12: Plots And Plans
The human man frowned at Lissa. “There’s easier ways to kill a bunch of people than to graphically murder them one by one,” he pointed out. “Especially given how much political damage they’re risking here. If they’re going for numbers, blowing up the building in an ‘accident’ makes more sense – what are they going to do, individually murder every type A in the city?”
“It’s not about killing all of them,” Lissa said impatiently. “In fact, killing all of them would be a really, really bad idea, given how many type A vampires we have to feed. The ’Pays would be competing with the Zeroes for a food source and that’s a terrifying prospect. Zeroes are weak individually but they tend to band together against threats; it’s their only way to survive. If anyone tries to infringe on their blood rights, they’ll defend them to the last; they absolutely will not give ground because they know they’re the most disposable population, so they can’t afford to give any ground at all when it comes to their food source or they risk starvation. So damaging the ’Pays’ food supply would create a whole lot more problems for the elders than it would solve.” She was pacing, she realised. “That’s the game; it has to be. Absolutely nobody wants to risk a starvation event, so any threat at all to the type A supply is going to be taken as grounds to call off the expansion. They’re holding the whole Scarlet City hostage to defeat my sister’s power play and discredit her in politics.”
“And killing my people to do it,” the man said, sounding disgusted.
“Yes. But the sooner we find a way to defeat this ploy, the more potential murder victims we can save.” The specific murderer didn’t matter; they were a patsy, some Bee or Zero in a desperate enough situation the be cornered into dirtying their hands. It was Madame and her co-conspirators that Lissa needed to defeat.
Without getting herself killed or imprisoned. And without getting Taira killed or imprisoned.
She said goodbye to the human and headed back to the Scarlet City. This was Taira’s realm of expertise, but Taira couldn’t be trusted to handle it; she was being short-sighted and reckless, that was the whole reason that they were in this situation. Just for a moment, as she went through the checkpoints and back into the City, Lissa considered letting the whole thing just play out. Let them cause their minor panic, let them force back Taira’s initiative and let their murderer take the fall and sweep the whole thing away. She knew enough, or at least suspected enough, that she could find something to negotiate with to keep the blame off herself and Benny, something to blackmail her with that was just bothersome enough to be worth Madame blaming the actual murderer to keep her quiet, but not dangerous enough to be worth killing Lissa to keep her quiet. Some small piece of evidence to back up all of her speculation. There’d be time to do that. They still had to kill quite a few more humans to create any kind of a panic over a potential type A blood shortage.
If she kept her head down and kept her and Benny out of jail, then after all, what was actually at stake? Some politicians, including her sister, would get embarrassed and lose some influence for a while. Some more humans would die, but that wasn’t a real risk; the elders would never risk a serious diplomatic incident with the human city above, they’d be pulling their strings and calling in favours and watching the numbers to avoid any problems. A murderer would go to jail, and the corrupt politicians pulling their strings would keep being corrupt politicians.
Whereas if she did try to stop it, she’d be putting herself, her friend and her sister in danger, risking instability inside the Scarlet City as well as trouble with Lakeview when the truth got out, potentially damaging the core of their political system itself depending on whether the scandal hurt the elders, and the end result would be more Taipays around when Taira’s initiative went through, which was something that Lissa didn’t want in the first place.
Logically, it might make more sense to simply ignore this.
Except they’d had the gall to use her. To use her as a hostage, as a distraction, whatever. They’d used her friend, and then her, in their shady little game to try to sabotage her sister’s population expansion plan because they couldn’t legitimately beat her. And if Taira had the political influence to push for these sorts of changes in the first place, she was going to keep doing it, and they were going to keep using whatever underhanded tactics they had to to stop her, until somebody (almost definitely Taira, if that stupid publicity stunt with the handshakes was any indication of future behaviour) made some huge misstep and crashed and burned. Lissa couldn’t let herself become a piece to be played against her sister. She couldn’t let them get away with this.
But then, if she did find a way to unravel this whole thing, and Taira’s population expansion went through, that wasn’t any less dangerous. Taira had already told her that her next step would be to increase the Bee population, which would be pretty easy once the had significantly more ’Pays as the Bees wouldn’t stand for that kind of imbalance for long, with the goal of making Abbies even more of a minority population to the point where natural superiority alone would no longer let them politically dominate the city. If letting the Abbies make a habit of using Lissa to control Taira was dangerous, it was nothing compared to actually letting Taira succeed with the first step of such a plan. Taking on the other Abbies like this would get her killed. And probably get Lissa killed and endanger the stability of the Scarlet City, too.
So maybe she should stand back and let the elders win, and that might make her sister calm the fuck down and get back to reality, which –
“Lissa?”
Lissa started and blinked up at the person she’d almost run into. Tall woman, long hair in gold ringlets, face and body stunningly beautiful by the standards of beauty from when Lissa was human – someone about as old as she was.
Extremely familiar. “Stella! It’s been forever!”
“Only about a year and a half,” Stella laughed, throwing her arms around Lissa. “How are you? You look well.”
“I look the same as I always do, same as you do.”
“By which you mean I look amazing.”
“Of course. How are things?”
“Same as always. Might be big news coming up at work, keep an eye on the music charts for me, but I can’t say anything yet. You?”
