Free A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

small sigh. He pulled a chair out for her, as if the room were his. She could have made a big deal about the fact that he was doing community service, was under her legal supervision, and could, in fact, imprison him at any time.
    But she decided not to make any power plays and, at the moment, to ignore any he pulled—if he was pulling any right now. He could also simply be polite.
    She sat.
    “Here is my problem,” Okani said. “I have done business with one Eaufasse clan which operates outside of Epriccom. I’ve always had the impression that this particular group of Eaufasse were exiles, but I could never confirm it.”
    She didn’t want to hear about him, but she had learned long ago that people often prefaced what she wanted to hear about with something important; she ignored his words at her own peril.
    “I speak Fasse,” he said. “I’m good at it.”
    She tensed.
    “But I speak a formal version of the language. I just want you to know that.”
    “Why is it important?” she asked.
    “Because, at times,” he said, “in this interview, your group lapsed into a dialect that I think I understand. I can’t guarantee that I do understand it.”
    “Oh, great,” she said. “Just great.”
    She tried not to be too upset. She already believed Okani was a better translator than Uzven. Okani told her his limitations. Uzven placed his own interpretation on everything.
    “The other thing you need to know,” Okani said, “is that the kid here, he’s fluent.”
    “In Fasse?”
    Okani nodded. “His Fasse is better than mine. Much better. I don’t have the accent and I don’t have his gift for idiom.”
    She let out another sigh. Every time she thought she had a handle on this case, the ground shifted beneath her. “I’ve got to meet with him in less than an hour. Tell me what you can.”
    Okani folded his hands. “First, the asylum question. The Eaufasse don’t appear to have a word for ‘asylum’ because, as far as I can tell, they don’t understand the concept, at least not in the sense of protection from a foreign government and immunity from extradition.”
    She folded her own hands together, mirroring Okani’s posture. She did that on purpose to make sure he relaxed.
    He didn’t seem to notice. “Apparently, the Eaufasse don’t understand extradition. I couldn’t find it in a quick search of their laws.”
    “You found a database of their laws?” She’d been unable to find anything like that; it was the first thing she had checked for. It was always the first thing she checked for whenever she was encountering a new culture. The laws told her more than any cultural representative would.
    Okani slipped his hands apart. One hand gripped the arm of his chair.
    “Um, I have a database,” he said. “It’s not official. It’s the things I and my old friends learned about that little clan of Eaufasse we’d encountered.”
    “Do you know of anything official?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “Believe me, I’ve looked. There’s nothing easily accessible. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means that we can’t find it.”
    She brought her hands up and tapped her chin with her thumbs. She was going to have to document Okani’s claims, so that if (when) she did misstep, she could show that she had tried to do things the Eaufasse way.
    “All right,” she said. “The Eaufasse don’t have a concept of extradition, so far as we know, which means that they don’t have a concept of asylum or protection from prosecution from the outside.”
    “Prosecution or persecution,” he said pointedly. She wondered if that was a reference to his own legal troubles. She decided to ignore that.
    “So he couldn’t have been asking for asylum,” she said.
    “Not in their language, no,” Okani said. “Your previous translator got that wrong.”
    He seemed to speak with a great deal of relish about that. Had she told him Uzven’s name? Or just that it was Peyti? Or had she simply