by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

— CHAPTER 18 —

In which the trap is sprung and Jaya reads his father's journal ... and begins to understand his death in a new light.

oOo

Ana slipped, silent, into the dim hallway—cautious, but not surreptitious. Her dark robes murmured silkily; barely loud enough to be heard above the rapid beating of her heart. She was sure that would bring the walls down. At the bottom of the staircase, she glanced away up the broad hallway. The flat panel of light squeezing beneath the door of Jaya’s study confirmed that his meeting with Mall Gar was still in progress. She continued on her way, exiting the back of the house and heading for the long, two-story stable.

In that darkened building, she stopped to let her eyes grow accustomed to the gloom and listened to the soft midnight whispers of the horses in their boxes. She moved down the rows of stalls to the area where the carriages were kept.

She had just laid her hands on the tongue of the bike she’d targeted as an appropriate vehicle when a sharp sound from behind froze her. Common sense told her it was one of the horses rattling the door of its luxurious cell. Common sense told her she was being paranoid. Still, she listened to the dark stable the way a gaur-witch listens to a new mine shaft—all senses pointing outward.

When nothing else stirred, when she had convinced herself that fear was out of place here, she dared move. Behind the padded bench seat of the two-wheeler, her hands found the closure of the stowage cowling and opened it, groping within. The little pile of equipment she had secreted earlier in the evening was still there: the coil of rope, the palm-lamp, the small leather satchel.

She slipped the palm-lamp under her robe and clipped it to the belt at the waist of her black body suit, then moved back to the front of the bike. Grasping the tongue in both hands, she rolled the little carriage out into the middle of the harnessing arena, then selected and harnessed a dark horse. She checked each buckle, quietly tugged at the traces, then paused to murmur a quick prayer.

A moment later she was driving across the yard, a blaze of pinkgold light washing over her, heading for the main gate. The guards had been instructed to keep people out. No one had said anything to them about keeping anyone in. They were not party to the whys and wherefores of their job, so when Ana called out something about visiting a friend in town they merely exchanged uneasy glances and let her go on her way unchecked. She sang on the drive into the Silk District. She’d done all her thinking; had tried on every “what if” she could think of. There was no sense in worrying it to death.

A block from the Badan-Devaki, she pulled the bike up to a public tie-down and secured the horse to one of the many empty rings. Light from a corner street lamp flooded the area with unwelcome light; she had to slip into the bike’s shadow to pull off the robe. She flipped it onto the seat, then went to the rear of the vehicle to retrieve the rope and the satchel. She was dismayed to find she hadn’t secured the hood to the stowage, relieved to find that it hadn’t resulted in the loss of her equipment. The rope went over one shoulder; she clipped the satchel to the front of her belt and slid her fingers into the soft web of the palm-lamp.

As she melted into a pool of shadow along the tie-down wall, her memory called the maps to mind; the sketches and print-outs folded in the satchel at her waist. She found the mouth of the alley that ran behind the Badan-Devaki. There was a gate across it.

She hunkered down in the shadow of a trash bin and checked the time, cupping the palm-lamp above her timepiece. Ten minutes to wait. She chafed at the seeming endlessness of it, wishing she had cut it closer. She was building up a charge of fear. That was dangerous.

She took a deep breath and began a shallow discipline; not involving all her senses—she needed to hear the street—but just deep enough to calm her mounting pulse and massage some patience into her apprehension. It was an effort well spent; when her ears caught the sound of something shuffling along the wall to her left, she did not jump out of hiding, but only stiffened with a sudden chill, senses flung outward, straining.

Another sound intruded from the right, growing louder—the rush of an air wagon. She strained her hearing back to the left, but the shuffling was swallowed in the wash of the wagon’s jets. She could feel its warm breath on her face and hands. She gave her entire attention to the wagon. It had a two seat cabin, rounded and skull-like, that gave the vehicle the look of a mythical beast. It was a tractor rig with a pleated tongue between cab and trailer.

