“And big yellow teeth!” Jadwiga giggled. “They bite!”
“Well, that’s true. And kick, sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.” Jadwiga rocked on her haunches. “Do you like ponies?”
“Very much.”
“Want to see mine?”
“Yes, in a bit.” Jadwiga wriggled in impatience, which Ekaterin steadfastly ignored. “But you mentioned two other people—Ma Roga, and Boris? Who are they? I don’t know them.”
“This is all Ma’s place.” Jadwiga waved a skinny arm over her head. “Boris is her real son. He’s big.”
“Has Ma Roga lived here for a very long time?”
“Forever,” Jadwiga assured her earnestly.
Ekaterin wanted to work back to the radbug problem, but it seemed premature to alarm the girl with the news that they were both stolen and deadly poisonous. Because as far as the cumulative effects of contamination in the zone went, Jadwiga seemed way out ahead. She studied the girl’s thin arms and thick torso. The swollen belly of starvation? Another tumor? “Do you get enough to eat? Does Ma Roga feed you?”
Jadwiga waved a hand—she actually had only five fingers on the right side. “Oh, yeah. But it hurts to swallow. ‘Cause of this thing.” The hand squeezed her growth, but then flinched away. “Ingi and I tried tying a string around it once, to pinch it off, but it hurt too much, and Ma says it grows on the inside anyway so’s that wouldn’t do any good.” She made a face.
Ekaterin quashed horror. She managed, neutrally, “I’m afraid Ma Roga is right about that. You need a proper doctor.” And why hasn’t she been brought to one? What the hell, Vadim…?
Jadwiga wrinkled her short nose in confusion, but then shrugged it off.
Positive, Ekaterin reminded herself. And, real son…? “Have you lived here long?
“For always. Ma promised.”
“Do you know how old you are?”
“‘Course I do.” Faint indignation in that rough voice. “I’m fifteen.”
“But you are not Ma Roga’s daughter? And Ingi—he’s not her child either?”
“Oh, we’re all her children.” Was that wave in the direction of the skull-studded graveyard?
“How…” How to ask this? “How did you and Ingi come here? In the first place?”
“When we were little Ma told us she found us all under cabbage leaves, but that’s just silly. There’s this place in the woods, in the zone. Ingi says he’s seen it, but I don’t know. ‘Cept I know Vadim brought me specially.”
A muffled yell sounded from the distance, and rhythmic thumping; Ekaterin twisted around, one hand going out to push herself to her feet. The thumping resolved into the beat of small unshod hooves, and the yelling came from Enrique. Cantering toward them was a scruffy pony wearing a rope bridle, bearing a thin, white-haired figure, bareback, his legs wrapped around the pony’s barrel. In hot pursuit, clumsy in his protective garb and faceplate, ran Enrique. “Stop, you little thief!”
Ingi yanked back on his rope reins, bringing his mount more-or-less to a halt. “Jaddie!” he cried. “Get away, run away! It’s the white ghosts, get away!”
Jadwiga stared up, but declined to jump to her feet as Ekaterin had. “They’re not ghosts, stupid. They’re just people in white clothes.”
“That’s what Ma meant! These people! Outsiders!”
Ingi, it appeared, had a good grasp of consensual lying…
Jadwiga’s lower lip stuck out as she considered this. “Well, she told you not to ride in the sun, and you don’t listen to that, either.”
This delaying argument allowed Enrique time to overtake his quarry—he grabbed for the albino boy’s arm. Enrique did not so much pull him off as hold him while the pony jinked out from under him. The animal simulated a bolt in a desultory fashion but, as soon as it had trotted a few meters out of reach, put its head down to tear at the grass. Ingi fell on his feet and twisted out of Enrique’s grip.
Whatever he was about to try next was interrupted when Jadwiga, beginning to yell something else at him, was seized by a prolonged coughing fit that ended with her spitting out blood onto the ground. She peered at the thick red blob, appearing more peeved than surprised or alarmed. Her six-fingered left hand swept a little dirt over it, as if to cover it up. Ingi ran over and crouched by her side, making a frustrated wave. He finally offered her the hem of her own skirt by way of handkerchief to wipe her lips, which she accepted indifferently.
