"A moment," the azi Florian said, when Justin and Grant started out the door after Jordan and Paul, in the general mill of family and azi headed their separate ways.
"Later," Justin said. His heart began to pound, the way it did anytime he came near Ari or her bodyguards on anything but coldest business, and he took Grant by the arm and tried to get him out the door as Florian blocked Grant's path.
"I'm very sorry," Florian said, looking as if he were. "Sera has said she wants Grant. He's assigned to her now."
For a moment Justin did not realize what he had heard. Grant stood very still in his grip.
"He can retrieve his belongings," Florian said.
"Tell her no." They were blocking the Schwartzes from exit. Justin moved confusedly into the hall, drawing Grant with him, but Florian stayed with them. "Tell her—tell her, dammit, if she wants my cooperation in anything, he stays with me!"
"I'm terribly sorry, ser," Florian said—always soft-spoken, soft-eyed. "She said that it was already done. Please understand. He should get his things. Catlin and I will watch out for him the best we can."
"She's not going to do this," Justin told Grant, as Florian slipped back into the dining hall, where Ari delayed. He was cold through and through. His supper sat uneasy at his stomach. "Wait here." His father was waiting with Paul a little down the hall, and Justin crossed the distance in a half-dozen strides, face composed, showing no more, he hoped, than an understandable annoyance; and please, God, not as pale as he was afraid it was. "Something's come up with a project," he told Jordan. "I have to go see about it."
Jordan nodded, had questions, perhaps, but the explanation seemed to cover it; and Justin walked back again to the doorway where Grant stood. He put a hand on Grant's shoulder in passing, and went inside where Ari lingered talking to Giraud Nye.
He waited the few seconds until Ari deliberately passed her eye across him, a silent summons; she seemed to say something dismissing Giraud, because Giraud looked back too, then left.
Ari waited.
"What's this about Grant?" Justin asked when he was face to face with her.
"I need him," Ari said, "that's all. He's a Special geneset, he's relevant to what I'm working on, and I need him now, that's all. Nothing personal."
"It is." He lost control of his voice, seventeen and facing a woman as terrible as his father. He wanted to hit her. And that was not an option. Ari, in Reseune, could do anything. To anyone. He had learned that. "What do you want? What do you really want out of me?"
"I told you, it's not personal. Nothing like it. Grant can get his tilings, he can have a few days to calm down— You'll see him. It's not like you're not working in that wing."
"You're going to run tape on him!"
"That's what he's for, isn't it? He's an experimental. Tests are what he pays for his keep—"
"He pays for his keep as a designer, dammit, he's not one of your damn test-subjects, he's—" My brother, he almost said.
"I'm sorry if you've lost your objectivity in this. And I'd suggest you calm yourself down right now. You don't have your license to handle an Alpha yet, and you're not likely to get it if you can't control your emotions better than this. If you've given him promises you can't keep, you've mishandled him, you understand me? You've hurt him. God knows what else you've done, and I can see right now you and I are due for a long, long talk—about what an Alpha is, and what you've done with him, and whether or not you're going to get that license. It takes more than brains, my lad, it takes the ability to think past what you want, and what you believe, and it's about time you learned it."
"All right, all right, I'll do what you want. He will. Just leave him with me!"
"Calm down, hear? Calm down. I'm not leaving him with anyone in that state. Also—" She tapped him on the chest. "You're dealing with me, dear, and you know I'm good at getting my own way: you know you always lose points when you show that much to your opposition, especially to a professional. You get those eyes dry, you put yourself in order, and you take Grant home and see he comes with everything he needs. Most of all you calm him down and don't frighten him any further. Where are your sensibilities?"
"Damn you! What do you want?"
"I've got what I want. Just go do what I tell you. You work for me. And you'll show up polite and respectful in the morning. Hear me? Now go take care of your business."
"I—"
Ari turned and walked out the door that led to the service area and a lift upstairs; Catlin and Florian barred his way, azi, and without choice.
