We sat at the swivel-seats. Skye rested her left arm on the console, tilting her head to prop her temple against her index finger. Her smile was unforced, but quietly infuriating. “Shoot.”
“I want to talk about what you did.”
She fluttered her free hand. “No need.”
“I’m afraid there is.”
“Um. This isn’t about thanking me, is it?”
“No. I hope to get around to that, sooner or later. But right now I can’t afford to. There’s too much about tonight that still needs to be explained.”
Her tiny smile remained where it was. But she lifted her head off her index finger, and lowered that hand to her lap, where it joined the other in uncharacteristically prim repose. “No offense taken, Counselor. You have a job to do. What would you like to know?”
“How come you were the only ones who saw me?”
“The only one,” she corrected me, showing absolutely no impatience at my refusal to retain this one essential point. “It was dark.”
“Not all that dark. Hammocktown is lit at night.”
“Yes, it is. But once the suns go out, and everybody’s back from wherever they’ve flown off to, there’s less reason to be up and about. People tend to settle in, alone or with friends. Traffic from tent to tent goes way down.”
I remembered the Brachiator term for human beings. “A Ghost town.”
The reference amused her. “A Half-Ghost town anyway.”
I grinned back, despite the seriousness of the moment, but forced myself to drop it at once. “But that didn’t stop you from showing up just in time.”
Now she looked more than just insolent. She looked downright knowing. “That does strike me as convenient. Are you complaining?”
“No. But before we move on from here, I need to eliminate the possibility that the entire incident wasn’t staged just to make me trust you.”
Her smile didn’t falter, but for a moment it turned absent. “Did you notice how close Oscin came to dropping us both?”
“I also know how effortlessly you caught me in the first place.”
“It was far from effortless, Counselor. At the moment I decided to go for you, reaching you and bringing you back alive were already far from sure things. Catching untrained people, in situations like that, never is. There’s no way to know how they’re going to react. They seize hold when you need them to go limp, go stiff when you need them to grab hold, faint when you need them to react, or at the very worst treat you like something they have to climb instead of somebody trying to help. Had your need been any less immediate, I would have preferred to tell you to hang on while I summoned help. That would have been easier for me and safer for you. But instead I arrived at the last second and didn’t have time to measure the chances of you reacting in some manner that would doom us both. I had to act then, right then, or lose you. And even then, I think the chance of success was, maybe, one out of three.”
I didn’t know what appalled me more: her estimate being that low, or that high. “Which is, again, convenient. If you like dramatic rescues.”
She chuckled. “I prefer dull rescues. Less stressful.”
Something was off, here. I wasn’t rattling her at all. At the very least I’d expect her to be angry. “I’ve been rescued from other dangerous situations. I know how they tend to be spur-of-the-moment improvisations. But if we consider what almost happened to me, in light of what happened to Warmuth and Santiago, we see that all three incidents show a certain preference for theatricality. And rescuing me, in the way that you did, very much fits that overall pattern. To believe it real, I need more. Like what you were doing up and around, and that close to my hammock, in the first place?”
Her lips curled, turning that secretive smile into a broad one, all teeth and gums and unforced hilarity. “Hallelujah. At long last, we come to the relevant line of questioning.”
I waited for her to elaborate, but no go: she was going to make me ask. “What were you doing there?”
“I was coming to surprise you with a visit.”
“Why?
“Because,” she said, slowly and clearly and without a trace of hurt or sarcasm, “there seemed precious little chance of you inviting me.”
Running an investigation like this would have been a lot easier had I possessed some kind of mystical, infallible sense separating truth from fiction. The truth is that I have no such gift. It’s a good thing I’m talented at piecing together the bits that corroborate each other, because I usually can’t tell the truth just by listening. I could now, because I found myself connecting the way Skye was looking at me with the way Oscin had looked at me yesterday.
It wasn’t something I’d ever been comfortable with. I’d tried to live my life without it. But I had seen it before, and I did know what it looked like.
I said something stupid. “Both of you?”
Skye had corrected me on the same point, only two minutes ago. But she indulged me one more time. “There is only one of me.”
It still didn’t make any rational sense. This was, after all, me we were talking about, and I knew exactly how unlikable I was. It made even less sense when I considered that the Porrinyards had been treating me this way since the very first moment I’d met them.
But for once, I knew the truth just by hearing it.
Well.
This was interesting.
I didn’t want it to be interesting. But, damn. It was.
I’d already noticed how beautiful they were.
I pivoted my seat away from the console, rose, tugged a wrinkle out of my jumpsuit, and stood there feeling stupid while Skye just sat there, damnably calm, her confident smile not wavering a millimeter.
Not knowing what else to say, I ventured, “Thank you for saving my life.”
She said, “We’ll work out the terms later.”
I offered a queasy smile, and left in a hurry, emerging from the transport just in time to see the hands closed tight on Gibb’s neck.
15. ARRESTS
I heard the fight before I saw it.
A pair of angry voices, one male, one female, were both lost in the kind of argument where being heard was no longer as important as making sure the opponent was not. Both participants had passed well beyond the border that separates shouting from screaming, their voices distorted past intelligibility, their words reduced to bursts of concentrated rage.
I didn’t recognize either voice. They were too distorted by volume. But in that instant before my eyes tracked the disturbance to its source, I was able to put faces to some of the other participants. I heard Oskar Levine cursing in disgust, Cif Negelein crying something I couldn’t make out, and Robin Fish screaming for intervention.
Then I spotted the crowd across the hangar and caught the unmistakable sound of somebody’s palm smacking somebody’s face.
Then half a dozen people fell to the ground as two hurtling forms bowled over the line of spectators. A few just stumbled backward, some went to their knees, but two who caught the full brunt of the impact went down hard.
I broke into a run just as the two combatants joined those two unlucky bystanders on the floor.
Li-Tsan Crin had landed on top, screeching hatred and bile as her knees slammed hard into Stuart Gibb’s abdomen. She’d wrapped her hands around his neck and dug both thumbs into the vital soft spot separating Adam’s apple from windpipe. Gibb had grabbed her wrists, first attempting to break her stranglehold and, then, failing that, digging his nails into her tendons in an instinctive attempt to make his murder too painful a job for her to finish.
Before I could reach them, Negelein and Lassiter both seized Li-Tsan by her left arm and two others I didn’t recognize took her right. Their combined efforts succeeded only in lifting Li-Tsan and Gibb off the deck together, in a fused ball of hate. The combined weight proved too much, and Li-Tsan took advantage of that as she once again drove the back of Gibb’s head against the deck.