“Back here,” a henchman said, and led them through a door into another low room, this one filled with several rows of lab tables, each with flat-screen monitors and humming computer hard drives. They passed through that room and into another, this one a sprawling office with dark blue carpeting, a foosball table, a pinball machine, and a huge oaken L-shaped desk with its own complement of oversized black flat-screen computer monitors. The back of a leather captain’s chair faced them from behind the desk, and Marla rolled her eyes again. What a James-Bond-villain gesture this was going to be.
“Mr. Dalton,” a henchman said. “Your guest is here.” They stepped back, standing on either side of the door.
The chair swiveled. The man sitting in it (with his elbows on the armrests, and his forefingers steepled together, even) was identical to the henchman, though he wore a different T-shirt, ragged khaki shorts, and bulging red-tinted WWII-style aviator goggles. “Have a seat,” he said. “I’m Dalton.”
“I gathered that,” Marla said, and sat in one of the mismatched chairs on her side of the desk. B sat down, too.
Rondeau wandered over to the pinball machine. “Sweet!” he said. “It doesn’t even need quarters!” He started to play.
Dalton frowned.
“Don’t mind him,” Marla said. “He’s got the attention span of a canary. I’m Marla, by the way.”
“I know who you are,” he said. “An out-of-towner. Also the last person seen with Finch before he died.”
“I do have that distinction. And you’re the local technomancer. Can’t say I ever saw the appeal of this stuff, but then, that’s why I’m not a silicon mage.”
“Silicon?” Dalton said. “Please. I’ve got nothing but diamond processors here. They run faster without over-heating.”
“I can’t tell you how fascinating that is,” Marla said. “But we’ve got better things to talk about.”
“True,” he said. “Like why you killed Finch, and what you did with the Cornerstone.”
“How did someone as stupid as you get into a position of power?” Marla said, genuinely astonished. Beside her, B winced.
“Hey, B!” Rondeau said. “Come here! They’ve got the Area 51 arcade game! Let’s shoot some aliens!”
“Go on,” Marla said. “Have fun.”
B muttered something gratefully and went to join Rondeau.
Dalton leaned forward. “I don’t think you understand who you’re dealing with. It’s my job to find out what happened to Finch, and to mete out punishment.”
“Listen, diamond-boy, I didn’t kill Finch. We made an arrangement. He was going to do me a favor, and I was going to do him a favor. Before we could do anything, though, we got ambushed by a lunatic named Mutex and his amazing dancing killing frogs. He’s the one who killed Papa Bear and stole the Cornerstone.”
Dalton tapped a few keys on one of the keyboards in front of him. “Oh-kay,” he said after a moment. “You’re on the level.”
Marla glanced around. “I don’t sense a truth-circle.”
“What, with chalk and burning herbs?” Dalton snorted. “Please. This room is wired with sensors so delicate they’d make a CIA operative weep with envy, and I’ve developed a system that actually works as a lie detector, not like that polygraph bullshit that only really pegs stress. I know you’re telling the truth. But I’m not happy to hear it. Mutex? I thought he was long gone. He tried to get a meeting with me, and I let one of my mirrors talk to him. It wasn’t—”
“Mirrors?” Marla said, thinking of enchanted looking-glasses.
He gestured toward the door, where the henchmen still stood. “Them. My mirror-selves.”
Marla twisted around and looked at them. Their clothes had changed, and now they wore what Dalton wore. “They’re not homunculi?”
“Ha. Vat-grown clones, on a psychic link party-line with me? Please.”
If he says, “What? Please” one more time, Marla thought, I’m going to choke him with a computer cable.
“I don’t have time for retro technologies like that,” Dalton went on. “My mirrors are me, duplicated, running on a thirty-minute refresh rate. Every half hour I get a ping from them, and they get updated to whatever my present state is—so their clothes change to match mine, they know what I know, everything.”
“And this is done with computers?” Marla said.