Chase You To The Sun (17 page)

“What happened to you?” Shou’s voice made her look up from her feet. He emerged from the doors, stepping onto the deck with a cigarette in his mouth.

“Nothing,” she deflected. “I just had a little workout, that’s all.”

He looked past her at Bruce, approaching the house at a leisurely pace. “You running away from him?”

Lana exhaled forcibly. “He’s pushing me away, more like.”

The Japanese pirate took a drag on his cigarette. “Of course he is. He likes you too much.”

“What?” Her jaw dropped as she stared up at Shou blankly.

“It’s pretty obvious if you know him well.”

Lana wanted to protest, pry more out of him, but from the corner of her eye, she saw Bruce was now well within earshot. “But why...” she trailed off.

“I should probably stop talking,” Shou observed before taking another cigarette out of his packet and offering it to Bruce, who presently joined the two of them at the doors. “Hello,
oyabun
.”

“
Konnichiwa
,” Bruce replied with a faint grin. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“You want one too?” Shou presented Lana with his pack of smokes.

“Sure. Yeah. Why not?” It had been a while since she’d had a cigarette. Before she moved to Mars, she’d smoked quite a bit because Sergei had been a smoker.

“Because it’s bad for your lungs,” Bruce deadpanned.

Lana rolled her eyes. “Aren’t they all tar-free these days?”

“Not the ones Shou’s smoking.”

“Oh, well. It’ll help me relax.”

“You stressed?”

“Me? Heavens, no. I can’t imagine why.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Laying on the sarcasm?”

“If you two keep quarreling, I’m going somewhere else,” Shou announced with a wink, paling somewhat when Bruce shot him a warning glare. “Sorry, boss.”

“You should probably do just that,” Bruce said calmly. “I don’t think Sveta is quite done yelling at me yet.”

“Oh, I’m done,” Lana assured him, still seething with fury. “I said everything I needed to say.”

“Then let’s go inside and get this over with.”

They both finished their cigarettes so quickly that Lana felt slightly nauseous when she followed Bruce into the house and down the hallway to his study.

“Sit,” he just said once they were inside. Chester and John were waiting near the desk monitor, Chester clutching a hard drive that looked a bit battered. John pulled out a stool for her to sit on, being uncharacteristically gentleman-like.

Her heart was tapping against her ribs as she sat down and faced the screen. While Chester hooked up several cables to the portable hard disk, Bruce took a seat on a chair right next to her. “Lana,” he said softly.

She grudgingly looked aside. “Yeah?”

“Maybe we should talk after this.”

A tiny crack ran through her veneer of ice. “If you insist.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I do.”

And then, the screen spluttered to life. John dimmed the lights in the room so they could all see better what was on the tape. At first, there was nothing to see – just static. Gradually, the black-and-white pixels disappeared, making way for a shaky image of a dark, stony hallway. A tunnel. It looked like the camera had been fitted onto somebody’s helmet, or possibly hidden inside a spectacle frame.

“Here we are,” a hollow voice piped up in Russian. “The control room.”

A door swung open, giving access to a giant sort of cave filled to the brim with control panels, monitors, computers, and wires. Slowly, the group of people apparently getting a tour of the premises poured inside. The man carrying the secret camera came in last. With a shock, Lana recognized the man heading the group of visitors.

Her dad. It had been
his
voice.

“This is where we detonate the controlled explosions to get to the layers of Promethean gemstone. The material we all love so much,” he continued his monologue. “We’ve actually just exposed a new layer of precious stone this morning. Once we get to the working area, you can see how we’re equipping our laborers with materials to excavate the gems.”

“How do you make sure you don’t damage any of the gemstone layers?” one of the visitors wanted to know.

“The fissures running through the rocky surface are very narrow,” Mr. Ivanov replied. “Because we calculate the exact spot we need to dig, we only need a little bit of explosive – and some very careful and diligent workers.”

When they left the room again, the camera briefly zoomed in on a logo on the back of a uniform one of the men was wearing. Lana sucked in her breath when she saw it belonged to UralBank, the largest private bank in the Russian Realm. They shouldn’t even be allowed inside – they were not a part of the government.