“Ah, well. The drama with this new ’Pay expansion that Taira’s all wrapped up in is a drag, but aside from that, things are fine.”
“What new expansion? You know I don’t keep up with politics, darling.”
“There was a huge announcement. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“Maybe everyone in your circles. But, well, politics.” Stella smiled at her, and it was like seeing the sun again. Lissa liked Stella; she was the sort of friend who it was really fun to hang out with once every one or two years and at no other times because to much of each other annoyed the fuck out of both of them, especially since Stella had joined the Yunor about thirty years ago. They’d dated for a while, fifty or so years back, before Stella had learned that she was only into men and Lissa had learned that she wasn’t into much of anyone, and that had gone about as well as one could expect and ended better than could be expected, considering.
“Are you free for coffee?” Stella asked. “I’m just wasting time tonight, otherwise.”
Coffee with an old friend who didn’t care about politics sounded perfect. “Sure. Somewhere private, though. I’m going to complain a lot, and none of it is for public ears.”
“Ah. A complaint sesh. My favourite kind of coffee talk. Who’s the victim of our ire?”
“My sister.”
“Ooooh! A really juicy complaint sesh!”
Twenty five minutes later, the two were high above the city in an apartment so stylishly decorated it could be the VIP room of a high end nightclub, drinking some very nice coffee.
“Wow,” Stella said, raising a perfectly shaped brow over her perfectly brewed beverage. “Just wow.”
“Yeah.”
“I always thought of your sister as being, well, really grounded and sensible. You know, as much as an Abby can be.”
“Yeah, me too.” Lissa sipped her own coffee. “Though I guess an Abby can be crazy and come off as sensible since they own the fucking world, right? Maybe she’s always like this and the only reason it’s obvious now is that she’s targeting other Abbies. Which is just. I have no idea what’s going through her head. She’s acting like this is all so simple, but come on. She’s trying to take down the fucking government through demographic population inflation. And I know my sister; I know she’d only be doing shit like this if it had a good chance of actually working. But I don’t see how.”
“So now you’re like, should you ride this out and let the Abbies crush your sister, putting her and you in more danger in the future and getting a bunch more humans killed, or should you try to stop them from stopping her, putting everyone in the more dangerous position of her actually succeeding at this step and moving on to the really dangerous parts of the plan?”
“Pretty much. I mean, if it’s gonna fail, this is the best place for it to fail. But I don’t want my sister defeated by the other Abbies through trickery and blackmail. And also, like I said, she’s usually better at risks than this, so what if this is actually a really good plan and I’m missing something? I don’t exactly have the details on everything. I trust Taira. Or at least, I always have before. But I’d rather this whole thing just die down somehow, without the elders having to close a vice on her. If we can somehow get her to back off… but she won’t be talked out of anything. I’ve tried.”
“Have you tried talking to the people who’re actually affected by this step?”
Lissa almost spilled her coffee. “Tell the elder Abbies she’s planning to dilute their power and overthrow the system? No! She’d be killed!”
Stella laughed. “What an Abby conclusion to reach, thinking that they’re the people affected. No, I meant the Taipays.”
The Taipays. Huh. Step one was this massive ’Pay expansion, and it was being done with the backing of Holland, and presumably other influential ’Pays. Obviously, they wouldn’t know the whole plan; they were expecting a population increase for themselves that would legitimise a resource and territory expansion over the Bees, turning their three-tiered system into a four-tiered one by giving the ’Pays, not a biological advantage over the Bees, but at least an economic and political one. They didn’t know the whole plan, and there was no way on Earth that Lissa would tell them; she didn’t trust Holland or his ilk not to throw Taira to the mercy of the elders for a handshake and a smile.
But if she could explain the serial killer scheme, find some way to use that information to get Holland to back off on the bill, be more clever about it, push him to implode the initiative from the inside so that it looked to the elders like the whole thing had failed on its own merits and had nothing to do with their machinations, would that… help? It would be politically very embarrassing for Taira, certainly. It would make her look like much less of a threat, much less of a target, and maybe take the wind out of her sails before she pulled any more ridiculous public stunts like that handshake.
The second biggest question was how to use such information to get Holland to back off. And the actual most important question was how to get him to listen to her in the first place. She didn’t know Holland personally, and there was absolutely no way that a ’Pay caught up in a scheme like this would trust the ravings of a Bee. He’d assume that she was part of a Bee group that felt threatened by the expansion and was making stuff up. Hell, he wouldn’t even meet with her at all, most likely. He had no reason to trust or listen to her.
Lissa set her cup on the artful coaster sitting on the high-end glass coffee table. The glass was polished perfectly clean, something that Lissa had always assumed impossible with those stupid bastard tables and their love of catching dust and smears and highlighting in every ray of light what a slob you were for not being able to clean a goddamned piece of glass. This one reflected her face back at her perfectly. Tired eyes. Frazzled hair. Cheeks, nose, chin, that were familiar to her not just as her own features, but as the ones she saw regularly on her sister’s face.
Holland had no reason to trust or listen to her. But there was someone he would trust and listen to.
“Hey, Stella. How would you feel about giving me a makeover?”
Derin Edala 