The Occasional Diamond Thief

by J. A. McLachlan

  “She’s impulsive.”

  He smiles. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘impulsive’ to describe a Select. Perhaps I haven’t met enough of them?”

  He already knows they aren’t, so I don’t answer. Didn’t I wonder the same thing the first time I met Agatha? I thought it was all an act.

  “You were in jail here. I had you freed when I learned of it. Did you know that?”

  I nod.

  “Then you know that I’m not unjust.”

  You had me brought here against my will today, I think.

  “It wasn’t your Select who insisted you be set free. Why was she content to let you stay in jail? Why didn’t she want you to leave Malem? Have you asked yourself these questions?”

  I am beginning to. I’m following where he’s leading me, as hypnotized by his words as a rabbit caught in the spell of a snake. Until I remember Agatha running through the door of the Queen’s meeting room to kneel at my side. It wasn’t the High Priest standing outside that chamber after bringing her to help me. It was Prad Gaelig. Prad Gaelig and Agatha.

  He frowns, as though he guesses my thoughts by my silence. “Your loyalty is admirable but misplaced. I would not want to find myself in your position.” His voice is as cold as his eyes now. “I’d want to know what the Select intended for me. And what she intends with this little charade in the fever hut.”

  He’s lying to me. It was Agatha and Prad Gaelig who argued for my freedom. But not until the ship had left. Is he right about that? Is the Order using me? Agatha knows about the diamond. Do they want her to give me up in return for water for Iterria? It makes more sense than the Adept expecting me to teach Agatha enough Malemese to represent the Order here.

  “I will give you some time to consider.” He stands up to leave.

  “Has the Select been charged with a crime?”

  “Not yet.”

  “On my world that makes her innocent.”

  “We are not on your world.”

  Is that a threat? I stand up, too, and meet his gaze evenly.

  “Do you really believe she’s innocent?” he demands.

  “She saved a child’s life,” I remind him. “Whatever you accuse her of, do you really think your people will believe she’s guilty?”

  “Yes, that was clever of her, wasn’t it?” he says smoothly. “I expect she was immunized before she left Seraffa.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  One of the guards returns and escorts me to a room further down the hallway. It doesn’t look like the stone jail cell, but there’s a cot and a small alcove to the side with a sink and a toilet, and when the guard shuts the door I hear an unmistakable click. At least the window has glass in it. I pace the room, feeling helpless. The High Priest is crazy, and no one knows I’m here except Kaline and Mehda, and they were too afraid of his guards to even acknowledge me. I stop pacing and hug myself, shivering. Am I going to disappear, like Hamza?

  No, I am not. I take a deep breath. No one’s coming to help me, so I’ll have to get out of here myself. If I can escape and hide somewhere until the King returns, I can ask for his protection. Hamza trusted the King.

  I think of the actionvids Etin took me to. If this was an actionvid, there’d be a way to escape. I walk to the window and look out onto an eight-story, straight drop to the street. Maybe not this way.

  Overpower the guard next time he opens the door? Surprise will be on my side because I’ve been so meek until now… I think of the muscular guards who escorted me here and give up that plan. If I ever get home, I promise myself I’ll take a self-defense course.

  I go to the window again and look down. Way down. Vidheroes are insane.

  From the window, the clouds look close enough to touch and thick enough to walk on, a strange, soft-textured landscape of rolling hills and valleys. I sigh at the thought of such an easy solution. All I’d have to do is break the window and hide in the clouds. Of course, they’d see the broken window and know where I was. They’d see…

  What if I break the window and hide behind the door? It would look like I’d climbed out. When the guard goes to the window to look—

  A sharp click at the door startles me. Even more startling is the person who walks in.

  “Prad Gaelig!” I want to run to him until I notice how stiffly he’s standing. “You didn’t come to get me out.”

  “I can’t. But nothing bad will happen to you here.”

  Right, I think. “How did you know I was here?”

