He shrugged, grimacing. “It wasn’t a valid contract. You should never have been here in the first place.”
I took a deep breath, let it out. “What happens now?”
His hand settled on his gun; his stare hit zero degrees Kelvin as he searched the crowd for Protz. “Now,” he said, “the shit hits the fan.” He subvocalized a call, and suddenly two guards were pushing through the confusion of bodies. Natasa gestured at me. “Take him to the infirmary. Stay with him.”
“But I’m not—”
He gave me a look. “Get his arm cared for. Then find out where they put that injured Fed and put him in the next bed.”
The guards nodded. One of them smiled. “No problem.”
“How’s Park?” Natasa asked. That had been the name on the datapatch of the guard I’d brought out.
“Meds say she’ll be all right, sir.”
“Good,” Natasa murmured, nodding, but looking down.
“Namaste,” I murmured. Natasa glanced at me, without understanding. As the guards led me away I looked back, watching Natasa’s progress toward Protz. They were out of my line of sight before I could see it happen, but I smiled anyway.
TWENTY-NINE
BY THE TIME I was sharing a room with the Fed, he’d been sedated past caring. Any conversation with him was going to have to wait. At least I’d overheard enough to know that his name was Ronin, and that he was going to survive.
It was almost harder to believe I might actually survive this. I lay down on the empty bed, still cradling my sudoskin-covered wrist, glad enough to rest as fatigue unraveled what was left of my consciousness.
* * *
I opened my eyes again, startled out of sleep, only realizing then that I’d been asleep, probably for hours.
Luc Wauno was standing beside the bed, his hand still on my shoulder, shaking me awake. He held his hand up in silent warning as he saw my eyes open.
“Wauno?” I mumbled, sitting up. “Where the hell did you come from?”
He nodded at the other bed. Natasa stood beside it, helping Ronin to his feet. Ronin looked more stupefied than I did, probably from the meds he’d been given, but he was tracking and functional. Natasa looked worse than Ronin, as if he’d been fighting his grief for hours and losing the battle. “I don’t like what I’m hearing upstairs,” Natasa said. “I want you both safely out of reach until there’s backup available.” He handed Ronin his uniform jacket and pants and began to help him get into them.
As I got out of bed I glanced up at the security monitors. They were always on, everywhere, including here.
“We’re running a playback loop—all anyone sees is the two of you sleeping,” Natasa said, answering my look.
“Where are we going?” I asked, shaking cloud-dreams out of my head. “No place is safe—”
“I know a place that is,” Wauno said, and his smile said, Freaktown.
I nodded, glancing at Ronin, at the databand on his wrist. “Leave that here.”
He looked at me like I’d told him to leave one of his eyes.
“They can track you by it. If Tau decides to bury its mistakes, you won’t be safe anywhere with that on.”
A stunned-prey look filled his face. I saw doubt replace it, and finally acceptance. Slowly, reluctantly, he unlatched his data-band; stood holding it in his hand like he was weighing it.
“He’s right. It’s the only way to be sure,” Natasa said.
Ronin dropped the databand on his bed, grimacing. Natasa put an arm around him, supporting him as we went out of the room. Guards waited in the hallway to escort us through the installation’s maze to the entrance.
Wauno’s new transport was waiting right where the old one had, once before, on the landing plaza outside the complex’s main entrance. There were clouds phasing across the face of the moon as I glanced up … or maybe they were something more, watching over us.
More guards were waiting by the transport. They gave us a thumbs-up and stepped aside. The hatch opened, and Wauno took over supporting Ronin to help him up the ramp.
I started after them; hesitated as I realized Natasa wasn’t following. “What about you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’ll be all right.” He nodded at the guards flanking him.
“What if you’re wrong?” I asked.
“Ronin has my testimony and data waiting for him. Wauno knows how to access it.” He smiled sourly.
“What about Joby?”
His smile disappeared. “He’ll be safe…” he said, and the words seemed to choke him. “He’ll be with you.” He went back through the line of guards toward the complex entrance.
