Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  Her hand lowered and a frown crossed her face.

  Had he just failed some test? Was she come to finally kill the last of his family? What about the data only he knew? What about Harold?

  “What are you doing here?” his voice creaked from lack of use.

  “I’m a researcher.” She pointed toward the terminal. “Is that data yours? You don’t look like an Isabel.”

  “Jaron. I’m Jaron.” A researcher. “A researcher of what?”

  “Jungle botany.”

  “Plants?”

  “Yes, botany is the study of plants.”

  “I knew that.” The conversation, even to Jaron’s inexperienced ear, was not going well. He glanced over at the terminal again. A complex graph with six axes and dozens of differently colored and weighted lines hung above the desk.

  “What are you doing with my data?”

  “So, you must be Isabel.”

  “Isabel.” He glanced once more at those dark, eyes. They were not the eyes he’d always feared a WEC killer would have. “Isabel? Oh, no. My sister. She’s…gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He tried to picture his long lost sister, but other than an impression of dark hair, he couldn’t really recall her. How long had it been?

  “I’m a student. Some crazy grant organization sent me here.”

  “A student? A grant?” If that was true? If she wasn’t from the WEC, what was she doing with his data?

  “Are you a parrot? You’re thin enough to be one. Is that you? Jaron, Lord of the Parrots. I caught a glimpse of your macaw. He’s beautiful.”

  “Harold.” His attention moved back to the graph. There were patterns and echoes of patterns between the various lines. He edged around the massive bulk of the intruder and slid into the chair. It was still warm from the woman’s body. And there was a strange scent. Not of the jungle. A smell he’d never found before, like, he didn’t know what. Like the scent of moss on the fall air, high in the mountains. But that wasn’t right either.

  He squirmed to get away from the heat of the plas chair but it was all around him.

  “Where’s my data?” Yet the graph—there were familiar patterns here.

  “This is yours? Do you realize how much it contradicts the modern scientific literature?” A large hand reached past his shoulder and toggled the command keys. Layer upon layer of his research flashed up in vast arrays of tables.

  He toggled it back to the graph. “Every single fact here has been verified by a minimum of ten separate observations. The other researchers are wrong. You didn’t touch my data, did you?”

  Jaron spun to face the intruder and came face-to-face with a huge pair of breasts straining outward against the thin white t-shirt. He fell backwards off the chair and caught his shoulder on the console. One of the massive hands lifted him back to his place like Harold moving a leaf with his massive beak.

  “Your data is just fine. I simply graphed the results.”

  He traced the axes for habitat, diurnal cycles, and interspecies competition through the air. The finger that extended into the lines of twisting light was incredibly grimy. But it was attached to an arm he was sure was his. With the massive woman looming behind him, he was suddenly intensely aware of how he must look. He shoved the offending hand beneath the desk.

  But the leaf ant wasn’t right. He toggled back to his data, scrolled down to Atta, and began altering the data string.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Your chart is elegant, socialization by habitat zone. But the leaf ant only follows this reaction in the river valleys. The effect rolls off and ceases fifty meters above the high flood mark. The social zoning alters in reaction to various predators differently in the valleys than the rest of the jungle. Microhabitat adaptation.”

  He flipped back to her chart and the curve had shifted to show the habitatal specialization.

  “That is really excellent.”

  Jaron glanced at the woman again, he’d almost forgot he wasn’t speaking to Harold. The vast white expanse of her chest was barely a hand’s-breadth away. This time he caught his elbow as he fell from the chair.

  # # #

  It gave her the creeps to even pick up the bucket. Suz could feel the layers of grime coming off on her fingers. She sluiced it full from the top of a wave and hefted it back into the fisher’s shack, careful to make sure nothing touched her white pants.

  She almost lost the bucket as well as she hefted the seawater over the prone figure that snored on a pile of fishnet. It sputtered like a drowning fish and bolted upright.

  “What the hell?” He wrapped large hands around his head as if to keep it from exploding.

  “Hi, Brycie.” Suz tossed the bucket into a corner that made a loud enough clatter to send shudders along his body. One eye squinted up at her in the dim shack.

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, son.”

  “You look so different.”

  She twirled once around for him. Her self-defense workouts with her personal guard had toned her body to a point where she was actually pleased with it. She knew her tanned and fit figure was shown off to best advantage by her jewel-toned silken blouse and scarf contrasted against the white pants and blazer.

  “Your hair.”

  Men. You did complete makeovers in the three years they’d been gone, and all they ever noticed was your hair. Of course, the great cascade of it down to her waist was one of her favorite features in the mirror. And it stopped men cold which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  “Time to get up, Brycie. Or should I refill the bucket.”

  “No. No. Once is quite enough. You don’t by any chance have a new brain in one of those pockets, that might hurt a bit less.”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  As he rose to his feet and loomed above her, just like her father, she had to bite back the nervousness that crept in against her wishes. He had filled out from a gawky teen into a big, handsome youth. He and his father looked so alike. It gave her the shivers despite the heat.

