I glanced at her and found Varro and Nilo nodding along with her words. “Is it true that he doesn’t have to do what I tell him?”
Chira chuckled. “Does he seem like the type to do what you tell him?” She laughed again and then shook her head when she saw that I was serious. “A life debt is complicated, but it won’t force him to act against his will. Order him around all you want—it won’t do anything.”
“Except amuse the rest of us,” Kee added. “Though him having to obey your orders would’ve been fun, too.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” I murmured.
She cocked her head at me, and I saw the exact moment the lightbulb went off. “You and him—oh.” She scowled. “Oh. Yeah, that would be bad if he couldn’t say no.”
“You want to enlighten the rest of us?” Eli asked.
“No, she does not,” I interrupted before Kee could speak. “Where are we on the investigation?”
“My script is almost done,” Kee said. “I haven’t found any sign of Morten, but I’m still looking.”
Lexi said, “I’m tracking down a possible lead on the monitoring station, but I haven’t found anything else.”
“Something good?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know yet.”
“We haven’t found anything, either,” Eli said. Over the comm, he continued, “If FHP is here, they’re staying well under the radar.”
I fought the urge to move, to act, to do something. Zenzi had a population of more than two million. I wasn’t going to just bump into one of the kidnappers by wandering around aimlessly. Sorting through the data was the best option, but it felt like doing nothing.
Twenty minutes later, Kee bounced in her seat with a triumphant sound. “The script is done. Who wants to see what this transport was up to, hmm?”
Torran returned to the room, and we all crowded around Kee’s workstation—everyone except Lexi. “Lex?” I asked.
She waved her fingers without removing her focus from her workstation. “I’m busy. Don’t wait. I’ll get the highlights later.”
Kee nodded and pulled up a map that had a few points marked. “This is the transport owner’s house,” she said, pointing at the first. She moved to the rest of the marks, naming them as she went. “Parking garage, Torran’s house, and where the transport was abandoned.”
The first few minutes were all trips to and from the owner’s house, but the date in the corner jumped wildly between each trip. “This is the data from before the vehicle was stolen,” she explained.
As we watched the little animated transport on the map, it left the owner’s house and drove straight to the parking garage. “Is this the theft?”
“No, this is a month ago,” Torran said.
Sure enough, the transport returned to the owner’s house. It made a few more trips to unlabeled locations, then sat for a week. Finally, it moved to the garage and stayed there.
“I want a list of all of these locations,” Torran said.
Kee smiled at him. “I’m way ahead of you. I have a raw data list I can share, and my new script is working on auto-tagging all of the locations.”
“For someone who doesn’t use their transport often, that seemed like a lot of trips,” I said. “Did you check the owner’s connections?”
“We didn’t find anything,” Torran said, “but you’re right, the data is suspicious.”
The next time the transport moved, it followed the route the kidnappers had taken. After the final pickup, it moved toward the forest, but rather than stopping at the marked abandonment point, it kept going. Kee zoomed in, and the map location perfectly overlaid the monitoring station. The transport paused for a moment, then turned around and returned to the expected point.
“Why would it go to the monitoring station?” Eli asked. “What’s there?”
“There’s nothing there,” Torran said. “We checked it after the kidnapping, and Tavi and I checked it again yesterday.”
Lexi cleared her throat and pointed at her workstation. “Yes, but did you look under it?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lexi’s smug expression meant she was very pleased with herself. She looked at me. “I started digging again when you asked me about it the second time,” she said. “I know you said it wasn’t a priority, but I figured whatever was bothering you was worth looking into, and I was right.” She winced apologetically. “But it wasn’t cheap.”
I suppressed my own wince. Lexi’s “not cheap” generally meant thousands and thousands of credits—if not tens of thousands. But if it led to Cien, then it would be worth it, especially because I totally intended to hold Torran to his promise of bonus pay.
Lexi’s screen displayed a scan of a very old set of blueprints. It took me a moment to figure out exactly what I was looking at because all of the labels were in Valovan. The blueprints showed a cross-section of the monitoring station. The little building sat on top of a much larger underground structure.
I sucked in a sharp breath. “All the equipment on top of the building isn’t for the monitoring station itself, but ventilation for the underground rooms. That’s what was bothering me about the building.”
“There’s also this,” Lexi said, pointing at a tunnel that led off the page. It was labeled with an arrow and Valovan text. “I’m not a fluent reader, but as far as I can tell, that says ‘to palace.’”
“It does,” Nilo confirmed quietly. The charming Valoff had used the excuse of looking at the screen to ease closer to Lexi. She didn’t seem uncomfortable, so I left it alone.
I turned to Torran and pointed at the screen. “Did you know about this?”
He held my gaze, his expression shuttered. “No.”
“Does the empress?”
This time he hesitated. “I don’t know, but it is likely because it seems as if it was designed as an emergency shelter.”
Dread pooled in my stomach. If it had taken Lexi this long to find the information on the monitoring station, then a group of FHP soldiers wouldn’t have just stumbled across it. But if someone had tipped them off . . . Surely the empress wouldn’t use her own nephew as a pawn to start a war.
Right?
The grim set of Torran’s mouth told me that his thoughts tracked with mine. “Perhaps we should keep this information to ourselves for now,” I said. “Just in case someone in the palace isn’t trustworthy.”
Eli looked at the map still up on Kee’s screen. “Is the monitoring station far enough away that Cien couldn’t contact someone in one of those fancy houses at the edge of the forest?”
“No,” Torran said. “Cien is strong enough that he would be able to reach me here from that distance.”
“So he’s either drugged or being shielded,” Havil said. He took a deep breath. “I will need to accompany the assault group in case it’s the former.”
The Valoffs offered him sympathetic looks. As an empath, being in the main assault group would be miserable, but he still planned to do his duty.
“Cien might not be there,” Lexi pointed out. “Just because this exists doesn’t mean that it’s the answer.”
It was the bucket of cold reality we all needed, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant to hear.