“You think he’d hurt her?” Heavy questions.
“I think Ordek of Six was ninety-one rotations old and never hurt a being in his life. And I think a male who is bought does what he is told. So no, Mara doesn’t get told tonight. Not because I don’t think she deserves to know… she deserves to know more than any being in this room. Because the moment she knows, she becomes the most dangerous thing in her own apartment.”
“Then how do you keep her safe?” Chief challenges.
“I already know how. From tonight, I’m on her. All of it. Every hour.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I walk her from the housing block to the mine every morning and I walk her back every night. That’s already established.” I turn to Chief. “Meaning I move my shift. I’m taking the late rotation and I’m working my office hours around hers so that whenever that female is inside the mine, I am inside the mine, and I am never more than two levels from wherever she’s opened a panel.”
“You’ll be on your feet twenty hours a diurnal,” Trunk says.
“Yes. Cannibal takes my seam. Claws covers the survey work. I’ll do the load manifests at night… I’m not sleeping anyway.”
Chief’s jaw works but he doesn’t argue.
“And the housing block,” Ines remarks. “That’s the part that frightens me. That’s where he actually is. She’s asleep forty paces from him every night with a door that opens with a Minecorp key.”
“I know.”
“So what do you do about that?”
“There’s a maintenance alcove on the third floor of that block, across from the lift bank, with a clear line to both their doors. It’s dark, it’s disused, and I’ve already walked it. From tonight, when I’ve delivered her home, I don’t leave the building.I sit in that alcove and I watch that corridor until her shift starts in the morning.”
“You’re going to stake out an apartment hallway,” Cannibal says slowly. “All night. Every night.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Until we can prove it,” I say. “Or until he does something.”
“That’s not sustainable,” Chief says.
“It doesn’t have to be sustainable. It has to beenough.” I look around the room, at all of them. “You want to know the truth of it? I don’t care what it costs me. I am not going to be too late again. Not for her.”
Nobody says a word.
“And Andrew Wilson. I want more eyes on him too. Not mine — he knows my face too well and he already watches me watch him. I need beings he doesn’t look at twice.”
“I can cover the transport platform,” Naomi says from the doorway. “I’m in and out of Admin all diurnal with the studio commissions. Nobody looks at me.”
“And I’ll have him in the labs twice a week,” Roxy says. Her voice has changed. “He comes to me. He’s been coming to me for two weeks. I can tell you where he is and what he asks about, every time.”
“I’m in the cafeteria,” Jana says. “Everybody comes through my line eventually. Everybody talks in a food line.”
“Leah’s on his floor too,” Ines adds. “She’s on his floor and she’s atech, she can be in that corridor at any hour of the diurnal with a legitimate reason and a toolkit.”
“Good.” Something loosens very slightly in my chest. “Then he doesn’t move on this rock without one of us seeing it.”
“There’s one more thing,” Chief says. He stands. “Mara Wilson is never alone in this colony,” he says. “Not on the levels, not on the transport, not in that housing block. I don’t care howwe arrange it. Somebody’s eyes are on that female at every hour. Roxy, Leah, Naomi, Jana, the crews, whoever’s near — we keep her surrounded and we do not tell her why.”
“She’ll notice,” Ines says.
“Then she notices.” Chief shrugs. “Better a female who wonders why the miners have gone strange and friendly than the alternative.”
“Yes,” I agree. “I don’t mind if she notices either.”
