She hesitated on the curb. He didn"t look back, but he had kept a few of his links on. He was using a camera chip to monitor several directions, making certain no one followed them. One of his other chips pinged for theft networks, the kind that searched for active links and stole information from them.
After a moment, Costard"s shoulders sank. She hurried to catch up to him. Flint slowed down so that she could.
They were heading away from the bombed-out area, toward a group of shops and restaurants that catered to the university crowd. The shops claimed to have the latest Earth fashions, while the restaurants advertised cheap food. A few downscale hotels crowded each other in the next block.
"All you had to do was tell me you don"t want the case," Costard snapped as she reached his side.
"No, that"s not all," he said. "I learned a lot of things the last few days. One of them is that the Disty death rituals are a lot more complicated than you mentioned. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of variations of each law."
"Are you telling me that we can pick which one applies?"
"I"m telling you that finding the children might not be enough. There might be other steps involved."
She shoved her hands in the pockets of her sweater and stared straight ahead, almost as if she hadn"t heard him.
Students poured out of a nearby building, laughing and holding some sort of fabric he didn"t recognize. He waited until they pa.s.sed before continuing.
"I looked up your Disappeared," he said. "She"s not Lagrima Jrgen."
That caught Costard"s attention. She glanced at him, eyes wide. "Who is she, then?"
"I don"t know," he said, "and we may never know. There are layers of ident.i.ty, and so far as I can tell, they were designed for one shady deal after another."
"Shady," she said. "You mean illegal?"
He shook his head. "She seemed to be working with a team that knew how to use laws to their own advantage, skirting the edge of the law"s intent in such a way that the action would hold up in court if, indeed, the case was ever taken to court."
"Like the M"Kri Tribesmen," Costard said.
"Exactly." Flint crossed another street, this time heading to the paths that wound through the university"s main campus. "And this is the problem. I think, in order to take the attention off of her, she invented that family listed in the court records."
"Invented." Costard breathed the word. She stopped near some oak trees. They were real and very tall, nurtured by the Environmental Department. "She couldn"t have invented them. Her pelvis had parturition scars."
Flint stopped too. "What?"
"A woman"s pelvis actually shows how many times she"s given birth. Jrgen"s pelvis confirms the record. She had two children."
He glanced around. No one stood near them. Flint had brought Costard here for a reason: The campus had pockets that had no links at all.
"Well," he said, "the family only shows up in the court doc.u.ments. The other information I found about Lagrima Jrgen doesn"t mention family at all-and it should have."
"That"s impossible. She had children."
"But we don"t know if she raised them. We don"t even know if they survived childhood," Flint said.
A young woman carrying a pile of old doc.u.ments came out of a nearby building and started down the path.
"We need to move," Flint said.
Costard looked at him as if he had told her she had to run in the Moon Marathon. "I"m done with the conversation."
"No," he said. "I need to tell you a few more things."
"You"ve already said you"re not taking the case. You"ve already said that things are much worse than I thought they were-and I thought they were awful. What else can you tell me?"
"Let"s walk." He beckoned her forward, into an enclosed area between the naturally growing trees. This was a modified greenhouse with open ends. The greenhouse wasn"t designed to grow food, like the greenhouses outside the Dome. This one had only green, leafy plants that seemed very overgrown.
The university had dozens of these open-ended greenhouses all over campus. For the last several years, they had been running experiments on the production of pure oxygen.
This was the natural section, near the trees that had been planted decades ago by some environmental sciences students who believed that the Dome would be better off if greenery dominated the interior. Flint knew, because he had studied it, that the natural greenhouses worked on old-fashioned systems-no automation at all. The plants were watered by hand, nurtured by hand, and fertilized by hand.
No electronic devices were allowed near these greenhouses, and even the cameras, which kept track of the moment-by-moment growth, had to film from a distance of at least twenty feet. Because previous studies had shown how sensitive the plants were to what humans called white noise, no sound equipment was allowed nearby either.