"Florian," she called from some distance, impatient, and Florian left Catlin alone to hold the doorway—the worse, because Catlin had no compunction such as Florian had, Catlin would strike him, and strike hard, at the next step beyond her warning.
"Go the other way, young ser," Catlin said. "Otherwise you'll be under arrest."
He turned abruptly and walked back to the other door, where Grant stood, very pale and very quiet, witness to all of it.
"Come on," Justin said, and grabbed him by the arm. Ordinarily there would be a slight, human resistance, a tension in the muscles. There was none. Grant simply came, walked with him when he let him go, and offered not a word till they were down the hall and in the lift that took them up to third level residencies.
"Why is she doing this?"
"I don't know. I don't know. Don't panic. It's going to be all right."
Grant looked at him, a fragile hope that hit him in the gut, as the lift stopped.
Down the hall again, to the apartment that was theirs, in a residential quiet-zone, only a handful of passersby at this hour. Justin took his keycard from its clip on his pocket and inserted it with difficulty in the slot. His hand was shaking. Grant had to see it.
"No entries since last use of this key," the monitor's bland voice said, and the lights came on, since that was what he had programmed his Minder to do for his entry at this hour, all the way through the beige and blue living room, to his bedroom.
"Grant's here," he mumbled at it, and more lights came on, Grant's bedroom, visible through the archway leftward.
"I'll get my things," Grant said; and, the first sign of fracture, a wobble in his voice when he asked: "Shouldn't we call Jordan?"
"God." Justin embraced him. Grant held on to him, trembling in long, spasmodic shivers; and Justin clenched his own arms tight, trying to think, trying to reason past his own situation and the law inside Reseune which said that he could not protect the azi who had been a brother to him since he could remember.
Grant knew everything, knew everything that he knew. Grant and he had no difference, none, except that damning X on Grant's number, that made him Reseune property as long as he lived.
She could interrogate him about Jordan, about everything he knew or suspected, test systems on him, put him under tape with one structure and another, put sections of his memory under block, do any damned thing she wanted, and there was no way he could stop it.
It was revenge against his father. It was a hold on him, who, the same way Grant had just been transferred, had been Aptituded into Ari's wing. Let her, he had said to his father. Let her take me into her staff. Don't contest it. It's all right. You can't afford a falling-out with her right now, and maybe it's a good place for me to be.
Because he had had a notion then that his father, harried with plans (again) for getting a transfer, could lose too much.
You tell me, Jordan had said with the greatest severity, you tell me immediately if she makes trouble for you.
There had been trouble. There had been more than trouble, from his second day in that wing—an interview with Ari in her office, Ari too close and touching him in a way that started out only friendly and got much too personal, while she suggested quietly that there was more reason than his test scores that she had requisitioned him into her wing, and that he and Grant both could . . . accommodate her, that others of her aides did, and that was the way tilings were expected to be on her staff. Or, she had hinted, there were ways to make life difficult.
He had been disgusted, and scared; and worst of all, he had seen Ari's intention, the trap laid—slow provocations, himself the leverage she meant to wield against Jordan, a campaign to provoke him to an incident she could use. So he had gone along with it when she put her hands on him, and stammered his way through reports while she sat on the arm of his chair and rested her hand on his shoulder. She had asked him to her office after hours, had asked him questions, pretending to fill out personnel reports, and he mumbled answers, things he did not dwell on, things he did not want even to remember, because he had never even had a chance to do the things she asked him about, and never wanted in his life to do some of the things she talked about; and suspected that without tape, without drugs, without anything but his own naivete and her skill, she was in the process of twisting his whole life. He could fight back—by losing his capacity to be shocked, by answering her flippantly, playing the game—
—but it was her game.
"I'll think of something," he said to Grant. "There's a way put of this. It'll be all right." And he let Grant go off to his rooms to pack, while he stood alone in the living room in the grip of a chill that went to his bones. He wanted to phone Jordan, ask advice, whether there was anything legal they could do.
