by Jake Elwood
A brief daydream about the dead fish idea kept her diverted for a time, until her mind wandered to the practical details of casing a building like this. Nothing electronic would escape detection for long.
A couple of clerks came down the corridor, giving Lark and her babysitter brief, curious glances as they passed. That was the key weakness to this environment, Lark realized. Human traffic. No one could keep track of every face, and the citizens of Zemoth weren't about to tolerate strict traffic controls, not imposed by Skylanders, not in their own civic buildings. No, the way to spy on this place was in person, with a live human being.
A fat man in a business suit, three PADs clenched in his hands, came plodding down the corridor, peering at each door as he passed. Lark analyzed him, wondering if he could be a spy working for Hiram Hearne. By pretending to be lost he had an excuse to look in every direction, and those PADs could be recording video as he went. Even his fat, listless appearance was an asset, as it made him seem innocuous. Terrorists and assassins were supposed to be lean, hard, dangerous, right? His body was the perfect cover.
The man stopped in front of a door, palmed it open, and Lark heard voices raised in greeting. So, not him, then. She was willing to bet Hearne had someone like him, though, keeping an eye on the Skylanders.
She fidgeted, wishing she could go prowling through the building looking for spies. Still, the Skylander offices were right here, where she was at. If she stayed where she was, the spy should come by sooner or later, right?
Heels clacked on the floor tiles, and Lark turned her head. A slim young woman in a dark suit came striding up the corridor. She looked exactly the way Lark imagined a spy or assassin would look, fit and alert and somehow quietly dangerous, walking with a predator's grace. The effect was somewhat spoiled when the woman paused, turning in a slow circle, gazing around as if she was lost. It gave her a good look at Lark, the old man, and everything else in the corridor, and Lark felt her pulse increase. Lark slid her fingers into her pocket, reaching for her PAD, wondering if she could get a picture without the woman noticing.
A door swung open just to Lark's left and a burly man leaned out into the corridor. Immediately the slim young woman's face lit up. "There you are," she said, and hurried over. The two of them exchanged kisses to the cheek while Lark stood a pace away, watching from the corner of her eye. Then they hurried off, laughing together, talking about a newly opened café.
Lark frowned, disappointed. She'd been so sure. There were no more likely candidates in sight, just a slovenly man in baggy coveralls with a rag in his hand, slouching down the corridor, peering at the walls and doorknobs and occasionally polishing a surface or scrubbing at a stain. It was hard to imagine a less likely candidate for a spy.
Thirty long seconds passed before Lark made the connection. The cleaner was practically invisible. Impossible to notice. He could wander the entire building and raise not a flicker of suspicion.
He was the perfect spy.
By that time he had already passed her. She stared at his retreating back, wondering. Then she started after him.
"Little girl!" She heard a curse, bitten off, and then the sound of footsteps behind her. "You, there." The old man muttered something under his breath, then said, "Caramel. Carmichael. Cameron?" He couldn't have made more than half a dozen steps but he already sounded out of breath. "Stop!"
The cleaner started to walk a little faster. He hadn't turned to see what the commotion was about, practically an admission of guilt in Lark's mind. She passed him and took two more quick steps.
"I said stop!"
Lark turned, pretending she somehow didn't know the cleaner was there, brought her hands up as if to cushion herself, and crashed into his chest. Her hands touched his shoulders at armpit level. There was no gun in a shoulder holster. She said "Oof!" and slid her hands down his sides. If the gun was in the back of his waistband or an ankle holster she was going to miss it, but—
There it was. A hard shape right at waist level under his coveralls. She gave the butt of the gun a quick squeeze, making sure.
Definitely a handgun.
The cleaner's hands closed on her shoulders and he pushed her back a step. She had her first really good look at his face. He was middle-aged, unshaven, the bristly hairs on his cheeks a mix of black and white. He had brown skin and round cheeks that made him look soft and jovial until you saw his eyes. He had the coldest, meanest eyes Lark had seen since her father died, and those eyes bored into her as if he wanted to memorize every detail of her face.
