The lights flickered on, dimmed, brightened. The feeling of terror faded much more slowly than its sounds.
The results of the blast seemed hardly to justify its force. There was a new opening in the Palace facade, at ground level. Workers swarmed around it as soon as the dust had cleared. Mischa sat up, brushed herself off, and watched. As she scrambled to a better vantage point, the change in the cavern wall kept catching on the corner of her vision.
The workers began to smooth the blasted edges, forming a new doorway to the lower level of the Palace. People on First Hill, which faced the Palace, stood on their balconies pitching stones and gravel out into the Circle. Mischa saw no bodies or blood, which was on the order of a miracle.
She began to notice other, more subtle changes: an undercurrent of excitement, more people along the arc where the bars were clustered. It was like early spring, when several of Blaisse's ships came in at once. Mischa was beginning to tire, but her curiosity kept her going. She started down the helix and met Kiri coming up.
"You do get around."
"What's going on?"
"I guess the new people decided they needed a private entrance in Stone Palace."
"What new people?"
"A ship landed while you were healing."
"In the storms—? And you didn't tell me—"
"I thought I could keep you resting," Kiri said. "I yield."
"Who are they? How—?"
"Come back home and I'll tell you what I know. Which isn't much."
They returned to Mischa's niche.
Jan Hikaru's Journaclass="underline"
Earth: clouds, a walk through a sandstorm that would kill an unprotected person, a maze of caverns, trapped human beings. I believe that the city we are in grew up inside one of the huge bomb shelters built here before the Last War. We are in gaudily appointed rooms that I find irritating, but they seem to suit the other people from the ship.
I haven't buried my friend's body yet; I can't until I know the customs. I'm acquainted with no one. Whom should I ask? Beggars? Slaves? (There are slaves in this society. How can I do nothing, knowing that?)
I can't stay in the Palace, I can't stay with the pseudosibs and their people. I have no place here, I want none. But I haven't any other place either.
Am I just afraid? When something happens that I can't accept, that I as an individual could protest, will I rationalize inaction?
I went outside Stone Palace today. I had to get out. I walked along a street of bars and pleasure houses, where people sell services, their bodies, drugs in any form or effect. And beggars—I have never been approached by beggars before. People used to try to press coins into my hands when I helped my poet through the streets. I regretted not having money or anything else to give the crippled children in the city, until I realized that their deformities are induced, not congenital. They have mutilated themselves, or they have been mutilated.
How could we leave earth to this?
During the following days, Mischa watched the pseudosibs from a distance and found out all she could about them from the people with whom they dealt. She saw that their section of Stone Palace was much less guarded than Blaisse's, and that they seemed not to have such a pathological fear of the city. This encouraged her. Yet time had passed; she was forced to take note of it: her immediate need was to replenish her store of tribute before her uncle and Gemmi called her again. She spied on Stone Palace from the alpha-helix all one day, but did not approach it, and when the lights above began to dim, she left her own shabby section and climbed down to the Circle.
She had been watching one of the bright little import shops facing the Palace. A recess one level above the shop gave her a place to sit where she was not obviously spying on it. The climb had tired her; she kept dozing off as she waited. When the ceiling lights faded to their lowest intensity for the night, the merchant pulled heavy curtains across the multicolored sparkles in the windows and locked his door. Mischa already knew that he lived behind the shop. That was not in itself a hindrance; she was by training and preference a sneakthief, and quiet. It only remained for her to watch his place throughout one night, to discover whether he had a companion contract or a security subscription.
The patrol did stop once, early on. Mischa inspected the Family people hopefully, but neither of the pair was the ice-eyed administrator. She must be long since promoted from foot patrol, but Mischa would have liked to rob a place whose protection was that one's responsibility.
Mischa waited until the night was half over. Finally, doubting her ability to stay awake another four hours, another one hour, she walked slowly home.
The next night, the hours passed slowly. Mischa watched from a higher vantage point. The security patrol stopped only once, at the same time as the night before. Mischa knew it was good: she knew she could walk in and take what she wanted whenever she decided to.
Perspiration broke out on her forehead. She held out her hand and found it trembling. She clenched her fist and the new scars on her wrists turned white. Her body tried to tell her that she had been too badly hurt too recently, that she was still weak, that she was tired from her vigil. She climbed down across the roofs until she was over the shop. Her knees and her stomach felt the same, frightened. When she drove the shaking out with anger, it was anger at herself and at her fear: tomorrow when the time came to return, would she find some excuse against it? She might fool herself into being too tired, too weak, any of a hundred things. The possibility of that much self-deception scared her as much as the possibility that she was losing her nerve.
There was no motion nearby, little sound, an aura of life, but sleeping life. Lying flat on the roof, she listened, and received a reward of silence. Looking over the edge, she found the windows dark and curtained and the door firmly closed.
Chris had taught her to pick locks so early that she could not remember the lessons. He had been a good thief; she was better. She swung down to the next level. The shop door was recessed, putting her in deep shadow. With her lockpicks she gently probed the double locks. Opening them took longer than she liked, but the door finally clicked open, with neither the shrill scream of a scare-alarm nor the low reverberation of a warning device in the merchant's sleeping quarters.
Mischa eased through the doorway. Inside the shop, semiprecious stones glowed deep black or glinted brightly. As Mischa shut the door, the outside lights flickered. For half a second the shop was a shattered rainbow. It would soon be light in Center.
The single doorway at the back of the shop was closed only by a curtain. Mischa crept quietly about, checking for silent-alarm wires, finding none.
The glass cases were locked and uninteresting. Everything on display was semiprecious or artificial, and set. Unset stones were less trouble, harder to trace.
Beneath the cases, shallow drawers in tiers of four each opened toward the back. Narrow panels separated them. The drawers were locked, but no more securely than the front door. They held boxes of pendants and rings and anklets of no higher quality than the jewelry already displayed. Unperturbed, Mischa stopped actively searching, sat back against the wall, and simply looked, as she did for the moon on the nights she was outside. The sky-glow behind the clouds would catch on the edge of her vision, not where her sight was sharpest. This search was similar, but she made her mind act, rather than her eyes.
She knelt again before the drawers and slid her fingers beneath their lower edges. She tapped the panels between them, listening for any hollowness, and tugged at them gently. One opened, swinging upward and outward smoothly and quickly. The hinge clicked faintly; the panel remained open.