Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
It had been three days since the garden incident.
Some of the residents of Moone’s Landing thought it was nothing.
Others thought it was very much something.
The group in the latter half expected Holly to get to the bottom of it, and that meant confronting who they considered to be the only likely suspect: Rasker Vipp.
This was what brought Holly to the door of room seventeen.
She brought her hand up and knocked. There was a doorbell feature to the pad beside the door, but knocking was more friendly than chiming.
It was a nuance thing: familiar people knocked; strangers chimed.
She wanted Rasker to be comfortable, to let his guard down, so she went the friendly route.
Later, when she asked him about the garden, he might not think of her as so friendly.
She had practiced what she was going to say the whole way here.
She had a plan. It was a perfectly good plan as long as she did not panic, blurt out an accusation and immediately follow it up with an apology.
He would deserve one, because Holly did not believe that Rasker had anything to do with the small acts of sabotage at Moone’s Landing.
Nevertheless, she would be calm, and observant, and sensible.
The door opened.
Rasker looked at her with his whole body.
He leaned in a little and gave her his full attention.
His expression did a thing where he looked relaxed and intense at the same time.
It didn’t make sense, but that’s what it was.
She had never met another person who looked at her that way, and she liked it more than she should.
“The water station,” she said. Not hello, not good morning.
Just that. She blew a stray hair out of her eyes.
“I’m going to troubleshoot the system for distribution problems. The square is bone dry and I’ve traced it as far as I can from above.
I’m going to the underground caverns.” She paused when he just stared at her.
“I mentioned it to you a while ago. The pools my great-grandfather filled with water that no one could drink? I thought you might want to see them.”
There was a beat.
“Of course,” he said. “Give me a moment.”
He disappeared back inside, and Holly exhaled.
She turned and looked down the empty hallway and fidgeted with the hem of her long-sleeve pullover.
Being nervous annoyed her. But if she was being honest with herself, the reason why she was uneasy was simple: She was going to interrogate someone about a crime he did not commit.
He emerged wearing loose dark trousers and a close-fitting shirt, a jacket folded over one arm. His dark blue hair was loose and less tamed today, and longer than she had realized. It reached the edge of his jaw.
She turned and started walking before he could catch her staring. “Lead on, Holly.”
The zig was parked at the side entrance.
The tired little vehicle hovered just above the paved surface, with the rear passenger-side corner sagging.
She’d placed a bucket of tools, borrowed from Sam’s “nonessential” stash, in the space behind the seats.
She had had to negotiate with Sam for this modest collection, and he had handed each item over with the pained expression of one lending out his last currency unit.
Holly drove. It was easier than she had expected, and she had come to enjoy the zig, even though it rattled at anything above moderate speed and there was a panel underneath, somewhere, that vibrated during turns.
Loop Road curved through the interior of the outpost, and she took them around it at a comfortable pace.
They passed the residential cluster, the field, and then the pond and the overgrown wood where the vegetation had gone wild and tangled.
Here, Holly slowed down to look at the cabin. It sat at the pond’s edge, quiet and small, half-swallowed in vines.
“What are you looking at?” Rasker asked.
“See that?” she asked, pointing toward the spot where just a sliver of siding peeked through the trees and shrubs.
“Oliver built that cabin for his family to enjoy.” She glanced at it as they passed, watching it disappear between the trees.
“It’s abandoned, but when this is all settled, I want to open it up.
Clear it out. Make it into something for Bean and me. ”
Rasker said nothing. She was getting better at reading his silences. This one was not dismissive. It was thoughtful.
A moment later, he sat up straight and said, “Stop.”
Holly stopped the zig.
He slipped on his Ocuvai device. The screen covered his left eye as he peered through the trees, toward a small clearing that sat back from the road, half-hidden by a stand of overgrown brush.
Lacking the augmented vision, it took her a second to see what he was seeing.
Then she noticed the signs of undergrowth that had been pushed aside.
The ground had been flattened, and the grass compressed in a round shape.
“Is someone sleeping there?” she wondered.
“Could be Cody,” Rasker said.
Holly frowned. “No. He’s staying at the hotel. He has a room.”
“He may have a room,” Rasker said, still looking at the clearing, “but I don’t think he’s been in it much. When did you last see him in the halls?”
She thought about it. She…hadn’t. She had passed him near The Emporium a couple of days ago. He’d given her one of his lazy smiles and a “hey, cuz!” But in the hallway during daylight hours? “Not for at least a week,” she replied. “I can’t imagine why he’d prefer the ground to a bed.”
“Some people find it useful,” Rasker said, removing the Ocuvai, “to make themselves scarce when they’ve overstayed their welcome.”
Well, Cody had overstayed his welcome. Holly pulled her eyes away from the clearing and got the zig moving again. She recognized the small, unremarkable building that housed a vital feature of the outpost: the water supply.
She pulled the zig to a stop in front of the building. Rasker stopped her before she could get out.
“Are you okay?” A crease bisected his pinched brows. “You seem jumpy.”
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Just been so busy. You know.”
His gaze didn’t leave hers. “Sure.”
She slipped from the zig, grabbed her bucket, and headed for the door with Rasker following. The building itself was nothing, just a narrow entry with a flat ceiling and a basic panel on the wall. But past the entry, the floor dropped away, and Holly stopped walking.
A long walkway stretched before them, railed on both sides, and below it lay the pools.
She had not expected this. Nothing about the schematic, or what Alyce had described, had prepared her for pools made from natural formations of rock, organic scoops from the stone that were filled with still and perfectly clear water.
