Fama was a big woman who seemed to wear all of her clothes at the same time. The outer garment was always different, but Dunya thought she recognized a couple of the layers underneath. It was cooler than average here, where a breeze came down from the distant North Pole. But she didn’t think that was the explanation. Fama was still ready to flee, and wanted to make sure she had everything she needed with her when the time came.

  “Any shakedowns recently?” Dunya asked.

  “None, thanks to your suggestion.”

  Dunya tried to remember what she had come up with.

  “Ah, Strop.”

  Fama shrugged. “He knows his food, I’ll give him that.”

  Merv Strop was an agent of the Office of Adversary Knowledge, Boscobel’s internal security force. Fama had been getting harassed by some low-level thugs from the Dead Roots, competitors to those Green Burnings Phineus gave tactics classes to. Dunya had suggested that she invite agent Strop to dine, in a visible way. The Dead Roots had moved off to find an easier target, while Strop had stayed.

  “He’s actually got a real crime to solve, I hear,” Fama said. “Someone took off with an ancient emergency kit from some secure area. It’s sweating his skull, making him ornery.”

  Dunya had to get to business. “I’m curious about someone. In the area. A Martian, I’ve heard.”

  “Anything else? Martians don’t got red dots on their foreheads to make them easy to spot.”

  Dunya had found a few minutes to check up on available tourist entries. She had access because tourists were sometimes refugees in disguise—or ended up as refugees when a political shift back home left them unable to return after their relaxing vacation lounging in a tree branch. No Martians had turned up, but there was one good possibility, from the innerbelt asteroid Fortuna. Fortuna had close relations with Mars, and might have been willing to cooperate in screening someone’s identity. If so, this person had some connections to the Martian government, but was probably operating unofficially.

  “It’s someone a fairly tough guy would still be nervous about. One possibility is a woman, supposedly from Fortuna.” And Phineus had been nervous. Who knew what enemies Phineus might have made back on Mars?

  “I need some critters,” Fama said. “Soup’s kind of bland.”

  Dunya helped pluck bugs from the underside of the leaf. Most of them escaped her fingers. Fama grabbed writhing handfuls and dumped them into the steaming pot. Their shells puffed, and their dissolving legs gave the stock the saffron color that marked its quality. A restaurant depended on the diet of its feedbugs as much as it did on the skill of its chef.

  “That might actually explain a few things, though.” Fama tasted, and nodded in satisfaction. “That’s enough now. Let the rest go.”

  The bugs scurried into the fibers. “You’ve seen someone?” Dunya said.

  “Didn’t think ‘Martian’ ’til you said. A woman. Tall. Does claim to be from Fortuna but moves like she grew up in gravity. No obvious business. Has a drink here, chats with someone there. But she’s working hard the whole time. No relaxation in her.” Fama was desperate to expand her business, kept her eye on competitors and potential customers.

  “Any idea where I can find her?”

  “She sleeps at the Moss, I think.”

  Fama was looking over Dunya’s shoulder to see who might have come in. She should let the woman get to her business.

  “Anything else you need to talk about?” Dunya said.

  “Well…” Fama was suddenly reluctant. “Tell me. How long did it take you to feel that you fit in?”

  “Here in Boscobel?” Dunya made it a principle to be honest with her clients. Sometimes that was difficult. “Most days I don’t feel I fit in at all. But sometimes, when I stand under a dripping leaf and watch the white gibbons jump the gap at Gantan, I think I should never have been anywhere else.”

  Fama scooped a bug out of the soup and sucked thoughtfully on its head. “Hope for me yet, then.”

  “Hope for us all.”

  * * *

  A couple of clients later, Dunya was at the Moss, a set of rental rooms on stilts above the mosses that gave the name. This woman was after Phineus for something, and Phineus was nervous about it. His casualness had been unconvincing. If she was keeping Phineus under observation, Dunya had a chance to maybe spot her.

