Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Damn!” M’lord slumped. “Damn. I hope Ako proves a more faithful zookeeper than I did.”

  “Well, it’s not as if we could kidnap him,” said Vorlynkin, with a faint smile. M’lord eyed him. Perhaps thinking better of this mild venture into humor, Vorlynkin cleared his throat and went back to looking bland. Roic wondered if he should take Vorlynkin aside later and warn him not to say things like that around m’lord, and not because the Lord Auditor might take offense.

  Roic rubbed sandy eyelids. “Perhaps you’d best sleep on it, m’lord,” he suggested, not without self-interest. M’lord had plainly had the advantage of a shower and fresh clothes, but still looked as if he’d been up all night, as had they all. And the shiny glitter in his eyes was a tip-off. “Have you checked your neurotransmitter levels since you got back?” The elevation of same being early warning of an impending seizure, and signal it was time to use the medical seizure-stimulator to short-circuit the fit—in some safe and controlled place.

  M’lord addressed an unrevealing mutter to his shoes.

  “Right,” said Roic, in a very firm tone.

  M’lord sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Can I go back to my hotel now?” asked Raven hopefully.

  “Yes, but stay in touch. In fact—Vorlynkin, please issue Dr. Durona a secured wristcom before he goes, eh?”

  Vorlynkin’s brows rose, but he said only, “Yes, my lord.”

  “I need more data,” m’lord growled, to no one in particular. He looked up appraisingly at the consul. “All right, Vorlynkin. If WhiteChrys or any of our other late hosts call to inquire after me, I want you to tell them that I am very upset by the disruption of the conference and the kidnapping of my armsman. In fact, I’m furious, and as soon as I recover from my ordeal I plan to stalk home and give a very bad report of the affair to anyone who will listen, starting with Emperor Gregor.”

  “Er… and are you?” asked Vorlynkin, sounding nonplussed.

  M’lord returned only an unreassuring grin. “I want you to test how far they’ll go to reopen their lines of communication. Indicate you’ll do your diplomatic best to calm me down, but you’re not sure it can be done. If they offer you incentives for the task, take them up.”

  “You… want me to accept a bribe, sir?” A little real offense tightened Vorlynkin’s jaw, as well as understandable alarm.

  “Well, at least pretend to consider it, eh? It will show us who wants what, and how badly. If they don’t come through, I’ll have to think of another move, but if you’re a tolerably good fisherman, I think you can hook them for me.”

  “I’ll, um… try my best, sir.” Vorlynkin didn’t exactly stare at the Lord Auditor as if the little man had sprouted two heads, but Roic could almost see the consul scrambling to keep pace. Yeah, welcome to my world.

  The debriefing broke up.

  The consulate harbored two spare bedrooms upstairs fitted out for guests, not much used for the purpose and slowly filling with assorted storage. One had been hastily cleared for the Lord Auditor. Roic turned down the bed and rummaged in m’lord’s luggage for the seizure stimulator. M’lord stripped to his underwear, sat on the bed, and eyed the medical device with loathing.

  “Kludgy thing.”

  “Yes, m’lord. Tell me, am I to trust the consulate fellows here, or not?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ve been caught out before with embassy staff or even ImpSec couriers being suborned.”

  “Because if you mean to use them for backup, which we very much need, you’re going to have to start including them in your loop. I could see Lieutenant Johannes, f’r instance, didn’t know what to make of you leaving him out just now.”

  “It’s this Lord Auditor thing. I used to be able to get almost anyone to talk to me, damn it. In your spare minutes, try your hand at evaluating them, eh? I’ve no doubt they’ll be more willing to be frank with you, simple honest face and all that.”

  “Yes, m’lord.”

  “I already know that somebody out there is buying people. Question is, has the consulate been bought already, or did there seem no need to secure it before I showed up? At least neither of the Barrayarans have families here, so I don’t have to worry about negative incentives.” M’lord scowled, lay back, and set the stimulator to the curve of his skull. Roic handed him the mouth guard, which he fitted around his teeth. He took a breath and squeezed his eyes shut like someone about to down a dose of some nasty-tasting medicine, and triggered the stimulator.

