Jadwiga’s lower lip stuck out as she considered this. “Well, she told you not to ride in the sun, and you don’t listen to that, either.”
This delaying argument allowed Enrique time to overtake his quarry—he grabbed for the albino boy’s arm. Enrique did not so much pull him off as hold him while the pony jinked out from under him. The animal simulated a bolt in a desultory fashion but, as soon as it had trotted a few meters out of reach, put its head down to tear at the grass. Ingi fell on his feet and twisted out of Enrique’s grip.
Whatever he was about to try next was interrupted when Jadwiga, beginning to yell something else at him, was seized by a prolonged coughing fit that ended with her spitting out blood onto the ground. She peered at the thick red blob, appearing more peeved than surprised or alarmed. Her six-fingered left hand swept a little dirt over it, as if to cover it up. Ingi ran over and crouched by her side, making a frustrated wave. He finally offered her the hem of her own skirt by way of handkerchief to wipe her lips, which she accepted indifferently.
Ekaterin, in a moment of inspiration, sat back down, motioning Enrique to do the same.
“Hi, there,” she said, trying for some cross between maternal warmth and drawing-room politeness, in the hopes that either the former would be soothing or the latter would prove contagious, or at least quelling. “You must be Ingi, right? Jadwiga was just telling me about you. My name is Ekaterin, and my friend here”—a nod across—“is named Enrique.”
Enrique looked as though he would have preferred Dr. Borgos, but, getting a closer look at their inadvertent young hosts, quite plainly came to a prudent decision to let Ekaterin-the-Barrayaran take point on this one. Slowly, he lowered himself to the ground as well. Ingi, evidently feeling himself outvoted, sank to his knees. The grazing pony ignored them all, moving off a little farther.
“I saw you,” admitted Ingi. “In the woods.” The curiosity he had displayed in the scans from last night seemed to be regaining the upper hand. “In your suits.” His gaze kept returning to Ekaterin, de-suited or at least de-hooded.
“Spying on us, were you?” said Enrique. “You took our bugs!”
Ingi looked more shifty than guilty. “You left them. Anything left in the zone is ours.”
“Nice try,” said Ekaterin, “but no. You also must have seen Vadim with us. Vadim talked to you the other night, didn’t he? Told you to stay away, away from our plot, maybe?”
A shot more than figuratively in the dark, remembering Vadim’s little patrol into the gloaming, but it won a familiar squirm. Ingi really must be about her son Nikki’s age, caught on that uncomfortable boundary between eager and surly, equally desperate for praise and escape. “Maybe.”
“We know you took our bugs; we have vids. And we found them in the shed just now,” said Enrique sternly. “Was that all of them? Or did you put any of them somewhere else, or lose any along the way?”
Wary shrug. “Most of them, I guess.”
“Why?” Enrique almost wailed.
Another shrug. “Jaddie liked them. They were a present.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to give them back—”
Ekaterin held up a hand to stem this premature point. “A present. Was it her birthday?” It was nearly halfway around the year from Winterfair.
“Not exactly. She’s kind of sick.” White fingers pulled up shreds of grass, and the boy looked away. “They seemed better than flowers. She can pick her own flowers.”
“Do you know how sick?” Do you know your friend is dying?
A downward stare. “Yeah.”
Yeah. Backcountry children in general were not so insulated from death as their city counterparts. Nor birth, nor illness, nor any other part of life. Least of all in this—entirely illegal, Ekaterin was reminded—squatter encampment.
“These bugs are special, and very important to us,” Ekaterin began. “Important to the future of the zone, and of the district.”
“She says they made them!” Jadwiga gestured at Ingi. “Do you believe that? How can people make bugs?”
Ingi shook his head.
At some point, when they went public, Ekaterin was going to have to explain the radbugs to backcountry district subjects; some of the creakiest oldsters were perhaps little better educated than these lost children. Call it practice. “Enrique started with ordinary bugs, then bred these for a special job. You do know that the zone is the zone, forbidden to people, because it is contaminated with radioactives?”
“Rads are bad.” Jadwiga nodded. “Ma says.”
Ingi was watching Ekaterin suspiciously. “Vadim says city people overreact. That’s good, because it keeps them away. We don’t want people to come here!”
Ekaterin hesitated, then forged on. “To simplify it very much—what they really do is a bit more complicated—our radbugs eat rads. We think we can use them to clean all the poison out of the zone and make it a place people can live again.”
Enrique cringed visibly at this fast-forward version, but had the wit not to step on her lines. She could tell it hurt, though.
“We live here now,” said Jadwiga.
“Live without getting sick, though… no thyroid or bone cancer, or other, subtler damage.” Ekaterin touched her throat; Ingi rocked back. Jadwiga just frowned. “The thing is, the contamination that the radbugs eat makes them radioactive—full of rads—themselves. That’s why I made Enrique put the trefoils, the lights, the—the glowing yellow flowers—on their backs, to be a warning to people not to touch. The brighter the light, the more poisonous the bug is, and you shouldn’t handle it.”
Ingi’s brow wrinkled as he puzzled this through. “Why don’t the bugs die, then? If they’re really eating poison?”
“They do, eventually. But not before they’ve collected quite a lot of contaminants for removal. It’s… really rather heroic, when you think about it.” Or would be, if insects in general weren’t basically little machines to start with. Biochemical machines, to be sure.
Jadwiga looked deeply dismayed. “They’ll all die? But they’re pretty!”
Ingi said scornfully, “Everything dies.” But then shut his mouth abruptly. Conscious of his own tactlessness? Interesting.
Ekaterin was conscious of a strong impulse to strap both these feckless youngsters into the back of her lightflyer and whisk them straight to Hassadar General. Without waiting for whatever grownups had permitted this to go on. And then come back to deal directly with it all leading a squad of…. well, perhaps not rangers. Hassadar municipal guards? Vorkosigan armsmen? Drat it, we’d entrusted the ranger cadre to prevent this sort of nightmare!
Not that a squad of Hassadar guardsmen, or even their own very loyal armsmen, would greet being ordered into the zone with enthusiasm, suited up for it or not. The devil is in the details, Miles was fond of saying. She must need more details, because it was certain that full understanding of this devilish situation was still eluding her.
“Has Vadim ever offered to take either of you two anywhere? To a doctor, perhaps?” Ekaterin tried again, addressing Ingi this time.
Ingi flinched back, and cried, “No! We can’t leave! They’d have to shoot the dogs and goats and ponies!” Jadwiga bobbed in agitation, nodding.
It was true that one of the rangers’ jobs was to cull the feral dog packs, although usually only when incursions were reported by the zone’s few rural neighbors. These hunts had formerly been conducted on horseback, with the aid of the rangers’ own dogs, but nowadays from the air, with the aid of scanners, Ekaterin understood. Although backcountry folks were just as likely to deal with such problems by themselves—no one had a tally of how much antique military ordnance was still floating illegally around the district, discreetly cached.