Odd Girl Out

the next row of stacks back. Our crate wasn't in any of them, either. Apparently, the Spiders who were supposed to load the thing aboard had screwed up.

Or else someone wanted me to think they had.

For a long moment I stood in the center of the main aisle, gazing at the intimidating archipelago of cargo stacks stretching to the rear of the car and trying to think. Checking out every crate in here would take hours, and there were two more baggage cars behind this one. I could easily be at this until we reached the far end of the Jurian Collective, which was probably exactly what the Modhri wanted me to do.

'Fine,' I muttered under my breath. Quadrail crates were pretty well sealed, which made breaking into one a lengthy proposition. A properly handled multitool on one corner of the lid would allow someone a peek inside, but of course with our crate all that would gain him would be a look at the three sealed metal boxes inside. To get any farther than that would require a crowbar—which he wouldn't have been allowed to bring aboard—or else a lot of time and even more patience.

And he certainly wouldn't want someone like me blundering into him while he worked.

Smiling to myself, I headed back toward the baggage car's rear door. It was, I had to admit, a reasonably good plan for something that had to have been thrown together more or less on the fly. A walker plants a whiffer to clear out the car, including the coral's assumed Melding watchdog. In the confusion, the walker and maybe a friend or two slip through the back door and manhandle the crate one or even two cars back.

It was, from the Modhri's point of view, a win-win situation. If the Melding watchdog realized the coral had been moved and came running to find out what had happened to it, the Modhri would gain instant identification of one of his enemies. If the watchdog didn't come charging to the rescue, but tried to get a message to Bayta and me instead, the Modhri would have that much more time to break into the crate or whatever else was necessary to bring the wayward coral back into the happy Modhran family.

What he hadn't counted on was that the Spiders would alert Bayta, who would alert me, and that I would be on the scene this quickly. By now he would barely have had time to even get the crate moved, let alone started working on it. If I could catch him in the act, not only would I have a pair of walkers identified, but I could have the Spiders kick them off the train as soon as we reached Jurskala.

I reached the door and punched the release. The door opened, and I stepped through into the vestibule and punched the inner door's release.

Nothing happened.

I hit the release again, and again. But it was no use. The Modhri had anticipated me charging to the rescue, all right. He'd locked me out.

I muttered a curse under my breath. So he wanted to play cute? Fine—I could do cute, too. All I needed to do was get back to the passenger coaches and grab the first conductor I saw. Whatever the Modhri had done to lock the door, I'd simply have one of the Spiders undo it.

I was halfway back toward the front of the baggage car when I came around a curve in the pathway to find myself facing a group of four Juriani moving cautiously through the same pathway in my direction. They caught sight of me, the hawk beaks in their iguana-like faces clicked once in perfect unison, and they broke into a fast jog.

I picked up my pace, too, heading straight toward them. I caught a flicker of uncertainty on their scaled faces at the sight of a clearly insane Human rushing into four-to-one odds, and they reflexively slowed their pace a little.

Their uncertainty lasted exactly as long as it took me to clear the current crate stack I'd been passing and take off at full speed down a weaving cross pathway. I was half a dozen steps down it when I heard the sudden clatter of foot claws as they gave chase.

I made it around the back of the next island before they reached my branch point and came in after me. With my pursuers momentarily out of sight, I got a grip on the safety webbing of the stack I was facing and started to climb.

It wasn't easy. The webbing wasn't really designed for this, and the strands were a little too thin for a comfortable grip. But I was inspired, and up I went. I'd had a couple of serious confrontations in Quadrail baggage cars over the past few months, and neither had exactly ended to my complete satisfaction. My best bet for avoiding a repeat performance was to take the high ground and try to get back to civilization before I got myself surrounded.

I had my fingers on the top crate of the stack and was starting to pull myself up when a clawed hand grabbed my right ankle.

Instantly, I kicked sideways as hard as I could with my left foot, catching the Juri's fingers with the edge of my heel. There was a multiple screech from all four walkers as the pain of the blow shot across and through the entire Modhran mind segment. The Juri let go of my ankle, and I quickly pulled myself the rest of my way up and onto the crate.

The fortunes of necessity, I discovered, had ended up with me on top of one of the shorter stacks, one where I could stand nearly upright without bumping my head on the ceiling. From my new vantage point, I saw now that most of the stacks were a crate or even two crates taller than mine. That meant that some of the stacks had enough clearance between them and the ceiling for me to crouch or crawl, while others had a gap I could barely squeeze my arm into.

Unfortunately, the nature of the room's geography meant that I couldn't see from here which routes would lead me safely back to the car's forward door and which would instead funnel me into cul-de-sacs where the only way out would be to backtrack or drop to the floor. At that point, I'd be back to the same short odds I'd started with.

As I hesitated, a movement to my right caught my eye, and I turned to see one of the Juriani laboriously claw his way up onto the top of the crate two islands down from me. Picking the most likely-looking path forward, I set off.

The trip was like an echo of all those fun times on the Westali Academy obstacle course. Most of the islands could only be reached by a sort of leap/roll maneuver that I had to invent more or less as I did it, a trick which enabled me to land on my back or side instead of arriving with my head against the ceiling and my shins against the edge of the topmost crate. As I'd already noted, many of the gaps were too small even for that trick, and for those I had to jump to the stack's side, grabbing the top edge as I passed, and making my way along by sliding sideways hand-by-hand.

Getting to the next island in line from either of those positions was even more challenging. But I had no choice. From the clattering noises around me, and from occasional glimpses of struggling Juriani, it appeared that the Modhri had assigned two of the walkers to the job of chasing me across the rooftops, while the other two waited below to intercept me in case I dropped back to the floor and made a run for it.

On one level, the whole thing was bizarre. There was, after all, only a single door leading back to the rest of the train. In theory, all the Modhri had to do was position his four walkers at that exit and wait for me to get tired or hungry enough to come down from my perch. Bayta would eventually wonder where I was, of course, but if she didn't want to risk leaving Rebekah alone all she would be able to do would be to send a Spider out looking for me. Given the Spiders' inherent inability to fight, that wouldn't be a big help.

Yet here the walkers were, huffing and puffing their way up crates in a dusty Quadrail baggage car, chasing me to the ends of the earth and then some. All I could think of was that the Modhri—or at least this particular mind segment—must be really furious at me for breaking my promise to destroy the Abomination.

I had made it to within a couple of islands of the front of the car, and was starting to wonder what exactly I was going to do when I got there, when I heard the sound of the door sliding open.

I froze, straining my ears. Besides my current playmates who from their clothing were obviously third-class passengers, the Modhri undoubtedly had another half-dozen or more walkers up in first. If he'd decided to bring them back here to join in the fun, this was going to get very sticky indeed.

And then, over the sound of wheels on track beneath us, I heard the distinctive click-click-click of Spider legs on hard flooring.

I rolled to the edge of my current stack and looked over the side. It was the stationmaster I'd seen earlier at the scene of the whiffer diversion in the third-class car. He had stepped a couple of meters into the baggage car and then stopped, almost as if he was assessing the situation. Two of the Jurian walkers were standing to either side of him, watching him as warily as I could sense he was watching them.

I didn't hesitate. Bayta could probably recognize individual Spiders—for all I knew she could even call them by