Chapter Eight
1/
The trailer was where Trowa had last seen it, and that surprised him. He'd expected to find Cathrine gone to wherever the circus had taken her; all during the trip here he'd composed in his head what he would ask the people who might possibly have known her, and thereby discover exactly where the circus had traveled to.
It didn't make sense. The door was locked, and no matter how he knocked no answer was forthcoming. Half the day he waited, watching for Cathrine and growing steadily more despondent as the hours passed and the sun descended from its throne. He went in search of a rock, hoping to break a window--she couldn't be angry with him later, because he had waited for a ridiculously long time and it was now growing dark.
The ground was dry and dusty and the only rocks he could find were pebbles. Finally he took off one of his boots and swung it as a window as hard as he could. The glass cracked. He swung again and succeeded in breaking out most of the glass, carefully sweeping away the rest of it with the heel of his boot.
Satisfied, Trowa lithely flipped himself up and in through the window, landing unsteadily upon the edge of the kitchen sink. From there he leapt to the tiled floor, glancing around suspiciously as he did so. It was for all appearances perfectly normal. Pans scattered everywhere, a stick of butter carelessly left out to melt into a goopy mess. Ants swarmed over the yellow puddle, and Trowa looked away, disgusted.
The living room was neater; only a few of the couch cushions were lying on the floor or in chairs. Trowa bypassed the lightless room, heading for Cathrine's bedchamber at the end of a short hallway.
It was little more than a glorified closet. A bed was tucked in the corner, one edge of the comforter pulled down as Cathrine liked it. A home-made target was fastened on the opposite wall, just over a simple wooden wardrobe where Cathrine kept her casual clothes. Her circus costumes were in plastic bags alongside these.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest that anything was the matter, besides the gnawing fact that Cathrine simply was not there. He left her room and walked the empty hallway, possibilities winging tauntingly around his head--all the places she could have been, all the things she could have been doing, all the reasons she might have had.
Trowa trudged into the kitchen. The sickly sweet scent of rotting food slammed into him like a brick wall--he hadn't noticed before. The generator must have given out some time ago. No water, no food, no Cathrine. He propped open the front door and raised the windows, hoping to alleviate the horrible smell and the now stifling heat.
As he was doing this, out of the corner of his eye he saw something glinting in the sunlight--something fastened to the handle of a closed cabinet door, something he immediately recognized as a tiny video recorder. He was being watched.
Furiously he tore open every cabinet in the room, pulled out drawers, kicked open the refrigerator--here, there, small black eyes watching his every move. Into the living room he ran, seeing the devices everywhere and despising them, dying of worry for Cathrine.
"Mr. Barton?"
He looked up to find the elderly woman who owned the grocery store down the street standing at the doorway. She took a step back, suddenly fearful. He was a terror--the one eye visible past his mop of brown hair blazed like a green star, though his expression was otherwise cool; it was an odd combination of passion and composure.
"What," he said curtly.
"You--you have a call waiting for you back at the store."
A chill went through Trowa. The last time he'd received a phone call, he'd been thrust into a deadly scheme which he still didn't completely understand. But his choices were practically nonexistent. He nodded to the woman and followed her out of the trailer.
2/
Cathrine didn't think she was very brave. Most of her life, defiance had burned within her breast; she'd been proud. But now fear smothered most of her resistance like cold water.
For days--how many she had no idea--she had been here in this old church, its walls gray and cold. Her clothes had been taken away her first day here--her body bathed and hair washed--and she wore a simple black dress, suitable for a young schoolgirl. She was almost sure that it was indeed a uniform, because sometimes during the day she could hear childish laughter from somewhere in the church. Maybe a school for little Catholic kids. It was definitely a Catholic church, complete with incense and candles and beautiful statues. She could see all this on the route from her little cell to the tiny room where everyday a young priest would come to see her and reassure her that she was in very good hands and could freely confess her sins. On these trips she never failed to notice the suited men standing in the shadows. So she never confessed to the priest--never cried out that this just wasn't right, that she was a good woman and shouldn't be treated this way, watched and sealed away like a criminal, far from home. Never mentioned Trowa's name except in a whispered prayer each night and each morning to a god she was beginning to doubt.
