The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) Read Free Page B

escape?”
    “Escape where?” Didier asked. “He could have roamed this facility or maybe even made it to the dock, but that’s where he’d get caught, and he knew it. He could manipulate systems inside here, maybe just the once. But he couldn’t manipulate the entire prison. No one can.”
    She knew that. She was just so shaken that she hadn’t thought it through.
    “Besides,” Didier said, “he did escape. He died. We can’t prosecute him now.”
    She glanced up at Didier. He still looked odd in the red light, almost as if he were enjoying this.
    “Surely the punishments wouldn’t have been that bad,” she said.
    “I don’t think it was the punishment he was worried about,” Didier said. “He knew he wasn’t ever going to get out of prison, and that he would become just another bad guy in a whole universe full of bad guys. This way, his people will still do his bidding—those who are free—and he will always have this doubt connected to him. Did he really do all those things? Or did someone set him up?”
    She shook her head, then wished she hadn’t. It made her dizzier. She almost put out a hand to catch herself, then thought the better of it.
    “Why would he care about that?” she asked. “Wouldn’t he rather be alive?”
    “This was a man who had people worship him.” Didier sounded excited. Why would he sound excited? Shouldn’t he be worried? “He liked that. He believed he was important, and they believed it too.”
    “Until, what is it called, Abbondiado?”
    “See?” Didier said. “You know what happened to him, how he was captured, how things turned on him. You know it, and therefore, you think he’s important. You don’t know that about the other prisoners here.”
    That wasn’t entirely true. There were some Xelen imprisoned in a far wing for eating their human companions on a supply run. If she thought hard, she could come up with a dozen other examples.
    But she understood Didier’s point. She knew about Frémont. Everyone knew about Frémont.
    “You think this is important,” she said. “I mean, beyond us getting in trouble for his death.”
    “Oh, we won’t,” Didier said. “There’ll be a big investigation, and everyone will wonder how he got whatever it was that he ingested, and then—”
    “He ate something?” she asked.
    Didier shrugged. “I’m no coroner. But that pinkish foam around his mouth suggests poison to me.”
    How he knew the foam was pinkish in this light was beyond her.
    “And they can’t trace it to us?” she asked.
    “Not unless you gave it to him.”
    She shivered again. She needed to stand up. She was cutting off her own air here—what little air there was.
    “I never met him before today,” she said, sounding stupid.
    “You haven’t met him now,” Didier said, but he was grinning. “You’re not used to the low-oxygen ratios are you?”
    “No,” she said, and she sounded as sick as she felt. “Can I go?”
    “Nope,” he said. “I need your help.”
    “For what?” she asked.
    He helped her up, then grabbed some evidence bags from the box.
    “You and me,” he said. “We got about ten minutes before someone notices something off. I figure the best we can do is five, because I want to jump ahead of this thing. So, we get as much DNA as we can.”
    “What?” Chills ran down her back. Didier wanted her to touch Frémont? What if he wasn’t dead? What if he was?
    Her stomach did a slow flip.
    “Ah, sweet child, do you know why people work in prisons?”
    She suspected the answer wasn’t as simple as they need a job . “Why?”
    “Because, if done right, there are a lot of money making opportunities here.”
    Somehow she hadn’t thought Didier was one of the guards who sold things and made a profit. No prisoner ever flagged Didier as someone who traded on the prison black market. No one ever marked Didier’s file for possible illegal activity.
    She had thought it was because he was unassailably honest, but she was