“Ill,” Jago said. “What did you read, Bren-ji?”
He tried to frame an answer. Good newsseemed a little extravagant. He truly wasn’t doing well.
The door cracked. Jago held it with her hand, protective of him. Jase said, “Bren?”
“In a moment, Jase.” Adrenaline surged up, annoyance, anger, he didn’t know what. But Jase persisted.
“I have to talk to him, nand’ Jago. Please.”
“Let him in, nadi-ji,” Bren said, thinking by the tone of Jase’s voice he might have found something urgent in the record. Jago let the door open and Jase slipped in, while he knew the room outside would be concluding something was direly wrong.
“I need to talk to you,” Jase said. “I read the message. I need to talk to you. Alone.”
He didn’t understand. He damned sure didn’t want to discuss his personal life. He had a great deal else weighing on him.
But part of that great deal else was Jase’s cooperation.
“Jago,” he said.
“I will not leave you, Bren-ji.”
Nor should. Jago took herself to the side, however, and back a pace to the wall.
That left Jase as alone as he could manage in a tiny space; and Jase ducked his head and took a breath in the manner of a man with an unpleasant task in front of him. “Bren,” Jase said in a low voice, and went on in his own language, “Yolanda’s trying to get away. She’s coming here. She’s going to try.”
That took several heartbeats to listen to. And a few more to try to figure. Yolanda Mercheson, Jase’s partner from the ship, was going to leaveMospheira?
“Why?” was the only thing he could say, not When? Not How? which were backed up and waiting, but at that point, Cenedi opened the door.
“Nandiin. Is there a problem?”
“We’re all right,” Bren said. His nerves were still wound tight, and he realized that the dowager was being kept waiting. “A moment, Cenedi-ji. Please excuse me to the dowager for just a moment.” One didn’t dosuch a thing; but he did. “Jase. Why? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know the details. I just know she’s coming here. It’s her judgment she can’t work with the island.”
Giving up on Mospheira? The ship was writing off the human population.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “And we’re going to have to explain this to the dowager. When is she doing this?” Jase’s sudden passion for the seashore began to nag at the back of a mind grown suspicious, over the years, of every anomaly. “Where did you make contact? When?”
“On the phone,” Jase said in a faint voice; and Jase was white-faced and sweating. “We had it arranged before we came down, that if one of us found the place we were in impossible, if demands were being put on us that we couldn’t accept, we’d cross the water somehow. And she—called me on the phone and that was how I knew. I knew I had to come at least to the coast. And then if she made it I was bound to find out about it if I was with you, so I could get her—get her to the capital. But I didn’t know it was so big out here. I didn’t know it—”
“Jase, that story’s got so many holes in it—”
“I’m not lying.”
“You were just going to flit over to the coast and pick her up—on what? A boat? A plane? Or is she going to hike over?” He was too shaken right now to be reasonable. Temper was very close to the surface. “How did you know? And don’t tell me you made a phone call I don’t know about. Anything that came into the apartment I doknow about, unless it walked in on two legs.”
“No. It didn’t. We had it arranged, Bren, we didn’tknow what we were putting ourselves into, and we knew there was a potential for problems with the atevi side; we knew there was a potential for problems on the island, too, but we really thought if things broke down they’d break down here, not there. So we said—if we had to signal trouble—one of us would say—would say there was a family emergency. We figured it was the one thing even atevi might understand and let one of us reach the other. And whoever—whoever had to run for it, it was going to be the other one who had somebody get sick. Or die, if it was a life and death situation. She said my father died, Bren. She’s in real trouble.”
He mighthave let expression to his face. He wasn’t entirely sure. He was angry. He was embarrassed, and angry, and had a clear idea Jago followed most of it. He’d been through the entire government with Jase’s lie. He’d intervened in an already touchy situation with a Guild half of whose local members had fled the site they were standing in.
“I didn’t know the atevi,” Jase said. “I didn’t understand the way things are set up here. I didn’t know you had realproblems yourself, and then I did know and I didn’t know how I was going to make it work and get her to the mainland when you had far worse troubles than I could claim to and you weren’t getting your family out. I knew it wasn’t going to work the way we’d planned, and I felt like hell about your situation, and I didn’t know what to do except get over here somehow and get to the shore and know if she made it I’d be here—”
“You know,” Bren said, with far better control of his voice than he thought he’d have, “you know I could take about any of it, piece at a time. I could understand your lying to me. I could accept you had to. But you took after meabout lying, Jase. You went all high and holy about mylying, and you wanted meto apologize to you, when you damned well knew it was the other way around, Jase, that’s what I can’t understand.”
“I didn’t know I could believe you!”
“And now you can.”
“Now I do,” Jase said.
“Wasn’t the plan that we’d sendfor her? Or was this something else, Jase? Are we hearing one more story?”
“I didn’t want to call for her to come over here into something worse than she was in. And I didn’t dare give her a come-ahead. I was with strange security. I couldn’t get you for four days, Bren. I couldn’t ask the staff. You said be careful with them. By then it was too late. My call to my mother—the ship hadn’t heard from Yolanda. Not in four days. And I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you want to come out here. And it’s not what you expected. And nowyou trust me.”
“Everything you’ve told me,” Jase began, but now hisvoice was shaking. “Everything so far makes sense. I believe Yolanda’s leaving the island is tied to what Deana Hanks is doing, it’s tied to everything you’ve told me. I’ve been trying all the way out here to find a way to tell you what was going on, but every time I tried I ran into something elsethat wasn’t what you’d led me to think. I didn’t know but what Yolanda was leaving the island withHanks. But I don’t think so, now. By everything I’ve heard, I don’t think so. These people outside don’t make me think so. The business in the apartment didn’t make me think so. The dowager doesn’t. But I just haven’t known what to do, Bren. I tried to find out the truth—and at the first you were lying to me, and you work for the Mospheiran government, andfor the aiji, and I didn’t know where you stood, and everything was coming apart.”
That made sense. The fishing trip. The damned fishing trip. Every lie they’d told each other, every difference of perceptions two hundred years of separation made in two sets of humans.
And if Yolanda Mercheson was pulling out of Mospheira, there were going to be some angry and desperate people on the island, who were only going to make matters more tense and more desperate for all of them remotely involved.
Forces on various sides of atevi concerns were moving on the mainland. Everything that had been going forward was still in motion and now human troubles were linked into it.