“Done with the jet lag, are we?”
“I took pills.” Remembering the SST’s silence, its lack of apparent motion.
“Pills,” the man said. “Hotel adequate?”
“Yes,” Laney said. “Ready for the interview.”
“Well then,” vigorously rubbing his face with heavily scarred hands. He lowered his hands and stared at Laney, as if seeing him for the first time. Laney, avoiding the gaze of those eyes, took in the man’s outfit, some sort of nanopore exercise gear intended to fit loosely on a smaller but still very large man. Of no particular color in the darkness of the Trial. Open from collar to breastbone. Straining against abnormal mass. Exposed flesh tracked and crossed by an atlas of scars, baffling in their variety of shape and texture. “Well, then?”
Laney looked up from the scars. “I’m here for a job interview.”
“Are you?”
“Are you the interviewer?”
“ ‘Interviewer’?” The ambiguous grimace revealing an obvious dental prosthesis.
Laney turned to the Japanese in the round glasses. “Colin Laney.”
“Shinya Yamazaki,” the man said, extending his hand. They shook. “We spoke on the telephone.”
“You’re conducting the interview?”
A flurry of blinks. “I’m sorry, no,” the man said. And then, “I am a student of existential sociology.”
“I don’t get it,” Laney said. The two opposite said nothing. Shinya Yamazaki looked embarrassed. The one-eared man glowered.
“You’re Australian,” Laney said to the one-eared man.
“Tazzie,” the man corrected. “Sided with the South in the Troubles.”