Odd Girl Out

He snorted. 'A futile gesture,' he scoffed. 'Others will have seen you come in here.'

'And tearing the place up while they look for the rabbit hole will take time,' I countered. 'Time is always a good thing to have.'

Again, his eyes searched my face. 'As you wish,' he said. Stepping away from the shaft, he gestured me toward it.

'Thank you.' I gestured in turn to Bayta. 'After you.'

Silently, she got her feet on the ladder and started down. With one final look at Karim, I followed.

We passed through the curtain and into the hidden room. Rebekah was again sitting cross-legged on the bed, just as she'd been the last time I was here.

Karim was right. In the past few hours something had definitely happened to the girl. Her face was drawn and even paler than it had been earlier. Her shoulders were hunched, and her throat was tight. 'Hello, Rebekah,' I greeted her cautiously.

'Hello, Mr. Compton,' she said. Speaking to me, but with her eyes locked on Bayta.

I looked at Bayta. Her eyes were locked just as tightly on Rebekah. 'This is Bayta,' I said, looking back at Rebekah. 'You asked about her earlier.'

'Yes,' Rebekah said, an odd breathiness in her voice. 'I'm …honored …Ms. Bayta.'

'Just Bayta,' Bayta told her. She had some of Rebekah's same breathiness in her voice, too. 'We've come to get you out of here.'

To my surprise, a pair of tears trickled down Rebekah's cheeks. 'It's too late,' she whispered. 'I can't go.'

'Of course you can,' I said, taking a step toward her. 'If you're too weak to handle the ladder—'

'Don't touch me!' she snapped with sudden fire.

I braked to an abrupt halt. For a second there a real live scared ten-year-old had peeked out through all that unnatural maturity I'd seen in her earlier. 'Sure,' I soothed, searching her face for some clue to her reaction. 'Do you need me to carry you out?' I asked.

'No,' she said. 'I told you, I can't go. I can't move. If I do, he'll know where I am.'

An unpleasant tingle went up my back. 'You mean the Modhri?'

She closed her eyes. 'Yes.'

I touched Bayta's arm, nodded back over my shoulder. Together, we backed out of the room into the passageway, stopping at the curtain. 'Okay, I give up,' I murmured. 'What the hell is going on?'

'I don't know,' Bayta said, her eyes focused on something about five-sixths of the way to infinity. 'But I think she's telling the truth.'

'I'm so glad to hear it,' I growled. 'Are you saying the Modhri's developed his own psychic radar now?'

'It's not radar,' Bayta said. 'I don't know what it is. But she is in danger, Frank.'

'Why?' I demanded. 'What can possibly be so important about a lone ten-year-old girl? I mean, this isn't —'

'It isn't what?' Bayta asked.

'Never mind,' I growled. I'd been about to tell her this simply wasn't how the Modhri did things.

But how the hell did I know how the Modhri did things? I didn't even understand how this whole group mind thing worked, let alone what kind of alien thoughts or motivations he might have.

I took a deep breath. Fine. Western Alliance Intelligence had trained me to be a detective. It was about time I did some detecting.

Assume Karim was right, that something new and critical had happened sometime in the past four hours. What could that something be?

Bayta and I had visited Rebekah. We'd been hauled away for a visit to Veldrick. We'd run across McMicking and had dinner with him. Veldrick had tried to have me thrown into jail for a few hours, possibly because he was trying to move more of his coral.

Trying to move more of his coral …

'Bayta, we were talking at dinner about telepathic overlap between the Modhri and Humans,' I said. 'Presumably, Humans can't sense the Modhri—or vice versa—any better than you and the Spiders can. Right?'

'I assume so, yes,' she said. 'There's certainly never been a case I've heard of where the Modhri and any species had that kind of communication.'

'Okay,' I said. 'But what if the Human in question was herself telepathic?'

Bayta's eyes flicked back toward the room. 'Rebekah?'

'Why not?' I said. 'You seem able to sense her, at least well enough to know when she's four meters under your feet. And it's starting to sound like she and the Modhri can sense each other, too.'

'Except that Humans aren't telepathic,' she said tartly. 'I'm not aware of a single documented exception.'

'Okay, so that's a soft spot in the theory,' I conceded. 'But there's a first time for everything. Maybe there's something in the air or water here that switched on a gene.'

She shook her head. 'There must be a more reasonable explanation.'

'Like what?' I asked. 'She's afraid the Modhri will detect her if she moves. He's not seeing, hearing, or smelling her.' I cocked an eyebrow. 'For that matter, neither were you earlier today.'

Her lip twitched. 'Let's assume you're right,' she said. 'What do we do about it?'

'I'll show you.' I pulled out my comm and punched in McMicking's number. 'It's me,' I said when he answered. 'How's the analysis going?'

'I've got a list of Veldrick's alien contacts,' he said. 'The hacker program's still working on the city's utilities records.'

'Any of the alien data jumping out at you?'

'One bit is, yes,' he said. 'A group of six Filiaelians showed up on New Tigris about six weeks ago. Since then, they've done some very impressive business with Veldrick.'

'How impressive?'

'About ten times that of any other Crown Rosette customer,' McMicking said.

I chewed my lip. And Veldrick had rather bragged about how gifts of his coral had helped with his business contacts. 'Forget everyone else for the moment,' I told McMicking. 'Concentrate on the Fillies.'

There was a short pause. 'You once told me the Modhri hadn't penetrated the Filiaelian Assembly,' he reminded me.

'That was the information I was given,' I confirmed. 'It may turn out to have been incorrect. It could also turn out that the Fillies are innocent pawns in the Modhri's scheme.'

There was another pause, a longer one this time. 'All right,' he said at last. 'If you're sure you want to start poking sticks that direction.'

It was an oddly squeamish comment for a man of McMicking's history and reputation. But I didn't really blame him. The Filiaelian Assembly filled a significant fraction of the far end of the galaxy, with colonized worlds and systems reputed to number in the thousands.

That all by itself put them at the top of the social and economic food chain. Add to that their utter alienness, plus their habit of casual genetic manipulation of their own kind, and you had a group of horse-faced, satin-skinned people you did not want to irritate or offend. 'We go where the trail leads,' I said. 'Right now, it's leading to those six Fillies.'

'All right,' he said again. 'But unless there's something solid—'

'Hold it,' I interrupted. The curtain beside me had rippled slightly, as if catching a puff of air from the other side.

'Mr. Compton?' Karim's voice stage-whispered from the direction of the shaft. 'Mr. Compton?'

'I'll call you back,' I murmured to McMicking, and broke the connection. 'Stay here,' I added to Bayta, pulling the kwi out of my pocket and pressing it into her hand. Drawing my Beretta, I slipped past the curtain into the passageway.