Star's End

  “Esme,” Rena said gently. “Maybe you should rest for a bit. The office can wait another day, and Isabel’s back safely—I know you didn’t sleep last night.”

  “This is going to bother me.” I stopped next to the window and looked out at the rain-soaked garden. “I just—God, I just want to find out what happened.”

  Rena stared at me. I’d never told her that I’d promised myself I’d keep my sisters safe. But maybe she knew anyway. She didn’t ask me to explain.

  “I’m going to see the soldiers,” I said. “Have another look at the security feeds.” I hadn’t told her about the flicker of movement I saw before Isabel appeared. It was a clue, but I kept it to myself. I guess I wanted to be the one to figure out what happened.

  “I really wish you’d rest,” she said.

  “I’ve gotten by on less sleep. Let me know if you find anything else.”

  I swept out of the library without waiting for an answer. I’d already called in to the office to explain I had a family emergency and wouldn’t be in until tomorrow at the latest, but when I took a meandering route so that I could walk past the garage, I saw that Dad’s car, a prototype of some new technology, with mind-links for the drivers, wasn’t there. Dad had gone in. He knew we’d found Isabel—Mr. Whittaker had assured me he’d given Dad the message. But I’d been with Isabel all morning and hadn’t seen Dad once.

  Had he even bothered to check up on her? Did he even care?

  I told myself it didn’t matter, that I cared, and Rena cared, and that was enough. But I didn’t believe it.

  The sun had come out from behind the wispy gray clouds, although showers of rain still sprinkled over the garden, dampening my hair and clothes and catching in the light so that they sparkled. Diamond-rain, we used to call it when we were kids. Children always have lots of name for rain, but by the time you’re an adult, you forget them all.

  The soldiers’ door was open except for the screen. I banged on the frame. “Hello?” I called out. “It’s Esme Coromina! I’d like to watch the security feeds again.”

  Private Snow answered, a different Private Snow from when I was a teenager. This one was a woman, tall and broad-shouldered, with pale hair she wore in a soldier’s buzz cut. She was my age, but she reminded me of my mother. I didn’t like talking to her.

  “Oh,” I said. “Is Private Sun here?”

  “No, they’re all out scouting the perimeter. Your father has them looking for evidence. Seems to think we’re cops now.” She paused. “Sorry, that was inapp—”

  “Evidence?” I frowned. He didn’t care enough to visit Isabel before he left, but he sent the soldiers out sifting through the grounds. He only cared about us in the abstract.

  “Yeah, told us to look for whatever we could find. But Private Sun thought you’d be stopping by to look at the holos again, and it was my turn to stay in, anyway. Glad to hear the little girl turned up all right.” She shifted her weight like she was uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  She unlatched the screen and let me in.

  “Did he give you any idea at all what you’re looking for?” I blurted the question out. I felt like Dad was keeping something from me. But then, I always felt like that.

  “Not really. Just said if we found anything unusual.” She shrugged. “You’d get more information out of him, I imagine.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I said.

  She didn’t respond.

  We went into the security room. I waited while Private Snow got the recordings to the right place.

  “Take it back a few moments before she walked out of the woods this morning,” I said. “And zoom out. I want to see as much as possible.” Private Snow didn’t question. The lawn filled up the room, watery gray light casting shadows over our faces. The position wasn’t the same angle I’d been watching from the sunroom, but it was close enough. I stared hard at the place where I’d seen the flickers, but there was nothing on the recording. Then Isabel stepped out of the trees, small and bedraggled.

  I still didn’t think I’d imagined those flickers.

  “Go back,” I said. “I want to watch again.”

  She did. This time, I zoomed in on the place where Isabel emerged. It was only a meter or so from where I’d been watching the flickers. Weird that I hadn’t noticed her right away, but I’d been distracted.

  The trees rustled. Shadows shifted over the grass. And Isabel stepped out of the darkness like she was walking through a doorway.

  “Does that look weird to you?” I asked Private Snow.

  “Does what?”

