Skeeter’s mouth fell open. The lean and grizzled former time scout smiled, a trifle grimly. “Wash your hands, Skeeter. Before you rub tear gas into your eyes again.” Behind Kit’s shoulder, Robert Li, the station’s resident antiquarian, bent over another sink, helping Rachel rinse tear gas out of her eyes. Belatedly, Skeeter noticed the floppy rubber gas mask dangling from Kit’s neck. Where the devil had Kit Carson found a gas mask? Surely he hadn’t bought one from that Templar selling them down in Little Agora? Wherever he’d stashed it—probably that fabled safe of his, up in the Neo Edo Hotel’s office—there’d been two of ‘em, because Robert Li wore one, too. Well, maybe Kit had bought them from that Templar, after all. He was smart enough to prepare for any kind of trouble. Wordlessly, Skeeter washed his hands.
When he’d completed the ritual, which helped him regain his composure and some measure of his equilibrium, he straightened up and met Kit’s gaze again. He was startled by the respect he found there. “Thanks,” Skeeter mumbled, embarrassed.
Kit merely nodded. “Better strip off those clothes. The Neo Edo’s laundry staff can clean the tear gas out of them.”
Well, why not? Skeeter had done stranger things in his life than strip naked in front of Kit Carson and the station’s leading antiquities expert in the middle of the most expensive bathroom in Shangri-La Station while a riot raged outside. He was down to his skivvies when Hashim Ibn Fahd, a down-time teenager who’d stumbled, shocked, through the new Arabian Nights gate, arrived. Dressed in Neo Edo Hotel bellhop livery, which startled Skeeter, since Hashim hadn’t been employed two days previously, the boy carried a bundle of clothing under one arm and a large plastic sack.