I'm a terrible sister, she often thought despairingly. I betrayed Trowa once--made him accept that job--sent him into space--lost him. I know he's out there somewhere. They're looking for him.
She would die before she let a word concerning Trowa escape her lips in the presence of the dark men or the kindly priest. Absolutely die. She wanted to die--no longer certain of the promise of heaven or hell, she only desired death or freedom, whichever came first.
She entertained thoughts of screaming out the truth to all those good-natured people who passed in and out of the church, from the dreary, lovely world into this place, stuck in time because people believed it should be. Their escape. Cathrine wanted to break their illusions. Where was God? Why was he letting this happen to her? Had she brought it on herself by hiding her true intentions from Trowa? Was she living in sin--was her love for Trowa too strong, when he only thought of her as a protective elder sister? Where was God, where was God, oh, where was God?
3/
Heero Yuy could have jumped out of his skin when he heard the telephone ringing, but he wasn't that sort of person. Instead he grunted and stared at the yellow plastic covering of the phone. No one ever called him except for sometimes Duo Maxwell, who didn't know any better (or so Heero told himself, unwilling to consider that Duo probably did know better but liked to talk with--or rather at--Heero anyway).
Finally he picked up the receiver and said, "Third time this week, Duo. You must be feeling lucky."
"Not so much," replied a dead-pan voice. "I hope you aren't busy. It took me a very long time to find your number."
". . . Trowa Barton?" All the muscles in Heero's body went taut. He hadn't heard that voice in two years.
"Yeah, it's me."
"What the hell?"
"I need your help." Trowa wove a complicated story that could have come straight out of a fairy tale despite its matter-of-fact explanation. He finished by telling how his employers contacted him on his home colony and ordered him to report to a base near L1 if he wanted to claim his sister.
Cathrine. The circus girl, Heero thought. He remembered her only vaguely as an eccentrically dressed person who hadn't liked him much, though Trowa had seemed quite taken with her.
He stared at his small apartment. Its walls were covered in posters Duo had sent him in the mail (mostly rock bands in beads and leather, and the occasional sports car--Duo also sent centerfolds of scantily clad women but Heero couldn't bring himself to display them). Rain splattered against the windows--even on the cusp of summer, L1 was chilly in wet weather, and Heero wore an old sweatshirt and a ratty pair of jeans one size too small. This wasn't his home. At least, he didn't think of it as one. Sometimes he wondered what a home eally was--always he'd traveled from colony to colony, wherever his missions took him. Impersonal hotel rooms and dormitories. Sometimes he thought of a verdant country on the edge of civilization, ruled by a gentle Queen and populated by idealistic men and women who worshipped the ground she stood upon. But this was a fantasy. The closest thing to a home he'd ever had was Wing's tiny cockpit, and even that had been destroyed.
"Heero, are you there?"
"Yeah." He turned his back on the room, instead watching the raindrops trickle down the glass.
"You still have your laptop, right?"
"Of course." It was on his desk, closed because he hadn't needed it for anything besides essays and e-mail for a long time. Too long. College had spoiled him, but he couldn't tolerate the military, not after all he'd been through. And what else was open to a burnt-out warrior like him, unwilling to kill and unable to do anything else?
"Write this down, okay?" Heero fetched a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote down so much information his hands began to cramp up. Men in suits and reeking of religion, a secret organization with hidden records, and blueprints, pictures, a huge beautiful house.
"They must have left traces somewhere. Here's the number they told me to call months ago--" Trowa recited it. "--and the address they told me to meet them at." He rattled it off flawlessly. Heero suspected he'd memorized everything he knew about Cathrine's abductors, which really wasn't much. "No one knows underground organizations like you do, Heero."
"Hm."
And then Trowa hung up.