  “Where am I?”

  “About the worst place I’ve ever been. Ende, on Flores Island. Have you heard of it? Do you know how you got here?”

  He staggered out into the blazing sun with a hand low over his eyes as he squinted up and down the dock.

  “Indonesia, right? How I got here? Not sure.”

  “Does the name Irana mean anything to you? Irana Keller.”

  “Irana? But that was Kuala Lampur? Or maybe Darwin. Not sure where we started the night. She was pretty wild. Great in bed.”

  “Whoa there, Brycie. Way too much information.” Yes, he was full-grown, a foot taller than she was, but imagining her boy, who had been a baby just an eye-blink ago, frolicking in some intercontinental sexual frenzy was a place she just didn’t want to go.

  “How about a shower?”

  He blinked down at her from his shaded eyes. “And maybe get out of this sun?”

  There was the little boy she remembered. She turned him and pushed him toward the beach with the tips of her fingers. He was even grimier than the bucket.

  # # #

  The hotel mistress hadn’t wanted to let “her tall gigolo” into the hotel without a percentage of his fee. Suz wanted to giggle, since she was twice Brycie’s age, instead she set the woman in her place with a cool look. Three years had passed since she’d seen her son, how many ways had they grown apart?

  She paced from the golden-threaded sofa, across the cool tile floor, out through the French doors onto the balcony, and past the small dining table laden with a meal she hoped would repair the aftermath of his binge, to the broad white-painted railing yellowing from sea and sun.

  The long, curved beach of Ende was coming to life with the cooling evening. Gunung Meja, a great truncated volcanic stack, dominated the f
ar end of the beach shaded with purples and reds of the setting sun.

  A soccer game was shaping up quickly out on the sand, a rough game played by too many fisherman all in the mood to blow off some steam. Body blocks that would fit into an old American-style football game failed to sideline player after player despite how crippling the blows appeared.

  She turned from the intensifying brawl at a soft noise behind her. There was Brycie, filling the doorway.

  His long hair was slicked back, broad shoulders filled the suit she’d purchased for him. Sunglasses now covered his bloodshot eyes and he actually looked more sharp than hung over. She stepped up to him, wrapped her arms about his middle and rested her head on his shoulder. Hesitant hands settled against her back and he finally set his chin atop her head.

  A slight rocking motion came over them, as if she were holding a hurt young boy and not a full-grown man. When the shakes started, she held on. What had he been through, what had happened to her fragile, genius boy in the time he’d been gone?

  At long last, with a shuddering deep breath, and then another, she could feel him pull away and straighten. Yes, there was a time when they didn’t want to need you, no matter how much they did. She released him, though given the choice she’d never have let him go again.

  “How did you find me?”

  “You thumbed in.”

  He aimed his sunglasses at her. “I haven’t been that stupid in a long time.”

  “That’s how I found the name of Irana Keller. She must have owed you a lot of money.”

  “Yea,” he looked up toward the sky, “money, enough that she didn’t want to transfer it into cash, and a few other things. She thought she was better at poker than she actually was. She’d already spent a few days paying out her other losses to me.”

  “Too much information, remember. Anyway, my guess is when she saw who she was dealing with, or at least how the global security system has you registered, she freaked, dumped you in that hut, and ran.”

  “Sounds about right. How did you find me?”

  “An alarm set to your print went off in Ende, though I knew my father was in Africa.”

  “You were tracking me,” he moved back rabbit-scared onto the threshold of the French doors.

  With all the casualness she didn’t feel, Suz sat in one of the wrought-iron chairs at the table and lifted her glass of ice tea, carefully wiping the condensation with a red napkin so that it wouldn’t drip on her suit.

  “No, I track my father. I—” she didn’t want to reveal all she was doing. Trying to trace the larger pattern of his activities and abuses. Not yet.

  “I like to keep track of him. I feel safer knowing where he isn’t.”

  A foot retreated back into the apartment. “Look, thanks for the shower, but if he’s coming, I’m gone.”

  “He won’t be. I’m much further up the alarm queue than he is. I intercepted your thumb-in. My operatives rerouted it through electronic nodes in seven different countries before having it locate you in Covent Gardens in the heart of London.”

  “But London doesn’t exist anymore. Even I’m not dumb enough to descend into that radioactive hell.”

  “I know that. You know that. But I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a special WEC team was landing there even now to ‘rescue’ you.”

  Brycie checked once more over his shoulder as if troops were about to leap from the apartment and grab him. Then, after checking the sky and the beach, he edged forward to sit opposite her.

  He took his own ice tea and rubbed it across his face, letting the condensation dribble down onto his suit leaving dark blotches, though they evaporated quickly enough in the heat.

  “You’re messing with security traces. And you tracked me to this hole.” He took a long swallow of his tea as more water dribbled onto his jacket. He stopped abruptly and inspected her over the glass’ rim. “Operatives?”

  “Brycie?”

  “I haven’t been called that in a long time. Almost forgot about it.” A slow smile creased his face.

