Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2 (2 page)

“By the time you want to sell it. This is your car?”

“Well, it really belongs to my dad’s law firm. But I’m buying it from them as fast as I can. And before they agreed to hire me they made me take several driving-safety courses. I’m very safe. Really.”

Jase set his teeth against the impulse to babble. If the client asked, Jase would have to admit he was sixteen and had only had his license for six months. But if he didn’t ask . . .

Mr. Hillyard stretched out his legs. “Roomier than it looks. So where will we stop for the night?”

Definitely not interested in making good time, which was probably for the best. Jase’s father had threatened to revoke his driving privileges for a year if he picked up one more ticket.

“We can stop at Tok if you want to quit around seven,” Jase told him. “But if you’d like to run a little later, we could reach Glennallen by ten.”

***

Mr. Hillyard was a good pickup, not unfriendly, but once they’d started driving, he’d opened his com screen and gone to work, which meant Jase didn’t have to entertain him. And some of the curves that descended into the valley west of the border were a driver’s dream. Jase had dropped down to the recommended speed limit as he swept down the hillside, as he always did carrying stodgy clients, but he still had to pay attention to the road. He didn’t notice anything until Mr. Hillyard said, “What’s that?”

That
was a brown cloud hovering over the road at the bottom of the hill. Jase slowed a bit more.

“Dust?” He didn’t see any roadwork.

The cloud swirled and surged toward them, resolving itself into thousands upon thousands of bees.

Nerves prickled up the back of Jase’s neck. He slowed to a crawl, not wanting to coat the Tesla in bug goo.

“I’m glad you put the top up,” Mr. Hillyard said. “Is this the right time of year for bees to swarm?”

“I don’t know.” Their small hard bodies pinged off the car’s metal skin and rapped against the windows. “I guess. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Jase was
very
glad he’d put the top up. The bees were outside and he and the client were safe inside, but his heart still beat faster. He could hear their mindless buzzing over the swish of tires on pavement, like a distant chain saw.

Quite a few of the bees had landed on the car and were crawling around the door and the edges of the windows. Between the black and yellow bodies traveling across the windshield and the swarm still in the air, Jase could hardly see the road. Mr. Hillyard reached forward abruptly and punched the button that closed the outside air vent.

“Just in case. Perhaps you’d like to drive a bit faster?”

Jase grimaced. “I’ll have to wash the car. Bug guts are pretty sticky.” But he increased his speed a little as he spoke. “There’s a drive-through wash in Tok, but it’ll take a sonic scrub to get it really clean and the closest place for that is Anchorage.”

Bees were bouncing off the windshield.

“Maybe you’ll be out of it soon,” said Mr. Hillyard.

If anything, the cloud ahead of the car was thicker than the cloud behind.

“I think they’re following us.”

Mr. Hillyard frowned at the spinning swarm. “That’s crazy. Why would they?”

“I don’t know. I used a different car wax last time, but that shouldn’t . . .”

The bees
were
following them. Jase could see patterns in the cloud, brown wisps surging forward to cling to his car. He’d thought bees were attracted to flowers, but there was nothing flowerlike about the Tesla.

This was too weird.

“I’m going to speed up,” he warned the client, and took the Tesla from thirty to seventy in about two seconds.

The acceleration threw Jase back in the seat, but he’d been expecting it. The bees hadn’t expected it, and scores of small bodies burst against the windshield—emitting tiny flashes of light as they exploded.

“Whoa! Did you see that?”

Jase turned on the vibro sweep to remove the disgusting remains, and in moments the windshield was clear. Cleaning the headlights and grill wouldn’t be that easy.

“Some sort of phosphorescence?” Mr. Hillyard sounded as baffled as Jase felt. “I didn’t think bees did that.”

“Me either.” Jase watched the swarm in the rearview screen; the bees were still flying after him, though they were falling behind. Falling behind a lot more slowly than Jase had thought they would. Those bees must be going almost sixty, and he increased the Tesla’s speed a bit more.

The client, he noted, made no objection.

“Maybe they caught the sunlight at just the right angle as they burst.” Mr. Hillyard sounded a bit unnerved. “I’ve never heard of bees swarming a car, either. Do you have a different species of bees here?”

