Carnival

She hadn’t expected Katherinessen to pause and turn, and give that slow, considering look to Kusanagi‑Jones. Whatever Kusanagi‑Jones’s expression disclosed in return, Lesa couldn’t read it, but it seemed to satisfy Katherinessen.

“All right,” he said, when he looked back. “I’ll try.”

Which was the best he could honestly offer. She waited a beat, to see if anything else was forthcoming, and nodded twice. “At least if I win, it saves us staging a coup.”

“Sure,” Katherinessen replied. “All we have to do is fix an election. And provoke a revolution.”

Lesa smiled, nudging the still‑cold glass farther from the edge of the desk with the backs of her fingers. “Or two.”

Kusanagi‑Jones buried his face in his glass and breathed deeply, letting eye‑stinging fumes chase his muddleheadedness away. “How did you two make contact?” he said to Vincent.

“New Amazonia turns out to be a hotbed of political unrest.” Vincent scratched the back of his neck, wincing. Kusanagi‑Jones had to lace both hands around the glass in front of his groin to keep from reaching to stop Vincent’s hand as he said, “Who’d guess? But Lesa hasn’t told you the best part.”

Kusanagi‑Jones lifted his chin. “Suspense is killing me.”

“As I mentioned in the car, Robert’s vanished. The bad news is, he was the primary contact between Vincent and myself. Unfortunately, he was also working for Elder Kyoto, who, we learned last night, is secretly involved in a radical male‑rights movement called Parity.”

“Who wants in on the conspiracy.”

“She’s in,” Vincent replied. Kusanagi‑Jones gave him the dirtiest look he could manage, and Vincent met it bold‑faced.

“Nice private little junta you’ve whipped up.”

“It’s what you call an arrangement of convenience,” Vincent said. “The bad news is, Robert is missing–”

“And Robert knows about all three of you.”

“And my mother,” Lesa said. “Who is not, however, aware that we’re hoping to rearrange New Amazonia’s social order quite as much as we are.”

“And it’s safe to talk about this in her house?”

Lesa smiled. “My security priorities are higher than hers.”

Vincent straightened, moving stiffly. “Ur’s prepared to go to war, if necessary. This doesn’t have to stay secret long.”

Kusanagi‑Jones shook his head. He suspected that if he were even remotely psychologically normal, he shouldhave been feeling worry, even panic. But it was excitement that gripped him, finally, the narrow color‑brightening focus of a purpose. “I’ve hopped a cresting wave.”

Vincent smiled. “Something like that. We’re committing treason against two governments; everybody with a grudge can ride. Do you think your Free Earth contacts can help?”

“Depends what the plan is.”

“What was yours?”

“Sabotage. Prevent Earth from getting its hands on the technology by any means necessary. Very straightforward. Easy enough for a lone operative to accomplish.”

Lesa looked up. “What made you go to Vincent, then?”

“Vincent knows. He’s satisfied.” Well, he knew the hasty outline at least, Kusanagi‑Jones having filled him in quickly about Kii’s ultimatum before they decided to bring the challenge to Miss Pretoria’s attention. Hadn’t been time for details.

“Anyway,” Kusanagi‑Jones continued, when Lesa had been staring at him for a little longer than was comfortable. “How many factions arethere in the New Amazonian government?”

“That I’m aware of?” She shrugged, too. “For current players, we have to count all of us, Parity, whoever Robert is working for, the isolationists, the appeasement faction, and the separatists, who want the males– allthe males–off New Amazonia. And whoever it was who tried to kidnap Vincent, whoever attempted to assassinate Claude–”

“Though there may be overlap.” Vincent made a face. “Do we at least have a DNA type on that woman you wounded yesterday?”

“Take at least a week,” she said, and Kusanagi‑Jones wasn’t sure if he or Vincent looked more startled. “Backwater colony, remember? As you were so eager to point out to us just the other night. Besides, genetic research is a very touchy subject here.”

