# # #
ALICE. In Switzerland.
Edward spent most of Wednesday morning yelling to make sure that Kathy had her fill of him before the holiday weekend, a fact that did very little to support my need for focus and preparation. Barely two hours after the day began, Kathy had resorted to wearing her Bose noise-cancelling headphones, which she'd simply plugged into the phone, and at that point I realized it fell to me to figure out a way to bring his decibel level down to a manageable roar.
Paul came unwittingly to my rescue when he barged in to ask Edward's advice about which potato-based vodka was the smoothest. It was an odd question, but further explanation revealed that there were plans afoot in the bullpen to develop and consume a Thanksgiving meal based purely on alcohol, with Wild Turkey as the main course, potato vodka, cranberry wine, and pumpkin ale as sides, and, most bizarrely, a jar of kosher dill pickles one of them found tucked away in the office kitchen. Popular opinion held that the vinegar in the brine was close enough to alcohol to qualify, and the added bonus of including something green and vaguely vegetable in nature made everyone feel as though cooking had taken place. There was talk of buying a rum cake as well, which would serve as both a representative stuffing and a potential dessert option, in case anyone was still conscious and up for that.
The timely distraction and subsequent debate allowed me to organize all of my notes and the dozens of files I'd built on all things CERN and AliRoot, which I dummy-labeled and encrypted on my laptop in the event that I'd gotten my paws on something that would make anyone doing a cursory search there nervous. A little healthy paranoia had always served me well.
The boys in the pen might have been bored to tears, but I was far from it. In addition to the prep work for Geneva, I was juggling three stories and trying to work out sit-downs for a piece on new prosthetic legs for soldiers who'd suffered devastating injuries in Iraq.
"Well, I don't think we need to travel anywhere to watch people die a horrible death," Edward informed me when he dropped by my office shortly before lunchtime. "If they really go through with this, we should put a call in to Roosevelt Hospital's ER and have them on standby with extra stomach pumps."
"Even smart men have the stupidest conversations ever when they're bored. Why this went from idle speculation to being an actual thing with them, I'll never understand."
His face was sad as he regarded me. "How can you not get it? It's like Mount Everest for them now. They need to do it, because it's there. See, this is why men always find the cool stuff; we're compelled to go out and look for it. If Christina Columbus had been the captain of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, she'd have made it as far as Barcelona and then been distracted by nice shoes. Women aren't natural explorers."
"We're not natural morons, either."
"Point taken," he conceded, ever fair. " Are you packed? I'll bet you're packed."
"Of course I'm packed. Well, except for what I need from here. Are you packed?"
"I'm always packed, Isabella. Wow, that was unworthy of me. Forget I said it. All that quality time with Paul appears to have undermined my ability to throw heat — I'm momentarily sans zing. Let me just go back outside and start a fight with what's-her-name, for the exercise."
"Leave Kathy alone. Finish up whatever you're working on so we can get out of here and make it to the airport on time."
He was gone with a wink, closing my door and leaving me to finish dotting my "i"s and crossing my "t"s. I let myself be swallowed up by the job once more, desperate to get everything to bed so that I could leave it alone for a few days, and reminding myself that this was why I never took vacations unless they were forced on me. No matter what I left behind me when I walked away from my desk, it had a habit of hitching a ride in my head and making it impossible for me to relax and forget for more than a few hours at a time. The effort of trying to let it all go was pointless as a result, and I just found it easier to stay where I was. If Alice's happiness weren't riding on this trip to Switzerland, I wouldn't even have considered making the journey.
I worked straight through lunch, and only looked up when there was a tentative knock on my door. "Make it fast," I warned whoever was on the other side, covering the mouthpiece of my phone so as not to confuse the helpful secretary in Colonel Pasquina's office at Walter Reed.
The door opened, and the beautiful face that poked its way into my office almost made me drop the receiver.
"Uh, hi," I mumbled gracelessly, before I recalled that I was still on the line with the secretary. "Maria, you've been fantastic. Thank you so much for everything; do you think he can call me back on Monday? Great. You, too. Have a terrific holiday. Thanks. Yeah." And with that vague, rushed close, I ended the phone call, putting the receiver somewhere in the vicinity of the base of the phone as I took a breath and looked up again to greet my visitor in a hopefully more poised fashion.
