Chương 71: Chapter 70: Justice served

People imagine we are the ones who cut the bond. That's not how it works. Either party may release a bond alone, and either party can do so at any hour of any day, and almost none of them ever do, because the pain is severe enough to talk most of them out of it twice over. Both parties know this instinctively once the bond is established. What we provide is a dark room, a quiet floor, and someone to sit with them until the pain passes. Everything else belongs to the involved parties.

- Odera Vasant, Twenty-First Chief of People for Progress, on the founding of the first sanctuary programme The transport came through the north gate with its lights off and stopped short of the lower terrace. The crates that came out of it were plain grey composite with mesh panels and the PfP registration stencilled on the side, built to be practical and easy to transport. The handlers set them down and stood back. The bird stood about four feet at the shoulder and filled its crate to the walls.

It was pitch black, with the last hand's width of each wing running deep red. It looked like a mix of a condor and an eagle, built for intimidation. When the mesh panel came up, it did not come out. It turned its head through the full arc twice, taking in the terrace and the office block and the dark beyond both, and then pushed itself into the far corner and stayed there with its weight forward. The serpent was as thick as Kara's forearm and long enough to have coiled four times over.

Its scales were almost transparent, with a faint luminescence from within. Cold came off it in waves such that the crate floor had gone damp. It had wound itself into the tightest configuration the space allowed and its head was under a coil, tongue tasting the air. It did not move at all when the panel opened. The third crate was smaller. Pip came up onto the frame the moment the mesh went up, took in the air and the unfamiliar smells, and found Kara.

She crossed the ground in about a second and a half and went up his leg and his side and onto his shoulder, where she put both hands flat against the side of his head and made a thin repeating sound with her mouth almost shut, over and over, the noise she made when she was anxious.

"Alright, alright" Kara said.

"I've got you." Waggy arrived at speed and started shouldering into Kara's shin, because that was Waggy's method of inserting himself into things. Pip looked down at him, and the sound stopped. Shanks watched all of it without interrupting.

"First room for the bird," he told the handlers.

"Second for the serpent. Keep them apart and keep the lights low."

"And this one?"

"This one appears to have made her own arrangements." The two rooms at the end of the lower terrace were dim and lined and quieter than anywhere Kara had stood in his life. Sound went about three feet from his mouth and stopped. The bird went into the first room and did not settle. It moved the perimeter twice, close to the wall, checking corners it had already checked. The serpent went into the second and stayed coiled, watching the outside keenly.

Cato waited on the terrace between the two doors, looking in at each in turn. Shanks started, "Until the court has its verdict out, they will be staying here. After a brief inspection of their health, we will release them into the biomes best suited for them within the limits of this sanctuary."

"Neither of them are hurt," Kara said.

"No."

"That bird's flight feathers are in pretty good condition. Somebody was paying a specialist." He watched it turn the corner again. Shanks was quiet for a moment.

"What are you trying to say."

"They were in fancy cages." Kara nodded at the first room.

"That bird has never flown at anything. It's four feet at the shoulder and it's been standing on a perch in a hall so that people coming through the door would look at it. The serpent was kept cold because the cold makes it easier to see through, and that's the whole reason. Nobody was hurting them. Nobody was doing anything to them at all, and I don't know a word for it, but I've watched Pip in a room with one commissioned climbing frame in it for four weeks and I know it's the same thing."

"Six years," Shanks sighed.

"That's how long we've had a description of that hall, and there has never been an hour in those six years when a court would have accepted a word of it. There is no offence in law for keeping an animal beautifully and pointlessly, as long as they were not subject to irrefutable abuse." Pip had gone down off Kara's shoulder and was hanging off a fern growing out of the terrace wall, turning the fronds over to look at the undersides.

"Can it be undone?" Kara asked. Shanks turned to look at him properly.

"What?"

"The bond. She's registered to Lucianne, that bird's registered to Tomas, and whatever's in the news tomorrow, none of that moves the registration." Kara kept his eyes on the fern.

"She could sit here for forty years still tied to a woman who kept her in a box because it looked good."

"It can be undone."

"How?"

"She has to voluntarily let go of it." Shanks said it evenly.

"That's the whole mechanism. Either party can release a bond on their own, at any time, without the other one's agreement and without anyone else's help. It has always worked that way." Kara had to stop and turn that over, because it did not fit anything he had been taught.

"Then why does anyone stay bonded to something they hate?"

"Two reasons, and the first one is the real one." Shanks nodded at the first room.

"That bird does not want to. Nothing bonded ever wants to. It sits in them like it's a part of their body, and the idea of not having it produces something close to what you would feel being asked to give up a hand. You should know how it feels." Kara nodded. The bond felt like it was a part of him. He could not ever imagine giving it up voluntarily.

