Slow River

Chapter 23

I was still thinking about Spanner’s hard gray smile in the breakroom as the shift started draining their hot drinks, picking up masks, and standing, ready to get back to the last third of the night. The news was showing on the screen, but as I fastened my neck seal and strapped on waders, that dry-bone smile was superimposed on the changing pictures. The sound was off; but the female anchor was nodding at something the male anchor had said, her face composed in that caring expression they always affect when they talk about someone or some cause the listening public will want to take to their hearts.

I should not have said those things to Spanner. They should not have been spoken aloud. It was the kind of thing Spanner herself would have done, not me. Not Lore. And the snake would strike, sooner or later.

A close-up of the male anchor cut away to a second screen: a picture of a teenaged boy with the kind of feather cut that always looks so good on dusty black Asian hair. He seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was the chair he was tied to.

My muscles went rigid, as though my hands were tied to my sides. My body seemed in the wrong place, the wrong position, as if I should be sitting down.

The picture on the screen changed from the boy to me, sitting on the same chair. My body felt confused, in three places at once: sitting in a tent, in bright light, weeping and slurring; naked and bleeding on the cobbles, bathing in the light of images of myself tied to a chair; standing clothed—uniformed, anyway—in a hot breakroom.

The bell signaling the end of the break rang, but I just stood there, stupid and still and alone, while the pictures of me played. Eventually, the screen cut to the male anchor speaking soundlessly, and then back to the sixteen-year-old boy. Then a man, old enough to be the boy’s father, hurrying down some steps on a narrow street, the kind found in the centers of some Asian cities, shielding his face from the sun and bright camera lights.

I could move again. I turned up the sound. “—tape was given to the net an hour ago. Although the family refused to comment, a spokeswoman for the Singapore police department tells us she suspects the Chen family have known about the kidnap of Lucas Chen for over a week.”

Cut to female anchor, “And this isn’t the only similarity to the van de Oest abduction over three years ago.” Another picture, this time of a young Frances Lorien. Solemn-faced, arrogant. I wondered when it had been taken. I didn’t remember it.

I turned the sound off; and sat down. I stood up again, quickly. Sitting made me feel vulnerable, made me remember the light, the camera.

Not again. Not all those pictures running, over and over.

I looked at the screen again. The boy wasn’t me, but the chair was the same, and the tent, the light. Everything.

Probably the same kidnappers. Kidnapper, I told myself. Fishface was probably three years dead.

“Bird!” Magyar. Hard-eyed and cross. “Break finished more than—”

“I know. Five minutes ago.” I felt unreal. Suspended somewhere between then and now Between Frances Lorien and Bird. “I’m Lore,” I whispered to myself. “I’m Lore.”

Magyar stepped closer. “What are you mumbling about?”

“You want to know who I am? Take a look. Up there. May as well look now as later. They’ll be playing it for days.” Poor Magyar, she didn’t understand. “What do you think—is it me?”

“What?”

I nodded at the screen. She glanced at it, then back at me, then, almost unwillingly, back at the screen. Her face began to change, muscles moving as her brain processed the information. I suppose it was a shock. She jerked her arm up and out to the volume switch.

“—with Oster van de Oest, live from Auckland.” The fountain was buttery with summer sunshine. Oster, used to cameras, had made sure the sun was behind him so he wouldn’t squint.

“We empathize with the family of Lucas Chen. We know how we felt uhen Frances Lorien was taken. We know that somewhere, someone knows where she is. Even after three years. We’re prepared to offer two hundred and fifty thousand for information leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of our daughter.”

He looked different. Older. And so formal. He thought I was dead.

I turned the sound off. “It’s not Auckland, you know.”

Magyar looked at me blankly. “The house, Ratnapida. The family has an agreement with the news services not to reveal where we live.” They were showing more pictures of me. Magyar was looking back and forth from me to the screen. “Not that easy to see at first, is it? But you’d have spotted it eventually. It’s there, if you think to look.”

She was turned away from me now, studying the bright pictures, but she watched me from the corner of her eye.

