“They know you’re going to try, and the thing you’re taking isn’t theirs, so they’ll treat it like a game. Whereas if they caught you trying to pick them—”

“They wouldn’t,” Rebecca said. “What you’re really saying is you don’t actually have forty-eight deniers.”

“No,” Jean-Claude admitted. “Not after I paid off your orphan indenture.”

Rebecca had the good grace to wince at that reminder. “Sorry. Thankful I am.”

Jean-Claude said, “Just save your cleverness for things that need it.”

CHAPTER

Seven

The morning dawned cold and clear. It was a tall sky, as the aeronauts called it. The cold air pressed the sickly green Miasma down and the thin streaming clouds up, leaving the Thunderclap to scud along on a fair wind.

Isabelle and Bitterlich stood shoulder to shoulder in the chartroom poring over Quill’s possessions. When he smiled for her, his warmth spread through her chest, but they were here to work not chat. It occurred to her that lately he’d been a constant presence when there was work to be done, but mostly absent when there was not.

Perhaps she’d been imagining his attraction, mistaking a general affability for a deeper desire.

Yet, worrying that question wasn’t productive. She and Bitterlich searched Quill’s clothes and other personal paraphernalia and set them aside, which left them with a pile of notebooks and specimen boxes.

The boxes proved to contain mostly dried insects. Isabelle found husks ranging in size from a botfly to a beetle the size of a man’s fist. The beetle was a cerulean blue at the front and stippled to a bright orange at the back. There were three different sorts of wasplike creatures in shades of yellow, purple, and green. There was something that looked like a dragonfly crossed with a scorpion, and something that looked like a centipede with crystal wings where legs might have been. Isabelle envisioned it undulating through the air.

According to Lael’s notes, all of these had been collected from the remains of the swarm that had attacked Hailer Dok’s clan on Craton Auroborea. And this was only a tiny sampling of what they could expect to encounter in the jungle there.

“Have you ever seen bugs like these?” Isabelle asked Bitterlich; he had much more knowledge of zoological empiricism than she did.

He shook his head. “All of these are foreign to me, but that’s not what bothers me. Both Dok and Lael said they were attacked by a great swarm of insects of different kinds, but that doesn’t make any sense. Some bugs swarm, and sometimes different types of bugs swarm at the same time, but they don’t coordinate. The biggest enemy of most bugs is other bugs.”

“Unless some other force is driving them,” Isabelle said.

“Or maybe this is just a type of cooperation we haven’t seen before,” Bitterlich said. “People always underestimate insects.”