If Blake does know or suspect I’m Star and he’s just trying to suck me into a trap, he’s not in any great rush to trigger it. For the next week I follow the big boss-man around like a good little gofer, sometimes running errands for him, but more often just standing around beside and behind him and looking stone. The big troll called Box is the head of Blake’s Praetorian guard, it turns out. It also turns out I’ve sadly underrated Box all these months. Sure, he talks like he’s got rocks in his mouth and crammed down his throat; sure, like anyone who resembles an escapee from a nightmare factory, he has an uphill battle credibility-wise. But I openly and freely admit that Box isn’t the congenital idiot everyone takes him for, and that his warped and bulbous skull contains a prodigious amount of trivia—for example, everything you never wanted to know (and were too smart to ask) about the World Combat Cyclists League plus its past and current roster of sociopathic murderers ... er, players, yeah, that’s it. He also likes archaic, nineteen-sixties "folk" music. After Big Bad Bart, I can forgive him for that, however. He also claims he could once play the Irish whistle before he goblinized and his fingers got too big. Under other circumstances, I could get to like him, but I can’t afford to let that happen. Which is probably what I hate most about undercover work.