Owegbé! She’s going to die of shame when she hears about this. I sit up suddenly in my bed. I will cause both their deaths. And Etin, he’s going to despise me.
This is too painful to think about, so I lie down again and revert back to Agatha. It doesn’t make sense that she’d make me trade the necklace for the bracelet if she knew they were going to catch me at Messer Sodum’s and get it back. For that matter, why didn’t she just tell me to report to the Adept when she saw me standing before the open safe with the necklace in my hands?
Nothing makes sense.
I get up early the next morning and take a long, hot bath followed by a shower. There may not be such luxuries in prison. I spend some time debating whether to take my father’s leather pouch with me or not, but in the end I hide it under my mattress, along with the tools Sodum sold me. Then the whole way there on the slowstrip I berate myself for choosing such an obvious hiding place. At least it takes my mind off what I’m heading toward.
There’s a Prophet’s Avenue in the capital city on every world, and Number One always houses the O.U.B.’s planetary administrative offices. The rest of Prophet’s Avenue is lined with residences for the Select stationed on the planet. Even those working in distant cities have a unit here. The Adepts live in residential wings in Number One.
As I limp down Prophet’s Avenue, still favoring my left ankle, I have the sensation of being watched. I imagine a Select at every window staring at me, knowing why I’m here. When I find Number One I go straight up to the door, even though I’m early. I won’t give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me hesitate, as though I’m afraid. Which I am, terribly, but that’s my business.
The porter leads me to a waiting room and asks whether I’d like something to eat or drink. She’s middle-aged, dressed in a blue and white jumpsuit, with her hair knotted tightly at the back. Her voice is pleasant but she doesn’t smile; in fact she shows as little expression as a Select. Agatha excepted.
I take a drink, as though I’m here on a social visit. My stomach’s in such knots I have to work at not gagging when I sip it, but I don’t let her see that. When she leaves I look around. That plant in the corner wouldn’t mind absorbing some liquid. I sit down beside it casually.
At precisely ten hundred hours the porter reappears and escorts me to an inner room. There’s a high desk on a raised platform at the far end, and two smaller tables in the middle of the room facing it, each one with a Select sitting at it, their backs to me. The table on the right has a second, empty chair beside the Select. It all looks very plain and unimposing—until the Adept walks in.
She is wearing the blue and white robes of the Order, but all I notice are her eyes. She glances round the room and settles on me with an intense, unwavering attention that makes me feel like a bird caught in the stare of a snake. I freeze in the doorway. I can’t move, can’t even think straight, although there’s nothing overtly sinister about her. She doesn’t look angry or cruel or judgmental. She’s just so focused that everything and everyone else dims by comparison.
“Kia Ugiagbe,” she says. Her voice is calm, but it resonates in the room, which seems too small to contain her. I take a nervous step forward. Should I bow? Approach her? I dip my head quickly.
“Face your accuser.” The Select on the left rises. He bows to her and turns to face me. It’s the Select I saw at Messer Sodum’s two days ago.
“And the companion who will advise you.” The second Select stands, bows, and turns around.
It’s Select Agatha.
Chapter Eight
“I know this person, Adept.” Agatha has turned back toward the Adept so I can’t see her expression, but her voice is calm, emotionless.
“Tell us.”
I force myself to breathe evenly, and wait for the damning evidence to come out.
“I met her at her father’s funeral.”
“Is that all?”
“No. She is training to be a translator. I met her again at an embassy reception.”
“Did you speak together?”
“Yes.”
The Adept and I both wait (me more anxiously than her) but Agatha volunteers nothing further. I avoid the Adept’s eyes when she looks at me, trying to keep my face as blank as possible.
“Do you want another advisor?” she asks me.
Yes! I want Agatha—and the testimony she can give, assuming she hasn’t already—as far away as possible. But if I say yes, the Adept will know there’s more to the story than Agatha admitted. She’ll read it in my face. No, I correct myself, she already has. And Agatha won’t lie if the Adept asks her outright, which she’s probably planning to do.
Why didn’t Agatha tell her the whole story? Is it part of the role of advisor, Agatha has to do her best to help me? If that’s it, and I say I don’t want her as my advisor, I might be releasing her to testify against me. I have a headache already, and the interrogation hasn’t even started yet.
Whose decision was it to make her my advisor? Is she trying to protect me, or—I remember her strange behavior at the embassy—is she trying to protect herself? To keep that from coming out? Or did she already confess, and this is the O.U.B.’s way of making sure it doesn’t come out?
I don’t know enough about this process. Enough? I don’t know anything! But if I ask questions they’ll know at once why I’m asking them. I look at Agatha. All I can see is the back of her head, and the blue habit. She doesn’t sit like the other Select and the Adept. She slouches a little. Not really—you have to know her to see it. It’s that intangible slouch that decides me.
“I don’t care,” I say. Wait. Wouldn’t an innocent person want someone she knew?
