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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I need your attention here, please,” the land surveyor said and from his tone he intended none of the politeness his words implied. The middle-aged man with the perpetual annoyed expression gazed around a breathtaking vista of ocean, cultivated palm oil groves, mountainside wilds, and the higher frost-covered peak as if it were all no better than a crumbling parking lot.

Adamou had shed his ceremonial robes for more construction-area-appropriate attire, and he regretted it. If he hadn’t matched the surveyor’s rough pants and a cotton shirt, the man might be speaking with more respect or at least more…something. Adamou had a pullover in the car trunk for when they got further up the mountain and would need it. But it was the same brand of mountaineering gear as the one this man had tied around his waist. Adamou suppressed an urge to strangle the surveyor with it. The problem with the man’s work wasn’t respect exactly. It was that Adamou wasn’t confident in the accuracy of the report, and every time he asked a question the man got surlier.

The surveyor lifted up a hand to beckon Maurie over. She ignored him to give the ocean a long stare. She stood statue-still in a fluttering red dress with a mass of gold and charcoal-black hair beads. They clattered like old bones when she finally turned her head.

“The spirits are not at rest here,” she said.

The surveyor blinked and looked to Adamou.

“This doesn’t look like the path the engineers recommended,” Adamou said. He really wished Pascaline were here. The great aunt was important and all, but she’d gotten through that recent worrying spell. Pascaline could stop visiting her so much and get her butt up to the mountain. She was supposed to be the top technical expert to reign over all these specialists who kept trying to rearrange their component parts without consideration for how badly it would throw off their portion’s connection to the larger project.

“Civil engineers,” the surveyor snorted. “I bet they never even looked at the land. If you’d gone with the original route, it would cut through acres more of your uncle’s palm plantations.”

“While this cuts more wilds to bleed the countryside,” Maurie said with a dreamy distracted tone. “Sacred bushlands beloved of the ancestor spirits who fought to hold this mountain when they lived.”

“Uh, what?” The surveyor shook his head and focused on Adamou. “I’m sure you understand not wanting to give up good production land, not to mention the zebra wood groves. I managed to entirely avoid them with this change. Can’t even see them from here. You’re welcome for that. That artisan timber is not to be wasted for an odd rail system to nowhere that, let’s be clear here, is probably not ever going to be finished.”

“We will complete the project,” Adamou said with a stiffness that was becoming way too necessary lately. Who the hell had convinced so many of their new subcontractors that they weren’t serious about the project?

“Of course.” The man made a gesture brushing aside his earlier comment. “You must get as many of the Objective Based Targets completed on or before schedule to cash out the payments and claim maximum bonuses. That was made clear to all of us when Benoit visited for his little encouragement talk. Thank him for that wine, by the way. I’m usually more of a beer man, but that ice wine from his Austrian villa? A very tasty vintage with quite the kick to it on the way down.”

“Ashes. All are ashes,” Maurie muttered.

The surveyor shifted away from her.

“I want the originally chosen site surveyed, not this random other path,” Adamou said, gesturing vaguely off to the north where he thought the path was supposed to be.

“Bad idea,” the surveyor said.

“It’s not your choice,” Adamou wasn’t sure how he’d ended up losing this argument that he shouldn’t have to be even having. He needed to be firm now to take advantage of the man’s wariness of Maurie to press for what seemed to be the only sane choice. He didn’t actually know if this alternate path would work or not, but he strongly suspected that the answer was not. And besides, the surveyor was supposed to be marking on the land the path selected on the map, not picking some other route and changing the map.

The growl of wheels on gravel announced a new vehicle arriving, and Adamou hoped Pascaline would be in it. They desperately needed their technical lead on hand for this nonsense to end.

“Benoit will explain it all to you,” the surveyor said, also looking toward the car as if he expected the answers to come from its passenger as well.

“Benoit who?” Adamou said, exasperated. He knew a half dozen Benoits. None of them worked on the project.

Finally, the surveyor had the grace to look confused.

Pascaline pulled to a stop next to them in an open four-wheel-drive vehicle and hooked a finger at the three of them. “Uncle Benoit,” she said, “is an interfering busybody without hiring authority. The surveyor we actually are paying is at the real site. See you there.” She put the car in gear again.

“This is absurd!” The surveyor threw his notes on the ground and stormed off. His vehicle tore down the road after Pascaline’s.

“I think we’re still going to have to pay him,” Adamou said. “Did you ever get that guy’s name?”

Maurie shrugged. “No idea. My head is thumping, and I’m seeing auroras over everything again like it’s all covered with shiny specks of gold or something.”

