Vicious Grace by M. L. N. Hanover Page A

only a reassuring, fake-British computer voice to guide me. Haze grayed the blue of the sky, softening the sunlight and bringing the infinite bowl of air a little closer. Traffic on the gentle left-then-right curves of the Kennedy Expressway was thick, but not as suicidally impolite as Los Angeles had been. Still, I found myself watching the other drivers carefully while the GPS told me where to go.
    It almost worked. If it weren’t for Bell Avenue ending about twenty feet before it hit Taylor Street and making my last turn impossible, it would have been twenty minutes. I parked on Bell and walked the rest of the way. All the buildings were brick, two stories at the least, three at the most, and crowded up against the sidewalk. A busker with a ukulele sang a Tom Waits tune as I walked past. The breeze that cooled my cheeks and brushed back my hair smelled like car exhaust.
    The Bump & Grind Café didn’t live up to its lurid name; it was all fresh coffee and baking apples. A flat-screen television was showing an art film that I remembered having heard about but had never actually seen. A few computers sat around, apparently for the free use of anyone who bought a coffee and wasn’t surfing for porn. And Kim sat at a table by the window. Half of a latte rested in front of her, the film of milk on the glass matching the hazy sky. Her purse was tucked under the chair, her head bent over a book.
    For the space of a heartbeat, she didn’t see me, and I caught a glimpse of who she was when she thought no one was watching. Her clothes belonged on an older woman, neat, professional earth tones. Her pale hair gave the impression of being touched by gray, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t. Her gaze was focused, intent, closed. The softness at her jaw and the first, faint wrinkles at her neck reminded me of how my mother had looked when I was still a girl. And there was something else too; she had the same air of waiting for something she knew wasn’t going to come.
    She looked up and nodded, and the impression vanished. She was once again my familiar, hard-edged Kim.
    “So what’s happened and why do we need a vacuum cleaner?” she asked instead of saying hello.
    While we walked back to the minivan, I brought her up to date, not just on the discovery of the secret rooms but on Los Angeles and the Lisbon notations—DC1 and YNTH—with our assumption that the first meant high security and the second being anyone’s guess. She listened with her head canted forward, like she was leaning into my words.
    “What about the image enhancement on Oonishi’s data set?” she asked when I was done.
    “Already uploaded.”
    “Do we have an estimate of the time it’s going to take?”
    “No,” I said, pulling out onto Polk. “We’ll know when we know.”
    She nodded once, but she didn’t look pleased. I felt a little tightness at the back of my throat, like I’d gotten a bad grade on a paper that I’d been proud of. Maybe hanging out with her hadn’t been a good idea.
    “Problem?” I asked, my tone carefully neutral.
    “We’ve got too many tests and not enough data,” she said. “I wish we’d gotten into Eric’s secret rooms before we did the work for Oonishi. If there’s anything useful in there at all, it’s going to change the questionnaire.”
    “It isn’t like Eric left us directions.”
    “God forbid,” Kim said. “That man never let anything by if he could help it.”
    “Did you love him?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t even wondered until I saw her there in the café, waiting for something. “I mean, I know you and Eric—”
    Kim took a quick breath, shrugged, and answered just as if I’d had any business asking.
    “No, I didn’t. I don’t know why I did what I did. At first, I thought it was only that we were confined in the same cabin for too long, and humans act like that. But then after, when it kept . . . happening. Well, I didn’t love him. He didn’t particularly like me. The