"I'm sorry," she apologized, a slight crease forming between her flawless tawny eyebrows. "Your secretary was away from her desk, and I thought maybe I'd just...but you're obviously very busy. I just wanted to say hello, finally." Her words were apologetic, but her expression left no doubt that she wasn't the least bit sorry about risking whatever she needed to risk in order to see my face up close.
"No, hi, of course. Please come in. It's very nice to meet you."
The door opened wider as she slipped into my office, and I peered hopefully behind her to see whether or not Edward would be joining us, but he was infuriatingly nowhere to be found.
"Oh, crap," I whispered, not knowing what to say next, or how to say it. Her eyes twinkled and she fought to keep her mouth from forming a sympathetic grin.
"Yes, 'oh, crap' indeed," she repeated, still battling a smile. "I know I've seen you before, but I don't think we've ever actually been introduced. I understand you prefer 'Bella', is that right?" I could only nod in response, like the bobbing block of wood I'd apparently morphed into the moment she walked through the door.
"Perfect. Bella it is, then. And please, call me Esme." She settled herself into the much-used chair in front of my desk, crossing her legs and putting her purse on the floor next to her but still clutching a white paper bag with the fingers of her right hand.
"Is...does Edward know you're here?" If he'd known and left me all alone to face this, he'd be paying, and paying dearly.
She shrugged; on her, the action looked elegant. "I thought I'd come find you first. I love my son, but he can be a little slow to cough up interesting details. I'm hoping that's not a reporter thing," she said, shooting me a look heavy with significance. "In any event, since my husband tells me we're no longer having the Thanksgiving meal I've been carefully preparing for the better part of the past week, I thought I'd bring over a few turkey sandwiches. This way, I can at least tell my friends that I had a holiday meal with you. They don't have to know the awkward particulars." She offered me the bag, and my rumbling stomach thanked her in ways my hogtied mouth had yet to figure out how to do.
"So, Bella...care to tell me what's going on? All I've managed to get out of Edward is that the gossip columns weren't making up the fact that you two kissed over dinner at Alto. I don't want to pry—unless, of course, you don't mind if I do—but I'm naturally a bit curious now, because he hasn't brought a girl over for dinner since his sophomore year in college, and it was pretty obvious what that situation was all about." And then she snorted, and there was nothing even remotely elegant or ladylike in the action. It was in that moment I realized I could really love her.
"Uhm, I'm not really sure I should be—," I started to say, but Edward's sudden appearance in the doorway made me swallow the rest of the deflection.
"Hello, mother," he greeted her, his Seinfeldian voice so full of sarcasm that I was amazed the words didn't dent the carpet as they exited his mouth. "How nice of you to drop by and snoop around behind my back."
"Don't be so dramatic. I'm snooping right in front of you," she grinned, then stood briefly to give him a kiss on his cheek.
Edward and his eyebrows addressed me. "Feel free to completely ignore her. You have my enthusiastic support. And you," he said, turning back to his mother. "How long were you skulking in the hallway, waiting for Kathy to leave her post?"
"Almost twenty minutes. I was about to call Leslie in Victor's office to work out a reason for her to go up there," she answered without hesitation.
"You have no shame. It's something I usually thank you for passing along to me, but in this particular case, it's inconvenient."
I cleared my throat and shot for the distant moon. "I'd love to continue this conversation, but I really do have some work I need to finish here. Do the two of you maybe want to go have a nice mother-son catch-up? I'm so sorry - I need to finish this before we leave today."
"Nice try. Polite. Thoughtful. Completely ineffective." She was really smiling now, half-apology, half-mischief, a powerful echo of the man she raised.
Edward sat down next to her with a huff. "Fine, we'll give you five minutes, and I'll even cut to the chase just to spare us all the agony of your kid-glove inquisition. Is there a sandwich in the bag for me too, or did you only come prepared for one victim?"
I passed him the extra sandwich while I watched the two of them exchange a complicated series of eyerolls and headshakes.
"Ready? Yes. About a month ago. We're not sure, but we'll let you know. Dinner, out, when we get back. That's classified. That's also classified. No, you can't, and very much so."
