“The nights?”
“There’s a maintenance alcove on this floor, across from the lift bank. I’ve been sitting in it from the time I bring you home until your shift starts.”
“Every night?”
“Since Ordek died.”
And I think about Andrew standing in my kitchen sayinghe’s stalking you, Mara, he was in the hallway at zero-two-hundred, and me laughing at him, and telling him he’d seen a hazard trolley with a jacket on it.
“You could have told meanyof it. At any point.”
“Yes.”
“Thenwhy didn’t you?” It comes out as close to a shout as I’ve got left. “I’m not a child. I’m not — I have a clearance, Cayzor, I’ve worked classified installations for nine years, I know how to hold information. You didn’t even give me the chance to be trusted.”
“Because you’d have gone to him, or at the very least he would’ve been able to read the change in your demeanor.”
He says it without any heat at all, which is somehow worse.
“You’d have gone down that corridor and knocked on his door and looked at your brother’s face and asked him. Not to accuse him. To give him the chance to explain it, because you love him and there’s no one else left. You’d have wanted him to have a reason.”
I open my mouth.
I close it.
“And then he runs,” Cayzor says. “Which we can survive, because he’s run and we’re surviving it. Or he doesn’t run.” A pause. “And Ordek of Six was ninety-one rotations old and had never hurt anyone in his life, and he is dead, and I had already worked out that you were standing closer to this than he ever was.”
“So you decided for me.”
“Yes.”
“You had no right.”
“No,” he agrees. “I didn’t.”
That stops me, a little.
“Roxy said the same thing,” he says. “She said it in front of my whole family and she was angry with me and she was correct. She made me promise that when it came, I would be the one to tell you, and that you’d be told everything, including that we knew and said nothing. That’s why I’m standing here. That’s the promise.”
“And you waited anyway.”
He doesn’t flinch from it. “And you can be angry with me for as long as you want, and you’ll be right, and I’d do it again — but not for the reason you think.”
“Then say the reason.”
He’s quiet for a second. “I was frightened. Not of losing the case.” He looks at me. “I was frightened that the moment I said his name out loud in this room, you would look at me the way you’re looking at me now. And I’d never be able to take it back. So I had two weeks of you being glad to see me, and I took them, and I knew exactly what I was doing.”
He leaves after that.
He doesn’t slam anything, because he doesn’t do that. He just says goodnight, quietly, and lets himself out, and the door shuts. I stand in the middle of my front room in an apartment that is suddenly, enormously, catastrophically empty.
My brother is gone. The whole colony has been watching me for six days. There’s a dead old man I never met who I can’t stop thinking about. And I have just driven out the only person who’s been in this room with me for weeks.
I sit down on the floor again.
I’m still there when the knock comes.
He’s got a bag.
