“Believe me, sir,” she said to Reese, “you don’t want to see him.”
Reese gave her a cool stare. “I do. I want to know what we’re fighting for.”
We’re fighting to keep human children human, DeRicci thought. We’re fighting to make sure some weird alien race doesn’t warp this kid’s mind and make him into something that’s not Wygnin either.
Instead, she said, “Sir, I don’t know what Mrs. Wilder said to you, but trust me, you don’t want to see that kid.”
“Why not?” Reese faced her. He was taller than she was, broad-shouldered and muscular. He looked more like a soccer player than a lawyer.
“Because if we lose this, that kid will haunt your dreams at night. You’ll never be able to close your eyes again.”
“I take it you’ve seen him,” Reese said.
DeRicci shook her head. “I learned that lesson a long time ago, sir.”
He sighed. Part of the problem, she would wager, was that he wasn’t used to waiting on others. He was used to being the one in charge. But his specialty was local government regulations and Armstrong law. He knew nothing about Disappeareds and had admitted it the moment DeRicci had barged into his office.
Maybe if he had known something about Disappeareds, he wouldn’t have sent for the Wilder family and he wouldn’t have called in Carryth. He would have told DeRicci to cut her losses and leave.
Then the door to the conference room opened. The father came out. He was even smaller in person, his back hunched, his eyes hollow. If anything, his face seemed paler than it had in the holding room.
It took him a moment to focus on DeRicci’s face. “I’m supposed to wait out here.”
He sounded bewildered.
“Who told you that?” Reese asked.
Wilder looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.
“You have the right to be inside,” Reese was saying, apparently not noticing the odd expression on Wilder’s face. “It’s your child, after all—”
“Sir.” DeRicci put a hand on his wool sleeve, silencing him.
“My wife,” Wilder said, as if his answer came through a time-delayed Earth-Moon communications hook-up. “My wife begged me to leave.”
“Sometimes it’s better for one spouse to handle a case,” DeRicci said. She knew why the wife wanted him out of there. The wife wanted to tell Carryth the truth.
“Nonsense,” Reese said. “It’s—”
DeRicci squeezed harder on his arm. As much trouble as she had gotten into the past twenty-four hours, manhandling the city attorney shouldn’t make matters any worse.
“Sir,” DeRicci said. “Why don’t you take Mr. Wilder for some breakfast. I’m sure he hasn’t eaten—”
“No.” Wilder spoke with a firmness that DeRicci didn’t think he was capable of. “They want you inside.”
“All right,” DeRicci said. “Then I’ll take you.”
“Both of you,” Wilder said.
Reese studied him for a moment, the situation suddenly becoming clear to him. DeRicci hadn’t mentioned her suspicions to him when she had first talked with him—that the wife hadn’t told her husband about her experiences on Korsve. DeRicci had assumed Reese would understand that. More often than not, Disappeareds did not confide anything about their previous lives to their current mates.
“She did something, didn’t she?” Wilder asked, his voice cracking. “Something that made the Wygnin angry. And she was afraid to tell me. She should have told me. We could have done something, rather than wait for those creatures to steal one of our children. For God’s sake, we have two others.”
Then he blinked at DeRicci. “Is that why you people insisted on guards for the other two?”
“It’s standard in cases like this,” DeRicci lied. And it probably would have been if there were cases like this. But, to her knowledge, no one had ever caught the Wygnin with questionable warrants before.
“Are we all in danger?” he asked.
Reese came closer. “Mr. Wilder, we’re doing what we can—”
“But will it be enough?” Wilder asked. “My son is at stake, my whole family. You don’t know what that’s like.”
“No.” Behind Wilder’s back, Reese gestured toward the assistant. “I don’t. But we’ll help you in any way we can.”
The assistant approached. Her gaze met Wilder’s, and then he looked away.
“Let Haru take you downstairs, get you something to eat, let you rest while we go inside. I promise, we’ll do the best thing possible for your family.”
