Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “There’s a readout,” she said. “Just give it a minute.”

  The lights stopped circling him. The diagnostic table had probably cooled, like it had done with her.

  “It’s done, right?”

  “I’m looking,” she said.

  She grabbed the hypo she’d had a moment earlier.

  “Oh, dear,” she said with all the concern she could muster. He looked at her, eyes wide. For a moment, she saw what he had looked like as a child—all big eyes and need—and she forced the image away.

  “Is it bad?” he asked.

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  “What do I do?” He started to sit up. “I gotta go to the decon chamber, right?”

  She put a hand on his chest—the other hand, the one not holding the hypo. “We can deal with it here.”

  Her voice sounded strangled. She half swallowed her words. She wondered if he could hear the terror in her voice.

  She’d never done anything like this before. She’d been tested before she joined Aleyd, and the tests said she was capable of hands-on killing, and she had thought it was a career-destroying result, but no one said anything. She had just thought about it ever since, wondering if—when the time came—she could actually hurt another human being.

  “How?” He sounded as nervous as she felt.

  For a moment, she wondered if he was asking how she was going to get away. Her face flushed. Then she realized what he was asking. How could she heal him?

  He wasn’t ill. He hadn’t been contaminated at all.

  “I still have the medicine for me. You have the same thing, only not so bad. Here, hold out your arm.”

  She took his left arm. The skin was greasy and soft, not hard and muscular like she had expected.

  She was actually glad. Glad he disgusted her. Glad he hadn’t noticed how terrified she was.

  He extended his arm, opening the vulnerable flesh inside the elbow to her. She put the hypo there and pushed, but nothing happened.

  Then she remembered she had to flick the hypo itself on. With a movement of her thumb, she did, and the medicine whooshed out, penetrating his skin.

  “How long will it take to work?” His gaze met hers, his eyes trusting. How come he trusted her when he knew that she was a kidnap victim, a woman who wanted to escape?

  “Not long,” she said.

  He smiled, then closed his eyes. He looked younger that way, and maybe what she had taken for stupidity was simply youth and inexperience. The Recovery Man said they never worked with human beings. She hadn’t believed that until now.

  His breath came evenly. The drug had put him to sleep.

  “How long will he be unconscious?” she asked the computer.

  “Factoring mass and health as well as susceptibility to the drug, six Earth hours.”

  Not long enough. If she couldn’t neutralize the Recovery Man in that time, she’d have two men after her again, and this time, they wouldn’t trust her.

  “What will a second dose do?” she asked.

  “Suppress his respiration. He will die. It is not recommended.”

  Not recommended. What a stupid way to say Don’t do it.

  She glanced at the diagnostics on the side of the table. It had recovery capability. It could clear the drug from his system if she overdosed him.

  Her breath came in shallow gasps. Somehow her eyes had filled with tears. When the Gyonnese complained to Aleyd about her nutrition-rich synthetic water solution, she’d been appalled. She hadn’t known about the larvae. If she had, she never would have used that combination of chemicals.

  She would have recommended against chemicals at all.

  But she hadn’t known. It had been an accident—and for her, an intellectual one. She hadn’t been to Gyonne; she didn’t know what the Gyonnese looked like, let alone what they thought of or how they treated their children.

  She didn’t know about the larvae and the “true” children and the importance of heritage, not then.

  And if she had, she would have taken precautions.

  But she never thought of herself as a mass murderer, even though the Gyonnese thought of her that way.

  Speciesist that she was, she wouldn’t have thought of herself that way, even if she had killed those larvae on purpose. They weren’t human. They were living beings, yes, but not human.

  And mass murderer was a term reserved by humans for humans who killed other humans.

  Repeatedly.

  She closed her eyes, and shoved the man off the diagnostic table. The table slid into her thighs so hard that she knew she’d bruise. Then she heard a thud as he landed on the floor.

  She opened her eyes.

  The table was still attached to the wall, but the end was swinging wildly. Apparently, it had been designed for such movements.

  He lay beneath it, on his side, his shirt riding up to reveal flesh paler than the rest of him. He was blissfully unaware that he had fallen a meter and a half, and would probably be as bruised as Rhonda was.

  If he woke up.

  Which he wouldn’t.

  She grabbed another hypo, crouched, and flicked the damn thing on. Then she pressed it against that pale flesh visible on his back.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry, really. Sorry.”

  But he didn’t hear her. He didn’t move for the longest time, and she thought it hadn’t worked until he convulsed.

  He groped at the floor, his left eye opening slightly. The eyeball had rolled upward. He wasn’t conscious.

  Foam formed on his mouth, and he convulsed again.

  This time, she tossed the hypo aside, stood, and grabbed the laser scalpels.

  Then she pressed her hand on the door, startled that it opened, and ran as fast as she could toward the bridge.

  Twenty-nine

  Flint got up and peered out the door of Van Alen’s office. No one was in the waiting room. No one was even in the hallway that led to it.

