Odd Girl Out

'I have the opening moves of one,' I said. 'The details will depend on what the Modhri decides to do. I'll need Bayta aboard the train with us when we make our move.'

'What if he leaves her here instead?'

'Then we'll have to tour around the galaxy for a while until he decides I'm stalling and brings her aboard so he can threaten her to my face,' I said.

Rebekah's eyes unfocused. 'No, he'll bring her along,' she said slowly. 'He likes keeping his eggs in one basket.'

'Yes, I've noticed that,' I said. 'Let's hope he stays to form on this one.' I looked at my watch. 'Our train arrives in just under an hour, with a forty-five-minute layover. Plenty of time for us to make our arrangements. We'll have our usual double compartment, by the way, which we'll be sharing with your supposed crate of Melding coral.'

'And the real coral?'

'Don't worry, it'll be right there with us,' I assured her, smiling tightly. 'Just leave that one to me.'

One hour and forty minutes later, our train pulled out of the station.

I stayed in my compartment with my face pressed to the window from the moment Rebekah and I got in until the moment the conductors stepped back inside the train and irised the doors closed. I saw no sign of Bayta.

Nevertheless, half an hour after leaving the station, when I took Rebekah on a brief walking tour up and down the compartment car corridor, she confirmed that Bayta was indeed aboard.

'She's in the first compartment, the one across from the car door,' she told me as she sat down on the edge of the bed in her compartment. 'I don't know why I couldn't sense her when we first came in.'

'She was probably still unconscious,' I said, stepping back and leaning an elbow on the crate I'd positioned on the midline between our two compartments. It was a fairly inconvenient place to put the thing, actually, and I anticipated a few stubbed toes and barked shins in my future. But if someone started to break into one of our compartments I wanted to be able to quickly shove the crate into the other one and close the dividing wall. It might only gain us a minute or two, but sometimes that made all the difference. 'But at least that explains why the Modhri made sure to drag out the cancellation of my murder charge.'

'It does?' Rebekah asked, frowning.

'Sure.' I pointed toward the front of the car. 'The Modhri wanted Bayta along, but he didn't want us seeing where he'd stashed her. So instead of all of us just boarding the train at Jurskala, he had his walkers put her on a train going the other direction, took her off at the next station, and then loaded her aboard this train when it came through. That way, by the time we check in, she's already in and hidden.'

'Only he doesn't know I can sense her,' Rebekah murmured.

'There are a lot of things he doesn't knew,' I sad, feeling a little of the worry lifting from my shoulders. All our erudite expectations aside, the Modhri could still have decided not to bring Bayta aboard our expedition until we reached our supposed destination of Benedais thirteen and a half days from now. That would have been awkward, since Rebekah and I needed to get off at Sibbrava a week earlier than that. 'Anyway, I'm hungry,' I went on. 'Let's go to the dining car and get something to eat.'

'You think that's safe?' Rebekah asked, looking at the door.

'The Modhri thinks you're blissfully leading him to the Promised Land, remember?' I reminded her. 'He won't bother us. Besides, now that Bayta's awake we need a Spider to see us so she knows we're aboard with her.'

'Oh. Of course,' she said, standing up. 'Now that you mention it, I'm sort of hungry too.'

'Good,' I said, giving the crate a tap as I moved toward her door. 'By the way, how's your coral doing?'

She frowned toward the rear of the train. 'He's all light,' she said.

'It's not going to be a problem, you being this far away from him, is it?'

'It shouldn't be,' she assured me.

'Good,' I said. 'Then let's go eat. By the way, have you ever tried onion rings?'

NINETEEN :

The train the Modhri had chosen for us turned out to be a local, which meant that as we traveled along we never went more than four or five hours before finding ourselves at yet another stop. Occasionally a station's decor and service buildings showed some imagination and originality, at least from what Rebekah and I could see through our compartment windows. But most of the stops were small Jurian colony worlds, and for those a fairly straightforward cookie-cutter design mentality had been at work. By the time I turned in that first night, I was hardily even bothering to look out the window anymore as we rolled to a stop.

The next day dawned—figuratively speaking, of course—looking to be a copy of the first.

It didn't stay that way for long.

'What is this?' Rebekah asked, peering at the breakfast order I'd brought back to our compartment.

'A Cimman delicacy called daybreak noodles,' I told her as I set our plates on top of the crate. With neither of us really comfortable sitting out in the open in the dining car, and with the curve couches of both our compartments unavailable inside the folded-up dividing wall, the crate had naturally evolved into our dining table. 'Try it—you'll like it.'

'Uh-huh,' she said, with the kind of knowing look only a ten-year-old can deliver.

'No, really,' I insisted, scooping up one of the deep blue noodles from my plate with my fork and folding it into my mouth. 'Try it.'

'I never heard of anyone eating noodles for breakfast,' she said, still looking doubtful as she cut off a small piece of noodle with the edge of her fork. She gave it a cautious nibble, her face screwing up as she did so. 'It's kind of spicy.'

'Kija spice, to be specific,' I told her. Putting another noodle into my mouth, I rolled it over my tongue, mentally gauging it against my personal taste-bud Richter scale. 'It's no worse than oreganino, really.'

'Which people also don't eat for breakfast.'

'You'd be surprised what some people eat for breakfast,' I told her. 'It's not more than an order of magnitude stronger than cinnamon, either, which people eat for breakfast all the time.'

'I suppose,' she said, trying another noodle. 'It's not so bad once you get used to it.'

'That's the spirit,' I said approvingly. 'Anyway, be forewarned that kija's a staple of Cimman cooking, so you'd better get used to it if you're going to set up shop on Sibbrava.'

'I suppose,' she said, turning her head to gaze out the window. We had passed through an atmosphere barrier and were angling downward, headed into yet another station. 'There are so many things about these peoples I don't understand.'

'I would assume a telepath would know everything about everyone,' I said. 'Especially his fellow telepaths.'

'I didn't say I didn't know them,' she said, taking a larger bite of noodle. She was still chewing cautiously, but at least she wasn't wincing outright anymore. 'I do, probably as well as any Human. I just don't understand them.'

'Ah,' I said, not entirely sure I understood the distinction.

'Well, like there,' she said, pointing out the window with her fork. 'All Jurian architecture involves the image of a key somewhere, either a real key shape or else a stylized representation of one.'

'You're kidding,' I said, frowning. I'd never even heard of such a thing before.

'No, it's true,' she said. 'They keep it a dead, dark secret from outsiders—they think it sounds silly, and they're sort of ashamed of it. But they keep doing it.'

'It's no sillier than stuff the rest of us do,' I said, setting down my fork and stepping over to the window. I'd lost track of exactly where we were, but I could see this was a bigger station than most we'd passed through the