Promissory Note Read online

  Laura sat down. It seemed to be the friendly thing to do. Besides, she did appreciate the coffee. “I really am.”

  “Why? I mean…why you?”

  “Why not me?” she asked cautiously.

  Havel lifted his hand toward her, then let it fall. “Well, look at you. You’re beautiful.”

  Someone sniggered in the far corner and she looked around, surprised.

  The gray-haired man looked up. “You’re not going to get her to dinner with an approach like that.”

  Laura looked at Havel, startled. Then she gave him what she hoped was a polite smile. “You’re very sweet.”

  Havel wrinkled his nose. “That’s what every guy wants to hear, that he’s sweet.”

  “Give up, Havel,” the gray-haired man said. “Ms. Hyland keeps company with Oskar Carey.”

  There was a small silence. Havel stared at her while Laura felt her cheeks burn. “Groundman for the Blues?” he said, sounding impressed.

  “You know who I am?” she asked, directing the question at everyone there. “I didn’t tell you my name.”

  “You didn’t have to,” the gray-haired man said. He ran his hands over the desk then tapped it. On the screen in front of her appeared one of the public pictures of her and Oskar, taken at the arena just after the end of a game. “I remember faces,” the gray-haired man added. “Especially ones like yours.”

  “Hoping for dinner yourself, Amil?” Havel asked.

  Everyone laughed.

  Then the laughter cut off abruptly, like a recording halted in mid-stream.

  Laura heard Havel draw in a quick breath. She swiveled on the chair to look behind her.

  Micah Thorne was standing just inside the door at the back of the room, studying her.

  There was a scowl on his face.

  Laura got to her feet, her heart banging against her chest. “Mr. Thorn?” she asked politely, although she knew it was him. She had studied the public profile 3D on the Forum last night.

  Looking at the real man now, she thought the 3D had failed to capture his true essence.

  He had deep olive flesh and black eyes and hair. She knew his hair was black only because his chin was dark with growth. His hair had been groomed back to a stubble less substantial than that on his chin.

  The scowl hadn’t shifted. His chin was slightly lowered so he could look at her directly, which meant he was looking out from under his brows. It intensified the unhappy expression.

  Laura cleared her throat. “My name is Lauressa Hyland. You have a marker of mine that I need to discuss with you.”

  The coders were all watching her with open curiosity.

  “Perhaps we could talk in a private room?” she suggested. “Unless you want everyone to hear the details of the bargain you struck two days ago with Kelly Peck?”

  Thorn studied her for a moment longer. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

  Laura glanced at Havel, flummoxed.

  Havel jerked his head again, this time toward the door that Micah Thorn had just walked through.

  Laura handed him the coffee cup with a small smile and hurried after Micah Thorn.

  Chapter Three

  There was a short corridor on the other side of the door, that led left and right. Thorn was on the left, heading down the corridor. He didn’t look back.

  Laura watched him walking away from her. His gait seemed wrong, in some way. It wasn’t normal, although it was close. It just didn’t seem…balanced.

  She hurried after him, her heart doing the little trip hammer thing it had been doing on and off for the two days since the radiation alert had begun. It was stress and she would have to do something about bringing her adrenaline levels down, later, when she had a moment to spare. Extraordinary stress was never a good thing for her.

  Thorn turned left again, through one of the three doors at that end of the corridor. One of the doors was at the very end of the corridor and was closed. The third door was opposite the one Thorn had stepped into.

  Like the main room behind her, the corridor was plain, default silver, the floor matt industrial black, the lighting indirect, white and blandly bright.

  Laura followed Thorn into the room.

  The first thing that struck her about the room was the size of it. It was tiny. Her bedroom in her small one-person house was larger than this and Micah Thorn was a senior coder. Yes, he had his own office, but this was barely an office. It was a closet.

  The walls were the same default silver, the floor black, the lighting bright and unmerciful.

  There were screens everywhere. That was her second impression.

  The room was lined with shelves, some high and some low. The high shelves had rows of screen emitters and most of them had screens floating above them. All the screens were showing different things. Some of the screens had data in serried ranks that Laura recognized as coding. She handled code all day long so even though she couldn’t read it, she knew what it was.

  The others had pictures and images, some of them moving.

  There was a single chair in the room, in the far corner from the door. It was a big chair and didn’t look particularly comfortable despite the shape. It was a serviceable brown, which didn’t go with anything else in the room. Thorne didn’t sit in the chair.

  Instead, he turned his back against the wall opposite the door and perched on the low shelf there, pushing out his long legs so they were straight. He crossed his arms and looked at her.

  Laura hovered in the middle of the room, suddenly awkward. She pulled out her journal, but didn’t turn it on. Instead she clutched it. Micah Thorne was looking at her with stormy black eyes, as if he could see right through her. Possibly, he could. He had to know why she was here.

  She shifted on her feet and cleared her throat.

  Thorn’s brows lifted. “A chair,” he said, sounding almost surprised. “Here…” He moved over to the big thing in the corner as Laura watched, surprised. Was he going to drag it over for her to sit on?

