The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,85

told me, and Catrin knowed well enough I couldn’t read words of the old times. “Sony Copration is just a story,” I said. “Like Break-back Jack or the Dry Ladies. If you don’t know who did something, you say it was Sony.”

“I never heard that,” Catrin said, but she let it go by because it didn’t matter to her right then. It was something else she was interested in. “There’s a lock on the player. Mardew’s tried everything he knows to make it work, but it doesn’t do a thing. That means you set a code. Something you got to say to wake it up. Tell me what it is.”

I thought back to what Ursala told me that day in her tent after she killed the drone. She said some tech could taste your sweat and know it was you from the flavour of it. “There’s no code,” I told Catrin. “What there is, it’s like the DreamSleeve knows who I am as soon as I pick it up. It knows me, and it plays. I guess it doesn’t know Mardew, or if it does then it doesn’t like him too well.”

Catrin give a laugh that was quick and sour. “Mardew gets better with age,” she says. “About the same way milk does. He’s got his heart set on that thing, though Fer already told him no. Well, it’s better if it goes back on its shelf, for some years at least. Long enough for people to forget.”

That thought made me angry, and anger made me reckless in spite of the bad spot I was in. “It’s mine,” I said again. “It waked for me, so the law makes it mine.”

“Okay,” Catrin said. “And what’s wrong with what you just said, Koli? What did you just miss out? I know you’re no fool to have managed to do what you done. So tell me now, for it’s important. Why ain’t the law going to help you?”

I didn’t answer for a long time, but she kept on staring at me, waiting on me to say it. “Because Ramparts make the law,” I muttered.

“Exactly. And they do it for the good of all, not the good of one. If I let you go from here, that’s fine for you and bad for everyone else. The things you figured out would have everyone shouting and accusing and laying into each other. All we got of order, right and calm would go straight over the fence and into the shitheap. How long do you think we’d last after that? How long would the gates stay shut and the forest stay out? I don’t mean to see Mythen Rood come apart on account of you.”

“You don’t mean to give up your power, is what,” I said. And now I did start to cry, for I seen it was hopeless and I was going to die in a little room under the ground without nobody knowing where I was gone to. For whatever lie the Ramparts told about me was bound to of been a good one, that would keep anyone from looking for me or asking questions about me. Maybe they said a drone got me, and it got me so good there wasn’t nothing left. Maybe they showed my mother the pig’s innards from the Salt Feast and said rats et the rest of me.

But I got a surprise then. When she seen me crying, Catrin looked somewhat dismayed. She put a hand on my shoulder again. Then when that didn’t do no good, she went down on one knee and took my head between her two hands, putting her face right up close to mine. “Shush,” she says. “Don’t be stupid now. Listen to me. Listen to me, Koli.”

“I don’t want to die, Dam Catrin,” I says to her, between sobs.

“Nor I don’t want to kill you,” she said. “I seen you grow up, alongside of my Jon. You always was fast friends, the two of you, for good or ill, and them memories is strong with me. I’ll kill you if I got to, Koli, don’t mistake me. But I’m trying to think of another way and I’m reckoning it out right now with my father and my sister. You don’t want to give up and lie down just yet.”

She put a few more questions to me after that, but I don’t remember what they was. Hope had made me deaf and blind. And most likely dumb too, for Catrin give up