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Except it was not a boy. It was Irene—who was not gold-haired any longer. Irene had not very much hair at all, and what she had was stained dark, still looking damp, and plastered very close to her head. The clothes were the coat and trousers and boots she had worn when she boarded the shuttle.

“Reni-ji,” he said, and stood up.

Irene drew in a deep breath, then flicked a glance at mani and bowed very, very properly before she said anything.

Then it was: “Nandi. Nand' dowager.”

“What is this?” mani asked sharply. “Paidhi, what has happened?”

“Braddock,” nand' Bren said, “has taken up residence in Irene-nadi's apartment, aiji-ma, with her mother. Irene-nadi disguised herself and slipped out during twilight. She approached the ship-folk guards, speaking only Ragi. They suspected she was not atevi, surely, but they had no way to solve the puzzle she posed, so they brought her through and called Jase-aiji, who told nand' Geigi. She has no knowledge where Gene and Artur may be. She says the third boy, Bjorn, was at his lessons when the doors shut and he has not come home.”

“Clever girl,” mani said. “Clever. Come here, child.”

“Nand' dowager,” Irene said very faintly, and came closer—scared, Cajeiri could see it. But proper. Proper, with everything she had learned in Lord Tatiseigi's house.

“Excellently done,” mani said, looking her up and down. “What shall we do for you, child?”

“Find Gene and Artur and Bjorn, nand' dowager.
Please
.”

Mani heard that, and took on that look that said she was truly calculating now, not just politicking, and Cajeiri took in his breath, prepared to go take hold of Irene's arm if he must, to moderate whatever she did when mani spoke.

“The tunnels the youngsters have used are locked, aiji-ma,” nand' Bren said. “The boys may be together in the locked sections, or not. Bjorn's father came to Irene's apartment to ask whether Irene knew where he was, but Irene was not permitted to answer.”

Irene nodded. “Yes.”

“We have the ship-folk for allies,” mani said. “We hear the stationmaster will be Gin-nandi.”

“Yes,” nand' Bren said, “she is, aiji-ma. Gin-nandi has already taken over.”

“Then arrest Braddock,” mani said with a flick of her hand.

Everybody took in breath. Except mani. Except Irene, who stood there expecting just that. And there was Cenedi, who, right along with nand' Bren's aishid, would arrest Braddock this instant if they had Braddock near at hand.

“This man has been a nuisance long enough,” mani said. “Now we know where he is. And is not this station, like the ship, penetrated with service passages which you say are locked. Surely we can unlock them.”

Bren-nandi and Jase-aiji were not immediately against it, Cajeiri saw it in their faces. But there was sober consideration there, too.

“If it is an atevi operation with Gin-nandi's consent,” Jase said, “my governing consideration is not leaving hostages, or having damage. I may not have heard about this in any timely way to prevent the move. Once it begins, I shall back the ship's allies.”

Sometimes Jase-aiji's Ragi was a little confusing. But not this time, Cajeiri thought. He understood perfectly that Jase was standing back and saying mani and Gin-nandi could do what they liked. Cajeiri had his hands clenched behind him, trying to restrain himself from saying anything that would set things wrong. But:

“I have maps,” he said.

“You,”
mani said immediately, “are
not
going.”

He understood that. He longed to go. He desperately longed to do something. But he understood. If they were concerned about Gene and Artur and Bjorn being hostages, they would certainly not want
him
in Braddock's reach, in any sense. And he could not impress them by saying otherwise.

“Yes,” he said, “but I have the maps, mani. All the places. All the routes. Irene-nadi helped me draw them.”

“Nand' Bren has my map, too,” Irene said. “With
my
section. Where my mother's apartment is.”

 • • • 

The notebook was indeed in code. A fairly effective code, at least to Bren's eyes, as they clustered around the dowager's dining table.

“Freight tunnel. F24-01,” Cajeiri said. “Is that not how Bjorn would go, Reni-ji?”

