'What kind of place is this?' whispered Yah-noo. 'I didn't know anyone lived like this anymore. Why don't they go to the cities and get a job?'
'Maybe it's not that easy,' muttered Rose, but no one was listening to her.
The commander was pacing out the perimeter of the church, but at Rose's words he circled back to stand before them. 'You don't talk. You don't fight. We don't kill you.'
Zenobia jumped up from the chair she had commandeered. 'Do you know who we are?' Her coiffure had come undone, the careful sculpture of bleached hair all in disarray over her shoulders, strands swinging in front of her pale eyes. 'We're important people! They'll be looking for us! You can't just-! You can't just-!'
He hit her across the face, and she shrieked, as much in outrage and fear as in pain, remembered her torn clothing, and sank to the ground moaning and wailing.
'I know who you are. I know what you are. The great lost, who have nothing to want because you have everything. So you circle the world, most brave of you, I think, while the corporation gets free publicity for their new technology. Very expensive, such technology. Research and development takes years, and years longer to earn back the work put into it. Why would I be here if I didn't know who you are and what you have with you?'
'What do you want from us?' asked Akvir bravely, dark chin quivering, although he glanced anxiously at the young toughs waiting by the door. For all that he was their leader, he was scarcely older than these teens. Behind, the old woman grabbed
Doctor Baby Jesus and vanished with the doll into the shadows to the right of the altar.
The commander smiled. 'The solar array, of course. That's what that other group wanted as well, but I expect they were only criminals.'
'You'll never get away with this!' cried Zenobia as she clutched her ragged shift against her.
Rose winced.
The commander lifted his chin, indicating Rose. He had seen. 'You don't think so either, muchacha?'
'No,' she whispered, embarrassed. Afraid. But he hadn't killed her because she was blemished. Maybe that meant she had, in his eyes, a kind of immunity. 'I mean, yes. You probably won't get away with it. I don't know how you can escape surveillance and a corporate investigation. Even if the Constabulary can't find you, Surbrent-Xia's agents will hunt you down in the end, I guess.' She finished passionately. 'It's just that I hate that line!'
'That line?' He shrugged, not understanding her idiom.
'That line. That phrase. 'You'll never get away with this.' It's such a clichй.'
'Oh! Oh! Oh! You-you-you-defect!' Zenobia raked at her with those lovely, long tricolor fingernails, but Rose twisted away, catching only the tip of one finger along her shoulder before Akvir grabbed Zenobia by the shoulders and dragged her back, but Zenobia was at least his height and certainly as heavy. Chairs tipped over; the Sunseekers screamed and scattered as the toughs took the opening to charge in and beat indiscriminately. Yah-noo ran for the door but was pulled down before he got there. What envy or frustration fueled the anger of their captors? Poverty? Abandonment? Political grievance? She didn't know, but sliding up against one wall she saw her chance: an open path to the altar.
She sprinted, saw a curtained opening, and tumbled through as shouts rang out behind her, but the ground fell out beneath her feet and she tripped down three weathered, cracked wooden steps and fell hard on her knees in the center of a tiny room whose only light came from a flickering fluorescent fixture so old that it looked positively prehistoric, a relic from the Stone Age.
A cot, a bench, a small table with a single burner gas stove.
A discolored chest with a painted lid depicting faded flowers and butterflies, once bright. The startled caretaker, who was standing at the table tinkering with Doctor Baby Jesus, turned around, holding a screwdriver in one hand. A chipped porcelain sink was shoved up against the wall opposite the curtain, flanked by a shelf-a wood plank set across concrete blocks-laden with bright red-and-blue plastic dishes: a stack of plates, bowls, and three cups. There was no other door. It was a blind alley.
The light alternately buzzed and whined as it flickered. It might snap off at any moment, leaving them in darkness as, behind, the sound of screams, sobs, and broken pleas carried in past the woven curtain.
What if the light went out? Rose bit a hand, stifling a scream. She hadn't been in darkness for months.
