Chapter 155: The Questions Not Asked

Marek had been unsure until then whether she was refusing to answer because she genuinely didn’t know enough or because there was something she didn’t want the officer to hear.

Watching her now made the second possibility much harder to ignore. Whatever she knew, mentioning her family had clearly made her even more reluctant to say it.

Rhovan came over sometime during Irial’s statement. He had finished giving his own, although the first thing he paid attention to was Marek’s face rather than anything the CMS was doing.

“Your cheek is starting to swell. You might want to do something about that before tomorrow.”

Marek touched the sore side of his face. “It’ll heal.”

“That doesn’t mean you’ll look good while it does.”

Marek ignored him and continued listening to Irial. Rhovan eventually followed his attention toward her and remained quiet for a while before asking, “How long have you been watching her?”

“Long enough to know she isn’t telling them everything.” Marek lowered his voice slightly. “The Service also found environmental-monitoring equipment near where one of those men had been fighting.”

“I heard them talking about it.”

Marek waited for more, but Rhovan seemed perfectly content to leave it there. “You don’t find that strange?”

“I find plenty of things strange.” Rhovan folded his arms as he watched the officers examining the damaged device. “What I don’t find reasonable is deciding that your father has something to do with this because you recognized what kind of equipment they found.”

“I didn’t say he did.”

“Good, because you don’t know where that component came from, who it belonged to, or what those men were using it for. All you know is that Tomas worked with similar systems on Earth.”

Marek already knew that much. Finding environmental-monitoring equipment in Courtspire did not suddenly mean his father had been involved with Irial or the men who attacked her. He still wanted to know why it had been there, especially after spending so much time searching for Tomas and finding almost nothing useful.

“I’m not saying it’s connected to him,” Marek said. “I just don’t want to ignore it when this is the first thing I’ve come across here that even resembles something from his work.”

Rhovan was quiet for a moment before turning toward Irial again. “Being curious about it is fine. Following those men or trying to involve yourself in whatever caused this is another matter.”

“I wasn’t planning to follow anyone,” Marek argued.

“Maybe not yet, but you’ve been staring at that woman and her bag ever since the officers arrived.”

Marek couldn’t really argue with that. He had already considered asking Irial what she was carrying once the Service finished taking her statement, hoping that perhaps a stranger like him would make her open up. ‘Perhaps.’

Rhovan seemed to guess where his thoughts had gone. “You helped somebody who was being forced into a vehicle in the middle of a public plaza. That’s one thing. We know nothing about the people who attacked her, and she isn’t even willing to explain the situation to the officers handling the case. I would rather you not decide that a few days in Courtspire City have somehow made you qualified to investigate whatever this is.”

“I’m not trying to investigate it.”

“You only received legal standing recently. You still barely know the city, and I had to explain the paired food servings to you.”

Marek frowned. “I still don’t see what food has to do with any of this.”

“It has nothing to do with it, at least literally. And that’s why it’s useful. If something that harmless still confuses you, imagine how much you don’t know about the people who just tried to kidnap someone.”

Marek did not like how reasonable it sounded. He wasn’t about to run after the escaped driver or start looking for the people behind the attack, but asking Irial about the bag still seemed harmless enough.

“I was only thinking about asking her what’s inside.”

Rhovan considered that for a moment. “You can ask. Whether she tells you is her problem.”

The Service kept them there for a while longer.

Nobody in the group was accused of anything. There were enough witnesses and recordings around the plaza that the officers already had a decent idea of how the fight started, and most of the additional questions concerned the escaped vehicle and the two captured men.

Kellan eventually complained that he had already explained the same punch three times. Dario told him it was probably because his explanations were terrible.

Then, they began arguing all of a sudden until Eren told both of them to stop making the officers’ jobs harder.

Marek left them to it.

Irial finished her statement sometime after the others.

The CMS arranged transportation for her, but she didn’t leave without walking over to the group first. She looked tired. The fear from earlier had faded enough that Marek could finally see how exhausted she was, but she still carried the bag over the same shoulder.

“I wanted to thank all of you.”

Dario told her she didn’t need to, while Nadia asked whether she had somewhere safe to stay after leaving the plaza. Irial assured her she did, though Marek wasn’t entirely convinced after hearing the rest of her statement.

She eventually turned toward him. “Newton, right?”

“Newton Machiavelli.”

Irial nodded. “I’ll remember it.”

Marek had been thinking about asking what was inside her bag ever since the officers started questioning her, but standing in front of her now made the question seem much less reasonable. She had already refused to explain the situation to the Civic Measure Service, and he was still somebody she had met less than an hour ago because three men had tried to drag her into a vehicle and yes, still a stranger.

“Take care of yourself,” he said instead.

“I will.”

Irial gave the rest of them another quiet thank-you before walking toward the vehicle the Service had arranged for her. Marek stayed where he was until she got inside, though his attention returned to the bag once before the door closed.

Rhovan was standing nearby, but thankfully, he did not comment on it.

They returned to Goldwake House later that evening, and the whole kidnapping apparently did very little to affect Kellan’s appetite. He went looking for food almost as soon as they arrived, with Dario following him into the kitchen despite the fact that both of them had spent half the afternoon surrounded by restaurants and food stalls.

Silas and Rafe were still talking about the vehicle that escaped. Rafe had seen more of its route than anyone else in the group, while Silas kept going back over what happened near the curb and where the damaged device had been found. Nadia stayed with them for a while before complaining that Rhovan’s attempt at sightseeing had somehow ended with an attempted kidnapping.

Marek eventually left them and went into the rear garden.

Rhovan’s golden markers from their earlier lesson were already gone, so he used parts of the garden instead. The edge of the stone pathway and one of the nearby posts became his first pair of references, and once Spatial Parallax settled between them, Marek began switching to other fixed points whenever the relationship became too easy to maintain.

Practicing there was much simpler than trying to use the Technique in Lantern Plaza. Nothing was rushing toward him, nobody was trying to hit him, and the references stayed exactly where he expected them to be.

He knew that was the entire reason Rhovan had started his training with stationary objects, but after managing to use Spatial Parallax during the fight, only to lose it once everything became more chaotic, Marek wanted his control to become reliable enough that movement wouldn’t throw him off so easily.

He continued until maintaining the references started taking more effort than it should have. At that point, Marek released the Technique and sat near the edge of the garden before he turned a useful practice session into several more hours of staring at objects and getting increasingly worse at it.

His mind returned to Lantern Plaza anyway.

Irial had claimed that she didn’t know the men who attacked her. And Marek could believe that much. What bothered him was everything she had tried to avoid afterward. The kidnappers had cared enough about her bag to go after it even after they had already lost their chance to take her, and something that looked like environmental-monitoring equipment had been found near where one of them had been fighting.

Neither detail proved anything on its own. The device might not even have belonged to them, and Courtspire certainly had plenty of reasons to use environmental equipment without Tomas Vale being involved in any of it.

Marek still couldn’t completely dismiss it.

He had spent hours searching records for his father and had found almost nothing useful. Now, on the same day, he had met a woman carrying documents she refused to explain, heard her bring up her family before anybody specifically mentioned them, and seen equipment related to the same general field Tomas had worked in back on Earth.

That was not sufficient for Marek to call any of it a lead, but it was enough that he knew he would remember Irial Venipra if he encountered her again.