Ana’s eyes seized on the narrow hitch. There was enough room there for a slender passenger, she decided, and coiled herself, waiting for the wagon to pull abreast of her cover. The aperture appeared almost too quickly and Ana bolted into a low leap, landing, cat-like, on the synthetic fabric of the telescoping joint. She would be lucky, she realized, if she wasn’t crushed by the two halves of the rig and prayed the wagon wouldn’t meet with any obstacles in the alley.

It didn’t. It glided on its cushion of air up the throat of the alley, the photonic gate opening and closing silently before and after. Ana watched brick and masonry flicker in its forward light bar.

The wagon soon slowed. Ana made herself as small as possible in her dark nest, her eyes on the bath of light around the Badan-Devaki service entrance.

She realized, with a freezing jolt, that the wagon would glide right by that well-lit portal and present its rear doors. When it did, her precarious perch would be flooded with light. She rolled from the hitch and was swallowed by the trailer’s shadow. She walked beside it, stopping when it stopped; it blocked her from the view of the B&D security guards.

Her back against the trailer, she glanced back, down its long, smooth flank. The service entrance lights flooded the alley behind, opening a broad fan of illumination across the worn paving—a fan that lay between Ana and her access to the dalali’s sub-regions.

The snick of a door catch brought her attention back toward the cabin. Less than three steps away the cabin door swung open and a shadowy pair of legs thrust out. She moved swiftly, silently, toward them—one long step and a pivot and she’d swung back into the breach between cab and trailer. Curled into a ball on the nearly collapsed tongue, Ana squeezed her eyes closed and hugged her knees fiercely, barely hearing the driver and his companion pass by the dark slot. Several deep breaths and a numb prayer of thanks later, she opened her eyes and glanced up toward the cab.

In the mirror surface of the window of the driver’s open door, she could see the transparent, distorted images of the two draymen and a handful of B&D guards. They were armed.

One of the guards pulled open the building’s service door. It swung outward and stopped, turning the delta of brilliance Ana must ford into a mere canal. She peered at it hopefully. That was little more than a meter in width. Dangerous, yes. But not deadly.

The draymen opened the rear doors of the trailer. It bobbed as they boarded and began unloading. Ana slipped off the hitch and moved silently down the dark side of the wagon. From beneath the ramp, she could see the guards. There were three. They were not watching the alley. They were talking and chewing pramada sticks, which meant their faculties would be cloudy at best.

Encouraged, Ana waited until both draymen had disappeared into the broad entrance, then took two long strides across the glowing river of roadway. The flash of light hit her full in the face before she plunged into darkness and stopped, stone still, listening.

The mumble of voices and the shuffle of feet continued behind her. Someone chuckled. She relaxed and moved the last few steps to the wall of the building, resisting the temptation to collapse against it in relief.

Summoning her concentration, Ana turned away from the light and put a hand against the cold brick. She’d taken three steps when something scraped the hard stone of the alley floor barely two meters in front of her. She hung between advance and retreat, imagining horrors; imagining Parva Rishi leering at her from the sooty beyond.

No, it could just as easily be a rodent of some sort—a citizen of the alley, itself terrified of alien intrusion. Something small. Something harmless. It was, even now, backing away in fear. Turning to give her one last, wild-eyed glance. Skittering away to safety.

The scraping repeated itself, was followed by shuffling and the clatter of pebbles against stone. Wings fluttered.

Ana expelled a silent breath of relief. A night bird, that was all. Hunting, as she was hunting. She calmed herself and moved cautiously to the access shaft.

She crouched by the small rectangle of absolute darkness and reached a hand tentatively into it. There was no covering to be pried away; it was open to the alley. Open too, said a small, annoying voice, to whatever lived in the alley.

Ana swallowed a tingle of apprehension. She’d faced worse on her own world. She thrust her legs into the opening and rolled onto her stomach, letting herself backwards into the aperture. Her toes touched gritty bottom. She lowered herself to the floor, then turned slowly, putting her back to the access. She took a deep, centering breath and a long moment to orient herself to the void. The place smelled of wet and rusty metal.

