Page 31 of Mongrels United
“I called to see if you had remembered to eat at all while this very important thing happened.”
She pressed her lips together. “You know me too well.”
“And not those fruit bars they put on the table in front of you, either,” Avan said.
She laughed. “I will go to the food printer the minute we stop talking, I promise.”
Her father’s expression sobered. “Is the matter very serious, daughter?”
She could feel her smile draining from her face. “Yes,” she said softly.
Avan clenched his hands together instead of pressing the fingertips together. “And dangerous, perhaps?”
Grady hesitated. Her father preferred truth at all times, but he was also of the opinion that sometimes the truth should be leavened, that for some people, it was a kindness to blunt the message. Just not for him, or those he thought strong enough to deal with raw truth.
Was it fair to tell him she thought this business about Bellish to be highly dangerous? Or was it kinder to soften the truth? She glanced at her father’s temples, where the tight curls were a pale grey, and the loose skin under his chin, which hadn’t been there a few years ago. His hands clenched together so that the skin over the back of them looked stretched. He worried about her. He worried for her. Perhaps too much.
That quick reflection allowed her to smile at her father and shake her head. “Not dangerous at all, especially if I can deal with it quickly, which is why I’m still in the office.” For the first time she realized that there was no one else here. The big table was empty, the stations shut down, and only her section emitted any screens. Even the lights were turned down. Glennis must have scheduled them to dim as the night wore on.
“And now I’m starving,” Grady added truthfully, with a grimace.
Her father laughed, showing very white teeth. “Go. Eat. When your work is done, we’ll arrange another night for dinner. I will delight you with a meal that assaults your palate and reminds you that you love me despite my bad taste in food.”
She laughed with him and wished that everyone could see this playful side of her father. Instead, they spoke of him as a modern philosopher and man of grave wisdom. Which he was. But that wasn’t all he was.
As she had promised, as soon as her father disconnected, Grady went into the tiny kitchen area where the food printer was located and printed herself a hot green curry.
While it was printing and while she was eating it, Grady let herself mull over the day’s events and the slowly emerging picture about Bellish. The gravity of the facts which she had gathered were frightening.
Nash Hyson didn’t know it yet, but he was intimately involved in those facts.
Her father often said that:people deserve to know the truth…until they demonstrate by their actions that the truth is of lesser value to them than pretty illusions.
Nash Hyson was somewhere on the ship, right now, making himself face ugly facts about his father. And Grady had even more facts to hand.
He deserved to know those, too.
Her mind made up, Grady closed up the office, set it to wake at an hour she guessed would be earlier than anyone else would arrive, and left to catch the train to the Palatine. It was late, but Nash Hyson would be up at this hour and she knew exactly where he would be.
The train was empty and the ship was shut down for the night in the same way she had just shut down the Bridge office. The sun lights were shut off and only peripheral night lights glowed with a dull luminance that was just enough to see where to put one foot after the other and not ram her shins into anything solid.
Even though it was late, she could still see silhouettes flitting between buildings, or slipping between the closed-up stalls in the Aventine marketplace.
There were weaving, jogging lights in among the towers and pipes of the Field of Mars, too. The sight of them made her heart squeeze. No one had legitimate business in the Field of Mars at this time of night. This was the secret underbelly of the ship she was seeing from the corners of her eyes.
Were they making deals over Bellish? How far had this dreadful drug permeated the ship?
Grady shifted on the edge of the seat, so her shoulder was to the window of the carriage, and peered ahead, where the entrance to the Palatine was glowing with the bright daylights that always illuminated one side of the drum. The square aperture of the entrance, high up in the bulkhead, seemed to beckon.
The magline ended directly beside the elevator up to the Palatine entrance. While she rode the elevator to the docking platform, Grady pulled up Nash’s profile on the Forum, and looked up the name of the tavern he had built at one end of the Meadow. She had never been there, but she would need the name of the building to direct the taxiboat.
The Happy Nightingale.
Now,thatwas a business name which utterly failed to reflect the nature of its owner, she thought.
All the taxiboats were docked when she reached the platform. Two taxi-boats were clearly manually operated. She hadn’t known human-operated taxi boats were still in operation. Both of them were shut down, with clear canopies over them, and their LEDs extinguished.
She picked one of the AI-operated boats and plugged in her directions, then settled on the bench. It had been a very long time since she had visited the Palatine. As the boat pushed off from the dock, it also corkscrewed to orient itself for the descent down to the Meadow, which was halfway along the drum.
