The tailor lengthened his stride again. A wary smile stretched across his face as he reached the spot where Regan and his gang stood. “Good morning, Constable. May we get by?”
Regan turned around and gave the tailor a once-over. “Morning, Wilseck, and no.” His smile was grim. “This is what we call a checkpoint. We’re going to have to check your chip. And yours.” He nodded at Teal. Teal’s throat closed, but his attention was fleeting. He didn’t recognize her. She fought the urge to touch her face. How much had they changed her? “And we have to ask if you’ve seen her.” He unhooked the chip reader from his belt and held it up so they could see the little 3-D of Teal shining there. His gaze flitted over Teal, and rested again on Wilseck, and then shot back to Teal. This time his brow started to furrow.
Teal swallowed hard, while the tailor, Wilseck, squinted at the 3-D. “Nope. Nobody I know.”
Regan took a step closer and pointed the display at Teal. “How about you?”
Teal’s heart thundered in her chest. She was sure the whole world could hear it. She had to do something now, right now. Regan was looking too closely at her. He’d know her in another second.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s Teal Trust, isn’t it?”
Regan’s brow furrowed more deeply for a second and then smoothed out. “That’s right. Have you seen her?”
Teal nodded. “She’s been hanging out around the library, trying to buy a skyhook for the computer so she can get hold of someone on Athena.”
“She try to buy from you?”
Again, Teal nodded. “I’m not that desperate, though. If that kid’s legal, I’m a constable.”
Regan smiled, and maybe he laughed silently. “But I don’t know you, do I?”
“I guess not.” She saluted him. “Collie Od.”
She watched his eyes flicker back and forth as he ran through some kind of mental list. “No, I don’t know you,” he said, more to himself than to her. He looked over her shoulder at the transport guards. “Collie and Wilseck stay here until we get back from the library.”
Regan strode up the pier. Teal swallowed past the fear in her throat and glanced back at Wilseck. He looked placid, ready to wait all day, but she could feel the tension singing through him. The look he gave her was the same cold expression she’d seen from Chena a million times. It said, What do you think you’re doing?
Keeping the cop away from me, she thought toward him, but she couldn’t tell if the idea reached him.
Instead, he nodded to the two checkpoint guards blocking the peer. “Grace. Cole.”
Grace stood on the left-hand side of the pier and carried a taser on her belt as well as a scanner. “Willie.”
“What’s the score with this Teal Trust?”
Cole smirked. “Willie, if you expect me to believe you don’t know about the Trusts, you must be way off your game.”
Wilseck gave a small nod. “All right, I know. What I don’t know is why the constable is looking for her.”
“Because she’s gone missing, hasn’t she?” Grace crossed her arms. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, now, would you, Willie?”
Wilseck’s smile grew sly, and Teal’s heart began to pound. Wilseck was running a game here, and she didn’t know the rules. “That all depends, doesn’t it?”
Cole stepped forward. “Oh, no, Willie. You don’t have any leverage this time. All we have to do is tell the cop you know.”
“Well, you could do that,” agreed Wilseck, appearing completely unruffled. “But it wouldn’t be very good for you if Lopera had to tell her employers you weren’t playing along.”
At those words, Cole went dead white. Who was Lopera? Who were her employers? Teal had never seen a villager look like that except when somebody was suggesting he might be getting on the wrong side of a Pharmakeus…
Or the hothousers.
No. He couldn’t be threatening them with the hothousers. What he was doing was so illegal they’d toss him into involuntary before he had time to blink. No. There had to be something else going on.
But Cole’s face was still that sick, scared white. “Willie, look, it’s not just us. That Constable Regan is not going to be pushed around. We can’t just…”
Grace, on the other hand, just licked her lips and looked away. When she looked back, Teal saw a combination of steel and resignation in her face. “What do you want, Willie?” she asked wearily.
Wilseck’s smile grew even wider. “I always knew you were the smart one, Grace.”