CHAPTER ONE
“Show me the sandals first,” I said.
Debbie held out the pair of size eight sparkly high-heeled strappy sandals. I had been knocking on doors all afternoon, hunting for sandals like this for some lady over on Rosa.
“My sister’s name is Lynn Miller,” Debbie said. “She’s been missing for three weeks.”
I had a bad feeling about this. My job is finding things, but normally that just means finding willing sellers for interested buyers. That’s why I was looking for the sandals. Finding a person was a whole different kettle of shark bait. But the seastead wasn’t that big, so unless she’d fallen over the side and drowned . . . I pulled out my gadget to take notes. “Okay,” I said, and keyed in the name. “What else can you tell me?”
“We’re both guest workers,” Debbie said, which I’d guessed from the overcrowded quarters where they lived. It always smelled like feet down here. “Bonded labor,” she added, which was very nearly redundant. “Our bond-holder is Dennis Gibbon, the guy who owns Gibbon’s Dining Hall. He has me working elsewhere as a cleaner; Lynn washes dishes at the dining hall. Washed, I mean. She’s not there anymore.”
My father and I had a subscription to Gibbon’s; maybe this would be easier than I’d thought. I nodded, waiting for her to go on.
“Three weeks ago, Lynn got sick and had to miss work. She doesn’t get paid if she doesn’t work, so then two weeks ago she missed a payment to Gibbon. She went to talk to him—actually, what she wanted was to borrow money to see a doctor. She never came back.”
“Did you ask Gibbon what happened to her?”
“He wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
She did, in the form of a U.S. Passport. I captured an image of the photo with my gadget. “What’s going to satisfy you?” I asked. “I mean, if I come back and say, ‘I saw her and she’s fine, give me the sandals,’ I don’t imagine that’ll do it.”
“You could bring me a note from her. I’d recognize her handwriting.”
“Okay,” I said. I put my gadget in my pocket. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I live on Min, short for New Minerva, which is a seastead in the Pacific Ocean, 220 nautical miles west from Los Angeles, California. The seastead is basically a chain of man-made islands, anchored into place, with some bonus retired cruise ships and ocean freighters chained up to the platforms. Min is only one part: there’s also Lib, Rosa, Pete, Sal, and Amsterdarn, and each one is its own country with its own set of rules (except for Lib, which doesn’t have any rules at all; that’s sort of the point).
The seasteads were built by people who wanted more freedom and less government (a lot less government, in the case of Lib) than they thought they’d ever be able to get in any existing country. And since all the land that existed was already claimed by someone, they built their own. That was forty-nine years ago. My father and I came to live on Min when I was four, after my mother died. I’m sixteen now.
I’d wanted to get a job, but it was hard to find one. Mostly, the people who were hiring wanted real grown-ups with PhDs. For the scut work, stuff like mopping floors and washing dishes, they wanted to hire guest workers, because they’re cheap and reliable.
Guest workers are non-citizens; to become a citizen, you have to buy a stake, and that’s not cheap. Most of the people who come here without the cash to buy a stake don’t have the money to get here, so they take out a bonded loan and work to pay it off.
I finally found a job at Miscellenry, which is this general store run by a guy named Jamie. Jamie hired me to find stuff. Here’s a weird thing about the seastead: people have a lot of money (stakeholders do, anyway—guest workers, not so much) but there’s still a lot of stuff they can’t just go buy easily. I mean, you can go to California to shop, but it’s a long boat ride or an expensive flight, and entering the U.S. can be a huge hassle because they don’t recognize seastead citizenship as a thing. You can order stuff, but shipping things to the seastead takes forever and costs a ton.
But there are about 80,000 people who live on the seastead permanently, like me and my dad, and sometimes we need stuff. We get a lot of tourists—Amsterdarn does, anyway—and they bring stuff to sell or trade, but let’s say you need something really specific, like a size six black bathing suit. There’s only a few stores and they might not have one in stock. But there’s probably someone on the seastead who’s got one, who’ll sell it for the right price, or trade it for the right thing. And that was my job: finding that stuff, and then getting the person who owned it what they wanted in exchange.
I found the size six black bikini and I found a case of White Musk scented shampoo and I found a particular brand of baby binky. Not to mention a bottle of fancy single-malt scotch (that was actually pretty easy; tourists bring fancy booze because the guide books say it’s easy to sell or trade here) and a pair of sapphire drop-style earrings and a nice presentation box for them. Sparkly strappy high-heeled sandals in size eight had been my downfall but now I’d found those, too. All I had to do now was find Lynn and get a note saying she was okay.
