Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

“I—” Daria cast a sidelong look at the open bedroom door, and then dropped her gaze to her own knees. “There was a motel in a place called Pinesborough, near the Washington border. Someone from the graveyard shift found the No Vacancy sign on and the office closed and called the cops. The cops found practically everyone in the building dead. Do you know what a motel is, Tagen?”

“A bedding station where humans mate extramaritally,” he replied.

She looked at him, opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again and seriously said, “You watch too much cable television.”

“What then?”

“I didn’t say you were wrong.” She rubbed at her knees restlessly. “I just wanted to make sure you knew what one looked like, so when I say that practically everyone in the building was dead, you know that means someone had to go to a bunch of different rooms.”

“I do.” He regarded her closely. “When you say ‘practically’…do you mean to imply that there are survivors?”

“I’m just repeating what the news guy said. No one’s confirmed yet how many bodies there were or if there really were survivors or even how the people were killed, so…” She trailed off, looking increasingly uncomfortable, and raised a hand to rub at her scars. “So this is probably a huge waste of your time, come to think of it. Forget it. Go back to sleep.”

She stood up and Tagen moved swiftly to intercept her before she could reach the door. “Tell me,” he said intently.

“It’s probably nothing,” she insisted and tried to go around him.

He caught her arm.

She looked at his hand and when he did not release her, she sighed and said, “I was looking at the map and…and it’s not a dead match or anything, but…I think I see—”

“A pattern,” Tagen said, drawing a deep, clarifying breath. “I knew that you would. What is it?”

“Don’t get excited,” she warned him. “It’s not a real clear circle.”

Tagen blinked. He turned his head, frowning at the corner of the room as he conjured a memory of the map before him. Surely, he would have seen something as obvious as a circle.

“That’s not all. Or, actually, there’s more, but some or all of it could be crap.”

He doubted that.

“Do you want to come see?” she asked hesitantly.

“Yes.” Tagen left the rest of his clothing where they lay on the floor and went half-clad out into the hall, preceding his human and moving with great purpose.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said again, her head bent and cheeks pink.

“So I hear.”

“The stairs need vacuuming,” she muttered.

He turned around mid-step, one claw raised to the level of her eyes. “If you so much as touch that appliance—”

“Here, look.” Daria ducked under his arm and crossed into the sitting room, indicating the map spread out on the floor. There were more marks on it, black ones to indicate the deaths at the movie theatre and, presumably, this new killing site at the motel she spoke of. But there was also a rash of small, red circles, some of then enclosing black marks, others merely nearby.

Tagen stood beside her, looking down at the map with his hands clasped behind his back in officer’s stance. “What am I looking for?”

“It starts here, on Highway 20, when he’s on foot. These are the first murders, we agree on that, right?”

“Yes.”

“East, east, east…and then he gets his car and he goes all the way out here. Now, we can kind of consider these his feelers. He never goes out that far after this, and he’ll never kill two times in a row while traveling in the same direction again. Okay?”

Tagen shrugged and nodded, his brows still drawn together in confusion.

Daria looked up at him, bit at her lip in that endearing expression of nervousness, and then hunkered down and put her finger on the map. “He went out on I-84 and he came back the same way, I think. Then he turned up I-15, going north. Here’s the tattoo parlor, a day or two after the motel guy in Idaho. And here’s Blue Ridge, off I-5, way down by Sacramento. Now…” Daria’s teeth found her lip again. Gods, that was distracting. “The only way your guy can get from I-15 northbound to Blue Ridge, is if he stopped and took Highway 12 west back to I-84, and then to Portland first and hop on I-5. See?”

“If you say it’s so,” he said, believing himself to be a very patient man.

Daria pointed at a red circle aside of what, presumably, was Highway 12. “This is an abandoned car,” she said. “It was registered to one of these guys—” She pointed at the second of E’Var’s killings. “—and the day after it was ticketed, a missing persons report came in from the family of a young man who was supposed to be coming to Portland from Missoula, which meant he probably took Highway 12. They haven’t found him yet, but his car turned up over here—” She indicated another red circle, low on the map. “Right about the same time another family filed another missing person report. Now do you see it?”

“I…see it lies east of Blue Ridge,” Tagen said slowly. He dropped to one knee beside her and in a doubtful voice, added, “Is this the circle of which you speak?”

