demanded that Martin take me to her, but I was not truly seeing or understanding what was happening around me. I could not believe my Theodora was dead. It made no sense that she would be dead. None. Then I touched her cold flesh.
“She’s been dead since early this morning,” Carmen said behind me.
My own eyes and nose had already told me that much. Hours dead. Dead well before sunrise. Dead while Russell Silk and I tore at one another. Dead while I lay making Celia my own. Dead.
I found myself on my knees beside Theodora making sounds I could not recall ever having made before. She had come to me because she trusted me, loved me. She had been so happy when I asked her to join me here at Punta Nublada where she should have been safe. I had promised her a good life, had had every intention of keeping my promise. I would have kept her with me for the rest of her life. How could she be dead?
I wanted the people around me gone. I wanted to be let alone to examine Theodora, to understand her death. I must have made some gesture because the watching symbionts all took a few steps back. I knelt on the ground alongside Theodora, selecting out scents that were not her own, separating them into
odors and groups of odors that I recognized. Theodora had gone to at least one of the parties, and that made for a confusion of scents—sweat, blood, aftershave, cologne, food and drink of several kinds, sexual arousal, many personal scents. There were fourteen distinct, personal human scents.
The odor that screamed loudest at me was the strong blood-scent in Theodora’s hair—her blood. I looked and found the wound there. Her hair was stiff and matted with dried blood. Dead blood. I touched her head, ran my fingers over it, and found the place where there was a softness, an indentation. Someone had hit her so hard that they broke her skull.
Someone had murdered her.
Who had done it? Why? No one knew her here. No one had reason to harm her. No one would have harmed her . . . except, perhaps, to harm me. Would someone do that? Murder one person in the hope of causing pain to another? Why not? Someone—the Silks, surely—had murdered nearly two hundred people, human and Ina, in the hope of killing me, killing all that my eldermothers had created.
I closed my eyes, tried to quiet my thoughts and focus on Theodora. After a moment, I breathed deeply again and continued sorting through the scents. She had been in contact with fourteen different humans—Gordon symbionts and visitors. I didn’t recognize all of them, but six I could picture. These were people I had met or had had pointed out to me. The others ... the other scents I would remember. When I found the people they belonged to, I would know them. Any of them could have killed her, or
perhaps they had only brushed against her at one of the parties. Perhaps they had danced with her or touched her in some other casual way. She had not had sex with anyone recently.
There seemed no way to tell which of the fourteen might have hit her, but . . . Had her blood splashed on the killer? Had the killer kept the weapon used to kill her? Had the killer touched her at all beyond battering her to death, perhaps to examine her to be certain she was dead?
I put my face down closer to her broken, bloody head. But then the scent of dead blood, of Theodora’s beloved body, ten or more hours dead, became all that I could smell, and I had to turn away from it after a moment. I stood up and stepped a short distance away, gasping, sick, desperate for clean air.
Someone spoke to me, came near, and I shouted, “Let me alone! Get away from me!” A moment later, I
realized that I had shouted at Wright, my first. I had told him to go away. Stupid of me. Stupid! I looked up at him, saw that he was already backing away, not wanting to go but going.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Stay here, Wright. Stay near me while I finish this.”
I breathed deeply for a moment, then turned back to Theodora and tried again. I rolled her from her back onto her side so that I could see and smell whatever had been trapped under her. The significant odors were more blood, of course, and the scents of five more people. Again, I recognized some of them—three of the five. Through the night, then, nineteen people had had enough contact with Theodora to leave their scents on her—nineteen people, any one of whom might be her murderer. I would have to find each of them and speak to them or to their Ina.
I stood up, finally, and went on looking at my dead Theodora. I would have to go to her daughter and son-in-law and tell them that she was dead. They couldn’t know everything, but they had a right to know that. After I found her killer, I would go to her family.
I looked around for Martin. He was still there. The onlookers had gone away, but Martin and my four symbionts still waited.
“Has anyone left the community today?” I asked. He shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“Could someone have left without your knowing?” “Of course. I have to sleep, too, girl.”
And William Gordon had bitten him early this morning. I looked back at Theodora. “I don’t know what should be done with the dead, Martin.”
