Hart looked at him. “And now she knows that somebody else knows.”
Will went white.
“And whoever put her there knows that somebody else knows—”
“Jesus, Hart!”
“She didn’t see you?” asked Hart.
“No … I don’t think so. Only the back of my pants, maybe.”
“But they’ll figure it’s a kid.”
Will pushed away his coffeecup. “I’m never going to school again.”
“But you’ve got to,” said Hart ruthlessly.
Hart let him sleep over. Willie was still shivering, and thought that if he went home this late and got beaten up on top of everything else, he’d just die. Not that he did much sleeping.
Miss Smith wasn’t in the next morning. Miss Weston, who was supposed to be retired, took the class. Willie got slapped for not knowing the answer to a math problem, but he could no more concentrate on the slap than on the problem.
It was during the afternoon session that the men finally came. They wore the black colors of the Ecclesiastical Police, rarely seen in Sangaree. One of them stood in front of the class and made a little speech about the importance of following the rules of the Church and how they were all expected to grow up to be useful members of society. Then two other men came down the aisle— Will thought his heart would jump out of his chest—and passed him by and stood by the chair where Thomas Vanessa sat. And they asked him to come with them, please. And Tommy, with a funny, held-in look on his face, got up and went with them. He started to take his books, but they said he could leave them behind.
When Tommy was gone, the man who made the speech told them that perversity had to be rooted out at the source, and that Thomas Vanessa had been very, very bad. He wouldn’t even want to tell good children what Thomas had done. And then he left. And Miss Weston came and took up Tommy’s books and put them on her own desk. Will’s eyes kept going back to those books all during the rest of the lessons.
“They take them away and cut them up for parts,” he heard his father’s voice echoing.
Tommy hadn’t done anything. He should have spoken up. He could still get up how, and tell Miss Weston to call back the men. Tommy didn’t deserve to get cut up for parts.
Willie didn’t want to get cut up for parts either. He risked an anguished glance back at Hart.
Hart returned his gaze calmly. He looked back down at his religion book, and Will suddenly knew how the men in black had gotten Tommy’s name. How had Hart done it? Did he say, “Tommy came and bragged that he was going to try to get into the teachers’ residence?” Hart could have done that, he could have talked to those men. He was never scared.
But to give then Tommy’s name! If it had been Parry Winzek’s name, or one of his hangers-on, Will could almost—almost—have understood it. But Tommy had never done anything to them. They barely knew him.
He couldn’t just sit here! Willie hissed, making Hart look up. Well? said Hart’s look.
And Will experienced one of those moments—like the moment in the yard when he saw the code of fighting differently, but now it was stronger, more precise and intense. He couldn’t say how he knew, but he knew it with a force of clarity and logic that matched his knowledge of if-I-drop-this-pen-it-will-hit-the-floor. He knew it in his bones. Hart didn’t give a damn if it was Tommy Vanessa or anybody else. None of them were real to him. That brief look of contempt that Will had seen the first day in the yard, that was real. For a moment he felt as if he were in Hart’s skin, and his own claim to reality seemed to dwindle.
It was the final gift of traumatic knowledge in a day of traumatic knowledge. His stomach heaved. He held the sides of his chair until his knuckles grew white.
You can still get up and say something, said a voice in his head. Hurry.
What?
Tommy Vanessa. He’s innocent.
That’s right, thought Will, there’s still time to do something. And he went on thinking it, more and more weakly, as the rest of the afternoon passed.
To Will’s unutterable relief, Hartley’s guardian took him out of Sangaree shortly thereafter. They moved to one of the upper decks, and Will assumed at the time that they would never meet again.
The years taught Will that a teacher’s residence was a good place to hide an android; certainly the aristo families lived with little privacy, cousins and servants always walking in and out, and the folk in the poorer areas shared space as a matter of course. The teachers lived like monks, in small single cells. He could even see why “Miss Smith” would regularly use a spit nobody else used. He supposed a mechanical body required periodic maintenance, just as a flesh one did. But he’d never, never come up with a reason why somebody had brought an android onto the Opal. And he’d given it an enormous amount of thought, for a subject he tried to push out of his mind.
And now, a decade later, Will crossed the courtyard to the alleyway with a sour taste in his mouth. It was a taste that called up the bitter flavor of the coffee Hart had poured for him on that night. Will had never tried coffee again, though it was available at the Diamond court. He had no reason to believe it had become any sweeter.
Out on the street he took a deep breath. The Bloodshed wasn’t far away; he didn’t much care if Lysette’s set was over or not. He wanted to see her.
He changed direction, then slowed. A thought occurred to him.
It was an open secret that Hartley Quince had come out of the holding pens. But children don’t leave the pens on their own, not even genius psychopaths like Hart. So somebody arranged to