  Roic timed the seizure—it was a long one, suggesting m’lord had been pushing the limit. Roic was used to the rolled-back eyes, the weird grimace, and the shivering, but he doubted he’d ever be quite reconciled to the strange absence of that driving personality animating the face. In due course, the neural storm passed, and m’lord lay slack, his eyes opening again on the universe as though his gaze recreated it.

  “God, I hate this,” he muttered. His standard mantra at this point.

  “Yes, m’lord,” Roic soothed. His standard response.

  “I’ll be useless for the rest of the night even if I do get slept out. And tomorrow as well.”

  “I’ll bring you coffee.”

  “Thanks, Roic.” M’lord rolled over and drew up the covers, surrendering at last to the demands of his depleted body. Muffled into the pillow, almost inaudibly, “F’r everythin’…”

  Roic shook his head and tiptoed off to find his own bunk.

  Jin blinked open sore eyes in the semi-darkness of his sister Minako’s tiny bedroom, then bit his lip on a groan. He’d meant to stay awake, outwait and maybe outwit his captors, but the exhaustion of the past day had betrayed him. He sat up on his elbow. A nightlight low on the wall shed a dim pink glow, but the room lacked a clock. It was still full dark outside, and the muffled rumble of Uncle Hikaru’s snores sounded through the thin walls of the next room, so everyone else was asleep, but it could be any hour from midnight to near-dawn.

  He swung bare legs out from under the covers of the narrow futon. Aunt Lorna had put him to bed in his underwear, since his cousin Tetsu’s pajamas had been too big, and his cousin Ken’s too small. His own clothes she had hauled away to wash, or maybe burn, she’d said, since there was no telling where they’d been. Jin sure wasn’t telling, anyway.

  Hopelessly, he went to the window and tried the lock. It unlatched, but the window only slid aside about three centimeters. Uncle Hikaru had climbed up on a borrowed ladder, after the argument at dinner, and blocked the window groove with a rod. Jin could just curl his fingers around the frame, but couldn’t get his hand through. He wasn’t going to be able to repeat his escape of last year.

  Jin pressed his forehead to the cool glass and looked down at the patch of patio, one floor below. In a way, Aunt Lorna had made it easy for him, back then, by exiling all his animals out there. After he’d climbed out the window and dropped down, he’d only had to load them all up on Minako’s outgrown stroller, left in the lee of the fence earlier that day. He’d been terrified at the time that Gyre’s squawk and Lucky’s meowing would alert the household, or that the glass box holding the rats and the turtle would tip and clatter, but it had been a cold night, the windows closed, and nobody but him paid attention to his creatures anyway.

  Well, Tetsu had got in the habit of teasing Gyre, till Gyre had, naturally, bit him. Then there’d been the trip to emergency care, and the surgical glue and antibiotics, and Aunt Lorna screeching more than Tetsu, though mostly about the bill. Tetsu had shown off his battle scar at school the next day pretty smugly, Jin thought.

  Jin slipped over and tried the door, turning the latch as silently as he could. Still locked. There had been another big argument about whether people had to get up in the night to let Jin go to the bathroom, which Uncle Hikaru had settled, in a very practical way, by providing Jin with a bucket, which had scandalized Aunt Lorna and made Tetsu and Ken make fun of him, till Uncle had thumped them. That had been after the squabble over where J
in was to sleep, since his sister was now judged too big to share a bed with him, or maybe it was the other way around. Tetsu and Ken, already dividing a cramped room, complained about having yet a third boy shoved in atop their clutter, and had also objected to being made Jin’s watchers. Jin had endured much in silence, last night and today, in anticipation of a timely escape. He hadn’t expected to be locked in.

  “Just till the boy settles down,” Uncle Hikaru had said—as if Jin would abandon his creatures. As if he would ever stay here.

  Was Miles-san taking care of his charges properly? What must he think, when Jin never came back with his money? Would he think Jin had stolen it? The police had stolen it, really, but would even that extraordinary off-worlder believe Jin over the grownups? He swallowed a lump in his throat, determined not to cry again, because maybe letting go like that was why he’d fallen asleep, earlier. Although what was the point in forcing himself to stay awake when he couldn’t get out? He returned to the futon and sank down in despair.

