Trading in Danger

She stared out the window, noting that the jabla trees were in bloom, pink fluffy puffs among the darker green of the haricond and jupal. The red tile roofs of the house and outbuildings showed among the green, with a sudden flash of light from the big pool. Nearer to the runway were the office buildings, utilitarian cream blocks topped with solar panels, but neat, with a ruffle of red and blue flowers on either side of the main door.

“Give us a hand, Ky,” Gaspard said. Ky yanked her attention back to the instruments, and called out items on the checklist as Gaspard made the final approach. Then they were down, and rolling. Ky turned her collar right side out, and reached back for her uniform jacket. She was not going to come home disheveled and disorganized. By the time Gaspard had taxied to the parking line, where old George waited to hook up the tie-downs, she was ready to pass—well, not any official inspection, but any of the staff.

“Good to see you home,” George said. “You didn’t belong with the likes of them slimes anyway.”

Ky knew it would do no good to tell him they weren’t slimes. George, veteran of the Second War, loathed mainlanders. He had refused regen treatment for his leg because it would have meant a mainland hospital.

“I’ll take your bags,” George said now. “Your dad wants to see you right away.” He moved stiffly to the luggage compartment.

Ky turned to the office building. No one was coming out to meet her—normal. Were they going to pretend all this was normal? The sea breeze, moist and fragrant, lay its hand on her cheek, and she wanted to yield to it, to be soothed by it, but she was no longer the child who had left here four years ago.

Inside the front door, cooler air swirled around her. She faced a warren of desks and workstations, most occupied by obviously busy people who barely looked up as she entered. On her left, the familiar corridor led to the row of walled offices: her father’s, her uncle’s, her elder brothers’.

She hesitated a moment outside the door to her father’s office, then tapped, and opened the door.

Her father looked up from his desk as she came in. “Kylara, beshi… you look like you must feel.”

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not. Come here—” He came out from behind his desk and held out his arms. Ky leaned into his embrace. “Shhh, shhhh,” he murmured, though she had made no sound. He smelled of the tik plantations he must have walked around that morning, a complex scent she had known forever.

“I didn’t know,” she said, into his shoulder. “I thought I was helping…”

His shoulder twitched. “Do you remember your fifth birthday party?”

How could she ever forget when they kept bringing that up? She had pushed Mina Patel into the wading pool, and Mina had contrived to fall crooked and cut her head on the one place the rim’s padding had worn away, because she’d kept her hair bows on, in spite of Ky’s advice to take them off or they’d get wet. And it had been for a good cause, because Mina had been tormenting her little sister Asha, who was afraid of the water, and was about to push her, when Ky shoved Mina. Mina had grabbed at Asha when she overbalanced, so they’d both screamed and Ky had been sent inside, at her own birthday party, to sit in glowering misery in her room while her friends ate her birthday cake and her mother—her own mother—made a fuss over Mina Patel.

“You have to learn to think first, Kylara,” her father said now, his hands on her shoulders pushing her gently back so he could give her That Look.

“I did think,” she said. “At least, I thought it was thinking…”

“Well… I’m sure you meant well,” he said. “Now we have to figure out what to do with you—”

She had thought of that, in the last moments before landing. “I could go to the university and finish a degree,” she said. “I have almost enough credits—”

“No,” he said firmly. “We can’t have that. You can’t be here; there’s too much publicity.”

“I could go to Darien Tech, over on Secci…”

“No. It’s out of the question. I’ve already decided—” He paused as someone tapped on the office door. “Who is it?”

“Me.” Ky’s older brother Sanish opened the door and put his head in. “Are you busy—oh,Ky.You’re here.”

As if he didn’t know. As if they didn’t all know. As if he hadn’t come to gloat, in a big-brotherish way.

“Come on in, San. I was just telling Kylara what we came up with.”

“You were in on this?” Ky asked. She could feel her neck getting hot.

“All I did was look up figures,” San said, spreading his hands. “Don’t blame me.”

“We weren’t going to tell you until after supper,” her father said. “But since you are here a little early… and after all, your mother wants her time with you…”

Her heart sank. While she’d been sitting, bored and miserable, in the plane on the flight out, they’d had time to plot out her whole life, probably. Just like when she was thirteen, and they’d decided that a trip in space as an apprentice on a Vatta freighter would get that nonsense about the military out of her head.

“We think it’s clever,” her father said, with a glance at San that told Ky exactly who he thought was the clever one of the family. Not her, of course. “You’ll have a chance to prove yourself, and you’ll be well out of the way.”

Out of the way. Like a naughty child. She was not going to cry. “Well, what is your marvelous idea?” she asked in a voice that even she could hear sounded sulky.

“We’re sending you out to the Rift with a ship going to salvage,” her father said. “You’ll have a cargo on the way out, sell the ship, then come back commercial. Altogether it should take at least eleven months, and by then things will surely have died down.”

Ky glared at her father and older brother. “You’d think I’d blown up a ship,” she said.

“Don’t be overdramatic, Ky,” her father said. “No one’s accused you of anything like that. We’re trusting you to do family business. It’s an honor—”

“No. You’re sticking me in a corner. Hiding me—”

“We could do that well enough by giving you a job in inventory control right here at the tik plantations. Be reasonable,Ky.”

“But—I’ll be gone months and months—maybe years. And it’s boring—”

“The heat will be off you by then, and it may not be boring. You’ll be heading out into the Borderlands.”

“Maybe.” Ky glared, but she already knew she would take the job. What other choice did she have? “I guess it’s all right.”

“Good. You’re taking the Gle