The result was a pinched finger and quiet, somewhat unladylike remark.

"See," she said to Kay without heat once she'd shaken her hand a few times, "this really isn't up to full spec."

Kay shook his head, reaching for an argument he hadn't fully thought out. They were in Jerel's workroom, and should've already left for Simka's Alley if they wanted to be in time to hear Norin and Feter's set.

"You can't believe everything you download off the graynet. What evidence do you have that--"

As usual, Jerel thought nothing of cutting her friend off in midsentence.

"The evidence I have is that I squished my fingers! This board's getting scratched and I'm getting slowed down. Costs me money, and it's dangerous, too!"

Kay was still formulating a reply as she opened the small tool case, removed the neomagnetic rotator, and applied it quickly to the three spots the overlay sheet indicated at the forward end of the printout.

A chirp sounded, and the slideboard clacked to the countertop like a piece of inert plastic.

"Jerel, you're gonna get yourself in trouble!"

"Huh!" was her reply, or maybe it was her reaction to the sharp click of the power module when she applied the rotator to three more spots and the module ejected itself energetically from the board.

Kay dragged one hand distractedly through his curly blond hair. "Jerel," he began again, having at last found the thread of his argument. . . .

"Anyhow, Kay, is the word out at school about Mileeda?" Jerel looked up from her work, peering directly into his eyes. He knew the ploy, and tried to soldier on with his point, despite the offered change of topic.

"You told me when you signed up with Capsule Courier that they have a no-modify clause in the contract for anyone who uses a leased board. You're still leasing yours, right? Else it'd be purple or flashing gold or anything but safety orange . . ."

"Piff," she said, which wasn't so much an answer as blowing her too-long bangs out of her eyes as she peered at the innards of the slideboard, now indecently on its back and open to view.

"Right," she said. "I told you that. But you know, some of the crew has got to be using mods or else they'd be running into the same problems Mileeda and I are. Did. Coming too close to the bottom pavers, scraping on random junk in alleyways, catching on rags and paper, for Thirster's sake."

She took a tool he didn't recognize from her kit and probed the interior of the board as she talked.

"But anyhow, see, I'm not going to mess with the speed bits, and that's what they can check real easy with the standard pre-trip dock, because that'll give them a much different ETA. I'm going for a slightly stronger compression and a little more height. That'll take me over the worst of the gravel on the route, maybe even all of it, and get me there within allowable time. Should work, I bet."

Kay sighed. Once she'd opened the thing his case was lost, anyway. He tried to recall the flow of the conversation, came up with a name mentioned twice.

"What about Mileeda, anyway? What word is there?"

She lifted an eyebrow, piffed again, looked down and plunged back into some adjustment he couldn't follow, talking into the slideboard.

"Mileeda didn't finish her last trip yesterday. Got one of the naugy pouch runs up toward Highsteel. 'Cept she didn't get there. Something weird happened."

She said something beneath her breath which might have been "thirst" or might have been "burst" or even . . .

"There!"

Kay lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

"What weird happened?" he insisted patiently.

Jerel laughed, oddly, alternately rubbing at the small marks on her wrists the way she did when she was thinking, or tense.

"I dunno. No one does. She just never finished the run is what's weird. And she never went home!"

Kay perked up, seeing a shot at some juicy gossip to feed his mother. The more he could keep her busy with what was actually going on around them, the less likely it was that she'd fall back into one of her rants about the purity of the Oligarchy, or his duty to learn the forms of the fifth hand flourish to a sitting Speaker . . .

"She didn't hijack the run?" He asked Jerel.

"Nah. Nothing so reasonable as that. She's just gone, poof! The street cops found her board--it was still humming, so they took it in to inspect--and they found her pouch. Clari said the pouch was just sitting on the board along one of the back alleys right near CapCour, like she'd stepped off to stretch or get a drink and just never came back."

There was a slight snicking sound, which was the power module going back into the board. With a flourish Jerel turned the board over, touched the points with her rotator; and the board hung above the counter again, this time significantly higher.

"There! All set."

There was triumph and relief in that, and Kay felt a bit better. At least Jerel'd known that she might not have been able to get the thing back together. But she was off again on another topic.

"Tomorrow I got a mandatory meeting at CapCour and Clari said something about a safety review because of Mileeda going missing. I guess I won't be able to stop by and see you at the zoo unless they don't give me any trips." She squinched her eyes, considering. "They might not," she said darkly. "With Mileeda off I'm back to lowest on the lists. And if she shows up, you bet they'll fire her. You can't just walk away from your board and leave a courier pouch sitting in the middle of the street!" She looked doleful. "So there, I'm stuck!"