  Still, his stomach clenched. He felt like everyone was watching him. He felt like a man about to collapse.

  He didn’t trust his own eyes. He wanted a double-check.

  So he went back inside and called up holoscreens of the information. He stared at the access logs for Emmeline’s files. The lettering looked like it had been written on the air around him.

  It wouldn’t matter if someone else saw it. They wouldn’t know what it meant. They wouldn’t even know if he had it read aloud.

  So he did.

  The computer’s voice was the default voice, a vaguely androgynous digitized thing that sounded weak and tinny.

  The killer’s attorneys had accessed the files repeatedly. No surprise there. The killer had been appealing his case for years now. Or rather, they had. The killer himself hadn’t appealed at all. He’d even asked them to call off the appeal, but they wouldn’t.

  Armstrong law provided for retrials if something was wrong with the first. There was always something wrong with a trial. It took very little to get the first retrial, a little more to get the second, and just a little more to get the third.

  Flint had gone to none of them, not even the first. He didn’t want to see the man who had killed his daughter—the man who had worked at a day care center, charged with protecting children, and who had somehow managed to murder three of them.

  Flint didn’t trust himself to look at that man. Flint wasn’t sure the man would have survived the encounter.

  But his name on Emmeline’s records—and the name of his attorneys—was no surprise. And the names of the prosecuting attorneys in all the retrials were no surprise, either.

  The surprises were scattered throughout the list. Paloma, more than once.

  Flint would have expected the once, just to make sure whoever had come to see her had reason. But not repeatedly. Not five times, all with police approval.

  His stomach churned. He looked at the lettering. Through it, he could see the walls of Van Alen’s office, the exit into the waiting room, t
he desk that dominated the entire space.

  Over it all: Paloma, Paloma, Paloma.

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and listened. Five times. He hadn’t missed that.

  And mixed with her name, another surprise. Lawyers again, but lawyers with odd names. Names he didn’t recognize. He had to hear them pronounced to know what they were.

  Some sort of alien firm.

  That made him nauseous. That made him believe that someone thought Emmeline was still alive, but Disappeared. Because Rhonda—not him, it couldn’t have been him, he’d been a computer programmer, for heaven’s sake—had done something to anger an alien government.

  One whose name he didn’t recognize.

  He commanded the system to shut down the audio, then he opened his eyes. The names were spelled nothing like they sounded, which was not unusual for alien translations. The translators did the best they could, but often Spanish simply didn’t have the ability to mimic certain sounds—glottal stops, airy whispers without actual words, whistles.

  The names sounded like a mixture of all of those.

  He copied those names, moved them into their own file, and let the system search for them to see if they were in a standard database.

  Then he went back to Emmeline’s file. There had to be something here, something that made people return. He hadn’t seen it, but he’d studied that file since he was a grieving father. He’d never looked at it as a policeman, as a homicide detective.

  What was missing? What was hidden?

  He went slowly, even though he knew every moment he wasted could be a moment in which he’d get caught. But he had a few other things to examine before he went to two other files in the police department records.

  He just hoped no one would see activity along that back door, and hoped that no one would notice how much he was doing.

  After a few minutes, he found nothing. He didn’t trust himself to stay there, too afraid he’d make a mistake, given how upset he was. He copied Emmeline’s files, then copied his own files—not just the police files, but going all the way back—and then copied Rhonda’s.

  As a last-minute thing, he also copied the access logs for all three.

  Then he shut off the outside link. The computer beeped a complaint: it was still searching for the lawyers’ names.

  He’d figure out what those were shortly.

  First, he had to examine the files. Still, he went back to Emmeline’s. And found nothing.

  He stood, paced, thought. Tried to remember the investigation.

  They’d gone through his home as if he’d been the criminal. He’d been angry about that—why did they have to gather evidence in his house when the crime had occurred at the center? Only after he’d been through the academy did he realize they initially thought he’d brought her to the daycare center already dead.

  But he hadn’t. She’d been laughing when he let her go. She no longer cried when she saw him leave. He’d always seen that as a tiny loss, even though it was, from a parenting standpoint, a small victory.

  He clenched a fist, forced himself to concentrate.

  What else had they done?

  They’d taken DNA swabs from him and Rhonda and from Emmeline. DNA swabs and articles of clothing to compare—although Rhonda said some were for the funeral home—and then they had asked questions, questions, questions.

  DNA swabs.

  He whirled, went back to the screen.

  DNA swabs were standard in the death of a child, any death, really. It was the only way to confirm identity. An adult had DNA on file. A child, a baby, often didn’t, so they always took DNA from the parents.

  Always.

  The computer beeped at him. The lawyers’ names were Guerrovi Chawki, Saari Namate, and something that came out all consonants. He’d never heard of the law firm, which was also spelled in all consonants.

  He made note of the names and set them aside. Then he opened the autopsy file and scanned. Then he slowed down and went through the thing line by line.

  No DNA.

  Not even a line about it.

  This was a major oversight, and one the defense should have used.

