Chelen City: Chapter Eleven, Part Two

 Notes: About to get plotty! yay, I love plot. Enjoy the warm-up ;)

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Eleven, Part Two

***

Chapter Eleven, Part Two

 

They were barely three steps into the ballroom before Kieron said, “Hell, how many of these people have you slept with?”

“What?” Odd question, but…Elanus let his eyes rove over the nearest members of the crowd. “Oh, maybe…ten of them?”

“Out of?”

“The closest fifty or so? Why?” He arched an eyebrow at Kieron. “Are you slutshaming me?”

“No, but I do wonder if I’m going to have to test everything I eat or drink tonight for poison.” Aw, he thought people were jealous of him. How sweet. “Not to mention, I can barely see anything in this crowd.”

“Mm, good point.” Ganians were a cosmopolitan people, but this was definitely a party dominated by locals. Elanus couldn’t see more than two other people of average human height in the whole room. “I would say don’t worry too much about being poisoned, there aren’t many assassins who would try something like that in a crowd of rich people who’d react badly to a mix-up, and as for seeing…” He grinned. “You could get up on my shoulders.”

“No way.”

“Then you’ve just got to suffer through it, ba—”

“Elanus Desfontaines!” And there was Fritz, cutting through the crowd like a fish through water, all his magnificence on display in a tight-fitting red suit with crushed velvet accent pieces in black and gold. He looked like a raceship driver. “At last! I was beginning to think you’d ignored the invitation completely.”

“No, I only wanted to.” They shook hands, but Fritz’s eyes were already fixed on Kieron, who looked nonplussed to be the object of so much focused attention.

“The man in the flesh. What a delight to meet you at last.” When he shook Kieron’s hand, Fritz’s touch was much lighter, almost delicate. What, was he afraid of crushing the poor little guy’s fingers? Elanus stifled a smile. “I’ve heard as much as I could about you, which wasn’t nearly enough. I’d love to join you at the bar for a drink, darling.”

“Thank you, but I’ve got Elanus for fetching me drinks,” Kieron said, settling into his “customer service” tone of voice. It was a tone Elanus loved—patient but curt, with an edge like Kieron would rather be doing almost anything else.

“Yes, but Elanus is going to be quite busy in a moment, whereas I—” Fritz beamed at him and spread his hands wide “—am all yours.”

Kieron glanced up at Elanus, who had just caught sight of a swirling windstorm in the distance. Shit. She was headed this way, fast. Fritz was bad enough—he didn’t need to subject Kieron to Caria before he knew what his own reception was going to be. “Maybe you could bring me something instead,” he said, hoping Kieron would take the hint.

He did, and a moment later Kieron slid his hand into the crux of a very startled Fritz’s elbow. “All right. Show me to the drinks.”

“I’d be delighted to…” They were barely past the first layer of buffering guests when Caria arrived. If Fritz was a fish, then Caria somehow moved like the water itself—she didn’t sidle her way through a crowd, people moved around her instead. The grande old dame of Gania, and Chelen City in particular, came to a stop in front of Elanus.

Even with a hundred years on him she was still half a head taller. Her hair was pure white, pulled into spikes to look like an ancient depiction of a sun or a halo. Her dress was layers and layers of silvery gray tulle, edged with an antigravitational threading device that made them float and bounce in a way that was mesmerizing. Her skin was dyed dark gray, her eyes bore silver lenses to make them shine, and the whites had been polished up to such an extent that Elanus could practically see his reflection in them.

And she was carrying a cane, too. One that probably doubled as four different types of weapons—or seventeen if you were Kieron.

“Elanus.” She tilted her head, scrutinizing him ruthlessly. “What, you couldn’t be bothered to dress up for me tonight?”

“You don’t think I have?” He might be wearing more subdued colors, but this suit was the cutting edge of fashion. The transparent panels were a particularly daring touch, he thought, and matched the pattern in his beard.

“I think you look ready for a funeral, my dear.”

“At least if it’s mine, I’ll be pretty for it,” he quipped back. Caria laughed and put an arm around his shoulders, pulling him in to a hug.

“Not as pretty as your strange little lover,” she whispered in his ear.

Ah, there was the venom, the implicit threat. “Do you really want to do this here?” he asked her in an equally soft tone of voice.

“Do what, Elanus?”

“Talk about what happened on the station?”

Caria stared at him, unblinking for a long moment. Her eyes were truly uncanny like this. If Elanus hadn’t felt so utterly justified in everything he did to Deysan, he might have been unnerved. “We should talk, shouldn’t we?” she said at last, and began to lead him through the crowd.

Elanus wasn’t concerned about Kieron for his own sake—the man was tougher than everyone who saw him gave him credit for. But he would be concerned if he came back and couldn’t find Elanus. He activated his implant and pulled up his positional software, just to give Kieron a map if he needed one, as well as his biometric data.

