Klar glanced in Boheng's direction. "You don't look like the completely uneducated sort from the badlands—of course, you might have been educated out there, but you carry the scent of the Habitable Zone. I can smell it."
Boheng tilted his head back in a gesture of surrender. "Officer, you're not actually going to treat me like a criminal and interrogate me, are you? I said I'm a friend of the inspector, and you saw for yourself that it's true. I wasn't lying. Surely you don't think a friend of an inspector would lose their mind and deliberately come to her territory to commit murder in secret?"
"Hard to say," Klar's gaze was completely rippleless. "If the people killed are all ones she feels are troublesome or deserves to die, then it makes a lot of sense."
Boheng was left speechless, for a moment unable to even think of how to defend himself.
Right then, a voice came from right above the two of them.
"If it were a friend willing to share my worries like that, I certainly wouldn't let him get involved."
Both of them looked toward the source of the voice at the same time, seeing someone standing behind the second-floor railing at an unknown moment. Amid the layers of overlapping tree shadows, Klar squinted for a moment before quickly realizing that it must be Hesta's voice.
A series of footsteps approached from afar, and sure enough, Klar saw Hesta and Silei appear together at the spiral staircase nearby, the two of them one after the other, moving toward the core of the greenhouse.
Thinking that Hesta might have heard everything just said, Klar felt a brief ripple of unease, but immediately let it go—what was there she couldn't hear? It was a good chance to test her