  “Brycie,” she liked the sound of it too. “How did you ever survive in that house?”

  He laughed, finally, truly relaxed for the first time. His shoulders dropped back as he shook his head. “I don’t have a clue, Mom. How did you?”

  “I inherited my mother’s operatives.”

  “Allow me to repeat: Operatives?”

  She cast her mind back to that dark day when news had arrived that her mother was dead. “Flitter crash,” Bryce Sr. had informed her. But she knew that was a lie.

  That night, her mother’s assistant came to tuck her into bed. The woman had told her the truth. Unable to escape Bryce Sr. any other way, she had killed herself. And there was a carefully protected squad of troops including both fighting and technical specialists who would now protect her and get her anything she needed. When she’d called upon them so many years later, they still existed. Hidden, dormant, but not gone.

  Suz looked out at the soccer game which had descended into a brawl that was only occasionally interrupted by a flurry of movement on the part of the small black-and-white ball. The noise that must be pounding outward from the field was lost in the distance and the steady roar of the breaking surf.

  “Mother left them to me when she—,” all these years and the abandonment still twisted her gut, “when she killed herself.”

  Brycie’s voice was very soft, barely louder than the evening, “She didn’t. He did.”

  Suz jerked about to face him.

  “He— Inside my head. I can see the memory. Tired of her. Your mother was…discarded. I’m sorry.”

  She twisted back to sea, but could see none of it. Her mother hadn’t abandoned her. But Bryce Sr. had her killed. Someday, someone would take something her father cared about, and she hoped to hell she was there to see it. She could feel her breath roaring in and out like a dragon’s as her anger, her fury, was brushed to life anew at what the man had done.

  She heaved her ice tea against the side of a rattling old truck passing on the street below. It smashed with a terribly satisfying noise scattering ice tea, glass, and ice cubes in a dozen skittering directions. She had to do something more. She had to find a way to get back at him. To undo what he did so casually. There must be a way.

  “Mom?”

  There was. Brycie. Sitting beside her was all of her father’s memories. All the keys she needed.

  “Mom?” A worried, little-boy’s voice sounded from somewhere far away.

  But she didn’t want to use her own son. That would be as bad as her father, using others to fight his battles.

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  She didn’t even know she’d spoken. She took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes.

  “No. I won’t do things the way my father does. I won’t use others to strike back at him. I won’t use you—” She was babbling. Clamping her jaw shut, she glanced over at him.

  He too had taken off his glasses and was gazing back at her. His dark eyes were filled with warmth, not calculation.

  “What do you need?”

  “That’s not why I came to see you, honest. I missed you, Brycie. I liked your postcards. I hated it when they stopped.” His anonymous cards had given her some sense of his peripatetic existence, and they’d joined his younger art on the wall of her office. A picture of the Greek island of Ios with a field of goats grazing around an impossibly white church. Some very scantily clad, golden-skinned bathing beauties frolicking in the pool before an ancient Hindu temple while being watched by a sunning water buffalo. A cowboy riding an impossibly huge kangaroo, with saddle, reins, and all, waving his hat over his head and a speech bubble: “Wish you were here.”

  “I guess they stopped about the time the old man paid me a visit.”

  “I didn’t know he’d found you.”

/>   “Found me on a South Seas island. Managed to ruin yet another piece of my life. God I hate that man.”

  “Can you help me?” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  “How?”

  Something had shifted, even his voice was different. The nineteen-year-old boy was abruptly gone and she could feel her father gazing at her. There was a wariness and caution that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  “I’m sorry, Brycie. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “It’s said, so ask.”

  Suz checked, but his intent gaze still hadn’t softened. How did it work inside his head? Did he and his parent’s personalities take turns being in the fore? Or was it as he’d described to her three years ago, that only concentrating on a thought brought his parent’s memories to the fore? Were they merging? Was her Brycie slowly disappearing? If so, this might be her last chance to be with her son, but she needed his knowledge as well.

  She couldn’t face him and turned now to observe the battered and the bloody soccer teams staggering off the darkening beach toward the bars that lined the night-market. Clusters of little booths, all brightly lit, had sprung into existence and were serving all the varied foods of the Indonesian waterfront.

  “My chief operative was killed.” The voice that spoke was hardened, remote, factual. Not who she was. Definitely not who Suzie was. What was she evolving into living in her father’s house?

  “I’ve determined that it truly was just an accident.”

  “And you want my memories to verify that? Thanks a lot. Now I’m a databank to two people. No, he doesn’t even know you have operatives. He barely knows you exist. Is that what you wanted to hear? Is that why you came to find me? To remind me how far I’ve fallen?” His voice was harsh.

  “What? No. Not that. None of that.” She turned back in time to see his scowl soften into sadness. “What did he do to you?”

  Now it was Brycie’s turn to inspect the night. “I’ve been kept…updated. He doesn’t want me to get too out of date in case something happens to him. He… He’s… His mind is horrible.”