Hah, she replied. If I think of something I’ll mention it.

I reached the sealed hatch that accessed the passage to the engineering module, then had to work on the panel to bypass the damage I’d done to delay anyone opening it from the other side. Breaking the safe zone I’d established might not be a great idea, but my sentry drones on the other two sealed hatches had registered no activity, so as a calculated risk it wasn’t nearly as dumb as some other things I could think of. And the Targets in the control area foyer still hadn’t picked up the screen device, and I couldn’t sit around and wait for them to get off their asses.

Right, I could, but I wasn’t going to.

Amena said, Everybody in the survey team must be really worried about us. I’m glad … I mean, I’m not glad you got caught, too, but if I was here alone … It would have been really bad. My uncle Thiago is probably relieved that at least you’re with me.

The hatch opened onto an empty corridor, no targetDrones. I sealed it again and left a sentry drone on this side to alert me if anything tampered with it. Then I sent the rest of my cloud ahead down the corridor. I knew Amena was trying to compliment me. But it was strange that her view of Thiago’s opinion of me was so different from the objective reality. Your uncle Thiago doesn’t trust me. Not that I was upset about that or cared about it at all.

She made a snorting noise that came through the feed and my drone audio. Sure he does. You saved him from those people who attacked the facility.

That was beside the point. I’d saved a lot of humans and the number who had trusted and/or noticed me as anything other than an appliance attached to HubSystem afterward was statistically insignificant. He didn’t like the way I did it.

She sighed and rubbed at a dark stain on her shoe. He’s still getting over what happened with second mom getting abducted after her survey. Things like that don’t happen on Preservation. It was a big shock. And … maybe he’s a little jealous. She can talk to you about what happened to her, but she can’t talk to us.

Mensah had said that, too. I didn’t understand why they wanted her to talk about it. Couldn’t they just read the report? That’s not what we talk about. Most of the time.

Amena hesitated. They wouldn’t really have killed her. They couldn’t get away with that.

That sounds incredibly naive, but Amena and Thiago and the rest of Mensah’s family and 99 plus percent of Preservation’s population still didn’t know about the other assassination attempt. If GrayCris had managed to cut a deal with the company, they would have. They would have taken the ransom from Preservation and killed her, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin, and no one would have been able to do anything about it.