“What are they saying?” Chester hissed.

“He’s going to show these fat bankers the people who do all the work in his mines,” Bruce replied surmisely. He leaned forward, his eyes fixed intently on the screen.

Lana froze when the camera image flickered off and then came back on again. The spy working for Bruce had probably switched the set off during their walk down to the mines. Her entire body froze as the camera zoomed in on a long row of tiny, emaciated figures climbing down into a dangerously jagged and narrow fissure by rope ladder. This didn’t compute.

These weren’t laborers at all.

They were
children
.

“What – who are they?” she croaked, her heart skipping a beat as one of the kids clinging to the ladder turned his head and seemed to shout something at the group of visitors. A plea for help. His sunken eyes begged the onlookers for mercy, for a way out of the darkness.

“Those are your father’s employees,” Bruce replied, his voice suddenly strangled. “Take a good, long look at what exactly fuels your economy.”

Lana furiously tried to blink away her tears of shock, focusing on the video footage. How many of these poor children were there? Hundreds. And this was probably just one shift. It was sick. They couldn’t be older than six, maybe seven.

“This can’t be real,” she whispered. The whole thing would be a crime against humanity if it were. “It’s not real.”

“If only that were true,” Chester said softly.

“But how? Why?”

“The only people small enough to get all the gemstone out of those crevices are children,” Chester explained.

Something inside of her snapped. No – her father wasn’t capable of doing such things. These people were lying to her. Why would Ivanov Mining Company feel the need to abuse poor, helpless children if there were machines who could do this kind of work? “This is a fake, isn’t it?” she said in a trembling voice. “There was a splice, just now. That first bit was a recording of my father in the control room, and this – this is some kind of bizarre theater piece.” She turned to Bruce, her hands clenched into tight fists. “Why are you doing this to me? You bastard. You terrorize me and then you seduce me and sweet-talk me so I’ll gobble this right up? This
nonsense
?”

Bruce stared right back at her, his eyes aflame and sad at the same time. “Lana. Shut up. Don’t be absurd.”

“No,
you
shut up,” she screamed hysterically. “You don’t know my dad! You don’t know my family! You killed my mom, and you’re lying to me. You’ve lied about everything.”

This was insane – the whole situation was. Bruce was screwed in the head. Shou was probably making stuff up about him liking her on purpose, just to confuse her. These pirates were all out to brainwash her into thinking her dad was evil.

“Miss Ivanova, please stop yelling,” Chester tried to calm her down. Friendly, sympathetic Chester. He was in on it too.

“I will not,” she replied, her voice cracking on the last word. “Leave me alone, all of you.” She jumped up from her stool, pointing her finger at Bruce, who was sitting there with a pale face. “Most of all you. I never want to see you again, or touch you again, or talk to you. Fuck off.”

Before anyone could stop her, she made a beeline for the door, kicking it open in blind rage before storming down the hallway. She didn’t slow down and took the stairs two steps at a time, reaching her room just as she heard noises and heavy footfalls downstairs. With trembling hands, she slammed the door shut and typed in the code she’d set for the lock: 3-11-50. They’d have to break down the door lock and all if they wanted to drag her out of here.

Lana felt her knees buckle as she tried to stand up straight. Sobbing, she sank to the floor, hiding her head in her hands. Oh my God. Why were they doing this to her? Wasn’t it bad enough that she was their prisoner?

A knock on the door made her look up in a panic. “Go away,” she shouted. “I have nothing to say to you.”

She froze when someone slipped a pad through the crack under her door. “It’s me,” Hikaru’s muffled voice addressed her. “Bruce wanted you to have this.”

“I don’t care,” Lana snapped. “I’m not gonna watch his stupid, fake movie clip.”

“I suggest you do,” Hikaru urged her quietly. “You were the one asking to see those recordings. Remember that.”

Lana’s breath hitched in her throat. It was true – Bruce hadn’t offered to show them to her until she’d asked. In fact, he’d only told her about the slaves in the Ivanov Mines after she’d asked him to tell her what problem he had with her father. And even then, he hadn’t mentioned they were children. She closed her eyes, exhaling raggedly. “Maybe I should,” she mumbled.

