Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (16 page)

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m just waiting for the next train. I thought I’d get a bit more scanning done before it showed up.”

Berhane looked over her shoulder. “How do you know when it gets here?”

“There are announcements,” he said. “This place is so huge, we don’t want anyone to miss a train and get stuck here.”

Echoing her thoughts from her arrival. She nodded, hoping she didn’t look quite as nervous as she felt.

“First time here?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Inspecting where your money is going?” Somehow he didn’t make the question sound rude. It seemed routine.

“No,” she said. “I want to go to work.”

“It’s rather dull, scanning things in the warehouse,” he said.

“I…was hoping to be in the field.”

His eyebrows went up. He snapped a finger and a serving bot showed up, floating down the aisle, its top a flat tray. He set the scanner on the tray, and the bot disappeared.

“Why don’t they scan?” she asked, nodding toward the bot.

“We need eyeballs on everything,” he said. “Since we’re working with volunteers, we have to make sure they don’t ‘accidentally’ compensate themselves with some of our supplies, and then fudge the system to cover it.”

“Can’t someone set up an inventory system that’s hard to fudge?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “For a lot of money. And then that someone would have to update it. It wouldn’t be volunteer friendly.”

“But wouldn’t the volunteers be better off in the field—”

“Not everyone can handle the field,” he said. “And a lot of people are like you. They want to do something, but they might only have an hour here or an hour there. They can scan things or help with the ordering or make sure the right supplies are on the right train. There’s so much more to do here than we could ever manage. Especially now.”

She nodded. She wondered if some of the people who couldn’t “handle” the field had tried, or if Kaspian and his crew washed them out in training.

She would find out, she supposed.

“Do you work here?” she asked.

He smiled. “No. I volunteer.”

“It’s clear you didn’t just join up after Anniversary Day,” she said.

His smile faded. “I’ve been here a while. Less than I want, but more than I should, probably, given Fee.”

It took Berhane a moment to realize he meant his daughter, Fiona, and not some fee for working here.

“Your daughter is special,” she said.

“I like to think so,” he said.

An announcement for the next train into Armstrong sounded overhead and across her links. It would leave ten minutes from now.

“I guess we should go,” he said.

She nodded and let him lead her out of the warehouse of pallets. She kept the map on in her links though; she was beginning to wonder if she would ever entirely trust anyone.

He was leading her the way the map showed.

They reached the platform. The train waited, silver coated with gray Moon dust. No one sat inside the car.

Ó Brádaigh gestured with his hand, as if he were holding a door open for her. She smiled at him and boarded first.

He followed, and hesitated as if he wasn’t sure if he should sit near her. After a moment, he sat across from her.

“I’m kind of amazed you want to go in the field,” he said.

She shrugged a shoulder. “I want to contribute.”

“There are other ways to contribute.” He sounded like Kaspian.

“Yes,” she said, “and I’m doing them. But they don’t feel like enough.”

Ó Brádaigh studied her for a moment. “Guilt?” he asked softly.

She stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“It just seems like a reaction… I don’t know. I’m sorry. That was presumptuous of me.”

The train beeped. A warning flashed across her links that the train would leave in less than a minute.

No one else joined them on the train.

“What was?” she asked.

“That, you know, I thought, maybe you…” He shook his head again.

“I’m feeling guilty because I’m rich and privileged?” she asked, careful not to sound bitter.

“No, I was thinking, sometimes when a major crisis happens, we feel like if we could just do something, then we can make up for surviving it.” He looked down. “Or, at least, I do.”

She was going to argue with him until that last sentence, uttered so softly she almost missed it.

Did she want to explain herself to this man? She didn’t even know him, yet she felt like she did.

“I…um…yeah, that’s probably a component,” she said. “My mother died four years ago. In the first bombing.”

He raised his head. His expression was…quizzical? Fascinated? She couldn’t quite tell.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t have to pick up Fee for another hour. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

A cup of coffee. No one had offered to buy her coffee while on a train since her mother’s last morning.

