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Better not, she told herself. She might as well tell her colleagues and her dean, accept the escort of however many university lawyers they would probably unleash, and, dressed in her most formal suit, drive ceremoniously to the station. Where, no doubt, things would take forever if they happened at all. She had suspicions that the lawyers would express "grave reservations" and other such language designed to stop her from doing what she thought was right until her brother could be called.
A campus cruiser whirred slowly toward her. Jogging alongside was a cleaning crew in coveralls and sunvisors. Workfare recipients? she thought. They ran in step, without the sloppy individualism of the Welfare Island denizens. Almost, she thought, as if they were programmed. Their coveralls bore the University seal. One lifted his visor to wipe his brow. His face was very young, his eyes blank. Students had an ugly word for the maintenance squads: campus nulls. No one knew where LAU found so many of them. Student myth insisted they had defaulted on their loans.
She ran by them, noting from the corner of her eye the rentacop's surprised look. Damn! He'd probably call that in. She turned a corner, looking down as her ru
She began to perspire, and her thick old gray sweatsuit settled into its familiar folds. She passed a broken shard of glass and saw the same lean woman she had seen reflected yesterday in the helmet of a hoplite's riot gear: sandy-colored, rather than vivid, but wholly resolved. The street narrowed here. The station . . . that turn, or the next?
She stopped and drew out her map.
"Yo!"
Wyn crumpled her map with one hand. With the other, slowly, she reached for her panic button.
"Not go
"I'm trying to help out some friends," she answered before she thought. Don't let him know you have money, not him, and not whatever friends he's got with him. "They were . . . got caught in the riot yesterday."
"You the teacher?"
"What?" She jumped at the voice and unfamiliar presence that questioned when she had expected threat. Something about its tones reminded her of her student she had come out to rescue, and she replied in Spanish.
"Speak Anglo, lady, per favor. I need to learn it good and blow this fuckin' Island like hermanito mio. An' I don' understand your kind of talk."
"Your brother?" Eyes and voice and face flickered as the boy rose from behind a scribbled-over, rusted dumpster.
"In your class. How you think I know you?"
"Want to go with me to the station?" Wyn asked. "He was arrested in the riot, defending some of the other students. I'm going down there now to bail him-"
"No WAY!" cried the boy. "You stay clear. He's gone now, you gotta think of him as gone . . . . I'm telling you the truth. Get outta here fast."
"It is the law" Wyn said firmly, "that a Citizen-not just a Taxpayer, mind you-but any Citizen may post bail and be released unless he's done something for which bail is denied. It is the law." Echoes-we honor the laws, and we honor the laws that are above the laws-rumbled like thunder in her mind. Or maybe that was the junker that clattered by on malfunctioning airtreads, forcing Wyn and the boy against a stained wall.
"Law don' work for us." The street-crawler's whine came back into the boy's voice.
"There is always law."
"For you, maybe. Rich lady. WASP lady. You go and talk, and maybe they give you coffee, maybe they call you 'ma'am.' But it won't do no good." The boy scrubbed a fist across his face. "They're gone. Gotta think of it that way. Even our mama, and she cry all the time. Don't go, lady. You don't want them to know who you are."
"He's your brother," Wyn said. Her voice went high and reedy. It nettled her: here she was, prepared to go bail out her students, and this child warned her away. His own brother, for pity's sake.
The boy looked down. "He's gone. And you're off your turf." He shifted from foot to foot, uneasy.
"People coming?" she asked, arching one eyebrow up.
"If we stand here too long."
"Walk me to the station," she suggested. The longer she stood here, the less she liked the walls with their smeared graffiti and windows covered by broken boards or the way they pressed in on her, or how old-style dumpsters provided the sites of a hundred ambushes. "Get me there, and then take off."
He thought about it, glanced around with a sentry's wariness, then nodded as if he were making an enormous concession. "Part way," he grudged. "Gotta get home. Don't want them to see me."
He turned his face away, but not before Wyn saw a dark flush of shame.
She was used to precinct houses that aped the Georgian brick of her university, to police who nodded to her and called her ma'am. She was not used to the boy's unease at approaching a police station or at the bunker that squatted between a garage and a locksmith's; and she did not approve, either of the fear or the reasons for it. Booths heavy with plexiglass and metal loomed up before it, well before it. The men and women in them stared down, not out. Wyn's guide hesitated. "They know we're here. Sense our body heat or something like that."
His feet shuffled, a strained, uncomfortable dance.
What would be the point of giving him a reward? They were being watched: if not by the police, then by his friends or his enemies. No point.
"I'll be fine from here," she said on a deep breath that made the lie believable.
"They're coming!" The boy's voice cracked. At Wyn's gesture, he vanished more quickly than she would have believed.
"He bothering you, lady?" The officers who edged up to her wore gear only slightly less formidable than the visored helmets and shields of their riot equipment. One held a bell-mouthed weapon Wyn identified with some amazement as a sonic stu
"He was giving me directions. He was trying to help." She raised her voice, hoping the boy would hear her.
Their eyes raked her suspiciously. She wished for the protection that a car, a university escort, or the careful panoply of a dress suit might give her. She held her hands prudently away from the pouch at her belt.
"I'm from the University. Wyn . . . Professor Baker, on leave from Harvard." She managed not to wince as she brought out the seldom-used snobberies. "Classics Department. Some of my students got caught up in yesterday's disturbance. I came to bail them out." And, seeing their disbelieving eyes on her gray sweatsuit and tousled hair, "I have ID and credit on me."
They gestured her to proceed them into the stationhouse, a move that had everything to do with caution and nothing to do with courtesy. Her shoulderblades prickled every time she thought of the sonic stu
She was sweating as if she'd run the Boston Marathon by the time she moved through the metal detectors and stated her business, first to a uniformed receptionist, whose flat eyes blinked, once, skeptically at her, then widened as she produced ID and platinum card. The sudden respect in her voice made Wyn tighten her lips, and tighten them further as the officers who had brought her in escorted her past the barrier. Her show of money and ID made them more respectful, but only slightly.
A flickering CRT and a bored officer faced her as she stated her business. She knew her voice had taken on its most glacial New England snap as she stated her business.