I started at Gibbon’s Dining Hall. Most steader apartments don’t have full kitchens. For meals, you buy a subscription to a cafeteria. There are super fancy ones that have a dozen vats going at once so you can eat anything from beef to emu to lobster, and there are really basic ones with a single vat that grows beef that smells fishy because they never clean it. Gibbon’s is nice enough but not top end. He serves fresh vegetables but nothing fancy, and there’s a choice of three meats most nights. He doesn’t have windows. Dad has a window in his office at home, so he says he doesn’t see a reason to pay for a view to go with his food. Especially since half the time, he sends out for food and takes a working meal in his office anyway.
Dad wasn’t at dinner tonight. I read a book while I ate my steak and fries and steamed baby carrots (see? fresh vegetables, but nothing fancy). When I was done, I left my tray to be cleared and walked back to the kitchens. A swinging door separated the work areas from the eating areas: beyond, it was noisy and hot. I could see the kitchen, crowded with workers plating food and washing dishes, on my left. At the end of the hall was a door marked “Office.”
“Miss, this area is staff only,” someone said from the kitchen.
“I want to talk to Mr. Gibbon,” I said, pushing my hair back behind my ear. I was sweating in the heat. “I’ll only be a minute. Is he available?”
“Uh . . . ”
I walked up to the office door and knocked on it. There was a grumbling sound from inside and the door was yanked open. “What?” Mr. Gibbon loomed in the doorway, scowling down at me through his bushy moustache. The office behind him was small and messy. Someone was sitting in the visitor’s chair; I could see their knees.
“Mr. Gibbon?”
“Yeah?” He looked down at me and his scowl was slowly replaced by the sort of blankly courteous, slightly wary expression that people usually wore when they were talking to my father. “Is there a problem?”
Back before I got this job, I would have been a lot more nervous, but working as a Finder I’d kind of gotten used to bugging people. “I’m looking for Lynn Miller. She’s a guest worker who worked here until two weeks ago.”
“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“You are her bond-holder,” I said. “Or you were at the time.”
“I can’t possibly keep track of every one of my bond-workers.”
“Can you check your records?”
He gave me an exasperated look. “They’re organized by number, not name. Do you have her ID number? I didn’t think so. Look, we’re very busy back here. Was the food good tonight? Go on out and dessert will be along in just a minute.” He shuffled me toward the swinging door and added, “You really shouldn’t come back here. It’s not safe for customers. Call my secretary if you want to make an appointment to see me.”
Well, that was a brush-off if I’d ever heard one. I sat down, wondering why he’d been so incredibly unhelpful. Was he hiding something, or did he honestly not recognize her name? I could totally believe that he kept records by number. Bonded guest workers had a thin plastic bracelet with a number on it. If I went back, maybe Debbie would be able to tell me what Lynn’s number was. Of course, if her bond had been sold, it would’ve been changed . . .
Anyway, if I was supposed to “make an appointment” I had a bad feeling he’d be busy for the next year and a half.
“Dessert, miss?”
The server set a slice of chocolate cake in front of me and hurried away. It wasn’t until I’d almost finished eating that I noticed the slip of paper under the plate.
Meet me at St. Peter’s in an hour if you want to know what happened to Lynn.
St. Peter’s was the Catholic church. It was over on Rosa, and was pretty small—not many people here are particularly religious. But there are more families on Rosa, and there are a couple of churches.
It was a Wednesday, the day the new episode of Stead Life usually dropped, and my father and I always watched it together. I checked the time. An hour would make me late enough getting home that my father would notice, but he probably wouldn’t care if it was for my job. I sent him a quick text in case he wondered: still trying to track down some sandals, don’t start the show without me. I read my book for a while as Gibbon’s slowly emptied out, and then I walked over to Rosa.
The church had a statue out by the door, a life-sized plaster statue of a man holding a fishing net in one hand and a key in the other. A plaque at the bottom said St. Peter the Fisherman on it. I could tell it was plaster because there was a large chip out of the draping brown robes St. Peter was wearing. The door to the church was closed but had a hand-written sign taped to it saying please come in, all are welcome.
I stood around awkwardly in the corridor for a minute or two, then decided I’d be less conspicuous if I went inside to wait. People went into churches to pray, right? No one could tell from looking that I was an atheist (and anyway, I’m sixteen—lots of teenagers experiment with religiosity). I was relieved that they weren’t holding a church service inside, although there were lots of people. Some looked like they were praying—people were kneeling, their eyes closed, whispering to themselves, I couldn’t think what else they might be doing—but others were just sitting quietly. A couple of people had found better-lit spots and were reading. I sat down and waited.
