Safe House

Maj made a face. “Well, I’m trying to break him in gently. Not that it’s easy…he wants to dive right in. When we finished a six-hour battle last night, he wanted just to jump right back in again as soon as he’d gone to the bathroom.”

“I just bet. Well, again, keep an eye on him — you wouldn’t want him to overdo it.”

“That’s what his dad said, supposedly.”

“Oh?”

“To my dad, yeah. He wants to spend some time helping Niko find his way through our Net when he gets here, apparently.”

“A wise parent,” Winters said, and leaned back at the chair, looking at the brown bird, which steadfastly refused to notice that no amount of pecking at the feeder was producing any food.

“You don’t suppose…” Maj blinked, trying to sort out a sudden new thought.

“What?”

“That his dad hid anything important in his son’s Net space when he had it cloned here….”

Winters paused visibly, then gave Maj an approving look. “That’s the first thing we checked,” he said. “No.”

Maj’s heart sank a little — she had hoped the idea was original. “But then I guess,” she said, “that it would have been the first thing the other side would have thought of, too.”

Winters nodded. “We moved his material onto one of our secure servers from the one to which it had originally been ported,” he said. “We’ve been through that space with a fine-tooth comb, Maj, and there’s nothing there but some private writing — not in code — some simple games, and some schoolwork. Though your boy’s quite a linguist.”

“Yeah,” Maj said. “I think he’s been holding back to make me feel less ignorant.”

Winters laughed out loud at that. “Stings, does it? I’m not surprised. I know a couple of people who have the language gift, and it makes me feel like a dolt when I hear them being so fluent. Never mind…I’ll have more time to start studying languages when I retire. And your whole life’s before you…you’ve got plenty of time.”

“It won’t be before me if I stay on here much longer,” Maj said, for her mother suddenly put her head into the kitchen, from the hall, and Maj could see her through one of the doorways in her work space, mouthing words which probably translated into something like “Get in the shower now or you’ll be late for school.” “Captain Winters, thanks for your time. I just wanted to check with you myself.”

“Always pleased to help,” he said, and turned his eyes back to the piles of work on his desk. “Give a shout if you need me.”

“Right. Off,” Maj said, and Winters’s image flicked away to blackness, followed a moment later by her work space. She was sitting in the kitchen again, looking at her mother.

“The phone company called,” she said. “I can’t believe your father told them anyone here would be conscious at this hour.”

“He was,” Maj said.

“Yes, and look who got to answer the call when it came,” said her mother. “Well, they’re sending their people over this morning. I just hope they’ll be gone by the time you get home.” She looked annoyed. Maj suspected this was because her mother, not being able to leave well enough alone, would stand over the installers and watch everything they did all day, and then afterward complain that she had lost a day’s work. There were few things better calculated to fray her temper.

Maj got up, stretched, glanced up at the repeater and did the little interior “blink” that shut her implant’s connection to it down. The work space behind her went away, leaving her in a kitchen rapidly growing brighter with the new day. “Yeah, I hope they’re gone by then, too,” she said. “Oh, one thing I have to do before I leave…order some sweats for Niko….”

“I’ll take care of that, honey.”

“Have fun. He takes a size thirty-six sneaker.”

“Is that a real size?” her mother said suspiciously.

Maj made her way down to the shower, chuckling.

Maj spent all that day thinking more about Laurent than about anything else. Her morning went by in a strangely disoriented way, and she had trouble concentrating on her class-work, which was unusual for Maj. She plunged through math and physics with no difficulties, but when she hit history, she found that the Teapot Dome scandal seemed unusually remote. Somehow, the history with which she had been dealing at home, the more recent events of a place thousands of miles away, seemed far more concrete and important. In her house, drinking her tea, was someone who had escaped from that history — a particularly nasty piece of it. And will he ever go back? Maj wondered. She couldn’t imagine wanting to go back to the place where he and his father had been forced to live in such fear. But at the same time, home was home. He may even love the place, Maj thought.

If that was the case, she wondered how he managed it. Maj tended to be very sensitive to the emotional atmosphere around her; a fight or a disagreement in the Green household would make the hair stand up all over her until it was resolved, and even then she would be twitchy about everything everyone said for a day or so afterward. He must have known, she thought, that they were watching him and his father all the time. I could never stand something like that. Yet at the same time, possibly it was something you could get used to, like air pollution.

Laurent certainly didn’t seem particularly damaged; though maybe this was simply because he was smart. Intelligence, applied to your daily circumstances, was probably a big help. And it was also possible that Laurent was simply a lot tougher than he looked. His slightly delicate appearance could very well be hiding a much more robust personality than you might expect at first glance.

Nonetheless, Maj fretted about him on and off all day, as if her mother wasn’t perfectly capable of taking care of Laurent while Maj was going about her own business. He’s only thirteen, she kept thinking; and yeah, said the back of her mind, a thirteen-year-old who is perfectly capable of being shipped thousands of miles away from his normal life at the drop of a hat, and hardly turning a hair. Maybe you should get used to the idea that there are other people at least as competent as you are, even if they are three or four years younger….

But the end of the school day still couldn’t come soon enough for Maj. She felt antsy enough to take the local bus home from her high school and walk the two blocks to the house, rather than walking the whole two miles as she preferred to. The last few steps, the last half block or so, she found herself hurrying, and she took the steps up to the front door nearly at a run.

But when she bounced in the door and looked around, everything was quiet. She wandered down the hall and saw that her mother’s office door was slightly open. Her mother was sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap. “Mom?” Maj said softly.

Her mother looked over her shoulder, stretched, and yawned. “Oh,” she said, “you’re back. I wasn’t expecting you for another hour yet.”

“This late in the year,” Maj said, “there’s not as much to do as usual….”

Her mother looked at her with barely concealed amusement. “I would have thought,” she said, “it might have more to do with our guest.”

Maj gave her mother her own version of what her mother described as “an old-fashioned look.”

“Oh,” Maj said, “I don’t know.” But she wandered farther down the hall before her mother could get any more of her guesses right.

“Nice try, honey. He’s online,” her mother called after her. “In the den.”

“Why does this not surprise me?” Maj said softly as she turned back to her mother’s office and leaned against the door. “Are the phone people done?”

“With the concrete part of the installation, yes,” her mom said. “They said we might lose service once or twice this afternoon before business hours are over — it seems they have to do some tweaking at the exchange. It shouldn’t affect us too much, though. I wouldn’t start anything vital right now, that’s all.”

“Wasn’t planning to.”

Maj wandered down the hall again and looked in the den door, saw Laurent sitting there quietly in the implant chair. The Muffin was sitting in his lap.

Maj smiled a little and went into the kitchen. She dumped her book bags and the light jacket she had brought