The Diamond Deep (59 page)

Evie rocketed toward it, a force of girl bent on release.

He expected it to shoot her, but instead she collided with it, threw her shoulder into it and her arms as far around it as they would go.

It shifted, tilted.

Evie kicked, screaming. She bore it down into a deeper tilt by sheer force.

They held that way, suspended in space, Evie riding the robot with all of her weight while it bobbed and tried to right itself.

The lights on it dimmed.

She leapt up and down on the slender robotic body with all of the force she could muster, her face twisted with anger and grief. Onor expected her to fall, but she managed to stay on, to ride it, to almost dance her fury.

It crashed onto the floor and split down the middle, a line of electronic guts spilling out between the two halves, wires breaking.

Evie crouched and smacked at it with her fists, cursing and crying.

The other two enforcers left, moving exactly the way they usually did, quietly and calmly floating through the crowd, leaving the tiny young woman to smash at their fallen comrade.

Onor and Naveen stood and looked back and forth between Haric's body, Evie's flailing fists, and the retreating enforcers.

“How is Haric?” Aleesi asked in his ear.

“Dead,” Onor whispered.

“That pisses me off.”

Aleesi sounded so human when she was hurt, so different from Ix. “Can you tell Ruby? You were talking to her earlier.”

“I'll tell her in a moment. You should be safe now, but you should leave the Brawl immediately. Satyana is waiting for you near the same door you came in. She'll take you to the Court of the Deeping Rules.”

Ruby opened her eyes, still slumped against Joel's shoulder. She'd lost some time. There was no way to tell how much. The same people remained in the room. Marcelle sat quietly beside her, staring into space. SueAnne rested in her chair, chin on her hands, watching Ruby. Lya stood and watched them all, silent. She looked almost sane, as if being in the middle of an emergency had calmed her.

Ruby took a deep breath, grinding her teeth against a sharp pain. A knife blade might have felt better than whatever mystery had taken up residence in her stomach.

Joel spoke softly but firmly. “We
must
hide Aleesi and Ix.”

“Where?” SueAnne asked.

He shook his head. “Maybe in the bar? Allen surely has places to hide almost anything.”

“We won't be able to talk to her if we do that. We won't know what happened to Haric.”

Aleesi answered her. “Haric is dead. The enforcers have been reassigned to other work. Satyana is on her way to help Onor and Evie, so she will not be able to help you, at least not now.”

Ruby focused on the first three words.
Haric is dead.
Joel and Onor and the others had sent him out to do work he wasn't prepared for, and he'd been killed. If only she had insisted that he come with her, instead of rebuffing him. She could still see his face. Pleading with her to take him along. He had wanted to protect her.

It had been her job to protect him. He was her assistant, her helper.

Damn it!

Joel pulled her back to their own peril with a tightening of his arms around her waist and a low-voiced sentence. “We have to get out of here, and we have to hide the AIs. Now.”

“Take my chair,” SueAnne said.

“Why?” Ruby asked.

“Because that way you can go faster and further.” The sadness that seemed to drip from SueAnne's voice was almost physical. A tear had gathered in the corner of her right eye, catching on the wrinkles there instead of falling down her face. “You can carry the webling in the pouch under my seat where I keep my coat and slate.”

Ruby started to protest but Joel said, “Thank you,” before Ruby could get any words out of her mouth.

SueAnne stood up and moved slowly to the couch. She must have noticed Ruby glaring at her, since she said, “I'll be all right. I'm just old. I can walk.”

And Ruby was sick, maybe sick to death. She couldn't think that way, think about dying, except she couldn't help it. Haric's death had bored a hole inside her that sat beside the other deaths that had driven her forward for years. Her friend Nona, who had died after two reds raped her. Hugh, Lya's Hugh, who had died fighting to help Ruby change the ship so that no one else would be raped and killed. Ben, the old red who had always looked out for her and Onor.

Joel picked her up and put her down in SueAnne's wheelchair. It was surprisingly comfortable, worn loose and soft by SueAnne's body. A bit too big. Marcelle emptied the pouch under the seat, handing the blanket and slate to SueAnne.

“What about the others?” Ruby asked. “Onor and Evie?”

“They're safe for the moment. Naveen is with them.”

Lya had come to stand next to Ruby. The feel of her had changed, as if she had temporarily run out of reasons to accuse Ruby. Her eyes were big in her gaunt face, and she looked more vulnerable than Ruby remembered her looking for a long time.

Joel spoke to the AIs. “I'm unplugging you now.” That was all the ceremony he offered them, his face tight and worried as he glanced repeatedly at Ruby.

Aleesi would be able to talk to Onor but not to Ruby. The webling would have power for a few days.

She felt numb, as if she could slip away into mourning. Haric. Poor, good Haric who had only wanted to matter. Haric's death pulled her away from herself. It sent her into a strange soft sadness that was like feeling and not feeling all at once. She hated it. She should be so full of anger that the only choice she had was to be strong, to feel strong. The best she could manage was to grip the arms of the chair hard and sit up as straight as she could.

There were still tangles in her hair. What a strange thing to worry about. Maybe people worried about little things when everything else felt big.

Joel bent in front of her, holding the webling. His hands slid beneath the fabric of the seat, pushing the big object into the pouch. It barely fit. “We need to cover it.”

“Here.” Lya stood beside Joel, holding out the white shawl that had been draped across her shoulders.

For a moment his tense shoulders suggested that he'd refuse to let Lya help even when he needed her, but instead he drew a deep breath and took the shawl and stuffed it around the cylinder. It would provide both covering and cushioning. When he was done, Joel touched Ruby's knee and gave her a soft, tender smile.

