When I’d cut the connection, Tic said, "Let’s hope she doesn’t get the message for at least an hour."

"Why?"

"Because the world-soul tells me that’s the flying time to Sallysweet River. Gird yourself, Smallwood, we’re going in."

No. We didn’t hop a waiting skimmer and spunk off to face the enemy. Tic and I weren’t witless… nor were we police club-thumpers, equipped with badges, body armor, and all mod cons for buttonholing possible murder suspects. I gave a silent inward cheer when Tic asked, "Who do you know with the local gendarmes, Smallwood? Someone with a dash of authority to rally the troops on our behalf. Someone who’ll listen to you talk about Maya without dismissing you as a total loon."

"There’s a Captain Cheticamp," I answered. "We got along cozily enough last night."

Tic motioned toward the phone again. "Call this cozy fellow and bend him to your will."

Basil Cheticamp, bless him, was actually on duty; he even knew background details on Chappalar’s murder, though he wasn’t part of the inquiry team. Just as well he hadn’t been directly involved — when he heard how the investigators had overlooked Maya as a lead, Cheticamp swore they’d all be drummed down to dogcatchers. He promised to dispatch a squad to Sallysweet River on the double: two detectives to ask Dr. Cuttack polite questions, and a pack of armored ScrambleTac officers just in case homicidal androids came marching across the tundra. He was already paging his troops, when I asked, "Where will we meet your people?"

The captain stopped mid-sentence and gave me the steely-eyed glare. "Meet?"

"The Vigil intends to scrutinize your handling of this case. A master proctor and I will accompany your squad to Sallysweet River."

"Ms. Smallwood…"

"Proctor Smallwood," I corrected. His glare got two ore-grades steelier. "Proctor Smallwood, it is precious inappropriate for civilians—"

"We aren’t civilians," I interrupted. "We’re members of the Vigil. We have a legal right to scrutinize police activity however we see fit."

"You’ll get a complete report on everything that happens."

"Not good enough. Master Tic and I want to be present on the scene."

Cheticamp’s face went lemonish. "Tic? Tic’s in Bonaventure? Smallwood, every police officer on the planet knows Tic is…"

"A total loon?" I suggested.

"Worse: a Jonah. There isn’t a single rattlesnake on Demoth, but if Tic went walking in the woods, he’d find one. Not that it would bite him — it’d go for the next poor bugger to come down the trail. If Tic is in Bonaventure…"

Cheticamp shook his head. Not a happy man.

Part of me wanted to let him off the hook; after all, why should Tic and I plop ourselves into the line of fire? We could stay home, read the police reports, evaluate what we read…

But that was a piss-poor way to run a scrutiny. Dissect the paperwork, but never trust it — advice as old as the Vigil itself. Get out of the office. Go through the closed doors.

"Captain," I said in my most humble Mom-Faye voice, "we don’t want to do your job… we only want to do ours. You know we aren’t trying to push you around, or rake your people over the coals; we’re just observing your procedures, the way the Vigil always does. Sure and all, this is an extra complication for you, but your department and the Vigil have always worked it out in the past. Right?"

I hoped that was true. Police generally had a sulky tolerance for the Vigil — not that they liked us breathing over their shoulders, but they’d lived with our presence long enough that we came with the landscape: like paperwork and foot patrol. On the other hand, if Cheticamp had ever got his knuckles rapped because of a Vigil report…

The captain sighed. "All right, Proctor Smallwood. You and Tic can go in-country with the squad. I’ll go too, as your personal escort. Pick you up in five minutes."

The screen went blank before I could say thank you.

STRAWBERRY SMOKE

I had goaded/charmed/blustered my family into leaving Sallysweet River when I was twenty-one. By then, I was bored with the boonies and stabilized enough after my years of wildness to get cringey over the way people looked at me on the street. Anyway, a bare-rock mining town had bugger-all opportunities compared to the big city of Bonaventure… where Winston got his scholarship to law school, Angie found she was a VR savant, Egerton bought his first cargo-hauler, and so on. The family thanked me eventually, each by each, for nagging and ragging till we moved.

Despite that, my spouses hadn’t totally cut their ties with the old hometown. They’d all returned time and again over the years, visiting parents and siblings, showing off their children and other successes.

Me, I’d never gone back. Dads was dead. Mother had left town the day I got married — either washing her hands of me, or just taking the opportunity to attend to her own sanity now that my spouses were in charge of mine. Whatever the reason, Ma had scarpered south to the jungles of Argentia and was now breeding Demothian orchids for their natural antivirals, living in a grass shack with a gentleman Oolom pharmer. So I had no family to visit in Sallysweet River. And nary a success to show off… not unless you counted mere survival. On top of which, how could you feel nostalgic for a slag heap of a town, filled with bad memories and folks who thought I was dirt?

Even so… even so. I found myself going dewy-eyed as the police skimmer soared over forest and tundra toward my birthplace. The darkness got to me; no lights below but the glint of stars reflecting off snow. I remembered nights as a girl, walking through that darkness — with Dads, with a boy, with friends, or by myself, each type of walk different and each one rare magical.

Funny how you forget about magic. Even when you say (as we all do) that you’ve never lost the spirit of childhood, you find that for years you haven’t felt the slightest magical shiver. And you don’t really acknowledge that till magic touches you again.

Darkness. Quiet.

Yes, the police skimmer had some dim interior lights. And there was the background mutter of a ScrambleTac sergeant outlining plans for contingencies. But that had nothing to do with me. I sat by the window and let my mind be swallowed by the night.

Unyielding tundra night: the same night that had hugged me as a child. The same night that had wrapped this land in silence for untold humanless millennia.

Deep roots. Continuity. Home.

Sallysweet River had grown. Our old family compound once stood on the edge of town; now it anchored a dandified second village, dotted with tourist shops and tourist chalets and tourist amusement plazas. All but the Henry Smallwood Guest Home were huddled down empty now, hibernating in the darkness. This was the lull season, too late for skiing, too early for hiking, too muddy for damned near anything. The skimmer settled down in the guest-home parking lot. Cheticamp, Tic and I waited while the ScrambleTac team fanned out to deploy themselves around the perimeter. The club-thumpers looked right chipper as they slunk into the darkness. I don’t know if that meant they were confident there’d be no trouble or happy at the possibility they might get into a firefight.

On the trip in, one of the detectives made a bet with all takers that Maya had nothing to do with the killings. At most, she might have babbled too freely in a public place, gossiping that her snuggle-time pal Chappalar was scheduled to lead a secret inspection of Pump Station 3. One of the real bad guys probably overheard her and seized the chance to scrag a proctor on the job.

The detective who proposed this theory was a man named Willis Bleak — a roly-poly Homo sap with a boyish unwrinkled face that surely doomed him to play Good Cop for his entire professional career. His partner, P.O. Fellburnie, was a female Divian of the TyeTye breed: a head taller than me, thick as a barrel, and spilling out of her clothes with muscle. TyeTyes were originally designed for life on a planet whose gravity topped 2.3 Earth G’s; Jupkur once joked they weren’t engineered genetically but geologically, like walking chunks of real estate that could bench-press nine hundred kilos. Among friends, Fellburnie came across as quite the amiable woman, a classic "genial giant"… but on the job, I could imagine her slipping into Bad Cop any old time she felt like it.