Coming of Age (18 page)

What's going to happen to
me?

“But I'm afraid you're not going to get to brag to anyone about it,” Gavra continued. “From now on you must consider your ability to read a complete and total secret.
Total.
If we find out you've told anyone at all, you'll face total loss of all your hive points and maybe further punishment as well. Do you understand?”

It took several heartbeats for that to sink in; and when it did, it was like flying into the cool of an unexpected cloudburst on a stifling July day. The relief that went rippling through Lisa's body was as intense as the fear it washed away, and it left her weak and even trembling slightly. “Oh, I—Gavra, I—oh, yes, I understand completely. I won't tell anyone—I promise. I—oh, Gavra, I was
so
afraid I would be—you know.”

The barest hint of a smile flickered over Gavra's face. “I understand. But I'm serious about what'll happen if you tell anyone. Don't forget that.”

“I won't. Thank you for—oh!” Halfway to her feet, Lisa abruptly sat down again. “I almost forgot—Daryl! Can you help me find him now?”

Gavra's face had turned to wood again. “I'm sorry, Lisa, but I think you'd better forget about Daryl, permanently.”

The tension flooded back into Lisa's body with a suddenness that threatened to bring up her dinner. “What do you mean? What have they done to him?”

“There aren't specific rules against you getting books from a teen; but there
are
rules against him giving books to you,” Gavra said grimly. “Daryl knew the rules and has to accept his proper punishment for breaking them.”

“No!” The word burst from Lisa's lips like a small thunderclap as a hundred horrible images crowded into her mind. “No, they can't! It's
my
fault Daryl did it—
I'm
the one who made him give me the books. They should punish
me,
not him!”

Gavra shook her head. “He knew the rules,” she repeated. “In this world you have to take the responsibility for your actions—your
own
actions, no one else's. You may have made the original suggestion, Lisa, but the decision he made was his own.”

Lisa's breath felt like fire in her lungs. “What have they done to him?” she whispered. “Please tell me. I was his friend.”

The Senior frowned. “Are you thinking … ? Oh, good heavens, girl—no, no, he's alive and perfectly well. How could you think otherwise?”

The reassuring words made no impression whatsoever on Lisa's panic. “Where is he? If he's all right, I should be able to see him.”

“I'm afraid that can't be allowed. I'm sorry.”

“Then what have they done to him?”

“
Nothing,
Lisa. Really. I promise.”

Slowly, Lisa got to her feet, and for the first time in her life said to Gavra Norward, “I don't believe you.”

Gavra said nothing; but the quiet pain in her eyes made Lisa feel even worse than she already did. But she forced herself to continue. “I don't know if you're lying to me or if someone else is lying to you first. But they told Daryl that Hari was all right, too, after he tried to kill himself.” She moved toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Gavra asked.

“To find Daryl,” Lisa said, her vision suddenly blurring. Angrily, she blinked back the tears, the effort making the soreness in her throat worse. “I have to know what this—this punishment of his was.”

“Lisa, he's
all right.
They just don't want you and Daryl to see each other again.”

“I'll believe that when I see him.” She focused on the doorknob, teeking it around—

“Lisa. Wait.”

The preteen hesitated at the command in Gavra's tone, torn between her frightening new spirit of rebellion and her instinctive respect for hive authority. Slowly, she turned back to face the Senior, letting her teekay grip on the knob dissolve. “What?”

“If you go charging off tonight or miss work tomorrow I'll have no choice but to report your actions to the police and … certain others. However”—Gavra's eyes caught Lisa's with unexpected intensity—“as long as you behave reasonably, your weekend time is your own, and I have no official control over your activities. You'll have a better chance if you wait until Saturday to do anything about this. Will you do that?”

Lisa stared at her, indecision churning her stomach. Every muscle in her body was screaming at her to start the search
now
—the last thing she wanted was to sit around worrying for an extra day and a half. But even with her emotions riding high, the tiny core of common sense within her knew Gavra's suggestion made sense.
If …
“You're not going to warn them, are you?” she asked flatly.

