I saw Quint suppress a sigh. “Mr. Wren, do you accept the offer?”

I smiled at her. “No,” I said.

CHAPTER THREE:

The Lost Language

The same guards came back to get me from my cell half a day later.

“Hi,” I said, while they took me up in the mysterious freight elevator to another cloak-and-dagger meeting with that asshole Quint. “Long time no see.” I repeated myself in a couple new languages and dialects when they didn’t answer, just in case it really was all a matter of misunderstanding.

My introduction to the nicely appointed, surveillance-less room was a lot less gentle this time.

Quint sat behind the desk, wearing a different tailored jacket, the antique clock still in glittering pieces on the table in front of her. No one used this office except to make shady deals, I guessed. Benny and Leah weren’t there, but there was a set of Raginian crystal glasses on the table beside a bottle of wine with a label that was unintelligible even to me.

“Please sit, Mr. Wren,” Quint said, attempting to pretend she was glad to see me. “Would you like a drink?”

“I’m parched,” I said, just to watch her smile grow stiff, and sat down in the same chair I’d taken before, across from Quint and beside the glittering gears. “Yes, thank you.”

She passed me a glass. She held her own glass properly, fingers curled gracefully around the bowl. I deliberately held mine in a fist around the stem. We smiled at each other across the table, Quint’s smile a terrible little rictus.

Eventually she seemed to understand what I was waiting for, and took a tiny sip out of her glass. Only then did I take a sip out of mine. It was unlikely that Quint’s boss would go through the trouble of ruining some—wow, really expensive—wine, just to poison me when he could have me commit a staged suicide in my cell with bedsheets, but my faith in the Republican government was pretty low, so it couldn’t hurt to be sure.

Quint said, “My boss believes that I didn’t offer the proper incentives. He says that I misunderstood your fundamental motivations.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” I reassured her. “Most of the time, I’m not even sure what those are.”

Quint plowed ahead with admirable determination. “You should know how we found that ship. You see, it’s difficult to detect the ship at its current location—the radiation of the dying star masks its signature. You have to already know it’s there in order to observe it, or else get very, very lucky. We got lucky. A few weeks ago we picked up a broadcast from that ship. This,” and she pulled a handheld out of her pocket, bringing the number of electronics in the room up to one, “is that recording.”

She tapped the screen, then held it out towards me, lying flat on her palm. Static welled up, the harsh blurriness of a furiously radiating star, but there was a voice buried in that static.