“Bit of a nanny, is he?” Caria tugged him closer. “I can see your linkage in your eyes.”

“It’s considered rude to abandon your date at a party,” Elanus replied.

“Oh what, and you’d never be caught dead being rude?”

“I’m plenty rude,” Elanus said. “But I don’t want Kieron to start killing people, either.”

“I heard he was quite proficient at stopping a few…unsavory attempts on your life.”

Oh, is that what you heard? Even her phrasing gave him more clues about what she did and didn’t know. “Don’t worry about him, he’ll be all right.” They stopped at a cocktail table encased in a beam of blue light where, miraculously, no one else seemed willing to approach them. Elanus smiled. “A mobile throne of sorts?”

“No less than I deserve,” she replied. “And also resistant to invasive technologies, so it will be hard for someone to eavesdrop on our conversation.”

“They could still read lips.”

“I’m not interested in hiding behind closed doors to speak to you,” Caria said crisply. “I will never give you the pleasure of my undivided attention like that again. What I do want from you is the truth of Deysan’s death. Unalloyed, no softening it, no trying to be kind to me out of some misplaced sentiment. I know how you felt about him and I wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

Elanus’s hackles rose. “And you think you’re entitled to my version of the truth because you invited me to a fancy party and cornered me?”

“I think I have the capacity to be quite illuminating to you,” she replied. “I know many things of interest, to many different people. I promise to share some of that knowledge with you in exchange for Deysan’s final days.”

“You won’t like it.”

“I dislike my ignorance even more.”

Elanus sighed. “If you try to kill me because of what I’m about to say, Kieron will take it badly.”

“Consider me warned.”

All right, then. She was asking for it, and he was going to provide—as quickly and concisely as possible. He wasn’t a monster, after all.

Even if remembering Deysan Moritz and the things he’d considered doing to him made Elanus feel that way sometimes.

Chelen City: Chapter Eleven, Part One

 Notes: New Chelen City for you! It's a party and we'll cry if we want to, dammit.

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Eleven, Part One

***

Chapter Eleven, Part One

 

“I’m not comfortable with this.”

“It was literally sewn to fit you perfectly, I don’t believe it’s not comfortable.”

The cutting look Kieron leveled at him was delicious. “I’m not talking about this fucking suit, although—when did you measure me for this?”

“I’ve had your measurements since the first time you interacted with Catie,” Elanus replied. “A physical scan is part of her self-defense mechanisms. You’ve lost almost three pounds since living here, by the way, and how is it possible for you to eat less now that you’re in a place with the cuisine of the entire Federation at your disposal instead of food that’s been shoved at the back of an industrial freezer in the middle of nowhere?”

“I’m talking,” Kieron said after taking a quelling breath, “about using Lizzie to get to the party.”

“It should be meeeeee!” Catie shouted over the house intercom.

“Baby! Ouch!” Elanus slapped his hands over his ears. “Too loud!”

“Meeeeeee!”

“You’re in the middle of changing your skin! We have to leave in five minutes if we’re going to get to Caria’s building in time! Stop complaining!”

“Youuuu should have told meee befooore, I want to gooooo!”

Lizzie, true to her nature, wasn’t saying anything out loud, but Elanus had a feel/impression/sense in his implant’s connection to her that was a mix of guilt and pleasure. Catie, on the other hand, was static and rage.

“Next time we have to fly to a building in the middle of nowhere, we’ll take you, honey,” he promised. “But we can’t go in you as-is, people would get too curious about a ship whose exterior wasn’t consistent.”

“I hate you!”

“Catie!” Kieron snapped before Elanus could. “That’s cruel and beneath you.”

There was a long pause, then—“I don’t caaare,” she snapped in a softer, more hurt voice. “You hate me.”

“We love you very much,” Elanus said, forcing his voice to be patient even as his brain swung from angry to depressed every other second. “But this discussion is over. Ryu will be here with you if you need anythi—”

Her connection to their implants, and the house system, shut down completely. It was the equivalent of a slammed door in their faces.

“For shit’s sake,” Elanus muttered. “Let’s just go.”

“Yeah. Go. Leave me with the teenage sentient ship who’s on some sort of hormonal bender,” Ryu said caustically from where he was sitting, legs crossed as he used one eye to read something in his implant and the other to look judgingly at them. So judgingly.

“We could haul you to a party of rich, powerful assholes, one of whom wants you dead instead,” Kieron offered.

Elanus sighed. “No more arguments tonight, at least not in this house. We’ve got to go.” He pointed a finger at Ryu. “I know you can’t stop her from doing whatever she wants, but I’d like it if you got physical surveillance on her hangar door. If she’s about to go joyriding because she’s in a snit, I want to know about it.”

“Fine.”