Gavra shook her head, and Lisa realized it had all come down to a single, very simple, choice: would she or would she not trust the woman standing before her.

It was, strangely enough, a remarkably easy decision to make. For all Gavra's talk of punishment and official duties, Lisa could sense—as she should have known all along—that the Senior was on her side in this mess. “All right,” she said at last. “Where would you suggest I start looking?”

“I don't know,” Gavra said, her voice tinged with relief. “But you might begin with the intro schools in the nearest towns. All I know is that he's not in Barona anymore.”

“All right.” Lisa turned and finished teeking open the door. Halfway through the opening, she paused and looked back at Gavra. “Thank you,” she said.

“Don't worry about him,” the Senior advised her quietly. “Search as long as you like, but don't let panic drive you to do anything foolish. Other people aren't likely to be sympathetic as I am to what you're doing.”

Lisa swallowed, thinking about her little invasion of Lee Intro.
Does Gavra know about that?
she wondered. “I'll be careful,” she said. Teeking the door closed behind her, she left the office.

She spent the next two hours in one of the preteen girls' lounges, watching her thoughts spin in their painful circles and feeling her emotions burn down to an exhausted ache. Mercifully, none of her friends came by to talk … or perhaps something in her manner discouraged approach. When the lights-out warning sounded, she went immediately to her floor's bathroom, completing her bedtime preparations quickly enough to be out before the main crush arrived. Back in her room, she gave one-word answers to Sheelah's cheerful queries about her day until the other took the hint and shut up.

For a long time afterward she lay awake in the darkness, listening to Sheelah's steady breathing and watching the faint pattern of light the curtains allowed into the room. Finally, around one-thirty, she fell asleep.

Her dreams were not pleasant ones.

T
HE SIX O'CLOCK WAKE-UP
buzzer literally blasted Lisa out of bed, startling her enough to cause an involuntary half-meter teekay bounce into the air. Settling back to her tangled sheets, she rubbed her eyes and took a deep, ragged breath.

“You okay?” came a cautious voice from the other bed.

Lisa ran a tongue over her lips. Her pounding heart was beginning to recover from the shock now, but the headache throbbing in time with it was showing no signs of going away. Her stomach was oddly tender, and her entire body felt like it had been pulled repeatedly through a wringer. “I'm fine,” she told Sheelah tiredly.

The other preteen was out of bed now, eyeing Lisa with a mixture of suspicion and concern. “Fine, huh? You look like something a Seven would haul in out of the rain and ask permission to keep. And you were tossing and moaning half the night. I think you're coming down with something. You want me to go call the nurse?”

“No, I'll be okay,” Lisa insisted, teeking her clothes over from the chair where she'd laid them out the previous night. “I didn't sleep well; I'm just tired. Um … I didn't say anything when I was tossing around, did I?”

Sheelah frowned. “Nothing I could understand. But if you want to talk about it now, I'm game.”

“Talk about what?” Lisa asked, heart starting to speed up again.

“Whatever's bothering you.” Sheelah sat down cross-legged on her bed. “Either you're sick or else you've got one monster of a problem eating away at you. Come on—you want to tell me what it is?”

For a long moment Lisa was sorely tempted. She
wanted
to talk about it, certainly, and from past experience she knew Sheelah could be trusted with even the most personal of secrets. But Gavra's warning still echoed through her mind, and she knew it wouldn't be fair to Sheelah to get her involved in this, too. “Thanks,” she told her roommate, “but this is something I have to work out for myself.”

Sheelah's expression said she was unconvinced, but she nodded anyway. “Okay, it's up to you. But I'm available anytime you change your mind. And I still think you should go see the nurse.”

“Right after breakfast,” Lisa promised.

Surprisingly enough—at least to Lisa—she was feeling much better by the time breakfast was over. The food had helped both her headache and tender stomach, and the normal morning activities had eased the worst of the kinks out of her muscles. The hive nurse, as expected, found no evidence of any sickness, and a few minutes later she was flying with her work crew toward their current construction site.

