Marina leads me and Cleve upstairs and through a door. A receptionist sits there at the center of a hallway, and she tells him, “I’m Dr. Marina Citali. I was the envoy sent to Data Haven.”
For what feels like the first time, someone understands exactly what all that means. This person actually knows Marina and is shocked to see her. “Oh my gosh! We thought you didn’t make it! Are you okay?”
Marina steadies herself and replies as levelly as she can, “We found out on the way back that Ayumu died.” Those words are hard for her to get out, and once she does, the floodgates are open. “And we found Ayumu and…”
She begins sharing all the information about the circumstances of Ayumu’s death. It’s not the most pressing topic right now, but more importantly, she’s getting more and more upset. She’s having a really rough day so far. I step up to her and put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. “It’s okay, Marina,” I say softly. “We can handle this from here, if you need a moment.”
Marina takes a shaky breath and gives me a little nod. I release her and step back. She collects herself and tells the receptionist, “These two gentlemen are the return envoys from Data Haven. They will fill you in on the details.” Then she leaves us in his care and heads to a breakroom just a few doors down.
The clerk looks back and forth between me and Cleve. “So you’re looking for a meeting…?”
I wave Cleve forward. “Allow me to introduce Datajack Prime.” The receptionist responds with his own name, Steve, but I don’t supply mine. “We have very timely issues that we need to discuss with Deirdre Skye. We need the soonest appointment you can give us.”
Steve glances down at the calendar and offers to fit us in tomorrow morning at nine. I frown at the delay, and he apologizes that she’s already in a meeting right now with the mariners about their recent work shutting down Morgan Shipping. I do my thing, being charming and attentive, and coax some more information out of him. “They’ve actually been able to train some of the marine wildlife!” he says.
“The mariners or Morgan?” I ask, not sure who ‘they’ was referring to.
“The mariners.” The clerk laughs. “Morgan? That doesn’t quite sound like his style.”
“What wildlife? Aquatic craw?”
In response, Steve tells me about enormous winged creatures called xenodragons. That phenotype is rather uncommon around these parts; the biggest flying creatures we’ve seen have been small and insect-like. “Xenodragons are so large that they can’t hurt you directly,” he says. I cannot imagine anything so big that it could not hurt me, not after my run-in with a siege worm. “But they can create great winds or stifle them, which can still boats. It forces Morgan to burn fuel to move around—which granted, is bad in some sense. But the key here is that we can make the currents move against Morgan’s ships.”
He shows me a sketch, and I’m surprised to see that the creature has a lot in common with shimmerflies, though of course on a much larger scale. This is definitely not mentioned in the zine Marina made. Despite the presence of the word dragon in its name, it doesn’t have vicious teeth like that mutated moth that attacked me in the Progenitor lab. They don’t breathe fire, and they don’t have giant claws. Their name mainly comes from being enormous and flying.
As for making the appointment, I have him list us as Datajack Prime O.A. “Cleve” Cleveland and aide. I don’t want Deirdre to see my name before she sees me. That will raise too many questions, and I want to be there to answer them. “I’m sorry I can’t give you a slot any sooner,” Steve says. “I’m sure your discussions with Dr. Skye are important, but she has a lot of important things going on, and we were not expecting your visit. Will Marina be joining you?”
“Yes,” Cleve replies without hesitation.
The receptionist jots her down as Dr. Marina Citali, Envoy to Data Haven, and then there’s not much else he can do for us. There isn’t an embassy district in which the Stepdaughters can lodge us—Marina will have to take care of finding us accommodations. “I’m sorry, we haven’t really had envoys much before,” he apologizes, not sure of what else to offer us.
“You don’t treat with the University?” I ask. “You’ve only sent envoys there, not received anybody back?” Although initially reluctant to divulge too much, Steve does eventually share that there is an ambassador from the University of Chiron currently here in town. He asks in turn about our relationship with that group, and I tell him that we haven’t had the opportunity to directly interact with the University yet. “I don’t know if you know this, but Data Haven is very, very small.”
“You’re our first treatment,” Cleve says. I’m not sure if that was intended as a joke, but we all chuckle.
“I knew that you weren’t as populous as us or Morgan Industries, but I wasn’t sure of the scale,” the receptionist says.
With all that business out of the way, I dig for a little more information to satisfy my own curiosity. “Who was that young fellow who vaulted up the stairs and past you a little while ago?”
The clerk rolls his eyes. “Ugh, that was Jack Skye. You wouldn’t know him; he’s the son of our president of the council, Dr. Deirdre Skye. He’s a little bit… He’s a lot, actually, I should say. I was surprised to see him here.”
I nod to myself. This now all makes sense. Deirdre and I spent a lot of time looking at each other across the narrow width of a lunch table, and I know her features well. They have a lot in common with Jack’s, and she wasn’t too much older than Jack that last time I saw her. No wonder he looked familiar.