Bitter Waters (6 page)

“How did they find the foster children?”

“Hmm?” She had been focused on hooking her bra.

“It's not like foster children come with big signs.”

“We're not sure.” Camisole slid on over bra, and she reached for her silk blouse, carefully hung up to prevent wrinkles. “It might be someone employed by CYS, but it could be anyone from a caseworker down to a janitor. We've moved
many of the high-risk children to new homes, and started doing background checks on everyone that came in contact with the placing information.”

“If there's anything I can do to help find the missing kids, I'll be happy to do it,” Ukiah said. “Max might talk about needing to get paid, but that's mostly trying not to set the precedent of working pro bono.”

“Give a man a fish, feed him a day,” Indigo said. “Your mothers probably would have rather he taught you something safer.”

“I'm good at this.”

“Yes, you are.” She stepped into her skirt, pulled it up to her hips, and zipped it close. It was a good thing that they had just finished, or he'd be tempted to take it back off her. “Here.” She slipped a small plastic self-sealing bag out of her skirt pocket and handed it to Ukiah. “They're using stolen cars during the kidnappings and abandoning them. This white powder was found in all four cars. The lab is working on it, but I was hoping you could tell me what it is.”

The bag was roughly the size of his thumb. Ukiah pulled open the seal and slipped his forefinger into the gritty white material. He sniffed it and touched the coated finger to his tongue. “It's limestone that has been reduced down to lime by baking and grinding. There's sand in it. There's very old animal hair mixed into this; some of it's cow and the rest is horsehair.” As he rubbed the last of the fine residue between thumb and forefinger, he found flecks of oil-based paint. “It's horsehair plaster. At least a hundred years old. Before they used drywall or gypsum plaster, they used horsehair plaster to do walls. The horsehair is to help hold the mix together. Any house older than seventy or eighty years old would have some or all of its walls made of this stuff.”

“Three-quarters of Pittsburgh, then,” Indigo said with utter disgust. She shrugged into her shoulder rig, making sure that the leather straps lay smooth over her white blouse, and the holster was snug under her left armpit. “I was hoping it would be much more unusual than that.”

“Considering the age, you might be able to show it's all from one house.”

From the nursery came noises of Kittanning waking up and not happy at finding himself alone.

“Good timing.” Indigo slipped her pistol into its holster.

Kittanning had rolled over, crawled to the edge of the crib, and was trying to pull himself to stand when they came into the nursery. Mom Lara had mentioned Kittanning starting to crawl a few days before; remembering how long Cally had taken before crawling, Ukiah could only guess that Kittanning had grown impatient with his lack of mobility.

Kittanning grinned in toothless delight at the prospect of being picked up.

“He's probably wet,” Ukiah warned.

“I know.” She allowed Ukiah to pick Kittanning up, hovered close, stroking Kittanning's puppy-soft hair. “I need to go, but I'll be back after work. I want to hear everything about your trip that you couldn't tell me over the phone: like what the Ontongard scout ship was like, and what you remember now about growing up with the Kicking Deers.”

While they had talked at length the entire time he was in Oregon, he'd edited what he said over the phone, just in case someone overheard. It reminded him of Hutchinson.

“There's a Homeland Security agent coming to the offices later today. He's been asking questions about me and Max and the shooting at the airport,” Ukiah told her as he walked her to her car; Indigo carrying her suit jacket.

Worry flashed across her face. “Why?”

“I don't know. I'm worried someone might have linked it back to the Mars Rover.”

“I've gone over all the reports by the police and the coroner's office: they read like two biker gangs went to war over a site for a rave. It should be strictly a local FBI case.”

“A rave?”

“Dance parties held in abandoned buildings.” Indigo used her key fob to unlock her car. “It's nearly textbook contamination of reports: one of the first people into the old terminal decided that the Ontongard equipment looked like the audio/video setup for a rave and influenced everyone else.”

“Are you sure someone else didn't doctor the reports?”