Heero dropped the receiver, his mind whirling. Then he strode across his room and sat before his computer, almost smiling as the familiar blue screen flashed on.
4/
Trowa glanced around cautiously, making sure no one saw him exit the back of the convenience store. He'd used the pay phone out front, figuring that it would be infinitely harder for a call to be traced. He wasn't even on his colony--this was a large colony, all steel canyons and concrete streets, far from where his ex-employers might expect to find him.
He wandered down alleyways, biding his time until Heero had had a chance to do any of his research. Trowa would call him again from some other phone, some other colony.
Until then, he could only wait.
5/
It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and the streets of Sei-Matsuyu (rightfully the city was christened "St. Matthew", but most of the inhabitants were the descendants of Japanese colonists) were bulging with children in ecstasies to be out of school for the day. Adults in cars and buses and on foot rushed home, all enjoying their last few hours of daylight. After nightfall they would be locked in their apartments and houses and trailers, curtains pulled against any spying eyes. The curfew on this colony was strictly enforced, and no other city was as well-policed as Sei-Matsuyu, the capital. After nine-thirty p.m., the streets would be deserted, the alleyways cemetery-silent.
Trowa closed his own curtains. His room was cheap--there hadn't been much money to take with him when he'd left the trailer--and stuffy, but it was safer than chancing being found outside after curfew. That was all he needed: a run-in with the police.
Steam still drifted out of the bathroom from his recent shower, filling the room with the smell of wet hotel soap. Clean clothes, edible food, a ceiling fan that at least kept the damp air in motion if it didn't actually cool the room--he was pretty well-off here. But he didn't dare use the hotel phone to contact Heero. Though he'd used an assumed name, he couldn't be sure that the phone-lines in Sei-Matsuyu weren't being tapped, what with the high level of security. This was, after all, where Cathrine's captors had told him to meet them.
He'd last spoken to Heero late last night, from a house he'd broken into on a colony he'd never been to before.
"There isn't a great deal of information about them," Heero had said almost ruefully. "Catholic organization--they've been reprimanded by the Vatican at least once for questionable practices, though no one seems to know exactly what those practices were. No specific leader, but I did find the name of a prominent priest. Father Michael Bailey. Originally from the United States of America on earth, but he used to do missionary work all over the Western Hemisphere and the colonies under its jurisdiction. He wrote quite a few papers on the evils of 'religion reversed', as he called it--Latin American pagan groups and Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims, from what I can tell." There had been the sound of computer keys clacking, and then Heero went on. "There were only three or four blueprints I found that had any connection with the group--they call themselves 'Les Frères,' by the way."
"The Brothers," Trowa had murmured.
"Do you want me to fax you the blueprints? I don't think they're the ones you were given."
"Why not?"
Heero snorted. "Unless you mean to tell me that you were helping a group of religious fanatics infiltrate the house of Quatre Raberba Winner, I doubt you'll recognize these blueprints."
Silence had fallen between them, and then Trowa had said, "Quatre?"
"I remember doing background checks on all of you years ago. The blueprints are definitely from somewhere on L4, and definitely Winner property. The headquarters of his business and his private residence are pictured."
He wrote quite a few papers on the evils of religion reversed, as he called it--Latin American pagan groups and Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims.
"'Religion reversed'," Trowa had whispered, going pale.
"What?"
"I--I've got to go." And he'd hung up, horror freezing his heart within his chest.
Now here he was, still torn between somehow warning Quatre and going right out there and saving Cathrine--both of which were difficult tasks. He had no way of contacting L4 anytime soon, and he wasn't entirely certain that he could get Cathrine back without resorting to violence of some sort. Not that he would balk from violence if it came to that--he had hidden knives up his sleeves and in his boots, though he hadn't been able to secure a gun on such short notice.
They were after Quatre all along, he thought bitterly, sitting on the edge of his thin mattress and willing the hours to pass more quickly. He's Muslim aristocracy in L4; a prime target. Why didn't I see this coming?