“I don’t know.” On a list of things Jase cared about, different species of bees were near the bottom. “Though if they’re going to be a driving hazard, I guess I’d better find out.” He looked at the rearview again. “They’re gone.”

But he kept his speed just over the limit for another half hour . . . and Mr. Hillyard still didn’t complain.

***

Jase drove through the auto wash in Tok, though the Tesla wasn’t as crusted with bug guts as he’d expected. He found quite a few places where the homicidal bees had given their lives to mess up his finish, but instead of the adhesive stickiness he expected, their remains seemed oddly dry. Almost flaky.

The old-fashioned water car wash removed all the residue, and Mr. Hillyard eventually stopped looking for more swarms and went back to his com screen.

His client’s silence gave Jase time to think, and soon worrying about weird bugs gave way to speculating about that mysterious leather bag in his pocket. His first chance to examine it came that night in Glennallen, after he saw Mr. Hillyard safely into his hotel room.

Jase took a few minutes to go back out to the parking lot and spread a cover over the Tesla. There was no rain in the forecast, but he preferred not to come out in the morning and find his car covered with bees. He’d throw away that new wax as soon as he got home.

When he reached his own room, Jase kicked off his shoes and sat on the bed, pulling out the small pouch before he even took off his suit. Judging by the way it squished there was some sort of powder inside, and the girl had done a lousy job with her knots. The cords that had wrapped neatly around it had come loose, tangling in his pocket, and Jase had to unscramble them before he could tackle the final knot that closed the neck.

His grandfather would be appalled that anyone would use a medicine pouch to smuggle something harmful, and the old man had dumped enough culture guilt when Jase was little that his conscience twinged. But
he
wasn’t the one who’d chosen that disguise for their drugs.

Was it time to try again with his grandfather?

Jase groaned aloud at the thought. Getting to his grandparents’ house would take eight hours, and the last time he hadn’t gotten past the front door! The time before that his grandmother had let him in. His grandfather had asked his gruff question, always the first thing he said to Jase these days. After Jase had answered, he’d turned on the TV and refused to say anything more.

But Jase couldn’t change the answer.

His parents and his grandmother said that the gulf between his father and his grandfather wasn’t his fault, but Jase couldn’t help but feel things would be different if he’d been better at it, when his grandfather had tried so hard to indoctrinate him into Our Way of Life. He could still hear the capital letters the old man put on those words.

But even if he wasn’t cut out for any of the Ananut paths, he couldn’t shake the thought that someday he might be able to get through to his grandfather. They’d both tried, in the beginning. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

It was time to try again.

He’d go next weekend, Jase resolved. Unless his father’s firm had another job for him. He was trying not to hope too hard for that, when the medicine bag’s strings finally loosened.

There weren’t any drugs so powerful you’d get in trouble just touching them, right? If this was the kind of stuff that nuked people’s brains, he could always flush it. He would flush it, as soon as he knew what it was.

Jase opened the narrow neck and looked in, but there wasn’t enough light to see anything. He tipped a small amount of the powder onto his palm. He knew nothing about drugs, but to him it looked like . . .

“Dirt?” The word sounded loud in the empty room.

Small brown crystals that looked like fine sand. Powdery dust that left a pale yellow smudge on his palm. It smelled dusty, not the chemical tang he’d been expecting. Jase quashed the temptation to taste it before he’d even stuck out his tongue. And he’d better wash his hands. Thoroughly.

He really didn’t know about drugs. There probably was one that left yellow smudges. And it probably turned you into a raving imbecile with a single touch. And it didn’t show any sign it was going to affect you for about twelve hours, so you started to believe you were a flying goat just as your car was doing sixty around a forty-mile-an-hour curve.

Because your car could do that.

Jase tipped the drug, dirt, whatever-it-was, back into the pouch and tied it closed. If they didn’t even store it in an air-tight container it couldn’t be too lethal, but he’d wash his hands anyway.

He didn’t know about drugs, and he wasn’t stupid enough to want to change that, not on a personal level.

But he’d bet Ferd knew someone who did.

