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He sees her lingering behind after one of their long meetings with the Ratris. Her head is bowed in hushed conversation with a man Norman knows is responsible for overseeing the cattle children’s finances. He knows this man’s name to be Nicholas Ratri, but on days like this one, Don and Gilda refer to him by far less charitable terms. The woman with him has her back turned to them, and her short, flaxen hair obscures her face from view. One of them, he guesses.
He gestures for Don and Gilda to join him outside. They look as mutinous as Norman feels; there was no point in staying within earshot of the people bankrolling their search party.
“I hate this,” Gilda says plainly when they are out of the ballroom, voicing only what they had all been thinking. “Begging for their money, listening to them say it’s all a waste, because she might already be —“
“I do too,” Norman cuts her off, because he doesn’t want her finishing that sentence. “But until we get Emma back, we’ll need their network.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Don says bitterly. “You know it is, man. We could be out searching for her instead.”
“We need them,” Norman repeats, dragging a weary hand over his face. The day they find Emma, when the feel of her hand is steady and warm and intertwined in his, he will swear that they won’t ever take a cent from the Ratri Clan again. But this wasn’t that day.
“I can negotiate during the meetings for your group,” a voice behind them says, and they whirl about to see that it belongs to the woman from earlier. Meeting her gaze now, Norman has a vague memory of an armed figure at Isabella’s side. “So you can focus on searching for that girl.”
“Who are you?” Gilda asks a little sharply.
“I was a Sister back at Gracefield,” the woman says, confirming Norman’s suspicions. “We’ve met briefly. My name is Matilda.”
Beside them, Don bristles, and Norman himself has trouble keeping his expression placid. Every cattle child was encouraged to attend these briefings with the Ratris, to voice their grievances or requests for resources. Still, he can’t imagine what place a Breeder would have here, playing pretend with the same men and women who had once insisted their hearts be cut open. In her last moments at the demon world, Emma may have trusted the Sisters and the Mothers but Norman —
Norman isn’t Emma. And he certainly doesn’t know how to trust a stranger — a woman who might have gladly walked them all to their deaths — with Emma’s life. His unease must have shown on his face, because the woman fixes him with a piercing stare. And something about the way she looks at him: Norman can’t decide if it is familiar or haunting.
“I want to help you,” she says earnestly now. “If you’ll let me.”
Gilda and Don have both gone silent, and he knows they are waiting for his lead.
“We’re planning to cover all of former Australia in the next week,” Norman answers instead. “If what we have now doesn’t fund it, we’ll need enough for travel, lodging, meals —“
“I’ll take care of it,” Matilda assures him. “Whatever you need, I’ll get them to double it.”
She offers him a small smile now, when he considers her with undisguised wariness.
“I’ve worked for the Ratri Clan for more than half my life. I know how to make them show their hand.”
And that was that.
***
The human world, Norman comes to learn, is not all that different from theirs.
Children are still sold to the highest bidder, and women never just go missing. There are reports of thousands of young women, found years after their disappearance: beaten or starved or shackled or — irreversibly destroyed in ways that makes Norman’s stomach turn. The most selfish part of him hopes that Emma could survive even that.
A painless death would be kinder. Norman should know: he orchestrated thousands himself when he discovered children with tubes snaking up their limp throats. But Norman doesn’t know how to imagine a world without Emma. He doesn’t want to learn now.
And the others must know this too, because drowned victims, burnt corpses, pearly-white skulls — Norman avoids all of these reports with a fervor. And anyone careless enough to be caught harboring one under his watch is always on the receiving end of his bite.
On the quietest nights, when he’s locked himself up in the control room the Ratri Clan had installed in the children’s quarters, he wants to tell Emma these things, ask her how could you how could you how could you —
In the stark light of the hundreds of screens around him, Norman’s entire vision swims in blue. On nights like this one, Ray is the only one who can stomach the databases with him. It is like that now, with Ray looking over — Irish gene lines, of all things — and Norman examining inns rumoured to house traffickers.
“I spoke to Matilda,” Ray informs him, his eyes still fixed on the luminous screen before him. “She says a few of the other Sisters want to help too.”
“Why?” Norman asks flatly. He thinks of Isabella, who had sworn to make repentance and gotten herself disemboweled for it. Misplaced guilt was dangerous, and Norman isn’t sure he has any patience for it.
