Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

The sound

of the flier started as a high and distant whine, but it grew louder quickly. Less than a minute after she first noticed it, the sound was a roar. The black laminate body and three cold thrusters appeared over the treetops and fell into a thin meadow, hardly more than a break between trees. When the door popped open, she expected to see the light-blue uniforms of security. She prepared to identify herself and explain that she’d decided to go for a hike. It was only partly a lie.

But while there were two armed guards, the first person out of the flier was Colonel Ilich. He trotted toward her, and his face was dark. The thrusters didn’t cycle all the way down, so when he reached her, he had to shout.

“Get in the flier.”

“What?”

“You need to get in the flier now. You have to get back to the State Building.”

“I don’t understand.”

Ilich’s jaw clenched and he pointed at the open door. “You. There. Now. This isn’t difficult.”

Teresa stepped back like she’d been slapped. In all the years Ilich had been her tutor, he had never been mean to her. Never been anything but patient and supportive and amused. Even when she didn’t do her work or did something inappropriate, the punishment was just a long talk about why she’d made the choices she did and what the goals of her education were. It was like seeing a different man in an Ilich suit. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. She saw Oh, for fuck’s sake on his lips, but she couldn’t hear it.

He made a little bow and gestured her forward like a servant making way for his master, but she felt the impatience in it. The contempt. The anger.

Oh, she thought as she walked to the flier. He’s frightened.

At the flier, Muskrat balked, and before Teresa could coax her in, Ilich assigned one of the guards to go back on foot with the dog. The flier’s door closed with a deep clank, and they lurched up over the trees. Even though the body of the flier had looked opaque from the outside, it was no darker than tinted glass from her seat. She could see the State Building clearly as soon as they cleared the top branches.

“How did you know where I was?” Teresa asked.

Ilich shook his head, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. When he did, his voice had more like its usual tone: patient and gentle. The difference was that now she knew it was a mask.

“You had a locator implanted in your jawbone when you were born. There is never a moment when security doesn’t know how to find you, and your safety is part of my sacred duty.”

It was like hearing a language she almost understood. She could pick out the meaning of each word, but she couldn’t quite make sense of the whole. The idea was too foreign. Too wrong.

“Your father felt it was important for you to have some experience of rebellion and autonomy, so he permitted your excursions so long as they didn’t take you too far from the State Building. He said he was solo free-climbing on the surface of Mars at your age, and that he learned things about himself that way. He hoped you would find use in the same independence and solitude.”

Solitude. He didn’t know about Timothy, then. There was nothing on any world that would make her tell him either. She felt the buzz of outrage in her throat. “So you just let me think…”

The flier passed over the outer wall of the State Building and curved around to the east. They weren’t heading for the landing pad but the lawn outside the residence. A single figure stood in the gardens, watching them pass. She thought it was Holden.

“I respected your autonomy and your privacy to the extent that security protocols permitted,” Ilich said. “But I needed to be able to find you in case there was an emergency.”

“There’s an emergency?”

“Yes,” he said. “There is.”

Her father smiled at her, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes deeper than she remembered them. The opalescence in his iris was more pronounced, and something seemed to glow from under his skin. His study had been a bedroom, back when he’d still slept. That hadn’t been for years. Now it had a desk hand carved from Laconian wood with a grain like sedimentary rock, a wide table, a shelf with half a dozen physical books, and the divan where he was sitting. Where he had been sitting when the change came.

“Father?” Teresa said. “Can you hear me?”

His mouth changed into a little o, like he was a child seeing something marvelous. He reached out, patting at the air beside her head. She took his hand, and it was hot.

“Has he said anything?” she asked.

Kelly, her father’s personal valet, shook his head. “A few things, but none of it made sense. After it happened, I came to see him, and he was like this. Just like this.” He nodded to Cortázar, sitting on the edge of the table. “I got Dr. Cortázar as quickly as I could.”

“Your opinion?” Ilich asked. His voice was cool, and her father didn’t react to it at all. “What’s wrong with him?”

Cortázar spread his hands. “I could only speculate.”

“Then do,” Ilich said.