Poirot confronted him at noon.
He had dreamed of music the night before—the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem. Dying Mozart writing his own death mass. Dying Arlena, soon, though she did not know it. And in the dream, the choir’s faces were not human. They were zerg. Creep spread beneath their feet like spilled ink on a murder map.
“You did not strangle her, mon ami ,” the detective said. “You did not poison her wine. You reprogrammed her chrono-synapse three nights ago, using a psi-emitter disguised as a radio. She walked to the cave at the appointed hour. Not because she was pushed. Because the terran ghost inside her—the one she did not know existed—executed order Lacrimosa.”
Kerrigan smiled. “In the Koprulu sector, we call that a build order. In your novels, M. Poirot, you call it maldad bajo el sol . Evil under the sun. But evil is just a bug in the system.”
Lacrimosa dies illa — that weeping day when from the ashes rises guilty man. But here, on this hot rock, guilt was not human either. It was a protocol.
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