His suggestion of collaboration should have made me nervous. But it didn’t. As Servants, Nuruddin and I had worked together like clockwork, for years. He had always been skillful and discreet. He must have received similar covert training, so he was a natural. And I wondered if I had ever really convinced myself that I should kill him.
I still don’t know the answer to that.
“You have a deal,” I said. “But if I’m to spare your life, there is something more I require of you.”
* * *
Edna Constantin married Marco Charmayne without any fanfare. None of her relatives were invited to the brief ceremony—not even her powerful grandmother. Marco’s mother and father were their only attendants.
Edna and Marco both looked composed as they spoke their vows, and perhaps a little stiff. They held hands when they walked back down the hallway together and got on the mover that would take them into the Habitat Sector. While Marco chatted with his parents, Edna sent a communication to her grandmother. I found the voice she used very interesting. She had disposed of the obnoxious tone. I think she patterned her new voice after Lady Sheba’s.
I don’t think she was using the word bitch as a direct insult. She seemed to be using it as a technical term, as if her granddaughter were an animal instead of a person.
But then Trent Constantin did something impulsive. Within five minutes of receiving his grandmother’s message, he sent a copy of the recording of Edna’s gang rape to Baylor Charmayne.
So his threat to expose Edna had not been empty. His action seemed overconfident. He had defied the will of his grandmother and of Donnie Constantin.
I waited for a response from Baylor, imagining everything from
However—Baylor did not respond. And he ignored subsequent queries from Trent.
It was a fine demonstration of Baylor’s ability to maintain decorum, if not of his higher grasp of ethics. Among Executives, the Big Game is always being played. They value that contest of will and intellect above everything.
Trent wasn’t good at it. He launched message after message to Baylor, going from peevish to downright incoherent. I expected Baylor to become impatient and block the kid. But that’s not how Executives deal with losers. They give you plenty of rope to hang yourself.
Trent finally gave up. And he stopped sending messages to Edna, who had also been ignoring him. I’ll give her credit for that much; she realized he was now beneath her. She might be crazy, but she was enough of an Executive to ascend to her new role in the Charmayne clan, even if she was really a broodmare. If my suspicions were correct, it wasn’t Trent Constantin whom Edna had reason to fear.
You people are dead to me, she told her grandmother.
But Grandmother knew better. That’s what they all say.
How long would it take for Edna to realize she was right?
9
Spaced … Again …
I froze with my hands on the locker, the warning klaxon for imminent decompression blasting my ears. All my instincts screamed at me to open it.
I glanced at the inner door of Lock 002. Two Security persons looked in through the view window, their faces expressionless.
The outer door opened, something smacked me in the face, and my ears popped as I was pulled off my feet and the void rushed toward me. For a moment I thought I might black out, and I sucked in a big drag of air.
I could breathe just fine.
What the hell? I wondered, taking note of the ruby droplets of my own blood that floated around my head. I sucked in another lungful of air without effort and wondered what was up (and what was down). I stretched my arms and felt my fingers sink into something soft but transparent.
said Medusa.
Olympia’s flank swung into view, along with several of Medusa’s tentacles. I realized she must have extended herself around me before I could suffer more than a nosebleed, which happened because the walls of her membrane smacked me in the face when the door opened. She sealed it so fast, I didn’t have to skip a breath.
Together, we crawled along the hull of Olympia, using her spin to our advantage. The view was no less majestic than it had ever been, and my overexcited brain conjured a celebratory piece of music: the third movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony. It rollicked and rolled, and we made good time.
Edna had forced me to accelerate my plans. But we were committed. We made our way to the series-200 locks, mentally reviewing the blueprints of the compound we must visit within the hour. Everyone was where they were supposed to be.
But that could change in a heartbeat. And if it did, things would get very screwed up.
Edna really was a pain in the ass.
* * *
She would never appear on the roster of a Chang party again, but according to Nuruddin, Edna had managed to attend two gatherings with the Charmaynes without disrupting them. As Kumiko, I served alongside Nuruddin at the third party to which she and Marco were invited.
Marco Charmayne and his new wife entered the patio dining area to the strains of good ol’ Pachelbel’s Canon in D and were seated much closer to Baylor than Marco had been in the old days, just three seats down from Ryan. That alone was enough reason for Marco to look cheerful, but he was gentle in his interactions with Edna, and I entertained the idea that they might be happy with each other.
But then Edna’s gaze fell on me, and I saw recognition in her eyes. A smirk twisted her mouth.
By the time she was seated, her features had smoothed again.
