Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Mara
Lucas wakes at oh-three-hundred, the way he does, and by the time I’ve got my eyes open Cayzor is already out of the bed.
I don’t even hear him move anymore. Seven feet of Margol Xylan gets up off a mattress in total silence and crosses a dark room, and the first I know of it is the sound of my son stopping mid-complaint because somebody enormous has picked him up.
“He’s wet,” Cayzor says.
I lie there in the warm dark listening to my miner change my son’s diaper and narrate the process to him in a low rumble — now the other side, hold still, no, that is my thumb.
Darling.
He brings Lucas over and puts him in my arms for feeding and sits down on the edge of the bed with his back to me.
That’s what he does. Every night. He never goes back to sleep until we’re both settled.
I am so in love with Cayzor of Eighteen that it hurts. I love him when he’s putting my boots on and I love him at oh-three-hundred with my son on his shoulder.
He’s my husband. That’s what he is because I don’t have another word that fits. He lives in my apartment and sleeps in my bed and gets up with my baby. And he looks at me, every day, all day, without once trying to hide it, like I am the only thing on this planet worth looking at.
He loves me as much as I love him.
And we have never touched.
Not once. Not skin to skin, not ever. Nine months in the same apartment and six of them in the same bed and I have never felt that male’s bare hand on me anywhere.
I’ve never kissed him. I have thought about it so much that it’s become its own small madness — what his mouth would do, whether he’d know how.
I’ve never had his hands on my body. I’ve never had him inside me.
I lie six inches from him every night and I am thirty-three years old and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want that, and it doesn’t happen, and it might never happen.
Because he scented me in this kitchen, in that doorway, on the first night he ever came here.
We are not compatible.
He told me plainly, the way he tells me everything, and I have had close to a year to make my peace with it and I have not managed it for a single diurnal.
That male adores my son.
He carries Lucas around this apartment and talks to him constantly in Xylan and human both. He learned the entire human feeding schedule in about four days. He has opinions about Lucas’s sleep patterns that he expresses with the same flat certainty he’d use on a fracture in the east wall.
So here is my situation.
I live with a male who behaves in every conceivable way like my mate. He guards me, feeds me, sleeps beside me, and is raising a child who isn’t his as though the question doesn’t arise. He looks at me with his whole heart in his face every single day.
And by the only measure his species recognizes, I’m nothing to him. We’re not compatible.
It is the most bizarre situation any woman has ever been in.
Although, none of this has been normal. I came here to fix a power grid and instead I found a murder, lost a brother, had a baby on an alien mining planet, and fell in love with a seven-foot male who has never touched me.
Why would the ending be normal?
The alert comes at eleven-forty in the morning, four diurnals later.
I’m at the table with Lucas asleep against my shoulder and the level four hundred monitors up on three screens, because that’s how I’ve spent every waking hour for six weeks, watching a section of dead grid for somebody to come and touch it.
And somebody touches it.
I go absolutely still.
It’s small. It’s exactly as small as it should be, because a competent being wouldn’t announce themselves — a diagnostic ping against the junction I built, gentle as a hand on a doorknob, checking whether the fault is real before committing to anything.
Then a second one. Then a request for the load history on that section.
“Cayzor,” I shout. “They’re reading my work.”
“Got it.”
Cayzor’s on the comm to Chief before I’ve finished describing what I’m seeing, and Chief’s on to Grytel, and Grytel, who has had a security detail on standby rotation for six weeks and has never once complained, has Minecorp security moving toward the lift bank inside four minutes.
And Leah is at my door in ninety seconds. She comes straight in, already reaching, and takes Lucas off my shoulder in that smooth practiced way she has, and my son doesn’t even wake up. “Go and catch him.”
The lift down to four hundred takes six minutes and I spend all of them being terrified.
Not of the operative. Of everything else, whether a false load path looks real enough to a stranger.
Cayzor stands beside me in the cage and doesn’t say a word.
Then, about four levels out, he says, “You built it well.”
“You don’t know that.”
“They’re reading it for eleven minutes now. A being who thought it was false would have stopped in two.”
Which is exactly the reassurance I needed.