Soft blue-white and pale gold light glowed from flat, round fixtures embedded in the walls and ceiling, and from smaller ones set into the sides of the pools themselves.
The effect was something between a deep cave and a well-appointed room.
The ceiling curved down low on one side and opened up on the other, and the light was just enough to see by without being harsh. It asked nothing of your eyes.
The smell reached her then. Salt and stone and deep, clean minerals. “Oh,” she said quietly. “This isn’t what I expected from a plumbing station.”
“Same,” Rasker said, and his voice was different. Softer.
Holly stood there for a moment longer than was strictly professional. She felt like she did as a child, watching the dark forest through the windows.
She shook herself and shifted the tool bucket to her other hand.
“Right. The water system is through there.” She gestured toward the far end of the walkway, where a fabricated wall divided the natural stone from a more utilitarian space beyond.
“Feel free to hang out here.” The light made his features practically glow, highlighting his cheekbones and the firm cut of his lips.
“I’m going to find out what’s going on back there. ”
“Do you think you can fix the rain?”
“Maybe. The distribution lines branch off from there.” She started moving. “I think there’s a blockage somewhere in the connection to the square. I need to find it.”
They walked the length of the pool chamber side by side, footsteps quiet on the walkway, and Holly kept her attention forward. The light shifted as they moved, and the water in the pools was so still it looked like poured glass.
“You pursued a career in engineering,” Rasker said, not quite a question, as they walked. “You could have chosen not to work at all. Most humans on Earth can now, yes? The automated systems provide.”
“Most things, yes,” she said. “The old monetary system collapsed hundreds of years ago, when automation replaced most jobs.”
“So why work?”
It was a good question, and one every single employer asked of every single applicant.
It had been a long time since she’d been asked this.
“I like reinventing things. Fixing them and making them into something more. And I wanted to be very, very good at it. Sol-Arc Industries’ business is upgrading facilities, making them more efficient, or changing their purpose from one thing to another.
Full redesigns, but made better.” Ugh, that was actually one of their sales lines.
She glanced at him. “Not for the nits. The work was always more interesting than what the nits could buy.” She paused.
“I thought that was ambition. Now I’m starting to think ambition was just the word I used before I knew what I actually wanted. ”
“What do you want, then?”
She considered the question before answering.
“Purpose, maybe? To matter. But I—I think I was chasing it in the wrong direction.” She thought of Sol-Arc.
Of the years of careful neutrality, the standardized wardrobe, the stripped-down version of herself she had settled for before Beenan demanded more.
“I’m beginning to think my ambition caused me to mistake prestige for purpose.
They can look a lot alike from the outside. ”
“There is nothing wrong with ambition,” he said. “Nothing would get done without it.”
“Sure, as long as you don’t lose yourself in it, and that’s the whole trick, isn’t it?”she mused. “Figuring out which parts of yourself to lose and which to keep. What brought you here? Prestige or purpose?”
Rasker shrugged. “Prestige, for sure. And I have never denied my own ambition.”
She hadn’t expected such plain honesty from him. “So you do this…” She swept a hand to encompass the outpost and his designs on acquiring it for his clients. “For the nits?”
“Yes.” He nodded, but his gaze moved over the water. “The ‘old monetary system’ that collapsed on Earth is still operating on Nakri.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” But it made sense.
“Well, I’d like to retire one day—not on Nakri,” he specified. “Someplace quiet and less hectic. Maybe then, I’ll have time to find my purpose.”
She followed his gaze over the still pools and the soft light.
This place could make people content with less than they thought they needed.
She had a sudden, clear image of herself here, years from now, running the day-to-day of Moone’s Landing with no crises and no Sol-Arc and no one telling her how to look and what devices to embed in her brain.
It was a startling image. It did not feel ridiculous. It felt wonderful.
Yes, she had been getting purpose wrong for a long time.
Holly ducked through a low archway into the plumbing space and instantly, the tool bucket became heavier.
This part of the underground was everything the pool chamber was not: functional, ugly, and honestly, a bit overwhelming.
Rasker followed her, but she waved him off.
“I invited you here to enjoy the water, which sounded like the kind you described from your home. Not to poke around in the water system.” She smiled.
“You would be absolutely no help, anyway.”
“Fair point.” He acknowledged his uselessness in this instance with a nod. “I’ll stay out of your way.”
Rasker left Holly to the water system and she took in her surroundings.
Tanks the size of small rooms rose up from the floor to the curved ceiling, connected by a dense grid of pipes and tubes and pressure valves.
It was noisy here, but most large, working systems were.
Noises were a good way of learning if a system had a problem…
if you knew what it sounded like when it was working properly.
Which Holly didn’t. She listened to the low, constant hum and the occasional tick of something contracting or expanding.
Well, she’d have to dig around and find out what was going on the hard way.
Holly set down her bucket and got to work.
It took a while. She moved slowly through the grid, tracing each line, building the map in her head.
Most of the pipes and tubes were in reasonable condition.
Old, and some of them overdue for replacement, but functioning.
She followed the line that fed rain to the square until she found the clog.
The buildup had been nobody’s fault. Just time.
She shut off the valve, opened up the tube, and used a tool from the bucket until the blockage broke free and the line cleared. After closing it up and reopening the valve, the difference was immediate. A smooth flow of water moved through the tube.
She stood up and stretched her back, satisfied that she’d been able to make this fix without having to bother Sam about it.
She’d hoped to fix the fountain while she was down here, but she could not find those connections anywhere.
It was probably for the best that she stopped with one project, however, because this one had taken longer than she’d thought.
She gathered her tools, picked up the bucket, and went back through the archway into the pool chamber.
The water was no longer still.