A pained silence followed. Vincent cleared his throat. “Anyway, our plan was a little more complex.”

“It always is.” But Kusanagi‑Jones lifted his glass to his lips and drank, politely attentive. “You had said something about fomenting revolution.”

“Revolution here. Eventually,” Lesa said.

“If you’re busy fighting a civil war–”

“ Afterwe bring our support to a rebellion on Coalition‑controlled worlds. That means replacing the government, but we do that every three years anyway, and if we make Claude look bad enough, when we call for a vote of no confidence we’ll get it. The Coalition’s advances come in handy, actually. There’s nothing like an external enemy to unify political opponents.” She smiled. “You can even send home reports that you’re working to weaken Claude’s administration, and be telling the truth.”

Kusanagi‑Jones rubbed the side of his nose. “The other issue. Robert.”

Lesa nodded, biting her lip.

“He knows all this?”

“We’ll bring him in. Don’t worry. If he’d gone to Claude, I’d be in custody, and she wouldn’t be trying to discredit you.”

Kusanagi‑Jones snorted. “Unless she’s waiting to see who else we implicate. You suppose diplomatic immunity will keep Singapore’s people from shooting us as spies?”

“Depends,” Vincent said, “on how badly they want a war.”

Later, after a more in‑depth discussion of the details of alliance with Lesa, Vincent paced the bedroom while Angelo curled, catnapping, on the bed. Angelo was breathing in that low, gulping fashion that meant nightmares, but Vincent set his jaw and didn’t wake him. He needed the sleep too much, no matter how poor its quality.

And Vincent needed the time to think.

Axiomatically, there came a point in any secret action where the plan failed and the operative was left to improvise. And when that happened, the best option was a lotof options. He wasn’t about to close off any doors until he had to–with Lesa, or with Kyoto.

Or with Michelangelo.

Angelo’s second report on Kii had been more detailed, including not just the ultimatum, but some of Angelo’s conjectures as to what “Consent” might be. Enough to set Vincent’s fingers twitching. Angelo’s revelations about the city’s resident–Transcendent–Dragon were the most interesting development, especially when combined with the unforeseen complication of having taken refuge in Pretoria house.

While their temporary accommodation was restful, with the storm passed and the walls revealing a panoramic view of expanses of jungle canopy, seen from above, it was also inconveniently far from the gallery. And the interface room Michelangelo had discovered there.

And Angelo thought Vincent should talk to Kii.

Vincent was disinclined to argue. What an intoxicating idea: an alien–a realalien. A creature of mythic resonance.

Intoxicating, and terrifying. Vincent wasn’t remotely qualified to handle this. And there was the practical problem of how to get there without telling Lesa about the Dragon in her basement, since Angelo seemed to think she didn’t already know. He paced slowly, trying to make the space he had to walk in seem longer, and became aware that Angelo had awakened only when he spoke.

“Should ask to examine the crime scene in the morning.” He sat up as Vincent turned to him, leveling his breathing. He didn’t look any more rested.

“Dreams?” Vincent asked. Angelo dismissed the question with one of his sideways gestures, as if deflecting a blow, but Vincent leaned forward and gave him the eyebrow.

“ Skidbladnir,if you must know.” Angelo turned away, not bothering to hide the lie. “Can we be transferred back to our original rooms tonight? For convenience’ sake?”

“Once you’ve accepted Elder Singapore’s challenge.”

“Once Miss Pretoria has accepted it for me,” he replied, leaning back on his elbows. “How’s your back?”

“It hurts,” Vincent said. “But improving. I think the docs are getting some purchase on it.” He used their private channel to continue. “You don’t suppose your new friend is limited to appearing there,do you?”

“Pretty silly if he were.”

“So he probably knows what happened to the statue.”

Angelo was out of bed before Vincent realized he was standing. “He probably knows all sorts of things. The question is, if he’s ethical, will he sharethem?”

Volley and return. Sometimes surprising things came up that way. Vincent batted it back. “How do you suppose his ethics stack up to ours? Do you think they have anything in common?”

