“What does your husband say?”
“He doesn’t know,” she said. “We wanted to see if the city would back us in this negotiation first.”
Reese’s mouth turned down at the corners as if he had tasted something sour. “You’ve gone through all the options?” he asked Carryth.
“We’re lucky to have this one,” Carryth said.
“Lucky,” DeRicci repeated, not believing it.
“Lucky,” Mrs. Wilder said firmly.
Reese closed his eyes and sighed. “Then we’ll back you,” he said. “We have no other choice.”
Twenty-Two
“Jamal?”
He opened his eyes. His neck hurt, and his right foot tingled because the blood flow had been cut off.
He had fallen asleep sitting up in the chair beside the window, in the Moon’s crummiest hotel room.
“Jamal?” Dylani had a hand on Ennis’s back. The boy was sprawled on his stomach, his head turned, sucking his thumb. One of his arms was wrapped around Mr. Biscuit.
“I’m sorry, Dylani,” Jamal said. “I guess I dozed.”
“Do you think the police are going to contact us today?”
He blinked, sat up straight, and moved his foot. Only one side had fallen asleep. The other side was just fine. “I don’t know.”
“How can they just expect us to stay here? Will the Wygnin come for Ennis again?”
Probably. If he didn’t figure out what to do. But he felt like there was nothing left to do, unless he found a Disappearance service. The last time, his company had recommended one. This time, he had no idea who to turn to.
“Jamal?”
“I don’t know, Dylani.”
She sat up. Ennis made a soft sound of protest, but otherwise didn’t move. For an active baby boy, he had been very subdued the last twelve hours. Jamal wondered if the police had a doctor on staff that they would let him use at no charge.
Probably not. Everything had its cost. He kept forgetting that.
“Why did they target us?” she asked. “Do they just do that? Target innocent people? Steal babies for no real reason? Can’t they have babies of their own?”
She didn’t know. Of course she didn’t know. Most people didn’t. The changes that had evolved over the years had come gradually, and the protests were small, and rarely covered on the news. This is the price we pay for interstellar commerce, Jamal’s old boss used to say, and Jamal later learned that it was the party line, not just for corporations, but for the Earth Alliance as well.
The price they all paid—the price Jamal was facing—was the Alliance’s dirty little secret, someone else’s problem, something that would go away once humans learned how to interact with the aliens.
Or so the rationale went.
And Dylani had never faced any of this. She was an engineer who knew dome mechanics. She never had to deal with all the subtleties of interstellar law, the vast differences between races and cultures, the way that a wink could be a friendly gesture to one group of people and a hostile one to another.
She was in an unfamiliar world, and he hadn’t helped her understand it.
“No, Dylani,” Jamal said. “It’s like the police said. The Wygnin always believe they have cause.”
There were lines on her face that hadn’t been there the week before. Her eyes looked sunken, and some of her prettiness was gone.
Then he realized she had asked the question deliberately. Her sharp mind was manipulating him, using everything she knew of him to pull information from him.
“What cause could they possibly have?” she asked.
He froze. He had known that she would ask this question eventually, had known that he would have to give her some kind of answer, but he didn’t know what to say.
“They’re not saying,” he said after a moment.
Her gaze met his, and he couldn’t tell if she believed him or not. She had to suspect something. After all, he was taking the point on this. He had talked to the attorney alone. He had asked questions of the authorities that she hadn’t even thought of.
Up until this crisis in their lives together, she had been the one who had been the strongest, who had been in charge and in control. It had to have been hard for her to take the passive role here, but she had done so without complaint.
“What do you know that I don’t, Jamal?” she asked quietly.
Ennis gave a soft cry and pulled Mr. Biscuit closer, ending the moment. Jamal let out a small sigh and stood, stretching, hoping that Dylani didn’t feel his relief.
She rubbed her hand over their son’s back, soothing him. “You insisted on meeting with the attorney alone, so you must know something.”
Her expression hadn’t changed. The even rhythm of her hand on Ennis’s back was the same also. Yet something in her voice alerted him to buried anger.
Buried anger and suspicion.
Jamal sighed again. Partial truth was all he had the courage for. “I asked him if he’d help us find a Disappearance service.”
Her eyes widened. He’d seen them do that so often, in passion, in anger, but never in this kind of shock—or was it fear? He had only seen fear once before and that was a few days ago, when she thought Ennis was gone for good.
“Leave everything?” she asked.
“If we have to,” Jamal said.
“Isn’t that like admitting we did something wrong?”
“No,” Jamal said.
“But we don’t need to Disappear. They have the wrong family. They can’t have Ennis because we’re not the people they’re looking for.”
“It’s not like human law,” Jamal said. “We have to prove we’re the wrong people, and no one will take our case.”
“I thought that’s what the police are doing,” she said. “I thought they’re making sure the Wygnin have the right children.”
“Yes,” Jamal said. “Making sure they have the right children.”