  “The way Isabel walks out of the woods—could you go back? Thanks.” The recording reset itself. “Now watch. It looks weird, how she walks out of the woods.”

  Everything moved again. Silvery rain, rustling trees. The shadows lengthened over the grass and Isabel stepped out of them. That was the only way to describe it. She stepped out of a fucking shadow.

  Private Snow paused the recording. “That does seem strange.” She frowned, fiddled with the controls, and paused the recording right at the moment Isabel appeared. All I could see on the holo was a black, mud-caked shoe and a skinny calf.

  “That can’t be right,” I said.

  “It’s probably the recording.” Private Snow lurched the holo forward moment by moment. Isabel materialized from the feet up. “I mean, damn. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Really?” I turned to her. “There isn’t any kind of, I don’t know, stealth equipment that can do that? I know we’ve been working on something, but nothing we’ve got is anywhere remotely on that level.” I hesitated. “I was worried it might be OCI tech, but—” My voice trailed off.

  Private Snow looked at me. Her eyes were big and dark brown, like a deer’s. They didn’t seem like the eyes of a soldier. “With all due respect, Ms. Coromina, you’d know more about it than me. All non-Coromina weapons on the Four Sisters are banned, so if—”

  “Oh, please,” I snapped. “Just because something’s banned doesn’t mean people won’t have it. Especially the sort of people who kidnap little girls.”

  Private Snow shook her head. “You’d be surprised, especially with the scanners they have up in the atmosphere. But there’s nothing like that in use that I’m aware of, certainly not on that level. I imagine this whole thing is a just a holo-trick. The light was bad—the recording’s pretty dark, all told.” She shrugged.

  I turned back to the holo, frozen in place on a shot of Isabel staring off to the left. Staring at me, I knew, although the zoom had cut off all but my right hand, a tiny white blur on the edge of the projection.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Look.” Private Snow hesitated. “I can ask around, but you got to promise me some kind of immunity, right? If people hear me asking about non-Coromina weapons—”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to my father and make sure he gives you and your contacts immunity. Just for this.” I held up one finger, and she nodded. I wasn’t sure this was a promise I could keep, but I needed to know for sure. And even if Dad didn’t care about Isabel, he’d want to know about non-Coromina weapons making their way into the system.

  I turned back to the holographic version of Isabel, staring off into space. I didn’t believe it was a holo-trick. Dad had been so sure she was fine that he hadn’t even come home when she went missing.

  He knew what was lurking in those shadows. And I wanted to know what it was too.

  • • •

  After Isabel’s return, I had her run through a full gauntlet of tests, both physical and psychological, and the end conclusion was that exactly nothing had happened to her.

  “She just ran away into the woods,” Dr. Clavé told me. She was the psychologist I had hired to talk to Isabel. “It’s a huge estate. I’m surprised this didn’t happen with Daphne and Adrienne.” She smiled. “Or with you.”

  “She was gone overnight!”

  “Plenty of children run away from home
for a day or so. It would be a matter of concern if she came back injured or distraught, but she didn’t.”

  There was nothing more for me to say to that. Dr. Clavé was right: Isabel was thoroughly unharmed by the experience. I watched her for the first week after she came back, and she seemed herself, eating her usual foods without complaint, playing hologames with Adrienne and Daphne in their suite, growing restless from the rain. I asked Rena and the other staff if they noticed anything unusual about her behavior, but they hadn’t either.

  I also heard back from Private Snow—but she wasn’t able to learn anything about true invisibility technology even existing, much less being brought onto Ekkeko as contraband. Another lead thwarted.

  There was still their strange, hissing language, though. The girls would speak it to each other when they thought no one was listening, and one afternoon, I happened to overhear them. I came home early, tired of the bright off-white lighting in the Coromina Group building, and I passed the playroom on the way to my home office. The hissing stopped me dead in my tracks.

  I didn’t know why. I’d heard it before. But after hearing it on the security holo, where it was tied inexorably to her disappearance, I associated it with danger.

