Page 69 of Xel: Broken Bond
“That’s right,” I confirmed.
She nodded, looking a little frazzled. “Right. Good. Sorry, we’ve got a Catherine coming to look at the puppies at three o’clock, and tomorrow, there’s a Carol who wants to see the donkeys, so I’m having trouble keeping track of everyone.” She hopped off her stool and gave me a quick hug. “Good luck with it. I hope she’s open to the idea. It sounds like it would be good for her.”
A minute or two later, a car pulled up outside, and Kathy got out, clutching a large handbag and with her habitual scowl on her face. I’d known her long enough to know that the expression was a defence, rather than an indication of her mood.
I headed outside, and Kathy’s scowl only got darker as she saw me coming. “This isn’t some prank, is it?” she asked me immediately. “Because it took me two hours to get here. Three trains and a taxi, and some half-wit spilling coffee all over myshoes.” She shook one of her feet in irritation, though the coffee seemed to have long since dried.
“Not a prank, no,” I told her. “But it’s not quite as simple as I made it sound. There is a job here that I think you’d like. But the person in charge of it knows that you’re not a registered member of the Alliance.” I felt it was only fair to warn her of that right up front. Then, if she wanted to hightail it out of here, her taxi was still here waiting for her.
Her expression only turned more sour. “So it’s more exploitation, is it? More being paid a pittance and treated like dirt? Did Ronson’s nephew end up being cut from the same cloth, then? No, Xel, I’ve had enough of that. Mr Ronson chewed me up and spat me out, and now there are lawyers crawling through the place like rats, so I’ve hardly got a job anymore as it is. Dorral called me in this morning, promised that there weren’t any bigwigs around to get us into trouble today, but the place is falling apart. A full quarter of the staff have quit, saying they can’t afford to be arrested for working illegally. So he’s spitting chips that I decided to turn around and leave again. If you’ve got a job that I can do, then I sorely need it, but I can’t be jumping through nineteen hoops to get it, particularly since that would mean me moving across the other side of the city to do it. I can’t commute every day, and do you know how hard it is to find a place to rent when I don’t have documentation?”
I didn’t begrudge her the rant the slightest bit. Everything she said was true, and I hadn’t even thought about the fact that she would have to move to work here. Although, there was a good possibility that she could end up living in one of the cabins that the Ranzors were currently constructing in the back paddocks.
“It’s a real job, and it pays a real wage,” I told her. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with a few complications. Come with me and we can talk about it. And I’ll need to ask you a few questions. I’d just rather not do that right here, in front ofthe road.” We were still trying to keep as many details about the colony as quiet as possible. Any visitors who asked were being told that the trucks of building materials were for student accommodation, and Vonnie and the Ranzors were doing their best to keep out of sight.
Kathy folded her arms, assessing me with a cool sweep of her eyes. “You don’t seem like the type to stab someone in the back,” she said at length. But at the same time, she seemed far from convinced about any of this.
“I’m not stabbing anyone in the back,” I said, knowing it would only reassure her so much. “My new master is a wonderful man. He’s nothing at all like Mr Ronson. I like my work, looking after all the animals. And he let me adopt a cat,” I added, unable to help the smile as I thought of Mr Beans. Now that he’d settled in properly in the cottage, he was becoming more adventurous, and yesterday, he’d stolen a small packet of cat food from the pantry. Vonnie and I had spent ten minutes trying to coax him out from under my master’s bed, where he’d gone to hide with his treat.
That, it seemed, got Kathy’s shell to crack. “I like cats,” she grumbled, seeming indignant about it. “Always wanted one, but I can’t adopt one without everyone finding out I don’t have Alliance membership. Stupid rules.”
I suppressed a grin at her belligerence. “Come with me for a walk over to the barn,” I said. “I’ll show you the baby thumbit and tell you about the job.”
“Fine,” Kathy said, with an exaggerated sigh. “Lead on. I might as well hear you out, at least.”
I led the way around the back of the reception building and down the path towards the barn. It was out of the way of any visitors or deliveries, but it also wasn’t close enough to the colony barn to give anything away. “The first thing I need to ask you,” I said, “is how you came to be living on Rendol 4. I’ve hada very recent education about immigration laws, so I know that in order to-”
“How do you know I’m not an Alliance member?” Kathy asked me, cutting right to the point.