Elanus led the way upstairs to Lizzie’s hangar, bypassing Catie’s door without a glance. Kieron, soft-hearted thing that he was, hesitated there. “Should I try to talk to her?”

“The door’s locked,” Elanus pointed out. “And we really are late. We’ll talk to her when we get back.”

“All right.” They headed into Lizzie’s hangar, where there quieter child was sitting with her door open, lights a warm glow inviting them inside.

“Hello, Kee. Hello, Elanus.”

“Hi, sweetheart.” Elanus slid into the pilot’s seat as Kieron paused to pat Lizzie’s bulkhead comfortingly.

“I’m sorry Catie is sad.”

“She’s mad, honey, not sad.”

“No,” Lizzie said as she began her startup protocols, “she’s very sad.”

Yeah, I know she is. “Well, sad or not, she can’t make every little thing into a production without consequences,” Elanus said, then smacked himself on the forehead. “Shit, I sound just like my father.”

“We’ll talk with her when we get back,” Kieron promised as he sat down next to Elanus. “Promise.”

“You still love her, though.”

Was his heart supposed to hurt like this? “Of course we still love her,” Elanus said, keeping his eyes firmly on the opening hangar door so he didn’t do something dumb like start to cry. “We love both of you. You’re our girls.”

“And we understand why she’s upset,” Kieron added. “It’s been a long time since either of you girls has been out of your rooms, and the first chance you get, she’s excluded. But that’s not a question of favoritism or us punishing her or anything like that. It’s a matter of bad timing, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Lizzie said as she began to hover. She eased out of the hangar and up into the sky, high enough that she’d be safely above any other rooftops or tubes, then turned northeast, away from the city.

“We’re three minutes behind schedule,” Elanus said. “You’re gonna have to crank the speed up, hon.”

He felt Lizzie’s pleasure through his implant. “Yes, Elanus,” she said, and then—whew, that was some acceleration.

Kieron shook his head a little bit, a physical cue he used frequently to reflect that he was forcibly letting go and refocusing. He ought to work harder to hide that, before someone used it against him.

Then again, since the only person who knew what it meant was Elanus, maybe not.

“So, why does Caria Jayde own a home outside of Chelen City?”

“Not a home,” Elanus clarified. “A building. A skyscraper that, yes, doubles as her home, but it’s also the seat of her personal manufacturing and business productions.”

“What does she manufacture?”

“Trouble!” Another cutting look. Elanus was going to hit a record in no time. “She’s in pharmaceuticals, mostly related to Regen but also some more specialty items for those of us with Elfshot Disease.”

Kieron turned to face him. “Really?”

“Quite.”

“So she’s got a financial motivation to suppress any potential avenue to cure it, then.”

Elanus shook his head. “So much more of her funds are tied up in Central System contracts for Regen; she wouldn’t miss the miniscule amount of money she makes for Elfshot treatment. Besides, she doesn’t run any of it herself anymore. Caria has been more interested in entertainment and charity for decades now.”

“So she says.”

“True,” Elanus allowed. “That’s one of the things we’ll need to assess while we’re out here.”

“Great.”

Actually… “Are you…”

Kieron shot him a glance. “Armed? Yes.”

“We’re not going to get in there with weapons,” Elanus said. “A firm rule of hers.”

“It’s not a gun.”

“Kieron.”

“Or a knife.”

“Not the point—”

“Or a garrote.”

“You’re deliberately missing the point.”

“How does it feel?” he asked with a bland smile. “And half the clothing Ganians wear have components that would qualify as weaponry under normal circumstances, so don’t worry about my little extras. No one is going to give a shit about me when there are people walking around with knives holding their hair up and on the ends of their fingers.”

“They’re flare, not knives.”

“Eh, nuclear, nucular.”

Truly, there were times when Elanus felt like he’d never understand his lover.

“We’re getting close,” Lizzie announced. “One kilometer and closing.” And yes, there was the big, ostentatiously lit building coming up right in front of them. It was set in the side of a mountain, disguising its silhouette somewhat, but the lights were a dead giveaway as to its edges.

“Follow the parking procedures she’s broadcasting,” Elanus said, and Lizzie began to slow down. “Let’s get this party started.”

Chelen City: Chapter Ten, Part Two

 Notes: Laying out the lies! And some post-coital snuggling, always nice.

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Ten, Part Two

***

Chapter Ten, Part Two

 

“All right, let me get this straight.” They were sitting together in bed, a tray full of half-eaten snacks between them as Elanus explained where he was at with his investigations. He was also mentally weighing the odds of getting an elbow to the face if he swept the tray aside and pounced on Kieron—it had been a while, and they’d had a very trying day, so he figured he could probably manage to convince his lover he was being charmingly spontaneous rather than trying to distract him from the list of woes Elanus had just laid out.