Dylani’s hand finally stopped rubbing Ennis’s back. Her long fingers extended around his small ribcage. He was breathing easily, asleep, his thumb falling out of his mouth.
“You make that sound like there’s bad in that,” she said.
He nodded. “If the Wygnin convince the police that Ennis is the right child, nothing we can say will prove them wrong.”
“But—”
“No buts, Dylani. Simple truth.”
“The lawyer explained that to you?”
He confirmed it, but Jamal had already known it. “Yes. If that happens, the Wygnin will take Ennis.”
“Surely that lawyer is wrong. I think we should go to someone else. I think that he lied to you about no one wanting to take the case. I think—”
“He didn’t lie, Dylani. He says no one is willing to face the Wygnin any more. And why would anyone be willing, when they can lose something so very precious?”
This time she looked down at Ennis. Her hand moved up and down with each of his deep breaths. “Are we going to lose him, Jamal?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But you think so.”
“We’re out of options, Dylani.”
“What about the Disappearance services?” she asked.
“The lawyer wouldn’t recommend any. Said he can’t as an officer of the court.”
“So we find one.”
“They’re expensive,” Jamal said.
“It’s Ennis,” she said. “We’ll do what we can.”
Jamal nodded. “We might be able to afford to send only one of us away.”
Her mouth opened slightly. “You mean send him by himself?”
“Yes,” Jamal said.
“But then we’d lose him.”
“Yes.”
She blinked, looked down, took a deep breath. All of her maneuvers to prevent herself from bursting into tears.
“I still don’t see why you’d have to meet with the attorney alone to talk about Disappearance services,” she said after a moment.
“I wanted hi
m to make it possible for you to disappear with Ennis.”
“Me?”
Jamal nodded.
“Then what would you do?”
He met her gaze. No matter what happened they would never be the same. Their relationship would change; their feelings toward the world, toward each other, toward Ennis, would all change.
“I would stay here and work off the debt,” he said.
“You could have told me that plan,” she said.
“You would have tried to talk me out of it.”
“And you’re telling me this now because he wouldn’t help us?”
Jamal nodded. “I don’t know how to proceed any more, Dylani. I’m afraid if the Wygnin see us approach a Disappearance service, they’ll think we’re guilty. And we can’t ask anyone else to intercede for us without jeopardizing them too.”
“We could hide on our own,” Dylani said.
He wished it were that simple. “We don’t have the resources.”
“We can find the money.”
“It’s not the money,” he said. “Do you know how to get false identification that holds up? Do you know someone who’ll do illegal enhancements without approaching the police?”
She blinked again, shook her head. “We’re at their mercy, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think we are.”
* * *
Flint sat at his office desk, hunched over the computer screen. The Rev had gotten him thinking. He had suspected that the link between the cases had to do with Disappeareds, but he wasn’t certain until the Rev mentioned that Palmer/Maakestad was one. That meant that the yachts probably belonged to a Disappearance service, and the service had probably bought them in bulk.
He had a forensic team trying to recover the serial number from Maakestad’s yacht, and the Port would try to recover one from the Disty vengeance killing, but he didn’t have that kind of time. He wanted to have answers immediately.
As he reached the First Rank Detective Unit, he had received a message on his link that the Rev had turned over the crew of the Maakestad yacht. They were spacesick, as the Rev had claimed, and there was evidence of mistreatment, probably when the Rev learned that the crew had let Maakestad escape.
But he wasn’t going to deal with the Rev yet. He wanted this information first. He plugged images of the yachts into the databases, along with the modifications on both ships, hoping that some port would have the original manifestos of both ships.
He also found the make, model, and year of the yachts and sent that through other databases, trying to find out who had bought more than one, maybe even recently.
As the computer worked, he got up and went to the snack vendor. Someone had left a box of fresh croissants beside it, a morning favor that day shift sometimes did them. He took one, and reminded himself to bring in something soon. He also poured himself some coffee.
The door to the Unit slammed open, and DeRicci came in. Her hair was even messier than before, but her face was clean and she had put on different clothes.
“There you are,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“My link is on,” he said.
“I didn’t want to go through a link. Are we alone up here?”
“I don’t know.” He hadn’t looked to see who else was working this early in the morning. Obviously someone else had been here because of the croissants.
He grabbed one more for DeRicci, even though she grimaced at him. “Get yourself some coffee,” he said, “and join me in my office.”
He sounded like the senior partner in the team. He thought that odd. Maybe their power relationship had changed since he had met with the chief, saving them both.
DeRicci didn’t question him. She poured herself coffee, her hand shaking so badly that she almost spilled it on herself, then followed him to his office.
He sat behind the desk as she closed the door. He put her croissant on a napkin near the edge of the desk, and she set her coffee down carefully as if she didn’t trust herself not to spill.
“What is it?” he asked.
She sank into her chair. “I’m going to quit, Miles. I thought you should be the first to know.”
