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Everyone froze as a life-size hologram of a Frairy appeared in the space between Mathet and the rest of us. It wore a baseball cap, a lime-color lace turtleneck, white foustanella, and beaded sandals.
"What?" Mathet snarled.
"Sheesh! Who pissed in your water bowl?" Duff asked.
"We have no time for this." The captain cast a glare at one of the techs behind him. She poised a hand over the board in front of her.
"Make time!" The Frairy barked, his tone marking the two of them as equals. "This is critical."
Scowling, Mathet lifted his hand to stay the tech's action. "What is it?"
"We need Zant."
"No." The hand started to drop in a gesture for the tech to cut contact.
"Shit! You haven't killed her yet have you?"
"Doesn't matter." The hand stopped, poised. Ears twitched impatiently.
"We have a big problem. We need her."
"Why?"
"Because we can't see the kid."
Mathet's raised arm drifted downward. "What are you talking about? The Cheel sees where it is."
"It does. It sees her. But no one else can. We even had a team with hands on. By the time backup arrived to assist them, they were standing around, looking confused, and couldn't remember why they were there. She wiped their memories."
My mouth dropped open while ears around me slanted forward and out in disbelief.
The Frairy's 3-D image twisted to look at me. "Oh, hey, Flygirl. Glad you're still alive." He turned back to Mathet. "We need her. She may be the only one who can help us bring in this kid. "
"Explain," Mathet snapped at the Frairy.
"Coming through."
"No—"
Before Mathet finished his refusal, Duff materialized in place.
"No," the captain repeated, this time directing the word over his shoulder at two of the techs as they surged toward the Frairy, weapons in hand.
Duff shoved a small mechanism into a baggy pocket and looked around the room again. "You all look appropriately on edge. Good. We need that."
"Are they allowed to do that?" I asked Meeroush, my stunned brain trying to sort out what was happening.
Instead of answering my question, Meeroush snapped a narrow band around my right wrist and another onto his. A wireless handcuff. I wasn't going anywhere without him now.
"Well played." The Frairy nodded at him. "It doesn't solve the problem, though."
"Explain," Mathet demanded again.
"The Speakers constantly monitored the kid in the Cheel's Eye, as we agreed. For a day, she drifted aimlessly. Yesterday something changed. She started moving straight across the city, toward the Zones. She even took some public transport. Now she's on the outer perimeter of the Compound. If she goes in, the Cheel loses eyes on. A short time ago, we decided to pull her in before that happened.
"It should have been easy. We were monitoring the whole thing through the Cheel's Eye and talking to our people on the ground. But, when the recovery team moved in to retrieve her, they didn't see a darned thing. Nothing! The Speakers had to give them instructions on how to get their hands on her. She fought them, but things were going okay; we had her. Then all of a sudden, they straightened, dropping their hands, and she took off. We watched it happen! By the time a backup team arrived, the others were wandering around, wondering why they were there. They didn't remember anything about the encounter! Meanwhile, courtesy of the Cheel, we watched her running away!"
"Mindwipe? That's not possible," I said.
Duff looked at me. "Invisible and mindwipe. Should be impossible. Apparently isn't. We have footage." He lifted his hands to expand a personal screen in the air for the rest of us.
A dimly lit area next to the wall of a building bloomed. The kid sat on a stoop peeling a piece of fruit.
But if she was invisible... "How are we seeing this?" I asked.
"The Cheel presence," Duff said without looking away from the image.
I remembered the questions I put to Piika after her declaration that the Cheel was one yet many parts. She said the parts all saw as one. The true impact of her answer sent a jolt of shock through my brain now. Every little blade I had walked past had been seeing me.
I had not appreciated what an amazing aid the plant was until now. The realization forced me to view Duff in a new and different light. Official or unofficial? Covert ops or organized crime? He was something far more than a security-minded citizen.
Mathet's order for his techs to notify the others of the Tabi situation suddenly seemed a bit strange. What the heck were these people up to?
The kid on the viewer looked up, an expression of concern passing over her angelic features as several Frairies moved into view. They walked cautiously, arms out, as if they were herding fish.
Trying to catch something they couldn't see.
She scrambled to her feet, fear touching her face. I had seen that before, out at Idwal. It stung me.
She took a step toward the wall on her left, and the Frairy on that side lurched toward it, too. The others shuffled forward to close off her escape from the other direction.
The kid frowned, perplexed, as if this was the first time she had encountered this problem. She made a swiping motion with her right hand.
The Frairies on that side did not react to the movement.
Smart kid. She was figuring it out from their lumbering approach. She knew they weren't seeing her, even if she didn't understand how they were aware of her presence.
My mind flashed back to the Cheel pool and the Frairy boy—at my outrage when he leaned carelessly against the wall, nearly pinning her leg. He hadn't even known she was there!
As I watched the Frairy team sidle forward, trying to corral the kid, it hit me: the Cheel had not realized there was a problem with the kid up to this point, either. Since its many eyes viewed her, it had not imagined other beings on its world could not.
