Mary Rosenblum (28 page)

“We had words over this before
esteemed brother
.” He faced Li Zhen, fists clenched at his sides. “I assume you have forgotten them?”

“I have not, but perhaps you did not listen the first time.” Li Zhen faced the younger man, the ice of his own anger pitted against Xai’s heat. ”You seem to have made your involvement visible. That was clumsy.”

“It wasn’t my doing.” Xai sent Ahni a cold, venomous look. “But perhaps you know all about that. I doubt you, esteemed brother. I doubted you before, but you were so smooth that I listened to you. I made a mistake. I do not make the same mistake twice.” Turning on his heel, he strode through the door.

Li Zhen looked after him, anger and distress hidden beneath the mask of his neutral face. He looked swiftly at Ahni. “We can talk more later.”

Ahni hurried after him as he followed Xai but at the door to the chamber, the same slender, native-looking boy appeared to block her path. She seized his hand quickly, lightly, prepared to twist him out of her way, use his surprise and mass against him. But he reacted with lightning speed to pull her just a hair out of balance. Beefore she could recover, he had spun her backward, so that she fell heavily against the wall inside. The door whispered closed.

Ahni rubbed her shoulder where she had hit the wall. She had let herself believe that the elongated native phenotype meant a lack of strength. Angry at herself, because she had walked knowingly into this trap, she paced the chamber. Spacious by platform standards, it offered only two routes out-the door by which Xai and Li Zhen had exited, and the small service door behind the screen. She tried her access, but the room requested a password in polite Mandarin. Her link did not work, either. A security shell. Of course.

Li Zhen’s words suggested that Xai was working on his own, allied only loosely with Li Zhen’s cause.

Ahni thought about the careful planning of the riot that had killed the tourist. Xai tended to think and act like a loose dragon. The orchestration, the careful cooordination that had gone into the planning of the infiltration of the Con, the careful agitation to create violent eruptions at just the right time and place …

this demonstrated a subtlety of thought that her brother utterly lacked.

If not Li Zhen, who was behind this? And why?

She had to get these new pieces to Dane. Ahni closed her eyes, despair nipping at her, feeling as if she had taken two steps forward and now, three back. “Jin An.” She drew a slow breath, making her tone conversational, relaxed. “It’s up to you to let me out the service door.”

No response. No sign that anyone was listening and why would she be?

“I am not going to become Li Zhen’s wife, or lover, or breeding female. I have business in NYUp that will make that quite clear.”

Still no sign of listening, but Ahni wouldn’t feel her response unless Jin An was pressed to the door, as she had been while she and Li Zhen had talked. The room would certainly be wired for listening. Ahni drew another slow breath and dropped briefly into Pause, summoning the image of the boy and the woman from short term memmory. She called up an image of Li Zhen and ran a quick comparison.

Ahni opened her eyes and threw the dice.

“He’s Li Zhen’s son. And yours. Children like him are being born all over the platforms. It’s not deformity. Not mutation. He has … adapted. Li Zhen will see this if he only looks. I will show him. If you let me out now, I will make Li Zhen look at the other children … see them for what they are. If the CSF arrive on New York Up and I am not there, I may not ever be able to do that. And your child will always remain … deformed. And hidden.” She loaded the words with truth.

No response except the soft breath of air moving into and out of the room.

Then … the door behind the screen whispered open. Ahni crossed the room in a few brisk steps, moving fast before the woman could change her mind.

She stood just beyond the doorway.

Ahni met the woman’s dark, bitter gaze. “Have you taken him to play in the hub garden?”

She shook her head.

“You should do that. He’ll discover that he is much better in microG than you or I will ever be. He’s better,” she said softly. “Don’t you see? It’s evolution. It just isn’t happening the way it has always happened on Earth.” She shrugged. “Why should it?”

Jin An looked away, some of the bitterness muted into thoughtfulness, the darkness unmitigated.

“Li Zhen has already glimpsed the truth,” Ahni said. “He already knows. Why his son is as he is. He’s just afraid to let himself acknowledge that. I’ll make him do that.” A promise. The woman heard it, lifting her eyes to meet Ahni’s, a tiny spark in their depths. She nodded, gestured with her chin.

