Read Online Necessity's Child (Liaden Universe®) by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee - Free Book Online

the top of her mind.
    Kneeling on the far side of the luthia ’s fire, Udari watched with his great dark eyes, but said nothing.
    “Wait . . .” the luthia murmured, her fingers stroking the cooling fires. They paused at the center of the battered forehead, described a sign.
    For an instant, Kezzi saw it—an orb divided against itself, as if the gadje ’s soul had been sundered, half from half.
    The luthia breathed in, and sat back on her heels.
    “We will do what may be done,” she said, meeting Udari’s eyes across the fire. “Kezzi, bring my bag.”
    * * *
    The new street policy put into play by the Consolidated Bosses of Surebleak said that, if the hospital field unit came up with somebody hurt in ways that seemed to be consistent with violence, they were to call the Street Patrol. The Patrol was to relay the call to the office of the appropriate Boss, where whoever was on comm would pass it to the ’hand on watch, who would either note it, or act on it.
    It was, Mike Golden admitted, more likely that such calls would be noted than acted on, given everything else that was prolly going on at the exact same minute. Boss Nova wasn’t one to let any snow drift around her . Or her ’hands. And, the Consolidated Bosses—or, say, at least Boss Conrad—weren’t no dummies. There was a safety net built into the system. The Patrol had to send one of theirs ’round to the hospital to have a look an’ a chat. If the Patroller found something interesting, then another call would get made to the Boss.
    That second call always got an answer from the Boss’s household—a high level answer, too, ever since the big thinkers decided to make their lives smooth and easy by retiring the Road Boss’s wife. His pregnant wife.
    Yeah, Mike thought, some people were too stupid to come in outta the snow.
    All that being so, he was in the kitchen, grabbing a cup of coffee and a cookie by way of soothing his hurt feelings, when Ali come in with the message.
    “Three repeaters at clinic,” she said. “One cut bad, one smashed nose, one broke finger.”
    Mike shrugged and took a bite of his cookie.
    “Come in from the warehouse side,” she added.
    Oh, had they?
    He gave Ali a nod, that being the best he could do with a mouthful of cookie, and she took herself back to the comm.
    Him, he sipped his hot coffee with respect and had a minute’s quiet thought.
    It happened the Bosses were thinking to expand into the company warehouses, which’d been standing empty, absent the odd metal-miner, since the Company’d gone off and left their hired help to fend for themselves while the Company mined timonium in some other, less chilly locale.
    Given the realities of Surebleak, you’da thought the warehouses would’ve been taken down to a few splinters of steel by this time, but—funny thing. They weren’t. Peculiar things went on up in the warehouses; folks disappeared, or fell down so hard their brains got shook and they didn’t remember quite where they’d got turned around. Didn’t take much of that before the warehouses came to be avoided.
    And that’d been okay, under the old ways of doin’ things.
    Under the new way, though . . .
    Mike sighed.
    If there was something with teeth living in the warehouses, best to know it before the Bosses sent in the work crews.
    ’Nother thing, too, while he was thinkin’.
    The girl with the dog—Anna, if he was to believe her, which he didn’t particularly—she’d pointed off north when he’d asked her where home was.
    But she’d run away east .
    Toward the warehouse district.
    Mike finished his coffee and stood there in the corner of the kitchen, staring hard at nothing much.
    Three bad acts coming in all banged up from outta the warehouses? One little girl an’ her little dog weren’t gonna be responsible for that.
    Were they?
    Only one way to find out, like his grandma used to say. And who knew? The repeaters might’ve noticed something useful.
    Mike rinsed his cup and put it