Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Scar
For once in my life, I’m thinking more of a female than of my own family, or the case I’ve been working since my parents were murdered. I think of her more than of the crystal in my pocket and the Illibrium in this mine.
How is this possible?
I don’t fully understand what is happening to me but I’m unable to squash these protective feelings I have for Mara Wilson.
I am obsessed with this human engineer. She is pregnant with another human’s child, yet I do not care and this does not diminish my need to remain at her side in any way.
In fact, I feel protective toward her and also the child she carries.
This explains why I’ve left the compound early, which never happens. I did not file out this morning and take public transport with them, instead I left alone at dawn and I am here, standing in the lobby of employee housing like a fool.
The more time I spend with her, the more I want to remain at her side.
Last night, when she was in the compound for dinner with my family, I made sure to sit at her side.
My whole family made sure that I was able to sit next to her, they seemed to expect it and then they moved Andrew away from us so that we could have more privacy, which was perfect.
I have told myself a reason for being here.
We need to go over the archive rosters before shift, and it’s more efficient to do it on the walk than to lose an hour of her day later.
I constructed this reasoning at some point between waking and dressing, and it held up all the way down the jungle road, and it is holding up less well now that I have been standing in this lobby for nineteen minutes.
Minecorp employees notice me standing in the lobby, for no reason.
I’m near the lift bank with nothing in my hands, not moving, not waiting for a lift.
A pair of techs come out, see me, go quiet, and take the long way around to the doors.
A Gravian maintenance worker looks up, looks away, and finds something fascinating about her boots.
I wanted to see Mara before our shifts start.
There’s no report to deliver and no roster that couldn’t wait and no reason in the Four Sectors for me to be here except that I woke in the dark at the compound with her name already in my head, and the walls felt too close, and the only thought that made any sense was go where she is.
So here I am. Standing in a lobby. Waiting for a female who is not mine and never will be.
The lift opens and it’s the wrong Wilson.
Andrew steps out with his tablet already in his hand, mid-stride, and he gets three steps into the lobby before he registers me. “Scar.” Something crosses his face too fast to name and is replaced by the easy warmth that does not feel genuine. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting.”
“Right.” He laughs, glancing around the empty lobby as though the answer might be standing somewhere behind me. “For…?”
“Your sister.”
“Huh.” He tucks the tablet under his arm. “Early start.”
“Yes.”
He waits for the rest. There is no rest. I have found that beings will fill a silence with almost anything if you simply decline to fill it yourself, and Andrew Wilson is a male who cannot let a silence lie there.
“Work thing?” he says. “Grid stuff? Because we’re not scheduled on the archive until… ”
“Rosters.”
“Rosters. Sure.” His smile stays exactly where it is. “You know you could just message her. She’s got a tablet. She’s had it surgically attached to her hand since she was nineteen.”
“I could.”
It’s a perfectly civil moment. Two beings exchanging pleasantries before shift. And underneath it there’s something hard. He’s been smiling since the lift doors opened. It is an excellent fake smile, and it has not once in this conversation reached anywhere near his eyes.
“Well,” he says, and takes half a step closer, and drops his voice into something warmer, more confiding, brother-to-brother.
“Look, since we’re both here… Mara’s got a lot on her plate right now.
This contract’s the biggest thing she’s ever taken on and she’s had a rough year, personally.
Bad breakup, the whole thing.” He gives me a rueful little shrug, one male to another.
“She gets attached to people fast, always has. It’s a good quality and it’s gotten her hurt about a dozen times. ”
I say nothing.
“So.” He spreads his hands, pleasant and reasonable. “It’s just, she’s mine to look out for, you know? That’s my job. There’s only the two of us.”
She’s mine to look out for.
I turn the phrase over the way I’d turn over a crystal in the tunnel.
On its face it’s nothing. A brother, protective, staking a claim to his own sister’s welfare.
Any male might say it. My own brothers have said versions of it about their brides for years.
It’s the mine that snags and the smoothness of the delivery, the way it arrived pre-assembled, as though he’d had it ready in his mouth before he came down in the lift.
“She’s an adult female,” I say. “She looks out for herself.”
Andrew’s smile flickers, just for an instant, and then he laughs, “Ha. She’d love hearing you say that.”
