"Sorry," Serrin apologized vaguely. He was too busy taking in the lobby of the Imperial after the cab ride from the airport. "Is this just the tourist stuff?" He was impressed. The wall hangings, tapestries, and batik-like prints looked good enough to be worth a lot of nuyen.

"Mostly," Michael said. "Any animal skin is fake, of

course. The Zulu Nation is very tough on that one. Poaching carries an automatic death sentence. Being out in the wilds with an unlicensed weapon gets you a minimum twenty years. Death, if they reckon it's a hunting weapon. One of the little quirks around here is that it's less dangerous to have an assault cannon in the bush than to have a grotty little rifle, at least as far as the law is concerned. Heavy weaponry ruins the skins."

"What about rhinos? Aren't they hunted for their horns?" Serrin asked.

"Where've you been for the last thirty years? The only rhinos alive are in zoos, term," Michael replied. "Or on disk."

He ambled over to the reception desk. Kristen almost had to be dragged along with Serrin, having already received some distinctly hostile looks.

"Thank you so much," Michael enthused as he took the key cards for the rooms, "it's so good to be here. The coach is at ten o'clock tomorrow? Excellent. You're so efficient. Thank you again."

"Pass the sick bag," Serrin muttered as they headed for the elevators.

Michael gave him a sardonic smile. "We're tourists, remember? Behave like one. Divide your IQ by your boot size and just act unnatural."

"Kristen's a tourist?" Serrin asked. It didn't seem terribly plausible, somehow.

"Well, sort of," Michael said as the elevator doors swished open. "You haven't checked all the IDs, I see."

"What do you mean?" Serrin said suspiciously.

"She's a distant cousin, old boy. That's what her ID says. It was my idea," Michael replied smoothly.

"What?" The elf was flummoxed.

"It was the logical thing to do. What better reason for a Cape Town girl to be accompanying a bunch of foreigners. Anything else would look suspicious. I'm afraid one of my male relatives, some licentious old rake or other, must have enjoyed a brief dalliance in the Cape at some time and now I am overjoyed to have discovered my long-lost relative," Michael grinned.

"It's all right," Kristen assured the frowning elf. "He asked my permission to do it."

"Look on the bright side, old boy. If you weren't an elf I'd have had her down as your daughter," Michael sniggered. Avoiding the elf's swat at his head, he ducked out the elevator doors as they opened to deposit the little group on the fifteenth floor.

"I've got to go catch up on some research. See you later," Michael said as he set off along the carpeted corridor.

"I wanted to ask you something about that," Serrin called after him. "I wondered that is, Tom and I had a word I wondered if we, that is you, could identify the other people who might be possible targets. Those with the right genetic makeup."

Michael opened his mouth to begin a reply, and then sighed. "Sure, there must be people I haven't come up with yet. There's a good reason I can't do that now. If I tried to get into the medical databases of every country on the globe, someone would eventually sit up and take notice. So far, I've only checked those on Kristen's list and those from the countries with flights into JFK around the time of Serrin's departure. Which leaves about eighty-five percent of the planet unaccounted for.

"Someone is going to start hearing alarm bells if I set my frames to doing everything. And what if it turned out to be the person we're looking for? We don't want him to find us first." Michael sliced a finger across his throat, melodramatically but not without some impact. "Sorry, chummers. What feels right may not be the smartest thing to do." He didn't wait for a rejoinder, but slotted his key card into the door and vanished into his room.

"I guess he's got a point," Serrin sighed. The troll looked darkly at him and mumbled something inaudible before stomping off to his own quarters.

Kristen looked uncertain, not sure what to do with the little plastic card. Serrin showed her how to use it, realizing that staying in a hotel was another thing she'd never done before.

"It's automatic. Just slide the thing in. It has your identity and a code number on it," he said as the door

hummed back and the card popped back out of the slot. "Go ahead and enjoy yourself here. Drink the bar dry if you want to. You don't have to pay." Then he began limping down the hall to his own room. "See you for dinner. Just knock if you want anything."

Five minutes later, there was a soft tapping on the door. Serrin left the trid news service flickering on the screen and opened it to let the puzzled-looking girl in.

"Can I talk to you?" she said, parking herself on the huge bed in a way that said she wasn't taking no for an answer. Looking at her, he was struck by the fact that she was barefoot, her toes curled up, pink soles contrasting with the polished brown of the upper sides of her feet. It was an incongruous perception. But then Serrin always tended to see details when he wanted to avoid the big picture.

"I don't really understand what's going on," she said.

Serrin shrugged. "I wish I could say that I do," he told her. "I've been trying to figure out how a bungled kidnapping got me halfway round the world inside less than a week. All I wanted to do was some quiet research in a library somewhere and now all this."

"Why did you bring me with you? What use can I possibly be? I never expected to see you anyway. Why didn't you just up and leave without me?"

The directness of the questions hurt. The elf was acutely aware that a life like hers was eminently disposable. Street kids disappeared every day, in London, Cape Town, Rio, Seattle, any city you could name. No one cared about them, or their fate. The best chance of survival often came with gang membership, but that usually ended up with the kid dead or maimed in a stabbing or a Shootout anyway.

"It just didn't feel like the right thing to do," he said lamely, preferring not to think about his own experience of losing his parents at a young age. It wasn't just the usual disappointment and hurt of goodbyes. There was a lot more to it than that, but he'd never delved much into that whole bundle of confused and powerful emotions.

"Why didn't you ask me in right away?" Kristen said,

stretching out a little on the bed. He didn't understand what she meant.

"You haven't made a pass at me," she said coolly.

The elf hesitated. He knew that if he said the wrong thing, it could ruin everything. He decided to wait until he had more of a clue about what she wanted him to say.

"Should I have?" he asked.

"Everyone else does. You're rich, you wear fine clothes, you stay in hotels. Your face was on the cover of a magazine. When people like you come dockside, there's only one reason. Usually."

He wasn't sure whether there was any hostility lurking in all this. He was very uncomfortable, aware that despite his greater age and experience of the world he was suddenly at a major disadvantage. Trying to buy some time, he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. To his surprise, he managed an immaculate smoke ring with the final stages of the exhalation. He sat down beside her.

"I don't know about everyone else. It's not that you aren't pretty. It's just that I got burned recently," he said, and then told her about what had happened with Julia Richards. He felt somewhat relieved. It was getting him off the hook.

"But it's not just that," he blurted out. "I don't know, I really don't. I feel like I've known you a long time, which is just plain crazy. And I don't mean that you remind me of someone else." It flashed through his mind that in some way that wasn't quite true, but he was too confused and uncertain to say that. "I care for you, but it isn't sexual. Somehow. Oh, spirits, I don't know."