“In an hour” was 8:15 p.m. but no one came at 8:15. No one came at 8:20. I started to wonder at 8:25 if I’d misunderstood where I was supposed to meet him—had he meant for me to wait outside? I started to stand up, but a man dressed in damp white clothes and heavy black work shoes was dropping into a half-kneel and crossing himself, and then sliding in next to me. He was thickly built, with dark hair and large hands that were covered in little knife scars. Chef’s hands.
“You’re Beck Garrison, aren’t you?” he whispered. “Someone in the kitchen said you’re Paul Garrison’s daughter.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering if this would make him clam up. My father makes people nervous.
Instead, he turned his head to give me a long, appraising look. “Lynn’s bond was sold to someone named Janus,” he said.
“Is that a first name or a last one?”
“I don’t know. What I can tell you is, Lynn was sick. She came in to talk to Mr. Gibbon, and they went into his office. They left together and she hasn’t been back—not to the kitchen, not to her old spot in the locker rooms.” The locker rooms were the dorms where people rented a space just big enough to sleep in; that’s where I’d met Debbie. “You know her sister’s been looking, right?”
“Yeah, she said she’d—” I bit back the information about the sandals, suddenly a little embarrassed by it. “We’re bartering. What she wanted from me was to find out whether her sister is okay. Do you know anything else about Janus?”
The man—I still didn’t know his name, I realized—bit his lip and looked down. “There have been a few other disappearances in the last month. Janus’s name comes up every time.”
Well, the others weren’t my problem. Just Lynn.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“I’d rather you didn’t know it. Mr. Gibbon holds my bond, too.”
*
My father was still working when I got home, but he looked up as soon as I came in. “Did you find what you needed?” he asked.
“Getting closer,” I said, and shrugged. I wondered if he knew who Janus was, but asking him that question would start a cascade of other questions that I thought would end in, “you really should be minding your own business, Beck,” and I decided not to ask. “You didn’t start watching Stead Life without me, did you?”
“Wouldn’t think of it.” He stood up and stretched, then came out to the living room, closing his office behind him. We sat side by side on the couch and turned on the wall TV. Stead Life is weekly reality show filmed on the seastead. All the mainland subscribers watch it for the exotic outré seastead lifestyle. All the seasteaders watch it so we can gossip after we see our friends on the show.
Tonight’s show was about dating on the seastead. There was a clip of a woman saying “the odds are good, but the goods are odd,” because there are more men than women who live here. Then the show followed her around as she went on a date with a guy—not someone I knew. They started by going for drinks at a bar on one of Min’s outside decks, which could have been very nice but it was chilly when they arrived and shortly after it started raining. They walked over to Rosa for a bar there, instead. The date went really badly, and not because of the weather—the guy just wanted to talk about himself, and he wasn’t interesting enough to justify it. When they were done, Stead Life interviewed them both separately. The woman said that she wanted a man who laughed at her jokes some of the time. The man said that women on the Stead were all entitled because there were too many men and not enough women and he was going to give up on dating.
I did catch a glimpse of Thor, one of the boys in my Humanities tutoring group, as they walked down the hallway. He looked up at the camera open-mouthed and then caught himself and walked away quickly.
The imbalanced numbers weren’t a factor for the teenagers with dating. The fact that there just weren’t all that many kids here was a much bigger issue. I’d never seen my father go on a date, and I glanced at him now, wondering if there was a reason for that. He was reading something off his tablet. He was too old for the woman on Stead Life, probably, but he was good about laughing at other people’s jokes. He laughed at my jokes, anyway. Usually.
I went back to wondering about Janus.
I had no idea who Janus was, but the seastead is pretty tightly knit. I was pretty sure that if I asked around, he’d turn up.
The seastead doesn’t have public schools (obviously) or even any schools per se at all. Little kids usually get schooled by their parents, although since my mother wasn’t around, my father paid Shara’s mom to tutor me along with Shara. That worked out fine until we got to be about eleven and math got complicated enough that her mother didn’t feel confident teaching us anymore.
For older kids, most people hire tutors. I had math and science tutoring in the morning with Mrs. Leonard, who rented space to hold classes and taught fifteen kids at once. Then a lunch break; I could walk back to Gibbon’s, if I wanted, or buy something at one of the little sandwich shops on Rosa. In the afternoons, I had Humanities tutoring with Mrs. Rodriguez, who taught Literature, History, and Econ out of her apartment. There were six of us in her high school group.