  The playroom door was cracked open, and I hovered outside it, listening. It still sounded like gibberish, all those low, growly sibilants. I closed my eyes, trying to parse the words. I couldn’t.

  The girls dissolved into giggles. My eyes flew open and I had a brief moment of panic, like I’d been caught breaking some minor corporate rule. I peered into the room. Isabel and the twins were sitting in a circle on the floor, the set of wind-up metal dolls I’d brought them back from Amana arranged in the center of the circle. Adrienne lifted one of the dolls and said something in their language, and then Isabel did the same.

  I pulled away and took a deep breath. There was nothing sinister. Just little girls playing a game.

  Except I didn’t believe that, not really. Not because of Isabel, who was clearly all right—and I was grateful for that, I was—but because of Dad. I was certain that he knew something about her disappearance, and I hated that he was keeping it from me. He’d shoved me into Genetics because he could trust me, and yet he wouldn’t reveal whatever dangerous secrets were lurking in the woods of the estate.

  Things were busier at work, too. We were in the process of adding new improvements to the standard soldier model—fiddly stuff, mostly, that had to do with the body’s immune system and means of recovery. It was my first big project in Genetics and I wanted to get it right. Gaining a higher security clearance seemed even more important now that Isabel had disappeared, because the higher the clearance, the more likely it was I could find out what the hell was going on.

  And then messages from Dad started to materialize. Questions and tasks, mostly, out of the blue. Did Flor DeCrie suggest anything in your meeting today, and if so, what was it? Dr. Vanya is working on an update to the white blood cells—could you prepare a report of his progress?

  I answered them dutifully, knowing those kinds of inanities were the way to a high security clearance. But I also paid attention to them. They’d started up after Isabel’s disappearance, and even though Dad tried to make them as ordinary and as bland as possible, I knew that couldn’t be a coincidence. I searched for the pattern, just like I had with my mother’s messages all those years before. This time, though, I knew the pattern was actually there, even if I couldn’t quite see it.

  Some of the questions dealt with the immune-system work we were doing, but most of them didn’t. Most of them were just Dad angling for reports of my day-to-day activities, and I might have thought it was Dad checking up on me if I hadn’t known there was an entire network of corporate watchdogs set in place to do that for him. I was sure the questions tied to Isabel’s disappearance somehow. I suspected as well that they were linked in some way to Project X, since only something like Project X would require this level of obfuscation. Which was a disturbing thought, that one of Dad’s corporate projects involved my little sister. But I was old enough to expect that sort of thing from Dad.

  I knew that if I could figure out what the connection was, then I’d be better equipped to protect Isabel and Daphne and Adrienne from the machinations of my father.

  But I couldn’t find a pattern. The questions came through, about immune systems, about meetings with the lab-wranglers, about my lunch with the liaison to the CG marketing division, who was one of Dad’s little favorites, which just complicated things even more. I knew Dad was probably sending me false questions as well. Still, I’d filter out my messages so all I could see was a list of questions, and I read through them, over and over, trying to make sense of them. But they may as well have been a code.

  Then one afternoon, Dad called a meeting.

  There weren’t many people there—just Dad and me and Alexander Fforde, the lab-wrangler, who managed the scientists and reported directly to me. We met in a room up on the eighty-ninth floor, with a huge picture window that, as with Dad’s office, looked out at the ocean. I couldn’t see anything, though, because it was storming that day, rain buffeting against the glass. Every now and then, lightning burned up all the light in the room. Fitting weather.

  “Genetics will be starting something new,” Dad announced from his place at the front of the table. “Something internal.”

  Alexander and I glanced at each other.

  “Do we have the budget for that?” I asked, trying to play my role to the fullest.

  Dad glared at me. “We always have the budget for self-defense.”

  The room went quiet except for the rain.

  “Self-defense?” Alexander squeaked.

  “Yes. OCI has been making some movements I’m not happy about. Trying to recruit my own people out from under me, making inquiries into the two smaller labs. I don’t like it.” He grinned. “I suspect they’re after the latest Ninety-Nine project, but so far, they haven’t even come close.”

