Busted Flush

Tom’s eyes flicked from Lilith to Hei-lian and back. He smiled lazily. If he made an effort to hide his smugness, Hei-lian thought, he failed.

“If I tell you, I won’t be mysterious,” he said.

Silver eyes narrowed. Hei-lian watched the British ace raptor-close. Lilith seemed as skilled and imaginative at pleasing a female lover as a male one; the more so when the object of their exercise was to excite a man who scarcely needed erotic encouragement. Until the fourth or fifth time, anyway . . .

And Tom—before sleeping with him the first time, weeks ago, Hei-lian expected his lovemaking to be brisk and perfunctory, perhaps even brutal. And indeed when his passion mounted he was forceful as a stallion. But before that he was both remarkably sensitive and skilled.

As he had been tonight, despite devoting greater efforts to the interloper. I suppose I can assuage my ego with the fact Tom can actually enjoy my aging face and body at the same time as this perfect black and silver succubus.

“You’ve fought many brilliant guerrilla campaigns, Tom,” said Lilith, running a black-painted fingernail down his chest. His pectoral muscles were defined but no more: without his remarkable ace gifts he would have been strong, but wiry-strong, not a steroid-pumped freak. “Each time betrayal brought you down.”

“Damn straight,” Tom said. “It was the only thing that could.”

“Yet your partnership with President-for-Life Nshombo endures. A few years ago, he was just another minor faction leader in the endless, bloody Congo wars. The next thing the world knows you’re at his side; he’s vanquished his rivals, conquered the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then the Republic of the Congo, and is well on his way toward carving a new resource-rich superpower from the heart of Africa. What transformed both your fortunes so?”

Tom shrugged. “Nothing succeeds like success, like the capitalists say. Dr. Nshombo’s objectively Marxist. We’re after the same ends. We agree on the means. Especially that to make an omelet you’ve got to break a few eggs.”

Hei-lian wasn’t objectively Marxist. Far less Maoist. Never had been. She had learned all the right words, and parroted them with appropriate conviction. She had her Party pin, which always delighted Tom when she wore it. But to her it was no more than a necessary token, a kind of union card. Had she actually believed the rhetoric, the Ministry would have purged her years before as an idiot or a dangerous loon.

A brow-furrow marred the smooth perfection of Lilith’s face. Hei-lian repressed a smirk. She almost wished her opposite number—for Guoanbu agreed with the world intelligence community’s consensus that Lilith was a spy for the Crown, although her background was if anything a darker secret than Tom’s—luck in learning anything. Hei-lian had gotten little more from Weathers than anyone could get from a quick Google. And Hei-lian was good.

“And then there’s your daughter, Sprout,” Lilith said. “She’s quite lovely, make no mistake. Yet one almost gets the impression she’s older than you. How is that possible, really?”

Hei-lian felt Tom tense. “It’s an ace thing.”

“But when first you burst upon the scene, twelve years ago, you looked to be a man of twenty. In the interim you’d appeared to have aged quite normally.”

“Yeah. Shit happens.”

Lilith drew back slightly. Hei-lian allowed herself the ghost of a smile. Lilith clearly wasn’t used to men talking to her like that.

“Speaking of your daughter,” Hei-lian said. Not to let her rival off the hook. She had her own agenda. Or, she amended quickly, her country’s. “I’m concerned by her, Tom.” Appalled would be a better word, but she’d never dare say that. It was absurd to indulge a real child as he did Sprout. To so indulge an adult—and for an adult to act so utterly like a child—made Hei-lian’s flesh crawl.

“She’s happy here,” Tom said.

Lilith seemed not to resent Hei-lian speaking. If anything she seemed mildly hopeful Hei-lian, as a lover of some standing, could winkle out of Tom some scrap that a mere one-night stand, however spectacular, could not. Neither did Lilith show jealousy of her. She wouldn’t, Hei-lian thought, any more than Tom would feel jealous of the world’s strongest nat.

Any more than she herself would feel jealous of an ant. Although she envied them, sometimes, the mindless simplicity of their drudge work.

“But wouldn’t Sprout be better off in a proper institution?” Hei-lian said. Locked away where real humans wouldn’t have to endure her? she didn’t say. As Sprout surely would be in the People’s Republic. “Wouldn’t she be safer?”