Carnival

Lifting her head, blinking sweat from her lashes, she studied the vines on her right side, looking for a place with fewer thorns. The motion made her light-headed, the jungle a green whirl around her as she tilted her head back. But it would go faster now. She had a hand free, through careful work and resolute refusal to panic, and there was a spot about a half-meter to the right and slightly over her head where the thorns might be thin enough that she’d only shred her hand grabbing onto the vine, rather than crippling it.

It beat dying here.

She reached out and took hold, gritting her teeth against the pain as she forced herself to close her hand.

Some of the thorns broke, while others cut deep, but she held on. Held on, and tensed the shoulder, and flexed the biceps, and pulled. She felt the tendons in her forearm take the strain, the searing heat flash up her neck, blinding white static, and a concomitant lessening of pain as her weight came off the thorns.

This might just work.

When Vincent had asked to talk to Katya, he hadn’t expected Elena to consent. They both knew talkwas a euphemism. But she showed him into the room and left him there, and almost two days later, there he still sat, across a low table from Katya, his bare heels resting on the strictly decorative rungs of a stool that was an outgrowth of House rather than a piece of individual furniture. He was already growing accustomed to single-purpose objects, wasteful as they were. The little cultural differences could seem absolutely homey, compared to the big ones.

Katya stared sullenly, her hands folded in her lap as if to hide the manacles linking her wrists. She wouldn’t shift her gaze from his chin, which was meant to be disconcerting.

Vincent wouldn’t permit it to succeed.

She was good. Very practiced, very serene, offering open, neutral body language nearly as controlled as Michelangelo’s despite exhaustion that had her swaying in her chair. Many years of practice in lying to her mother had given her that edge.

But Vincent wasn’t Lesa, and he didn’t have a mother’s blindness, her self-deception.

Katya Pretoria had no power over him.

They had been sitting here, with brief intermissions, for sixty-one hours, most of two New Amazonian days. Katya had been sitting longer than Vincent, because Agnes took over when Vincent left the room, and Katya…didn’t leave the room.

Agnes, Katya would plead with. Vincent didn’t envy the older woman that.

Vincent could have taken longer breaks, but he contented himself with catnaps barely longer than microsleeps, because they were in this together. She needed never to realize he had been gone long enough to rest…and when she broke, he needed to be there. He needed to be making a difference, doing something, anything. Even if it was wrong.

And besides, he had something neither Katya nor Agnes had. He had chemistry, and his superperceiver’s skills.

He hadn’t seen Elena Pretoria since the interrogation started, and he didn’t blame her. He didn’t have a granddaughter, but if he did, he didn’t think he’d care to watch her browbeaten, cajoled, misled, manipulated, and entrapped by the likes of Vincent Katherinessen.

Especially if his child’s life hung in the balance.

He could only hope that wherever she was, Elena was putting as much effort into locating Saide Austin’s illegal genetic engineering lab as Vincent was into prying any potentially useful information out of Katya. And having better success.

He thought she might be weakening, though. The pauses were growing longer, the disconnects between her sentences had become disconnects between phrases, and she could no longer maintain the thread of a lie—or even a narrative. Her wobble on the stool had become a sway.

She would break. All he needed was time. And to put away the sinking, invalid knowledge that Michelangelo could already be dead. Thatwas unbearable, the idea that something could have happened, and Vincent would not know. He wanted to believe there was some connection, that somehow he’d understand if anything happened. It was self-delusion. Magical thinking.

Even breaking her wasn’t without risks. After a certain point, she’d tell him anything just to get him to leave her alone. If she lied, he was counting on his ability to catch it. Almost as much as he was counting on her actually possessing the information he needed, which might be a little more problematic. But he’d deal with that crisis when he got there.

“Katya,” he said as he hopped off his stool and came around the table to stand beside her, “if you tell me where they took your mother, I can let you sleep. I can get you something to drink and put you in your own bed. Wouldn’t that be nice?”