Sister of Shadows, page 19
“Yes. You could have. All you boys could have saved us weak girls.” She spat the last bit. Before he could object, she patted his hand. “I know you mean well, Humphrey. But you don’t understand how hard it is to talk about. You don’t know how small it makes me feel to talk about it even now.”
“But you are talking about it now.”
Wanda motioned to the raging sea with her chin. “Out here we’re all small. I figure, what difference does it make?”
“I’ll talk to Horace.”
“No, you won’t.”
“But I won’t allow him to continue harassing you.”
Horace had always been a problem. Wild, undisciplined, and with a penchant for torturing insects. Humphrey would never forget seeing the boy firing the machine gun at Senator Bentilius’s guards, wild rage in his eyes.
Wanda sighed through her nose and smiled, tight lipped. “I don’t think he’ll be doing much harassing any time soon.”
“Why?”
The door to the bridge opened again and Leslie strode in. She wore a self-satisfied look, as if she’d just won an argument. She glanced at Wanda. “He’s in the room opposite Sang’s.”
“Has the bleeding stopped?”
Leslie shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t care.”
Wanda smiled and nudged Humphrey with a sharp shoulder. “Leslie punched him in the nose.”
Leslie grunted. “A good thing Sensei didn’t teach me to fight. I might have done much worse.”
Orson waved a paw to get Humphrey’s attention. “I want to send Rosales to—uh, assist—Summer. We need to squeeze more out of the engines.”
Humphrey could only imagine how Summer would react to that. And from what Humphrey had learned, Orson’s mechanic hadn’t kept the engines in very good repair to begin with.
“Why, are the seas growing?” Humphrey couldn’t imagine plowing through bigger waves. He thought it might be better for them to just sink beneath the surface and put an end to their queasy misery.
“No. But there’s a fleet to the southeast.”
“A what?” Humphrey said.
Orson’s eyes flashed momentarily to meet Leslie’s. Just as quickly they snapped back to Humphrey’s. “A fleet. You said something about getting away from the island before a backup force arrived?”
The man swiveled in his chair and pointed. “Fifty miles that way.” He checked a display on the control console. “Make that forty-nine.”
“How many ships?” Leslie demanded.
“Impossible to say. The storm is generating a lot of noise for our radar. At least ten ships. Big ones. With big guns.”
37
I Know My Children
Motion sickness was for the unprepared.
And a good butler was never unprepared.
Mr. Justin popped another motion sickness tablet and hummed quietly to himself. The storm was making a mess of the boat, especially in the holds, where the Scions were taking turns tossing up their meals.
Fortunately, Sensei had trained into them a sense of hygiene. Beat it into them, more like.
The butler laughed, realizing he was still worrying about housekeeping problems. Old habits die hard, as they say.
The Scions could take care of themselves. And it seemed the worst of their sickness was waning as they collapsed into insensible slumber.
Obu, a very clever Spider from Humphrey’s Nine, had showed everyone how to fasten themselves into their bunks with some spare rope he’d found lying about. He’d helped secure the bunks so they would stop sliding and tumbling as well.
Mr. Justin wondered—with only the slightest bit of actual interest—who Obu’s progenitor might be.
With everyone hunkered down in the holds and Humphrey suffering on the bridge, Mr. Justin had the run of the ship as long as he stayed off the weather deck. Only a fool would go out in that.
He stumbled down the Deck One companionway, heading aft toward Orson’s stateroom.
He stopped momentarily to peek into the staterooms where Sang and Horace were locked up. The latter boy’s nose had stopped bleeding after all. Pity.
Of all the Scions, Horace was the only one Mr. Justin would actually consider killing rather than selling. But that would be an unnecessary waste. Once overwritten, nothing of the boy’s weird sadistic nature would remain.
He considered how to weave Horace into his plan, but since everyone thought Sang was Mr. Justin, Sang would have to serve. Also a pity, as Sang was truly a nice boy.