1/
The trailer was where Trowa had last seen it, and that surprised him. He'd expected to find Cathrine gone to wherever the circus had taken her; all during the trip here he'd composed in his head what he would ask the people who might possibly have known her, and thereby discover exactly where the circus had traveled to.
It didn't make sense. The door was locked, and no matter how he knocked no answer was forthcoming. Half the day he waited, watching for Cathrine and growing steadily more despondent as the hours passed and the sun descended from its throne. He went in search of a rock, hoping to break a window--she couldn't be angry with him later, because he had waited for a ridiculously long time and it was now growing dark.
The ground was dry and dusty and the only rocks he could find were pebbles. Finally he took off one of his boots and swung it as a window as hard as he could. The glass cracked. He swung again and succeeded in breaking out most of the glass, carefully sweeping away the rest of it with the heel of his boot.
Satisfied, Trowa lithely flipped himself up and in through the window, landing unsteadily upon the edge of the kitchen sink. From there he leapt to the tiled floor, glancing around suspiciously as he did so. It was for all appearances perfectly normal. Pans scattered everywhere, a stick of butter carelessly left out to melt into a goopy mess. Ants swarmed over the yellow puddle, and Trowa looked away, disgusted.
The living room was neater; only a few of the couch cushions were lying on the floor or in chairs. Trowa bypassed the lightless room, heading for Cathrine's bedchamber at the end of a short hallway.
It was little more than a glorified closet. A bed was tucked in the corner, one edge of the comforter pulled down as Cathrine liked it. A home-made target was fastened on the opposite wall, just over a simple wooden wardrobe where Cathrine kept her casual clothes. Her circus costumes were in plastic bags alongside these.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest that anything was the matter, besides the gnawing fact that Cathrine simply was not there. He left her room and walked the empty hallway, possibilities winging tauntingly around his head--all the places she could have been, all the things she could have been doing, all the reasons she might have had.
Trowa trudged into the kitchen. The sickly sweet scent of rotting food slammed into him like a brick wall--he hadn't noticed before. The generator must have given out some time ago. No water, no food, no Cathrine. He propped open the front door and raised the windows, hoping to alleviate the horrible smell and the now stifling heat.
As he was doing this, out of the corner of his eye he saw something glinting in the sunlight--something fastened to the handle of a closed cabinet door, something he immediately recognized as a tiny video recorder. He was being watched.
Furiously he tore open every cabinet in the room, pulled out drawers, kicked open the refrigerator--here, there, small black eyes watching his every move. Into the living room he ran, seeing the devices everywhere and despising them, dying of worry for Cathrine.
"Mr. Barton?"
He looked up to find the elderly woman who owned the grocery store down the street standing at the doorway. She took a step back, suddenly fearful. He was a terror--the one eye visible past his mop of brown hair blazed like a green star, though his expression was otherwise cool; it was an odd combination of passion and composure.
"What," he said curtly.
"You--you have a call waiting for you back at the store."
A chill went through Trowa. The last time he'd received a phone call, he'd been thrust into a deadly scheme which he still didn't completely understand. But his choices were practically nonexistent. He nodded to the woman and followed her out of the trailer.
2/
Cathrine didn't think she was very brave. Most of her life, defiance had burned within her breast; she'd been proud. But now fear smothered most of her resistance like cold water.
For days--how many she had no idea--she had been here in this old church, its walls gray and cold. Her clothes had been taken away her first day here--her body bathed and hair washed--and she wore a simple black dress, suitable for a young schoolgirl. She was almost sure that it was indeed a uniform, because sometimes during the day she could hear childish laughter from somewhere in the church. Maybe a school for little Catholic kids. It was definitely a Catholic church, complete with incense and candles and beautiful statues. She could see all this on the route from her little cell to the tiny room where everyday a young priest would come to see her and reassure her that she was in very good hands and could freely confess her sins. On these trips she never failed to notice the suited men standing in the shadows. So she never confessed to the priest--never cried out that this just wasn't right, that she was a good woman and shouldn't be treated this way, watched and sealed away like a criminal, far from home. Never mentioned Trowa's name except in a whispered prayer each night and each morning to a god she was beginning to doubt.