DeRicci tensed. Reese was making a foolish promise. They might try to do the best thing possible, but they probably wouldn’t be able to. All of them were restricted by interstellar law.
The assistant took Wilder by the arm and spoke to him as if he were a child. Apparently she had done this before. Wilder glanced over his shoulder once, the expression on his face both desperate and resigned. Then he turned a corner, out of view, and DeRicci sighed with relief.
“This doesn’t get easier,” she said to Reese.
His lips thinned. “Let’s go join the meeting.”
He pulled open the conference room door. The room was completely sealed, no windows and a lot of artificial lighting. The wall had built-in panels that looked like rotating panoramas, but apparently they had been shut off too.
As elegant as the room was, it felt more like a prison than some of the cells that DeRicci had seen.
Justine Wilder sat at the end of the table as if she were getting ready to run a board meeting, her hands folded on the fake mahogany surface. Carryth sat beside her, hunched forward like a desperate lover.
Carryth looked more like DeRicci’s expectations. He was so thin that he was gaunt, and his eyes were too small for his face. He had had a cheap enhancement done on his hair to cover a bald spot, and the hair had grown in thicker and a different color. Since the enhancement was on his crown, he probably didn’t even notice.
“Mr. Wilder said you wanted us in here,” Reese said.
Carryth nodded. “Since I’m technically working for you here and not for Mrs. Wilder, we need your approval for our plan.”
“Then what am I doing here?” DeRicci asked.
Carryth’s dark gaze met hers. “You’re the only one of us who has talked with the Wygnin about this case. I figure you might have some insights.”
DeRicci nodded, doubting he was right, but willing to stay here. She was too tired to be searching for Palmer—if, indeed, Palmer was still on the run—and she really didn’t want to face either the Rev or the Wygnin. If she stayed here, she wouldn’t be called upon to do any of that.
“However,” Carryth said, “whatever we say in this room is privileged and cannot be spoken of outside of here. If you cannot agree to that, then you’ll have to leave.”
DeRicci sank into the nearest chair. It had a soft upholstered seat, which she did not expect, and was very comfortable. “I can keep secrets.”
“Good.” Carryth turned toward Justine Wilder. “Mrs. Wilder, do you want to tell them the history?”
Reese sat beside Justine Wilder and gave her a warm smile. She did not smile in return. If anything, she seemed even more tightly wound than she had in the holding room. DeRicci had the odd sense that if she touched Mrs. Wilder, the woman would shatter.
“My husband,” Mrs. Wilder said, her voice husky and low, “knows nothing about any of this. I’ll have to tell him, but I prefer to tell him my way. All right?”
DeRicci nodded. Reese opened his mouth as if he were going to point out that the confidentiality agreement covered this, but Carryth stopped him with a slight shake of the head.
“The Wygnin’s warrant is valid.” Justine Wilder bowed her head. “I lived on Korsve fifteen years ago, before I met my husband. I had a different name then—the name on the warrant.”
It was as if she were still afraid to mention that name. Maybe the habit of hiding her identity had gotten so ingrained that she couldn’t speak th
e name any more.
“I was the CEO of a small firm that specialized in bottled water products for outlying colonies. The water on Korsve is particularly pure and the Wygnin have no qualms about selling it. They do it themselves now.”
DeRicci hadn’t known that.
“It’s in one of their caves, of course. Just a big one, with tons of high grade equipment that they bought from us. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”
DeRicci wondered how the woman could sound so calm when her body was so tense. Perhaps it was the skill that had gotten her through the past fifteen years.
“I loved Korsve. You have no idea how beautiful it is there.” Mrs. Wilder smiled slightly with the memory. “But we didn’t understand the Wygnin. No one did. I’m not sure we still do.”
Then her gaze met DeRicci’s and DeRicci felt cold.