“Don’t look for a circle-shape,” she told him. “Look at the roads.”

She took his hand, placed his finger on the first black mark and drew it east on the thick line used to designate a roadway. East and north and west and south and east upon another road and then…

“What is this?” he asked, moving his finger from the eastward highway onto a north-running road to a red circle.

“That’s Sugarush, Nevada,” she told him. Every muscle of her was tense, betraying a great uncertainty. “Where thirteen kids got horribly killed in the woods. I didn’t think to look into that too closely when it happened because the cops have the girl who says she did it already in custody, but you get to Sugarush by going south on I-5 from Blue Ridge and east on I-80, and then take a north on Highway 95, see? And if you keep going north on 95, you’ll hit Highway 20, which will take you—”

“West,” Tagen said.

“To Hillmark,” Daria finished.

Tagen leaned back, his claws flexing on his bent knee, and stared grimly at the map. “What exactly happened in this place, Sugarush?” he asked.

“A lot of massive head trauma, I found out that much. One survivor, a girl, high as a flippin’ kite. She confessed, Tagen. At the time, she claimed she got high and imagined ‘that guy from the bible’ came and must have told her to kill everyone.”

“Bible?”

“A book most of us humans have read,” she said, shaking her head to show that wasn’t the point. “Until now, I didn’t have a reason to find out any more, but the murders she’s taking credit for fit your guy’s M.O. too damn well. I poked around a little, and I found a sound bite where she finally says just which guy from the bible she thinks she met.”

“And—?”

“And it’s a guy named Cain.” She looked up into his thunderstruck face. “Does this prisoner of yours, Kanetus E’Var, ever shorten his name?”

“He may,” Tagen said numbly. He stared down at the map. “And from Sugarush to Hillmark.”

“From Hillmark south about an hour on Highway 395 to another motel where three guys were killed the same night as the movie theater massacre. From there, south just to Route 31 eastbound, and straight out to Pinesborough. You see, it’s not a round sort of circle, but it’s always like that. He doesn’t appear to be traveling every single day, but he turns when he kills and he turns in the same exact pattern along the big roads. East, north, west, south. Which means,” she said, leaning back to look at him, “that he probably took 97 north after he was done at Pinesborough. And…and I’ll tell you something else, if you want to hear it.”

“Speak,” he said. His voice was hoarse enough that he did not recognize it for his own.

Daria glanced at the timepiece on her wrist. “The news report specified it was the graveyard shift guy who called the cops. Graveyard starts at two. Now…going back here to Hillmark and the motel he hit the same night…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think he set out to kill people at that motel. I think he stopped there to sleep.”

“Surely not!”

“He did his thing at the theatre, and then he drove about an hour and stopped at the motel. He killed those men, and then he drove another hour and stopped again. This time, he did sleep. In a motel, and I’ll tell you why I think so.”

“He would never take such a risk!”

“Assuming E’Var’s driver isn’t speeding—which I’m guessing she isn’t, seeing as she has an alien in the car—and assuming an average speed of sixty miles per hour, plus an hour for rest stops and fill-ups, you can go from Pinesborough on Highway 97 north to where it turns into I-82 north and from there to the I-90 intersection in ten hours. At the I-82 and I-90 intersection, you will find many cheap hotels with check-out times posted at eleven or noon. Now, if E’Var is camping in the woods somewhere and not sleeping in a motel, he would already be on the road before then because he’d want to start moving while it was still cool and not sit around waiting for it to get that hot.”

“That…makes sense,” he admitted.

“The distance varies a lot,” Daria continued, “but for the most part, I can see an eight or nine hour drive between each of these murders. Hillmark is only eight hours from Sugarush, but it’s ten hours if you start counting down by the I-80 intersection instead of by the murders. It’s nine and a half hours from Sugarush to the Highway 20 intersection, where there happens to be a cute little town with a lot of summer resorts…hotels. Eight hours from that place back to Blue Ridge. Eleven hours from Blue Ridge to Portland, but seeing as that was I-5, I’m guessing that was more than one day’s drive anyway. The reason why this is important is because eight or nine hours of driving will take you quite handily from check-out time at most hotels to the time of day when it starts to cool off outside enough that you don’t go into Heat anymore, Tagen.”

He could not find his voice.

“He’s sleeping in hotels,” Daria said again.

