A quiet sob filtered through the room behind me. I froze. Another, sad and tortured, the sound of a being in mourning.
All my triumph evaporated.
He was all alone in the galaxy, one of the last thousand, all that was left of his species, and now he wept in my inn.
I tiptoed away, back to the front room. Maud had landed on the couch. Arland elected to stay where he was, in the doorway. Sean hadn’t moved from his spot by the wall.
“You know an Arbitrator?” Maud asked.
“As much as anyone can know George. He’s a complicated guy.” And he had just done me an enormous favor.
“Was he the same one I met?”
“Probably.” It had to be George. Only he would look at this situation and figure out a way to help me and the Hiru at the same time.
“Are you going to take the offer?” Sean asked.
“We would be fools not to,” Maud said. “We couldn’t afford to ask the Archivarius a question if we worked nonstop every day for the rest of our lives.”
She wasn’t wrong. George had given us a once-in-a-lifetime gift, but it came with serious strings attached.
“Our brother and I searched for our parents for years,” I said. “We found nothing. The Archivarius has an enormous wealth of knowledge. If anyone knows, it does.”
“I sense a but coming,” Maud said.
“We would be facing the Draziri. Sooner or later they will show up. We’re putting the inn at risk of exposure and the guests at risk of injury.”
Maud rubbed her face.
I thought of the Hiru in the room, weeping quietly at the memory of his planet’s sky. You would have to be completely heartless to say no. If the inn had no other guests… No, not even then. It would be irresponsible. Sometimes my job required me to be heartless. I knew the correct thing to do, so why was it making me feel sick to my stomach?
“Also, we don’t have the manpower,” I said.
“You have me,” Sean said.
“I appreciate it, but you are not part of the inn.”
Sean pulled his wallet out of his pants, took out a dollar, and handed it to me.
Okay. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Hire me.”
“I will be more than delighted to lend a hand,” Arland said.
“You are a guest,” Maud said.
“I’m on a sojourn,” he said. “Trying to improve my physical and mental state. A little exercise is good for the body. It is my understanding that an innkeeper must meet the needs of her guests. I require a battle.”
“Nobody asked me,” Caldenia said, gliding into the room from the kitchen. “Because I’m apparently, what is the saying, chopped kidneys.”
“Liver,” I said.
“Thank you, my dear. Chopped liver. However, I would welcome some excitement as well. Life can be so dreadfully dull without a little spice, especially around the holidays.”
Only Caldenia would call the threat of an interstellar invasion “a little spice.”
My phone rang. I stuck the dollar into the pocket of my jeans under my robe and went to pick it up.
“Dina,” Brian Rodriguez said, his voice vibrating with stress. “So glad I caught you.”
“Mr. Rodriguez, what’s wrong?”
Mr. Rodriguez had never asked me for anything. Please don’t be the Ku, please don’t be the Ku…
“Do you get the Dallas station?”
“Which one?”
“Any network.”
I covered the phone with my hand. “Screen. I need the feed from WFAA8 from Dallas.”
A screen slid from the wall, blinked, and flared into light. A stretch of a highway, shown from above, clearly filmed from a helicopter. A pack of police cars sped down the asphalt, lights on. In front of them a pale oval of light slid at reckless speed, zigzagging back and forth among the vehicles.
“You know what, Jim, we are some distance away,” a male voice said through the mild static. “We’re going to try to push in on it, but so far we have been unable to see the nature of this vehicle. We are still quite a ways away, so we’ll try to get close and see if we can make out what is underneath that light. We’ll have to see what happens as this vehicle keeps going down the highway here.”
“We know how dangerous these high-speed pursuits are,” a female newscaster said. “Whether on a freeway or on surface streets. But when you have such a bright light obscuring the vehicle, that can’t possibly be safe. It is clearly blinding the officers who are pursuing this person. Can you imagine seeing that in your rearview mirror?”
Sean swore.
Oh no. Please no. I was very clear when Wing checked out of the inn before we went to get Maud. Very clear. I said to stay at Casa Feliz and behave or leave the planet.
“Well, as we can see, Jean, the police aren’t really following too close behind. In fact, they are giving this driver plenty of room, trying to keep him from panicking and doing something reckless…”
“I’m so sorry to ask you for a favor,” Mr. Rodriquez said. “But this is one of my guests. A Ku. His name is Wing.”
Damn it!
“He checked into my inn last night, went out just before sunrise, and now we have this mess happening. I have no idea where he is going.”
I knew exactly where he was going. He was heading down I45 toward me. He was coming back to Gertrude Hunt.
“Thank God someone fitted his boost bike with a daytime obfuscator,” Mr. Rodriguez said.
I looked at Sean.
He raised his hands and mouthed, “It was all you had in the garage.”
“I was his last stop,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He never checked out.”
Wing was still a guest. If Wing was caught, Mr. Rodriquez would be hauled before the Assembly, and the Assembly wouldn’t be kind.
“He’s barreling down the highway toward you and he’s got half of the Dallas PD behind him. He’s about to clear the city limits and then the State Troopers are going to get involved. I can’t get to him fast enough. We’d have to get in front of him to grab him. Any vehicle we’d have to use to get to that kind of speed would be too attention-grabbing in daylight, and the news channels are having a feeding frenzy. Is there any way you could help me?”
“Why in the world would you put an obfuscator on his boost bike?”
Sean and I sat in the back of the Ryder truck we had rented forty minutes ago. We’d attached a photon projector to it, drove here, and parked it on the grass well away from the road, on the side of I45. In front of us the highway rolled into the distance, completely empty.
“Because he had nothing at all, and he is a Ku.” Sean rested his arms on the wheel and checked his phone.
“There were refractors in the garage. And a photon projector.”
“I didn’t see those, but even if I did, I wouldn’t have put one on his bike.”
“Why not?”
“Because he is a Ku. We used them as scouts on Nexus. He barely follows the rules as is and he drives like a maniac. If he got it through his thick skull that his boost bike was now invisible, he would zip around in daylight. We’d have a pileup on every major interstate after he was through. I put the obfuscator on there and told him it was only for emergencies and if he used it, law enforcement would come and hunt him.”
Put that way, I had to agree. Wing was a menace. He wouldn’t just cause accidents. He would cause many accidents. People would be hurt, possibly die.
Sean growled under his breath. “Arland is ignoring my texts.”
“Have you tried sending a kissy face?”
Sean looked at me for a moment.
“Maybe he’s just not that into you.”
He tapped his ear piece. “They’ve just passed Madisonville. They threw out the spike strips, but of course he blasted right through them since he’s riding two feet above the ground. He should be in range in about two minutes.”