Kelley Eskridge by Solitaire Read Free Book Online Page A

than sprinting ability. The company's
strategy, Jackal had come to understand, was to offer power to people
who were experienced enough to make quick decisions out of confidence
in their own reference points, rather than rashness or received wisdom.
Youth was almost never an advantage at Ko.
    She remembered having this macroscopic
realization: it was the first time she had been able to articulate an
original perception about the company, about business strategy in
general, rather than parroting back the theories of her teachers. Khofi
Andabe had grinned with pleasure at their weekly review session. “Good
for you, Fraulein Schakal,” he said, leaning back far enough in his
chair to make it creak in distress. It was his game to name her in the
dozen languages that he knew—at their first meeting, when Jackal began
her training in earnest at the age of thirteen, he had leaned across
his office desk with his square face resting on his big fists and said,
“ Eh bien , Jackal,” except that he
pronounced it zhaKAL . “Zhakal,” he
had said again. “An unexpected naming, to be sure.” Then he had smiled
and she had liked him. The years of working together had brought her
from liking to trust, and now Andabe was almost like a part of her own
web. His approval mattered; she enjoyed making him grin.
    Good work, he had said almost a year ago
about her new understanding, and the next week had entered her into
Neill's workshop series in activity management.
    “Khofi, no,” she gasped when he told her.
    “And why not?”
    “I'm not ready.”
    “Nonsense. I am to say when you are ready,
and I have said. Neill has agreed. It is arranged.” He wiped his hands
against each other and then spread them as if this would show her that
the thing was done.
    “It's too advanced.” God, her mother had
only just been through it herself two years ago, after how many years
of building an experience base and a track record of successful smaller
projects. She'll be pissed, Jackal thought in passing.
    Khofi said, “You are ready for this
training. It is necessary. You will need to know these things as the
Hope of Ko.”
    “Why?”
    “You will understand when you have
completed the series, when you have these skills.”
    “You're supposed to be my advisor. How
come you won't ever tell me why I'm supposed to be learning these
things? Maybe all the other Hopes are studying macroengineering or
combinatorial mathematics or zero-gee furniture design.”
    “I doubt this, Zhakal.”
    “Well, then, you know more about it than I
do.”
    Andabe delivered his sigh of
disappointment and dismay, a labored, breathy whistle through a pursed
bottom lip. It didn't impress her anymore, and she was exasperated
enough to tell him so.
    “This is how I know you are ready,” he
said smugly, and that was the end of the discussion.
    Two days later she headed through
Esperance Park toward the cart of the ice cream man, in his usual place
along the grass at the west end of the biggest fountain. He was a Ko
employee like everyone else, but he wore his ID skin meld unobtrusively
high on his wrist, up under his long sleeves, and behaved instead as if
he and his cart had just happened upon this spot for the first and only
time in a long and varied journey. His ice cream was rich and
surprising, a single, different flavor each day in crunchy brown waffle
cones.
    Two strangers offered to let her into the
line. She refused with a smile and stood at the end behind a man whom
she noticed primarily because he was as anonymous as anyone she'd ever
seen on the island. Most adults on Ko used clothing to signal their
working function or status. She knew enough of the code, from a
life-time's worth of dinners with Donatella, to be genuinely confused
by the man in front of her.
    He turned around enough that she could see
about three quarters of his face: white, no clear ethnic markers. Even
his sunglasses were unremarkable. “So, what do you think?” he asked.
    It was too