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Lila saunters into Kala’s laboratory as careless as you please, not a scrap of clothing on her body even though there are two other scientists there. Kala raises her eyebrows and takes a long, slow breath. Forces herself to relax; Lila’s not really here, after all. Lila hasn’t been really here since the one time they did meet in person, last April in a crowded bar. Kala barely noticed her at the time. She hadn’t thought the woman who offered to buy her a drink, which she then turned down, would turn out to be a major feature in her life.
“Kala,” Lila purrs. She sits down on top of the table, right next to a whole bunch of dangerous chemicals—and of course they can’t burn her, she’s not here, but it’s just so unsanitary. Naked, oiled thighs on Kala’s lab table. And of course she’ll have to pause the entire experiment.
She neutralizes the mixture most likely to explode (she’ll just have to restart in a minute), and glances over to check that her colleagues are too absorbed in their work to pay attention to what she’s doing.
“Kaaaala,” Lila says again, and now she’s more pouting than purring. But when Kala looks at her she’s still smiling, and she can’t help but sigh.
She raises her eyebrows again, now more pointedly, and mutters, “I’m at work.”
“You didn’t send me a new batch of blockers this month,” Lila says.
“You don’t use them anyway. Neither does your cluster.”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter how I use them. It only matters that you provide.” Lila uncrosses and recrosses her legs, fast enough that Kala gets just the barest glimpse of pussy (not that she was looking, really!) and asks, “Are we quarreling, Kala?”
“No,” Kala says, “we are not. But aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
Kala tilts her head. She knows how to smirk too. “You didn’t pay me, Lila.”
Lila crosses her arms over her bare chest.
Quid pro quo for the very tools of survival isn’t Kala’s idea of a good partnership, exactly, but to be fair Lila was the one who started it.
Their first meeting—the bar, the offer of a drink in exchange for a number. Kala declined. Lila laughed and accepted the rejection with grace. She’d already gotten what she really wanted: a look in Kala’s eyes, a more effective means of reaching her than any telephone number. She showed up in Kala’s own home the next day, and that was when she offered the second bargain.
“I’ll explain to you how I’m here,” she said, when Kala paused for breath in the middle of a ranted interrogation, “if you tell me something in exchange.”
“What?”
Lila pursed her lips. “Oh, I don’t know. How about who’s in your cluster? It’s always good to know the market.”
Kala wasn’t sure what made her uneasy with that—the use of the word market (what was that supposed to mean?) or the tone of Lila’s voice or the fact that it was so much information in exchange for so little. Either way, she didn’t accept that bargain either.
Lila huffed. “You’re an infuriating woman, Kala Dandekar.”
“How do you know my name?”
She trailed her hands through Kala’s hair. Fingers like a ghost. “All right then. You don’t have to tell me about your whole cluster. Just tell me who you’re in love with instead of your fiancé.”
“What?”
“The man at the bar last night? Obviously he’s not the one for you. Is it someone in your cluster? Tell me who it is, and I’ll let the other six go.”
Again, the phrasing. Let the other six go—as if she were a spider, not just looking for information but for more. Kala said, “I’m not in love with anyone.”
“…but that includes your fiancé too, still?”
“I can’t give you information on anyone in my cluster. Now tell me how you’re here. In exchange I’ll tell you something you’ll find useful.”
Lila laughed. “Will you?” What could you know that would be useful to me, her eyes implied.
“Yes.”
“All right.” Lila beckoned Kala closer, though they were already close enough. She whispered the answer in Kala’s ear, all about how connections could form between sensates not in the same cluster, as simple as meeting eyes. “Like love at first sight,” she murmured, soft as a breath.
It was all simple but intriguing. Kala took notes. When she tried to ask for more details, Lila tut tutted. “You said you’d tell me something useful, Kala.” She already considered them to be on a first name basis.
“I know the current primary alias of Whispers. Or the Cannibal, as some call him.”
“Oh?”
“Milton Bailey Brandt. My cluster is targeting him and his corporation currently.” Targeting was maybe a strong word, but Kala liked to stay optimistic. She leaned forward. “Do you want in?”
Lila gave an elaborate shrug. “Well. I suppose your information was useful.”
She vanished without giving any real answer. For a while Kala was paranoid that she would be somehow connected to Whispers and any day now Kala’s laboratory would be stormed by men in hazmat suits but that never happened, so Kala concluded she must have a cluster somewhat like Kala’s: defensive, reclusive, feeling its way through the world.
She did not expect they would meet again.
Lila bites her lip. “That’s very stingy, Kala. I gave you good information just last month about Whispers’ movements.”
