The Third Claw of God Read Online Free PDF Page B

said.
    I ignored them. “Who was that last passenger?”
    “That would be the gentleman, Monday Brown.”
    The name meant nothing to me. What did was the timeline. The Bursteeni ship carrying the two Bocaian assassins had docked at Layabout ten hours before my own arrival. This Brown person hadn’t checked aboard the Royal Carriage until some five hours later, meaning that he’d possessed ample opportunity to meet with the Bocaians while they were waiting for me. Following that, he’d been an evacuee offstation for the entire duration of Pescziuwicz’s security sweep. In the absence of any other intelligence about him, I already found myself worrying about Claws of God in his luggage. “And aside from him? Was anybody other than him aboard the carriage for less than eight hours?”
    “Not that I am aware of, ma’am. I can investigate, if you’d like—”
    “Never mind. That’ll be all for now.”
    Had Arturo clicked his heels, I might have been forced to kill him. Instead, he merely bowed, an act that simply argued for a light wounding. He didn’t stick around long enough to receive either punishment, but made his descent to the lower levels using the spiral staircase at the other end of the parlor. I stood up, folded my arms, and wondered, not for the first or even twentieth time, just what Hans Bettelhine wanted with me. Up until now the closest I’d ever come to dealing with the Family on any substantial basis was a few interviews with distant cousins representing the corporation’s interests in remote outposts, and so far removed from the wealth and power of the Bettelhine Inner Family that they must have felt like human skin cells connected to the organism but superfluous and unconnected to the beat of its huge, cavernous heart.
    But this was the belly of the beast…
    Behind me, the Porrinyards said, “Andrea?”
    I didn’t turn. “What?”
    “You’re obsessing again.”
    I still didn’t turn. “This is going to be a bad one, love.”
    “I would not be surprised. On this corrupt world, with these corrupt people, it could not be anything less. But that’s just an additional reason to face our trials properly refreshed.”
    There was something familiar about their shared tone, something that made me turn. They were cuddled together on a nearby love seat, Skye resting her head on Oscin’s shoulder and playing, idly, with the fingers of his right hand. She peered at me from beneath half-closed lids, a special look of hers she’d always used to communicate her boldest invitations. Oscin faced me head-on, his smile so slight that only a curlicue wrinkle at the edge of his lips distinguished it from the one he wore at his moments of greatest concentration.
    Their shared mind meant that they both found me amusing in the same, exact way, but the subtle differences between her smile and his seemed to express complementary attitudes that arrived at the same place by coincidence alone. It was a pose, but one they must have practiced with great care.
    “The main problem with focus,” they said together, “is losing your peripheral vision.”
    I felt foolish. “For Juje’s sake, love, somebody just tried to kill me!”
    Their fingertips traced each other like old friends searching for changes in familiar faces. “True. And it was a catastrophically incompetent attempt, wasn’t it?”
    “So?”
    “So why not celebrate?”
    “Because there’s another assassin out there!”
    They tsked. “That deduction, brilliant as I found it, remains unproved. It’s entirely based on the premise that the actions of sentients dedicated to mad and murderous causes can be trusted to make some kind of consistent internal sense: an idea easily debunked by any look at the history of mad and murderous causes. Tonight, in these spectacular accommodations, I don’t even see a reason to let it ruin our mood. The operative phrase in this place should be,We’ve hit the big time.”
    They patted the couch cushions in