I had a prepared answer to that, based off a planning session with one of Colonel Riglis’s strategic planners. “The accountants going over the hotel books have been finding some discrepancies,” I told her. “Cole wants to sell it, but he needs a proper business assessment before he can do that. And the accountants said there aren’t enough staff on the books to match up to the number of people working there. The lawyers did a bit of digging, and your name didn’t show up on the list of registered staff.”
“Yeah, well… these things are always too good to last forever,” Kathy grumbled again. “I was going to need a new job anyway, with old Ronson pushing up daisies.” This display of attitude was exactly the reason that both Cole and Torv were going to think I was out of my mind in recommending Kathy for this job. Caring for a couple of dozen babies required patience and good humour and a certain playfulness that, based on first impressions, Kathy seemed to be entirely lacking.
“So how did you come to be on Rendol 4?” I asked again. Everything else we talked about today would hinge on her explanation for that one thing. And I felt my heart rate speed up as I braced myself for bad news.
Kathy stopped walking, turning to stare at me with what seemed to be a combination of hope and defeat. It was the most vulnerable I’d ever seen her, in the full three years I’d known her. “My grandparents were part of the Rashtolic Uprising. I don’t know if you know much about that. The Rashtol system is three thousand light years from here. It culminated in an entire planet being wiped out in nuclear warfare. My parents condemned the violence, but they couldn’t do anything to stop it.So they packed up a couple of bags of belongings, and we headed for the Alliance.
“There were three hundred refugees on the ship we were on. We were attacked by pirates as we were coming through the Zharag system, and they disabled the ship and blew a hole in the side. About eighty people managed to make it into evacuation pods. Ours was picked up by a smuggler who did us the magnanimous favour of dropping us off on Rendol 4, in exchange for every single credit my parents owned.
“They had no money, no food, no documentation, so they built a little cabin in the forest north of Hon and my dad started going to work as a dock hand at the fishing piers. My mum eventually found work as a nanny for a wealthy family who agreed not to report her to the police, so long as they could pay her half the legal wage. They scraped a living together, piece by piece, until we could move into a real house.” She gave me another stern look. “There are plenty of people on Rendol 4 willing to turn a blind eye to certain legalities, because they understand that life doesn’t come in a neatly packaged box with a pretty bow. And there are an equal number of people who are willing to turn a blind eye in exchange for the right to exploit the hell out of someone, because that person is too afraid to say no. I’ve known my fair share of both types of people. And I’m just about done with dealing with the latter.”
I was going to have to explain all of this to Torv later but he’d given me notional permission to continue the conversation, if Kathy had a reasonable explanation for her presence here. And based on what he’d said this morning, if her parents had brought her here at the age of ten, she was in the clear.
“As I said, my new master is a very kind man,” I told her. “He has no desire to exploit anyone. The job on offer will pay a real wage, and there’s a chance it could come with accommodation provided. That’s not a guarantee at this point,” I added, notwanting to mislead her by promising more than I could give. “But it’s part of the long term plan for the project. Aside from that, the job itself isn’t actually to do with caring for any of the animals. But based on what you’ve just said, I think it might be right up your alley.”
Kathy scoffed. “And the people in charge of this project are just going to overlook the fact that I’m undocumented?”
“No,” I said. “They’re going to provide you with documentation.”
Kathy froze, a look of sheer terror on her face. “You mean this is agovernment leveljob?” She started looking around, like a rat surrounded by cats. “Withlawyersandpublic servantsandimmigration personnel?”
“Come into the barn and look at our baby thumbit,” I told her, firmly standing my ground. “And don’t run away until you’ve heard me out. You won’t gain anything by doing that.”
Once again, she stopped, this time looking entirely confused. “It’s been what, four fucking weeks since you moved here?”
I shrugged, not sure how it was relevant. “More or less.”
“So where the hell did all thisconfidencecome from?” she asked, gesturing vaguely to the whole of my body. “Back at the hotel, you’d flinch if you dropped a single towel on the floor.”