She found out how right he was as soon as she left the station. News vans had pulled up in front of it. Reporters shouted questions at her. She didn't answer any of them. That didn't keep them from shouting more. It didn't keep them from trying to follow Kwame Daniels' car, either. But four cars with black drivers and young woman passengers left the police-station parking lot at the same time.
"I think we shook 'em." Kwame Daniels sounded pleased with himself.
But three news crews waited in the hotel lobby. Annette went right on not answering questions. Detective Daniels tried to stand between her and the cameras while she registered. He didn't have much luck.
Hotel security people did keep reporters from going up in the elevator with her or right after her. And two hard-faced men and a hard-faced woman in business clothes stalked the hallway on her floor. One of the men said, "We'll check your food before it gets to you, Miss Klein. Wouldn't want any unfortunate incidents."
Wouldn't want anyone poisoning you, he meant. Plenty of people would benefit if the star witness against them came down with a sudden case of loss of life. Some of them were bound to be rich and influential. Annette sighed. Next to worries like that, even reporters didn't seem so bad.
The jumpier the guards got, the more careful Jacques acted around them. The men in mottled clothes knew the slaves knew something was wrong. They knew they might have to deal with trouble. And they were ready to slap it down in a hurry, and hard, if it cropped up. Jacques didn't want to get shot for no reason at all, especially when he hoped Khadija would lead rescuers back here.
Dumnorix didn't believe that that chance was real. "We can take them," he said. "And when we do . . ." He knew what he wanted to do to the guards. He must have been thinking about it ever since he became a slave. Some of the torturers in the Kingdom of Versailles could have taken lessons from him.
"This is not a good time," Jacques said. "They're ready. They have muskets. We have shovels. Bad odds." He hefted his own shovel to remind the older man what he meant.
"We have spirit. We have bravery." Dumnorix sounded like a wolf on the prowl. "They have nothing. You can see it in their faces."
Were he a wolf talking about pulling down sheep, or even talking about pulling down elk, Jacques wouldn't have argued with him. But the prey he hungered for had sharper teeth than he did. "They will fight for their lives," Jacques said. "They know they all die if they lose. That makes them fight hard."
Dumnorix looked at him as if he'd crawled out from under a flat rock. "Where is your spirit?"
"I have spirit," Jacques answered. "I have sense, too, or I hope I do. Even if we win, even if we kill them, so what?"
Now the redheaded man just plain stared. "We have revenge, by the gods! What else do we need?"
"The guards beat the people who live here. They beat them over and over, whenever they fought. The people who live here want revenge, too," Jacques said. "The guards know how to fight them. They know how to use all their tools of war. Do you? What will the people who live here do to us? How will they tell us from the guards?"
"You worry too much," Dumnorix said.
"You don't worry enough," Jacques said, and worried more than ever himself. The only way he could stop Dumnorix from rising up was by warning the guards. He couldn't bring himself to do that. If he did, it would make him feel filthy. But if Dum-norix and however many men he would bring with him did rebel, what would happen then? Even if they won by some miracle— and winning would take a miracle—they would still lose. They still had to face the locals afterwards, and they had no idea how to work the machines or the magic or whatever it was that kept lamps burning without fire and did all the other amazing things that happened in the manor.
Dumnorix didn't care about any of that. He only cared about striking. His being a pagan didn't bother Jacques so much. The guards were enemies, and yet they swore by Jesus, if not by Henri. Some of the Muslims among the slaves had become Jacques' friends, and he thought Muslims were as wrong as pagans. No, the problem was that Dumnorix was a hotheaded fool. He saw only what he wanted to do right now. What might spring from that. . . He didn't care. It wasn't real to him till it hit him in the nose.
Wherever Khadija had gone, if she'd really gone anywhere, Jacques hoped she'd come back soon. He prayed to Henri that she would. He was the only person here who believed in God's Second Son. He hoped that would persuade Henri to listen to him.
He wasn't the only slave here who worried about Khadija, though. One evening after supper, the woman with the crooked teeth who'd been her friend said, "I want to talk to you." Her Arabic was almost as bad as the bits of Breton and Dumnorix's language that Jacques used.
He understood her, though. "Go ahead," he answered, also in Arabic. "You're Emishtar, yes?"
"Yes," she said. "You know where is Khadija?"
None of the guards seemed to be paying special attention to them. He knew he had to be careful anyway. "I'm not sure," he answered. "I hope I do."
"She is all right?" Emishtar asked.
Jacques only shrugged. "I don't know. I hope so."
Emishtar eyed him. "She go into danger, yes?" Unhappily, he nodded. She wagged a finger at him. He almost laughed— when she did that, she reminded him of his mother. But she sounded angry as she asked, "Why you not stop her?"
He did laugh then. The idea that he could stop Khadija from doing anything she aimed to do ... The idea that anybody could stop Khadija from doing anything she wanted to do ... He spread his hands. "How?" he asked.
That made Emishtar smile, too. Jacques found himself liking her smile even if she had bad teeth. Plenty of people did. And she understood what his laugh and his one-word question meant, too. "She is like bull, yes," Emishtar said, and pawed the ground to make sure he understood what she was talking about. She added, "But she like you. Maybe she listen to you."
"No," Jacques said, and let it go at that. Khadija really did like him? This older woman was her friend. She would know if anybody did. Jacques felt like grinning like a fool.
Emishtar smiled at him. "You are a good boy," she said, and walked away.
Jacques was happy and angry at the same time. A boy? He wasn't a boy! He was about to turn eighteen. If that didn't make him a man, what would?
Back in Madrid. This time, Annette came by hypersonic shuttle, not by scamming her way aboard a transposition chamber. She went through customs instead of escaping from a man who might have stopped her if he'd thought a little faster. And the reporters in Spain were just as annoying as the ones in the United States. She couldn't even tell them she didn't speak Spanish, because they all spoke English.
She'd had to make a fuss to get back to Spain. Higher-ups in Crosstime Traffic didn't care that she'd promised some of the slaves at the manor she'd come back. Several higher-ups were under arrest as the scandal widened. Others plainly wished it was never uncovered. They would rather have gone on doing business as usual. Slaves? As long as nobody knew about them, they might as well not have existed.
But Crosstime Traffic couldn't afford any more bad publicity. The company would have got it by the carload lot after trying to keep Annette from returning to where she'd been enslaved. No matter what the higher-ups might have been thinking to themselves, they weren't dumb. They could see that. And so here she was, at Crosstime Traffic's expense.
CT technicians were setting up an enormous transposition chamber in a park several kilometers from the building that was in the same spot here as the manor was in that other alternate. Next to the cost of doing that, flying Annette over from the USA was small change. Thanks to endless computer work, the techs sounded sure they could find that other alternate. Annette hoped they were right.