Ingray, Garal, Danach, and Hevom sat in one of the larger rooms, one that looked as though it might be used for meetings, or perhaps it was one the officers used for breaks or meals, because there was a wide table and a few benches, no windows, the walls set to a pattern of blue, brown, and yellow zigzags. Emergency procedures notices hung on the wall opposite the door, actually physically printed on sheets of plastic, so that they could be read even without overlays, and under those a scratched wooden shelf holding a few mismatched cups and a half-empty bottle of pepper sauce. “Can’t we just go home?” Danach had asked, when they’d first been escorted to the room, and only received a long, apologetic response that had added up to definitely not. “I’m messaging my mother,” Danach had said then, a threatening undercurrent to the pleasant tone of his voice, and the Safety officer had said that he was quite welcome to do so, but had still refused to let them leave.
That had been several hours ago, and Netano hadn’t answered. A curt message had come to both Danach and Ingray from Netano’s chief of staff—their nuncle, Ingray’s boss if she hadn’t yet lost her job—telling them to be patient and cooperate with Planetary Safety. On receiving that message, Danach had descended into silent, gloomy anger. But honestly, Ingray couldn’t imagine that Netano being here, let alone any of her staff, would make much difference. If this had been something minor, no doubt she would have pried her children free of Planetary Safety by now, but a murder was something else entirely. Especially given that she was considering another run for prolocutor. Ingray suspected that Danach himself might have been much more noisily belligerent had he not known that the behavior of any of Netano’s household right now could be an issue in an upcoming election.
So they sat in the office, waiting for some Planetary Safety official to send them home. Danach sulked. Hevom seemed stunned, staring blankly into space, not touching the lunch he’d been so eager for, which an officer had brought in from the groundcar. Garal seemed completely untroubled, and once e had eaten eir lunch e sat quietly, seemingly unworried, to all appearances content to read the emergency notices. Ingray remembered that e was accustomed to the company of murderers or worse.
Both Ingray and Danach turned immediately toward the door as soon as it opened. Neither Garal nor Hevom moved. A tall and broad-shouldered neman in the green-and-gold jacket and lungi of a deputy chief of Planetary Safety entered. “Good evening,” e said, in heavily accented Yiir. Not Bantia, presumably so that Hevom would understand em. It was a language most well-educated Hwaeans knew at least a bit of, though the deputy chief’s accent didn’t sound well educated. Sounded, in fact, as though e wasn’t from this area but from Lim District. “I apologize for keeping you all waiting so long. I’m Cheban Veret, Deputy Chief of Serious Crimes. And this”—e gestured to the shorter, slimmer person behind him, in a similar uniform, though with an odd, wide, darker green stripe from jacket collar to shoulder to wrist that Ingray had never seen before—“is my assistant, Taucris Ithesta.”
Danach gave a short, bitter laugh. “Taucris! I thought you left the party last night because you were bored.”
“I told you,” said Taucris, “I had to go to work this morning. Hello, Ingray.”
“Hello, Taucris.” Ingray nearly slipped and used her child-name instead. “I’m sorry I didn’t get home in time to congratulate you properly.” Oblique, not saying directly what those congratulations would be for. Ingray had claimed her adult name in her late teens, like nearly everyone she knew. Taucris was nearly twenty-five, so much older than expected that it might be embarrassing to them … to her, to have it pointed out.
Taucris gave a tiny lift of the corners of her mouth, barely a smile. “Thank you.”
“Excellencies,” said Deputy Chief Veret after a moment of silence. “You’ve already given the parkland officers an account of your visit here this morning and afternoon, for which, thank you. I do have some additional questions, and once those are addressed you can be on your way. To begin: Excellency Garal Ket. Or, should I say, Pahlad Budrakim.”
Garal smiled. An actual smile, not just eir normal quirk of the mouth. “I’m sorry, Ingray,” e said. “You’re a nice kid, for an Aughskold. I didn’t want to lie to you but I didn’t see any other way.” And then, looking at the deputy chief, “She didn’t know. She found me on Tyr Siilas. I gave her a sob story, and she helped me get back to Hwae. Nice kid, like I said.”
“How could she know?” asked Deputy Chief Veret. “I barely believe it myself, and I’ve seen the data. How did you get out of Compassionate Removal?”
“I obviously never made it there to begin with,” said Garal—no, Pahlad. Calmly. Lying with such familiar smooth conviction. “I never intended to come back. Not at first. But I’ve decided I want to tell all of Hwae what I did with the Garseddai vestiges.”
And e knew. If e was really, actually Pahlad, e had to know what e had done with them. E had known the whole time e’d been talking about places they could pretend e’d left them. Ingray was trying to get her thoughts around that.
“Well,” said the deputy chief. “That’s as may be. At the moment I’m most interested in the murder of Excellency Zat. It’s been difficult to piece together what must have happened, not least because I haven’t been able to find any reason anyone within kilometers of the parkland today would have wished her dead. Until your name came up.”
“But,” said Ingray, still feeling as though nothing around her was quite solid, not even the bench she sat on, “e was with me the whole time! We both watched Zat go up the hill, and Garal was never out of my sight after that until I went up the hill and found …”
“Yes,” agreed the deputy chief. “That is a problem. In fact, no one was near the deceased from the moment she went up the hill until you found her body, excellency. But she was certainly murdered. Stabbed through the heart with what was probably some sort of knife. And she’d been …” The deputy chief hesitated. “She’d been spiked to the rovingtree.” Ingray thought of Zat’s head pressed so firmly against the tree trunk, the blood at the corner of her mouth. “Presumably so that she’d stay sitting up. The spike was a marker stake. It’s used in construction, and also in various kinds of”—e hesitated, looking for a word or phrase—“historical excavation work. Zat’s mech was carrying six of them, she declared them on entering the system. But we don’t know where her mech went. We’re looking for it now. In the meantime we still need to understand why it was done. As I said, no one anywhere near seemed to have any reason to kill Excellency Zat. That is, until the name Pahlad Budrakim came up.”
“Ethiat,” Pahlad suggested, “doesn’t like the plan to dig up Eswae Parkland. Is it because he doesn’t like the idea of Excellency Zat trying to legitimize Omkem claims to a history in the system? Or does he object to the disruption to one of our planet’s beautiful natural areas?”
“Tearing up nature,” said Danach. Still sullen, but unable to resist a jibe at Prolocutor Budrakim. “He hasn’t said anything about the Omkem.”