This time, he only nodded.

“I don’t have proof of any of this,” she said, looking helpless. “And the more I’m telling you now, the less sure I am of any of it, to be honest, but look, if I’m right, well, nine hours out of Pinesborough would put him here-ish.” She uncapped her red marker and drew a wide circle on her map. “There’s three little towns there that look big enough for gas stations and stop lights. I can look online and find phone numbers for every motel in that area. We can call them, ask if they’ve seen your guy or his purple-haired girlfriend, and if someone has—” She looked at her timepiece again. “We can be there by eight. Nine at the latest. Before he’s even woken up.”

“Make your list,” Tagen ordered. He straightened up fast, his heart slamming against his ribs. “And ready your vehicle.” He stared one final moment more at the map on the floor, and then swung around and made for his room.

He took the stairs two and three at a time and ran down the hall to pack his things. He was not completely sure how much time lay between eight and eleven of the human clock, but he suspected it was not enough to allow as many phone calls as would need to be made. Nevertheless, it was more of a lead than he ever could have accomplished on his own and it felt right. He couldn’t say why exactly, but the conviction remained; perhaps he had some insight after all, or at least enough to recognize it when he saw it in others.

He finished dressing speedily and, on the assumption that this trail of Daria’s devising would lead to more than a wild goose (he was more and more fond of that phrase), Tagen packed everything—his computer, his medical kit, even the damned stimulator that Daria had purchased for him—everything apart from his guns. Those he buckled on his hip. That act, more than anything else, made him realize just how much he believed in Daria’s theory, and that in turn made him wonder how many humans which he had met may have mirrored her intellect before their spirits were crushed by enslavement.

That thought disturbed him so deeply that he was forced to shut it away. He could do nothing for the humans already in captivity or in preserves, but that did not render him entirely impotent in the matter. He would arrest E’Var, take him back to Jota, and once the Gate came down, that would be an end to the trafficking of Earth-born humans. And if that was the only legacy of Tagen Pahnee, it would still be a damned fine one to his way of thinking.

He went downstairs in full spirits and waited in the kitchen, trying not to pace, watching Daria work the antiquated model of a modern human computer. The way in which all her fingers moved would have proved hypnotic under other circumstances, but now, he felt only a dull impatience at the need to touch all the keys. Of course, he wished her to be thorough, but…

“You can make pages of these,” he said, takking his talons on the kitchen tiles. “As you did for the…the Watch-Death?”

“Deathwatch Northwest,” she said distractedly. “I guess so, but the phone is right there. I can just call—”

“Please make the pages. I would rather travel now and call once distance has been lessened.”

“But—”

“I realize it may take more than one day before our search sparks,” he continued. “But this feels right, Daria. If not tomorrow, or the next day, then the next, and on until—”

Tagen stopped mid-word. He cocked his head, frowning assiduously at the back of her head. She had ceased to type. She was staring at the screen of her computer but she did not seem to be looking at it. It was difficult to say, exactly, in the synthetic glow of the monitor, but she seemed to have paled.

“Until he is found,” he finished warily.

Her shoulders hunched. She pushed at the keys of her computer and the printing device beside it began to spit out paper. She said nothing.

Tagen’s talons flexed up to tak irritably at the tiles; lowering them in silence required effort enough to make his legs ache. “Do not…think me insensitive to your feelings,” he began.

“It’s not what you think.”

“I cannot do this without you,” he went on forcefully. “I cannot match his distance without a vehicle and a pilot.”

“I can’t—”

“What would you rather do, wait for him to knock at your door? What—” Tagen silenced himself grimly, staring down at the tiles until he trusted himself to speak gently. But when he looked up again, his words died in his throat.

She was sitting very still with her hands folded before her, her expression fixed on the monitor, and tears streaming down her face.

Well. He supposed he could have simply slapped her and ordered her to obey him. Then he could be a real slave-master.

“Daria,” he began.

“It’s not what you think,” she said again. “I can do this…I guess. I can drive, anyway. And I’ve got enough cash and credit saved up for a few days on the road, I don’t even care about that. And I know you need my help. I’m not trying to be difficult.” She reached up and wiped one cheek dry on the back of her hand. “But you have to understand…this could take a lot of time. God knows I have plenty of that, but…”

She turned around, but not to face him. Her eyes went to the empty food dish in the cat’s corner of the kitchen. “I didn’t think about it before. I just left the door open and got out of here before I froze up, you know? But we came back and he’d eaten everything and…and I’m in the middle of nowhere. Okay, he’s just a cat, and I know that doesn’t matter for much compared to what’s going on with your guy, but he’s my cat, he’s all I’ve had for the last six years, and…what’s going to happen to him if something happens to me?”

