“Andrea!” Skye again, her voice now betraying real pain.
“I’ve got it!” The tube’s endpoints irised open, and it snapped open along its length, each half reflecting the other in cross-section. I grabbed it, stood up, and ran over to Skye, positioning the bottom half of the tube under the stranglecord, then snapping the upper half shut over it.
The locks engaged and the endpoints irised shut, trapping most of the cord inside; but the endpoints still extruded, and Skye still held a bucking torus in each hand. All I’d done, so far, was give a flying stranglecord the potential to become a flying club if released to fly on its own accord. But at least Skye didn’t have to hold those toruses anymore.
She released them and took hold of the tube itself. “Thank you, Andrea. Are you all right?”
“Of course she is not all right,” an irritated Paakth-Doy said. “She is injured. Sit down, Counselor, and I will tend to your wounds.”
“We don’t have time for that, Doy—”
She placed her hand on my shoulder. “You may enjoy playing the bitch, Counselor, but in this I promise I can be a much bigger bitch than you. I am talented at it. As you said to me not long ago…Sit your ass down.”
I blinked several times, thought of several unforgivable things I could say to her, applied them to logic and common sense on one side and my urgent need to hit something on the other, then nodded and lowered myself to the side of the bed.
Paakth-Doy left to get her first aid kit, muttering an excuse-me when she was just out of sight.
I didn’t know who she’d spoken to until Wethers appeared in the doorway, rumpled and pale and wide-eyed and still rubbing his throat with one hand. He said nothing, just stared at me, evidently paralyzed by the cognitive dissonance between the human impulse to thank me for saving his life and his obligation as an officer of the Bettelhine Corporation to continue regarding me as threat to the family secrets. After a moment he dropped eye contact, gulped, then winced, the very effort of swallowing painful.
I spared him the embarrassment of speaking first. “Are you all right?”
He gave a slow nod before managing a hoarse, “I thought I was dead.”
“Must have been frightening,” I remarked, unable to resist a sarcastic, “and you with so much to live for.”
He looked down. Damned if my words hadn’t wounded him.
When Skye shifted her grip on the tube, the toruses at the endpoints of the cord protruding from both ends thrashed indignantly, still looking for a throat to encircle. “Don’t be too hard on him, Andrea. You owe him your life.”
I tried to imagine a pale and almost inarticulate Wethers stumbling into the parlor, into the middle of all those people, with wild stories of a self-propelled stranglecord. “I’m surprised we don’t have a mob scene in here.”
Wethers thrust his chin out, and croaked. “I work for the Bettelhines, Counselor. I know how to be discreet, and I suspected that you would want me to be. Under the circumstances I suppressed any signs of my own condition until I could let your companion here know that you needed immediate assistance.”
I flexed my hands, and winced. “That was…good thinking.” I thought but did not add, Almost too good. Forgetting that Wethers was even now only a few minutes removed from threatening me with the wrath of the Bettelhine empire, anybody else in that circumstance would have been hollering his head off. The revelation that a high-ranking Bettelhine employee could be prepared to exercise that inhuman level of discretion, in that kind of life-or-death situation, raised hard questions about what else Bettelhine employees might be prepared to do. “Have you ever…seen this device before?”
Wethers shook his head.
“I have,” said Skye.
She started to say where, but that’s when Paakth-Doy returned carrying her first aid kit. Doy had to duck under Wethers’s arms as she passed him in the bedroom doorway, but managed it without so much as an excuse-me as she rushed to my side with the nanite pen.
As Paakth-Doy closed my wounds, Skye said, “It’s another obscure antique weapon, this one of Ghyei design. Their aristocracy called it Fire Snake, and once a medieval time much filled with intrigue and backstabbing used to happily set it loose in the homes of relatives higher in the line of succession.”
I had never heard of these Ghyei; they were not one of the major powers, nor one famous for any other reason. “You know too much of this shit, love.”
Skye’s lips twisted. “Blame a morbid imagination.”
“I’ve never noticed it before.”
“The two of me weren’t always the same person you know.”
Uh-huh. “Do you think it’s a genuine artifact or a recreation?”
“Given the diameter of the average Ghyei throat, which two or three human beings would be able to inhabit comfortably, it’s pretty safe to say they wouldn’t find a Fire Snake of this size useful except as dental floss.”
Paakth-Doy, intent on closing the slits on my palms, emitted an unwilling giggle at that. We all looked at her. She colored, shrugged an apology, and went back to what she’d been doing. My palms numbed, tingled, grew cool, and then pleasantly warm. “What’s it doing here?”
Skye seemed surprised I’d ask such a bone-stupid obvious question. “I’d assume the same thing the Claws of God are doing here. Killing people.”
Wethers said, “I think Counselor wanted something a little more specific than that.”
“I appreciate that,” Skye told him. “But whether this one was targeted for yourself, for Counselor, or for any target of convenience, remains a question. From the speed with which it went after me when I entered, I’d have to say that it seemed willing to go after anybody within a certain proximity, prioritized by threat level.”
That made sense. I asked her, “What are the odds that it was here when we moved into the suite?”
Skye considered that. “I would say about equal to the odds of it being placed here at some point in the past few hours, by one of the people you’ve been interviewing.”
That was how I figured it as well. But that didn’t help much, as Dina Pearlman, Monday Brown, Wethers, Arturo Mendez, Paakth-Doy, and Philip Bettelhine had all been in here since the emergency stop; it was just as possible that somebody else had pulled a fast one and put the Fire Snake in our suite at some point when neither the Porrinyards or myself were looking.
Wethers said, “I don’t believe it myself, Counselor, but since this is your suite it’s just as possible given the facts that the damned thing belongs to you or your companions and that you set it off here to distract us from your own guilt in the murder of the Khaajiir.”
Paakth-Doy gave him a disbelieving look.
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it, Doy. He has a point. That is a possibility.” I then faced him and said, “Just as it remains possible that you dropped the thing from a pocket and allowed it to attack you in my presence. Just as it remains possible that it had been programmed to strangle you up to the point of permanent damage but no further; that it was supposed to give me a good fight but no more, and that your diligence in summoning help so soon after you’d expressed such contempt for me amounted to nothing more than a charade designed to make you look trustworthy and above suspicion in the other crimes aboard this carriage. I don’t particularly believe any of that, Mr. Wethers, any more than you profess to believe in the theory you offered. But it also fits the facts. And as you say, it’s a theory I’m forced to keep in mind.”
Wethers rubbed his eyes, with a terrible weariness that might have been building for much of his adult life. “Noted.” Then he faced me again, his expression as sad and lost as any I’d ever known. I had been told that he had no family but the Bettelhines, no love but for his career; I’d lived in similar isolation for much of my own life before meeting the Porrinyards, and could only wonder if he dealt with the loneliness the same way I had, by becoming proud of it and nurturing it like a pet fed on loathing and venom. “But as grateful as I am to you, for saving my life, what I said before still goes. This is Bettelhine territory. And you really don’t want to abuse your privileges as a guest.”