The Occasional Diamond Thief

by J. A. McLachlan

  “Come, sit,” Agatha says. “Anything you say… we’ll be silent of it.”

  Jumal looks at me. I nod. My throat’s too dry to speak.

  “My cousin Tira is sick.” Jumal’s hands clench at his side. He has large hands, strong hands. They look helpless now.

  “Tira has CoVir.” Agatha guesses, when Jumal doesn’t continue.

  Jumal shuts his eyes. “Yes.”

  I gasp, and can’t help myself—I shrink back, away from him.

  Agatha leans forward. “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “No one knows?”

  “Me. My Aunt.” He looks at us. “You.”

  “We come.”

  Is she crazy? His cousin has CoVir!

  “We can’t go,” I say in Edoan, so Jumal won’t understand. “Tira’s mother can nurse her.”

  They both just look at me. “I… I’ll go for a doctor,” I say, this time in Malemese, since apparently Jumal’s a good guesser.

  “When the doctor comes,” Agatha says in Edoan, “Tira will be sent to the fever house in the swamp. She is two years old. Her family will be quarantined in their home. I am going to visit Naevah before the doctor is sent for. You can come or stay here.”

  No way in the universe am I going to… I catch Jumal watching me. Agatha’s already headed for the door. I take a step, and stop. It’s lunacy! Agatha’s never seen those fevers, that vacant look in the eyes of someone who’s supposed to love you… And what can we do, anyway?

  Jumal’s uncle put himself in jeopardy to come to my aid. That’s why he isn’t here, taking care of his family. That’s why Jumal’s here, asking us for help.

  Suddenly I’m angry. How can he ask this of me? Don’t be afraid, I won’t let anything happen to you, he says, and then asks me to go catch CoVir, when there’s nothing I can do for his cousin, anyway. And if I don’t go I’ll look terrible and selfish, and he’ll hate me, and God knows what Agatha might offer to do to help them when I’m not there to stop her. And if she dies, where will I be?

  “I’m coming,” I say, but I’m furious. And Jumal knows it, because he looks at me, and it’s the same look Jaro gives me just before he says, “F-.”

  *****

  Naevah comes to greet us as soon as Jumal opens the door to their apartment. The relief on her face when she sees Agatha confirms my suspicions. She’s going to ask her to do something awful, and Agatha will do it, unless I can stop her.

  A thin, fretful wail comes from somewhere in the apartment. A little girl runs toward us and throws her arms around Jumal’s legs, brushing against me. I jump back into the hall.

  “This is Liat,” Agatha says, “Tira’s twin sister.”

  I let my breath out and step into the apartment again. Jumal shuts the door. He picks up his cousin and looks at me above the little girl’s dark curls. His eyes look worried. I look aside. Jumal’s right to be worried, no matter what Select Hamza said about the CoVir strain being weaker now.

  The tiny background cry continues. Jumal puts Liat down and starts toward the back bedroom but Naevah stops him and goes herself. Agatha and Jumal and I stand there in silence listening to the soft murmur of Naevah’s voice in the next room. The crying eases, but when Naevah returns it starts up again. I try to ignore it, and find myself staring at Liat, who has crept up against her mother’s leg.

  Naevah picks Liat up. One of her hands brushes through Liat’s hair, easing the tangles free, cradling the little head against her shoulder. She holds Liat tightly, as though memorizing the feel of the child in her arms. Agatha takes a step toward them. I grab her arm, stopping her.

  “I’m going with Tira into the fever house,” Naevah says. She buries her face in Liat’s hair.

  “You can’t!” Jumal says. “The swamp is full of diseases. No one ever comes back.” His voice breaks.

  “Tira cannot go alone,” Naevah says gently.

  “Aunt Naevah—”

  “I’ll go,” Agatha says. “You have Liat and Jumal to think of, as well as Tira.”

  “No!” They all look at me. I don’t care, she can’t die! She’s all that stands between me and the Queen’s fury. It’s selfish. I know I’m being selfish, but so are they.

