He headed for the door and pulled it open. As he went out he turned and added, “Stay here until I come back. Don’t go anywhere.”
The door closed behind him and he was gone, leaving an awkward silence. The group stared at each other.
“Don’t go anywhere.” Sapphire Karpov scowled. “Sure. Where we likely to go?”
Rick Lasker said, “How long’s he gonna be away? I’m starving.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“If those are standard autochef designs,” said Sapphire, “we’ll be all right.”
“You know how to program one?” Josh asked.
“I do. And Topaz can make an autochef stand on its head.”
The group converged on the supply cabinets and began to raid them for food.
“You know what?” Sig Lasker said. He had not joined the others, and he was standing alone in the middle of the kitchen.
“Nothing you like here?” Hag had his arms full of bottles and food packets.
“I’m not thinking about food. I’m still thinking of him.” Sig jerked his thumb in the direction of the outside door.
“What about him?” Amethyst asked.
“Gage only answered half your question. He said he couldn’t reach Foodlines headquarters easily. But he never said why he couldn’t talk to other Foodlines groups here on Solferino, to see if they knew what had gone wrong.”
“What do you think that means?” Josh was wondering if he had read Sig wrongly. The biggest Lasker brother looked and sounded like a thug, but he might be a smart thug.
“I think there are no other groups. This settlement is it. I don’t know what you were told when you signed up, but everything turned pretty vague in our briefings when it came to the number of people already on Solferino. I got other ideas, too. I have to think.” Sig headed for the longest of the tables and sat down. After a few moments the others drifted over to join him, all except Topaz Karpov and Rick Lasker, who were studying an autochef, and Dawn, who stood in a corner of the room staring at a blank wall.
The group at the table exchanged speculative glances. Without Bothwell Gage to tell them what to do or how to organize their interactions, they were not sure how to behave. Tomorrow they might fight like their old selves, but the day’s experiences had made them drop their guards for a while.
“Other ideas, like what?” Sapphire Karpov asked after a few seconds.
“Ideas, like weird.” Sig stared down at his closed fists. “Let me ask you a question. Are your parents on their way to Solferino?”
Amethyst laughed, but Sapphire shook her head. “He’s not joking, Amy.”
She turned to Sig. “What you ask only sounds funny if you know my parents. They’re a little, well, let’s say strange. How many other people d’you know who named their kids after gemstones?”
Hag grunted, in what might have been a suppressed laugh, but Sig shook his head at him.
“So they’re not here,” he said, “and you don’t think that they’ll be coming?”
“I’ll bet on it. You’d never get them to Solferino as long as there’s a bar or a casino open on Earth.”
“So how come you four are here? Never mind, that’s none of my business.” Sig turned to Josh. “How about you?” He jerked his head to include Dawn, still standing up, but he wasn’t addressing the question to her. “Are your parents here on Solferino?”
“We’re not brother and sister.” Josh cleared his throat. “She’s my cousin.”
He knew that wasn’t Sig’s real question, and he went on, “My mother won’t be coming. She’s… busy, back on Earth. But my aunt and uncle—Dawn’s father and stepmother—they’re supposed to come out in a few months, when they’ve tied up their other business.”
Supposed to. Except that Josh was suddenly sure that Aunt Stacy didn’t want to. She wanted to stay and live in the farmhouse at Burnt Willow, even if Uncle Ryan wouldn’t be working the farm himself any more. Josh didn’t want to tell any of that to Sig and the others. And what he had said just might be true.
Sig put his hands palm up on the table and shrugged his big shoulders. “All right. They’re coming to join you. That blows my idea. Let’s eat.”
Topaz Karpov and Rick Lasker had arrived at the table with loaded plates of food.
“What was your idea?” asked Sapphire.
“Nothing that matters. Forget it.” Sig turned to Hag. “And you forget the other thing, too, all right.”
“Me? Forget what?”
“You know.” Sig picked up a fork and began to eat. “Not another word,” he said with his mouth full, “ ’less you want a thick ear.”
Hag’s dark-complexioned face showed injured innocence. But he too picked up a fork and started to eat.
Josh went across to where Dawn was staring at the wall, turned her round, and brought her to the table. He sat her down and took a seat next to her.
Topaz Karpov was on his immediate right. She pushed two plates of food toward Josh and Dawn, and smiled at him shyly.
“She’s not really like, brain-dead, is she? I thought she was, at first.”
It occurred to Josh that those were the first words that Topaz had ever spoken to him, except in answer to a direct question. “No,” he said. “She’s not brain-dead.”
He felt almost guilty, talking about Dawn as though she wasn’t there. That’s what Aunt Stacy did.
“Dawn is autistic,” he went on. All the others were listening closely.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means she’s different. She doesn’t speak much, but she hears everything, and I think she remembers everything. What made you change your mind about her?”
“She said, ‘Lions and tigers and bears,’ after you said ‘Animals with internal skeletons and backbones.’ ” Topaz craned around Josh, to look more closely at Dawn. “She’s beautiful, you know. Can Dawn read and write?”
Josh felt like a fool. He had taken Aunt Stacy’s assessment, without bothering to check for himself. “I don’t know.”
“Can you read, Dawn?” Topaz asked.
She might as well have been talking to herself. Dawn went on eating and took absolutely no notice.
“Total retard,” Rick Lasker muttered, after a few silent seconds.
Josh heard that comment with oddly mixed feelings. Somehow it seemed all right for him to resent Dawn—after all, he was saddled with her, and he was the one who had to drag her around with him like a baby. But that didn’t give strangers the right to insult her. He was saved from having to react to Rick, because Amethyst Karpov suddenly sat up straight and said, “Shut up, all of you.”
“Amy!” Sapphire said. “You don’t—”
“Shut up, and listen. Can’t any of you hear it?”
They could. It was the whine of engines from outside.
“He’s leaving us!” Rick cried. “He can’t.”
There was a rush for the door, halted briefly by Sapphire’s urgent shout to her sisters: “Face masks!”
Sig, leading the way, jerked the door open with one hand while he was still fiddling with his mask with the other. He halted on the threshold, until the others crowded behind him and shoved him out of the way.
Josh came last in the group. He had paused to bring Dawn along, decided to leave her at the table, and hurried after the others. They had all stopped close to the doorway. He pushed his way through them, and was enormously relieved to see that the lander stood exactly where they had left it, in the middle of the cleared circle.