The bracelets on his wrists were quickglass, which was not unusual. But any watchers - there were none - would be surprised to see the quickglass morph into six floating teardrop shapes, each half the size of a fist. Mini flying cameras were decidedly old school and low tech, but the quickglass used chameleoware to be invisible to SatScan from above - and sent back data using protocols that were entirely his own, all they way down to the core trinary, bearing no relationship to anything used in Skein.
‘Fly now,’ he murmured.
All six spydrops rose into the air.
Once more Roger had to duck out of sight. This time he commanded a quickglass wall to form an alcove, using commands that would not set off alarms - not here in Parallaville, where the public were encouraged to tweak the architecture at their whim - but would be perfectly open to official scrutiny of the building’s memory.
Several laughing, drunken festival-goers staggered past without detecting him.
Why am I doing this?
It was Helsen who set off all his alarms - she of the darkness, she and her creepy friend - but it was Alisha he cared about.
So why should I mess up her chance of upraise?
If she was supposed to be networking with the Luculenti élite, that was fine. But he remembered that it was Helsen who had told Alisha to make contact with someone called Stargonier. He had no way of knowing for sure - if he tried an image search in Skein, he might attract peacekeeper attention - but his intuition was that this Luculenta was Rafaella Stargonier. For one thing, he thought that Alisha did not know many Luculenti.
Then he saw the Luculenta in clear, and the back of his neck felt cold.
‘Trust your intuition,’ Dad had told him more than once. ‘Civilized people disregard the wisdom of four billion years of evolution, and step inside a room or vehicle with someone who makes them uneasy, or let someone help them carry things for them out of politeness, while their reptile brain is screaming alarm signals. Becoming a victim out of embarrassment is stupid.’
Predators and psychopaths have unusual biochemistry - neither cause nor effect, for behaviour changes hormonal balance, while hormones alter behaviour, in a feedback loop that can be benign (optimism produces health produces optimism) or deadly. The reptilean part of every human brain can smell danger.
Roger knew this because he had consciously learned it, with the civilized part of his mind. When he looked at the Luculenta, his intellectual understanding reinforced the automatic emotion.
She scared him.
Up ahead, Alisha nodded to the Luculenta, touched fists and walked away. She headed through a maze of vertical levitated flanges that formed a smiling human face or a scowling tiger, or merely a jumble of shapes, depending on the angle.
And was that a hungry look on the Luculenta’s face, as she watched Alisha leave?
His tu-ring chimed.
Shit.
But he accepted the incoming comms request, perhaps because of his unease, in case there was something wrong.
‘Hey,’ said Stef in a virtual holo. ‘I just talked to Alisha.’
‘In reality?’
‘No, she’s not with us, and neither are you. But you’re not together, either.’
‘Was that semantically null, or are you just babbling?’
‘You’ve used that line before. Don’t you play double-bind games with me, Roger Blackstone.’
‘Tell me you’re sober.’
‘I’m sober. Just don’t expect me to tell the truth. Except we want you back here now.’
‘Maybe—’
Beyond the virtual Stef he could see the real Luculenta, the presumed Rafaella Stargonier. A masked man was approaching her - he wore a holo fox’s head, a yellow cape - and he was staggering a bit, laughing. Propositioning her?
The man fell back, hand clutching his forehead as his fox mask disappeared.
A Luculentus, playing with altered mental states for recreation - he could have sobered with a single well-formed thought - but now he stood there, swaying. The Luculenta stared at him, trembling, then she pulled back, turned, and stalked away, heading for a mirror-bright ramp that led into the heart of Parallaville.
‘—I’ll see you soon, Stef. Endit.’
The virtual holo snapped out of existence just as Stef had been about to say something.
Stargonier wanted to kill him. Or something.
But she stopped herself. Because this was a public place? Or for some other reason?
Not believing his own actions - this was a kind of social daring that was new to him - Roger hurried down the yellow ramp to the Luculentus, who was rubbing his face but looking much better.
‘Sir? Are you all right?’
‘Absolutely. Thank you for asking, young man. The ability to tailor one’s own neurocognitive states for recreation is not for the unskilled.’
‘Does that mean you can make yourself feel well again?’
Normal colour was returning to the man’s face.
‘It does indeed. As you can see.’
‘Er, may I ask what you talked to the Luculenta about?’
‘Which Luculenta in particular?’
‘Just now.’ Roger pointed. ‘Standing there a few moments ago.’
‘I think you’re mistaken. Perhaps I’m not the only one who needs to take care with altered states.’
‘I—Maybe.’ Roger smiled, remembering the effect of the warm wine, and exaggerating it in his mind to deflect suspicion. ‘That could be the case.’
‘You weren’t looking for company during the Festival?’
‘Er, no, sir. I’ve friends waiting for me.’
‘Then enjoy the rest of the week.’
‘And you, sir.’
Roger walked away, heading for the mirror ramp. Clearly the Luculenta was dangerous, but perhaps mostly to her own kind. Still he would need to stay well back in case she—
Danger.
Overhead were three distant itches - that was how he felt them - and when he looked, he could just make out the hovering teardrop outlines. Belonging to the Luculenta?
Regardless, the devices were complex, not legal, and too powerful for him to waste time deciding whether they were armed.
Beneath his smartlenses, golden fire grew.
Then he commanded the lenses to clear as he let loose. The release of energy felt wonderful.
And when it was done, he made a move - not to follow the Luculenta, but to get out of Parallaville as fast as possible.
Sunadomari crouched over his smoking, fallen spydrops. The case had just become more complex. If there had not been one of his friends among the murder victims, this would have made him smile, enjoying the challenge.
Now what?
He could access the surrounding buildings’ memories using peacekeeper privileges, and he could try for SatScan, although there were so many smartmiasmas and holos in the sky for Festival, there was no guarantee of clear data. But he was aware that Hailey Recht, Skein designer, had fallen. Perhaps the normal methods of tracking were insufficient. If the enemy, whoever it was, could monitor Skein enquiries, then interrogating the buildings would send a clear warning; and if the enemy could alter Skein data without logging it, then whatever surveillance logs he found would be worthless.
His spydrops were not strictly legal. Given that, there was no point in keeping them as forensic samples. He stood up and commanded the quickstone ground to swallow up the destroyed devices, dissolving them.
When they were gone, he looked up into the sky, requesting SatScan access, not specifying a person to search for, just an aerial view of Lucis City. Then he changed his mind, realizing that even this much could be dangerous if the enemy was as capable as he suspected. He closed the link down.
But his spydrops had not perished because of someone with Skein mastery. Their design was proprietary all the way down, so the attack had been more basic and generic than tricky code. There was only one kind of person he knew capable of inducing destructive resonance in any kind of device.