I'm a terrible sister, she often thought despairingly. I betrayed Trowa once--made him accept that job--sent him into space--lost him. I know he's out there somewhere. They're looking for him.
She would die before she let a word concerning Trowa escape her lips in the presence of the dark men or the kindly priest. Absolutely die. She wanted to die--no longer certain of the promise of heaven or hell, she only desired death or freedom, whichever came first.
She entertained thoughts of screaming out the truth to all those good-natured people who passed in and out of the church, from the dreary, lovely world into this place, stuck in time because people believed it should be. Their escape. Cathrine wanted to break their illusions. Where was God? Why was he letting this happen to her? Had she brought it on herself by hiding her true intentions from Trowa? Was she living in sin--was her love for Trowa too strong, when he only thought of her as a protective elder sister? Where was God, where was God, oh, where was God?
3/
Heero Yuy could have jumped out of his skin when he heard the telephone ringing, but he wasn't that sort of person. Instead he grunted and stared at the yellow plastic covering of the phone. No one ever called him except for sometimes Duo Maxwell, who didn't know any better (or so Heero told himself, unwilling to consider that Duo probably did know better but liked to talk with--or rather at--Heero anyway).
Finally he picked up the receiver and said, "Third time this week, Duo. You must be feeling lucky."
"Not so much," replied a dead-pan voice. "I hope you aren't busy. It took me a very long time to find your number."
". . . Trowa Barton?" All the muscles in Heero's body went taut. He hadn't heard that voice in two years.
"Yeah, it's me."
"What the hell?"
"I need your help." Trowa wove a complicated story that could have come straight out of a fairy tale despite its matter-of-fact explanation. He finished by telling how his employers contacted him on his home colony and ordered him to report to a base near L1 if he wanted to claim his sister.
Cathrine. The circus girl, Heero thought. He remembered her only vaguely as an eccentrically dressed person who hadn't liked him much, though Trowa had seemed quite taken with her.
He stared at his small apartment. Its walls were covered in posters Duo had sent him in the mail (mostly rock bands in beads and leather, and the occasional sports car--Duo also sent centerfolds of scantily clad women but Heero couldn't bring himself to display them). Rain splattered against the windows--even on the cusp of summer, L1 was chilly in wet weather, and Heero wore an old sweatshirt and a ratty pair of jeans one size too small. This wasn't his home. At least, he didn't think of it as one. Sometimes he wondered what a home eally was--always he'd traveled from colony to colony, wherever his missions took him. Impersonal hotel rooms and dormitories. Sometimes he thought of a verdant country on the edge of civilization, ruled by a gentle Queen and populated by idealistic men and women who worshipped the ground she stood upon. But this was a fantasy. The closest thing to a home he'd ever had was Wing's tiny cockpit, and even that had been destroyed.
"Heero, are you there?"
"Yeah." He turned his back on the room, instead watching the raindrops trickle down the glass.
"You still have your laptop, right?"
"Of course." It was on his desk, closed because he hadn't needed it for anything besides essays and e-mail for a long time. Too long. College had spoiled him, but he couldn't tolerate the military, not after all he'd been through. And what else was open to a burnt-out warrior like him, unwilling to kill and unable to do anything else?
"Write this down, okay?" Heero fetched a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote down so much information his hands began to cramp up. Men in suits and reeking of religion, a secret organization with hidden records, and blueprints, pictures, a huge beautiful house.
"They must have left traces somewhere. Here's the number they told me to call months ago--" Trowa recited it. "--and the address they told me to meet them at." He rattled it off flawlessly. Heero suspected he'd memorized everything he knew about Cathrine's abductors, which really wasn't much. "No one knows underground organizations like you do, Heero."
"Hm."
And then Trowa hung up.
