She sat back in her chair, as if exhausted by the long speech.
'Which means the killer came to us from another planet,' Melthine said.
'No,' Tan groused. 'It only means we’ve made a lot of assumptions. He might be a native and he hid the other bodies. Or he dropped them off a balcony, fed the dinosaurs. But it looks like we need to operate on the theory that the same person killed all three women and that he’s going to do it again.'
'I’m not Silent,' Gray said, 'and I’m nowhere near an expert in Dream theory, but doesn’t a Silent’s landscape disappear when they leave the Dream or if they die while in it? Temm-and her forest-should have disappeared the moment she died. Why did her Dream body hang around after this hat guy killed her?'
Ara picked up the glass. She could still smell the scotch. 'I imagine it did vanish. But
'Why?' Gray said intently.
'Because he did it without a noticeable break in the scenery. There should have been a flicker or something between the time Iris’s Dream ended and he took it over. There wasn’t. That means he’s highly skilled in the Dream, in addition to being frighteningly powerful.'
'Powerful because he could kill her, you mean?' Gray said. 'There’ve been other Dream murders over the centuries, and in all cases the killer had to be more powerful than the victim.'
'It’s more than just the amount of power.' Ara set the glass back down and turned her gaze to the darkening window. 'First, he was able to wrench control of her own turf away from her and change it. That means his mind was stronger than Iris’s. Second, he was able to disrupt her concentration enough that she couldn’t leave the Dream to escape. That isn’t easy to do because every Silent knows that the Dream is just that-a dream. You can wake up whenever you want. He scared Iris so much that she forgot this fact. Third, he was powerful enough to convince Iris’s mind that she was being torn limb from limb. The human survival instinct is very strong, Inspector. It takes a lot of power to convince someone that they’re dead. This guy is both potent and skilled, and the idea that I myself might run across him in the Dream makes me shake.'
'What’s the official cause of death?' Melthine asked.
'Mental trauma,' Gray said. 'The patterns of bruises on Temm’s body are consistent with being wrapped up and partially crushed by something with an irregular surface, such as a tree branch. Her body created the bruises in psychosomatic response to what happened to her mind in the Dream. Being torn to pieces, however, is more than your average human brain can pull off, so to speak.'
Tan pursed her lips. 'We need to discuss the finger angle.' When the others didn’t respond, she continued. 'Medical examiner confirmed that Temm’s finger was severed and replaced post mortem. Less than an hour after Temm died, in fact. Means that the killer murdered her in the Dream, came into her house afterward, cut the finger off, sewed Wren Hamil’s finger on, and left. We’ve interviewed the neighbors. None of them saw anyone.'
'What about her boyfriend?' Melthine said. 'Is he a suspect? The neighbors wouldn’t think anything of him going inside.'
Linus Gray shook his head. 'He’s not Silent. Genetic scan confirms. He couldn’t kill anyone in the Dream. And he has an iron-clad alibi for the time before and after she died. He’s a monorail engineer and he was driving one all day. Plenty of witnesses.'
'He kills them,' Tan mused aloud, 'tears off a finger in the Dream, writes a number on their foreheads. Then he goes to their house, cuts a finger off, replaces it with a finger from the last victim.'
'Whose finger was sewn onto the first victim-Prinna Meg?' Ara asked. 'Do you know?'
'The finger’s DNA isn’t in any computer records,' Gray said. 'All we know is that the thing came from a woman and she was Silent.'
'So maybe the killer
'That would seem to follow,' Gray agreed.
'What do all the victims have in common?' Tan said. 'That might give us a clue, too.'
'They’re all women,' Gray said, ticking his fingers. 'They’re all Silent, and they’re all Children of Irfan.'
'Wren Hamil, the second victim, was a student,' Melthine pointed out. 'Not a full Child.'
'But they’re all associated with the Children in some way,' Gray said. 'They were all between eighteen and forty. Hair and eye color are all different. So are height and weight. None of them knew each other as far as we’ve been able to tell. We’ll have to do a deeper comparison just to be sure, but I’m not optimistic.'
'Did the forensics team find any clues at Iris’s house?' Melthine asked.
'Not yet,' Gray replied. 'But it doesn’t look good either. No fingerprints, no blood or other body fluids except the victim’s. We’re looking into fibers, but since there wasn’t a struggle where any would get rubbed off, we aren’t hopeful.'
'Why does he do it?' Ara blurted.
Tan shrugged again. 'Been doing some reading, but I’m not an expert on serial killers. Maybe he hates Silent women, or just the Children. Hope we can figure it out. It’ll bring us one step closer to catching him.' Her face hardened. 'We
They discussed the case further, but brought nothing new to light. Ara walked home, jumping at every shadow and every fluttering leaf. She regretted passing up Tan and Gray’s offer of an escort. The warm summer breeze only reminded her of the cold one in the Dream, and it seemed like she could hear Iris Temm’s final heart- rending scream in the far distance. Once, a dinosaur roared below her and she nearly leaped off the walkway in panic.
When Ara got home, the house was dark. Fear clutched at her and she ran inside. Ben’s door was shut. Shakily, Ara opened it and peered inside. Ben lay face-up on his bed in a puddle of silver moonlight. The sheets were tangled around him, leaving his bed as messy as the rest of the room. His skin looked like marble, and she saw with relief the gentle rise and fall of his breathing.
She almost ran into the room to gather him close to her but stopped herself. Ben wouldn’t appreciate being woken up, and the logical part of her knew the killer wouldn’t come for him. He was male and not-
— not Silent.
Ara looked at her son for a long time, then gently closed the door and went to bed.
CHAPTER SIX
You can’t buy friends. You can only shop for them.
Kendi Weaver woke with a small start and wondered where he was. The walls and ceiling were white plaster and they smelled of fresh paint. There were no high beams above him, and his pillow wasn’t filled with-
Memory returned in a rush. Mother Ara. Bellerophon. The monastery. His room.
His room. Kendi had never had his own room, not in the tiny apartment back in Sydney and certainly not on Mistress Blanc’s farm. He sat up. His window faced east, and the sky outside, barely visible between the tree branches, was just beginning to lighten. The cool morning air was scented with damp summer leaves and carried only a fraction of the breath-stopping humidity he had hated back on the farm.
Kendi stretched luxuriously, and his skin slid over smooth white sheets instead of a rough pallet cover. The room was, he supposed, fairly small by most standards, barely five meters by three. It contained only a bed, night stand, desk, chair, and wardrobe. The white walls were bare except for a darker patch that would become a vid- screen. A set of narrow French doors next to the window lead out onto a shared balcony. Birds began hesitant morning song outside.
Kendi had arrived in the room fairly late last night. The paperwork he’d had to fill out at the spaceport had lasted quite a while, and Mother Ara had left the little group in the care of a man named Brother Manny with the explanation that she wanted to get home and see her son. A hasty supper and a whirlwind monorail ride to the
