The Secret War - 1st novel in the Shadow Series

Chapter 5 .

VAI

On the parked shuttle with Warpaint nearby and my father standing over me, the last thing I expected was for the old man to pull me to my feet and embrace me. For a moment, I froze. I had barely touched my father since I came out of stasis.

This time, I didn't have the chance to decline. Maybe I wouldn't have, anyway. He pressed me close. I patted him on the back half-heartedly.

"What in the hell were you thinking, Vai? I can't leave you alone for three damn days? Three days?"

His touch forced me to wrestle with the contradictions of his tenderness and his anger, and the fact that I loved him and at the same time hated him for what he'd done to me. I resented that. I didn't want to think about those things.

I pulled away, and he guided me back into my seat like I was some frail thing, sat down next to me with his hand on my shoulder. Commander Ragear's touch had been warm, empathetic. My father's was rough.

"I get it," I said glibly, "it's all my fault. I'll try to avoid being drugged and beaten by criminals in the future."

"Of course it's your fault," he snapped. "You could have avoided it this time."

I could have. But I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of saying so.

"I asked you to do three things. Stay home, stay out of trouble, get on the shuttle to Jupiter Station. This should not have been difficult, even for you."

"Yeah, well, my friend was in trouble" -- he wasn't my friend -- "and when my friends are in trouble I do something about it. Would you mind taking your hand off me?"

He looked at me, and I looked back coldly. I thought I saw him vulnerable, for just a moment, as he turned his face away from mine in frustration. It made me think I still had the power to hurt him, and that . . . wasn't entirely unpleasant.

"Fine," he said, going cold himself. "Well, Warpaint filled me in on the basics while you were having your screaming fit." My father briefly ran through the day's events. I left the estate after receiving some mysterious damn message from Thrissko, that kid I spent time with at the gym, ending up at some little Bundu-jo tailor shop. There I got handed my ass extravagantly by some local crooks, who drugged me, nearly killed me, and eventually I showed up for the shuttle, late my father added, with a variety of broken bones, screaming like a maniac for no discernible reason . . .

He said these things counting them off on his fingers, and finished with, "Exactly what the hell went on in the basement of this little shop?"

"I'm exhausted," I said.

"Vai."

"Point me at the nearest bed. Let's yell at each other tomorrow, what do you say?"

He slapped his okulus around his forearm, and it went cylindrical. "Why can't anything ever be easy with you? Fine, you want it the hard way? So be it. Volo, ostendo." His volo swiveled and projected a square of light into the air showing the display of my father's okulus. I watched as he accessed a second okulus—mine, and navigated to my messages.

A sudden feeling of despair hacked at my guts. "What do you think you're doing?" I didn't want him digging through my private communications. They were for me, just for me. This was a violation, a kind of awful theft. "Stop it," I said. "Get out of my okulus. Whatever I do, it's none of your business."

Technically, until a citizen of the Gathering was 18 years old, a guardian could access the contents of their okulus, but it was something that almost never happened.