Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Scar
The call comes at the end of shift, when I’m closing down my screens and thinking about meeting with Mara again.
Then Ines’s face comes up on the wall screen and every thought I have goes out like a lamp. “Sit down,” she orders.
“I am sitting.”
“Good.” She takes a breath. “I found the money, it’s three payments sent over fourteen months into an account he’s been careful about. It’s not his working account or anything his sister would ever see.”
“How much?”
She tells me.
I make a noise in my chest. It’s more than I expected and more currency than a male like that would see in a decade of honest work.
“Routed?”
“Through four shells, and the fourth one is where it gets interesting.” She glances down. “A holdings concern out of Chronos. Mining futures, freight, the usual nothing. It looks like a hundred other companies.” She looks back up. “But Hallie knows the name.”
“From the ledger?”
Ines nods once. “It’s in there, Scar. It’s not the House itself, they’re not stupid, there’s no line in any document anywhere that says House Vaszneth. But it’s one of the concerns her ledger flags as moving House money. She recognized it before I finished saying it.”
I sit back. “That’s not inference,” I say.
“No, it isn’t.” Her voice is level. “I’ve been very careful to tell everyone that we had a story and not a case.
Scar, we have a case. It’s not a court case — an arbiter would want the account holder named and the House connected by something better than a bride’s stolen ledger.
But it’s a case. This is a male who owed everything to beings who break hands, and then three payments arrived from a Chronos concern with House money in it, and then he came here. ”
“Dates.”
“That’s the part I wanted you sitting down for.” She puts them on the screen. Three of them, side by side.
I look at the first one for a long time. “That’s before…” I have to stop and go back over it, because I want to be wrong. “Ines, that other one is four diurnals after they signed the Timbur contract.”
“Yes. You don’t get paid four days after you sign something unless the arrangement already existed. They didn’t find him here. They found him on New Earth, and they bought him, and then he went and got himself hired onto Minecorp.”
“He steered her here.”
“Exactly.”
I put my hand flat on the desk because my claws have come out and the desk is a good place for them.
“Scar, her brother didn’t get corrupted on Timbur.
He didn’t arrive and get tempted. He was bought on New Earth, and then he found a job for them in the exact location that his employers needed and he brought his sister along because his sister is the door.
Her clearances. Her reputation. Her name on the contract. ”
The screens hum. Somewhere above me a lift runs. “He sold her before they ever left home.”
“The worst part is the money’s gone, Scar.
He didn’t use the payoff to get himself out of a tight position and make a fresh start.
No, he continued to gamble and lose. He took House money and put it straight back into the thing that made him buyable in the first place.
He’s in more debt now than he was when they originally bought him.
” Ines lets that sit for exactly one breath.
“Whatever they gave him, he’s already lost it, and he owes more than he did before, which means he is more theirs now than he has ever been.
There is no version where he stops. He can’t. ”
I stand in my office and I look at three dates on a screen and I understand that I have been wrong for eight years about something fundamental. Not about the conspiracy, that was real. The House is real, the plan is real, my parents are dead and the plan that Hallie brought to us is why.
But I have spent eight years imagining the beings on the other end of this.
I’ve built them in my head at odd hours in this room, cold Royal Pigment males with long reasons, Houses with strategies, a whole architecture of intent.
Something that made sense. Something worth what it cost. Because if my mother and father died, then it had to have been for something, and the something had to be enormous.
And the door they came through is a human male with a habit.
Andrew Wilson sold his own sister and this planet and the lives of everyone on it, and he did it for currency he then took directly to a table and lost. He has nothing.
He didn’t buy a house with it. He didn’t buy safety or time.
He bought a few weeks for himself, three separate times, and then he needed more.
Ordek of Six is dead because of that.
There’s no reason at the bottom of this.
“Scar.” Ines’s voice, quiet. “Are you still with me?”
“Ordek died for nothing. That’s what you’ve just told me. He died so a male could lose currency at a table on a planet he’d never seen.”
Ines doesn’t answer, which is the right answer.
I take it to Chief. I alert him on his tablet, while he’s working in a mine shaft. Trunk is right next to him when he takes the vid call. I tell them both the entire story, expecting them to tell everyone else later.
Chief listens without interrupting. When I’m done, he’s quiet for a moment. “That’s enough to move,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Then we move. Hallie starts on Chronos tomorrow, properly, not carefully. She’ll want to reach out to the ones she still trusts.” He rubs his jaw. “And it’s time to talk to Grytel. I don’t like it and I’m going to do it anyway.”
“I’ll speak to Grytel.”
