"Good day to you," Chun Li nodded gravely, rising to his feet as the others at the table followed suit. "I'm Station Chief Wilmin Chun Li; on behalf of HTI's Solitaire operation, I welcome you."

A proud man, I saw, though not necessarily in the bad sense of that word. Proud of his accomplishments, proud of his organization and of the job he had done here... and more than a little nervous. Worried that Carillon would summarily dismiss him? It was a reasonable possibility, and a sadly not unreasonable fear: in corporate acquisitions like this a long and loyal work record often became a liability. Over it all, covering the other emotions like a translucent glaze, was a general sense of tension. The same tension, perhaps, that Calandra and I had sensed in Solitaire as a whole...

"Good day to you as well, sir," Randon returned the nod. "I'm honored to be here." He gestured to Schock and me. "May I present my aides: Dapper Schock and Gilead Raca Benedar."

There wasn't a single wisp of surprise from anyone at the table over my name. Not that I really needed further confirmation that they were expecting me.

Chun Li exchanged polite nods with each of us and gestured to his sides. "My assistant managers: Tomus Blake and Angli Karash."

Blake was angry, and he was making little effort to hide it. Tight-lipped, he nodded to Randon with barely adequate courtesy and barely glanced at Schock and me. It wasn't Aikman's version of anti-Watcher prejudice, though: Blake was angry at all of us. Perhaps he felt betrayed at HTI's inability to keep Carillon from taking over; perhaps it was simply that he was now likely to be frozen out of contention for Chun Li's position, a position he very clearly wanted.

Karash, in contrast, was much more phlegmatic than either of the two men; certainly more polite than Blake. Her sense was that of a capable, politically-minded supervisor maintaining a neutral wait-and-see attitude and preparing to roll with whatever rocking occurred. Though with fewer years invested in the Solitaire operation, she of course also had less to lose than they did. All things considered, she was still the most promising potential ally among the three.

The ritual exchange of nods over, Chun Li waved us into our chairs. "Please be seated, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos; gentlemen. I'm sure you have many questions you'd like to ask."

"Yes, indeed," Randon agreed. We sat down, Calandra and the two shields moving to the wall behind us. "First of all, I'd like to bring you greetings from my father, Lord Kelsey-Ramos, and the entire Carillon Group board."

Seated against the wall almost directly behind Chun Li, impossible to miss whenever I looked that direction, was a stunningly beautiful woman.

It was an old ploy, but no less effective for all that, and the woman herself was better at it than many I'd seen. Her almost casual posture subtly emphasized the allure of breasts and legs; while her face, framed delicately by a hairsculpt much too expensive for her indicated corporate position, was coyly provocative. Each time our eyes met—which was practically every time I looked her direction—her lips curled in a barely detectable but nevertheless sultry half smile.

But however many times she'd laid out this snare, it was clear that she'd never tried it on a Watcher. Even as I felt my body stirring with the lust she was trying to distract me with, the rest of her sense came through the allure... and of its own accord my desire drained quietly away. She was cold, manipulating, arrogantly amused—so totally opposite, in fact, to the softly sensuous image she was trying to project that her seduction became little more than a gross parody; pitiful and disgusting instead of being alluring. I gazed into her eyes one last time, seeing there that she knew she'd failed—but had no idea why—and turned my eyes deliberately away.

"First of all," Randon continued, "let me assure you that, unlike some corporations, Carillon is not in the habit of automatically replacing the directors and employees of freshly acquired companies..."

Perhaps they'd suspected that the long-distance seduction would fail; perhaps they were merely being cautious. Whatever the reason, they'd arranged a second distraction for me... a distraction that turned out to be far more effective than the first.

He was one of the HTI guards—or perhaps more precisely, he was dressed in an HTI guard's uniform: a fascinatingly twitch-faced man standing against the wall just inside the range of my peripheral vision. Twitch-faced, and radiating the most unstable emotional state I had ever sensed.

"...Our policy is to try wherever possible to maintain continuity and existing relationships, particularly when such relationships are clearly working well..."

He wasn't insane, at least not in any way I would have expected to read insanity. His emotions were simply on a permanent scattercoast. One minute he would be tense and nervous, the next fearful, the next inordinately pleased with himself, the next sullen and withdrawn.... "What we do demand is ability. There's no place in the Carillon Group for incompetence. Any employee that has been getting a downhill coast while others looked the other way or covered up will be in for an extremely rude shock..."

No corporate guard chief could possibly tolerate a man that emotionally unbalanced, which left it a tossup as to whether HTI had raided a treatment hospital or weirded up one of their own guards with some schizm-inducing drug. But at this point the method didn't really matter. Try as I might, I couldn't entirely ignore the man; and the mental effort to do so threatened to become a distraction in itself.

"...So. There will be memos and perhaps some reorganizational papers coming down the line over the next few months, I imagine, as soon as we've had time to sift through all the records. But that ought to give you at least a brief overview of our plans. Are there any questions?"

The twitch wasn't just in his face, either. There were echoing spasms in varying degrees from shoulders, knees, and hands.

Including the hand hovering tautly beside the butt of his holstered needler.

I licked the inside of my lip. No danger, was my first, back-brain feeling; but under the circumstances that was hardly the sort of conclusion I could afford to trust to a subconscious synthesis of unidentified cues. A schizoid man armed with a needler could almost literally mow this entire roomful of people down in the space of a few heartbeats.

On the other hand, none of the other HTI guards were directing any worry at all in his direction. Was that the cue I'd picked up on, that they hadn't picked up any danger themselves? Perhaps; but my sense of had felt stronger than that.

"I think I speak for all of us," Chun Li spoke up, "when I say that we'll all do our best to make this transition as smooth as possible, both for Carillon and ourselves..."

My phone vibrated its silent call signal. Dropping my gaze with an effort from the twitchy guard, I eased the instrument from its belt case and keyed for nonverbal. Behind me I could hear a faint and unintelligible voice—Kutzko's—while, under the edge of the table, I watched his words flow across the tiny screen:

CALANDRA SAYS TO TELL YOU HIS NEEDLER ISN'T LOADED. THAT MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?

An eerie feeling crept across the back of my neck. She'd done it again. Read my mind with complete ease... and this time without even having to see my face.

She was right, too, of course. Looking back at the guard—his sense that of almost childlike cunning at the moment—it was obvious that his needler was riding much too high in its holster to be carrying even a partially filled clip. That, plus the way it swung against his leg when he twitched—the cues had all been there, and clearly my back-brain had picked up on them in deciding he wasn't a danger to us. I only wished I could have identified them faster. At least as fast as Calandra had.