“I'm fairly sure.” Indigo slid on her suit jacket, covering
up her pistol now that they were out in public. “There's a history of the Hell's Angels and the Pagans fighting turf wars here in Pittsburgh. I heard more than one reference to the Hell's Angels supplying drugs to raves that afternoon.”

Ukiah winced as the combination of “Ontongard” and “drugs” connected in his brain with lots of sharp edges.

“What is it?” Indigo asked, seeing the reaction.

“Maybe nothing.” He stalled her as he backtracked through his memory of exploring the scout ship. His father, Prime, had sabotaged the scout ship so it crashed, and then used explosive charges to bury it under the Oregon Blue Mountains. By all evidence, Prime had smashed everything useful during a running fight, and Hex, wounded to the point of forgetting the ship's location, had never found his way back.

“Tell me.” She covered his hand with hers.

“Every ship carries an arsenal of machines that create bioweapons. The machines are called the Ae.”

“And they weren't on the scout ship,” she guessed, eyes going wide.

He nodded unhappily. “The armory was empty. There were broken weapons scattered all over the ship, but I just realized that I didn't see the Ae among them.” Kittanning squirmed, adding a wet diaper to the list of world-threatening problems. “If Hex took the Ae with him, though, he has had them for over two centuries with the Pack hounding him the whole time. It's possible a Pack dog, even Rennie himself, has already destroyed the Ae and Rennie was too wounded to remember.”

“But you don't know where they are.”

“I'm going to find out,” he promised her.

 

After Indigo kissed them both good-bye, promising to call after the autopsy, Ukiah carried Kittanning back into the mansion to change his diaper.

“Last diaper,” Ukiah told Kittanning as he arranged the diaper-changing supplies. “We'll have to go shopping now.”

His mind, though, was on the Ae. Rennie had given Ukiah a blood mouse with genetic memories stretching back
countless generations of Pack and Ontongard, to a time when Ontongard were nothing but pond scum. Ukiah sorted through those memories now, trying to juggle through several lifetimes—Rennie, Coyote, Prime—to find the last memory of the Ae.

While both Rennie and Coyote searched often for a sign of the machines, neither had found any clue to their fate. Alarmingly, Prime's only references to them was that he dare not tamper with them while working on the destruction of the mother ship and other assorted plans including Ukiah's conception; the mounting number of disasters made Hex obsessive about all the weapons.

Linked through all the memories—naturally enough—were references back to the Ae's creators, the Gah'h. The Ae had been a last defense stolen out of their hands; as a race all that was left of them were Ontongard memories.

Kittanning had been mouthing on his fingers. He held up his hand to Ukiah's inspection now.
“My hand?”

“Yes, that's your hand.”

Kittanning stuck his hand into his mouth and gummed it some more.
“Why is it like this? I can remember it as something else.”

Kittanning was made after Rennie had given Ukiah the blood mouse, thus he was “born” with a full set of the ancient memories. As he grew, though, those memories deteriorated, leaving a confusing hodgepodge of earlier hosts with different body types, from wolf down to the octopilike Gah'h. Apparently Ukiah's thoughts had stirred up Kittanning's memories too, leaving him disorientated as to which were truly his.

“Those were the ones that came before us,” Ukiah tried to explain. “They're all gone now.”

Kittanning took the tiny hand out of his mouth again and held it out, concentrating on it. Ukiah felt the cells in the hand readying themselves to change and shift, rearranging them to the Gah'h ancient design—a long boneless tentacle with suckers.

“No, no, no, no!” Ukiah cried, catching hold of
Kittanning's tiny hand, forcing his own will onto it. “That was someone else's hand. We like our hands this way.”

“We do?”
Kittanning voiced doubts, comparing his limited abilities as opposed to remembered fluid grace.

“This is Daddy's hand.” Ukiah held it up to show that it matched in shape the littler one, built on the identical blueprint. “Doesn't it feel nice?” He massaged Kittanning's feet. “It can touch, and tickle, and give you your bimpy.” This was the family nickname for the pacifier. “And pick you up, and love you.”