Ray shrugs. “They all worked under Mama,” he explains. “If I had to guess — this is their way of making things up to her.”
“Tell them we have enough babysitters.”
Ray fixes him with a disproving look.
“We need all the help we can get,” Ray tells him sharply, and suddenly they are eleven and Ray is telling him he’s an idiot for trying to take everybody just because Emma said so. “You know that.”
If Norman isn’t Emma, then he certainly isn’t Ray.
Ray, who had once swallowed down twelve years of simmering hatred to disassemble a camera. Ray, who could forgive the Mothers and the Sisters and the Ratris — not because Emma said so, but because seething is time away from sorting through databases. Norman can only bite on his own tongue.
“I don’t understand,” he starts now, closing a news report announcing the miraculous recovery of a missing teenage girl. The girl was still comatose, hands so marred with acid that her fingerprints were unretrievable. Norman isn’t sure what part of that is miraculous, except for the fact that she’s not Emma. She may have been someone else’s daughter, sister, friend; she might have been everything to another teenage boy, whose pulse thrummed only the syllables of her name since the moment she vanished. But all Norman can think of is how very relieved he is that she’s not Emma.
“I don’t understand,” he repeats. “Why Matilda’s been so involved? What’s in it for her?”
Ray gives him a hard look. If Norman didn’t know any better, he would guess it was pitying.
“Give her a chance,” Ray says quietly. “You aren’t the only one who feels guilty.”
Even Norman can’t find an argument with that.
***
The Sisters turn out to become a bigger asset than either Ray or Norman envision.
Two decades of full scores on daily tests result in itemized lists of Jane Doe reports across the world, organized by their proximity to suspected trafficking centers, major natural calamities and the re-entry coordinates of the cattle children, from when they had first appeared in the Human World. There are charts outlining the girls by age, appearance, and genetic markers.
“Wow,” Don says eloquently when the list flickers with live updates. “Peter Ratri never stood a chance.”
A few of the women chuckle at this, but Matilda’s face remains impassive.
“Well?” she prompts Norman, her arms folded tightly over her chest. “Will this do?”
Norman doesn’t look directly at her. Instead, he watches little red squares light up a few of the missing girls’ names.
“What is that?” he asks stiffly, nodding at the squares.
“Deceased reports,” Matilda answers, and she might have been talking about the weather for all anyone knew. “Something to cross-check, so we’ll know when to stop looking.”
“That’s not necessary,” Gilda says hotly, and two pink patches color her cheeks. “Emma wouldn’t have died so easily.”
“It’s been over a year,” Matilda says coldly. “Past that point, any identifiers connected to her are as good as meaningless. It doesn’t hurt to cross out our options, especially if she’s no longer —“
“Emma was armed,” Don reminds her. “She knows how to hunt. She can take care of herself just fine. And she’s not stupid enough to let herself get caught either.”
“Then how come she hasn’t contacted you?” Matilda asks smoothly. “This world isn’t like ours, you know. Getting shipped out isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a girl her age.”
Norman thinks of fingerprints, scrubbed away by undiluted acid.
“She’s not dead,” he says placidly. “You don’t have to store those reports.”
Matilda raises a single, pale eyebrow.
“What if she is?” she demands. “Don’t you want to know?”
“She’s not,” he repeats and his words come out even, despite the faint ringing in his ears. “We’ll keep looking until we find her.”
“That’s not —“
“We asked for extra hands,” he says, slamming the flat of his palm against the wooden table between them. Both Don and Gilda jump. “Not your theories.”
Matilda opens her mouth to retort, and Ray chooses this moment to walk in.
His eyes travel from Don, looking slightly stunned, to Gilda, who is positively fuming, to Matilda, whose expression is unreadable, and finally, to Norman, who is paler than usual.
“What’s going on?” Ray asks him pointedly, and Norman just scoffs.
“Ask her,” he snarls, casting one last, withering look at Matilda before storming away.
When Norman reaches the doorway, he hears Ray sigh long-sufferingly behind him.
“I told you,” he hears Ray say. “He wouldn’t like that.”
***
Somehow, Ray has wrangled both Norman and Matilda into sitting side-by-side, sorting through undocumented arrivals in militarized zones.