“Shouldn’t you be with your Nine?”
Mr. Justin managed not to jump out of his skin. He turned to find Sensei emerging from the small galley kitchen a few doors down. The martial arts master held a can of beans in one hand, tin lid cocked up. In his other he held a plastic spoon.
Fast thinking was just normal everyday thinking for Mr. Justin. The lie he conceived on the spot made him smile. Working among these people was like a chess master playing against three-year-olds.
“Mother Tyeesha was concerned about Sang and Horace. She sent me to peek in and discover whether they were as ill as everyone else. I have ginger.” He held up an empty fist.
Sensei shoved a spoonful of beans—cold, it appeared—into his mouth and mushed them around for a moment before swallowing. He had gained his sea legs faster than anyone else. He merely shifted his weight to remain rooted where he stood as Aphrodite climbed and plunged over the raging swells. A dangerous man, indeed.
“Odd. I was just speaking with Mother Tyeesha. She expressed to me the same concern. Didn’t mention sending you to do the same task she assigned me.”
Mr. Justin smiled and stepped closer. He’d spent a fair amount of time before a mirror, practicing various expressions with his smooth feminine face. He put on one that he knew expressed exasperation. “That poor old woman. She’s so forgetful these days. And she’s absolutely convinced Sang is not Mr. Justin. I explained the evidence we’ve gathered, but she wouldn’t hear it. She kept saying—”
Sensei interjected, filling in Mother Tyeesha’s words: “‘I know my children. Sang is as innocent as a newborn babe.’”
“Yes. Exactly that. I have to admire her affection for us, even if I think it’s a bit blind.”
“So how is Sang?” Sensei took another spoonful. He seemed casual, but there was something in the flicker of darkness in his eyes that warned Mr. Justin. The man was suspicious.
“I didn’t see any vomit on the floor.” He said it lightly, with a smile. “Horace, on the other hand . . .”
“I heard there was an altercation. I extracted from Kirk that Horace has been a bit of a menace recently.”
Sensei went to Horace’s door, peered in the window, mashing another spoonful of beans in his mouth. His shoulders were like balls of iron, his thighs, thick logs. Too dangerous to keep around.
“I had warned Vaughan about it,” Mr. Justin said. “Humphrey, too. But everyone was so distracted by Birthday. And then everything with Dr. Carlhagen happened.”
Sensei nodded slowly, scraping the spoon around the inside of the can.
Mr. Justin wished he had everything in place. Right here. He could get rid of the man and it would be so easy.
But everything was not in place. And a good butler knew patience, knew preparation, planning, double-checking, thinking of contingencies, and then striking when all aligned as it should. This was not that time.
“I want to go check on Summer in the engine room,” Mr. Justin said. “She sometimes forgets to eat when she’s absorbed in mechanical problems. And on this ship, that means she’ll starve to death.”
He almost turned to leave, but in the last instant remembered that Scions do not just leave Sensei’s presence without being dismissed. Maybe Jacey could get away with that, but Leslie could not.
Not yet.
Sensei eyed him for what seemed like fifteen seconds before nodding a dismissal.
Mr. Justin let a grin replace his polite and attentive expression as he walked up the companionway and into the flickering dimness toward the engine room. Just short of that were Orson’s quarters.
Mr. Justin had led the search of Orson’s room himself so he could report to Humphrey that nothing untoward was in there, nothing Orson could use to hurt a Scion or the ship.
That was untrue, however. There was something in there that could most definitely hurt a Scion.
More importantly, it could kill Sensei Rosa.
38
In a Bar, Mac
Sounds of festivities rumbled through the door of Jacey’s room.
Bass notes and drums thrummed and made her windows resonate. Above that noise came shrieks of laughter, shouts, and the occasional clash of breaking glass.
Jacey kept the lights off now, except for the video monitor. Every so often she crept to the window to watch people come and go alone or in couples. They’d stroll around the pool, most of the women wearing versions of what Jacey wore. A few had on short dresses.
