Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Scar
Something is wrong before I reach the door.
I come up the corridor of the senior quarters with Jana’s stew warm in my hands. Ines’s questions are in my head in the order we set them, and I am, I’ll admit, looking forward to this visit.
And then I see the beings grouped outside Ordek’s door.
A med tech, packing something into a case.
A Facilities supervisor with a tablet, thumbing through a form.
Two older neighbors standing in the corridor with their hands at their sides, doing nothing at all, in that particular stillness beings get when they’ve just been told something and haven’t decided how to feel about it yet.
Nobody is hurrying. Whatever happened here has finished happening.
The supervisor looks up and sees me, seven feet of scarred miner striding up the corridor with a food container in his hands and his face changes.
I stop walking.
“You’re the Fever brother.” The supervisor’s tired and he’s already filed it; I can see the form closed on his tablet. “Ordek mentioned you were coming. I’m sorry. It happened last night.”
“What happened?”
“He went down to the mine on his own.” He shrugs, not unkindly, the shrug of a male who has done this too many times.
“You know how he was, recently retired and still sneaking back into the mine three, four diurnals a week, wandering the old sections, talking to the Illibrium.” A tired half-smile that fades.
“It happened on the service stair on level two hundred. It’s a bad stair, that one, very steep. We think he missed a step.”
“When?”
“Late. Between third bell and dawn, the med tech says. He wasn’t found until the morning shift came through.” He checks the tablet, not because he needs to. “He’d have gone fast. If that helps.”
It doesn’t help.
“Who ruled it?”
“Ruled it?” He blinks at me. “Nobody ruled it. Ninety-one rotations old, bad knees, night, an unlit service stair he had no business on. Accident. It’s signed off.
” He hesitates, and something almost gentle comes into his voice, which I like even less.
“It’s not a mystery, miner. He was old. It’s how the old ones go here, they can’t stay out of the mine, and one diurnal the mine keeps them. ”
I go back to the mine and ask everything I’m allowed to ask.
I ask to see where it happened, then I check on the light on that stair and when it was last serviced. I ask whether anyone else was on that level, whether the access log shows anything, whether there was anyone with him, if anyone heard anything.
And every single answer is ordinary.
The light on that stair has been bad for two rotations.
There’s a maintenance ticket for it from before Ordek retired.
He’d been on that level a dozen times this moon cycle alone, the log shows it, along with a hundred other harmless wanderings.
Nobody else was down there with him. Nobody heard anything, because nobody was there to hear.
The med tech, when I put myself in front of her, is patient with me.
There’s nothing wrong with him. That’s what she says.
There’s nothing wrong with him, sir, apart from the fall.
No mark that doesn’t fit. No wound in the wrong place.
Nothing under the fingernails, nothing on the hands, nothing anywhere on that old body that says a single thing except that he was ninety-one and it was dark and he went down a bad stair.
It’s perfect.
That’s what I’m standing there understanding, with the container going cold against my palms. It isn’t clumsy and it isn’t clever.
It’s perfect. It is exactly, precisely, indistinguishably the death that old male was always most likely to have, and it happened in the one place where nobody would ever look twice.
I have been looking at killings for eight years. I know craft when I see it.
And I can’t prove a single word of that to any being alive.
Three nights ago I pulled the maintenance archive and found his name marked twice.
Two nights ago I sent word to him, and his grandson keyed it, and the reply came back that I should come after second bell and bring food and not be early.
Last night he went down a stair he’d gone down a thousand times.
And this morning I came to ask him what he saw.
That’s not coincidence. That’s a sequence.
I go back to the compound and wait for my family to come home.
Lila and the others leave me alone as I sit in the front room while the light goes down over the jungle.
I don’t turn on a lamp, and I watch as one by one my brothers come up the road off their shift.
I hear the noise of them at the door, boots and voices, Cannibal saying something and Heavy laughing at it, the ordinary sound of seven males coming home.
Claws finds me first and stops in the doorway. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“Get everyone,” I growl. “We need to have a family meeting.”
Ten minutes later, my whole family is in the front room, and every one of them looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.
They’re all here.
Chief in the big chair, arms folded. Heavy and Claws are on the long bench with Cannibal standing behind them with Roxy.