“She was kind to me at my father’s funeral.” I let my voice tremble and wipe my eye. It’s dry with fear. I’m not dumb enough to imagine this will get me any sympathy, but a little dab might explain why I don’t look the Adept in the eye. She’ll see right through me if I let her look in my eyes.
“I take it then that you accept your present advisor?”
I nod without looking up, and dab again for good measure.
“There is nothing wrong with your eye. You may be seated.”
I walk forward and sit beside Agatha. Drop into the seat, more like, my legs giving out. Well, anyone would be nervous here—it would look more suspicious not to be.
At a nod from the Adept the male Select gets up and walks around his table. He bows to the Adept, nods to Agatha and me, and then recounts everything that happened at Messer Sodum’s shop two nights ago, word for word.
There’s no point questioning his story. Even in civil court, if a Select proves he or she was in a position to hear a conversation, not a single word of the exchange can be in question. If their enhanced memory slips—and that’s unlikely—their video-audio scan implant won’t.
Listening to the Adept recreate my conversation with Sodum, I recognize Sodum’s attempts to downplay my actions. I didn’t pick up on them at the time, but how could I have known? Protecting himself, no doubt, making our joint enterprise look a little less shady—hah!—but maybe I can still use his suggestion that the bracelet was lying on a table and I picked it up on impulse. I didn’t answer Sodum, so the Select can’t record a denial. As soon as he finishes speaking I stand up, glancing quickly at the Adept for permission.
I should never have looked at her. The concentrated focus of the Adept’s gaze turns on me. I’m caught, half-way between sitting and standing, immobile. I do not want to lie to this woman. It’s essential to tell the full truth. I’ll feel so relieved when I do…
Agatha’s hand is on my arm. I can see it but I can’t feel it. “Sit down until the Adept addresses you,” she says. Her calm voice cuts through my trance. I gasp, only realizing now that I haven’t been breathing, and sink back into my chair.
What happened? I peek through my lashes and see the Adept is contemplating Agatha now. Agatha returns her look blandly. Maybe she doesn’t know what she interrupted? Her expression and p
osture give nothing away.
They all give nothing. I’m totally out of my depth here: a blind girl taking on the sighted. They can read every thought on my face and I can see nothing on theirs. I look down at my hands folded in my lap, feeling utterly helpless. Beside me, Agatha doesn’t move or say anything, but I can feel her, and I know she deliberately broke the Adept’s hold on me.
The Adept must know it, too. The silence is so thick I feel like I’m breathing it in, choking on it. I won’t look up. I won’t, no matter how much I want to. My hands are clenched so hard in my lap my knuckles are white, but even an Adept can’t see through a table.
Like that matters. She can see the tension in my face, whether I look at her or not. Well, who wouldn’t be tense? It doesn’t prove anything, as long as I don’t look up.
“How did you come by the bracelet, child?” she asks.
I look down at my lap. Ashamed, I think, trying to infuse myself with the emotion for them to read. That’s got to be what they want, they already know I did it.
“Stand up,” Agatha says quietly.
I get up slowly, giving myself time to formulate the story and convince myself of it. To mix in an equal measure of the truth so the false parts can slip by. I’ll only look up when I tell the true parts.
“I believed Lady Khalida wouldn’t mind if I took the bracelet.”
“Why would you think that? Look at me, child.”
“I’m so ashamed.” Good. I think I actually felt that. Now the truth: “I’m very sorry I did it.” Perhaps a little too vehement, but I look up quickly as I say it so the Adept can see truth in my eyes.
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to, she understands everything. Everyone is sorry when they’re caught. She sees right through me, and now I am ashamed. I have to tell her the truth.
“I took the bracelet.” Some part of my mind screams at me, shut up! but it’s too distant to matter. I’m overwhelmed by a realization of the futility of lying, by a compulsion to confess.
“How?”
“I stole it.” No, my mind cries, don’t answer. But I can’t stop myself.
“Tell me.”
Trapped in the Adept’s gaze, I can only obey. “I picked the lock of the safe.”
“How is it that it was closed with no sign of tampering?”
I’m silent. I want to tell the Adept, and the longer the silence lasts the more desperate I become to say it, tell it all. But Agatha didn’t tell on me. I grit my teeth against the longing to speak…
The room begins to spin. I start to feel sick, exhausted by the effort of not speaking…
Agatha stands up beside me. “I closed it.”
Chapter Nine
“You were there?” The Adept’s voice is mild, and yet I wouldn’t want to be Agatha at this moment for anything in the universe.
“What is done to her must be done to me also.”
I’d considered making that point myself, but I was going for the opposite twist: let us both go.
“You participated in a theft?” The Adept looks only at Agatha. There’s no difference in her expression that I can see, but Agatha’s face turns white. I feel like I’m witnessing something brutal, as though the Adept is beating Agatha and Agatha’s barely holding up under the onslaught. And yet there’s no sound, no movement; only the quiet look between them which is so charged it leaves me faint and shaken.
“It seemed the right thing at the time,” Agatha says finally. Her face is still rigidly inexpressive, but now it’s chalky-gray. Her pale blue eyes are full of that miserable expression that makes me want to slap her and defend her at the same time.
