“This isn’t going to work.”
“We’ll see. Either way, war excuses many lapses, especially if the duke gets his weapons and quashes the rebellion. In the meantime, Lord Marce, you get to find out how much you are worth to your father. If not for yourself, then for whatever reason he has for sending you off the planet. You don’t want to tell me what that is, do you?”
“It’s not any of your business.”
“I know you believe that. But you might be surprised at the scope of my business.”
“Since the scope of your business clearly involves kidnapping, I don’t think anything you’d do at this point would surprise me much.”
“Again, fair point. I’m willing to listen if you want to tell me why you’re really planning to leave End.”
Marce stayed silent, staring at Ghreni.
“That’s fine,” Ghreni said, after a minute. “If your father doesn’t move quickly enough, we’ll be torturing you a bit to motivate him. Video and all of that. While we’re doing that I’ll have them ask you about this again.”
“Torture doesn’t get truthful answers.”
“That’s what they say. Again, we’ll see.” Ghreni stood up and pointed to the far end of the container. “In the meantime, there’s a toilet in that far corner, and over here there’s a cooler with water and a few snacks.” He pointed toward the near end. “The door is here. If you get within five feet of it, an electric current goes through it. If you touch it, you probably won’t die, but you’ll wish you had. If you still somehow manage to open it anyway, my people on the other side will make you wish you hadn’t. You understand?”
Marce nodded.
“Good.” Ghreni considered Marce. “I do apologize about this. This wasn’t how I would have done it. And I realize this will make things awkward between us from here on out.”
“For starters,” Marce said, echoing Ghreni’s comments from earlier. Ghreni smiled and exited.
Marce went to the cooler, took out a bottle of water, and drank from it, looking at his surroundings again. Table lamp, chairs, toilet, cooler. No cot. A cold metal floor and cold metal walls. He walked to the front of the room, not too close to the wide doors, and heard voices on the other side, low, masculine. He couldn’t make out what they were saying.
This is lovely, he thought. The only good news in any of this was that Ghreni gave back his data crypt, which was rather more valuable than he knew. Otherwise, this was a mess. By now his father would probably have been contacted by Ghreni Nohamapetan. Marce didn’t know how his father would react. On one hand this was exactly the sort of thing he’d push back against. On the other hand, Ghreni was right that the only things Dad really cared about in this life were his children.
There was also the matter that somewhere between a week and a month from now, Interdependency marks were going to be worth less, pound for pound, than dirt. That being the case, Dad might hand the money over simply because it wouldn’t matter in the long run, or even the slightly-longer-than-short run.
But then this uprising, which was beginning to look like it might sort itself out, and not in the duke’s favor, might get a new burst of life from those additional weapons. More death, more destruction, more people displaced from their homes—at a time when everyone on End’s life was going to be turned upside down anyway, because of the Flow stream out from the planet closing up.
Marce took another swallow from his water. He was afraid, and deeply concerned for his individual well-being—Ghreni Nohamapetan struck him as just the sort of smug sociopath that would in fact have him tortured just for fun—but he also felt strangely detached. Whether that was shock at his current state of being, or just awareness that human civilization was close to the end, so relatively speaking this was nothing, or both, was something he couldn’t parse. He was scared, but he was also tired. At the moment, at least, being tired was something he could actually do something about.
So Marce Claremont went back to his chair, sat in it, put his feet up on the table, crossed his arms, closed his eyes, and tried to take a nap.
Some indefinite time later he felt himself being shaken awake. “Look who’s here to see you,” said a familiar voice.
Marce opened his eyes, blinking, and tried to focus on the thing directly in front of him. It was Giggy, his stuffed pig. The person behind Giggy, waving him in Marce’s face, was his sister Vrenna.
“You found me,” Marce said, groggy.
“That’s what I do,” Vrenna replied, handing Giggy over to her brother.
“Why weren’t you electrified?”
“What?” Vrenna looked puzzled.
“Never mind. How did you find me?”
“I had help. I’ll explain later. Are you okay to walk?”
“I’m fine.”
“Then let’s get moving before the two chunks I stunned wake up.”
Vrenna led Marce out of the room, which was, as suspected, a repurposed cargo container, located inside a tumbledown warehouse. Marce’s container was not the only one; two more, presumably currently unoccupied, were lined up next to his. One of them had a long streak of blood curving away from it, as if a body had been dragged away. Outside Marce’s container two men lay on the floor of the warehouse, the same two who had grabbed him and pulled him into the van. They were breathing, which was more than Marce really wanted for them at the moment.
“What is this place?”
“It looks like an extracurricular detention center,” Vrenna said.
“For the duke?”
“Maybe. Come on.” Vrenna led her brother out of the warehouse, and pushed him toward a nondescript groundcar. Marce got in and buckled up while Vrenna put the thing into manual drive.
“Where are the others?” Marce asked, looking around.
“What others?” Vrenna asked.
“You came to get me alone?”
“I didn’t have a lot of time to make a project out of it.” Vrenna checked her surroundings and began driving off.
“What if I had been injured? What if I hadn’t been able to walk? What if there had been more than two of them?”
“I would have figured something out.”
“I have notes on this rescue.”
“I can put you back if you like.”
Marce giggled and clutched his stuffed pig tighter. “Don’t mind me, sis,” he said. “I’m just having a little post-kidnapping freakout.”
Vrenna reached over and took her brother’s hand. “I know,” she said. “Go ahead and freak out a little. I don’t mind.”
After a couple of minutes of relatively restrained freakout, Marce held up Giggy and looked at him. “You brought Giggy with you.”
“I did. I thought it might distract you from thinking too much while I got you out of there.”
“It worked, but I’m wondering how you got him in the first place.”
“He was given to me. Along with the rest of the stuff you had in a rucksack when you were kidnapped.”
“Okay, but how did you get any of that?”
“It was given to me by the people who were watching you.”
“People were watching me?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Chapter
8
The call from Ghreni Nohamapetan after he lost Marce Claremont had to be one of the most satisfying calls Kiva had ever gotten in her life.
“Marce Claremont is gone,” he said.
“Who?” Kiva replied.
“Don’t fuck with me, Kiva. I want to know where he is.”
“I couldn’t tell you where he is. It’s not my job to keep track of him. My job, as I understood it, was to tell you if he tried to book passage on my ship. He did, and I told you. You were supposed to wait until he was about to board to snatch him, if I remember correctly. You decided not to wait. So it looks like this one is on you.”
“The people I had with Claremont tell me they were attacked by a woman.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“It was Vrenna Claremont.”
“You mean the sister who had years of training to murder people for the state, and then became a cop? Yes, that would be my logical guess too.”
“I want to know how she came to find out we were targeting her brother.”
“So ask her.”