Spin State - Chris Moriarty [72]
He was blind.
His fingers walked over her nose and lips, into her eye sockets. “You’ve changed your face,” he said. “But you’re Gil’s daughter. Mirce told them you’d died, but I knew. They would have told me. They keep their secrets, of course. But something like that they’d have told me.”
“Who would have told you?”
“The saints, Katie. Her saints. Don’t tell me you’ve stopped praying to Her. You mustn’t do that, Katie. She needs our prayers. She lives by them. And She answers them.”
Li glanced down, saw the cold fire of the silver crucifix hanging on the priest’s scarred chest. A strangled cry echoed against the rock, and she realized that it came from her own throat.
Cartwright kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “You’ve come to ask me about the fire, haven’t you?”
Li swallowed, scraped her thoughts together. “What caused it, Cartwright?”
“Sharifi.”
“How? What was she after? What did she want you to do for her?”
“What witches always do; strike crystal.”
“But Sharifi had the company witch,” she said.
“Ah, but she didn’t trust the company witch, did she? Not at first. She only brought her in for the dirty work.”
“You mean the work in the Trinidad. But what was the witch doing there if they’d already found the condensa—the crystal?”
“She still needed someone to sing them for her, didn’t she? She still needed to talk to them. She still needed to run her damn tests. I wouldn’t do it for her. And she didn’t want a priest anyway.” His face twisted. “She wasn’t a believing woman.”
“I don’t understand. What wouldn’t you do for her?”
“Haas’s work,” Cartwright answered. “Devil’s work.”
“But she changed her mind, didn’t she?” Li asked, seized by a trembling conviction that Cartwright knew, that he’d always known, that he was somehow at the center of it all. “Or someone changed it for her. What happened before the fire? Why did Sharifi destroy her data? What was she afraid of?”
“Of the fires of Hell,” Cartwright said, crossing himself. “Of Her just punishments.”
Li heard a noise in the darkness, closer than any noise should be, and realized that she was trembling violently, that it was the soft clink of the zipper tab at her throat she was hearing, the rustle of her own clothes against skin and rock.
“You should visit your mother,” Cartwright said. “It’s not good to neglect her.”
“You’ve got me mixed up with someone else, Cartwright.”
“That’s not what your father says.”
A memory welled up from her gut like an underground river. She stopped it, corked it, slammed every door in her mind on it. “My father’s dead,” she said harshly. “And I came here for information, not church talk.”
“You came for the same reason we all come,” Cartwright said. “She called you.”
Li cleared her throat, choking on coal dust. “Did Sharifi’s project have union approval?”
“I’m Her man,” Cartwright said. “Not the union’s man.”
“Don’t feed me that line.” She held up her right hand in the gesture of the faded, peeling Christ Triumphant that had reigned over the Saturday night masses of her half-remembered childhood. “You’re two fingers of the same hand. I remember that much.”
“Then you remember enough to answer your question yourself. Haven’t you been there? They told me you swam in it.”
“The glory hole,” Li whispered, remembering the gleaming walls and fractal vaults of Sharifi’s secret chamber. “It’s a chapel. You found her a chapel.”
“My mother took me to the last chapel in her arms, down a bootlegger’s shaft,” Cartwright said. “AMC dug that one up and sold it off-planet. Like they always do.” He smiled, and it seemed to Li that his blind eyes were staring through her at a bright light she couldn’t see. “But not this time. This time we were ready.”
“Did Sharifi know what she’d found, Cartwright?”
“She knew as much as a nonbeliever could know.”
“She knew as much as you decided to tell her, you mean. You used her. You used