Ruban marvelled at how completely the atmosphere at the office had changed overnight. Whereas yesterday they had been harried and overworked, bogged down by too many cases and too little time, today everything seemed to be moving almost effortlessly, as though someone had breathed new life into the very air of the stuffy old red-brick structure.
They had won an important battle, and consequently, it seemed, felt that much closer to winning the war. Ruban felt it too. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t beating impotently against an impenetrable wall, or waging a doomed campaign against an invincible foe. Finally, he thought he was beginning to achieve some sense of direction in this case, some much-needed clarity about the path ahead. He had barely had a wink of sleep last night, after watching all the various news broadcasts screaming themselves hoarse about the leaked video and everything that it brought with it, but somehow he felt oddly refreshed this morning; lighter too, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
He still wasn’t entirely sure how he was meant to deal with random strangers coming up to him and asking to take a selfie with him, or with the half dozen women who had waylaid him and insisted on weeping at him on his way over to the office that morning. Vikram had been right: it was like it had been just after the Parliament attack last year, only worse. Way worse. Still, he figured that if it meant he could keep the SifCo case and see it through to the end, he would find a way to deal with the rest.
Faiz and Dai had volunteered to go deal with the latest attack on a government warehouse in the NCR along with some of the local Hunters, so that the rest of the team could stay back at the office and research the new developments in the SifCo case. Which was exactly what they were doing now, assisted by generous amounts of strong coffee and takeaway Zainian noodles.
Putting an enormous pile of old files down on his desk with a thump and waving away the resultant dust clouds, Rinku huffed. “These are all the records I could find about Tauheen’s activities during the last century. I wouldn’t put too much stock by them, though. Most of it’s just rumours and speculation, from some of the more…imaginative channels and publications. More like UFO sightings than proper investigative reporting. And even when there’s solid proof – like pictures and stuff – nobody really seemed to know what she was up to or why. Again, it’s just more wild speculation.”
Simani groaned. “You shouldn’t have killed that Aeriel, Ruban. The one that took the disk before Tauheen. Do we even know its name yet? It must be somewhere in the system.” She turned to look expectantly at Rinku. “If it’d been alive we could’ve interrogated it about Tauheen’s location. Not to mention her endgame. I still can’t figure out what the fuck Aeriels could want with sif and sifblade formulas. It’d be one thing to simply destroy it; that I could understand. But to go through all this trouble to steal the thing. It just doesn’t make any goddamned sense.”
Ruban scowled. “It’s not like I had a lot of time to think about it. I hadn’t gone there prepared for a Hunt, you know. It was more instinct than forethought, everything that happened after that first blast in the west wing.”
“It’s a good thing he killed him too,” Ashwin piped up from the back where he was pouring himself more coffee, inundating the liquid with spoonfuls of sugar. The sight made Ruban want to gag. Hema’s cat purred in agreement, rubbing herself against the Zainian’s leg with languorous satisfaction. “Tauheen herself was bad enough. It would’ve been worse if she’d had help. Besides, he wouldn’t have told you anything even if you had managed to capture him. After all, if anything they say about the Aeriel Queen is true, I’d be more scared of her than anything they could do to me in Jahagrad, don’t you think?”
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“Not that your unique ability to identify the proper pronoun for every Aeriel isn’t overwhelmingly helpful, but at the moment you have more important things to answer for, wouldn’t you say?” drawled Ruban, his eyes fixed on one of the files Rinku had just dumped on his desk. “Like why you felt the irresistible need to bare your soul to Casia Washi on national TV last night without consulting any of us first.”
Ashwin marched over to the main gallery indignantly, putting his cup down on Faiz’s desk and plopping down into his chair in a flurry of loose hair and flowing coat. The cat gave an incensed squawk at being thus ignored and planted herself huffily upon Hema’s desk, thumping her tail at Ashwin. In a way, Ruban understood her feelings. The man could be a veritable pain in the ass when he wanted to be.
He hadn’t come back to the flat last night, so Ruban supposed he had stayed over with friends at WNN after the interview, probably Casia Washi herself, though he had never thought they were quite that close. At any event, he hadn’t asked. A side-effect of the sleepover, though, seemed to be that wherever he had been, Ashwin hadn’t managed to procure a ribbon to tie up his hair in its usual braid. Consequently, it now covered his back almost like a dark curtain, falling right down to his hips. Ruban imagined it would make moving around mighty awkward, with your hair getting under your butt every time you tried to sit down. Well, nobody had ever accused Zainian nobility of pragmatism.
“It wasn’t like I went up to her asking to be interviewed, you know,” Ashwin said, scowling at Ruban. “She asked me to appear on the show, so I did. Especially since she already had the video, they all did. So I figured, what harm can it really do to explain it all properly? Better than all of them jumping to their own conclusions and raising another shitstorm around the case. Besides, Miss Casia had helped me a lot when I first came to this country, y’know. She’s a friend. I couldn’t just refuse her request out of hand. Anyway,” he paused mid-rant to look at Ruban through narrowed eyes. “I don’t see what you’ve got to complain about, all things considered.”
“Well, even if we don’t yet know the identity of the dead Aeriel, we still have the live one to think about,” Hema said, interrupting the argument, probably sensing that it was not one that was likely to end anytime soon without external intervention.
“What, you mean Tauheen?” asked Rinku. “I’d say that’s all we’ve been thinking about lately.”
Hema shook her head, running her fingers absently through Kitty’s lush grey fur. The cat rolled over promptly, an unspoken command for a belly-rub. “No. I mean the one that attacked the west wing. The one that created the distraction to get Ruban away from the disk in the first place.”
Rinku frowned. “I think that was Tauheen too, though. She could have created the distraction while the other one sneaked in and stole the disk. She probably hadn’t counted on Ruban to realise that it was a ploy and return as fast as he did. When her minion died, she came in to finish the job herself.”
“No. Hema’s right,” Ruban said, flipping through one of the files on his desk with some interest. “It couldn’t have been her. Tauheen I mean. Her attack on the east wing was strong enough to blow a large chunk of the wall clean off, reduce it to nothing more than rubble and dust. That would have cost her a ton of energy. She couldn’t have done that less than ten minutes after the west wing blast, which wasn’t anything to scoff at either. It would have drained her completely, to the point of utter exhaustion. Which obviously wasn’t the case, since she fought us both and got away with barely a scratch to show for it.”