The Dark Reaches (25 page)

Sen Paolo, who of course moved easily here, waited for them at a hatch up ahead. When Tereu and Gareth reached it, Gareth guided her hands to a metal handle set into the wall. She stopped herself from rocking there like a silly balloon and glanced at sen Paolo. “Let’s get this over with quickly. I want to go home.”

There it was again, in sen Paolo’s eyes: pity. Beside her, Gareth punched in the security code and hauled the hatch open.

Light spilled out. The compartment inside—a lock?—was small, spherical, with a huge round window of thick glass facing into the room beyond, which was filled with harsh white light. Tereu allowed herself to drift forward, curious—there was a sleeping sack in there, floating loose and empty, and a large bulb of water—

It burst from the corner of her vision and plastered itself in front of her, pressing against the other side of the glass. The shape of a man, dressed in a white coverall, silhouetted against the light.

Tereu lurched back and felt the welcome warmth of both men’s arms catching her, holding her steady. Then as her eyes adapted and she saw the thing’s face, she took a thin breath and let it out in a whispered scream.

It had no eyes, except for little crusted wounds. The nose had been mashed to parallel slits; the mouth drooled, shapeless and toothless. A wire led into one of the eye wounds, its other end attached to a small round object like a lens that the thing held in one hand, pressed against the glass. Aimed at her.

With a wave of revulsion, she remembered the report she had read this evening. The thing was looking at her—in the only way it could.

She took a breath. So. Sen Paolo had probably hoped for this effect—hoped for the horror, the fear that she had just shown him.

Well, that would be his last satisfaction. She drew on years of self-control—years of experience Hiso had given her that this young man could not begin to guess at. She turned herself around awkwardly to face sen Paolo, and said, almost evenly, “Did you imagine that I was not aware of this?”

“Yes,” sen Paolo said. His voice was flat, sober. “I knew you were not aware of it, not in this way. Or Pilot Kimura would have paraded you out here to see it already. This is the grand opening move of his war against the Cold Minds. Surely he would want you to cut the ribbon—if he wanted you to understand it at all.”

She gritted her teeth. “So what is the point of this?”

“I thought,” sen Paolo said quietly, “that seeing this might remind you of who you are. Of who you
really
are.”

“Seeing this monster!”

“Seeing that the policies you oversee,” Iain said, “turned an innocent, healthy human child into—this.”

On the other side of the glass the thing shifted its hand to look toward sen Paolo. She saw sen Paolo gather himself—saw him smile at the thing, as if it could know what that meant!

Then she shuddered.
Perhaps it does know.
Some of the children taken were as old as eight or nine. . . .

No.
“Pilot sen Paolo,” Tereu said coldly, “I resent this disgusting effort at emotional manipulation. Gareth, take me home.”

The boy looked at her. “I’m sorry, Cousin. Not yet.”

She drew her head back, affronted. “Now,” she said. “Or I will speak to First Pilot Kimura, and your career will end.”

“I think,” the boy said carefully, “that it was going to end soon anyway.”

Tereu twitched her hand, signaling for security. Gareth caught the motion and shook his head. “It won’t work, Cousin.”

“No help in range,” Iain said. “There is only a small medical staff on duty in the night hours, and their monitoring room is on the other side of the—patient’s quarters, one level up. They can’t hear us.”

“You’re committing a crime,” she said hotly.

“I’m trying to get you to listen to me,” sen Paolo said. “Set aside your fear of Hiso. He can’t hear you now. He can’t control your actions unless you choose to allow it. All I ask is that you listen. I give you my word that you will be returned safely home tonight.”

“While you and this renegade escape to the deepsiders,” she spat. She saw Gareth wince.

“No,” sen Paolo said. “Gareth will keep his oath to the First Pilot—he’ll return and face what happens next. And I’ll remain in your power. But, Madame—the ground is shifting.”

She looked at the thing on the other side of the glass. “
Must
we talk here?”