The Charmaynes were not, by any means, so musically ritualistic as the Changs in the execution of their parties. The Charmaynes directed interaction by clues in conversation between Baylor and his closest circle. Other guests might venture to speak, but it was a risky thing if you didn’t know exactly what the muckety-mucks meant. They didn’t discourage intellectual challenges—they savored them. But you suffered consequences if you couldn’t temper your remarks with grace, wit, and political savvy.
So most guests played it safe—especially if they were Charmaynes. Visitors from other clans had more leeway, so long as they were not deliberately insulting. And that’s why Baylor often broke the ice with (mostly) harmless remarks. On that occasion he got the ball rolling with a discussion about the complexity of making chocolate.
And a complex process it is. But the synchronicity startled me.
“Who could imagine,” said Baylor, “that products fermented from this pod could eventually be turned into this wonderful chocolate bar?” He stood to give everyone a good view of the items in question. We Servants took the opportunity to refill the coffee cups.
While the other guests looked at Baylor, Edna picked up her cup of hot coffee, spilled it down the front of her dress, and dropped it. It was a fragile antique, so it smashed to bits when it hit the table.
All eyes turned to Edna, and she gasped with pain. “Stupid worm! This is the second time you’ve assaulted me!”
Her accusation sent a ripple through my fellow Servants. Unlike the Executives, they had seen what Edna had done, but they were forbidden to say so. And worst of all, she had used the word assaulted.
It came w
ith an automatic sentence.
Nuruddin remained as composed as he had always been, but color drained from his face. Only his training saved him and the others from making the mistake of reacting as Ryan Charmayne ordered Security to take me away. “Lock 002,” Baylor said.
Edna had scalded herself, but she couldn’t hide her satisfaction as she watched me being marched away from the party. Baylor Charmayne would not have missed such a detail either, though he could do nothing at that point without losing face.
I moved gracefully between my captors.
I could have gone limp and made them drag me the whole way. I could have cried and pleaded with them, grabbed at everyone we passed. And I intended to do just that—once we had passed out of sight of the Executives. I didn’t want to give Edna any more satisfaction than I had to.
I kept my head high until we entered the staging area. I was about to throw myself into a performance when I met the shocked gaze of Terry Charmayne.
He froze as he guessed what my guards were about to do with me. He schooled his expression pretty well, but I could see his pain. I knew whom he was remembering.
So I waited until we were past the staging area and out of his sight before I abandoned my dignity and sagged in the arms of my captors, and had to be hauled to my feet again, multiple times. It was remarkably cathartic. I carried on like a pro.
They tossed me into Lock 002 and sealed the inner door. I ran to the suit lockers.
* * *
I would miss Kumiko. I liked the way she drew her eyebrows, and her geisha-painted mouth was a fun detail. But her death allowed me to dispose of her identity without the usual history cleanup. If all went according to plan within the next few hours, she would not have died in vain.
Schnebly had long since given up his monitoring of the locks, but even if he had still been at it, Medusa had figured a work-around that allowed us to enter a lock without leaving either a record of the incident or a gap where a record would have been. Once inside, Medusa and I began our journey toward the Inner Skin, and I looked in on Baylor Charmayne’s party notes.
Sedate Edna as soon as the rest of the guests leave, Baylor ordered his Chief of Staff. First thing during the morning cycle, we’ll harvest her eggs.
That gave us ten hours during which Edna would be under close scrutiny in the Charmaynes’ private medical center. We burned almost an hour of that time just getting where we needed to go, partly because we were trying to avoid people and partly because of the distances traveled inside Olympia.
I felt calm by the time we moved through the worm tunnel next to the Constantin compound. We found the secret access to their maintenance crawl space. Medusa pushed her tentacles inside and pulled us after them. She removed the panel that admitted us to the youngest kinsman’s quarters without making a sound. We slid out like a sea predator emerging from a coral reef.
“Who are you?!” demanded Brett Constantin, too surprised to be frightened.
We pounced on him.
* * *
In one night, we killed every single Constantin kinsman who had made an appearance as a rapist in Donnie’s recordings—twenty-six in all. We had to move quickly enough to finish before anyone could discover the first victim. Though we posed the bodies to present a ritualistic scenario, it was much more like an assembly line to us.
Or perhaps I should call it a disassembly line.
We created a pattern not just in the posing of the bodies, but also the order in which they were killed, a spiral that wound in concentric circles, tightening with each death and stalking toward a center in which resided Donnie Constantin—though it would seem to observers that Gloria was there. I imagined her sitting at her lavish desk, scribbling furiously about the danger to her. Donnie would listen gravely, but he would know that the threat was to him, not her. Because he knew what he had in common with his dead kinsmen.
He had to be there when it was all over, alive and untouched. He must see the pattern—though he wasn’t the one whose attention we were trying to attract.