This was how the night-bound lived, shrouded in twilight. Or at least that's what Akvir said. That's what they were escaping.
Saying nothing, the old woman closed up the back of Doctor Baby Jesus and dropped the screwdriver into a pocket in her faded skirt. She examined Rose as might a clinician, scrutinizing her faults and blemishes. Rose stared back as tears welled in her eyes and spilled because of the pain in her knees, but she didn't cry out. She kept biting her hand. Maybe, possibly, they hadn't noticed her run in here. Maybe.
In this drawn-out pause, the shadowy depths of the tiny chamber came slowly clear, walls revealed, holding a few treasures: a photo of Doctor Baby Jesus stuck to one wall next to a larger photo showing a small girl lying in a sick bed clutching the doll itself, or a different doll that looked exactly the same. A cross with a man nailed to it, a far smaller version of the one in the church, was affixed to the wall above the cot. Half the wall between shelf and corner was taken up by a huge, gaudy low-tech publicity poster. Its 3-D and sense-sound properties were obviously long since defunct, but the depth-enhanced color images still dazzled, even in such a dim room.
Especially in such a dim room.
Her father's face stared at her, bearing the famous ironic, iconic half smile from the role that had made him famous across ten star systems: the ill-fated romantic lead in Empire of Grass. He had ripped a hole in the heart of the universe-handsome, commanding, sensitive, strong, driven, passionate. Doomed but never defeated. Glorious. Blazing.
'Daddy,' she whimpered, staring up at him. He would save her, if he knew. She blinked hard. The sim-screen wavered and, after a snowy pause, snapped into clear focus.
The curtain swept aside and the commander clattered down the three wooden steps. One creaked at his weight. He slid the barrel up her spine and allowed it to rest against her right shoulder blade.
'Ya lo veo!' cried the old woman, looking from Rose to the poster and back to Rose. She began to talk rapidly, gesticulating. When the commander said nothing, did not even move his gun from against Rose's back, she clucked like a hen shooing feckless chicks out of the way and scurried over to take Rose's hands in hers.
'Su padre? Si, menina?' Your father? Yes?
Then she turned on him again with a flood of scolding. The rapid-fire lecture continued as the commander slowly backed up the stairs like a man retreating from a rabid dog.
'What hind of fool are you, Marcos, not to recognize this girl as the child of El Sol? Have you no hind of intelligence in your grand organization, that it comes to an imprisoned old woman like me-' She spoke so quickly that the translation program had trouble keeping up. '… que ve las telenovelas y los canales de chismes… who watches the soap operas and the channels of gossip [alternate option] entertainment channels to tell you that you should have known that more people would be on that ship than the children of businessmen?'
The old woman finished with a dignified glare at her compatriot. 'This girl will not be harmed.'
'That one?' He indicated the actor, then Rose. 'This child? With the marked face? How is it possible? She carries this blot.' He touched his own cheek, as if in echo of the stain on hers. 'The children of the rich do not have these things.'
'God's will is not ours to question,' she answered.
He shrugged the strap of his scatter gun to settle it more comfortably on his shoulders. 'Look at her. Even to look past the mark, she is not so handsome as El Sol.'
'No one is as handsome as my father,' retorted Rose fiercely, although it was difficult to focus on the poster since the image blended with the words scrolling across the bottom of her sim-screen.
They both looked at her.
'Ah.' Seсora Maria waved a hand in front of Rose's face. Her seamed and spotted palm cut back and forth through the sim-screen. Swallowing bile, reeling from the disrupted image, Rose blinked off the screen.
'Imbйcil! Que estabas pensando? Esta niсa, de semejante familial For supuesto que lleva implantada la pantalla de simula-cion. Ahora ya ha entendido cada palabra que has dicho, tu y los ostros brutos!'
Without effort, she turned her anger off, as with a switch, and presented a kindly face to Rose, speaking Standard. 'For favor, no use the seem… What it is you call this thing?'
'Sim-screen.'
'Si. Gracias.'