I watched him go, speechless, until Wauno called my name, telling me to get on board.
I climbed the ramp, stood beside him while the hatch sealed behind me. Standing this close to him in the transport’s dimly lit interior, I saw that he was wearing the medicine pouch. “Luc, I … I’m sorry,” I muttered, looking away. “I never…”
He looked blank, until he realized what I was looking at. He touched the worn leather bag and shook his head. “It was there for you,” he said quietly. “When you needed it. That’s all.”
I looked up at him in disbelief. “How did you know I would need it?”
“I didn’t,” he said with a slow smile. “It knew, I suppose. That’s what it does. Believe it or not.” He shrugged, looking up at me again. “I know what happened when we crashed,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.” He took his place in the pilot’s seat.
I swallowed a lot of useless words and turned away to find a seat for myself. Ronin was already strapped in. Sitting behind him was Perrymeade, holding Joby in his lap.
I stopped moving. “What do you want? You two-faced son of a—”
“Cat!” Suddenly Kissindre stood up from the seat behind theirs. “Shut up and listen to me.” I was already gaping, speechless, as she came forward, moving carefully as the transport began to lift. I could see the pale line of a fading scar on her cheek. But she was moving all right, not maimed, not crippled. I sank into the seat across from Ronin like my brain had shorted out.
“I know the transport accident wasn’t your fault,” she said as I looked away from her eyes. “Uncle Janos knew that too.”
I raised my head. “Then … why—?” I held up my bandaged wrist, looking at him. “Why did he do this to me?” My hands made a fist, and started to tremble.
Her fingers barely touched the sudoskin on my wrist. “To buy you time, until the FTA could send more investigators. To keep Borosage from killing you.”
I opened my mouth.
“Do you think you’d be alive now if my uncle had left you with Tau’s Corporate Security?”
“No,” I whispered. Finally I looked at Perrymeade again. “I really thought you hated my guts,” I said. “I really thought you meant it.”
“Maybe I did, just then,” Perrymeade said. I almost imagined I saw a ghost of a smile. “But if I hadn’t, Borosage would never have believed me.”
“Maybe I deserved it,” I murmured, glancing away.
“Maybe you were right in everything you did, too.”
I didn’t answer; couldn’t even look back at him. The unreality of where I was now, the total unexpectedness of what these people had done, for me and against the system of lies, was almost more than I could deal with.
When I looked up again at last, it was to look at Joby, sitting motionless in Perrymeade’s arms. His eyes were on my face, staring at me as fixedly as the eyes of a doll, until I was sure it wasn’t random. “Joby…?” I said softly. He blinked. But he didn’t move, didn’t speak. I looked away again, sick at heart, wondering if this wasn’t worse somehow than the way he’d been before. “Why is he here? It could be dangerous—”
“Not as dangerous as leaving him where Tau could find him,” Perrymeade said grimly. I remembered then what Natasa had said to me. I glanced at Joby again long enough to see that he wasn’t wearing a databand either.
&
nbsp; I rubbed my wrist, feeling the sudoskin loosen at the edges as my ragged nails caught on it. I forced my hand away, wondering if the day would ever come when I felt secure enough in who I was and where I was to stop doing that. However long it took, it was going to take even longer now. “All right, then,” I said. “Why are you two here?” I nodded at Kissindre and Perrymeade.
“Adding links to the chain of truth, I hope,” Perrymeade answered. “I’ve been cooperating with the FTA ever since I learned you’d contacted them.”
“How did you know that?” I asked, surprised.
“Hanjen. Even before Borosage let it slip, Hanjen had contacted me.”
“How did he know that?”
“Miya told him,” Kissindre said. “He told my uncle, after he’d agreed to help Tau find you.…” She looked away from my face and back again. “Borosage’s men were everywhere on the Hydran side of the river, Cat. They forced their way into houses and destroyed people’s belongings. They terrorized children in school; they took away patients from the hospital and jailed them without any cause. They embargoed food shipments—”
I shook my head, stunned as I realized that it really was Hanjen who had told Tau where we’d taken Joby; surrendered his own foster daughter to the Humans … betrayed us, to save his people. He’d been trapped between a rock and a hard place. But we’d put him there.