“I'm ready,” she said. She looked over at SueAnne. “Thank you.”

The old woman smiled, and then settled back in the chair she had chosen to sit in and pulled out her slate.

It felt wrong to be wheeled out of the room instead of walking out. One of the wheels creaked each time around, giving a beat to her movement. They took an elevator she had passed but never taken, going down the two floors from the morning meeting room to the base floor of Ash. They passed one of the open areas where two mothers watched over four children playing with red balls. None of them looked her way, or noticed that it was Ruby and not SueAnne in the wheelchair.

The bar was empty when they got there, unless you counted a single robotic server that told them to sit wherever they wanted. “It's never talked to me before,” Ruby said.

Joel said, “Allen usually turns that off. If the robot is talking to us, then Allen is off somewhere else. Maybe he left a note.” He wheeled Ruby to a seat and left her to check the board behind the bar. “Allen said he's in the big kitchen. Let's go find him.”

“I can stay here,” Ruby said.

Joel eyed Lya, clearly trying to figure out how to remind Ruby what he thought of Lya without telegraphing it loud enough for Lya to notice. He failed; concern painted his face tight.

“It's okay,” Ruby told him. “It will only take you ten minutes. I'm safe enough.”

He truly looked torn.

“Go on,” she said. “You need Allen to find a truly hidden place.” The cargo bars had been full of clever hidey holes. Surely Allen had built some into this bar. “Besides, I really am safe enough. I've known Lya longer than I've known you.”

That decided him. “I'll hurry.” He was gone almost before he finished saying it.

Ruby and Lya each ordered citrus-water from the serving robot. Ruby watched it trundle off, trying not to feel Haric's death any more than she had to. She took the emergency pin that Satyana had given her and held it.

The bot squeaked back across the floor with its tray. Ruby took a tumbler and looked at Lya, struggling for words. “At least there are
some
good things here. We never had this kind of bitter-sweet in a drink.”

Lya took her own sip, and made a slight face. “I wish it were slightly sweeter.” Her voice dropped. “I'm sorry about Haric. I liked him. He was so earnest.”

“Yes.”

“I know about death, you know,” Lya said. “I know how it turns you around and gives you a different focus entirely.”

Ruby laughed. “What do you think drives me?”

Lya didn't answer with any of the trite phrases she'd been spouting off to her followers. She waited Ruby out.

The awkward silence left Ruby thinking of Haric standing by her side so often, waiting to help her. “I had a friend once. Back when we were still in school and before the sky fell. Her name was Nona. I think I've mentioned her to you.” She trailed off, remembering how she and Nona used to sit side by side in common and make up stories about the people walking by. “We were always together. Onor knew her, and Marcelle had met her. If she had lived, there would have been four of us, except maybe if she were still here, I never would have wanted to fight badly enough to change anything.”

“What happened?”

“Her mom needed pills—maybe now I can look back and see it was an addiction, but then we were young. Anyway, Nona earned stuff the way young girls could then, she sold herself to the reds. That's why I hate prostitution so much. It was killing her—just doing it. Selling her soul. But I was worried that even worse would happen. I went to stop her, but I was too late.” Ruby felt tears at the edges of her eyes, and wiped at them. It wouldn't do for Koren's people to come in and find Ruby crying. She hadn't cried about Nona for a long time. She'd thought about her a lot, turned her into a personal icon, her death into a whip she struck herself with over and over. But she hadn't thought about the girl who wanted to succeed in school so bad she woke up an hour before the shift-change warning bell. The girl who told jokes that made Ruby giggle so hard she almost fell off a bench once. Ruby couldn't remember the joke any more, but she did remember the explosion of laughter.

When it felt like she had some emotional control back, Ruby continued. “I found her. She had been stabbed. By reds. To this day, her death reminds me how awful too much power is. Maybe she didn't give them good enough sex that night, maybe she said the wrong thing, maybe they just didn't want to get caught.” Now she was angry all over again and tears were spilling down her face. “That's why I did it.” Two deep breaths. She need to have more control. “I saw that we got free so no one else could die unnoticed that way.”

Lya knelt beside the chair and put an arm across Ruby's back. “I'm sorry,” she said.

Ruby lifted her face. “I'm sorry about Hugh.”

“You never said that before.”

“I'm sorry about that, too.” And about Haric, and about herself. She was going to die. She could feel it, like an out-breath that thinking about Nona had made possible. Only she didn't want to. She wanted to sing, she wanted to change the whole damned station here, and she wanted to hold Marcelle's baby.

Most of all, she wanted to hold Marcelle's baby.

As if thinking about her illness made it talk to her, a sharp pain stabbed up from her insides, as if it were reaching from her belly toward her heart. She bent over the pain. Its exquisite sharpness drove away other feelings and shrank her world to her physical reaction.

She counted her own heartbeats as the agony eased.

Footsteps made her look up. Joel coming in the interior door he had left through. Allen followed. Joel must not have liked what he saw on her face since he rushed to her side. “Are you okay?”

No. She nodded. “Of course. “ Her voice sounded hoarse and just louder than a whisper.

Before she could ask if he'd found a hiding place, four men in uniform came through the door from the outside hallway. “Ruby Martin and Joel North?”

Joel stood up. “Yes?”

“You are required to come with us. You have been accused of violating one of the three primal Deeping Rules and are accused of causing harm to the station.”

Joel asked. “Who are we accused of harming?”

“That will be explained to you.”

Ruby opened the pin and pushed the button.

“According to who?” Lya asked. “Can't you see that Ruby's sick? She needs to stay here.”