  Jumal looks wretched. “I didn’t mean for this…”

  I glare at him. What did he think, when he came for her?

  “You can’t go,” Naevah says to Agatha. “You wouldn’t be allowed. You’re a foreigner.”

  “Why does Tira have to go? They have medicine for it now, don’t they?” I ask.

  “And they’ll give it to her, before they leave her there.” Naevah’s voice is patient, explaining something obvious to a foreigner. “Tira has to be isolated so she won’t infect anyone else. And we have to be quarantined, in case the strain has mutated. We cannot let the plague begin again.” She sits down, holding Liat in her lap. Her hands continue to stroke the solemn-faced toddler.

  Will this be the last time Liat feels her mother’s caress? Is that what Naevah’s thinking as she cradles one daughter and prepares herself to follow the other into death?

  “Select, will you stay with Liat and Jumal while I am gone? You will be quarantined here with them. I know it’s a lot to ask…”

  “She doesn’t need to. I’ll be here. I’ll take care of Liat,” Jumal says.

  “And if you get sick? You know nothing must happen to you, Jumal. The Select will know what to do to keep you safe here.” She turns to Agatha, a question in her eyes.

  No! I open my mouth to remind Agatha that she has a mission here, but I can’t say that in front of them. I close my mouth and settle on a Meaningful Look.

  “No,” Agatha says.

  Naevah’s shoulders slump but she nods at once. “I’m sorry—” she begins.

  “I take Tira Prophet’s Lane. It is isolated, not like apartment. No one comes. Tira get well there.”

  What?!

  “We can’t disobey the law,” Jumal objects before I can. “I can never let myself think I’m above the law.”

  At the same time, Naevah shakes her head and says, “We have to notify a doctor and go into quarantine. The city cannot be put at risk for one child. The rest of Malem’s children are precious too. And the High Priest would never agree to let Tira go with you. The guards will take her to the fever house themselves if I don’t.”

  “I go after, when they gone. I take care of Tira. You stay here.”

  I know at once that Agatha’s planning something. She won’t outright lie, but she isn’t sharing, either. They don’t notice, because they don’t know her, but she’s drawn that Select lack-of-expression over her face, and she’s done it for a reason.

  “You won’t be able to get in,” Naevah says. “They’ll lock the door to prevent her from wandering out, and they keep the keys at the jail.”

  At the word ‘jail,’ I shiver. As though she fears it too, the pitiful wail of a sick baby comes from the bedroom. I catch myself looking at Liat again. She has taken one of her mother’s hands between her smaller ones. She spreads Naevah’s fingers wide and sticks her chubby, baby fingers between them. When Naevah closes her fingers around them Liat gives a gleeful chuckle that shakes her whole body.

  Looking up, I see Jumal staring toward the back of the apartment where Tira’s weak crying can still be heard. His face is twisted as though he’s in pain.

  “Locks are no problem,” I say.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We don’t speak all the way home. I already know what Agatha intends to do. It’s obvious by what she didn’t say. She never actually lied to Naevah and Jumal—she only told them she’d take care of Tira, not where she intended to do it.

  “You mean to shut yourself in this house with a contagious CoVir patient!” I accuse her as soon as we get inside.

  “I intend to nurse Tira until she’s well, yes.”

  “If you die, what will that do to your mission? Or don’t you care about that anymore?”

  “I won’t die, Kia.
”

  “You don’t know that!” She’s going to risk her life on Hamza’s assurance that the CoVir strain is too weak now to be a threat to healthy adults. He better be right, that’s all. Because if she dies and he shows up, I’ll murder him myself!

  If he isn’t already dead.

  I hate this place.

  I stomp into Agatha’s bedroom, grab a blanket from her bed and take it to one of the empty rooms. “She has to sleep in there.”

  “Alright,” Agatha agrees.

  “And we’re burning that blanket afterwards.”

  She nods. Before I can think of another demand, she asks, “What did you mean, ‘locks are no problem’?”

  I’ve been regretting that comment since I made it. But clearly Agatha’s going to do this anyway, whether I help her or not. So I tell her.

