Zat’s chest didn’t seem to be moving under that stain, no rise and fall of breath, and Ingray couldn’t think what it was she ought to do next, even if it was true, but it couldn’t be true, she must be mistaken. “Excellency Zat,” Ingray said again. Made herself step closer. A flat, empty seedpod dropped from the rovingtree, brushed Zat’s cheek, landed on that dark stain on her tunic.
Suddenly terrified and sick to her stomach, Ingray made herself take a deep breath and swallow. Carefully, hoping the nausea wouldn’t overcome her. She turned to look down the hill again, where Garal and Danach waited, where Hevom still stared at the river.
She needed to tell them what had happened. And then what? Then she needed to send a message to Planetary Safety. They would take care of it after that, they would know what to do. But she found she couldn’t bring herself to think out any sort of message, so instead she walked back down the hill. Maybe she would be able to say it by the time she reached the bottom, maybe she would be able to tell everyone that Zat, her mother’s guest, hadn’t moved for hours, or replied to messages, because she was dead.
7
The parkland’s Safety office was mostly a visitor center—restrooms, some snacks for sale—bean crackers, three flavors of roasted cicadas, milk sweets—and a fabricator that would make various sorts of customizable vestiges. A counter where a Safety officer sat, with a few rooms behind that. Offices, Ingray had always assumed, though it turned out that there was also a small holding area, in case someone had to be detained.
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 s
eemed 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.”
“Ah,” said Pahlad, with only the slightest hint of bitterness. “He’ll have been getting Omkem money himself, then. At any rate, whatever his objection, he’ll have discovered it when he saw it might be a way to limit the influence of Representative Aughskold. But surely you don’t think I’m acting for Ethiat Budrakim. Besides, I rather suspect he’s got his hands full dealing with more important issues. Like finding some political advantage in the Geck being here.”
Deputy Chief Veret said, “I had a long talk with Representative Aughskold before I came in here.” Ingray looked quickly at Danach, who showed no sign of reacting to that news. The deputy chief continued. “She tells me she and Prolocutor Budrakim had a very acrimonious conversation on the topic just last week. The prolocutor was adamant that he would prevent the disturbance of Eswae Parkland if it was in his power.”
Pahlad smiled again. “Is that a fact.”
“If you please, Pahlad,” said Taucris then, “put your bag on the table.”
“Of course,” said Pahlad, still smiling, and did so.
Taucris held out her hand, and the dark green stripe on her sleeve raised itself up on dozens of legs and swarmed down and across onto the table. It ran onto Pahlad’s black bag, pushed at it here and there until it opened, and then dived inside. Nutrient blocks tumbled out onto the table, and then, “Ah,” said Taucris, frowning, focusing somewhere in the air in front of her, and the mech slid out of the bag, several of its many legs clutching the handle of a knife.
It was the sort of knife the cook in Netano’s house might use to slice meat. In fact, Ingray was quite sure it was one of the cook’s knives.
“I stole it from the kitchen,” Pahlad said in answer to her look. “I went to the kitchen late last night looking for food, and I saw the knives. It just made me feel safer to have it.”
One end of the mech opened, like a mouth. It brought the knife closer to the opening and spat out a plastic blob that it pulled and patted until it enclosed the knife. “It matches,” said Taucris.
“What?” asked Ingray, startled.
“It matches the wound,” said Deputy Chief Veret. “It could have been the knife that stabbed Excellency Zat.”
“But there are three or four more just like it in my mother’s kitchen,” Ingray protested. “And probably lots of other kitchens.”
“Maybe,” said the deputy chief. “We’ll look into that. In the meantime, Pahlad Budrakim, I’m afraid we’re detaining you on suspicion of murder.”
“Really?” Pahlad seemed entirely untroubled by this. “Not for escaping an unescapable prison and coming back alive when I wasn’t supposed to?”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before,” admitted the deputy chief. “Not that I know of. And I don’t think there’s any legal provision for it happening.”
“Well, that’s something, isn’t it. I presume Officer Taucris Ithesta will give me a receipt for my bag, with an inventory of its contents?” Taucris gestured confirmation of this. “Not my first time being detained, you know.” E stood. “Goodbye, Ingray. You really should take the captain’s advice.”
When Taucris had led Pahlad out of the room, and the deputy chief had told the rest of them they could go, so long as they remained available to Planetary Safety for further questions, Danach said, “Who is the captain and what was his advice?”
“No one you know, and none of your business,” said Ingray. “Let’s go home.”
By the time they arrived back at Netano’s house, it was quite late, but lights still shone through the blue and green and red glass blocks. A servant opened the door, and Ingray, Danach, and Hevom entered to find Netano herself, in businesslike formal skirts and jacket and sandals, her unruly black hair braided into neat submission. “Ah, you’re back,” she said, on seeing them enter. “Excellency Hevom, I am so very, very sorry for your loss.”
