CHAPTER TWO
I picked myself up and rubbed the sore spot on my back, struggling to catch my breath. My legs were shaking, and I had to lean against the wall of the corridor. What the hell? I was done with the snooping. Well, he was right about one thing: being Paul Garrison’s daughter wasn’t going to protect me here, because I wasn’t about to go to my father and tell him about this.
But no one would go to the trouble of trying to intimidate me unless I was actually about to find something out that was really a secret. What was so important about Lynn? Anyway, I’d found out where she was, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Or was there?
Maybe the final piece of the puzzle was something I could get by talking to Lynn.
My back throbbed in time with my pounding heart. The thought of this next step made me feel queasy and shaky. Someone who could punch me in the back could have shot me in the back just as easily. Of course, if you murder Paul Garrison’s daughter, people will come asking questions. But depending on what I found out, killing me might be the lesser risk.
And if Lynn knew something—if she had that final piece—
The adrenaline was wearing off, leaving me even shakier than the pain had. I found a sandwich shop and bought myself a soda, sitting down to drink it. Maybe I could go back to Debbie and tell her about this. But the thought of facing Debbie again, after the news I’d given her, made me quail.
As Paul Garrison’s daughter, I have certain privileges, as long as my father doesn’t choose to revoke them, anyway. There are places I’m not technically allowed to go, but no one’s actually going to stop me from going to them. If I did this right, I’d be perfectly safe. Until later, anyway, when my father found out, and would be furious, but . . .
I tipped up the bottle to drink the last of my soda, feeling my heart speeding up with fear and excitement.
I was going to have only one chance to do this.
I turned away from home and headed for Rosa. Then I kept going—through Rosa, through Pete, and all the way to Lib.
Most of the stead nations were founded by people who wanted more freedom. No one here has to pay taxes (though there are all sorts of fees). There are a few more things that are illegal on Rosa, like it’s illegal to sell addictive substances to minors without a note from their parents. That’s why it’s supposed to be the best stead to raise a family. On Lib, though, nothing’s illegal at all.
Stead Life did a whole series of shows about Lib, because it’s the stead that mainlanders find most confusing. To answer the question everyone asks first: yes, this means it’s legal to kill people, but it also means it’s legal to kill you, so if you’re planning to kill someone you’d better hope they don’t have any friends. This means it’s legal to steal, but see above about how it’s legal to kill you. But in fact people mostly don’t go around randomly killing and stealing. Stead Life told viewers that it was mostly a stead full of people who like to mind their own business.
If you get in trouble on Lib, though, you want to have a subscription to a security group. If you don’t have a subscription, you can do a last-minute hire, but that costs a lot. My father and I don’t live on Lib, but he keeps a subscription to the ADs, the Alpha Dogs, who are the biggest and toughest security group. So if I got in trouble on Lib, I could call the ADs to help me out. If I disappeared and there was some reason to think that I was being held in a skin farm and forced to work with growth matrix, the ADs would come looking for me, and although no one has to let the ADs in to look around (because they’re not the police; there aren’t any police) they are very capable of making you sorry if you don’t.
I’m not actually supposed to go to Lib without permission.
I was going to be in huge, huge trouble.
But “trouble” for me meant grounded for life. Not bonded in a skin farm until I earned out my contract or died of cancer.
The first place I went after I crossed into Lib was the AD’s office. I told the receptionist who I was and she buzzed me in and looked up my picture. “Can I see my security contract?” I asked.
“Of course, Miss Garrison.” She handed it over. I read through the different services they provided and my heart started beating faster.
“OK,” I said, wishing my voice wasn’t all shaky. “I’d like an escort, please.”
The receptionist pressed a buzzer and one of the ADs came out to the office. He was tall, muscular, and carrying a gun: exactly what you wanted if you were going to be wandering around Lib, sticking your nose where it didn’t belong. Actually, ideally you’d want ten guys like this, but my contract said I could have one. Whatever. Being Paul Garrison’s daughter was worth at least a half-dozen all on its own. “I’m going to the Butterfield Skin Factory,” I said. “Are they contracted with you?”
