“Why?” he asked, sounding honestly interested.

“I don’t have time for this. Come on.” With Tybalt’s help, I was able to shift her into the brush along the building, looking back at Elliot as we got her out of sight. “How is it night out here? The sun just came up.”

“The land is suggestible in a Shallowing. If we went back in and came out a door, it would be daylight.”

“Right.” I straightened, stepping out of the bushes. “Lead the way, and keep talking.”

Elliot started to walk. “I mentioned that there were problems, yes? They were mostly in the upload process. We were planning to copy people into the machines without killing them or changing them in any way. We’d just have an extra ‘version’ of them, and of everything in Faerie, that would live inside our computers.”

“How would that save Faerie?” asked Tybalt, pacing me.

“Our ideals and culture would endure, even if nothing else did.” He shook his head. “It didn’t work. Yui was in charge of magical integration. She said the system refused to release the data. She could make it copy, but she couldn’t make it interact.”

“It was frozen?” I asked.

“Basically. I don’t quite understand where things went wrong—I worked in an administrative capacity, and I never used the actual equipment.”

Cats were slinking out of the bushes, falling into formation behind Tybalt. I ignored them, saying, “Somebody might have come up with a new process.”

“It’s possible.”

“Would Yui have volunteered to test it?”

“Absolutely not. Barbara died before Yui; even if her death was caused by the development team, Yui wouldn’t have agreed to test a process that had already killed someone.”

“What was Terrie’s involvement?”

“She worked on the software with Jan, creating the virtual environment. Gordan designed the hardware interfaces.”

“Gordan’s the one who determined how the machines hooked up to the subjects?”

“Well, yes.”

“I see.” The pieces of the puzzle were fitting together. I didn’t like the results, but they were the ones that fit. “That’s where you had the most problems, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.” Elliot stopped walking, staring at me. “Oh, Oberon’s teeth . . .”

I glanced to Tybalt, trying to read his expression. It had gone completely neutral, but his eyes were locked on Elliot. Still, I pressed on. “You tried with cats first, didn’t you? They remember everything. They were perfect.”

“I knew there was a plan to try with feline test subjects, but I was never involved.”

“Yeah, well, if you ask the cats, the ones who went to be ‘tested’ never came back.”

Elliot licked his lips nervously. “Barbara was very upset.”

So was Tybalt. His shoulders were locked, and the smell of pennyroyal and musk was rising in the air around him. Reaching over, I took hold of his wrist, keeping my eyes on Elliot. “And you never asked?”