Hand-painted signs tucked into the gra.s.s warned that anyone who entered this area had to shut down their links or be subject to huge fines. Costard started to turn away from the area, but Flint put a hand behind her back.
"Shut down your links," he said, "including emergency links."
Her breath caught. It was a matter of trust. If she believed in him, she"d go into a secluded place with no outside access at all.
She touched the back of her hand. He waited until his system confirmed that hers was off before shutting down his own.
They stepped into the greenhouse proper. The air did seem cleaner here. It had a tang to it that Flint found nowhere else on Armstrong, not even in the artificially designed greenhouses. He sometimes came here to sit and think, especially after his injuries last year. He had found this a good place to heal.
"Why the secrecy?" she asked.
"Because," he said, "what I"m about to tell you can"t go on any record."
Her face hardened, almost as if she were bracing herself for his words.
"When you queried about Lagrima Jrgen, you aroused interest all over the known universe," he said. "There were news reports, most of which recycled the M"Kri Tribesmen case, but a few were about the skeleton itself."
"Why is this bad?"
"We don"t know who she was or who she worked for," Flint said. "Someone did kill her and plant her body on that site."
Costard nodded. "I"ve thought of that."
"That someone may still be alive."
"I thought of that too."
"And may not be human," Flint said.
Costard sighed. She obviously hadn"t thought of that. "Meaning they might have weird laws about people who discover the bodies of the dead."
"Or something about pa.s.sing guilt through touch, or any kind of strange thing you and I can"t imagine. The news stories weren"t very specific. For all these people know, you could have found some incriminating evidence with that body, or something else that might frighten them."
Costard reached for one of the long, thin leaves, nearly touched it, then brought her hand back as if she wasn"t sure she could. She looked very small among the overgrown plants; the hardened expression had morphed into something resigned and sad.
"This frightens you, so you won"t take the case," she said.
Flint shook his head. "I see no reason to take the case."
She frowned at him.
"It might take years to uncover this woman"s ident.i.ty. I don"t believe she had a family-or at least one that we can find in your time frame. And now, besides the Disty, there might be other aliens involved."
"Do you think anyone will take the case?" Costard asked.
"I don"t think you should go to anyone else," Flint said.
"What? Are you saying I should just accept this? I should go back to Mars like a good little soldier and let them dish out this stupid fate without even trying to stop them?"
"No," Flint said. "I think you should disappear."
She stumbled and gripped a nearby table. One of the plants started to fall, and Flint caught it. He set it back on the table. Costard stood next to him, both hands on the table.
"You"re a Retrieval Artist. You"re not supposed to tell me to disappear," she said. "Can"t you lose your license for this?"
"We"re not licensed," he said. "I can do whatever I want."
"Why would you tell me to disappear? You, of all people?"
"Because I, of all people, know what you"re fighting. The Disappearance Services were set up for precisely this kind of situation. Under our laws, what you did was normal behavior, helping another agency, doing your work. To the Disty, you have made yourself a part of that death scene, and only a few things might get you out of it, if that."
"So you"re advising me to break the law?" she asked.
"I"m advising you to take advantage of a loophole. You haven"t been charged with anything on the Moon. You were sent here to solve a problem, with the Disty government"s permission. If you go back to Mars, you"ll be subject to their laws. If you go back to Earth, you will as well. And once that time limit is up, the government of Armstrong will have to give you back to Sahara Dome. There"s no place in the Alliance that Aisha Costard can go and be safe. But if you take a new ident.i.ty, you will have a lot of places you can go. You will be safe."
"Except from people like you," she said.
He suppressed a sigh. She was horribly uninformed. He supposed most people were. They had simple jobs and even simpler lives, and probably didn"t even think about the intricacies of interstellar justice from day to day.
"Thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands throughout the Alliance, use Disappearance Services every year," he said. "Most of those people are never thought of again. Most of them escape. Most of them go on to live productive lives somewhere else."
