***
Gerda stopped, her hand resting on the doorknob. She had the door to Paavo’s room cracked open. It wasn’t quite dark inside—Paavo hated full dark—but it was that strange sepia color that the Dome mechanics called Dome Twilight.
Her boy was curled in a fetal position on his bed, his arms around his stomach, his face pressed into his pillow. It had taken him nearly twenty minutes to calm down once they had come home, and then he had fallen asleep.
She hoped he slept for hours. She needed some time to herself.
She left the door open just a crack, so she could hear him if he cried out.
She took the security vids into the living room and used one of the separate computers Luc kept around for emergencies. The chips slid in as if they were made for the new system, and the images floated in front of her in holographic form.
She modified them so that they would be on a flat screen. She didn’t want Paavo to wake up, come into the living room, and see his Ghosts yet again.
But she felt like they weren’t his Ghosts any longer. They were hers.
Over the years, she had tried not to think of them: Ishani Grazian, her face red and blotchy, her eyes wet with tears; pasty Károly Grazian, his hand on her arm, leading her away as if they were going to their doom.
Gerda shouldn’t have seen them. She had gone to the baby wing of the Child Center, her steps light, her mood even lighter. She had stopped just outside the door, about to enter when she realized something awful was going on inside.
The attendant had just taken a baby from Ishani Grazian. Only Gerda hadn’t known that was Ishani at the time. She hadn’t known anything. Just that an unhappy couple stood inside, unwilling to relinquish a child.
It wasn’t until the couple left that Gerda realized the child they relinquished was hers.
Her Paavo.
Gerda had thought of that moment a hundred times over the past six years—the way Ishani Grazian had turned to her husband, his arms enveloping her, his face still turned toward the baby boy that the assistant carried out of the room. The couple had stood there for maybe five minutes, Ishani with her face hidden, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed; Károly with his head turned, his gaze on the closed door at the back of the family room.
That was what the Child Center called that room—the family room. Gerda had liked the name when she first heard it. Later, she had wondered at the wisdom of it.
That afternoon, she had stayed back, waiting for the couple to leave. Their distress was palpable, even through the clear window to the hallway.
Finally Károly Grazian said something to his wife. She raised her head, wiped her face with her thumb and forefinger, and nodded at him.
Then he put his arm around her and led her from the room.
They stopped just outside the door. Ishani Grazian looked directly at Gerda. Ishani’s eyes were a bright green—brighter than any eyes Gerda had ever seen before. That unnerved her, and so did Ishani’s expression.
Gerda had never seen such complete despair.
Not before—and not since.
Sometimes she thought it was the despair that caused the memory to surface so often. She hadn’t understood despair then, but she understood it now.
She felt it whenever she looked on her son and thought about all the dangers he could face—not just as a brilliant and socially maladjusted child, but also as an adult living in a strange and hostile universe.
Not to mention the problems he would face as Luc Deshin’s only son.
She had contacted Luc through her emergency links. He knew what was going on.
She hoped he would be home soon.
Gerda sank into her favorite chair and looked at the ever-changing wallscape. She had designed the images to soothe—water rushing down a cliff face in Vekke; the sun rising over a lake on Earth; the barren brownness of an unsettled portion of the Moon—but she barely saw them now, noting only as the images blended, one into another.
Normally, she would let Luc handle this. The Grazians and people like them were usually his problems. She didn’t want to know.
But she couldn’t let him handle the Grazians. She needed to know each and every detail.
She needed to keep those horrible people away from her son.
***
Luc Deshin slid his chair away from his desk. The clear wall he used to screen flat images had frozen on two faces he thought he would never see again: Károly and Ishani Grazian.
Usually Luc forgot names. Especially names of the Disappeared. They had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. So he ceased to think of them.
Yet these two had returned just like the nickname his odd little son had given them. They had reappeared like unwanted ghosts.
Luc’s office was on the top floor of one of downtown Armstrong’s few highrise buildings. His business occupied the floor below. His office rose above that, a bubble on the roof of the highest building in town.
That bubble gave him a spectacular three-hundred-and sixty-degree view of the city, the Dome, and the Moon beyond. He could see for kilometers.
Sometimes, he liked to say, he could see his entire empire, even though what he had wasn’t technically an empire. It was a confederation of businesses, friends, and enemies, a grouping held together by the force of his personality and the power of his money.
What irritated him this time was that money wouldn’t solve the problem he found himself in this very afternoon.
Gerda had sent him all of the information she had through an encrypted link. At his urging, she had told him what she knew, and then she had begged him to come home.
His Gerda did not beg. She was a strong woman, his equal in all ways. But this had upset her.
And, if he was honest, it upset him as well.
Not the least of it was Paavo. The child was inexplicably odd, impossible to talk to, and deeply loving. Luc’s heart twisted whenever he thought of the boy. Sometimes, when Luc got home at night, he just enveloped Paavo in his arms.