She recalled the computer rendering of the sub-structure. This should be a rough square, about four meters to a side. The opposing side funneled into a narrow passage hemmed by pipes and conduits. She tried to imagine that; tried to overlay an illuminated map on the lightless place. It was difficult and she wished for a miner’s helm with the computer image in memory. But she didn’t have one and so began a measured pace toward the opposite side of the imagined square, counting each footstep under her breath, her hands outstretched. Even in the soft shoes she’d chosen for the adventure, each step seemed to emit a crunchy shriek as it crushed unseen debris.

In fourteen deafening steps, her fingertips touched cold, curving metal. A large pipe. She felt to the left. The pipe took a sharp upward angle. She felt to the right. The pipe turned away and ran before her into the dark. She followed it, finding herself in the pipe-hemmed pathway that led into the bowels of the dalali. The floor plan had given the width as half a meter. She stretched out her arms. Good. The floor plan was accurate.

It was too soon for the palm-lamp, she decided, and continued her blind, fingertip progress to her immediate goal—a second pipe-bound chamber with a trap door to the regions above.

Above the rush of her own breath, above the crackle of her footfall, she heard, or rather felt, something behind her. She froze, found herself listening to nothing but the rhythm of her heart, thudding in her chest. She isolated it, closed her mind to it.

Other sounds scurried forward to take its place—the gurgle of water in the pipes, a slow drip from somewhere ahead and to the right, a sporadic creaking from over head, a pervasive hum and, on the periphery, minute noises like the whisper of tiny feet on the gritty floor. She refused to put form to it.

Ears ringing from the intensity of her listening, she took a step forward. Paused. Nothing. She took another step, her hands nearly gripping the cold, filthy pipes that ran level with her head.

A long scrape of sound shrieked at her from the blackness. She shot forward, her hands braced before her at eye level, struck a large pipe, rebounded, spun, stumbled to the right and half-fell into a corner. She hung there, barely daring to breathe, her arms lying atop the cross-piece of some bit of framework.

The blackness was absolute. Nothing existed in this place with her. Nothing but dripping, scurrying, screaming blackness.

She took hold of her panic with the firm, callused hands of a veteran miner. Whatever was sharing this alien cave with her was at least five meters away and around a corner. That is, she thought wryly, unless it was small enough to glide under the pipes.

She pushed herself upright, listening. The nerve-flaying sounds were gone. For now.

Ana struggled to reconnoiter. She had known where she was when she’d started her sprint—just below the first corner. The forced right turn was all right, but the next turn should have been a left only a meter and a half along this corridor. She must have stumbled twice that distance to the corner, which meant she’d have to work her way back down the passage.

Grit crunched softly somewhere in the darkness. Somewhere back the way she’d just come.

Her jaw clenched painfully. She willed it to relax. It was only three steps—four, at most. A quick right turn, then another quick jog to the left.

Just put one foot in front of the other, Anala, she told herself, and did that, feeling for the junction and curve that would signal the turn.

One step. Two steps. Three. Her hand met the raised collar of the junction fitting and ahead of her in the dark, something brushed the dust.

She slipped around the corner as silently as possible, sidling, listening. Her hands sought signs of progress—another curving juncture slid beneath them. Her right hand, extended at arm’s length met a wall—the “T” intersection that butted against the lift shaft. She padded left; three meters later, she turned right.

She stopped. Now she had to measure carefully or turn on the lamp. She turned her head toward her back trail, listening. Nothing.

Biting her lip, she took what she hoped was a half-meter step, then another and another. She stopped, turned and fanned her fingers against the wall. The metal framework she expected to find was not there. She felt left and right. Nothing. Had she gone too far or not far enough?

Above the sudden clamor of adrenaline, her senses told her something was moving in the peaty gloom, advancing on her up the pipe work maze. Denying her fear the power of form, she thumbed on the palm-lamp and scraped its golden beam across the wall.

Not far enough! She dove at the spider-work of metal braces the light revealed—a manual cantilever stairwell. Ana gave the mechanism a swift glance, saw the oil-packed chains that supported the closest end. She shut off the palm-lamp and, before the image of the stair frame could fade from her eyes, lunged for the bottom end of the narrow steps. Under the sudden weight, the mechanism groaned, resisted, then gave, lowering in a ponderous glide. She willed it down. When it was still a meter from the floor, she flung her body onto it and crawled upward toward the seemingly unreachable trapdoor.

