Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Mara
Cayzor doesn’t say anything about that either. He just stays on the floor with me. At some point his hand comes down onto my shoulder, warm and comforting.
“It’s a good thing,” he says eventually. “A child.”
“It’s a disaster.”
“No. It isn’t. And you aren’t alone in this, Mara.”
I sniff and wipe at the wetness on my face. I’m certain that what he just said is super significant, but I suddenly feel an overwhelming need to see my brother.
Under the shaking, the raw throat and the awful floating clarity after throwing up, I know I must see Andrew.
I have to stand in front of him and watch his face while I say all of it out loud, because there is still a piece of me — a big, embarrassing piece — that is absolutely certain he will have an explanation.
That’s what I’m thinking as I wash my face. He’ll explain it. Four years on that clearance record and he’ll have a reason and it’ll be stupid and I’ll be furious with him for a month and then it’ll be fine.
Cayzor doesn’t try to stop me.
He doesn’t say you shouldn’t or let me handle it or any of the seventeen things a male his size might reasonably say to a woman who’s just been vomiting in the toilet.
He stands up, and he opens my door for me and walks down the corridor beside me.
He knows what I’m doing without me having to say a word.
Forty paces to my brother’s door.
The door isn’t locked. That’s the first wrong thing. Andrew locks his door, he’s been locking his door since we were kids.
I push it open. “Andrew?”
The lights are still on and I stand in the doorway trying to work out what I’m looking at, because it isn’t empty. There’s a cup on the counter with something dried in the bottom of it. His spare boots are by the door. The bed’s unmade. It looks like a room somebody is still living in.
It’s only when I start walking through it that I understand.
Both of his tablets are gone, the work one and the personal one. His credentials. The little document case he’s carried since he was twenty. The good jacket, the only expensive thing he owns, that he wears when he wants people to take him seriously.
And he took the flat metal box with our mother’s ring and the picture of them at the coast before we were born. He stood in this room and picked up his tablets, his jacket and our mother’s box, and he left everything else, and he walked out.
“Mara,” Cayzor says quietly from the doorway.
I’m going through the drawers, and the shelf, and the little table by the bed, and then I’m doing it again, faster, opening things I’ve already opened.
“What are you looking for?”
“A note.”
“He was already gone,” Cayzor says.
I turn around, realizing there’s no note.
“The cup on that counter is dry, Mara. That’s been there since this morning at the latest. He didn’t leave because you found out. He left before you found out.”
I stand in the middle of my brother’s abandoned room. “Then how did he know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody warned him.”
“Maybe.” He doesn’t offer me anything comfortable.
“Or he saw the family watching him and worked it out. Or his employers pulled him out because we were getting close. Or he simply looked at his sister being escorted everywhere by miners and did the arithmetic.” A pause.
“We may never know which. I want to be honest with you about that.”
I don’t get to stand in front of my brother and make him look at me.
I don’t get to hear him deny it, or admit it, or explain, or lie badly, or cry, or any of the ten thousand things I have been playing out in my head for the last hour.
He’s not going to look me in the face. He’s not going to give me a reason.
He just left. Like he left every job. Ahead of the audit, quietly, taking the valuables.
And I was the last thing he walked away from.
Ten minutes later we’re back in my apartment, sitting on the couch, side by side.
“What did he get?” I ask. “I want to know. Three payments, you said. You know the amounts, you said them, and I wasn’t listening properly because I was busy telling you your evidence was garbage.
” I look up at him. “What did he actually get out of it? For me, and for this planet, and for that old man. What’s it worth? Because I’d like to know the number.”
So he tells me the number.
And then, because I keep looking at him, he tells me the rest. That the money’s gone, all three payments, that each one landed and was gone inside a few weeks, into exactly the thing that made him buyable in the first place.
Tonight, wherever he is, he is in more debt than he was before any of it started.
I laugh. It’s a horrible sound. “He didn’t do it to get out. If he’d taken that money and cleared the debt and walked away clean, I could — I don’t know, I could at least understand in a way.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
“I trusted him and he used me, lied to me for years.”
Silence.
“You didn’t even need it,” I say, to nobody, to an empty apartment, to a man who isn’t there anymore. “You just couldn’t stop.” And then I look over to Cayzor again. “How long have you known about this?”
“Two weeks that it was likely him. Six diurnals since Ines gave me the debts.” He says it plainly, no softening. “Tonight is when it became provable.”
“Two weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve known for two weeks.”
“I’ve suspected for two weeks.”
“You sat at that table.” I point at it. My hand isn’t steady.
“You sat right there and ate my food and listened to me talk about him. I told you about him. I told you the whole — I told you he’d had a rough few years and I hired him to keep him employed and it was the best decision I ever made, and I was proud of it, and you sat there and let me say it. ”
“Yes, I apologize, but I only had a faint suspicion at the time. But I’ve been working hard, Mara, to build this case and keep you safe.”
I exhale. “Who else?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Roxy. Leah. Ines. Hallie. My brothers. The brides.”
“All of them. It was a guard detail. I thought I’d been adopted.
I sat in here and told my brother…I defended it to him, Cayzor.
He said it was strange how you were all always around and I told him it was the nicest thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.