  He smiles. “Jumal told me. Mehda and Kaline told him they saw you being taken inside—against your will, they thought?” I nod. “Jumal was ready to break quarantine until I promised to come and see how you’re doing.”

  I want to smile at the thought of Jumal threatening to break out and come get me, as if he could do anything against the High Priest.

  “He’s crazy, you know. Your High Priest. He imagines conspiracies everywhere.”

  “Maybe he’s not imagining them.”

  I stare at Prad Gaelig. He looks sincere. “You think so too? You think the Select and I are involved in some kind of conspiracy against Malem?”

  “It’s happened before.”

  “A Select?” I don’t bother hiding the scorn from my voice. “I don’t believe you.”

  Prad Gaelig shrugs. “I can tell you what I know. Belief is up to you.”

  I should tell him to go. I don’t need to hear more insinuations about Agatha’s motives. But I do need to hear the truth about my father’s visit. I look at Prad Gaelig. He’s waiting calmly for my decision. I trust him. For no good reason I can give, but I do. It’s probably stupid of me. “Alright. Tell me what happened during the plague. And about my father, when he was here.”

  Prad Gaelig nods. He sits on the end of the bed, since there’s no chair. I sit cross-legged on the other end facing him.

  “I was seventeen when the plague struck. I wasn’t here at first. I’d taken my oaths as a priest that spring and was sent out to administer to the farmers for three years. I didn’t know anything until messengers started to bring news from the city. That was before we built radio towers. We wanted to live simply, but the plague convinced us of the need for emergency contact.” He speaks in a matter-of-fact voice, staring straight ahead.

  “People were dying, the messengers said. Young people, strong people, not just the elderly and weak. No one knew why. We were a healthy people with no serious ailments aside from old age and injury, and suddenly we were dying.” A look of pain crosses his face.

  “I didn’t believe it at first. I thought the messengers were exaggerating. But the fear in their eyes kept me awake at night. I began to think of my family, my parents, my little sister.”

  He pauses. His hands have begun to tremble. He clasps them together.

  “People began to arrive from the city, fleeing the epidemic. When I saw the refugees I began to believe. I questioned everyone, hoping for a letter from the High Priest calling me back—I was desperate to see my family—but instead I received orders to remain in the country.” He takes a deep breath, looking down at his hands as though he can see the letter there. “That’s when I knew it was bad, worse than the reports, worse than I could imagine. Because they needed me to stay there. They needed some of us to survive.”

  “The King and Queen fell ill, and two of the princes. The other two princes were rushed out to the country, the eldest and the youngest, a baby not yet two. Our current king was sixteen when his father died. He married, as is our custom, before assuming the crown. His first task was to bury his family.

  “No more messengers came, and no more refugees. People were being shot if they tried to leave the city. On the farms, we waited in silence for any news. We couldn’t bear to talk about those we’d left behind; we couldn’t think about anything else. We hated ourselves, hiding in safety while an unimaginable horror crept over everyone we loved.”

  Prad Gaelig stares at the window as though it’s a vidscreen on which the bitter events of hi
s youth are unfolding. My eyes are drawn to the window as if I, too, am looking into that past.

  “After five months I could stand it no longer. I decided to go home.

  “Things were even worse than I imagined. One person in every hundred was already dead, one third of the population was deathly sick.

  “The High Priest was angry to see me, but he put me to work.” His voice takes on a harder note. “I served as his secretary at the trial of the Select and the captain of the Lightfoot.” He turns to look at me. “The Lightfoot was an Iterrian spaceship. It arrived on Malem three weeks before the plague, in the hire of the O.U.B., bringing a Select.”

  “You think he had something to do with the plague just because he was here?”

  “She. And I know she did.”

  “Tell me the rest,” I say with a slight shrug. He continues as though he doesn’t notice it.