I expected the Charmaynes to be notified first. Because, unfortunately for Edna, her last communication to Lady Gloria had been You people are dead to me. It should appear the Constantins had been murdered by someone who felt threatened by them, someone who had a secret to protect. The nature of that secret was suggested in the recording Trent had sent to Baylor.
Trent died last. Once we killed him, we should have made our escape immediately, but I lingered. I had begun to review Nuruddin’s movies (also called films, according to Medusa), and recognized many of the composers who had arranged their soundtracks. Music from Yasushi Akutagawa’s score for Gate of Hell had begun to play in my head. It blended traditional Japanese instruments with nontraditional to produce a haunting, rather hopeless impression of noble families struggling to maintain decorum and protocol while those around them engaged in backstabbing, blackmail, and intimidation.
She pulled us into the crawl space and secured the access panel behind us.
* * *
Less than an hour later, Lady Gloria’s Chief of Staff contacted Baylor’s Chief. The Constantins demanded an accounting of Edna’s whereabouts. Baylor’s staff could personally swear that she had been under their close surveillance, sedated in the medical center. I think Lady Gloria’s staff believed this, because what was being done to Edna in that medical center was apparently standard procedure for Constantin women, whether they married into other clans or not. The only difference was that most clans waited a few weeks after marriage before making a girl face the truth about why she existed.
Edna’s tantrum at Baylor’s party had forced his hand. It was entirely unexpected—and thoroughly documented.
They intended to harvest eggs from from her ovaries and freeze them. I assumed the Charmaynes could use them to make their own children, or sell some of them to other clans who wanted to make use of them for whatever favors or goods they deemed fair. But what would become of Edna once her resources had been tapped?
Marco sat with her in the medical center and held her hand. Baylor ordered security doubled, once he heard about the murders.
Quite a lot was in question by then. Medusa and I had left the false walls in place, but inspectors discovered them once they decided to be thorough.
It goes without saying that our work in and out of that tunnel did not appear on any Security recording. And sadly, even the best investigations suffer from some bias, once they really get rolling. In this case, the bias was directed inward—especially when the blackmail recordings were retrieved from the trash file in which Donnie had tried to hide them.
Lady Gloria stopped messaging Donnie. She didn’t accuse him or question him. She saved her questions for her own Chief of Staff. He was a no-nonsense sort of fellow who never drew conclusions from information—he simply stated what had been observed and discovered. The conclusions belonged entirely to Gloria.
And to Donnie. He bombarded Gloria with messages.
I would have liked to ask Donnie, What did you gain by raping them? Because the answer was power. No Executive wants to see another Executive get too much of what they craved themselves. And neither did I.
I didn’t attempt to access visual surveillance of Gloria watching the blackmail recordings. I knew what the Chief had sent to her, and how much time she took to review the evidence. I also knew the sequence in which he had arranged them. It told a particular story. And this is why I didn’t want to see Gloria’s expression.
Not because I thought it would be full of pain. Gloria may not have been a regular on the party circu
it, but she was the quintessential Executive. I could forgive her lack of compassion, but her arrogance might make me wish I had completed one more killing that night, despite the danger.
Some risks are not worth taking.
The investigation had just begun when doctors moved Edna into a sterile room and a team began to extract her eggs. Not all of them, of course—they could do this procedure several more times within the next ten years. She might be a rich vein.
Marco shed some tears when they took Edna away, and I wondered how much he knew about what she had suffered. Would his compassion for his new wife turn to impatience if she couldn’t put her past behind her? Or would her wounds strengthen his devotion?
By the time Edna had moved into Recovery, the investigation was over. Lady Gloria led a procession to Lock 011.
I was intrigued to notice that no women worked within those ranks. A quick survey of her staff files revealed that women did not perform any service for Lady Gloria more demanding than preparing her food or cleaning her quarters. No kinswomen accompanied her as witnesses, either.
One kinsman marched in that company: Donnie, in the middle of the pack, surrounded by hefty Security men. His expression wavered between contempt and dismay. He thought he had everyone backed tightly into corners. This was very unjust, in his estimation.
The men around him did a fair job of looking impassive, but I detected some sympathy.
Did you give that one chocolate? I wondered. Did you give that other one cashews? I’ve always wanted to try cashews.
Donnie made no protest and gave no speeches when they hauled him into the air lock. He fell to his knees, forcing Lady Gloria to stand on tiptoe so she could observe him as he was blown into the void. When it was over, she walked back to her quarters with none of the steady decorum that had marked Lady Sheba’s execution marches. Her face looked like a thundercloud, because her Chief had just informed her that other Executives had managed to copy and view those recordings Donnie had attempted to hide in the trash.
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