“You’ll speak to Grytel,” Chief agrees, “and you’ll do it without putting a claw through his desk, because we need what that male has and we cannot get it any other way.”
“Understood.”
Trunk hasn’t said anything. He’s looking at me.
“You have to tell her,” he says.
“Tonight,” I agree. “I’m going to explain to her everything that her brother did and why and what he’s been hiding from her this whole time.”
Chief lets out a long breath. “You know what happens when you do.”
“The moment she knows, he knows. Not because she’d tell him, but because she couldn’t hide it, and he’ll see it on her face the first time they’re in a room.
And then he runs, or he calls his handlers, or he does something worse.
From the second I open my mouth in that apartment, we’re on a clock… I’m going anyway.”
“Go on, then,” he says. “Keep Mara safe.”
I walk to employee housing in the dark.
It’s raining a little, the fine warm rain that comes most evenings, and the road out of the compound is loud with the jungle.
I go up the stairs and stand there with my hand raised for longer than I should.
Then I knock.
She opens the door with a cloth in one hand and her hair falling out of its tie and she is grinning before the door is fully open.
“Okay, so, don’t panic, but I have conquered the flatbread.
” She’s already turning back into the room, talking over her shoulder, hauling me in by pure momentum.
“I want you to know I have made four of them and only two are structurally unsound. That’s a fifty percent success rate, which is up from zero, which in engineering terms is called progress. ”
“Mara.”
“ — and I’ve also done a thing with the protein that I’m not going to describe because if I describe it you’ll have opinions before you’ve eaten it.”
“Mara.”
She stops and turns around and looks at me properly. “What’s happened?”
“Sit down. Please. This is important.”
“Cayzor?” She sits. On the edge of the chair, both hands in her lap, the way you sit in a med bay when they’ve told you the results are back.
“I have to tell you something about Andrew.”
“Is he okay? Is he hurt?”
“No, no. As far as I know he’s fine. But I need to tell you something that I’ve learned about your brother. It’s a story you don’t know. But understand I wouldn’t bring this to you unless we had all the evidence to prove what I’m saying isn’t just a story, but actual fact.”
“Tell me.”
I don’t soften any of it. I’ve thought about that while I walked here and I know exactly what she’d want. So I give it to her in order, the way I’d want it given to me.
I tell her about the three positions before she hired him.
Not the story she tells — the truth of them.
The audit he resigned ahead of. The equipment that went missing.
The contract four years ago that he was removed from, on her clearance, that she was never told about.
I tell her that no employer ever pressed charges, because none of them wanted it on record that they’d been robbed by their own tech, which is why she never found any of it and never could have.
I tell her about the debts. A decade of them.
The kind that don’t come from a bank and don’t get forgiven and are never, ever paid off.
I tell her what Ines’s contacts said, twice, in almost the same words, about her brother — he always thinks the next one’s going to fix it.
I tell her about the three payments and the amounts. I tell her the routing, and the four shells, and the holdings concern on Chronos, and that Hallie knows that name from the ledger she carried off that planet in her own hands.
And then I tell her the dates.
“The first payment,” I say, “landed four diurnals after the two of you signed the Timbur contract. He was already talking to them, Mara, before you’d left New Earth.
He was bought on your home planet, and then he went and found a contract on the one rock his employers needed a door into, and he brought you with him.
” I make myself hold her eyes. “Nobody ever looked at either of you twice because he arrived with you.”
Her hands are flat on her knees.
“And then you and I pulled a maintenance roster out of an archive nobody had touched in forty rotations. And within two diurnals, an old male who was in the walls of that grid on both the diurnals that matter fell down a service stair in the dark.”
She sucks in a breath.
“He didn’t need Ordek’s name. That’s what I couldn’t work out, and it’s what Ines worked out for me.
He was in the same Minecorp system we were, every diurnal, with his own credentials and every right to be there.
He didn’t have to hear anything. He only had to see that somebody had suddenly started digging through forty rotations of old facilities schedules — and then tell the beings who pay him which direction we were looking. ”
“That’s all it would have taken,” I say. “One message. He might not even know what he did.”
Mara Wilson sits very still in a chair in a warm apartment with the smell of burnt flatbread in the air, and looks at a point somewhere past my shoulder, and doesn’t move at all.
When she finally speaks, her voice is perfectly level.
Quiet. The voice she uses on level four hundred when she’s reading something off a panel that doesn’t make sense and she wants to be certain she has it right before she says it out loud. “So let me make sure I understand.”
“All right.”
“You’re telling me my brother is a criminal, who got a witness killed.”