The lift chimes again behind him.
Mara steps out.
She’s got her gear on and her hair pulled back.
She fights with a glove and looks up and sees me.
And she lights up. It sweeps across her beautiful face at once, surprise and then something bright and unguarded.
“Cayzor.” She comes across the lobby fast. “What are, did we have something this morning? I didn’t have anything on my… ”
“No.”
“No?”
“I came to walk with you.” Six words, and every one of them true, and I hear how they land in the quiet lobby.
Her mouth opens. Closes. A flush comes up her throat and she looks, for a moment, entirely undone, and then she recovers, and grins at me. “Well. Okay. Good. I have about eleven questions about the maintenance archive and you’ve saved me having to type them.”
“That’s why I came.”
“Sure it is,” Andrew grumbles.
I ignore him. So does Mara.
“Morning, Mar,” her brother then says brightly. “Ready? We’re going to get eaten alive on level four hundred today.”
“Morning.” She’s still faintly pink. “Cayzor’s walking with us.”
“And I will do this every morning and afternoon, before and after every work shift.”
“Great,” Andrew says. “Fantastic.”
Leah and Roxy come to my office just after midshift.
I hear them before the door, two sets of footsteps and a low conversation. Then the knock, which is unusual in itself. Family doesn’t knock.
“Have you got a minute?” Leah says.
“I do.”
They come in, and Roxy shuts the door behind them and then they stand there looking quiet and uncomfortable.
“What’s wrong?”
They exchange a look. Roxy, who has never been at a loss for words in my presence, examines her own hands.
“Okay,” Leah says finally. “This is going to sound insane, and we’ve been going back and forth about whether to even come down here, and if you tell us we’re being ridiculous we’ll go away and never mention it again.”
“Say it.”
“It’s Andrew,” Roxy blurts out. “We don’t like him.”
Something goes very still behind my ribs.
“Told you it sounds insane,” Leah says. “But…I don’t like him either.”
“It doesn’t. I don’t like that male either,” I admit.
Roxy looks up sharply. “The problem is that I’ve been telling myself these last few diurnals that I’m a scientist and I can’t walk into somebody’s office with a feeling and no data.”
I lean back and cross my arms. “Tell me the feeling.”
“Well, first, he’s different when she’s not there,” Roxy explains.
“That’s the thing I keep coming back to.
With Mara he’s lovely, honestly. Warm, funny, teasing, the whole devoted-brother thing, and it’s completely convincing.
And then she walks out of the room and something changes, like he’s stopped paying full price for the performance. ”
“It’s the labs for me,” Leah says. “He turns up constantly in locations that have nothing to do with his grid work. He’s all over the mine, being charming at everybody, which sounds like nothing.
It is nothing. But he’s been on this planet for a week now and he’s got names for people I’ve worked beside for years and never learned. ”
“And the questions he asks don’t seem reasonable,” Roxy says.
“The questions,” Leah agrees.
“What questions?”
“Where does mine security actually sit in the org chart? Who reports to Grytel directly and who reports through Admin? Whether the transport manifests get logged planetside or off-world. How the shift rosters get set and who has the authority to change them.” She looks up.
“Scar, he’s a grid tech. None of that is grid work.
Not one of those questions has anything to do with the power network, and he asks them like he’s making conversation, and every single time I answer him I feel weird afterwards and I can’t tell you why. ”
“And the dinner last night was the part that got me feeling truly weird about him,” Leah says quietly.
“And the dinner,” Roxy agrees. “I don’t like his questions being directed at us. Yuck.”
Neither of them elaborates because they don’t need to, every being at that table felt him working his way toward the murder of our parents with a sympathetic face on, and then trying again after Chief was trying to change the subject.
Leah leans forward, and all the lightness has gone out of her. “Mara has no idea.”
“None,” Roxy says. “Not a flicker. She thinks he’s the best brother in the Four Sectors. We like her. That’s why this is so awful. He’s working behind her back and she’d defend him to the death.”
“Thank you for coming to me,” I say. “You aren’t insane. But that isn’t proof. A male being strange is not a crime, and I need you both to keep behaving exactly as you have been. Ordinary. Friendly. No change he can read.”
“So you have been thinking about him.”
“Yes, in fact I’ve asked Ines to look into this.”