Roic waited for dusk to deepen, and for the occasional echo of footsteps along the gallery to fall silent for a good long time, before venturing a cautious reconnoiter.  The door lock yielded to force, or rather, the flimsy doorframe splintered and gave up the mechanism whole, more loudly than he would have liked, but no one called out or came to investigate.  Crouching to slip beneath any view from the windows, bare feet silent on the boards but for an occasional tiny clink from the chain swathing his ankle, he discovered that the gallery wrapped the rectangular building on three sides, with stairs down on either end.  About a dozen rooms like his lined this level.  There was no third storey.

Another building, with faint yellow gleams leaking from its windows, lay down the slope to the right.  Obscured in the trees behind it seemed to be a parking area, but a marked lack of security lighting made the details invisible—both to Roic and to anyone passing overhead in a lightflyer, he guessed.  Right now he was grateful for the shadows.  He slipped around to the far end.  A third building, vaguely shed-like, sat low and black in the gloom down at the border of the level scrubland.  Roic wondered if there'd been a fire, to so clear out the crowded conifers.

Roic's heart nearly failed him when a voice above his head hissed, "Roic!  Up here!"

He jerked his head back to see a pale smudge of a face peering over the edge of the roof.  A long black braid swung forward over the figure's shoulder, triggering recognition and relief.  "Dr. Durona?  Raven?  So they got you, too!"

"Sh!  Not so loud.  We were in the same lift van.  You were out cold.  Come up, before someone comes back."  A pair of lean arms extended downward; Raven was apparently lying prone.  "Careful of my hands . . ."

With no more noise than a grunt and a scrape, Roic scrambled up to the flat rooftop.  Their careful foot-slides making no thumps that could be heard through a ceiling below, they took shelter of sorts in the lee of a vent housing.

Raven Durona could have passed for a Kibou-daini native—a slim intellectual Eurasian in body and face, with a high-bridged nose and straight black hair to his waist—till he opened his mouth and that un-local accent came out.  Delegate from the Durona Medical Group on Escobar, he'd been the only other person at the cryo-conference Roic had known, and moderately well at that, but m'lord, inexplicably, had signed them away from each other.  Raven had accepted the signal with the merest nod and eyebrow twitch, and steered around Roic and m'lord thereafter.  Leaving m'lord clear, Roic realized in retrospect, to trawl for his own targets.

Roic lowered himself to sit cross-legged, the Escobaran cryo-surgeon wrapped his arms around his knees, and they put their faces close together.

In a nearly voiceless murmur, Roic said, "Seen any guards?"