Carnival

Walter whisked his muzzle across the deck and picked his way down the stairs, pausing at the bottom to sniff again before angling left, toward the bigger thoroughfare, threading between merrymakers at a rate that had Lesa hustling to keep up. She trotted, too, keeping the leash slack, though Walter occasionally turned to glare. “I’m running as fast as I can!”

He didn’t seem to believe her, but he was too well trained to lunge at the lead, even when irritated by streets clotted by buskers and food vendors. It had been Lesa’s idea to train the household khir as messengers, when she was Katya’s age, an idea that had turned out well. So well that other households had copied the trick once they found out how adept the khir were at memorizing routes.

The pace he set was better than a jog. Her honor jarred on her thigh with every footstep; her hair disarrayed and stuck to her forehead with sweat. She clucked to Walter, slowing him as they threaded between people so they wouldn’t accidentally trample other pedestrians and spark a duel, or overrun Katya and have rather a lot of explaining to do.

That Katya had gone on foot heightened Lesa’s suspicions. If she’d called a car—either public transport or Pretoria house’s communal one—her destination would have become a matter of record. Walking for exercise was one thing, but it was early for parties, even in Carnival, and if Katya weregoing to parties, she wouldn’t want to arrive sweat-saturated and stinking.

Lesa had always encouraged Robert to know her children, to develop relationships with them, far beyond the customary. He had, and both Robert and the children had seemed to enjoy it.

And now Katya was making Lesa pay for it.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

After their dead-end conversation with Kii, Vincent had happened to be watching when Lesa appeared in the courtyard, whistled for her pet, and snapped a leash onto his collar. “Angelo,” he’d said, without turning, “follow her.”

Which was how Kusanagi-Jones came to be slipping through the steadily increasing press of cheering, staggering, singing men and women behind Lesa and her animal like the sting on an adder’s tail, following the rest of what he took to be a long and somewhat complicated snake. Vincent remained at Pretoria house, nursing his sunburn and wrenched knee and covering Kusanagi-Jones’s tracks, but the drop from their balcony was only four meters and Kusanagi-Jones could have done it without tools, stark naked and on a sprained ankle.

Fully equipped, he could almost take it as an insult how easy escape had been.

Robert’s decampment was more interesting, and Kusanagi-Jones was still trying to comprehend it. Based on his imperfect understanding of the layout of Pretoria house, the men’s quarters were isolated well up the tower and guarded. It was a descent that could not be made inobviously on ropes, especially in the middle of a festival, and if the guard had not been overpowered, the obvious solution was that somebody inside the house had assisted Robert in getting out.

Kusanagi-Jones wasn’t surprised to discover that Vincent wasn’t sanguine as to Lesa’s involvement. Robert certainly wasn’t the only double in Pretoria house, and neither Vincent nor Kusanagi-Jones wanted to trust Lesa more than necessary.

Which was somewhat ridiculous, given how much Kusanagi-Jones was trusting Vincent. But at this point, if he wasn’t going to choose to trust Vincent he might as well go home, hand in his commission, and wait to be surplused. For the first time in his life, political and personal ideals were aligning, and if that wasn’t worth dying for, he was in the wrong line of work.

And so as they left the side street graced by Pretoria house, he dropped the camouflage function on his wardrobe as he stepped into a shadow, and stepped out again dressed to blend with the Carnival crowd. His wardrobe had no license of a mask, but it could provide something that would pass for a street license, barring inspection—and, it being Carnival, there were a lot of men on the thoroughfares. Though Kusanagi-Jones didn’t think he’d have cared to try it any other time of year.

The moderately illegal modifications to the cosmetics subroutine he carried—under Cabinet seal, as patching a wardrobe was beyond even Vincent’s skills—made it easy to change his skin tone and alter his facial features. Programs for haircut, color, style, length, and texture came standard.

He couldn’t do much about his height—beyond heeled shoes—or his build, and those were distinctive enough to cause him worry. Fortunately, Lesa Pretoria was either stringing along any potential tail, or she just wasn’t very good at spotting one. She knew what she was supposed to do—the techniques were there—but the application was crude. And even had she been more accomplished, she was hampered by the animal that accompanied her. An animal that was going somewhere.