“It’s the same woman, only younger,” he said.
DeRicci nodded. “That’s my take too.”
“That’s not from the Wygnin, is it?” He had asked that as a question, but he already knew the answer. He’d seen the images in the handheld. He just hadn’t seen them very clearly.
“It’s part of the warrant,” DeRicci said.
He stared at the face. The woman’s holo looked so innocent, so young. Both the innocence and the youth were gone from the woman below. She hadn’t moved the entire time he had stood there, although the father continued pacing.
The uniform still looked at the wall as if she could see through it. No one was talking below. It looked like they hadn’t even tried.
He remembered the little boy, his face streaked with tears, trying valiantly not to name his family, afraid his sisters would have to go in his place. Had the child known his mother had done something wrong? How could he? What parent would tell her child that his life would be forfeit for a crime she had committed long before he was born?
“What can we do?” Flint asked.
“I don’t know,” DeRicci said. “Challenge the warrant, maybe.”
“Based on what? The Wygnin will know when they see that woman that they have the right person. We did, and we hadn’t had as much time to study her image as they have.”
“There’s got to be something,” DeRicci said. “An eight-year-old child has a fully developed human personality. The Wygnin will destroy him.”
“Why didn’t these people think of that before they had children?” Flint murmured. “They knew the risks.”
“I guess they think they’re immune.” DeRicci punched the handheld and the holo-image went away.
“In some ways, they are,” Flint said. “It’s their children who pay.”
DeRicci’s gaze met his. “I’m going to the City Attorney.”
“You’re supposed to help me with the Rev.”
She slipped her hand-held in her pocket. “Look, Miles. I’m angry, tired, and discouraged. You want me to handle some delicate negotiations with the most volatile creatures we’ve ever run across?”
He didn’t, but he didn’t want her to get into trouble either. Besides, part of him wanted her to deal with the parents, not him. He didn’t want to think about losing a child, even if that child wasn’t his own.
“What can the city attorney do?” he asked.
“Maybe he’s run across this before,” DeRicci said.
“Reese? He’s so new he makes me seem like I’ve been detecting for years. He can’t help us.”
“We don’t know until we try.” DeRicci pushed past Flint and headed toward the door.
“DeRicci,” he said.
She stopped as her hand pushed against the double doors. “What?”
“Before you go, you might want to shower, change into a real uniform. Get the dust off your face.”
She brushed her cheek with her forefingers, then held them out, as if checking the veracity of his statement.
“I didn’t ask you before,” he said quietly, “but did you get hurt in that wreck?”
Her hand went toward her left arm, then stopped as if she had thought the better of it. She flashed him a self-deprecating smile. “No,” she said as she pushed her way out of the door. “Everything bounces off me.”
Then the door closed behind her, leaving him alone in the hall of mirrors, staring at a couple who were about to lose their oldest son.
Twenty
Jamal sat on one of the hard upholstered chairs in his hotel room. He had pushed it next to the window and had raised the privacy screen just enough so that he could see the street below.
A lot of people walked around in Armstrong Dome at night. He was used to Gagarin Dome with its strict ordinances and post-midnight curfews. No one would walk the streets in Gagarin. The police would pick them up and give them a stern lecture if they even tried.
He wished he were in Gagarin Dome now. All the people moving below made him nervous.
Jamal leaned his head on the wall and closed his eyes. As if anything could make him nervous. He was past nervous. His body had been cycling through every emotion it could find, apparently trying to find something other than complete and total loss to settle on.
Hakan Needahl had taken away the last of his hope. The lawyer had convinced Jamal that no one would take this case, no matter what he did. Not even if they looked at Ennis’s beautiful, innocent face, and realized he had nothing to do with this.
None of them wanted to be in the same position Jamal was.
He opened his eyes and sighed. His wife was asleep on the double bed, her body curled around Ennis’s, protective even in sleep. Ennis clutched Mr. Biscuit, as if the loss of the stuffed dog had been worse than the loss of his home.
The boy had snuffled himself to sleep, and nothing Dylani had done could soothe him. Ennis probably sensed how his parents were feeling. Their fears were only enhancing his.
There had to be a solution. Jamal just had to find it.
His brain didn’t work the way it used to, searching for all the angles, finding all the hidden loopholes. He’d been a passive, quiet man for the past decade, and it had changed how he thought.
Right now, he needed the man he had been, the man who had gotten him into this trouble.
The man who had placed five huge office buildings on sacred Wygnin land.
Jamal tried to shake that memory away, but it didn’t work. If he closed his eyes, he could will himself back to Korsve when the shuttle touched down. He had been newly promoted, one of the fastest rising executives his corporation had ever seen, and he believed he could conquer whatever world he was sent to.
He’d even met the Wygnin before and had gotten along with them, which was why the corporation had sent him to Korsve. They believed he would work well with the Wygnin, that his management would make a success out of the company’s branch on Korsve.