“That’s me. Frances Lorien van de Oest. The real me. Or it was.” I didn’t know who I was now. I had an eerie sense of multiplicity, of staring down at my reflection in the water and seeing three faces instead of one.

Magyar was very still, and her eyes looked odd. Slitty. Sunk back into their epicanthic folds. I knew I should be wary of her strange expression, but I felt oddly dispassionate. Unreal. The pictures on the screen kept moving, mute. The three reflections in my head rippled. Who am I? Magyar still didn’t say anything. She was clenching and unclenching her plasthene-gloved fists. Her mouth was a straight line.

“You aren’t supposed to be angry,” I said calmly, from a great distance.

“No? Tell me, Bird, how am I supposed to react?”

Like everyone else reacted to the van de Oest name: shock, awe, then a closing off as the person they were dealing with changed from human to van de Oest.

“I don’t understand. Why are you angry?”

“Because I feel like a fool.” Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. “We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.”

Just like that. Dismissed. “But…”

“But what?” Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She couldn’t just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else… But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it—to be treated as a real person?

“We’re not done with this, Bird. Not nearly done. We’ll talk after the shift. After you’ve made up your time.”

She waited. I waited back, then realized she had the upper hand: I was the worker, she the supervisor. The fact that I had told her who I really was didn’t change that. I left the break-room. As though my movement had disturbed the surface of a river, the three faces shivered and blurred together, indistinct.

I don’t remember walking to the troughs, but found myself there, trembling, looking at my face in the slick black water.

Who am I? What would I say if I opened my mouth?

We ordered loc, the hot chocolate liqueur. Magyar took a big gulp of steaming liquid and burned herself. She swore, called to the man behind the counter for some ice, then scowled at him when he shoved an ice bucket her way. Her eyebrows were very dark against her pale skin.

She put a cube in her mouth, crunched, sucked.

I said nothing, I did not even want to breathe too hard, in case the single blurred reflection in my head separated out again.

“So. We’re here to talk about the way you lied to me.”

I spoke carefully, uncertain of my voice. Of my accent. Of the language. Of my own tongue. “It’s hard.”

“Do it anyway.” Utterly unsympathetic.

“Tell me about your family.”

“Why? We’re here to talk about you, not me.”

“Do you have brothers? Or sisters?”

“Both.” She swallowed her ice and took another experimental sip of loc.

“I have—had—two sisters and a brother. But one is a half sister, Greta, my mother’s daughter, and she’s so much older than me she’s more like an aunt—”

“Is this relevant?”

“—and the other brother and sister are twins. Were twins. Stella killed herself.” Now she was listening. “In some ways I was like an only child. And my parents should have divorced fifteen years ago. I am used to hiding things that matter to me, keeping them close. It’s what I do. Who I am.”

“Tell me why the fuck I should care about that! You think that just because you can buy me and Hedon Road, probably the whole city, a hundred times over I’ll nod and say, Fine? Just like that? Without even an explanation of why you’ve been hiding, lying to me? Lying to everyone.”

There was no way to deal with her anger. I ignored it. “This job, Hedon Road isn’t a game to me. I need it. I have less money than you do.” Not true, not true. What about the thirty thousand? The faces shimmered, each with their own secrets.

The muscles in her jaw had relaxed a little, and her pupils were returning to normal.

“I was kidnapped. You know that. When they, when I escaped, I couldn’t go back.” The rest stuck in my throat like small polished pebbles.

“Why? And why did you lie?”

I sat there, mute.

“I feel like such a fool. Do you have any idea how used I feel? All that time I was ordering you around, telling you to bring me this readout or that, treating you like an apprentice. Making you work like that. All that time, you knew, you knew…” She swirled the remains of her loc around the glass. “You know something? You’ve made me feel ashamed of myself. Of how I bullied you. I don’t like that.”

“You didn’t bully me.”

She wasn’t listening. “But why? That’s what I don’t understand. You say you need the money, but why? Why aren’t you back with Mummy and Daddy—”

“Don’t.” Sharper than I intended. “Please, don’t call them that.”