Even after all they’d been through in the last few days, he was surprised. “Why?”
“Because I can’t do this any more. They can’t expect me to continue doing this.”
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Offering up sacrifices to the goddamn aliens!” Her voice rose on that last, and he glanced at the door, wondering if anyone heard.
“Sacrifices?” he repeated. “Jasper?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”
He froze. “They want all of the children now?”
DeRicci shook her head. “The mother. The mother did something really stupid, and she’s going to go instead of the kid. If—and this is a big if—if the Wygnin agree.”
Flint set down his croissant. He understood the mother’s impulse. He would have done the same for Emmeline if he’d had the chance.
DeRicci stood up and stalked around the small office. “We have to stand by when the Wygnin take that bright, interesting, intelligent woman and destroy everything that makes her who she is. Why can’t we punish her? Our laws are humane.”
Flint’s stomach churned. The coffee he’d been using to stay awake wasn’t sitting well with him any more.
“You don’t think what she did is worth a life,” he said.
“No, I don’t!” DeRicci stopped near the door, peered out of it, then shook her head.
“But the Wygnin do.”
Her shoulders slumped. “I know. That’s why we have the interstellar agreements, so that we can prosecute crimes in our own ways. It sounds so good in theory, but I’m the one who gets to practice it. I’m the one who has to send this poor woman to the Wygnin, knowing what they’ll do. Even if her husband manages to turn the warrant around, she’ll never come back intact.”
He knew that. “You think the Wygnin will accept the woman?”
“Yes, I do,” DeRicci said.
“So you’re angry that you met her.”
“Yes!” DeRicci whirled.
“Because you tried so hard not to see the children in case you’d have to give them up.”
“I’m already haunted, Miles. I don’t need another goddamn face.”
“Haunted?” he asked.
She closed her eyes and slumped against the door. She was thinner than she had been when he met her, the bones on her face prominent. Had she been forgetting to eat? Or was the strain of the last few days so much that she was burning up fuel at an alarming rate?
“Sit down,” he said.
She sighed, opened her eyes, and returned to her chair. She picked up the croissant, but did not eat it.
“Did you ever look at my file?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It’s none of my business.”
“Jeez, you show amazing restraint.”
He smiled. “You looked at mine, then.”
“Of course,” she said. “I wanted to know what I was getting into.”
“So what would I have found in your file?”
She set the croissant back down, as if she couldn’t face eating it. “I refused to give a teenage boy to the Disty.”
“The Disty?” Flint hadn’t expected that. Maybe something with the Wygnin, but not a different alien group.
She nodded. “He hadn’t done anything. Not really. But they decided he’d committed cross-cultural contamination, and the Eighth Multicultural upheld.”
“What did he do?”
“He taught a hatchling to speak English.”
The Disty had three kinds of offspring: male, female and hatchling. The hatchling was a genderless being that had no value in Disty society. At a certain age, a hatchling, regardless of intelligence or its parents’ social status, left the home and went to a special school where it learned the art of service.
Non
-Disty rarely saw hatchlings, who usually returned to the family home as servants. A lot of humans who had casual contact with the Disty didn’t even know hatchlings existed.
“How did he meet the hatchling?” Flint asked.
“He grew up next door to it,” DeRicci said. “They were friends. He did this before he turned ten.”
“Before the hatchling was sent away?”
She nodded. “Then the word got out somehow, or the hatchling screwed up and understood something it wasn’t supposed to, and he got caught. In the meantime, his family had left Mars and moved here. We had a general order to arrest and deport. I refused.”
“What were the Disty going to do to him?” Flint asked, remembering the vengeance killing, and shuddering.
“Exemplary justice, remember? They have to make an example out of someone, and do it publicly so that it’s a statement.”
Flint nodded, and took a sip of his coffee. It made his stomach even queasier. He pushed the cup away.
“So,” DeRicci said, “they figured the boy made it impossible for the hatchling to function in their society, so they were going to make it impossible for the boy to function in ours.”
Flint frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“They were going to take his tongue,” she said.
Flint winced and set the croissant down. “We could replace it.”
“Not if it’s Disty vengeance, we can’t,” she said. “He has to live that way.”
She spoke in present tense.
“They did it, didn’t they? They took him.”
She pulled her croissant apart. “Out of my hands, screaming that I had promised him he’d be able to stay.”
“What happened to you?”
“The usual. Counseling, reprimand, some retraining, a demotion. You know.”
He didn’t, not really. He’d never made a mistake in his professional career. At least not one he’d been caught at.
He wasn’t sure he would like being punished for doing the right thing.
“I can’t go through that again, Flint. I can’t watch them take this woman—”
“She won’t be screaming,” he said. “It sounds like she’s volunteering.”
“She has no real choice.” DeRicci sighed. “I’m supposed to protect and serve, you know? Not make life more comfortable for the aliens among us.”
The Disappeared Page 24