The Administration Series (225 page)

I still told him things that couldn't have been in the file, and look what he's done with it.

However, she nodded again, because it seemed to be what he wanted. Tentatively, she tried to return the embrace, and at once he released her and stepped back.

"So now that's all sorted, we can get back to work. What's been going on here while I was drowning my sorrows?"

He smiled at her, the smile he used for all the other admins when he wanted to charm them into doing something for him. Bright, with a hint of wickedness, and not a drop of genuine warmth.

After she'd given him the news, told him what was on his schedule and offered him a coffee (which he refused), Sara went back to her desk and stared at the screen, and tried not to cry.

The station was chaos, but Warrick was still glad he'd decided to meet Dilly here. Reports had the Space Centre even more heavily mobbed by anxious friends and relatives desperate to meet the first flights back since the unrest.

He waited for an hour before he saw her. For some reason, he'd been imagining her with luggage — everyone else seemed to be laden with the maximum permitted — but she had her usual small bag over her shoulder. She looked as calm, collected and immaculate as ever, until she caught sight of him.

"Dilly," he said eventually. "Some oxygen would be useful."

She let him go, and he was surprised to see tears on her cheeks. He fished in his jacket pocket. "Here you go. Hankie."

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "God, I'm sorry. How stupid."

"Not at all."

"It's being back, that's all. I never realised how much it felt like home. New London, I mean. Until I was out there and you and Mother and Asher and everyone else were back here and I couldn't get hold of anyone and you might all have been dead, for all I knew."

He took her arm gently, and found she was shaking. "Do you want to sit down somewhere?"

"No. I'll be fine in a minute. Can we just go, please?"

As they waited outside the station for the car to make its way through the tangled traffic, she told him about the trouble on Mars base. It seemed to have suffered a restrained version of events on Earth, kept in check by fear of the consequences of serious damage to the sealed environment. She made the journey back on the overcrowded shuttle sound almost the worst part.

When they had taken their seats, before the car had even pulled away, she said, "How's Toreth?"

He looked at her, surprised. "He's . . . well, as far as I know, he's fine."

"Oh, thank God." She sat back in the seat.

"You could have asked before. When we spoke."

"I couldn't. I thought about it. But I heard about Int-Sec before I managed to get through. About I&I. There were reports, some pictures. I thought he might be dead, and then I thought you'd have told me if he was, but if he was and you hadn't told me then it was because you didn't want to, and so I couldn't ask and anyway the connections were so bad that I didn't want to start anything and then lose you before it was all right." She paused for breath. "If that makes any sense to you. I'm not sure if it does to me, any more."

He smiled. "I understand. Thanks for being concerned about him."

"I was much more concerned about you." She paused, then added, "I know you know that I don't like him, but I don't want him dead, for God's sake. I'd just, well, rather not have to see him around, that's all."

"Well, that isn't going to be a problem any more."

"What?"

"He's —" And he stopped, realising that this was the first time he'd said it to anyone. "He says it's finished. We're finished."

"What?" And he saw it briefly in her eyes — her first, automatic reaction. Relief. "When?"

"A couple of weeks ago. Exactly fourteen days, in fact. If you give me a moment to work it out I can humiliate myself for you and do it in hours, minutes and seconds."

He hadn't meant to sound so bitter, but Dilly ignored his tone. She moved over to the seat beside him. "What happened?"

"There was an extremely unpleasant scene, the details of which I have no wish to go into, and he walked out. Since then I've had one message and a brief but explicit request conveyed over a comm, on the sole occasion that I managed to get through to him."

"What did he say?"

"Over the comm? 'Fuck off', sincerely meant. I'd like to put that down to the fact that he was drunk, which he undoubtedly was, but in all honesty I can't. After that, I decided not to bother working through his call blocks."

"And the message?"

"'It's finished. Don't bother to try to get in touch. I don't want to see you or speak to you again, for any reason'." At least the brevity made it easy to remember. "I've left messages for him, but I have no idea if he's reading them."

"And he means it? This isn't one of his attention-seeking 'chase me' things?"

He couldn't help a wry smile. "If it is, he's making it rather harder than usual to catch him."

"And you're . . . what? Letting it go at that?"

"I don't know. I thought . . . or rather, I hoped that he would come round on his own. That's the way it normally goes." Her eyebrow went up at 'normally'.

"Normal for Toreth. This time is different; I don't think he's coming back. I've looked for him, but he's trying so hard to stay away from me that I don't know if I should keep trying. Besides which, I have no idea what to say to him, even if I did find him." Knowing it probably wasn't a good idea, he added, "What do you think I should do?"

She didn't even pretend to think about it. "
I'm
not going to drive you out onto the streets to hunt him down. I think you're much better off without him, you know that. In fact, you should be grateful you've got a chance to walk away from it — I always worried you wouldn't get that."

One of her fears about Toreth that he'd never even tried to reassure, because it had always been the most valid.

'The only way you can understand that feeling is by trying to own them'.

Warrick looked down at his hands, seeing ghosts of manacles. She and Carnac were both right. Toreth was inarguably jealous, possessive and, above all, incapable of dealing with those feelings without becoming angry, which only made him more dangerous. He wouldn't take goodbye well, or accept it perhaps at all. Not normally. In a way, then, this
was
an opportunity, one he might never get again, to walk away cleanly — to be free from something that was undeniably hard work at times. Furthermore, from that point of view, rejecting it meant making a serious commitment, even if he were the only one of them who would recognise that.

If, in fact, declining the chance of escape was an option. If Carnac's revelations hadn't driven Toreth into a retreat from which he could never be coaxed.

"Keir?"

He looked up. "I was thinking about what you said."

She studied him for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm sorry, but you asked what I thought. If he says it's finished, I say accept it."

Finished. It sounded so final from someone else. The last lingering doubts disappeared. Despite everything, he wanted Toreth — it really was that simple. "I'll think about it."

"Hm. I know what that means. But it's your life, as usual. I just think that — " She shook her head. "No, actually I don't. You've told me often enough that it's none of my business."

Clear enough. Time to change the subject. "What are your plans?"

"I'm not sure. I was hoping I could stay with you until I can get something sorted out. I've got a ton of things to do for work, before I even think about anything else. Although I ought to go and see Mother first. How is she?"

This was the part he'd been dreading most. He'd been using Toreth, in a way, just to keep away from this topic.

"She's fine. But she's . . . not at home."

"Where is she?" When he didn't answer, she looked at him more closely. "What's wrong? Is she hurt?"

"No." Truth or lie? Unfortunately, the truth wasn't a realistic option. "She got herself into some trouble. She was arrested, briefly, and now she's gone away. She didn't tell me where, but I've heard from her and she's fine. I can show you the messages from her."

"Arrested?" She looked baffled. "What could
Mother
have done that would get her arrested?"

"I don't know the details — old trouble, I suspect, that all this business turned into new trouble. Something to do with Tarin's father."

Without hesitation she said, "You're lying."

"Yes, I am. Dilly, I can't tell you the truth. It's too risky. It's not that I don't trust you, but the more people who know what happened, the more dangerous it will be for everyone. You, me, Mother, Jen, Tarin. Valeria." And Toreth.

"Keir —"

"No." He held her gaze. "Not on this one. Don't turn it into a fight, please, because I'm not going to tell you. Not now. Eventually, if I can, I promise."

For a moment, he thought she wouldn't believe him, or would believe him and carry on anyway, because Jen always said they were as alike in stubbornness as in everything else. Then she nodded. "All right. If you say so, I trust you."

"Thank you."

She sighed and leaned on his shoulder. "It hasn't changed here, has it?"

"No. No, I'm afraid not. Not that much."

"When I was stuck in the 'port, watching the news, I thought there'd be some point to it all, in the end. That things might be different — better. But it's not going to happen. Everything's going to go on, exactly the same as it was before."

"Not exactly the same."

She shook her head. "Tarin's right. God knows, I never thought I'd say that, but he is. A few things here and there aren't going to make any difference at all. The whole system needs changing. It'll happen again, all this awful mess, until it does change. And it's going to be just as dangerous to say that kind of thing as it ever was, isn't it?"

Warrick thought of Toreth's reforms to I&I, and Carnac's conviction that the interrogation rooms would be back in use before long.

He put his arm round Dilly and kissed her temple. "I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see."

When Sara saw Warrick striding across the office, loyalty and fear got her out of her chair and in front of Toreth's door before she even had a chance to wonder how Warrick had talked his way past the front desk. Persistent bloody-mindedness, if his expression was any indication.

She'd lied to him at ten o'clock every day, for the whole week, and said she hadn't seen Toreth yet. Hoping that, now Toreth was back at work, she would be able to change his mind. However, he barely spoke to her, and he looked no better when he arrived in the mornings — she had begun to forget that he hadn't always had black rings around his eyes.

Warrick stopped in front of her. "Sara, let me past."

It wasn't a tone of voice she looked forward to arguing with, and for a moment she felt tempted not to try. Once Toreth saw Warrick, once he had to talk to him, then things would either go to hell in ten seconds flat, or everything would turn out wonderfully. However, she wasn't going to be responsible for the first option. He would never, ever forgive her for another betrayal.

"I told you," she said. "He's not back."

"Interesting, because the main reception is under the impression that he has been in residence since Monday."

"He's busy," she said, falling back on the automatic admin lie. Warrick merely looked at her until she said, "He doesn't want to see you."

"I am perfectly well aware of that. However,
I
want to see
him
. Don't play games — let me past."

She stared at him, remembering him talking to the captain the day he'd got them out of I&I. Heads had started to come up around the still sparsely populated office. Over his shoulder, she saw Kel mouth, "Security?" She shook her head at him.

"Warrick, if you're going to be like that, I suggest that you go. Before someone calls downstairs and you get thrown out."

"I don't —" Then his voice softened. "Yes. I apologise for being so uncivil. Will you at least tell him that I'm here?"

"He'll know already. Reception will have called it up."

"Tell him anyway. Please."

She hesitated, looking at the door. Warrick walked a couple of metres away and folded his arms. "I give you my word I won't try to go in."

At her desk, she switched the link through to the speaker, leaving no scope for misunderstandings. "Toreth? Warrick's here. He wants to see you."

After barely a second's hesitation, Toreth said, "Tell him to fuck off." Then he cut the connection.

Warrick made a small, aborted movement towards the door, stopping at her squeak of alarm. "Don't worry, I'm not going in."

"Warrick, I'm sorry."

"Can you at least let me know where he's staying? Having no idea where he is is . . . concerning."

She hesitated, before deciding that the lie would have to stand. "No. I still don't know — he didn't tell me. But there's no need to worry about him. He's —" so bloody miserable that I can't bear to look at him. "He's fine, honestly."

"If he were fine, he'd see me."