When Shara and I first graduated from home schooling to tutoring, we had lunch together every day. But then Maureen moved to the stead. For about six months, when Shara and I were thirteen and Maureen was fourteen, they made a point of not inviting me with them when they went to lunch. Then Shara’s mom found out and after that I was always invited, but I’d never felt exactly welcome.
That morning, I took notes and drank coffee and tried, unsuccessfully, to pay attention. My mind kept wandering to the sparkly sandals and the mystery of what had happened to Lynn. When we broke for lunch, Shara dutifully invited me to join her and Maureen, but I shrugged her off and went down to Miscellenry to get Jamie’s new list for me and start looking for stuff.
I grabbed a sandwich to go from a shop while looking for the items on the list: a coffee grinder, potting soil, and a pair of brown shoelaces for men’s dress shoes (or really, a single unbroken shoelace would do). As I made my way around from one apartment to the next, I asked about Janus. I found the coffee grinder with no problems (I tried a newcomer; that’s exactly the sort of thing people bring to the stead, then decide within six months they don’t need). The shoelaces (a pair, still in their package) were similarly easy. I got a good lead on the potting soil just as I realized I was going to be late for afternoon tutoring. No one knew Janus.
I ran up the stairs two at a time and was only barely late. Mrs. Rodriguez had a permanent sign on her door saying Experienced Humanities and Social Sciences Tutor, all ages, now accepting students. There were six of us in the high school group: Shara and Maureen, John and Andy and Thor, and me. Thor was new to the seastead, kind of. His family had moved last year and bought their stake right away. Rumors said his father paid in actual gold, which is always one of the options but still, you don’t see that very often.
Mrs. Rodriguez had a really nice apartment—couches for everyone and a lovely big window. It always smelled faintly of coffee, even when she wasn’t brewing any. Coffee, and clean sheets. She kept a spider plant hanging in her window; it trailed little tendrils all the way down to the floor.
Maureen and Shara exchanged amused looks as I came in late and out of breath. I ignored them. Thor scooted over on the couch to make room for me, and I sat down, pulling out my gadget. “Saw you on Stead Life last night,” I said, and he blushed.
Mrs. Rodriguez was teaching Econ today. She talked about Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the noble experiment of the seastead founding fathers. “Thor, you’ve lived somewhere with taxes. Why don’t you talk about that?” she said.
He blushed and stammered a little, because she’d put him on the spot, and pushed a loose hair back out of his face. Thor had longish dark hair, curly, that was constantly in his eyes. “I didn’t have to pay them, my parents did,” he said.
“Did you pay taxes when you went shopping?” she asked.
“Oh—yeah! Sales taxes.” He grinned, showing his dimple. “Back on shore—well, in the U.S. anyway, I don’t know about other places—we had to pay money to the government every time we bought something. They also took money out of my parents’ pay and at the end of the year they had to fill out this huge form that said whether they’d taken out enough. If the government decided that they hadn’t taken enough they’d make my parents send in even more and if they didn’t, they could go to jail. Or they’d take our house.” He frowned at the memory. “Anyway, that’s part of why we moved here.”
“I’ve paid sales taxes,” Shara said. “We go to shore every year and do some shopping, and yeah, you think you’re going to have to pay one thing and WHAM, it’s like . . . way more.” She flipped her ponytail over her shoulder and let out an exaggerated sigh.
“We won’t be going back,” Thor said. “At least, my dad won’t. Because right before we left, the government came with a HUGE bill and said, ‘Well actually there was some sort of mistake and you owe a lot more than we thought,’ and my father told them to shove it up their—um, he told them where to shove it. And we came here.”
“Aw, there’s more to shore than the U.S. of A.,” Andy said. “We never go to San Fran, but we visit the Caymans every year, and the shopping’s almost as good.”
Thor shrugged. “We’ll see if they change their mind. Right now my parents say we’ll never leave ever.”
John stirred. “Like Beck’s father,” he said. “She hasn’t been to shore since she was four.”
Shara and Maureen looked at each other; they probably thought they were being discreet, but Shara giggled, and Maureen looked disdainful behind her long blonde eyelashes, and I felt my cheeks burn despite my best efforts to keep a neutral face. Thor, on the other hand, glanced at me with sudden interest. “They’ll take you to the Caymans,” I blurted. “Sooner or later.” My father was eccentric. I was the only teenager on the stead who was stuck here all the time, I was pretty sure.