"Sorry," she said, and twisted loose from his grasp. She was suddenly very glad Denner was there as she darted around the cleaner and hurried to the old man's side.
"Where were you going? You can't just run off." The old man paused to catch his breath.
Lark looked over her shoulder. The cleaner was hurrying down the corridor. He'd be gone from the building in moments, and he wouldn't be coming back, either. He knew exactly what Lark had done. He knew that she knew.
The door to the boardroom swung open. Coe stood in the doorway, looking about as cheerful as always. "Lark."
Lark opened her mouth to tell her about the cleaner, the gun, the spying that she knew the man had been doing. But he would be long gone before Lark could explain. And dead of old age before she could get anyone to actually believe her. He had to be walking out the front doors of the building right about now. The front doors, which were just over …
"This is a very serious matter, and—"
Lark shoved past Coe and crossed the boardroom, reaching for her PAD. There were opaque windows along the back wall. She dialed one window to transparency, turned on the PAD's video camera, and pressed her face to the window.
"What are you doing?" Fevridge sounded utterly baffled. Lark ignored her. The cleaner was crossing the street, maybe a dozen meters away. She zoomed in, his image wobbling in the viewfinder. All she could see was the back of his head. She banged the PAD sharply against the window pane. The PAD clanked against the window and the man turned, staring for a moment almost directly at her. Then he scowled, turned, and hurried away. In moments he was gone from her field of view.
"Young lady." Coe's voice was frosty with disapproval. "I don't think you realize the gravity of your situation."
Lark shut off the camera and turned, making her face contrite. "I'm sorry, Ms. Coe. I thought I saw a robin outside. I haven't seen a real bird in years. I got really excited."
Coe and Fevridge stared at her. Denner, still puffing for breath, stood in the doorway and stared at her. Al Fazil stared at her. Lark stared back, telling herself over and over that sticking her tongue out at them all would be a bad idea.
"Whatever you might think of her manners," Fevridge said at last, "it doesn't make her a security risk."
Coe managed to look even less pleasant than before, but she nodded. "You'll want to watch yourself, young lady." She held her hand up, thumb and forefinger almost touching. "You're this close to being expelled from the city."
"I think residents of this planet will make the decisions about who can stay in our cities," Fevridge said mildly. "Good day. Lark, come with me, please. It's time you rejoined your class."
Lark decided to wait until the last instant before she and the senator turned a corner before turning and sticking out her tongue. Coe and her cronies were nowhere in sight, though. Lark turned back, disappointed, and followed Fevridge outside.
The cleaner – the spy, in other words – was nowhere in sight. Lark gazed around, not sure if she was relieved or disappointed. The man had looked at her like he was filing her away for future reference. That couldn't be good news.
She patted the pocket where her PAD rested. She wouldn’t see him again – not if she could help it – but that didn't mean she wasn't going to find out who he was.
Chapter 11
Late that evening she sat up in the room she shared with Millie, chatting. Objectively the room was nothing much, a tiny bedroom with a narrow bed
along each wall, a little desk and a shared bathroom. The walls were dingy and the room smelled faintly of sweat. It was an honest-to-goodness university dorm room, though, which made it downright exciting.
She'd made her afternoon detour with Skyland security sound like a case of mistaken identity, not interesting at all. Miss Grimsby had latched onto that comforting story like a drowning woman seizing a hoverbelt. The kids had been skeptical, but Lark stuck to her story and they accepted it.
Now Lark was pretending not to be impressed by the idea of meeting Kaia Highstar in another day and a half. Millie, though, was completely star-struck. "I wonder if she'll talk to us. Of course, she's fifteen. She'll think we're little kids. But what if she DOES talk to us? What do you think she's like?"
Lark rolled her eyes. "She probably thinks about boys all the time. And, I don't know, makeup. And whatever rich people think about." Lark had been rich for most of her life, but she wasn't about to admit it to Millie. "I bet she's really boring."
Millie looked scandalized. "How can you say that?"
