Regeneration

by Stephanie Saulter

  And in her heart of hearts she knew that when she showed him things ahead of anyone else it was as much as anything for the pleasure of hearing him tell her how brilliant she was. Grow up, Agwé, she thought. Stop looking for validation. Be more like Gabe. She made her final edits and sent the vid off to the publicity service.

  It would be a nice surprise for him.

  Gabriel would later kick himself for the fact that he had switched his band to standby; although the din he was subjected to when he rendezvoused with his mother at the school to pick up the three children was so loud that he’d never have been able to monitor the streams anyway. Eve was still giving him the cold shoulder, but he was pleased to see that she was being a bit less bossy than usual with Misha and Sural. The three were in different classes, and from the enthusiasm of their reunion anyone would have thought they hadn’t seen each other for weeks instead of mere hours.

  “Eve still believes it was me,” he murmured to Gaela as they walked behind the chattering trio. “I don’t even need to read her again to tell.”

  “I’ve told her you had nothing to do with it, that I was the one who knew something was up. I’m not surprised she’s holding a grudge; I just don’t understand why it’s against the wrong person.”

  “She’s convinced herself that you’re covering for me.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s a lot easier to stay mad at mean big brother than lovely cuddly Mama,” he said. “Don’t worry about it; I’ll live. She can’t keep it up forever. Any luck finding the kid who sent her the link?”

  “No, the family has moved abroad. The school was very surprised—they said it wasn’t a child they’d’ve expected such behavior from.”

  “I think Herran should trace the family, just to be safe. He will if we explain it’s for Eve. I wanted to ask him yesterday, but he was really rattled by the police interview; it kind of made him shut down a bit.”

  “He doesn’t like it when people he knows behave in ways he’s not used to. Let’s give him a day or two to get his equilibrium back.”

  They were walking arm in arm, and when she looked up at him it made him feel a little disoriented: it was preposterous that he could, in the last year, have grown so much taller than his mother. “Is there news?” she asked.

  “Yes—‘Top Secret,’ as Herran would say.” He told her about the conversation with Mikal. “So the rest of today should be fairly quiet, but tomorrow will be manic. The police will try to keep the press from finding out that it was me who tipped them off,” he added quickly.

  “You shouldn’t be there at all. Leave it to Pilan to sort out.”

  “Mama, I can’t. It’s my job and I’m good at it, and he’d be terrible. Besides, if I suddenly disappeared, it’d be pretty easy to put two and two together, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t like this, Gabe.”

  “I don’t like it either, but I’d like it even less if I couldn’t do anything about it.” He looked askance at her. “You and Papa aren’t going to make me stay away, are you? Please don’t.”

  Gaela sighed deeply. “We’ve talked about it,” she said candidly, “and so far we’ve decided that as long as you personally are not in danger and you want to keep going, we don’t want to stop you. But we’re going to have to talk about it some more now, I think.”

  “Mama—”

  “No, listen to me, Gabriel. Your father and I admire your commitment, we really do. You know how proud of you we are. But we have a job to do too, and if we decide you’re not safe or it’s getting too much for you to handle, you’re out. Not least,” she said with a catch in her voice, “because it would kill me if anything happened to you. Got it?”

  He had to blink hard and clear his own throat before he could answer her. “Got it.”

  She patted his arm. “Good. Now, those three delinquents are about to charge into the grocery, climb all over the tables in the café, and attempt to breach the kitchen. Your father will pretend to be amused, but it drives him crazy, so if you can help me corral them in less time than it usually takes we’ll both earn major points.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  In the end all it took was a promise to play mind-reading games to entice the giggling boys and a grumbling Eve out of the café and into the garden, where Gabriel put them to work gathering up the overnight windfall of leaves and small branches. “So, Mish is thinking he doesn’t know why we’re bothering to do this,” Gabriel announced, holding to his end of the bargain. “He thinks it would be better to use the sticks to play swords or horses or throwing games.”

