Free Icons by Margaret Stohl Page B

sees him. Except it’s different to her, because she created him. She possesses him. When shelooks at him, she feels pleasure. It’s the same love she feels when she looks in the mirror.
    If you can call that love.
    I don’t remember my mother, not really. But I can’t imagine she felt the same way about me. I can’t imagine I was only a mirror to her, nothing more. I guess I’ll never know.
    “Do you know why you’re here? Why I sent for you?” She looks to me, smoothing a stray strand of silver hair behind her ear. Her skin is flawless, not a wrinkle in sight. Her eyes, the animal eyes, are blue-gray, hard as steel. As set as the Tracks. “Why my own son came to get you, in fact, all the way from Mission La Purísima? Against what should have been his better judgment, and my wishes?” Her eyes flicker over to him and back.
    “No, sir.” The color drains out of my face at the mention of my home and everything I have lost. “Ma’am.” She looks at me pointedly. I try again. “I mean, Madame Ambassador.”
    “Please, sit.”
    I feel myself jerking downward as if I were a dog on a leash.
    Lucas is no better. He’s in his seat before I am. I try to look at the Ambassador, but it’s much harder now. The morning light is bright and blasts through the slatted blinds, sending blurry stripes across our faces,across the walls. As if the world outside was made of nothing but light. Even the ceiling lights are hot and white and flooding directly down on me. I sense that my chair is placed just so, for this express purpose, as if I am in some sort of interrogation chamber.
    I know I am.
    “Doloria. Can I call you Dolly?”
    I nod. It’s all I can manage. I try not to think about the fact that I am sitting there in a private meeting with the Ambassador, in army pants and combat boots. That she knows my nickname.
    I try not to think that this woman could kill me with one wave of her hand.
    “Have you ever been outside the Grass, Dolly?”
    I shake my head before I remember to speak. “No. Madame Ambassador.”
    She shifts in her chair, looking from me to Lucas again, slowly now. “Colonel Catallus? Can you de-Classify the footage, please?” She looks toward me, almost apologetically. “My Head of Security. It requires two Classified Embassy clearance codes to activate use of unauthorized feeds. Protocol.”
    A man steps out of the shadows, where he has been standing behind the Ambassador’s desk, half hidden in the shadow of a potted palm. It is the Brass Wings Man, I realize. He is wearing a military suit that looks oddlyreligious. I think once again of the Padre, my Padre.
    I look away.
    The Ambassador watches as the vid-screen behind her desk flickers online. “I’m not sure you understand what it’s like, Doloria, to serve two masters. I do it myself, every day.” She turns her back to me, staring at the images on the screen. A gray cityscape rolls past the camera.
    “The House of Lords relies on me to keep the Embassy City on task and in line, as they do all their Ambassadors. The Hole, as you Grass call it, is the fifth-largest surviving Embassy City on the planet. Keeping the city running is no small task. And more importantly, keeping the Projects running is essential to our continued survival.”
    I only nod.
    “Our Lords are not unkind masters. In the time that they’ve been here, they’ve been reasonable. They’ve never asked us anything that we couldn’t do. In fact, in many ways, our civilization has never functioned better. That’s why GAP Miyazawa refers to it as our Second Renaissance, as I suppose you know.”
    The Second Renaissance.
Grass don’t think of it that way, but I don’t tell her that.
    “Madame Ambassador.” The Colonel hands her a remote. She picks it up and points it. The images on the screen change.
    “This is the House of Lords. That gray building is the original mother ship itself. To use the familiar cultural terminology.”
    There it is. The House of Lords, a