Angelo paused, scuffing one foot across the carpetplant. “He’ll avoid the unnecessary destruction of sentient organisms. Or, esthelich,his word. Get the feeling it’s not exactly what we’d call sentient.”

“Right. And he likes pets.”

The look Angelo gave Vincent could have fused his wardrobe. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Quite.”

“So what do we do?”

Vincent rocked on his heels, folding his arms. “We ask?”

“Here?”

“Why not? It’s not as if anyplace in this city is free of surveillance, and we have to assume Kii has some control of House, if he’s observing the citizens–”

“–denizens. Think he’s as concerned for the khir as he is for the Penthesileans.”

“Granted.” Vincent bit his lower lip and frowned at Angelo until Angelo licked his lips and looked down.

And then he dropped channel and said aloud, “House, Vincent and I would like to speak to Kii, please. Privately.”

For a moment nothing happened. Then the rippling leaves of the rain forest canopy fluttered faster, sliding together like chips of mica swirled in a flask, layering, interweaving, a teal‑colored stain creeping through the gathered mass until it smoothed, scaled, feathered, and blinked great yellow eyes at them. “This chamber is private,” the hologram said. “Greetings, Vincent Katherinessen. You speak to Kii.”

Angelo’s description hadn’t prepared Vincent for the reality of Kii. That serpentine shape emerging from camouflaging jungle triggered atavistic responses, an adrenaline spike for which his watch barely compensated. He took one unwilling step back anyway, shivering, and forced himself to pretend calm. “Kii,” he said, as soon as he could trust his voice. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

And then he bowed, formally, as he would have on Old Earth, rather than taking a stranger’s hand. Kii seemed to bow as well, its head dropping on its long neck as it took advantage of apparent depth of field to slither a meter or two “closer.”

“You oppose your government’s agenda for this population?”

Vincent swallowed. Angelo stood at his shoulder, silently encouraging, and it was all Vincent could do not to glance at him for support. But he didn’t care to take his eyes off Kii. The Dragon’s direct, forward gaze was intent as any predator’s, and meeting it made Vincent very aware that he was small and–mostly–quite soft‑fleshed.

“We wish to assist you in protecting New Amazonia from Coalition control. We wish to preserve that population as well.”

“But not its Consent.”

“No,” Vincent answered. “Not its Consent. Its…Consent is not the will of the governed.”

Kii hissed, just the breathy rush of air from its jaw, without any vocal vibration. It wasn’t actually talking,Vincent realized. He was hearing sounds, but they didn’t match any vocalizations the Dragon made. “You are very strange bipeds,” it said. “The Consent is that Kii shall not aid you.”

It was not, Vincent told himself, unexpected. He closed his eyes for a moment, though it was an effort breaking Kii’s regard. “So you deliver your ultimatum, and leave us to it?”

“It is the Consent,” Kii said, unperturbed. “It is Consented that Kii may observe and speak with you, and continue Kii’s attempts to help your local population adapt. And protect them and the khir, as necessary.”

Vincent sank down on his haunches, tilting his head back, up at the looming Dragon. It was comforting to make himself smaller. “Kii, can you use your…wormhole technology to connect points in the local universe?”

“Spatial travel? No. Only parallel branes,” Kii said. “The wormholes must lie along a geodesic, and they must transect, or be perpendicular, orthogonalto the originating, no, the initiating brane. It is not the Consent to provide technology.”

“So you didn’t just plunk one down beside your sun for power,” Angelo said, resting one hand on Vincent’s shoulder, his knees a few inches from Vincent’s tender back. Kii’s nictitating membranes slid closed and open once more.

“We couldn’t give it to them anyway, even if Kii would provide it,” Vincent said, craning his neck to get a look at Michelangelo’s face. “Maybe a power feed. Not the generator technology. It’s not an option under any circumstances.”

