There was, unfortunately, one catch: the kwi was telepathically activated, which meant I needed Bayta or a Spider to turn the damn thing on for me.

Which meant that if the puff of air I’d felt meant there was trouble coming through my door, I would need to bellow Bayta awake through our dividing wall and hope she got the message before someone tried to strangle me in my bed—

“Frank?” Bayta’s voice came out of the darkness, tense and hurried and scared. “Frank, there’s trouble. The Spiders want us in third class right away.”

“What is it?” I asked, feeling a flicker of relief as I swung my legs out from under the blanket and grabbed for my clothes.

“It’s one of the Shorshians,” she said. “He’s come down sick.”

I paused, shirt in hand. She’d barged in on me for this? “So have them call a doctor,” I growled.

“The doctors are already there,” she said, her voice shaking, “and they say he’s not just sick. He’s been poisoned.”

TWO

I’d been about to toss my shirt back onto my clothes stack. Now, instead, I started pulling it on.

Poisons couldn’t be brought aboard Quadrail trains. They just couldn’t. The same huge station-based sensor arrays that sniffed out weapons and weapon components did an equally efficient job of screening out poisons. All sorts of poisons, and all known varieties of poison-producing flora and fauna. The sensors also looked for every known type of dangerous bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms. The Shorshian back there simply couldn’t have been poisoned.

But some doctor apparently thought he had. Either we had an incompetent quack aboard, or there was a serious problem.

All Quadrail trains came equipped with a couple of small dispensaries, typically tucked in at one end of the first-class and second/third-class dining cars.