I only hoped that the series of answers he'd given her matched up with the series of questions I assumed she would ask if given the chance to. She seemed satisfied enough. My sense of things was that she was every bit as casually dangerous as her son could ever be, and that I'd be wise to watch my step around her.
"Do I want to hear the other side of that exchange, or should I just go along with it?"
"Depends," he smiled at me. "Have you had a complete personality transplant at any point today? If your answer is no, just go along with it."
Esme Cullen sighed and rose from the chair. "You are an unhelpful person, Edward. Next Wednesday, then. Le Bernadin, so your father can have his escolar and say hello to Eric. Seven-thirty, and please, please don't be late." She extended her warm right hand across my desk, and I grasped it with my own. "Whatever it is you're doing? As far as I'm concerned it's right up there with fishes and loaves. I'd give you my firstborn, but I'm pretty sure you've already got him."
"I'll walk you out, so I can tell you all about how unhappy I am with your end run. Say goodbye to the nice lady you won't be bothering again without previous warning, Mom."
She completely ignored him and continued to hold onto my hand. "It was the greatest possible pleasure, Bella. I'll see you next week. I have a feeling you and I are going to get along very, very well. In fact, I'm going to make sure we do." Her eyes, a more muted color than her son's but no less perceptive and penetrating, met mine, and in them she showed me all the joy and hope and gratitude she wouldn't express in front of him.
Esme walked out ahead of her son, who turned toward me and waved his hands in front of his face as a sort of "you didn't see anything" disapparation gesture, making me laugh and exhale with relief.
It wasn't until we were settled into our first-class seats on SwissAir 47 that I broke and asked for just a hint about what it was he'd confirmed to his mother.
"Just give me one. The last one, maybe. What was 'very much so' all about?"
He reached across the blonde wood partition to grab my hand. "She wondered whether it was serious, and it is. Very much so." My arm bent at an awkward angle as he raised my hand to kiss my palm, and I realized that he could have broken my arm clean off in that moment and I wouldn't have cared a bit.
"Serious?"
"Seriously serious," he confirmed, his eyes telegraphing the fact that he didn't consider the moment to be a good one to get into anything really heavy. "I'm thinking of giving you the password for my iTunes account."
I kissed his hand in return, my heart full of what hadn't been said, but what was already known all the same. "Whoa, baby steps. And if I haven't said it yet, thank you for being on this plane with me."
"Are you kidding? Mystery and potential danger on foreign soil? It's like you knew just what to get me for Christmas." He shifted in his seat and grumbled. "First class sucks. You're too far away."
While it did suck that he was separated from me by an assortment of partitions and screens, it was also amazing, and I finally understood why the tickets in that part of the plane cost thousands of dollars. I dozed off some time after the dinner of pan-fried fillet of John Dory served on actual china and chased with a Toblerone trio, only waking up briefly when Edward reached over the partition to turn off my reading light and tell me that I should recline the seat into the full flat bed. I might not have been fond of getting away from it all, but there was no denying that getting away in high style made it infinitely more pleasant.
Brilliant winter sunshine blinded us as we made the short journey from the airport to Geneva via taxi, passing through the clean, crisp streets of the pretty mountain city before we arrived at the Hotel D'Angelterre on the Right Bank of Lake Geneva. The Jet d'Eau sprayed chilly water five hundred feet into the air for our visual entertainment, but we were far more interested in speeding through the check-in process and heading up to the room to shower and change for our trip back out to CERN.
I wrinkled my nose when Edward stepped out of the bathroom. "Is that the same shirt you were wearing in Grozny? "
He nodded. "I did have it washed, you know. I love this shirt. It's my lucky shirt."
Battling the urge to roll my eyes at him, I tucked several bits of paper with details about everything Alice could remember from the dream and some maps of the lab into the inside pocket of my blazer, gave some notes a final, frantic glance, then grabbed my cell phone and stuck it in my shoulder bag, where it joined an assortment of Euros and my passport. "Are you ready? If we leave now, we'll still have some time to poke around like tourists before we need to meet up with Castiglione."