“Fine. Your family, then. Why aren’t you with them, in your fancy house, or estate, or whatever?”

“Ratnapida.”

“What?”

“The house. It’s called Ratnapida.” Stella in the fountain. Oster. Then, later, Oster and Tok, standing side by side. Tok looking beaten.

“Whatever. You could be in the sunshine, doing nothing. So why are you hiding? And what happened to the real Sal Bird?”

I think I killed someone, I had told her. “I never met her. She died in an accident.” I waited for her to decide whether or not to believe me. I knew I looked calmer than I felt. Years of training at the dinner table.

She absorbed that, nodding. Still expressionless. “Go on.”

“The man I killed…” I swallowed. The man I killed. “It was one of the men who kidnapped me.” I told her about the tent, the drugs. About Crablegs and the camera. About finding the nail.

“This is hard. I haven’t thought about it. It was… So when they took me outside, after they’d told me my family hadn’t paid… I thought… it just…” Another swallow. I looked down at my hand on the bar. This was not something I wanted to think about. I stared at my fingertips, the way the skin curled pinkly around the nails. She put her hands on mine, warm and dry. I still couldn’t look up. Try, that hand said. “I had the nail hidden in my fist. When we got outside I hit him in the neck.”

She lifted her hand from mine and picked up her drink. “Was he dead?”

“The other one, Crablegs, he said I’d killed him. “But…” But of course Crablegs would want me to think that. Keep me confused, docile. “I don’t know. I just assumed.”

“Then that’s the first thing we do tomorrow.”

“We?”

She just looked at me, indecipherable.

I felt strange. “I need another drink.”

We were quiet while the drinks arrived.

“When did it happen, the kidnap?”

“September. Three years ago.” Crisp clean air like the scent of apples. The cobbles, blood. Only he might not be dead after all. And Magyar had said we.

“September. Right. So we’ll look at all the murder reports from three—”

But I wasn’t listening. I might not have killed him after all. “Do you have any idea what this means to me?” I said suddenly.

Her voice was soft. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I put my hand on hers, the one still wrapped around her glass. Neither of us said anything. We both pretended our hands weren’t warm and soft together, palm to back, finger on finger, the hair of her forearm touching the underside of my wrist.

“I want to tell you something. About my family. Why Stella killed herself. No one else knows.” Not even Spanner. Do you know what I’m entrusting to you? I think she did. “My father loved me. That’s what I thought. But then I found out my sister Stella had been…” I couldn’t say it. It was as though there were a clothespin crimping that part of my mind together. I had to talk about it. “I had bad dreams about a monster. My older sister, Greta—she was already grown by the time my mother married my… Anyway, she understood what was really happening. She gave me a lock for my door, so…” the monster “my…” the monster “so Oster couldn’t come into my bedroom when I was alone. Stella went into therapy. Tok said she was getting better, but then she killed herself. And I hadn’t known anything. All that time, he was doing that to her. Had been. And then when she got older, when she wasn’t a helpless child anymore, he tried it on me. But Greta knew.” Greta, always gray and stooped, hesitant as though something was about to come around the corner and get her. “I think it had happened to her, too. What I can’t understand…” The air in the bar seemed too thick all of a sudden, the oxygen all used up. I wanted to go belly to the ground, where it was safer, where it was easier to breathe. “What I can’t understand is why no one told me. Tok knew. Stella knew. Greta knew. I didn’t. I should have guessed. There were all these clues. He even… He even took me for a walk and asked me what I knew, what I had been told.”

What did Stella say? he had asked.

No one tells me anything, I replied.

But Greta had tried. Or at least she had got me the lock.

Magyar was frowning. “I’m trying to understand something. You said you thought Oster turned to you when Stella was too old…”

“Yes.”

“But you think Greta was abused, too.”

“Yes.”

“Lore.” Her eyes were soft, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. She sighed. “Tell me about the time… Tell me about the night the monster came to you.”

“I dreamt. At least that’s what Katerine said when I woke up with her hand on my shoulder.”