It was not unreachable, but it was set at an a awkward angle to the steps. She ended up lying on her back along the metal frame, pushing upward with increasing force. Thought of the unseen Something Behind nearly made her frantic, but she fought the urge to pound on the trapdoor and kept her pressure on it firm and consistent.

It gave, at last, and swung away with what seemed like a deafening protest.

She sat up, poking her head into a darkness as complete as the vat of black below, yet radically different. Close, cottony warmth pressed against her face and neck. She scanned for a light source, but hadn’t found it when the metal beneath her vibrated.

The gentle touch of the unknown electrified her, sent her flying up through the trap and onto the floor above. She scrambled, rolled and felt something feathery brush by her in a direction she took to be up. She struck something solid—a frame of some sort—and used it to stop her wild roll.

She lay silent now, tangled up in herself, cursing the folds of fabric that had fallen on her from overhead. She felt movement from that direction—rhythmic and diminishing. She reached up a hand. It met cloth—soft, silken cloth. She was lying beneath a clothing rack.

She dragged the swinging clothes into noiseless submission, begging total silence—and it was silent here. No scurrying, no scream and crash of dripping water; just solid, dust-covered silence.

Still waiting for Something to drag itself out of the sublevel abyss, she moved carefully into a more or less upright position, then slid whatever had fallen on her to the floor. Using the clothes rack as a landmark, she tried to pinpoint the trap door. With help from some God-sent trickle of light, she made out its squared edge toward the center of the room. It was still angled upward just as she’d left it.

Orienting herself, she guessed her back was to a wall that abutted the backstage area of the main Salon. That put one exit on her left, and two somewhere along the wall at her back. It was that left-hand one she wanted. It fed into a connecting corridor to the rear foyer, from which she had her choice of lift basket or back stair. She got her feet beneath her and started to rise.

A door opened somewhere on the periphery of her senses. The lights came on. She froze, not so much as breathing on the fabric hanging about her face. She couldn’t see who was shuffling toward her hiding place from the unseen doorway in the wall to her left; she could only hear their tuneless humming and the swish-scuffle of their feet across the floor. What she could see, between barely parted veils of color, was the trap door. It was shut.

She tried to make herself believe in some well-lubricated, fully automatic mechanism; some system of counter-weights that had just now came into play. Something she’d failed to see when she forced the door. She didn’t believe in it.

The shuffle-hum was closer now, making her shiver with tension. It stopped not two paces off.

“MM-hm,” murmured a female voice. “Blue. Bl-ue.” The rack trembled and creaked, hooks scraped wood—closer, then closer. “Blue, blue, blue,” the voice chanted.

Ana could see the woman’s feet—silver-shod—through the diaphony to her left. Dear Tara-Ji...

“Ah! Blue!” The rack jolted. There was a moment of silence, then, “Ah! Tsk!”

A hand appeared between Ana’s knees. It reached for and grasped the fabric that lay over her toes, whisked it away. The voice muttered about dirt. Then, the shuffle-hum commenced again and moved away. The lights went out, the final stream cutting off as the door closed.

Ana slid to the floor. Three seconds later she made a mad, but silent dash for her far away target—the door to the outside corridor. It took all the courage she possessed to open it into the empty rear foyer; more than that to navigate the length of that to the back stair.

Reaching that goal with ragged nerves, she slipped upward toward her goal.

oOo

It’s a strange and startling coincidence that the very evening of the day I poke my photonic nose into the accounts of the Kasi-Nawahr Consortium, Scar-Eye and his companions cross my path. Cross it! By God, they very nearly cut it in two. Scar-Eye is short on both patience and gentility, but fortunately the bruises do not show when I’m fully dressed, and if I constrain myself around Mel (a damned hard thing to do), I might be able to hide them from her as well. That much is imperative.

