It had been some other glory hole she had visited, not this one. A hole long since dug out and sold off piece by piece by AMC or some other company. Her mother had carried her. Her father was there, nearby but not with them. It was in another deposit; she remembered long hours on the rough mountain roads, borrowed rebreathers passed from hand to hand in the shaking, grinding truck bed under the flapping canvas. It was dark when they left, darker when they got there, darkest in the hot muttering mine. She had been terrified by the noises the mine made, by all those tons of mountain shifting and grumbling above her. I am inside a beast, she remembered thinking, swallowed alive, like Jonah.
The memory dropped away from her. She shook her head and looked around. What had they been doing in that other glory hole? Why had they gone there? She followed the vein of the memory, trying to pick it up further along, pry loose some concrete recollection. Nothing.
“What’s that?” McCuen asked, pointing at the Love-in-Tokyo.
Li jumped; she’d forgotten him. Then she held it out for him to see.
He grinned. “Doesn’t look like Sharifi’s style exactly.”
“Is it possible Cartwright or someone else would have been bringing children down here?”
McCuen looked uncomfortable. “Well, AMC tries to stop them. But what are they going to do? They can’t block off every borehole and ventilation drift. And even if they tried, there are plenty they don’t know about.”
“What do you know about glory holes, McCuen?”
He looked at her as if he thought she was asking a trick question.
“Really. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I knew before… before I enlisted.”
McCuen took a breath and frowned. “They’re what the geologists call white bodies—nodes in the beds that cross multiple strata. The best crystal’s always in the white bodies. Some of them are transport-grade straight through from end to end. When a company hits one… well, it’s the big money. Boom time.”
“But it’s more than money, right? Why’s Cartwright so worked up about it?”
“I’m Pentecostal,” McCuen said, and there was a knife edge of disapproval in his voice so subtle Li would have missed it if she hadn’t somehow known it would be there.
“And this is about the pit priests,” she said slowly. “And the union.”
“Is there a difference?” McCuen asked.
“Come on, Brian. It’s important.”
“I… only know what you hear. I’m not sure most of the Catholics know much more than that. It’s not like Rome approves of it.”
“And?”
“And nothing. The priests—the ones that believe in it—look for white bodies. That’s what Cartwright’s doing down here. Not that AMC knows he’s a priest. They’d flay him alive.”
“And what do they do when they find a glory hole?”
“Go down and gawk at it, mostly. I mean what do people do when the Pope comes?”
“And?”
His face shut down. “And nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing I just saw cross your face. Tell me what you just decided not to tell me.”
“I didn’t decide not to tell you. I just don’t believe in repeating rumors. I mean, I haven’t mentioned all the guys who are supposed to have fought for the Provisionals, have I? Because obviously they haven’t. It’s just tongue wagging.”
“Actually,” Li said, “a lot of them have.”
McCuen stared. “No shit,” he said, and she could see the wondering look on his face even in the lamplight. “Like who?”
“Chuck Kinney, for one.”
“He’s a construct!”
“So? And the barkeep at the Molly. Obviously. Oh, and those two brothers, the redheads, four or five years older than me.”
“Mutt and Jeff?”
“Christ, they still call them that?”
“Well, look at them.”
Li laughed. “So what’s the supposedly not true rumor about what they’re doing down here?” she asked, hoping McCuen’s gossipy mood would survive the change of subject.
“Oh, it’s a lot weirder than the IRA thing. More like the kind of story you tell kids to scare them into doing what you want them to.” He grinned. “I bet it was my aunt or someone who told me. And… you really don’t know any of this?”
“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I forget.” She grinned. “You’ll get to find out all about that soon enough.”
“Right. Well, the story about the glory holes is that the priests take people down there and… feed them to something.”
Li laughed. “What, like ritual cannibalism?”
“I told you it was ridiculous.”
It is ridiculous, Li started to say. But before she could open her mouth, the vaults spun around her ears and she was in the grip of another flashback.
Her father and mother were there. But they were smaller than in the last memory, strangely reduced. It took her a moment to puzzle that out. Then she realized it was she who had changed, not them. This was a more recent memory.
She tried to see their faces but couldn’t. She knew who they were in an abstract sense, but their actual features were invisible to her. As if each of them wore a blank white mask that said Mother or Father. As if they had no faces.
Two men stood beside her father, cloaked in shadow. One she recognized by the set of his shoulders and the scar snaking down his throat: Cartwright. The other, thin, wiry, ducking his head into his collar, she couldn’t quite place. She looked at her mother and saw that she was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked back toward her father, and she almost fainted in terror.
His chest was gone. All she saw there was a dark hole that swallowed all the light of the crystals around them, that threatened to suck down into itself even the spanning ribs of the vaults overhead. He smiled at her—or perhaps he just smiled. Slowly, not taking his eyes from hers, he lifted a hand, plunged it into the black void within him, and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper.
Li saw the paper, the bony coal-scarred hand holding it, even the sooty rubber band tied off around the wad. She saw it all, registered it, digested it with the surreal accuracy of dream vision. What she did not see—not until it was too late, not until it was burning in her hand already—was what the paper was.
It was money. Money she’d spent fifteen years ago.
SecServ, UNSC Headquarters: 22.10.48.
Nguyen sat at her desk under the tall windows. Ruddy sunlight glinted off her uniform jacket, struck fire off her epaulettes, haloed her straight-backed figure in red and gold.
“So,” she said. “The station exec was skimming. You think. But you don’t have proof, as far as I can see, other than the fact that you think he’s mistreating his girlfriend. Everyone is always skimming in any Bose-Einstein operation, Li. The rewards are too rich to resist. If he really is guilty, AMC probably knows already, and they won’t welcome hearing about—what did you say his name was?”
“Haas.”
“—hearing about Haas from us.”
Li didn’t answer immediately. Nguyen continued. “What about Gould?”
“She’ll reach Freetown in twenty days.”
“Then you need to have this wrapped up by then.”
“We may not be able to wrap it up without her.”