Perrymeade turned to Ronin, who’d been watching us with the rapt attention of a man caught up in a threedy psychodrama when he’d expected to see the Indy News.
“Mez Ronin,” Perrymeade said, suddenly hesitant. “I … there are no words to say how sorry I am about … the deaths of your team members.”
Ronin nodded wordlessly. The look of a disaster victim was still deep in his dark, up-slanting eyes; that look would be there a lot longer than the cuts and bruises on his face. His cropped black hair slid down across his face as he nodded; he didn’t seem to notice. His hair, his eyes, reminded me of someone … the taMings … Jule, whose face I hadn’t seen for so long that it was getting hard to see her clearly in my mind.…
I pushed my own filthy hair out of my eyes for the tenth time since I’d got on board, and glanced at Kissindre. She wasn’t looking at me now. I looked away again, thinking about Miya. Borosage’s men had missed her at the monastery, but I didn’t know what had happened during the time I’d been at the reef interface … whether she’d be waiting for me when I got to Freaktown, whether she was safe, whether she was still free—
“… thank you,” Ronin said to me. Kissindre nudged my arm, and I realized we’d been having a conversation I hadn’t been listening to.
“For what?” I said.
He looked surprised. “For all you’ve risked, to bring the truth out.”
I saw Jule in my mind’s eye again as I looked at him. If it hadn’t been for Jule, the feelings I’d had for her, I never would have met her aunt, Lady Elnear taMing, or Natan Isplanasky, who’d sent Ronin here. I never would have set foot on Refuge; I’d still be a half-breed street punk in Quarro’s Oldcity, or else I’d be dead. None of this would have happened. But other things would have. Maybe they wouldn’t have been any better. I shook my head; looked out the window at nothing disguised as night.
“All the risks,” Ronin repeated. “Isplanasky told me about how he met you.…” He almost smiled. “And he said you sent him an illegal message about conditions here. He said your style hadn’t changed much.”
I managed a smile of my own, hoping I never had to tell him how I’d done it.
“And you’re the one who found the survivors inside the reef.”
I nodded again, the motion like a rictus, even though he hadn’t really asked a question.
“You must have a lot to tell me. I’ve heard what Perrymeade has to say. I’ve got testimony from Natasa. But I want what you know, what you’ve seen, heard, sensed, every damn detail of it—” He held up his hand, palm out. I blinked as I saw a recorder implant staring at me like a misplaced eye.
“How many people were on your team?” I asked.
He looked startled, then stunned, and I was sorry I’d asked. “Four,” he said faintly, like that one word held the mass of a planet. “Four.…”
He didn’t have to tell me the others hadn’t been strangers. Slowly he closed his hand, hiding the recorder. For a long minute he didn’t say anything more, didn’t ask anything more, as if all the false energy of painkillers and denial had gone out of him and left him lost and hurting. He was blinking too much when he looked up at me again; his face was set with anger. He opened his hand, waiting for me to speak.
I hesitated, not certain where to start. “You know … about Joby?” I asked, reaching out from my seat to hold Joby’s hand. I thought the fingers twitched, like they were trying to close around mine. I glanced at Perrymeade and held out my arms. He hesitated, but then he passed Joby to me. I held him close, remembering the warm, breathing weight of his small body.
I moved his hands, slowly and gently, until his arms were around my neck. He held on, clinging to me without my help. “Hi, Joby,” I whispered, my throat tight. “Missed you.…” Not knowing whether he could hear me, let alone understand me. I tried to find my way into his thoughts, now that he was so close, but the inner space between our minds had its own geography, and neither one of us had a sense of direction.
“Perrymeade has told me his suspicions,” Ronin said gently, almost hesitantly. “Is there more you can tell me?”
I glanced up, distracted, almost resenting the interruption. I forced myself to get past it and answer him. “I can tell you more than anyone knows,” I said, and began at the beginning.