“Katerine was there when you woke up?”

“Yes.” I was puzzled.

“Lore.” She took both my hands in hers. “Just think a minute. You dreamed about the monster, and when you woke it was Katerine who was there.” I looked at her blankly. “You say Greta had been abused, too. But she was an adult by the time your mother and father married.”

“Yes…” I said slowly.

“Then if the abuser likes them young, it couldn’t have been Oster.”

Absurdly it was Tok who came to mind, his laugh of disbelief when I shouted at him about being mean to Katerine, demanded to know if he realized what he was doing to her: What I have done to her?

“It’s too hot in here. I have to go outside.” The air was so thick I felt as though I was swimming toward the door, fighting for breath. I leaned against the wall outside, gasping. I had forgotten to bring my coat. Through my thin shirt the bricks were hard against my shoulder blades.

Katerine on the bed, fully dressed. “It’s a dream,” she said to Oster. Oster, who was just stumbling into the room.

Magyar came out, our coats draped over her arm. She held mine out silently.

“But she’s my mother,” I said finally.

“Yes.”

My mother, the monster. Which meant Oster wasn’t a monster after all. This time I had to bend forward, head nearly to my knees, before I could get air into my lungs.

My mother, the monster. And Oster—he could be my father again. The one I thought I’d lost.

I started pulling on my coat. “I have to go.”

“Go where? Are you all right.”

“I don’t know. But I need to think.”

The air above the wharf was heavy with damp, the scent of timbers softened and swollen with rain and river water. I slipped down the right alleyway, found the panel set in the pavement, and levered it open. I laid my fingers lightly on the switches, then Hipped them. The lights went out.

There was no moon and the stars hid behind soft black clouds; nothing to reflect from the water. Just me. I sat down on the wharf, careless of the cold. I could feel the river rather than see it: distended by the rains of the last two days to a thick, dark tongue feeling its way blindly to the sea. Somewhere downriver a barge bumped hollowly against its moorings. Water lapped softly at the timbers.

An old river made old sounds. The water at Ratnapida had never sounded or smelled like this. There, it fountained in the sunshine, tinkled on stone, plopped when a fish surfaced for a fly. Even the rain sparkled—fast showers, followed by rainbows and glistening grass. Young water, and lighthearted. Maybe that was why Stella had chosen the fountain as her backdrop…

It all seemed so different now: Stella desperate and pleading, begging for Oster to notice, to do something. Giving him, and me, clues that we couldn’t see.

Katerine had watched the whole scene so calmly. Too calmly, I saw now: What mother should be able to watch her daughter like that, half naked, drunk, obviously in some pain? Why hadn’t I thought about that before? Because that’s just how Katerine was: closed up like a lacquered fan.

But not always, Something, some feeling I had never seen, never even caught a glimpse of, had prompted her to steal into her children’s room at night—Greta, Stella, me—and… and… I felt again the heat of the monster’s breath on the back of my neck and the fear, the creeping flesh feeling that something was terribly awry in my seven-year-old world.

How many times had Stella had to lie quietly through that? A mother was a foundation, a cornerstone, a touchstone, not a monster. Not the reason to kill oneself.

All the time my mother had been doing that to my sister I had wanted her to love me, had ached for her approval, had wanted her to believe I was like her.

I had to lean forward with my weight on my palms, I was so dizzy. Did the fact that I knew, now, what she had done make her a different person? Was I a bad person because I still wanted to be like her? And I still did. On some level I always would. It was what I had grown up with, that image of the calm, competent woman.

I didn’t want to think about it. I stared down at my hands, at the drying cobbles, the miniature riverbeds that formed between them. Here and there were discarded remnants of the tourist trade: beverage cans, a torn disk wrapper. It would all be cleaned up by midmorning.

Katerine had always liked things clean and orderly. Efficient. That monster, Tok had called her. That monster can’t be allowed to get away with it.

Tok and Oster talking to the camera. Tok looking—not beaten, I realized, but exhausted. What had they done to her? Where was she? Why hadn’t they said something, anything on the net?