Instead, he disgraced them all, got charged with criminal negligence by the Wygnin, and had to Disappear.
And the corporation had been lucky because it hadn’t had to take the blame. His name had been on each decision. The trail had led directly back to him because he had wanted credit for his brilliance.
His stupidity, actually.
He looked at Ennis, asleep next to Dylani. Jamal had never really imagined a child, never really imagined what it would mean to lose one.
The counselor at Disappearance Inc had told him he was lucky all those years ago. She had said that his parents were too old to be of interest in that Wygnin warrant, and since he was an only child, the line would die out with him.
All he had to do was remain in hiding, and make certain he had no children.
Perhaps this was why the Wygnin behaved the way they did. Punishing a man by imprisoning him or even by putting him to death seemed simplistic. Taking away something he loved was a lot more sophisticated, creating a void that would never be filled.
Just like Jamal had done on Korsve.
He closed his eyes again, saw the pristine piece of property, just outside the Wygnin’s only city. The property had been near a river that had flowed red down a mountainside. Flowers grew along its bank, and out of a granite rock cropping that looked as sturdy as anything Jamal had ever seen.
He had come late to Korsve, so he hadn’t heard the warnings. The Wygnin didn’t completely understand property rights. They often sold the same piece of property over and over again, commenting on the foolishness of humans who thought land could be altered.
Even then no one had really understood that the only inhabited continent on Korsve was strewn with natural caves and hollowed-out boulders that made great dwellings. The city itself was a naturally occurring boulderfield that had been modified just enough to allow Wygnin to live together in large numbers.
The Wygnin did manufacture things, from glass for windows to a substance that was very rocklike, which they used to seal the boulder homes from the weather.
But they did not build homes and office buildings from scratch.
When they first saw humans doing that, they had been appalled, and the humans had misunderstood. They had thought that they had chosen the wrong piece of land—because of the nestlings or because of the land’s history.
They had never thought that building and altering the landscape was foreign to the Wygnin in and of itself.
In fact, the way that humans learned about that was through Jamal.
He sighed and stood, feeling restless. His conversation with Needahl had continued long after the man had said no one would work for Jamal. Jamal tried various arguments, hoping to engage Needahl’s restless intellect.
Apparently Needahl had had a strategy in mind, because his attitude had changed completely after he had seen the warrant.
“This child is young enough,” Needahl had said again. “He will survive the ordeal and not understand what he has lost.”
But Jamal would. He had even asked if Needahl would recommend a new Disappearance service.
“I’m an officer of the court,” Needahl had said. “Disappearance services break the law. I cannot give you this information. I’d be contributing to a crime.”
And he’d ended the conversation shortly after that.
Jamal had no money to hire a Disappearance service. But maybe he could make a deal with one.
He stood, and paced, careful to move quietly so that he wouldn’t wake his sleeping wife and child.
If he explained everything to Dylani, she would be furious at him. She might want him out of her life. He could convince her to Disappear with Ennis, and he would pay all the fees for their Disappearance by indenturing himself to them if he had to. He’d give them whatever paycheck he had for as long as they wanted, if only they’d guarantee that his son and his wife would be safe.
He now knew that no guarantee was forever. But he had to do something. Anything. So long as the Wygnin didn’t take Ennis. He didn’t care what happened to him as long as his son had a chance to remain human and survive.
* * *
With the addition of the interpreter, the interrogation room seemed even smaller. Or maybe Flint felt that way because two of the Rev—not the two Flint had spoken with—had emotion collars fanned out around their tiny faces.
The emotion collars, like other Rev limbs, seemed invisible when they were at rest. When they appeared, they often startled the unprepared observer.
In some ways, Flint thought the emotion collars the most disturbing Rev feature of all. The collars—which had an entirely different name in the Rev language—had been named by early human colonists on Revnata because the flaps of skin resembled the ruffled collars Elizabethans wore in England in the sixteenth century. The collars changed color as a Rev’s emotion deepened—starting at pale white and moving all the way to a maroon when the Rev’s emotion was at its height.
The problem with emotion collars was that they responded to any strong emotion; Flint couldn’t tell if these Rev were angry or were feeling something else. These Rev emotion collars were still pale white but their eyes had bulged out even further than usual.
The Rev Flint had spoken with initially was standing very close to the interpreter. The interpreter had taken the chair nearest the door. He huddled against it, his feet braced as if he were ready to run at any moment.
When the interpreter realized Flint was there, he said, “I thought you were going to be right back.”
There was an edge of panic to his voice that Flint didn’t like. “What’s been going on here?”
“They’re getting upset that no one is working with them. Apparently they thought I had some kind of authority.”
Flint nodded, made sure the door was closed tightly, then stepped farther into the room. The smell of ginger was even stronger than it had been before. His eyes watered.
“I’m sorry,” Flint said in English. “I was checking on some information for you.”
The interpreter repeated Flint’s words in Rev, starting to speak almost at the same time Flint had. Flint caught enough of the interpreter’s words to realize the man was doing his job correctly. From that moment on, Flint wouldn’t worry about the translations.
