Free Tails You Lose by Lisa Smedman

leaned over the drone.
    "I had another look at this clip last night, and I noticed something interesting," he said. "Just as the woman pulls back out of the camera's field of view, the image becomes blurrier. At first, I assumed that the mesh cloth had shifted, but then I took a closer look."
    Hu touched an icon on his monitor, and the magnification increased. The clock superimposed on the vidclip slowed, stretching a single second into a minute. Alma suddenly saw something new: the blur started in the middle of the camera's point of view and spread slowly outward like flowing water. The blurring was uneven, as if the obstruction on the lens was frothy. Alma suddenly realized what it must be.
    "She spit on the drone," she whispered.
    Hu nodded gravely. Beside him, Mr. Lali tensed in his seat.
    "We managed to collect a sample of the dried saliva from the lens," Hu said.
    Alma nodded. She could guess what was coming next: PCI security would have done DNA typing on the saliva and would have a "fingerprint" of the fourth intruder. If they found a likely suspect, a DNA match would prove that person's guilt or innocence. Normally, the development would have excited Alma—it meant they were that much closer to solving the riddle of who had conducted the extraction. But with Hu and Mr. Lali acting so strangely, Alma found herself dreading what was to come.
    Hu was watching her intently, unspeaking, his cyberarms resting in too casual a manner on the polished tabletop. Mr. Lali's eyes were puckered with lines of sorrow and regret, like those of a father who was reluctantly facing the prospect of disciplining his child. Mr. Lali whispered a single word: "Why?"
    Alma blinked.
    Hu was more direct. "The DNA from the saliva was an exact match with the cell samples in your personnel file. We didn't just do the usual random sampling—we typed all twenty-three chromosome pairs. Every single one was a match. You were the fourth person on that team, Alma. You extracted Gray Squirrel, then conveniently found him again yesterday—dead."
    Alma shook her head, her mind whirling. "But . . . but that makes no sense," she said. "Why would I want to extract Gray Squirrel?"
    "Gray Squirrel was a valuable commodity," Mr. Lali said softly. "The REM inducer has both military and civilian applications. Whichever corporation releases it will be launched into triple-A status."
    "We know who paid for the extraction," Hu tired at her. "We've traced the buyer back to Tan Tien Incorporated."
    He was staring at her, as if waiting for a reaction. The only one she could provide was surprise. She'd been charting probabilities for days, trying to come up with the name of the corporation that had ordered Gray Squirrel's extraction, and had only managed to narrow the list of possibles down to eight. How had Hu come up with the answer?
    Nervously, Alma called up the corporate files in her headware memory and scanned them for Tan Tien Inc. The company was headquartered in Beijing and was one of the more prominent corporations in the Pacific Prosperity Group. Headed up by the reclusive Sau-kok Chu, it specialized in pure research. The cyberware and bioware it developed never left the drafting computers, except as copyrighted data. The corporation made its money licensing its research to other companies that actually built the hardware.
    It would be easy enough for Tan Tien to claim the REM inducer as its own, especially since PCI had yet to release any information on the hot new project it was being so secretive about. But in order for Tan Tien to profit from the extraction, Gray Squirrel would have to agree to tell it about the project—in detail.
    "You've seen Gray Squirrel's psych profiles," Alma protested. "He'd never willingly work for anyone else or provide data from any of our research projects. He's inno—"
    Suddenly, Alma remembered the reading the I Ching had given her that morning: Innocence, with one changing yin line that would later transform the hexagram