But it was all too likely Jordan would go straight to Ari to negotiate Grant free of her. Then Ari might play other cards, like tapes of those office sessions—
—O God, then Jordan would go straight to the Science Bureau, and launch a fight that would break all the careful agreements and lose him everything.
Query the House computers on the law—but there was nothing he dared use: every log-on was recorded. Everything left traces. There was no way that Reseune would not win a head-on challenge. He did not know the extent of Ari's political power, but it was enough that it could open new exploration routes, subvert companies on distant star-stations and affect trade directly with old Earth itself; and that was just the visible part of it.
Beyond the archway, he heard the sounds of the closet door, saw Grant piling his clothes onto the bed.
He knew suddenly where Grant was going—the way they had dreamed of when they were boys, sitting on the banks of the Novaya Volga, sending boats made of old cans floating down to Novgorod, for city folk to marvel at. And later, on a certain evening when they had talked about Jordan's transfer, about the chance of them being held until Jordan could get them out.
It was that worst-case now, he thought, not the way they had planned, but it was the only chance they had.
He walked into Grant's room, laid a finger on his lips for silence, because there was Security monitoring: Jordan had told him it went on. He took Grant's arm, led him quickly and quietly out into the living room, toward the door, took his coat from the closet—no choice about that: it was close to freezing outside, people came and went from wing to wing in the open, it was ordinary enough. He handed Grant his, and led him out into the hall.
Where to? Grant's worried look said plainly. Justin, are you doing something stupid?
Justin took his arm and hauled Grant along, down the hall, back to the lift.
He pushed T, for the tunnel-level. The car shot downward. God, let there be no stops on main—
"Justin—"
He shoved Grant against the wall of the lift, held him there, never mind that Grant was a head taller. "Quiet," he said. "That's an order. Not a word. Nothing. Hear?"
He did not speak to Grant that way. Ever. He was shaking. Grant clamped his jaw and nodded, terrified, as the lift door opened on the dingy concrete of the storm-tunnels. He dragged Grant out, backed him against the wall again. Calmer this time.
"Now you listen to me. We're going down to the Town—"
"I—"
"Listen to me. I want you to go null. Deep-state, all the way. Right now. Do it. And stay that way. That's an order, Grant. If you never in your life did exactly what I said, —do it now. Now! Hear me?"
Grant took a gulp of air, composed himself then, expressionless in two desperate breaths.
No panic now. Steady. "Good," Justin said. "Put the coat on and come on."
Up another lift, to the Administration wing, the oldest; back to the antiquated Ad wing kitchens, where the night shift staff did dinner clean-up and breakfast prep for the catering service. It was the escape route every kid in the House had used at one time or another, through the kitchens, back where the ovens were, where the air-conditioning never was enough, where staff from generation to generation had propped the fire-door with trash-bins to get a breeze. The kitchen workers had no inclination to report young walk-throughs, not unless someone asked, and Administration never stopped the practice—that routed juvenile CIT truants and pranksters past witnesses who would, if asked, readily say yes, Justin Warrick and his azi had gone out that door—
—but not until they were missed.
Shhh, he mimed to the kitchen azi, who gave them bewildered and anxious looks—the late hour, and the fact they were older than the usual fugitives who came this way.
Past the trash-bin, down the steps into the chill dark.
Grant overtook him by the pump shed that was the first cover on the hill before it sloped rapidly to the road.
"We're going down the hill," Justin said then. "Taking the boat."
"What about Jordan?" Grant objected.
"He's all right. Come on."
He broke away and Grant ran after him, pelted downslope to intercept the road. Then they strolled at a more ordinary pace down through the floodlit intersections of the warehouses, the repair shops, the streets of the lower Town. The few guards awake at this hour were on the perimeters, to mind the compound fences and the weather reports, not two boys from the House bound down toward the airport road. The bakery and the mills ran full-scale at night, but they were far off across the town, distant gleam of lights as they left the last of the barracks.
"Is Jordan getting hold of Merild?" Grant asked.
"Trust me. I know what I'm doing."
"Justin, —"
"Shut up, Grant. Hear me?"
