A Few Good Men (31 page)

“They might have sent him to a seacity half across the globe,” I said.

This time it was Martha who snorted, which goes to show that rude behavior ran in that family. It made me like them a terrible lot. “Like that bunch of paranoids would trust him too far from their reach. Let’s face it: Nat—and you—are threats to the nearby Good Men and to the little alliance amid this group which are all within twelve hours—tops—broom flight of each other. Less than that in a flyer. Yes, all the Good Men will unite to punish the murder of one of them, but will they bestir themselves to do something about it, when their domains are half across the world? And will the local Good Men, who have no contact with them, trust them with a valued prisoner? I bet you not.”

Jan sighed. “Then they are fools, because this will be the shot that was heard around the world.”

Martha gave him a concerned look, then nodded. “We shall pray it is so.”

Cloak and Skirt

First I want to register the fact that I’d never before been prayed over or, for that matter, blessed. It was a very odd experience, particularly since—while I wouldn’t be willing to bet that there was nothing after death—I was far from being convinced that there was an afterlife, or a God.

But before we left, Martha put her hands on my shoulder and Jan’s and murmured something about God watching over us in our endeavor, and allowing us to find Nat and bring him home safe. And then she stood on tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. Before that could register, Jan patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. They headed out towards the terrace, brooms in hand.

“Wait,” I said. “It might not be safe.”

“Safer than in recent days,” Simon said. He looked at me, again, with those oddly shrewd eyes, above the wealth of improbably gaudy ruffles. “If you are right and they want us to run our heads into the noose, they’re not going to try to capture us before, are they? That would stop them getting the big name. Besides, it’s you they want to capture. And besides all, we’re the Brooms of Doom, we know how to fight.” He gave Abigail a lopsided smile. “Now, Angel, you bring him to the lair . . . oh, by midnight, and we’ll discuss what we found if anything. I still say we’ll find nothing and will be left with looking at high-security facilities. I don’t know which one I hope for. They’re both bad situations for us.”

“Angel?” I said, feeling oddly protective and like this was something that Sam should have been here to hear.

Abigail shrugged. “Sounds good, doesn’t it? Means nothing. See, I grew up with Nat and Max and Martha, and all of them, and all their friends too treated me like a little sister. Martha started calling me
Angel
, so then they all did. But they all treat me like I’m a little kid and Simon is the worst of them. He keeps warning me about boys, as if I were ten, instead of twenty.”

“Would you be very upset with me if I also started warning you about boys?” I asked. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was striking and full of energy and fire, and I suspected like most self-sufficient young women, she’d be curiously blind to the workings of her own heart, much less to the possibly less than honorable ideas of any young men approaching her.

She gave me a side long glance. “Not at this point. I expect everyone I meet will become as bad as Nat.”

“Is Nat bad? That way?”

Her eyelids came down halfway and she sighed. “We’d better go out through the tunnel,” she said, stepping to the door and locking it. “We’d better make it as stealthy as possible. I’ll go out first. Despite what Simon says, there’s just the bare possibility they’ll be scanning for you specifically. I still feel you’re a high-value target. If I were the Good Men, I’d still try to capture you, anyway.”

While she was talking, I’d opened my secret compartment and was dressing in broomer leathers and—because I wasn’t sure where exactly our search would take us, in a pair of longer, just-below-the-knee boots with a serious look of utility-wear about them. It was the type of boots that were worn by workers who had to wade through low-flowing rivers or step into flooded basements to repair pipes. Though they were leather, they were made in such a way as to be impermeable. I had no idea who had thought to furnish me with a pair of those, but whoever it was I loved him or her. These would keep my feet warm should there be a long flight ahead, and they would keep them dry and clean, should we need to wade through one of the piles of refuse quite normal in certain areas of town.

When I was done, a look in the mirror told me I looked like a dangerous broomer indeed. Good, since I was going to go into those certain—by which one should read dangerous—areas of town accompanied by Abigail. I figured I needed all the intimidation I could muster. Sam would expect it of me, and perhaps Nat too.

I asked her again, when we were in the tunnel. “Do you feel that Nat is overprotective?”

