“You’re the Fever brother.” The supervisor’s tired and he’s already filed it; I can see the form closed on his tablet. “Ordek mentioned you were coming. I’m sorry. It happened last night.”
“What happened?”
“He went down to the mine on his own.” He shrugs, not unkindly, the shrug of a male who has done this too many times. “You know how he was, recently retired and still sneaking back into the mine three, four diurnals a week, wandering the old sections, talking to the Illibrium.” A tired half-smile that fades. “It happened on the service stair on level two hundred. It’s a bad stair, that one, very steep. We think he missed a step.”
“When?”
“Late. Between third bell and dawn, the med tech says. He wasn’t found until the morning shift came through.” He checks the tablet, not because he needs to. “He’d have gone fast. If that helps.”
It doesn’t help.
“Who ruled it?”
“Ruled it?” He blinks at me. “Nobodyruledit. Ninety-one rotations old, bad knees, night, an unlit service stair he had no business on. Accident. It’s signed off.” He hesitates, and something almost gentle comes into his voice, which I like even less. “It’s not a mystery, miner. He was old. It’s how the old ones go here, they can’t stay out of the mine, and one diurnal the mine keeps them.”
I go backto the mine and ask everything I’m allowed to ask.
I ask to see where it happened, then I check on the light on that stair and when it was last serviced. I ask whether anyone else was on that level, whether the access log shows anything, whether there was anyone with him, if anyone heard anything.
And every single answer is ordinary.
The light on that stair has been bad for two rotations. There’s a maintenance ticket for it from before Ordek retired. He’d been on that level a dozen times this moon cycle alone, the log shows it, along with a hundred other harmless wanderings. Nobody else was down there with him. Nobody heard anything, because nobody was there to hear.
The med tech, when I put myself in front of her, is patient with me. There’s nothing wrong with him. That’s what she says.There’s nothing wrong with him, sir, apart from the fall.No mark that doesn’t fit. No wound in the wrong place. Nothing under the fingernails, nothing on the hands, nothing anywhere on that old body that says a single thing except that he was ninety-one and it was dark and he went down a bad stair.
It’s perfect.
That’s what I’m standing there understanding, with the container going cold against my palms. It isn’t clumsy and it isn’t clever. It’sperfect.It is exactly, precisely, indistinguishably the death that old male was always most likely to have, and it happened in the one place where nobody would ever look twice.
I have been looking at killings for eight years. I know craft when I see it.
And I can’t prove a single word of that to any being alive. Three nights ago I pulled the maintenance archive and found his name marked twice. Two nights ago I sent word to him, and his grandson keyed it, and the reply came back that I should come after second bell and bring food and not be early. Last night he went down a stair he’d gone down a thousand times. And this morning I came to ask him what he saw.
That’s not coincidence. That’s a sequence.
I go backto the compound and wait for my family to come home.
Lila and the others leave me alone as I sit in the front room while the light goes down over the jungle. I don’t turn on a lamp, and I watch as one by one my brothers come up the road off their shift. I hear the noise of them at the door, boots and voices, Cannibal saying something and Heavy laughing at it, the ordinary sound of seven males coming home.
Claws finds me first and stops in the doorway. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“Get everyone,” I growl. “We need to have a family meeting.”
Ten minutes later,my whole family is in the front room, and every one of them looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.
They’re all here.
Chief in the big chair, arms folded. Heavy and Claws are on the long bench with Cannibal standing behind them with Roxy. Trunk is near the fire with Vela against his shoulder, and Ines beside him with her tablet already in her hand, because she took one look at my face when she came in and went to get it. Hallie is in the corner with Rook, one hand on the curve of her belly. Jana in the doorway from the kitchen with a cloth still in her hands.
The young ones have been sent to the back living room with Naomi and Lila. Somebody has shut the door. Hook and Leah aren’t here, they’re at employee housing, and it’s full dark, and I’m not sending anyone out on that road tonight. They’ll be told tomorrow.
“What is happening?” Chief questions. “Why have you called this meeting?”
“Ordek of Six is dead,” I announce.
The room changes.
Most beings in the room know Ordek. Chief’s face goes still, and Heavy saysah, no, quietly. Claws puts a hand over his mouth.
