"Carrow," Draka repeated, still looking at him. "Right. Hi, Evan."
"Good evening," Edi-Veen said.
Draka's eyebrows performed a small private celebration. She pulled Coreni in by the elbow and dropped her voice to the register she used for information she considered urgent. "Where did you find him and how quickly can you introduce me to his friends?"
"He doesn't have friends here. He's visiting, I said."
"Coreni. He is —" Draka gestured at him with the particular economy of motion that conveyed an entire sentence without using one.
"I'm aware."
"Are you? Because you look like you're pretending not to be."
"I look like someone who needs a drink and hasn't found one yet. Where's the bar?"
Draka, accepting defeat with the grace of someone who fully intended to revisit this later, pointed toward the far wall and dissolved back into the crowd. Coreni turned to find Edi-Veen watching the exchange with the expression of someone who had understood most of it and was filing the rest.
"Your friend," he said.
"Colleague. Mostly."
"She finds me conspicuous."
"Everyone finds you conspicuous. That's not the problem. The problem is you find everyone else interesting in a way that reads as surveillance." She steered them toward the bar. "Look bored. Look like you've been to a hundred parties and this one isn't your favorite."
"I have never been to a party."
She stopped walking. "At all?"
"The Chancellor attended formal government functions. Those are not parties."
"What's the difference?"
He considered this with the seriousness he appeared to give everything. "At a government function, everyone is trying to get something from everyone else and pretending otherwise. This appears to be the same, but louder."
Coreni looked at him for a moment. "That is possibly the most accurate description of a party I have ever heard."
Something almost like satisfaction crossed his face. She turned away before she could react to it.
Her editor found her at the bar.
Pell was a compact man with extensive cranial plating and the energy of someone who had been aggrieved for so long it had become his natural state. He materialized at her elbow with a drink already in his hand and the particular expression that meant she was going to hear about this for several weeks at minimum.
"Two days," he said. "No message. No location ping. Nothing."
"I was working a story."
"Without authorization."
"The best ones are always without authorization."
"Coreni." He said her name with a specific exhaustion that told her she was, despite everything, not actually in serious trouble yet. Pell was many things, but he knew what she brought in. "What story?"
She had prepared for this question. She had a version that was true enough to be convincing and vague enough to protect what she didn't yet understand. "I had a source with information about the Chancellor. I was running it down."
Pell's expression shifted — the aggrievement not gone, but something behind it sharpening. He glanced, briefly, at Edi-Veen. "And him?"
"Visiting. From Carrow."
