“That’s the part I wanted you sitting down for.” She puts them on the screen. Three of them, side by side.
I look at the first one for a long time. “That’s before…” I have to stop and go back over it, because I want to be wrong. “Ines, that other one is four diurnals after they signed the Timbur contract.”
“Yes. You don’t get paid four days after you sign something unless the arrangement already existed. They didn’t find him here. They found him on New Earth, and they bought him, and then he went and got himself hired onto Minecorp.”
“He steered her here.”
“Exactly.”
I put my hand flat on the desk because my claws have come out and the desk is a good place for them.
“Scar, her brother didn’t get corrupted on Timbur. He didn’t arrive and get tempted. He was bought on New Earth, and then he found a job for them in the exact location that his employers needed and he brought his sister along because his sister is the door. Her clearances. Her reputation. Her name on the contract.”
The screens hum. Somewhere above me a lift runs. “He sold her before they ever left home.”
“The worst part is the money’s gone, Scar. He didn’t use the payoff to get himself out of a tight position and make a fresh start. No, he continued to gamble and lose. He took House money and put it straight back into the thing that made him buyable in the first place. He’s in more debt now than he was when they originally bought him.” Ines lets that sit for exactly one breath. “Whatever they gave him, he’s already lost it, and he owes more than he did before, which means he is more theirs now than he has ever been. There is no version where he stops. He can’t.”
I stand in my office and I look at three dates on a screen and I understand that I have been wrong for eight years about something fundamental. Not about the conspiracy, that was real. The House is real, the plan is real, my parents are dead and the plan that Hallie brought to us is why.
But I have spent eight years imagining the beings on the other end of this. I’ve built them in my head at odd hours in this room, cold Royal Pigment males with long reasons, Houses with strategies, a whole architecture of intent. Something that made sense. Somethingworthwhat it cost. Because if my mother and father died, then it had to have been for something, and the something had to be enormous.
And the door they came through is a human male with a habit.
Andrew Wilson sold his own sister and this planet and the lives of everyone on it, and he did it for currency he then took directly to a table and lost. He has nothing. He didn’t buy a house with it. He didn’t buy safety or time. He bought a few weeks for himself, three separate times, and then he needed more.
Ordek of Six is dead because of that.
There’s no reason at the bottom of this.
“Scar.” Ines’s voice, quiet. “Are you still with me?”
“Ordek died for nothing. That’s what you’ve just told me. He died so a male could lose currency at a table on a planet he’d never seen.”
Ines doesn’t answer, which is the right answer.
I take it to Chief.I alert him on his tablet, while he’s working in a mine shaft. Trunk is right next to him when he takes the vid call. I tell them both the entire story, expecting them to tell everyone else later.
Chief listens without interrupting. When I’m done, he’s quiet for a moment. “That’s enough to move,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Then we move. Hallie starts on Chronos tomorrow, properly, not carefully. She’ll want to reach out to the ones she still trusts.” He rubs his jaw. “And it’s time to talk to Grytel. I don’t like it and I’m going to do it anyway.”
“I’ll speak to Grytel.”
“You’ll speak to Grytel,” Chief agrees, “and you’ll do it without putting a claw through his desk, because we need what that male has and we cannot get it any other way.”
“Understood.”
Trunk hasn’t said anything. He’s looking at me.
“You have to tell her,” he says.
“Tonight,” I agree. “I’m going to explain to her everything that her brother did and why and what he’s been hiding from her this whole time.”
Chief lets out a long breath. “You know what happens when you do.”
“The moment she knows, he knows. Not because she’d tell him, but because she couldn’t hide it, and he’ll see it on her face the first time they’re in a room. And then he runs, or he calls his handlers, or he does something worse. From the second I open my mouth in that apartment, we’re on a clock…I’m going anyway.”
