"I tried to kill Robert Capa once," Loinnir Whitby said.
Nothing but a table separated Paul from the woman and man seated across from him. No barrier. No screen, no Plexiglas. Were he to attack them, the AutoTaze with which he'd been implanted would send directly to his spine a jolt of electricity stiff enough to turn his nerves to jelly; were he to escape, the device would act as a homing beacon. They'd all three of them be scanned for contraband as they left the interrogation area. But for the sensors and microphones and cameras dotting the room, he and they were very much alone.
Stephen Mace shifted in his chair as Whitby spoke, his movement easy, relaxed; Paul saw the panther-glide of muscles beneath Mace's sweatshirt. He was watching Paul with predatory calm. He had an artificial eye, Paul knew, but it was impossible to tell which one it was.
"But I had an excuse," Whitby continued. "He tried to throttle me, and I hit him with a spanner. Would've stove his head in if this fella here--" -- a casual head-tip toward Mace-- "-- hadn't stopped me. We were both a bit insane at the time, me and Robert. Him a bit more. So what's your excuse, Paul?"
She was beautiful in a way that Cassie wasn't. Features as clean, but her face was longer and leaner. Not harsh, not old. Experienced. The face of a woman who'd been to hell and back, as literally as any woman on Earth could claim to have been. Her eyes reminded Paul of Superior in November, when patches of blue from the sky glinted in the lake's cold waves.
"I don't know."
"You don't know, or you don't want to talk about it?" Mace asked bluntly.
"It's the worst kind of cabin fever, living in a life pod." Whitby leaned closer, put her forearms on the table. "Y' can't step outside, see. Oh, you can, but you're wearin' your own life pod when y' do, and it's a hundred times smaller'n the one you left." She had an accent, Paul realized. Irish or Scottish. He'd never heard it in any of the interviews she'd given since the mission. Lilting and gentle. Soothing, even. Utterly unlike her expression, or like the North Sea eyes she had trained on him. "As for those with you-- you come to feel that you're all part of the same creature. Y' share each other's space and smell for so long that you come to feel you're all extensions of each other. Which is to say, Paul, the four of us-- Robert, Eddie Trey, Stephen here, myself-- we feel it very keenly when one of us is hurt. Why'd you do it, lad? What did Robert Capa ever do to you?"
"I was jealous. I got drunk, I did drugs, and--"
"-- and that is bullshit," Mace said. "That's what you told the cops. That's what's in the report."
"I don't have to speak to you--"
"And you know what?" Mace, too, leaned in close. "I could break your fucking neck right here, right now, and they wouldn't do a goddamn thing to me. I could do it and walk right out and snap my fucking fingers, and they'd cover it up. Haven't you heard, kid? Me and Loinnir, and Trey and Capa: we are fucking gods on this planet."
"Mace," said Whitby, very softly. She kept her eyes on Paul.
"You know the funny thing--?" Mace continued. "When we started out on the mission, I didn't even particularly like the little freak. But what Loinnir said's true. You live long enough with someone like that without killing him, or without him killing you, and you end up being part of his life, like he's part of yours. Robert Capa's a better man than you'll ever be, and he didn't deserve what you did to him."
Paul had no choice but to let him talk; Whitby allowed Mace to speak uninterrupted and watched Paul as he did. She seemed to read something in Paul's face, though Paul tried hard not to react to anything he heard; she asked, her voice still lilting and quiet, when Mace had finished: "Who's your roomie, then, Paul?"
"What do you mean--?" Paul heard himself whisper.
"Oh, for--"
Mace's hand went up in a fist; Whitby gently but firmly caught it there in mid-air, midway to Paul's face, and drew it down to the tabletop. Not for the sake of the cameras, of course, or for those beyond the interrogation-room walls who were watching what those cameras showed. Mace had been right, Paul knew: he and Whitby were Robert Capa's friends and crewmates, the archangels who stood to the right and left of Earth's young sun-god, and were anything to happen to him, that is to say to Paul, to Robert Capa's would-be murderer, here in this dim taupe-walled room, were he to trip, for instance, and break his neck against the edge of the heavy table whose legs were bolted to the floor, the data files from the room's camera feeds would turn up erased and no one would otherwise bear witness. Detective Wilhelm had asked if Paul had wanted him or another officer present while Whitby and Mace spoke to him; Paul had declined. He had declined the presence of a lawyer, too.
His parents: he wondered if they knew. They must. It blared from the news nonstop. They lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, lifelong Midwesterners, and they would be sensible enough not to attempt the drive from there to here, into an Upper Peninsula late-spring blizzard. They hadn't called, either, not yet. Paul was glad. His mother would cry, and that would make Paul cry, too. His father would have nothing to offer his son but anger, shock, and disappointment. Which was exactly, Paul knew, what he deserved.
"Flatmate, Paul," Loinnir Whitby prompted quietly. "Y' have one, I assume. You know what it's like, sharin' space with someone in a place like this. Six months of winter, all that. Gets close, don't it?"
"Yeah."
"What's he like-- I'm assuming it's a fella-- What's he like, Paul?"
She really had no right to ask, Paul knew. But he found her voice comforting. He could hear in her tone how they'd survived, she and Mace and Capa and Trey, in the cramped lifepod configured from the flight deck of the Icarus II. Nearly sixteen months in just that space, two cold, dimly lit decks crowded with equipment and workstations, two of them, Mace and Trey, badly hurt, and all four of them dependent on the mercies of recyclers for their air, water, and food. Paul glanced at the scars on Mace's face. He remembered, too, hearing that Robert Capa had suffered some sort of psychotic break at the beginning of their voyage home, something to do vaguely, mystically even, with his presence too near the solar bomb just before it detonated. But he had recovered, or the mission's public relations team had in any case effectively downplayed the details of his mental illness, if it had in fact existed, and Robert Capa owed a good deal of his survival, recovery, and post-mission life on the world he had saved to the woman who sat across from Paul now.
"Mike," Paul said to her. "His name is Mike. He's majoring in language arts. Wants to be a writer."
"Ooh--" Whitby flinched wryly, smiled. She met Paul's eyes, and it was as though she and he were alone in the room, or in a room less unpleasant. "That's rough, innit--?"
