The Very Best of Kate Elliott (38 page)

Marcos was already pushing past her.“What kind of contract? Is there money? Is there publicity? We’ll need leverage. . . .” He leaned down in front of the view screen, introduced himself, and began bargaining.

“Daddy!”

“Love you, Rosie! Now, M. Marcos. First we’ll need an all-hours contact number—”

“Daddy!”

Marcos ignored her, and her father had forgotten her. Amazingly, Marcos didn’t even object, or seem to notice, as Rose left the hut and trudged down the dirt street back to the church, her only companions half a dozen chickens and two mangy dogs who circled warily, darting in to sniff at her heels until she kicked one. Yelping, they raced away.

The church remained empty, abandoned, six chairs overturned and one drying bloodstain, nothing serious.

Only bruised.

Señora Maria had departed from the little back chamber, but she had left Doctor Baby Jesus sitting upright on the shelf, plump arms spread in a welcoming gesture as Rose halted in front of him.

“I speak English,” said Rose, her voice choked. Tears spilled, but she fought against them.“I need help.”

A whirr. A squeal.

“Please wait while I connect you.”

A different voice, this time.A woman.“Please state your location and need. I am M. Maldonado, medical technician. I am here to help you.”

A pause.

“Are you there?” The voice deepened with concern.

She found her voice, lost beneath the streaming tears. “I just need your help. Can you connect me to my brother? His name is Anton Mikhailov. He’s an advocate at—uh—” She traced down through her sim-screen.“This is his priority number.”

“Are you in danger?”

“No. No. Kind of. Nobody’s going to kill me. But I’m lost—I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what you’re here for. I know this isn’t important. You must get thousands of life-and-death calls every hour.”

The woman made a sound, like a swallowed chuckle. “This system was defunct twenty years ago, but we keep a few personnel on-line because of people who have no other access. It’s all right. It’s all right. What’s your name?”

“Rose.”

“Please stay on the line, Rose. I’ll get a channel to your brother. If you want to talk, just say something. I’m here listening.”

She had nothing to say. She fidgeted anxiously, swallowing compulsively, each time hoping to consume the lump that constricted her throat.

Dull, officious Anton, who worked as an advocate for troubled children or some other equally worthy and boring vocation. He had left the family fourteen years before, when she was only a baby. He had been raised by someone else, by traitors, thieves, defectives. He had rarely visited his parents and then only on supervised visitations, because the ones who had stolen him had poisoned his mind. Yet he always wrote to her four times a year on the quarter, chatty notes detailing the obscenely tedious details of his life. Each note repeated at the end the same tired cliché: Call me any time, Rosie. Any time.

She didn’t really know him. He could as well have been a stranger. Why should he do anything for her if her father didn’t even care enough to come when she asked? Wasn’t this the only time she had ever asked anything of her father?

All these years she had never asked.

“Patching you through,” said helpful M. Maldonado. “M. Mikhailov, I’ll remain on stepped-back link if you need me.”

“Thank you. Rose?” Anton had a reedy tenor, rising querulously. She didn’t know him well enough to know if he was surprised, annoyed, or pleased.

“Anton, it’s Rose.”

I’m Rose, she thought, half astonished, hearing her own voice speak her own name: a small, isolated voice, lost in the dim room, in the old church, in the forgotten village, in the green jungle, on the common earth beneath clouds that covered the all-seeing eye of the sun. It was amazing anyone could hear her at all. She sobbed, choking on it, so it came out sounding halfway between a cough and a sneeze. She could barely squeeze out words.

“Please, come get me.”

“Of course, Rose. Right away. Where are you?”

“I’m all alone.”

The buzz of the fluorescent lamp accompanied her other companion: the solitude, not even a mouse or a roach. The world had emptied out around her. For an instant, she thought the connection had failed until Doctor Baby Jesus whirred and Anton spoke again, an odd tone in his suddenly very even, level all-on-the-same-note voice.

“Did you call Dad?”

She sobbed. She could get no word past her throat, no comprehensible sound, only this wrenching, gasping, ugly sound.

The baby doctor sighed with Anton’s voice. “He’ll never love you, Rosie. Never. He can’t love anyone but himself.”

Fury made her articulate.“He
does
love me. He says so.”

