“Okay, obviously we don’t want to tell the Auditor just yet.” Kiem reached out distractedly and moved some of the files on the table, apparently at random.

Jainan folded his hands in his lap and suppressed the fierce itch to move them back. “But you didn’t do anything. We just need to make Internal Security prove that and find out who did. Even if it was Taam—sorry, I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead—he must have had help. He couldn’t be doing all that on his own.”

Jainan’s next argument died off in his throat. We. Kiem said it so casually, as if he weren’t positioning himself as an ally to a political deadweight, a foreigner under investigation. Kiem crossed his ankle over one knee, flicking aimlessly between projections on the table. Jainan watched him and felt oddly weightless.

“What about Lunver’s people?” Kiem said suddenly.

Jainan was taken off-balance. “What about them?”

What was dawning on Kiem’s face was, incredibly, the start of a grin. It was impossible to depress him for any length of time. “They have all the data on Kingfisher, don’t they? They might know something about the hacking attempt.

And your friend Aren seemed reasonable, even if Colonel Lunver isn’t.”

A frisson went through Jainan like water down a pane of glass. “Aren’s stationed in the main Kingfisher offices now,” he said. “The remote one. Hvaren Base.”

“Taam’s flybug was military issue, wasn’t it?” Kiem said thoughtfully.

“Maybe they’ll have the real crash data. Taam’s former partner and General Tegnar’s son. I bet we can swing a visit.”

The air tasted different. Jainan recognized it from when he’d been a practicing researcher: it felt like the moment before he flipped the switch on a combustion experiment. Kiem’s eyes were on him. “That would not be out of the question.”

“Then that’s what we do,” Kiem said. “Let’s give Internal Security something to really investigate.”

CHAPTER 14

By the time they’d set everything up, Kiem was itching to get out of the palace.

He had never been good at just sitting there waiting for the other shoe to drop, and Internal Security was presumably cobbling together some fairly hefty shoes.

Better for him and Jainan to try and do some shoe-tossing of their own.

He was so keen to get going, he had his bag packed and in his flybug before he realized he was ten minutes earlier than the time he’d told Jainan. He leaned against the side of the flybug in the dim confines of the docking hangar, surrounded by gleaming ranks of flyers, and killed some time by checking the dartcar results. It wasn’t easy to concentrate.