Peter reached out, very slowly, and took the handles of the model to rotate it. He zoomed them in and suddenly he and Toby were inside, hovering above the landing where Maria Teresa had died. Peter stared at the tiled floor for a while. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “I could hear them talking.”
Toby waited. Haltingly, his brother said, “There was this spot near the back of the room where the kidnappers were keeping me. There was an air vent in the floor, and if I put my ear to it, sometimes I could hear them. It was too faint for me to make out what they were saying, but I knew the voices.”
Now he looked up at Toby. “One day, after I’d been there for, oh it must have been a couple of weeks, I put my ear down there and heard them talking to somebody else who was there. I could feel the footsteps through the floor, and I heard his voice.
“It was Father.”
Toby blinked, and suddenly his thoughts were sliding all over, trying to catch each other. “What?”
“Our. Father.” Peter had come around the cicada bed and was closing in on Toby, his eyes wide. “Our father was there. He was part of it. It might even have been him who let them in—him who killed Maria Teresa—”
The words came out in a rush now. “Why would they need to kill her? They could have tied her up, they were wearing masks so she wouldn’t have seen their faces and I didn’t see them kill her, I didn’t even know about it until after. But if she’d caught him helping, if he’d been seen, then he couldn’t let her live, could he? It would have ruined everything.”
Toby was too horrified to speak. He wiped away the virtual model of the house, and so it was just him and his brother, eye to eye in the cold machine space of the chamber. “But … why…?”
“Why?” Peter’s brows crunched into a sarcastic expression; he’d made that as a boy, but it had never drawn so many wrinkles with it in the old days. “Why? Sedna.
“The kidnapping is what convinced Mom to leave Earth. Same with nearly everybody else who came. The whole incident galvanized an entire movement, remember? Maybe you don’t. Money came in from everywhere to pay my ransom, and afterward, it hung around, because suddenly Dad had a plan. He went back to all the people who’d helped and told them, ‘Look, there’s something better we can do with this money. We can’t trust Earth anymore, either the trillionaires or the poor. We’ve got to get out.’ My disappearance, my being tied up in that room, my seeing them killed in front of me and learning about Maria Teresa—all that was just part of the plan.”
He was trembling now and had shed all the years that separated them. He was just Peter now, just Toby’s little brother.
“And I knew it,” he said. “I knew it every step of the way—from when we left Earth to setting up the colony, to after you abandoned us to when he did, too—”
“I never abandoned you,” objected Toby.
“You two were close, you and Dad. After you disappeared, all I could think was, ‘He’s snuck back to Earth, to make way for Dad’s return. Where they’ll be trillionaires with the Sedna wealth…’ Because, well, you were always the one who measured up. I was damaged goods after the kidnapping, a bad reminder, and anyway, if I hadn’t been expendable to begin with he’d never have used me for it.”
“Wait, what are you trying to … you think I knew about this? You think Dad told me?”
Peter lowered his head, looking up past his brows at Toby. “You’re saying he didn’t?”
“I…” There’d been that conversation on the rooftop … Peter was beginning to smile; he was taking Toby’s hesitation as a yes, so Toby said, “There was something!” He recounted that conversation and their father’s words to him. I’m going to do something to help change things, and it could get rough for us for a while. You may not understand everything that’s happening.
“That’s it,” he finished.
“That’s it?” Peter was glaring at him. Toby stared him down.
“The only reasons you think I knew is that I disappeared, and because…” He wanted to deny Peter’s other assertion, but he couldn’t. “Maybe he did favor me. I was the eldest. But that didn’t mean he confided in me. Do you really think I would have kept it together if he’d told me? Maybe I was the oldest, but he didn’t spend any more time with me than he did with you and Evie. Meaning, almost none. You were the ones I knew. He was my dad, he was important, but my life revolved around you guys!
“Look, Pete, you’ve got the tug I left Sedna in. Your forensics people have to have gone over it. You know it really was adrift for fourteen thousand years. You know what happened to knock it out of commission. You may have spent the past forty years thinking I abandoned you, but you know now that I didn’t. It was an accident. I got lost. And now I’m home.
“And I knew nothing about … what you just told me.”
It was unbelievable, horrible, couldn’t be true—but even as Toby was thinking these things, his imagination was fitting it all together. His awakening on Lowdown, the order from the Chairman, and all his discoveries about the locksteps and the Toby cult and the Guides. They all spun in his mind, a whirlpool with its center at that single moment in the past, when Peter crouched on the floor of his cell listening at a grate.
“This … all of this … you’ve been running ever since.” And not just Peter, but Carter McGonigal, too—fleeing from his crime on Earth and pulling his family and friends with him. Had Mom known, or suspected? She, too, jumping forward through time, each leap farther than the last. Telling everyone all the while that she was hunting for that moment when her lost Toby would return to her, when really she was trying to get away from something else, some knowledge she couldn’t unlearn.
“Evayne … does she…?”
Peter nodded. “I told her, oh, thirty years ago I guess. Long after you’d left. She never really came to terms with it, I think.”
Toby hung his head. Everything had changed, and he wasn’t ever going to get back what he’d just lost.
“Sorry, Toby,” said Peter. “It’s funny—you know there was a day, long time ago now, when I suddenly realized you weren’t my older brother anymore. That I was the older one. I’m older than Dad now, did you know that? Older than Mom, too. The family’s on my shoulders now. I’m not yours to command.”
It came to Toby then that Peter really had intended to kill him on Lowdown, and just now when he’d brought out that vicious looking little pistol, Toby had been within seconds of dying. A wash of adrenaline hit him, and he hid his suddenly shaking hands behind his back.
He tried to pull himself together. For a moment he’d forgotten why he’d come here; he was adrift and at the mercy of the Chairman. Then his gaze caught the green telltales of their mother’s cicada bed, and he clutched at the purpose and idea that had brought him here.
He looked up at Peter again, all his cockiness gone. “I get it. And you’re right. By the time I got to Wallop I thought I knew what was going on. I was the big brother, come back to set you guys right.” He laughed humorlessly at himself. “Yeah, that was totally wrong, wasn’t it?”
Peter nodded. “You see, things have changed. You’ll understand why later, but right now, Toby, you have to shut Mom’s bed down again. Put her back to sleep.”
Toby sucked in a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and said, “No.”
Peter blinked and started to speak, but Toby said, “This part of it I understand perfectly. You and Evie have locked yourselves and the locksteps into a pattern you can’t get out of. You’re riding a whirlwind that’s roaring into the future, and you think you have to steer it. You think you can play Consensus with seventy thousand worlds—actually, you think you have to. Evie’s terrified that it’ll all fall apart if you don’t keep your hands on the wheel. So are you, right?”