But Toma only said, “I'll see that it's sent out directly. They doubled your order, by the way. The extra transport charge has been deducted from your account.” The warden's brows lifted at that, but she did not otherwise respond.
The Earther always remained on the landing pad until Toma's flitter lifted and disappeared entirely from sight. More and more often as the days passed, she was frowning when she turned back toward the farm control shed.
Of all the woman's activities, it was her trips to the mountain-top that intrigued Pua most. At the most unexpected moments, she would stop what she was doing, push back from the computer, or step, frowning, from the control shed. She would stare up at the mountain for a moment, then cross the compound to climb the summit path.
All she did up there was sit cross-legged under the snow trees. Her eyes would close; her breathing would slow. Her long fingers would relax until they lay loose and flaccid across her knees. After a time, she would breathe deeply, then stand and stretch, staring out across the lagoons.
Before striding back downhill, she always ran her palms along at least one of the snow trees. When Pua later checked the places where the Earther's hands paused on the smooth bark, she almost always found a snowball hidden underneath. It surprised her at first, because only she and her mother had been able to find the hardened sap deposits so easily. Maybe it's because she's such a strong land person, Pua thought. Or maybe the trees just like her because of her hands. Pua found it interesting that the warden never removed the snowballs from the trees.
Then, at the end of the third week, the pattern changed.
The woman had spent many hours in the shed that day, studying some new Earth history and language tapes that Toma had brought. Pua had watched for a time, trying to understand the woman's intense interest in things that had no connection to Pukui, but had finally given up in boredom and retreated to her usual watching spot under the main house.
As evening approached, Katie delivered food to the control shed, something Pua had never seen her do before. Katie had always been afraid of the shed, or, more likely, the machines in it. Pua waved to Katie from under the house and was soon brought her own dinner there. She and Katie shared the food, and while they ate, they talked, mostly of things incomprehensible to Pua. She got the impression, though, that Katie had decided that the warden was an acceptable addition to the household.
When they were finished, Katie dug up a small snowball that Pua had missed, and handed it to her with a grin.
“Good job, Katie,” Pua told her. “You did just what Mama wanted.” Katie beamed with pride.
Sometime later, the warden emerged from the control shed and strode directly to the mountain. At the summit, she paced for a time, staring up at the rings and the rising moons. Then she took something from her pocket and put it into her mouth. She chewed slowly. Finally, she called, “Come on up here, Pua. I need to talk to you.”
Pua frowned. She had been certain the woman hadn't seen her following this time. She pushed aside a fanner fern and crawled into the open.
“How'd you know I was here?”
“You watched me from that same spot last night,” the warden said. “If you're going to follow people around in the woods, you need to learn to hide yourself better.”
Pua scuffed across the moat and ducked under the trees. She squatted at the woman's side. The warden moved so they were facing each other and pulled two small brown oblongs from her pocket. She handed one to Pua and put the other into her mouth. “No need to unwrap it,” she said. “The paper's edible.”
Pua eyed the thing dubiously, but knew better than to refuse a food offering from the mountainlady who, after all, spent more time studying the local customs than she did looking for the missing research records. Pua slid the strange brown thing between her teeth. It was tasteless and as hard as a stone.
“How's the harvest going?” the warden asked.
“Why are you asking me?” The thing in Pua's mouth grew suddenly soft and sweet. Candy! Pua thought. This must be what was in the big box that had come with the last supply run, the caramel things the mountainlady had been talking to Toma about. No wonder she had been so happy to get them.
“You know the reef better than anyone. Does it look like we've opened those three sections to the sun in time to prevent any long-term damage?” The warden wiped the corner of her mouth with her finger.
Pua looked out toward the water. The sun had almost set, and the reef had begun to glow. She chewed for a while, then swallowed. “Eleven and thirteen are okay. It's too soon to know for sure about ten, but the silverfish and skudders are coming back. That means there's still food there. That squall yesterday spattered some live algae from the lifting net at nine, but the crews cleaned it up without any problem.” She nodded toward the east. “We're going to have rain tonight, and high swell, but Zena said the storm that's causing it is starting to veer north.”
“Yes,” the warden said. “I've been watching the satellite reports. We're cutting it close, but I think we're going to make it. Fatu has prepared the charges for setting up last-minute methane blows, though, just in case.” It was a poor substitute for clearing the algae altogether, but if the pens were going to be torn open, blowing them in advance would at least leave only dead algae to be scattered over the reef.
“Alignment is tomorrow night,” Pua said. “After that, the tides will start to go down. It will be easier to get the last of the harvest done before the next storm comes close.”
“I'm told you're still spending time with the net crews,” the warden said.
Pua unwrapped a string of friendly vine from her ankle and stretched it out between her fingers. “It's my reef,” she said without looking up.
“That won't mean much if you get yourself killed.”
Pua met her look then. She snapped the vine in half.