They reached the edge of the port. The field lights were out right now, but the beacon still blipped its steady strobe into the dark of a mostly vacant world. Far off, the freight warehouses and the big RESEUNEAIR hangar showed clear, brightly lit, night-work and maintenance going on with one of the commercial planes.
"Justin, —does he know?"
"He'll handle it. Come on." Justin set out at a run again, leaving Grant no breath for questions, down the road that passed the end of the runway to the barge-dock and down across the concrete bridgeway to the low-lying warehouses at the edge of the river.
No one locked the doors down here at the small boathouse. No one needed to. He pushed at the door of the shabby prefab, winced at the creak of the hinge. Inside, an iron grid whispered hollowly under their feet. Water splashed and slapped at the pilings and buffers, starlight reflecting wetly around the outlines of the boats moored there. The whole place smelled of river-water and oil and the air was burning cold.
''Justin," Grant said. "For God's sake—"
"Everything's all right. You go exactly the way we planned—"
"I go—"
"I'm not leaving. You are."
"You're out of your mind! Justin!"
Justin clambered aboard the nearest boat, opened up the pressurized cabin door and left Grant nothing to do but follow him aboard with his objections.
"Justin, if you stay now, they can arrest you!"
"And if I take you out of here there's no way in hell I'll ever get certified to be near you, you know that. So I'm not down here tonight. I don't know a thing about this. I just go back up there, say I never left my room, how am I to know where you went? Maybe a platythere ate you and got indigestion." He flipped the on-switch, checked the gauges, one toggle-switch and another. "There you go, everything's full, batteries all charged. Wonderful how the staff keeps things up, isn't it?"
"Justin." Grant's voice was shaking. He had his hands in his pockets. The air was bitter chill near the water. "Listen to me now, let's have some sense here. I'm azi. I was listening to tape in the cradle, for God's sake. If she runs something on me I can handle it, I can rip the structures apart and tell you if there were any bugs in it—"
"The hell you can."
"I can survive her tests, and there's no way she can axe my Contract, there's no axe-code. I know for a fact there's not—I know my sets, Justin. Let's just forget this and go up the hill and we'll figure out another way. If it gets bad, we always have this for an option."
"Shut up and listen to me. Remember how we mapped this out: first lights you see on your right are still Reseune: that's the number ten precip station, up on the bluffs. The lights on your left two klicks on will be Moreyville. If you run completely dark you can pass there before Ari gets wind of this, and it's a clear night. Remember, stay to the center of the channel, that's the only way to miss the bars, and for God's sake, be careful of snags. Current comes from the left when you get to the Kennicutt. You turn into it, and the first lights you see after that, two, maybe three hours on, that's Krugers. You tell them who you are and you give them this—" He turned on a dim chart-light and scribbled a number down on the pad clipped to the dash. Under the number he wrote: MERILD. "Tell them call Merild, no matter the hour. You can tell Merild when he gets there—tell him Ari's blackmailing Jordan through me, dammit, that's all he has to know. Tell him I can't come until my father's free, but I had to get you out of there, you're one more hostage than Jordan can cope with. Understand?"
"Yes," Grant said in a faint voice, azi-like: yes.
"The Krugers won't betray you. Tell them I said sink the boat if they have to. It's Emory's. Merild will handle everything else."
"Ari will call the police."
"That's fine. Let her. Don't try to go past the Kennicutt. If you have to, the next place on down the Volga is Avery, overnight, maybe more, and she could intercept you. Besides, you'd get caught up in Cyteen-law and police down there, and you know what that could be. Krugers is it. It has to be." He looked back at Grant's face in the faint glow of the chart-light, and it struck him suddenly that he might not see him again. "Be careful. For God's sake, be careful."
"Justin." Grant embraced him hard. "You be careful. Please."
"I'll push you out of here. Go on. Dog the seals down."
"The other boat—" Grant said.
"I'll take care of it. Go!" Justin turned and ducked out of the door, hopped up on the deck and onto the echoing grating. He cast off the ties then, threw them aboard, shoved the big boat back with his foot and with his hands till it drifted clear, scraping the buffers.