Paul wasn't precisely sure what she meant, but he found himself nodding. "Yeah. Can be."
"Did that once, once upon a time. Tried for literature at uni, couldn't crack it. My brother got his degree. He's a writer, and a right nut he turned out t' be. Can turn your head all the way 'round with his moods and talk. Mike's that way, too, is he--?"
Paul looked to the tabletop. Whitby still had Mace by the wrist, but her hand was holding him now, not restraining him. "Yeah," he said. "He gets stuck on a paper or a project, or Beth does, and--"
"Who's Beth?" Mace asked.
"My girlfriend. She, uh--"
Whitby said to the silence that followed: "Gets confusing, doesn't it, Paul? There y'are with your math problems, and it's all so straightforward, all so clean and clear-cut, and then you drop rhetoric into it, those bloody English majors and their papers, and it gets all muddled. She doing language arts, too? Beth?"
"Yeah."
"She pretty, Paul?" Mace looked at him. Paul could feel the man's stony gaze on the crown of his head. "Must be, if you're willing to kill a guy for her."
Paul felt himself shrinking in at Mace's tone. Before he could reply, there was a rapping. The door opened, and Detective Wilhelm looked in.
"Cassandra Capa is here," he said. "She'd like a word with Paul. Alone."
When the word came that Capa's attacker had given himself up, John had offered to stay at the hospital. He no doubt could see in Cassie's face her righteous, angry curiosity: if one of them were to confront the creature who had hurt their Robert, it should be her.
Marjory wasn't with them at Marquette General. At least not yet. She was on ice-rescue: a group of fishermen had been stupid enough to venture out onto Superior's treacherous, snow-punked spring ice, and now two of the four were on a floe drifting away from shore and the sheltered shallow water of the bay off Marquette. Man three had made it back to Highway 41, which skirted the bay, to find help. Man four had drowned, and two members of the rescue team nearly had, too, trying to persuade Superior to give up her dead.
"Marjory likes to say that only Jesus Christ was qualified to walk on water," John had said, as he and Cassie drove to the hospital two hours earlier. "The rest of us risk our necks every damn time. As usual, she's right. People never learn."
Cassie had wondered once, shortly into her new relationship with Capa's family, why Marjory, who was respectably into the age range of early retirement, still chose to work so many hours in the field. To which Marjory had replied, frank and unoffended:
"Because I choose to remain in a place so full of dolts and morons." She smiled and aimed a nudge at John, who at the time had been helping wash raspberries for pie. "Like this one here."
Having finished his graduate studies, twenty-seven-year-old John Capa had been visiting friends in Marquette. Up from Chicago he was, and he knew about a hundred and fifty percent less about kayaking than he and his friends thought he did.
"Rolled about fifty yards off Middle Island, and couldn't right himself," Marjory said, as she rolled out pie crust. "By the time his friends fished him out, he'd drunk about half the lake, and he wasn't breathing. One of my first quick-response cases. We got the water sucked out of his lungs; we were getting brainwaves on the field-C.A.T. So I start with the CPR, and three or four breaths in, he gags about a quarter-cup of lakewater into my mouth and opens his eyes. And the rest, as they say, is history--"
"As I remember it, you called me an idiot," John said. "For starters."
"That wasn't until later. When I thought you had a chance in hell of understanding what I was saying."
"I came by the barracks to thank her," John said to Cassie. "She said she hoped it was on my way to the airport or the highway, because they had idiots enough in the region without tourists coming in to drown themselves, too."
"So he leaves," Marge continue. "And I said to Mary Johnson-- Mary was my field partner at the time; Jerry hadn't even joined up yet-- I said to her: 'Why'd a guy with eyes that beautiful have to be so stupid? You wouldn't want someone that dumb loose in the gene pool.'"
John chuckled. "As it turned out, I was loose in the gene pool less than two years later."
"'Dumb at first sight.'" Marge smiled. "Nearly put that on the wedding invitations."
Detective Mann drove Cassie to the central police station in Marquette. The world was white. Everything was soft and rounded and muffled. There were people outside the station, and they seemed muffled, too, and bundled up, though not as much against the cold as against the snow. The temperature was a comfortable-- for the denizens of the Upper Peninsula, anyway-- thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Even on Cassie's California skin it wasn't especially chilling. Nonetheless, snow could creep in and melt to icewater under a collar; cheeks turned raw from being too long outside in the damp. As she got out of the car, Cassie felt eyes on her, anger, hope. She heard her name and Capa's spoken, the words hushed and blunt as wood in the snowy air. "That's her; that's his wife." As if she were there to exact revenge.
"His name is Paul Brehmer, and he's likely to become federal property," Detective Wilhelm said, as he greeted Cassie inside the station. He took her coat, brushed the snow from it, folded it over his arm as he walked her back to the interrogation rooms. "Feds want to treat it like an attack on a foreign dignitary. We told them we'd just as soon keep it local. No use attracting more kooks than what we've already got. He's been quiet since we brought him in--"
"You feel sorry for him," Cassie said. She knew she'd feel differently if Capa were dead, but she was compassionate by nature, and she sensed Wilhelm was, too. The boy they had in custody might be a monster, but he was at least capable of feeling guilt, or he'd not have turned himself in.
"It's his affect." Wilhelm paused at a keypad to the right of a gray door, a small mesh-reinforced window at eye level in its dull metal surface. He tapped in a lock code; Cassie heard a heavy, flat click. Wilhelm opened the door, politely ushered her through. "Not flat: that'd peg him as a psychopath right there. He's not bragging, he's not making threats. Polite kid. If anything, I'd say he's scared. Can't say I blame him."
Cassie stepped into a taupe-walled hallway, dimly but adequately lit. Metal doors, like the one through which they'd just passed, to the right and left. "Has he said why he did it?"
"Says his girl was nuts for your husband. Obsessed. I'm sorry-- you know that people are, don't you--?"
Cassie nodded. She thought of the crowd outside the station, the snow-dusted dozen or so waiting for word on the boy who'd tried to kill their savior. Patient and quiet, shuffling their feet to ward off the shivers that came from standing so long in the chill. Waiting for news. For a sign. For a signal--
Cassie shivered.
She'd seen it in their faces, solemn and focused, as they watched her get out of the car. She had only to give the word--
Kill him.