“Yes,” sen Paolo said. “We must.”

She closed her eyes. “Then I will listen—for my people’s sake.”

“You’re afraid for your people,” sen Paolo said.

“I’m bound to them by my word of honor,” she said. “And I love them.” She opened her eyes and met his gaze fiercely. “Tell me what choice
you
would have made, in my people’s place six centuries ago. With the Cold Minds about to crush you, about to end everything.”

“I can’t, of course,” he said. His voice was gentle. “I never was in your place. But I’ve had—the opportunity to learn something about honor.”

She kept her eyes on his.

“Kimura Hiso has the kind of honor my brothers of the Line held for so long,” sen Paolo said. “Pledged to a proud tradition. Built on something outside himself: his ideal of your city, your people. What I have learned—” His voice actually faltered. She watched him sharply as he continued. “What I have learned is that honor like that . . . because it is external, it can be broken by forces we do not control. I—someone I love dearly taught me that the first, the most important truth to hold to is truth to oneself. Always to ask, do my actions, do my decisions reflect the man I should be?”

“You cannot tell me that Kimura Hiso is dishonorable,” she said. But she heard the uncertainty in her voice. Damn—he was shaking her.

He looked straight at her. Into her. “I do tell you that. Examine yourself. Consider what was done to the human being we are looking at. Not just here, now, but at the beginning of his life, when he was sold into the Cold Minds’ service. Will you say it was done in your name, and by your will?”

Out of pride, she made herself turn her head and look at the thing inside the glass. “I knew of it, and I do not repudiate it,” she said firmly. “That was done to protect my people. To whom I am sworn.”

His voice was careful, kind. “At any price?”

“Even my life,” she said angrily.

“Even his?” Now Sen Paolo’s voice shook. “I learned, through the worst—loss—of my life, that the one price you can’t pay to protect what your soul treasures most is—your soul itself.” He took a breath, then another, and went on. “It breaks people. As it has broken Kimura Hiso. He cannot walk away from this choice; he’s paid too much of himself. You—have not, not yet.”

“You don’t know me at all,” she said fiercely, against the sting of tears in her eyes.

“I want to help you,” he said. “Has it been so long since anyone wanted to help you?”

Tears again. She turned her face away from him, blinked hard, and looked at the thing in the cage. It had drifted away from the glass and now huddled in a far corner of the space, head down, its face mercifully hidden. And in that moment, for that moment, she saw it as human, and afraid.

As she was afraid. But to lead was to choose, even in the face of fear. She looked back at sen Paolo—be damned if he saw the tears—took a breath. And asked, “How can I free my people from this bargain?”

She saw no hint of triumph in his expression, only sober assessment of her words. “Time is short,” he said. “Kimura Hiso’s plan for saving the Tritoners cannot work—the Cold Minds will simply destroy you. But he has, nevertheless, set it in motion. We must end it now—by ending the bargain. Breaking it. Denying the Cold Minds their next prey.”

She stared at him. “How?”

“In the end it will take all of us,” he said. “My people, the people of Triton, and the deepsiders. But for now, you can make all the difference. Your cousin—” He looked at Gareth, who nodded. “In his work for the First Pilot, your cousin receives the reports of the jumpship patrols when they discover a vulnerable deepsider habitat. Gareth sets out the information for Kimura Hiso, who—passes it to the Cold Minds.” He looked at Tereu. “With your permission, Madame—let him pass that same information to you as well. Then, if you wish, you can convey it to your connections among the deepsiders.” There was a hard glint in his eyes. “I know that you have them.”

He knows that I allowed Kiaho’s kidnapping.
She held herself stiffly upright. “I will do it,” she said.

He bowed his head to her, the full, deep bow of respect.

“And now,” she said, suddenly weary beyond belief, “Cousin, please—take me home.”