“They sold me some land in a nearby forest. I built my dream house there.” Mrs. Wilder’s voice started to shake. “We felled some trees to expand the view and covered over some moss growing on the forest floor. The Wygnin got really upset. They—”
Her voice broke. She put a hand to her mouth. Carryth gave her an encouraging smile, but she didn’t seem to see it.
After a moment, he took up the story. “The Wygnin claimed that Mrs. Wilder had committed mass murder.”
DeRicci’s mouth went dry, even though she had expected this. “Nestlings?”
Nestlings were native Korsve creatures that looked like plants. At first, humans had thought the Wygnin considered the Nestlings food. Later, it turned out that the Nestlings were sentient and the moss that Mrs. Wilder mentioned were made from a spiderweb-like material that the Nestlings used to build egg sacks.
“Nestlings and tree nymphs,” Carryth said. “Over a hundred of each.”
Tree nymphs lived inside the hollow trees in that part of Korsve. Like the Wygnin, they did not build their own dwellings but used what they found. Unlike the Wygnin, they never built anything else either. Tree nymphs were hunter-gatherers who had who trafficked in ideas rather than in anything material.
“Were these charges true?” DeRicci asked.
Mrs. Wilder nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “We offered reparations. Money, whatever they would take.”
“And they wanted your children.”
“The first-borns,” she whispered. “All of them, from everyone in the company.”
“But it was your house,” Reese said.
“The Wygnin believe in a life for a life,” Carryth said. “Either Mrs. Wilder could have agreed to indenture her family to the Wygnin in perpetuity or they would have to find other human lives, preferably from her company.”
“The Wygnin thought this was a reasonable offer,” she said, brushing at her eyes. “They were only taking about half the lives in payment, and they weren’t requiring all of them to be from my family. The problem was that while I was single and childless, most of my employees were not. And we didn’t have a big enough staff on Korsve. We would have had to use other employees from other parts of the colonized universe.”
DeRicci clasped her hands and then rubbed her thumbs, one on top of the other. She knew better than to speak at the moment.
“Didn’t these employees sign the standard interstellar waiver?” Reese asked.
He was such an attorney, thinking about the legal end and not the human one. The interstellar waiver had been developed as it became clear that interstellar trading required a relaxation of human laws. The employees of a company were often asked to sign the waiver, which required them to submit to all laws of the worlds on which the company they worked for did business.
“Of course they signed,” Mrs. Wilder said. “But how would you like it if someone you never met told you that you had to give up your oldest child because the CEO of your company built a house on top of a native nesting ground?”
Reese covered his mouth. DeRicci continued to rub her thumbs together. It didn’t matter how many stories she heard like this, she never ever got used to them.
“So I went to the Wygnin,” Mrs. Wilder said, “and I asked them what else I could do. I said that I was the one at fault, that my company had nothing to do with this, and I’d be willing to sacrifice anything to keep them out of it.”
“So they demanded your first-born,” DeRicci said.
“No,” Mrs. Wilder said. “They were beginning to understand humans by then. They realized that reproduction wasn’t an imperative for us, that many of us had no children at all. Instead, they demanded that we close up shop, give them the business, and then teach them how to run it.”
“I’d never heard of anything like that from the Wygnin,” Reese said, which didn’t surprise DeRicci. She doubted he knew much about the Wygnin at all. But she hadn’t heard anything like that either.
“Then they issued a warrant that said they had the right to my first-born and should I not have a child within the next twenty years, they could take me.” She rubbed her eyes, the first real overt sign of strain.
“Why didn’t they take you right then and there?” Reese asked, confirming DeRicci’s hunch.
Mrs. Wilder gave him a sad smile. “They prefer children. Infants, really. So that they can mold them, make them Wygnin.”
“They can’t—”
“They try,” DeRicci said. “They come close, too. I’ve met some of the adults they’d taken as children. These people look human, sort of, but they have no concept of who and what we are.”
Reese shook his head. “Human is human.”
