The Clan Corporate

"I've never met the… uh, met Creon," Helge said carefully. "At least, not to talk to. Is he, really?" She'd seen him before, at court. Prince Creon took after his father in looks, except that his father didn't drool on his collar. "My duties kept me away from court so much that I know too little-I mean to cause no offense-"

"Of course he's an idiot," Alexis said grimly. "And the worst is, he need not have been. A tragedy of birth gifted him with a condition called, by the Clan's doctors, PKU. We knew this, for our loyal subjects render their services to the crown without stint. One can live with it, we are told, without problems, if one restricts the diet carefully."

Aspartame poisoning? For a moment Helge was fully Miriam. Miriam, who had completed pre-med before switching educational tracks. She knew enough about hereditary diseases-of which phenylketonuria was quite a common one-to guess the rest of the story. "Someone in the kitchen added a sweetener to his diet while he was an infant?" she hazarded.

"Oh yes," breathed the king, and for an instant Miriam caught a flicker of the rage bottled up behind his calm face. She flinched. "By the time the plot was exposed he was… as you see. Ruined. And the irony of it is, he is the one who inherited his grandmother's trait. My wife"-for a moment the closed look returned-"never learned this. She died not long after, heartbroken. And now the doctors have discovered a way of knowing, and they say Creon is a carrier while my golden boy, my Egon-is not."

"How can they tell?" Helge asked artlessly, then concealed her expression with her glass.

"In the past year, they have developed a new blood test." Alexis was watching her expression, she realized, and felt her cheeks flush. "They can tell which child born of a world-walker and an-a, another-inherit the trait, and which do not. Creon is, the duke your uncle tells me, a carrier. His children, by a wife from the Clan, would be world-walkers. And unless the doctors conspire to make it so, they would not inherit his condition."

"I-understand," Helge managed, almost stammering with embarrassment. How do I talk my way out of this? she asked herself, with growing horror. I can't tell the king to fuck off-how much does he know about me? Does he know about Ben and Rita? Ben, her ex-husband, and Rita, her adopted-out daughter. Not to mention the other boyfriends she'd had since Ben, up to and including Roland. Would that work? Don't royal brides have to be virgins or something, or is that only for the crown prince? "It must be a dilemma for you."

"You have become a matter of some small interest to us," Alexis said, smiling, as he took her elbow and gently steered her, unresisting, back toward the door and the di

Internment

It had been twelve weeks, and Matt was already getting stir-crazy.

"I'm bored," he a

"I feel your pain." Mike frowned. Has it only been twelve weeks? That was how long they'd been holding Matt. For the first couple of weeks they'd kept him in a DEA safe house, but then they'd transferred him here-to a windowless apartment hastily assembled in the middle of an EMCON cell occupying the top floor of a rented office block. Matt's world had narrowed until it consisted of an efficiency filled with blandly corporate Sears-catalog furniture, home electronics from Costco, and soft furnishings and kitchenware from IKEA. A prison cell, in other words, but a comfortably furnished one.

Smith had been quite insistent on the prisoner's isolation; there wasn't even a television in the apartment, just a flat-screen DVD player and a library of disks. A team of decorators from spook central had wallpapered the rooms outside the apartment with fine copper mesh: there were guards on the elevator bank. The kitchenette had a microwave oven, a freezer with a dozen flavors of ready meal, and plastic cutlery in case the prisoner tried to kill himself. Nobody wanted to take any chances with losing Matthias.

Not that he was being treated like a prisoner-not like the two couriers in the deep sub-basement cell who lived like moles, seeing daylight only when Dr. James's BLUESKY spooks needed them for their experiments. But Matt wasn't a world-walker. Matt could tell Mike everything Mike wanted to know, but he couldn't take him there. As Pete Garfinkle had so crudely put it, it was like the difference between a pre-op transsexual and a ten-buck crack whore: Matt just didn't have the equipment to give FTO what they wanted.

"Listen, I'd like to get you somewhere better to live, a bit more freedom. A chance to get out and move about. But we're really up in the air here. We don't have closure; we need to be able to question any Clan members we get our hands on ourselves. So my boss is on me to keep pumping you until we've got a basic grammar and lexicon so if anything happens to you-say you had a heart attack tomorrow-we wouldn't be up shit creek."

"Stop bullshitting me." Matthias had been staring at the fake window in the corner of the room. (Curtains covering a sheet of glass in front of a photograph of the cityscape outside.) Now he turned back to Mike, clearly a

Mike took a deep breath, nodded. "My boss," he said, almost apologetically. And to some extent it was true; never mind Colonel Smith, the REMF-James-acted like he didn't trust his own left hand to give him the time of day. And he reported to Daddy Warbucks by way of the NSC-and Mike had heard all about that guy. Read about him. "Using you as an interpreter would risk exposing you to classified information. He's very security-conscious."

"As he should be." Matthias snorted exasperatedly. "All right, I'll work on your stupid dictionary. When are we going to start creating my new identity?"

"New identity?" Mike did a double take.

"Yah, the Witness Protection Scheme does try to provide the new identity, doesn't it?"

"Oh." Mike stared at him. "The Witness Protection Program is administered by the Department of Justice. This isn't a DOJ operation anymore, it got taken off us-I was seconded because I was already involved. Didn't you know?

Matthias frowned. "Who owns it?" he demanded. "The military?" Mike forced himself not to reply. After a moment Matt inclined his head fractionally. "I see," he murmured.

Mike licked his suddenly dry lips. Did I just make a mistake? he wondered. "You don't need to worry about that," he said. "Nothing has changed."

"All right." Matt sat down again. He sent Mike a look that clearly said, I don't believe you.

Mike rubbed his hands together and tried to change the subject. "What would happen if-say-you were a world-walker, and you tried to cross over while you were up here?" he asked.

"I'd fall." Matt glanced at the floor. "How high…?"

"Twenty-fourth floor." The set of Matt's shoulders relaxed imperceptibly. Mike had no problem reading the gesture: I'm safe from them, here.

"Would you always fall?" Mike persisted.

"Well-not if there was a mountain on the other side." Matt nodded thoughtfully. "Might be doppelgangered with a tower, in which case he'd get a bad headache and go nowhere. Or the world-walker might be lying down, in contact with solid object-go nowhere then, too."