The Girl Who Wasn't There by G Scott Huggins

Author:G Scott Huggins [Huggins, G Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989414347
Publisher: Digital Science Fiction, an imprint of Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.
Published: 2019-08-24T22:00:00+00:00

Paul didn’t know whether his mother would be home, but fortunately, she was sitting behind her desk. His heart was still hammering in his chest with the speed of bounding all the way from class. He didn’t know how he looked, but it must have been bad because their mother did a double take when she looked up from her desk.

“Good heavens, what’s got into you two?” she asked. “I thought you’d be enjoying Afters, not looking like you’d seen a dome fracture.”

Paul forced himself to speak slowly. “Well, that’s the thing. Mom, has there been any news of a puncture? On a minestead somewhere, I mean?”

“No, of course not,” their mother said. “You know all those would go out on the Colonet. We might need all the help we could get.”

“Well, could anything…smaller have happened?” he asked, mind racing. “Like, say, an emergency that wasn’t quite that severe, but would look bad to someone who hadn’t lived on the Moon long?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. She called up a screen that hovered in the air. “Anything like that would be logged. The most dire emergency that happened today was another one of my Secutors going on the fritz inside the shipyard again.”

“Same problem as before?” asked Paul.

“Yes.”

“Well, can’t you use Dad’s override transceivers?” asked Paul.

“I tried,” she said tightly. “It still went into Maintenance Mode and went right to the garage.”

Paul gulped. The only conceivable reason for that is either that the transceivers were bad…or that he and Jael had screwed up somehow when they’d installed them. He hoped Mom would ask their father about the first possibility first.

“I need access to the stable security cameras,” he said, rushing straight on.

“Why?” said his mother, her eyes narrowing.

Paul knew he wasn’t going to be able to skate over this, so he launched into the story of what Cynthia had done. “We all volunteered to go with her and help, of course,” he finished. “But she wouldn’t wait, and we couldn’t find anything on the Colonet Rapid Response channel to show that anything had happened.”

“That’s because nothing did happen.” Their mother frowned. “Paul, it sounds to me like your new friend made some sort of mistake—probably tried to dodge her own parents’ curfew and sneak out to Afters behind their backs—and got caught. And then wasn’t honest enough to tell you so. You really should have figured that out on your own.”

Paul hesitated. He didn’t really want to tell his mother that the girl he was looking for had managed to disappear on him twice. It made him sound incompetent or overly dramatic. “But I think she might be in trouble,” he finished, weakly.

His mother smiled grimly. “How much trouble? No, Paul. I told your father already; we are not voyeurs. We have the power to watch what everyone in this colony does, whenever we want to. And the abuse of that power always starts with thinking it’s for people’s own good. Now if you have some reason to believe that she’s being forced or is in actual danger, that’s one thing.

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