“Nope,” the bodyguard said. “They use the Tigers.”
“Great,” I said, because the Tigers were not as tough as the ADs, and this meant no conflict of interest. (There’s a process they go through when two of their clients are in conflict, but I wasn’t sure it would work out to my advantage, considering.) “Let’s go.”
We walked through the corridors. Lib is probably the creakiest and least pleasant of the steads. Min is a mix of man-made islands and old cruise ships; Rosa is mostly cruise ships. Lib is an old Russian cargo ship. (Pete, which is the stead that was founded by Russians, is not on a Russian cargo ship, because they knew better.) There are not a lot of windows.
It was a good thing my bodyguard knew where the skin farm was because there wasn’t a sign. “You’re sure this is it?” I said. He nodded. “Okay. I want to go in.”
He hesitated, and looked me over.
“Are you my bodyguard, or my minder? I want to go in.”
He shrugged and pressed the buzzer. “I’m here from the ADs,” he said into the intercom. “We like to come in. Don’t make this difficult.”
The door buzzed and clicked open. “I hope you don’t want a lot of time,” he said. “Your contract doesn’t provide for backup, so if I need it, there’s going to be a serious extra charge.”
Which my father would take out of my hide. I stepped in: there was a long straight hallway of shut doors. “LYNN MILLER!” I shouted. “I’M LOOKING FOR LYNN MILLER.”
Doors opened and heads poked out to look at me—pale, sickly, nervous women in blue lab scrubs and latex gloves. “Lynn is in lab three,” someone called to me, nervously.
A security guard came out—I could tell he was security because of his uniform, and his gun. The AD stepped forward. “Are you managerial level?” he asked conversationally. The security guard shook his head. “Then you’re not paid well enough to have to deal with me. Go call the Tigers.”
The security guard swallowed hard and retreated into his office.
“Come on,” I said to my escort. The doors were labeled with numbers, so lab three was easy to find. The door was locked; my bodyguard kicked it down.
I’d noticed the smell as soon as I came in the front door, but here by the skin, the stench was incredible, stomach-turning. The skin itself was red and almost pulsing, in layers of screens; the techs crouched over it, prodding it with things that looked like long-handled tiny spoons. “Is Lynn Miller here?” I asked.
One of the women straightened up. “I’m Lynn Miller,” she said.
She was chained to the workbench. “Can you get her loose?” I said to my bodyguard.
He gave me a look. “I’m hired to protect you. She is not on my contract.”
“Yeah?” I walked over and grabbed her arm. “Lynn, will you give me the honor of your company? Say yes.”
“. . . Yes?”
“Lynn is my date and my contract specifies that you will provide protection services for me and my date at all times. And I want you to get us out of here.”
My bodyguard heaved a sigh. “Okay,” he said. “But if you insist, your father’s going to have to get a full report. Are you sure about this?”
My stomach lurched. But I was going to have to explain all this sooner or later; I might as well get in huge trouble for actually rescuing someone. And I wasn’t going to have another chance.
“Do it,” I said.
He yanked a tool out of his pocket that snapped Lynn’s shackles open in two seconds. “Can we go now?” he asked.
“The sooner the better,” I said.
“Where are you taking me?” Lynn said, stripping off her gloves.
“You’re an American, right?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got a super-romantic date on Min, then.” At the American Institute, which I wasn’t going to say out loud in front of someone who was going to report back to my father.
The Tigers hadn’t arrived yet, so we just walked out. The bodyguard urged us to pick up the pace, which we did, or at least as much as Lynn could; she was still recovering from her surgery and winced with every step. The AD escorted us to the edge of Lib, then washed his hands of us.
“Who are you?” Lynn asked.
“My name is Beck, and your sister, um, hired me. To look for you.”
Lynn looked me over skeptically.
“You disappeared,” I said. “She wanted to know where you were, and if you were okay. Which you weren’t.”