"Productive," she muttered.
"Only a few are important enough to have the alien governments or some lawyer or some law enforcement agency spend the money on a Tracker. Fewer have family with enough money, or businesses with enough incentives, to hire a Retrieval Artist to track them down. Even then, our mission isn"t always to bring them back. We also find them to give them inheritances or to notify them that their parents died or to tell them it"s safe to return to their old life. Trackers bring them back to face the legal charges they"d fled. Retrieval Artists often leave Disappeareds in their new ident.i.ties, living their new lives. Most disappearances work, and work well."
"I can"t live somewhere else," she said. "My work is on Earth. All I know is human bones."
"You"ll learn something new," Flint said.
"I don"t want to learn something new," Costard said. "I want to go home, to my university and my friends and my house. I don"t ever want to see Mars again, and I certainly don"t ever want to hear of the Disty."
"If you stay in your current life, that won"t happen," Flint said. "You probably won"t go home, and you"ll probably have to deal with the Disty until the end of what"s going to be a very short life."
She closed her eyes, her frown deepening. "You can"t see any other way out of this?"
"There"s no easily locatable family for Lagrima Jrgen," he said. "That I do know. And I don"t know the Disty law well enough to know if they"ll accept the family of the woman who posed as Lagrima Jrgen, whatever her ident.i.ty might be. As I mentioned, the variations are extreme. Check it out. Disty laws are in all of the databases. You can probably access them from the hotel."
She opened her eyes. They were lined with tears. "I"m not doing this just for me. I"m doing this for the entire team back in Sahara Dome. Everyone, from the detective to the medical examiner, who got near Lagrima"s body are considered contaminated by the Disty. What about them?"
"They"ll have to solve it their own way," Flint said. "I can"t give them this advice, and neither can you. If you do, the Disty"ll monitor the Disappearance Services and none of you will survive."
"So it"s better for me to get out and leave them behind."
"Yes," he said. "At least you"ll go on living."
She let go of the table. "You"re so cold."
He nodded. "You asked me to work for you. The best way I can work for you is to tell you this."
She stepped toward him, and he saw that switch again, the one she had done when she came to his office. The anger came just as suddenly and just as powerfully.
"I hired you for all of us. Finding the children wasn"t just going to benefit me. It was going to help Sharyn and Petros and everyone else in the SDHPD who worked on this case. I"m using their money to pay your salary, and you tell me to run away from them? How dare you."
That last she said very softly, as if he were the one who created this entire mess.
"I"m telling you to save your life," he said. "We can"t save theirs."
"You don"t know," she said. "All you have is guesses. You guess guess that there"s no family. You that there"s no family. You suppose suppose that the Disty won"t accept family from the same woman if she has a different name. You that the Disty won"t accept family from the same woman if she has a different name. You think think the Disty ritual is more complicated. That"s not proof." the Disty ritual is more complicated. That"s not proof."
She had a point. But it was more minor than she thought. Her naivete had been the problem from the beginning. It continued to be the problem now.
"Actual hard facts are rare in my business," he said, "and they come at great cost. I might be able to find out who Lagrima Jrgen really was, what happened to the children she gave birth to, and who she worked for, but I might not. I might find her family, and I might not. At that point, this will have cost a lot of money-"
"I don"t care about money," Costard snapped.
He ignored her. "And by the time I find out, you and everyone you seem to be protecting will be long dead."
"You can"t be sure."
"No," he said. "I can"t."
"So try," she said.
"At the risk of your life?" he asked.
"It"s already at risk," she said.
He wanted to take her and force her to face the difficult position she was in. But he doubted she"d listen.
He tried one last argument.
"Look," he said. "I"ll stay on the case if you promise me you"ll disappear."
"Don"t make conditions." She was shaking with anger. She hadn"t moved away from him, and he could actually feel the force of her emotion.