By the time I’d finished, Joby was lying asleep in my arms, and we were passing over the lighted grid of Tau Riverton. I never thought I’d be glad to see it again, and I wasn’t. But beyond the dark gash that marked the river canyon were the random lights and dendritic streets of Freaktown.
I breathed a sigh of relief as we passed over the river without being hailed by CorpSec. I wondered where Wauno was taking us, now that Grandmother was gone.
He took us to Hanjen. He let the transport hover centimeters above Hanjen’s rooftop, like he was afraid the building might not support its mass. We climbed out, carefully, helping each other down.
Wauno left the ship suspended just above the roof and guided us to a stairway leading down. I wondered why he’d brought us here, when Hanjen had betrayed me once already. I understood now why Hanjen had done it, but that didn’t make trusting him any easier. But I trusted Wauno, so I didn’t ask any questions.
As we went on across the roof I noticed the remains of a wall and pillars around its perimeter. There must have been a sheltered tower up here once, for an, for communing with the cloud-whales. Nothing was left of it now but bits of masonry like broken teeth. I was surprised Hanjen hadn’t replaced it. Maybe he’d felt like there was no way to reclaim what his people had lost when they lost the an lirr, and the sight of a prayer tower that would be meaningless forever wasn’t something he wanted to confront every day.
Hanjen was waiting for us below, in a room I remembered. He stiffened a little as he saw me come in, carrying Joby. I wasn’t sure if he was reacting to what was in my eyes or just to the sight of me. The room looked the way I remembered, filled with artifacts of a past that was gone forever.
I thought about the last time I’d seen him, how I’d been with the HARM survivors after the CorpSec massacre, how he’d held Grandmother’s lifeless body in his arms and cursed us all for what we’d done. That day had been just the beginning of the grief the Satoh had caused the Community.… And even though he’d hated us then, and had every reason to, his act against us had been an act of desperation, done to keep Borosage from grinding the embers of a guttering fire into cold ashes.
Hanjen bowed formally to us, taking his eyes off me as he said, “Namaste. Welcome to my home.”
The others bowed back to him, Wauno and Kissindre murmuring “Namaste” as nat
urally as breathing. Perrymeade’s bow was awkward as he echoed “Namaste,” the first Hydran word I’d ever heard him speak. Ronin imitated the others, doing it well. I stood where I was, holding Joby, stiff and silent.
“Namaste,” another voice said.
“Miya—?” I turned.
She was already looking at me as she entered the room, as if she’d known what she’d see, where each of us stood, even before I spoke. (!—CatJoby—!) Her mind slurred our names into one thought, shot through with emotion. She crossed the room to us, moving as silently as if she was afraid we’d vanish. But her smile widened with each step. As she closed the space between us, she closed her eyes in concentration and took us gently inside the circle of her mind.
My mind burst open like shuttered windows, and suddenly the two of them were there inside me, sharing the view. (Namaste,) I said, finally understanding its true meaning.
(I was so afraid for you—) she thought, kissing me as she called me by my unspoken name.
“Mommy…?” Joby murmured, rubbing his eyes like he’d just wakened from a strange dream to find us there. “Daddy.” He smiled—we were all smiling, impossibly, in the same place at the same time, in our own pocket world again. The room and everyone else in it had ceased to exist, and the universe beyond it—
Someone teleported into the room, almost on top of us.
“Naoh!” I wasn’t sure how many of us said her name at once, like a chorus. Ronin recoiled like he’d never seen anybody tele-port before. Maybe he hadn’t.
I glanced at the others: Kissindre and Wauno, Perrymeade and Hanjen, all caught with their expressions halfway between poles.
Naoh’s surprise became disgust as she turned to find Miya with me and Joby. Her mental barrier ruptured the fragile link I shared with them, before she cut us all out of her mind. She turned away, completing her rejection of our existence.
Miya was back inside my thoughts instantly. I felt her try to force an opening in the wall of her sister’s silence; to force Naoh to acknowledge our right to be together … felt her fail.