“That’s okay,” I assured him, a prickling sensation running up my back. A distant, eerie whistling sort of sound was the way I’d characterized my own recent wake-up call. “How long ago did all this happen?”
He shrugged. “An hour. Perhaps a bit more.”
Just enough time, in other words, for someone to make his way back up to the front of the train, dose a sleeping Modhran walker with hypnotic so that he could play shill for me, and call me awake so he could send me to my death.
In fact, with this added bit of information, the late-night conversations I’d noticed as I passed through first class suddenly took on an entirely new aspect. Odds were that one of those conversations had been the killer talking to one of the Modhri’s other walkers, getting ready to feed Krel Vevri’s lines to him by remote control. That was a capability of the group mind that had never occurred to me. “So why didn’t you kill me?” I asked.
Emikai snorted. “I do not murder on anyone’s demand,” he growled.
“Glad to hear it,” I said, rubbing my throat again. “So what now? We let bygones be bygones and I let you go back to your nice comfy Quadrail seat?”
He cocked his head. “Do you think that would be wise?”
My estimate of his competence, which had already been pretty high, rose a couple more points. Most citizens would have leaped at the offer. But Emikai was either more thoughtful or more canny than that.
Which led directly to the bigger question of who or what this horse-faced enigma was, and whose side he was on. If anyone’s. “Unfortunately—unfortunately for you, anyway—no, I don’t,” I said. “I’m thinking it could be highly interesting to see what kind of reaction we get when I not only don’t turn up dead, but you turn up back in irons.”
“I expected you would say that.” Emikai looked around us. “I presume this time you will have watchers present in the event that he attempts this again?”
“Absolutely,” I promised, keeping my voice even. “If you’re ready, let’s go ahead and reset the stage.”
He eyed me another moment, then nodded. “Very well,” he said.
Five minutes later, with Emikai once again tied to his perch, I was on my way back to the front of the train. And this time, I was moving with a lighter, quicker step.
Because though Emikai didn’t know it, there had been watchers present during his abortive rescue: the two twitters Bayta had left on guard.
It was going to be highly interesting to find out what exactly they’d seen.
What they’d seen, it turned out, was exactly nothing.
“That’s impossible,” I growled, glaring at Bayta from my seat at her computer desk as she sat stiffly on the edge of her bed. “You left them there. You ordered them to watch. How can they not have seen something?”
“I don’t know,” Bayta said. Her voice was as stiff as her posture. “They just froze up, somehow.”
“How does a Spider freeze up?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Bayta repeated tartly. “Something happened to them. Something I’ve never heard of happening before.”
I stared at her …and then my fatigue-numbed brain finally got it. Bayta hadn’t gone all stiff and angry because she was mad
She wasn’t angry. She was scared.
“Okay,” I said, forcing the frustration out of my voice. This was no time for emotion of any sort. “Let’s start at the beginning. When did this blank spot happen?”
“As near as we can tell, just under two hours ago,” Bayta said, her voice still stiff but sounding marginally calmer now that I was no longer yelling at her. “About the same time Logra Emikai says someone cut him free of his bonds.”
“And it knocked out both Spiders so that they didn’t see anything?”
“It didn’t exactly knock them out,” Bayta said hesitantly, frowning out into space as if looking for the right words. “It was more like they had been looking somewhere else and …is ‘spaced out’ a correct English term?”
“It is indeed,” I assured her. “Did they notice anything unusual happening just before or during this brain freeze?”
“How could they notice anything during the brain freeze?” Bayta asked patiently. “They were incapacitated.”
“I know they were,” I said. “But they’re telepathically linked to the rest of the Spiders, and I assume no one else was affected.”
“No, no one else was affected,” Bayta said, shaking her head. “But the two twitters were somehow disconnected from the rest of the Spiders during that time.”
“And no one noticed that?”
She shrugged. “The Spiders aren’t a group mind,” she reminded me. “They’re not connected that tightly.”
I grimaced. And even if someone had noticed, they probably wouldn’t have done anything. That wasn’t the way Spiders did things. “Well, it’s certainly not the first dead end we’ve hit in this case,” I said. “At least we’ve proved now that Logra Emikai isn’t our killer.”
“Have we?” Bayta countered. “Couldn’t this have just been an elaborate plan on his part to deflect suspicion away from him?”
“Hardly,” I said. “The whole story about being ordered to kill me implies that his midnight visitor thought he would be willing to do the dastardly deed, which implies a relationship of some sort with said midnight visitor. That actually puts him closer to the center of this mess than he would have been if he’d just stayed put like a good little prisoner. It’s more likely that the real killer was hoping this would muddy the waters by throwing some of the suspicion onto Emikai.”
“Or hoped Logra Emikai would kill you,” Bayta said quietly.
“There is that,” I conceded. “Fortunately, he couldn’t be present to either encourage or assist. He had to be up here pulling Vevri’s strings.”
“Yes,” Bayta said, her voice chilling a bit. “Let’s talk about Krel Vevri, shall we?”
I took a deep breath. For a while I’d considered keeping my deal with the Modhri private, knowing that Bayta probably wouldn’t take the news very well. But down deep, I’d known all along I couldn’t do that. Bayta was my ally and my friend, and it would be neither safe nor fair for me to cut her out of something this important.
Besides, I could still see the quiet pain that had flooded into her eyes when she’d learned I’d held out on her about the Chahwyn’s new defender-class Spiders. I wasn’t about to go through that twice in one trip.
So as she sat still and silent on her bed, I told her all about it.
I was prepared for her to be stunned, or aghast, or outraged. I wasn’t prepared for her to be quietly unreadable. “So there is a mind segment aboard,” she said when I’d finished. “I’d always thought there probably was.”
“It seemed a reasonable deal to make,” I said, still trying to figure out what was going on behind that emotionless face. “This may be our only chance of getting fresh information on this case.”
“And you’d rather work with the Modhri than let a killer escape punishment?”
“This isn’t an ordinary killer, Bayta,” I reminded her. “He’s figured out how to commit quiet, subtle murder on a Quadrail. Not just beat someone to death with his bare hands, which we’ve seen before, but real, genuine, untraceable murder.” I waved a hand. “Not to mention that he’s also got a technique for freezing or otherwise incapacitating Spiders. You think the Chahwyn will want him getting away with all that?”
“It doesn’t really matter what the Chahwyn wants, does it?” she countered. “You’ve already made the decision.” She eyed me. “But there’s a possibility you haven’t mentioned. What if it was the Modhri himself who was responsible for what happened with Logra Emikai and the twitters?”