“Bug on a windshield,” Méarana had agreed, a Terran phrase her father had once taught her.
And so they had launched themselves into the void. Ravn had waited until the last possible moment, when the external sensors had detected molecular jangling and an exponential increase in surface temperatures. “Wave cannon,” she said, and they had jumped with their baggage in tow even as behind them their ship began to disintegrate. After which, their cloaks made them invisible to GEM detectors and their luggage drifted like so much debris.
The entry locks of ships are never sealed because no pilot wishes to face the air lock and pat her pockets wondering where she put her keys. But operating keys are another matter. No pilot wishes another to saunter on board and fly off with her ship. The former owner, the late Rigardo-ji Edelwasser, had been a bonded smuggler, and Ravn, before she had turned the vessel over to Fleet, had squirreled a duplicate set of hard keys inside one of his many hidey-holes. The soft keys she had memorized. It was a matter of minutes to retrieve them, insert them into their proper ports, enter them at apposite terminals, or speak them into appropriate pickups and thereby complete the circuits for command and control.
The ship’s departure occasioned no comment from Space Traffic Control beyond the granting of clearance and the assignment of a departure orbit toward the New Anatole entrance of the Gong Halys. STC had been informed earlier by SVMG that the Lion’s Mouth was repossessing the Sèan Beta. Best it depart quickly before another unauthorized ship should attempt to seize it. One fewer Shadow in Henrietta system would make everyone happier.
Including the Shadow.
A monoship had little room for song and dance, but Méarana and Ravn managed. Life seldom tastes so sweet as it does when stolen back at the very brink from those who would take it. Méarana finally understood, a little, a phrase favored by the Ravn: “life along the razor’s edge.” She was rushed. She was high. She was giddy. They drank toasts to themselves, each other, the dead swoswai, and the live Shadow they had manipulated into avenging him. Méarana extemporized a rollicking geantraí while her companion danced a staccato of footwork known to the high-up hills she had once called home. In the end, laughing, they fell into each other’s arms.
“On to Terra!” Méarana declared to the grinning face above her.
“Noot quite yet, sweet. First, we stoop at Dao Chetty.”
Méarana pushed the Shadow off her and sat up on the couch. “Dao Chetty?” she said with sudden apprehension. The capital world of the Confederation. The center of all iniquity. A world whose very name fell leaden from the lips.
“I moost meet soomeone there,” Ravn said.
“Oh no, we must heigh for Terra, to rescue my father!”
“Oh, my sweet, yes. All in good time do I bring Gidula his praysent.” The Shadow leaned forward to pat her cheek, but Méarana ducked it. “Listen to me, yngling,” the Shadow said in a voice with more iron and less play. “Your father is like a toothache. To pull him from the mouth of Gidula is more than my strength. So I must persuade Domino Tight to join us. It will not be easy to divert him from his duty, but like a frog, I will capture him with my tongue. Haha.” Then, more seriously, she added, “To rescue your father wants more than to reach Terra quickly—but impotently.”
The harper leapt to her feet and turned away from her companion, folding her arms. “But you don’t need this Domino Tight. Mother is—”
“Following us? You meant her to when you joined me.” Ravn nodded slowly, as if to herself. “That is why your companionship was worth the wager. But I have no assurance that the wager is won, and ‘one sure ally on hand is worth two that might lurk in the bushes.’ It is best to copper the bet. And a second Shadow may dissuade your mother from foolish decisions if she does follow.”
“But what if Gidula should kill Father before we get there, because we delayed to fetch this Domino?”
“A large ‘if,’ and large because it contains two,” said the Shadow. “The first if is Gidula’s. He may have already killed your father, months ago. He may kill him five minutes before we land, however fast we scurry. Or he may have melted butter on Donovan’s head, put melons under his arms, and seated him at the right hand of power. Until we know Schrödinger has cut the thread, all possibilities remain open. Ignorance is hope. Beside,” she continued, “the second if belongs to Donovan. Gidula will not kill him until he cracks his memory. But I spend many months with your father, and I know, a little, how his mind works. Well, some of his minds. The scarred man’s egg is not so easily cracked.”
“You don’t think he’d cooperate with Gidula? I mean, if he thinks Gidula plans to overthrow the Names, and he knows the way into the Secret City…”
A shrug. “That secrecy is his life insurance. Once revealed, of what use then, Donovan buigh? He think long and hard which of us he lead inside. If he does start remembering, he will … his phrase, ‘take a hike.’”
“You sound as if you and he planned this all out ahead of time.”
“Ooh, you grant poor Ravn too mooch foorsight. But Donovan is my brother-in-blood. I have died for him, and he put on the shenmat for me. That is…” She waved with her hand as if swatting flies. “You cannot understand such things. I will save him if I can. This I vow on the blood of the Abattoir. But never forget, young harper, this war has larger goals, and the prices for them are higher than his life—or mine.” Her voice had progressively hardened as she spoke. Then the sprightly smile returned. “Now, coome. I shoow you where your father and poor Ravn battle Froog Prince togayther.”
Méarana followed the Shadow down the long hall from the control room. All this time, all these many weeks of travel, and she had forgotten that her companion was a Shadow and had her own objectives. Méarana remembered another thing. Ravn had said in the sitting room at Clanthompson Hall that in the Shadow War she had already killed her brother.
The harper did not care for being manipulated. She did not like it from her mother, she had not liked it from Donovan, and she certainly did not like it from this strange, charming coral snake of a Shadow. The Shadow had wanted the help of Bridget ban and, failing that, had taken Méarana to force her mother’s play. And the Shadow had managed all this while allowing Méarana to suggest and lead the escapade!
And so a little reserve grew in her resolve. She was no longer quite so intimate with the Ravn, did not follow her around as before or hang over her shoulder. Perhaps Ravn was relieved by this, though nothing showed in her demeanor. It would not be accurate to say that Méarana acceded to the stopover at Dao Chetty. Her consent was neither requested nor required. But she did agree, if only to maintain the fiction that she and Ravn were partners in this enterprise and she was not simply a stage prop. Ravn, whether she saw the need for the charade or simply did not care, accepted Méarana’s agreement with grave thanks.
And so Méarana spent the next two months composing goltraí in the lounge where Ravn had once so fruitlessly imprisoned her father. In the hidden room where the smuggler had died, Méarana found traces of the blood that had splashed there: stains painted in difficult corners and angles. She thought how easily her father could have died. She thought how easily the Ravn could have bought herself time by slamming the door and shutting Father and Froggie together. The laments played without a title in Méarana’s mind and ran from there down to her fingers and so out to the strings.
She tried as well to compose a tune to depict her mother hastening after her, but it would not cohere. In the night, when the strings were stilled, a thin sliver of doubt would stab Méarana: There was no pursuit. Bridget ban had weighed the costs and the benefits and had written her daughter off as lost. It was a relic of her childhood, was this cold fear, a piece of an age when her mother would disappear for weeks or months at a time and the daughter would wonder if she would ever come back.