Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Mara
“Yes,” Cayzor says.
And something in me stands up and starts working, the way it always does, because that is what I do, I fix things. You put a broken system in front of me and I do not sit down on the floor and weep about it, I open the panel.
“No,” I say. “No, wait. Let’s go back through it, because there are problems with this.”
“Mara…”
“Shell companies.” I’m already up, moving, pulling my tablet off the counter because my hands need to be doing something.
“Four shells, you said. Cayzor, that’s what shells are for.
That’s their entire function. You route money through four of them precisely so that nobody at the far end can say who paid whom, and the fact that money went through four of them tells you exactly nothing except that somebody wanted privacy.
Half the contractors in the Four Sectors get paid through shells. We have been paid through shells.”
He doesn’t argue, just calmly watches me work through my problem.
“What actually connects the fourth one to House Vaszneth? And don’t say Hallie. I like Hallie, but what you’re telling me is that a woman who stole a document off Chronos two years ago recognized a company name. That’s memory, not a true link.”
“It’s in the ledger.”
“Then show me the ledger. Show me the page. Because if that ledger says this concern moves House money then that’s one thing, and if it’s a name on a list of two hundred names, that’s completely different, and I’d like to know which it is before I convict my brother of murder.”
“It’s not a list of two hundred names.”
“Then I want to see it.”
“You will. Ines will give you all of it, every document.”
“Fine. Next. Money arriving in an account is not evidence of what the money was for, Cayzor. I’ll accept that I’m learning that my brother is a gambler with a decade of debt.
Money moves in and out of a gambler’s accounts constantly, that’s what the word means.
Somebody paying him could be a debt settled, a loan, a win, a friend covering him, literally anything. ”
“It was three times within fourteen months, from the same source.”
“That’s worse, actually, that’s more consistent with a payment plan than a bribe.
I want to say this carefully because she’s your family and I like her, but Ines is a journalist. Her sources are unnamed and her method is calling in favors from beings who owe her.
That’s not an investigation, that’s very good gossip, and I have watched extremely good gossip be wrong about beings my entire career. ”
“You’re right about that,” Cayzor agrees. “It wouldn’t stand in front of an arbiter. Ines said so herself. She said we have a case and not a court case. I’m not going to tell you her sourcing is better than it is.”
I bite at my lip because the fact that he concedes and isn’t defending is somehow so much worse than if he’d argued.
I grab my tablet. “There’s one thing I can check myself is the clearance from four years ago.
You said he was removed from a contract on my clearance and I was never told.
” My thumb’s already moving. “That’s a personnel action and it’s on my contracting record, not his.
If it happened, I can see it right now. So, I’m going to look. ”
I pull up my contracting history. Nine years of it, every posting, every clearance, every renewal, all of it filed away in the tidy chronological way I keep everything, because I am organized and thorough and I have never in my life missed a detail that mattered.
There it is. Fen-Arrenth Station. Four years ago, eleven months, structural grid replacement.
I remember that job. It was a bad job — freezing, and the client was awful, and it ended early, and Andrew told me the client cut the scope in month nine and we both grumbled about the lost income and went home.
I open the record. And there’s a line in it I have never seen in my life.
Personnel action — contractor removed for cause — reported to contracting authority.
Not to me, to the contracting authority, because I wasn’t the contracting authority, I was the named engineer. I never had the smallest reason in the universe to go looking through the administrative back end of a finished job for something I didn’t know existed.
It’s been sitting there for four years.
I sit down on the arm of the chair with my tablet in my hands.
And it all comes down at once, out of order, in pieces, the way I imagine your life does when it stops being the one you thought you had.
I got him the Salo contract. I recommended him — I put my name next to his to a client who asked me directly whether he was reliable, and I said yes, and I meant it.
Every time a project manager pulled me aside and asked, quietly, whether my brother was all right, and I laughed and said he’d had a rough few years and he’s completely solid now and felt — I felt good about it.
I felt good about myself, standing by my brother.
I thought I was saving him.
That’s why I’m on this planet. That’s the entire reason. Not a career decision, not an opportunity, not the biggest Illibrium system in the known universe, because Andrew was excited and I wanted to give him a good thing.