Linnea’s borrowed chrono woke her early on the morning of the day Esayeh had promised to take her back to Triton. She had bathed the night before, in the steamy, soapy, noisy community refresher on this passageway, and she had gone to the laundry one passage over and carefully washed the best of her deepsider clothes. These, too, were borrowed, from Pilang—but last night Pilang had made the loan a gift: soft red trousers tight at the ankles, and a snug knitted gray shirt.

In her tiny, curtained sleep cubby, Linnea dressed carefully, listening for some sign that Esayeh was up and about in the small cluttered space beyond. In the dim light in front of a scrap of mirror, she went to work combing her hair. Just a little longer, and she could braid it—she grinned at the thought of Iain’s probable reaction to that. Then she went still, with a shiver of joyful realization.
In just a few hours, I’ll see him again.
She stuffed the comb into her bag, still grinning.

Last night she and Pilang and Esayeh had gone out for drinks at a pub at the far end of the park. They had drifted home late through the dim blue-white artificial moonlight in the park, Esayeh and Pilang hand in hand arguing about the words of some song, singing snatches of it back and forth. Eventually Linnea had left them behind. After all these days, she knew her way home to Esayeh’s tiny quarters, to the sleep cubby he had lent to her.

But she’d never heard Esayeh come in last night at all.
His business, and Pilang’s.
She tied her hair neatly into the red-and-gray scarf Pilang had brought her last night to complete the gift.

Then she unlaced the curtain cautiously and poked her head out, half-expecting to see both Pilang’s and Esayeh’s heads at the top of his sleep bag. But the room was empty. She turned up the string of multicolored lights surrounding the entrance door and looked around at the walls festooned with net bags of real books, wadded shirts tied in place by their sleeves, a cluster of rumpled cloth flowers, two and a half pouches of wine, a couple of archaic-looking crystal recorders, three rabbit skins tied in a bunch, and, stuffed next to Esayeh’s sleeping sack, the pair of thick, insanely colorful hand-knitted socks he always put on as soon as he got home. There was no comm, of course, and Linnea saw no sign of a handwritten note.

Her heart sinking a little, she grabbed the small net bag of bright yellow tomatoes tied next to the curtain of her cubby, snagged it onto her belt, and pushed her way out into the passageway. She pulled her way quickly along toward Froyda’s space, where it was usually possible to get a bulb of coffee at this hour, especially if you had some farm produce, especially tomatoes. Esayeh would surely be waiting for her there.

Only he wasn’t. When Linnea poked her head through the open doorway, she found only a couple of teenagers holding hands and whispering, and a gray-haired woman reading a paper book frayed almost into fuzz; and Froyda, of course. No one else.

Linnea gave the tomatoes to Froyda, refusing coffee with polite thanks. “Have you seen Esayeh this morning?”

Froyda, a comfortably large woman whose short frizzle of blazing red hair contrasted oddly with her brown skin, shook her head. She gave Linnea a knowing smile—like everyone on this passageway she had obviously figured out that Linnea was not a deepsider, or indeed even from Triton. “You’re heading out, I hear.”

“I hope so,” Linnea said. “Thanks. I’ll be back and see you someday.”

“Be glad to see you, if I happen to be here,” Froyda said. Then she coughed politely into the crook of her elbow, and said, “You know, sometimes Esayeh goes down to Mechanical. He’s pretty good with repairs, and they drag him in—”

Linnea smiled her thanks. “Not this time, I think.”
He’d better not have done anything like that. Not today.
She launched herself back into the passageway, almost hitting an adolescent boy on air-leak patrol, who squealed and reproached her. Her next stop was Pilang’s sleeping space, two passages over and one up—the space between the inner and outer tank walls was thick here, so the neighborhoods were densely woven and intertwined.

But Pilang’s black cloth door was laced tight shut, and when Linnea called out for her, no one answered.

All right. The clinic next. Linnea knew she did not want to make the long trip to the docking ring only to find no one there. Someone at the clinic would at least know where Pilang was, and Pilang could point her to Esayeh.