The tension eases, as though the Adept has pulled it back.
“Then it must have been.” She turns to me. “You have still committed a crime. With or without an accomplice.” She says the last as if she knows what I considered earlier. As if. Of course she knows; she’s an Adept. Why bother talking at all?
“It is worth your while to answer my questions. You might still surprise me.”
I blink. It’s a very small movement, but I might as well shout out loud that she’s guessing my every thought. Agatha, standing beside me, is caught in the same intense scrutiny. Somehow she’s ended up on trial with me.
“I stole it. She—” I almost use Agatha’s name “—came in and found me in front of the open safe. The Select is innocent.”
“You must tell the whole truth,” Agatha says softly beside me. “If I had told you not to steal, you wouldn’t have.”
“I would have gone back later.” The truth is being drawn out of me against my will. I even want to tell the Adept about my father’s stolen diamond. No, not that!
“You’re holding something back.”
“It isn’t mine to tell.” I will not shame my father’s memory.
“But it’s eating at you, child. It’s hurting you.”
“It isn’t mine to tell.”
The Adept looks at me a moment longer, then glances at Agatha. “Sit down, both of you. I’ve seen enough.” She nods at the male Select, my accuser. “Thank you. You have fulfilled your role.”
Agatha sits down carefully. Her face is still gray. The other Select stands up to leave. “She is a common thief,” he says distinctly.
I hate the way it sounds, dripping out of his judgmental mouth.
“No.” Agatha’s voice is firm despite the weary expression she cannot hide.
The Adept looks at me.
“Not, like, full-time,” I mumble. “…Maybe occasionally…”
Her face doesn’t change, but something in her eyes looks like if she wasn’t an Adept, she might laugh.
For one insane second I almost grin at her, but Agatha touches my arm discreetly and I swallow it. Cocky wouldn’t go down well here.
“You are going to Malem,” the Adept tells Agatha when the door has closed behind my accuser. “You will relieve the Select who is there now.”
“Thank you, Adept.” Agatha’s voice is as calm as though she’s been offered a post on Earth, not been sent to obscurity on a horrible, disease-ridden, backwater planet further out than even Seraffa. I look sideways at her with a mixture of horror and pity.
“You may accompany her if you’d like.”
I’m not sure I’ve heard right until I look up and see the Adept looking at me. There’s no pressure or command in her look this time, just a calm neutrality. I want to laugh but my throat has closed so tightly I can’t even pull air into my lungs. “I should accompany her?” I croak.
“You may if you choose to.”
“To Malem?”
“I believe you speak the language?”
I want to say no, but there’s no sense denying it.
“The Select will need an interpreter at—” it sounds like she’s about to say ‘at first’ until she looks at Agatha. “—for a while.”
“What’s the alternative?” my voice comes out high-pitched, desperate.
“Alternative? The alternative is that you don’t go.”
“My punishment. How will you punish me?”
“Where did you hear such a thing? We do not administer punishment. Weren’t you raised in the Order?”
“You’ll just let me go?”
“Of course we will.”
“And the bracelet?”
“It will be handed over to the pols. We do not keep stolen goods.”
“So… So I’ll just go free?”
She allows herself an expression. It is pained. “Surely you can work that out for yourself. The bracelet will be returned to Lady Khalida. She may press charges. The Select who accused you may be asked to testify. You have already heard his testimony. You are young, and this is the first time you’ve been caught stealing. I expect they will go easy on you.”
Easy on me. I close my eyes. It will be the end of translating; the Dean made that clear. And then Owegbé will hear of it. Even if she wasn’t already sick, this would kill her. Etin and Oghogho will never forgive me. Why should
they? I’m a monster, killing both my parents.
“Don’t torture yourself, child. It is self-indulgent. If you were irredeemable, you wouldn’t be here.”
I consider telling her about my mother, that I took the bracelet to pay her medical costs. But the Adept must know it wasn’t my first theft; they knew that when they waited for me in the back of Sodum’s shop.
“And if I go? What testimony will the Select give then?”
“The Select will have to say the thief is no longer on this world. He will not be told where you have gone. He will not give your name unless he can accuse you to your face; that is our way. Lady Khalida will have her bracelet back, but she will have no one to press charges against.”
She isn’t smiling, but I’ve been so aware of every clue my face and body send, I can’t help being more aware of hers. She isn’t smiling. But she is.
“Why me?” They could afford to hire any translator they wanted; surely they could find someone who speaks Malemese and Edoan. Why choose a 16-year-old student?
“You have become… available,” she says.
That does it. That arrogance! I open my mouth to refuse, but before I can speak she adds, “There has been a vision placing you on Malem.”
I sit there with my mouth open. The O.U.B. never lie. I know it, but right now I can’t believe it. They do have visions, and usually their visions come true—but a vision about me? I just look at her, not knowing how to respond to such a ridiculous statement.
“The vision occurred two years after your birth.”
“What was it?” I play along. “What amazing thing will I do on Malem?”
The Occasional Diamond Thief Page 7