I am now fully apprised of my mortality and weakness of character. The confrontation gave me pause to wonder why I must go on with this, suspecting, as I do now, that it could cost me more than a few bruised ribs. Yet, if what I suspect is true, if the Consortium is trying to grapple the reins of government, must I not go on? Must I not obtain some proof the Inner Circle can use to prosecute the grapplers?

I have spoken only to Sri Radha about this latest development. She, alone, has a transcript of the conversation I intercepted two evenings ago, and I am not certain, but only hope she is to be trusted. That the KNC has gotten to the Vrinda Varma is clear. What is not clear is which members they own.

I’m certain Duran Prakash is serving as the agent of the person or persons at the head of this dragon. I am not certain whose face the head wears. I had even begun to suspect Nigudha Bhrasta before Ram-eve, but Namun tells me he was in Vatapur recovering from a surgery. Bhrasta’s heart is not good, Namun confided, and I can tell from the irony in my friend’s eye, I am invited to take him metaphorically. Of those present at the banquet that evening, I remember only that three people were absent from the room when I entered the study and caught the outgoing message: Sarad Valli, Duran Prakash, and Ranjan Vrksa, Bhrasta’s able lieutenant. There may have been others and I curse my memory for its inattentiveness. I suspect that Prakashsama or even Vrksa may have been the sender of the message. Perhaps both of them are implicated.

There may yet be a way to attempt a retrieval of the log file they so carefully erased. If I can retrieve that, I can track the call.

oOo

Gar looked up at Jaya from the amber glow of the com-journal’s little screen, his eyes strained. “Are you supposing, Nathu Rai, that the Vadin Adivaram is one of those owned by the KNC—and that Prakash-sama may be the purchaser?”

“I’m inclined to fear that, yes.”

The Sarngin shook his head. “What prompted your father to embark on this investigation?”

“He thought he was seeing an unhealthy trend in Vrinda Varma consultation. Some of the junior members would back a particular opinion so stubbornly, it would block resolution. Things would get tabled or just drag out interminably. It wasn’t anything he could pinpoint precisely enough to warrant an investigation, so he didn’t say anything, just took notes on the various issues that seemed to cause the most trouble.

“Then, Duran Prakash suggested to him that his friendship with Namun Vedda should also extend to the Consortium. There was a particular issue on the Council docket that indirectly affected Vedda Technologies and Prakash indicated that if Father was really a loyal friend he’d throw his vote toward the KNC. Father rejected the idea so thoroughly, he didn’t expect to hear any more about it. Then he started thinking about that trend in consultation and looked at his notes. The issues that caused the most contention, the ones the junior members were so stubborn about, were all issues that affected the KNC either directly or indirectly, through their various suppliers and contractors.

“After that, Father wondered if he should have cultivated the situation with Prakash—led him a little to see how far he was willing to go to own the Sarojin vote. He had some thought of getting Prakash into a compromising position, then reporting him to Uncle Namun.”

“Uncle Namun, you call him. He is not really your Uncle.”

Jaya shook his head. “My godfather and an old family friend—fanatical in his insistence that government, business, and friendship be kept in their separate spheres. He would have decapitated Prakash if he thought he was trying to coerce Father into throwing his vote, perhaps even default on his contracts with the Consortium.”

“Which would have devastated his own company,” observed Gar.

“Namun Vedda is a man of principle. He has always put family, friendship, and honor before business interests. Something that has never endeared him to the members of the KNC board.”

“This conversation your father intercepted—he never discovered who the participants were?”

Jaya shook his head. “Evidently he had a house full of guests. Father was in the study when he caught the outgoing message on the vicom. It was startling enough that he monitored it and traced it to the terminal in the library, but by the time he got to the terminal, whoever placed the call was gone. There were about four members of the Kasi-Nawahr Board here that night, plus quite a few members of the Vrinda Varma, some of whom were, according to the message, Consortium targets.”

Gar nodded, tapping the com-journal with one finger. “He says he was peeking into their accounts. He was then looking for—what—pay-offs?”

“He wondered if money was moving out of KNC coffers into the accounts of individual Varmana. He used his Council access rights to try to track that.”

“And he found...?”