"She'll have bodyguards all around her. We won't even talk to her. Not unless we get the bodyguards to pass notes." Lark hadn't had bodyguards when she lived on Hesperus, but there were armor plates on the car that took her to school, and the school had pretty high security. It had to be much worse for Kaia, who had to worry about not just being kidnapped for ransom, but murder as well.
"There won't be bodyguards," Millie predicted. "Not for us. We're just kids."
Lark thought of the cleaner and frowned. "There better be bodyguards," she muttered. "She needs them."
Later, when the lights were out and the sound of Millie's deep breathing came from the other bed, Lark took out her PAD and played back the little stream of video she'd taken through the window. She stared at the man's face, brooding. He scared her.
She thought about doing nothing, letting go, leaving it alone. But she already had his attention. He knew quite a bit about her. She was already at risk.
It was time to catch up.
She took a good still image of his face and sent it off to a query service. There were thousands of ways a person could end up being catalogued, from store cameras to robot databanks. Privacy laws could only go so far. If you knew where to look – and it wasn't all that hard to find out – there was a startling amount you could often learn about someone.
The best query services pulled in data from across most of the settled galaxy. Ironically the best way to learn about someone here on Zemoth was to send the query off-world. There weren't any query services based on a nowhere planet like this one. Lark sent the picture to an interstellar hub, wincing as she thought about the damage it would do to her allowance, and turned off the PAD. The query would take hours at the very least.
She lay back, listening to Millie sleep, wishing she could be as carefree and unworried. Then she grinned in the darkness. There was a plot afoot, unfolding all around them, and poor Millie Vanderstars was oblivious. Lark, though, was in it up to her neck. That was a much more interesting place to be.
Too restless to sleep, she wandered over to the window and peered out at the dark rooftops of Kingsland. She pushed on the hinged window without much hope, expecting it to open a handspan or less, but to her surprise it swung wide. As Lark climbed into the window frame she felt the light push of a force field. That would be for safety, she knew. The farther she went, the harder the field would push. The actual generators would be right at the edge of the roof. If she slipped, she wouldn't be able to fall.
The roof was covered in wide tiles, cold against Lark's feet, but reassuringly rough to the touch. She wouldn't lose her footing. The roof had a fairly steep pitch, and Lark kept a hand on the frame of her window as she worked her way carefully outside. Her room had a dormer window, and she clambered up until she was able to perch on the peak of the dormer.
The evening breeze played across her skin, cool enough to make her shiver, and Lark smiled. Her perch wasn't comfortable, exactly, but the novelty of being outside on a rooftop in her pajamas was irresistible.
The university buildings were fronted in blocks of pale brown stone in imitation of old Earth. As an architectural choice it was absurd, but it gave the halls and dormitories an air of solemn solidity, a ponderous beauty that was even better in the faint glow of a few security lights.
Miss Grimsby would have a heart attack if she could see me right now. The thought made her giggle, and she stretched, luxuriating in the smell of grass and distant flowers, the sensation of cool tiles against her almost-numb feet, the dark silhouette of dormers and chimney caps all around her.
Lark switched her gaze to the view directly ahead of her, feeling her heart thump against her ribs, trying to figure out why she was suddenly alarmed. It used to happen to her all the time, in the months after she left Hesperus. A face in a crowd would remind her of her father, or the color of a wall would suggest her room back home, and something close to panic would fill her mind. That hadn't happened to her in months, though.
What am I scared of? What is it? She frowned into the darkness, annoyed by the mystery as much as she was afraid. Cassie says to let your subconscious work on stuff. If you can't remember someone's name, or where you left your PAD, or you're trying to figure out why something bothers you, think about something else. Like, do they actually make the walls out of stone, or do they make sensible modern walls and then just put a layer of stone on –
"Oh." Lark felt her body go rigid. She knew what was wrong, and she carefully kept her face pointed forward, not looking to her left where, she was suddenly certain, someone sat just below the crest of a dormer one room over.
