‘I spent a lot of time studying the Howlers,’ said Rozalia. ‘They hunt by night and hole up during the day. As long as we were out of there by dark, we should have been fine. That time, however, things were different, and I could never figure out why.’

Doesn’t that sound familiar, I thought, thinking of the bee-brains. ‘So the expedition was attacked by Howlers?’

She nodded. ‘We made a run for a building we’d already scouted out that had previously been fortified, presumably by someone making their last stand against the things. We were shooting the creatures down the whole way. That’s what I remember: Casey, with his shotgun, taking them down calm as anything, one after the other, as they came running towards us.’ She wrapped her arms around her shoulders as if suddenly cold. ‘But we had to get back through the transfer stage before dusk, or none of us would ever have made it out. Casey managed to trap the Howlers in a basement for long enough to give the rest of us a chance to make a dash for a ’copter waiting to lift us back to the staging area. I really hate to say it, but if it wasn’t for Casey . . .’

I looked down at the pages spread out on the oilskin. ‘It sounds like a standard screw-up, from the description at least.’

‘There was an investigation,’ said Chloe drily. ‘There’s always an investigation.’

‘And?’

She gave me a thumbs-down gesture. ‘And zilch. They just blamed us for not doing a good enough job of keeping Bramnik and his guests safe. Which is bullshit, based on what I heard from Rozalia and the others.’

Chloe nodded at the papers in my lap. ‘What else does it say?’

I picked up the next page. ‘Says here he – I mean, the other Jerry – had a hard time talking to anyone about any of the incidents or asking any kind of questions without giving the game away. Instead he tried to learn how some of the equipment worked by talking to members of the Authority’s technical and civilian staff. That way, maybe he could figure out just what it was that kept going wrong.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Rozalia. ‘Once you get some of those technical guys talking, you can’t shut them up. Getting them to not talk would be harder.’

I looked at her. ‘I thought there were rules about none of them communicating with us?’

‘Sure,’ Rozalia agreed. ‘If it’s something important, like where they’re all from, or anything like that. But how a field radio works or how you repair a drone isn’t nearly so much of a problem.’

‘Listen to this,’ I said, and read aloud:

There was just too much going wrong, said Bramnik, for it not to be some kind of sabotage. But then, who could be responsible?