A Local Habitation
Page 50

“He didn’t order, he asked. And you’re wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“I do care if you all die, because Faerie cares. I care because no one needs to die, and,” I raised one hand in mock melodrama, “Sylvester will kick my ass if I don’t care.”
It worked. She bit back a smile, half-turning to keep me from noticing. Ha; too late. I can be pretentious sometimes, but I know it, and knowing your flaws means you can exploit them. “This would work better if we weren’t fighting,” I said.
She looked back. “You’re right,” she conceded, “it probably would.”
“You don’t have to like me. I mean, April doesn’t.”
Gordan grinned. “April doesn’t like a lot of things.”
“I noticed. Why is that?”
“She’s distanced.”
“Distanced?” I asked. I wanted Gordan to relax, but I had a job to do, and part of it was learning everything I could about the remaining inhabitants of Tamed Lightning. Most of them were probably nice folks, but one of them was a killer.
“She used to be a tree. She did tree things—she drank water, absorbed nutrients from the soil, photosynthesized—the good stuff.” She leaned back in her chair, now on familiar ground. “You want to talk ‘cycle of nature,’ trees have it down. Everything nature does is in a tree.”
“True enough.”
“So she’s a tree. Only suddenly she’s not a tree, she’s a network server. It’s cold there. It does server things, not living things. Instead of sunlight, she has electricity. Instead of roots, she has cables. It’s stuff she didn’t need before. So she starts to learn these new things—how to be a good machine—and she forgets about sunlight, and water in her roots, and photosynthesis.”
“Oh,” I said, realization dawning. “The Dryad is the tree.”
“Right. The more she knows about being a machine, the less she knows about being anything else.”
“But she still likes some people.”
“No, she likes Jan. The rest of us are tolerated as functions her ‘mother’ needs to remain operational.” Gordan shrugged. “It’s no big deal. We’re used to her.”
“Doesn’t it seem a bit . . . strange?”
“Have you ever met anyone with a cat they’d adopted from the pound?”
I blinked, a little thrown by the conversational shift. “Yes.”
“Let me guess: the cat was devoted to them and hated everyone else. Am I close?”
“Yeah,” I said, thoughtfully. Mitch and Stacy adopted a kitten from the SPCA once. It was a little ball of fluffy feline evil, set permanently on “kill.” Every time Shadow saw me—or Cliff, or even Kerry—he launched himself for whatever tender bits were closest to hand and started trying to remove them. But he never stopped purring when Stacy was around.
He died of old age two years before I came home. According to Mitch, he never mellowed: even when he was toothless and half-blind, he kept trying to savage anyone who came to visit. Good for him.
“It’s like that for April and Jan. April was the lost kitten at the pound, and Jan was the one who brought her home. It makes sense for April to be totally devoted. Personally, I’m amazed you can ever get her to stop following Jan around.”
“So they’re always together?”
“Not always. But if Jan snaps her fingers and says ‘jump,’ you can bet April will be right there to make sure you’re asking ‘how high.’ ”
“I see.”
“Do you?” Gordan fixed me with a stare. “I may not be big on the purebloods as a whole, but there’s a lot of loyalty around here. You might want to watch who you’re pointing the finger at.”
There’s no arguing with a statement like that. “I need to be getting back. You shouldn’t be here on your own.”
“I’m a big girl.” She held up a small black box. “This is my panic button. Anything comes for me, I push this, and the server failure alarm goes off. Don’t worry about me.”
I frowned. “Why doesn’t everyone have one of those?”
“We’ve never needed them before.”
“We need them now.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” She looked at me impassively, adding, “I’m not moving.”
“I got that.” I sighed, rising. “Don’t die.”
“Not intending to.”
I walked away into the darkness, feeling her eyes on my back until I turned the corner back onto the main pathway. I wasn’t comfortable leaving her alone, but I was even less comfortable staying, and I wasn’t going to fight with her. Not until I’d had the chance to go over Barbara’s papers and figure out what, exactly, they meant.
Thanks to the air-conditioning being off while we were on generator power, it was actually cooler outside the building. I squinted up at the moon, and then glanced to my watch. Almost four o’clock; the sun would be up soon. Just one more complication for the list.
Walking from the open spaces outside into the enclosed halls was like walking into a science- fiction ghost town; I was just waiting for the aliens to attack. The windows showed conflicting views of the landscaping outside, seeming even more disparate than they had earlier. A window on the third floor—if you could judge by the apparent distance to the ground—showed a perfect nighttime view of the lawn, complete with cats sprawled on the moonlit path.
Jan’s office was two rooms over at the end of a long hallway. The door, which had been propped open before, was closed. Frowning, I put a hand on the knife at my belt as I walked up and knocked. “Jan? Are you in there?”
“Coming!” There was a series of bumps and clatters as Jan made her way across the office and swung the door open. I glanced past her. Elliot was gone.
“Where’s Elliot?”
“He had to go get something. But I haven’t left this office—I’m totally safe, I was working on . . . actually, never mind what I was working on. I can’t explain it, and you wouldn’t understand it.” There was no insult in her tone—she was almost certainly right. Tilting her head to the side, her expression turned concerned. “Are you okay? I mean, you’re all pale. Have you eaten? Or slept?”