I’d barely closed the door behind me when the divider opened and Bayta came in. “How long do we wait?” she asked briskly.
“How long do we wait for what?” I asked.
“To go back and confront Dr. Aronobal,” she said, frowning. “We were just dropping off Mr. Kennrick so he wouldn’t be there, weren’t we?”
“No, we were dropping off Mr. Kennrick so that we could all go to bed and get some sleep,” I said.
Her face fell a little. “Oh,” she said. “I thought …” She trailed off.
“You thought I was blowing smoke,” I said. “And under other circumstances, I might have been. But not this time.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Well, then …I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”
“Good night,” I replied. “Sleep well.”
She disappeared back into her compartment, and the dividing wall between us again closed.
With a tired sigh, I checked my watch. Twenty minutes, I decided, would be enough for her to finish her bedtime preparations and fall asleep.
It wasn’t like I’d just lied to her, I reminded myself firmly. I really wasn’t going back to third to confront Aronobal.
The Modhri had clued me in on Emikai’s attempt on my compartment. Why he’d done that I didn’t know.
But twenty minutes from now I was going to find out.
My first plan was to go back to the rear first-class coach car, where the Modhri had spoken through Qiddicoj to warn me about the intruder. But the Modhri was a group mind, after all, which meant that talking to one walker was the same as talking to another. On a hunch, I stopped by the bar.
Sure enough, the Juri I’d seen earlier was still there. He’d collapsed onto his table, his head pillowed on his folded arms, obviously sound asleep.
Back when I’d traveled third-class for Westali I’d seen occasional passengers sleeping that way. Up to now I’d never seen a first-class traveler who hadn’t managed to make it back to his or her much comfier seat. The implications, and the invitation, were obvious. Walking over to the sleeping figure, I sat down across the table from him. “Hello, Modhri,” I said quietly.
“Hello, Compton,” the Juri replied instantly. “I see you were able to stop him.”
“Yes, thanks to your timely information,” I confirmed. “Why did you do it?”
“I hoped to prove myself trustworthy.” He hesitated. “I need your help.”
I felt my eyebrows creeping up my forehead. The Modhri as someone trustworthy was novel enough. The idea that he needed—and wanted—help from me was right off the scale. “To do what?” I asked.
“To find the murderer aboard this train,” he said. “Is the intruder you stopped that murderer?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “He’s got a first-class pass, and those don’t come cheap, which means this guy has some serious financial backing.” I grimaced. “But my gut says no.”
“Then the killer is still at large,” the Modhri said grimly. “And may kill again.”
“Fair chance of that, yes,” I agreed. “Why do you care?”
Again, he hesitated. “Because as he kills those aboard this train, he is also killing me.”
I stared down at the sleeping face. “He’s what?”
“He has killed four and tried to kill two others,” the Modhri said. “Two of the dead were my Eyes.”
I looked over at the server Spider standing behind the counter, out of range of our conversation, my brain swirling as everything about this case tried to realign itself. Could the as-yet-unexplained motive for these murders be something as simple as an attempt to kill off this particular Modhran mind segment? “Which two?” I asked.
“The first and third to die,” he said. “Master Colix and di-Master Strinni.”
“And what makes you think you can trust me?” I asked. “I’m your enemy, remember?”
“But you have destroyed my Eyes and Arms only in battle,” he said. “Never have you engaged in direct murder.” The sleeping Juri’s mouth twitched. “And you have already saved one Eye that would also have been lost without your intervention.”
He was right on that one, anyway. Qiddicoj would almost certainly have died of the same intestinal ravages that had killed Givvrac if I hadn’t come up with the solution. “Of course, I didn’t know Osantra Qiddicoj was a walker at the time,” I reminded him.
“Would that have made a difference?”
I thought it over. The worst thing about fighting the damn Modhri was that most of his pawns were both unwilling and innocent. You couldn’t go around slaughtering them for crimes they didn’t even know they’d committed. You couldn’t stand by and let someone else knock them off, either. “Not really,” I conceded.
“As I thought,” the Modhri said. “At first I feared you might be the person responsible for the deaths. But I’m now convinced otherwise.”
“Glad to hear that,” I said. I was, too. About the only thing that could have made this situation worse would have been to have a paranoid Modhran mind segment also gunning for me. “But just because I’m not going to let people get murdered doesn’t mean I’m ready to jump on board as your ally.”
“Yet I may be of assistance in your investigation,” the Modhri pointed out. “And recall that two others who were not associated with me have also been killed. Do you not seek justice for them?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. After all I’d been through with the Modhri, the thought of cooperating with him had all the skin-crawling unpleasantness of being offered lunch by a high-ranking member of the Inquisition.
And yet, the detached Westali investigator in me could see the possibilities here. One of the most frustrating roadblocks of the investigation so far had been my inability to nail down the last few hours of Master Colix’s life. But if he’d been a Modhran walker, all those details were suddenly available to me, as clear and precise as if his whole life had been copied onto off-site backup. Which, in a sense, it had. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re suggesting that we work together—you and I—to catch the murderer aboard this train.”
“Correct.”
“And afterwards?”
“You will have my thanks,” the Modhri said.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “What’s the rest of the Modhri going to say when he finds out you joined forces with someone he’d like to see dead?”
For a moment the Modhri didn’t answer. I looked at the server again, wondering if he was even now informing Bayta that I was having a heart-to-heart with a sleeping passenger. “As with all beings, my first duty is to survive,” the Modhri said at last. “Clearly, this murderer has found a way to bring weapons of death aboard a Quadrail. If he is permitted to escape undetected and unpunished, then none of us will ever be safe. Not you, and not I.”
That was something I’d also thought about lately. I’d thought about it a lot. “Let’s hope the rest of the mind will also see it that way,” I said. “So the plan is that we team up, catch this joker, then go our separate ways?”
“Yes,” he said, and there was no mistaking the relief in his voice. “Thank you.”
“Hang on,” I warned. “Before you go all grateful, there are a few ground rules. First of all, how many walkers do you have aboard?”
“Three remain,” he said.
Three out of an original five, kicking the mind segment down by forty percent. No wonder he was panicked enough to ask me for help. “Their names and species?”
He hesitated. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I need to know who, what, and where you are,” I told him. “Partly for operational purposes; mostly because I don’t like having potential surprises at my back.”
“I have sworn to cooperate with you.”
“And I’m pleased to hear that,” I said. “Their names and species?”