"And the second reason?"

"The process is not painless." Shanks continued.

"I have had it described to me by three people who could describe it. All of them said the same thing, which is that it feels like something being driven into the skull from the inside, on and on, without let-up. The animals cannot tell me anything, but I have watched two hundred of them go through it and I do not need telling. It takes hold over about two minutes. It runs somewhere between ten and forty. Then it stops, completely, and there is nothing left of it afterward. No injury.

Nothing that shows up on any examination I've ever ordered. But while it's happening it is the worst thing that has ever happened to them, and they know that going in, because you can feel what you're about to do before you do it."

"And they still do it."

"Some of them. Not all. Some refuse it every time it's offered for years." Shanks put a hand on Cato's shoulder.

"The ones who come through it afterward are... Freer, for the lack of a better word. Almost like they were carrying a burden which has now come off their shoulders, and they eat better and sleep better and go further out into the ground than they ever did before, and every rescue we have ever released into these biomes that was still bonded stayed within sight of the buildings. Every one that broke it went out and found somewhere."

"And Cato?"

"She sits with them. I have watched her do it two hundred times and I cannot tell you what she does." Shanks looked at Cato fondly.

"It runs shorter with her in the room, and they recover a lot faster afterwards. That's the only thing I can measure." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. Kara looked at the fern, and at Pip hanging under it by one arm.

"You want me to ask her."

"I want you to decide whether to ask her. Those are different, and I would like you to be clear which one I'm putting to you."

"And the other end? Lucianne's end?"

"Nothing." Shanks said.

"Her end simply reports as severed. The pain is felt by both parties. That much I do know, and I know it hurts a great deal worse on the human side, because a human end of a bond is not simple. Anyone here who ever did it will tell you about it for hours." He let a beat go.

"Which is why it is almost never a human who lets go." Kara sat down on the terrace with his back against the wall, and Pip came and sat on his knee, and Waggy folded down against his other leg with his chin on his paws. He had no idea how to do this. There was no skill for it and no vocabulary either. Four weeks of taking her outside and letting her climb things. He held his hands out flat and she put both of hers into them, which was a thing she had started doing in the second week.

He told her anyway, knowing that she could not understand the words, but could follow the tone. That there was a thing running between her and Lucianne that she had never chosen. That she could cut it, and nobody else could. That it would hurt worse than anything ever had, and that the hurt would stop. That afterward she would belong to nobody, and there was somebody he had in mind who was nothing like Lucianne, and she would never have to sit in a room with one commissioned climbing frame again.

That she could also say no, and he would take her inside and feed her, and nobody would raise it a second time. Pip watched his mouth the whole way through. Then Waggy got up. He went past Kara's knee, put his forehead against Pip's shoulder, and stayed there. Kara had seen him do that once before, on a mountain, with a dragon that had a quill through her wing. Pip took her hands out of Kara's and put one of them on the back of Waggy's neck. Then she got down, and went to the open door of the third room.

Nothing announced when it started. Kara had half expected something from the System, a prompt or a confirmation, some notification that the bond was being broken. There was none. He sat on the floor of a dim lined room with a gibbon on his lap and watched her go still, all over, for about the length of a breath. Then she started shaking. It came up over roughly two minutes, exactly as he had been told.

It began in her hands and went into her arms and then everything, and she pushed her head down hard against his chest and pressed both palms flat over her own skull and screamed twice. The second scream cut off partway. After that she lost consciousness, but continued shaking uncontrollably. Cato came in.

She crossed the floor and took Pip out of Kara's arms with a firmness that did not permit discussion, and went down into the corner with her, and put one arm right over the whole of her and laid the other hand on the back of her skull. Kara went with them and got as far as the corner and Cato did not stop him, so he stayed, close enough to have a hand on Pip's foot. After the first four or five minutes, she went rigid.

Then the rigidity started coming and going in waves, a hard clench and then a slackening, and each wave took a little longer to arrive than the one before it. Cato's hand never stopped moving on the back of her head, a skill clearly at play. At some point, Kara noticed that her breathing had slowed right down and that Pip's was following it. Waggy pressed himself against Kara's side and shook and would not be moved. Shanks stayed at the door and did not come in. At around eleven minutes, Pip's breathing changed.

At about fourteen she pushed Cato's arm off, which Cato allowed, and sat up on the floor with her fur standing out in every direction and looked around at all of them. Then she went up the wall.

She reached the ceiling beam in a single movement and hung off it by one hand and let out a long rising chatter with her whole mouth open, the noise she had made the first afternoon Kara ever took her outside, and swung the length of the beam and back, and dropped onto Cato's head, and bounced off it onto Kara's shoulder, and from there back up to the beam.

