“The cup on that counter is dry, Mara. That’s been there since this morning at the latest. He didn’t leave because you found out. He left before you found out.”
I stand in the middle of my brother’s abandoned room. “Then how did he know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody warned him.”
“Maybe.” He doesn’t offer me anything comfortable. “Or he saw the family watching him and worked it out. Or his employers pulled him out because we were getting close. Or he simply looked at his sister being escorted everywhere by miners and did the arithmetic.” A pause. “We may never know which. I want to be honest with you about that.”
I don’t get to stand in front of my brother and make him look at me. I don’t get to hear him deny it, or admit it, or explain, or lie badly, or cry, or any of the ten thousand things I have been playing out in my head for the last hour. He’s not going to look me in the face. He’s not going to give me a reason.
He just left. Like he left every job. Ahead of the audit, quietly, taking the valuables.
And I was the last thing he walked away from.
Ten minuteslater we’re back in my apartment, sitting on the couch, side by side.
“What did he get?” I ask. “I want to know. Three payments, you said. You know the amounts, you said them, and I wasn’t listening properly because I was busy telling you your evidence was garbage.” I look up at him. “What did he actually get out of it? For me, and for this planet, and for that old man. What’s it worth? Because I’d like to know the number.”
So he tells me the number.
And then, because I keep looking at him, he tells me the rest. That the money’s gone, all three payments, that each one landed and was gone inside a few weeks, into exactly the thing that made him buyable in the first place. Tonight, wherever he is, he is inmoredebt than he was before any of it started.
I laugh. It’s a horrible sound. “He didn’t do it to get out. If he’d taken that money and cleared the debt and walked away clean, I could — I don’t know, I could at least understand in a way.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
“I trusted him and he used me, lied to me for years.”
Silence.
“You didn’t even need it,” I say, to nobody, to an empty apartment, to a man who isn’t there anymore. “You just couldn’t stop.” And then I look over to Cayzor again. “How long have you known about this?”
“Two weeks that it was likely him. Six diurnals since Ines gave me the debts.” He says it plainly, no softening. “Tonight is when it became provable.”
“Two weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You’veknownfor two weeks.”
“I’ve suspected for two weeks.”
“You sat at that table.” I point at it. My hand isn’t steady. “You sat right there and ate my food and listened to me talk about him. I told you about him. I told you the whole — I told you he’d had a rough few years and I hired him to keep him employed and it was the best decision I ever made, and I wasproudof it, and you sat there and let me say it.”
“Yes, I apologize, but I only had a faint suspicion at the time. But I’ve been working hard, Mara, to build this case and keep you safe.”
I exhale. “Who else?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Roxy. Leah. Ines. Hallie. My brothers. The brides.”
“All of them. It was a guard detail.I thought I’d been adopted.I sat in here and told my brother…Idefendedit to him, Cayzor. He said it was strange how you were all always around and I told him it was the nicest thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life. I said that. Out loud. I said I’ve eaten nine hundred dinners alone in rented rooms and here are beings who notice where I am.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“And it was a rota.”
“Yes. It was a rota. Chief set it the night Ordek died. Nobody was to leave you alone in this colony, in the mine, on the transport, or in this building. Roxy took the levels. Leah took the corridor. Naomi took the platform. Jana took the cafeteria.” A pause. “I took the mornings and the evenings and the nights.”