It swung round sideways, inert and dark, then caught the current off the boathouse and drifted, following the sweep of the main channel, turning again.
He opened up the second boat and threw up the cover on the engine.
The starter was electronic. He pulled the solid state board, dropped the cover down, closed the hatch behind him, and dropped the board into the water before he made the jump between the boat and the metal grid of the dock.
In the same moment he heard the distant, muffled cough of Grant's engine.
Solid then, chugging away.
He cleared the boathouse, latched the door and ran. It was dangerous to be down here on the river-edge, in the dark, dangerous anywhere less patrolled, where something native could have gotten in, weed in the ditch, stuff carried in the air—God knew. He tried not to think about it. He ran, took up on the road again, walking as he caught a stitch in his side.
He expected commotion. He expected someone on night shift at the airport to have seen the boat, or heard its engine start. But the work at the hangars was noisy. Maybe someone had had a power wrench going. Maybe they thought it was some passing boat from Moreyville or up-Volga, with a balky engine. And they had the bright lights to blind them.
So far their luck was a hundred percent.
Till he got to the House and found the kitchen door locked.
He sat down a while on the steps, teeth chattering, trying to think it through, and gave it a while, time for a boat to get well on its way. But if he sat there the night, then it was unarguable that it was conspiracy.
If he gave them evidence of that—
It would land on Jordan.
So there was nothing to do finally but use his key and trip the silent warnings he knew would be in place by now.
Security showed up to meet him in the halls by the kitchens. "Ser," the azi in charge said, "where are you coming from?"
"I felt like a walk," he said. "That's all. I drank too much. I wanted some cold air."
The azi called that in to the Security office; Justin waited, expecting the man's expression to change then, when the order came back. But the azi only nodded. "Good evening, ser."
He walked away, weak-kneed, rode the lift up and walked all the lonely way to the apartment.
The lights came on inside. "No entries since the last use of this key," the dulcet voice of the Minder said.
He went into Grant's room. He picked things up and hung them back in the closet and put them in drawers. He found small, strange things among Grant's belongings, a tinsel souvenir Jordan had brought back from holiday in Novgorod, a cheap curio spacer patch of the freighter Kittyhawk that he had brought back from Novgorod airport, for Grant, who had not been allowed to go. A photo of the pair of them, aged four, Grant pale-skinned, skinny, and shockingly red-haired, himself in that damned silly hat he had thought was grown-up, digging in the garden with the azi. Another photo of them, at a mutually gawky ten, standing on the fence of the livestock pens, barefoot, toes curled identically pigeon-toed over the rail, arms under chins, both grinning like fools.
God. It was as if a limb had been cut off, and the shock had not quite gotten to the brain yet, but it had hit his gut, and it told him it was going to get worse.
Ari would call him now, he had no doubt.
He went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, hugged his arms about himself and stared at the patterns in the veneer of the table, anything but shut his eyes and see the boat and the river.
Or think of Ari.
Only Grant? Merild would ask, when he got that phone message. Merild would take alarm. Merild might well call Reseune and try to talk to Jordan; and he could not afford that: he tried to think what he would say, how he would cover it. Grant could tell Merild enough, maybe, to set Merild working on a rescue of some sort; but, oh, God, if something got to Jordan about Ari and him, either from Grant, from Merild, or from Ari—and Jordan blew up—
No. Jordan was too cagy to do something without thinking it out—
The time passed. The air of the apartment felt cold as the chill outside; he wanted to go in to his own bed, and pull the covers about him, but he asked the Minder for more heat and kept to the living room, fighting to stay awake, afraid he would sleep through a Minder call.
None came.
Small boats went out of one port and never got to another, that was all. It happened even to experienced pilots.
He thought about every step he had taken, every choice he had, over and over again. He thought about calling Jordan, telling him everything.
No, he told himself. No. He could handle it with Ari. Jordan needed help, and Jordan not knowing was the only way it worked.