The wards on the generator room were undisturbed. Quentin released them, and I stepped inside, taking a moment to study the scene before I let the others in. Peter was still intact; the night-haunts weren’t coming. The forensic tests I could perform—checking for footprints, tracks, and blood trails, noting the wounds and their locations on Peter’s body—took only a few minutes. Jan ran the tests on the equipment; there were no loose wires, and the generators time stamped the power outage at 7:49 PM—not exactly the witching hour. No leads there.

I looked to Jan, frowning. “Could he have turned the generators off as he fell? Could this have been a coincidence?”

“No way,” Jan replied. “You have to trip three breakers and press a button on the back of the main generator if you want to shut the system down. Failsafes.”

“Why do you know that?” She’d rattled off that chain of actions a little too glibly for my tastes.

Tiredly, Elliot said, “Jan does a lot of our hardware maintenance, especially now that we’re on a skeleton crew. She has to be able to kill the power in case of an emergency.”

“Plus, I designed a lot of these systems,” Jan said.

Elliot smiled wearily. “That, too.”

“Right,” I said, raking my hair back with both hands and sighing. “So it was intentional.”

“Looks like it,” Jan said. “Unless a dying man knows what fuses to pull.”

“Okay. Let’s get moving.”

The four of us wrapped as much of Peter’s body as we could in a sheet, careful not to break his wings, and we carried him down to the basement, clearing off a counter before laying him down. Elliot shuddered the whole time. He was starting to look rumpled; I was worried that our Bannick was going to pieces.

“What do we do now?” he asked, not looking at me.

“Now we hunt,” I said. I looked to Jan, expecting an argument, but she nodded. “Elliot, you’re with me; Quentin, with Jan. If you see anything, don’t investigate. Just run.”

“All right,” said Quentin. And we were off.

The halls of ALH were snarled like Möbius strips, bending back on themselves in strange and implausible ways. Some rooms were brightly lit, while others were illuminated only by the dim light lancing in from outside. We searched room by room, hunting through closets and cubbyholes and finding more secret routes than I wanted to believe. Tracking anyone would have been a nightmare, but tracking a native—and that was what we had to be looking for—was going to be all but impossible. Thanks to the recent personnel losses, I couldn’t even be sure that the person we were looking for was one of our known suspects.

We found nothing. And I kept thinking of Terrie’s exaggerated mourning and Gordan’s too-clean hands.