  Misha, examining a boomerang-shaped specimen as he trudged over to dump it on the growing pile, stopped and stared with his mouth open. Gabriel grinned at him.

  Then he looked at Misha’s brother. “Suri thinks we’re doing it just to tidy up for Aunty Gaela, and he likes things tidy so he doesn’t mind. Right, Suri?” The little boy nodded gravely over a tiny armful of lichen-covered twigs collected from beneath the apple tree. “Whereas Eve knows exactly why, don’t you, Eve? She thinks we’re building special houses, and she’s imagining all the creatures that might come live in them this winter.”

  Misha rounded on her. “What creatures?”

  Eve, caught between her determination not to accept any overtures from her brother and her love of showing off, wavered and broke. “Hedgehogs,” she said hopefully. “An’ worms and bugs and spiders and maybe even snakes—”

  “Snakes?” squeaked Suri, dropping his twigs in alarm.

  “They’re not dangerous or anything.” And she was off, spinning stories about all the creeping, crawling things she claimed to remember from back when they lived in the mountains near Grandpa Reginald, illustrating her tall tales by poking at rotting logs to disturb centipedes and woodlice, turning damp leaves over for earthworms, rediscovering the hole at the base of the old brick wall from which a toad had emerged in the spring.

  Gaela shook with silent laughter, and Gabriel felt waves of approval rolling his way. “Very good,” she murmured to him as she headed inside. “We might have a visitor, by the way. It appears you’re not the only one taking the afternoon off.”

  Don’t say anything, she continued inside his head. That way it can be a surprise if she comes, and no disappointment if she doesn’t.

  But she did come, of course. He had just about managed to get the drifts of fallen leaves raked up against the back wall despite the scattering charges of the children, when a shadow flashed across the sunlit garden: sharp-edged, bird-shaped, and banking, far larger than any bird.

  “Aunt Aryel!” Eve shrieked in delight as she curved around the treetops at the back of the garden.

  “Aunty Aryel!” echoed Misha, hopping from one long leg to the other with excitement. Sural shaded his eyes with his odd little hands, lost his balance as he spun with face upturned to follow Aryel’s movement and tumbled onto the damp grass, still looking up, barely noticing that he had fallen.

  It was funny, Gabriel thought, that no matter how many times they had seen her in the air it was never any less of a thrill. The children scattered to give her room, though the idea that she needed much was an illusion born of the massive span of her wings; she swept them up to spill the air and dropped feet-first onto a small patch of lawn between a rose bush and Bal’s herb beds. She carried a large, lumpy bag in her arms, and was immediately mobbed.

  “What did you bring us?” Eve demanded as Aryel crouched to greet them.

  “What makes you think I brought you anything?” Aryel returned, trying to hang on to the bag and hug three squirming children at the same time. “Maybe it’s for—Oh well.” Their enthusiastic hugs had knocked it loose and several small golden apples tumbled out. As the boys scrambled after them Aryel scooped one up and tossed it to Eve. “There you go. A present from Maryam House, since your old tree doesn’t fruit anymore.”

  “Shonk’ou,” Eve said, around a massive mouthful of apple. Misha held his firmly clamped in his jaws as he
returned two more to the bag, nodding solemnly in agreement. Sural considered the samples he held in either hand, made his selection and dropped the other back as Gabriel gathered the bag up.

  “Aunty A, why are you flying with these?” he scolded. “They’re heavy. I could have come over.”

  “They weigh slightly less than a small boy,” she said, smiling. “And then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of a visit.”

  “Are they for us or the café?”

  “You,” she replied, and followed him inside as he took them upstairs to the apartment. He glanced back over his shoulder at her.

  “Your band is off. You want to talk to me about Kaboom? Who told you? Papa . . . and Herran?” He looked back again, this time in surprise.

