The Domino Pattern

“He’s to keep an eye on our compartments while we’re gone,” I said. “Just in case Logra Emikai and Dr. Aronobal have another friend aboard.”

“I am not associated with Dr. Aronobal,” Emikai insisted.

“Right—I keep forgetting,” I said. “By the way, Bayta, is the good doctor still waiting for me in the dispensary?”

“Yes,” she confirmed.

“Have the server tell her that I’m not coming and to go back to her seat,” I said. “He can tell her I’ll come by in the morning and talk to her then.”

“All right.” Bayta said doubtfully. “You sure you don’t want to deal with this tonight?”

“Positive,” I said. “This way, by the time we get back there, she’ll hopefully have her privacy shield up and won’t see us march Emikai past her. She’ll then have a few hours to miss her friend and wonder what went wrong before I go see her.” I nudged Emikai in the side. “Get moving—we’ve got a long way to go.”

———

It was a long, but fortunately quiet, walk back to the rear of the train. Emikai, probably still aching from the kwi blast, had apparently opted for the fight-another-day strategy and gave us no trouble along the way. I half expected him to stumble, cough, or otherwise try to signal Aronobal as we passed the doctor’s privacy-shielded seat, but he didn’t even try that.

I’d had Bayta send instructions on ahead, and by the time we reached the third baggage car I found the Spiders had set up everything just as I’d requested. There was a chair, a small table holding a box of emergency ration bars and bottled water, and a spare self-contained toilet the Spiders had scrounged from one of the storage cars, everything laid out neatly in front of one of the stacks of cargo boxes. We settled Emikai on the stool, and using the pieces of safety webbing he’d cut earlier, I tied his wrists to opposite ends of the crate stack. I adjusted the lengths carefully, leaving him enough slack to be able to reach his food tray and to shift himself over onto the toilet, but not enough for either hand to reach the other hand’s rope. With Humans or Shorshians I would also have had to keep him from biting through his bonds, but Filly teeth weren’t configured for that sort of thing.

“There we go,” I said, stepping back to examine my handiwork. “Enjoy the quiet, Logra Emikai. We’ll be checking on you every once in a while, in case you decide you want to tell us what you and Dr. Aronobal are up to.”

“Dr. Aronobal and I have nothing to do with each other.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, pleasant dreams. I hope you can sleep sitting up.”

Ushering Bayta and Kennrick in front of me, we left Emikai to his new home. “Aren’t you going to leave a guard?” Kennrick asked as we reached the vestibule and crossed into the next car forward.

“No need,” I assured him. “He’s not going anywhere.” I carefully avoided looking significantly at Bayta who, I was sure, was similarly smart enough not to look significantly at me. There was a guard team on duty, in fact: a pair of twitters, lurking in nearby shadows where they could watch for visitors or escape attempts.

“I suppose not,” Kennrick muttered. “Anyway, even if he gets loose, it’s not like he can jump from a moving train. You still going to wait until morning to brace Dr. Aronobal about this?”

“Why? You think I should do it now?”

“It might not be a bad idea,” Kennrick said. “She has to know that something has gone wrong. If you wait until tomorrow, she’ll have had all those extra hours to come up with a good story.”

“She’ll also have had those same hours to sweat about what’s happened to her accomplice and wonder what went wrong,” I pointed out.

“I still think it’d be better to do it now,” Kennrick said. “If you’re too tired, I could run the interrogation while you watched. I trained in law, remember—I know all the techniques for getting witnesses to say the wrong thing.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “It’s still not happening tonight.”

Kennrick hissed out a sigh. “Whatever.” He sent me a sideways glare. “Just remember that it was my contract teammates who were killed. Whenever you’re ready to try and get a confession—out of either of them—I want to be there.”

“You’ll be at the top of the visitors list,” I promised.

“Fine,” he said. “By the way, do you think I could have a look at that bypass mimic of his?”

“What for?”

“Just curious,” he said. “Early on in my career I handled a high-level corporate espionage case, and I ended up learning a lot about gadgets like that. I might be able to figure out if his would actually work.”

“So you can duplicate it?” I asked mildly.

“So I can find out whether I can sleep for the next three weeks,” he retorted. “Once Emikai and his buddies have finished off the rest of the contract team, who’s to say they won’t come after Dr. Witherspoon and me, too?”

“An intriguing thought,” I agreed. “Maybe after the Spiders have checked it out they’ll let you take a look.”

We walked the rest of the way in silence. When we reached our car, I sent Bayta through her compartment door, nodded a good-night to Kennrick as he and I reached mine, and opened my door as he continued forward to his.

I’d barely closed the door behind me when the divider opened and Bayta came in. “How long do we wait?” she asked briskly.

“How long do we wait for what?” I asked.

“To go back and confront Dr. Aronobal,” she said, frowning. “We were just dropping off Mr. Kennrick so he wouldn’t be there, weren’t we?”

“No, we were dropping off Mr. Kennrick so that we could all go to bed and get some sleep,” I said.

Her face fell a little. “Oh,” she said. “I thought …” She trailed off.

“You thought I was blowing smoke,” I said. “And under other circumstances, I might have been. But not this time.”

“Oh,” she said again. “Well, then …I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

“Good night,” I replied. “Sleep well.”

She disappeared back into her compartment, and the dividing wall between us again closed.

With a tired sigh, I checked my watch. Twenty minutes, I decided, would be enough for her to finish her bedtime preparations and fall asleep.

It wasn’t like I’d just lied to her, I reminded myself firmly. I really wasn’t going back to third to confront Aronobal.

The Modhri had clued me in on Emikai’s attempt on my compartment. Why he’d done that I didn’t know.

But twenty minutes from now I was going to find out.

———

My first plan was to go back to the rear first-class coach car, where the Modhri had spoken through Qiddicoj to warn me about the intruder. But the Modhri was a group mind, after all, which meant that talking to one walker was the same as talking to another. On a hunch, I stopped by the bar.

Sure enough, the Juri I’d seen earlier was still there. He’d collapsed onto his table, his head pillowed on his folded arms, obviously sound asleep.

Back when I’d traveled third-class for Westali I’d seen occasional passengers sleeping that way. Up to now I’d never seen a first-class traveler who hadn’t managed to make it back to his or her much comfier seat. The implications, and the invitation, were obvious. Walking over to the sleeping figure, I sat down across the table from him. “Hello, Modhri,” I said quietly.

“Hello, Compton,” the Juri replied instantly. “I see you were able to stop him.”

“Yes, thanks to your timely information,” I confirmed. “Why did you do it?”

“I hoped to prove myself trustworthy.” He hesitated. “I need your help.”

I felt my eyebrows creeping up my forehead. The Modhri as someone trustworthy was novel enough. The idea that he needed—and wanted—help from me was right off the scale. “To do what?” I asked.

“To find the murderer aboard this train,” he said. “Is the intruder you stopped that