"That," Shanks said from the doorway, and had to stop and start again.

"That is what happens. Every time. Well, variations of the same thing, depending on the animal involved of course." Kara tried the bird next. It would not listen. Kara stood in the first room a long while with a shrikewing looking through him and got nowhere. Shanks said some of them took days, and some took the offer and refused it every time it was made for the rest of their lives, and that the offer stayed open regardless. The serpent would not either.

It was Pip who fixed it, and Kara never worked out what she did. She went into the first room ahead of him, walked out into the middle of the floor where a bird twice her size stood with its beak at her head height, and sat down in front of it. Then she started doing things. She turned herself upside down. She went up the wall and came back. She sat down again and put her hands out flat, palms up. The bird watched her for a long time.

Then it lowered its head until the point of its beak touched the floor beside her and left it there, and Shanks went past Kara into the room without a word. Kara stepped back out onto the terrace, because Shanks asked him to, and because he did not want to be in the building for it.

"Sir," he said at the door.

"You said it's worse on the human side."

"Considerably." Kara looked out at the dark marsh, and worked out roughly what hour it was in Area 5, and thought about what was about to happen. He opened his interface, saw the ping from Moghli with a live link and smiled. Ghilim watched the whole thing from a rented room in Area 7 with the sound turned up. He had been on the feed since it opened. He had watched the hall fill, watched the family emblem go up behind the lectern, watched the wife take her position three steps back and to the left of Tomas.

Lucianne was not in the frame anywhere. Tomas was extraordinary. Ghilim had known he would be and it was still something to sit through. He spoke about his daughter for four minutes and did not say one thing that was false. He named the technology that could assemble a human voice out of public recordings, correctly, with the specification numbers. He said that it was a conspiracy against his family at a strategically sensitive time and his poor daughter had been framed. Then he brought up the mute boy.

He said he had withdrawn those charges himself, a year ago, when every voice in the Area wanted the boy strung up. He said he had done it because a person who cannot speak for himself deserves somebody to speak for him. The hall went soft when he said it, and Ghilim sat in a rented room two Areas away and clenched his hands. Then four Task Force officers came in at the back of the hall.

The senior officer walked up the centre aisle with a slate held at his side, in full view of every recorder in the room, and stopped four feet short of the lectern and waited to be acknowledged, which was the most aggressive thing he could have done. Tomas acknowledged him. Tomas said, into a live microphone, that he was glad to answer anything at all, that he had never in his life had any involvement in any illegal transfer of any animal, and that the timing of this ought to interest every person in the room.

It was a good answer. Ghilim watched it working on the crowd. Then Tomas stopped. He got four more words out. The hand that was not on the lectern went up to the side of his head, and he leaned forward over it, and his knees folded. The senior officer caught him under the arm entirely on instinct and stood there holding a Tier 8 faction leader up with an expression on his face that said he had no idea what was happening and no procedure for it. The wife did not move. Ghilim noted that.

They got him out between two of them with his feet dragging and his head down, past forty recorders, under the lights, while the hall made confused noises. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, and worked at it. What just happened? Tomas had not looked like he was under duress. Poison was not it either, because poison in a hall with four Task Force officers walking in was a different kind of event entirely, and nobody had gone near him.

Whatever it was had come internally and had come at a moment somebody had picked. The feed stayed on the lectern for a while and then found the senior officer, standing where Tomas had been, holding a slate he had visibly not read, taking forty questions at once. He raised a hand for quiet and got it.

"Mr. Tomas is being taken in on a warrant issued a couple of hours ago," he said.

"There will be a fair trial. If he is found innocent, he will be released and compensated for his time." Ghilim sat back. He had heard that sentence before, delivered in that same flat institutional register, multiple times. There will be a fair trial. If you're found innocent, you'll be compensated for your time. Now the same sentence, in the same voice the organisation trained into all of them, used on the man who had aimed it at him. The irony. He laughed. He knew who had done this.

The same quiet, brave boy he had come to love as a brother. Four years old, dropping out of a tree at three hyenas to get to a boy he had never met. And now this. He had been trying his best to repay the debt all his life, but it had just gotten even bigger. There would have been others involved as well, and he would have to find a way to thank them. He suspected he knew who some of the others were. He shut the feed off and sat in the quiet. He would go to Mars.

He had been circling it for months and the circling was now finished. Not because the Freeks had run out of work and not because Clara would let him go easily, but because every single thing he did on this planet from here on was a thing that could be traced back toward a first-year at University 11, and his brother had just spent a year quietly dismantling a faction leader to clear his name, and the very least Ghilim could do in return was stop giving anyone a reason to look. Get to F. Then go.

A few months, no more. He would just have to convince Clara somehow. Or he could just disappear.