He couldn’t talk to the boy, but he could hold him, and that was enough.
It always made Gerda smile. If only your enemies could see you now, she would say. They would know that everything they say about you is not true.
But he was glad they thought it was all true. Because they said he had no heart. If they discovered his heart held his wife and son close, they would threaten his family.
Like the Grazians had.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt fear.
Gerda had asked him to come home because she had felt the same fear. She wanted his presence to protect them.
But he knew a better way to protect them. He would send a security team to the house. Then he would get his number one in here and talk to him about finding the Grazians.
Finally, he would visit his lawyer.
The first measure protected his family should the Grazians be even bolder this afternoon than they were at the school. The second—if it worked—would ensure that they would never bother his family again.
And the third would take care of legal details he should have finished years ago.
He pushed one palm against the other, feeling the muscles in both arms strain. Once his life had been a lot easier. Once his fists had taken care of everything.
But that was long ago.
Before Gerda.
Before Paavo.
Before Luc learned that power exerted behind the scenes was always so much more effective than power exerted with two bruised and bloody fists.
***
Flint sat in the security room of the Aristotle Academy. Already he hated their system. The single room with no out-of-building back-up was too vulnerable to attack; they needed redundant and overlying systems.
He ran through the security protocols three times, and didn’t find a breach—even though there clearly had been one. At first, he thought he was overlooking something. And then he remembered what he had told Selah: that many breaches came from outside hacking tha
t changed internal protocols.
Unlike most security engineers, he knew how to search for a subtle outside hack. Someone who had gone through a backdoor, pretended to be a designer, and changed the system.
But he still found nothing.
Which made him rethink his entire approach.
There was a fool-proof way to break into a secure facility: Have someone on the inside let you in.
He searched for that and found no evidence of it. No one had let the Grazians in. They had walked through like everyone who belonged here.
Everyone who belonged. He looked through the system, to see what the protocols were to determine who belonged.
Nothing had been changed. There was nothing unusual. So he went back to the Grazians’ entry to see how the security system had classified them.
And he started when he saw the answer.
It had classified them as parents.
Parents had access to all areas of the school except the administrative and security areas. They were allowed through the internal security systems by touching a scanner. It ran the DNA. A secondary protocol compared the DNA to their child’s.
The system was different if the child was adopted. But most of the children hadn’t been. So the system worked most of the time.
Flint back traced everything, and when he was sure of his information, he summoned Selah. Then he leaned back to wait for her.
The Grazians probably hadn’t even tried to break through the system. They probably hadn’t realized that the Aristotle Academy had a high level of security.
They had just walked through the front gate—as if they belonged.
Which their biological profile said they did.
***
Paavo woke up in near darkness. His heart was pounding and the skin on his face was stiff from dried tears. He wiped at it as he sat up, groggy from sleeping too long in the afternoon.
A woman sat at the edge of his bed. For a minute, he thought it was his mother. Then his eyes adjusted to the dimness.
It was the Ghost. The woman Ghost. The one who had grabbed him.
He didn’t scream. This time she didn’t scare him quite as badly as she had before. Maybe because he expected to see her again.
He wanted her and that male Ghost to leave him alone, but so far, they hadn’t. And he had a hunch that unless his mom and dad did something to stop them, the Ghosts wouldn’t ever leave him alone.
Paavo let out a quiet breath. He wasn’t sure if she had seen him move yet. Maybe if he thought it through, he could find a way off the bed and out of the room before she grabbed him again.
But he couldn’t resist moving his foot toward her. As his foot got closer, he couldn’t feel her weight on the bed, holding the covers down.
His heart beat even faster.
He kicked his foot toward her as hard as he could. He almost fell off the bed when his foot went through her image.
She still didn’t notice him. She wasn’t real then.
He blinked, saw that she was wearing the clothes she always wore, and her hair was its normal red. He flicked the lights on, and she turned toward him.
Somehow that movement had told her he was awake.
“Enrique,” she said. “I’m so sorry we scared you. I didn’t think we would. I thought we had been preparing you for the day we came back.”
“You’re not real,” he said.
“I’m real,” she said. “But this image isn’t. It’s a projection through some special links your father installed before we left. This visual of me is old, but the words I’m speaking are happening now.”
“You’re talking to me?” he asked. “From where?”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “What does matter is that we regain your trust.”
“I want you to go away,” he said.
“Enrique—”
“My name is Paavo,” he said.
“Your given name is Enrique,” she said.
“My name is Paavo.” He wasn’t going to talk to her if she didn’t call him by his real name.
“Paavo?” his mother called from the other room. “Are you all right?”
No, he wasn’t all right. He was scared and confused and staring at the Ghost, only this time it wasn’t real.
He took a deep breath to shout.