Berhane felt a pang deep in her heart. She almost said no. And because she almost said no, she made herself smile.

“I’d like that,” she said.

NINETEEN

“FIRST,” THE GIRL said, “you tell me what a famous rich guy like you is doing here.”

Deshin stared at her, activating one of his chips. She was clearly Pietres’ daughter. Then she figured out who Deshin was. Most people in Armstrong had heard of him, but not seen him. It was rare for him to be recognized outside of the city or the Moon’s business community.

But that didn’t mean much. If she paid attention to people like her father or people who had done business with her father in the past, she might know who Deshin was.

So he launched a quick search of his internal databases, to make sure she was who she said she was.

He also checked for a record of Pietres’s death. That came up immediately and confirmed what she told Deshin: Pietres had died a week before Anniversary Day, but no cause was listed.

The lights had finally turned completely on in the small storefront. It was cluttered and dusty, filled with unlabeled vials and boxes. Some rocks and gems glittered on one shelf, a few bound books were stacked on another. He’d worked with books like that before. Their pages were often coated with poisons that were best transferred on paper.

In this place, he knew better than to touch anything with his bare hands. He had warned Jakande about the same thing, and he hoped Jakande remembered.

Jakande was focused on Deshin and the girl, standing a half step behind Deshin, and probably turned slightly so that he could see the door as well as the girl behind the counter.

Deshin didn’t turn to look, so he didn’t know for certain. He just knew how Jakande did his job.

The search on the girl came back slowly—the private network that Deshin used was having trouble getting power down here. But it was a tribute to the network that it could work even in this place. Deshin would wager that most people’s private networks didn’t work at all in Pietres’s storefront.

According to the search, the girl’s name was Ethelina. She was twenty-two, and she was the only surviving member of Pietres’s family. His sons had been killed more than a decade ago, and his wife had died twenty years before.

Deshin had known none of that before now, even though he had done business with Pietres more recently than twenty-five years ago. Of course, Deshin hadn’t done the business face to face. He had made the contact, then had his people handle things.

Pietres had been in a dangerous business, and the collateral damage that had been his family simply showed it.

“Ethelina,” Deshin said, and the girl started. Her colorless eyes grew wide. She hadn’t expected him to find her name at all. “Tell me what happened to your father.”

She bit her upper lip. To her credit, she didn’t look in any direction or even seem to access her links. That, more than anything, told Deshin that she was alone down here, and that no one else had hacked the business or the business’s networks.

She swallowed hard, then glanced at Jakande.

“You may as well trust me,” Deshin said. “Because no one else is going to help you out. Since your family is gone and your father didn’t make many friends, you’re going to have to try to run his business on your own. And believe me, a protected kid who went to the Moon’s best schools wasn’t trained to run this kind of work, not with the kind of people you’ll run into.”

She swallowed hard again. “People like you, Mr. Deshin?”

He smiled. It was an old smile, one he rarely used any more. Half charm, half menace. It used to have quite an impact on women all those years ago. They saw the charm and discounted the menace. Men often saw only the menace and discounted the charm.

She glanced at Jakande again, then back at Deshin. She had apparently noticed both the charm and the menace, because the attitude she had shown just a moment before faded.

He waited. She would come around. She had no one, and she was scared. She’d already made two mistakes in this conversation, and if she thought it through, she would realize what those mistakes were.

“If I tell you what happened to my father, will you leave me alone?” she asked.

“If you want me to,” Deshin said, and meant it.
He
would leave her alone. But he might send a business associate here to try to buy out the last of Pietres’ stock and his stored information.

Deshin wasn’t going to tell her that, though.

She swallowed a third time. It seemed to be an involuntary response, a tell, something that would destroy her in this business.