Hevom managed to pull himself out of his stunned reverie. “Thank you, Representative. I … thank you.”
“Please make yourself at home here, for as long as you need. Ingray, a word in the sitting room.”
Danach smirked. “Good night, Mama,” he said, and headed up the stairs. Hevom followed.
In the sitting room, Netano gestured Ingray to a seat, the armchair where Danach had lounged the day before. “Planetary Safety has asked the news services to hold off on reporting Excellency Zat’s death,” Netano said, having taken her own seat on a bench opposite. “So, I’m sure, has Prolocutor Budrakim. Pahlad’s return isn’t something the news services know about, but of course once they start poking around it probably won’t be long before they discover it. I predict they will restrain themselves for two or three days, at the most. There’s no possible way this can be kept quiet indefinitely. So explain to me.”
Clearly Danach had told Netano something in his messages to her. Just what, though, Ingray couldn’t be certain. “I met em … I met Garal, or I suppose e’s really Pahlad. I met em on Tyr Siilas. E looked so much like Pahlad I said something to em about it, but e said e wasn’t. And I got to talking to em and e said e was stranded and out of money and had no one to help em get home, so I thought I would help.” Netano didn’t visibly react to any of it; her round face held just a pleasant, listening expression. “And we got here, and Danach immediately thought the same thing I’d thought, that this person looked a lot like Pahlad Budrakim, only he decided that e must really be Pahlad, and came to my room to tell us he knew who e really was. And we just kind of played along.”
“Only it turned out the person you were dealing with really was Pahlad Budrakim.” Ingray gestured agreement. “Deputy Chief Veret assumes that Pahlad obtained eir own false identification at Tyr Siilas. Danach, on the other hand, is quite sure that it was you who purchased it. But you didn’t just buy a false identity for a random stranger you met on Tyr Siilas, no matter how forlorn they seemed. You’d already bought it for something else, hadn’t you. Who did you intend it for?”
Ingray took a deep breath. “I’d had a plan. I went to Tyr Siilas to … well, when I got there I discovered the thing I wanted to do wouldn’t work. It wasn’t any good to me anymore, but Garal—I mean, Pahlad—really needed it.”
“The fact that you had a false identity on you to begin with, and that it was so easily transferred to this person you happened to run across, and who you brought here, and the alacrity with which you confirmed Danach’s identification of em—an identification you tell me you believed to be incorrect—suggests to me that your plan wasn’t entirely legal or aboveboard to begin with,” said Netano. “And no doubt your plan was aimed at your brother.” Ingray’s face heated, but she said nothing. “It’s probably better if I don’t know the details. I don’t intend to say any of this to Planetary Safety. But if the deputy chief discovers it for emself, well, this would be a bad time for those details to come out.”
“Yes, Mama.” Ingray didn’t have anything else to say to that.
“You’re certain that Pahlad was with you the whole time, in Eswae? And e couldn’t have been piloting a mech part of the time?”
Ingray was relieved that Netano wasn’t pursuing the issue of her having brought Pahlad Budrakim home any further, but wary, too—it didn’t mean her mother wouldn’t bring it up again sometime in the future. “The only mech anyone saw was Excellency Zat’s Uto.” Ingray thought of the marker spike and suppressed a shudder. Whoever had killed Zat had to have used her own mech to do it. “I can’t imagine Pahlad would have
had access to that. And e never seemed distracted, or like e was thinking about something else.” Then again, Captain Uisine never had, either, even when he’d been drinking, and Ingray knew he was almost always piloting one—or, unheard of, two or three—at any given time.
“Well.” Netano sighed. “Your timing isn’t very good, Ingray. You know it’s coming up on campaign season. I would hate to have a family scandal cost me an election.” Her tone was mild, but Ingray knew it for a warning. “But it may be we can get some advantage out of it. My sources tell me that the prolocutor left for Hwae Station the moment he heard about the Geck arriving. But he’s turned right around and is on his way back home, because of Pahlad.”
“The prolocutor himself?” asked Ingray, frowning. “Not his daughter?” Ethiat had already given his name to his heir, and she often made appearances or visits for her father now. It was technically the same as being there himself, though of course everyone knew the difference, and interpreted which of them went where as a judgment on what or who the prolocutor felt was most important.
“The prolocutor himself,” confirmed Netano. “Even though he could—and should—have sent his daughter.” When Netano said should, she certainly meant politically, the way it would look to Prolocutor Budrakim’s constituency. The news services hadn’t yet learned of Pahlad Budrakim’s presence on Hwae, or eir involvement in the death of Excellency Zat, and so most people would find the prolocutor’s sudden return inexplicable. “I am no longer confident that the prolocutor values the interests of Assembly electors the way he ought, and I am on my way to the station now to be certain that someone will. But I also have good reason to stay home and deal with this situation. If I had named my heir, the way that the prolocutor has, my course would be very simple—I would leave that Netano here to handle this situation.” Of course. Politics before family, unless family was politics. Which it often was.