“Yes,” Irene said. Proprieties or not, they had hot tea and cakes at the formal dining table, which had become the center of business, with Cajeiri's notebook and Irene's folded notes spread out. Lord Geigi sat consulting a handheld device with a station schematic, which provided the precise location and address, given the children's notes. Bren translated, where vocabulary met gaps, in either direction. Jase simply observed, officially not seeing a thing.

“If he was trying to get home from his lessons,” Irene said in ship-speak, which they had insisted was the best for the purpose,
F24-09
is where we all would meet. And M298 is how you get between 23 and 24.”

“M298,” Geigi said in Ragi, “is an old and generally unused maintenance tunnel from the original station construction. Even a tall human must guard his head in such places. They are rarely inspected.”

“But they retain pressure,” Tano said.

“Yes,” Geigi said. “When the doors shut, likewise the section's tunnels are locked and sealed. Heat and pressure continue, as with the rest of the section: they fare as it does.”

“And, Reni-nadi,” Cenedi said.
“Your
apartment.”

The dowager had retired to her office, having made her demands. Guild—his aishid, the dowager's, Geigi's, and the Guild observers, as well as Cajeiri and Irene—clustered about the dining table which the dowager had not hesitated to provide. They took notes from Geigi's diagrams and from Cajeiri's notebook and Irene's . . . quickly so, in the theory, as Banichi put it, that they had an unguessably short time before Braddock woke up, realized his first hostage had fled the apartment, and sent his people to look for Irene in the logical places—notably Artur's apartment and Gene's, over in 24, which was not sealed from 23. Braddock's people might have already taken Artur: they had not asked about him. They might have taken Bjorn. There was no knowing. Moving himself and his lieutenants closer to the section 23 door, only a hallway away from that vital checkpoint, Braddock had put himself in a prime position to assemble a mob, make his demands by way of the ship-folk guards at the doors, who had communication with exactly the people Braddock would want to reach, and in the same move, he had
had
Irene under lock and key, secure, with no fuss—until Irene had stolen the key and finessed her way into ship-folk hands.

“This is the master key, the one that can override everything in the apartment.” Irene had reached in her pocket and laid the red card on the table. “My mother's. I was very quiet leaving. The main door makes very little noise. I locked it when I left. But they have to call Central to open it, without the master key. And the com is out.”

Irene, in her element, had unsuspected qualities, Bren thought. Where had she kept the clothes? Behind her nightgown, deep in the closet. The stolen makeup and the scissors? Under her mattress. The boots—hardly the sort of item to conceal under a mattress? “I wore those. I liked them.”

Had she planned it? Likely she'd started thinking about escape when the doors closed, when Bjorn's father came, when she'd found reason to worry about the others.

And when word had gotten out that the shuttle had arrived, when she hoped she'd have high-level help if she could get out, she'd disguised herself, working fast, opened the apartment door and locked it.

And if they were extremely lucky, Braddock might still be asleep, oblivious to the fact his prime hostage had escaped.

They had Irene's address, in A-level, very near the section 24 doors. And they also had the mother's master key.

That key, that unlikely square of plastic that locked and unlocked everything in that apartment, was an inspiration.

“Geigi-ji,” Bren said, “we do not really
need
this key to get in, do we?”

“No,” Geigi said. “Not while we maintain control of Central.” Geigi's face, ordinarily genial, was very different in this deliberation. “More, nandi, what is not generally known, Central can lock or unlock
all
apartments in a section at once, and set the code so that this key will not work.”

“All locks?” Bren asked.

“All locks of a given category in a given section can be unlocked or locked—or have their codes changed—from our boards.”

“Could Mospheiran Central do this?”