“Surely she didn’t have the money to pay for you rescuing me like that.”
“No,” I said. “By the way, do you know some deep, dark secret that’s not supposed to get out? Because someone assaulted me earlier today to tell me to mind my own business. That’s why I decided to come find you.”
Lynn eyed me with renewed suspicion. “No,” she said. “If I knew some deep, dark secret I’d be down at the bottom of the deep, dark ocean right about now. I wouldn’t have been in a skin farm.”
“So what happened to you, exactly?”
“I got sick—really sick. I hit up Gibbon for a loan, and he said he’d sell my bond to someone who’d arrange treatment for me. I had to sign a consent, because of the laws on Min. Janus took me to the clinic, and they said I needed kidney regeneration. That’s horribly expensive, but without it . . . Anyway, Janus told me the only place that would pay for that sort of treatment was a skin farm. I still wanted to refuse, but there’s a loophole when someone has a terminal condition and can’t pay for their treatment. Their contract can be sold without their consent to anyone willing to foot the bill. So that’s how I wound up in the skin farm.”
There was something here I wasn’t seeing.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The American Institute,” I said.
“Do you think they’ll let me use a phone?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said, assuming she’d want to call her sister to come meet her.
I felt nervous going down Embassy Row. It basically looked like any other corridor full of shops, but really well-kept with very clean windows, and each had a flag displayed in the big window in front instead of merchandise. We passed Mexico and France before we got to the American one. A bell tinkled as we went in, like in a store. There was a young man sitting at a desk, with a nametag that said, “Tyrone LeBlanc, Director.” He was Black, which was unusual on the stead; most of the locals were white, Asian, or Hispanic. Mr. LeBlanc looked at Lynn, and at me, and then said, “May I help you?”
“This is Lynn Miller,” I said. “She’s bonded to a skin farm and wants to—”
“—Make a phone call,” she said. “If you don’t mind. I don’t have my passport with me.”
“Did you register with us when you arrived?” he asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Well—you can definitely use a phone,” he said, and handed one to her before turning to me. “Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but are you Rebecca Garrison?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Don’t go anywhere, I have something for you.” He stepped into the back and returned with a sealed paper envelope, with Rebecca Garrison written on the front.
My stomach lurched. It was just like my father to do something like this—just in case I ever disobeyed him. Well, I didn’t have to read it now. I stuffed it into my pocket, mumbling, “Thanks.”
Near me, Lynn had gotten through to someone. “I’m calling to renegotiate my contract,” she said, her voice triumphant.
*
The U.S. government will provide transportation to citizens in danger under certain circumstances, and that was one of the reasons I’d snatched Lynn. They don’t recognize the validity of bond contracts generally and they consider a U.S. citizen being held to work in a skin farm to essentially have been kidnapped and imprisoned under dangerous circumstances. I’d figured Lynn would take the first boat back to California, but instead she was spelling out a set of conditions under which she’d let John Butterfield resell her bond to someone else. “We’re not talking about profit,” she said furiously, pacing back and forth in front of the desk. “We’re talking about how much of a loss you’re going to take.”
“What happened to her?” Mr. LeBlanc asked me.
“She had kidney failure,” I said, and explained the sequence of events.
“Huh,” he said. “Kidney failure, really? Same thing happened with an escaped bond-worker last month, too.”
“What causes kidney failure, anyway?”
“Oh, lots of things. Untreated diabetes, certain illnesses, drug overdoses . . . Kidneys filter out toxins, so an overdose of anything toxic.” He pursed his lips. “You’re not big on food and water inspectors here, you know. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”
“Lynn?”
She pressed the mute button on the phone. “Yes?”
“Which canteen do you subscribe to?”
“Clark’s. It’s near the locker rooms.”
Could that be the secret? That Clark’s was poisoning people? But thousands of bond-workers ate there; if it were poisoning people, the clinic would be overflowing with dying bond-workers.
No; if Lynn had been poisoned, she’d surely been singled out.