We talked Econ until the coffee break, when Mrs. Rodriguez made us a pot of coffee and everyone pulled out literature homework. “Hey,” I said as I added sugar to my coffee. “Does anyone know a guy named Janus?”
“Is that a first name or a last name?” Thor asked.
“I don’t know.”
Mrs. Rodriguez looked over from her kitchenette, where she was getting a carton of creamer out of the fridge. “Why are you looking for him?”
“I’m trying to find a woman named Lynn. He’s her bond-holder.”
“He probably isn’t, actually,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “He’s sort of a bond wholesaler. Buys bonds from people who don’t need or want a particular bond-worker anymore, and resells to whoever. He doesn’t usually keep people very long.”
“Why are you such an expert?” Sarah asked.
Mrs. Rodriguez shrugged. “He eats at my dining hall. We’ve shared a table once or twice.”
What did I tell you? In a place this cut off from everywhere else, sooner or later you’ll run into someone who knows the person you’re looking for.
I didn’t ask Mrs. Rodriguez where she ate, because I already knew. She mentioned twice that she ate at Primrose, which was on the top deck of one of Rosa’s former cruise ships, and had one of the nicest views on the stead. She had a husband who worked as a bioengineer on Sal, and she believed it was worth paying for scenery with her food.
If I was going to infiltrate Primrose, I needed to try to guess whether Janus usually ate dinner early or late. Or if he ate dinner in his office most of the time anyway, like my dad, and I’d have a better bet finding him at lunchtime. I finally decided to hope he was a late eater, because that way I could grab dinner at my own dining hall before my father was likely to turn up, and then scoot up to Primrose. He had let me get a job, but he didn’t entirely approve of it, and I had a vague feeling he would not approve at all of this particular task. Usually I just pestered people at home about cologne and coffee beans. This time, I was bothering important businessmen at work.
I wondered if my father knew Janus.
They don’t check IDs at the door of Gibbon’s because the staff pretty much know everyone who eats there. There was a maitre d’ at the door of Primrose, though, and I wouldn’t be able to just slip in. She certainly wasn’t going to let me in to stalk Janus, either, so honesty was out. Instead, I smiled broadly and introduced myself and said that although my father really liked Gibbon’s, I was getting tired of eating in a cave and wanted to try to talk him into upgrading. “I think it’ll work better if I sample your food, though,” I said. “If I can tell him what a meal’s like. But even if you could just let me in to soak up the atmosphere . . . ?”
She gave me an anticipatory smile. “You’re Paul Garrison’s daughter, aren’t you? We be delighted to invite you in for a complimentary dinner.” She waved me inside.
Primrose is a lot fancier than Gibbon’s. It’s not just the windows (and they have an entire wall of windows). There are white tablecloths on all the tables, and they have wine to drink instead of just beer, and people really were eating lobster. There were more women here than in Gibbon’s—probably nearly a third of the people eating at Primrose were female. There are a lot more men than women on the seastead, but there are places where women cluster a bit, and this was apparently one.
I couldn’t go off into a corner and read since I needed to try to figure out who Janus was, so I pulled out a chair next to a table and beamed at the dozen or so strangers. “Is this seat taken?” Assured that it wasn’t, I repeated my line about how I wanted to try to talk my father into upgrading and asked everyone what their favorite dish was at Primrose. It was easy to segue from that into introductions, but no one there was Janus. Well, it had been a long shot.
The woman sitting next to me was older than me, and friendly. “I’ve heard all the really interesting people on the stead eat at Primrose,” I whispered. “Is it true the stars from Stead Life eat here?” My table neighbor craned her neck and said she didn’t see them, but yes, Primrose was where the Stead Life hosts ate their meals.
“So who here have I heard of?”
She pointed out a dozen or so people, including an elected official (we have a few of those, on Min), one of the chief surgeons from the hospital, and an old guy who was one of the handful of remaining founders (he came over to help start the seastead when he was nineteen, which is why he’s still around, forty-nine years later).
“My teacher eats here, too,” I said. “Mrs. Rodriguez. Do you know her?” I listed a few other people who I thought might plausibly eat in Primrose (some did, some didn’t) and then tried for Janus.
“You mean Rick Janus?” Oh: a last name. Good to know. “Yeah, see him over there?”
“In the green?” I said, looking where she was pointing.
“Yeah, he’s just sitting down.”
I suppressed a gleeful grin (or at least, I thought I did), threw out another name or two for camouflage, and finished my dinner. Target acquired.
