Trigger pursed her lips. "I won't. So the grabbers who were after me figured I was booby-trapped. But then they came in anyway. That doesn't seem very bright. Or did you do something again to make them think the road was clear?" "No," he said. "They were trying to clear the road for themselves. We thought they would finally. The deal was set up as a one-two." "As a what?" "One-two. You slug into what could be a trap like that with one gang. If it was a trap, they were sacrifices. You hope the opposition will now relax its precautions. Sometimes it does--and a day or so later you're back for the real raid. That works occasionally. Anyway it was the plan in this case." "How do you know?" "They'd started closing in for the grab in Ceyce when Quillan's group located you. So Quillan grabbed you first." She flushed. "I wasn't as smart as I thought, was I?" The Commissioner grunted. "Smart enough to give us a king-sized headache! But _they_ didn't have any trouble finding you. We discovered tonight that some kind of tracer material had been worked into all your clothes. Even the flimsies. Somebody may have been planted in the school laundry, but that's not important now." He looked at her for a moment. "What made you decide to take off so suddenly?" he asked. Trigger shrugged. "I was getting pretty angry with you," she admitted. "More or less with everybody. Then I applied for a transfer, and the application bounced--from Evalee! I figured I'd had enough and that I'd just quietly clear out. So I did--or thought I did." "Can't blame you," said Holati. Trigger said, "I still think it would have been smarter to keep me informed right from the start of what was going on." He shook his head. "I wouldn't be telling you a thing even now," he said, "if it hadn't been definitely established that you're already involved in the matter. This could develop into a pretty messy operation. I wouldn't have wanted you in on it, if it could have been avoided. And if you weren't going to be in on it, I couldn't go spilling Federation secrets to you." "I'm in on it, definitely, eh?" He nodded. "For the duration." "But you're still not telling me everything?" "There're a few things I can't tell you," he said. "I'm following orders in that." Trigger smiled faintly. "That's a switch! I didn't know you knew how." "I've followed plenty of orders in my time," the Commissioner said, "when I thought they made sense. And I think these do." Trigger was silent a moment. "You said a while ago that most of the heat was to go off me tonight. Can you talk about that?" "Yes, that's all right." He considered. "I'll have to tell you something else again first--why we're going to Manon." She settled back in her chair. "Go ahead."