Norman isn’t Ray — he can’t thrive in silence, but he’s not Emma either, who can’t ever stand it. He doesn’t mind it, and he can work just as effectively with it as he would without it, so that’s all there is to say about that. When he finally looks up to glance at his watch, he finds that seven hours have passed. He has made it a point not to speak unnecessarily with Matilda through any of these hours.
“You can go to bed,” Matilda says, and he realizes with a start she had been watching him. “I can finish the rest of these.”
“No need,” Norman says curtly. His voice echoes throughout the control room and it occurs to him that at some point, everyone else had gone up to bed.
“I can imagine what you think of me,” Matilda says now. She must have realized they were alone too. “You might find me cruel. But believe me when I say I do want to help you, Norman.”
“I don’t think you’re cruel,” Norman says, looking up to meet her gaze. “I think you’re used to getting results, and Emma’s death would be — the quickest outcome.”
“You’re right,” Matilda agrees, and then she gives a little laugh at his startled expression. “Close to right anyway. I don’t like waiting for answers.”
There is a little crease between her eyebrows, and Norman thinks of Ray, of the almost-pity in his eyes.
“Why are you helping us?” Norman asks abruptly, and Matilda tears her eyes from the monitor before her.
“Why else?” Matilda asks, almost indignantly. “I owe this much to Isabella. She died saving that girl.”
Norman frowns. Sometimes, he thinks the Sisters see the escapees as little more than precocious children, as though Norman doesn’t have a lifetime of perfect scores under his belt, as though this very feat hadn’t earned him a one-way ticket into Legravalima’s prized rat cage.
“That’s not it,” he says now, and Matilda’s eyes narrow. “If that was all, you wouldn’t still be here at four in the morning.”
“You dealt with the Ratri Clan so we wouldn’t have to,” he recalls. “You got those Sisters on board to help with the search. And for some reason, Ray seems to like you too. So, I’ll ask again: why are you helping us?”
Matilda just stares at him, her jaw clenched as though she were holding back several things she would like to say to him. She releases a shuddering breath.
“What do you know?” she says at last. “About your mother?”
“My mother is dead,” Norman says brusquely. “She died the same year I was born.”
It was one of the first things he had checked, the second he had gotten his hands on Lambda’s list of cattle children. Not out of longing or even curiosity — he had done it out of practicality, because children like Norman had had their veins pumped with poison at Lambda for months on end and a mother was a clue, a genetic blueprint that could make sense of at least 50% of the things wrong with him.
But 72684 had died on March 22nd, 2034, barely a day after Norman’s birthday. He supposes the only clue there was that he had inherited her weak physical constitution.
“Not your birth mother,” Matilda says, and her incredulity is written all over her face, as though this wasn’t the answer she had expected from him. “I meant Isabella.”
“What about Isabella?” Norman asks roughly, and Matilda chuckles.
“You don’t like talking about her.”
“I can talk about her just fine,” Norman answers. He can’t bring himself to call her — Mother, Mama, Mom, or even 73584 — but Isabella was Isabella. Just like how 72684 was his mother. Neither fact had any bearing on the other.
“If you say so,” Matilda smirks, and Norman pretends this doesn’t nettle him. “Well, what I meant to say was, do you know how Isabella enlisted my help?”
“She threatened to have you killed,” Norman guesses, and Matilda actually giggles.
“My goodness!” she exclaims, smiling sideways at him. “You think so little of everyone.”
“How did she get your help?” Norman asks pointedly, ignoring this comment.
“She revealed,” starts Matilda, leaning back in her chair. “That she was raising my child at Plant 4. My biological child.”
Norman thinks he must have heard her wrong.
“Not only that,” Matilda adds on, apparently enjoying the way Norman’s eyebrows furrow at this information. “She told me my child escaped. Took out her transmitter and ran off with less than a year to her shipment date!”
“But,” Norman starts haltingly. The lilt of her laughter, her too-bright stare, Ray’s uncharacteristic pity — but that couldn’t mean?
“Come now, boy,” she says lightly. “They told me you were clever.”
He opens his mouth, and then closes it again. When he finds his voice again, it comes out disbelieving, tremulous:
“You’re Emma’s mother.”
***