Suddenly, she laughed. “Do you know what the swimmers call you, Mountainlady? Puhi ‘ai Pōhaku. They say—” She lowered her voice to imitate the swimmers, especially the men, as they described the warden's likeness to a rock eel. “They say, ‘She's nice to look at. She moves real smooth. But watch out! ‘Cause if you get in her way, she'll bite your head off.'”
Pua clutched her sides in her delight at the warden's expression. “Sometimes you're so funny.” She giggled. “Even the rays think so.”
The warden stared at her. “Sometimes I think Fatu is right about you having seawater for brains.”
Pua straightened. She wiped her eyes. “Fatu said that?”
The woman nodded.
Pua considered the idea for a moment. It sounded like a fine compliment coming from Fatu. She grinned.
The warden reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a red string. She stretched it between her two hands just as Pua had the friendly vine, then laid it across Pua's left knee. Pua rolled it over with her finger.
“What is it?”
“A locator signaling device,” the warden said. “It's been programmed to respond to one of my implants. I want you to wear it. Tie it in your hair or something. With all the other decorations you wear, no one will ever notice it.”
Pua knocked the string off her leg. The woman caught it easily before it touched the ground. She moved almost as effortlessly as a real waterworlder now.
“It's for your own safety, Pua. It operates on a private channel. I'm the only one who can trace you through it, and if you're ever in trouble, all you have to do to alert me is break the string.”
“No! I don't want you following me around. I don't want anybody following me around.”
“Somebody else already is,” the warden said.
“What?”
“They're monitoring me, too.” The warden's voice had taken on that quiet tone again, that dead-calm tone that Pua had come to dread. Things always went wrong when she used that tone. “Remember when I first woke up and Doctor Waight turned off the electromagnetic field? My shoulder itched, and she told me one of my locator implants h
ad been triggered accidentally. It never occurred to me then that she would have reason to lie.” She rubbed a hand over her right shoulder.
Pua wrapped her arms around her upraised knees, feeling suddenly cold. She stared at the string in the warden's hand.
“They replaced one of my implants while I was in dep,” the woman said. “That itch must have been a test to be sure it worked. I discovered it about an hour ago when I tried to program this to my private code.” She lifted the string.
“I don't have any implants,” Pua said, wishing she could keep her voice as steady as the woman's.
The warden glanced at Pua's hands. “You were at the bathing pool this afternoon, then you followed the overflow stream about halfway down. You moved into the woods on the opposite side from the house, stopped for a while about where the mountain apple tree is, then went straight downhill to—”
“Stop it!” Pua cried.
“They've got you on a very restricted channel,” the warden said. “But it's long-range and extremely precise. Whoever bugged you knows exactly where you've been every minute since you left the recon center.”
"Why?"
“I presume it's because they want you to lead them to what they're trying to find,” the warden said.
Pua stared at her, hard. “I don't know where the TC records are! If I knew, I'd just give them to the stupid Company so they'd leave Pukui alone.” She was afraid to look down at her hands. She had never thought about anyone using them to hide something. Since returning to Pukui, she had tried not to think about her hands at all.
The warden watched her for a moment. “They gave me yours, didn't they?” she asked.
Pua turned to stare out at the sea. She didn't want to think about the woman's hands, either.
“It was a direct transplant,” the warden said. She rubbed the tips of her long fingers together. “There was no cloning involved. No dramatic new technique. They just did a direct human-to-human transplant.”
Pua hadn't even told Fatu about her hands.
“They knew from my medical records that I would make a compatible recipient,” the warden went on. “Hell, the drugs they used to prevent rejection of my new eye implants were still fully active. They didn't even have to prep my system.”
Fatu had held Pua's hands so very long that first night she had been home. He had wrapped his wide, strong fingers around hers and held them tight for a long, long time. Was that why he had warned her so strongly to stay away from the barrier reef? Had he known, or at least guessed, about the locator, too?
The woman touched her knee. Pua dragged her attention back.
“Doctor Waight told me these hands would regenerate if they were damaged,” the mountainlady said, “right in the very beginning, but I never made the connection. Not even when I noticed that yours were small for your size. I was so horrified by what they had done to me that I never even considered what they might have done to you.”
Pua glanced down at the hand on her knee. It was larger than it had been before, an adult hand, grown to match the warden's full size. Its fingers moved smoothly, gracefully, in patterns she didn't remember as being her own. Still, even on the Earthwoman, it moved like a waterworlder's hand.
“Pualei,” the warden said softly. “If I had known. If I had even guessed they were your hands and not just cloned parts, I would never have agreed to use them. Not for any reason. Not even to get my own back.”
Pua met her look. “What good would that have done? If you hadn't made Mr. Crawley let me come here with you, they would have taken my new hands by now, too.” She wondered if it was the rising moonlight that made the woman's skin so pale. “Doctor Waight said they'd already found someone else with a close enough genotype match. They were just waiting for my hands to regenerate all the way. That's why they want me back. So they can keep making new waterworlders with my hands. They're trying to clone them, too, because that would be a lot faster than waiting for mine to grow back each time, but they don't know how. Only my mama...”