  He didn’t drag it at all. He bent his knees, gripped the arms of the thing and lifted it.

  Then he turned to bring it over to where she was standing. She heard him give a little hiss as he twisted. His expression didn’t change.

  Laura moved out of the way as he placed the chair back down again. It made a deep grinding sound as it landed, proving that it was just as heavy as it looked.

  Thorn pushed it around to face the shelf and sat back on the shelf again.

  Laura pushed her hair back over her shoulders and sat in the big chair. It was just as uncomfortable as it looked, except that it did support every inch of her body, including her feet. Even the arms were concave, letting her arms rest there naturally, except that she had her journal in her left hand, held against her torso.

  “Do you always sit there?” she asked Thorn. It came out of her despite her intention to keep the conversation polite and business-like.

  “When I have to sit,” he replied.

  When he didn’t say anything else, she let her gaze skitter around the room once more. He wasn’t going to help her say what she had to say by asking why she was here. She was going to have to put it out there by herself.

  There were no personal possessions on any of the shelves, she realized. Except, there was a box on the shelf by Thorn’s shoulder. It looked like faux wood, with deep carvings on it.

  In a room remarkable for its absence of such things, the warm, decorative box was an oddity.

  Laura pulled her gaze away from the thing and made herself look directly at Thorn.

  He was scowling at her again. He wasn’t having any trouble looking at her at all.

  She cleared her throat again. “Did you watch the game last night, Mr. Thorn?” Tankball was a safe subject. She never failed to put people at ease by talking about tankball, because everyone had an opinion.

  “I don’t like tankball,” Thorn said shortly and this time, she had no trouble detecting the anger in his voice.

&nb
sp; For some reason, this interview was going badly and Laura couldn’t figure out why. Was it because this was Micah Thorn she was trying to deal with?

  Regardless, she had to go through with it. She had to try to wrestle an extension on her note out of him, although now she wondered if that was even going to be possible. She was starting to understand the reasons for his reputation.

  It wasn’t that he was anti-social. He wasn’t rude. He had thought to pull the chair out for her, so he was capable of being considerate. It was more that he simply didn’t engage. He refused to.

  It was like trying to deal with a black hole that kept everything contained behind the event horizon. Why didn’t he ask her why she was here, even though they both knew the answer? It would be the polite thing to do.

  He just looked at her, the scowl back in place, his chin lowered, his black eyes steady.

  She had to do this. She had to get the extension. As much as she wanted to get up and leave right now, she couldn’t.

  Laura turned on the journal and looked at the top page of notes, scanning them to place everything in the forefront of her mind once more. “Two days ago, you struck a deal with Kelly Peck, Mr. Thorn. In exchange for your house in the Palatine, Kelly gave you his apartment here in the Aventine and signed over to you possession of a promissory note. My note.”

  She looked up at him, expecting that he would not have moved from his intimidating position on the shelf.

  He was rubbing his left leg. The tips of his fingers were digging into the muscles above the knee.

  As she looked, he snatched his hand away, as if she had caught him in a deeply embarrassing act. His gaze flicked away.

  Laura could feel her own cheeks burning in reaction. She felt as if she had compromised him. This was somehow her fault.

  She began talking quickly. “You see, Mr. Thorn, the thing is, the note still has two years left on it and while I don’t know what you want to do with a houseful of produce, you took the note free and clear so you apparently want it for something. Although that’s none of my business. You have the note. I have to meet the agreement as promised, only when I made the deal with Kelly Peck, neither of us expected a radiation leak would wipe out my entire garden inside three hours. So that’s why I’m here, now. Although you probably know that already, because you had to put up with the radiation leak the same as all of us. Or did you? The back quarter of the Aventine is an enclosed space, so maybe you didn’t. Only you know about it because you live on the ship the same as all of us. I mean, I’m not implying that you might not. Live here, I mean. It’s just that it will take forever to start the garden again. You have no idea how difficult it is to get enough soil to make any sort of a decent garden…How could you? You lived in the Palatine, where it was everywhere and you never thought about it. The first time I built the garden, it took me a week to trade for a bucketful of it.”

  She winced and fell silent. Her cheeks were even hotter now. Her whole face was glowing. She was making a complete fool of herself. What was wrong with her? Why was she babbling in this way?

  “You need an extension on the agreement,” Thorn said flatly. “I presume for an additional three years as it would take you that long just to begin producing again.”

  Laura stared at him, her astonishment evaporating her awkwardness. “Yes,” she said. Hadn’t she said that? She thought back over everything she had just said and realized that no, she hadn’t.

  So much for her notes. She rested the journal on the arm of the chair. Only, the concave shape of the arm didn’t allow the journal to sit flatly. It slithered over the side and dropped to the floor.

  Thorn leaned forward in a whiplash movement that almost defeated her vision. He threw out his arm and grew still.

  Laura leaned over to look down the side of the chair. Her journal was resting in the palm of his hand, just above the unforgiving hard, black floor.

  Thorn straightened up again, turning the journal face-up. He barely glanced at it as he held it out to her. She could feel her face was burning again, anyway. She couldn’t look at him.

