Geoffrey’s sigh turned into a huge, world-weary exhalation. He hadn’t realised the burden he had been carrying around until he finally opened up to Sunday.
‘Have a guess who.’
‘Mother and Father are too far away to have got to you that thoroughly. Which leaves . . . Hector and Lucas?’
He nodded slowly. ‘They came to me the day after the scattering, with a proposal. Which, incidentally, I’m not supposed to discuss with another living soul.’
He told her about the safe-deposit box, about his specific instructions and how he had already violated them.
‘Scheming, manipulative vipers,’ she said, squinting as if she’d just bitten into something sour.
‘It wasn’t technically blackmail.’
‘Don’t make excuses for those stepped-on turds, brother.’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Look, I can understand them not wanting Eunice’s name dragged through the dirt, but why use people this way? Why not just appeal to their better natures?’
‘I’m not sure I’ve got one.’
‘You’d have done it, if they made a good enough case. But they think everyone in the world works the way they do.’
‘Well, look,’ Geoffrey said, feeling an odd, inexplicable impulse to defend Hector and Lucas in their absence. ‘What’s done is done. Sorry I wasn’t upfront with you earlier, but at least now it’s all out in the open.’
‘Yes. Apart from one small thing.’ She eyed him levelly. ‘You still haven’t told me what was in the safe-deposit box.’
Sunday Akinya did not know whether she ought to be awed or disappointed by the glove. It was certainly an unremarkable-looking item: grubby and old-fashioned, the kind of thing that, had she put her mind to it, she could easily have found in a dozen Zone flea markets. In fact, she could probably have assembled an entire spacesuit, given time.
‘That,’ she said.
‘That,’ her brother affirmed. ‘And that alone. It was the only thing in the box.’
‘Either Eunice was mad, or that glove has to mean something.’
‘That’s what I reckon – as does Hector. Do you know much about spacesuits?’
‘It’s old-looking. And that dirt is Lunar, so even if that glove was made somewhere else, it’s spent time here.’
‘You can tell it’s Lunar dust that easily?’
‘I can smell it. Gunpowdery. Or what people tell me gunpowder ought to smell like. Kind of thing you get good at, when you’ve spent enough time up here. It’s been cleaned, but you never get rid of the traces.’ With a vague feeling of apprehension, Sunday continued to examine the glove. ‘But let me get this straight. Hector told you to leave it there while you visit me, but collect it on the way down?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then so far you’re only in
‘I’m sure they’ll see it that way.’
The glove was heavier in her hand than she had expected. The articulation was stiff, like a rusted gauntlet from a suit of armour. ‘I just mean,’ she went on, ‘we have some breathing space.’ She pushed her hand into the open cuff, as far as her fingers would go.
‘There’s something jammed into three of the fingers,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I couldn’t even get my hand past the connecting ring.’
Sunday tried for a few moments, then withdrew her hand very slowly. ‘Guess we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s some kind of . . . well, booby trap.’
‘From Eunice?’
‘If she was mad enough to put a glove in a bank vault, she was mad enough to turn it into a bomb.’
‘I never even thought of bombs,’ Geoffrey said.
‘You’ve spent too much time in the Surveilled World. Just because you can’t assemble a lethal mechanism out there doesn’t mean you can’t do it
Even with the glove tucked into his bag, Geoffrey must have been scanned and probed a dozen times just between the bank and the railway station. Every door he went through would have been alert to the presence of harmful materials or mechanisms, and he hadn’t been stopped or questioned once. If there was something nasty – or even just suspicious-looking – in the glove, it was concealed well enough to fool routine systems.
Jitendra, who had been observing silently until then, said, ‘We’ve got our own scanner. Might be an idea to run the glove through it and be sure.’
Sunday handed it to him warily, knowing how Jitendra liked to dismantle things, often without being entirely sure how to put them back together. ‘Until we know what it’s worth, I don’t want you putting a scratch on it.’
Active doorframes were frowned upon in the Descrutinised Zone – people didn’t like walking around feeling as if their bodies were living exhibits made of various densities of coloured glass. Equally discouraged were smart textiles, the kind that could be worn or slept in, invisibly woven with superconducting sensors. Sunday had a medical cuff, which was fully capable of detecting anything seriously amiss, but on a day-to-day, even month-to- month basis, what went on inside her body was her own business. In the Descrutinised Zone, it was even possible