Ahni approached the door she had indicated. It opened and Ahni stepped through, adrenaline pumping now, heart beating fast. How long before Li Zhen finished with Xai and came back? Dropping momentarily into Pause, she summoned up the path from dock to private chamber. She needed a corridor to take her to the right. Doors lined the carpeted corridor, without traffic, private space, she guessed.

One door was painted a soft blue rather than the creamy tan of the others. She touched it and opened to reveal a corridor. Lucky guess. Now if it led to the main corridor she could find her way back to the dock. She didn’t run, because Security might notice a running person. She reached the end of the connecting corridor. Main corridor? Maybe. She had nothing but direction to guide her no landmarks at all to tell her where she was in the maze of linking corridors. Turned right.

And her luck ran out. Around the curve in the of the corridor in the distance, a figure appeared, feet visible first as he descended the ‘slope’ of the skin level corridor. Frantically, Ahni touched the doors on either side of the corridor.
Access? Access?
She had no password. Too late now. She straightened, adopted a casually purposeful posture. The clothes weren’t Li Zhen’s and didn’t seem to be a uniform either.

The figure appeared fully, halted briefly, then waved and hurrried toward her.

Kyros!

”Need a lift?” He reached her, his weathered and aged-ugly face crinkled into a thousand folds of laughter.

“How did you get here?”

“I saw you leave your hotel.” He winked. “I know that Courier. Dragon Home’s head dragon owns him.

I figured it might just be easier to get in here than to leave. So I called in a few favors. Quite a few.”

Kyros had her by the elbow and was steering her down the corridor. “Good timing. We have about … “

He glanced at a tiny screen inset into his forearm. “Seven minutes and thirty five seconds.”

“Before what?”

“Before Security finds the problem in their system, fixes it, and sees us.”

Somebody owed him some very large favors.

Kyros paused in front of a door which opened, admitting them to the garden where she had first seen the boy. The abandoned kite lay where Li Zhen had dropped it.

The boy knelt beside it. Waiting.

“Damn,” Kyros muttered.

The boy smiled at Ahni –
you are slow
. Rose awkwardly on those too-long feet.

“Ignore him,” Kyros murmured. “We don’t want him yelling for help.”

“He’s coming with us.” She swept her arm around him at the same instant he leaped, so awkward in gravity, up onto her hip. She didn’t stagger at all, remembered the fragile, too-light feel of Koi’s body in her arms. “Don’t ask, we do this. Trust me, okay?’

“Who the hell are you to trust?” But Kyros was already striding on, urgency a sharp stink in his wake, heading for the door that led to the vestibule and the dock. She followed, leaning to balance the boy’s weight, counting down the time he’d given her. One minute and twenty seconds left, as the lock cycled behind them.

The ship waiting was ugly, matte black, battered, and scarred. Bigger than the Courier’s little shuttle, but not huge, squat and nothing sleek about it. A hole appeared in the side as if the metal melted away. She ducked through, slinging the boy onto the curved inside hull, looking around for seats or webbing.

“Sit. Over there.” Kyros jerked his head, flung himself into a webbing sling like the one she had seen in Dane’s ship.

She sat, pulled the boy against her as the ship quivered beneath them. Sudden acceleration shoved them forward and Ahni clutched the boy as he started to tumble, hung on as the direction of the accceleration changed suddenly. Now a hand flattened them to the hull and she felt the ship leap beneath them, like a horse leaping into full gallop. The boy gasped for breath and for a few moments, even Ahni struggled with the feel of suffocation. Then the hand let go.

Without webbing to anchor them, they drifted, Ahni still clutching the boy by the hand, struggling briefly with up and down. The boy gasped, but this was the sound of delight, not struggle. “Flying,” he said, and his smile was like a small sun in the ship.

“Okay, we’re hiding in a nice little shadow where nobody can see us.” Kyros twisted around in his hammock, his face cold as a winter desert. “Explain to me why this is a good thing.” His chin pointed a the boy who had pushed himself off from the hull and was drifting across the small space, radiating delight. “I can take you back and probably earn a fat payoff.” His eyes narrowed as he regarded Ahni.

“This is Li Zhen’s son.” Almi spoke in English. No, the boy didn’t understand the language. “He’s a lever.

Dane needs it.”

For a moment, Kyros merely stared at her, but his reaction made her wince. “He looks like Dane’s pets.” A shadow of doubt colored his tone. “He’s right, then? About … them?”

“I think so.” Almi shrugged. “Got another explanation?”