“She should be cleaned up, given a funeral, and ... well, buried. We have our own cemetery here.”
I still didn’t know what to do. Theodora should be prepared for burial. A memorial service of some kind should be arranged. Her killer should be caught, should be killed. And yet in a few hours the Council of Judgment would begin its second night, and I would have to be there.
“Shori, girl,” Martin said. He spoke with such gentleness that I wanted to run away from him. I could not dissolve emotionally and lose myself in grief. I did not dare. There was no time.
“Shori, we’ll take care of her body. We’ll prepare her for burial. We can have services for her after the
Council is over. You go find out who did this. That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”
I looked at him, and all I could do was nod.
“Leave her to us.” He almost turned away, then stopped and drew a deep breath. “Two things, Shori. They’re important.”
“All right,” I said.
He looked down and met my gaze with a different expression—harder, unhappy, but determined.
“Tell me, Martin,” I said. “You’ve been a friend. Go ahead and say whatever it is that you don’t want to say.”
He nodded. “Don’t kill anyone. No matter how certain you are that you’ve found the right person, don’t kill. Not yet. Chances are, the murderer is one of the visitors—one of the Gordon family’s guests. You are more than a guest. You’ll be mated to the sons of the family in a few years. But still ... Tell Preston or Hayden what’s happened before you take a life.”
I stared at him, unable to answer at first. Until that moment, if I had learned that Martin himself had killed Theodora, I’m not sure I could have stopped myself from killing him. And yet, I understood on some murky emotional level and from slivers of recovered memory that it would be a serious offense against
the Gordons to kill one of their guests. I could n’t remember anyone ever doing such a thing, but I felt enough horror and disgust at the thought of doing it to know that I must not.
“I won’t kill anyone,” I said finally. Another nod.
“And don’t bite anyone.”
That one was even harder. But I could see the reason for it. If I found the killer, he or she would be the symbiont of someone here. Again, I knew— again without understanding fully how I knew—that it would be wrong to interfere with someone else’s symbiont.
“The Ina might be the guilty one,” I said. “Probably would be.” “All the more reason not to abuse the symbiont.”
“I won’t bite unless someone attacks me,” I said. “I would rather bite than break bones or tear flesh.” And I walked away from him. My symbionts followed me.
When we were alone, Wright pulled me to him and hugged me and held me for a while. I felt as though I wanted to stay that way, safe with him, breathing his good, familiar scent. It mattered more than I would have thought possible that he was alive, that he loved me and wanted somehow to comfort me. I knew that if I let him, he would take me home and put me to bed and stay with me until I fell asleep. I knew he would do that because I had come to know him that well. I longed to let him do that.
But there was no time. If possible, by the time tonight’s Council session began, I wanted to know who had killed Theodora. I wanted to prevent the murderer from leaving or killing anyone else, and I wanted to put this new crime before the Council to see whether they would deal with it. If they didn’t, I would.
I pushed back from Wright and realized that he had lifted me off the ground and was holding me so that I could look at him almost at eye level. I kissed the side of his mouth, then kissed his mouth and said, “Put me down.”
He set me on my feet. “What do you want us to do?” he asked.
And I almost disintegrated again. He understood. Of course he did. “I need you to stay together,” I said. “Protect one another.” I looked at each of them, missing immediately the face that was not there. “I don’t know whether Theodora’s murder has anything to do with the other attempts on us or with Council of Judgment, but it seems likely.” I paused. It hurt to say her name. I took a breath and went on. “Go talk to Jill Renner sym Wayne. She spent some time with Theodora last night and left her scent for me to find. She wouldn’t have hurt Theodora, but she might have seen her having trouble with someone or leaving a party with someone. Was there a party at Wayne’s house last night?”
“Sym Wayne?” Wright said, frowning. “Is that how you say it, then, when someone is a symbiont? That’s what happens to our names? We’re sym Shori?”
“You are,” I said.
“Something you remembered?”
“No. Something I learned from hearing people talk. What about Wayne’s house? Was there a party?” “Not at Wayne’s,” Celia said. “But there was a party at Edward’s and a big party at
