“Whatever else he was, he was charming,” Etcetera said. “In that smart, sociopathic way. Fun to argue with, if you weren’t his daughter.”
“There he is,” Limpopo said. The boys gathered around their screen as they zoomed and error-corrected the feed from the remaining cams in the inner courtyard. He was dressed in bottle-green cords and a down vest over a long-sleeved shirt. His hair was white, but his face was smooth, his posture erect. He walked slowly and purposefully. He was old, but he didn’t look frail.
“Can one of you get him, please?” Gretyl said to the boys. “I don’t want to go up in case he’s planning to snatch me.”
The boys argued over who would do it. A kid named Troy, sixteen, with a short afro, an easygoing smile, and smart, fast eyes, won. He raced away. A moment later, they watched him on the screen, talking with Jacob Redwater, leading him.
“This oughta be good,” Etcetera said.
Gretyl wondered where Iceweasel was, whether she was seeing this. There was a lot of clamor from the crowd to livecast her talk with Redwater. She said no, firmly, while agreeing to record and release it later, depending on whether there was a later.
Jacob Redwater came into the control room, preceded by a bow-wave of understated cologne. Gretyl stood and looked him up and down, looking for bulges indicating guns or other surprises. Not that they had to bulge much these days, and not that she knew much about what kind of bulges they made.
His face was impassive. He’d been crying, minutes ago, broken and lost. Now he wore the zotta mask, two parts charming sophisticate, one part dead-eyed predator. A man who could make entertaining conversation over dinner, then go home and bankrupt your employer and put you on the street.
“Hello, Gretyl.” He stood before Troy like Troy had a gun in his back and he was pretending that it wasn’t there.
“Hello, Mr. Redwater.” She extended her hand.
His hand was warm and firm. “Call me Jacob.”
Limpopo gave him a funny look. Gretyl remembered Jacob Redwater had set her up to be rendered to this prison, ripped from family and everything dear to her. She was used to thinking of him as the man who’d sired and kidnapped her wife, but he was Limpopo’s arch-nemesis. She wondered if Limpopo would shiv the bastard, who surely deserved it. She was about to lunge to take out her frail old friend, frailer alongside this vigorous, unthinkably rich man, but Limpopo held her hand out.
“Limpopo.” He tilted his head, straining to recognize her.
“Hello, Jacob.”
“Nice to see you,” said Etcetera. Redwater’s eyes widened. He started at the speaker between her collarbones. “It’s me, Hubert. I’m dead.”
“I see. Nice to talk to you again, even so.”
Troy brought him a chair. The three sat together, boys clustered at the room’s other end, ostentatiously not listening while ferociously eavesdropping.
Redwater said nothing. Gretyl put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, arching her back to work the creak and ache of sitting and terror out. “What did you want to talk about, Jacob?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“You don’t want your daughter hurt. You’re indifferent to what happens to the old dyke she’s shacked up with.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about your sexuality. My cousin is gay, you know.”
“I know. That’s the reason you’re running the family fortune these days.”
He shook his head. “It’s more complicated. You can believe that if you want. The internal politics of the Redwater family are always and only about one thing.”
“Money.”
“Power. Money’s just keeping score.”
“Must have really fucked you off when Iceweasel gave her share to that merc.” She wanted him to squirm. She’d expected him to be the weeping man on the phone. She didn’t want to die with the sight of him erect and proud burned into her optic nerve, proof the sun would never set on the zotta empire.
He nodded. “It made things complicated in our family. But it wasn’t fatal. Nadie and I are on good terms these days, believe it or not.”
Gretyl kept her best poker face, willing herself not to give away the fact that Nadie had Iceweasel and the boys with her.
“I would like to see my daughter and my grandsons.”
“I think you gave up that right when you had her kidnapped, Mr. Redwater,” Limpopo said. They looked at her. Her eyes glittered dangerously. “When you had me disappeared.”
“When you had me murdered,” Etcetera said.
Redwater was impassive. Gretyl thought she saw anxious tells, sudden realization by this arrogant princeling that he was three levels underground, surrounded by people who owed him a debt of violence.
He spoke carefully. “I didn’t say I had a right to it. The things that happened were beyond regrettable. They were terrible. I brought Natalie home because I knew there was trouble ahead for you and your friends. The murders of those two security operators tipped things over the edge. There was no way things would be business as usual after that. I wanted her safe. The things that followed, what happened to you, were nothing to do with me.”
She and Limpopo started to speak at once, broke off, looked at each other. Limpopo made a “go ahead” gesture. “He’s your father-in-law.” She smiled sardonically.
Jacob Redwater returned the smile, pretending he didn’t notice its venom.
“What murders, Jacob?”
“The two people that Zyz lost at the ‘university’ complex. Went in, never came out. That was bad enough. But then we discovered that they’d been captured and subsequently executed—euthanized—that their remains had been desecrated—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Gretyl said. But she knew. For the first couple years, the deadheading bodies of those two mercs had been like unwanted family heirlooms, dutifully lugged from one place to another, scans cared for and backed up. Back when she was on the move all the time, the arrangements for their care had been a constant reminder of the terrible thing they’d done in the tunnels of Walkaway U, Tam’s dire warnings, the obligation they’d created for themselves. Once they’d settled in Gary and moved the two bodies, or people, or whatever, into canopic jars in the basement, automatically tended as they slept in endless, blank-faced, brain-dead stasis, she’d managed to put them out of mind—mostly.
“So you kidnapped her and deprived her of clothes and companionship because you had her best interests at heart?”
“Yes. Because I knew the alternative was much worse. Death. As you discovered. That’s why I’m here. Because, whether or not you believe this, I love my daughter. I raised her. I held her when she was born. I told her bedtime stories. I changed her diapers. She is my flesh and blood. I am a part of her, always will be. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want my grandchildren to die.”