Ekaterin, in a moment of inspiration, sat back down, motioning Enrique to do the same.
“Hi, there,” she said, trying for some cross between maternal warmth and drawing-room politeness, in the hopes that either the former would be soothing or the latter would prove contagious, or at least quelling. “You must be Ingi, right? Jadwiga was just telling me about you. My name is Ekaterin, and my friend here”—a nod across—“is named Enrique.”
Enrique looked as though he would have preferred Dr. Borgos, but, getting a closer look at their inadvertent young hosts, quite plainly came to a prudent decision to let Ekaterin-the-Barrayaran take point on this one. Slowly, he lowered himself to the ground as well. Ingi, evidently feeling himself outvoted, sank to his knees. The grazing pony ignored them all, moving off a little farther.
“I saw you,” admitted Ingi. “In the woods.” The curiosity he had displayed in the scans from last night seemed to be regaining the upper hand. “In your suits.” His gaze kept returning to Ekaterin, de-suited or at least de-hooded.
“Spying on us, were you?” said Enrique. “You took our bugs!”
Ingi looked more shifty than guilty. “You left them. Anything left in the zone is ours.”
“Nice try,” said Ekaterin, “but no. You also must have seen Vadim with us. Vadim talked to you the other night, didn’t he? Told you to stay away, away from our plot, maybe?”
A shot more than figuratively in the dark, remembering Vadim’s little patrol into the gloaming, but it won a familiar squirm. Ingi really must be about her son Nikki’s age, caught on that uncomfortable boundary between eager and surly, equally desperate for praise and escape. “Maybe.”
“We know you took our bugs; we have vids. And we found them in the shed just now,” said Enrique sternly. “Was that all of them? Or did you put any of them somewhere else, or lose any along the way?”
Wary shrug. “Most of them, I guess.”
“Why?” Enrique almost wailed.
Another shrug. “Jaddie liked them. They were a present.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to give them back—”
Ekaterin held up a hand to stem this premature point. “A present. Was it her birthday?” It was nearly halfway around the year from Winterfair.
“Not exactly. She’s kind of sick.” White fingers pulled up shreds of grass, and the boy looked away. “They seemed better than flowers. She can pick her own flowers.”
“Do you know how sick?” Do you know your friend is dying?
A downward stare. “Yeah.”
Yeah. Backcountry children in general were not so insulated from death as their city counterparts. Nor birth, nor illness, nor any other part of life. Least of all in this—entirely illegal, Ekaterin was reminded—squatter encampment.
“These bugs are special, and very important to us,” Ekaterin began. “Important to the future of the zone, and of the district.”
“She says they made them!” Jadwiga gestured at Ingi. “Do you believe that? How can people make bugs?”
Ingi shook his head.
At some point, when they went public, Ekaterin was going to have to explain the radbugs to backcountry district subjects; some of the creakiest oldsters were perhaps little better educated than these lost children. Call it practice. “Enrique started with ordinary bugs, then bred these for a special job. You do know that the zone is the zone, forbidden to people, because it is contaminated with radioactives?”
“Rads are bad.” Jadwiga nodded. “Ma says.”
Ingi was watching Ekateri
n suspiciously. “Vadim says city people overreact. That’s good, because it keeps them away. We don’t want people to come here!”
Ekaterin hesitated, then forged on. “To simplify it very much—what they really do is a bit more complicated—our radbugs eat rads. We think we can use them to clean all the poison out of the zone and make it a place people can live again.”
Enrique cringed visibly at this fast-forward version, but had the wit not to step on her lines. She could tell it hurt, though.
“We live here now,” said Jadwiga.
“Live without getting sick, though… no thyroid or bone cancer, or other, subtler damage.” Ekaterin touched her throat; Ingi rocked back. Jadwiga just frowned. “The thing is, the contamination that the radbugs eat makes them radioactive—full of rads—themselves. That’s why I made Enrique put the trefoils, the lights, the—the glowing yellow flowers—on their backs, to be a warning to people not to touch. The brighter the light, the more poisonous the bug is, and you shouldn’t handle it.”
Ingi’s brow wrinkled as he puzzled this through. “Why don’t the bugs die, then? If they’re really eating poison?”
