S44

I have a chat with Tushabe later. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” he says.

I draw him farther into a walkway dead end. “When Ezebel overheard the conversation about keeping Dropkick and Bedrock a secret, it left me wondering if Bedrock is a team like ours. Think you can find out?”

“I can give it a try,” he says.

Two days later, Tushabe whispers to me, “Bedrock is same as us, twelve athletes, designed for the Worldspanner circuit.”

So that confirms it. The Assembly has spent half a billion credits on Bedrock, a team exactly like us. Bedrock could not possibly make that amount of money back, no matter how good they are. So why form the team at all? Why form us at all?

In the Artiste box, draw a bloody bear trap.