Kay sighed. He'd heard all the news about Jerel going up one on the lists when the new girl came on with the company, and about the confusions since people said they looked so much alike. Jerel didn't see it, and he didn't himself. Beyond the fact that they both had brown hair, Mileeda didn't look anything like Jerel. Jerel was-- Jerel. You couldn't mistake her for anybody else.

"At least you have some idea what you'll be doing. I can never tell if I'm going to be able to get off to the zoo on schedule or if I'm going to have to listen to my mother talk about the gowns some dead woman wore to a ball fifty years ago, and why it caused a governor to get thrown off a planet on the other side of the sector." Jerel nodded. She'd been trapped more than once by a sudden bout of Kay's mother's reminisces about the times before the revolution had sapped the Oligarchy's power.

Both she and Kay had been infants when the battles and riots swept the Oligarchy from a century's reign; they'd both lost a father in that strife--and Jerel her mother, too. Jerel, it was known, had actually been on the scene of the last enigmatic battle. Kay's mother never tired of explaining how much she and Kay had in common--including that moment when an overmatched fleet of revolutionaries had somehow disappeared, dragging all traces of itself and its enemy with it.

The Oligarchy had not long survived the fruitless, galaxy-wide search for its supposedly invincible armada, for the revolution's supporters--long victims of the Oligarchs--had been well prepared for the resulting confusion.

Jerel knew that sometimes Kay thought his mother was a victim, too, for whatever dreams she'd had in those days were now gone, lost in an ever more tangled web of memories that failed to match the world she lived in, and most likely didn't match the world she had lived in, either.

"I'm hoping to get to work early tomorrow, if you do get a chance to come by," Kay said; "my mom's been sleeping late again."

"I'm sorry, Kay," Jerel said with quick sympathy. She startled him by touching his hand briefly, and then flung the slideboard at the floor, knowing it wouldn't hit. A quick jump and she landed on it firmly, the slideboots locking her feet into proper position.

This, of course, meant another change of topic; with any luck, Kay thought, they'd be able to leave now. If they hurried, they'd still be in time to hear--

There was a shuffling noise in the hall, and an "accidental" rap on the wall or door frame, and then Jerel's uncle Orned appeared.

Kay blushed but Jerel didn't. Her uncle was far too good an insurance man to walk about making such a noise unless he intended it. For some reason he'd decided she and Kay needed a certain amount of privacy, including a subtle warning that he was on the way, ever since he'd found them sitting side by side looking over a copy of the latest Barst's Catalogue of Alien Creatures, trying to decide which of the newest crop looked most dangerous. Uncle Orned nodded to Kay, smiling his slight, neutral smile; seeming not at all dismayed to find Jerel hovering soundlessly in the middle of the room.

"Hello, Kay. Didn't hear you come in."

This might have been true, give the volume of the music, but Jerel doubted very much that he'd been unaware of her presence in the apartment--or of Kay's. Her stomach tightened a bit. Something was brewing.

As if to confirm that, her uncle turned to her, the smile disappearing.

"See your friend to the door, Jerel--you'll have a chance to talk to him tomorrow. As soon as he leaves, bring yourself down to my library. Yesterday."

Now what? she thought, and exchanged a glance with Kay, thinking of Simka's Alley and the promise to Feter. Biting her lip, she looked again to Uncle Orned, trying to gauge if she could talk her way free for an hour--not that it was likely, with yesterday in play--but Orned had already gone back out the door.

"Yesterday?" Kay asked, heading for the front door, trying to analyze the slightly odd inflection in the word as Orned had used it.

Jerel sighed, worried, but not so worried that she could resist the urge to lean forward and use the slideboard to take her to the door.

"Yesterday?" she said. "That's one of Uncle Orned's code words for 'right now.' Kind of like saying, 'You're in trouble, triple max.'"

Kay blinked. "But, we didn't do--" Jerel gave him a wan smile, opening the door and wobbling in a small circle with the board.

"If this was a 'we' kind of problem, Uncle Orned would have included you, I'm sure. Whatever it is, it's mine, double bet. Tell Feter I'll come later if I can."

"Right." Kay left with a wave of hand; behind him he could hear the door sigh closed as Jerel put her shoulder to it, and then heard the unmistakable sounds of the automatic locks--and then double manual locks--as she closed up.

