Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  No matter how often she said the words, she still could not bring herself to believe them.

  * * *

  * * *

  For the next three days, Kit watched the news media with an obsessive attention. She rose early every morning to journey into the city and find one of the gulden monitors (there were none to be found anywhere near Sereva’s neighborhood). The indigo media, she was sure, would not cover the news she was interested in, the news she was most afraid of hearing: that Jex Zanlan was dead.

  The gulden monitors did carry the first piece of information she watched for, the fact that Jex had been released. The item was the lead story on all the monitors, though she noticed it did not make it into the indigo media until the following day. She expected the streets to be filled with outraged citizens, blueskins storming the Complex to protest, but she appeared to be the only one in the city who had noted that particular paragraph, who cared at all about the fate of Jex Zanlan.

  He must be well and truly on the path to death, or Ariana Bayless would not have risked releasing him. Kit knew she must scan the monitors every day to glean what information she could.

  But the next morning, what she read on the gulden news screens was an article about the other man she loved. And it was even more shocking.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Kitrini, what’s wrong? Are you sick?” Sereva demanded as Kit staggered into her cousin’s office, clutching a hard copy of the story. “Sit down. What happened? Claressa, go get me some water,” she directed at her secretary before flying back to Kit’s side. “What’s wrong?”

  Kit held out the hard copy, but Sereva merely glanced at it impatiently. “What is that? I can’t read it.”

  “Article,” Kit whispered. “Nolan’s gone to the gulden media with the story of the virus.”

  “What?” Sereva demanded and snatched the paper from Kit’s hand as if she had miraculously summoned up the ability to read gold-tongue. “What does it say?”

  “Everything. Ariana Bayless. Cerisa Daylen. Chay Zanlan. Everybody is named. And—” Kit shook her head. She couldn’t swallow. The words were caught in her throat, hurting her, cutting off her air. “And—”

  Sereva was studying the paper again. “Is this him? This picture? This is Nolan?” Kit nodded. “So it names him, too. The stupid man, he’s just ruined his life. He’s ruined their lives. I can’t imagine—what in the world can come of this—?”

  “It’s worse,” Kit said, still in that hoarse, constricted voice. “He’s made up another virus. For blueskins.”

  “A virus for the indigo? A—you mean, a disease? He’s created a disease for his own people? Why would he do that? Why would—and how would the gulden papers know about that?”

  “He told them. And he told them that he—he gave the virus—he gave it to the gulden—”

  The papers fell from Sereva’s hand; her dark face grew darker with disbelief. “He what?”

  “To make everything fair. To give them power over us like we have over them. To make sure no one else does what Cerisa has done. But he—but he—he gave the virus to Jex Zanlan, or one of his friends—”

  “But Jex Zanlan will instantly use such a weapon!” Sereva cried.

  Kit nodded. She was exhausted, empty, dull with terror. And these were the two men she had loved most in the world. “I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The city was in a frenzy for the next seven days. Sirens split the air with warning; loudspeakers broadcast unintelligible updates; quarantine made the streets ghostly during what should have been the busiest hours. Schools were shut down, houses were shuttered against airborne germs, and only those who absolutely had to venture out could be found hurrying fearfully down the deserted sidewalks.

  But they had to have news. The media, both indigo and gulden, had expanded their broadcasts and set up remote communal monitors in neighborhoods where the residents could not afford to buy their own screens. The wealthy homeowners had their own screens and could watch the stories unfold from the safety of their fortresses, but the poor and the transient collected in small uneasy groups on the sidewalks of their neighborhoods to follow the progress of the crisis.

  Ariana Bayless and Cerisa Daylen had committed a double suicide in the mayor’s home. Their bodies were discovered shortly after the indigo media translated the gulden news item and incorporated it into their noon coverage. They were dead; their offices were in utter disarray; and Nolan Adelpho was nowhere to be found.

  At the Biolab where he had worked, however, the activity was at a fever pitch. De facto laboratory head Pakt Shoiklin gave terse interviews that boiled down to: “We are aware of the problem, and we are working on it.” Indigo journalists wanted to know how they could trust a gulden to find a cure for a blueskin disease, and the man smiled.

  “A blueskin infected the gulden, and a blueskin found the antidote,” he said. “Why shouldn’t a guldman find the cure for the blueskin poison? Thus each race will have cause to be grateful to the other.”

  “You would save the indigo?” a blueskin reporter asked with obvious skepticism.

  The man named Pakt smiled somewhat menacingly. “Even if I would not,” he said, “I have biologists on my staff who would. Does that satisfy you?”

  But he would not allow the journalists in to interview his workers, saying, “They’re too busy, and if I were you, I would not want to distract them from work that might save my life.” Reporters camped out in front of the lab doors, waiting for workers to come and go, but none of the scientists left the building, a news item in itself, which was duly reported. Not a day went by in the next week in which there was not some broadcast from “the shadowed halls of the city’s Complex, where brave and diligent scientists are hard at work racing to solve the mystery of disease.”

