“Thanks again for the grub,” she said.

Kali smiled and went back to her original seat. The aircraft whispered through the sky, its flight almost completely without engine noise or vibration. She strapped in.

Across the aisle, Musil pretended not to have been paying attention to her. All these hours together and she hadn’t said a word to him. But her gesture to the girl was very kind. Perhaps she was opening up somewhat. He didn’t know. But he did know the aroma of the chowder was tantalizing. He wished he had also gotten something to eat before takeoff.

He sat back and wondered about CloudCable’s missing ship and Kali, two unsolved mysteries that kept his mind busy for the entire flight back to New York.

The Terminal

Carmody smoked a cigarette, his bicolored eyes watching Dragonfly lower to the roof. One was dark brown, the other greenish-gold, with faint brown lines radiating from his pupil like the spokes of a wheel. Back in the day, his boys in 22nd Special Tactics had called it his ocelot’s eye, and the name had stuck.

The VTOL’s wheels kissed the vertiport’s rubber dead center in the yellow ring. There were two aircraft already on the pad: Blackbird, a large modified Bell V-280 with synthetic blackest-black stealth skin, and Lulu, a hot and high MD 500 single-rotor chopper recently moved from Lower Manhattan’s FBI heliport, now belonging to the Force’s Cy-Eye Surveillance and Aviation arm.

Dragonfly settled down with barely a sound. Its rotors stopped spinning, and the cabin door opened. Carmody crushed out his stub, glanced around for a trash can and dropped it under its metal bonnet. He didn’t like leaving behind messes, large or small.

He stood between the pad and the building’s rooftop access door, watching the passenger compartment empty out. Musil, Kali, then their pickup. The three of them walked toward Carmody on their way to the door, Musil with a nod hello, the pickup walking straight past him. He looked at Kali, who had dropped back a few steps.

“She didn’t notice me,” he said.

“Is your ego hurt?”

Carmody smiled a little.

“I’ll live,” he said. “I’ve seen her around.”

“Natasha Mori. She’s an instructor. Among other things.”

“What happened to her on that island?”

“She and a friend were stranded there. In yesterday’s storm.”

“That friend have a name?”

“Bryan Ferago.”

“Don’t recognize it. He one of ours?”

“One of yours.”

Carmody grunted. “Is the storm why she’s so beat-up?”

“I don’t think so. Not altogether.”

“Then, what happened?”

“She wouldn’t talk about it. But Ferago’s hand was injured. Deliberately.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was impaled. His fingers have multiple fractures. Their tendons are in shreds. As if someone wanted to maim him.”

“And she hasn’t said what happened to them?”

“That’s the fourth time you asked.”