Trickster (12 page)

 
Kendi passed the waterfall and thumbed open the double door to the suite he had rented. The place was bright and airy, with a large outer sitting room, two well-appointed bathrooms, and four bedrooms. Enormous windows looked out over the cityscape. Although the suite sported its own holographic generator which allowed guests to add artwork or chunks of outdoor scenes, no one had been able to agree on a decoration scheme and Kendi had finally shut the system off entirely. As a result, the place was rather plain, done in simple greens and browns.

 
Ben had appropriated part of the sitting room as a work area, and he had hooked up his own computer to the hotel's network. The man himself was hunched over the keyboard, clothes rumpled, red hair tousled. In other words, looking perfectly normal. Lucia stood behind Ben's chair, one hand on the Irfan figurine around her neck. The holographic display above the desk showed text and pictures.

 
"What's going on?" Kendi demanded without preamble.

 
Ben hesitated. Lucia looked perfectly calm, but Kendi felt his whole insides screw up with tension. Bad news, that's what it was all right. Otherwise they'd come right out and say it.

 
"Well?" He strode to the desk. "Just tell me. Or do I have to read it for myself?"

 
"It's bad," Ben said finally.

 
"I'll go see what Gretchen is up to," Lucia murmured, and quietly withdrew into the room the two of them shared. Kendi's legs went weak.

 
"Ben, what is it?" Kendi asked. "I can't handle suspense. Just say it. Did you find them? Are they . . . are they dead?"

 
"I don't know," Ben replied. He reached up and took Kendi's hand. "Ken, I found a series of news stories. A firm called DrimCom--the
Com
is short for
Communication
--encountered a . . . loss. It used to own twenty-odd Silent slaves, but only two of them came through the Despair with their Silence intact. One's a man, the other's a woman."

 
"My family?" Kendi asked.

 
"Yeah. I have their holos. Want to see?"

 
Kendi leaned forward despite his fear. "You know the answer to that."

 
Ben tapped a key and the text vanished. The head of a woman in her mid-twenties appeared. She was beautiful, with large brown eyes, skin darker than Kendi's, and sharply-defined features that included a firm chin. Kendi touched his own chin when he saw her. "Martina," he breathed.

 
Another hologram appeared beside the first, one of a man in his thirties. The resemblance to Kendi was unmistakable, except for the striking blue eyes. Sejal had similar eyes, and Kendi had once suspected Sejal--wrongly--of being Utang's son. Kendi's throat thickened. The last time he had seen his brother and sister they had been fifteen and ten, respectively. Now they were adults.

 
"I managed to break into their medical records, including their DNA scans," Ben said. "I ran a comparison. All three of you have the same mitochondrial DNA, which means you're siblings. It's definitely them."

 
Kendi's heart was racing and he tightened his grip on Ben's hand. "You said there's bad news."

 
"Yeah." Ben ran his free hand through his hair. "Ken, they've both disappeared."

 
For a moment Kendi could only focus on the fact that Ben was calling him
Ken
, a nickname he didn't allow anyone else to use and one Ben used only rarely. Then he said, "Disappeared?"

 
"Kidnapped. Someone broke into the slave quarters and snatched them both away. No clues, according to the news reports. They're gone."

 
Kendi's knees turned to water and the room darkened. Eventually he became aware that he was sitting on the floor with his head between his knees. Ben knelt next to him, an arm around his shoulder. Kendi felt like he was spinning.

 
"Just breathe," Ben said. "Slow and steady. You'll be okay."

 
"What is wrong?" came Harenn's voice. "Is he injured?"

 
"He almost fainted," Ben told her. "The news was a shock."

 
Kendi looked up and the room swayed. Harenn's unveiled face--
All life, it still looks strange to see her
, he thought incongruously--was looking down with concern. She was rather pretty, with rounded cheeks and care lines around her mouth. Although she had stopped wearing the veil, she continued to cover her hair with a translucent scarf.

 
"When?" Kendi asked hoarsely.

 
"When what?" Ben asked.

