Blood Double (God Wars #1)(43)
The young men who took the buckets of seeds and bruised fruit chunks away were all flirted with—Yinza rubbed against them whenever they came near. I wanted to vomit—Yinza was using her youth and what prettiness she had to cover for what I considered shoddy work. She always managed to make the quota set by Griya, however, so she kept her job. Yinza always chose the table behind mine, too, and while I didn't assign much truth to what came out of Yinza's mouth, I did learn a few things.
"I heard the owners are late coming back from vacation," Yinza said as she flipped a seed into her bucket one morning. We'd been there nearly an eight-day and already had two days off. Yinza had disappeared during those two days, arriving back at our barracks just under curfew with a smile on her face. It didn't take a psychic to realize what she'd been doing. She'd returned with all sorts of new information to pass along.
"I heard they're never late and they never miss harvest," Yinza prattled. I glanced up briefly; Yinza's knife had stopped while she gestured at her tablemate, a pretty brunette named Sora. Sora had quickly fallen in with Yinza and the two were nearly inseparable, except when Yinza was in bed with a man, I assumed.
Names of the primary owners of NorthStar floated into my conscious mind—I'd done research on it as well. Again, no images could be associated with names; there'd been only the briefest of biographies on NorthStar's site. The rumor (supplied by Yinza) was that the owners were somewhat reclusive and seldom were seen leaving their palace-like home.
"Do you think there's a problem with NorthStar?" Sora breathed. Any problem with the gishi fruit groves would have a major impact on Avendor's economy. The groves paid the most in taxes, after all, but Avendor was diversified. They had other cash crops—mostly tropical fruits and berries, along with a thriving furniture industry.
Next to nothing was made of actual wood in either Alliance, but Avendor raised hardwoods and supplied wealthy buyers with the finest in handcrafted, solid wood desks, tables and other furniture. Woodcarvers and furniture makers had their own guild and enticed the best artisans away from other worlds. Even so, Avendor was still sparsely populated; it only boasted two cities that held more than six million people and I had the impression that this was the way the government on Avendor wanted it to be.
"Has to be a problem. Vacation? Who can't cut a vacation short if they're needed at home? I think they're having financial problems and are looking for a buyer." Yinza was moving into the realm of wild speculation, with a side trip into misinformed supposition.
NorthStar was stable, handsome and beautiful owners notwithstanding. If Yinza had the intelligence to do research rather than rely on her own vivid and erroneous imagination, she'd know that as well. Her knife hadn't cut a single fruit the entire time she'd been traveling in the outer reaches of possibilities, and I wondered for perhaps the hundredth time how she made her quota.
*
"You're falling behind." Griya called me to her office first thing the following morning.
"What?" I was stunned and it came out in my voice. The older woman handed me a comp-vid, showing that my current rate of production was below what it had been in the beginning, twelve days earlier. "That can't be right," I muttered.
I knew I was getting faster at cutting; my sore muscles at the end of the day attested to that. I also hadn't counted the number of filled bags the young men carried away from my end of the table—those bags were hauled toward industrial walk-in freezers, awaiting shipment to a cosmetics factory elsewhere.
"Are you contesting these figures?" Griya asked, a grim expression on her wrinkled face. She was aging, although Avendorans, like many races, lived to be two hundred or better. I imagined that she was nearing one-ninety at least.
Biting my lip, I stared at Griya. Should I contest the figures? I was new and only beginning to suspect what was really going on. Rocking the boat was often dangerous—more so for the one reporting the problems at times than for the actual perpetrators. I couldn't afford to be without this job—any movement by Kalia Sollo could alert the assassin that no doubt still hunted me. Swallowing my pride and the truth with difficulty, I shook my head.
"I'll work harder, I promise," I muttered, staring at my hands. That afternoon, I listened to Yinza prattle away about things she knew next to nothing about, filling only six bags of a fifteen-bag quota. I, on the other hand, filled twenty-seven. The following morning, I saw that I'd been credited with sixteen bags while Yinza had seventeen listed beside her name.
*
"They're in bed with her and taking another employee's bags to fill Yinza's quota," Griya pointed out to Trace the next day. "I watched the cameras myself—those boys are covering for her."
"Do we know for sure that Yinza is in on this, or are the boys taking the initiative?" Trace asked.
"No idea at this point, but we can fire the boys and see what happens."
"Who are they stealing from?"
"The other new girl, who is nearly doubling her quota. She's faster than any of my others at this point."
"I still can't get over what that face is doing working in gishi fruit groves," Trace shook his head. "The most beautiful woman I've ever seen, and she's doing this."
"She hides her face as often as possible," Griya pointed at the screen, where Kalia ducked her head whenever anyone walked past. "Did you do a background check?"