My mother. I imagined her carefully: tidy hair, concise conversation, economical gestures. She had never gestured much, come to think of it. And her hair was always cut the same way, though she did occasionally tint it varying shades of blond, as a concession to fashion. Her eyes… I had never known the color of her eyes. Did she hide them in a subconscious attempt to hide her soul?

My mother, who was all too human. She had got away with hurting her children because she was so… acceptable. But someone must have known. Tok had. And he had tried to tell me. Why had he taken so long to speak out?

My father should have known! But so should I. No: I was a child. Not really.

Had Oster known? I tried to remember how he had behaved that afternoon with Stella in the fountain. He had known something was wrong. He had even asked me what I knew…

He should have known. I couldn’t get away from that. He was my father—Stella’s father—and he should have taken some responsibility, some interest in us apart from that absurd competition with his wife to make us love him more.

He should have known. But he wasn’t a monster. And I missed him. I wanted to have him back. I’d spent the last three years believing him to be something he was not, and I wanted to touch him, maybe have him ruffle my hair, anything, just to make contact again with the father I had thought I had known.

A barge hooted from downriver, a burly morning noise. Almost dawn.

I stretched and stood, feeling strange: wobbly and light-boned. So much had changed. I had my father back, and had lost my mother. And Magyar knew who I was. She could see through the obscuring reflections. To her I wasn’t van de Oest, I wasn’t Criminal, I wasn’t Bird. I was just me, Lore.

Lore’s birthday came and went. Twenty. She went out in the blustery September wind with the cat’s daily ration of leftovers. As usual she knelt to push the plate under the bushes without really looking, but this time the plate bumped into something soft. She peered into the tangle of dry wood and old, dead leaves.

It was a kitten. Dead. Probably about two weeks old.

Skinny. Fur the color of sand.

She looked at it a long time, then went inside to get her work gloves and spade. It weighed nothing.

Kittens should be round, she thought. It struck her as terribly wrong for something so young to look so used-up. It should have had warm milk, and spring, and a skyful of butterflies to chase. Not a short, hard life and an end on the cold ground.

It was wrong. All wrong.

Spanner was reading. “I don’t really see what the difference is, whether you enjoy it or not.” She barely looked up from the gray book screen in her lap.

“Because it’s a lie.” Because kittens should be round.

Spanner switched to the next page. “It’s flickering again.”

“What?” Lore was confused for a moment; then she realized Spanner was fiddling with the screen contrast. “Turn that book off and listen to me.”

Spanner turned it off, put it down on the cushion next to her. “I was listening. You were saying that if you enjoy yourself it must not be real.”

“You’re being obtuse.”

“No. It’s a job, just like any other. You don’t begrudge Jamaican cane cutters a smoke to make their work less monotonous, do you? Or Chileans a good chew of coca leaf to get them up the next mountain trail where the air’s too thin for anything except their goats. So why deny yourself?”

“Because I hate what we do.”

“You just said you enjoyed it.”

“I do, at the time.”

“Then you’d rather not enjoy it?”

“I’d rather not do it at all.”

“And you’d rather not eat, too?”

“There has to be another way! We could use a fake PIDA, a good one, to get a job. We could—”

“We have a job.”

“I hate it! It makes me feel ashamed, and I’m sick of being ashamed.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You haven’t hurt anyone.”

“I’ve hurt myself. This is my body, my—”

“Temple, right” Spanner shook her head. “It’s not a temple, it’s a sack of meat.” She slapped herself on the thigh. “A tool made of muscle and skin and bone, to be used the same way we use any other tool.”

“No.” Lore was horrified. “Your body isn’t just a tool like a… a screwdriver. It is you. What it does and feels makes you who you are. Don’t you see that?”

“You are who you fuck?” Spanner’s eyes were challenging. “Then who does that make you?”

