Larsen escorted me into a private elevator where a few minutes of painful silence incubated many, many questions between us. A tiny camera stared down at us. A man with Larsen’s resources could easily track someone like Crater and know exactly where he would be. Then all he had to do was send in the fae. I side-eyed Larsen. He didn’t look dangerous, but neither did I.
The elevator doors opened into a carpeted hallway dressed in muted reds and wooden panels that must have cost a planetary fortune. I curled my fingers into fists to stop from reaching out and stroking the wood. Just because I hadn’t seen wood in forever didn’t mean the reporter I was pretending to be hadn’t. The privileged clearly had access to enough wood to line their hallways with it. Could it be from Earth? No, that was too much of a stretch.
Larsen opened a frosted glass door and breezed into a meeting room the size of my entire container. “Would you like a drink?”
“No… thank you.” The windows beckoned. The view over Halow was… I didn’t have the words. And now I did reach out and touch the floor-to-ceiling windows. They sloped gently inward, a quirk of the building’s pyramid shape. Beyond, Calicto glittered far into the distance in a rainbow of color, light, movement, and beyond the habitat’s curved domes, ion storms fractured purple skies. The only time I’d seen it from so high up, I’d been stowed away on a ship making its final approach. Living in Sage, cruising the sinks, it was easy to forget how beautiful Calicto was from a distance.
“I imagine you must have a view just like it from your apartment in… where is it you live?”
Larsen had crept up beside me. It was the only explanation because I hadn’t heard him move. His eyes sparkled, waiting for my answer.
“Oh, sure. Of course. All the time. Really, I get bored of looking at it.” He was testing me, scrutinizing me. I waved at the view like it was nothing and moved to the long wooden table. “Is this… oak?”
“It is,” Larsen said. He crossed the room and opened a drinks cabinet. “You’ve seen oak before?”
“No,” I lied. “I mean, only on the datanet.” I brushed my fingers across the glossy surface. “And you actually made a table out of it, like the old days, huh?”
“Call me a traditionalist. Besides, keeping trees behind glass in museums seems like such a waste.” He moved to stand beside the ornately carved oak chair at the head of the table.
The table alone was worth more than my entire life’s worth of possessions. The chair—carved by hand—was a work of art. I wanted to ask if both were from Earth but wasn’t sure whether I was ready for the answer. Maybe those rumors that he was of old world blood had some truth in them.
“So…” I cleared my throat. “Mister Larsen. Crater’s assassination. What do you know about it?”
“Very little.” He poured himself a syrupy drink and lifted an empty glass, offering to fill it for me. “Are you sure you won’t have some?”
“All right, a little.” I needed something to stop my nerves from rattling. I hadn’t expected to be met with such extravagance.
Larsen handed my drink over and sipped from his own glass.
I tasted the drink and recognized it as a much smoother, finer example of the wine The Boot served on special occasions. But no water. The man still had limits. I tilted the glass, acknowledging his kindness. “Thank you.”
He seemed pleased and leaned against the meeting table. “There was nothing wrong with the equipment Arcon installed at that establishment.” He briefly admired his view, watching a local shuttle slide on by—and then turned his gaze on me. “It performed exactly as it should have.”
“By detaining the wrong people?”
He lifted his chin. “If you walk into a security scanner with hot weapons, they will react. It’s what they do. Crater’s men were the obvious threat in that room.”
“If that’s the case, why did your equipment miss the assassin?”
He smiled, so confident. “The assassin wasn’t in the room with him.”
Did he know that for certain because he was the one who had hired the assassin, or was it an educated guess? I couldn’t tell by watching him, and I was usually quick to read people. He should have been simple to read. A suit at the top of his game, thousands of people below him, doing his bidding. And yet, I didn’t get that impression from Larsen. His presence seemed almost small, but in a familiar, friendly way.
“Why do you think Crater was assassinated, Mister Larsen?”
He laughed a smooth liquid laughter, the type women everywhere had no choice but to notice. “I have no idea. I imagine a man like that has many enemies. He was a wanted terrorist, correct?”
“Alleged terrorist.”
“Well, then, I doubt the marshals will waste much energy in tracking down his killer.”
Larsen looked the part. Spoke the part. There was no denying he was smooth and refined, like the wine we were both drinking, but it didn’t add up. Perhaps it was his smile. At a glance, it looked real, sitting prettily on his lips, but upon closer inspection, it seemed shallow, as though that smile was a mask hiding something else behind. But what?
There was one simple way to test the man’s involvement. Surprise him.
I set my drink down on the table and looked Larsen in the eye. “What do you know of the protofae, Mister Larsen?”
The sparkle in his eyes sharpened, but as quickly as I’d seen it, the intense effect vanished, leaving me to wonder if I’d simply seen the exact reaction I had wanted to see. “The fae?” he chuckled. “You aren’t suggesting they had anything to do with a terrorist mineworker?” He laughed harder.
I let my lips curve at one corner. “You’re right, it is ludicrous. Who would believe a fae killed Crater?”
“Who, indeed.” His laughter faded as he noticed I wasn’t laughing along with him. “You’re serious?”
“You tell me.”
“The fae?” he almost snarled. “That’s absurd. Nobody has seen one in…” He grasped for the timescale. “In what might as well be forever. A fae couldn’t get near Calicto, not with all this… tek.” He definitely snarled that last word. But wasn’t his business built on all this tek? Why the sudden disdain?
“What else do you know?”
His eyes narrowed. “What is this? Are you trying to implicate me in that man’s death?”
“I don’t need to implicate you when you’ve done a fine job of doing exactly that all by yourself. Do you often circumvent your own security and send illegal messages, Mister Larsen? The next time you do, you might want to use a fake name.”
Tension gripped his body, and gone was the easy mannerisms of Arcon’s friendly CEO. He straightened and stared through me without blinking. The full weight of his ocular-enhanced glare set my teeth on edge.
“I think it’s time you left, Miss Walker.”
But I couldn’t leave, not without a lead on the fae who had stolen Sota. “I think it’s time you dropped the lies, Larsen.”
A change came over him, like flicking a switch, and the man stilled. He tilted his head and asked softly, “Who are you?”
I grinned and reached for my concealed whip. “A nobody.” The second I touched my whip, magic flared to life, upsetting my disguise. My illusion pixelated and dissolved in front of Larsen’s widening eyes. I flicked the whip, freeing its length, lassoed it around and lashed at Larsen in a move I’d performed a thousand times before. The whip would coil around his neck. I’d yank him forward and get my answers. Only, it didn’t happen like that. Larsen threw up his forearm, tangling my whip around his wrist, and he yanked, pulling me off balance.
Not possible, my thoughts screamed as I toppled toward Arcon’s CEO. The magic should be burning through him. Unless he wasn’t human…
His fingers clamped around my neck, jolting me to a stop at arm’s length. He squeezed, but only enough to hold me. Then he revealed that he too knew how to play the illusion game. Larsen’s smart, young businessman appearance fell apart—just like my disguise had. His sandy blonde hair was the first to go, dissolving into dead-straight blackness. The rest of him collapsed like a creature shucking off its shell. What lay beneath turned my heart to ice. The warfae.