She wasn’t speaking now of merely taking several unexpected days away from her home. The last of Tagen’s anger left him.

“He started out a stray,” Daria said glumly. “I keep telling myself he could probably wander off and find another home just like he found me, if…if I just left the door open for him, he could—”

“Don’t do that,” Tagen sighed. “The earth will track itself in and distress you.”

She smiled, but it was a lackluster attempt at best.

“Could we not take him with us?” Tagen asked. “What does he need apart from food and scratching sand?”

“I…Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve never tried taking him anywhere before. There aren’t many cats who like cars.” She stood up and called the cat’s name, as though she sincerely expected to interview the creature on the subject.

Grendel appeared at once, but took a moment to de-emphasize the speed at which it had arrived by rubbing its head against the doorjamb. It gazed around the room with a convincing show of indifference and uttered an inquiry.

Tagen glanced at Daria, who continued to stand and look uncertain, and then frowned at the cat, who licked its left paw in a pointed snub. Clearly, decisive action was called for. He straightened his jacket and moved briskly to the cupboard.

The instant he laid his hands on the cat’s food tins, Grendel lost all self-respect. It followed at Tagen’s heels, moaning piteously and scratching at Tagen’s shins. Tagen was unmoved. He marched out to Daria’s vehicle and opened the rear hatch. The cat leapt inside eagerly enough when Tagen dropped its food in the open hold. He set his pack beside the purring animals, shut the hatch and turned around.

Daria was standing on the porch with her paper in her hands. She was smiling faintly.

“He seems amenable to travel,” Tagen declared.

“As long as there’s food involved, sure.”

“Command is all about providing the proper motivations to one’s crew.”

“Good luck trying to command a cat,” she said, and then, softly, “Thanks.”

Tagen shrugged. It was a little thing, after all.

“Let me just grab my keys and some kitty litter and we’ll hit the road.” She vanished back into the house, her head high and her step once again certain.

Tagen leaned against the side of the groundcar to wait for her. He glanced behind him at Grendel, who had exhausted its attempts to grow opposing thumbs and open its own tins and who now lay contentedly on its side, watching him through the glass. “I command you to sleep,” he said sternly.

The cat closed its eyes.

Some were simply born to command.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Thirty

Daria came out of the motel office with her head down and a beaten twist to her mouth. Looking at her, Tagen knew what he was going to hear. Still, he was not daunted. They had come a great distance in a short time (well, relatively. He had only the vaguest notion of how far they were now from Daria’s home, and an even vaguer impression of the time that had elapsed. He knew that, were this Jota, they could have crossed the span in one-tenth the time. He also knew that, were he still on foot, it would be a journey of so many days that he might see Earth’s miserable summer end before he had reached this place), but now their progress was being measured one motel, and one disappointment, after another.

“No luck,” Daria said, unnecessarily in light of her dispirited expression. She picked up her printed page, pulled a writing stylus from the groundcar’s small fore-compartment, and made a neat line through one of the listings. It was the fourteenth such marking, representing nearly half of the register.

“What is the time?” he asked as soon as she tucked her page away again.

She looked at the narrow band encircling her wrist. “Eleven fifteen,” she said, and sighed. “He’s up and gone by now, wherever he is.”

“Agreed.” Tagen tried to lean back and had to settle for rolling his shoulders instead in the tight confines of the groundcar’s interior. “And it is very hot, so he is likely to travel by day and hunt when it begins to cool.”

“Which will be eight or nine hours from now.” Daria shook her head, her palms rubbing restlessly at her knees. She did not look at him and she made no attempt to start the engine of the vehicle. “I could be wrong about this, Tagen. He might not even be on this road.”

In ordinary circumstances, Tagen Pahnee was a man prone to the contagious effects of pessimism, but not this time. His gut told him they were close. Despite Daria’s obvious discouragement at having checked so many motels with so little to show for it, Tagen remained confidant.