  “I’m having a break from the band,” she said guiltily. “I dropped by to see Herran yesterday. He was a bit distressed, but I couldn’t get him to explain why. He told me about the meeting, but not what it was actually about—just who was there. So I got hold of your father and he explained very briefly. I haven’t said anything to anyone except Eli. But I wanted to ask you, because it—Hi, Gaela.”

  “Hi—Wow, that’s more than I expected—”

  “Three less than there were.” She looked at the tray of sandwiches and drinks in Gaela’s hands. “They might not have any room left.”

  “Are you joking? They’re like locusts. If we’re lucky, maybe they’ll leave a couple for the rest of us. Make yourselves some tea.” And she was gone down the stairs.

  Gabriel unloaded the bag thoughtfully.

  “Because it reminded you and Papa of something,” he murmured, finishing Aryel’s thought. “Mama too.” He pointed at his own band. “Sorry. I turned mine off to play games with the kids.”

  “Gabriel, you’ve been poking around in my head since you were Suri’s age. I don’t mind. Tell me about Kaboom: how does it work?”

  “How did it work—they’ve been arrested and the story’s going to break tomorrow.” He explained how the streamers had operated, reading her thoughts as she processed the information. “Blimey, are you serious? Zavcka Klist did the same thing?”

  “Something very like it. She was lobbying for limits to be placed on the rights that were being extended to gems, and it was part of trying to stoke the kind of fear and distrust that politicians would have to respond to. And that led to the godgang attacks, the assault on Maryam House—”

  “—when Mama and I were kidnapped and you rescued us,” he said matter-of-factly. “They call it the ‘Maryam House Massacre’ in college.”

  Aryel’s expression was bleak. “It might have gone beyond what Zavcka intended, but she helped create the conditions that made it possible. That was several years before the crimes that sent her to prison, though—the theft of the Phoenix genestock, and Ellyn and . . .” She nodded at the window, which was open a crack, letting in the cool autumn air and the sound of Eve’s laughter from the garden below. “Her part in those earlier events was entered into evidence, but since it wasn’t what she was actually charged with, it ended up being kind of a footnote.”

  “And now you think—what? I can’t tell.”

  “That’s because I don’t know what to think. The similar methodology could be a coincidence, or it could be someone who knew about what she did then is part of this conspiracy now.”

  “Maybe the someone is her?”

  “I can certainly believe it of her, Gabriel, but I haven’t been able to work out how. Kaboom’s been active for weeks, and the toxin operation for months, but she’s only been out of prison a few days. She was allowed very few visitors, all of whom were thoroughly vetted, and she had virtually no private communication. And apart from all of that, it’s not obvious what she’d stand to gain from damaging Thames Tidal.”

  “I don’t want to sound like I think I’m important,” Gabriel said, “but I work there. And Eve is my sister.”

  “I don’t think she knows anything about Eve, but she might know about you, and you are important.”

  “This is what you were thinking last night: that the thing that connects everything might be Zavcka Klist.”

  “It was.” Aryel sighed and rubbed a hand across her face. For a moment she looked tired, and older than he was used to. “I’ve known for some time that there’s a deep strategy against Thames Tidal, but not who’s behind it—and I still don’t, Gabe. Zavcka does have the kind of mind for this, but that doesn’t prove it’s her. It might just be sheer coincidence that she was released right into the middle of things.” She picked up the cup of tea Gabriel had placed in front of her. “She’s been our bogeyman for so long, and with good reason, but there’s a huge risk that if we decide this is her work we might miss what’s really going on.”

  “What’s really going on is that she might have found a way to do it even from inside prison—she’s smart enough. She might be doing it because of you, because of me, because it’s gems. This might be her revenge.”

  Aryel blew on her tea. He felt the thought take form a moment before she spoke, in the moment that she gave up fighting it.

  “I can’t be sure it isn’t,” she said. “And it would explain a lot.”