There was no reply. Apparently, Hikaru had left her alone, just like she wanted.

Lana didn’t know how long she sat there, curled up into a ball, staring miserably at the pad in front of her. She remained sitting on the floor until her muscles ached and her stomach started to rumble. Moving slowly, she got up and stumbled to her bedside table, where she found some cookies she’d been saving. Chewing on them didn’t make the hollow feeling in her entire body go away, though.

She ate all four of them. Only then did she crawl back to the spot where Hikaru had slipped the pad under the door and picked up the device.

The start-up screen had no icons to set up a call or connect to the network. Of course not. They weren’t stupid. The only thing on there was a shortcut to a movie file. With a trip-hammering heart, Lana swallowed down the lump in her throat and pressed play.

The same images of her father in the control room flashed by in front of her eyes. The same walk down the obscure corridor, and then the time lapse, the recording skipping to the scene of the malnourished children climbing down the frayed rope ladder.

She gasped when the camera swerved up again to reveal her father and three UralBank employees standing by the crevice, peering down into the dark cleft. They were gesturing at each other, some inaudible conversation passing between them. And then her father smiled at the bankers, and looked down once more. He was sending those children down, possibly to their deaths, and he did it with a smile.

A ragged cry tore out of her. Before she fully realized what she was doing, Lana forcefully chucked the pad across the room. It skidded to a stop next to the window, hitting the radiator with a clunk. The screen flickered off, but the image reel in her mind wouldn’t shut down.

It had to be true. The footage seemed genuine. And Hikaru was right – why would Bruce go through all this trouble just to convince her that Ivanov Mining Industries policies were despicable and immoral?

“No,” she whispered, rocking back and forth on her heels, hugging her knees. “No, no, no, no, please.” Like an unstoppable force, Bruce had destroyed her safe little world, turned it upside down, exposed it for what it was. “No,” she suddenly howled at the top of her lungs.

The real criminal was her own dad.

T
he dark force field around the house had already come down by the time Lana stumbled to the door at last. If she ever wanted to use the toilet or eat again, she’d have to go out – there was no way around it.

After typing in the code for the lock, she carefully pushed down the handle and opened the door to a crack. The hallway was empty and dark. Maybe she could manage to quickly rush to the bathroom and use the toilet without anyone noticing. That still didn’t solve the problem of her imminent lack of food, but she was sure she could endure hunger a lot better than a full bladder.

Lana snuck down the hallway, soundlessly slipping into the nearest bathroom. After locking the door, she used the toilet without flushing and stared at herself in the mirror in the semi-darkness. Man, she looked like shit. Her eyes were puffy and red, her skin was sallow – she was completely washed out. If Bruce put her in front of a video screen to talk to her dad right now, he’d probably blow up the engines of all his cargo ships single-handedly just to get her out of this place.

Her father loved her. He was a good man – he had to be. And yet, he’d condoned terrible things. In the end, nothing was as black-and-white as it had always seemed.

Her heart stopped when she heard voices drifting up from the stairwell. Were they coming to drag her out of her room? Lana yanked the bathroom door open and pelted down the hallway, keeping her eyes fixed on the door to her safe, quiet room. She’d lock the door as soon as she was inside.

“Hold it.” The sound of his dark, gravelly voice almost made her trip over her own feet. Lana turned her head and spotted Bruce standing at the top of the stairs, his arms crossed over his bare chest and his mouth set in a grim line. Maybe he’d been on his way to the bathroom too. He was already dressed for bed.

With a sinking feeling, Lana realized Bruce was probably livid. He was going to
murder
her. Give her a good beating, at the very least. All those things she’d said to him in front of his men – they were inexcusable. The fear coursing through her body paralyzed her mind, but somehow made her run faster at the same time. Panting, she made a desperate run for her door, knowing full well she couldn’t outrun him. It took him only a couple of long, brisk strides to end up at her room at the same time she did.

“I told you I don’t want to talk to you.” It was almost as if someone else was speaking the words. Lana bit her lower lip in horror, afraid of what else might come out of her mouth if she didn’t sink her teeth into it.