“The early riser, working on the roof, the one you sought to hide your presence from. There is some chance the one who set the blast was o’erlooked as well.” He coughed again. He’d done it several times during the round of questions, but this time it went on a little longer.

Tick-Tick rose, filled a glass with water from the jug by the sink, and set it down in front of him. He drank the whole thing, with great concentration, and thanked the Ticker in the language of their mutual homeland. I think if he hadn’t been distracted he would have picked another language.

The Ticker smiled and said, “De nada.” Linn looked up, startled and, I’d swear, apologetic. The sudden motion made him cough again, and Tick-Tick refilled the glass.

To forestall a repeat performance of the whole thing, I said, “That sounds awful.”

Linn shook his head. “It is only smoke, I think, from Felkin’s house. And little sleep, and some distress of mind.”

I could count my acquaintance with Linn in hours, but admitting to distress seemed completely out of character for him. I stared. Tick-Tick ambled away, down to the first level and her workbench, and that made me stare, too. Had I missed something? I must have, because Linn was visibly relieved when she passed out of earshot.

People in the World may claim that in Bordertown, all bets are off when it comes to manners, but that’s ridiculous. Etiquette is much more complicated here, and the residents learn it faster, because we’d all go crazy otherwise. Bad enough in the World, where one culture’s respect for privacy is another’s standoffishness. Toss in the customs from over the Border (various and contradictory), plus the lot of us who came here from one culture or another too young to have been properly socialized anyway, and it’s a zoo. Anybody who’s fit to stay in town figures out in the first fifteen minutes that good social skills are worth more than a late-model tank in most neighborhoods, for defense and offense. And the first and last rule of B-town etiquette is, if all else fails, keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. Having mastered that one, I waited for Linn to give me a hint.

He contemplated the glass of water, his lean face grave. “This is difficult,” he said at last.

I decided that wasn’t my hint.

He pursed his lips, as if he’d come to an unsavory decision, and raised his eyes to mine again. “You see, I’d ask a boon of you, but there I’m stopped. I cannot frame its nature. How may you grant what I’ve not craft to ask?”

After working that one over for a second, I said, “I see.”