  Maybe tomorrow night he could hide a screwdriver or some other tools in the room, and try to take the window or the door lock apart from the inside. Tenbury would have known how, Jin was sure. He didn’t think he could pretend to be all settled down so quickly and thus lull his captors into relaxing their guard, not when he was growing more and more frantic inside. Aunt Lorna had threatened she was going to sign him right up tomorrow for Tetsu and Ken’s school, because she couldn’t afford to lose any more work days over him. School, he recalled, had seemed even less easy to escape from than—Jin refused to think of this narrow rented row-house as home.

  The door lock clicked. Aunt Lorna, checking up on him? He could still hear Uncle Hikaru’s snores. He rolled over to face the wall, hitched his covers up over his shoulder, and scrunched his eyes shut.

  “Jin?” a shy voice whispered. “Are you asleep?”

  Jin rolled back, both relieved and annoyed. It was only Mina. “Yes,” he growled.

  A short silence. “No, you’re not.”

  “What do you want?” Some forgotten doll or stuffed toy, he supposed, although she’d taken a basket of them with her to her temporary bed on the couch downstairs.

  The door rumbled, sliding into its slot, and small feet padded to the side of his futon. He rolled over onto his elbow again and stared up at her, staring down at him. She shared Jin’s brown eyes and tousled mop of black hair, but she was taller and less chubby than he remembered from fourteen months ago. Then, she hadn’t even started school yet—now she was in her second year. She seemed less… bewildered-looking, somehow.

  “If I let you out,” she said, “will you take me with you?”

  “Huh?” Startled, Jin sat up and hugged his knees. What, she wasn’t just lost on the way to the bathroom? “No, of course not. Are you crazy?”

  Her face fell. “Oh.” She retreated to the door and started to pull it shut behind her.

  “No, wait!” Jin hissed, lumbering up.

  Next door, the snores stopped. They both froze. After a moment, there came a creaking and a sort of gurgling-drain noise, and the snores started up again.

  “We can’t talk here,” Jin whispered. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  She seemed to think this over, then nodded, waiting in the hallway while he wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and trailed after her. Jin shoved the door closed again very slowly and quietly. The stairs squeaked under their tiptoeing feet, but no one came after them.

  “Don’t turn the light on,” Jin said, keeping his voice low. There was enough light leaking from what Uncle Hikaru called the one-butt kitchen, in a niche off the living-dining room, to keep from tripping on things.

  Mina settled back in her twisted nest of covers on the couch. Jin sat on the edge of Uncle Hikaru’s chair and stared around.

  Mina asked, “Do you remember Daddy?”

  “Sort of. Some.”

  “I don’t. Just his picture in the family shrine Mommy set up.”

  “You were three.” Jin had been seven when their father had died. Four years ago—it seemed half a lifetime. He remembered his mother’s extravagant grief and anger rather better, and how seldom he’d seen her after that—as if one death had stolen both parents, even before the policewomen had come for her. “Doesn’t Aunt Lorna keep the family shrine anymore?”

  “She let me keep it in my room for a while, but then we ran out of space when I needed a desk for school, so she boxed it up and put it away. I wasn’t sure if to set your picture in it or not.”

  Mina was putting on her shoes, a determined look on her face.

  “You can’t go with me,” Jin repeated uneasily. “Not where I’m going.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “A long walk. Too far for you. Why do you want to come anyway?” She’d been Aunt and Uncle’s pet, he thought.

  “Tetsu and Ken are horrid to me. Teasing and bedeviling. Uncle Hikaru yells at them, but he never gets up and does anything.”

  Jin didn’t quite see the problem with this. Well, he had a dim sense that maybe it was his job to heckle his own sister, but if somebody else wanted to take up the slack, he had no objection. “They’re probably just jealous because you get all the girl stuff. Plus if you weren’t here, Ken would have your room,” he added in a fair-minded fashion.

  “Uncle and Aunt were talking about ’dopting me, before you came back. But I don’t want Tetsu and Ken for my brothers. I want my real brother.”