Angelo scratched the side of his nose, staring down at Vincent as if it were an everyday occurrence for Kii’s holographic head to hover over both of them while they argued. “If they can’t use it for travel, or as a weapon within this universe, tell me why.”

“Gravity,” Vincent answered. He licked his lips and tilted his head back again, addressing Kii directly. “Just because you can’t make a wormhole open under your enemy’s feet doesn’t mean you can’t use this as a weapon. Kii, correct me if I’m wrong, but do your manipulations of branes cause tidal effects?”

“We amend for them,” it said. “But you are correct. There is gravitational pollution. Some we harvest as an additional energy source, or to create effects in the physical universe.”

“Such as tucking a nebula around your star to hide it from random passers‑by?”

The Dragon’s smile was an obvious mimicry of human expressions, on a face never meant to host them. Its ear fronds lifted and focused, the feathery whiskers that made its muzzle seem bearded sweeping forward, as if focusing its senses on Vincent. “Such as,” it said.

Vincent held his face expressionless as much by reflex as by intent. Michelangelo shifted, broke contact, and sat down on the carpetplant with a plop. “Can’t give the Coalition that. If they didn’t break something on purpose, they’d break it by accident.”

“Can they be educated?”

“Have you metmy species?” Michelangelo snapped.

Vincent burst out laughing and caught his arm. “Kii, can the Consent limit what it provides?”

“The Consent is not to provide.”

“If it did–does the Consent ever, uh, change its mind?”

“The Consent is sometimes altered by a change in circumstances,” Kii said. “But the current probabilities do not indicate it likely. The Consent is to defend.”

Vincent rolled to his knees and pressed himself to his feet, careful of his twinging knee. He thought better if he walked, despite the unsettling oscillation of Kii’s head as it followed him. Michelangelo scooted back against the bed, out of the way. “If we could present a convincing argument, do you think the Consent would authorize us to build receivers? Only? Or even provide them, as a solid‑state technology, for trade? That export would provide the Consent with leverage over the Coalition. They would have something to risk, in opposing you.”

Kii sunk lower, resting its chin on the interlaced knuckles of its wing‑joint digits, the extended pinkie fingers folded against its sides. “You wish a crippled technology?”

“Why not?”

“It could be arranged. The Consent will contemplate it.” Kii considered, and tilted its long head toward Michelangelo. “This, Kii is not forbidden to impart, Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones. There is a weapon in your blood.”

Kusanagi‑Jones heard the words plainly, but they didn’t process at first. He was tired, overstimulated, still unsettled with the dream he’d lied to Vincent about. It hadn’t been Skidbladnirat all, but the old dream, the one of Assessment. But it hadn’t been his death he’d dreamed this time, or his mother’s.

It had been Vincent’s.

He looked down at his hands, as if expecting to see what Kii meant, and then his eyes flicked up again and he bounced to his feet. “Bioweapon.”

“Yes.”

Of course, Old Earth didn’t need to invade New Amazonia. They could do it the easy way. And the months in cryo to help time the latency right. “The Coalition didn’t–”

Kii reached forward, as if to sniff, or sweep its whiskers and labial pits across Kusanagi‑Jones. But its head was nothing more than a projection in the holographic wall, and Kusanagi‑Jones was treated to the bizarre perspective of the Dragon seemingly lunging for him, and never arriving. Kusanagi‑Jones locked his hands on the edge of the bed and held his ground, when he wanted to flinch and shield his eyes. It isn’t real.

“Since yesterday,” Kii said. “The infection is new.”

Kusanagi‑Jones turned toward Vincent, who stood framed against the evening light filtering through the doorway to the balcony. “Saide Austin,” he said. “Bitch.”

Vincent stepped forward, and Kusanagi‑Jones stepped away. Since last night. Which meant that Vincent had no more than casual exposure, and–“How long?”

“It is a tailored retrovirus,” Kii said. “It will affect only certain genetic strains of the human animal.”

“Mine,” Kusanagi‑Jones said.

