The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

“I’m not a sucker,” Nick said.

“You are so.” She sipped at her cocktail—Sex on the Beach—through a straw and paddled her feet in the water. “You love the Guild.”

“In that case we’re all suckers,” Nick said. “All we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules.”

Leo, rotating gently in his panda bear, snorted. “That’s a pretty tall order,” he said. His slang was better than both of theirs, and he loved to show off.

“What does that mean?”

“A tall order?” Leo put his head back and let his three braids dangle in the water. His head was plucked bald except for a square patch of hair at the back, which was long and braided into three thin plaits. He had been told this hairstyle would not be acceptable in Bangalore, but he still had a few months in Chile, and Leo wasn’t going to reach for the razor until the plane was waiting for him. “A tall order is something that is nearly impossible. So you say that all we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules. I say, ‘That’s a tall order.’ It means that I’m not sure I can do it.”

“Why not?”

Leo rolled his head to the side and looked at Nick. “I’m disenchanted with the Guild.”

“Why?”

“Remember that guy, a couple of weeks ago? I was walking with him across the quad.”

“Yes,” Nick said. “The man in the baby-blue suit.”

“The Man in the Baby-Blue Suit,” Meg said. “It sounds like a song.”

“He wasn’t anything like a song,” Leo said. “Unless it was a song about ominous government types.”

“What was his name?”

“He never told me.”

“All right, so.” Meg thought about it. “We’ll call him Mibbs.”

“They call me Mister Mibbs!” Nick was pleased with his joke.

Leo didn’t laugh. “You saw him, Nick. He wasn’t funny.”

“No,” Nick agreed. “Even in that suit he wasn’t funny.”

“He walked at a distance from me,” Leo said. “As if he were afraid to come too close. He asked me about my experiences on what he kept calling the ‘warpath.’”

“That’s nothing new. Everyone’s always asking you crazy questions about being an Indian,” Nick said. “Like that thirteenth-century Japanese guy who keeps challenging you to an archery contest.”

“And that German woman,” Meg piped up. “Astride von What-have-you.”

Leo put his hands over his ears. “Oh, God, Astride! I was so glad when she finally left.”

Nick laughed, but Leo dropped his hands from his ears and his eyes were serious. “He asked me all sorts of intense questions. Very specific. About certain practices of, shall we say, revenge? Revenge isn’t quite the right word. It’s about compensation, completion . . . but to an outsider, it can look . . .”

“Vicious?” Nick supplied the word, thinking of Badajoz.

“Perhaps. In any case, Mr. Mibbs had very broad questions about what ‘Indians’ do with white captives.”

“Like, torture?”

Leo shrugged. “He had all this crazy mixed-up information about the Mohawks and the Mixtecs, most of it complete bullshit. He seemed to think that Mohawks sacrifice babies on top of pyramids and eat their livers, which is absurd because . . . well, never mind. The point is, he was obsessed with how to find out if a stolen baby had been killed or adopted. I told him that I’m Pocumtuk, not Mixhawk . . . ” Leo laughed, then frowned when Nick and Meg just stared at him. “Well, anyway, he told me to shut up and answer his questions. So I said I could only speak for my nation, but that it was important to understand that when it is deemed appropriate for our captives to die, they die in a manner that we feel mirrors the agonies of our own hearts. If it is deemed appropriate that they be adopted, they are ceremonially incorporated into the nation—”

“It would be great if you would use shorter sentences,” Meg said.

Leo rolled his eyes and carried on. “At which point he interrupted me too, and said he didn’t care about the particulars; was there some sort of computer database recording what happened to white babies stolen by—and I am using his words here—bloodthirsty savages like myself? I just started laughing because what else was I supposed to do?”

“Scalp him and eat his liver on a pyramid, I guess,” Nick said, swishing his hands through the warm water.

“Well, yes. I should have thought of that of course. And he does have a great head of hair, but who would want to touch it?”

Nick smiled, and so did Leo, but Nick knew they were both pretending to make light of Mr. Mibbs. Just the thought of touching that man gave Nick the creeps, like hearing a door close in an empty house.

“So I laughed,” Leo said, “and I asked him which part of the past he was from. He said it was an official question: Was there such a database? I said he could take his official question and stuff it up his ass. He said that if I didn’t answer his question I would be sorry.”

“You think he was Guild brass or something?” Meg’s voice was high with excitement.

“Yes,” Leo said. “I think he was.”

“What happened then? He said he’d make you sorry, and then what?”

“Then he . . . well, he looked at me,” Leo said. “He’d avoided looking at me up until that point, and then suddenly he just lifted his head and stared. You must have felt it, Nick. That thing he did with his eyes. When he looked at you. That feeling, that desolation.”

“Felt what?” Meg asked.

Nick recalled the emotion that had flooded him when that gaze had been turned on him. “Despair,” he said.

“Yes. It was like he was pushing into my head. Pushing out my emotions and replacing them with his.”

“Mind control,” Meg said. “The Guild uses mind control.”

“Surely not,” Nick said. “It’s easy enough to read people’s emotions when they look at you. He was just a weird, unhappy man with a disturbing imagination. He wasn’t a Guild official. Think about all the Guild officials we know here at the compound. Think about the Alderwoman, Alice Gacoki. She’s