"We don't know if we're close to them or not," Lucia said. "That's the problem. We don't have a single-"

A customer turned away from the cart, raising a sausage in a bun to his mouth. A pang shot through Harenn's stomach. She dropped the holo-unit and grabbed the man by the lapels of his shirt. With a strength that surprised even herself, she shoved him into an alley and up against the hard stone wall. The sausage went flying. The man grunted and his eyes widened with shock and surprise as the tip of the large knife Harenn always carried pricked his throat. Lucia gaped.

"Harenn, what-?" she began.

"Do you remember me?" Harenn hissed. " Do you? "

"Who the fuck are you, lady?" the man yelped. His eyes were saucer-wide beneath straw-blond hair.

"You don't remember, then." Ignoring Lucia's startled questions, Harenn shoved her face closer to the man's. The big knife blade, sharp and unmoving, pressed against his jugular. "I am unsure if that makes me simply angry or absolutely furious. In either case it does not bode well for you."

"Harenn!" Lucia protested. "What's going on?"

"Tell the woman who you are," Harenn growled.

"Lady, I don't-"

"Tell her!" She pressed the edge of the blade into his skin until a drop of blood oozed down the edge. The man cringed. "Tell her your name!"

"I'm… it's Marlin Silver."

Harenn pressed harder. "Liar! Tell the truth, or I will slice you open here and now."

"Todd!" the man howled. "My name is Isaac Todd!"

"Where did you say you found him?" Kendi demanded.

"Not far from the spaceport," Harenn said grimly. "I was showing the holograms of your brother and sister around and I saw him. Lucia and I dragged him back to the ship, then we called you."

"She almost killed him-" Lucia began.

"I still may," Harenn said.

"— but I convinced her that he might be a good source of underworld information."

"Hey, there's no need for violence." Isaac Todd raised both his hands in supplication. A silver slave band, fitted by Lucia, encircled one wrist to ensure he wouldn't attack anyone. The man was attractive enough. Square jaw, blond hair, well-molded physique, blue eyes. Bedj-ka was lucky that way, Kendi decided. The boy had his father's features and his mother's coloring. He was going to break hearts in a dozen solar systems when he got older.

"What are you doing here, Isaac?" Harenn demanded. "Does it have anything to do with the slaves who were kidnapped from DrimCom?"

"I don't have to talk to you," Todd replied tightly.

"You fail to understand, my husband," Harenn purred. She leaned forward, pushing her bare face into his. "You will talk to us and you will tell us everything we need to know. I have in this medical bay a wide variety of drugs that will make you reveal everything that ever happened in your filthy life. Some of those drugs have very interesting side-effects. You will talk, Isaac, and then I will check the veracity of your answers with my collection of chemicals. The only question is how miserable I will make you in the process. How miserable do you want to be?"

In the corner, Ben shifted with obvious discomfort. Kendi, however, paid him scant attention. Isaac Todd was an illegal slaver found on the same planet in the same city at the same time his brother and sister had been kidnapped. The coincidence was simply too much to ignore, and every instinct Kendi had said that Todd knew something about Utang and Martina. The only question was how much he knew.

"I have rights," Todd said. "You can't do this to me."

"To whom will you complain, husband?" Harenn asked. "The police? Perhaps we should call them right now and see what they say when I tell them we have a man who is wanted on many planets for kidnapping and illegal slave trafficking."

"Who do you work for?" Kendi asked.

Todd remained silent. After a moment, Harenn reached for an instrument tray and came up with a hypodermic needle long and thick enough to puncture bone. It glittered in the harsh overhead light.

"That's not a dermospray," Todd yelped, pushing himself backward on the bed until his back was against the wall.

"How observant you are," Harenn said. "I do have dermosprays, but I am not inclined to use them."

"Harenn," Kendi warned. "The Children have rules about this kind of thing. We don't torture people."

"I am not a Child," Harenn pointed out.

"But you work for us and you do have to operate by our rules," Kendi said.

"Thank you," Todd sighed. But his eyes never left the needle. His face was pale, and a thin sheen of sweat had broken out on his face. Phobic? Certainly seemed to be.

"However, Mr. Todd," Kendi continued, "Harenn is the only one qualified to administer interrogatives. If, in her considered opinion, the best way to give one to you is by a needle, I can't say I'm qualified to counter what she says."

Harenn touched the hypodermic to Todd's arm and he jumped as if she had touched him with a hot iron. "For subjects who aren't cooperative," she said, "the needle is unfortunately the best method of delivery. It ensures the drug gets into the bloodstream instead of pooling beneath the skin."

"I'll talk!" Todd shouted. "Just get that thing away from me."

"Who do you work for?" Kendi repeated. "Keep in mind that we're going to check what you say, and Harenn won't be happy if you're caught in a lie."

Todd licked his lips. "I work for Silent Acquisitions."

Lucia raised her eyebrows and Kendi clenched a fist. Silent Acquisitions was a megacorporation that dealt in Silence in all its forms-communication, research, genegineering, and slaves. They were known galaxy-wide as being worse than ruthless. Kendi and Ara had between them stolen away more than a dozen slaves from them and their subsidiaries over the years, and he had no doubt that both of them were high on the corp's most wanted list, though Ara was now beyond such considerations.

"What do you do for them?" Kendi said.

"I'm a scout for the Collection."

"And what's the Collection?"

Todd shifted nervously on the bed. "Look, if anyone finds out I'm talking to you, I'm dead meat, all right? I've already told you enough to earn me five years in the corp's waste pits."

"And you have kept silent about enough to earn you five stabs with my knife," Harenn growled.

"You may as well keep on going," Kendi said, taking on the part of good cop to Harenn's bad. "You've gone this far, and we're going to get it out of you either way with the drugs. We won't tell anyone where we got the information. What's the Collection?"

Todd hesitated. "I have your word you'll keep where you found out to yourself?"

"Absolutely," Kendi said, tapping his amulet and raising his right hand. "I swear by Irfan herself."

Still Todd hesitated. Kendi suppressed an urge to wrap his hands around the man's neck and throttle the information out of him. Finally Todd cleared his throat.

"After the Despair," he said, "functioning Silent suddenly became really rare and valuable, right? Everyone at Silent Acquisitions is pretty worried about that. I mean, the few Silent we have left will die eventually, and we won't have anything at all. Silent Acquisitions will eventually disappear."