The door to Uncle Orned's office was closed, which was a bad sign indeed. Jerel could hear music on the other side, not as loud as it had been. This was not looking good. Worse, she couldn't figure out what it was she might have done. That she'd done something she had no doubt. Uncle Orned was strict, but he didn't make up things to get mad about.

Perforce, she stared into the retina reader set beside the door, and punched her personal code--five two-digit numbers and three letters--into the disguised ornamental key plate.

The door slid silently out of the way.

The music was energetic and orchestral; she took that as an additional sign as to the depth of the trouble and met her uncle's glance instantly.

He nodded very slightly, his eyes cool; and she took her seat carefully.

Uncle Orned's desk faced the door. In fact, in all the rooms of their flat his favorite chair faced the door. In all the rooms there was an inconspicuous holster with a gun in it, right where Uncle could reach it as he sat. At the moment he was reading from his newsfeed, or his persfeed. That screen was out of her sight, for, as he'd explained to her when she was quite young, his job required him to deal with information he couldn't share.

With anybody.

The library itself was old-fashioned, with a couple of ancient bound books for decoration and dozens of shelves of infosource on various media. Her uncle's work also required that he own his own copies of a lot of infosource so that his interest in any particular bit of information right now wouldn't be noticed.

It was this fact that had helped lead her to her interest in ship repair, for he allowed her to access any of the information on the three walls not behind his desk. It was there she'd stumbled across a space drive repair training module meant for apprentices when she was barely able to read. Fascinated, she'd demanded tools and a ship to work on--which Uncle Orned had refused to provide. He had, however, provided her with tools and access to more or less appropriate projects for her skill level. Uncle Orned was fair--he didn't just order in the agespecified material, but tested her and made sure she was being challenged by her studies, formal or informal.

The music, Jerel realized, was approaching its a crescendo. As it did, her uncle visibly relaxed. He stopped reading and keyboarding, let his gaze rest on a distant somewhere he could see and she couldn't, and did one of his breathing exercises.

Jerel bit her lip and tried not to squirm in her chair. Uncle Orned was still a young enough man that he'd more than once been mistaken for her older brother, a case made for casual viewers by their more-or-less matching looks--smooth tan skin and wiry build, brown eyes, brown hair--and even his hairstyle. It wasn't that his hair was cut like a boy's, it was just that it wasn't as formal or as formidable as the hairstyles worn by many of the older men, men who'd been active adults well before the revolution. If anything, Uncle Orned's hair could be said to be neutral, much like his clothes, and his voice, and his willingness to discuss his own history, though he, too, had been an adult during the revolution.

The revolution was something she sincerely couldn't remember, which made her uncle's unwillingness to discuss his part in it, if any, doubly frustrating. She knew from history lessons how bad it had been elsewhere, but remarkably little about how bad it had been here. When the lessons had first come up, back when she was a kid, she'd searched Uncle Orned's archives for more data, but learned, surprisingly, that what she'd been used to thinking of as the most complete library on the planet didn't hold much information about the revolution at all.

When she asked Uncle Orned about that missing info, he'd promised to tell her later, but when "later" came, he'd only pointed her to the same archives and suggested she look more closely.

She hadn't--and maybe that had been a test of some kind, for when she hadn't followed up for some days, she found that her allowance had been raised a bit, while Uncle Orned directed her reading even more heavily toward the space drives and mechanics she loved so much. If he'd hoped she'd go into the insurance business herself, he never said.

The music volume fell momentarily--and now she recognized it, though she couldn't name it. Uncle Orned played it a lot, sometimes over and over when he was working. He called it his "thinking music." Now came the rousing finale, with a crash of cymbals and drums and other instruments she couldn't identify, and a brief twitter of what might have been electric butterfly wings. . . .

Then suddenly there was no sound in the room but her own breathing.

The pause lasted a few more seconds, and then Uncle Orned's cool brown gaze was on her.

"Jerel," he said conversationally, as if he'd just noticed she was in the room. "I think we must talk. Perhaps, I daresay, you must talk."

There was silence, and his gaze was unwavering. Finally, she asked, in a small voice, "What should I talk about, Uncle?"

He ran his hands through his hair above his ears, turning that movement into a languid stretch, hands at shoulder height.

"I suspect first," he said, still in that conversation voice, which was somehow much worse that being yelled at, "we must have you talk about what you expect of me, and how long you expect it."

She was startled, and the amazement made its way into her voice, which shook a bit.

"Expect from you, Uncle? How do you mean?"

He sat straighter in his chair, and swept his right hand out, indicating the room, and in effect the entire apartment. His mouth straightened, and he might have sighed very quietly.