“Love is just another commodity to him. Maybe you get something, but there’s always a price to be paid. I’m so sorry.”

“He does love me.”

“I’ll come get you. Stay where you are, Rosie. I’ll come. Will you stay? Will you be there? Don’t go running off anywhere? You’re not going to change your mind and follow those damned Sunseekers?”

“But he doesn’t want me.” She began to sob again, torn in two. She heard Anton reply, faintly, only maybe his voice wasn’t any fainter and it was just her own weeping that drowned him.

“I’m coming, Rosie. Just tell me where you are.”

She couldn’t speak. She could only cry as their voices filtered through the creaky stutter of the baby doll’s speaker.

“M. Mikhailov, I’m attempting to triangulate, but the intercessor has been partially disabled so I can’t get a lock on your sister’s position.”

“Do you have a position on the Sunseekers?”

“The Sunseekers?”

“That ship with the new solar array technology. That grotesque advertising ploy—‘you need never set foot in darkness again,’ something like that. I can’t remember their idiot slogan. Maybe in your line of work you don’t have to keep up on the gossip rags—”

“Oh!” said the voice of M. Maldonado. “Isn’t that the ship that the actor Vasil Veselov’s daughter ran away to—”

“That one,” interrupted Anton. “Do you have any way to get a fix on it? Here, let me see, they’ve got a public relations site that tracks—Yes. Here it is. I’ve got it touched down in a municipio called San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán.”

“I’ll get all transport information for that region, but if you’re in— ah—London, it will take you at least eighteen hours with the most efficient connections, including ground transport or hovercab.”

“I have access to a private ’car. Rose. Rose?”

“I’m here.” Amazing how tiny and mouselike her voice sounded, barely audible, the merest squeak.

“Rose, now listen. It says here there’s an old historic museum in San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán. Do you know where that is? Can you get there and wait there?”

Of course, maybe it wasn’t more than open welts sown with salt, discovering the truth: her father had wanted her with the Sunseekers all along. Had manipulated her to get her there. Surbrent-Xia had paid him to get his daughter onto the ship in the most publicly scandalous way possible. He had set it all up, used her to get the money and the publicity.

“Daddy doesn’t want me,” she said, voice all liquid as the horrible truth flooded over her, soaking her to the bones.

“I know, Rosie. But I love you. I’m coming. Just tell me where you are. Tell me if you can get to the museum.”

“Okay,” she said, to say something because she had forgotten what words meant. A chasm gaped; she knelt on the edge, scrabbling not to tumble into the awful yawning void. What would she do now, if no one wanted her? Why would anyone want her anyway? Blemished, disfigured, stained. Ugly.

“Okay,” he repeated, sounding a little annoyed, but maybe he was just worried.

Maybe he was actually worried about her. The notion shocked her into paying attention.

“Okay,” he repeated.“I will be there in no less than six hours.You must wait by the museum. Don’t go off with the Sunseekers, Rosie. I will meet you there, no matter what. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Doctor Baby Jesus fell silent, having done his work. The fluorescent light flickered. A roach scuttled across the shelf, and froze, sensing her shadow. Her tears stained the concrete floor, speckles of moisture evaporating around her feet. She just stood there, stunned, unable to think or act. She couldn’t even remember what she had agreed to. The light hummed. The roach vanished under the safety of the baby doll’s lacy robe.

“Hola! Hey! You in here, chica?” The voice, male and bossy, spoke perfectly indigenous Standard. The young shirtless tough who had hit Akvir upside the head and cursed at him in Spanish pushed aside the curtain and ducked in. “There you are. I’m taking you back to the village.”

“The village?” she echoed stupidly, staring at the rifle he held. Staring at him. He had pulled the bandanna down and the ski mask off, revealing a pleasant face marred only by the half-cocked smirk on his lips. He sounded just like one of her friends from home, except for the Western Hemisphere flatness of his accent.

“The village,” he agreed, rolling his eyes. He did not threaten her with the gun.“Those Sunseeker people, they’re all there, waiting to get picked up. You’re supposed to go with them. We got to go, pronto. You know. Fast.”

“That’s by the old museum, isn’t it?”

“Si,” he said, eyes squinted as he examined her.“You okay?”

She wiped her cheeks. Maybe the dim light hid the messy cry.