 
"When did it happen? When were they kidnapped?"

 
"Two days ago. The day before we got to Drim."

 
Harenn looked abruptly stricken. She backed away, her skin gone pale. "Oh god."

 
Kendi closed his eyes.

 
"What's the matter?" Ben demanded. "Harenn, don't you faint, too. What the hell is wrong?"

 
"Two days ago," Harenn whispered. "They vanished two days ago. If we had first come to Drim instead of going to Klimkinnar to get Bedj-ka, we might have arrived before . . . " She trailed off.

 
"Oh," Ben said.

 
Kendi opened his eyes. "Harenn, don't you feel guilty. I need you to be yourself right now. It was my--" he swallowed "--my decision to go to Klimkinnar, not yours. It's my fault."

 
"Hey!" Ben grabbed Kendi's hand again. "It's not your fault, Ken. You had no way of knowing. The people who kidnapped your brother and sister--it's
their
fault. The people who enslaved them in the first place--it's
their
fault. Not yours, not Harenn's. Mom would pitch a fit if she knew you were thinking that way."

 
Mom. Mother Ara. All life, she would have known what to do. Kendi felt like he was floundering, drowning in a frothy sea. What was the next step? What should he do? He had no idea. And then for a moment it felt like Ara was standing over him.

 
Wake up,
she snapped.
On your feet. If you want to find them, you have to go look
.

 
"Yes, Mother," he muttered.

 
"What?" Ben said.

 
"Nothing. Help me up. Then get Gretchen and Lucia in here. We have a kidnapping to solve."

 
"Look, I've gone through this with the police twice already," complained the woman. She was dressed in scarlet from head to foot, with a scarf twisted through night-black hair. The small hologram hovering near her collar gave her name as Linda Tellman and her title as First Manager. She had an artificial sort of beauty that told Kendi's practiced eye she had been to a fresh-up at least once.

 
"I know, ma'am," Kendi said, slipping the fake police ID back into his pocket. "But you know how this sort of thing works. Every time you go over it, you may remember some detail you left out before."

 
"Well, you cop-guys are thorough, I'll give you that," Tellman muttered. She gestured at a chair near her desk. "Have a seat, Detective."

 
"Actually, I haven't seen the crime scene yet," Kendi said. "Could you go through what happened while we walk down there?"

 
Tellman sighed. "Somewhere in here I do have work to get done, but it can wait, right?"

 
Kendi didn't answer. He merely followed her through a series of corridors and down two flights of stairs. The DrimCom building, located on the outskirts of Felice, was low and sprawling, with lots of steel and blue-tinted reflective windows. Many of the offices they passed were empty, recent indications of DrimCom's recent loss of revenue.

 
As if reading Kendi's mind, Tellman said, "If we can't get these two back, the company's going to go under. There isn't much of it left as it is. We had twenty-six Silent--"

 
"All slaves?" Kendi interrupted.

 
Tellman nodded. "But after the Despair, only two of them were able to enter the Dream. We held on to the others as long as we could, hoping their Silence would come back, but eventually we had to sell them. We raised our communication rates for the two Silent we had left, just like everyone else is doing, but then this happened. Our only source of revenue--gone. DrimCom's dying on the vine now."

 
"You don't seem overly upset," Kendi observed.

 
"I've got my savings--unlike a lot of people around here," Tellman said. "And I have prospects. My uncle works for Sufur Enterprises, and he says they have positions open, if you know who to talk to."

 
They reached an area that reminded Kendi of the Varsis Hotel. Numbered doors faced a quiet hallway lit with yellow lamps. Tellman selected one of the doors and thumbed the lock. It clicked open for her.

 
"These are our slave quarters," she said, entering ahead of Kendi. "The woman's name was Violet. This was her room."