-- and Paul Brehmer would die. Or the people doing Cassie's bidding would die, or find themselves tazed and arrested in the process.
"Closest thing to God most of us will ever see," Wilhelm added softly, as he halted before the last door on the hall's left side.
Cassie frowned. "Did he say that, or are you saying it now?"
"What--?"
"The 'closest thing to God.'"
Wilhelm looked through the door's heavy meshed window before he keyed the unlock code. "He said it. Got it from his girl. She's a student, like he is, at the U. Language arts. She did this paper on your husband, and she said--"
"What's her name? Can I ask that?"
"Beth-- ah-- Beth Markham."
Wilhelm rapped at the door, turned the handle.
Paul remained seated as Mace and Whitby rose and left the room. He could hear them, then, in the hall, them and Detective Wilhelm, talking quietly with Robert Capa's wife.
Then she walked in and closed the door behind her. Paul rose. It felt-- ridiculously, he knew, and giddily-- as though he were being drawn up out of his chair by his heart. She was real; she was right there--
"Cassie--" he heard himself say.
She stepped around the table. She drew back her right hand and slapped him across the face. She knew how to hit. From his viewpoint of sudden, accepting shock Paul knew this. She kept her body loose throughout the swing, and her arm unfurled like a whip, and for all her delicacy-- and she was delicate, this close up-- had she hit him with a closed fist, Paul knew, she might have knocked him down. As it was, he stood with his eyes averted and meekly touched his tongue to the blood seeping where his left top canine had nicked the inside of his mouth.
"I've already told Detective Wilhelm I'm prepared to be tried for battery," she said.
"I won't press charges," Paul replied.
"It's not for you to decide. Nothing is for you to decide. Not any more. I've struck an arrestee in police custody. I can be charged for that. I can lose my job and my commission." Cassie stepped away from him. "Sit down."
Paul seated himself. Cassie seated herself across from him, in the chair where Whitby had sat. She was even more beautiful than she'd been on the three-dee. She looked pale, though, too, and her dark eyes were still tired from crying.
"I'm sorry," Paul said.
"How old are you, Paul?"
"Twenty."
"Do you know how old Robert Capa was when he was asked to join Project Icarus?"
"Fifteen," Paul said, very quietly. He knew Capa's biography. Most people did, he figured. Like most of those people, he admired Capa; like those in Capa's field, as a young engineer Paul respected the man's work. What the hell am I doing here--?
"Then you must know that he was seventeen when he was told he was too young to join the crew of Icarus I."
"Yes, ma'am," Paul whispered.
"For the next seven years, he devoted himself to the Icarus Project. His life was the Project. Am I boring you, Paul--?"
He tried not to flinch before her dark, accusing eyes. "No."
"When the second mission became necessary, he knew more about the science of saving the sun than anyone else on Earth. He was twenty-four when I last saw him, before he left. Nearly three years he was away."
She sat back in her chair. She folded her hands calmly on the tabletop between them and watched him. Her wedding ring, a simple, elegant band in white gold or platinum, glinted softly in the room's dim light. She waited until Paul met her eyes before she continued.
"He spent his life saving this planet, and he's never really had a chance to live on it." Sad wonder in her voice, in the frown that drew her dark brows together. "Why would you take that away from him?"
"I don't know." Paul could feel the tears welling up in his eyes. He looked away. "I'm sorry."
She said nothing. More than any retort, any take on "You're not sorry: you're pathetic," her silence stung him. That, and the sympathy in her eyes. She believed Paul had hurt the man she loved, and she hated him for it. But she pitied him, too. Why--?
A final, undeserved kindness: in the moment before Paul started to cry, Cassie looked toward one of the wall cameras and said, "We're finished here, Detective Wilhelm."
Detective Mann saw Paul's visitors out. Wilhelm entered the interrogation room as Cassie was leaving it; she saw him offer Paul a kindly smile along with a Kleenex, and she heard him say:
"Restroom, Paul? Then what do you say we get you something to eat, son--? You must be hungry."
He would definitely be the "good cop" to Detective Mann's "bad," if such things actually went on in real police work and not just in vids or books; what Cassie found striking, though, was the sincerity in Wilhelm's tone, even in those few words. The empathy of a professional whose work required him to be half-psychologist, certainly. Legal requirements, too, of course: depriving a suspect of sleep, food, or basic hygiene could nullify even the most blatant confessions.
But, no, this was something else. Cassie had felt it as she sat across from Paul and looked openly at his face. He couldn't or wouldn't meet her eyes, but he wasn't shrinking away from her gaze. He wasn't trying to hide; his tears were real. He was, Cassie thought, absolutely ordinary. Tallish, a bit gangly, black hair kept neat, hazel eyes. High forehead, regular features. Nothing sinister about him, not a thing. More than that-- and the thought struck her as a revelation-- nothing that would make anyone say, after the grisly fact, "He was always such a quiet boy." No: Paul, she realized, was ordinary. Had had his share of scrapes, made his share of dumb mistakes, was likely average or just above in his grades, a dependable if unexceptional member of his engineering team at school. Not a festering, resentful, long-simmering, ticking-time-bomb bone in his body.
She wondered if she knew what Detective Wilhelm would say to him, the opening words of the interrogation following Paul's bathroom break, his being given a sandwich, a Coke, a bag of Fritos from the snack machine--
Who really did it, Paul--?
"There's something I need to show you," Cassie said to Whitby, as Detective Mann led them back to the lobby of the station. She looked in her tote.
Her flashpad wasn't there. She'd left it on the lamp table that morning, when she'd picked up the Twain en route to the hospital.
"Can we-- I need to go back to the house."
"Sure--" Whitby looked to Mace--
"Why don't you two go?" Mace dug in his pocket, handed Whitby a set of keys. He smiled at Cassie. "I'll head back to the hospital, keep an eye on Brainiac for you."
She smiled back at him. "Thanks, Mace."
"Be careful on those roads." Mace leaned in, kissed the corner of Whitby's mouth. Cassie saw her glow at the contact, where once Whitby might have bristled at his tone, or at words her younger self could easily have found patronizing. Then Mace was off toward the duty desk and Detective Mann, and as Cassie left with Whitby, she heard him finagling either a ride back to the hospital or to a car rental.
