Hal exchanged a look with Fee.
“Go. Ihaveto speak to Jaden,” she said. “I’m wearing my bracelet, I’m in disguise, and I cannot risk him slipping away again.”
Hal gave a reluctant nod, and just remembered in time that if she was Grihan, and a member of his crew, he wouldn’t be pulling her close for a kiss.
Instead he briefly touched her arm. “Be very careful.”
He strode off with Rial, and managed to only glance back once.
Fiona was headed to the left, toward her office, and no one seemed to be paying her any attention.
And still . . . he couldn’t help thinking he was making a mistake.
CHAPTER 28
Fee decidedto go in the back way.
It was a way in and out that no one other than she and Eazi knew about, mainly because they had built it.
Always looking for ways to keep her safe, Eazi had suggested he have his drones come in at night and engineer a secret back door, and Fee had used it a few times, once or twice just for fun, and a couple of times to avoid a diplomat on the war path or a merchant trying to get more concessions than he or she was due.
She went down the alley behind her office building. As with all alleyways in Larga Ways, it was as narrow as it could get away with, given there was only so much real estate to be had on a floating space platform. Still, lush, dark green plants that clearly thrived in shady conditions hung in waterfalls of frothy leaves and trailing vines down the side of the building, making it less dank and unpleasant, and more like a tropical gorge.
She slid behind one very dense curtain of vines to the side of the emergency exit, touched her hand to the palm plate, and then stepped into the tiny space Eazi had build next to the storage room.
A hidden lens outside usually transmitted a view of the passage beyond onto a screen on the wall, but with all comms down, it was completely blind.
Fee pressed her ear against the panel that pretended to be part of the passage wall, and then slid it aside and stepped out.
She was alone, to her relief, and she started up the back stairs.
The building was a shared one, with her offices taking up the first three floors, and then other businesses operating on the many floors above, but this part of the service staircase was not open to anyone other than her people.
Hopefully she would not encounter anyone on her staff, as she was sure her disguise would not hold for long with the people who knew her and saw her every day.
She jogged up to her office and when she stepped into the foyer she made sure to close the door silently behind her.
It felt overly dramatic to creep up on her own administrative assistant the way she was, but she wanted to watch him, just as Tean Lee’s officer had, without being observed, to get a sense of what was going on.
The fact that he hadn’t spoken to Tean Lee once since the comms had gone down was almost incomprehensible to her, and she would fire him if he didn’t have a good excuse.
She heard him speaking before she turned the corner to the open plan area that was his office, as well as a waiting area for her visitors. Her own office was beyond, with a view of the docking arms that always faced Balco.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” Jaden said. “She can’t contact me, because you’ve shut down the comms, and I haven’t seen her since she arrived.”
“How she arrived at all is a question we should be asking ourselves,” a woman said. “No runners or ships have come orgone since the comms went down, although I saw the Grihan battleship just left. And that is disturbing, as well.”
“This is her way station,” Jaden said. “If anyone had a secret way on and off of it, it would be her, don’t you think?”
“Fine, she obviously has some tricks up her sleeve, but she and that Grihan captain she was with took down three of my team, and I need to work out where they’ve been taken, and I need to find out how to activate the thinking system.”
“You are sure you have Eazi?” Jaden asked, and Fee could hear the trepidation in his voice.
At least he hadn’t lost his mind completely, she thought.
Also, it was clear the woman he was talking to was the one who had taken Fee’s trophy replica from the warehouse. Which put Jaden Tris in far more trouble than he had been before, when she just thought he was shirking his duties.
She weighed her options. Confronting the woman would most likely not yield much, but Jaden Tris was another story. She could crack him, and she would.