“Someone I’m ashamed of.” And Lore understood with blinding clarity why Stella had killed herself. To be used like a receptacle, a commodity, and to know it, to be helpless before it, and then to see that helplessness reflected back at her every time her eyes met her abuser’s across the table, every time she saw herself in the mirror. There would never be any way to escape that kind of shame. She looked at Spanner, who was waiting with her eyebrows raised. “What happened? What happened to you, to make you feel you have to do this?”

“Nothing had to happen. I’m not some pathetic victim, reacting instead of acting.” She folded her arms. “I’m simply a realist.”

Lore stared at her, then shook her head tiredly.

“You don’t believe me?”

But that was not what Lore had meant by the head shake. How could she argue against someone’s reality?

She looked at Spanner for a long time. At the hair that needed combing, the light blue eyes she had seen cry only once, at the beginning of the wrinkle on the left side of her mouth, where the muscles pulled when she laughed. She wanted to hold Spanner close, stroke her hair, tell her it was all right, she didn’t have to be a realist all the time; she, Lore, would let her dream, let her stretch and reach and try, and if she failed, then it wasn’t the end of the world.

But Spanner’s pupils were tiny and her arms were still folded and her face was like a mummy’s: thin, drawn too tight, used up too early. She had never had the chance to play, to laugh without calculation, without looking over her shoulder. Kittens should be round.

Lore was suddenly very, very tired. “I’m going to lie down.”

She went into the bedroom and drew the curtains against the lights outside, The close, dark air reminded her of the tent. She felt trapped. There had to be a way out. For both of them.

She fell asleep and dreamed of Stella, surrounded by her friends at Ratnapida, laughing, watching the net charity commercials, thumbing her PIDA into the base of.the screen and sending thousands to some aid organization Lore had never heard of. Then jetting off to some other island paradise to do the same thing. Always traveling. Running, running, but never getting away. Stella, who had escaped by dying.

When Lore woke it was dark, and she knew how they could escape.

I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling stiff and sore, as though my body had tried to rearrange itself physically to fit three people inside one skin. I felt denser, more closely packed. Solid and strange. There was a message on the screen from the plant: shifts were back to normal. I had received four other calls, all aborted without leaving a message.

The flat was stuffy. I went down to Tom’s. “I brought you a recording of the…” I was suddenly embarrassed. Scam, I thought, fake commercial, and was ashamed. I held out the disk. He took it. “This is yours, too,” I pulled the small packet of debit cards from my pocket. “We got more than I thought. There’s about five thousand here.” It was more than the share we had agreed upon, but he needed it more than me. Now it was his turn to look embarrassed, but he took the packet. “I thought Gibbon might want a walk.”

We walked along the canal, the dog at the fullest extent of his leash. A stiff wind pushed the clouds along at a tilt and slapped water up against the banks. The air smelled of weeds and wind and Gibbon’s coat. We saw two Canada geese landing in a wide dike. Gibbon ran for them, barking and dragging me behind him, but the geese just ignored us. He wanted to run some more, so we did, feet thudding on the densely packed dirt of the towpath, mouths open.

For a while, it seemed that I ran through the fountains with Tok, that I ran through the city streets with Spanner, that I ran on my own in an older skin. I felt as though I swam through the swirling meeting point of three rivers, each at a different temperature, each tugging me this way and that. Then it was just me, and Gibbon, and a windy afternoon. Tom was watching the net when I got back. Not the scam. Soup was heating.

“You didn’t watch it?”

“No. I didn’t want to see myself looking old and useless.”

He was old, and arthritic, and lonely—but his eyes were not heavy-lidded and ancient and used up, like Spanner’s; they weren’t dull and eaten-away and dead like the kitten’s. How did he watch the net for hours and keep eyes like that?

I wondered if he had seen the video of Chen’s kidnapping, of me; what he might do if he had recognized me and seen the reward posted; whether he would turn me in… and if I would blame him if he did. A quarter of a million would change his life.

He looked at me a long time when I handed him Gibbon’s leash. I met his eyes. Not like Spanner’s at all. I patted Gibbon. “The walk was a good idea,” I said.

I got to the plant a little before six. Magyar was waiting at the gates. Her relief was obvious.