The doors open. I don’t see it happen properly, because I’m behind Cayzor and Cayzor is approximately the size of a door, but I hear it — Minecorp security coming up the tunnel from the lift side, and then the Fever Brothers coming down from the old shaft above, which nobody told me they could do and which I will be asking about later.
There are three of them at the junction.
Two are muscle, big, professional, armed, and they read the room in about one second and put their hands where everyone can see them, because they are outnumbered eleven to three by miners in a mine and they know exactly how that ends.
And the third one doesn’t move at all.
He’s old.
That’s the first thing. He’s old, and he’s Royal Pigment — I can see it from thirty paces, that particular polished quality, the dark as night pigment and fancy clothes. I’ve seen so many like him on Chronos. He has a tablet in one hand and he does not put it down.
He looks at eleven enormous miners and a security detail and a small human female, and sighs.
“Well,” he says. “This is disappointing.”
“On your knees,” the head of security shouts.
“No, I don’t think so.” He tucks the tablet into his coat, unhurried. “I’m ninety-four rotations old and I have a condition in both hips, and if this is going to become physical I’d rather it happened to somebody else. Am I under arrest? By whom? I’d like that established before anyone touches me.”
“You’re being detained by Timbur Minecorp security,” says the detail commander, “for unauthorized access to critical Illibrium infrastructure — “
“Mm. And that’s a genuine charge on this rock, is it. Not something you’ve assembled this morning.” He looks around at us with mild interest, like a male examining the fittings in a rented room. “Which of you is the engineer?” His eyes come to me. “You built that fault.”
I don’t say anything.
“Oh, don’t be tedious, there’s no one here to impress.
You built it, and you built it beautifully.
” He actually sounds pleased. “I looked at that load path for six minutes and it never occurred to me to doubt it. That’s not flattery, I’ve read three hundred grid reports in my life and I have never been fooled by one. You should be extremely proud.”
“You killed an old man,” I growl.
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“Ordek of Six.”
“And you killed our parents,” Chief snarls.
The male shrugs. “There have been a number of small necessities over the rotations and I’m afraid I haven’t retained the names. You’ll find that’s how it works, at a certain scale. You don’t remember the ones who didn’t matter.”
“Why are you here?” Chief questions.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re obviously a House elder and you came down four hundred levels into the Illibrium mine personally.” Chief’s voice doesn’t move. “Why?”
And the old male looks genuinely, sincerely irritated for the first time.
“Because I have been trying to have this done properly for eleven rotations and every single being I have paid to do it has been an idiot. Do you have the faintest conception of what I’ve been working with?
” He gestures at nothing, at all of us. “A union official who could be bought for less than the cost of a good coat and who then had the extraordinary stupidity to get himself arrested. Three operatives sent to remove one youngest brother who managed instead to shoot him in a corridor and get themselves seen. A human contractor with a gambling problem.”
He straightens his coat. “Eleven rotations of paying fools to do simple things, and then repairing what they broke, and then paying more fools. And then a genuine opportunity finally appears, a real fault, in the oldest section, unreported, and I am supposed to hand it to another idiot? No. I came myself because I have concluded that if a thing is to be done correctly on this miserable rock, I shall have to come and do it myself.”
And then Grytel comes down the gallery.
He’s late, he came from Admin, four hundred levels up, and he’s still moving fast when he comes around the last of the rock.
He stops so hard that the male behind him nearly walks into him.
“Uncle,” he says.
“Grytel.” The old male inclines his head, perfectly pleasant. “You’ve got thin. Your mother would say something.”
“Uncle.”
“Yes, Grytel, we’ve established the relationship.”
“You..” Grytel’s hand comes up and drops again. “You were at my commissioning. You signed my…”
“I signed your commission, yes. I put you in that chair.” He says it as though correcting a small error of fact. “You’ve been an enormous help, incidentally, and I’d like you to know that none of it required any effort on your part whatsoever.”
Grytel’s jaw clenches. “The standing-order amendments.”
“Through your office, yes.”
“The demotion order.”
“That one I did personally, I recall. It came through in a batch of forty-one and you signed all forty-one in about nine minutes, which I remember because I was told about it afterward and I thought it was rather sad.” He shrugs.
“You’ve never once read a batch amendment in eleven rotations.