“Have you brought the woman?” the Rev asked.
“I need to see your warrant,” Flint said.
The Rev turned to one of his companions, the other Rev without the obvious emotion collar. His left upper arm moved above his robe, reaching into its side and removing a piece of ridged Revina silk. He handed it to Flint.
Flint had seen Rev warrants like this one before. The Revina silk acted like a screen on an ancient palmtop. The Rev had thoughtfully set the warrant on its English version. Flint studied it.
The accompanying image was of a thinner, brittle-looking version of the woman he had seen in the decontamination unit. She looked no older now; she’d obviously had some expensive enhancements.
Flint thought it odd that someone who was on the run from the Rev for—he glanced again at the warrant—seven years hadn’t bothered to have her features changed.
“The name here is the one you used earlier,” he said to the Rev. “Ekaterina Maakestad.”
“Yes,” the Rev said. “I thought we had covered this.”
“We have no one in Armstrong with that name.”
“She has changed it then,” the Rev said.
“The warrant is unspecific,” Flint said. “It only demands that we release her into your custody for an undetermined period of years. What has she done, and what will become of her?”
The second part of his question was unusual and he knew it. But he asked it anyway, hoping that the Rev would answer without hesitating.
“She will be placed in a Rev penal colony,” the Rev said. “We have several for non-Rev now. The workload is lighter, more suited to the weaker physique of the human. She will labor for us for ten to twenty years, depending on her health and her abilities to continue her duties. Then, depending on her conduct, she will be exiled from Revnata and all its satellites after five more years of contemplation.”
As Rev sentences went, this was a light one. The interpreter knew that as well because he gave Flint a sideways look.
“You’ve been searching for her for a long time,” Flint said. “Yet it sounds like her crime is not a great one.”
“It is an important one,” the Rev said. “She is an example of what can go wrong in the relationships between our peoples.”
Clearly some Rev had made that argument with the Multicultural Tribunal and won.
“So what has she done?” Flint asked.
“Her crime is not the issue here,” the Rev said. “You must turn her over into our custody.”
The interpreter’s voice shook as he said that last. Flint followed his gaze. He was looking at the two emotion collars. They were turning pale yellow.
Even though the spokesrev was remaining calm, his companions were not.
Flint did not look at them again. He didn’t want their agitation to affect him. But his eyes were still watering from the ginger smell and his palms were getting damp.
“I agree,” he said. “Her crime is not the issue. She’s been tried and found guilty under your laws, and that decision was upheld by an interstellar court.”
The Rev emotion collars were turning white again.
“However,” he said, “the woman who came in on that yacht says her name is Greta Palmer. Her history says she has never been anywhere except the Mars and Earth, and so I can’t turn her over to you.”
“You are required to.” The Rev shook the silk at Flint.
“I am required to turn Ekaterina Maakestad over to you,” Flint said. “Not Greta Palmer.”
“You know they are the same woman,” the Rev said.
“I suspect they are,” Flint said. “Which is why, if you tell me what she’s done, I can talk to her, see if she makes some kind of slip-up.”
“That seems like a lot of work for nothing,” the Rev said. “Tes
t her DNA. Then we’ll have clear proof.”
“That’ll take even more time,” Flint said. “Under our laws, I need probable cause to extract DNA from another human. All I have is the fact that she arrived under rather mysterious circumstances. I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise much on that route. However, if I speak with her, I might be able to expedite this.”
He hoped he wouldn’t have to keep track of his lies. He was making this up as he went along—and he hoped it was obvious to no one except himself.
The Rev swiveled his head one-hundred-and-eighty degrees so that he could look at his companions. Their emotion collars were still white. Apparently they had bought Flint’s story as well.
The Rev swiveled his head back toward Flint. “Ekaterina Maakestad practiced law on Revnata. She used deception to win her client’s acquittal.”
Flint let his surprise show. He had not expected this. “Her human client?”
“No. It is complicated.” For the first time since Flint had entered the room, the Rev looked at the interpreter. They spoke for a moment, and Flint only caught half of the interchange. Something about making sure he got all of the details right.
The interpreter was shaking so badly that he looked like he might come apart. Flint doubted that the man would ever cross the Rev. He wondered why the Rev suspected it.
“Most interstellar cases are complicated,” Flint said, when the consultation had finished.
“Not like this one,” the Rev said. “Ekaterina Maakestad defended many clients, most of them human, but in this case, her client was Rev. She represented him before a Rev court. Do you know what that means?”
Flint shook his head. Obviously all of these details were important to the Rev, but he had no idea why.
“When a human represents a human before a Rev court, the rules are different. We know that your people do not always understand our laws, and we are more lenient, particularly with your attorneys.”
Flint nodded, wondering how many human lawyers practicing on Rev worlds knew that.
“But when a human attorney has the temerity to take a Rev client, we assume she knows Rev law.”
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