“Was it you who called and hung up? Thought I wouldn’t show?” It had occurred to me while I dressed, sweating, remembering the look on Tom’s face, my own doubts. I didn’t want to tempt friends, or those who might become friends. I could have run, disappeared, just another tiny rodent in the undergrowth of the city… But if I ran I would be alone again, never knowing who I was when I bent to look at my reflection.

Being near Magyar made me feel known and understood.

We walked into the locker room very close but not quite touching. We caught a few slantwise glances, coming in together, and Kinnis even slapped me on the back, grinning hugely.

I wondered why I wasn’t telling them that their obvious assumption was wrong. I wondered why Magyar wasn’t, either.

“Later,” Magyar said, “at the break.”

We went our separate ways.

All through the first half of the shift, Cel kept watching me, raising her eyebrow at me when I caught her gaze. Annoyingly, I kept blushing.

Five minutes before the break Magyar came to find me. I watched her striding toward me, loosening her mask, frowning. The different lights ran across her hair, which looked very clean and soft. When her right leg moved forward, the skinny pulled taut over her left breast. The plasthene would feel warm under my hands.

“Bird.”

“Magyar.”

“We need to talk.”

“Anywhere but the breakroom. I’m beginning to feel like a trophy wife.” I just blurted it out, and she blushed, which meant I did, too, imagining what she might be thinking, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips, which were very red. And then of course Cel was there, raising her eyebrow at us both.

Frowning ferociously, Magyar led me to the glass-walled office where we had faced off with Hepple. She went around the desk and sat in the comfortably upholstered chair. She was angry again. “Feels good. Want a try? No? Well, I suppose you’ve sat behind big desks a lot. You were probably used to chairs like these by the time you were seven.”

I thought we had gone through all this rich girl—poor girl stuff yesterday. “What’s bothering you?”

“Have you checked the police records yet?”

“No.” I should have. Of course I should have, but I had been sleeping, exhausted and confused.

“I did. Or my friend did. She works in the county records office. I called her this morning, asked her to check.”

“And?”

“And nothing. At least not from this part of the country.”

There was a large dry patch high up in my throat. “How about hospitals?”

“Also nothing.”

The dry patch was getting bigger. “I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I, frankly.”

I didn’t really want to ask her. “Do you believe me?”

“I wonder if you’re telling me everything.”

“You’ve heard the high points. There are some things I don’t want to talk about. Some of them are a matter of public record,” like the net video, “some are things only I know about.” And Spanner. “But I haven’t lied to you. Except about my name.”

There was another chair on my side of the desk. I took it.

“So, what do we do from here?”

I didn’t have any suggestions. She was the one who didn’t trust me. I was tired of dancing to other people’s tunes. Somewhere below, water gushed loudly through a pipe. It was hot in the glass box.

Eventually, she sighed and put her feet up on the desk. “You’re a van de Oest. But you won’t go back to your family because your mother abused your sisters and might have abused you. And because you think you killed someone. But there’s no record of a dead body. No body, no murder, no crime. And if your mother did abuse anyone, it’s not your fault, so why should you suffer? Why not just go back and get her arrested?”

“She may already be arrested.” I told her about Tok and Oster, the strange appeal they had made two years ago. “But there’s more to it than that.”

Magyar folded her arms in satisfaction. “Thought there might be.”

“My ransom wasn’t paid for a long, long time. I thought the delay was deliberate.”

“Thought or think?”

“I don’t know.” Did the fact that it was Katerine and not Oster make a difference? No. “I was in that tent for weeks. The ransom demand was thirty million.” I ignored the way her pupils dilated. “They wouldn’t actually expect thirty million, of course. That’s just a negotiating tool. But they would expect about ten.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s the kind of thing you learn growing up.”

“You might.”

I supposed it might seem odd, to grow up understanding the mechanics of abduction. “Ten million—even thirty million—means nothing to my family. Just on my own I’m worth more than that.” Talk of millions was doing what mention of my name yesterday had not. I could see the shutters start to come down in Magyar’s head. “Don’t. Damn you, Magyar, don’t go away, don’t pretend I’m not real. There’s nothing I can do about the money. It’s what I was brought up with. But I don’t have it now.”