She gave me one of her sidelong glances. “That would be an understatement,” she said, at last. “You have to understand that Father is always very busy. The Keeva—your property is extensive and hard to manage, particularly since—”

“He circumvents some of the more outrageous orders, yes,” I said.

“Yeah. And Mother is big in the Daughters of Liberty. Her training is in communications and propaganda and . . .” Abigail shrugged. “For some reason, this got Nat thinking that he was as good as a surrogate father to all of us. All of us, even Martha. And me. I mean, I don’t mind his acting like that towards the younger kids, because someone has to look after them and James is too much like Nat and inclined to take the bit between his teeth, but by the founders, Martha is his exact age, and I’m almost their age, and what business does he have treating us like we’re young innocents in need of sheltering? It’s like something doesn’t fit together in his head and he . . . Well, he has this compulsion to . . . When we trained in the countryside, one time, I saw this chicken. She had a clutch of chicks, you know, but she didn’t seem to be satisfied with them, and she kept trying to shove the cat’s three kittens under her wings, too, to protect them. And I looked at her and thought that was Nat to the life.”

I couldn’t help a chuckle, though it hit me, immediately afterwards, and with sobering certainty that this explained why Nat had devoted so much time to explaining things to me and trying to help me. It wasn’t that he liked me. He’d said, many times, that he didn’t, or at least that he wasn’t sure if he did. But he still tried to protect me—even though I was fourteen years older than he.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It’s endearing in a way, and I realize he takes on a great burden, trying to make sure we’re okay, and also that he has saved all of us—except perhaps Martha—from problems. But he tends to manage and . . . parent everyone. He even did to Max, which . . .” The sidelong glance again, and I realized she had no idea what I knew.

“I know how it was between them,” I said, though I suddenly wondered if I did. I’d assumed the horrible torture that Max’s seeming rejection had been to Nat for a year had come from Nat’s being the dependent member of the relationship. But if he weren’t, what had been working on him? Guilt? Guilt that something had happened to Max and Nat couldn’t save him? That was bad. If it had been just moving his dependence away from a partner who made the decisions and extended him protection—as their relative social positions would indicate—then when he found out that Max was in fact dead; when he executed the body that had been Max’s, he would have been free. But if he felt guilty on the possibility of Max having been brain washed, then finding out Max had been killed, and having to destroy the body to kill the murderer would have increased that guilt to an unbearable amount. Perhaps taking me, metaphorically, under his grubby wing was a psychological attempt to compensate.

“Which was vaguely creepy,” Abigail completed. She pressed her lips together and looked stern. “I feel very strongly one shouldn’t parent one’s lover.” And to the chuckle this surprised out of me. “You might think I’m silly, but I would hate it horribly, on either of end of that. I don’t want someone I love—when I love someone, that is—to parent me, and I’d hate to do it to them.” She was quiet a moment, while we dropped to a lower level of the tunnel. “Though to be honest, Max didn’t seem to mind. I never knew if he minded it, but put up with it because of Nat, or if he really found it convenient to have Nat tell him when it was time to eat and ask him if he’d remembered to brush his teeth.”

“No, really,” I said. “He didn’t—”

“Ask him about brushing his teeth? No. Not since Max was about ten, at least, but he did buy most of Max’s clothes, and told him what to wear when, and Max just . . . let him.”

“I take it you don’t let him do that? To that extent?” I was thinking of the grey suits all the siblings wore.

“I hope not,” she said. “But it is awfully convenient, and awfully comfortable, to let other people take care of all your small problems, you know? Before you know it, you’re relying on them, and even when you don’t, it’s like . . . It’s like having a boulder at your back, you know? No one can sneak up behind, and if you’re tired, you can lean back against it. That’s . . . that’s why it’s so odd not to have Nat, not to know if he’s alive or dead. It’s . . . it’s like not knowing if the sun will come out tomorrow.” She turned back to look at me. “Lucius, we must bring Nat back. And he must be alive. He must.”

