4
“Pretty,” Janet cooed, her slender hand playing in the holo of the swirling code Freak had uploaded to my smart. “What is it? Some kind of art piece?”
“Not exactly sure.” Her face was devoid of anything I could discern as artifice. Most vampires I’d met were lousy liars, maybe it was a fault in the gene sequencing, the boundless human gift for deception getting lost in the mix somewhere. In any case she had either never seen the code before or had forgotten it, and I had serious doubts she was capable of forgetting anything.
I switched off the smart and sat back in my seat, regarding the as yet unsipped glass of Kentucky Red on the table. We were in the bar on the Yang One viewing tier, the cavernous trans-steel ceiling two hundred meters above offering a fine view of the Axis, a slow
