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Well, so be it. When we found Bianca and Cleb safe and sound, we could tidy up any misunderstandings. I wouldn’t allow her to be punished for something she hadn’t done.
There were small indentations in the carpet where they’d placed the holographic projectors and taken a complete three-dimensional snapshot of the scene. They could go over it again and again as many times as necessary.
It didn’t matter. The room wouldn’t be touched until Cleb was found.
No matter how long that took.
I entered the room and walked among Cleb’s things. I ran my hands over the toys I’d bought him to play with. None of it got played with. His favorites were his spy collection. Captain Titan, Titus, the gadgets, and sporty spaceships. I could swear he had the entire collection, but many appeared to be missing. He must have put them somewhere else.
I smiled at the idea of him playing with them. To think I was almost too late to enjoy being with him. After his parents died in tragic circumstances, he was left to me to take care of. No sooner had I learned the error of my ways than he was taken from me. Him, and his beautiful doting governess, who I fully intended on marrying.
It was a funny thing, for your entire worldview to shift on its axis. You think you have everything figured out, and then something comes along and blows a hole in it completely. To make you realize that the thing you prized above all others, the thing that you thought was the most important, suddenly gets shunted into second place. And a distant second at that.
It was also the cruelest thing that could happen. To come to love something so much and then for it to be stripped away.
I wanted to head outside right now and join the search. Maybe I would see something the others would not.
I wanted to lock down all travel stations, shut down the roads, prevent any spacecraft from leaving the planet.
But that was never going to happen. The thought of them slipping through my fingers, through the police’s net, was too much to bear.
I couldn’t be in that room. It was too stifling. I couldn’t be surrounded by everything that reminded me of Cleb and Bianca, the most precious things to me.
I turned and marched toward the door.
If only there was something there, something I could notice that would point the way.
I paused, my hand perched on the doorframe and recalled something, something so small and insignificant it would have been overlooked by anyone else.
It pointed the way.
I turned and headed back to Cleb’s collection of toys. I passed the untouched items that he never played with, items that gathered dust, passed the cuddly toys that were nothing to Cleb but decoration.
I moved to his collection of spies.
Most of them were missing. But were they missing for a reason?
Perhaps someone took them? Snatching them up in a hand as they stepped outside?
I scrambled under the bed and among the other toys. I checked under the rugs and the shelves. I felt each piece of clothing in his drawers and came up empty.
The other spy toys were not there.
“Waev?” I yelled. “Waev! Come quickly!”
Only one remained. The female spy. She lay on her back, her pistol pointing vaguely at the window.
Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe I was seeing patterns where there weren’t any.
Or maybe I was picking up on something only I could see.
“But Cleb might have played with the toys somewhere else in the house,” Waev said.
He looked dubious about my theory. I didn’t blame him. I’d think the same way if I were him.
“Have you ever known Cleb to play anywhere but in his room?” I said.
“No,” he admitted, “but since Bianca came, he hasn’t exactly been his usual self.”