It’s not a criticism. It’s simply true.”
“And the murders.”
“Which murders?”
“Their parents.” Grytel’s voice cracks straight across the middle of it. “The Margol male and his mate. In their bed. Eight rotations ago.”
“Ah.” The old male considers. “Yes. That was a correction. The male had found the survey discrepancy in the deep levels and had begun asking questions of beings who might have answered him, and he could not be bought, which was inconvenient, and he could not be transferred, because the union would not permit it.” A small, dismissive movement of one hand.
“So. A correction. Regrettable, and entirely necessary, and I’d do it again tomorrow. ”
“Why me?” Grytel says it quietly. It’s the only thing he’s said that sounds like it cost him anything.
“Why you what?”
“Why my administration. Why my name. You could have run it out of any office on this planet — “ He stops. Starts again. “Was it because you thought I’d help you? Did you think I was — “
“Oh, good gods, no.” The old male looks honestly startled. “Grytel. No. You’d never have helped. You’d have gone straight to a Chronos arbiter in tears.”
“Then why?”
“Because you’re harmless,” he says. “You’re a minor line and a distant one and you have no ambition, no talent, and no curiosity whatsoever,” he continues, not unkindly, which is the worst part.
“You sign what’s put in front of you. You’ve signed what was put in front of you for eleven rotations.
That is precisely — precisely — what the position required, and it is exactly why I put you in it, and I want you to understand that you have performed the role flawlessly. ”
Grytel doesn’t answer.
“You were never a collaborator, Grytel,” the old male says. “You were a chair.”
“He did do something, he filed the Bounty,” Cayzor says.
The old male turns. “I’m sorry?”
“Two diurnals ago.” Cayzor’s voice is completely flat. “Grytel of Thirty-Nine filed a formal complaint of sabotage against Illibrium infrastructure and posted a Bounty in his own name, against your House, knowing what it would cost him with his own blood.”
Something happens in the old male’s face. Not fear. Something much smaller and much more satisfying.
Surprise.
“He did what?”
“He signed it,” Cayzor says. “He read it first.”
They take him up.
It’s very ordinary in the end, which I did not expect. There’s no fight, because he’s ninety-four and he wasn’t ever going to fight. Ines is recording everything and has been since the lift doors opened. The two hired males are separated and processed and neither of them says a single word.
And at the transport level, when they walk him past us to the shuttle that’s going to take him up to a Hunter ship in a legal parking orbit, he stops in front of Cayzor.
“Which one are you? The youngest? No, the face. You’d be the one from the house.”
Cayzor looks down at him.
“Cayzor of Eighteen. Mm.” The old male studies him with mild, detached interest, like a specimen.
“You’ve cost me a great deal of currency and eleven rotations of work, and I’d like you to know that it changes nothing.
The Illibrium is too important to be left in the hands of beings who dig it with their claws.
That was true before your parents and it will be true after you.
Another House will simply do it better.”
“Perhaps,” Cayzor says. And then he leans down, until his ruined face is level with a Royal Pigment elder’s and he says, very quietly, “But you won’t see it. You’ll be in a cell. And I’ll be here.”
Daxon takes them at fourteen-twenty.
We stand out on the surface to watch it, all of us, in the wet green heat at the edge of the jungle — the whole family, and Grytel, and half the crews who’ve worked out that something enormous is happening.
There’s nothing to see. Just a shuttle going up, and then a long silence, and then Chief’s comm crackling.
“I have them,” Daxon says. “Bounties confirmed. Hold’s sealed.”
Rook makes a noise and puts both hands over his face.
“Chief. Tell Cayzor and the female that it’s the cleanest apprehension I’ve made in four rotations and I’m putting it on the Guild board with all their names on it.”
“He can hear you.”
“Good.” A pause, and the sound of a male four hundred kilometers straight up trying to say something. “That’s…I’m directly over the compound right now. I’ve got it on the scope. I can see the road.”
Nobody says anything for a second.
“Right,” Daxon says, thickly. “I’m taking these two to the Hunter Station. Somebody message me about the human baby, I want to know what name she picked.”
“His name’s Lucas,” I say.
“Lucas.” A pause. “That’s a good name. Tell him his uncle says so.”