 
Kendi stepped into the room. It was plainly furnished but bright, with yellow walls and a beige carpet. A light smell of perfumed body powder hung on the air. Several pictures--pen-and-ink drawings, not holograms--hung on the walls. Kendi almost gasped as he recognized Outback landscapes. Unable to help himself, he moved closer to one. A falcon skimmed high above a rocky cliff. At the base of the cliff wall sat a kangaroo. It was leaning back on its tail and staring up at the sky. In the bottom corner, the name "Martina" had been worked into the roots of a bush. Kendi's throat closed. This indeed belonged to his sister. She had eaten and slept and held onto her name in this very room. Her scent still lingered. With a trembling hand, he reached out to touch the glass of the frame.

 
"Is there something about her drawings?" Tellman asked behind him. "A clue?"

 
Kendi pulled his hand back and swallowed hard to get his voice under control. "Maybe. Why don't you tell me what happened and I'll look over the room."

 
"Like I told the other cop-guys, there isn't much to tell. The housekeeper was bringing Violet and Brad--that was the other one's name--their breakfasts and found the rooms empty. The doors were unlocked. The housekeeper tried to check with the security computer, but it had been taken off-line. A virus, we later found out. I was the Manager on duty, so the housekeeper called me next. I checked Brad's room, and he was gone, too. The moment they left their rooms, their shackles should have set off the alarms and shocked them unconscious, but that whole program was off-line. What with the recent cutbacks, we only have one tech left, and he only comes in every other day. Security was also reduced, but we didn't think it would be that big a deal. In retrospect, we probably should have been expecting this. Functioning Silent are a hell of a lot more valuable than they used to be."

 
"Was there a guard on duty that night?" Kendi asked, still unable to take his eyes off the landscapes. He had no idea Martina could draw like that. And they had given Utang the name "Brad."

 
"The guard was found unconscious at his post. Hit with a brain taser. He doesn't remember anything from the past three days. The doctor said that's normal."

 
"Was anything taken?"

 
"Besides the slaves? No. They didn't even take their clothes or any possessions. That's why we're treating it as a theft instead of an escape, even though there were no signs of a struggle. My guess is they--Violet and Brad--were hit with the same brain taser that took out the guard."

 
Kendi looked through Martina's closet. Judging from her clothes, she was a head shorter than he was, and either she liked the color blue or that was all DrimCom provided for her. As he searched, he kept up a running series of questions to Tellman and gleaned a few more facts. The surveillance cameras had been shorted out just before the guard had been tasered, so there were no video or holographic clues. The security files for the entire night had also been erased. A police search of both rooms had turned up no blood and no evidence of weapons discharge.

 
"What about Brad's room?" Kendi asked.

 
"Same thing," Tellman said. "No struggle, nothing missing but him. It must have been really weird for him."

 
"What do you mean?"

 
"We bought Brad only one day before the Despair hit. We thought we were lucky to have grabbed him. But he was depressed and despondent after the Despair. I don't think he and Violet even met. He refused to come out of his room. We were just about to start a more aggressive treatment program on him--"

 
Drugs and shocks
, Kendi translated.

 
"--and then this happened. He arrives here, then leaves again. Weird for him. But if he's Silent, he must have been genegineered, so he'll probably adapt. Comes with not being entirely human."

 
Kendi wanted to hit her, had even clenched a fist, when another woman poked her head into the room.

 
"Manager Tellman?" she said. "There's a police detective here who wants to interview you."

 
"Another one?" Tellman said.

 
Oops
, Kendi thought. "Probably my partner," he said aloud. "What's the detective's name?"

 
"Lena Halfson," replied the woman.

 
"That's her. Why don't you go down and get her, Manager Tallman, while I finish up in here?"

 
Tallman left, grumbling to herself about her position being reduced from manager to errand girl. The other woman followed. The moment they were out of sight, Kendi eased out of the room and sauntered swiftly down the hallway in the opposite direction. Then he paused, dashed back to the room, snatched the Outback landscape from the wall, and rushed back out. A bit of searching turned up a back exit. Kendi hurried out of the building to his rented groundcar, kept his back to the police vehicle parked only four spaces over, and drove quickly away, Martina's landscape on the seat beside him.