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still?”
    “Books and inscriptions. We’ve never found anything to help
us translate them.”
    “I’d like to see them,” he said.
    “Even if you can’t read them?”
    He shrugged. “I’m curious. That’s all.”
    Aisha eyed him sideways. She could tell when a person wasn’t
telling the whole truth. She could also tell when he wasn’t going to answer any
more questions. “They’re in the vault with the rest of the really valuable
finds. I don’t have access to that.”
    “Someday you will.”
    “Yes,” she said. Refusing to think about what might happen
if the expedition ended next season. “Years from now. After I’ve grown up and
gone to university and got all my degrees. Then I’ll get a key.”
    “When you’re terribly old,” he said.
    He was teasing her. He must have got over whatever shocked
the breath out of him. “Yes,” she said with a hint of a snap. “When I’m almost
as old as you.”
    That shut him up. A little too completely, maybe, but she
refused to feel guilty. It served him right for treating her like a child.

6
    Khalida knew about the Brats’ excursion. She also knew who
had gone with them. If she wanted to think like MI, she could wind herself into
a glorious fit of paranoia.
    The person they all called Rama was not about to kidnap the
offspring of the Doctors Nasir and Kanakarides. Whatever he was here for, she was
sure it had nothing to do with the Brats.
    He liked them. It was as simple as that. They kept him out
of mischief. As for what he did for them—she had seen the way he moved.
Somewhere, whether he remembered it or not, he had been trained to fight. The
Brats could do worse than attach themselves to a bodyguard.
    They came back windblown and loaded down with fish, which by
house rules they had to clean and cook. Rama, too. He was better at it than
they were.
    Khalida happened to notice how quiet he was in all the
bubble and babble. She also noticed when she went through the kitchen that he
had the boning knife in his right hand, and it worked as well as the left.
Whatever had been wrong with it when he first came, he seemed to have got over
it.
    It was one more odd thing about him, of more than she had
the patience to count. She recorded it, tagged it, and passed on by.
    There was still no response to her inquiries. Searches had
turned up nothing. As far as she or Vikram could determine, the man did not
exist.
    The latest results were waiting when she came up from dinner,
with Vikram’s tag on them: Spaceforce
Intel. Can’t get any deeper without setting off alarms.
    She had already tried and failed to convince him that they
could hack into Psycorps. That was insane, he said. Which it was, but Khalida
was reaching the point of not caring.
    Here was the best Spaceforce could come up with: a deep gene
scan that made no sense at all. He was, according to the scan, distantly but
definitely related to Khalida. He had also, the scan declared, originated on
Nevermore.
    She had committed the most basic of all errors: she had
contaminated the samples. She moved to delete the message, but paused. As
humiliations went, it was minor, and it was a useful reminder. There was no
excuse for sloppiness, no matter how distracted she was.
    There was a second message attached to the first. That was
even more ridiculous. Physiological age, thirty
to forty-five years. Chronological age—
    “Six thousand years?” Khalida dropped onto her bed and let
out a small, cathartic howl. “Now that’s not my mistake. They should know
better than to test the artifacts instead of the man.”
    She kept that, too. The rest was less egregiously wrong but
equally useless. He was not, Spaceforce Medical opined, modified. This was his
original form, as indicated by the genetics.
    Vikram had been right, then. Gengineered. The scan was not
set up to speculate as to where or how.
    Khalida shut off the feed and pressed her hands to her eyes.
“A mystery on top of an enigma,” she said. “He