"I'm good." He shrugged on a rumpled olive-drab canvas jacket, patted his pocket to make sure his passport was there, and popped his aviator shades on his face. "God, you're so tense. Loosen up. This is the fun part. Let's go save the world." Grabbing my hand, he pulled me out of the hotel room and down to the lobby, where the helpful doorman flagged down a taxi for us.
The CERN compound was enormous, a huge wooden globe-shaped structure greeting visitors to the place like the Orb of the Unknowable. The taxi dropped us off at Building 33, and we shuffled along with the rest of the curious tourists, picking up literature before we made our way back outside and across the Rue Meyrin to the Globe, where we wandered through the eerie "Universe of Particles" exhibit.
"This is thoroughly boring," Edward murmured, standing behind me while we waited our turn to view the screen at the next portion of the exhibit. "Danger factor zero. Let's find the clock guy and get to work."
We abandoned the Globe and made our way back to the reception center, where I asked the well-dressed man behind the cherrywood desk if he would ring Castiglione's office for me. Edward walked around the circumference of the vaguely-Aztecan inlaid floor art. "Is it meant to be a planet? Is it a particle? Is it a sign to the aliens that this is where they need to land? What?" he was muttering, and I begged him to take his energy down a notch or twenty, because I needed him to look completely disinterested.
The man behind the desk called us over to issue visitor's badges and yellow hardhats, and we were made to surrender my bag, any cell phones we were carrying, and our passports. I was seriously pissed off about that, but Edward merely shrugged and tossed his passport and phone at the guard, who then added insult to injury by wanding us to ensure that we weren't carrying anything suspicious or dangerous. "I imagine we're not going on the standard visitor's tour. It makes sense that they'd want to keep things confidential. Cheer up—we get party hats." He rapped his knuckles on the top of my hardhat, earning himself an elbow in the ribs.
"You need to look bored. Pretend that the conversation is the least interesting thing in the world."
"Consider it done, because I'm sure it will actually be the least interesting thing in the world." The left corner of his mouth lifted slightly. "You look amazing in that hat. We should absolutely steal it when we're through here."
"The hat turns you on?"
"Yes, the hat turns me on."
"Hmm." I was forced to laugh at him then, and it served to loosen me up a little bit. His hand came up to rest on my shoulder, and he shook it lightly, a reminder to me to chill out.
"Ms. Swan?"
Our nonsense was interrupted by a frail young man in a white lab coat. His sparse beard was unkempt, making him look like a Deadhead grad student, but his steel-gray eyes were deep and sharp. I nodded at him and held out my hand, which he took briefly into his own before dropping it and moving back a pace.
"I'm Felix, of Dr. Castiglione's team. If you and your guest will follow me, I'll drive you over to 3293. It's where the offline project lives."
"Oh," I said, surprised. "It's a nice day. I'm okay with walking." My father's voice automatically entered my brain whenever a stranger offered to drive me anywhere.
Felix showed me his teeth, but it would have been unfair to call the expression a smile. "It's some kilometres from here, actually. It's also in France, on the other side of the border. Let me assure you that driving is the best way to reach the building."
I glanced at Edward, whose whole face was saying "why the hell not?", so I nodded and we followed Felix out to his ancient navy-blue Peugeot. A momentary and entirely silent debate about which one of us would sit in the front seat of the car followed, after which Edward folded himself into the economical space in the back while I rode shotgun next to the hippie genius.
"Won't we need our passports if we're crossing the border?" I asked him as we pulled onto Meyrin.
His eyes found me a little too quickly before they returned to the task of scanning the road. "It won't be a problem. The Schengen agreement eliminates the need to show your passport when you cross the border."
"Road trip. Excellent," Edward chimed in, doing his best to look like an idiot. Under different circumstances, I'd have laughed at him, but the realization that we were about to cross into another country without our passports was more than a little unsettling.
The small guard station bore the flags of the nations it straddled, and the agent of the Douane who manned the post merely waved us through after Felix showed him a small green card, which he then replaced in the frayed visor over the driver's seat.
Building 3293 sat in the middle of a nondescript collection of squat office buildings and what looked to be light-industry warehouses. The only indication that we were entering a secure facility was the barbed-wire fence surrounding the compound and the guard at the gate. Felix parked the Peugeot and led us to the building's entrance; it was unlocked, and we simply strolled right in.