"It seems you expect me to be here. You expect food in the larder, you expect . . . comfort. I'd guess comfort is about right?"

She thought for a moment, still puzzled, but nodded carefully.

"Yes, Uncle, I guess that's close. I've been comfortable here for all the time I can remember. We've had food, we've had power. I've never heard you say 'I can't' if I asked for something." Here she wrinkled her nose and thought a moment before continuing.

"That's not to say I expect you to buy me everything I want--you've said 'I won't' often enough to make the point that I've got to pay for my own frivols."

"Ah, good," he said, with a glimmer of a smile. "We begin to approach the topic, then."

He stood, turning on his heel as he pointed at various of the infosource behind his desk.

"Here, here and here . . . and here, these are the things that have kept you comfortable over the last fifteen years or so. These are my studies and a large part of my work."

He pulled two of the cases from the shelves and flung them onto his desk. Jerel jumped at the paired thumps. "You know what I do for my living, so you know that sometimes people blame me for what other people pay me to do, just as someone might blame you if a package arrives broken, or a message comes too late."

She nodded, mesmerized by the intensity of his gaze.

"Yes, I do know what you do, and that not everyone appreciates it."

He laughed sharply, tapping each of the two cases in turn before sitting down again at the desk.

"These projects here were done years ago. This one"-- he caressed one of the flexible holders he'd tapped-- "this one took a year to set up and a another year to finalize. This one," he said, tapping the other, "very nearly put me in the hospital, or worse."

He sighed, and slowly leaned back in his chair.

"Jerel, we live in uncertain times. There are people and agencies out there in this world, and across several worlds, who see that my business is thwarting them. And it is my business to thwart them, if I take an insurance job."

He stood again, paced a quick short pace, turned to face her.

"I wonder, Jerel, if I should send you away to trade school. I wonder if you've been paying attention?"

"Trade school? Send me off Arantha?" That came out as a squeak. She was going to trade school part-time right here, plus there was her job and--

"Paying attention?" he repeated brusquely, leaning forward, hands flat atop the folders. "I don't think you have been paying enough attention. I find, for example, that someone you work with, someone your age, has gone missing in extremely strange circumstances. I learn this not from you--the source I would expect to hear it from--but from someone who owes me a favor and who knows where you work. Someone who saw the description of the missing girl and said it sounded like you!"

Jerel shook her head no, looking her uncle in the face, the knot in her stomach tying itself a little tighter.

"I guess," she said unsteadily, "we do look something alike."

Orned nodded. "I guess you do. And that is why I ask what you expect. How do you expect me to keep you comfortable and in food if you won't pay attention? How can you expect me to make sure you're safe if you don't tell me little things like this?"

She opened her mouth to explain, but he waved her off.

"What's Rule One?"

Jerel lifted her gaze to the ceiling and gritted her teeth.

"Jerel?" Uncle's no-nonsense voice, that was. She grimaced, knowing it was going to be a long afternoon, and started reciting.

"Rule One is always be alert."

Orned raised his hand silently--now with two fingers showing.

She went on grimly.

"Rule Two is take as few chances as possible."

Three fingers showed now.

"Rule Three is be concerned about anomaly."

She had the rhythm now, continued as he raised the fourth finger.

"Rule Four is don't attract unnecessary attention."

The fingers moved, showed five, but it was Uncle Orned who finished, coldly.

"And Rule Five is stay in touch--which for our purposes today means 'keep Orned informed.'" He paused, lips pressed into a grim line. "At the very least, you have failed to recall Rule Five--or else you have failed to observe Rules One, Two, Three, and Five. Am I right?"

Jerel's stomach actually hurt now. She wanted to yell, but, what would she say? She'd meant to mention Mileeda to her uncle as soon as she'd had a chance--

Orned slapped the table, and he smiled grimly. "You're in for the evening, as you have probably guessed already. If you think of anything else I should know about, do let me know. If you don't think of anything else, study."

She nodded, and he flipped his hand toward the door in dismissal.

"We'll talk more about this tomorrow. Come right home after work. Got that? Right home!"

She got up to leave--

"One more thing, Jerel."

She turned, saw his face still serious.

"Promise me you won't do anything stupid tomorrow?"

Jerel grimaced, replaced it quickly with a slight smile. "I promise, Uncle. And thanks for worrying about me."

He harrumphed, the set of his shoulders showing that he was still not quite relaxed, and waved her toward the door again.

She went, pleased to escape without a full self-defense test.