I told her what she wanted to hear. Look, I’m as rational as the next man, and as willing to face the truth, but what good would it do to shatter her hope, or even to seed doubt? Would it make it any easier for her to accept Nat’s death, if he was dead? I didn’t think so. If we found Nat dead, it was going to be a reverberating blow anyway, one that would shake her to the core, and possibly me too. All that telling her this was the overwhelming possibility now would do was to make her worry more from the beginning, and perhaps make it harder for her to be effective in rescue, which in turn might assure that even if Nat were alive, he would die when we got him.

I don’t know about you, but moral purity must always take second place to saving a man’s life, in my consideration. So, I lied. “We will find him, Abigail. And we’ll bring him back alive. I promise you.”

She rubbed the back of her fingers across her eyes and turned around. “What a fool I’m being. As though you had any choice over whether he’s alive or dead right now, or even if we can get him back alive, even if he is. I shouldn’t ask you stupid questions.”

“We will bring him back alive, if I have to move heaven and earth and time to do it,” I said, and was shocked to hear the earnestness in my voice which came out somewhere between a whisper and a growl. “If it’s something I can do, I will do it, Abigail.”

She didn’t turn back, which was a little disappointing after such a dramatic statement on my part. Instead, she nodded. “Yes, let’s get on with it and make haste.” And then added, with disarming frankness, “You see, I’d never realized how important Nat was to me. He’d just . . . He was just always there. I didn’t think about it. I thought . . . I thought he’d always be there. I’m not prepared for the alternative. I’ve already lost Max, who was like a brother to me.”

Making Haste Strangely

We were in the fifth broomer bar of the night. Which is to say that all the broomer bars we’d been in so far were starting to run together in my mind.

It wasn’t that difficult. Broomer bars are, if not all alike, all of a type. They tend to be in the lower economic areas of seacities, and sometimes of natural islands. For all I know there are several on continents too—brooms would seem to be a damn good idea when getting over vast, sparsely populated regions. But my area, the area I’d spent my broomer years in, and the area I was interested in right now, was not near a continent, so I didn’t know.

Broomer bars were always in the lower class area, often in the parts that had been roofed over by the construction of platforms for new development. They tended to be sparsely decorated—though one or two of them, perhaps being owned by people with aspirations to ambience, had pictures of brooms on the walls. Or pictures of bosomy girls riding brooms in the type of outfit that was guaranteed to give them frostbite within two seconds, even at lower altitudes and lower speeds. Perhaps my lack of appreciation for the art had to do with the fact that it did nothing for me. Or perhaps I had the type of mind that would analyze the incongruence of such pictures even if they depicted male broomers in next to nothing. I rather suspected that. It was a handicap.

But I wasn’t going to be able to test the theory in this particular bar, oh, so not originally called Brooming It and located in the lowest reaches of Syracuse Seacity, probably not more than a few meters of dimatough up from whatever remained of Never-Never. I might have been able to, if the owners had been inclined to art, because it took me about five seconds—I’m slow that way—after we went in, to realize that the clientele was almost exclusively male, that the broomer suits, even if not necessarily expensive, were better tailored than the ones we’d been seeing, suggesting used suits got fixed to fit the new owners, and that Abigail was not getting the normal-wide eyed wolfish looks, but rather puzzled stares.

Abigail must have realized the nature of the place at about the same time, because she looked back at me, a startled expression in her eyes. I grinned back at her, reassuringly. “You might have to protect me,” I said. And someone—Nat, when we got him back—would have to cure the girl of that unladylike snort.

I leaned down, to speak in her ear. “We won’t stay long,” I said. “Since it’s unlikely you’ll know anyone here, right?” I knew there were exclusively male, exclusively homosexual broomers’ lairs. The best known was perhaps the Lavender Buzzers, which had approached Ben and me to join, way back when. They were, however, big time serious broomers, with the sort of connections that allowed them to get squeeze from drug transports in order not to get robbed. Though they knew us only by our first names, if we joined, they would sooner or later attract attention they didn’t need. It was a bad combination all around. Neither Ben or I needed the money or had the drive—at least I didn’t—that impelled the rest of them. And having us aboard would call attention to them. Which considering in how many places in the world attraction for a member of the same sex fell under capital crimes or just short of it, would be unfair to them. And to us. But I’d had friends in the Buzzers and a half dozen other lairs. I just hadn’t socialized much outside my own lair so I hadn’t frequented the watering places.