Read Odd Girl Out for Free Online

too annoyed. It had been almost a month ago that the Modhri had dangled all that coral temptingly in front of us on the train ride between Ghonsilya and Bildim in the Tra’hok Unity. The choice had been clear: follow the crates and see where he was moving it, or stay with the mission we were already on.
    We’d stayed with the mission, and it was probably just as well that we had. Still, I’d hoped we might get to have it both ways. “It was still worth a try,” I said, keying the reader. The decryption program had done its magic, and there was Lorelei’s Quadrail itinerary.
    Some itinerary. Twenty days ago the woman had left New Tigris Station and headed to Earth. Adding in the torchliner trip, it looked like she’d gotten to my apartment only a couple of days before I had.
    And that was it. There was no record of her arrival into the New Tigris system, or of her departure from anywhere else in the galaxy. The woman might have been born on New Tigris for all the travel data the Spiders had been able to dig up.
    “What is that?” Bayta asked.
    “Apparently, a huge waste of Spider time,” I said, handing the reader to her. “You ever hear of this woman?”
    “Lorelei Beach,” Bayta murmured as she glanced over the report. “I don’t think so. Should I have?”
    McMicking’s suggestion that Lorelei might have been another Spider agent flashed to mind. “Just thought you might have met her somewhere,” I said. “She was killed in New York a little over a week ago.”
    “Was she a friend of yours?”
    I shook my head. “I met her for the first time a few hours before she died. She was shot with one of my guns, by the way.”
    Bayta’s eyes were steady on me. “I think you’d better start at the beginning.”
    I laid it all out for her, starting with the gun in my face and pausing only when the waiter brought over our lemonade and iced tea. Bayta listened in silence the whole time, not interrupting even once with a question or comment. Her knack for keeping quiet at the right time was one of her most endearing talents.
    “So what are we going to do?” she asked when I had finished.
    “Well, I’m going to go hunt up this sister of hers,” I said. “Not sure what you’re going to do.”
    “You don’t want me with you?”
    Her face was expressionless, the words nearly so. But just the same the hurt behind her eyes managed to make it out into the open. Another of her many talents. “Don’t get me wrong,” I assured her hastily. “Under normal circumstances I’d love to have you along. But this is likely to be dangerous.”
    She smiled wanly. “Like everything else we’ve done together hasn’t been?”
    “Point,” I conceded. “But there’s a particular edge of nasti-ness to this one. You didn’t see what they did to Lorelei. I did.”
    “I thought you’d decided the Modhri did that to cover the fact that he needed to destroy the walker’s polyp colony,” she reminded me.
    “That’s one possibility,” I said. “Problem is, he’s never done anything like that before with any of the other walkers he’s had to sacrifice for one reason or another. At least, not with anyone he’s sacrificed in our presence. It seems out of character for him, and it’s definitely a change of pattern. Either of those alone would be enough to worry me. Both of them together get my shivers up.”
    “What do you think it means?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve had a few days to think, and a couple of possibilities have occurred to me.”
    I drank down half my iced tea in a single swallow. Talking about death and mutilation always made my throat dry. “One: the whole thing could have been staged for my benefit. A ploy to get my attention, but good, and make me curious enough to keep digging.”
    “Why?”
    “I won’t know that until I find something,” I said. “Scenario two: framing me for a gruesome double murder was intended to put me out of circulation long enough for the Modhri to