"I got tired of waiting, Mom, and the computer said you were here," the boy blurted. "Are you ready for me in medical yet?"
"Leave us," Harenn snapped. "Go down to medical. Now!"
"Who's this?" the boy asked, and coughed. "The guy in the room? Rigid!"
Todd took a chance. "I'm your dad."
The boy's eyes bulged and he backed away. "Are you going to cut my throat?"
"What? No. I-" A wrenching shock made him gasp and clutch at the band around his wrist.
"You will be silent! " Harenn snarled. "You will not speak to him. You will not look at him."
"He's my son, too, Harenn," Todd told her.
"You gave up all rights to him when you sold him into slavery. Bedj-ka, go!"
"But I want to see-"
"Better obey your mother," Todd said. "Or she'll shock you like she does me. She likes shocking people, son."
"The only thing that is stopping my knife, husband," she hissed in his ear, "is the possibility that we might still need you. If you speak to him again, you will die, no matter what orders I am given. Is that clear?"
When she took her hand from his mouth, he said, "Perfectly clear." He staggered to his feet — Harenn offered no assistance — and added, "You call me a monster, Harenn. How is what you're doing to me any different?"
"I care nothing about what you say, Isaac." She nudged him forward. "I do not let the words of one who sells children into slavery bring doubt to my mind."
"Maybe you don't," he said without disguising the relish in his voice. "But what about Bedj-ka? I wonder what kind of bedtime story he'll ask for tonight, wife."
She shocked again, but it was worth it. And when he was back in his tiny room again, he made himself wait an entire hour before contacting Edsard Roon.
Kendi could see the trouble on Bedj-ka's face the moment the boy entered the medical bay. Automatically, he said, "What's wrong?"
"That guy you've been keeping in that room?" Bedj-ka replied. "I saw him with Mom in the hall. He said he was my father."
Bedj-ka nodded. "Is it true? Mom didn't deny it."
A dozen lies rushed through Kendi's head. He could say it wasn't true, that Todd was a prisoner of war, that Todd was a pathological liar. He could simply avoid the question and let Harenn deal with it. After all, he was her son.
But Kendi was captain of the ship, and that made Bedj-ka's relationship with Todd Kendi's responsibility, in a way. Besides, Kendi knew Harenn well enough to predict what she would tell him. Perhaps he could spare her a little pain.
"It's true," Kendi said. "His name is Isaac Todd, and he's your dad."
"Why didn't anyone tell me?" Bedj-ka demanded, then coughed hard.
"We didn't want you to get upset," Kendi replied. "It's still true that he sold you into slavery when you were a baby, and we didn't want you to be afraid he would do it again."
"You should have told me." Bedj-ka's tone was belligerent. Kendi sank down onto a rolling stool so his head was lower than the boy's, and let his arms hang limply at his sides in a non-threatening gesture calculated to avoid provoking further anger.
"Maybe we should have," Kendi admitted, voice quiet. "Sometimes adults make mistakes. But we figured you'd already been through so much. I mean, I remember how confused I was when Ara freed me. We didn't want to make things more complicated for you than they already were."
"He said Mom shocks him a lot. He said Mom likes to shock people for fun."
"That's not true," Kendi said. "I've known your Mom a long time, and she doesn't hurt people for fun." Only when she has a reason, added a wry voice in his head. "I think he was trying to make you angry at her by telling lies. Bedj-ka, I know this is hard and it hurts to hear, but Isaac Todd isn't a nice man. He's cruel and mean. That doesn't mean you're a mean person. You can be the person you want to be. You don't have to be like him."
"I don't care about him," Bedj-ka said. His voice shook. "He isn't really my father. He didn't raise me."
"That's right. And your mother loves you very much, no matter what anyone might say." Kendi patted Bedj-ka's shoulder. "She'll get that cold fixed right up, too. I'll even bet she won't make you do what I had to do when I got sick on the frog farm where I was a slave."
Bedj-ka looked at him, interested despite himself. "You were a slave on a frog farm?"
"Sure was. Anyway, this one species of frog secreted a substance that was refined into an anti-viral drug. We slaves couldn't refine anything, of course, so when we got sick, we only had one choice."
"What was that?"
Kendi kept an absolutely straight face. "We licked the frogs."
"Blech! You did not!"
"Absolute truth," Kendi said.
"That's disgusting!" Bedj-ka said just as Ben walked into the medical bay.
"What is?" he asked.
"Kendi was telling me about how he got sick when he was a slave," Bedj-ka said cheerfully.
Ben groaned. "He's not telling that atrocious frog-licking story, is he? It's completely apocryphal, you know."
"Hey!" Kendi said.
"What's 'apocryphal'?" Bedj-ka asked.
"Look it up," Ben said with a smile.
"Before you destroy the rest of my stories," Kendi growled, "do tell me you copied the logarithms into keys."
"Just finished."
"Did you trace the line from Roon's home office?"
"Gretchen did. And we got lucky — there's a hotel right up the street from his house. Gretchen's already got a room."
"Then let's go down there and get to work. Lucia should be back right soon with that clunker ship, and we have a lot to do."
Bejd-ka sneezed hard.
"But first," Kendi said, "we better get Harenn down here. Before that… thing happens."
"What thing?" Bedj-ka said.
"I don't want to worry you," Kendi said seriously.
"Oh, god," Ben muttered.
"Worry me about what?"
"Well… back on the farm there was this one slave I used to work with who sneezed so hard, a big chunk of brain flew straight out of his nose. It landed in a pond and the frogs ate it. I had to cut them open to get it back."
"Disgusting!" Bedj-ka howled happily.
"You're going to do him more damage than the Enclave," Ben said.
Keith bent his head and Dreamer Roon himself dropped the Beta medallion around his neck. Dreamer Roon boomed, "All praise the Dream!"
"All praise the Dream," shouted everyone. Martina mouthed the words but didn't say them. Keith's face beamed with pride, an expression shared by the six other new Betas on the stage. Martina and the other Alphas, along with their Deltas, knelt on the tiered floor, exactly as they had done the first day Dreamer Roon had addressed them.
She put the thought on her mental list of Confessions- I doubted Dreamer Roon's teachings. Impure! — and went back to telling herself it wasn't real. She could get out of here. She would get out of here, and she would take Keith with her. A while ago-Martina couldn't measure time in days or hours anymore-she would have thought this impossible, but Martina now had something that might allow her to pull it off.
Martina had a keycard.
She surreptitiously touched the palm of her left glove. The little square of plastic was still there. She had spotted it on the floor on her way to this very ceremony. Most slaves learned a certain amount of sleight-of-hand in order to pilfer small treats or hide forbidden objects, and Martina was no exception. With a false grunt of annoyance, she had bent over to scoop the object up, then told her questioning Delta that her slipper hadn't been unfastened after all, so sorry for holding up the group. Her yellow robe had no pockets, but she had folded her hands together inside her sleeves and worked the little card into her glove for safekeeping.