“We got to go,” he repeated, shifting his feet, dancing up two steps and pressing the curtain aside with his rifle as he glanced out into the church. “They got some ’cars coming in to get all of you out of here before sunset. You got to get out before sunset, right?”

“The museum,” she said.“Okay. Is it far?”

“Four or five kilometers. Not far. But we got to go now.”

She nodded like a marionette, moving to the strings pulled by someone else. She got her feet to move, one before the next, and soon enough as they came out of the church she found her legs worked pretty well, just moving along like a normal person’s legs would, nothing to it. A group of little boys played soccer along the dirt track of the hamlet, shouting and laughing as the ball rolled toward the river but was captured just in time. They turned off into the ragged forest growth before they passed the house where she had talked to her father; she saw no sign of Marcos except the flash of the ceramic satellite dish wired to the roof.

The boy walked in front of her. He had a good stride, confident and even jaunty, and he glanced back at intervals to make sure she hadn’t fallen behind or to warn her about an overhanging branch and, once, a snake that some earlier passerby had crushed with repeated blows. It had bright bands on what she could see of its body, a colorful, beautiful creature. Dead now. She sweated, but he had a canteen that he shared with her—not water but a sticky sweet orange drink. A rain shower passed over them, dense but brief, to leave a cooling haze in its wake. All the time they walked, he kept the big plateau to their left, although they did not ascend its slopes but rather cut around them along a maze of dirt trails.

“Who was that woman?” she asked after a while.

“My great-aunt? She’s some kind of crazy inventor, a genius, but she got into trouble with corporate politics. She was in prison for a long time, so I never saw her but I heard all about her. She was a real, uh, cabrona
.
Now maybe she is more nice.”

Rose could think of nothing to say to this; in a way, she was surprised at herself for asking anything at all. Just keeping track of her feet striking the dirt path one after the other and all over again amazed her, the steady rhythm, the cushioning earth, the leaf litter.

The forest opened into a milpa, a field of well-grown maize interspersed with manioc. A pair of teal ducks flew past. When they cut around the edge of the field they saw a stork feeding at an oxbow of muddy water, the remains of the summer’s flooding. Lowlands extended beyond, some of it marshy, birds flocking in the waters.

Another kilometer or so through a mixture of milpas and forest brought them to San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán on the shore of El Río Chiquito. Here the houses had a more modern look; half a dozen had solar ceramic roofs. There was a fenced-off basketball court and a school with a satellite dish and a plaza with a flagpole where the Sunseekers sat in a distraught huddle on the broad concrete expanse, staring anxiously westward while a few onlookers, both adults and children, watched them watching the horizon.

It was late afternoon. The sun sank quickly toward the trees.

The
Ra
sat forlornly on the grassy field behind the school, within sight of the old museum. Its stubby wings looked abraded, pockmarked, where the solar array had been stripped off.

“Rose!” Akvir jumped to his feet and rushed to her, his hand a warm fit on her elbow.“We thought we’d lost you!” He was flushed and sweating and a bruise purpled on his cheek, but he looked otherwise intact. He dragged her toward the others, who swarmed like bees around her, enveloping her with cries of excitement and expansive greetings. “You’re the hero, Rose! They said you begged for our lives to your dad and he asked them to let us go. And they did! All because of your father! They’re all fans of your father! They’ve all seen his shows. Can you get over it?”

She stood among them, drowned by them. All she could do was stare past their chattering faces at the boy who had led her here. He had fallen back to stand with a pair of village women, his arms crossed across his bare chest and the rifle, let loose, slung low by his butt. One of the women handed him a shirt; she seemed to be scolding him.

“Look!” screamed Zenobia, still clutching her torn clothing. “There they are! There they are!”

A pair of sleek, glossy hovercars banked around a curve in the river and leveled off by the boat dock, but after a moment during which, surely, the navigators had seen the leaping, waving, shouting Sunseekers, they nosed up the road to settle, humming, on the grassy field beside the disabled
Ra.
Akvir and the others jumped up and down, clapping and cheering, as the ramp of the closer ’car opened and three utility-suited workers, each carrying a tool kit, walked down to the ground. They ignored the crying, laughing young people and went straight for the
Ra.
After about five breaths, the second ’car’s ramp lowered and a woman dressed in a bright silver utility suit descended to the base where she raised both hands and beckoned for them to board.