I decided not to approach him at dinner because it would be too easy for him to have me thrown out, so I waited until he was done, then followed him out. “Mr. Janus?” I said as soon as we were out in the hall.
He turned around, looking surprised. “Yes? Do I know you from somewhere?” He was a little older than my father, with slate-gray hair and very bushy gray eyebrows.
“I don’t think so. My name is Rebecca Garrison, I work as a Finder for Jamie at Miscellenry.”
“Oh . . . ?” He wasn’t walking away, yet.
“I’m looking for a woman named Lynn Miller. You bought her bond, probably about two weeks ago?”
His eyes narrowed and he leaned back against the wall, folding his arms. “What about her?”
“I’ve been asked to find her and check on whether she’s okay.”
“I sold her bond.”
“Can you please tell me who you sold it to? Because I’ve been asked to get a note from her, just confirming that she’s okay.”
“I’m not going to tell you her new bond-holder,” he said. “I don’t discuss my deals; it’s bad business.” He stared at me and waited.
“She was sick—”
“She’s been treated.”
“That’s good,” I said, feeling desperate. “I just need a note—”
“Can’t give you one.” He waited a moment longer, then raised his gray eyebrows, said, “Nice to meet you, Rebecca,” and walked away.
It took me a long time to walk home from Primrose, partly because it was on Rosa, but also because on my way back I had to go out of my way to avoid Embassy Row. The U.S. maintains an office they call American Institute, because if they had an embassy that would be saying they thought Minerva counted as a country. My father is offended by the fact that they don’t recognize our sovereignty so he doesn’t let me go anywhere near the Institute. (We do have a couple of actual embassies, but one of them is from Rosa, which is kind of silly because they are right there and it’s not as if we have to show a passport to cross the bridge that connects Rosa to Min.)
The main room light was off when I came in, but my father’s office door was open and light spilled out from there. “Beck?”
I put down my bag on the table by the couch and went over to his office door, hesitating in the doorway. I wasn’t allowed to go in when he wasn’t there, and it left me feeling sort of weird about going in at all. “Yes?”
“I’ve been hearing rumors,” he said. “You were pestering Mr. Gibbon, back in the kitchens.”
I wondered what he knew, and who’d told him. “Only for a minute,” I said. “I left right away.”
“You were rude,” he said. “He put up with it because you’re my child, and he doesn’t want to lose me as a customer. I told him to send you packing, next time.” He looked up from his desk, his eyes cold. My father has blue eyes that are almost the exact same color as mine. I gazed over his shoulder, at the window behind him, even though I couldn’t see anything this time of night but my own reflection.
“Yessir,” I said.
“If your job becomes a problem,” he said, “you’ll have to quit.”
“Yessir,” I said again.
“Good.” He looked down. “I’m glad you understand.”
I took that as a dismissal and went to my own room. I put on an old episode of Stead Life with the volume turned down low while I did my homework for Mrs. Rodriguez. After a while, I shoved my gadget aside and set my picture of my mother on my lap.
I barely remembered her. She died in a car wreck. When I turned eleven, my father told me she’d been drinking when it happened. In my picture, she was laughing, holding me in her lap as we both sat on a big porch swing. I could see myself, a little, in the picture of my mother: she had freckles, like me. Her smile looked like mine. I couldn’t see what color her eyes were.
I wondered what she’d think of Min. If she’d have schooled me herself when I was little, instead of sending me to Shara’s mother, and if Shara would have seen me as more of a friend, in that case, and less of an annoying hanger-on to be shed when she met someone more interesting. If she’d insist on eating at Primrose, even if it cost extra.
When would my trip to Primrose get back to my father? Maybe I could convince him that I really had just been trying to sample the food, and my conversation with Janus was total coincidence. I’d bumped into him while leaving and said, “Excuse me,” and you know how rumors are . . .
I really didn’t want to quit my job. Having a job, a real job that brought in real money and not Min scrip, felt more important every time I got paid.
The most frustrating thing was that I still hadn’t found Lynn.
When I woke up to pee at 4 a.m., I thought of a way out of my dead end.
“I’m feeling sick,” I told my father when I saw him at breakfast. “It hurts to pee. Kind of a lot.”
“Who’ve you been sleeping with?” he asked.
“Dad. Don’t be ridiculous. I think I have a UTI, not some sort of weird STD.”
“It’ll be antibiotics either way, I suppose,” he said. “You know where the clinic is. I don’t need to take you in, do I?”
“No, I can go by myself,” I said. “Do you want me to call Mrs. Leonard? She may want to talk to you.”