The pool glowed with eldritch blue light from bulbs below the water level, a haze of blue colored the bottoms of palm trees nearby. To the right, a path wandered away toward the cliff, now lost in darkness.
Jacey wished the windows had louvers so she could let in some fresh air. Warmer air would be welcome, too. She wondered why Vin kept the place so cold. It made her think of the freezer in the medical ward. Perhaps the Progenitors were all dead and they just walked around with no blood in their hearts.
No. She’d been close enough to all of them to feel the warmth of their bodies. Her friends’ bodies. They were now dead, overwritten, gone, lost. Destroyed.
The news program she’d been watching continued to drone in the background. It was on a channel called Survivor News Network. And it looped the same handful of stories over and over.
Every time the Tent City segment came on and showed Ollie Montgomery and the President, Jacey watched, letting it sink in. She had known that the Progenitors were powerful people. The richest, the wealthiest. And though she had no understanding of the structure of nations in the outside world, she knew what the title of “president” meant. Socrates had taught her about the Democratic ideals of the ancient Greeks. He seemed to love that topic above all others, even more than Shakespeare. And that was saying something.
The fact that Leslie was the President’s Scion reinforced Dante’s argument that Dr. Carlhagen was gaining sway over the most powerful people on earth. What Jacey couldn’t understand, yet, was what he planned to do with that power. What did he want?
She had always attributed his actions to greed. And lust.
And his addiction, she reminded herself, remembering Dr. Carlhagen’s insatiable need for andleprixen.
She hadn’t told Dante about that yet. Hadn’t told him a lot of things.
Already she’d confided more than she’d planned. Desperation had made her do it because she wanted to get off this island and find Dr. Carlhagen.
Warring with that desire was her need to contact Humphrey. Dante said he’d help her get to a holodesk later, once everyone went to bed. The party had already raged for hours, and the sun had set long ago. She feared the sun would come up before they finally slept.
Frustrated, she snatched up the remote control and scanned through more channels.
The wealth of non-stop information astonished her. The dramatic productions alone filled hundreds of channels. Then there were the sporting events where people in colorful shirts and shorts kicked a white ball around a vast green field. She’d seen Sensei lead Scions in games of football before, but this was something on a much higher level. And the people! The arena was filled with over seventy thousand of them.
Another channel showed a young man in a suit standing in front of a map. It had a red and yellow swirl on it. “Hurricane Ignatius is building up in the Caribbean. Right now it’s approaching the uninhabited islands east of Puerto Rico. Computer models predict with high certainty it will turn north and graze the Florida stub, then continue up the coast. Salvage divers on what was once the eastern seaboard are heading to sea, hoping to avoid the worst of it.”
Jacey didn’t know the geography well enough to know where on the map she was. She knew the words Caribbean and Puerto Rico, though.
She needed to talk to Dante. Now.
If Aphrodite was caught in this storm, she’d soon be at the bottom of the sea.
At some point she’d gotten out of bed. She found herself back at the window, considering whether to pound on it.
And why shouldn’t she? Who was she protecting by staying hidden? Didn’t she want the truth to come out?
The sooner the better, actually. If the world learned of the Scion program now, before the president—and who knew how many other world leaders—transferred, wasn’t it more likely some force would sweep in and put a stop to it?
As wishful as that thinking was, she couldn’t convince herself it was true.
Everything she’d seen so far had showed her that any force that took St. Vitus was likely to use the Scion program for their own advantage, not to shut it down.
She remembered that Dr. Carlhagen had another Scion School somewhere. Humphrey hadn’t been able to find out where.
And then there was the carbo problem. Jacey’s very existence was illegal, apparently.
Returning to bed, she flipped away from the weather news and kept scanning. Her eyes weren’t even focused on the screen. Her thoughts were far away, imagining Humphrey and the rest thrashing through towering waves, their boat lost beneath them.