The offices themselves were disappointingly shabby, and nothing about them screamed "scientific innovation". People of every sort and description drifted up and down the dimly-lit hallways, all apparently focused on whatever task they had at hand. Felix was clearly a man of few words, as he hadn't said a thing to either one of us since his dismissal of my passport concerns. Although I was tempted to ascribe his silence to geeky shyness, he seemed rather to be anxious to be rid of the burden of bringing us to his boss.
We finally halted in front of a door that was slightly ajar. Felix pushed it open and gestured to us that we should precede him, so I went through and Edward followed me.
The man behind the meticulous desk was unexpected in an entirely different way from Jacob Black. I'd read whatever background I could find on him before we left New York, but there wasn't much beyond a brief biography on the CERN website and a list of the manifold awards and degrees he'd received; he was an acknowledged pioneer in his field, and any reference to him invariably included some mention of his visionary management of ALICE's data collection, which was unlike anything anyone had ever before attempted. His genius was intimidating, and I was grateful that I didn't know too much about him before our phone call, because I might not have even tried to get over with some lame tech jokes.
It was difficult to pinpoint his age, but jet-black muttonchop sideburns crawled along his jawline, and his hair (what there was of it) was slicked back with some sort of oily pomade. He wore coke-bottle glasses and was painfully thin, but dressed in a black lurex shirt and the tightest black slacks I'd ever seen in a professional environment. A dark green tattoo peered out over the top of his wide, sharp collar, and a single dark teardrop of a jewel swung from his left earlobe. He wouldn't have looked out of place at a dive bar in the East Village, which didn't disturb me in the slightest, but there was something about the air he wrapped around himself that set me instantly on my guard.
"Aaaah, Isabella. What a pleasure," he murmured as he stood to greet us. Felix evaporated from the room, closing the door behind him.
"Doctor Castiglione. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice," I replied, trying not to flinch as I stuck my hand out to meet the paper-thin skin of his cold, white fingers.
"Oh, please, call me Aro. We are friends, after all, aren't we?"
We weren't, but he didn't need to know that. "Of course. Aro. And my friends call me Bella. Speaking of friends, this is Edward, my colleague."
"Hey," Edward said, offering him his hand. "I'm Edward. Nice digs. So, this is where the magic happens?"
Aro's eyebrow arched in irritation. "We're scientists, not wizards. I'm not sure what you mean."
"Ignore me. It's a stupid American expression. Science isn't really my gig; I'm just here for the fondue and the meatballs."
"Meatballs are a Swedish thing, Edward. Sweden, not Switzerland."
"Ah," he nodded, and judging by his behavior, I'd certainly have thought he was as dumb as a shoe. "Okay. Sweden. I get them mixed up. The cheese thing is real though, right? I'll just shut up now and let you people do what you do."
"Are you a reporter as well, Mr., erm, Edward?"
Edward shrugged. "Yeah, but I'm new to the broadcast game. Bella here took pity on me, because she knows I don't get out much."
His infinitesimal curiosity in Edward apparently satisfied, Aro turned back to me, shrewd eyes calculating the measure of my involvement with my colleague. Our meatball exchange made it look as though I found him stupid, and while the outside of me was focused on moving forward with our meeting, the inside of me was applauding the neatness with which Edward made himself look harmless and made us look platonic in a few simple sentences.
"Well then, let's begin. We can start with the server, if you'd like. Follow me." And with that, he turned his back to Edward and completely ignored him for the rest of the tour. Lightly grasping me under my left elbow, he steered me out the door, launching into an explanation of Aliroot that left me scrambling to respond appropriately.
Every moment I spent in Aro's company only served to further convince me that there was something not quite right about him. He was punching the glass that covered my instinct meter, and a covert glance at Edward let me know that he was equally disturbed by the man. It was nothing in particular about him; rather, it was sort of...everything, from the way he moved his hands to the way he moved his mouth. He frequently smiled at me, but the smile hinted at motives beyond merely introducing me to his programming prowess.
"How many engineers are on staff to analyze the data you're collecting?"
We'd left the server facility and crossed over to the ALICE control room, a replica of the far larger LHC control room elsewhere on the CERN campus.