“I’ll call your teacher. Go on to the doc.”
I walked to the health center. The one we use is over on Rosa. I had to go around stupid Embassy Row again, and I checked in with the stead ID that didn’t so much say that I was Beck Garrison as that I was Paul Garrison’s daughter, because the money for my treatment would come out of his account. I got checked in, was told that my temperature was normal although my pulse was a little fast, and then the nurse said the doctor would come see me shortly.
“Don’t make her hurry,” I said, and gave the nurse my best most pathetic look. “I’m missing a calculus test. If I miss the whole thing she’ll let me make it up. If I only miss half, she’ll make me try to do it with half the time.”
The nurse sighed sympathetically and closed the door.
The tablet she left behind was locked, of course, but I’d watched her type in her password to look up my record and I got it right on the second try. I hit the button to search records and typed in LYNN MILLER.
Her record opened. Footsteps were coming and I almost hit the LOCK key but they went on by. It had never been less than ten minutes between the nurse leaving and the doctor arriving, so hopefully today would not be a nasty surprise. I didn’t care about Lynn’s diagnosis; I just wanted to know who’d paid for it.
Butterfield. Davis Butterfield. That was John’s father, John in my math class that I was missing. I actually knew this person. This next part might actually be easy.
The bill was really high. What the hell had been wrong with her? I pulled up the details and saw that five people were treated, not just one, all with the same condition. On the same day, even. That was weird. Every single one had kidney failure requiring regenerative therapy.
There was a brusque knock and the door swung open before I could lock the screen and put the tablet down. I did manage to clear the screen so no one would know what I’d been looking at, but I jumped at least a foot and I’m sure I looked extremely guilty, standing there with the tablet in my hand.
“You’re not supposed to touch that,” the doctor said irritably.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to see how it felt in my hand. I’m hoping for a new gadget soon.”
She picked it up and gave me a suspicious glare, then started asking me about my symptoms. “Have you been slumming?” she asked.
“What? It’s not an STD, I told my father—”
She waved her hand impatiently. “I’m not accusing you of sleeping around,” she said. “I’m wondering where you’ve been eating.”
“I ate at Primrose last night. Usually I eat at Gibbon’s.”
“What else have you eaten or drunk in the last week?”
I listed everything I could think of: cereal at home, coffee at Mrs. Rodriguez’s, the sandwich I’d had for lunch the other day . . .
The doctor ordered blood and urine tests. The lab technician came in and drew what looked like about a pint of blood from my arm, and then they sent me off to the lavatory to pee in a cup. “Nothing turned up,” the doctor said when she came back, “but we’ll do a twenty-four-hour culture to be sure. In the meantime, drink extra water but carry it with you from home. You need to be careful with what you eat and drink—Gibbon’s is fine, and Primrose, but if it’s somewhere you see folks from the locker rooms eating, you can do better.”
She hadn’t asked me any more questions about why I was looking at her gadget. I felt a flush of relief, and then wondered if she was going to tell my father I’d been snooping when she called with my lab results. Probably not; it would look as bad for her as for me if I’d actually managed to do anything more than admire the shiny screen.
Morning was almost over, but I headed for my math class anyway. Hopefully I’d get brownie points for coming for the last five minutes when I could have skipped, and I might have a chance to ask John what sort of business his father owned. As it turned out, Mrs. Leonard was more irritated by the interruption than impressed by my dedication, but I did manage to attach myself to John when we all went out to lunch. (At a sandwich shop, a nice upscale one that the doctor would undoubtedly have approved of.) I told him a funny story about hunting down a fancy hand-wound pocket watch and then noted that I’d been wondering if any of my classmates’ parents were hiring for something steadier.
“Oh, you wouldn’t want to work for my dad,” John said. “He owns a skin farm on Lib.”
“Ew,” I said.
“Yeah,” John said, and finished his sandwich. “Who want to work there?”
One of the things people come to the seastead for is cosmetic surgery. They don’t come here because it’s cheaper (although it is) but because there are things we can do that are illegal in other countries, or at least not approved, because they’re so experimental. Skin transplants are one of the big new things.
When you get old, your skin loses elasticity. You get wrinkles and liver spots, your risk of skin cancer goes up . . . your skin really starts to wear out. And that’s where skin farming comes in. You can send a sample of genetic material to John’s father, and he’ll give it to his technicians, and they’ll grow it until they’ve got this entire blanket of fresh, young skin. And then the surgeons can transplant it onto you, and when you heal you really do look a lot younger, and not creepy the way people who get face-lifts sometimes look.