“That is a question,” Geigi said. “Within a single section, a single category, such as section 23 residency, all lock codes
could
all be set to zero one, which no extant keycard can then open. Once all set to zero one, the entire category can be completely recoded. It was a setup procedure, not used since, that we can tell. Currently if a person
is
accidentally locked in or out, procedure is that the resident calls Central, produces the correct account number, which is read through the lock, and the command is sent to that lock. But that is the only part of the recovery procedure that is currently in operation. We found the category reset feature years ago, during setup on the station. We were never sure Mospheirans knew it, but we did not find it useful to mention when they wrote the modern manuals. So when it came recently to the issuance of keycards to the Reunioners, we let our human counterparts handle that operation, and watched with curiosity what they
would
do, with such a large number to process. They worked quite hard at it, card by card, with long lines and some altercation. So we believe we know something they do not.”

No, Lord Geigi, discovering such a drastic capability under his hands, would certainly
not
hasten to advise the Mospheirans. Trust had not run that deep.

“How long would it take?” Cenedi asked.

“The set to zero one is instant,” Geigi said with a shrug. “The reset goes at a computer's speed. One believes we can set to zero one and then back out of the situation, restoring the old codes from the backup files just as quickly. If that fails—” Geigi shrugged. “We can equally well unlock all those doors at once. But that would be a reluctant choice.”

“Is not communication shut down,” Ruheso asked, the senior Observer, “so these people cannot call for help?”

“Tillington mandated a communications shutdown in all the Reunioner sections, excepting only official announcements. We can likewise restore that service at any time, and if the backup fails, it would seem to be a good time, indeed. Tillington's act also shut down
relays
we might wish to use, and shut down worker communication inside the tunnels. If we restore one—we restore all. But I believe the Guild can actually manage without those, until we choose to restore communication with the residents.”

“We
can,” Geigi's Guild-senior said. And Hanidi, of the Observers, likewise nodded.

The Guild could indeed manage a detail like their own communications. That went with them, one of those details on which the Guild generally didn't comment.

“A Guild operation entirely,” Bren said, “would be my choice.”

It
was
a political question—
which
security organization would go in after Braddock. Mospheiran security nominally had sole control of the Reunioner sections, but Gin was still en route, and even if she could trust officers whose most recent commander was under house arrest, they were not the ones to go into Reunioner territory to arrest Braddock, not with the political situation Tillington and Braddock had set up.

The Captains were maintaining order by holding the sections shut and guarded, and by seeing to supply through the distribution centers. They had access. Armored personnel could easily walk into that hall, as physically close to the doors as that apartment was, and retrieve Braddock with no harm to themselves.

But using armor units posed a political problem of its own. Jase was the captain on duty for now, but very soon fourth-senior Riggins would take over. “Promise me asylum,” Jase said, not entirely facetiously. “Four units, battle armor, kitting up for shift-change right now, and walking right through that section door if you want them. Short and sharp and done.”

“No,” Bren said, “we need you politically safe.” He changed to Ragi, which everybody present understood. “Fault me where I am wrong, nadiin. First step is to disable all Reunioner residence keys in 23 so we do not have a crowd running the halls in panic. We access the two apartments in question. We arrest Braddock and his lieutenants, who will be locked in, and extract Irene's mother. Simultaneously, we search the tunnel Bjorn Andresson and the other two boys might have used and bring them out if we can find them, while the first team questions Braddock and his lieutenants about the boys. Second step, with or without success in the tunnels or with Braddock, is three teams entering the boys' separate residences by the nearest service passages and extracting anybody we find there to a safe location. At that point, barring further information, we restore public address in the Reunioner sections, ask them to protect the boys wherever they are, advise the other commands what we've just done, and, we hope, reset their locks to work. One cannot believe Ogun-aiji will be that unhappy to learn Braddock is in custody. We hope not to disturb 23 and 24 too much in the operation. Section 26 need not be inconvenienced in all this, but if they must be, nandi Geigi, do as you must, whatever you think prudent to stop a crowd forming.”

“You need me to translate,” Jase said in Ragi. “I am already in this. My bodyguard will get no blame for following my orders. And their suit systems can communicate with others, if they have to. One asks we operate as much within my watch as we can . . . and my time is running out.”