"Oh, Isabella," Aro sighed. "There is far too much data for the staff on hand to process. I've designed a protocol to disseminate data in individual packets to laboratories around the world. Everyone gets a little bit to work on, so that we're not charged with the task of doing it all ourselves. Many hands make light work."
"Oh, okay. And then the project heads at ALICE get the analyzed packets back so they can coordinate it and reach their conclusions?"
He tilted his head at me. "Well, yes, but only after it's passed under my review. I wouldn't want them to waste their time chasing someone's shoddy work, most especially when they haven't bothered to familiarize themselves with the protocol."
And that sent up a huge red flag for me; in essence, everything that ALICE was doing depended solely on how the man next to me interpreted it. Hundreds of people working with billions of dollars' worth of equipment, and in the end, Aro controlled it all, because information was the balance of power in any enterprise this large and complicated. Lord Acton's quote about absolute power corrupting absolutely echoed through my brain while I watched Aro fiddle with a set of keys, trying to fit one after another into the lock of the door in front of us. He kept everyone in the dark by feeding them only a portion of the picture. That had to mean something.
"Pezzo di merda," he swore under his breath, then turned back to me. "My apologies; the state of our art as it relates to the actual structure of this place is abysmal. Will you excuse me? I need to call maintenance. If you'll wait here for me, I should be back in a few moments."
"Of course," I responded, then waited until he'd disappeared down the end of the corridor before turning toward Edward, who whistled softly through his teeth.
"Whoa. Goosebumps, and not in a good way. He's like Dr. No's creepy goth brother."
"I know. Alarm bells all over the place," I agreed, then growled in frustration. "I wish we knew what the hell we were looking for. Whatever it is, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out he's in the middle of it, or knows something about whoever is."
"As much as I hate to say this, I think we need to split up. You stay here with him; I'll make myself scarce and see what I can find."
"You know even less about this stuff than I do. What good would it do for you to stumble around in the dark like that? You don't know where you're going, and you don't have any way to get where you want to go, anyway."
"Well, you've got several excellent points, there," he admitted, unbuttoning his frayed button-down collar. "But we're here, and it's not exactly around the corner from where we live, so we might as well have a good look around." His fingers fished around under the shirt collar for a moment, then reemerged with several small, white objects. "Plastic lock picks," he explained with a grin. "They never check the shirt collars."
"Ah, that explains the luck involved in this lucky shirt," I grinned back. "Wait — take these, since I have a guide." I handed him the map printouts I'd shoved into my pocket when we were in the hotel room.
"Brilliant. Are you going to be okay here? I'm not crazy about leaving you with Captain Creepy."
"Please. Piece of cake."
His eyebrows drew together. "Keep him talking, and stay out of dark corners. If he so much as puts one creepy finger anywhere near you, I'm going to make him cry really, really hard."
"I can take him. Get out of here before he comes back. Meet me in front of his office in two hours. Failsafe is the Peugeot, but we'd have to hotwire it and figure out how to get back across the border. Let's hope it doesn't come down to that. I can't believe I just said that—I sound completely insane."
"You should know that you saying things like that while wearing that hat is really doing it for me. I'm off to steal someone's badge and make a few friends. Be good."
"You too. See if you can find anything about how the data packets are managed. It's the only thing I can think of. Maybe he's taking point and that's how he's communicating with whoever wants to start trouble."
He nodded once, then took off in the opposite direction from the one Aro had taken. Breathing deeply to calm my nerves, I tried to sort through everything about Castiglione that set my teeth on edge. He was too slick to be guileless, and his involvement with ALICE was anything but peripheral. Everything he said was harmless and dull enough, but there was something...
I sounded like a conspiracy theorist. The rational side of my brain was throwing me some major attitude about putting so much stock in a half-assed dream. What if what Alice had really seen was only a power outage? She said everything just went dark. There were no bodies, no blood and no proof of death in her dream. Jake assured me time and time again that nothing they were doing would result in a major or catastrophic event. Would a little black hole or a random strangelet cause the whole earth to disappear? Was it even likely that either a black hole or a strangelet would develop in the first place? Nobody with the slightest bit of real scientific background seemed to think so. If ALICE the experiment wasn't likely to cause destruction, that left either force majeure in the form of an earthquake or other natural disaster, or a catastrophe designed and executed by man.