  Phineus wouldn’t listen to a thing Dunya had told him. He’d go to breakfast, meeting with a Green Burning or two, maybe in a corner, so as not to be obvious. If this woman, whoever she was, meant to keep him under observation, that would be an easy spot. If Phineus then went back to sulk in his unit, the woman might take the opportunity to come back to the Moss to take care of other business. If she did, she would most likely skirt the roots of the big ash tree.

  That was a lot of assumptions. But Boscobel was incredibly resistant to travel if you didn’t know it well. Once visitors learned a useful route, they tended to stick to it. Dunya found a spot by a mossy root where she could watch, get work done, and have someone bring her a coffee every now and then.

  After an hour or so, she had updated everyone’s files. Just as she was considering giving it up, she saw an odd bit of movement. Someone had started down the stairs from the direction of Phineus, glanced across the open area below, then stepped back. Somehow, Dunya had been spotted.

  Now Dunya was even more interested. Who was this woman? And why was she so anxious to avoid an interview?

  She’d been successful in predicting the Martian’s route home, at least. Where would the woman go now? She’d probably planned out some escape route and bolthole, for contingencies. Dunya was used to people trying to avoid her.

  What choices would have seemed smart to a Martian corridor dweller who hadn’t had the time to work out the intricacies of Boscobel? The main question was: up or down? Right here was a mazelike sprawl of roots. Concealment would seem easier, and it was just the kind of place that would give comfort to a Martian.

  But she would have thought past that. She’d try to be unpredictable, at least to herself. And she’d want to use the ways in which Boscobel differed from her home. She’d want things to be interesting. She’d climb.

  There were three good routes up from here. The closest one was exposed in most directions, easily seen. One of the other two, then.

  As it happened, both those routes hit a bottleneck in the understory, in a volume that had suffered a fire a couple of decades before. Several branches had not regrown to useful size, so both those routes would kink back to near the ash trunk.

  Dunya knew another way up. It was longer and involved climbing higher, into the crown. There was no on-bough route there, where a high wind swept the branches. To the inexperienced eye, it looked impassable. But Dunya knew a tunnel inside a bough, the result of a cleared-out fungal infection, that sometimes served as swing housing for low-status new dwellers. She’d have to step over people’s shitpots, but they knew her there. After that a drop-down would put her across where the Martian would have to go. That should persuade her that Dunya was someone she had to pay attention to.

  No matter what, after that she had to get home, find her daughter, and try to keep the rest of her life under repair. She grabbed a ladderway and rose up.

  * * *

  The sunglobe had moved past its brightest point and lunchtime had gone past when Dunya found herself in a wet space under massive leaves. Water burped up onto the ridged surfaces, and cascaded down to the hanging gardens below. Only a few misguided frogs clinging to strands of pale fungus gave hints of life elsewhere.

  This was part of Boscobel’s secret support equipment. Fluid-filled tubes along the walls carried nourishment to the higher reaches of the impossible trees. Light fibers pumped photons into photosynthetic centers to support metabolisms that couldn’t possibly get all their energy from the mostly decorative sunglobe.

  The woman now dodged through a small café that hung from the rough bark of the oak bough just below here. It was a good spot to check for pursuit.

  Too bad for her that Dunya was ahead of her, not behind.

  She was a long-limbed woman with big hands and feet. With the strength in her shoulders she looked like she could have picked up the entire café and shaken everything out of it. But instead of revealing any force, she moved smoothly, sliding past people before they even knew she was there. She wore her dark brown hair loose, a style more suitable to a Martian corridor than leafy Boscobel. She’d clearly bought that treesilk jacket here, though, and it suited the length of her torso. Dunya pulled herself back into concealment.

  The chase had taken her out of herself. Now all the worries of the day came back to her. As cold water dripped on the back of her neck, she worried about her afternoon schedule, about her next encounter with Bodil, about whether Bryn would send her a message today. The longer he was away, the more entertaining his messages got, a bad sign. A poorly healed pipe with a lumpy joint vibrated under her boot, and she saw that it had shaken a couple of the big leaves loose from their adhesive connections with each other. Pushing back with her elbow and feeling the leaves peel away from each other was like childishly poking at a loose tooth with your tongue, pleasant and disturbing at once. Looked at too closely, much of Boscobel was falling apart.