He couldn’t help himself: He thought of Paavo, and how unsuited the boy would be at her age if Deshin had died without training him. (Even if Deshin did train him; Paavo was marching on a similar education track to the one Ethelina had marched.)

“I killed him,” she said, and that caught Deshin’s attention like nothing else had. His hand moved ever so slightly closer to the pistol he carried under his suit coat.

Jakande had stiffened beside him, clearly ready to pull Deshin out of the building if need be.

“How did you kill him?” Deshin asked softly.

Her face crumpled. “I thought he was so handsome.”

It took Deshin a moment to realize she had meant a different “he.”

“Now they’re everywhere,” she said.

Jakande let out an involuntary “huh?” but Deshin understood.

“You brought one of the Anniversary Day clones down here?” Deshin asked.

Jakande turned quickly enough that Deshin saw it. Surprise.

I’ll take care of the conversation,
he sent to Jakande. It was a reprimand.

Deshin hadn’t reprimanded him for his lack of attention on Anniversary Day, believing it understandable. But Jakande had been a bit off ever since that massive bombing, and Deshin needed him on his game.

“I met him topside,” she said of the clone. “There’s a bar—it’s mostly for tourists, but I’d been here since I graduated, and I was getting so tired of Gerlache. There’s nothing in this place except criminals and failures.”

Deshin privately agreed. But he didn’t say anything, letting her talk. His heart was pounding. He hadn’t expected anyone to have talked with one of the clones, and she had.

“We hit it off. I was stupid,” she said. “I didn’t think he knew who I was, but he had to, right?”

It wasn’t hard to find her, especially if someone was looking at Pietres’s history. But Deshin didn’t say that either. He inclined his head in encouragement.

“We—God, I thought he was a handsome man, brilliant, and I was lucky to meet someone like him here. I figured I’d meet someone in school, but I never did or they’d dump me for no reason—”

Oh, there probably had been a reason. If she had been Deshin’s daughter, he would have had his people scare off anyone who hadn’t been appropriate.

“—but he, he was so considerate.” Those colorless eyes were lined with tears. She didn’t brush them away, but she didn’t blink either. “The next morning—I was so stupid. He was talking about love at first sight and romance and soul mates, and I believed him. I absolutely believed him.”

She really wouldn’t survive in this business if it had been that easy to get to her. Pietres should have been ashamed of himself, protecting her to that degree.

Then Deshin’s skin warmed. He was probably letting Gerda do the same thing with Paavo.

But Paavo was seven, not twenty-two. Paavo had time to toughen up. This girl should have been tough by the time she came of age.

“He wanted to meet my dad, and I said we could meet at this restaurant topside, and we did, and Dad thought it was weird, but he kinda liked him, and then they talked and I don’t know, they seemed to hit it off.”

“Did he negotiate to buy anything from your dad at dinner?” Deshin asked.

“No,” she said. “My dad would have told me to stay away from him then. My dad didn’t want me to associate with his people or the people who did business with him. My dad would have chased him off if he wanted anything from this place.”

“Then how do you know he killed your dad?” Deshin asked.

“Because the next day, before he left me, he said he had business and he’d be back, but he never came back. So I came here to talk to my dad, and I found him, and he was dead, and I called the police, but they didn’t care—you know what Daddy did.”

“I do,” Deshin said softly.

She nodded. “They don’t care about people like him and he knew it—”

The other “he” again, the boyfriend, the killer, the clone.

“—and that was how he could steal from my dad, and kill him, just like he killed Mayor Oliu.”

Oliu. One of the mayors assassinated on Anniversary Day.

“The police didn’t care that your father was killed with zoodeh?” Deshin asked. He was surprised. It was a banned substance, after all.

She gave him a contemptuous glance. “Where do you think you are, Armstrong? People die strangely here all the time. The police are paid to look the other way. I know. My father paid a bunch of them.”

She shook her head, then let out a small laugh.

“I would have thought that those payments bought some loyalty, but I guess not. Not after death.”