Chapter Thirteen
LUCIANA HAD NEVER BEEN INSIDE the Bridge area. She had never taken the tour of the actual bridge, where the captain had once sat when directing the ship and crew. She had never moved beyond the old arena and into the Collinas Gate area where the security gates to enter the Bridge were located.
She’d never had a reason to come to the Bridge until today.
The guards who watched her with suspicious gazes as she showed her wrist to let them scan her ID made her nervous and afraid that at any moment they would leap into some sort of violent action. Or that they would tell her she couldn’t enter.
None of the guards, today, wore side arms. They did have their batons, and she had heard, over the years, how effective the batons were at quelling any resistance. Yet she thought that refusing to let her into the Bridge would be even worse than beating her.
One of the guards came up to her as the scan of her wrist finished. “Come with me,” he said, his tone wooden.
Luciana meekly followed him along a wide, deserted passage, with many doors and other passages along it. He turned through a set of doors that opened silently as he approached them.
Inside were many automated desks, each with screens hovering over them.
The people sitting at the desks wore guard uniforms. An enormous screen floated up by the ceiling, over all the desks.
It was displaying a list. Items on the list blinked out as she glanced at the screen.
Luciana was too nervous to try to read it.
“Sit,” the guard said, pointing at a metal bench at the front of the room.
Everyone at the desks ignored her as she sank onto the cold bench. The guard that had brought her here turned and left.
How long should she stay here? Did anyone know she was here, apart from these people who were ignoring her?
It felt as though she had sat on the bench for hours, before a woman in a guard uniform came out of an inner door and stopped a dozen paces from the bench. She beckoned with her finger.
Luciana got to her feet and followed the woman back through the door, into a corridor with even more doors. The woman approached a narrow door on the right, which slide silently aside. Over her shoulder, Luciana saw Devar, standing at the back of the room.
She hurried forward, her eyes stinging. She breathed hard. She would not cry. Not in font of Devar. She hugged him. Until the woman cleared her throat. When Luciana looked around, she shook her head, and pointed at the chair on the other side of a narrow table.
Luciana sat.
Devar sat, too. He wasn’t cuffed or restrained in any way, and for that, Luciana was grateful.
The woman left and the door closed behind her.
Luciana examined Devar. He was pale and he’d lost weight. He looked tired, and a lot older than he was. “Oh, Devar…”
He shook his head. “Not here.” He said it gently.
Luciana straightened up. Yes, of course. He was right. They were likely recording both audio and video. She cleared her throat.
“How is Caelen?” he asked. His voice was remarkably steady.
“She’s fine.” Luciana added quickly, “They would only let one of us come today. And Caelen has to work. The rent on the Aventine apartment…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
Caelen couldn’t afford to pay the rent on the apartment if Devar wasn’t paying his share.
She was working overtime every day, just to try to cover it.
And Luciana would help, too. She could afford it. She told Devar none of that.
“Caelen should probably give up that apartment and go back to the Wall,” Devar said calmly.
Luciana stared at him in horror. “No! You’ll be out of here soon, and you can return to work—”
“I’m not a member of the coding institute anymore.”
“What? I don’t understand. How can they fire you? You haven’t done anything wrong!”
“The evidence says I did.” He shook his head.
“They showed me the code. It has all my signatures. It looks exactly like something I would write. It came from my office—just not my desk. They pointed out that I wouldn’t be stupid enough to hack the tankball from my own desk, and they’re right.
” He spoke with such…remoteness. As if he wasn’t talking about himself.
“Then there’s the code itself. Designed to make the ball fall into the hands of a Void Hound topman at just the right moment. It’s something I could have written in my sleep.”
Luciana stared at him, too terrified to speak.
“Then there are my money sheets. Bets placed and won, going back two seasons. And a bet placed that didn’t pay out because the arena collapsed. If the game had been won by the Hounds, the payout was astronomical. The odds were against them.”
“You hate tankball,” she whispered.
“Tankball was just the medium. There were other bets…it set a trend. They were all high risk, and all undiscovered.” His smile was humorless.
“They say I would have gone on, undiscovered, if I had known just a little bit more physics and learned a little more about tankball. I wouldn’t have put so much force on the ball.
Once it crashed through the wall, it executed the rest of the commands that would have sent it careening around the tank and then drop into the Hound’s goal mouth.
Once it broke out into the platform structure, those same moves destroyed all the support girders, instead. ”
Luciana licked her lips. “It’s all…lies.”
Devar didn’t react. “Look at my finances. It’s all there for anyone to see.”
“Manufactured,” she shot back. She was shaking. Badly.
Devar shrugged.
She curled her hand into a fist. “But you didn’t do this!”
“I can’t prove that,” Devar said, his tone flat. “And they can prove I did.”
Luciana beat her fist upon the table, in soft movements matching her heart rate. She drew in a breath, while Devar watched her pull herself together. “There has to be something we can do, surely?” She was proud of the fact that her voice was calm, matching his.
“There is something you can do,” Devar said.
“Tell me,” she said quickly, her hope soaring.
“Distance yourself from me. Don’t visit again. Don’t send me messages. Tell everyone you know how disappointed you are in me, that you don’t know where you went wrong, raising me. Declare I’m no son of yours.”
A fresh burst of horror spilled through her. “No!”
“And Caelen must do the same thing,” Devar went on with an implacable tone. “It is the only way either of you will come through this with minimal damage.”
“You speak as if you’ve given up, Devar. You can’t give up! I’ll find a way out of this, I swear.”
“You think I haven’t spent all my time in here trying to figure out a way out? There is none, mother.”
He put his hand on the table, and she could see how thin his fingers had grown. Then he said the most horrifying thing she had ever heard. “They’re attaching the death penalty to the fraud charges.”
The roaring in her head muffled all thought. All feelings.
When she could next pay attention to anything, she realized that she was being propped up in the chair. Devar held her shoulders. “Are you back?” he asked.
“I wish I wasn’t,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
He raised his chin and spoke to the ceiling. “Some water for my mother, please.” He settled her on the chair properly and returned to the other side of the table.
A guard stepped into the room and put a disposable cup on the table in front of Luciana and left.
Luciana didn’t think she could drink without gagging. She said weakly, “They’re just fraud charges…”
Devar seemed cold as he said in his precise way, “Fraud is a broad legal category covering any deliberate falsification of ship systems data. It’s the result of that falsification that determines the sentence.
In this case, the altered code for the ball also altered environmental controls—” He grimaced.
“Gravity.” Then he went on. “And that led to multiple deaths. They still call it fraud, because it was tampering for gain, only the penalty is upgraded. The charge is now fraud with lethal consequences.”
“Even if you did do it, you didn’t mean to kill anyone!”
“I don’t think anyone on the ship but you and Caelen care about that distinction,” Devar said. “They want someone to pay for what happened. And that someone turns out to be me. They’re pulling in mutiny, too. That’s how they’ll ram this through.”
“Mutiny…” She felt sick.
“Anything that compromises safety-critical infrastructure like gravity or life support is legally equivalent to mutiny. And mutiny carries an automatic death sentence.”
Luciana moaned. She couldn’t believe she was hearing this. Devar’s white face, the crimping of his hands so that the knuckles turned white, told her that she was.
“I…I don’t know what to do…” she whispered.
“Go home,” Devar told her. “And stay there until this is over.”
She put her face in her hands, shuddering, as she realized what he meant.
It would be over when they executed him.