Her own voice coming from the screen pulled her from the waking nightmare. “I found him in a bar, Mac. Where else? Looks like he was there all day. Drunk. He smelled like piss.”
Eyes focusing on the screen, Jacey felt the world tilting again.
She was on the screen.
She was sitting in a plain room, walls of concrete block. A battered table sat in the middle. She was on one side, wearing a sort of suit, but cut for her curves.
She had a strange necklace on that looked like a shoelace. A plastic placard dangled from the end in place of an actual piece of jewelry.
Jacey was leaning back in a chair, haughty expression on her face. Her hair was pulled back in the familiar ponytail, but the color was wrong. It looked sort of red. And she wore makeup, darkening her eyes, making them more mature, more sensual.
The real Jacey, the one sitting on the bed in the cold room in Vin’s mansion, swore. It was guttural, passionate, and breathless.
It was the first time Jacey had ever seen Jacqueline Buchanan.
39
Nawk Fleet Command Ship
The storm passed just before dawn, the seas mellowing into long gentle swells that rocked Aphrodite and her long-suffering passengers to sleep.
Humphrey was still up. He hadn’t slept for over twenty-four hours and it felt like twenty-four days.
Both bridge wing doors were braced open, letting in the fresh breeze. Sun-fire burned just beneath the horizon to the east, casting a burnt orange light onto the ragged tail of storm clouds scudding away to the northeast.
The air smelled clean. Humphrey’s stomach had settled once he’d been able to keep Mother Tyeesha’s ginger down long enough. And with the settling sea, the edge of hunger was working its way into his belly.
Orson scratched his beard as he studied a display on his console. “The fleet drifted east over the past few hours, but radar shows them bearing straight for us.”
He flipped a few switches and turned a knob. Static hissed from a metal-grated speaker next to a radio handset on a curly black cord. “Haven’t heard a peep from them yet.”
“Is that bad or good?” Humphrey asked.
Orson shrugged. “A military fleet in radar range is never good.”
Sensei was taking a turn at guard duty. He stood at the map table, frowning it at and clenching his jaw. “The islands we were headed for are beyond our reach at the moment, not that we could hide there anyway.”
“Should we turn back?” Humphrey asked. “Or maybe turn toward them?”
“Toward them?” Orson and Sensei said together.
Humphrey held his hands out. “I don’t know. I thought maybe we’d look less suspicious if we just casually went in their direction. What moron trying to escape their notice would do that?”
“Apparently you,” Orson said.
The comment stung, but only a little. Humphrey was confident they had to do something to mislead the fleet. Make them think Aphrodite was anything but a boatload of Scions.
“We don’t know they are the senator’s force,” Sensei said.
“What else could they be?”
Sensei clasped his hands behind his back and walked to and fro, head down in thought. “I don’t know. But we must be clear on what the objective facts are versus the ones we make up.”
The radio crackled and a tinny voice blasted out. “Freighter ship bearing southeast, this is NAUC fleet command ship A. Rodgers, please identify yourself, your port of departure, and your port of destination.”
Humphrey’s skin chilled despite the balmy air whirling through the bridge. “What’s a nawk fleet command ship?”
Orson stared at the speaker, tip of his pink tongue peeking from his whisker-shrouded mouth. “That’s N.A.U.C. It stands for North American Union—Caribbean Fleet. The A. Rodgers is an aircraft carrier. Fighters. Bombers. Sub-orbs. Missiles. Dozen gun turrets. A detachment of marines, probably. She’s got a whole slew of other ships with her.”
The message repeated. And then again. The next time the voice added, “you, with the bus, I’m talking to you.”
“You’d better answer,” Sensei said. “Remember, we don’t want to look suspicious.”
Orson lifted the handset and put it near his mouth. He didn’t thumb the transmit key though. “Just remember, they probably won’t kill you,” he said to Humphrey. “But they’ll have zero hesitation to put a bullet between my eyes.”