  “The Select was a native Iterrian. She came to ask their Majesties to supply Iterria with water. They were willing to pay. But we didn’t want foreigners living here, taking up even a small portion of our limited land to build their elevator to the stars, and who knows how many staying on to operate it. We’d told them that before. We came here to be left alone.

  “At that time there wasn’t any house on Prophet’s Lane—no Prophet’s Lane, in fact. The Select and the captain were staying as guests at the High Priest’s complex.

  “When the first few deaths occurred the captain wanted to leave. A priest was walking by their rooms and heard them quarreling. The Select refused to go. They had two weeks left before their time was up at the spaceport and she still hoped to convince us. The captain told her an epidemic was about to break out.”

  “How did he know?”

  “How, indeed?”

  “But you weren’t there.”

  “No, I was on the farms then. But it was well documented at the trial.”

  “What did the captain have to say?”

  “He denied it, until the Select confirmed what he’d said. Then he called it a hunch. Said he’d been on a lot of planets and ‘knew the signs’.” Prad Gaelig says this with such sarcasm in his voice that I can imagine the reaction it met with at the trial.

  “What happened?”

  “They were both jailed. By then nearly a third of the city was sick. People were desperate, traumatized by grief and fear. The High Priest used the spaceship’s com-comp to broadcast our plight. He sent the lab analysis and magnified images of the virus we were finding in our autopsies.

  “The O.U.B. sent out a call for aid—but no one could identify the virus.

  “Then Iterria responded. One week after they received our transmission, they’d done a review of medical data through human history and located a virus prevalent centuries ago on Earth that seemed to match ours: Acute Respiratory Syndrome, a member of the corona virus family. They were working on a vaccine. Were we still considering their request for water?”

  “They didn’t say that!”

  “I saw the recorded transmissions at the trial.” He meets my disbelieving stare calmly. “This is a story to you,” he says, looking aside. “To us it was a holocaust.”

  “I’m sorry. It must have been horrible.”

  “It still is.”

  He studies the window silently. The sky is dark, threatening another storm. When he begins talking again, his voice is bitter. “Surprisingly enough, the Iterrians did develop a cure, in only one week. And they offered a trade: the medicine for a water agreement.”

  “But you didn’t give them water,” I say, horrified. Were they that stubborn? Could all those people have been saved? Could my father have been?

  “We would have,” Prad Gaelig says. “But their transmission was intercepted. The Alliance worlds were outraged. There were satellite meetings, orders, threats, counter-threats… Meanwhile our people were dying.” He pauses, lost in his memories. When it seems he isn’t going to continue, I shift on the bed. I’m caught up in it now, I want to hear the rest.

  “Finally, Iterria agreed to give us the serum. The city went into a frenzy of celebration when it arrived. Patients in our hospitals began to recover, volunteers were trained to administer it to those who were ill at home. It was working. The dying was finally over.”

  “Your family?”

  “My father and my sister both survived. My mother would have wanted it that way.”

  “I’m sorry.” I let the silence lengthen before I say, “but it wasn’t over, was it? People were still dying when my father arrived.”

  Prad Gaelig looks at me. “It isn’t just a story to you, either, is it?” he says.

  “No,” I whisper.

  “The captain of the second Iterrian ship wanted the Select and the first captain to return to Iterria to be questioned there. We probably would have done it. As far as the people were concerned, Iterrians were now our saviors.

  “But the young Queen insisted the trial be held here. She didn’t trust the Iterrians. She ordered the original ship to be searched. When they did, they found a secret compartment built behind a side panel under the captain’s chair. Four small, empty glass vials were inside it. These were examined in a hospital lab. They contained traces of CoVir. And I was there at that time,” he adds pointedly.

  “The captain was clever enough not to leave fingerprints and he denied any knowledge of the vials—even under questioning.”

  “They tortured him,” I whisper in horror.

  Prad Gaelig observes me calmly. “So you believe that part even though I wasn’t an eye witness.”

  “But not… not the Select?”

