Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done it.
She realized this now. Calling out the wrong apartment number, sending them to 505 instead of 405: this was crazy. Suicidal. No wonder Peter had been furious with her. So furious that his next move had been to abandon her to her fate, leaving her handcuffed to a pipe. Csongor had been as shocked as Peter, but he’d taken her side in the matter because of dumb love. Why had Peter and Csongor been so incredulous at this decision that had seemed so easy, so obviously the correct move, to Zula?
Because Peter and Csongor had not been privy to the almost subliminal exchanges of glances and—not even anything as obvious as glances or words, but hidden signals in postures, facial expressions, the way that Zula, getting on an elevator with a group of Russians, had always chosen to stand by Sokolov’s side. Zula and Sokolov were allies. He would protect her from whatever fate Ivanov had in mind for them. And, sensing that she was under his umbrella, she had felt safe enough to send them to 505 when she knew that the Troll was in 405.
And she could do it again. She had been doing it again, this time with Jones. And part of the way you did it was by keeping your emotional shit together, not kicking and screaming, not suffering emotional breakdowns, showing you could handle it, could be trusted. Getting them used to having you around.
That was why she had relaxed and shown no emotion when Abdul-Wahaab had padlocked the chain around her ankle. A little thing. But a little thing that Jones had noticed, even if—especially if—he wasn’t aware that he was noticing it.
Could Jones really be that easily manipulated? He seemed so smart in all other ways.
I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid.
That explained it. Jones was at a loss to understand why Sokolov, his personal bête noire, thought enough of Zula to make her a primary topic of their one brief phone exchange. He had not observed the way that Zula and Sokolov had grown accustomed to each other during the days they’d been together; and even if he had, he might not have sussed it out, any more than Peter or Csongor had. Consequently, ever since hearing Sokolov’s voice coming out of that phone, Jones had been chewing on this, trying to figure out what Sokolov saw in her; and when she had killed Khalid, he had reckoned that this was the answer. He believed that Sokolov’s respect for Zula was rooted in an appreciation of Zula’s fighting spirit or her prowess with weapons or some other such quality: the kind of thing that a man like Jones would suppose that a man like Sokolov would hold in esteem.
And this left Jones wide open. Ready to be blindsided by the same tactics Zula had used with Sokolov. The difference being that in the case of Sokolov they hadn’t been tactics, just Zula instinctively trusting the man. The question now was: Could she bring about a similar effect in Jones’s mind by doing similar things in a way that was utterly calculated and insincere?
“ONE DAY, MY son, all of this could be yours,” Egdod intoned, swooping low over the Torgai Foothills. He was addressing an Anthron—a man, basically—whom he was holding by the scruff of the neck. The Anthron was dressed in the most nondescript possible woolen cloak. Between his bare feet (for he had declined to spend virtual money on shoes or even sandals), the mature coniferous forest of the Torgai streamed by, just a few hundred meters below.
“Far be it from me to question your database,” the Anthron replied, “but I still don’t see—”
“There!” Egdod called out, banking into a tight turn and spiraling down toward an outcropping of basalt. “Just at the base of those rocks.”
“I do see a fleck of yellow, but I assumed it was a patch of e?lanthassala,” said the Anthron, easily wrapping his tongue around the hexasyllabic name of the sacred flower of the montane branch of the K’Shetriae.
“Look again,” Egdod said, and he shed altitude until they were poised only a few meters above the “fleck.” This was now revealed as a mound of shiny yellow coins. “I’m going to drop you.” He did so.
“Heavens!” exclaimed the Anthron, then landed on his feet and fell awkwardly onto his arse, creating little gold-coin avalanches.
“If your character had better Proprioception—which you could get by spending some of your Attribute credits, or by sending him off to undertake certain types of training, or by drinking the right potion—he would have landed a little more adroitly and rolled out like a paratrooper instead of taking minor damage to his butt, as yours just did,” Egdod said, sounding a little peevish for a creature of nearly godlike status. For this newly created Anthron had been absurdly stingy with his Attribute credits and still had most of them hoarded in reserve where they were doing him absolutely no good.
The burst of gibberish left the Anthron utterly nonplussed.
“Never mind,” Egdod said.
“Who are those creatures coming out of the trees, over yonder?” the Anthron asked, turning his head to the left. Egdod—who was invisible to everyone in T’Rain except for the Anthron—spun in midair to see a pair of Dwinn marauders headed straight for them. One heavily armed and armored cataphract, unslinging a crossbow, and one mage, clad only in robes, but protected by a swirling nebula of colored lights: force field spells that she had thrown up to protect herself from random slings and arrows.
“You could see the answer for yourself if you had spent some of your Attribute credits on Perceptivity,” Egdod groused, and lost altitude until he had positioned himself directly in the path of the incoming crossbow bolt.
“I can’t see!” the Anthron complained.