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His hands slipped again.
    As she grabbed for him, he lost his grip. She caught one of his wrists — and the force of his falling yanked her off the wall. They dropped, dropped, dropped —
    And smashed into ground. Soz landed on top of him with an impact that nearly broke his ribs. She rolled off and kept rolling, scrabbling for a handhold. He clutched her upper arm, but it jerked through his grasp, then her elbow, her lower arm, her wrist — and he locked hands with her, clutching in desperation while they slid downhill. He struggled to stop their plunge, but his fingers just scraped over stone.
    Then he caught a jutting piece of rock and held on hard, his body straining with Soz's weight. A scratching came from below — and she let go of his hand.
    "Soz, no!" He grabbed at the air. "Soz!"
    "It's all right." Her strained voice came from below him. "You slowed me down enough so I could stop on a ledge. We're on a shelf in the cliff, under the Promenade."
    "How can you tell? It's dark." Even the starlight was muted below the bridge.
    "Got enhanced optics in my eyes," she said. He heard more scrabbling, and then she was pulling herself up beside him.
    So they went, climbing the cliff centimeter by excruciating centimeter. Soz reached the landing at the end of the Promenade and stood up, her body silhouetted against the stars. He climbed up next to her, half expecting the ground to crumble. But they were solidly on the mountain now, at the top of a staircase that wound its way through the mountains down to the plateau.
    They descended in silence. Gradually the wind eased, until it was no more than a whisper of its earlier violence.
    Finally Soz said, "Someone knew we were up there."
    "The drones." Jato wondered if Crankenshaft had set alarms in the city computer web to alert him when anyone looked at records of the trial. Whoever had set the Wind Lions against them would be desperate now, knowing they had to complete what they started lest Soz escape and report back to ISC.
    "I hadn't intended to get involved here," Soz said. "I was going to wait until I got back to headquarters to recommend they send an investigator."
    Investigator? Jato stiffened. If ISC got into this, he could be retried in an Imperial court. "Soz, why? I'm serving the sentence they gave me."
    She spoke quietly. "To find out why someone went to so much trouble to trump up that phony murder charge against you."
    That threw him. Really threw him. Crankenshaft had been meticulous in setting up the evidence, specifically to fool people like Soz.
    It was a moment before he found his voice. "How did you know it was false?"
    She snorted. "I saw the holos of that kid you supposedly killed. He was hanging around the port docks, watching a ship unload cargo."
    "'That kid' was a computer creation. He never existed."
    "I know."
    "But how?"
    She motioned toward the starport. "In several holos you can see the ship he's watching. It's a Tailor Scout, Class IV. Eight years ago those Tailors were using non-standard flood lamps to light their docking bays. Kaegul lamps. Advertised as 'the next best thing to sunlight.' They emitted ultraviolet light as well as visible."
    "Sounds reasonable."
    She shook her head. "Their UV component was too strong. It caused sunburns. So that model fell out of use fast. Only a few ships ever carried it."
    Jato whistled. "Dreamers have less melanin in their skin than most people. It makes them more susceptible to UV."
    Quietly she said, "Any Dreamer who spent as long under those Kaeguls as they claimed that boy did would have been broiled raw. Those records are beautiful, near perfect. Probably 99.9 percent of the people seeing them would have been fooled. But they're still fakes." Glancing at him, she added, "That's not all."
    "What else?"
    "Combat."
    "Combat?"
    "See enough of it and you get good at recognizing the symptoms of shock." She watched his face. "You. In every holo. You hardly said a word throughout that entire trial."
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