The technician jobs sort of suck, though.
The skin can’t just be grown in a vat (though it uses the same technology); it has to be grown on screens, and it’s a lot of work. The skin techs have to spread the cells on a screen, and they have to paint it with growth matrix, and then later they have to paint it with acid, and they go back and forth between the growth matrix and the acid to get it to grow right. If you spill the acid on yourself, you can get burns. If you spill the growth matrix on yourself, you can get cancer.
And since it’s a crappy job, but not a complicated job, they use bonded labor for it.
When tutoring was done for the day, I decided to go see Debbie again, and tell her what I’d found out. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get a note, and I didn’t think Lynn would write, “Doing fine, wish you were here!” even if she could. The thing is, normally bond-workers can at least go back to their bunks at the end of the day. The fact that they weren’t letting Lynn go home wasn’t a good sign.
Debbie lived in the locker rooms. The locker rooms were a set of dorms that rented each person a space just big enough to sleep in; the bunks had a door that you could pull down and lock, like a locker, so that you had some secure storage for your stuff, and you could lock yourself inside, too, if you were nervous about your roommates. They were used mostly by bond-workers, because they were the cheapest housing on the stead. Debbie’s held twelve women, three bunks on each wall, and Debbie answered the door when I knocked.
“I don’t have a note,” I said, “but I can tell you where she is.”
Debbie’s eyes went wide and she stood up, looking hopeful. “Where?” she said.
“Her new bond-holder is Davis Butterfield,” I said. “At least, he’s the one who paid for her medical treatment—she had to have a kidney regeneration. He has a skin farm on Lib. I assume that’s where she is now.”
The hope drained out of Debbie’s face like someone had pulled a stopper out of a tub. “Oh,” she said, her voice an inaudible whisper. “Oh. Are you sure?”
“Well—Mr. Gibbon sold her bond to some guy named Rick Janus. And Janus wouldn’t tell me who he sold it to, but he did tell me she’d gotten medical treatment, and I broke into one of the tablets at the clinic to look up her record and it said Davis Butterfield had covered the costs of her treatment. And I doubt he’d have done that just to be nice, so . . . ”
Debbie shook her head. “You’re right,” she said. Numbly, she reached back into her bunk, and handed me the sandals.
“I didn’t bring a note . . . ”
“What I asked you for wasn’t fair,” Debbie said. “I wanted you to tell me she was all right. But she’s not all right. You did find out what happened to her, though, so . . . the sandals are yours.” She blinked back tears.
“Are you going to try negotiating with Mr. Butterfield?”
Debbie shook her head. “No point. I don’t have any money. I sure as hell don’t have enough to buy out her bond and the cost of a kidney regeneration.” She stared at the floor. “I wish he’d at least let her out in the evenings to come here, so I could see her. But the U.S. said last year that they consider certain contracts void because the work is so hazardous, so . . .” She broke off abruptly, and looked up at me warily, her mouth clamped shut.
But I knew where she’d been going. The U.S. considered those contracts void; therefore, they’d help you get out of them. If Butterfield let her out, even for a few hours, she could run away. She could escape back to the U.S. and leave him with uncollectable debt.
I took the sandals, muttered something apologetic, and fled.
I delivered the sandals to the woman who wanted them and took my payment. Which wasn’t enough to pay for anyone’s surgery, or to buy out anyone’s bond, of course. It was pocket money, no more than that.
I’d finished the job. I’d found Lynn. My obligation was done. I looked at the latest list from Jamie: extra-plush tri-layer TP, a two-inch-diameter black button with four holes, and another pair of sandals, but this person was a lot less fussy, so long as they were size 9.
I headed back down to the locker rooms; someone would have the button, and people there were always glad to see me since I paid in hard currency for stuff they could spare. I’d just avoid Debbie’s dorm, because the thought of seeing her again made me feel uncomfortable. I wished her answer had been different.
I passed one of the cheap, nasty dining halls and smelled dinner cooking. People were lined up outside, waiting for it to open. If I’d needed something more complicated than a black button I’d probably have stopped to ask people about it, but instead I kept going.
I was turning down one of the hallways with a low ceiling when someone grabbed me from behind.
“Don’t go snooping around places that don’t concern you,” a male voice hissed in my ear. “Even being Paul Garrison’s daughter will only protect you up to a point.”
He hit me, hard, in the back. It hurt, a lot, and I screamed and he dropped me to the deck. “Stick to finding potting soil and Swiss Army knives,” he said, and walked away.