Kieron’s eyes narrowed, and he raised a spoon from the tray in a slightly threatening way. Or, maybe not. “So,” he continued, uninterrupted, “you think the person who tried to kill Ryu and who orchestrated me going to therapy and probably the person who tried to get Ryu to kill you are all the same person.”

“Or lead back to the same person after going through intermediaries, yes.”

“And you’re not sure yet what this person’s motivations are.”

“I’m sure that their motivations are connected with Deysan.” And, very likely, the “rumors” Deysan had let fly about his magnificent AI technology before blasting himself off to Cloverleaf Station. “It’s got to be someone powerful, too. There have been a huge number of attempted incursions on the house security system, mostly digital but occasionally physical. My existing program took care of all of them,” Elanus added when Kieron scowled.

“What did I say about not including me in these plans?”

“You know these plans, though! You know the security system, you helped improve it!”

“I didn’t know it was actively being tested!”

“You didn’t ask!”

Ooh, that glare—it was deadly. Elanus hastened to restart their earlier line of conversation. “Fritz was one of the parties I thought could be behind things, and it never pays to dismiss him, but after the interview, I’m thinking he doesn’t have quite the breadth of interest to be the culprit.” He made a face. “He seems to really be embracing the prurient route. It’s disappointing—the man was one of the best lawyers on the planet.”

“Is his license still active?”

“Let me check.” Elanus activated his implant, sped through connections until he got to the correct governmental institution, dipped into records—“No. Not since last year.”

“That’s recent,” Kieron noted. “Any reasoning in there as to why? Does it correspond to the beginning of his show?”

“No. He’s been doing the show for three years now.”

“Hmm.” Kieron looked pensive. “Maybe someone is blackmailing him.”

“Why blackmail him into not practicing law, though?” Elanus asked. “It’s always nice to have a lawyer in your pocket. I should know, I have twenty-seven of them, and they’re wonderful.”

“Twenty-seven—what the hell do you need twen—no, stop distracting me.” He pointed the spoon at Elanus again. “Go on.”

“The invitation to the party is from Caria Jayde.”

“Deysan’s sponsor.”

“Yes, and a friend of mine for many years.” Former friend now. “She’s been influential in business and pleasure on Gania for well over a hundred of our years, and while Deysan’s ‘slip-up’ as she termed it was enough to set her back, she would never stay out of the limelight forever.”

“And she doesn’t like you because you brought down her protégé.”

“Apparently.”

Kieron sighed. “And of course we can’t tell her exactly what kind of filthy son of a bitch he was, because we can’t let on any information about the girls.”

“Exactly.”

“Great. And the last one is your ex.”

“Restaria is a lot more than that,” Elanus pointed out. “Xe’s a good candidate for the issues surrounding you, and your Traktan friends.” There was another snarl that Elanus needed to untangle. “Since xe’s in a position of power in the government. But every sort of access can be bought for the right price, and both Caria and Fritz have a lot of money.”

“And this is as narrow as you can make the list.”

“It’s as narrow as I dare, honestly. There are half a dozen other individuals I can think of who have the means to carry out at least some of the probes and attacks we’ve weathered, but the motivations don’t line up as well.”

“Huh.” Kieron picked up the invitation Elanus had brought home. “I assume we’re going to this, then.”

“I ought to, at least.”

“What did we just fight about?”

“It’s going to be very boring!” Elanus defended himself. “Forgive me for thinking you’d have more fun here with the girls!”

“I’d rather be making sure you’re keeping your brains inside your skull, thanks very much,” Kieron retorted. “Besides, I’m specifically invited. So I don’t actually need your permission to show up as your plus-one.”

“What would you do there on your own?” Elanus challenged. “Hold a knife to someone’s throat while you interrogate them about me? Kieron, in this society, you can’—”

“I’d do just enough to capture some attention before faking a mild mental breakdown and seeing who came to ‘rescue’ me from myself,” Kieron replied.

Oh.

“Yeah, oh.”

I really need to work on my emotional camouflage. “Yes, please come to the party with me,” Elanus finally said. “But we’re not taking Ryu this time. He can stay here and look after the girls.”

Kieron raised an eyebrow. “You think that’s a good idea?”

“He has no way of knowing how advanced they are, and we can warn them to play dumb,” Elanus assured him. “I’m not going to take a bodyguard to this damn party. Killing someone in a public setting like this would be a huge breach of protocol.”

“Assassination protocol. Such bullshit.”

“Learn to live with it, babe.” Or at least learn the protocols so I don’t get fined when you finally kill someone and it’s in an unsanctioned way. But that admonition could wait for later. “I understand Catie and Lizzie have a symphony ready for us,” he said, more than ready to change the subject. “Shall we go have a listen?”

“Not…” Kieron shoved the snacks aside. “Quite…” He grabbed Elanus by the collar of his robe and pulled his mouth down. “Yet,” he murmured against his lips before sealing them with a kiss.

Oh, yes. Good idea.