Timothy Zahn - A Coming Of Age

Omega seemed taken aback. "Puberty? Why can't you tell before that?"

"Because there's no way to know if the small metabolic changes are going to have the desired effect. This is new territory; there aren't any theoretical curves to check experimental results against."

"I see." Omega looked over as Axel came in teeking a heavy-looking knapsack in front of him. "We'll discuss this later. Axel, we'll be tying up Tirrell in this room and putting Lisa in the living room; I want one of the kitchen chairs in each place."

Axel frowned as he let the knapsack drift gently to the floor. "Lisa too? I thought you were going to take her with us."

"That was before she fell in with bad company." Omega turned to Lisa, still standing rigid in her guards' teekay grip. "I had fine plans lor you, Lisa—literate preteens are not exactly common, you know, and you could have been of immense use to me. I'd had hopes of persuading you—with hypnotic drugs, perhaps—to be more compliant. But frankly, right now you're not worth that much trouble to me."

Jarvis looked at Lisa in surprise. Literate? No—surely Omega was lying; literacy was still restricted to those past Transition. But Lisa's expression held no surprise at Omega's words, only a sullen anger. And if she could indeed read... Jarvis's mind shifted into high gear, and for the first time he felt real hope. Maybe—with a properly phrased clue—he could vastly improve the odds he was leaving Tirrell with.

The kitchen chair arrived and Omega set to work.

It was a long-established axiom of Tigrin society—and the basis of the hive system—that a kid could only be controlled or immobilized by an older and stronger kid. But Omega had clearly done some hard thinking on the problem, and when he'd finished tying Tirrell into his chair, he took Lisa into the living room and proceeded to demonstrate his ingenuity.

His first step was to carefully tie her to the chair Axel had placed in the center of the room, positioning the knots behind her back and making sure none of them touched her skin, where they could conceivably be teeked open. His second step was to place a loose black bag over her head, tightening its drawstring snugly around her neck, and again tying it away from direct physical contact. And his final step—

Jarvis gasped. "Is that dynamite?"

"It is," Omega confirmed. Lying down on his back by the chair, he put down the stick of explosive and set to work with brackets and a screwdriver. "Lisa, I want you to listen carefully to me," he said as he worked. "I'm fastening a stick of dynamite to the underside of your chair. The detonator—the thing that sets it off—has its trigger fastened by a rope to the floor beneath the chair. If you try to teek the chair in any direction you'll blow yourself to bits. Understand?"

"Yes," Lisa's muffled voice answered. Not surprisingly, she sounded scared.

"Good." Omega finished his work in silence and got to his feet, checking the knots one last time. "Well, that should keep you here long enough for us to get safely away," he said with satisfaction. "Don't bother trying to break the rope, by the way; it's mountaineer's line and tests at just over two tons. Doctor, if you're ready...?"

Jarvis hesitated, stepped forward to touch Lisa's shoulder. "Lisa... I know you and Detective Tirrell don't think much of me, but please believe that I do care very much for Colin. I don't know if you can picture me in the role of a loving parent, but—well, I just wanted you to know." He turned back to Omega and nodded. "All right, I guess I'm ready."

"Axel, take the doctor and send him on with the others—they should head southeast," Omega ordered. "You and I will go collect anyone who's still looking for that damn righthand and catch up with them later."

Axel nodded, and suddenly Jarvis felt the floor fall away beneath him. This is it, he told himself bleakly as he was threaded skillfully through the doorway. I've done all I could. It's up to Tirrell and Lisa now.

He wondered if he would ever see any of them again.

The faint sounds of conversation and movement faded into silence. Trapped for the second time that day in blindness and solitude, Lisa made no effort to stop the tears rolling freely down her cheeks. Omega's promises hadn't fooled her; she'd already had a sample of his version of truth. This time, she felt certain, she was going to die.

"Lisa?" Tirrell's voice, though muffled by the bag, was nevertheless understandable. "I think they're gone. Are you okay?"

"What difference does it make?" she moaned, her silent sobs doubling in intensity.

"Lisa, pull yourself together!" the detective snapped. "We may still have a chance."

He was only trying to console her, she knew, but nevertheless she sniffed hard and managed to bring herself under some kind of control. "I'm okay now, she told him.

"Good girl. The first thing to do is get you out of whatever they've got over your head. Describe it to me and tell me how it's fastened."

She did the best she could. "I can't see anything at all through it," she finished.

"All right. Now, it's tight around your neck, so you should be able to use teekay on it there. Try teeking it outward in all directions and see if you can break the rope."

She tried; but there was just enough give in the rope to move it off her skin before breaking, and the instant that happened she lost the ability to teek it. "I can't do it," she admitted after several frustrating tries. "It keeps moving away."

"All right, don't get excited. Try this: throw your head back suddenly so that the bag is resting against your face. Use the contacts with your forehead and chin—or stick out your tongue—and teek the material at those points in opposite directions. If you can open up even a small tear, it'll be right in front of your eyes and the rest should be easy.

Taking a deep breath, she tried it. It took two tries to get the bag touching forehead and chin solidly enough, and several seconds of careful teeking before the first tiny tear appeared like a lighted jewel just past her nose. But with the edges of the tear visible... the sound of the bag shredding was perhaps the most satisfying sound she'd ever heard. "I did it!" she called, blinking in the sudden light.

"Great! Now, look carefully under you and see how that booby-trap line is attached to the floor. Don't move the chair in the process."

She didn't need the reminder. Leaning gingerly over as far as the restraining ropes would permit, she looked beneath the chair. "The rope goes through a hole cut in the rug," she said. "Should I tear the rug more and see where it goes?"

"Better not," Tirrell said quickly. "You might nudge the rope, or he might even have set things to go off if the tension decreases."

Lisa swallowed. She'd almost torn the rug without bothering to ask about it.... "Now what do we do?"

"Take a good look around the room. See if there's anything at all sharp enough to slice your ropes. There's a picture on the wall, isn't there?" he asked suddenly.

"Y-yes," Lisa said, frowning at the question. "It's a picture of the ocean."

"Teek it over to you and search it for a hidden knife or sharp edges. Hurry—I don't know how much time we've got."

"But why should there be anything like that on a picture?" Lisa asked, teeking the painting off its nail and bringing it to her.

"Remember Jarvis's last words to you? It seemed to me he went out of his way to use the word 'picture'—'picture me in the role of a parent,' or something like that. I think he might have been trying to tell us something."

"But there's nothing here," she told him, turning the picture over for the fifth time. "Just a normal picture in a wood frame. There's some writing on the back, but it doesn't say anything that'll help."