Two of the Frairy team got their hands on her. My heart twisted with pain at the terror on her little face as she fought to free herself. Other Frairies reached in, snatching at her.
Then her expression went hard. Startlingly, coldly hard.
The five Frairies suddenly straightened. They dropped their hands away from her and looked around in confusion. She dived between the closest would-be captor and the wall and ran. The image shifted, blurred. Her feet running on pavement edged with green clumps of plants flickered in and out of our vision.
The image on Duff's screen returned to focus on the Frairies as another team moved in to help them.
I exhaled a long, silent breath.
"They don't remember any of that. Crazy, hunh?" Duff glanced at me. He didn't sound amused. He looked back at Mathet. "So we thought maybe we should dig a little deeper. Find out what the people who brought her here had on her. The way maybe someone else should have done."
Mathet's lips drew back to expose long incisors. "The Ritto-ssa gave us the location of our missing navigator. They did mention any Human child."
"Yeah? Well, guess what? The Ritto-ssa didn't have a clue what we were talking about, either. No report of a kid rescued from space outside Idwal Station. We persisted, so they checked with their fleet office. Turns out the ship had all kinds of skewed numbers on their life support records. Not a lot, but a little beyond the expected usage of air, water, and food consumption after they added in Zant and the SAC. They went back and drew security footage from the ship's files. Wanna see what they found?"
See what the Rittos had from my time on their ship? Hell yes! I bit back my response.
Mathet was slower to respond. His eyes moved from Saurubi to me before he nodded. Duff pulled a narrow metallic strip from another pocket and held it out.
"Whose?" Mathet asked warily.
Duff cocked an impatient eyebrow. "Ritto. It's safe, but if it makes you feel better, run a check."
Shoff took the chip to a console where she and the tech conferred. The tech ran a handheld device over the chip.
"It reads clean, ser," Shoff said.
"We can view it on something external to our system." The tech held up a small, slotted device.
"Shoff." The Captain gestured to the console beside him.
She set the device on the indicated spot, slid in the strip, and passed her hand over it. A screen blossomed in the air. It showed a view of two intersecting passageways typical of a large, foldspace ship.
"This is from a monitored junction outside the medical facility on the Baccquey, the Ritto-ssa ship that brought them in," Duff said.
"Vivi!" Saura exclaimed.
The Tabisee in the room shifted uneasily, their expressions concerned.
"What?" I exclaimed. "I didn't see anything!"
Shoff's ears slanted with impatience. "Humans. Your eyes are too slow." She made an adjustment to the viewer.
I gasped as a small figure, dressed in white, crept around the corner from a side passage. "That's her. That's the kid!"
The figure moved carefully, checking every direction before continuing forward out of monitor range. Shortly afterward, it passed back the way it had come. Time stamps on the footage showed the record had been edited to collapse the time gap as she—the tiny form had to be the kid—passed through the intersection several more times. After the fourth time, her caution disappeared and she walked boldly, as if no one would question her presence. Sure enough, in the last pass, she encountered a Ritto going the opposite direction. It ignored her.
"Wait!" I exclaimed. "The crewman didn't acknowledge her. Were they used to seeing her by then?"
"That crewman has no memory of the encounter," Duff said.
"She walked right past them!"
"No memory. You said the kid hung out in the medical bay with the Ritto-ssa med crew?"
"Yes. She put her hand on the cover and smiled at me while they monitored readouts on the critical recovery unit. They even moved her out of their way!"
"None of the crew remember seeing her."
"Is Ritto visual perception different than ours?" I asked cautiously. I didn't recall any special notes on it in basic species training.
"They have the same visual physiology as Humans, Frairies, or Tabisee. Maybe a faster eye-brain exchange rate than some." Shoff gave me a meaningful glare.
"She can alter memory and perception..." I stared at the video log, my mind wrestling with the obvious conclusion. "But not a recording device."
"She may not be aware the devices exist. Yet. When she does find out..." Duff shrugged.
"And the Cheel? Will she be able to blank it?"
"Too many eyes from too many places, we think. Plus, the eyes have no mental presence of their own. The big problem with the Cheel is that its sight does not extend inside the Trade Compound. She gets in there, we lose eyes. Literally."
What must the brain of the Cheel be like, to coordinate the billions of images it received from all over its world every second?
The image on Duff's device looped back and the kid walked past the Ritto crewmember again. "Where the hell is she from?" I said aloud.
Everyone except Saurubi glared at me.
"That is a matter of considerable concern to us all," Duff said.
"Look, I agree, there's the obvious possibility she's Human, but we are not telepathic. I swear! Has anyone ever heard of a species, anywhere, who can block and erase the memory of its existence from the minds of the beings around it?" Like the Cheel, it was an awesome concept. And an equally terrifying one. The implications—beyond us trying to find her—were troubling on a massive scale. "Can any telepathic species, including the MoMo, do that? Block perception or alter memory?"
"None," Duff said. "That we are aware of," he added.
Yeah, kind of like, how would you know?
"You Humans are always working to change everything you get your hands on!" Mathet snarled as Shoff shut down the viewer. "What have you done?"