Albert Einstein once said that the next world war would be fought with stones. Assuming Einstein knew what he was talking about, there was every likelihood that I was placing too much reliance on the threat of the unknown. Big, scary physics events might not be the problem at all, and I didn't know enough about them anyway to stop them from destroying the world if that's what they wanted to do. I refocused my efforts on studying the pixels, hoping against hope that they would lead me to the bigger picture.
When he rejoined me several minutes later, Aro's expression was thunderous, but he quickly smoothed it away and adopted a more civilized expression. "Isabella, my apologies. The incompetents—they surround me, but I've managed to secure what should be a working key for this door. Please, let's continue." He looked past me in some hopeful confusion. "But where is your friend?"
I smiled. "He said something about finding a restroom, but I'm pretty sure that what he really wanted to find was the blonde who strolled past us while we were waiting for you to return. Should I try to track him down before we move on?"
He moved to stand even closer to me. "Oh, not at all. We wouldn't want to spoil his sport, would we? This is obviously quite tedious for a man of his, ah, intellectual bent." His spider hand found my elbow again, and he opened the door in front of us to guide me through.
"Your system is designed with such elegance. I'm curious: is it the possibility of scientific advancement that motivates you to innovate, or is it creation for the sake of creation, in the same way that an artist feels the need to fill a blank canvas?"
"You understand, and there are not many who do," he murmured, his voice much too close to my ear for comfort. "The science is attractive, but so much of it is beyond my ability to control." He patted a server stack with his free hand. "This...this I can control. This answers to me, and serves me. I have one petaFLOP at my command. There are one hundred thousand processors in more than a hundred facilities around the world, all taking the tasks I hand them and returning to me the information I need."
"The information the project needs," I corrected him, and tried to keep any trace of censure out of my tone.
His basilisk eyes shifted to study me all the same. "Yes, of course. The information the program needs. I'm fortunate to be involved in such an exciting project. I only hope to contribute whatever I can to ensure a successful outcome."
"You're far too modest. We can speak freely here, you and I. Without your ability to analyze the data, nothing would ever be discovered."
"I could feign modesty, but it's absolutely true," he laughed. "Tell me, Isabella, what are your interests beyond this? In what ways do you occupy your charming self when you are not traveling across oceans to humor dabblers in these dry arts?"
We were standing in an aisle of server stacks, in plain view of several engineers on the opposite side of the large room; I felt reasonably safe as long as they were in my sights. "Oh, nothing very interesting, I'm afraid. I'm devoted to my work, much like you—although as a general rule, I limit the stories I cover to things occurring in the States. What sorts of hobbies would people like us have time for?"
He tilted his head slightly in mock consideration. "Oh, there must always be time for other things. It's the only way to liberate the mind and send it off to conquer new territories. I indulge myself with a variety of...pastimes."
The way he said it left no doubt that he was referring to something involving significantly less clothing than we were currently wearing, and I schooled myself not to shiver at the thought.
"What does your family make of your devotion to your work?"
I forced out a light laugh, knowing full well what our new agenda was, and tried to prepare myself with a reasonable answer that wouldn't completely shut him down or make him hostile. "Oh, you know. I answer to no one but myself. I'm married to my job."
"Perhaps we can convince you to have an affair, then, and cheat on your passion for your occupation. After all, all work and no play makes beautiful women age before their time."
"You're very kind. It's a pity I'm not based here in Geneva; clearly, this is where the most intelligent men on earth have chosen to gather. It's grossly unfair of you all not to spread yourselves a bit thinner around the globe."
"Isabella, we live in the twenty-first century. Geography is no longer destiny. I have...friends in several countries. It's remarkable what one can accomplish when one is properly motivated."
The look in his eyes was a curious one: it wasn't precisely lecherous, but more acquisitive. Aro was apparently a collector of all sorts, and it didn't necessarily matter whether he was collecting data, or people, or power. He just wanted to have it all. In that moment, I felt less like a woman and more like a souvenir spoon or a stamp in a book. I was a way for him to say "Yes, I have one of those from New York." The realization took some of the pressure off of me, because it wasn't precisely personal with him, which meant that I could play the game from a more removed perspective.