“As I see it, the prisoner will proceed in one of two ways.” Tagen fetched out the printed page and ran his eye critically down the column of neatly-lettered alien words. “He may stay where he is. It seems that there has been a short lull after his larger hunts and the killings at the motel would certainly qualify. If not, he will move on, taking the first westward road he encounters, as has been his habit.”

“We think,” Daria interjected, stressing the second word.

“In either event, our course is clear. We must continue our inquiries until we find the place where either he has stayed or where he is staying even now. The road he takes next may depend greatly on which motel he has taken. Otherwise, we could simply drive on now and hope to overtake him.”

“How do you expect to know—” Daria interrupted herself with a yawn. “—when we’ve overtaken him? I mean, what if he stops early? He doesn’t do all his hunting when it’s cool.”

“No, that he does not. But these larger hunts have drawn swift attention. Your lawmen have come on his victims mere hours after he has passed. That being so, if we should pass by a great number of police vehicles…” He held out one hand to her, inviting conclusion.

“Yeah, I guess.” She looked around at the enclosing walls of forest. “Out here, it’s hardly likely they’d be busting the last of the big-time squirrel rustlers.” She turned to him, frowning and searching his face intently. “You’re putting a hell of a lot of faith in my slap-ass theory, you know that, right?”

“Had we known of this…circle he travels when he hunted Hillmark, I think that we would have him now,” he replied seriously. “In every suggestion you have made, there has been merit. I shall see you—”

He broke off sharply, then faced forward and stared away out the console window, making no attempt to complete the unfinished thought.

From the open hold in the rear of the groundcar came a sleepy cat-sound, and then Grendel’s head insinuated itself over Tagen’s shoulder. Words had not proved intriguing enough to rouse the animal from it’s incessant rest, but this silence had a prickly weight to it that anyone could feel. Tagen pulled the creature over the back of his seat and onto his lap in an attempt to disperse the awkwardness of the moment with interruption.

Daria waited for a short time, and then reached out and stilled the stroking movements of his hand on Grendel’s fur. “See me…?” she prompted, one brow raised.

He felt his lips stretching in a small smile, the humor of which utterly escaped him. “Recommended for commendation to our superiors,” he finished. He did not look at her.

Daria leaned back, and then faced forward as well. After a while, she said, “Daria Cleavon, intergalactic bounty hunter. Got a hell of nice ring to it.”

“Indeed.”

Silence, underscored by cat-growls of contentment.

Since the leave-taking of Daria’s home, Tagen had thought only of his prisoner. After so much stifling inaction, this day’s work left him with a renewal of purpose, even if it hadn’t delivered him E’Var in shackles. He knew with every cell of him that they were closing and he felt only the simmering excitement of pursuit nearing its end.

But now, all his thoughts went for the first time to that morning after, when he had his prisoner in custody or in ashes, and he stood again at his ship’s airlock, ready to leave Earth and all its inhabitants. All of them.

As hellish as this mission had been, as fervently as he hated this world, as much as he wished to be free of Heat…the thought of leaving still filled him with dark emotion. He couldn’t understand why. It was Daria at the heart of it, that much he knew, but it made the matter no clearer. He had taken many mates in his adult life and he had parted from each one when the time came without hesitation, just as they had done. The most emotion he had ever felt on leaving was a rueful wish for more time, spiced with good mating memories. This was not the same.

Tagen came slowly to the unpleasant realization that he didn’t want to leave Daria. It was even more than that; a part of him wanted very much to stay with her.

Impossible. He could never be safe on Earth. The tee-vee, and Daria herself, had made it clear that she could not protect him, and he did not doubt that if the fact of his arrival on this world were ever exposed, it would go very badly not only for him, but for her as well. It had been no less a thing than divinely-ordained chance that he had not been discovered already. He could not stay. Not one day longer than absolutely necessary. If the capture of E’Var were not so dreadfully important, he would have left already.

All of this was true and the truth was ugly. He couldn’t look at her now with these thoughts churning in his brain. There was no part of her he would not miss—the soft fall of her hair, her bi-colored eyes, the exotic lines and curves of her body, her voice and the amazing wisdoms it spoke so handily. Even her fat, smug cat. Life apart from that…felt hollow.