“Don’t renegotiate your contract,” I said. “Go back to California.”
She shook her head and returned to her conversation. I looked mutely at Mr. LeBlanc. He shrugged. “Fugitive bond-workers stay here more often than you’d think. In Lynn’s case, maybe there’s a warrant out for her arrest, and she’s taking advantage of the laws here to avoid extradition.”
Lynn glared at him and muted the phone again. “Drug charges,” she said. “Possession and manufacture of substances that are entirely legal on every island in the seastead. I’d bet dollars to scrip Mr. American Representative here has been known to possess an illegal substance from time to time.”
He shrugged.
“But even though she’s up on criminal charges back in the States, you’d still take her home, for free?”
“Well, not exactly for free,” he said. “We send her a bill later. She wouldn’t get sold into debt-slavery if she didn’t pay, though, we just garnish her paychecks.”
“Lynn,” I said. “I think the secret they’re protecting is that you were poisoned on purpose. Four other bond-workers were treated for kidney failure the same day as you, and all had their contracts bought by the same guy who bought yours. Other workers have disappeared from Gibbon’s dining hall, haven’t they? They’ve gotten sick, and never come back. I think Gibbon’s doing it. I think Gibbon, Janus, and Butterfield are conspiring to use the ‘terminal condition’ loophole to make sure Butterfield gets a steady stream of bond-workers.”
Lynn turned back to the phone. “Also,” she said, “I don’t want to be sold back to Gibbon.”
Gibbon, Janus, and Butterfield.
Min does have police, after a fashion; we’re not like Lib. But we don’t have a lot of police. Basically, they break up fist fights. If something gets stolen, you’d usually hire someone privately to try to retrieve it for you. There was a murder on the stead a few years ago and here’s what happened: everyone knew who did it, so the police went and arrested him and there was a lot of talk about trial procedures. While people were arguing about how exactly a murder trial ought to work, the victim’s brother hired a bunch of guys from Lib to break into the police station and kidnap the murderer. The guy’s drowned body turned up in the waters by Rosa the next day and everyone pretended to have no idea how that might have happened.
But here’s the other thing: the murder victim was a citizen, not a guest worker.
Something complicated like this—everyone would pretend they thought it was coincidence that all these people were developing kidney failure. Or maybe they’d blame Clark’s. The doctor at the clinic clearly thought it was Clark’s.
I did know one person who was powerful enough to actually make a difference, though: my father.
My father scared me. Especially when he was angry. But he was my father. I ought to be able to go to him with this.
“Dad?”
Our apartment was mostly dark; light spilled from my father’s office. “Come in here, Beck.”
“I need to talk to you about something,” I said.
He must have heard the seriousness in my voice because he pushed himself back from his work and gestured to the chair. My father’s office had one visitor’s chair, which sat directly in front of his painting. He had a painting on his wall of two girls playing a piano and singing to a person who seemed to be listening. I’d wondered a few times why he liked it; he wasn’t all that interested in music.
“I was trying to find something kind of unusual this week,” I said. “I was trying to find a person.”
His eye twitched. “Really.”
“Well, I started out trying to find a pair of size eight sparkly strappy sandals. But the woman who had those wanted me to try to find her sister.” He didn’t answer. I swallowed hard and went on. “So, okay, I’m going to skip all the intervening steps and tell you what I realized today, which is that Mr. Gibbon, Mr. Janus, and Mr. Butterfield are conspiring to poison bond-workers, so that their contracts can be sold for skin farm work. It wasn’t an accident that L—” I broke off, suddenly not wanting to give my father any names “—the woman I was looking for got sick.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Do you have any actual evidence for this story you’re telling me?”
“No,” I said, honestly. “I mean, I’m not a police officer or a doctor. But I bet if you examined any of the bond-workers who’ve been treated for kidney failure in the last month—”
“Yes, most likely you’d find traces, if a poison was involved. Well. Yes.” He pondered that. “I assume your, ah, your date, this afternoon . . . was the woman you were searching for?”