***

The next morning they set off early—at least Jase thought 7 a.m. was early. And it didn’t matter that the sun was up, because this time of year it rose at four in the morning! Some Alaskans didn’t seem to need much sleep in the summer. Jase wasn’t one of them.

Fortunately the day was clear, with only a scattering of clouds, so they might make it all the way to Anchorage on dry roads.

After Glennallen came a long flat stretch where the swampy icky woods were dotted with swampy meadows and swamps. Then there was a hilly stretch where Jase let the Tesla out just a little, because it hugged the curves so sweetly.

When you lived in the only state in the U.S. that didn’t have speed sensors outside the cities, you had to take advantage of it sometimes.

Mr. Hillyard, who’d been silent all morning, finally looked up from his screen. “This is incredible.”

“It’s got almost no drift on curves,” Jase told him, “because the battery weight is balanced over the tires. Maglev cars may use less power, and they can go fast if you don’t have to worry about braking. But for real performance nothing beats tires.”

He flexed his hands on the steering wheel. In a car like this the driver could feel the road’s surface through the wheel, through the way the car handled.

“That’s probably true,” said Mr. Hillyard. “But I was talking about the scenery. That glacier over there is the third I’ve seen this morning. What’s its name?”

“I don’t know. Alaska’s full of glaciers.”

“The car’s pretty incredible too,” Mr. Hillyard admitted. “Though I’m surprised your parents would buy it for a sixteen-year-old.”

If he was questioning Jase’s father’s parenting judgment, would he question his legal judgment as well?

“I’m paying it off,” Jase said quickly. “He didn’t just give it to me. It’s got one of the best safety systems on the road, even today. And I have to keep my grades up, and pay for my own insurance and maintenance. Dad’s firm has clients all over Alaska and northern Canada, with documents that need physical signatures, and more discretion than you can get dumping them at a small-town post office. Or clients who need someone to pick them up, discreetly.”

His father had explained why this client had to come in for an off-the-books weekend meeting, but it had to do with proprietary contracts and competitors, and Jase hadn’t paid attention. Most of the clients he drove had competitors they were paranoid about. That was why they let the firm transport them, instead of taking a public flight.

“You’re doing a good job,” Mr. Hillyard assured him. “I just . . . Does your mother approve?”

“Not really. But she . . . Hey, how do you know I’m sixteen? I didn’t tell you. Do you know my parents, or something?”

When a client was also a friend, Jase’s father usually mentioned it.

“I don’t know your parents.” Mr. Hillyard’s gaze fell, his fingers fidgeting with the dead com board. “But I know about the lawsuit, of course. If you were three during
Mintok v. the Native Corporation Acts,
that was in 2081. So you’d be sixteen now.”

“And three-sixteenths.” Jase had intended to sound cool and nonchalant, but some of the bitterness leaked in.

“I’m sorry,” the client said. “But surely that case made it matter less. Legally, not at all!”

The law didn’t decide what mattered. Not as far as Jase could see.

“Of course, sir. We’ll reach Anchorage in a few more hours. Do you want to go straight to the firm’s guest apartment? Or would you like to stop somewhere for lunch first?”

***

It was early afternoon by the time Jase finally deposited the client, and then commed his dad to report, and added that he was going to stop by Ferd’s on the way home.

His father, already dressed up for the client’s meeting, said, “Tell your mother.”

So Jase commed her too, then drove up the hill to Ferd’s house. Flattop Mountain was less a mountain than a long ridge that formed the southern border of the city. His father said the view, which let residents watch the big freighters coming in to dock, added a zero to every house price. Jase’s mother said it was worth it. Ferd’s house was one of the more modest homes on the hill’s lower slopes. On the top were mansions. Jase’s house was somewhere in between.

He didn’t have to com Ferd. He pulled into the driveway and beeped the horn, and several minutes later Ferd came out, hopping as he finished pulling on his shoes. He tumbled into the passenger seat as if he belonged there, then turned his wildly freckled face toward Jase.

“Bro, that shroud. It’s just
wrong.
”

Jase eyed Ferd’s neon green stretchie, decorated with a rotating spiral of DNA. It appeared to be mutating as it spun. “The suit? I was working. Everyone wears a suit to work. Your father wears a suit.”