Jaya shrugged and lifted the com-journal from Gar’s hands. “This entry was made less than a week before his death. I don’t know what he found...if he found anything at all.”

“Who is this Scar-Eye he speaks of? It occurs to me that this is not unlike your description of one of the alleged Workers’ Coalitionists who attacked you.”

Jaya glanced at the journal. “’A man with a scar running across his right eye,’” he read. “Yes, it occurs to me too. Only, five years ago, there was no Workers’ Coalition.”

“How did your father die, mahesa?”

Jaya felt the muscles of his chest constrict. “He was run down by an aircar left sitting with its engines idling. The Sarngin called it an accident. I’m beginning to have my doubts.”

oOo

Hunger was what finally drew Govi to the kitchen of the House Sarojin. He satisfied that, but found a full stomach did not completely still the dim anxiety that wriggled somewhere in his shaggy head.

Aridas was there, sharing a cup of channa with his wife. They had spoken and fallen silent to watch steam wraiths escape their mugs. Govi twitched his shoulders and threw a chuckled comment onto the table.

“That Ana creature,” he said.

Heli looked up from her channa. “That Ana creature?” she repeated. “What of her?”

Govi shied away from the defensive gleam in the woman’s eye and shrugged his shoulders. “She’s a curious curiosity.”

“That’s about as clear as a closed door,” said Heli dryly. “Before you explain it, know I won’t hear insults to the Rani Ana.”

“Insults? No. No insults,” Govi promised. “Compliments, only. She’s just not molded to rita. Not ordinary, I mean. Full of questions...like a man, see.”

Ari produced an odd grunt and Heli’s brows ascended.

“Like a man?”

Govi raised a calloused hand. “Now, don’t run off at the brain. I just mean she—well, she comes to me asking all this and that about my alley. How this lays and that. What time this happens and that. Same things the Nathu Rai and his Sarngin friend are asking. Now, what the Niraya Hell’s a woman be doing with that? Putting it in her chatbook?”

Ari and Heli were now looking at Govi in such a way as to make him wish he’d kept his mouth shut.

“She asked you these things?” Heli asked.

“I said so, didn’t I? She asked and I told.” He shrugged.

Heli leaned toward him across the table. “Did you tell Jaya Rai?”

“No. Why should I? What’s she going to do, after all? She’s a woman.”

Heli sat up. “She’s not a Mehtaran woman, Madman. She’s Ana.”

“And that means what?”

Ari pushed back his chair with a loud scrape and stood. “It means you’d better tell Jaya Rai, Govi-sama. Because this woman is like to do anything at all.”

oOo

The corridor was empty. At least, there were no people moving through it—but it was full of sounds and aromas and auras that extruded into the red velvet hall from beneath the closed doors. Chatter, laughter, sobbing. Foods and perfumes. Desire and satiation. Fear.

Ana shivered and retracted herself from the swirl of sensation. There was no business done on this level.

After a moment of thought, she decided the top floor was the most logical place to lodge the private zones of such a business. Taking the stairs, she by-passed the next two floors and made her way directly to the penthouse, where she was met by a sturdy wooden door whose polished plaque told her she was about to violate a private area. An equally polished handle told her the door opened on a manual slider.

She scanned the edges of the door for any sign of an alarm system or surveillance network. There didn’t seem to be any, but the situation dictated caution. She got to her knees and slid the door carefully aside, hunkering into the lowest crouch possible as she slipped through. She glanced down the corridor; it was opulent and empty. Everywhere was the product of Avasan gaur mines. Door handles gleamed with it; it adorned cornices and moldings; it dripped from light fixtures.

The fruits of our labor.

She shook the anger out after a moment and checked the doors here for surveillance gear. She saw none. What she did see were more golden plaques. They labeled the private quarters of Ashur Badan and Kareen Devaki, their respective offices and a shared Salon. An ornate lift cage reposed midway down Ashur Badan’s side of the hall.

Ana moved to the door with Kareen Devaki’s name on it. She laid her hand on the door handle, then closed her eyes, whispered a prayer and turned the handle, gently. There was no click, no creak, no groan, just silent mechanical obedience. The door opened.