“And Lito gave Maitake actual shelter in his home,” Kala points out. “I think the balance is currently tipped in our favor.”
Lila gives the smile which to her is really the equivalent of a frown. “Really, that’s very stingy, Kala,” she repeats, and it is. In the past months Kala and Lila’s clusters have grown closer and closer, their alliance stronger and stronger. They practically live out of each other’s pockets. And it’s stupid to keep on insisting on equivalent exchange but again, Lila was the one who started it, and Kala will continue it as long as she keeps up the façade of all this being business, just business, even when the rest of their cluster members have long begun to accept it is something more.
“I’m not so stingy,” Kala says, “I just want something more from you in exchange. Then, the blockers you want.”
Lila heaves a dramatic sigh.
Lila wasn’t the one to teach Kala how to make blockers. She just told Kala it was possible. All the rest—procuring the sample, deconstructing it to its bare bones and reconstructing it even more efficiently—Kala did with no help but her cluster’s. For that she didn’t owe Lila much, and when Lila told Kala that Kala should give her blockers for free in exchange, she’d just laughed.
She didn’t trust Lila very much. The first time she offered Lila blockers, she requested something very concrete.
“Guns?” Lila said, raising an eyebrow. “How very morbid of you. What makes you think I can get you guns?”
“A whole batch,” Kala promised. “A hundred pills. Each would last roughly five hours, depending on the body weight of the person. All I ask for is a few revolvers—or a single machine gun, if that would be easier to obtain.”
“You’ve been corrupted,” Lila mused. “You really should tell me about your cluster.”
But Kala didn’t, not yet. That came later, weeks later. They only told each other about their clusters when they realized they needed to. Not yet, not yet.
“It’s just that I thought you were a proper woman. An intellectual. It just seems rather boorish…”
“That’s my price. If you want the blockers…”
“Fine.” Lila shrugged. “It’s a bargain. By the way, whoever is the corrupting influence in your cluster, you should have asked them about the price of guns first. Your inexperience shows.” Daring, she kissed Kala on the cheek. “Not that I mind. It’s adorable.”
“You’re adorable,” Kala muttered when she was gone, well aware that it wasn’t, actually, a good comeback.
So things unfolded. Guns, blockers, information, cluster members helping other members when they were in proximity, webs of bargains that slowly grew more and more tangled. By the day Lila dropped in on Kala at the laboratory naked, they had many contact points in the cluster—it wasn’t just Lila and Kala anymore, and Kala even knew a few of Lila’s cluster members personally by now. And it wasn’t just a business relationship either. But if Lila insisted on treating it as one, then Kala would do the same.
She would do what she had to.
“Fine,” Lila snaps, when it’s clear Kala is not going to bend. “Your price, then?”
Kala has her where she wants her. “Are you still in Mumbai?”
“What does that matter to you? Unless the question is your price.”
“Come to the bar where we first met,” Kala says. “Buy me a drink.” She spreads her hands. “That is my price.”
Lila eyes her.
“I don’t think it’s asking too much,” Kala says sharply. She rehearsed this conversation earlier in her bedroom, with first Wolfgang and then Sun playing Lila’s part for her. They convinced her she sounded suave, coy, masterful. Saying it to Lila’s face, though—to Lila’s naked body—she feels more like an idiot. She feels exposed.
“I’m not in India right now,” Lila says after a moment.
“Oh. Well.” For some reason she’s always imagined Lila in reach—if not in Mumbai, then still within a day’s travel or so. Thinking of how Will and Riley, for example, have travelled half across the world since they met, perhaps it was a stupid assumption. Kala flushes. No! She promised herself she wouldn’t back down. “It can be another bar, if you want. I can fly out—the cluster has the money to cover it…”
“No, don’t bother. Like you said, the balance tips towards you.” Lila slides off the lab table. Unfortunately that leaves her standing right in front of Kala—face to face, breast to breast. “Give me two weeks, Kala. I’ll come. But send the blockers.”
Kala nods. “Of course. If I-If I have your word.”
A smirk skitters across Lila’s face. “Of course.”
And before she vanishes this time, she kisses Kala right on the lips. Kala gasps, and then she is gone.
She looks over at her colleagues. They wave at her brightly, encouraging smiles on their faces. Shit. They did see everything—her talking to air, the whole deal. At least by now the department fully accepts her as an eccentric; as long as she does good work, they’re okay with her being weird as hell.
So she starts heating up her chemicals again, takes out new supplies, and allows herself to smile. She hasn’t seen Lila in person since that first time, now long ago. It’ll be something to look forward to.
She thinks she’s driven a good bargain.