“Don’t say anything,” the Ghost said. “She can’t see me. She won’t even know I’m here.”
He wasn’t going to listen to any Ghost. No matter how much she scared him.
“Mooooom!” he shouted. “Mooooooooom!”
His mom came running. As she pushed open the door, the Ghost looked at Paavo. The expression on the Ghost’s face was familiar. It was the sad expression she usually wore.
Only this time, it seemed like she was judging him too.
“The Ghost is here,” he said to his mom. “She’s sitting on the edge of the bed.”
His mom looked directly at the Ghost. The Ghost shook her head slightly and then winked out.
“I don’t see anyone,” his mother said.
“She came through my links,” he said. “She said she wanted to talk to me through my links.”
“You don’t have functioning links,” his mother said.
“She said I do. She said my father put them in when I was little, before he left.”
“Your father?” His mother was frowning now. She had come inside the room. She put her hand on the edge of the bed, right where the Ghost had been. “Your father doesn’t know anything about links.”
And then his mom got that scared look again, the one she had had in the school.
“Then what did she mean?” Paavo asked.
“She meant that they violated the agreement,” his mom said. “Those bastards. They violated our agreement.”
***
“It’s irregular,” said Máirtín Oberholtz. “Not to mention dangerous.”
Luc Deshin bit back his irritation at the younger man. Máirtín Oberholtz had inherited his seat in the family law firm from his father, Martin Oberholtz. Luc had hired Martin fifteen years before. Luc had liked the old man. He was crusty and blunt and had a willingness to bend the law to see how far it would break.
Máirtín had no such willingness. Had this case been even slightly bendable, Luc would have demanded that Máirtín’s father join them.
But this was a straightforward request, and Máirtín would fulfill it, whether he wanted to or not.
Luc put his hands behind his back and walked away from Máirtín’s desk. He walked to the windows, wondering why there were curtains and why they had been pulled in the middle of the day.
The office itself was decidedly old-fashioned, with a lot of little niceties that had nothing to do with practicality and everything to do with ostentatious displays of wealth.
“The problem,” Máirtín was saying, is that you are letting the entire city—hell, the entire universe, know that Paavo isn’t your biological child.”
Maybe it was time to find another attorney within the firm. Old Martin was doing less and less work, and Máirtín was too conservative for Luc. Had he known that Luc had ordered his security team to take care of the Grazians no matter what, he would have been appalled.
Even though Luc could argue that it was well within the law to go after Disappeareds when they reappeared. No court in any part of the Alliance would punish him for going after the Grazians. And if something went wrong, well, then, so what? It was the cost of doing business.
“My son knows I love him,” Luc said.
“But people will wonder why you are adopting him now. Why did you wait? They’ll talk—”
“So?” Luc turned slowly, keeping his body rigid. Máirtín started. He looked small behind his big black desk, like a child playing dress up in his father’s office.
“So it wouldn’t be good for the child,” Máirtín said.
“It wouldn’t be good for the child to have his biological parents steal him away in the middle of a school day,” Luc sa
id, “which is exactly what they just tried to do. I can charge them with kidnapping whether or not I adopt my son. But a court will look on me much more kindly if I fulfill the legal formalities. Right?”
Máirtín sighed. “A court is going to wonder why you waited—”
“I waited on the advice of your father,” Luc snapped. “Paavo’s parents are Disappeareds. They abandoned him. Your father felt we might get into messy Disappearance issues if I tried to adopt him while they were gone, living their brand new life. But they’re back now, interfering with my family, and so I’m going to protect my family.”
He paused, then leaned forward, placing both hands flat on Máirtín’s desk.
“Think I’m going to have problems now?”
Máirtín’s face reddened. “Um, no.”
Luc had had enough. “I want one of your family law attorneys to handle this. I want the best you have, and that clearly is not you. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Máirtín said. He sounded relieved.
“I want this done as soon as possible. If you can have it done within the week, great. If you can have it done by the end of business, even better. If I have to pay to get a judge to look at the petition before midnight tonight, I will.”
“I doubt any judge will act that swiftly,” Máirtín said.
Luc permitted himself another small smile. “Maybe not for you,” he said. “But I’m sure one or two of them will roust themselves for me.”
***
Before he left the Aristotle Academy, Flint gave Selah a hastily compiled bid to redo her security system. He knew she would hire him to do so. The fact that the Grazians had just walked in without a security check through a logical loophole in her system had unnerved her.
He had gone back to his office to research the Grazians. Normally, he would have done the research throughout Armstrong, using public systems and secure databases in several of his various haunts, always covering his tracks.
But since the Grazians had already made a very public appearance by trying to remove their biological child from his school, Flint felt no qualms in doing the kind of research that anyone would do—the kind that would usually send Trackers and alien governments after the Disappeared.
The Possession of Paavo Deshin Page 3