He didn’t know how many of these thoughts were shared by his human, but she was too quiet not to be aware of any of them. The quiet they made between them was suffocating, but for his life, he couldn’t think of a thing to say to break it. Not in N’Glish, not even in Jotan. After all the times he had seen humans in the tee-vee programs fumble over words at moments like this for comic effect, here he sat and it was not in the least funny.

He had to say something. It was too hot to simply sit here and wait for the moment to pass. With the groundcar’s engines stilled, its climate controls could not function. He could feel the slow itch of Heat creeping up at him from deep in his core. He said, “Perhaps—”

“Yes?” She still did not look at him, but from the sides of his eyes, he saw her hands tighten on the guidance wheel of the groundcar.

“Perhaps we should rest here.” He shifted uncomfortably, feeling the metal walls around him creep closer. “You are weary. Grendel is restless.”

Neither of them looked at the sleeping cat draped across his lap.

“Wouldn’t you rather keep checking motels?”

“I see no need to visit them to do so.” He motioned at the printed list vaguely. “You will show me how to work the telephone. I will make the necessary calls while you sleep.”

“You can’t read.”

“I can recognize identical symbols when I see them,” he replied. “If you do not trust me to do that much, you can make the calls yourself when you waken, but I think you would be better for some sleep.”

“Suit yourself.” She opened her door, admitting a breeze only marginally cooler than the stuffy air inside the parked groundcar. There she paused, staring intently at her knees. “Tagen?”

He steeled himself. “Yes?”

She said nothing for several breaths. Finally, she expelled an unhappy sigh and let her tense shoulders fall. “We’ll have to sneak Grendel in. No pets allowed.”

“I understand.”

She left him and walked back across the parking bay to the office. Tagen watched her go, wishing he knew of some way to sort out what he was feeling.

“Grendel,” he said suddenly. He didn’t look down, but heard the sleepy miack of the animal’s attention. “I despise this world and all it has done to me on this mission, but I can never regret that it brought me to you.”

The orange head of the cat butted against his hand, emitting rumbles of flattered satisfaction. Tagen began to pet it, his eyes still fixed on the door through which Daria had gone. “I do care for you,” he said awkwardly. “And for every part of you.”

Grendel rolled onto its back to offer the part of its underbelly for an expression of Tagen’s care. Tagen rubbed through the soft fur distractedly.

“I am leaving you,” he said. His voice kept dropping in volume, but still seemed harsh and overloud to his ears, despite the muffling presence of the cat’s purrs. “And I grieve for that. But I cannot stay. I could never stay.”

Grendel, clearly, was fine with this decision and Tagen abandoned further words. He felt foolish. What use was there in agonizing over such a speech? Just for a moment, he visualized saying such a thing to his last sexual partner, there just as his tour had ended. He could picture in exquisite detail her embarrassment as she withstood his clumsy words. No, her means of departure had been far easier on both of them: ‘When my number comes up, expect me to call on you.’ Quick, calm, friendly, and flattering.

What would be the human equivalent? ‘It’s been fun. If I could ever come back to visit you, I would.’ He could visualize her reaction, too. Gods, it would be like slapping her across the face.

Daria was coming back, yawning against her hand as she walked. The sight of her was a hurting thing. He saw her, but felt her absence, and it made the life awaiting him once he’d returned to Jota seem colorless and even emptier.

He kept these bleak thoughts to himself as Daria got back behind the console and activated the engines. She pulled them just a few walking steps over and parked alongside a wing of doors. The boarding rooms for the wayside hostel, each one numbered. He could easily imagine it at night, the road empty, the air still, and Kanetus E’Var going one to the other with a chemist’s harvester in his bloodied hand. And that, he told himself sternly, was why he was really here. Never forget that.

He obeyed without comment Daria’s instructions to hide Grendel in his jacket as they entered their room, even though it would be apparent to any on-looker that he was a man hiding a large, moving object in his jacket, and Daria was carrying the animal’s scratch-sand in plain sight. But never mind. The ways of humans were many and beyond explanation. It was more important now to soothe his human’s mind than to stir her up with contradictory observations.

The room assigned to them was emotionless, musty, and overwarm, like virtually every hostelry chamber in all the universe. Even the artwork framed on the wall was eerily similar to those in rooms Tagen had been assigned in the past. Fortunately, the room had climate controls much like the groundcar’s; within minutes after Daria activated them, the waking itch of Heat dissipated and that, at least, was something.