To me, that spelled poison or some other doom that gave the victim time to linger.
Like a Claw of God, maybe.
And the thought made me look at Paakth-Doy again.
She asked, “What about you, Counselor? Are you well enough to stand?”
My side still gave me a twinge of pain with every deep breath. “I’m all right. You should take care of the other bleeders first.”
Jason’s smile showed genuine warmth. “Nice, heroic stance, Counselor. But: bullshit. You’re as entitled to medical care as the rest of us.”
“I’m not bleeding,” I said.
“Not externally,” he said.
“I tell you I’m fine.”
“You may go to the end of the line,” Paakth-Doy said. “If you can stand.”
Fair enough. I squeezed Skye’s forearm, and Oscin ran over to grab my other elbow. The pair of them supported me as I rose to my feet, grimacing past the pain of movement. It hurt like hell. I remained standing after the Porrinyards let me go. The bruise along my side was going to be stellar, but I’d functioned with much worse. “See? I’m fine.”
Paakth-Doy’s mouth hung open as she worked on Oscin’s chin next, the tip of her tongue pressed against her tiny, spotless lower teeth. I watched for several seconds, narrowing my reason for unease down to something having to do with her blank expression. It was setting off alarm bells, but I still did not know why.
Dina and Farley Pearlman huddled together on one of the couches, the husband whispering words of comfort to the wife. Vernon Wethers and Monday Brown treated themselves to some amber liquid from behind the bar. Dejah Shapiro, who had slipped away without me noticing, emerged after some unknown errand from the suite I now assumed to be hers. The Khaajiir slumped in exhaustion, his left hand still clutching the staff, his right curled into a claw against the armrest.
I felt a wave of black nausea, and again found myself unable to identify the precise shape of something horrible lurking at the edges of my consciousness. Again, Paakth-Doy had something to do with it. When she left Oscin and came to work on my bruised hip I said, “Excuse me. Young lady. Please forgive me for asking…You were not raised by human beings, were you?”
She didn’t look at me, her full attention absorbed by the gray clouds swirling at the tip of the nanite pen. “No. I was an orphan raised by Riirgaans. I never met another human being until I was twelve years old, Mercantile.”
That was similar to my own upbringing, in a way; I’d had plenty of humans around, but was just as close to the neighborhood Bocaians. “That’s—excuse me—why you show no facial expression, right?”
“Correct. The Riirgaans have no facial muscles. I never lacked for love, of a Riirgaan kind, but was never exposed to human expressions and thus never learned any until it was too late to pick up the skill. I am aware that some people find my appearance forbidding, but I assure you I’m quite congenial if you get to know me. Is that what you wanted to know, ma’am?”
“Not yet,” I said.
Philip Bettelhine moaned. “Counselor, can’t you see she’s—”
I held out my hand, in the universal gesture for stop. Something about my urgency succeeded in shutting him up, and even making him back up a step, as I said, “Please, Doy. I know these questions are very personal. But this is important. I’ve also noticed that you’re a mouth-breather, which I assume goes along with the somewhat nasal quality of your voice. Am I correct in my assumption that at some time during your life with your Riirgaans you had surgery on your nasal passages, to cut off your sense of smell and further your ability to adapt to life among your adopted species?”
Paakth-Doy spared me a glance that could have been anything from annoyance to encouragement. “Yes. The Riirgaans have no sense of smell. As a human girl, growing up in one of their families, I sometimes reacted at times when it was…inappropriate for me to react. I assure you, I was given a choice. The surgery was voluntary. Even now, I’m much happier, without—”
And now I knew why Paakth-Doy’s open mouth had bothered me so much. The rest of us were just people, enduring a stench we had written off as the expected taint in the atmosphere of any enclosed habitat that had just suffered serious damage.
But Paakth-Doy hadn’t reacted to the odor at all.
Had she been able to identify odors, she might not have devoted all her attention to the minor injuries of a few pampered passengers whose wounds were overt enough to be seen from a distance.
A medical professional like her would have been trained to recognize the smells given off by things like, for instance, perforated bowels.
And she would have followed that stench, that telltale scent of biological disaster, to its source.
I yelled and lurched across the room, not hearing the cries of people like Philip Bettelhine and Dina Pearlman who must have thought I’d gone mad, and the sudden alarm on the faces of the Porrinyards, who knew that I’d only react like this in the presence of death.
When I reached the Khaajiir I seized his shoulders and yanked him forward, revealing in the process that his slump had been more than exhaustion and that his stare had been more than shock.
The gases trapped by his body billowed upward, and I got a faceful, thick enough and rich enough that it was more like being splashed with a liquid than being hit with anything as intangible as air. The chair, designed for comfort, sloping downward from the natural resting place of a seated person’s knees, was now centimeters deep in a lumpy black stew composed of equal parts Bocaian blood, Bocaian shit, Bocaian urine, Bocaian bile, and dense but colorful swirls I could only assume to be the liquefied remnants of Bocaian organs. A thin mist rose from the awful mélange, the last of the Khaajiir’s internal heat, steaming as it collided with the cooler air of the parlor.
A black disk I recognized as a K’cenhowten Claw of God clung, unsupported, between his shoulder blades.
I heard gasps on all sides: coming from those who’d known the Khaajiir and considered him a friend, those who only considered him important and were now horrified that he was gone, those appalled by the sheer ugliness of the sight, those who sensed from this death that there would soon be more, even the gasps of those who did not yet understand what had happened and could only feel dread without understanding of the horror that had seized everybody else.
As for me?
All the uncertainty over why I was here, all the strain of dealing with the masters of a corporate empire, all the pressure of being owned outright by beings whose intentions toward me were shaky at best, all the shock of being targeted for death myself, all the horror of learning that a key assumption of my past had been a lie all along, and all the terror of the additional weight of the fresh challenge the AIsource had placed on my back, all went away, subsumed by something larger, something I had been carrying with me for most of the life.
For the first time since my arrival at Layabout, I was at home.
I knew why I was here and I knew what I was meant to do.
At the first moment of relative silence, I said it. “Someone in this room is a murderer.”
I had to give Philip Bettelhine credit. He gave as good as he got.
He croaked, “You mean, somebody other than you?”