"And what's her name?"
"Poke. But don't bother looking for her. She's dead."
Graff thought about that a moment. "Is that the bad thing Achilles did?"
"Bean has reason to believe so, though I don't think it would be evidence enough to convict in court. And as I said, all these things may be unconscious. I don't think Bean would knowingly try to get even with Achilles, or anybody else, for that matter, but he might hope you'd do it for him."
"You're still holding back, but I have no choice but to trust your judgment, do I?"
"I promise you that Achilles is a dead end."
"And if you think of a reason why it might not be so dead after all?"
"I want your program to succeed, Colonel Graff, even more than I want Bean to succeed. My priorities are not skewed by the fact that I do care about the child. I really have told you everything now. But I hope you'll help me also."
"Information isn't traded in the I.F., Sister Carlotta. It flows from those who have it to those who need it."
"Let me tell you what I want, and you decide if I need it."
"Well?"
"I want to know of any illegal or top secret projects involving the alteration of the human genome in the past ten years."
Graff looked off into the distance. "It's too soon for you to be off on a new project, isn't it. So this is the same old project. This is about Bean."
"He came from somewhere."
"You mean his mind came from somewhere."
"I mean the whole package. I think you're going to end up relying on this boy, betting all our lives on him, and I think you need to know what's going on in his genes. It's a poor second to knowing what's happening in his mind, but that, I suspect, will always be out of reach for you."
"You sent him up here, and then you tell me something like this. Don't you realize that you have just guaranteed that I will never let him move to the top of our selection pool?"
"You say that now, when you've only had him for a day," said Sister Carlotta. "He'll grow on you."
"He damn well better not shrink or he'd get sucked away by the air system."
"Tut-tut, Colonel Graff."
"Sorry, Sister," he answered.
"Give me a high enough clearance and I'll do the search myself."
"No," he said. "But I'll get summaries sent to you."
She knew that they would give her only as much information as they thought she should have. But when he tried to fob her off with useless drivel, she'd deal with that problem, too. Just as she would try to get to Achilles before the I.F. found him. Get him away from the streets and into a school. Under another name. Because if the I.F. found him, in all likelihood they would test him--or find her scores on him. If they tested him, they would fix his foot and bring him up to Battle School. And she had promised Bean that he would never have to face Achilles again.
8
GOOD STUDENT
"He doesn't play the fantasy game at all?"
"He has never so much as chosen a figure, let alone come through the portal."
"It's not possible that he hasn't discovered it."
"He reset the preferences on his desk so that the invitation no longer pops up."