“They do, eventually. But not before they’ve collected quite a lot of contaminants for removal. It’s… really rather heroic, when you think about it.” Or would be, if insects in general weren’t basically little machines to start with. Biochemical machines, to be sure.
Jadwiga looked deeply dismayed. “They’ll all die? But they’re pretty!”
Ingi said scornfully, “Everything dies.” But then shut his mouth abruptly. Conscious of his own tactlessness? Interesting.
Ekaterin was conscious of a strong impulse to strap both these feckless youngsters into the back of her lightflyer and whisk them straight to Hassadar General. Without waiting for whatever grownups had permitted this to go on. And then come back to deal directly with it all leading a squad of…. well, perhaps not rangers. Hassadar municipal guards? Vorkosigan armsmen? Drat it, we’d entrusted the ranger cadre to prevent this sort of nightmare!
Not that a squad of Hassadar guardsmen, or even their own very loyal armsmen, would greet being ordered into the zone with enthusiasm, suited up for it or not. The devil is in the details, Miles was fond of saying. She must need more details, because it was certain that full understanding of this devilish situation was still eluding her.
“Has Vadim ever offered to take either of you two anywhere? To a doctor, perhaps?” Ekaterin tried again, addressing Ingi this time.
Ingi flinched back, and cried, “No! We can’t leave! They’d have to shoot the dogs and goats and ponies!” Jadwiga bobbed in agitation, nodding.
It was true that one of the rangers’ jobs was to cull the feral dog packs, although usually only when incursions were reported by the zone’s few rural neighbors. These hunts had formerly been conducted on horseback, with the aid of the rangers’ own dogs, but nowadays from the air, with the aid of scanners, Ekaterin understood. Although backcountry folks were just as likely to deal with such problems by themselves—no one had a tally of how much antique military ordnance was still floating illegally around the district, discreetly cached.
“Do you have milk goats?” Ekaterin asked instead, approaching the problem sideways. It was also true, one couldn’t just abruptly abandon milk goats. Nor remove radiation-riddled animals from the zone. This one might not be quite such a social lie as the one about white ghosts.
Jadwiga nodded again, and oh dear Ekaterin wished she wouldn’t. “I milk them,” the girl said proudly. “That’s my job.” She glanced in new concern at Ingi. “Where are they? Taking them out is his job,” she added to Ekaterin, with a jerk of her thumb at the white boy.
“They’re around front.” Ingi gave a vague wave of his hand toward the shack-on-stilts, beyond which they’d left the lightflyer. Ekaterin followed the gesture, and saw a shadowy brown goat-shape rattling the greener bushes—nibbling, no doubt. Concentrating contaminants up the food chain.
“You’re not suppos’d to let them eat the garden,” scolded Jadwiga, to which Ingi replied defensively, “They’re not!” but betrayed a more intimate knowledge of goats by adding, “Yet.”
Jadwiga tossed her head. “Anyway, Ma says she’ll never, ever leave. I heard her tell Vadim and Boris, once. They thought we were asleep. That when she dies, she wants to be burned in her hut. Which is ick, and anyway, then where would we live?”
“She told Vadim she had old Count Piotr’s own word she was to be left alone in the zone,” Ingi allowed, sounding a bit reluctant. “Vadim said, but if nobody else alive now remembers, how can she prove it? She didn’t say.” He added after a moment, “She cuffed him on the head, though, so I don’t think she liked him saying that.”
Ekaterin mustered her patience. Jadwiga was older, but Ingi seemed brighter; he might know more. “How did Ma Roga come to be living here in the zone in the first place?”
Jadwiga repeated, “Forever,” albeit with less conviction than before; then, apparently struck by the question—had she never considered it till now?—added, “Boris would know. He knows lots.”
Ingi added, “You’re just some kind of city tourists, anyway. You don’t belong here.” He turned to Jadwiga: “We don’t have to tell them anything.”
Before Ekaterin could decide on the best way to disabuse the boy of his misapprehensions, Jadwiga put in, “Don’t worry. When Boris comes back, he’ll make them go away. He made that bad hunter go away, that time!”
Ingi bit his lip. “Shut up about that!” he hissed to her. “Just… don’t.” Jadwiga rocked back, offended.