Okay, I have to think. It's too late to hide. Whoever it is, they saw me come out my window. If they're going to try something it'll be when I start to go back to my room. I'll have to be quick. If someone comes after me, I'll jump. The force field will catch me. I'll jump and scream for help. She brought her feet back and took a deep breath, ready to spring up.
"Don't be afraid, Lark." The voice was a whisper in the darkness, a feminine voice with the unmistakable lilt of Skyland. "I won't hurt you."
Lark turned her head and a lithe figure came over the top of the next dormer. The stranger looked athletic, but she moved slowly, carefully. She's trying not to alarm me, Lark thought. Her heart thumped away regardless, and she planned how she'd fling herself sideways and down the pitched roof if she had to.
The stranger's shoulder caught a stray bit of light and Lark saw a blue cloth patch and light body armor. She let herself relax. Skylanders weren't good news exactly, but they were much better than mysterious terrorists.
The Skylander reached Lark's dormer roof and settled onto her haunches, then leaned back until her shoulders were against the tiles. She laced her fingers behind her head and gazed up at the sky. Lark gaped at her. She'd never seen a Skyland cop looking so … relaxed.
The stranger was close enough now for Lark to make out details. She had brown skin and straight dark hair that poked out from under a light helmet. She looked and sounded young, barely an adult, with smooth round cheeks that crinkled as she gave Lark a smile.
"My name's Alexandra." The smile widened. "I'm not supposed to tell you that, but they give me so many rules, they can't seriously expect me to follow all of them."
Lark, to her surprise, found herself smiling back. "You should meet Miss Grimsby."
"I'm sorry I scared you."
"I wasn't scared," Lark said defensively.
"Startled you, then. I'm surprised you spotted me. You have good eyes."
Lark felt herself blush at the compliment. She tried to find a return compliment, and instead said, "You're not supposed to be spying on my anymore."
"I know," Alexandra said. "The inspector gave us a very stern lecture this evening." She deepened her voice, mimicking someone. "The planetside population has certain expectations regarding their civil liberties. We must respect those liberties. Above all, we must appear to re
spect those liberties, or we will lose their cooperation and our mission here will become more difficult."
She sounded so pompous that Lark giggled, and Alexandra giggled too.
"You seem nice," Lark said impulsively. "All the Skylanders I've met have been bossy."
"Really? Who have you met?"
Too late, Lark wondered if she should have held her tongue. "Well, there was a woman named Coe. And an old man named Denner, and some soldiers like you."
"Technically I'm a peacekeeping officer," Alexandra said. To Lark's relief she didn't sound offended. "Denner and Coe, huh? Yeah, I can see what you mean. They're a little bossy." She chuckled, then said, "You seem nice too. They told me all the dirt – all the groundsiders would hate me."
"Why would we hate you?"
Alexandra shrugged, the movement barely visible in the dark. "For being from Skyland."
"That's dumb."
The woman shrugged again.
They sat in silence for a time. Lark was cold now, but no way was she going inside. Things on the roof were much too interesting.
"What did you do?" Alexandra said at last.
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Why am I watching you?"
Lark stared at her, startled. "Didn't they tell you?"
"Nope." Alexandra sounded a little irritated. "They just told me to climb up here and keep an eye on your window. I wasn't supposed to show myself if I could help it, or make any noise. If you leave, I'm supposed to report it. If someone comes after you, I'm supposed to stop them." She patted the pistol on her hip. "That's why they put a person out here instead of a camera. Faster reaction time. They think someone might come after you."
"After me?" Lark sputtered. "But why? Who?"
"I don't know." Alexandra spread her hands. "They don’t tell me anything but where to show up."
Lark thought about it. "But I haven't told anyone!"
"Told anyone what?"
Fevridge, Lark reflected, would no doubt tell her to keep her mouth shut. But surely it was wrong to know about a possible terrorist spy and not tell anyone. She blurted out the story of the janitor with a gun on his hip and how the man left the building as soon as Lark spotted him. "I knew no one would believe me," she said. "So I didn't even tell."