“Window’s not open on Sunday,” Saash said. “Do you ever think about anything but your stomach?”
“I sure do. Just the night before last there was this little ginger number, with these big green eyes, and she—”
Saash sat down in a clean spot behind a signal and started having herself a good scratch, yawning the while. “Urruah, you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who’s even slightly interested in your nightly exploits.”
“Au, it’s not your fault,” Urruah said magnanimously. “You can’t help not taking an interest, poor thing: you’re ffeih, after all.”
Rhiow smiled slightly: she had given up trying to teach Urruah tact too. But there was no arguing the statement, on either Saash’s part or her own. Before her wizardry, while still very young with her ehhif, Hhuha had taken Rhiow to the vet’s and unqueened her. Saash had had this happen, too, so long ago that she couldn’t even remember it. Being ffeih did free you from certain inconvenient urges; sometimes Rhiow wondered how still-queened wizards managed when heat and an assignment coincided. “Still,” Rhiow said, “Saash has a point. Till tomorrow, it’s MhHonalh’s or nothing for you, my kit.”
“Worth waiting for,” Urruah said, unconcerned, still ambling along. He paused, peering down. “Here, you missed one, Saash. Iau’s sweet name, but these things are getting big this year—”
He broke off. “Rhiow? This isn’t a rat.”
The alarm in his voice made Rhiow’s heart jump. She hurried over and stood with him to stare down unhappily at the small sodden heap of fur and limbs lying on the rail. Sometimes you ran into them down here, People who were sick or careless, and ran afoul of the trains: there was nothing much you could do but send their bodies on and wish them well in their next life. So young, she thought sadly: this catling could hardly have been out of his ’tweens, still kittenish and not yet old enough to worry about sex.
“Poor kit,” Saash said. “I wonder—”
He moved. A gasp, a heave of his chest, a kick of one leg. Another heave of breath.
“I don’t believe it,” Rhiow said. She bent down and gave his head a lick. He tasted foul, of cinder and train fumes as well as rat blood. She breathed breaths with him: the scent/taste was hurt and sick, yes, but not dead yet.
And someone said in her head, Rhiow? Are you free?
It was a voice she knew, and one she had expected to hear from, but not right this minute. The others heard it, too, from their expressions.
Urruah made a wry face. “The Area Advisory,” he said. “I guess we should be honored.”
“We got that shut,” Saash said, flicking an ear at the gate. “We’re honored. —You go on, Rhi. We’ll see to this one … and I’ll start those deep diagnostics. I’ve checked all four gates’ logs now. The other three are answering properly: no effect on them from this event. One thing, though. The log weave on this one is blank. No transits or accesses showing since the midnight archive-and-purge of the log.”
Rhiow blinked at that and started to demand explanations, but Saash turned away to the catling. “Ask me later.”
Rhiow jumped up onto the platform. “Next train’s at seven oh four,” she said, looking over her shoulder at them.
Urruah gave her a tolerant look. “It’s clear over on Track Thirty-two,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”
Rhiow sighed. She was a mess, a layer of dust and track cinders kicked up by the North White Plains local now stuck to the rat detritus that had sprayed her, but there was no time to do much about it. She shook herself hard, scrubbed at her face enough to become slightly decent—then trotted on up the platform, out through the gate, and into the main concourse.
Chapter Two
Here Rhiow stayed by the wall with some care, for the place was slowly becoming busy. Great beams of dusty sunlight slanted down into the concourse from the tall east windows; the big Accurist clock’s deep-throated bell began tolling seven.
Rhiow gazed around, seeing very little stillness in the place. It was all ehhif moving, going, heading somewhere; except up the steps on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, where the ticketed waiting area was, and the coffee bar next to it. In the coffee bar, with the Sunday Times piled up on the glass table in front of him, and a cup of something hot to one side, sat a tall dark-haired ehhif in jeans and running shoes and a beige polo shirt. As Rhiow looked at him, the ehhif glanced up from the section he was reading, and then looked right down at her and raised his eyebrows: a good trick, since she was invisible.
Rhiow trotted across the concourse and up the stairs, pausing only a moment near the bottom of the staircase to enjoy the residual scent of fish floating up from the Oyster Bar downstairs. At the top of the steps, she wove and dodged to miss a couple of transit cops coming out of the Metro-North police offices off to the left, and slid among the tables, to where Carl Romeo sat.
He was handsome, as ehhif went, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with high cheekbones, clear gray eyes, and a face that looked friendly to her—though of course it was always dangerous to felidomorphize. How he had turned up so fast, even with a malfunctioning gate, wasn’t hard to imagine: an Area Advisory was not limited to public transit in the performance of his duties.
“Dai stiho, Har’lh,” she said, tucking herself up comfortably under the table. She did not speak Ailurin to him. To one of another species but in her own line of work, she could use the Speech, and preferred to: its detailed professional vocabulary made errors of understanding less likely.
“Dai,” Carl said, using the paper to cover his attention to her. “Rhiow, what was all this about?”
“The integration we did yesterday came undone,” Rhiow said. “Saash is working on the technical details for me; we’ll know more in a while. But we were able to reinstate before the North White Plains local came in.”
Carl rustled his Times aside and reached for his cappuccino. “You and your team don’t usually need to do things twice,” Carl said. “Is there something I should know about?”
“Nothing regarding team function,” Rhiow said. “But I’m disturbed about the condition we found the gate in, Har’lh. The symptoms were of someone using it without due care. However, the logs show no transit, not even any accesses … which is odd. Either the gate was not used, and this malfunction had some other cause”—and she shuddered: that was a nest of mice Rhiow was unwilling to start ripping open—“or someone out on errantry did access it, and then wiped the logs on purpose. Not very ethical.”
Carl smiled, a thin humorless look. “That’s putting it mildly.” For a few moments he said nothing, and Rhiow wished she could guess all of what was going on in the mind behind that face. Ehhif could be inscrutable even after you’d learned to understand their expressions; one of the Area Advisories, the two people ultimately responsible for all the wizards working in the greater metropolitan area, could be expected to know things and have concerns Rhiow could only guess at. About some of those concerns, though, Rhiow felt she could safely speculate.