It was sure above all else that Banichi would never betray his partner, that she wouldn’t betray Banichi, not under fire and not in bed.

It was sure between him and Jago that the man’chi involved, the sense of association, flowed upward more than down, and that no human alive understood atevi relationships in the first place—

But the more he involved himself in the atevi world, the more he knew he wasn’t in a pairing. He’d assumed a triangle; and then knew it wasn’t even that, but deep in some atevi design, a baji-naji of their own convoluted creation, and deeper and deeper into feelings he knew he wasn’t wired to feel as atevi felt, not feeling as they did, only as he could.

God help him, he thought at times, but she never asked a thing of him. And they went on as formally and properly in public as they’d always been, always the three of them, she and he and Banichi, and four and five, if one counted Tano and Algini, as it had been from the time Tabini put them together.

He’d been in love in his teens, when he’d gone into the program, with the foreign, the complex, the different.

She certainly was. God, she was… pure self-abandoned trust, and sex, and her exotic, heavily armed version of caring all in the same cocktail.

They rested nestled together till their fingers and toes wrinkled, while the heater kept the water steaming.

They talked about the recent trip to Mospheira…

“Barb came to the airport,” he said.

“Did you approve?” she asked.

“Not in the least,” he said.

They talked about the supper with the dowager.

“Cenedi looked well,” he said.

But she never talked business in their interludes. She had, in whatever form, a better sense of romance than he did, twining a wet lock of his hair about her finger. She’d undone his braid. Her tongue traced the curve of his ear and traveled into it.

A shadow appeared in the doorway, above the steam.

Banichi.

He was appalled. “Jago-ji,” he said; she was aware… surprised, but not astonished.

“Nandi.” Banichi addressed him, incongruously, in the formal mode. “Your mother has called, requesting to be patched through wherever you are. She says it’s an emergency.”

Banichi had been exposed to his mother’s emergencies. He himself certainly had. He was remotely aware of the rest of his body, and simultaneously of the rest of Jago’s body, soft and hard in all the right places, as her arms and her knees unfolded from him.

He probably blushed. He certainly felt warmth.

“I regret the untimely approach,” Banichi said, “but she says she’s calling from the hospital.”

“Oh, damn.” He was on his way out of the water as Banichi procured him his robe.

Jago gathered herself out of the water as he slipped into the robe. He had the presence of mind to glance back at her in regret for the embarrassment, whatever it was, and knew that, in a Situation, Tano and Algini being absent with Jase, Banichi had left the security post rather than send servants into the bath to pull him out.

Bren yanked the sash tight on the robe, on his way out the door. His mother had had her spells before… had had surgery three years ago, one they thought had fixed the problem with her heart as far as age and life choices let anything fix the problem.

At least shewas calling.

God, could anything have happened to Toby or Jill? He had enemies, and some of them had no scruples. He’d cleared Kroger to call the island. Word of the mission could be out, no telling where, and he’d not been in contact with Shawn, to advise him to tighten his mother’s security, that hewas on this mission.

Banichi had reached the security station near the front entry, that place which, with its elaborate electronics, held the phones.

“The ordinary phone, nadi,” Banichi advised him, and Bren turned a swivel chair and settled onto it, picking up the phone that looked like a phone.

Banichi settled into the main post and punched buttons. Bren heard the relays click. “Go ahead,” he heard the atevi operator say in Mosphei’, that deep timbre of voice, and the lighter human voice responding: “Go ahead, now, Ms. Cameron.”

“Mother?”

“Bren?” There was the quavering edge of panic in his mother’s voice, real desperation, and that itself was uncommon: he knew the difference.

“Mother, are you all right? Where’s Toby?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Bren, you’ve just got to get back here. Tonight.”

“Mother, I’m sorry. I can’t just—”

“You have to get here!”

“Where’s Toby?” Had there been a plane crash? A car wreck? “Where are you?”

The line spat, one of those damnable static events that happened when the atevi network with its intensive security linked up by radio with the Mospheiran network. He clenched the receiver as if he could hang onto the line.

“… at the hospital!”

“In what city, Mother? Where’s Toby? Can you hear me?”

“I’m in the city!” That meant the capital, in ordinary usage. “I’m at the hospital! Can you hear me? Oh, damnthis line!”

Not inthe hospital. “You’re atthe hospital. Where’s Toby, Mother? Where’s my brother?”

“I don’t know. He got on a plane this afternoon. I think he should be home. I think he and Jill may have stopped at Louise’s to pick up the—”

“Mother, why are you at the hospital?”

“Bren, don’t be like that!”

“I’m not shouting, Mother. Just give me the news. Clearly. Coherently. What’s going on?”

“Barb’s in intensive care.”

“Barb.” Of all star-crossed people. Barb?

“Barb and I went shopping after we left the airport, after we put Toby on the plane, you know. We were at the Valley Center, the new closed mall, you know…”

“I know it. Did she fall?” There were escalators. There was new flooring. The place had opened this spring, huge pale building. Tall, open escalators.

“No, we just came out to go to the car, and this busjust came out of nowhere, Bren.”

“Bus. My God.”

“She went right under it, Bren. I fell down and I looked around as the tires came past and she never said a thing, she just… she just went under it, and packages were all over, I’d bought this new sweater…”

His mother was in shock. She was the world’s worst storyteller, but she wasn’t gathering her essential pieces at all.

“Mother, how bad?”

“It’s bad, Bren. She’s lying there with all these tubes in her. She’s messed up inside. She’s really bad. Bren, she wants you to come.”

He was dripping water onto the counter. His feet and hands were like ice in the air-conditioning. With the side of his finger, he smeared a set of water droplets out of existence, thinking of the new counter, the new facility. He was not at home. He was not going to be anywhere close to home, and he was trying to think what to say. He tried to choose some rational statement. “I know you’re with her, Mother.—Were youhurt?” Setting his mother to the first person singular was the fastest way to get his mother off the track of someone else’s woes. He’d practiced that tactic for years of smaller emergencies.

“She needs you, Bren.”

It was bad.

“Are youhurt, Mother?”

“Just my elbow. I scraped my elbow on the curb. Bren, she’s so bad…”

He winced and swore to himself. His hand was shaking. Jago had turned up in her bathrobe, with Banichi in the little security post, support for him. But he didn’t know who was with his mother, tonight, or how bad the damage was. Shawn’s people watched her. They always kept an eye toward her. But they’d damned well let down this time.

“Have they assessed Barb’s damage?”

“Spleen, liver, lung… right leg, left arm… they’re worried about a head injury.”

“God.” On medical matters his mother very well knew what she was talking about. She made a hobby of ailments. “Has anyone called Paul?”