“Anyway,” Mara says, too brightly. “So not Tomas and not Benjamin. I’ve got a list of other names, do you want to see?”
“Show me the list.”
She shows me the list. There are eleven names and two of them are perfectly good. She refuses both.
And at some point, late, my beautiful, pregnant Mara falls asleep with her feet still in my lap. I sit in the dark in an apartment I’ve come to think of as home, holding a small human female’s swollen ankle in one enormous hand.
And I think about a number I cannot give a child who isn’t mine.
Chapter Eighteen
Scar
The message comes at midshift and I read it standing in a gallery on level nineteen hundred with a cutter still in my hand.
Compound. All of us. Tonight.
And then, two lines down:
Hallie’s people came through. Daxon’s coming up on the screen. — Chief
Which on its own means nothing. We talk to Daxon constantly. He’s on that screen for every naming, every claiming, every time one of us has news worth carrying — Hook messages him about absolutely nothing at least twice a moon cycle and Daxon answers every time.
But Chief doesn’t call the whole family in for a chat with our eldest brother.
Chief calls the whole family in when something’s about to happen.
“I’m coming with you,”Mara huffs.
“You’re due next week. You need to stay at home and rest.”
“I’m aware of when I’m due, Cayzor, I’ve been keeping fairly close track.” She’s got one hand braced on the counter and the other on the small of her back. “It’s my plan they’re going to be talking about. It’s my brother. And it’s my grid.”
“What if you go into labor at the compound?”
“Then I will be in a house with four women who have done it, a med tech eleven minutes away, and eight males who would carry me there on a plank. Whereas if I stay here, I’ll be alone, wondering what everyone’s deciding about my life without me.”
I look at her for a while. “Get your boots,” I finally answer.
“You have to do my boots for me.”
I grin. “I know.”
The compound is full.
Everyone’s here. All seven of my brothers, all the brides, the long table shoved back against the wall and every chair in the house dragged into the front room. The young ones are being given toys and screens to keep them reasonably quiet.
Grytel of Thirty-Nine comes up the road at nineteen hundred and Chief lets him inside.
I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely used to it, thinking of Grytel as an ally instead of an enemy.
He looks worse than he did a rotation ago. The Royal Pigment keep themselves polished — it’s most of what they are — and he’s thinner in the face now, and there’s grey coming into the plates along his jaw. He stands in the doorway of the house he had a hand in demoting us to and waits to be invited.
“Chief.” Grytel looks at all of us gathered and says, “I am here to bring down the assholes who framed me as the instigator of a takedown of your crew and family. I do not enjoy beingplayed. And I am here to bring down a House on Chronos that has dissolved into fraud and criminality, which is unacceptable. And I will not let them interfere with Illibrium production. We may have been at odds in the past but know that we are working together on this project.”
Then he sits, taking the worst chair in the room. “Three things, and I’ll be brief, because I know how much you all enjoy my company. First, the transport schedules for the next two quarters are finalized under my authority, structured the way we discussed. Second, the Chronos filings are lodged in a way that means if this goes badly it lands on me and not on this family.”
“And the third?” Chief questions.