  There was a screen on the shelf to her left that showed a picture that wasn’t a picture at all. She frowned, looking at it. “What is that?” she said. “It doesn’t look like anything.”

  “It’s a map,” Thorn said. His voice was quiet.

  “I’ve seen the map. This doesn’t look the same. There are no ship sections, just to start. There aren’t even straight lines.”

  “That’s because it’s a map of old Terra.”

  Laura turned in the chair. “It’s not round. Worlds are round.”

  “It’s a flat map of a section of Terra that was called Europe.”

  “This is land?” she breathed. “I didn’t know you could do that. Make a map of a world, I mean.”

  “You’ve seen the ship’s map, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “The map isn’t the ship. It’s not even a photo of the ship,” he said, sounding a little bit impatient. “If you’ve studied the map, then you know what it shows you.”

  She frowned, staring at the lines and squiggles. There were chunks of the image that had been tinted different colors. It reminded her of the ship map. The Bridge section was blue on the map. The Aventine was a lighter blue. The Capitol was red….

  “The ship map is the same as the view I see when I look out from the top of the silos in the Field,” she said slowly. “So a map is like looking down on something from high above. Any map would be the same, yes?”

  He considered her. His scowl was gone. “Yes, exactly,” he said quietly, in a slow way that made her think his mind was moving on another track even as he was talking to her.

  “Does that mean the colors on that map are different districts, too?” She nodded toward the one on the screen.

  “Countries,” he said, his voice still flat. “With districts within them.”

  “Countries with whole districts inside them…Terra was huge.”

  “Destination is larger.”

  She looked at him, startled. “You’ve seen it?”

  “I’ve seen the astral engineers’ reports on its size.”

  Laura was back to staring at him again. “Astral engineers,” she breathed. “I didn’t even know there were astral engineers.”

  “They’re not needed on the Endurance.”

  She considered the novelty of the idea that there were professions that once existed that didn’t have a place on the ship and were now unknown to everyone. Then she found her gaze pulled back to the map once more. “That’s where the Endurance came from…”

  “Not technically. The Endurance was built in space outside Terra’s gravity well.”

  Laura put her journal firmly in her lap and gripped it. “This is what coders do all day? Read about maps and things that no one else even knows exist?”

  Something in his face shifted. “No,” he said flatly. “Coders code.”

  She had a feeling he had a lot more to say than that, yet he was back to silence once more.

  The colors on the map reminded her of something. “Why would you give up a house in Palatine?” she asked. “Even with my note on top of it, the quarters in the Aventine aren’t nearly the same in value.”

  “Value, yes. That’s why.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I am curious about the power of promissory notes and their effect upon the ship.”

  “They have an effect? I thought they were just promises. One person to another.”

  “They are promises. They are also time machines.”

  Laura squeezed her journal. She wanted to laugh at the outrageousness of his statement, except he looked absolutely serious. “I don’t understand,” she said finally.

  “Promissory notes cross time,” he said flatly. “You made the deal with Kelly Peck three years ago. You wanted his house, which was available right then, while the produce you would give him for the house wouldn’t be available for another two years. The note joined one ha
lf of the deal with the other half, at least two years away in time.”

  “I hadn’t thought about notes in that way,” she said slowly, thinking it through. “People use notes all the time. Tivoli might have ripe tomatoes that Keton wants now, only Keton’s strawberries won’t be ripe until three months from now, so he writes a note that…what did you call it? It locks the deal down.”

  “I study supply and demand,” Thorn said. “That’s why I wanted your note. Notes are powerful entities on the ship and in the last few decades people have started to use more and more of them. Only, they have weaknesses, as you’ve just discovered.”

  Laura’s heart thudded once, very hard. “It’s only three extra years,” she said. It didn’t sound like a trivial extension to her anymore.

  “I don’t want to wait for three years.”

  Laura sighed. “You want my house.”

  “No, I don’t want your house. I already have a perfectly good apartment I don’t use.”

  Laura stared at him.

  “That is the other weaknesses of promissory notes,” he said dryly. “If all you have is strawberries and no one wants strawberries, how do you acquire the bread that you need?”

  She swallowed. “What do you need?”

  “Your services, Ms. Ryland.”

  Wariness flooded her. “I have a job,” she said slowly.

  “I am aware of that. I am not asking for anything nefarious or inappropriate. I want your time, attention and labor outside your work hours.”

  Laura frowned. “You want me to work for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t read a line of code if my life depended upon it.”

  “You won’t be coding. You have unique qualifications for the work I need done.”

  She would have been alarmed, except that he had already said that he had no inappropriate expectations and oddly, she believed him. “It doesn’t matter what I am,” she told him. “If I can only work for you outside my normal work hours, then when I can be here, no one else will be.”

  Micah Thorn smiled. It was an astonishing expression, because up until now he had done nothing but scowl or stare at her. The darkness of his features vanished. She glimpsed very white, even teeth and his face lit with amusement. “You don’t know coders very well, do you?”