  “You brought what?” Her voice and her expression are completely controlled. I’ve never seen her so angry.

  “The Order made me leave Seraffa. I had to bring everything I owned. What should I have done with them?”

  “Given them back to Sodum. Thrown them away.”

  “Good thing I didn’t.”

  “You aren’t a thief any more, Kia!”

  “You do know you’re about to break the law?” I ask, angry now myself. “Do Select do that?”

  “All the time,” she says. “When there’s an ethical reason to: ‘If the potential benefit is greater than the potential risk of harm, and that risk is very slight,’” she quotes in a textbook voice.

  “You should have said that at my trial. We might not be here.”

  “I thought ethics was a required subject for translators. Why didn’t you say it?”

  “It’s a second year course. I won’t be taking it for quite a while.”

  She pretends not to notice my emphasis on the last three words. “We’re saving a child’s life. It is God’s work.”

  “But He’s using a thief’s tools.” And I go outside to get them for Him.

  Rain and cold have erased all signs of the hole, and the rock I placed near the spot has shifted. I dig five holes, shoving the spade into the damp soil repeatedly. I’m ticked at the way she called me a thief. Sure, on occasion, I made use of things someone else had set aside or didn’t want, but they—the O.U.B.—are making use of me, aren’t they? And no one’s called them on it. The analogy hurts, like I, too, have been set aside, not wanted. I ram the spade fiercely into the soil again, and feel it hit resistance, slide sideways over the smooth top of the tool box. I dig it out and tamp the soil down again.

  “They’ll throw you in jail if they catch you with this,” I warn her, setting it on the table. “And I won’t be able to get you out.” I don’t mean that. I don’t know how I’d do it, but I would.

  “I’m not going to be caught.”

  Of course she’ll get caught. She has no idea how to do this; she isn’t the least bit sneaky. But I can see that argument isn’t going to convince her.

  I explain how each device works, but we don’t have anything to practice on except the lock on the front door. Nobody puts their belongings in safes on Malem, and I have no idea what kind of lock there’ll be on the door to the fever hut. I can tell, though, that she isn’t getting it. She has no idea how to arrange the wires of the palm override so they lie close to, but not quite along the lines of her own palm and fingers, where they’ll override her personal hand print. She says she’ll hear the tumblers in the old-fashioned padlocks, but she doesn’t know what she should listen for, and when she practices picking the simple front door lock, she twists the pick too quickly.

  “Smooth,” I tell her. She gives it another jerk.

  “I just need to practice,” she says. I remember how long it took her to learn to open the door with a key, and I’m about to remind her of it when she tells me the rest of her plan: I’m supposed to storm off to the inn pretending we’ve had an argument, and stay there till Tira’s well and home again. I take a breath. We’re about to have that argument for real.

  “I’ll go get Tira and bring her here,” I say. God knows I don’t want to. I’m almost relieved when Agatha refuses to consider letting me, why should we both put ourselves at risk? But that’s not the point. Agatha’s going to fail; or worse, get caught.

  “I have more experience at this sort of thing.”

  “That’s not something to boast about. Anyway, you’re not going, I am.”

  “I’m not boasting, I’m stating a fact.”

  “Kia,” she says, and her voice says: Enough. “You’re not going to have anything to do with this. You are going to the inn, and you’re staying there, where the innkeeper can see you. So pack your bag.” She doesn’t quite say ‘now’ but it’s in her voice, and she is a Select. I go to pack my bag. But I’m still steaming. How can she not see I’m the best one to go get Tira?

  When I come out with my bag, she takes one look at my face and holds up her hand to stop me from starting again. “It’s time for you to go,” she says.

  Okay, it’s your funeral, I think. The cliché makes me wince. I turn back to face her at the door. “Tira has CoVir. Even if you nurse her, she probably won’t live. It’ll be all for nothing.”

  “Do you believe that, Kia?”

  Yes. I don’t say it out loud but Agatha sees it on my face.

  “You wanted to save your mother,” she says softly. “And then she died anyway.”

