“I’m not leading you anywhere! I don’t know. I told you that!”
“And I don’t believe it. Lovers talk. Sharifi must have told you things. That she found something. Some new piece of technology. Some new information.” Li paused, then went on. “Something Korchow wanted you to get from her.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Bella said stubbornly.
“Then how was it?”
Bella moved impatiently. “Is that all you came for? To ask questions?”
“What did you expect?” Li asked.
She waited, but Bella didn’t turn around, and only the slight tremor in her shoulders told Li she was crying again.
“Hannah didn’t go to Korchow about the crystals,” Bella said finally. “And there was nothing illegal about it. She was going to buy my contract, with her own money.”
Li stood speechless for a moment, unable to muster a response. “She couldn’t have bought your contract, Bella. She couldn’t have afforded it.”
“She was rich,” Bella insisted, with the blind certainty of someone who didn’t understand what the word meant, what money meant.
“Not that rich.”
“You’re wrong. She was going to. She promised.”
“So what went wrong, Bella? What happened to the happy ending?”
“She changed,” Bella said after a long silence. “She found something that made her happier than I could.”
Halfway back to her quarters Li realized she wasn’t even close to sleep and turned aside to catch the next surface-bound shuttle.
The pithead guards knew her by now; they searched her perfunctorily, almost apologetically. Twenty minutes later, just as the graveyard shift was turning, she climbed down the ladder into the glory hole.
The crystals were in full voice, overloading her internals, wreaking havoc on her scan systems. By the time she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder her infrared and quantum scans had cut out completely. She could have lit her lantern, but she didn’t want to. There was something terrible about the smallness of a light in this ancient airless darkness. She sat in the dark with her back against the ladder and retraced the twisting course of the investigation.
She saw no straight sight lines, no clear cause and effect, nothing but blind corners and dead drops. Had she accomplished anything at all here? Or was she just stuck in rewind, projecting her own ghosts onto Sharifi, dredging the sterile runoff of a dead girl’s pathetic memories?
Ask yourself who the players are, Cohen had said, and what they want. Well, what did they want?
Daahl and Ramirez wanted what the union always wanted. To wrest control of the mines away from the UN defense contractors, to build their workers’ paradise—a paradise that Li didn’t want any part of but that would probably be no worse than anyone else’s misguided little piece of heaven on earth.
Cartwright’s goals were tangential to the union’s, as Korchow would say. But he’d stand with the union —if only because the union was most likely to protect his precious crystals. If Daahl and Cartwright had to take Li down to get what they wanted, they would. Otherwise, they’d stay clear of her, if only because of their loyalty to the family she barely remembered.
Haas wanted to keep the mine running. And, when he thought he could get away with it, he’d wanted to keep Li out of the glory hole. Why? To avoid drawing the miners’ attention to it? No; they already knew, thanks to Cartwright and the wagging tongues of the miners Sharifi had paid union scale to dig it out for her. Was it simply the fierce multiplanetary’s drive to prevent a slowdown and protect profits? Or was it something more personal? Hiding his embezzling? Avenging himself for Bella’s betrayal?
Nguyen wanted Sharifi’s dataset. And she wanted to make sure no one else got it. That she knew things she wasn’t telling Li was a given, part of the price of working for her, of trusting her. But what were those things? Did she know what Sharifi had found in the mine? Who she had talked to about it? Did she know about Korchow? Was it just paranoia for Li to think she was following a track Nguyen had foreseen, even laid down for her?
And what about Korchow? He wanted the same information Nguyen wanted. He wanted it desperately enough to take the chance of approaching Li, of risking the sting he must know was a real possibility. And he had suggested—more than suggested—that Sharifi had already betrayed some of her secrets to him.
Bella was the wild card, of course. Did she know about Korchow? Was she working for him? What was there really between her and Haas? What had Voyt done to make her hate him so much? And what was the cold calculation Li had seen in her eyes? Grief over Sharifi, or something deeper, older, darker?
Something moved in the darkness.
Li’s eyes snapped open. Nothing.
Then she heard the faint but unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She slid a hand into her coverall and eased the Beretta out of its holster. She flicked the safety off, inching the lever back with agonizing slowness in order to muffle the dry little click of the catch snapping open.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Katie,” said a familiar voice.
A match flared. Li smelled sulfur, saw a monstrous shadow loom across the vault high above her. The shadow bent, shifted. A rusty pin squeaked, and a Davy lamp flared into life. “Hello,” Cartwright said from where he sat cross-legged on the gleaming floor. “So you heard them too, did you?”
“Heard who?” Li asked breathlessly.
“The saints, Katie. Her children.” He smiled. “Rejoice, for we know the hour and the day of Her Coming. It’s beginning.”
“Save the sermons for your sheep, Cartwright. It has nothing to do with me.”
Something drew her eyes into the inky shadows behind the priest. Some movement, so faint that she felt rather than saw it. But when the voice spoke out of the darkness she felt so little surprise that she realized she’d known Daahl would be here.
“If it has nothing to do with you,” he asked, “then why are you down here?”
“Just doing my job, that’s all.”
“There are a lot of people who are wondering just what that job is. A lot of people who’d like to know which side you’re on.”
She didn’t answer.
Cartwright began scratching at a patch of dry skin on his wrist, and something about the movement—the sound of fingernails on flesh, the dead skin flaking off and glittering in the lamplight—made her feel ill. He’s crazy, she thought. He always was crazy.
“Well, Katie,” Daahl asked, “don’t you have any answer at all for me?”
Li rubbed a clammy hand across her face.
“I’m going to show you something,” Daahl said. “I may regret showing it to you. A lot of people have told me I will, in fact. But I think you have a right to see it. I think you have a right to know what’s on the table here.”
Li saw the UNSC seal on the letter before he’d finished handing it to her. “This is a classified internal memo,” she said. “Where the hell are you getting this stuff?”
“Just read it.”
It took several reads for the sense of the thing to come through to her—and even then she wasn’t sure what the cautious, bureaucratically vague words really meant. Someone else had been sure though. Some other reader had been there before her, had scored through the critical lines with a strong confident hand: