‘It’ll be fairly dark by the time they get here,’ he said, one hand squeezing her shoulder. ‘I’m going out and lay additional mule tracks, around the corner and down a bit farther. They may use lights to see the trail, but in the dusk this wall will look solid, as though this crack were full of stone.’
He slipped out and onto the trail, seeking out tiny patches of soil that would take clear imprints of the false hooves. When he had gone half a mile farther, he came to a split in the trail, which he traveled until it petered out onto rock, and more rock stretching endlessly away to the south. Then he pocketed the mule shoes, climbed the wall and scrambled back the way he had come, careful to leave no visible trace, grateful for the wind that might be presumed to have blown their tracks away.
She was waiting for him with stones ready to plug the hole behind him. Their two mattresses were already inflated on the roughly rippled stone. ‘Thank God for an inflatable mattress,’ she murmured. ‘We’ll have to be quiet. It’ll be easier with something soft under us.’ Her voice broke into a gasping sob.
He pulled her toward him, almost roughly. ‘You’ve been strange ever since you saw them,’ he said. ‘Ever since you saw that man. There’s more to it than you’ve told me.’ He stretched out on his own mattress and drew her down beside him, watching her face. One eye was lit from the side by a last vagrant beam of sunset light, that eye tear-filled and spilling. ‘Tell me.’
She gasped. Her teeth were gritted. He saw the muscle at the corner of her jaw, clenched tight.
‘Will you tell me,’ he asked. ‘Don’t you think I should know?’
‘I had a friend,’ she said. ‘A good friend. Her name was Mechas, Gretl Mechas. She came from Heron’s World, on contract to the Department of Exploration. Not an Explorer. She was in procurement and accounting. They housed her in the Priory in Northwest because there was extra space there. We got to know one another very well….’
Tasmin waited, waited longer, then said, ‘Go on.’
‘She got word her sister was in need of something back on Heron’s World. Gretl never told me what it was. She seemed a little annoyed about it, in fact, like the kid had gotten herself into some kind of trouble. Anyhow, Gretl needed money to send home. She went down to Splash One, to the BDL credit authority. She could have done it all by com, but Gretl was like that. She liked to do things personally.’
‘Yes.’
‘When she got back she told me she’d met Harward Justin. He’d stopped by the loan desk while she was there, and he’d been pretty persistent in asking her to have lunch with him. She told me she’d refused him though he hadn’t made it easy. You’d have to have seen Gretl in order to visualize this properly, Tasmin. She was stunning. Men did pester her, but she didn’t take it seriously because she was in love with someone back on Heron’s. She laughed about it when she told me. She said Justin looked like a Jubal toadfish, fat and greasy and with terrible little eyes….
‘Anyhow, when she went to make her first payment, they told her Justin had paid off the loan. She owed him, personally. She left her payment in an envelope for him, but as she was leaving, that man – that Spider Geroan – accosted her and told her Justin wanted to see her.’
‘Yes.’
‘She was very strong-willed, Gretl. Indomitable. Spider Geroan took her to Justin’s office, there in the BDL building. Justin told her how he wanted her to pay the debt, and she told him she would pay her debt on the terms she had incurred when she took it, nothing else.
‘When she got back she was angry. I’d never seen her so angry before. And she told me what Justin said. Justin told her he’d paid her debt, now she owed him. He told her people had to pay him what they owed him, or else. He said if she wouldn’t have him, then Geroan could have her. And he laughed when he said it.
‘She told me about it, shaking her head over it, furious, not able to believe the man. She reported it to the Priory office and to the Explorer King, both personally and in writing. Technically, it was a violation of the union contract. The contract doesn’t allow sexual harassment….
‘Two days later they found her in the alley out behind the Priory, there in Northwest. Her flesh cut in little pieces, all over, like noodles. Head, face, everywhere. Her clothing and personal things were dumped on top of the body. Except for her clothing, we couldn’t have identified her. I tried to believe it was someone else, but the clothes were hers. No one could have recognized her. Whoever did it had rubbed something into the cuts to keep her from bleeding to death right away. And then dumped her there. Like a message.’
‘And you think it was Geroan?’
‘I know it was. I went to the protector that investigated
