"I'll clean you up!" She snatched a knife, holding it pointed toward his midsection, a meter and a half away with the table between them.
It was a dull blade, the one he used for spreading the garbanzo bean paste. It could do him no conceivable harm. Not in her hands, anyway. Ergun grinned at her.
"Eeee-yi-heeee!" she shrieked. In frustration, he thought.
Gloria Chan made a feint around the table. Then, in one smooth move, she flipped the knife expertly in her fingers, drew her hand back, and threw. Aiming low.
Ergun ducked again, but the blade caught him between the shoulder and chest. It could not penetrate very deeply, but it made him pause and blink in surprise. He felt a cold wetness against his skin. The residue of oily, yellow-brown paste on the blade would surely stain his shirt. Now he would have to change it before going back to work. His eyes squinted in fury, Ergun came around the table fast, charging at his wife.
Gloria turned and fled down the hall, headed for the outer door, the public corridor beyond, and a total scandal.
She was still shrieking. "Help! Murder!"
That was exactly what Kemil Ergun had in mind.
Demeter Coghlan was crossing between one ramp and another on Tharsis Montes s second level, heading back down to her hotel after lunch, when the shouting caught her attention.
"Help! Murder!"
Demeter was still so steamed over Jory's two-faced treatment of her that she wasn't thinking straight. Prudence, in a 21st-century urban setting, said you moved away from a cry of murder. Instead, Demeter was drawn to it: the voice was a woman's.
The corridors were narrower here than elsewhere in the complex—one sign, she had come to understand, of a private residential zone. The hex cubes were laid out with their connecting tunnels branching off at opposing angles, so that the eye was not oppressed by long vistas of drab, dull rock. Demeter threaded her way from one cut chamber to the next, seeking the origin of that shout.
On either side of the corridor, doors were opening and heads popping out. Martians might value their privacy above all else, Demeter reflected, but that didn't mean they couldn't enjoy a ruckus when one presented itself. Most of the faces seemed to be some blend of Earth's Asian populations.
Demeter had gone perhaps fifty paces down the tunnel when a young woman came around a corner and ran full-tilt into her. Demeter held on to the other's arms as the two of them went down.
"Let me go!" The young woman struggled. From her severely styled hair, Demeter guessed she was ethnic Chinese. "He's going to kill me!"
By the time Demeter had untangled herself and risen to one knee, other people were around to keep the woman from flying off.
"What's happening?"
"Who's been killed?"
"Isn't that Gloria Chan?"
"Help! Murder!" the Chinese woman shrieked again and pushed her way through the crowd.
The source of her terror appeared one second later. A man stumbled out of the cube she had just left. He wore dark slacks and a white shirt, blotched with blood. The handle of a knife stuck out of the shirt at a high angle. His dark face, crossed with a black and bristling mustache, was purple with rage. His eyes certainly sparked murder.
"Stop him!"
"It's the Turk!"
"He'll kill her!"
"Killer!"
The man passed by Demeter at a stiff-legged run, going after the woman, whose name appeared to be Gloria Chan. The people on all sides tried to grapple with him, but the sight of the knife handle put them off. One man fell, shrieking, and pulled down another. In two seconds more, neighbor had struck neighbor and a brawl was under way, everyone screaming in high-pitched gabble that bore no relation to English.
Demeter, still down on one knee, shrank against the tunnel wall and tried to keep out of the flight path of fists and feet. She raised the charm bracelet to the vicinity of her mouth.
"Sugar, call the police or whoever."
"Never no mi-ii—"
A hand reached down and clawed at Demeter's arm. The bangle was torn away and flew across the corridor. A silvery wink among dark and bobbling heads was the last Coghlan saw of her personal chrono.
She pressed into the one of the hex corners, made herself small in the junction between walls and floor, and waited for a break in the action so she might crawl into a doorway.
Demeter was still waiting when the corridor flooded with gas. Even with a fold of sleeve pressed over her nose and mouth, she felt its effects after a moment. Then she felt nothing at all.
Ellen Sorbel's head had been deep in the geological strata, feeling her way across a layer of broken schist, when Wyatt's voice came for her.
"You are wanted in jail," he said smugly.
"What? Now?" Ellen never brought her senses out of the datastream, just spoke as one disembodied voice to another. "Why?"
"A casual has been picked up in a public disturbance. She gives your name as a reference. Shall I say you are otherwise occupied?"
"Who is it? Oh, let me guess. Demeter Coghlan, right?"
'The woman can give no clear account of herself. She seems to have lost both her identity cards and her chrono. But Coghlan is the name she used."
'Tell them I'll be down directly."
Wyatt paused before responding. "Really, Miz Sorbel, your work for this department is much more important than looking after a... a firefly."
"Where did you get a term like that?" Ellen wondered aloud. "Demeter is a friend. Now unhook me ... and pass my message, will you?"
"Very well," the machine said stiffly.
Ellen had to appear at the cells in person to make the identification, now that Demeter had lost her electronic persona. When Sorbel arrived at the secure area, obvious from its uniform gray paint and its location down at the complex's lowest finished level, she found a dozen pallets laid out in the open corridors. Each one held a sleeping body, covered to the chin by a white sheet. Some of the sheets were spotted with blood. Here and there a medic attempted to bind a scalp wound or pressure-cuff a broken bone. It looked like the aftermath of a tong war; every exposed face was Chinese or Central Asian. This disturbed Ellen, because the Pacific Rim community was one of Tharsis Montes's most peaceful enclaves.
"Where is the Earth casual?" Sorbel asked the first militiaman she encountered.
"That way." He inclined his head down the tunnel.
She passed five cells, all large communal blocks three meters on a side. They were filled with drooping, listless people of mixed race, again with Chinese predominant. Some of the prisoners stared back; one or two smiled at Sorbel's own Pacific Rim face and coloring. None of these looked at all like Demeter. But from the sixth cell she heard: "Ellen! Over here!"
Demeter s Anglo features shone out like a beacon.
"Demeter, how did you get in there?"
"Some kind of riot. I just walked into it, minding my own business."
Ellen sensed this was not the entire truth. "I'll see if I can get you out," she promised.
Sorbel went back and found the militiaman. She offered her chips for verification and got Demeter released into her custody. Before he would let the Earth woman go, however, the man outlined Ellen's responsibilities in detail.
"I have to accompany you in court, personally, if there's to be a hearing," she explained to Coghlan as the two walked past the gray-painted walls, through a door made up of steel bars, and into the public corridors.
"Will they call me as a witness?"
"No, as a defendant. In cases like this, the presumption is that you went out of your zone and gave someone cause to take insult."
Demeter gasped. "But... I was trying to help! This woman was crying out in terror, so I went over to help her."