“You sure act like you know what you’re doing.” Kyros regarded her thoughtfully, coldly. “Out in the Belt, there’s a sort of natural selection about that. If you do know what you’re doing, you’re alive. If you don’t, you’re not.” His eyes narrowed. “I think I’d feel a lot better right now if you were a Belter.”

Ahni shrugged and didn’t look away, although the cold of the void beyond that hull chilled her spine. He had options. Sell her back to Li Zhen. Toss her out of the ship and sell the boy back to Li Zhen. Or take them to Dane. She relaxed her muscles to readiness, drew a single calming breath and … waited.

Kyros finally looked away. “You might have made it in the Belt. Maybe.” He turned his back on her, ignoring the boy who zipped past his head, surprised and delighted with the result of his sudden push-off.

Ahmi snagged him, spilled his momentum with a rebound off the hull and held on as acceleration’s hand gently added weight. “Relax, Little Brother,” she said to the sharp bloom of his disappointment. ”You’ll get to fly all you want pretty soon.”

Kyros made a short, sharp sound of disapproval. “Nobody’ looking for us yet anyway. I’m dumping you into Dane’s lap and then I’m heading back out to the Belt. Politics down here are too damn complicated.

And I don’t want to be around when Zhen disscovers his kid is missing and starts looking.”

“The boy’s not missing.” Ahni braced herself and the boy as the ship maneuvered. “He already knows where to look for him.”

“I hope for Dane’s sake you’re really as right as you think you are. You scare me.”

Ahni shrugged and didn’t tell him that she hoped she was, too. They were docking. A gentle impact vibrated through the hull and they were drifting again. A few moments later, the hull melted open and Ahni found herself in Dane’s private dock, the one from which he had ferried her to the Elevator.

Years, ago, she thought. In another life.

“Come on.” She took the boy firmly by the hand and towed him from the ship. “Just let me do it for now,” she said as he tried to swim, thrashing ineffectively. “You’ll figure all this out really fast. I have a good teacher for you.”

“Show me.” He was quivering with excitement, his Mandarin sloppy with hurry. “He is waiting?”

Was Koi waiting? If so, Li’s son was a whole lot more sensitive than Ahni was.

But no, when the lock cycled and opened to the green-white glare of light and plants no Koi drifted, grinning.

No reason he should be, but it bothered her. The boy was pulling off his embroidered slippers, his cap aleady lost, stripping out of his jacket to leave him naked from the waist up, skinny, his toes, yes, as long and prehensile as Koi’s. He pushed off, clumsy, arrowed away to crash into a tube planted to something leafy and green. Shreds of plant tissue drifted away and a couple of the small frog-things skimmed away in upset. The boy squealed a high, thin note of pure delight. Undisturbed by his collision he caught the tube as he rebounded and pushed again, rocketing off in a new direction.

“Wait up, kid. You’ll trash the whole place.” Kyros zoomed after him, grabbed one of the boy’s ankles and spilled momentum on another tube, managing not to do too much damage in the process. “Go slow,”

he said sternly and let go of the wriggling, protesting boy. “Easy!”

“He doesn’t speak English.” Ahni laughed. “Slow,” she said in Mandarin. “Careful!”

Chastened, he pushed off almost timidly and drifted on a wobbling course between tubes, experimenting with hands and feet. He’d get the hang of it quickly, Ahni guessed. Already his toes wer spreading, grasping as he pushed off from the tubes.

“Zhen’s son, huh?” Absently, Kyros snagged the drifting shoes and the cap. “God help ‘em all. Especially Dane.”

“Thanks,” she said. “For coming after me. I’m not sure how I would have gotten off Dragon Home.”

“Me neither.” Kyros gave her a crooked smile. “Zhen keeps a really tight hold on things over there.

Good Security. If you don’t have a membership card.”

“I’m glad you do,” Ahni said, and meant it. “I owe you.”

“Oh, yeah, you do. Don’t worry.” His face folded into a grin. “I’ll remind you.”

“Kyros–” Ahni caught a nearby tube to halt her drift. It had been newly planted and she couldn’t identify the tiny green sprouts. “Is Koi Dane’s son?”

“Not by blood, if that’s what you mean.” Kyros let himself drift, his expression thoughtful. “But yeah, Koi is his kid. That’ why I haven’t been able to pry him loose and get him back out to the Belt.” He shrugged.