Heero dropped the receiver, his mind whirling. Then he strode across his room and sat before his computer, almost smiling as the familiar blue screen flashed on.
4/
Trowa glanced around cautiously, making sure no one saw him exit the back of the convenience store. He'd used the pay phone out front, figuring that it would be infinitely harder for a call to be traced. He wasn't even on his colony--this was a large colony, all steel canyons and concrete streets, far from where his ex-employers might expect to find him.
He wandered down alleyways, biding his time until Heero had had a chance to do any of his research. Trowa would call him again from some other phone, some other colony.
Until then, he could only wait.
5/
It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and the streets of Sei-Matsuyu (rightfully the city was christened "St. Matthew", but most of the inhabitants were the descendants of Japanese colonists) were bulging with children in ecstasies to be out of school for the day. Adults in cars and buses and on foot rushed home, all enjoying their last few hours of daylight. After nightfall they would be locked in their apartments and houses and trailers, curtains pulled against any spying eyes. The curfew on this colony was strictly enforced, and no other city was as well-policed as Sei-Matsuyu, the capital. After nine-thirty p.m., the streets would be deserted, the alleyways cemetery-silent.
Trowa closed his own curtains. His room was cheap--there hadn't been much money to take with him when he'd left the trailer--and stuffy, but it was safer than chancing being found outside after curfew. That was all he needed: a run-in with the police.
Steam still drifted out of the bathroom from his recent shower, filling the room with the smell of wet hotel soap. Clean clothes, edible food, a ceiling fan that at least kept the damp air in motion if it didn't actually cool the room--he was pretty well-off here. But he didn't dare use the hotel phone to contact Heero. Though he'd used an assumed name, he couldn't be sure that the phone-lines in Sei-Matsuyu weren't being tapped, what with the high level of security. This was, after all, where Cathrine's captors had told him to meet them.
He'd last spoken to Heero late last night, from a house he'd broken into on a colony he'd never been to before.
"There isn't a great deal of information about them," Heero had said almost ruefully. "Catholic organization--they've been reprimanded by the Vatican at least once for questionable practices, though no one seems to know exactly what those practices were. No specific leader, but I did find the name of a prominent priest. Father Michael Bailey. Originally from the United States of America on earth, but he used to do missionary work all over the Western Hemisphere and the colonies under its jurisdiction. He wrote quite a few papers on the evils of 'religion reversed', as he called it--Latin American pagan groups and Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims, from what I can tell." There had been the sound of computer keys clacking, and then Heero went on. "There were only three or four blueprints I found that had any connection with the group--they call themselves 'Les Frères,' by the way."
"The Brothers," Trowa had murmured.
"Do you want me to fax you the blueprints? I don't think they're the ones you were given."
"Why not?"
Heero snorted. "Unless you mean to tell me that you were helping a group of religious fanatics infiltrate the house of Quatre Raberba Winner, I doubt you'll recognize these blueprints."
Silence had fallen between them, and then Trowa had said, "Quatre?"
"I remember doing background checks on all of you years ago. The blueprints are definitely from somewhere on L4, and definitely Winner property. The headquarters of his business and his private residence are pictured."
He wrote quite a few papers on the evils of religion reversed, as he called it--Latin American pagan groups and Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims.
"'Religion reversed'," Trowa had whispered, going pale.
"What?"
"I--I've got to go." And he'd hung up, horror freezing his heart within his chest.
Now here he was, still torn between somehow warning Quatre and going right out there and saving Cathrine--both of which were difficult tasks. He had no way of contacting L4 anytime soon, and he wasn't entirely certain that he could get Cathrine back without resorting to violence of some sort. Not that he would balk from violence if it came to that--he had hidden knives up his sleeves and in his boots, though he hadn't been able to secure a gun on such short notice.
They were after Quatre all along, he thought bitterly, sitting on the edge of his thin mattress and willing the hours to pass more quickly. He's Muslim aristocracy in L4; a prime target. Why didn't I see this coming?