"Jin!"  Vorlynkin's voice was sharp and hard, brooking no debate.  "Take Mina straight to your mother, and do what Dr. Durona tells you to.  If this fire spreads, they may have to evacuate all the buildings in the complex."  He raised his wristcom to his lips and began snapping connect-codes into it.

Jin dove for Nefertiti, who flapped away screeching.

"Leave the bloody animal!" Vorlynkin snarled over his shoulder, already starting away down the alley.  "Both of you, run!"

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Ted Fuwa, the old cryofacility's putative owner, turned out to be more-or-less what Miles had expected—a big, harried man in his late forties who looked as if he'd be more at home on a construction site than in a conference chamber, even one so strange as Madame Suze's quarters at midnight.

A less-expected presence was the consulate's local lawyer, an alert, composed, compact woman, with wiry salt-and-pepper hair, who stood barely taller than Miles himself.  Kareen, Miles was unsurprised to learn, had persuaded her to come here after hours.  Madame Xia stared back at him with at least as much covert interest, as the source of the increasingly bizarre stream of legal questions she'd been fielding for the past week or so from her formerly staid and routine client.  Miles trusted she was having her accumulated curiosity satisfied tonight.

Miles missed Vorlynkin, told off to stay with Sato and her children, and Suze wasn't happy that Tanaka had been called away to deal with some medical crisis, so he supposed the shifting sides, however you counted them, were still evenly matched.  Suze and Tenbury versus Mark and Kareen, Miles as unruly witness with Roic his silent partner, the attorney throwing in comments and questions now and then that gave everyone pause, and Fuwa versus everyone, although Miles wasted little sympathy on him.

Madame Suze folded her arms and stared hard at Mark.  "You still have given me no guarantees whatsoever about future provisions for the poor."

"I'm not running a charity, you know," Mark returned, irritably.

"I am," snapped Suze.

"Yes, but for how much longer?" asked Mark.  "Sooner or later, and more sooner than later, I think, it would be your turn to go downstairs.  And you would lose control of this place in any case.  Tenbury and Tanaka might hold things together for a while, but after that—what?"

"It's what I was waiting for," put in Fuwa, a bit mournfully.  Suze shot him a scornful look and sat up straighter in her big chair, as if to imply he'd be waiting for a while yet.  Miles was less sure.  Suze's skin bore more than a little of that pallid slackness that was the harbinger of decline.  One couldn't say she glowed with health, not even in her irate stress.