A Coming Of Age

"By all rights, Doctor, I should have you killed for that stunt."

Jarvis turned his attention to Omega. "You're probably right," he said coolly, ignoring the tightness in his stomach. His plan had worked, and the expected consequences now had to be faced. "Why don't you go ahead and do it? If your followers are willing to kill for you, that is."

For a long moment Omega said nothing, his singed hair and bright red forehead framing an expression that was nothing short of murderous. Slowly, the fury faded, to be replaced by something merely bitter. "I underestimated you," he acknowledged at last, his voice almost calm. "How did you do that, anyway?"

"Sulfuric acid in the flasks, a mixture of potassium chlorate and sugar wrapped in tissue paper as the packing material," Jarvis told him. "The reaction is extremely exothermic, and when you opened the lid the rush of oxygen caused all the paper to spontaneously ignite. I'd had the stuff ready to use ever since I realized the police were onto me," he added, glancing at Tirrell. "If I'd had a little more warning of Detective Tirrell's visit, I'd have had everything in the box, ready to go."

"I suppose the drugs that were in there were also destroyed?"

Jarvis nodded. "Very much so. Complex organic molecules fall apart easily in that kind of heat."

A movement outside caught Jarvis's attention, and he turned as three kids escorted a rigid-limbed Lisa through the window. "Well!" Omega said, turning as the girl was teeked to the floor. "At least we made a clean sweep. You have any trouble, Case?"

The boy addressed swallowed visibly. "Not too much with her, sir... but the righthand got away."

"He what?" Omega's satisfaction vanished.

"We couldn't help it, sir—when she flew out the window everyone looked, and he just shook off the hands on him and took off." The words were coming in a rush as the boy tried to vindicate himself. "We tried to catch him, but when we looked back he teeked a bunch of branches right in our faces... and by then she was loose again, so we had to chase both of them, and..." He shrugged helplessly. "Adom and the others are still looking for him, but I don't think they even know where he is anymore."

Tirrell snorted derisively. "Where he is, is halfway to civilization and a police force big enough to mop up your little group in five minutes. If you don't want a genuine battle on your hands, you'd better take your junior goons and get the hell out of here."

"Shut up, Tirrell," Omega said thoughtfully. "Doctor, you've left me no choice. You're going to have to come with us. Now."

"Prophet, if you want I'll take a couple of the others and go look for the righthand," Axel offered. "He can't have gotten that far."

"It's not worth it," Omega told him. "Why don't you go get the knapsack from where we left it and bring it here."

"Knapsack?" Jarvis asked carefully as Axel left the room. There had been something new in Omega's voice, something he didn't at all care for.

"I told you I wasn't going to hurt anyone, and I intend to keep my word," Omega said. "I'm going to leave everyone else here, suitably restrained, to wait for the police Tirrell claims will soon be coming."

Jarvis looked at the other's burned face and for a moment dared to hope... but with the next heartbeat he knew it couldn't be. Omega couldn't afford to leave Tirrell alive—despite his earlier sneering, it was clear that the detective had been hanging on his tail long enough and successfully enough to be a real danger. And if Tirrell was slated for death, then so was everyone in the cabin... including Colin.

It was the darkest, most painful decision Jarvis had ever had to face, and the fact that he'd known from the minute of Omega's arrival that it was coming made it no easier. To confess his lie about Colin's sleep would probably save the boy's life... but for what? What would Omega do with him wherever they were going? At the very least, he would surely try to bend Colin's loyalty toward himself, so as to be ready in the event that Jarvis's technique succeeded. Brought up by such a creature, what sort of life could Colin look forward to?

Or to put the question another way, what were the chances Colin could be rescued from the cabin or rescued from Omega's hideaway? Both, he suspected, were vanishingly small.

And then the ghost of an idea brushed across his mind. If Tirrell was truly insightful—and maybe a bit telepathic...

Omega's voice cut into his thoughts. "When will it be safe to move the child?"

Jarvis remembered to consult his watch before answering. "Not for two or three hours yet," he lied, knowing that with those words he was now committed. "Unless you want to wait, he'll have to stay here, too."

Omega's eyes bored into his. "Any particular reason he would be necessary to further experiments?"

Jarvis shook his head. "Any kid his age or a year or two older would do just as well. He's had several treatments, but given you'll have to wait until the subject reaches puberty to find out whether it worked anyway, two months isn't really significant."

Omega seemed taken aback. "Puberty? Why can't you tell before that?"

"Because there's no way to know if the small metabolic changes are going to have the desired effect. This is new territory; there aren't any theoretical curves to check experimental results against."

"I see." Omega looked over as Axel came in teeking a heavy-looking knapsack in front of him. "We'll discuss this later. Axel, we'll be tying up Tirrell in this room and putting Lisa in the living room; I want one of the kitchen chairs in each place."

Axel frowned as he let the knapsack drift gently to the floor. "Lisa too? I thought you were going to take her with us."

"That was before she fell in with bad company." Omega turned to Lisa, still standing rigid in her guards' teekay grip. "I had fine plans lor you, Lisa—literate preteens are not exactly common, you know, and you could have been of immense use to me. I'd had hopes of persuading you—with hypnotic drugs, perhaps—to be more compliant. But frankly, right now you're not worth that much trouble to me."

Jarvis looked at Lisa in surprise. Literate? No—surely Omega was lying; literacy was still restricted to those past Transition. But Lisa's expression held no surprise at Omega's words, only a sullen anger. And if she could indeed read... Jarvis's mind shifted into high gear, and for the first time he felt real hope. Maybe—with a properly phrased clue—he could vastly improve the odds he was leaving Tirrell with.

The kitchen chair arrived and Omega set to work.

It was a long-established axiom of Tigrin society—and the basis of the hive system—that a kid could only be controlled or immobilized by an older and stronger kid. But Omega had clearly done some hard thinking on the problem, and when he'd finished tying Tirrell into his chair, he took Lisa into the living room and proceeded to demonstrate his ingenuity.

His first step was to carefully tie her to the chair Axel had placed in the center of the room, positioning the knots behind her back and making sure none of them touched her skin, where they could conceivably be teeked open. His second step was to place a loose black bag over her head, tightening its drawstring snugly around her neck, and again tying it away from direct physical contact. And his final step—

Jarvis gasped. "Is that dynamite?"

"It is," Omega confirmed. Lying down on his back by the chair, he put down the stick of explosive and set to work with brackets and a screwdriver. "Lisa, I want you to listen carefully to me," he said as he worked. "I'm fastening a stick of dynamite to the underside of your chair. The detonator—the thing that sets it off—has its trigger fastened by a rope to the floor beneath the chair. If you try to teek the chair in any direction you'll blow yourself to bits. Understand?"