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mid-examination, the classic alarm reaction in wess’har. “Did you have to shout at people when you were a police officer?”
    Shan gritted her teeth. Wess’har—whether they were the local population on Wess’ej or their newly arrived Eqbas cousins—had the bizarre knack of being both childishly open and uncompromisingly menacing. She’d been too harsh on Shapakti, the poor bugger. Like her, he was just a long way from home, making the best of a bad job.
    No. I am home. This is where Aras has to stay; this is where Ade wants to be. I’ve got new priorities now.
    â€œI did a lot worse than shout, believe me,” she said. Shapakti seemed to cope with her occasionally pidgin mix of English and eqbas’u. “Sorry. I’m angry that Lindsay and Rayat are walking round alive when they nearly wiped out the bezeri. At least we’ve got that bastard even if we haven’t found her.”
    â€œYou want to kill him.”
    â€œThey’ll do for starters.”
    â€œEven though you now know the bezeri slaughtered another race in the past?”
    â€œWould that make a difference to you?”
    â€œNo. It was many generations ago. It wasn’t this one.”
    â€œOkay, I admit I’ve got a lot less sympathy for them now.” It’s nothing to do with sympathy. You think you’ve been conned. You don’t like anyone pulling a fast one on you. “But I’m still a copper. If I stand back and look at the evidence, Rayat and Lin are guilty. End of story.”
    â€œMotive matters to you.”
    â€œIntent is a large part of human law.”
    â€œWhat will you do if you catch Lindsay Neville?”
    It was a good simple question. Shapakti had a talent for those, just like Ade. “I ought to nip the problem in the bud and kill her too.”
    Shan tried to think of some outcome that made sense beyond wanting to smash Rayat’s smirking face. Lindsay’s solution seemed clearer cut: Lin wasn’t going to hand over c’naatat any faster than Shan would, but Shan wanted to be certain. Fragmentation. If the risk would be around forever, it was the only answer.
    â€œRayat has asked for asylum,” said Shapakti.
    â€œWess’har don’t do fancy legal stuff like asylum.”
    â€œIf I can remove c’naatat from him, then you would have no need to hunt down and destroy other c’naatat hosts. Then the condition could be managed if it got into a wider human population.”
    Shan didn’t like the sound of managed. She wanted to hear eradicated, and also wanted not to be part of that eradication, because she almost liked her life now. “How long am I going to lay here like a Drury Lane whore, Shap?” She held out her hand, palm up, imperious. “Give me the bloody probe and I’ll do it.”
    Shapakti hadn’t seen a human in this kind of detail before. He certainly hadn’t examined one with c’naatat, and he was fully suited against the risk of contamination. Sensible precaution: but Shan still felt like a leper, and an embarrassed one at that. She extracted the glass wand and held it by its midsection so that he could take the clean end in gloved fingers.
    â€œYou can’t remove it from wess’har, you can’t remove it from ussissi, and it looks like the thing’s learned how to stop you removing it from humans,” she said. Don’t get me back in that loop of wondering why I don’t have another go at killing myself, if it’s that dangerous. “So I think I’ll hang on to a high-yield grenade until further notice, if that’s okay by you.”
    Esganikan Gai regarded Rayat as her prisoner to process, and processing prisoners only had one definition for wess’har—execution. Shan didn’t have a problem with that, not for Rayat anyway. She recognized single-minded obsession with mission objectives when she saw it. It was like looking in a