"He's a clever fellow, that Detective Wilhelm," Whitby said, when she and Cassie were in the car Whitby and Mace had rented and were on the white road back to the Capa house. "Gives us closure by letting us confront the little bastard and gets half his interrogating done in the bargain. You don't think he did it either, do you, Cass? Paul?"
Cassie nipped absently at a knuckle while she looked out at the snow-covered world. Superior arched suddenly into view to the right of the highway, a flat expanse of white reaching to the north and west. The dark, nubbled rise of the near-shore islands. And, far to the west, a horizon line where clouds and fog seemed to mix: steam rising off the dark, deeper, open water, free of ice and slightly warmer than the air above. In the bay, Marge said, the ice still ranged from three to six inches thick, theoretically capable of supporting a human body or two, but-- as the fishermen that morning had found out-- rotten with cracks and brittle strata of snow.
"No, I don't."
They reached the house and entered, using a keycode Marjory had given Cassie that morning. Cassie's flashpad was where she had left it, on the same lamp table where she'd picked up the Twain earlier; she felt silly, now, for not having taken the pad at the same time. Subconsciously, though, she thought, she might have been loath to touch it.
"It's this paper," she said to Whitby, frowning as she powered on the pad and cued up Beth Markham's thesis on Capa. "A girl in one of John's classes wanted Robert to read it."
Whitby took the pad, read. Her eyebrows slowly peaked and valleyed their way through curiosity, amazement, frank contempt.
"This is terrible," she said, handing the pad back to Cassie. "Must admit, I've committed my share of crimes against the language, but--"
"Not worth killing someone over, is it?" Cassie said quietly.
"I'd stop short, myself." Whitby left the library, headed for the kitchen. "I could do with a cup of tea. You--?"
"Sure."
"Swift pop to the jaw, maybe," Whitby continued. She was at the sink, running water into the kettle from the tap. "And that being for whoever wrote--"
She stopped. She looked from the kettle to Cassie. "You don't think she wrote it, do you?"
"Neither do you, Loinnir. Why--?"
"I've not even met the girl," Whitby said slowly. She rummaged in the cupboards for tea and mugs. "I've not even met her, and looking at that-- It's like there's two voices in it, one pushing the other. Does that make sense to you, Cass--?"
Cassie nodded.
"Why didn't John pick up on it?" Whitby asked.
"Maybe because he has to see six dozen of these things. We have just the one."
"Have the police seen it?"
"Detective Wilhelm said that Paul mentioned it, but I'm not sure if he's read it. I just forwarded him a copy." Cassie watched as Whitby poured steaming water into a forest-green mug. "There was a boy in John's class with Beth--"
Whitby filled a second mug. "Not Paul--?"
"No. He was-- I didn't see them together until later, in the hall outside the lecture. He was-- You know how there's always one who has to play it cool? The one who's too good for it? 'Look at me, I'm not paying attention'--?"
"That would've been me, actually, about twenty years back." Wryly, Whitby blew steam from the surface of her tea, took a cautious sip. "Perpetual brown-nosers such as yourself'd not understand, Cassandra."
"Right." Cassie chuckled, reaching for the second mug. She grew quieter again as she took a swallow of tea. Whitby gave her time. "I saw him with her in the hall. They were walking away. She said something to him, and he turned and looked at me--"
She shuddered.
Whitby asked: "Would you know him if you saw him again?"
"Absolutely."
"You got the same feeling reading that paper as you got when he looked at you, am I right?"
"Detective Wilhelm would love that, wouldn't he?"
"He might give it a listen. Detective Mann'd like as not have you locked up." Whitby frowned, set her mug aside, went to the refrigerator seeking milk. "Any tip's a good tip, Cassie. Call Wilhelm when we're heading out. Need be, we can stop off at the police station before we go back to the hospital."
"Yeah. Thanks."
A moment followed, quiet and thoughtful, as Whitby stirred milk into her tea, and Cassie in turn took the carton and the spoon--
"Loinnir--!" she said, suddenly. "My God-- I nearly forgot--"
Whitby sputtered into her tea. "What--?"
"Congratulations." Cassie smiled openly at her. "You and Mace. I completely forgot--"
"Had a few more pressing things on your mind, didn't you--?" Whitby countered gently, smiling back.
Cassie nodded. Whitby could see in her face the juggling going on in the girl's emotions. Capa hurt, and he was the love of Cassie's life, no lie there. The rat bastard who'd done for him, caught or, more likely, not. And Mace: she wanted what was best for him, sincerely, and for the Scottish virago he'd bound himself to. But they'd been something years back, him and Cassie, and even if that something was nothing more than fuck buddies, you never quite broke a hundred percent away from a fellow who'd treated you well in bed.
Cassie drank more of her tea before she asked: "Did you get a ring out of him?"
"Aye." Whitby smiled, drew up from the collar of her sweater a shining circlet on a silver chain. Two entwined bands in white gold, a single sapphire. She passed the ring and the chain to Cassie. "Says it's him keepin' his eye on me."
"It's beautiful."
Something like guilt chilled the tea in Whitby's belly. "Honest to God, Cass, I didn't mean to ambush him. But Richie was half-reachin' for the shotgun, and Pete was passin' him the shells, and--"
Cassie looked at her blankly. "What--?"
"He-- Mace didn't tell you when he called?"
"No. Tell me wha--"
Then Cassie's eyes went wide. She grinned incredulously. "Loinnir--! Congratulations--!"
Whitby got her mug out of the way just before the hug hit. She found herself grinning, too, with her cheek against Cassie's dark hair. "Thank you, Cass. Thank you--"
Cassie squeezed her. Then she drew away slightly, studied Whitby's face, her own expression sobering. "You are-- I shouldn't assume-- You are happy about it, Loinnir, aren't you? You and Mace--?"
Too many emotions. Too many in twenty-four hours, all of them extreme and most of them bad, and it was as though they'd blindfolded the girl and were slapping her in turn. Whitby gently touched Cassie's cheek.
"Of course we are, Cass." She tipped her forehead to Cassie's, smiled. "Richie, though-- He says it'll be born with feathers and gills."
Cassie chuckled. "As long as it's healthy. Have you found out what it's going to be?"