  “How can they adopt you when Mom’s still…” He trailed off. Alive? The word choked in his throat, a wad of uncertainty. He swallowed it and went on: “You can’t stay where I’m going. I—they wouldn’t want you. You’d just get in the way.” While Suze-san and the people at her place might be willing to treat a stray boy as casually as a stray cat, he had a queasy sense that a stray girl, and younger at that, might be another story. And while the police, not to mention Uncle Hikaru and Aunt Lorna, might be less excited about him running away a second time, would that boredom extend to Mina? “You couldn’t keep up.”

  “Yes, I could!”

  “Sh! Keep your voice down!”

  Her mouth went mulish. “If you don’t take me along, I’ll set up a screech, and they’ll catch you and put you back in my room! And I won’t let you out again, so there!”

  He tried to decide if she was bluffing. No, probably not. Could he hit her on the head with something and knock her out while he made his getaway? He had a feeling that worked better in holovids than in real life. And if he hit her with one of Aunt Lorna’s pots or pans, the only blunt instruments immediately available, it would make a hellish bong and wake everybody up anyway, defeating his purpose.

  She interrupted his hostile mulling, in a practical tone that reminded him of Uncle Hikaru: “Besides, I have money and you don’t.”

  “…How much?”

  “Over five hundred nuyen,” she answered proudly. “I saved it up from my birthday and chores.”

  Enough for a dozen tram fares, except that Jin had sworn off the tube system. He craned his neck for a look at the kitchen clock—maybe two hours till dawn, and everybody getting up and missing them. That wasn’t very much of a headstart, compared to the last time. It was now or never. Jin surrendered to the inevitable. “All right, get ready. Quietly. Do you know where Aunt Lorna put my stuff?”

  They found Jin’s clothes in the plastic basket, along with his shoes, in the closet off the kitchen that harbored the launderizer. Mina knew which kitchen drawer hid the lunch bars, too, and stuck a dozen in a sack. Within minutes, they both edged out the sliding back door. Jin latched the patio gate as quietly as he could behind them, and led off up the alley.

  The occasional streetlights made cold halos in the clammy night mist. “I’ve never been outside this late before,” said Mina, still whispering, though they were well away from the row house. “It’s weird. Are you afraid of the dark?” She made to walk closer to Jin; he strode faster.

  “The dark’s all right. I
t’s people you have to be afraid of.”

  “I guess so.”

  A longer silence, while their feet thumped softly on the pavement. Then Mina said, “That thing Aunt Lorna said to you, about recid—recidiv… I can’t pronounce it. Kids who run away over and over. They don’t really freeze them, do they?”

  Jin pondered it uneasily. “I never heard of it before. And it would cost a lot of money, I think.”

  “So she was just trying to scare you into being good?”

  “Yeah.” The scare part had sure worked, Jin had to allow that.

  “But anyway, they don’t freeze you the first time.” Mina seemed to take undue satisfaction from this thought.

  An unwelcome memory rose in Jin’s mind. It wasn’t the clammy smell of the night that triggered it, because the policewomen had come for his mother in the daytime, but the clammy chill in his gut that day had felt much like this. Mom kneeling down, gripping his shoulders, saying, Jin, help look after Mina, all right? Be a good big brother, and do what Aunt Lorna tells you.

  Jin had given up on that last when Aunt Lorna had insisted that he get rid of all of his pets, yes, all, a clean sweep, there was no room and they smelled and pooped too much and that bird was homicidal and to top everything, Ken was supposedly allergic to Lucky, who was too lazy to scratch anyone. Jin just figured his cousin was doing all that sniffling and blowing on purpose, to be annoying, in which he certainly succeeded. Jin had forgotten the first part of that maternal parting… blessing, curse, whatever it was, because, after all, nobody yelled at Mina the way they’d yelled at him and his pets.

  He wished he hadn’t remembered that.

  They had a good long walk ahead of them just to get out of this area, which they needed to do before they were missed. Maybe they’d better lie up and hide during school hours. Jin selected a direction he was almost sure was south, and kept trudging.

  Chapter Seven

  Two days after his dawn return to the consulate, Miles’s party assembled on the front walk and watched the WhiteChrys groundcar pull up to collect them. It was long, sleek, gleaming, and settled to the pavement with a sigh like a satisfied lover.