  She slid out of concealment. Where was the woman? Had Dunya miscalculated?

  She felt the breath behind her. There was no time to respond. Something hit the back of her head and knocked her forward. She rolled, and found herself looking up at a long boot that pushed on her throat, and beyond it, slowly coming into focus, the Martian.

  The woman wasn’t beautiful, but she was certainly striking, with dark skin, high cheekbones, and big eyes the color of moss agate.

  “Who the hell are you?” Dunya said.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” the Martian said.

  “You could, but you have no right to. I’m a citizen of Boscobel trying to get through my day. You’re the one who snuck in here in pursuit of Phineus Gora.”

  “And who is Phineus Gora to you?”

  “My client. He’s a refugee. I’m responsible for grafting him onto Boscobel.”

  “Good luck with that.” The woman was amused. “So you look out for him.”

  “I look out for all my refugees. It’s my job. He’s worried about why you’re here.”

  “But he didn’t give you any details, hoping your sense of responsibility would put you in my way.” The amused look disappeared. “He had no right to risk you that way. His problems should stay his own.” She pulled her boot off Dunya’s throat.

  For a second, Dunya didn’t know what to do.

  “Get up, get up.” The woman was impatient. “You’ve tempted me into … actually, I think you’ve tempted me into exactly what Phineus hoped. Exposing myself. Giving the OAKs a reason to throw me out of Boscobel. Maybe he’s smarter than he seems.”

  Dunya sat up. What had Phineus gotten her to do?

  “He knows who you are,” Dunya said.

  The woman laughed. “He thinks he does.”

  “But I still have no idea.”

  “It may not matter. But … my name is Miriam Kostal. I’m from Mars.”

  “Dunya Hautala.”

  “Let me be short. Phineus is the inside man for a filibustering expedition that left Mars orbit two months ago and will be here within a day. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Anarchic Mars had turned into a menace to everyone between the orbits of Jupiter and Earth. A weak central government, recovering from assassination and attempted revolution, was unable to stop ambitious groups from putting together military expeditions to seize individual asteroids and set themselves up as ruling juntas. As a girl, Dunya had fled just such a takeover, finally fetching up on Boscobel.

  “And so you take a room at the Moss and follow Phineus around?” Dunya said. “How much sense does that make? Do the OAKs know? Anyone else?”

  “No one knows. Even on Mars. Filibustering expeditions rarely succeed without cooperation from their targets, either tacit or explicit. On Mars, the expedition has some official support. Here … I have no idea who might be involved. Anyone could have an interest in rearranging things to end up closer to the top. Phineus is a technician, not anyone involved in political discussions. He’s got a specific mission, assisting the initial penetration by the attacking force. I can’t trust anyone here. But I don’t need to. All I need to do is figure out what he’s doing, and stop it. Then I can be on my way.”

  Miriam was almost persuasive. It was always tempting to skip the mess of political compromise and get straight to the decisive action. And Boscobel sure was a mess. Dunya didn’t even try to deny it. But decisive action always left its own mess, to be cleaned up by people like her, while people like Miriam strode off in search of some other dramatic problem to fix.

  Dunya slid herself to sit with her back against the loose leaves.

  “The complexities of corruption are all we’ve got,” Dunya said. “I’m sure not everyone’s looking forward to being ruled by someone else. If you have information that will help our government fend off an attack, you should share it.”

  “No. I’ll be arrested. And now you. Any investigation will be ended by the new regime. End of story. End of us.”

  That was plausible enough. But Miriam hadn’t even tried getting cooperation. Dunya found herself irritated at the woman, impressive though she was. Boscobel was her home. She didn’t like thinking of it as a clump of trees run by people instantly eager to betray it for a better deal.