“Uh, is that an expected side effect? Pascaline said you’d been sick. Of course she also said you always know everyone’s names.”

“Maybe. No. I know a lot of names, but usually people have them embroidered on their shirts, and when I can see straight, I can read.” Maurie shook her head. “You better drive.”

“Tell me about Benoit, and I will,” he said, engaging the autodrive. He kept one hand on the wheel and foot over the brake, in case the system glitched on the rough roadway.

Maurie grunted. She did not explain anything. For several minutes Maurie pressed buttons on the vehicle’s console seemingly at random, and then leaned back into her seat defeated. “It insists on staying audio-locked to your comm. Do you have Bible audio files? I prefer Old Testament, but anything helps. I’m running out of vaguely religious out-of-context things to murmur, and everything is riding on me playing spirit woman properly.”

He gave her one lifted eyebrow and returned his focus to the road in time to brake for a two-foot-long snake. It slithered the rest of the way across the dirt track, and he let the autodrive continue on.

“You saw that? Wait, what did you see?” she said.

“There was a snake on the road.”

“Oh, good,” she said. “These meds are working.”

Adamou shrugged. “We get a lot of snakes on new roads or whatever we want to call this particular raw path that we didn’t need to spend time and effort—not to mention money—on clearing because it isn’t even the right part of the mountain slope. I don’t run over animals if I can help it. I don’t care if it was too small to damage the undercarriage.”

“Huh,” Maurie said. “So that’s why Pascaline likes you so much. You’re a softie for poisonous creatures, but for humans wasting resources, you turn pricklier than a cactus. Good fit for my cousin.”

“Pascaline would be delighted for the reincarnation of Saint Patrick to cast out all the snakes from Africa,” Adamou said. “She’s not a fan of poisonous creatures.”

Maurie waved away his objections. “Eh. It’s complicated. She respects them.” She pointed at a bare patch of land ahead. “Turn here. Like I said, Benoit is our uncle. One of Sadou Moussa’s younger half-sisters was his mom. He’s a fairly decent guy most of the time. Not addicted to anything. He doesn’t torture puppies. He probably even would still be married to his first wife if she hadn’t died of cancer a decade ago.”

“I’m waiting for the but,” Adamou said, turning the vehicle.

“He likes to host and be hosted. Charities and art. He’s endowed a few museums even. His life is about spending money.”

“And the Sadou fortunes have been shrinking for much of his lifetime, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah.” Maurie shrugged. “He and the others would’ve had to just learn to do with less eventually, but…”

“Your other uncle landed this project. So why’s Benoit getting in the way?”

“The heirs, as they see themselves, the ones in Uncle Benoit’s generation believe Grandpere has mismanaged the family oil trust. It’s a sticky situation. Our family adopted some Western ideas for family money management, and it’s not working out so well. Grandpere controls the trust now, but Uncle Benoit almost took control.” She waved a hand to indicate a lot of other details and maybe some water under the bridge. “It’s been more than six months since the last board meeting. So they could call another vote, but I think people must have realized it was stupid. I mean, the original idea wasn’t. When they figured that if they cut off the more distant members…”

“Oh, fucking hell,” Adamou said.

“Yeah. They figure the money would last longer. And they aren’t entirely wrong,” Maurie said. “But it’d be pretty misguided under the current situation to cut out Uncle Chummy.”

“Wait, who?”

“Tchami Fabrice.”

“I know who Tchami Fabrice is,” Adamou said. “Everyone knows of him. They were going to cut him off?”

“Yeah, well. He doesn’t use the Sadou name, which makes it easier for the heirs to see him as not really one of them. And also Uncle Tchami Fabrice has just accepted foreigners’ trouble with pronunciation and been going by Chummy for his working life, which further makes him seem like not really one of us. He’s told us to call him ‘Chummy’ too, because it confuses the TCGers if we use his real name. That, and we aren’t to call him ‘Uncle’ either, because it looks bad to the Westerners.”

“The launcher deal was a little sly gift for the family, was it?” Adamou said.

Maurie lifted her eyebrows. “Do you really have to ask?”

“What else don’t I know?”

“Probably a lot. But the biggest thing is that my aunts and uncles can drain the seed capital for this launcher before we get even the proper track path cleared if we don’t find a way to secure the bank account.”

Adamou blinked.

“No. You can’t get out of the agreement now. Great Aunt Mami called a lawyer in and went over it line by line with me in her hospital room.”

“Why’s she in the hospital?” Adamou said.

“Long-term health troubles related to snake bite and the antivenom overdose. Don’t be nosy,” Maurie said and then she added more without him having to ask. “She gets these flares sometimes. She’ll be okay. Probably. Anyway, her lawyers agree that you Endeleys are stuck with us and TCG might even be able to sue your family too if they can prove we didn’t make a proper effort to build this launcher.”

