Understandable, but annoying. Her cage was at the side of my bed, under my nightstand. I pounded the cage with the flat of my hand, making the whole s...ructure boom."Quiet!" I commanded. A few snuffles and then silence. I settled back and waited. According to my alarm clock it took seven minutes for her to start crying again. I rolled out of bed.The carpet beneath my feet was warm and yielding. The air conditioned air was crisp against my skin and my whole body felt fuzzy, as if I was moving in. Tears flowed down her cheeks. But Rahul still didn’t get a feeling of sadness from Payal and thought it to be an act. ACP stayed back to be with the family as he was a family friend. Rahul proceeded to the police station and was constantly in touch with Arvind and Iqbal.They were on the spot about 80 km away from Bangalore. At around 3 AM, the body of Rajeev had reached the government hospital for autopsy. By 6 in the morning, Arvind and Iqbal were back at the station with the car and impounded. Aunt Claire assured me that it wouldn't add up to much more than four or five inches with the way the wind scoured it away. She did take pains to warn me of possible black ice since it had warmed enough to melt the previous snow. We'd gone out before it had gotten really bad and chained up our vehicles, a totally new experience for me, so that we wouldn't have to bother in the morning.I left extra early, creeping along so that, if I did start to slide, I could reduce the possible damage. I. I needed to not draw any media attention to me, but she did want me to bitch slap the school board if I could.I fired up my computer to see if I could figure out what the hell was going on with the man-in-the-machine seemingly vanishing. Like the last time, it remained blazingly fast, and the Internet wasn’t lagging at all, but the man-in-the-machine had gone dark again. None of the ways I tried, including those he put in my head that were untraceable, got any response. I couldn’t even get the.