Trunk is near the fire with Vela against his shoulder, and Ines beside him with her tablet already in her hand, because she took one look at my face when she came in and went to get it.
Hallie is in the corner with Rook, one hand on the curve of her belly.
Jana in the doorway from the kitchen with a cloth still in her hands.
The young ones have been sent to the back living room with Naomi and Lila. Somebody has shut the door. Hook and Leah aren’t here, they’re at employee housing, and it’s full dark, and I’m not sending anyone out on that road tonight. They’ll be told tomorrow.
“What is happening?” Chief questions. “Why have you called this meeting?”
“Ordek of Six is dead,” I announce.
The room changes.
Most beings in the room know Ordek. Chief’s face goes still, and Heavy says ah, no, quietly. Claws puts a hand over his mouth.
Jana comes two steps into the room. “That’s so sad. He just recently retired.”
“You knew him?” Heavy asks.
“Yes, of course. He loved my stew and always asked if he could take some home for dinner.”
“How did it happen?” Chief questions.
“He fell down a service stair on level two hundred, alone, sometime after third bell last night. It’s been ruled an accident and already signed off. And there’s nothing wrong with it, I looked. There’s nothing at fault to find.”
“Then why,” Chief says slowly, “are we sitting in this room?”
“Start by telling them about the grid,” Ines says. “Not the case. Just the grid. Tell them what happened to it.”
I nod in agreement. “Both times the grid failed in the past we were told it was a cascade, but Mara says that’s wrong.”
“Meaning what?” Chief says.
“Meaning that there was no order to it, nothing went first.” I look around at them. “And then hours later it came back, also all at once. No partial restore, no sections coming up one at a time the way a system does when you bring it up. On. Like nothing happened.”
“And two moons ago?” Rook asks quietly. He’s the only one in this room who was bleeding on the floor of that med wing.
“Identical.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
“That’s not a system failing,” I say. “That’s a hand reaching in and turning it off. And then reaching back in and turning it on.”
“You’ve said this before,” Claws says. Not unkindly. “Two moons ago Security told you that — “
I shake my head. “Security told me the network is complex and complex things fail in ways we don’t expect and I thought that was that, but Mara has helped me to understand that it was more than that.
She believes that there was something wrong with the old grid and that possibly someone did this, twice, on purpose.
This wasn’t just random failures but instead both times were certainly sabotage, just as we’ve always thought. ”
“So somebody turned off the power to the mine,” Chief says slowly. “Twice.”
“Yes.”
“Then how did they reach it?”
“I thought the way to find out was to look at every being who came through that transporter. Every manifest. Every off-world credential, every clearance, every arrival and departure for eight years. I built a map of everyone who ever had reason to want my family harmed.”
“And?”
“And it dead-ends. Every path. Every time.” I open my hands. “Because I have been looking for a being who broke in. Somebody who came onto this mine and did a thing he wasn’t supposed to do. Which was the wrong question. Finally, Mara Wilson asked the right question.”
“Whis was?”
“Who was supposed to be touching it.”
The room is quiet.
“Say that again,” Chief says.
“The maintenance schedules.” I sit forward.
“The grid is forty years old and it runs an entire planet, so it has to be worked on constantly or it degrades, which means somewhere there is a record of every being who was physically inside that system, on which diurnal, doing what. Names and dates. It isn’t classified.
It isn’t hidden. It’s a work roster, it’s the most boring document in this mine, and in eight years of hunting murderers it never once crossed my mind to pull it.
” I make myself finish. “Because I was looking for the beings who broke in, and I never thought to look at the beings who were let in.”
“Gods,” Trunk says softly.
“To her it was obvious. She’s an engineer.
She doesn’t look at who might have wanted to hurt the machine — she looks at the machine, and at whose hands have been in it.
But there’s one name on that list twice.
” I look up. “Once in the fortnight before the first cascade. Once two moons ago, before the second.”
Jana’s hand comes up over her mouth. “Ordek?”
“Ordek. I sent word to him that I’d like to meet and talk with him about old times in the mine. I was going to see him this morning, except when I arrived I discovered he’s passed away last night.”