Adamou hissed his breath between his teeth.

“Who has access to the funds now?”

“Early on, Great Aunt Mami got through to Uncle Chummy and got it changed from a blanket ‘Any Sadou of Sadou Corporation’ authorization to just her.”

“It’s solved then,” Adamou said.

“No.” Maurie shook her head. “Great Aunt has been not well. Very not well. She signed over authority to Pascaline and me jointly. I’ve been avoiding the family and so has Pascaline. We also stay away from each other, because we have to both sign at once in person at the bank to release funds, and, well, family can be very convincing.”

Adamou pressed his lips into a flat line. “You need someone else added to the account. Someone who you can blame for the refusal and not be unwelcome among your own kin after Sadou Moussa passes on. You need me. And that’s why you’re telling me. Not because you think Endeley lawyers can’t find a way out of legalese written by Sadou lawyers.”

Maurie flapped her hands this way and that. “Pretending to be the embodiment of a cursed water spirit known for tricksy sudden prosperity helps. I mean, her myth includes that she will shower evil curses on the newly wealthy and everyone around them if crossed. I am suddenly in charge of a project with extremely high funding and even higher potential future incomes. I’ll make the legend work for us.”

Adamou wasn’t so sure. People with Austrian villas weren’t known for superstitious qualms. But a more important detail had been revealed just now. “So that’s why Pascaline is avoiding me. I thought she was holding a grudge about that mix-up where my uncle and your grandpere tried to make the two of us engaged.”

“I’m not interested in polygamy,” Maurie said. “Also, Pascaline would murder me, and I don’t like you.”

“Of course we can’t be engaged. I’m marrying Pascaline whenever I can finally convince her I won’t abandon her at the worst moment like your asshole family members have. If she got sick of me, I suppose we could pretend to have a thing, but I doubt it’d work. You’re really annoying, and I’m not that good at pretending to like people I don’t.”

Maurie rolled her eyes. “You are far more annoying than I am. But we can’t be engaged—not even for pretend to make the project look more stable—because the embodied vessels of Mami-Wata are always single and childless. Trying to marry or conceive twists the luck.”

“Fine,” Adamou said, “we can go with that reason, but you’re still annoying.”

“Says the guy who’s infatuated with Pascaline and doesn’t even know her.”

“I know her better than you do,” Adamou growled. None of the Sadous really knew Pascaline. And his feelings for her didn’t fit into something as simple as only love. She was amazing and wonderful and wounded but still charging on to do the right thing no matter how little credit for it she usually received from those closest to her.

“Oh yeah, where did she graduate from college?” Maurie gave him a dead-eyed glare and Adamou was certain there was something off about that question. The detailed background supplied many months ago by Fatima on behalf of Sadou Moussa had listed somewhere impressive in the United States. He didn’t actually remember which Ivy League school it had been. A more difficult question would have been to ask the year of graduation or the date. As a close cousin Maurie would have attended that event. Those sorts of universities made a spectacle of graduation with parties and galas to last a week at least. But Maurie hadn’t asked for anything but the college name. And the much shorter summary on Pascaline from Great Aunt Mami before the first engagement offer had included that college name also, but now thinking back Adamou remembered it had mentioned no dates. He’d assumed back then that Pascaline was continuing on for a graduate or doctoral degree, maybe remotely. But her field should’ve required a lot of trips back for in-person laboratory studies.

“She never graduated,” Adamou said.

Maurie flushed and looked away.

“Oh shit. She never graduated. Not just didn’t finish a master’s or doctoral program. She didn’t enter one. She didn’t complete her undergrad, did she?”

“I didn’t tell you that!” Maurie said.

“We are so fucked.”

“Oh yeah,” Maurie agreed.

“Tell me the rest,” Adamou said.

And Maurie did, ending with, “But Uncle Chummy thinks he’s giving us enough support that Pascaline can do fine as our technical lead even so, and he’s almost always right.”

Almost always.

“We just need to keep her from quitting,” Maurie said. “She keeps asking Uncle Chummy to replace her with some more experienced TCG hack. If that happens, I’m betting the flunky would move at least half the work to Ecuador or Indonesia or maybe both. And then if our build here slows down for any reason, like if we have to take more pauses than we hoped for, because maybe we need more rail realignments following bigger than usual tremors or whatever. We need her to stay.”

“I want her to stay,” Adamou agreed.

“So I think you should set date for the wedding,” Maurie said. “How about next week?”

“No,” Adamou ground out. “Not like this. Besides, I still owe her a favor.”


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