The lack of contact with Kennrick wasn’t from lack of trying on my part, either. I spent hours at a time wandering through the first-class areas of the train, checking the restaurant and bar and the entertainment and exercise facilities, without ever catching so much as a glimpse of our mystery man.

Through Bayta, I tried instructing the conductor Spiders to keep an eye on Kennrick’s door when they weren’t busy with other duties. But the two times I got word that he’d left his compartment he managed to disappear again before I could get there.

At one point, I lost my temper and ordered the Spiders to search the entire damn train tor him. But the conductors and servers were no better than any other Spiders at distinguishing between Humans, and all my demand did was waste their time and irritate Bayta.

Otherwise, Bayta and I occupied ourselves as best we could. We watched dit rec dramas and comedies on our computers, ate far too much good food, and did our best to work off those indulgences in the exercise room. Often we had the facility to ourselves, as most of the other first-class passengers were older than we were, light-years richer, and had apparently decided they were beyond anything as plebeian and vulgar as sweat and strain.

It was late at night at the beginning of our third week of travel, and I was lying awake in the dark trying to come up with a new strategy for cornering Kennrick, when I felt a subtle puff of air across my face.

My hand slipped reflexively beneath my pillow to grip the kwi I always kept within reach. The kwi was a weapon I’d conned out of the Chahwyn, a relic they’d dug up from the days of the Shonkla-raa war. An elegantly nonlethal weapon, it was capable of delivering three levels of pain, or three levels of unconsciousness, to anyone within its somewhat limited range.