Trapped

Annah stepped back and studied me. For a moment, I worried she would revert to her habit of silent staring… but then she said, "Yes. Just shock. Delayed reaction. You think you saw a ghost?"

"I didn't see it; I heard it. In the music room."

She took another step back, then sat gracefully in a chair covered with a throw-cloth of red and yellow satin. Her eyes never left my face. "Tell me," Annah said.

I did… settling into a wooden rocking chair padded with a white wool quilt. It was positioned opposite Annah's seat-probably where girls from the dorm sat when pouring out their hearts. I felt sheepish being there. But she wasn't listening like a don forcing herself to endure the woes of a whiny adolescent; her eyes were bright and glistening, her whole body leaning forward to catch every word. And why not? A ghost in her music room. A man who came babbling to her door. A chance to embrace him and give silent comfort. Deliriously operatic stuff. However soberly she sat, her face shone.

"So," I finished a few minutes later, "I came to you. Because it's your music room. You'd know if there'd been hauntings before. But I also wanted to ask who played the harp. In your classes. If there's a girl so devoted to the instrument that when she died… that her ghost… not that I believe in ghosts… that some effect would make it look as if her ghost had gone to play all the things she never had time to learn…"

I stopped because Annah was nodding. "There is such a girl. Who cares deeply. Who has a gift. When she arrived at the school, she already played a number of instruments, so I set her to learning the harp. It's such a lovely instrument; I wanted to hear it played by someone who wouldn't just go by rote. Rosalind's still just starting, but you can tell-"

"Rosalind?" I interrupted. "Rosalind Tzekich?"

"Yes. You know her?"

"She's in my Math C."

Rosalind Tzekich. Sixteen years old, very quiet, very intense. Perhaps the same sort of girl Musicmaster Annah had been at that age, except that Rosalind had black hair cut in bangs, a Mediterranean complexion, and a plumpish body she hid under shapeless frayed-hem dresses. Compared to the stylish fashion-plates who populated our school, Rosalind stood out like a sack of onions… though she could probably buy and sell the entire families of many of our students.

Rosalind's mother, Elizabeth Tzekich-known also as Elsbeth the Bloody, Our Lady of Shadows, or Knife-Hand Liz-was the outlaw terror of Southern Europe… or at least one of the terrors, since Hispania, Romana, Hellene, and the Balkans all seemed to cultivate criminal organizations as profusely as olives. (The Black Hand. The Hidden Cry. The Circle of Friends. Each specializing in some form of ugliness, from extortion to smuggling to kidnap.)

Mother Tzekich ran a band of thugs called the Ring of Knives. They made their money through sleazy mod-and-aug operations in back alleys from Gibraltar to Jerusalem. Did you want a poison gland implanted in your tongue so you could murder someone with a single kiss? Did you want a winning smile and a constant halo of pheromones? Or maybe you just fantasized about looking younger, more svelte, better endowed. Your dreams could come true for a price: through surgery, through sorcery, through OldTech procedures that rewrote your genes. A number of patients died on the operating table, a number came out disfigured or blighted, and plenty emptied their purses for no results whatsoever; but a sufficient tally of customers got enough of what they wanted that the Ring of Knives grew and prospered.

Ambitious Mother Tzekich didn't rest on her laurels. After making a name in the slice'n'dice trade, the Ring branched into other realms of business: forcibly seizing enterprises run by other criminal clans. The resulting gang war shook the Mediterranean. Soon it escalated farther afield, as the Ring fought to expand east into Asia and west to the Americas. In skirmish after skirmish, the Ring never suffered a significant defeat-partly because Tzekich had a genius for choosing the right targets, and partly because the Ring decked out its people with subcutaneous armor, enhanced reflexes, and even (so the rumors went) genes spliced from nonhuman sources. Animals and aliens, plants and ETs.

So the Ring of Knives gashed its way around the planet. Rival gangs fought back without mercy: dons and capos and czars would stop at nothing to see Elizabeth Tzekich dead. All this time, Rosalind stayed with her mother; but after a close call with a bomb spraying OldTech neurotoxins, the girl had been sent away for her own protection, to a boarding school in Nankeen.

Then to Alice Springs.

Then Quito.

Then Brazzaville.

Then Port-au-Prince.