"You're being separated now," said Achilles. "Wouldn't want anyone to start thinking of a rescue operation. You can still email each other. We want your creative synergy to continue. After all, you're the finest little military minds that humanity was able to squeeze out in its hour of need. We're all really proud of you, and we look forward to seeing your finest work in the near future."
One of the kids farted loudly.
Achilles only grinned, winked at Petra, and left.
Ten minutes later they were all in separate vehicles, being driven away to points unknown, somewhere in the vast reaches of the largest country on the face of the Earth.
Part Two
ALLIANCES
6
CODE
To: Graff%[email protected]
From: Konstan%[email protected]
Re: Leak
Your Excellency, I write to you myself because I was most vociferously opposing to your plan to take young Julian Delphiki from our protection. I was wrong as we learnt from the missile assault on former apartment today leaving two soldiers dead. We are follow your previous advice by public release that Julian was killed in attack. His room was target in late night and he would die instead of soldiers sleeping there. Penetration of our system very deep, obviously. We trust no one now. You were just in time and I regret my making of delay. My pride in Hellene military made me blind. You see I speak Common a little after all, no more bluffing between me and true friend to Greece. Because of you and not me a great national resource is not destroy.
If Bean had to be in hiding, there were worse places he could be than Araraquara. The town, named for a species of parrot, had been kept as something of a museum piece, with cobbled streets and old buildings. They weren't particularly beautiful old buildings or picturesque houses--even the cathedral was rather dull, and not particularly ancient, having been finished in the twentieth century. Still, there was the sense of a quieter way of life that had once been common in Brasil. The growth that had turned nearby Ribeirao Preto into a sprawling metropolis had pretty much passed Araraquara by. And even though the people were modern enough--you heard as much Common on the streets as Portuguese these days--Bean felt at home here in a way that he had never felt in Greece, where the desire to be fully European and fully Greek at the same time distorted public life and public spaces.
"It won't do to feel too much at home," said Sister Carlotta. "We can't stay anywhere for long."
"Achilles is the devil," said Bean. "Not God. He can't reach everywhere. He can't find us without some kind of evidence."
"He doesn't have to reach everywhere," said Sister Carlotta. "Only where we are."
"His hate for us makes him blind," said Bean.
"His fear makes him unnaturally alert."
Bean grinned--it was an old game between them. "It might not be Achilles who took the other kids."
"It might not be gravity th
at holds us to Earth," said Sister Carlotta, "but rather an unknown force with identical properties."
Then she grinned, too.
Sister Carlotta was a good traveling companion. She had a sense of humor. She understood his jokes and he enjoyed hers. But most of all, she liked to spend hours and hours without saying a thing, doing her work while he did his own. When they did talk, they were evolving a kind of oblique language where they both already knew everything that mattered so they only had to refer to it and the other would understand. Not that this implied they were kindred spirits or deeply attuned. It's just that their lives only touched at a few key points--they were in hiding, they were cut off from friends and family, and the same enemy wanted them dead. There was no one to gossip about because they knew no one. There was no chat because they had no interests beyond the projects at hand: trying to figure out where the other kids were being held, trying to determine what nation Achilles was serving (which would no doubt soon be serving him), and trying to understand the shape the world was taking so they could interfere with it, perhaps bending the course of history to a better end.
That was Sister Carlotta's goal, at least, and Bean was willing to take part in it, given that the same research required for the first two projects was identical to the research required for the last. He wasn't sure that he cared about the shape of history in the future.
He said that to Sister Carlotta once, and she only smiled. "Is it the world outside yourself you don't care about," she said, "or the future as a whole, including your own?"
"Why should I care about narrowing down which things in particular I don't care about?"
"Because if you didn't care about your own future, you wouldn't care whether you were alive to see it, and you wouldn't be going through all this nonsense to stay alive."
"I'm a mammal," said Bean. "I try to live forever whether I actually want to or not."
"You're a child of God, so you care what happens to his children whether you admit it to yourself or not."
It was not her glib response that bothered him, because he expected it--he had provoked it, really, no doubt (he told himself) because he liked the reassurance that if there was a God, then Bean mattered to him. No, what bothered him was the momentary darkness that passed across her face. A fleeting expression, barely revealed, which he would not have noticed had he not known her face so well, and had darkness so rarely been expressed on it.