Pin-Lee led the other two on a convoluted route through the shopping block, through various stores and plazas, and ended up in an open garden seating area at the foot of another cone-shaped hotel. It was a good effort, designed to take them through six different private security jurisdictions and private feed areas, a good way to lose a tail trying to follow you using drones or security cams. It didn’t lose me, of course, but it was a great way to lose normal (human) surveillance. And the seating area was surrounded by curtains of falling water, obscuring the view from the surrounding plazas and walkways.

I stopped outside the entrance, joining a small crowd of humans beside a store projecting more artsy product videos into the feed. On the hotel’s security cam I watched Pin-Lee and Gurathin have a short argument, which Ratthi tried to mediate, that ended with Gurathin and Ratthi taking a seat at a table and Pin-Lee walking away into the mercantile area next to the hotel’s lobby.

I know, I could have contacted them by now, either by establishing a secure connection on their feeds, or just walking up and saying hi. I just … wasn’t sure.

Okay, I was scared. Or nervous. Nervous-scared.

Were they my sort-of human friends? My clients? My ex-owners, though legally that was only Dr. Mensah. Were they going to see me and yell for help, alert security?

And if it was this hard with Ratthi and Pin-Lee (Gurathin had never liked me and it was mutual), what was it going to be like with Mensah, if I managed to get that far?

I didn’t know if I could trust them. I wanted to. But I want a lot of things—freedom, unlimited downloads, new episodes of Drama Sun Islands—most of which I wasn’t going to get.

I walked through the garden seating area, which was only 37 percent occupied, but Ratthi and Gurathin didn’t notice me. I scanned them as I went by, and picked up Gurathin’s augments but no energy signatures indicating weapons. Ratthi rubbed his eyes and sighed. Gurathin’s hard mouth was actually betraying some dismay.

I went through the open doorway into the mercantile area, which was light on the usual vending machines but had a lot of kiosks for various businesses, including passenger transport lines, station real estate, planetary real estate in this system and others, a lot of banks, and security companies. (Not Palisade, which catered only to corporate clients.) The area security was robust, but I couldn’t pick up any facial recognition scans. The feed was choked and privatized, any humans or augmented humans not registered with the hotel required to pay a fee to use it, and the security was all focused on theft-prevention. At the far end of the space was an access to a transit platform; it didn’t lead to the pipe, but to something called “transit bubbles.”