  “That’s good,” Alexander said.

  “Are you hoping to go to war?” I asked.

  Dad looked me straight in the eye. “No one ever hopes to go to war.”

  I glared at him for lying. We all knew a war could be very profitable for the Coromina Group.

  “But to answer your real question,” Dad went on, “I’m not expecting to go to war. I just want to make a few preparations, to speed up the work on the project. We were planning to start production at the end of the rainy season, but I want to move it forward. Which is why I need your help.” He pointed at Alexander and me in turn. “What I’m about to tell you is classified Level Eighty-Seven.”

  My heart fluttered. A jump that big, so soon?

  But then Dad went on: “I’m not increasing your security clearance. This is the only piece of information you’re getting. I assume you both know what it means if this information leaves this room?”

  My excitement faded. Of course I did. Termination, blacklisting. I suspect it could also mean something far harsher and just as permanent, but no one ever expressed those concerns aloud.

  Dad nodded, satisfied. We were trustworthy; that’s why we were there.

  “This new project will be based out of a lab here on Ekkeko,” Dad said. “Close to home.” He grinned. I sat still, feeling cautious and uncertain. “Unfortunately, the lab’s not currently equipped to manufacture soldiers from scratch—we’re still working on that part of the building, because, remember, we weren’t expecting to have to use it until the end of the season. No matter. I just need the two of you to arrange for some in-house blanks. Twelve to start with; we’ll be doing one squad.”

  Alexander slumped in his chair. Internal work, without a security increase, meant our jobs would be broken down into minor projects so we couldn’t see the full picture. I thought about all of Dad’s strange questions and assignments. Looked like he’d had me doing work on these new soldiers already.

  Isabel disappeared, Dad got the security patrolling the pe
rimeter of the estate, he announced a new lab related to Project X. The pieces were all there. But I just couldn’t see the connections.

  I studied Dad’s face, hoping for a tell, a hint of an explanation. But there wasn’t anything.

  “I have some specifications.” Dad pulled out his lightbox. On cue, so did Alexander and I.

  We all set our lightboxes on the table, and in unison, their screens flowered to life. Dad’s specifications appeared instantaneously on my holoscreen.

  “It’s encrypted,” Dad said. “If you want to access it alone, it will need to scan your fingerprints and eye retinas.”

  Alexander made a coughing, choking noise, which Dad ignored. I looked up at Alexander, and when he caught me looking, he shrugged, a bewildered expression on his face. I understood. This was a lot of subterfuge for a spec list.

  “Read them over now,” Dad said. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

  I did as he asked, scanning it quickly. Even with my short time in Genetics, I suspected that his requests were unusual, and the increasingly bewildered expression on Alexander’s face confirmed it for me. Dad wanted the soldiers developed to stage four, at which point they would be shipped to Ekkeko. He wanted us to remove the first wave of personality imprinting as well as the general behavioral modifications.

  “So,” Dad said, breaking the silence. “Do you have any questions?”

  He was daring us to question him. Trying to prove I wasn’t the daughter he could trust. Part of me wanted to hurl my lightbox at his head, to ask him why this stupid project and these stupid soldiers meant more to him than his family. Than Isabel. Than me.

  But I only shook my head and asked, “When do you want them delivered?”

  • • •

  I went home after the meeting. I told my assistant that I had a headache and wanted to lie down. It wasn’t exactly the truth.

  My lightbox chimed on the way home, and the Connectivity in the car whispered to me that Alexander had put in Dad’s order, placing it with Starspray City. That was quick for him—Dad knew how to frighten his employee-citizens into action. I pulled out my lightbox and approved the order. I watched as the order went through, and then I closed my eyes, trying to decide what to do next. I refused to believe there wasn’t a connection between this new assignment and Isabel’s disappearance. Had some rival corporation kidnapped her? But no, she’d been fine when she came back. It wasn’t like she had information they’d be looking for, anyway.