  “No. The trial lasted two standard months. Everything I’ve told you came out. CoVir came to Malem aboard that ship and someone took it planetside to infect the first few victims. Both the captain and the Select denied any knowledge of it.

  “The young Queen was for beheading them both, rather than risk letting the guilty one go free. She lost her entire family to the plague. The King and the High Priest wanted some degree of certainty before they offended either Iterria or the O.U.B., since both had also come to our aid. On the other hand, whoever was guilty had surely had assistance. The O.U.B. wanted Malem to join the Alliance; Iterria wanted a water trade agreement. One of them was willing to murder us for it. We wanted to know which one.”

  I glance at the window. It’s getting dark. The overhead light panels have come on without either of us noticing. It feels strange to look around the room, to draw myself back from the past his words have invoked. His hands are clenched in his lap so tightly the knuckles are white. Tell me about my father, I think, but at the same time, I’m afraid to hear it.

  “Then three new deaths occurred. And then five more. By this time everyone had been vaccinated. The trial was immediately adjourned while the King and the High Priest hurried to their council chambers for a full briefing.

  “I went to see my family. I hadn’t seen my father and sister during the trial. My father was ill when I arrived home. ‘How can he be ill?’ I yelled at them. ‘Didn’t he get the vaccination?’ My sister began to cry. ‘Weren’t you vaccinated?’ I grabbed my father’s shoulders as he lay in his bed and shook him. He was limp between my hands and I came to my senses, eased him back onto his bed and begged his forgiveness. He died two days later. By then we knew that CoVir had mutated. The mutated strain swept through the city out of control.”

  Prad Gaelig stands up. He wipes his face as though merely tired but I’ve already seen the dampness on his cheeks. I blink several times to prevent my own eyes from spilling over.

  “Jinna was sixteen.” He turns to me. “How old are you, Kia?”

  “Sixteen.” I struggle to get the word out through a constricted throat.

  “Are you ready to die?” he asks softly.

  I shake my head, frightened, and lean against the wall away from him.

  “Neither was Jinna. That was the last thing she said to me. ‘I’m too young to die, Gaelig.’”

  He turns and
walks to the window. Looking out he says softly, more to himself than to me: “but apparently she wasn’t.”

  He’s silent a long time.

  “Did you ever find out which of them did it?” I ask at last.

  “The captain. The trial resumed three weeks later. He was sick—he’d become infected with the mutated virus and knew he was going to die. He made a full confession before us all, even naming his co-conspirators on Iterria. Several of them were quite high in their government, I understand. Before he died, he asked the Select to forgive him.” Prad Gaelig turns to face me.

  “Did she?”

  “She rose and walked slowly across the room to stand in front of him. She wasn’t well, but it wasn’t CoVir. She tried to kill herself while she was in jail. She almost succeeded, with the help of a guard. Select can be very persuasive—he only came to his senses when she lost consciousness.”

  I stare at Prad Gaelig, my mouth open. A Select attempt suicide? I can’t believe it. I want to tell him he’s lying, that I’m not that gullible, but he continues, ignoring my reaction.

  “‘Do you know how many people you have murdered?’ the Select asked the captain. ‘Babies, young people at the beginning of their lives, parents with children to care for, the elderly who deserve a peaceful end…’ She leaned forward suddenly and slapped him with such force it knocked him to the floor.

  “He glared up at her, spat at her, called her a traitor to her world, reminded her that people would be dying there, too, of thirst, soon enough.

  “‘Not because of me,’ she said in a terrible voice that frightened me more than any human voice has ever done. I hear it still, sometimes, in my dreams.”

  I shiver and draw back. I know the force of a Select’s voice.

  Prad Gaelig stares out the window. He whispers the words again, to himself, “Not because of me.”

  The door opens, startling us both. A guard comes in carrying a plate of food.

  “Is it so late?” Prad Gaelig says. “I have to get back to Tira.”