“Daddy.”
Kittanning gurgled in delight at being cuddled.

Kittanning's sense of self wasn't as strong as Ukiah expected. He would have to be careful to keep his thoughts on the here and now.

 

Ukiah loaded Kittanning back into the Hummer. Concentrating on the task of gathering Kittanning's things and the slight worry of Kittanning changing shapes at the supermarket, Ukiah shrugged into his shoulder holster out of sheer habit and locked the gun safe. He was arming the security system when he realized what he had done. Rather than taking the time to reopen the gun safe and lock his pistol up, he opened the back closet and pulled out a windbreaker. It covered up his pistol, but anyone that could read bumps under clothing would be able to tell he was carrying.

While Ukiah easily handled highway and country driving with the Hummer, city driving with the big, manual transmission SUV challenged his abilities. The narrow Murray Avenue was insanely busy as usual. He fought the clutch to keep the Hummer from stalling as he coaxed it into the Giant Eagle's small, crowded parking lot designed by Escher. The only true near accident was with a white Taurus following him down Murray, apparently startled by his turn into the supermarket. Luckily he found an end parking space since the slots were all slightly too narrow for the extra-wide car.

Max had desensitized Ukiah to the Giant Eagle's confusion years ago, when they first became partners. It was all new to Kittanning, who went wide-eyed and silent at the sudden bombardment of stimuli. Ukiah locked Kittanning's car
seat into the basket of a shopping cart and started into the produce section.

Mom Lara had given him a detailed list with brand names, sizes, and little notes to check for dings in cans, broken seals on jars, and expiration dates on everything. It was Max's list, handed to him so casually, which was going to be a challenge: a ripe cantaloupe, a wedge of good Brie cheese, crackers, steak, potatoes, and “salad makings.”

After picking his way through a myriad of possible lettuce, tomatoes, and potato choices, using his perfect memory to pick up what Max usually bought, Ukiah found himself in front of the cantaloupes. He eyed the unrevealing green webbed rind. How did you tell if a cantaloupe was ripe? He picked one up and turned it in his hand. Did one assume that all of the cantaloupes were ripe? What exactly was a cantaloupe, anyhow? He knew it was a melon, but were melons fruits or vegetables? Ukiah could recall seeing people shaking and sniffing them. He shook the melon, squeezed it experimentally, and then sniffed at it.

The woman on the other side of the pile saw his confusion and said, “There's two ends to a cantaloupe. One where the stem was, one where the blossom was.” She showed him the difference. “To tell if a cantaloupe is ripe, versus not yet ripe, the spot where the stem was should be slightly squishy but still firm. The blossom side should smell of cantaloupe.” She demonstrated a sniff. “To tell if a cantaloupe is overripe, shake it: if it rattles it's overripe.”

She suddenly gasped, looking beyond him.

Ukiah turned, registered only that a tall man was lifting Kittanning out of his car seat, and snarled, about to fling the cantaloupe in hand as his opening attack. Recognition clicked in, and Ukiah checked his throw.

“Easy, Cub.” Rennie Shaw finished the motion of laying Kittanning on his shoulder. It was easy to know why the woman shopper had reacted with alarm; from shaggy gristle hair down to steel-shod biker boots, the tall, muscular leader of the Dog Warriors radiated menace. “It's only me.”

“Rennie.” Ukiah could not stop growling, nonetheless. Apparently no amount of Magic Boy could erase the Wolf Boy
instincts. Shrugging aside the confusion of the crowded supermarket, he could now sense other Pack members scattered around him. They prickled against his awareness like high-voltage electricity. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm just holding my grandson,” Rennie said lightly. “No need to stir up the other customers.”

Ukiah realized that the cantaloupe lady had frozen in place like a deer in headlights. “It's okay,” he told her. “He's family. I just didn't expect to see him here.”