v
"You have a phone call," the Minder said, and Justin started out of what had become sleep without his knowing it, lying as he had all night curled up on the living room couch; the sound brought him up on his elbow and onto his arm and then, as the Minder cut in and answered it, to his feet "I'm here," he said aloud, to the Minder, and heard it tell the caller:
"Justin is in. A moment, please."
He rubbed a face prickly with the faint stubble he could raise, eyes that refused to focus. "I'm here," he said, his heart beating so hard it hurt, and waited for bad news.
"Good morning," Ari said to him. "Sorry to bother you at this hour, Justin, but where is Grant?"
"I don't know," he said. Time. What time? He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on the dim numbers of the clock on the wall console. Five in the morning. He's got to be at Kruger's by now. He's got to. "Why? Isn't he there?" He looked beyond the arch, where the lights were still on, where Grant's bed was unslept-in, proof that everything was true, Grant had run, everything he remembered had happened.
We can't have gotten away with it.
"Justin, I want to talk with you, first thing when you get in today."
"Yes?" His voice cracked. It was the hour. He was shivering.
"At 0800. When you get in. In the Wing One lab."
"Yes, sera."
The contact went dead. Justin rubbed his face and squeezed his eyes shut, jaw clamped. He felt as if he was going to be sick.
He thought of calling his father. Or going to him.
But Ari had given him plenty of latitude to do that; and maybe it was what he was supposed to do, or maybe it was Ari trying to make him think it was what he was supposed to do, so that he would shy away from it. Trying to out-think her was like trying to out-think his father.
And he was trying to do both.
He made himself a breakfast of dry toast and juice, all he could force onto his unwilling stomach. He showered and dressed and paced, delaying about little things, because there was so much time, there was so damned much time to wait.
It was deliberate. He knew that it was. She did everything for a reason.
Grant might be in the hands of the police.
He might be back at Reseune.
He might be dead.
Ari meant to drop something on him, get some reaction out of him, and get it on tape. He prepared himself for anything she could say, even the worst eventuality; he prepared himself, if he had to, to say: I don't know. He left. I assumed he was going to you. How could I know? He's never done anything like this.
At 0745 he left his apartment and took the lift down to the main hall; passed Wing One security, walked to his own office, unlocked the door, turned on the lights, everything as he usually did.
He walked down the corridor where Jane Strassen was already in her office, and nodded a good morning to her. He rounded the corner and took the stairs down to the lab-section at the extreme end of the building.
He used his keycard on the security lock of the white doors and entered a corridor of small offices, all closed. Beyond, the double doors gave onto the dingy Wing One lab, with its smell of alcohol and chill and damp that brought back his early student days in this place. The lights were on. The big cold-room at the left had its vault door standing wide, brighter light coming from that quarter.
He let the outer doors shut and heard voices. Florian walked out from the vault-door of the lab.
Not unusual for a student to be here, not unusual for techs to be in and out of here: Lab One was old, outmoded by Building B's facilities, but it was still sound. Researchers still used it, favoring it over the longer walk back and forth to the huge birthlabs over in B, preferring the old hands-on equipment to the modern, more automated facilities. Ari had been down here a lot lately. She kept a lot of her personal work in the old cold-lab, as convenient a storage for that kind of thing, he had figured, as there was in Wing One.
Rubin project, he thought. Earlier her presence down here had puzzled him, when Ari did not need to do these things herself, when she had excellent techs to do the detail work. It no longer puzzled him.
I'll be wanting to oversee the process myselfjust a desire to have hands-on again. Maybe a little vanity. . . .
It was also private, the kind of situation with her that he had spent weeks trying to avoid.
"Sera is expecting you," Florian said.
"Thank you," he said, meticulously ordinary. "Do you know what about?"
"I would hope you do, ser," Florian answered him. Florian's dark eyes said nothing at all as he slid a glance toward the cold-lab door. "You can go in. Sera, Justin Warrick is here."
"All right," Ari's voice floated out.
Justin walked over to the open door of the long lab where Ari sat on a work-stool, at a counter, working at one of the old-fashioned separators. Damn," she complained without looking up. "I don't trust it. Got to get one out of B. I'm not going to put up with this." She looked up and the hasty lift of her hand startled him as his hand left the vault door. He realized he had moved the door then, and caught it and pushed the massive seal-door back, steadying it in frustration at his own young awkwardness, that rattled him when he most wanted composure.
"Damn thing," Ari muttered. "Jane's damn penny-pinchingyou touch it, it swings on you. That's going to get fixed. How are you this morning?"
"All right."
"Where's Grant?"
His heart was already beating hard. It picked up its beats and he forced it to slow down. "I don't know. I thought he was with you."
"Of course you did. Grant stole a boat last night. Sabotaged the other one. Security tracked him to Kruger's. What do you know about it?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all."
"Of course not." She turned on the stool. "Your companion planned the whole thing."
"I imagine he did. Grant's very capable." It was going too easily. Ari was capable of much, much more; of spinning it out, instead of going straight to the point. He held himself back from too much relief, as if it were a precipice and the current were carrying him too quickly toward it. Florian was still outside. There were no witnesses to what she saidor what she ordered. There was a lock on the doors out there. And there might well be a recorder running. "I wish he had told me."
Ari made a clicking with her tongue. "You want to see the security reports? You both went out last night. You came in alone."
"I was looking for Grant. He said he was going to borrow a carry-bag from next door. He never came back."
Ari's brows lifted. "Oh, come, now."
"Sorry. That's what I was doing."
"I'm really disappointed in you. I'd expected more invention."
"I've told you everything I know."
"Listen to me, young friend. What you did is theft, you know that? You know what happens if Reseune files charges."
"Yes," he said, as calmly, as full of implication as he could make it. "I really think I do."
"We're not Cyteen."
"I know."
"You're very smug. Why?"
"Because you're not going to file charges."
"Do you want to bet on that?"
He was supposed to react. He smiled at her. He had himself that far under control, not knowing, not at all knowing whether or not Grant was in her hands. "I'm betting on it," he said, and held his voice steady. "You've got me. You haven't got Grant. As long as things go right with me and my father, Grant keeps his mouth shut and we're all just fine."