“You could, though.”

“I could. But I won’t.”

“We’ll see.” But she smiled. It was just the corner of her mouth, but she was trying.

“At those prices, my release should have been negotiated within a week. Ten days at the most. I was in that tent six weeks. Why?”

“Bad communications?”

“No. They had excellent lines of communication. Think about it. Someone knew where to abduct me from. I’d been in Uruguay less than twenty-four hours, but they were ready: transport, masks, drugs. And they even knew I was allergic to subcutaneous spray injections. How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone told them. And the only people who knew were family members, and those close to the family.” I gave her a minute to absorb that. “So if my family, or someone close, set the whole thing up, the question has to be: Why? The family doesn’t need money, nor does the corporation.”

“Maybe it wasn’t money they were after.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe they just wanted me out of the way.”

“But why? And if it was the family, for family reasons, why the Chen kidnappings”

“I don’t know.”

Silence. “So you changed your name and hid.” I nodded. “Well.” She did not seem to know what to say.

She knew I had been in danger, maybe still was. She knew I was rich but would probably never claim the money. She knew I thought I had killed a man. “Magyar, will you help me?”

“Yes.”

Yes. “Just like that?”

She lifted her feet off the desk, gave me a crooked smile. “Murder, money, high intrigue. It’s just getting interesting.”

Another silence, this time longer. “Magyar, why?”

“Why do you think?” she asked softly.

It was not a rhetorical question. But she had known what Kinnis and Cel and all those others had been thinking, and she hadn’t contradicted them. “Because… Damn it, Cherry, you know why.”

“Maybe I do. But I need to hear it. I don’t think I can take any more surprises from you.” She got up, came around to my side of the desk. We stood about twelve inches from each other. The hairs on my neck and the backs of my hands tried to rise. It was like being in a strong magnetic field. I felt very exposed in my skinny.

“I like you,” I said suddenly. Which was not quite what I had intended. “I like being near you. And I admire you. What you think matters to me.” And I had made myself vulnerable. She was the only person in the world apart from Spanner who knew who I was.

I could see every pore in her face, the way the creases around her eyes deepened when she smiled. “Why didn’t you start trusting me a bit earlier?” She moved closer, nine inches, six.

I could feel the heat of her body through the plasthene of my suit. Our hipbones were almost touching. I imagined the feel of her skin under my hands.

The end-of-break Klaxon sounded. Down below there was movement as the shift came back to the troughs.

“Shit.” I started to turn away.,

She snagged my hand. Plasthene on plasthene. Safe and erotic. She did not seem to care about the glass walls. She moved her hand to my wrist, tugged until my arms came around her waist. She laid my palm against the small of her back, pressed it in place. My belly was an inch, half an inch, from hers. Heat swarmed up my legs, down my spine. “Is this what you want?”

I nodded.

“Say it.”

“Yes. This is what I want. You are who I want.”

What was between us swelled suddenly, and was almost tangible: ceramic and smooth, rounded as an egg.

We stepped apart by mutual consent. Magyar did not sit behind the desk again, but perched on one corner. I hovered uncertainly by the door. “We have a lot to do,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And I’ll have to split my time between this”—she gestured at the space between us, the possible murder, she meant—“and the sabotage.”

“Yes.” I turned to go, got as far as touching the door handle, turned. “Magyar, were you ever loved by your family?”

“Yes.”

So sure. “I don’t know if I was. I know that no one else ever did. I’m not sure what love is, but I want… I want to be real.” I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. “All the people I’ve slept with, none of them knew who I really was.” None of them had whispered my name, sent me love notes. Told me they couldn’t live without me. “I’ve never had any romance, ever. But how could I? I’ve been so many people, I never knew which ones were real. I want to find that out before you and I… before we go any further. I want to see what that’s like. Do you understand?”

“No,” she said softly, “but I’m trying.”

Good enough.