  One the prosecution should never have gone to trial without.

  Yet no one noticed.

  Emmeline’s DNA was not on file. It wasn’t confirmed. It wasn’t even mentioned.

  It was ignored.

  He rubbed a hand over his forehead.

  Ignored. Forgotten. Overlooked.

  Or not.

  And that’s why Paloma had come back after the first visit, why she had investigated the file repeatedly.

  Without the DNA, there was no way to verify Emmeline’s death.

  Yes, a death had occurred, but it might not have been hers. It might have been some other child.

  They thought he killed her before bringing her to the center.

  Did that mean the time of death was off?

  He scanned for time of death, as well. It was there, but vague, done in hours not minutes, like every other time of death on Armstrong.

  Hours.

  He stood up, his heart pounding. “You’re seeing what you want to see,” he muttered.

  But what if he wasn’t?

  What if he had mourned the wrong child?

  What if the notation was correct? What if Emmeline was alive and well on Callisto?

  With his ex-wife.

  Who hadn’t said a thing.

  Thirty

  Detective Zagrando had moved Talia to a new apartment two floors up. It had a better view, but she cared less about that than she had earlier. She was more worried about finding a lawyer.

  She had no idea how to do it. And Zagrando wanted her to. He told her she had to—to stall if nothing else.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened between him and that Aptheker woman, but it had scared him worse than it had scared her. And Talia didn’t think cops got scared—except maybe when their own lives were at stake or something. She didn’t think that Aptheker woman had threatened him.

  Talia had been pressed as close to the door as she could get. She heard most of what they said but not all of it. She’d told Zagrando when he’d come into the apartment that she’d heard all of it, though, so he wouldn’t lie to her or try to protect her.

  Besides, he was smart enough to figure out that she would try to jury-rig the apartment’s computer system so that she could replay the hallway conversation if he didn’t tell her.

  She’d liked the way he threw that woman out, but she didn’t like the way he believed that woman. Talia’s mother would never, ever, sell Talia to the company. Not even in the contract her mother had signed before Talia was born.

  That Aptheker woman had to be lying.

  Talia had told Zagrando that, but he didn’t believe her. His eyes didn’t quite meet hers, his expression got a little guarded. He thought she didn’t know. He thought her mother had lied to her about that, too.

  Talia put a hand on the window. It was cooler than the ones two floors below. She wasn’t sure if that was because it had been made of different materials or if there was some kind of temperature change this high up.

  Although if there was, the window should be warmer, right?

  She frowned and turned away from the window. The view didn’t show her anything except Valhalla Basin disappearing into the distance. All those happy corporate employees going about their lives, not realizing how bad things could really get.

  If she’d known, she wouldn’t have skipped school so much. She’d’ve considered herself a lot luckier than she had. Because she didn’t know how good she had it.

  A small alarm beeped. Zagrando had monkeyed with the control panel before he left. Now his image appeared next to it.

  “Talia, you should have looked up at least six lawyers by now. Follow the instructions I gave you. Make sure you know what their specialties are before you contact any of them, and make sure you’re on a secure link.”

  It was a recording. H
e’d somehow done that before he left, or he loaded it onto the system from a different part of the building.

  She thought about making a rude gesture, then reconsidered. Maybe everything she did in here was monitored.

  She shivered.

  Six lawyers by now. She wondered if that was an arbitrary number or if he thought she would take only a specific amount of time with each information file.

  Probably neither. He probably just wanted to scare her—and he’d done that, more with his own expression than with anything else.

  But she didn’t want to look for an attorney. Doing that meant her mom was really and truly gone.

  Which, if Talia told herself the truth, was exactly right. Her mother was gone, maybe never to return. Detective Bozeman had been trying to say that in the house, especially when he asked about next of kin.

  Even that Aptheker woman had mentioned it. And the Aptheker woman, theoretically, knew what kind of trouble Talia’s mom had gotten herself into.

  Talia felt those tears again, then shook them off. If she was going to be alone in this universe, then she was going to be strong. She hated weak people who whined their way through life.

  Her mom did too.

  Sometimes, her mom used to say, you have to take the initiative, even if you don’t want to. Sometimes taking charge is the only answer.

  Talia had always thought her mom was just giving mom advice. But maybe her mother was confessing. Maybe her mother had taken charge and gotten away with something.

  Or almost got away with it.

  Maybe.

  The hell of it was that Talia might never know.

  Especially if her mom never came back.

  Talia went into the bedroom and grabbed the small portable computer off the bed. Then she went back into the living room and sprawled on the couch. This couch sagged in the middle, and the material felt scratchier than the material on the other couch.

  But she couldn’t go back down there. The Aptheker woman knew where that apartment was. Zagrando promised that the Aptheker woman and any other Aleyd employee couldn’t access the information system on the first floor anymore, not until the legal issue was settled.

  Talia had to hire a lawyer. And maybe she could pay that lawyer to tell her what exactly her mother had done to make the Recovery Man take her.