"Mace and I thought we'd follow your example in that department." Whitby smoothed Cassie's hair, kissed her forehead, released her. She retrieved her mug from the countertop. "Not knowing will drive Richie insane."
"You're an evil woman."
"That's the rumor. I tend t' believe it."
Her phone-clip buzzed. Whitby tapped the circuit tab at her collar. "Whitby."
Loinnir? Mace. You might wanna tell Cass-- She heard him pause; just as quickly, she felt him realize how frightening said pause could be to her and to anyone else listening on her end.
He, umm, said something, said Mace, after possibly five eternal seconds. Capa. He was awake.
He'd been good about it. Responsible, a loyal crewmate. After Whitby and Cassie had left the police station, Mace had gotten a ride to the nearest Drive Exchange depot and rented himself a car. Americans-- and Mace still counted himself as one of those, notwithstanding the fact that billet, job, fiancee, and new family found him residing for the most part in a country the size of Iowa six thousand miles away-- were still nearly as resistant to the idea of public transportation as their big, variegated nation was. So the government had finally stopped trying to get everyone onto overpriced light rail and into buses and had started the Drive Exchange program instead. Day-rental of vehicles too stripped down and too damned ugly to attract the interest of carjackers and chop shops. The three models the program utilized were in fact exclusive to it, and the manufacturers had gone out of their way to out-do themselves in terms of homeliness and functionality. Mace, having been dropped at the depot, stood under the metal awning that sheltered the auto-select machines from the incessant snow and picked for himself a Cooper Minus. He entered his ident and credit information, and while he waited for the parking shelves to cycle his car from as far as four stories below the pavement, he called to check in with Trey.
Hey, man, said Trey. He didn't bother to put himself on the vid circuit. What's happening? I saw the news. That kid who turned himself in--
"We talked to him, Trey. Me and Loinnir. Cass was there, too."
Holy shit. Where are you now?
"Calling from a car rental. On my way back to the hospital. Listen, Trey-- man, it's just a feeling, but that kid-- I got this feeling he's not--"
-- not the one who did it. Right? I got that, too, looking at him. I know you've gotta be careful around the quiet ones. Guys like Capa, right--? -- and Mace could hear the affection in Trey's voice-- I know they can be dangerous as shit, but even just seeing this kid on the news--
Mace's car rumbled into view on the parking lift, flanked by four identical siblings. The retaining bars at the front of its stall slid away. It looked like a short-shank flat-black combat boot with wheels. Heavy bumpers, tires designed for the God-awful weather, along with, Mace knew, a traction and handling system tuned for the car's rental locale.
"He wouldn't have the balls for killing someone. Even someone as irritating as Brainiac. Got that feeling too, Trey."
Trey chuckled thoughtfully. No disrespect to Capa was forthcoming via Mace's comment, he had to know, or no more disrespect than Mace would have shown a younger brother who by military standards sometimes came up short in terms of common sense. Mace was keying in the unlock code on the Minus's door when Trey spoke again:
They'll sort it out. If he's lying, they'll know. In the meantime-- Mace, I'm assuming you'll see Cassie before I do. You want to let her know: I sorted things out with Minnesota. Capa's contacts at the U send their best wishes, and they say he's free to reschedule those lectures for any time he wants.
"Thanks, Trey." Mace smiled as he climbed into the Minus. "Wait-- You mean to say they didn't just ask you to speak in his place?"
I can tell 'em how to hack the universe, Mace. I have no fucking clue how the thing's put together.
When he arrived at Marquette General, things were quieter than they'd been the night before. Fewer people were milled outside the doors, their presence muffled and blunted by the snow, and the news vultures had been driven from the lobby. Mace proceeded back to the intensive care observation area where they'd left Capa the night before. The nurse called Anne wasn't at the center island; in her chair sat a dark-haired fortyish woman with a sensible, no-nonsense build beneath her floral nurse's smock and a name tag that read "Nancy Staerker, R.N." She was writing with a stylus on a data pad.
"Morning," Mace said. "I'm a friend of Robert Capa's. Is he still here--?"
"He certainly is. His father is with him now." With the tip of the stylus, she pointed back toward the alcove where they'd left Capa earlier that morning. Mace automatically tracked the direction of the point. When he did-- he saw, from the corner of his fake eye (the thing had peripherals that just didn't quit)-- she looked him over. Smiled slightly. Appreciatively.
Uh huh. Mace smiled, too. He looked back at her. "Thank you," he said politely.
"Mm hm." Her eyes were a deep blue-gray. Sparkles in them. She kept an eyebrow just short of cocked his way as Mace left the island.
He heard John's voice as he approached the alcove. Reading something, not talking. Mace knocked softly on the wall as he looked in.
"John--?"
John Capa rose from a chair next to Capa's bed. He looked tired but not exhausted; his fair hair was less than precisely combed; he'd traded his dress clothes of last night for a comfortably worn brown sweater and blue jeans. Behind him, on the bed, Capa was by all appearances asleep. His face was turned slightly their way on the pillow. He looked impossibly young, despite the stubble that was already darkening his cheeks. Honest to God, Mace thought, the little bastard could grow a beard faster than anyone he'd ever seen. He looked more comfortable, less exposed: someone had arranged a light-weave buff-colored blanket over his torso, and another over his left, unwounded leg. The dressing on his right thigh was clean and white. A monitor on the wall above the bed displayed his stats. Wavy lines, peaked lines, numbers in blue and yellow and green.
"Mace. Hello." John marked his place in the book from which he'd been reading, placed it on a tray-table beside Capa's bed. He gestured to a second chair. "Please: have a seat."
Mace shrugged out of his jacket and sat down. "How is he?"
"Still quiet. His doctor was in earlier. Says his neurological stats look good. No brain damage that they can see." He turned to Capa as he spoke, brushed his fingers gently through his son's hair. "It's up to him now. It's just a question of his wanting to wake up."
"That's good. Better than this morning, anyway." Mace settled back in his chair, looked frankly John's way. "He's gonna be fine, John."
"I know." John sat back down. He looked for a long moment at his son. Then he turned to Mace and said, evenly: "I need to apologize, Stephen."
"For--" His years teaching had given Capa's father a bearing that seemed military, an easy formality that Mace appreciated. He liked John Capa; the quiet distress in the man's face saddened him. "I'm sorry, sir: I don't understand."