  The bottom of the leaves was loose. The top still stuck. She didn’t have time to work on it more. She had no real reason to trust Miriam. She had to make contact with someone. She leaned her head back, as if thinking it over, and pushed harder. She knew there was a branch about ten feet below, where she could find a quick route down. The leaves parted behind her and she fell through.

  From the last glimpse of her face, Miriam was taken completely by surprise. But she recovered almost instantly. She dove forward, whipped out a long arm, and just managed to snag Dunya’s ankle as she fell. Stopping Dunya’s fall almost jerked her out of the gap. She braced one foot against the ripping leaf and swung Dunya to the side, until she dangled over a much longer drop. The endless network of tree boughs circled around her.

  She could tell Miriam was considering it. People would pretty much assume that Dunya had tried something too difficult for a non-native to do properly. “Poor Dunya never quite got the hang of it…”

  With a sudden effort, Miriam hauled her in. Dunya curled up and grabbed the edge of the leaf. Finally, she lay on the floor next to Miriam, sucking in air.

  “Nice move,” Miriam said. “You practice that?”

  “A sudden inspiration.”

  “Look,” Miriam said. “You want to go to the OAKs for help? I can’t stop you. It won’t help, and it might put this whole world at hazard. But it’s up to you.”

  “Would you really have killed me?” Dunya said.

  “An impolite question. We’ve been slashing each other’s faces on Mars for a decade or more now, trying to solve problems by eliminating the people we think are causing them. Hasn’t worked for us, but it’s habit now.”

  “Not for you, though.”

  “I wouldn’t rely on the quality of my habits, if I were you. Go. Go now. Before I get sensible.”

  Dunya could feel the stare of those agate eyes like something physical. She thought about saying something else, but nothing, not even “good luck,” made sense. Without another word, she turned and went.

  * * *

  “Eh?” Strop looked up from his soup. “Dunya. What are you doing here?”

  “I want to ask you some questions.”

  “Well, I…” Strop grunted in annoyance as Dunya pulled a chair up and joined him at his table. “Suit yourself, then.”

  Strop’s pale hair lay plastered to a soft-looking skull. He was the local OAK agent, and as OAKs went, he was a decent sort. OAKs didn’t go very far, Dunya reminded herself.

  “What do you know about Phineus?” she said. “I mean, what drove him from Mars, why he’s here. Who he’s in contact with.”

  Strop swallowed a spoonful of the soup and closed his eyes. He was known for his devotion to food, and his presence at a restaurant actually served as a sign of approval. So maybe Fama wasn’t quite the victim she made herself sound.

  “Phineus is your client, isn’t he?”

  “Of course,” Dunya said.

  “So it’s your job to make sure he stays out of trouble. What we pay you for. Didn’t you do some kind of intake when you got him? Then you know he’s a protected exile. Unable to return to Mars, but protected by Martian law. A Martian trying to kill him would be in serious trouble on return home. Anyone after him would have an unusual devotion to justice. Please be more vigilant about your intakes. They give you at least little preliminary information. Too bad we don’t get to do one when we have a child. That’s why children can surprise you. They never fill out the proper forms.”

  Strop had two well-liked and successful children, both older than Bodil. It was just exasperating.

  She thought about giving him Miriam Kostal. That he’d have to pay attention to. But Miriam had gauged her right. She couldn’t do it.

  And she was reflecting that there were probably good reasons why Phineus had been dumped on her without much background information. Did Strop know those reasons? In any event, bringing that up would either sound like whining or be actively dangerous.

  “Look, Dunya.” Fama had whisked away the soup, careful to show no sign she’d seen Dunya earlier, and the sculpted pyramid that steamed in front of him smelled delicious. “I appreciate that you’ve gotten a yen to get better at your job. These impulses never last. If you don’t mind a bit of friendly advice, I’d say that you should look after your own family situation instead.”

  “My family situation?” Dunya said. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”