  Kit watched them all—the features about the individual scientists at the Biolab, the bulletins about what form the disease might take, the updates of hysteria at the hospitals, the speculations about the whereabouts of Nolan Adelpho, the broadcast debates among city leaders about his ethics and his actions. “Hero or Traitor?” one of these panels was named, but there was very little actual question: hero to have attempted to save the gulden, traitor to have developed the formula that could destroy his own race.

  “Unforgivable,” pronounced one of the panelists. “Evil,” said a second one, and two of the others nodded.

  “But don’t you think,” said another woman, a small mousy blueskin who looked to be mid-caste and held some hard-won position in one of the governmental offices, “don’t you think he did the only thing possible to dramatize the barbarity of Ariana Bayless’s action? Don’t you think that otherwise we might have been shocked, but in a comfortable sort of way, because we didn’t feel at risk? If you yourself aren’t afraid to open the door and saunter down the street, how can you empathize with someone else who is?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said an older, turquoise-skinned woman—a member of the clergy, Kit thought, if she remembered the identifications correctly. “I don’t have to be on the point of death to comfort my parishioners who are dying.”

  “Don’t you?” was the mousy woman’s unconvinced reply. “Don’t you have to experience hunger to worry about whether the poor are fed?”

  “I don’t,” one of the other panelists said virtuously.

  “And how much have you given to charities in the past two years?” the mid-caste woman asked him.

  “Well, I—my own family is my first concern, and I direct my money and my energy to making sure they are not hungry,” he said stiffly.

  “Not a penny, then. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “How is this relevant?” the moderator broke in impatiently. “We were discussing the unspeakable actions of Nolan Adelpho—”

  “He wanted to get your attent
ion,” the woman replied softly. “And he wouldn’t have gotten it otherwise. I think he did the right thing.”

  But that opinion was vociferously voted down, and Kit never saw the woman on any other news panels.

  Sereva had to drag her away to eat meals and interact with the family, but Kit was reluctant to be in any room that didn’t have a monitor. At what point would they find Nolan, at what point would they discover Jex had died? She could not miss those announcements, either one of which would rend her in two. Sometimes, Sereva had meals brought to her in the study where Kit spent most of her time; sometimes, she sent Marcus and Bascom in to try to distract her. Kit played choisin with her nephews and helped them with their lessons (Sereva had designed a study plan for them during the quarantine), but she kept the monitors on. She couldn’t miss anything.

  Thus, she was watching late one evening when the reporters waiting outside the Biolab were rewarded with a glimpse of one of the scientists. The exhausted woman who stepped through the door looked vaguely familiar to Kit, though at first she couldn’t say why. The reporters clamored about her so loudly that Kit missed any mention of her name, though they did calm long enough to let her speak.

  “We think we’ve made some progress,” she said in a tired but calm voice. “It helped that Nolan’s notes were so complete.”

  “Nolan’s notes—Nolan Adelpho’s notes?” one of the reporters demanded.

  The woman nodded. “Yes. Two days after we learned of the indigo virus, we received a package from Nolan with a molecular breakdown of the disease and his theories on an antidote. We can’t be sure it’s effective, of course, until we have an actual human subject. But his notes are pretty thorough.”

  The reporters seemed unable to grasp this entire concept. “You mean, Nolan Adelpho designed his own cure?” one of them finally asked. “And he told you how to make it?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  The woman searched the crowd for the speaker, her tired eyes suddenly gone dark and angry. “Because he is not Cerisa Daylen! Because he does not want anybody to die! Because Nolan concocted this virus to make you—all of us!—stop and think about who we are, what we’re capable of—”

  “Murder and betrayal, that’s what he’s capable of!” one of the journalists shouted.

  “Look,” the scientist snapped. “None of you understands what has happened here. Cerisa Daylen was not the only biologist clever enough to create a lethal virus—but until she did it, no one else thought to try it. We think we’ve stopped her epidemic—and we think we can stop Nolan’s. But there are gulden biologists who are fully skilled enough to design new germs, new diseases, that we’ll know nothing about until they begin to destroy the indigo race. That’s what Nolan did. He reminded the gulden that they have a weapon every bit as sophisticated as ours—and he warned us that the weapon was already in gulden hands.”

  She began to push her way through the crowd, but the reporters kept shouting questions at her. “Which gulden scientists can manufacture such a disease?” “Do you really believe we’ve reached an age of biological warfare?” “One more question about Nolan Adelpho—” But she ignored them all, answered no more questions and finally made her escape. When she had finally disappeared from view, one of the broadcasters turned to the screen and announced, “That was Melina Lurio, a scientist at the Biolab for almost four years. She first joined Cerisa Daylen’s team the summer the tiseese virus was sweeping through the albino community—”

  Kit stopped listening. Melina. Now she remembered. She had met Melina at Corzehia’s ill-fated party, and they had talked of pointless things, but the indigo woman had been kind. And Nolan had mentioned her name to Kit with great affection; they must be close friends, she thought. She could not remember him mentioning anyone else’s name—except for Leesa’s—and the media had already established that Analeesa Corova had no clue as to Nolan’s whereabouts and would not willingly speak to him if she had. They had also discovered he was not at his city apartment. His family, while maintaining a stony silence on his behavior, had proved to the satisfaction of the authorities that Nolan was on none of the Adelpho properties.