"I behaved indecorously this morning."
"When you cried, you mean."
"Yes."
"Shit. John--" Mace stared at him in gentle incredulity. He leaned forward in his chair, parked his elbows on his knees, looked John Capa in the face. "If it'd been my boy, I'd've done the same thing."
John nodded, not meeting Mace's eyes but not avoiding them, either. His own clear eyes were thoughtful.
"You try so hard," he said. "I'm sure your father felt the same way, Stephen: when you and Robert and the others left for the sun. You try so hard to believe My boy's a hero. My boy died a hero--
"And all you can think of is the first time he looked at you. The first time he smiled at you. Knew you. The first time he called you 'Da.' All those firsts. And all you can feel now is pain and nothing, because he's dead, and a part of you is dead, too, the very best part of you. And you feel guilty. Guilty. Because you should be proud, so damnably proud, that your son died a hero.
"That's why we couldn't come to Edwards right away when you returned. It wasn't Marjory, Stephen: it was me. A shock to lose someone that precious to you. When we-- when I thought Robert was dead-- Months after the fact, after they'd determined that the solar re-ignition device had worked, after the safety margin they'd allowed for re-establishing contact with the mission. The despair never lessened, but you learned to live with it. Moments you could even forget it. The shock, then-- the shock of having him back: it was nearly as great as losing him."
He paused. Mace waited silently, patiently.
"Dr. Lasky," John continued quietly. "The project head. Father Icarus. He was a cold man, wasn't he--? He made the mistake of asking us, once the Icarus II and her crew were officially declared lost, if there were anything he could do for us, for me and for Marjory. I'm not prone to losing my temper, Mace. I recall feeling calm. But I looked at him and said, 'Should you, from your empyrean heights-- should you, Dr. Lasky, see our son-- would you send him home to us?'" He smiled slightly. "Marge told me later she had a more prosaic suggestion for him. As it was, he never spoke to us again. Not in person."
John settled back in his chair, looked again at his son. He sighed, a soft, lonely sound, like the wind blowing in from the gray reaches of the big lake to the north.
"To sum up: there's no worse feeling in the world, Stephen, than to lose a child. I'm sure Oscar Wilde would find a more clever way of putting it: once being a tragedy, perhaps; twice being beyond comprehension. I lost my son once. I couldn't bear to lose him again."
"I understand, sir."
"May your understanding remain just that, Stephen. May you never learn by experience."
Mace nodded. Both he and John went quiet. The machines monitoring Capa did their work without beeps or whirrings or clicks; Mace couldn't hear him breathing, though he could track the even, measured rise and fall of Capa's chest beneath the blanket. He sat with John for maybe three minutes, thinking, not speaking. Then he said: "Why don't you stretch your legs, John? Check in with Marjory? I can keep an eye on Rip van Winkle here."
"That's a good idea." John stood, moved carefully away from Capa's side. At the entrance to the alcove, he paused. "I know you and Robert have had your differences, Stephen," he said. "But you've been a good friend to him, and a good friend to our family. Marjory and I are glad you're here."
Mace nodded again, respectfully. "Sir."
John returned the nod, a trace of a smile on his tired, troubled face, and left the alcove. Mace watched him go. He remained where he was, in the second visitor's chair, thoughtfully watching the entrance to the alcove. Then he sighed and got up and moved over to the chair nearer the bed.
"Hey, man," he said quietly to Capa. "I'm supposed to talk to you, right? How's it going, Capa...?"
Capa, of course, said nothing. Wasn't even dreaming, by the look of it: his eyes were still beneath his closed lids, and his girlishly long eyelashes were at feathery rest. Mace at first felt silly, speaking to him. His voice felt as though it didn't fit his throat; it sounded too big in the quiet of the alcove. But he kept talking. Told Capa about Paul, the suspect in Capa's stabbing, whom Whitby had kept Mace from thrashing earlier that morning. Told Capa about Whitby herself: how she'd come close to drowning.
And ended up with an engagement ring instead.
"Difference between a push and a shove, Capa. I was gonna ask her. I might not've ever asked her. Just-- umm-- certain things made it-- umm--"
Mace stopped. Sensitivity wasn't his strong suit; confessions-- even to a guy in a coma-- weren't, either. He looked about, away from Capa's closed eyelids, and spotted on the tray table the book John had been reading from earlier. A Tramp Abroad.
Mace picked it up, flipped to a random page. Snorted--
"You've gotta be kidding--"
The type was dust-mote-sized; the prose creaked. The thing had to be a hundred years old. He paged back to the front matter--
"Copyright 1880." Mace shut the cover. "Figures."
He felt almost sorry for Capa. Between a dad who taught literature from before the dawn of time and a wife who worshipped on the altar of the great god Boring when it came to reading, the poor guy was trapped. Still, the book had to mean something to him, or it wouldn't be here. Mace dutifully paged back in, cleared his throat--
"But I am not gonna hold your damn hand, Brainiac. Got it--?" He waited through the space of Capa's nonresponse. Looked extra-carefully at the little bastard's face for signs of concealed smirking. Then he started to read.
He began where John had left off, and it was more boring than hell. The narrator-- Twain, he assumed-- and a buddy were taking a train to go hiking somewhere in Germany, and they were talking to a German family on the train, and the family spoke English, and wasn't that a relief, blah blah blah, and just as Mace was wondering who the hell would take a train to go hiking, and his eyes were starting to cross, he stopped reading where he was and began to flip at random.
-- sabers. He stopped at the word. Held his place. Skimmed. Smiled slightly. Started to read out loud to Capa--
Students at Heidelberg, these crazy S.O.B.s, they were dueling with heavy sabers. Padded to the gills, sure, but they were knocking the shit out of each other. Twain was standing off with the seconds and the medics, and these guys were sweating and grunting and chopping each other all to bits--
"Shit," Capa said.
Mace stopped reading. He looked at Capa. Capa was looking back at him. Mace's hand was resting over Capa's on the blanket covering Capa's belly.
Mace snatched his hand away. "Fuck you too, Brainiac."
He glowered. Capa smiled slightly.
"Hey, Mace," he murmured--
-- and his eyes closed again.