  22

  For the third time that afternoon, Patrick Crawford apologized profusely and excused himself to take an incoming call, and for the third time, Zavcka Klist smiled graciously as he departed, although by now she was seething with anger. Had it not been for his other roles—sycophant, acolyte and potential threat—she would have been on the line to Dhahab Investments herself, insisting that he be replaced immediately. He was useful in the prosecution of her own business, but by no means irreplaceable; anyone from the premier-client division would be able to provide what she needed. It was only her knowledge of his other alliances that could compel her to put up with this behavior, and he knew it: she could hear it in his tone when he begged to be excused; she could see in his eyes that he knew the answer could only be yes. His mask of respect hadn’t slipped but he had become presumptuous with her time and her space. There was no need for him to have been there for so many hours but he was confident now that come what may, she wouldn’t throw him out. He was taking advantage. Her blood boiled at the gall of the man.

  She walked over to the window, idly noticing that the books she’d handed to Eli Walker were still resting on the table where he had left them. She found it ludicrous that their conversation was by far the best she’d had since she’d been released.

  I’d rather spend another hour talking to Eli Walker than ten minutes more with this idiot—even Aryel would be preferable.

  Dear god, what is wrong with me?

  Outside, evening was closing in, and she realized that she was doing exactly as she had on countless other evenings, staring out through the bars of the grimy little window of her cell: watching another day die. At least the view was better here, but the study was no larger than the cell had been, and she had spent the entire day in it.

  Well, there was no need for that anymore. Perhaps if she went to the living room and powered up the wall screen Crawford would get the message that it was time for him to take his leave. But that hope was dashed as she approached, and heard his voice issuing from within. So that was where he had gone, the bumptious bastard: not out to the hall, as he should have, but into yet another of her precious—personal—spaces. Glancing in, she saw that his back was turned and he was pacing across the room. Pacing. What did he have to pace about?

  “No, of course I haven’t heard from Fischer,” she heard him say angrily.

  He sounded as thoroughly irritated with whoever he was speaking to as she was with him, which was some comfort, although his next words put the lie to his obsequiousness of the past few days.

  “Look, I’m having trouble on this end too. She wants me to—No, I know you think I should just do as I’m told . . .”

  Damn right. She stepped silently back out of sight and headed for her bedroom, considering her options as she swallowed a dose of her meds
. He could hardly follow her if she stayed there, but that would leave him free to roam the rest of the place until she emerged. And if she went to find Marcus in the kitchen the weasel might take it as an invitation to stay for dinner. She grudgingly returned to the study, wondering whether he was speaking to his boss at Dhahab or his associates in the K Club. She was not impressed with his tone of voice either way.

  Back in her chair, she angrily swiped away the price curves and market positions from her tablet screen and called up a newstream feed; she might as well see if there had been any new developments in the Thames Tidal business, and whether those idiots at Bankside had gotten any better at damage control since the morning. She would soon need to decide which of her holdings to liquidate, in order to scoop up more Bel’Natur shares at the new, lower price she had spent the last few days engineering. If the energy giant persisted in mismanaging this affair they would be prime candidates for a dumping.

  She found little to distract her. The police investigation appeared not to have advanced much; the names and faces of the two fugitives were still being flashed as WANTED and their former employers had progressed from incoherent to indignant, but their response was still a long way from commanding. One reporter snidely observed that even Standard BioSolutions’s attempt to get on the right side of the story had ended up looking po-faced next to the swift and unconditional intervention of Bel’Natur.

  Zavcka followed that link with interest and learned that Bel’Natur had worked around the clock to develop an organic inhibitor that could be deployed against the algae. Test data indicated that the product was close to a hundred percent effective and the company would make it available to endangered communities free of charge.

  That’s your work, isn’t it, Aryel? So clever! A safeguard against future attack for your own people, at the cost of a few tens of thousands of credits in research time and materials. The company will gain millions in public-relations value, possibly billions in the future contracts. I wonder when the current management realized how much of an asset you are.