“So what does Tauheen plan to do with the reinforced sifblade formula now that she has it?” Ruban asked, standing with his back against the kitchen counter as Ashwin put the dishes away. He would have helped, but he had been forced to eat noodles for the fifth day in a row by some goddamn creature that didn’t even need to eat in the first place, and he wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the moment.
Ashwin shrugged. “Develop hyper-effective sifblades? Use them to attack Vaan and retake the throne from Safaa, perhaps. Who knows? My mother moves in mysterious ways her wonders to perform. What?”
“Nothing. It’s just…it gives me backlash to think of her as your mother. Evil psychosis aside, she looked young enough to be my younger sister.”
Ashwin smirked. “Careful now, Ruban. Don’t go getting ensnared by my mother’s wily ways. Better men than you have fallen for that over the centuries, and it’s never ended well.”
“You Aeriels really do have a jacked up opinion of yourselves, don’t you? How does she plan to use the sifblades? Not like she or any of her kind can actually wield sif.”
“She wouldn’t have to. Not if she attacked Vaan with a human army.”
“A human army?” Ruban couldn’t help the disbelieving snort that escaped him. “Really? That’s her big master plan? Get an army of humans to be her cannon fodder in some stupid war against her own daughter? In what universe does she think that’s gonna work out? What human is she going to enlist?”
Ashwin’s mouth quirked into a wry little smile. “You don’t know her, do you? How do you think the Exiles held power for as long as they did even after the sealing of Vaan? She had humans fighting for her during the Rebellion; much more so than Aeriels, in fact. Spying on and killing their own kind at her command. My mother can be…very persuasive. If she wants a human army, she will have a human army. That is, unless we stop her before she can actually use the formula to get her arsenal in place. No army’s going to do her any good without the weaponry.”
“You know, I was thinking–”
“Were you, now?”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I know, right?”
Ruban rolled his eyes. “I was thinking…about what Reivaa said that night at Zikyang. About Hiya’s mother.” He shot a quick glance at the bedroom. The door was shut. Hopefully, the girl was already asleep.
Ashwin’s expression sobered. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Well, I was doing some digging. Nothing official, you understand. If Tauheen really has an insider in the government or the IAW, I don’t want to raise any alarms until we have something solid to go on. It would only put Uncle Subhas and Hiya in more danger if the mole thought we know something we shouldn’t.”
“And? Did you find anything?”
Ruban sighed, his shoulders sagging slightly. It had been a long day, and not a particularly productive one. “It’s not easy to find anything on a case this old. Most of the evidence that could’ve given us a clue about what really happened is gone. The case has been closed for nine years, and there wasn’t much of an investigation to begin with. Apparently, everyone always assumed it was a simple car accident.”
“Depending on where it happened and what she crashed into,” said Ashwin, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip, a look of concentration on his face. “An accident like that would be easy to fake with an energy-blast. Especially if the car blew up afterwards. Unless someone specifically suspected Aeriel involvement in the case, it would just be blamed on a gas leak or something of the kind.”
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Ruban nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking. Which is why I started looking into the paperwork. Vehicles leave paper trails just as much as people, you know. The physical evidence might be destroyed, but words on a piece of paper…” Ruban walked over to the centre-table and flicked open his briefcase.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing very concrete, but I did manage to recover some of the files from the original investigation. Apparently, the car had been serviced the day before the accident.” He held out the servicing bill dated February 5th, 2008. “Now, I find it hard to believe that a mechanic would have completely missed a technical issue serious enough to cause a fatal accident. Because there is no mention of any kind of a glitch in the receipt or anywhere else in the records of the garage – it’s within SifCo premises and caters almost exclusively to their employees and interns. They maintain detailed electronic records of all transactions. And well, there’s nothing to indicate that there was anything whatsoever wrong with Aunt Misri’s car when she collected it from the garage the day before the accident. I know it’s not conclusive, but…”
“But it doesn’t seem right. I agree. Reivaa may have been half delirious with pain and loss of energy by the time she started spouting all that, but she described your aunt in far too much detail for it to merely be a product of her twisted imagination. If nothing else, Reivaa had definitely seen her before.”
“And it’s not just that either. The accident happened behind Kanla Park. The place is a hub of activity now, what with the Select City Walk and all the shopping malls coming up around it. But that area was still under construction less than five years ago. In ‘08, they had barely laid the foundations for the buildings. It would have been nothing more than a long stretch of deserted road on the fringes of the city. If there was any place an energy-blast would have gone unnoticed, that was it.
“And why would Aunt Misri drive all the way around Kanla Park on her way to SifCo from the Kinoh Residence? I mean, I guess you could say she did it to avoid the traffic but really, it makes no sense when you think about it. She would have had to drive an extra hour just to get back into central Ragah, and then drive to SifCo from there. Why would she burn more gas if she wasn’t even making better time?”
Ashwin sighed. “Well, I suppose I might as well say it.”
“Say what?”
For a moment, the Aeriel looked away. He looked almost guilty. “Remember the first time you took me to your uncle’s home? Right after Tauheen had stolen the formula?”
“Yes.”
“Well, remember when Hiya dragged me up to her room? I noticed a picture of your aunt on the bookshelf. I didn’t know it was her at the time, of course. But well, Hiya said that she had died in an accident nine years ago. And it just struck me as odd,” he sighed, rubbing a pale hand over his face. “Look, you have to understand. It was just a vague hunch, what I was feeling. I had no real basis for it and no reason to think it was true, at least back then. If I’d thought there was any actual chance of my hunch being right, I would’ve found a way to let you know–”
“Just spit it out, will you?” Ruban snapped. His heart thundered in his ears and his fists clenched of their own volition, the nails leaving reddened marks on the skin of his palms.
Ashwin closed his eyes, releasing a breath. “Try not to kill me, okay? Some time ago – I suppose it would’ve been around nine or ten earth-years – Safaa’s spies brought news about some abductions and assassinations being carried out by Tauheen’s followers on earth. Not unlike what happened with Hiya, I suppose; only on a much larger scale, more organised. They mostly targeted high-ranking officials and politicians, and their close families. For political leverage, that kind of thing, you understand? Or that’s what Safaa thought anyway. She sent some of our soldiers to intervene, but she refuses to get more involved than absolutely necessary in the affairs of earth.”
He opened his eyes, his gaze almost apologetic when it met Ruban’s. “So when I heard that your aunt had been a scientist at SifCo. And your uncle being who he is, I couldn’t help but wonder. The timeline certainly adds up. Had I known the circumstances of her death back then, I would have known my suspicions were valid, at least in part. But I didn’t. And well, we had more immediate concerns to deal with, what with the IAW trying to take you off the case. So I didn’t think much of it then. And after we left, I guess I kept getting distracted with one thing or another until it just slipped my mind.” He sighed again. “I’m sorry. It’s no excuse, but I hadn’t known.”