Unfortunately, as her physical condition improved, she found her mind concentrating more and more on Daryl and the awesome task confronting her. Tigris was a horribly big world for them to hide a single teen in, and the more she considered that fact, the more hopeless it all seemed.
I'm going to find him,
she'd declared confidently to Gavra. Was the Senior even now chuckling at such foolishness? Her cheeks burned at the thought.

“Hey! Wait up!” a faint voice came through the roar of wind in her ears.

Startled, Lisa turned around to find her five girls lagging nearly ten meters behind her. Slowing down, she let them catch up.

“What's the hurry?” Beryl asked with the righteous indignation only a Nine could muster. “You trying for Miss Speed Demon of Three-oh-eight or something?”

“Sorry,” Lisa mumbled. “I guess I wasn't paying attention.”

“Good way to fly into a building,” Beryl said, only partly mollified.

Gritting her teeth, Lisa flew on in silence, furious at herself for getting so wrapped up in her problems. It would be better once they got to work, she promised herself; as soon as she had something else demanding her attention, she would be able to push Daryl back into a corner of her mind for the rest of the day. At least she
hoped
she would be able to.

But it turned out not to be that easy. Standing on one of the bare fourteenth-floor girders of the new building as she directed her girls in lifting and placing new girders in position, she had a great deal of time where all she had to do was watch … and try as she might, she was unable to keep her mind on what was happening. Still, that was more annoying than dangerous. Her crew had been doing building work together for nearly five months now, and she could trust them to know what they were doing.

An hour later, that casual assumption was shattered.

It happened without the slightest warning, at least without any that penetrated Lisa's preoccupation. One moment the heavy girder was resting in midair between two uprights, Neoma and Rena hovering near its center as welders at each end blew clouds of sparks into the light breeze—and the next moment there was a yelp of pain as the heavy steel beam wrenched itself free and plummeted toward the ground.

Her mind busy with other things, it cost Lisa a fraction of a second to switch gears … and in that blank moment she did precisely the worst thing she could possibly have done. Instead of staying where she was and trying to teek from a solid footing, she jumped off and angled away from the building in an attempt to get a better view of the falling girder amid the array of steelwork below. It wasn't until she tried to teek the girder to a halt that she awoke to her blunder.

The girder was very near the weight limit of her teekay strength, and with its head start it had built up a great deal of speed. With her entire teekay focused on the girder, she might have been able to stop it; but while she was also holding up her own forty kilograms, there wasn't a chance in the world of her doing so.

She tried anyway, though, her mind working with abnormal speed as she tried frantically to figure out what to do.
Rotation's easier than lifting,
she thought, remembering the power station flywheels, and put part of her effort into turning the beam to the vertical.
Should I let myself fall for a ways and try to at least soften its landing?
But that would be a minor help at best, because no matter how fast it was going when it hit it would crush whatever was underneath it. Catching her lower lip between her teeth, Lisa bit down hard as she threw everything she had into the battle.
Where the grack are the others?
she wondered desperately, afraid to shift even a fraction of her attention away from the girder. Some of them would be busy with their own loads, but surely Neoma and Rena hadn't
both
been incapacitated by whatever had happened up there … had they?
Oh, no
—
please no!

And then, barely fifteen meters above the ground, the girder's downward rush abruptly slowed. Within ten meters it had halted completely. Hardly daring to breathe, Lisa teeked it carefully to the side, moving it toward the spot where the rest of the girders were stacked. Only when it was safely down on its side did she look over to see Rena and Neoma—the latter clutching her hand—gazing intently down from their perch. Heaving a shuddering sigh of relief, she shifted her eyes to the ground where the girder would have landed. The half-dozen mugs lying by an overturned bench—and the six men drifting cautiously back to retrieve them—gave silent testimony to the tragedy that had almost happened. And Lisa began to shake.