Now what’s this tale? Nothing good, Ekaterin suspected. She just managed not to rub her forehead with her gloved and contaminated hand. Her nose itched; she sniffed. “Does Vadim visit you often?” The children seemed to speak of him without fear, which restrained her provisional fury with the man. Somewhat.
Jadwiga nodded vigorously. “He comes on his day off, usually. Not every time. He taught Ingi to read. But he won’t take us a ride in his van!”
By the expression crossing Ingi’s face, this was a shared peeve. “You should ask him again for your next birthday, if…” He cut himself off abruptly.
If you are still alive? “So you’ve never flown? Never seen the zone or the district from the air?” A sneaky method of getting the pair of them to Hassadar General occurred to her, but she set the ploy aside. For now.
Ingi was drawn out again despite himself. “Is it amazing?”
“Like magic?” said Jadwiga.
Ekaterin blinked, suddenly made aware of how familiarity bred not so much contempt, as unmindfulness. Blindness, even. “Yes. Yes, it is. I quite enjoy flying.” She added rather at random, “My husband gave me my lightflyer for a Winterfair present.”
Both youths looked wildly impressed. “He must like you a lot,” said Jadwiga.
“Well… yes,” Ekaterin admitted.
“Is he rich? Like a prince?”
“There aren’t any real princes, Jaddie,” said Ingi, impatient again. Embarrassed? “That was on Old Earth.”
“That’s not so! Vadim said there was one born in Vorbarr Sultana, far away over nine and nine districts where the emperor lives in a golden palace.” This last was delivered in a fairy-tale sing-song. “Is that true?” she demanded of Ekaterin.
“Not… not exactly…”
Ingi gave a self-satisfied sniff.
Ekaterin took a breath. “The capital is only three districts to the north, the Imperial Residence is made out of gray stone blocks, mostly, and there are two little princes and a princess now, but she’s just a baby.”
Enrique raised his brows at her through his face mask—in amused approval at this unwonted precision, perhaps.
Silence, as they digested this. “Have you seen this, for real?” asked Ingi at last. Enrique’s glance swung to include the boy. Ingi, Ekaterin thought, should get to know Enrique. She suspected they might hit it off, once Enrique got over his stolen-radbug grudge, whi
ch, now that they looked to be recoverable, he likely would.
“Yes.”
Jadwiga sat back with a sigh of profound satisfaction. To know that she lived in a world where princesses were real? Ekaterin recalled the unselfconscious joy she’d witnessed in Gregor’s and Laisa’s faces, when they’d shown off their new daughter to her on her last visit to the Residence. How agonizingly different must have been the emotions of Jadwiga’s real parents, when they’d… thrown her away in the zone?
In the hard Dendarii Mountains not far to the south, it had been the stern Time-of-Isolation custom to cut the throats of mutie infants, an approach that had stretched secretly into modern times before being finally stamped out. There’s this place in the woods. In these softer lowlands, had a seeming-softer custom lingered on too long? What is this haunted place, this… dreadful orphanage? Ekaterin was growing frantic for facts. They could not be worse than her imaginings.
“Ingi!” cawed a hoarse voice, echoing through the trees. “Where is the brat? Ingi, you’ve let the goats loose again. I’ll tan your hide.” That last sounded too tired to be a credible peril, but the source of the call rounded the raised hut.
Be careful what you wish for…
Two people led another shaggy pony, burdened with sacks hanging over its round barrel. A man of middling height had a hand out balancing, of all things, a battered old upholstered armchair, threadbare with foam padding showing through, slung teetering atop the animal. As the white-garbed strangers came into his sight, his snub features set in a scowl, which somehow made him look beefier than he actually was.
The older woman stumping forward wore skirt and tunic and heavy boots. She was shorter and slighter than the fellow, but her frown was fiercer. The pony took advantage of the distraction to buck and dump its load, which the man caught at only enough to direct its groundward thump.
The responsible grownups. Finally.
Such as they were…
“Trespassers!” snapped the woman, coming at them.
The fellow grabbed a length of firewood from the pile by the house and raised it in uncertain threat. “Should I beat t’em, Ma?”