“Go on, then,” he says. “Keep Mara safe.”
I walkto employee housing in the dark.
It’s raining a little, the fine warm rain that comes most evenings, and the road out of the compound is loud with the jungle.
I go up the stairs and stand there with my hand raised for longer than I should.
Then I knock.
She opens the door with a cloth in one hand and her hair falling out of its tie and she is grinning before the door is fully open.
“Okay, so, don’t panic, but I have conquered the flatbread.” She’s already turning back into the room, talking over her shoulder, hauling me in by pure momentum. “I want you to know I have made four of them and only two are structurally unsound. That’s a fifty percent success rate, which is up from zero, which in engineering terms is called progress.”
“Mara.”
“ — and I’ve also done a thing with the protein that I’m not going to describe because if I describe it you’ll have opinions before you’ve eaten it.”
“Mara.”
She stops and turns around and looks at me properly. “What’s happened?”
“Sit down. Please. This is important.”
“Cayzor?” She sits. On the edge of the chair, both hands in her lap, the way you sit in a med bay when they’ve told you the results are back.
“I have to tell you something about Andrew.”
“Is he okay? Is he hurt?”
“No, no. As far as I know he’s fine. But I need to tell you something that I’ve learned about your brother. It’s a story you don’t know. But understand I wouldn’t bring this to you unless we had all the evidence to prove what I’m saying isn’t just a story, but actual fact.”
“Tell me.”
I don’t soften any of it. I’ve thought about that while I walked here and I know exactly what she’d want. So I give it to her in order, the way I’d want it given to me.
I tell her about the three positions before she hired him. Not the story she tells — the truth of them. The audit he resigned ahead of. The equipment that went missing. The contract four years ago that he was removed from, on her clearance, that she was never told about. I tell her that no employer ever pressed charges, because none of them wanted it on record that they’d been robbed by their own tech, which is why she never found any of it and never could have. I tell her about the debts. A decade of them. The kind that don’t come from a bank and don’t get forgiven and are never, ever paid off. I tell her what Ines’s contacts said, twice, in almost the same words, about her brother —he always thinks the next one’s going to fix it.
I tell her about the three payments and the amounts. I tell her the routing, and the four shells, and the holdings concern on Chronos, and that Hallie knows that name from the ledger she carried off that planet in her own hands.
And then I tell her the dates.
“The first payment,” I say, “landed four diurnals after the two of you signed the Timbur contract. He was already talking to them, Mara, before you’d left New Earth. He was bought on your home planet, and then he went and found a contract on the one rock his employers needed a door into, and he brought you with him.” I make myself hold her eyes. “Nobody ever looked at either of you twice because he arrived with you.”
Her hands are flat on her knees.
“And then you and I pulled a maintenance roster out of an archive nobody had touched in forty rotations. And within two diurnals, an old male who was in the walls of that grid on both the diurnals that matter fell down a service stair in the dark.”
She sucks in a breath.
“He didn’t need Ordek’s name. That’s what I couldn’t work out, and it’s what Ines worked out for me. He was in the same Minecorp system we were, every diurnal, with his own credentials and every right to be there. He didn’t have to hear anything. He only had to see that somebody had suddenly started digging through forty rotations of old facilities schedules — and then tell the beings who pay him which direction we were looking.”
“That’s all it would have taken,” I say. “One message. He might not even know what he did.”
Mara Wilson sits very still in a chair in a warm apartment with the smell of burnt flatbread in the air, and looks at a point somewhere past my shoulder, and doesn’t move at all. When she finally speaks, her voice is perfectly level. Quiet. The voice she uses on level four hundred when she’s reading something off apanel that doesn’t make sense and she wants to be certain she has it right before she says it out loud. “So let me make sure I understand.”
“All right.”
“You’re telling me my brother is a criminal, who got a witness killed.”