"Shit--" Mace whispered, as realization struck him. He spoke to Capa's eyelids: "Capa? Shit-- Capa, come on, man--"
He caught himself, observed: Capa was still breathing, and doing so without distress. On the monitor above the bed, his stats still looked good. Mace got up, went to the entrance of the alcove.
"Nurse--?" He gestured to the people at the I.C.U.'s center island. Nurse Staerker stood and came over.
Mace stepped aside for her as she entered the alcove. He could see her professionalism in her: her eyes went to the rise and fall of Capa's chest, to his stats on the monitor. She checked his lines and his tubes and the dressing over his wound; she looked at his face, no doubt noting his skin tone (typically pale but far from blue-- and actually the "typically pale" thing was a lie: living in California, the little shit had been soaking up his fair share of the sun he'd fixed, by the look of him); she laid the back of her hand gently against his cheek.
"Looks good. Feels good." She straightened Capa's blankets as she asked Mace: "Has he been getting up to mischief?"
Much as he would admit to Whitby three minutes later, Mace said: "He, umm, said something."
"'Something.'"
"'Shit.'" Mace felt his cheeks go warm. "He, uh, opened his eyes and said, umm--"
"'Shit.' To you."
"Yes, ma'am. My name, too. He said 'Mace.'"
"I see." She left him hanging for a moment, while Mace felt like a stuttering idiot. The moron, big and too dumb to be a threat, whom John Capa had left to watch over his boy while he went to call his wife and coax a cup of coffee from one of the hospital's dispensers. Mace wilted before the dearth of nonsense in the woman's slate-blue eyes. He'd flown any number of experimental aircraft. He'd been all the way to the sun and back. He'd nearly had half his face blown off in the process. And here he was, fighting an urge to crawl under Capa's bed and hide. Jesus, she'd give Whitby a run for her money in a dead-eyed staring contest. He was bracing for the obvious question--
-- What the hell did you do to him--?
-- when Staerker smiled warmly and said: "That's good. He recognized you." She took a final look at Capa's numbers; she reached for his wrist, manually felt his pulse. Then she massaged his fingers gently and laid his hand back on his torso. "That's good, Robert," she said to Capa's calm face. "That's very, very good. You'll be back with us in no time.
"It could still be hours or days," she said to Mace. "Just between you and me. I'm not his neurologist. But he should start to come out of it now. It'll be like that: on and off. He'll be lucid; he'll be disoriented. He'll want to sleep. But he should be back soon." She patted Mace's shoulder as she left the alcove. "I'll let his doctor know. And don't worry: I've heard a lot worse than 'shit' from folks coming out of comas."
"Thanks." Mace returned her smile. He watched her walk back to the center island. Then he reached for his phone.
When the whole gang showed up, or all of them but Trey and Elena, Capa managed a smile and maybe two minutes of fuzzy consciousness for his wife, for Mace and Whitby, for John and Marjory, finally in from her grueling shift on icy Superior, and it seemed to put his sun-starting trick all to shame.
"Hi, baby," Cassie said, leaning over Capa, caressing his stubbly cheeks. Smiling through tears, she was as radiant as Mace had ever seen her. Mace watched her look at Capa and knew that he was witness to the proper order of things. Moments like these, he knew: he could care for her, he could be her friend, but she wasn't his to love, and she wasn't his to lose. A reminder like antiseptic. It stung, but it was clean and bracing, and it was good for him. His own proper order of things was standing by his side.
"C'mon, you." Whitby took Mace's hand and led him out of the alcove. Mace came along willingly, not only so that Capa could have his first real moment of consciousness alone with his wife and family but so that Nurse Staerker, keeping watch from the center island, wouldn't toss the whole lot of them out on their ears for crowding the little shit.
Later, though, Mace was restless. Marjory and John had invited him and Whitby to stay at the house, and they could hardly refuse (even if, in what had to qualify at the "cosmic" level in terms of ironies, it meant them sleeping in Capa's old room). But Marge was worn out, between the emotions that had been pounding her for the last twenty-four hours and the shift she'd pulled-- Mace would never be the one to tell her, as he could see in her face that she knew: she was approaching an age when she'd be too old, or at least too sensible, to be hauling idiots out of half-frozen lakes-- and so he and Whitby stopped at a grocery on the way back to the house and took over the night's kitchen duties.
Watching him chop vegetables, Cassie smiled. "You know how to cook now?"
"I'm living in Scotland, remember?" Mace replied. He glanced wryly toward Whitby, who was busy at the stove and the soup-pot. "I had no choice."
"It was either him learning to cook, or sheep-stomach surprise three times a day." Whitby cocked an eyebrow at him. She left the stock to simmer and came to kiss his cheek in the drollest of mock sympathy. "Oh, Mace, you poor thing."
Mace felt himself blush. Cassie snickered. "Whipped."
"Excuse me--" Mace turned on her. "What did you say--?"
Cassie met his eyes. She managed to hide maybe a quarter of her smirk. "'Whipped'--" she said, clearly.
"-- boy," Whitby finished. "Very handy in the kitchen, he is."
"You--" Mace pointed a celery stalk at Cassie. "Shut up. And you--" -- this, now, to Whitby, along with the realization that the grin on his face was no doubt neutralizing the glare he was attempting-- "-- you are swimming all the way back to Mulvern."
They ate soup and sandwiches, and all of them basked in a low, warm glow of relief. He'd slipped off to sleep again after his two lucid minutes, but Capa had known them. There'd been a moment's confusion when he asked Cassie why she, and not Whitby, was piloting the pod, but he recognized her and knew what she was to him, and he smiled when he saw Marge and John. Dr. Smith met with them before they left the hospital, and the prognosis was good: Capa was neurologically sound (that being, as always, thought Mace, a matter of opinion), the nanoweave they'd used to repair his artery was holding and strong, and he'd avoided crippling damage to the tendons and nerves in his leg. He wouldn't be running a marathon any time soon, but he'd be on his feet-- cautiously, if all continued to go well-- in less than ten days.
So that was the feeling they rode all through dinner: permutations of relief, shared and singular. Mace was glad for his friend's survival (even that, though, was a profound admission, and one he'd as soon keep to himself, at least for now. Tough it was for him to admit how much he cared for the little guy.); he was gladder still to see Marge and John smiling and eating, to hear Cassie laugh, to see the contentment in Whitby's watchful eyes. After John and Marge excused themselves, honestly citing exhaustion, for an early night, though, Whitby and Cassie showed Mace what they'd returned to the house for earlier.