  But perhaps this Melina Lurio might know where Nolan was.

  Kit fetched Sereva’s copy of the city directory and looked up Melina’s name. Yes, just as one might expect from that skin color and that chic appearance: She lived in one of the trendier indigo neighborhoods, deep in the city itself. It would be no trouble at all to find her.

  Accordingly, the next morning, Kit left the house early and took the limo to the city. A few of Sereva’s servants had volunteered to run errands and pick up groceries and, in general, brave the infectious perils of the world, so Kit had begged a ride from one of them. The streets were eerily deserted, only a few hardy souls walking the lonely sidewalks, cloths around their mouths to filter out germs and shoulders hunched to ward off unspecified dangers. It took the driver almost no time to cross the empty roads and deposit Kit on the doorstep she had requested.

  Melina Lurio lived in a modern three-story building with classical lines but unusual decoration in a neighborhood of houses that similarly mixed the traditional with the avant-garde. A hush hung over the whole street, and no one appeared to be stirring, either inside or out of the modish apartments, but that didn’t stop Kit. She boldly climbed the three steps to the front entrance hall, located the interior door that matched the number she had found in the directory, and knocked imperiously.

  After a long pause, during which Kit knocked twice more, the door was opened by a slim blueskin woman who looked mid-caste, tired, and irate. “Yes?” she said shortly.

  Kit stepped so close she was almost over the threshold, though this put her practically face to face with the woman at the door. “My name is Kitrini Candachi. I need to see Melina Lurio.”

  “You can’t. She’s sleeping. She’s been very busy this whole week working at—”

  “Yes, I know, she’s a Biolab scientist,” Kit said impatiently. “Doing important work. I need to see her. I need to ask her about Nolan.”

  “Nolan!” the woman repeated sharply. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  The woman shrugged and shook her head in an indeterminate motion that was supposed to convey “no” but looked unsure enough to be “yes.” She said, “Melina has talked of him. In the past.”

  “Does she know where he is now?”

  “Why would she?” the woman asked with an attempt at belligerence. She didn’t have true animosity in her, though; it came off more as apprehension.

  “Because somebody must. I need to find him.”

  “I’ll tell her you came looking. I can’t wake her up now. She needs her sleep.”

  “I’ll wait here till she wakes.”

  The woman tried to close the door, but Kit had rested her shoulder against it and did not budge. “You have to leave now,” the woman said with a somewhat pathetic attempt to be severe. “It’s too important that Melina be allowed to get her rest—”

  But there was a small commotion behind them and a weary voice from the other side of the door. “What’s the problem, Julitta? Is it the reporters again?”

  Julitta turned her head to answer and Kit tried to push the door wider but succeeded in gaining only an inch. “No, it’s some woman who says she needs to find Nolan.”

  “Nolan!” the voice exclaimed, and suddenly the door was flung open to reveal the Melina of the news monitor. She looked younger but scarcely more rested, dressed in a nondescript bathrobe and rubbing the exhaustion from her eyes. “How do you know Nolan? What do you want from him?”

  “I want to know where he is. I want to know if he’s all right. I remembered that you were a friend of his. I thought you might be able to help me find him.”

  Melina was studying her with those quick, expressi
ve eyes that seemed so thoughtful and, even at this hour, compassionate. “I know who you are,” she said slowly. “You’re Kitrini Candachi.”

  “We met at Corzehia Mallin’s party,” Kit said formally.

  Melina nodded. “But I’d heard of you before … And we saw you once, in the Complex. Nolan and I. But he didn’t know who you were then. Why should I believe you’re a friend of his now?”

  Kit spread her hands. Was she really a friend? What, exactly, was she to Nolan Adelpho? “I took him to Gold Mountain to save Chay Zanlan’s life,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know him before that journey, it’s true. But on the trip—we became friends. I want to help him now if I can.”

  But Melina had heard something in Kit’s explanation that was not in the words themselves. “So you’re the one,” she breathed. “He didn’t tell me your name.”

  Kit’s spirits lifted with hope. “He told you about the trip?”

  Melina shook her head. “I don’t think he told anyone—until he told the reporters. But it was clear something had happened. It was obvious he had fallen in love with someone.”

  Kit felt her face color with heat. “Do you know where he is?” she persisted. “I’m worried about him.”

  Melina stepped back and motioned Kit inside. Julitta closed the door behind her as Kit stepped into the spacious living room. She glanced around briefly at the colorful wall hangings and imaginative sculpture, then turned all her attention back to Melina.

  “I’m worried about him, too,” the scientist said frankly. “Half the city wants to kill him outright, and I’m not sure he’d be safe if he was spotted on the streets. I’ve tried to persuade him to go back to his mother’s but he says he isn’t welcome there, and he’s probably right. My grandmother wouldn’t let me cross the threshold of her house if I had done what he’s done.”

  “It was the noblest thing in the whole world!” Kit cried.

  Melina nodded. “Oh, I agree. But stupid and dangerous and incendiary nonetheless.”