He’d already been paid.
And then it gets worse, because I keep going, because I can’t stop. That morning after Cayzor stayed for dinner, with Hook and Leah and the baby, and Andrew asking what we’d talked about, and me — cheerful, proud, pleased with myself — telling him:
I got the schematics. The whole pre-upgrade archive. Load histories, failure logs, everything, going back forty years. It was all sitting on Cayzor’s system, nobody ever thought to keep it after the upgrade except him.
And Andrew’s whole face lighting up. That’s the thing we’ve been missing. That changes everything.
I gave it to him. I handed it to him on a walk to work.
And then —
Oh.
Oh no.
“The maintenance roster. That was my idea. I sat in this apartment and I asked you who was supposed to be touching the grid, and you’d never thought of it and you went and pulled schedules out of an archive nobody had opened in decades. Because I told you to.”
“And you said, when you were explaining—” I’m going to be sick. I can feel it arriving. “You said Andrew didn’t need Ordek’s name. That he just needed to see that somebody had started digging in the old maintenance records. That he was in that same system every day.”
Cayzor says nothing.
“He was standing right there,” I say. “He was in your office with us. He watched me ask you for the rosters.”
The room tilts.
“I found Ordek. Nobody had looked at that and I told you to look at it and two days later a ninety-one-year-old man dies.” I don’t finish it.
I’m already running for the bathroom.
I don’t make it in any dignified way.
I go down on my knees on the tile and throw up everything in me, and then I keep throwing up after there’s nothing left. My eyes stream. My whole face is wet. I can hear myself making a sound I’ve never made in front of another person in my life.
And then there’s an enormous hand gathering my hair up off my neck.
He’s on his knees on my bathroom floor. Cayzor of Eighteen, seven feet of him, folded down in a room that is much too small for him, holding my hair back in one huge careful fist and putting the other hand flat between my shoulder blades.
He doesn’t tell me it’s all right, because it isn’t. He doesn’t say a single word the entire time — he just kneels and holds my hair and lets me be as disgusting and as broken as I need to be. And when it’s finally finished he reaches up without letting go and runs the tap and hands me a cup.
I rinse my mouth. My hands are shaking so hard I nearly drop the glass.
Then I sit back against the wall, slide down and put my head against the tile.
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
“I’m pregnant,” I tell him.
It comes out flat, into the quiet.
I don’t know why I say it. I’ve been holding it for weeks like a stone in my mouth, from the first day, and I had a whole plan about it — I was going to get through this contract and go home and tell Andrew on the transporter platform on New Earth, and start the entire next part of my life somewhere clean and far away from here.
I think the truth is I don’t have any reason to keep it to myself anymore and since everything is coming out today, why not this too.
“I found out my first day of work. That’s why I nap so much and why I was sick this morning and the morning before that.
It’s why I’ve been eating like a lunatic.
The father’s name is Cole. We had a brief relationship and it wasn’t going anywhere.
He left me for my cousin two weeks before I got on that transporter.
They’re engaged to be married now and moving to Omega 9.
He never wanted children. He said so, repeatedly, the entire time we were together.
I’m about ninety-nine percent certain he’ll want nothing to do with this baby.
I don’t expect him to. I’m not planning around him.
I did the math the first week and decided I’m keeping this baby, even if this means I’m going to raise this baby all by myself. ”
I turn my head against the wall to look at him.
“I’m going to be somebody’s mother by myself. That’s the plan. That was already the plan before tonight, when I still had a brother. So…”
And Cayzor of Eighteen looks back at me, steady, with his enormous shoulders against my bathtub. “I know,” he says.
I blink. “You know what?”
“That you’re with child. I’ve known since the first night I came here and had dinner.”
My mouth is open. “That first night? The lasagna? And you never said anything. Why not?”
“I knew you’d tell me yourself when you were ready. I decided I’d follow whatever you did. If you told the brides, I’d know it was spoken of. If you told no one, I’d say nothing, for as long as that took.”
He knew. From the first night and never made me explain myself. He just quietly rearranged himself around a fact I hadn’t told him and waited for me to be ready.
I put my hands over my face and cry like I haven’t cried since I was nine years old.