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guardians on watch duty in the interrogation room entrance. The guardian who had spoken was a Twitchbak, a sabre-breed with long yellow fangs and spiky dark hair that ran in a long strip over his head and down the length of his back. His name was Renoir Snaggles and he smelt so strongly canine that Eli’s eyes watered every time he talked to him. Renoir had the usual cutting humour of a Twitchbak, which was often mistaken as sarcastic spite, but he was really a friendly guy and, above all, staunchly dedicated to the Regiment and his job. The other guardian, Renoir’s partner, was Charles ‘Tiny’ Twigs, an immensely tall and wide soldier, part human-breed, part gargantuan-breed. He stood, huge, dumb and gentle, blinking at Eli with three childlike eyes. Eli could not imagine, even with his untameable mind, what feats of acrobatic daring and sheer stupidity Tiny’s human-breed father must have performed to impregnate the surly, huge and hideous gargantuan-breed woman whom Tiny called mother.
    ‘ Lai Lai , boys,’ Eli responded with the imp-breed version of the Urigin phrase ‘Come on now’. ‘You try being funny with your underpants riding halfway up to your neck.’
    ‘I don’t wear underpants,’ the Twitchbak confessed and Eli shuddered.
    ‘That’s truly disturbing.’
    Renoir gave a fangy grin and, after several moments of computing, Tiny boomed with laughter.
    Eli glanced up from them to the holo-screen showing images of the interrogation cells, which were further down the corridor behind where the two guardians stood. His smile disappeared and something flip-flopped inside his gut. Ev’r Keets was well and truly up, standing – vicious, striking and perpetually unimpressed – in one corner of her cell. She was staring straight into the robotic spyer monitoring her – straight into Eli’s eyes. Being a one-way-spyer, the theory was he could see her and she couldn’t see him, but he was pretty sure the theory didn’t apply to Keets. Not many did. She was, to utilise a word used many times to describe him, weird , but she was also, to his immense relief, still definitely chained up.
    ‘She tried to bribe us ,’ Renoir told him. ‘Said if we let her go, she’d give us the gold on her arms.’
    Eli studied the bands of gold the fugitive wore up and down both her arms. From his study of ancient history, he guessed they were from the Forego Era and worth more than he could say without stuttering. They wholly concealed Keets’ bloodline marks – the twisted mass of dagger-like shapes of the Ohavor, the Blackwater Wolf family. During their many year-cycles hunting the fugitive, the commander had discovered that Ev’r Keets had been born Zingara Ohavor into a filthy poor scullion-gypsy family in the outcast village of Ont. Her tribe was large, violent, dirty and generally criminal.
    ‘We told her what she can do with her blood money,’ Renoir snarled.
    ‘We told her,’ Tiny echoed in his deep tones. ‘It’s blood money, that.’
    Eli stared at the image of the prisoner and saw her full pale lips form one word. Eli gulped. He didn’t need his lip-reading skills to know what she had said – Snack-size . Keets had given him this unfortunate nickname the third time the commander had arrested her, only for her to be released by the courts on insufficient evidence. Eli had ridden along in the transflyer transporting Keets to the courthouse, and she’d spoken to him of a time in history when just giants, imps and human-breeds had existed on Aquais. She had said the humans were a meal to the giants, but the imps were only snack-size. The trackers had continued to arrest Keets with the same outcome until finally, the last time they’d brought her in, during the year-cycle of the Frost, a judge too old to be scared of death, too cunning to be charmed and too rich to be bought, had decided to make the charges stick. Keets had escaped just after being sentenced to death. It had been widely believed that