you run out of platitudes to make you feel smart."
"True enough." Michele shrugged in a philosophical concession. He'd seen fellow aviators taking books and crossword puzzles into the cockpit with them for dull cruises on autopilot.
Avise continued to burble contentedly to himself. "Let's enjoy it while we can, won't you help me sing my song, from the dark end of the street, to the bright side of the road..."
Brian curled his lip in quiet appreciation as he caught the tail of the tune. He was pleased that one of his own local heroes had still got soul, but was still surprised at who it resonated with. "I didn't ever plan that that you could be a fan of Van the Man," Brian said as he turned around, "I thought you hated British stuff."
Avise didn't reply immediately, deciding whether or not Brian was casting an aspersion on his character, but settled on him simply being interested in his musical tastes. "Okay, so he sings in English, but Van Morrison is Irish, though."
"Northern Irish," Brian corrected him, "he's from Belfast."
Avise pouted, sour that something he enjoyed was being tainted by association with the tea-drinking pinkie-extended lordy-marms. "Well, that's pretty much Irish. It's even in the name."
Brian physically winced at his partner's insensitivity, especially when it was that exact sort of airy generalisation which contributed to the war with Padania in the first place. "...if you say so." He managed, diplomatically.
Avise did not start singing again, and instead pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and struck up a match to light it. The actinic blue haze of his smoke had just started to bruise the ceiling when Ferro entered the room.
"Hey, Marlboro Man," Ferro called out to Avise with uncharacteristic easy lightness, "time to put your shoes on." Ferro's gaze turned away from Avise hurriedly sucking down the rest of his cigarette and ranged out across the rest of the room as she raised the walkie-talkie in her hand, suddenly becoming more serious. "I have just had word from Petrushka that the alpha team are ready to move up to their start lines." – Michele hadn't heard this because alternate transmissions played on different channels to confuse snoopers – "Once Giada has finished setting up on the roof, and McDonnell joins Allison and the gamma team, we will initiate the operation."
The Section Two presence in Guihono was split between two separate buildings – the handlers and the reserve line of cyborgs were based in the observational position across the street from the Padanian safehouse, but the trio of Petrushka, Kara and Agapita who formed the direct assault unit were positioned in the next block, in a structure that looked over to a rear corner of the safe-house. All three were currently waiting for the attack order in a dimly-lit stairway leading up to the flat roof of their building; each felt the narrow passageway and wondered if this was the atmosphere of a trench before the big push. It felt quite good – the light was soft, the air was warm, the atmosphere was soothing, and the route was direct and clear.
The thought of the approaching battle brought another concern to Kara's mind, and she turned to look down the stairs to Agapita, who was bringing up the rear. As they had had to move around in public to reach their start line, all three of the cyborgs were dressed in ordinary street clothes. Agapita was wearing a light pastel-yellow tube top which clung to her tightly underneath her bare arms (augmented by Agapita's dark shooting gloves), running down to her waist where it contrasted with a deep burgundy short skirt with thick, ruffled pleats so that it looked almost like a rah-rah skirt that a cheerleader might wear. Between the two was a broad brown belt of soft leather, fastened with a silver-coloured buckle; she had threaded several webbing pouches through the belt, and as incongruous a feature you might have thought that they would be, their drab olive colour was actually complementary and fitting with the rest of the ensemble. Agapita had mussed up her normally straight hair, and while she had slipped on a pair of black pumps for the mission, some heeled sandals were waiting underneath a chair in a downstairs room.
"Are you sure that's suitable, Aggie?" Kara ventured.
Agapita looked down and plucked a finger at the elastic of her tube top. "Daniel in the den of the lions, Kara. He wasn't exactly clad in full plate there, either."
He wasn't exactly clad in a kinetic-dispersal gel layer that protected (inedible) polymer-filament muscles either, but Kara didn't press the issue. Feeling a surge of womanly compassion for her sister-cyborg, Kara shook her head sadly. "No, Aggie, I don't mean it that way." Kara stepped towards the perplexed cyborg and put her arm around her shoulder, turning Agapita around and leading her further down towards the stairs. It was only a gesture at privacy – Petrushka's cyborg ears would have heard them even at a whisper – but Kara trusted that the gesture would be understood and honoured. She leant her and Agapita's heads together and discreetly softened the blow with a low, almost sub-vocalised whisper. "Aggie," she began, gently but seriously, "I'm very sorry, but... your bust is really the wrong size to carry off a tube-top well. They're great with a large chest or no chest, but you, erm... fall between two stools. The tightness of the material doesn't give them better shape, it really just presses them down further and deforms them."
"Oh." Agapita seemed a little... perturbed. "Thank you for the, er, correction."
Being able to offer advice on something she did know about helped to fill Kara's confidence, and lead her on towards handling something that she didn't, and the real reason for speaking to Agapita. Kara licked her lips, which felt suddenly dry. "Listen, Agapita... how do you do it?"
"Do what?" Agapita, already put off-balance by Kara's revelations, couldn't see where her sister-cyborg was leading, and so was effectively hooked into continuing the conversation.
The arm around Agapita's shoulders tightened around the back of her neck as Kara became more urgent and insistent. "This. Right here and now."
"What – fight? That's our purpose." Agapita couldn't conceive of anything different. Her life was neatly encapsulated in the statement. "It's our advantage as cyborgs, a blessing really. Everyone sets out to enjoy the gifts they're given in life, but even if our lives are shorter we have the added motivation that lifts us up above sole indulgence and fulfils us with greater duty—"
"No, Agapita!" Kara hissed urgently. She was conditioned too, she understood fully the principles of justification, but her problem was more singular, a sharper, stabbing pain. "This mission. We live for our handlers, to support and defend them, but here we're being deliberately separated from them." The times when she'd been apart from Michele were alarming, a spinning knot of bewildering vertigo, like something had been removed from her body - a sudden shift of weight that threw her completely off-balance and incapable of remaining upright "How can you stand it?"
Agapita was solemnly quiet for a moment. "It's important for strategic development that the second generation demonstrate their ability to operate without close supervision." She then recited authoritatively, before leaning in closer for some more personal detail. "I overheard Mister Croce complaining once that Rico was useless on her own, that even doing a circuit of a hotel got her into trouble." A beat passed. "I thought it was unkind." She remembered to add, apologetically, as the compulsion to assert a generational strength in pursuit of an objective muddied the waters of empathy.
Kara looked pained by Agapita's answer. She knew that, she had been given the briefing as well, but she still felt ill at ease. What was Agapita's secret? Why wasn't she sharing? "But what do you think?" The whisper now grated harshly with a hostile, demanding growl.
Agapita blinked for a moment, struck by Kara's undisguised exasperation with her. It was part of a cyborg's programming to push back against aggression, and as Kara was a friend Agapita turned it into a question instead of a fist. "Do you trust Mr. Pagani, Kara?"
"Of course I do."
"I trust my handler, too. Absolutely. He told me something when I was first starting out, and it's true. I know that he can't look me in the eye if he's watching my back, but more importantly, if he could only depend on me conditionally, only if he was constantly chivvying me along as a voice in my ear, I wouldn't be fulfilling my total dedication to him – I would be inadequate. Besides," Agapita's hand drifted across to brush the round-beaded wooden bracelet and its small cross around her wrist, "Just because you can't see something doesn't mean that it's not there."
(Continued)