A paper. Written by a girl in one of John's classes.
He could feel silence descend on the house like the ceaselessly falling snow. He wasn't one for literary criticism, or even, in fact, much of one for literature at all, but this thing chilled Mace through. Set an anger, a restlessness, stirring in his bones.
Especially when he saw the looks on Cassie's and Whitby's faces. "You think whoever wrote this had something to do with Capa getting stabbed?" he asked.
"We do," Whitby replied frankly.
"Contact information is right here." Mace paged out to the file's ident tag. "Elizabeth Markham, two-ten Spooner Hall, Northern Michigan U." He looked from Cassie to Whitby. "We should check it out."
"Detective Wilhelm will follow up on it, Mace," Cassie said.
Mace looked at her. He knew she wasn't being afraid, only cautious. Always the sensible one. "He hasn't called, Cass."
"No, he hasn't," Whitby concurred. No word, not only about Beth Markham and her paper but also regarding what Wilhelm might have gotten out of Paul Brehmer, too. No word on Cassie's missing phone, either. Whitby took out the keys Mace had given her earlier.
"Let's go," she said.
It was nine-thirty by the time they stood outside the door of two-ten Spooner Hall. They'd come up unchallenged: the hall was mostly apartments and was reserved for upperclassmen, so there were no floor monitors. The security of the place was entrusted to the dark unblinking eyes of the cameras mounted on the walls. Mace, waiting with Whitby and Cassie in the hall outside Beth Markham's door, found himself wondering how many of those cameras actually worked. And, if they worked, what they had seen in the last twenty-four hours.
Movement from inside. There was a peep-lens on the door; Mace had a sudden sense of being watched.
"Yes? Who is it?" A girl's voice, muffled through the door. Suspicious or irritated or both.
Cassie stepped closer to the door, looked directly into the peep-lens. "Beth? It's Cassandra Capa. We met in Professor Capa's class. May I have a word with you?"
"Regarding what--?"
Mace shifted impatiently on his bootsoles. Cassie said evenly: "I have a question regarding the paper you wanted my husband to read."
A pause. Mace found himself tensing, thinking, imagining: Gunshots from within, bullets splintering the door. The sounds of panic and escape, footsteps thudding away from inside. The jolt as his shoulder connected with the heavy wood panel--
The door opened.
Beth Markham looked like Whitby, and nothing like her at all. She had Loinnir's coloring and her sea-blue eyes, and she was tall. But she was one of those girls who mistook being thin for being beautiful, let alone healthy. Whitby was long and lean, but she had a woman's share of meat on her frame, and she was strong. Mace loved that about her. This kid was brittle. No tone to her, just skin and bone.
"Alright." Her cold blue eyes settled on Mace. "You're Stephen Mace, aren't you...?"
Mace, sensing Whitby bristle, nearly had to suppress a smirk. He settled for a smile of tastefully toothy wattage. "Yes, I am."
"And Lorna Whitby." Beth managed to look at Whitby without taking her eyes off of Mace. Neat trick, that, Mace thought. He saw Whitby's right hand knot surreptitiously into a fist. Gonna be a whole lot harder to pull off when you're unconscious, kid.
"May we come in?" Whitby said.
"Certainly." Beth hesitated for a moment, her eyes going to the hall behind them. Then she ushered them in. Fairly typical student digs, typical mess of papers, books, secondhand furniture. Posters on the wall, art prints and rock groups. Mace stepped onto a worn rag rug in sepia, brown, blue, and red covering a wide patch of the wood floor. "Would you care to sit down--?"
"Thanks, no." Mace made room for Cassie and Whitby. As he did, he stepped to the side; in stepping, he looked off through the apartment's tiny kitchen and into a bedroom. There, on the bed, he saw an open suitcase. "Going somewhere?" he asked Beth.
The charm of his smile was wearing off. Beth stepped past him, through the kitchen, and shut the bedroom door.
"What was it you wanted to ask me?" she asked Cassie.
"That paper," Cassie replied. "Did you write it?"
Beth hesitated. She met Cassie's eyes coldly-- arrogantly, even, Mace thought-- but he could sense a birdlike shaking in her thin bones. "What do you mean?"
Whitby snorted softly. "It's a simple enough question, girl. Did you write it or didn't you?"
"I don't have to--"
"Beth--?" A young man's voice, calling from just outside, in the hall. "God, I thought they'd never leave--"
He walked in and stopped. Stopped both speaking and moving. He looked at Beth, and then at Mace and Whitby and, finally, at Cassie, with eyes so chilly blue that they made Beth's eyes seem like amber honey by comparison. He was tall and scarecrow-thin under his jeans and gray sweatshirt, and he had reddish-fair hair and a mouth like Capa's, those lips that girls seemed to like, a little too lush and full for a guy's lips to be. Only this kid's mouth was cruel-looking. Something like a perpetual smirk to the way it was set. Mace felt an immediate urge to punch it.
"Visitors, Beth? This late?"
"They wanted to know about the paper I wrote," Beth said. "Fallen Sun."
"I see." He turned to Whitby. "How do you do? I'm Mike. You're Loinnir Whitby, aren't you?"
Whitby shook the hand he offered her. "I am."
"And Stephen Mace. A pleasure, sir."
Mace's punching urge ratcheted up. He shook the kid's hand instead. Bold grip on the skinny bastard, he had to admit. "Sure. Right," he said.
Then Mike turned to Cassie. "Mrs. Capa, I presume?"
Cassie went absolutely pale. Or maybe it was the lighting. Maybe she was tired. She seemed steady enough as she returned Mike's handshake.
"What's this about Beth's paper?" Mike asked affably, heading for the kitchen. Mace heard a rattle of cutlery. "Can I offer you something to drink--?"
"No, thanks--" Whitby called to him.
Mace started slightly as Cassie touched his hand. He'd been right. She was close to him now, and he could see: she was absolutely white. Her face was very calm, but she was shaking. When she spoke, her voice was such a ghost of itself that Mace had to duck his head to hers to catch the words--
"It's him," she said.