I said that. Out loud. I said I’ve eaten nine hundred dinners alone in rented rooms and here are beings who notice where I am. ”
He doesn’t say anything.
“And it was a rota.”
“Yes. It was a rota. Chief set it the night Ordek died. Nobody was to leave you alone in this colony, in the mine, on the transport, or in this building. Roxy took the levels. Leah took the corridor. Naomi took the platform. Jana took the cafeteria.” A pause.
“I took the mornings and the evenings and the nights.”
“The nights?”
“There’s a maintenance alcove on this floor, across from the lift bank. I’ve been sitting in it from the time I bring you home until your shift starts.”
“Every night?”
“Since Ordek died.”
And I think about Andrew standing in my kitchen saying he’s stalking you, Mara, he was in the hallway at zero-two-hundred, and me laughing at him, and telling him he’d seen a hazard trolley with a jacket on it.
“You could have told me any of it. At any point.”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you?” It comes out as close to a shout as I’ve got left. “I’m not a child. I’m not — I have a clearance, Cayzor, I’ve worked classified installations for nine years, I know how to hold information. You didn’t even give me the chance to be trusted.”
“Because you’d have gone to him, or at the very least he would’ve been able to read the change in your demeanor.”
He says it without any heat at all, which is somehow worse.
“You’d have gone down that corridor and knocked on his door and looked at your brother’s face and asked him. Not to accuse him. To give him the chance to explain it, because you love him and there’s no one else left. You’d have wanted him to have a reason.”
I open my mouth.
I close it.
“And then he runs,” Cayzor says. “Which we can survive, because he’s run and we’re surviving it.
Or he doesn’t run.” A pause. “And Ordek of Six was ninety-one rotations old and had never hurt anyone in his life, and he is dead, and I had already worked out that you were standing closer to this than he ever was.”
“So you decided for me.”
“Yes.”
“You had no right.”
“No,” he agrees. “I didn’t.”
That stops me, a little.
“Roxy said the same thing,” he says. “She said it in front of my whole family and she was angry with me and she was correct. She made me promise that when it came, I would be the one to tell you, and that you’d be told everything, including that we knew and said nothing.
That’s why I’m standing here. That’s the promise. ”
“And you waited anyway.”
He doesn’t flinch from it. “And you can be angry with me for as long as you want, and you’ll be right, and I’d do it again — but not for the reason you think.”
“Then say the reason.”
He’s quiet for a second. “I was frightened. Not of losing the case.” He looks at me.
“I was frightened that the moment I said his name out loud in this room, you would look at me the way you’re looking at me now.
And I’d never be able to take it back. So I had two weeks of you being glad to see me, and I took them, and I knew exactly what I was doing. ”
He leaves after that.
He doesn’t slam anything, because he doesn’t do that. He just says goodnight, quietly, and lets himself out, and the door shuts. I stand in the middle of my front room in an apartment that is suddenly, enormously, catastrophically empty.
My brother is gone. The whole colony has been watching me for six days. There’s a dead old man I never met who I can’t stop thinking about. And I have just driven out the only person who’s been in this room with me for weeks.
I sit down on the floor again.
I’m still there when the knock comes.
He’s got a bag.
That’s the first thing I see when I open the door, an enormous scarred miner filling my doorway with a canvas duffel in one hand, still wet from the rain, looking exactly as he looked an hour ago except now he has luggage.
“What are you doing?”
He steps past me into the apartment, sets the bag down beside my couch, and turns around.
“I’m sleeping here.”
“What?”
“On the couch. Until this is finished.”
“But…”
“Your brother is not accounted for,” he rasps.
“He knows this building and has a Minecorp key that has not been revoked yet because revoking it tells his employers what we know. He left this colony in a hurry with beings behind him who kill witnesses.” He says it like he’s reading a manifest. “You are alone on this floor. So I’m sleeping here. ”
“You can’t just…”
“I’m not asking you.” Absolutely flat. “You can be angry with me. You can not speak to me. You can tell me to sit in the corridor and I’ll sit in the corridor. But I’m not leaving this floor at night, and the alcove is cold and I’d rather be inside the door than outside it.”
And I stand there in my own doorway with my mouth open and about nine different things to say, and then I decide that I want him.
“That couch is going to be too small for you.”
“Yes.”
“Like, comically too small.”
He takes his boots off and puts them by the door, which for some reason nearly sets me off again.
I get him a blanket. It comes up to about the middle of his chest and both of his feet hang off the end of the couch by a full arm’s length, and he arranges himself on it anyway without one word of complaint, sitting up with his back against the arm and his face toward the door.
I stand in the bedroom doorway for a second, looking at him.
“Are you going to sleep at all?”
“Some.”
I should say something. There’s an enormous amount to say, I’m still furious with him, I think, somewhere under the exhaustion.
I’m going to be furious with him again tomorrow, for not immediately telling me about Andrew.
And but he also held my hair back on a bathroom floor tonight and knew about my baby for weeks and never made me say a word.
Both things are true and I don’t have anywhere to put either of them.
“Cayzor.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t leave,” I say.
The dark is quiet for a moment.
“I won’t Mara…I won’t.”