“He was at this table.” Jana has both hands pressed flat against her apron. “In our home.”
“Yes.”
Claws stands up.
“Sit down,” Chief says, without heat.
“He was in ourhouse,” Claws snarls.
“Sitdown, brother.”
Claws sits. Barely.
“So he’s a thief with a habit,” Cannibal says. “Fine. I’ve known a hundred. That gets you a male who lifts equipment and lies about it. It doesn’t get you a male who kills a ninety-one-rotation-old facilities tech on an Illibrium mine at the edge of the Four Sectors.” He folds his massive arms. “What’s a broke New Earth gambler doinghere?”
“There’s something none of you have put together yet,” Hallie says. She hasn’t spoken until now. “The debts,” she says. “That’s not a detail. That’s themethod.”
Ines’s head comes up sharply.
“That’s how the Houses do it. I watched it for two years on Chronos. They don’t recruit loyalists — loyalists are expensive and they can change their minds. They buyproblems.They find a male with a debt he cannot possibly climb out of, some poor bastard three moons from having his hands broken, and they make that debt disappear. And that’s it, that’s the whole transaction. He’s theirs from that moment until he dies, because he knows exactly who fixed it and exactly what happens if he stops being useful. There was a records clerk in the Vaszneth archive,” she continues. “Nice male. Terrible at cards. He was into a Chronos lending house for more than he’d earn in a lifetime, and one diurnal it was simply gone, and after that he did whatever they asked and told himself he was lucky.” Her mouth twists. “They own a dozen beings like him. Probably a hundred. It’s not even a secret over there, it’s astrategy.Debt is how a House buys a being who’d normally never sell himself for currency.”
Hallie looks at me. “Three Vaszneth operatives walked onto this planet two moons ago and put a hole in my mate’s chest, and the grid died at the exact moment they needed it to. And then, weeks later, a human male with unpayable debts and legitimate systems access arrives on Timbur on his sister’s contract.” She spreads her hands. “You want to know who bought AndrewWilson? Look at who needed a door into this mine and had the money to buy one.”
“House Vaszneth,” Trunk says.
“House Vaszneth,” Hallie agrees.
Nobody argues.
“We can’t prove any of it,” Ines says. “I want that on the record, because it matters. Every piece of this is inference. The debts are real and the pattern is real, but there is not one document in the Four Sectors that connects Andrew Wilson to House Vaszneth, and until there is, we have a story and not a case.”
“Then we get one,” Chief says.
“Yes.” Ines nods. “We get one.”
Then the argument starts,the way it always does in this family, all at once and at volume.
Cannibal wants to take him tonight. Just take him because he’s on Timbur, within reach, and there are eight of us. Claws is already agreeing.
Chief shuts it down. “And when we take him? He denies everything. He’s a grid tech with a gambling problem and no charges on his record anywhere in the Four Sectors, and we’re the family with the grudge and the reputation. Vaszneth cuts him loose inside a diurnal, replaces him with someone we don’t know, and we’ve burned the only thread we have and told them we’re coming.” He looks around. “We move when we can prove it. Not before. We don’t tell anyone, yet, not even Mara.”
“I want to remind everyone that this is very dangerous,” Roxy inserts. “Yes, we have to wait on taking down Andrew and I understand why. But Ordek is dead. And meanwhile we’re all sitting here being very calm about the fact that Mara Wilson iswalking around that mine with the male who might have done it, and she has no idea, and we’ve decided not to tell her.”
“Roxy…”
“No.” She turns on me, and her hands are shaking and her voice isn’t. “I’d like somebody in this room to explain to me why Mara Wilson doesn’t get to be told that she isn’t safe.”
“You think I’m calm?” The words come out of me low and wrong, and every head in the room turns. “You think I’ve been sitting here calm?” I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing. “Roxy, I stood outside Ordek’s quarters with his supper going cold in my hands and I worked out that he died the night before I could reach him, and the second thought I had — thesecondone — was her name. Mara has been sitting at the second console in my office reading my case with her own hands and putting her own name in the access logs beside mine, and she does it every diurnal.” My claws have come out. I put them away. “I have not been calm since second bell this morning and I do not expect to be calm again until that male is in a cell.”
“Thentell her,” Roxy says.
“And what does she do with it?” I take a step toward her. “Tell me. You know her. She’s your friend. Tell me what Mara Wilson does at seventeen hundred hours when she walks into her quarters knowing what her brother is.”
Roxy’s mouth opens. Closes.
“She confronts him,” Ines says quietly. “She wouldn’t be able to help it. She’d want him to look her in the face and deny it.”
I pace the room. “She’d want him to have an explanation. She’d give him the chance to have one, because she loves him, because there’s no one else left. And when her brother learns the Fever Brothers are onto him does one of two things. He runs, and we lose him, and Vaszneth sends someone we can’t see coming, someone we don’t know the face of.” I let that hang. “Or he doesn’t run.”
