Day Eight #2
“I’m here,” said Kelli. It came out a weird, cracked whisper. “I’m here,” she said again, trying harder, and then she came back to herself. She was here. She had a body. Baz was here. Baz would listen to her.
The man holding her arms had let go. She ran forward.
She ran straight past the cops, some of whose hands made startled movements to the weapons at their belts.
Kelli’s mother had told her to be careful around professionals like these, not to make sudden movements in front of them or say anything rude, but she was too panicked and distraught to follow that advice.
Rowan might be dying right now, after all. She ran straight to Baz.
“Baz!” she shrieked. “Baz, you have to listen to me, they just threw a man in the trash! They threw Rowan in the trash! He’s going to die! You have to go find him, we have to help him!”
The cop in charge turned to her in bewilderment. People looked at Kelli like this sometimes, when she was so upset that her words got scrambled up with each other. But she thought she’d been perfectly clear. “What are you talking about?” said the cop. “What trash? What is this, where?”
“I don’t know where! They just said they were putting him in the trash!”
“I’m sure there has been some misunderstanding,” said Conchita, still completely calm. “Someone’s figure of speech taken too literally, maybe; I’m not sure what she’s talking about.”
“IT WAS NOT A FIGURE OF SPEECH!” Kelli screamed.
“Kelli.” Baz touched her face. She jerked, startled, but it oriented her attention back to him and she stopped screaming.
He talked slowly, clearly, the way people on television talked to a panicking animal.
“It’s okay. You’ve been through a lot; I can see that.
Just take a few breaths and slow down so you can help us understand what’s happened here. ”
Kelli managed to take a few breaths, although not slowly, and maybe not as deeply as he would have liked.
She hadn’t realized she was crying until Baz’s fingers had touched her wet cheek.
“You have to check the trash,” she repeated, in a voice that was not exactly calm but at least wasn’t screaming. “You have to right away, please!”
The lead cop sighed. “We’re searching the place anyway. Pasha, Yamuna, start the sweep. Check out the waste disposal units, see if there’s anyone stuck in there.”
“Sir,” said two other cops in acknowledgment, and they took off at a brisk walk in two different directions, with handfuls of their teammates following. About half of the group stayed behind in the atrium, staring Conchita Quixada down.
“You see?” said Baz gently. “They’re going to go find him. It’s going to be fine.”
Maybe it was a figure of speech. Maybe put him in the trash was code for some other horrible death that didn’t literally involve waste disposal.
Maybe they’d phrased it that way just to distract the cops and get them checking all the trash when Rowan was off dying somewhere else.
But there was nothing else anyone could do about that, either, except search more, and they plainly were going to search this whole place. She’d done all she could.
Kelli took a few slow breaths, trying to believe it. She’d done all she could. It was over now.
“That’s it,” said Baz as she got control of herself. “Now, the rest of these people have a lot they’re going to need to sort out, but they know how to do that without us. I think it’d be better if you came back to the ship with me now.”
He held out a pair of standard-issue handcuffs.
Kelli nodded, resigned. It really was over. She’d confessed her crimes and now she was under arrest. It was almost a relief.
She held out her hands.
Baz fumbled a little as he clicked the cuffs shut over her wrists. They pinched as they went on. At least he let her keep her hands in front of her, which was more comfortable than behind her back.
“I’m not even a security professional,” he said with a glance at all the security professionals. “So I can’t really, uh, do the honors. . . .”
“I’ll do them,” said the nearest cop, a squat woman who looked impatient with all this.
“Kelli Reynolds, you are under arrest for aggravated arson with terroristic intent, for unlawful possession of pirated materials, for disseminating age-restricted information to minors, for vandalism, and for grand larceny of intellectual property. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you.”
“For arson?” Conchita repeated, raising her eyebrows. Like she didn’t already know.
“We’ll deal with you in a minute,” one of the other cops snapped.
Kelli smiled slightly. Even knowing she’d told Inspiration about the heist, Conchita still hadn’t believed she’d tell them about the fire.
Conchita was an awful crime lord who thought she knew everything, and Kelli had gotten one over on her after all.
Anyway the reading of rights was a litany she’d heard a lot on television before, and she let the ritual of it lull her as Baz led her away.
“I gotta tell you,” said Baz as they walked through the weird, rusty, industrial metal of the back halls.
“I had to fight even to get onto this team. My job isn’t corporate counterespionage or community standards enforcement, do you understand?
My job is just coordinating a lot of media.
I told you that before you left. I told you, if you have a real concern about copyright infringers or other criminals, you take it through those channels, you don’t take it to me, you don’t go haring off on your own trying to be a vigilante when you have no training in how any of this works and—I’m sorry if this is insensitive—an actual diagnosed lack of commonsense understanding of how any of this works.
You could have gotten killed. You have no idea some of the other things that could have happened to you, besides getting killed.
Or maybe they did, I don’t know—we haven’t debriefed yet. I shouldn’t assume.”
“I didn’t know,” Kelli said woodenly. She felt like that, like a puppet, like a robot, like wood. “I didn’t know it was going to . . . be criminals like this. Wanting to make me steal stuff. I didn’t.”
Except she had kind of known. She’d had the thought the first time she talked to Rowan at the Good Dog: that she’d seen this on television before. That it was never going to be just a friendly talk. She’d gone anyway. Why?
Because she’d wanted to be with Rowan.
She tried not to think of him in the trash, whatever the trash was. Metaphor or not. Baz’s team was searching the place and they’d find him. It would be okay. She hoped it would be okay.
“The enforcement team didn’t even want to involve me,” said Baz.
“And I said, look, hell if I know why—she knows what the emergency numbers are—but I’m the one she’s sending the messages to.
You have to understand about Kelli; she supervises a great script but she is developmentally disabled.
She does not open up to people easily. She gets set off by every little thing.
If she’s saying all this to me it’s because I’m the one she trusts to hear it.
You go up there and storm the place without me, I don’t even know what she’ll do.
I won’t interfere with anything else, but she needs to see it’s me.
She needs to see me with you. Took some convincing.
And upper management didn’t like me leaving my actual job for this long either; it was a whole thing.
I stuck my neck out for you, is what I’m saying. You put me in a bad position.”
Kelli glowered up at him. He was skinny, but taller than her by about a head. “Why didn’t you answer me at all?”
“They told me not to. Too much chance of interception. That pink thing you bought from the mall is not exactly a professional-grade secure communication device. I’m surprised nobody found it on you, actually. How’d you hide it?”
She’d hid it by being treated like a human being.
Like a guest. Rowan had respected her too much to frisk her like a prisoner, and had trusted her too much to admit the need, and now he was maybe dead for that mistake.
Or maybe he was totally fine and just sitting in a trash heap?
Maybe they’d rescued him already? Maybe it was a metaphor?
Kelli wasn’t thinking straight about this.
“Anyway,” said Baz, “thanks to you we did see the heist coming, although only barely. The team didn’t get your messages about the exact methods until after it was over.
But you’d also told us you came from Io, and community standards enforcement has been itching for an excuse to crack down on some of these crime groups on Io.
A little crime is inevitable, you understand, if we tried to take that rate down to zero we’d wreck the place trying, but the Brimstones in particular have been getting too big for their britches, too ambitious, and stealing an actual entire character kernel is a provocation we can’t ignore.
And if you’re going after a group like them, you have to make sure the evidence is airtight.
So we let you take the kernel and then tracked your trajectory. ”
Kelli was finding it hard to concentrate, even though this was all extremely important. She thought she heard voices arguing in the distance behind her. The Brimstone Syndicate and the cops, in some dispute that she supposed was not her problem anymore.