Ana took the luxurious but business-like place at a glance, saw the vicom terminal and the connecting door to what must be Kareen Devaki’s private suite. She moved into the room, closing the door behind her. The terminal was active, displaying what appeared to be a tally of the day’s receipts. She slid into the chair, a smile beginning to curve her mouth. She recognized the program. Her father and mother used the same software to track their accounts.

It was almost too easy. She hadn’t dreamed she’d actually find the system opened to a module of the very program she needed to access. The thought that struck next wiped the vestigial smile from her lips. All this might mean that Devakisa had just left the terminal for only a moment—that she was even now in the next room and had every intention of returning to complete her late-night work.

Ana put her fingers to the keyboard. She exited the accounting module and called up the inventory. It was a continual shock seeing the familiar layout of fields detailing the acquisition and disposal of goods filled with the names and descriptions of human beings. She found Vanam Sanoh easily enough in the database—simply running a search for the girl’s name—but, reading the entry, she knew she would not find her in the dalali. Vanam Sanoh had been sold at public auction the day before she had supposedly sent her plea for help.

It was chilling knowledge—that a trap had been deliberately set for her. The mixture of fear and fury made her brain and fingers fly. When a search for “none” in the cree field yielded too many records, Ana added “fair” skin tone to the logic and netted a more manageable group. She eliminated several more on the basis of their descriptions then made a quick cross-check against the list she pulled out of her satchel.

There were still more fair-skinned id-less people in the dalali’s database than were accounted for by the list, but Ana couldn’t afford the time for a detailed comparison. She looked around, a little frantic, and saw the imager on a nearby table. She keyed the program to scan her list and enter them into a table she could check against the database records...and all but jumped out of her skin when the machine responded with a low hum.

Her eyes fastened on the door she assumed led to Devaki’s private salon. She fully expected it to swing open at any second. She was so intent on it, she almost failed to hear the sly sound that penetrated the door from the outside corridor.

At the exact moment she realized there was someone just outside the office, the imager disgorged its list. She froze for an instant, her hand already reaching for the printout flimsy, her eyes now on the external door. In that instant, the door handle turned.

She grabbed the flimsy from the imager’s output tray and flung herself out of the chair. She went toward the door, not away from it, and was barely behind it when it swung open.

Whoever was there didn’t move for a moment, but hovered with an uncertainty that Anala felt as a prickling sensation on the side of her face and neck. She tried to swallow the knot in her throat, but the muscles seemed paralyzed. She gave up and settled for taking a deep, silent, shaking breath.

There was a warm crackle of movement from the unseen one; a sliding of fabric on fabric, an intake of breath, a shift forward into the room.

Come in! thought Ana. Just come in and let me slip past you!

He/she did come in—swiftly, suddenly—and closed the door behind. Exposed, Ana recoiled, cold adrenaline pouring through her core. Then she lunged forward, whipped out a hand and grasped a black-clad arm.

“Hadas! What in the name of Ram-ji are you doing?”

He whirled around and half raised an arm in defense. His face showed immediate relief.

“Ana! Thank God!” he whispered. “I thought I’d lost you!”

“No, only your senses. What are you doing?” He opened his mouth to answer, but she shook her head. “Never mind. I know what you’re doing.”

“I couldn’t let you do this alone.”

“So now no one knows where either of us are.”

“I left a note on my bed. If they think to look for me, they’ll find it. Do you have the list?”

Exasperated, Ana took a deep breath and nodded. She patted the satchel. “Right here. Let’s get out of here.”

“Why don’t we make another copy of it?” Hadas suggested. “I’ll take one—you take the other. That way if anything happens to one of us...”

She grimaced. “You really take to this skulk and scurry business, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Ana nodded. “Keep an ear to the door.” She crossed to the desk and started the imaging process again. The machine responded with its sonorous hum and slid out a second copy of the records. Ana took it, then returned the vicom program to the accounting module, leaving it (she hoped) the way she’d found it.

She moved back to the door and handed Hadas the flimsy.

