Page 22 of Enthraller
Ed touched the button on the side and the wall swung inward.
She was impressed. It had taken the combined skills of both her and her nanos to find that button the first time. The Halatians obviously had a way of doing things, and Ed knew the secret code.
They stepped into the room, closed the wall behind them, and Wren opened the door into the passageway beyond cautiously.
A woman was walking away, her back to Wren, heading toward an open plan area with fast, efficient steps.
“Which way?” Ed asked, plastering himself up against her back to peer out, too.
She stilled, liking the feel of him. “The opposite way.” She pointed right, and slipped out, with Ed on her heels.
“Slow down.”
She turned back to tell him that wasn’t a good idea, but he was looking at the walls of the passageway.
He had said another trick was to create kinks and turns in a passage to help someone have a little privacy while they slipped into a secret room, and there were strange kinks in this one.
He drew abreast with her and guided her into a little dead end offshoot of the passage, his fingers dancing over the flowers, leaves and trees carved into the richly-decorated enamel wall.
“There.” He pressed something and she heard the faintest click. He grinned in triumph, pushed the wall with his shoulder, and there was another corridor.
They stepped inside, and Wren gasped.
They were standing in what looked like a transparent tunnel. She could see the passage they’d just come from to her right, and to her left, a series of private offices and conference rooms, all occupied.
“Suddenly, the Guan scanner makes sense,” she breathed. “They can’t see us?”
“That would rather be the point,” Ed murmured back.
“No wonder your fellow countryman built something that can see through walls. This is common on Halatia?” she whispered. “These secret tunnels?”
“Was common,” he corrected her, moving the sentence from the present tense to the past.
She patted his arm in a ridiculous effort to comfort him on the loss of his entire planet while she wondered how anyone had operated on Halatia, knowing they were probably being spied on. Now was probably not the time to ask.
“There’s Ethan Hyt,” he said, pointing a little way down the passage, and she followed him to stand directly in front of the office where Ethan paced, alone, as if waiting for someone.
“Is there a way in?” She kept her voice as quiet as possible.
Ed began to look, shook his head. “It’ll come out in an office somewhere. Probably the office of the person who ordered this built. But I’d rather see what’s going on with Ethan before we go looking for it.”
She agreed. She was too afraid to lean against either wall, so she sat down, cross-legged. Ed shot her an amused look and leaned against the wall with his shoulder, arms crossed.
The office Ethan was in, like all the others down the line, let out into a corridor which consisted of a massive windowall along one side, looking out onto the city. Each office door was also a window, letting in the natural light from the exterior window, although it could be made opaque for privacy.
Whoever’s office Ethan was in, they had chosen transparency, and she caught sight of a woman approaching, holding a cup in each hand. The door was slightly ajar, and she pushed it open with her shoulder and stepped into the room.
Velda Shanïha.
Ethan took a cup with a murmur of thanks, and Wren saw a flash of something on his face as Velda moved past him to sit behind her desk.
He’d been reluctant to approach Velda when they discussed it last night, and he’d told them it was a break in procedure, but now Wren would guess it had more to do with the fact that Ethan Hyt had feelings for the Head of Defense.
Strong feelings.
“So, tell me what’s going on, Captain Hyt.” Velda lifted her cup and took a sip of jah.
Ethan didn’t sit, although Velda surely meant him to. He kept standing, cradling the cup in his hands, as if warming them. “Two men transferred from the Nanganya SF office a few weeks ago. They tried to kill me last night.”