He heard from the ADs already. “Yes.”
“You are remarkably tenacious.”
“Thank you,” I said, even though I could tell this hadn’t been a compliment.
“And just what do you expect me to do about this, Beck?”
“Go to the police and make them investigate?”
“You must realize that you’ve overlooked a wide range of alternate possibilities. These individuals might have eaten or drunk something dodgy, first of all; that’s the simplest explanation. It might be pure coincidence. Or perhaps most likely of all, they might have all ingested something recreational that displayed questionable judgment on all their parts.”
“And coincidentally, Butterfield bought up all those people with kidney failure?”
“Oh, I’m sure that wasn’t a coincidence. He has an arrangement with the man who holds the patent on the kidney regeneration technique and can have it done at a discount. Undoubtedly, he has a standing request at the hospital for notification when anyone has significant kidney damage.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know a lot of things, Rebecca.” He fell silent and watched my reaction. I tried hard not to give him one. “Now,” he said, “I received several interesting calls today. Apparently you were pestering Rick Janus outside of his dining hall, after talking your way in. You had nothing wrong with you this morning at the clinic, although you did cost me a fair sum what with all the tests they ran. And you went to Lib this afternoon.”
He hadn’t heard about Embassy Row. I didn’t tell him.
“All, apparently, to find—and eventually to personally rescue this particular bond-worker. Surely the rescue wasn’t in your original agreement with the owner of the sandals.”
“. . . No.”
“No.” He leaned back. “So? Explain.”
“When I was down by the locker rooms today someone attacked me, grabbed me from behind and hit me, and told me to mind my own business.” I glared furiously at my own feet. “I was done but that made me think I must have missed something important. Something worth hiding.”
“I see.”
He fell silent. I lifted my chin and stared out the window. Or at the window, since it was dark.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve demonstrated that you are stubborn, disobedient, and disrespectful.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“No, you’re clearly not.” He tapped his desk with a pen. “I’m going to have to think on how best to use you. In the meantime, I’m grounding you for the next month. If Jamie still wants you as a Finder when the month is up, that’s between the two of you.”
I swallowed hard. “What about Gibbon and . . . what about the bond-workers?”
“I expect there won’t be any more mysterious kidney failures,” my father said, turning back to his computer screen. “I’ll pass the word along that if their plot could be unraveled by a persistent teenager they need to knock it off. I expect they will. Also, I don’t like people manhandling my daughter, especially considering how thoroughly the tactic backfired. I’ll see if I can identify the thug.”
“But—what about L—I mean, my date from this afternoon?”
He looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t go looking for Lynn Miller again,” he said. “I doubt that you will like what you find.”
Back in my room, I turned on a mainland streaming show, laid out my homework, and changed into pajamas. When I took off my jeans, they crinkled; the letter I’d been handed at the Institute was still in my pocket.
My father hadn’t mentioned that particular bit of disobedience. I smoothed the letter out, then opened it.
Dear Becky,
Happy birthday, darling. This is the twelfth of these messages I’ve written. Every year I send a new one to the Services Bureau on Rosa, in the hopes that eventually you will come in, and they can deliver it.
I’m not sure what your father has told you about me. I just want you to know that I love you, and I would like to see you. If you’re not willing to come stateside, I would like to speak with you by phone or correspond by letter. Whatever you’re comfortable with. If you’d like to leave New Minerva, the Bureau will provide you with transportation to San Francisco. I’ll meet you there, and take you home—to my home.
I just want you to know I haven’t forgotten you.
I’ll never forget you.
I hope to see you again someday.
Love,
Mom
My first thought, staring at this, was that someone was confused. This couldn’t be a letter from my mother; my mother was dead. She died in a drunk driving wreck years ago, before my father had brought me to the seastead.
Then rational thought caught up with what I thought I knew, and the truth hit me like a breaking wave. My father had lied. My father had lied.
I stared into the darkness, wide awake, my heart pounding.
What else had he lied about?