"I'm afraid that technology hasn't quite replaced the real thing in that department," I smiled. "But I have every faith that you'll eventually manage to create a reasonable facsimile. It's at least as important as working out what happened when the universe began, although I can see how the wording on the grant proposal would be trickier."
His laugh was soft and more than slightly oily. "And I can see that you stand in need of some tutelage on this subject. Will you join me for dinner this evening? Let me help you navigate the nightlife of this village. It can be surprisingly sophisticated, if one only knows where to look."
The answer I gave him was noncommittal in the extreme, and his smile let me know that he was far from done with the topic. We wandered on, little innuendos sprinkled delicately throughout our conversation; he took me on a tour of the larger control room, which housed stations for each of the experiments being run on the LHC. Dozens of people swarmed the three circular bays in the room, all staring at computer monitors and large screens showing images of what I assumed were various points along the collider tunnel. I'd read about how large this experiment was, but seeing it first-hand, the size and scope were just overwhelming to me. You could have fit the Brookhaven project into the smallest corner of this operation, and still have had acres of space left over. Science had always struck me as so hypothetical; it was a field of speculation, where academicians debated with one another until someone fell asleep or marks on a chalkboard yielded a definitive answer. Standing there in the belly of the physics beast made me realize that science was a dirty, grimy bloodsport, and that there were things going on that were enormous and slightly dangerous and the opposite of theoretical. All of this was occurring right under the nose of the jaded world, the citizens of which were barely paying any attention whatsoever to the potential of these experiments to change everything they currently accepted as true and real and immutable. If medieval Europe was rocked by the discovery that the world wasn't flat, what would modern Earth make of the discovery that antimatter surrounded them, or that there was proof of other life on distant planets, or that God could be found in the Higgs boson?
Our tour took us through virtually all of the ALICE complex; Aro didn't offer to take me down to the LHC tunnels, and given the vibe he was throwing my way, I couldn't help but be grateful for that. I tentatively agreed to dinner just to keep him happy, but knew that there was no way in hell I'd actually make the date, because even if I weren't completely capable of worming my way out of it, there was no way in hell Edward would let that cozy little tête–à–tête take place without a whole lot of disruptive shenanigans.
Despite my fears that we'd have to jack the Peugeot and make a run for the border, in the end, our getaway was surprisingly peaceful. When Aro and I made our way back to his office, we found Edward lounging against the wall adjacent to the office door, with his hands in his pockets and a thoroughly bored look on his face.
"About time," he huffed at me, but his eyes were asking me whether everything was all right. "It sucks that you don't have your phone on you—I had no way to find you guys, and when I made it back to where we were waiting, you were gone."
"Hey, don't chase random skirts down random hallways, and we won't be forced to walk on without you."
"Married. Waste of time. Are we wrapping up, or is there more touring to be done?"
"I think I've shown Isabella everything I can show her. Here, at any rate." Aro's didn't bother to hide his disdain for Edward, turning to me again and grasping one of my hands in both of his. "My dear, I will call you in an hour or so to confirm our plans for this evening. I very much look forward to continuing our conversation about hobbies."
He raised my hand to his lips, and where Edward's assault on that hand had completely obliterated my senses, this one only served to heighten my distrust of this man and his various motives. He might have been a genius, but every instinct I possessed warned me that Aro Castiglione was up to no good, nowhere.
# # #
A/N - Hi there! Thank you again, as always, for reading and reviewing and recommending this story, and my sincere apologies for the delay on this update; it's been a stupid month.
Littlesecret84 and ciaobella27 read this for me before you do. They're just wonderful.
While you wait for me to get my butt in gear, you should spend time with these two stories: "The Red Eye" by badjujube is an adorable tale of adorable vamp Edward, who is a private detective trying to figure out why the heck he's so interested in young Bella Swan. Did I mention it's adorable? Because it is. The European vampires wear clogs. Also, whatsmynom is making me smile a lot with her "Once More, with Feeling": Bella and Edward, ex-partners in a paranormal investigative unit, are reunited to figure out why people are falling in love in Forks. It's hilarious and quirky and original.