“Now, we’ve got to get out of here. Quietly and quickly. We’ll go back the way we came. There’s another airvan due in about-“—she glanced at her timepiece—“-twenty minutes. That’s our ride out.”

“Vanam Sanoh?”

“Already sold at auction. She couldn’t have sent that note.”

Hadas nodded, then tilted his head toward the door. “All quiet.”

“Let’s go.”

The hall was empty. Ana slid through the door with Hadas right behind. They hurried to the exit, slipped through and started their downward journey. It was still except for the muffled hammering of rhythmic music from the levels below.

They were perhaps halfway between the first and second floor when the door just above them opened and closed. They now shared the stairwell with an unknown someone.

Ana pushed Hadas downward, her eyes raised to the second level landing. He glided gracefully the remaining steps to the first floor. She followed and just saw someone round the corner of the second landing as she slipped around the corner of the first. The footsteps above them moved deliberately and swiftly downward.

Ana shoved open the door to the foyer and pushed Hadas through, following him into the dimly lit interior. It stretched before them in a seemingly endless tunnel of wood paneling and carpet. The backstage storage area was half the length of the building to the right along that tunnel, but at least the tunnel was empty.

“Run,” Ana whispered and gave Hadas a gentle shove. Together they sprinted toward the opposite end of the hall.

Ana heard a shout go up behind them, but ignored it, her eyes on Hadas’s back as his greater speed pulled him ahead of her. She was hungering for the black warmth of the storage area when someone stepped out of a doorway into Hadas’s path and collided with him.

The man grabbed the Avasan’s arms and held him, a scowl building on his broad face. Ana slowed, readying a sassy remark, and glanced back over her shoulder. Three men pursued them up the long foyer. One of them was Ashur Badan.

Barely thinking, Ana launched herself at their roadblock, hitting his elbow and jarring his grip. Hadas moved at the same time, kicking the fellow square in his sturdy shins. He wrenched free and pelted off down the foyer. Ana tried to follow, but found a hand wrapped solidly around one wrist. Terrified and furious, she put her head down and bit the man’s forearm as hard as she could. He shrieked and let go, grasping at her shoulder. He caught the rope that hung there instead. Ana let the rope go, slipping out of its coils and twisting away.

Hadas had disappeared and she made a flash decision not to draw their pursuers after him. With Badan’s men nearly on her heels, she threw herself through the next open doorway. Three doors confronted her in the semi-darkness. She chose one and catapulted into an unlit room that echoed every breath, every footfall. She was lost in a barrage of harsh, ambient sound.

She ran and collided with hard, cold surfaces, fell and scrambled up and went on. She met maze-like walls that herded her in square coils so that she lost all sense of direction. She could hear her own breathing—loud, rasping. She could hear the sound of feet on the unyielding floor and voices flinging themselves against the chill walls. 

Someone was very near. She recoiled and staggered along yet another smooth, patterned wall this one studded with painful obstructions. She bumped her shoulder, her breast; bruised her ribs and hands.

Without warning, a spray of freezing water hit her full in the face. She screamed and recoiled and was met by a stinging spray from another direction. She screamed again and ducked out from under it, stumbled and slipped and came down against a wall. The water was beneath her, too, cold as Niraya Hell.

On her knees and soaking wet, she felt along the wall for a way out. Trembling, she didn’t dare rise; didn’t dare poke her head up out of the black pocket of spray. She put her hands against the tile surface and began to creep along to the left.

Oh, God, should it be to the left?

A prickling ran up her back, colder than the water that lapped around her knees. He was right behind her, standing in the stinging spray and maybe he could even see her there, groveling at the wall like a pilgrim before a shrine. She started to turn and rise and was knocked down again by a blaze of light.

White. White room. White light gleaming and glittering and shining viciously off of every surface—tile and polished chrome. Her eyes watered from the glare. She knew this place, this deadend corner. She’d been here before, stripped naked and cleansed of Avasan soil.

He blocked out the light when he stood over her, and she dared, stupidly, to look up into his face. Anala Nadim experienced, then, for perhaps only the second or third time in her short life, a moment of real fear.