What about Kynan? And Koot? Had they survived the break-up of the raft? Or had Margo alone failed to drown in the stormy surf? One of the Portuguese, the man in the metal armor, spoke roughly to her. Margo had no idea what he'd said. The man stooped over her, spoke again, then backhanded her. She tried to get away and felt a tremendous blow connect. She didn't feel anything at all for a long time after that. When Margo regained her senses, someone had stripped her naked. The traders had clustered around her, leering. They'd started to unfasten their clothes.
Margo whimpered.
When the first one shoved her knees apart, Margo squeezed shut her eyes.
Malcolm ...
It took the bastards a long time to finish.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The withered-sea landscape garden of sand and stones in the corner of Kit's office had lost its ability to soothe. He slumped in his chair and shoved aside the mountain of government forms to be filled out, then stared at the raked sand and dry boulders. Eight weeks. It had felt more like eight years. Kit hadn't believed it possible to miss someone so keenly after such a short time much of it spent arguing, at that. His apartment felt empty. The Down Time had lost its appeal. The Commons would have been utterly dead-flat boring if not for the occasional excitement of a crow-sized pterodactyl raiding lunch from shocked hands or momentarily unguarded plates.
After a while, even the giggle of watching tourists dive under lunch tables had worn off. All that was left was the intolerable weight of government paperwork and the long hours wondering where she'd gone. He'd gone up-time long enough to hire an investigative agency to locate her birthplace in Minnesota and discover her real name, as well as search other time terminals to see if she might have gone scouting at one of them. So far, the agency had drawn an absolute blank. As far as anyone could tell, Margo had dropped off the face of the earth.
Which she might have, for all practical purposes, if she'd gone scouting from another terminal.
Whatever the solution to the mystery of Margo's whereabouts, TT-86 no longer felt quite so much like home.
Kit ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "Maybe I ought to retire up time." To do that, he'd have to close his accounts, find a buyer for the Neo Edo, locate a place to live in the real world, which had changed a lot and not for the better, so far as he could tell during the years he'd been down time.
Kit grunted. "I'm too tired to leave and too bored to stay."
So he picked up a stack of bills and started scanning them for errors, just to avoid government forms. He was halfway through an itemized bill from the library when an entry caught his attention. He hadn't done any research on fuel-consumption and lift-capacity for Floating Wedge ultralight airships.
"What the ..."
He checked the access code assigned to the bill. It was Margo's. He grunted. So she had been using the library, after all. Then he noticed the date. Kit swivelled in his chair, punching up gate departures for the past two months. There was the day Porta Romae had cycled, the day his granddaughter had walked back out of his life. The library entry on the bill was dated seven days afterward.
"Oh, hell, she couldn't even keep her goddamned password a secret. How many other charges did this thief run up against my account?" He found several additional entries, neatly itemized by subject matter and data source as well as computer time logged onto the mainframe. Each one post-dated Margo's precipitous departure through Primary.
Kit slid the bill angrily to one side of his desk. Unless he could locate the access-code pirate, he'd be stuck for one helluva research bill. He switched computer screens, typing out a simple monitoring program to set off an alarm the next time Margo's access code was entered into the system, then e-mailed messages to Brian Hendrickson and Mike Benson, alerting them to the fact that data piracy was occurring.
Then he called Bull Morgan.
"What's up, Kit?"
"We've got a data pirate loose on the station. Someone's used Margo's access code to bill research to my account."
"I'll make a note of it. You're sure it's an account pirate?"
"Margo left a week before the first incident. Went up Primary to God alone knows where. Or when."
Bull sympathized. "I'll do some checking, put Mike Benson on it."
"I've already e-mailed him about it and Brian Hendrickson, too. Thanks, Bull."
He hung up and glared at everything in sight. Then sighed, resigned himself to a long day, and settled resolutely to work again. When the phone rang less than a quarter of an hour later, he cradled the receiver between shoulder and ear.
"Yeah, Kit here."
"Kit, it's Bull."
He sat back in his chair, faintly surprised. "Damn, I knew you were efficient, but I didn't expect you to catch the rat this fast."
Bull chuckled. "We haven't. But I did turn up something odd. I thought you'd want to know."
"Yeah?"
"Margo passed through Primary, all right. Then she came back about a week later."
He sat straight up. "What?"
"She came back, but hasn't logged out again. Medical hasn't out-processed her records, the ATF has no trace of her leaving a second time through Customs..."
"But!" He closed his mouth again. "What about other gates?"
"Mike's working on it. Hang on a sec."
Kit waited in a sweat. Then Bull came back on. "No, she didn't log out through any of the other gates, either. Not the tourist ones, anyway, and nobody's filed paperwork to scout the unknown gates off Commons."
"Bull, she has to be somewhere. La-La Land's a closed environment."
A brief silence greeted him. "Kit, there are unstable gates."
He shut his eyes. "No. Not even Margo's that stupid. She was scared spitless of the Nexus Gate and after Orleans ..."
"Well, she's still here somewhere, then, avoiding you."
"For seven weeks? La-La Land isn't that big. Besides, Margo couldn't stay out of trouble for seven minutes, never mind seven weeks. If she were here, somebody would've seen her. She's not on the station." He thought hard. "Do me a favor, would you? See if anyone else is missing? I'll start asking around on my own, see what I can scare up. Maybe a small gate opened up somewhere we don't know about. Or maybe somebody went through one of the unexplored gates without permission." It'd be just like that little idiot to pull a stunt like that.
"Sure thing, Kit. I'll run some checks and let you know."
"Thanks."
Kit hung up and said several biting things to the withered-sea landscape garden, then started placing phone calls.
Kit didn't have much luck. Nobody he talked to had heard a whisper about an unknown gate. A couple of down timers who worked as Time Tours baggage handlers recalled seeing Margo return through Primary, but they had no idea where she'd gone afterward. Kit's granddaughter had managed to vanish without a trace from the heart of one of the most gossip-riddled communities in the world.
Then, when he least expected it, Malcolm Moore showed up.
The younger man had avoided Kit's company for eight full weeks. If Kit arrived someplace and Malcolm was already there, he made excuses to leave within moments. He turned down casual invitations to the Down Time for dinner and had become in general a hard-working recluse. Kit felt sorry for him. Clearly, Malcolm had taken Margo's rebellion and defection deeply to heart, blaming himself entirely. Kit had tried to apologize, to tell him it wasn't his fault, but Malcolm wasn't returning Kit's e-mail or phone calls, either.