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looked like a fingerprint of Androt blood. As she examined it, she caught a flash of something darting among the sculptures in the darkened garden. She stared, hoping to catch another movement, but everything remained still.
    Her hands twitched, wanting to touch the walls, to delve into the memories of the house and extract the truth of this terrible night. The craving flared unbearably and she flipped back the cap of one of her gloves and reached out. A sudden feeling of being watched stopped her. Through the window, she saw that the trackers had gathered beside the front gate and the commander was looking in directly at her. Silho swallowed, shaken by the second close call that night.
    She hurried for the door and pushed out of the room into the parlour, now crowded with grey-uniformed forensic investigators. They swarmed around the body. A short, round man she took to be B.L. Jenkins stood barking orders. Mrs Parkingham and the Androt maids were gone, possibly taken by guardians to another room to give their statements. Silho reached the door as the yellow-eyed hologramographer was arriving. They brushed past each other muttering hello and goodbye. As she stepped out into the night’s warmer air, she also saw the human-breed guardian from the first scene standing by the door. They nodded at each other and she hurried back along the path towards her team. She glanced into the darkness of the garden, feeling eyes watching her.
    She reached the others as Jude was finishing a long-range body-heat sweep.
    ‘Nothing unusual,’ he said. ‘No one injured.’
    Silho forced herself to speak up. ‘There was a spot of, I think, blood on the windowsill in there.’
    ‘This?’ Jude asked, as SevenM brought up a hologram he’d taken of the window and the smudged Androt blood.
    Silho nodded, surprised that she hadn’t noticed him taking the shot earlier.
    ‘We have actually done this once or twice before,’ Diega smirked. ‘Unlike you.’
    ‘Actually, Diega, this scene is Silho’s second scene – so that’s twice. Why don’t you give it a rest, or people will start to think you’re jealous,’ Jude challenged.
    Diega’s eyes widened with shock and anger.
    ‘Alright, let’s move to a clearing and take off,’ the commander intervened. He stepped down onto the road and headed back the way they’d come.
    Silho and Eli both hurried after him, leaving Jude and Diega to follow. Even with distance between the two groups, the tension between the pair was palpable. Silho felt grateful to Jude for standing up for her, but couldn’t help but wonder why. Was it just because he was a nice guy or did he want more from her? During the year-cycles of military training, she’d managed to keep to herself, but with the tracker team being so small and tight-knit it would be difficult to remain distant. She had to talk to them and let them into her life to a certain extent, otherwise they might become suspicious, but she could never let them get too close. The fact that Jude seemed so genuine and caring wouldn’t make keeping him away any easier. And then there was the commander. How was she going to keep up her front when he left her permanently stammering and blushing, torn between hoping he was looking at her and desperately trying to avoid those eyes? The pounding in her head intensified, and she only just stopped herself from grabbing at the pain.
    Fortunately, Eli again provided a distraction. He took a frame from his pocket and activated the holo-screen inside it. It displayed a still hologram of four Androts. Three of them Silho recognised as the maids from the house, the one that had showed them in and the two from the parlour; the fourth was an unknown machine-breed man.
    ‘Ada, Joy, Zoe and Kry,’ Eli read from the near-invisible tag on the side of the hologram. ‘I swiped this from the room.’
    The commander took it from him and held it up to his face.
    ‘The missing Androt’s barcode is 939993,’ he said, sounding