  “You can’t save anyone.”

  “But you tried. Nothing can take that away from you. Your brother and sister know it, too.”

  “Do you think they told her? Before…”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  I nod. And stand there with my hand on the doorknob, trying to leave. Don’t do it, I want to beg her. But I can still hear that little cry from the bedroom, and see Jumal’s and Naevah’s faces, and okay, I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it.

  “Even if Tira dies,” I say, “I’ll know why you did it.”

  *****

  I can feel the hard block under my hand, my fingers spread wide across it. I try to pull my hand back but someone is holding it there. Above me I hear the swish of a descending axe—

  I open my eyes, gasping. Darkness presses in around me with the weight of layered woolen blankets, its voice the pounding of my heart. Where am I?

  I sit up in bed. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I make out the lump that must be my bag and the clothes I wore yesterday draped over the back of the chair… in my room at the inn.

  I’m safe here, I tell myself.

  I arrived at the inn in time for lunch, and sat around the dining room all afternoon and evening, listening to my travel-tab and offering dark hints about Agatha making me do too much work. I managed to act surprised when the innkeeper’s wife told me a little girl had come down with CoVir that morning.

  I lie down and try to go back to sleep, but I can’t help thinking of Tira crying in her bedroom. I try not to imagine her all alone in the fever house. Has she been there all day? She’s only two, she won’t understand why she’s been left there.

  I pull the covers down, then quickly back up again. The room is freezing. At Prophet’s Lane we keep the temperature raised to merely cold. I close my eyes. There’s nothing I can do. But I see Jumal’s anguished face and Naevah’s bent head as she held Liat, and I wonder where Agatha is right now.

  Standing outside the fever house praying, I bet. She couldn’t pick a lock if her life depended on it. But she insisted she could do it in that stubborn tone of voice that it’s useless to argue against. I roll over. Not my problem.

  It’s useless. I’m wide awake. I throw off the covers and go to the window. A solid wall of black presses up against the glass. My eyes have adjusted as much as they’re going to, but the narrow alley on the other side of the window is only a memory. There’s no way of knowing whether the night is just beginning or half over. I hurry back to the bed and grope along the bottom till I find my woolen robe.

  Risky or not, I�
�m going to the fever house. I’ll watch from a distance, just to make sure.

  I feel my way back to the window, glad that the inn and its guest rooms are all on the ground floor. Opening the window, I lean out. As always, the sky is hidden by cloud cover. I can only hope the alley is as empty as it is silent. I climb through the small casement and let myself down onto the street, pulling the window shut behind me.

  The darkness is so dense I have trouble finding and putting on the Malemese robe I tossed out ahead of me. I shiver in the cold until the heavy wool slides down around me, and tug the hood over my head.

  I walk quickly, keeping close against the buildings. This is too easy, I think: the window, the pitch-black night, the city so silent and empty it might as well be unpopulated. It was that way earlier, too, when I went to check into the inn. The whole city is gripped in the pall Hamza described as it waits for one of its children to die.

  Ahead I see the last buildings that mark the edge of the city. Even the dim and infrequent streetlights have ended now. There’s no one around. I pull off my hood to see the way more clearly. I’m about to step out onto the road that leads into the country when I hear someone behind me.

  “What are you doing out here?” a gruff male voice demands.

  My heart nearly stops. I look around quickly. A woman has come into sight. Even from here I recognize the white on her habit. Didn’t she have the sense to wear one of the dark Malemese robes? The man whose voice I heard is nowhere in sight but Agatha has stopped and is looking behind, down the street she came from. I slip sideways into the deeper shadow of a building.

  It’s too dark to see Agatha’s face. Has she noticed me, too? Would she recognize me in the dark? I pull the hood back over my head, hiding my face once again in its folds. Agatha won’t be expecting me here; she thinks I’m asleep at the inn. But Agatha is a Select—she’s trained to notice everything and understand what she’s seeing. Could she do that even in the dark with the distraction of someone speaking to her?

  “I am walking and also I pray,” Agatha answers the man in her broken Malemese.