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The creature reached into his pocket.
I shuffled my feet.
“Oh no, please,” I said. “Don’t do this. I swear if I had just a little more time…”
He came out with a small device—not the neuralizer.
“Take this,” he said. “Plug it into his computer system in his study at home. We will study his communications. Meanwhile, you will get closer to him. You have another twenty-four hours to complete your mission.”
“Thank you!” I said. “I can do this. But is there a way to get an extension? By a month or two, maybe?”
“Twenty-four hours,” Not George Clooney said sternly. “No longer.”
He turned and left through the door.
I fell back on the sheetless bed, exhausted.
I had twenty-four more hours. A single day to learn a guy’s deepest darkest inner turmoil, secrets he kept hidden from his nearest and dearest, never mind total strangers.
They might as well have asked me to discover the theory of everything.
4
KAL
Sirena clutched the arms of her chair tightly as we swerved between two huge advertisement boards and joined the long stream of traffic peeling out of the city. It would take some time for us to break through the worst of the traffic and reach the green shores of the countryside where I lived.
She was nervous about flying in a spacecraft, but not as bad as I would have expected if her species hadn’t yet dabbled with aircraft. She was a nervous flyer and I knew exactly how she felt. I still got a little jittery when I flew. We were born with feet. I much preferred keeping them on the ground.
Zes sat in a seat ahead of us, relegated from his usual position at my side. He’d been polite enough to Sirena that morning—anything else and I would have had sharp words with him—and now he leaned back with his head facing the shuttlecraft ceiling and began to snore lightly.
Anyone looking at him would think he was dead to the world. He was anything but. Even prone as he was now, he could whip his blade out faster than the time it took to blink. He’d served my father and my brother. We were lucky to have him.
That morning, I met him for breakfast. He clamped a hand to his head and moved like a geriatric patient.
“What did I eat last night?” he said. He was in real agony.
“Serves you right for stuffing your face,” I said. “I brought you here as my date and you turned into a slob. The least you could do was comport yourself.”
Zes shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help it. You know what I’m like with Methusida steak. I can’t control myself. Did I do anything embarrassing?”
I thought back to the upturned faces of the lords and ladies he’d gatecrashed. I didn’t recognize them but I wanted to rub it in.
“Only kicked off a land skirmish war I’ll have to sort out when we get back,” I said.
“Really?” he said. “Oh man, I’m sorry. I don’t remember a thing after falling asleep.”
In truth, when I received the invitation, I knew it wasn’t going to be the most exciting event in the world. If it did turn out to be exciting, it meant they wanted to bury a blade in my back and toss me in a ditch somewhere. In such a situation, I needed the best guard I had.
The real reason I was giving him a hard time was because I wanted him to forgive me for what I was about to tell him I’d done.
I flapped my newspaper out wide and set to reading it.
“By the way,” I said, dropping it in as if it wasn’t such a big deal, “I invited someone to stay with us at the castle.”
“Oh? Who?”