“We’re learning that it isn’t.” Carryth spoke softly, but firmly. It was clear he wanted to move this meeting forward and Reese was getting in the way. “Go on, Mrs. Wilder.”
She seemed to tense even more. “After that meeting, my lawyers recommended that I go to a Disappearance service so that I could go on living my life without fear. So I did. I spent the last of my money buying a new identity. They promised me that I’d never have to worry about the Wygnin again. That was fifteen years ago. I was cautious at first, but then I figured they were right. The Wygnin had the business. They didn’t need me.”
DeRicci frowned. She had never heard of a Disappearance service making such a promise. “They guaranteed that you’d be all right?”
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Carryth said to her as if they were the only two in the room.
“They said because my case was so unusual, they doubted the Wygnin would try to keep track of me.” Mrs. Wilder shook her head. “I believed them.”
“You think the Wygnin tracked you from the beginning?” Reese asked.
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Wilder said.
“I’m sure they didn’t,” DeRicci said. “Or they would have taken your son when he was an infant. They found you just recently.”
“It doesn’t matter why they waited so long,” Mrs. Wilder said. “The key is that he’s too old to go with them. They’ll destroy him.”
DeRicci made herself sit very still. She didn’t want to agree with that statement even though she knew it was true. She didn’t even want to think about it. She had protected herself from seeing that child for just this reason: she knew she would be bound by law to give him to the Wygnin.
“You said you had a solution,” Reese said to Carryth.
“It’s a gamble,” he said. “And the city would have to take responsibility for it. If the Wygnin refuse our offer, then we’ll have to go along with their original warrant.”
Reese shook his head. He was clearly going to say that wasn’t possible, so DeRicci spoke instead.
“We’ll follow the law,” she said.
Reese frowned at her. “You came to me to see if we didn’t have to, and I don’t think this is just. We can’t—”
“We can and we do,” DeRicci said. “Usually you don’t hear about it because everything is very clear. This one wasn’t. And that gives us an edge, doesn’t it, Mr. Carryth?”
“Actually, no. The warrant is in order,” he said. “I’ve been s
tudying it and its history. Only if you take them together do they give us a loophole.”
DeRicci felt her breath catch. Even though she had wanted this, she hadn’t expected it.
“Initially, the Wygnin wanted an infant that they could mold. Jasper Wilder is as unsuitable as an adult is. The warrant allows only for the first born or Mrs. Wilder to be taken, not any other children.”
“You know this for sure?” DeRicci asked.
“It was my first question,” Mrs. Wilder said. “My daughter is 18 months old.”
DeRicci nodded.
“On this, the warrant is very clear, and we’re lucky for that. Which leaves the Wygnin with an unsatisfactory revenge. They don’t get the family member they were expecting to make up for all the loss that Mrs. Wilder inadvertently caused.”
“Stop the lawyer-speak,” DeRicci said, “and be plain.”
“The warrant says they’ll settle for me if I have no children.” Mrs. Wilder’s voice had strength in it for the first time. “Mr. Carryth believes we can successfully argue that my firstborn is not a suitable child.”
“So?” Reese said.
But DeRicci was already ahead of them. She felt a shiver of horror run through her. “You’re going to offer yourself?”
Mrs. Wilder nodded. “I’m the one who made the mistake, committed the crime according to their laws. I’m the one who should be punished, not Jasper.”
DeRicci leaned forward. “You know this is worse than dying. You know they’ll try to graft a Wygnin personality on you, and it’ll probably drive you insane.”
Mrs. Wilder’s gaze met hers. “They’d do the same thing to Jasper.”
DeRicci shook her head. “This isn’t acceptable. There has to be another solution.”
“The Wygnin have a valid warrant,” Carryth said. “Someone has to pay for this crime.”
“It was a misunderstanding,” Reese said.
“A misunderstanding that cost a lot of lives.” Mrs. Wilder folded her hands on the table, somehow managing to remain calm. “It’s all right, Detective. I’m willing to go.”
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