Interlude Lucy – School Days Part Three

Interlude Lucy – School Days Part Three

She was here thanks to Cat.

At the moment, with a knot of stress forming in her stomach, she wasn’t sure if she was pleased about that or not.

No, she couldn’t think that way. Her beloved might not usually be able to think more than a few days ahead, but Cat did always think about Lucy.

Lucy… knew that their relationship wasn’t the healthiest. She knew herself. She knew that she wasn’t the perfect woman for Cat, that part of her had fallen in love with Catherine because she needed help, and Cat would give it to her in exchange for the kind of love that they both desperately needed as an anchor.

She’d never admit it to anyone, least of all to Cat herself, but she felt a little bit of guilt about it. Not that she didn’t truly, genuinely, love Cat. Not that she didn’t want to be an old crone with Cat by her side. Not that she didn’t want to raise an even bigger family with Cat.

But Lucy had this burning thing in her that would never be satisfied by good food, or late-morning cuddles.

Catherine would be a satisfied woman just to have someone to hold and cherish and who loved her. She’d be happy with enough food to get by, a roof that didn’t leak too much, and a thin morsel of hope to keep her going.

Lucy wouldn’t be satisfied until she had the entire world in the palm of her hand.

There was a conflict there, most of all because she knew that Cat would give her the world on a whim if she just asked, and that kind of stupid, loving trust made Lucy burn with love and twisted guilt.

She’d never claimed to be a good person. She did claim, at least to herself, that she did all of this for their family, for their love, for their city, and not just because Lucy herself had spent far too long suffering at the mercy of people and things more powerful than her and out of her control, to the point where she yearned for that control herself like a man in the deep desert yearned for water.

They were two ships, filled with holes, and for a long time the only thing that stopped either of them from sinking was shoving fingers into each other’s holes.

“Heh,” she said. Cat would like that analogy.

“Miss Leblanc?” someone asked next to her, and she smoothly refocused on the moment.

“Sorry, was just thinking of something, ah, Micheal,” she replied as she glanced over to the young man who’d addressed her.

She, as well as a dozen helpful… stooges (she didn’t know if they were goons or henchpeople, exactly) were backstage behind the closed curtain of a presentation hall. It wasn’t a theater, and it wasn’t a stage, not exactly. Instead it was one of those large speaking rooms that the school used whenever there was someone important who came around to host a panel of some sort. This room was the breakroom just behind that, where they could get in without being accosted.

Myalis had helped her in a few small, subtle ways, on top of the bigger, more obvious ones. One of those bits of help was getting her software up to spec.

Not new cyberware, though Cat had gotten Lucy some very nice augs that would make most of the richy-rich students of CIAL green with envy, but pure software.

One of these was a facial recognition system designed for top-end corporate secretaries.

It created a database of faces, obviously, as well as names and a small section allowed her to input notes that would come up on looking at someone. Date of birth, important information about allegiances and family and gangs and so on.

It seemed so mundane, but she saw the way Micheal stood up a little straighter at being addressed by name.

People were so simple, sometimes.

“How’s the crowd looking?” she asked.

“Packed,” he replied. “Here, look at this, I took a pic.”

He sent her an unfiltered, unencrypted picture. It was taken from his point of view, literally, there was an off-focus smudge to one side that had to be the bridge of his nose.

The room she was going to speak in was tiered, so that each set of seats could see over the one before time. There wasn’t a seat that wasn’t packed. Some had two people squeezed into the same spot.

The back of the room was filled with more people, all of them standing. “Well, well, aren’t I popular tonight,” she muttered.

“Just normal, did you see the Rama Corp thing?” he asked.