She paused, and looked down at the warden's hand again. “Mr. Crawley told me they cut my hands off because of what I did to that man in the morgue.”
“Mother of mountains,” the woman breathed.
Pua shrugged. “After I saw you, I knew it wasn't true. I knew they just needed somebody to come to Pukui.”
“Pua,” the warden said quietly. “Tell me what's going on here. Tell me what's really going on.”
Pua blinked. “What do you mean?”
Only the woman's mouth smiled. “You're getting really good at that, Waterbaby. With a little more practice, you might just be able to fool me with that look of innocent confusion.”
Pua dropped her gaze back to her hands. She wished she were in the water. She wished Fatu would come so the woman would talk about something else. She wished the woman had gone into the burial cave and all the Company people had followed, and the ghosts had eaten them all.
“I didn't make Crawley do anything, Pua. He intended all along for us to come here together.”
Pua glanced up.
“When I told him what I wanted, he didn't even argue,” the warden said. “Not about the research. Not about the timing. Not about you. The only things he didn't like were giving me the title to the forest preserve and posting my contract on the public net. But he did both without a fight.”
She lifted her hand from Pua's knee. “What is it at Pukui that they're so desperate to find? There's more to it than just the missing TC enzyme research. There are too many other things going on that don't make sense. Too many people with blank faces and tight tongues.”
Pua wished at that moment that she dared trust the woman—she was that tired of hiding the truth. But then she thought of Mr. Crawley and Doctor Waight and her parents’ bodies lying in that cold, cold room. She said nothing.
The woman sighed. “If I ever have a secret I need to share, Pua, you'll be the one I share it with. You might be wrong in your silence, but no one will ever be able to fault you for the quality of it.” She stared out at the water for a moment. When she turned back, the hardness had returned to her eyes. “I've asked Toma and Fatu to meet with us tonight. They're probably waiting down at the landing pad by now.”
That surprised Pua. “Why?”
The warden uncrossed her legs. “I asked Fatu, because anything you're involved in, he's involved in. And I asked the inspector, because, despite his Company title, I'm certain he's in this thing up to his neck.”
She stood in one smooth motion. She offered her hand, and after some hesitation, Pua used it to pull herself up. The hand no longer felt like her own.
“You still want your other hands back, don't you?” she asked, not understanding how anyone could possibly want stiff, stubby Earther's hands after having had these. She stared at the long, beautiful fingers.
“Yes,” the mountainlady said, and Pua let them go.
But the warden did not release her hold. “That's not the right question anymore, Pua. I still want my hands back, but getting them is no longer my prime motivation for completing this job.”
Something had changed. What happened? Pua wanted to ask. What did you find out today that you didn't know before?
“I won't go back to Earth,” she said. “I don't care what happens, I won't let you take me back there.”
“I won't take you back, Waterbaby. I don't know what I'm going to do with you, but I promise I won't take you back to Waight or Crawley or anyone else connected with the Company.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Then the woman said, “Come on. Let's go talk to Fatu and Toma.”
Pua followed her out from under the trees and down the mountain path. When they reached a place where they could see Toma's flitter resting on the landing pad, Pua paused. In the water, where nothing was ever static, you had to take chances. Sometimes it got you killed, but sometimes...
“Gills,” she said softly.
“What?” The warden turned back.
> “Gills.” Pua said it firmly this time—and felt a chill go down her back. It's up to us, Le Fe'e, she sang silently. Fatu and Uncle Toma can't do anything more to help us, so we have to do it ourselves.
“If you're going to save Pukui,” Pua told the mountainlady, “you've got to start thinking like a waterworlder. Uncle Toma is in this thing up to his gills!”
Chapter 16
Pua's comment surprised Angie and relieved her greatly. It meant that the girl, while still not willing to reveal Pukui's secret herself, was at least acknowledging that the secret existed. At least, that's what Angie hoped it meant.
She paused as they approached the landing pad and offered Pua the locator string again. Pua didn't look pleased, but she took it. She coiled it around her left thumb before stuffing it into her shirt pocket.
Toma and Fatu were waiting beside the flitter. “Is there something wrong at the house?” Toma asked when Angie indicated that they should sit on the open lawn to talk.
“If you're concerned about being overheard,” Fatu said with a sidelong look at Pua, “the library is equipped with a privacy blanket.”
“I trust that blanket just slightly less than I trust the two of you,” Angie said. She motioned for Pua to sit at her left. Toma sat facing Angie, and Fatu closed the square. Pua didn't look comfortable with the arrangement. The light of the moons and the rings and the surrounding phosphorescent grass made it almost as light as day.
“Pua and I are both carrying high-precision, long-range locator implants,” she said as soon as they were settled.
Toma frowned and blinked, but said nothing. Fatu met Pua's look. The girl shook her head slightly, then cursed when she saw that Angie was looking directly at her. Angie lifted a questioning brow, and very deliberately, Pua molded her expression into her very best innocent-confusion look.
Angie smiled. “Very, very good, Waterbaby.”
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