“Yours. In females, it will not express to disease. Kii estimates the latency period to be on the order of part‑years.”

“The Penthesileans turned you into a bioweapon?” Vincent took another step forward, and this time Kusanagi‑Jones let him.

“Time bomb.” Kusanagi‑Jones bent over his watch, running diagnostics, search routines, low‑level scans, calm despite the twisting tightness in his chest. “Not even a blip. My body thinks it’s me. Supposed to carry it back to Earth and– pfft!” He waved his right hand in the air, still hunched over the green and blue lights glowing under the skin of his wrist.

“The New Amazonians think genetic tailoring is anathema.”

“Not anathema enough–”

Kii shifted, fanning and refolding its wings, a process that involved leaning back on its haunches to get them clear of the ground. “Kii has subroutines to contain the infection,” it said. “The Consent is indifferent with regard to Kii’s dealings with individuals. Kii may intervene in this thing.”

Vincent grabbed Kusanagi‑Jones’s arm and pulled him forward, front and center before the hologram. “You can cure him.”

“Kii can,” Kii said. The ragged‑edged patterns on its wing leather showed bold against blue sky as it beat them twice. Kusanagi‑Jones flinched from expected wind, but felt nothing.

“Wait.”

“No wait.” But Kusanagi‑Jones shook Vincent’s hand from his arm and dropped to their subchannel.

“You trust him? You can’t processthat thing, you know.”

“You don’t think there’s a virus? It makes Claude Singapore’s plan make a hell of a lot more sense, doesn’t it? Get you sent home, in disgrace, maybe brought before the Coalition Cabinet to testify, make all their separatist friends happy.” Vincent glanced sideways at Kii.

“First thing we do, let’s kill all the men.”

Kii, filling an apparent silence, said, “Your genotype proves resistant, Vincent Katherinessen.”

“Don’t know,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, over Kii. “If there is, it’s hiding in plain sight–You trust him.”

“It’s not human body language.”

“You trust him anyway.”

Slowly, Vincent nodded. He reached out gently and took Kusanagi‑Jones’s arm again, folding his fingers around the biceps and holding on like a child clinging to an adult’s finger.

“Bugger it,” Kusanagi‑Jones said out loud. “So do I.” He waved at Kii. “Do we know it’s fatal?”

“Kii estimates a 93 percent mortality rate.”

“Cure him,” Vincent said.

And again, Kusanagi‑Jones stepped away from his partner and said, “Wait.”

17

LESA DID NOT WANT TO TALK TO HER MOTHER. SHE MOST particularly had no desire at all to tell Elena the truth about Robert, and she was still working out her spin when the door to her office irised open again, admitting Katya. Her hair was bound back in a smooth, straight tail, and–an out‑of‑character note–her honor was strapped over garish festival trousers.

“I’m going out,” Katya announced, a conclusion Lesa had already drawn. “Do you want anything?”

“No. Thank you. Home for supper or out all night?”

Katya looked down. “It depends if I find a good party.”

The relationship between Lesa and her middle child had always resembled an arms race. Katya had been determined to become unreadable since she was a small child and she was often successful. But Lesa could almost always tell when she was hiding something, if not what she was hiding.

Lesa laid her stylus across the finished response to Claude she had been staring at, and folded her hands over it. Please let it be something innocent. A secret lover, a questionable hobby. Anything Katya thought Lesa should disapprove of.

Anything, but knowing where Robert was and concealing it from the rest of the household.

“All right,” Lesa said. “Try to stay out of fights.”

“Mom.”Katya paused before making good her escape. “Oh, and Grandma wants to see you. She’s up in the solar.”

“Wonderful.” Lesa levered herself from her chair, leaving the stylus laid across the desk but slipping the card into an envelope. “That’s what I was waiting for. Thank you, Katya.”

“No problem.” Katya grinned before slipping out the door.

Lesa followed, but turned right instead of left. She worried at her thumbnail with her teeth as she strode down the short, fluted corridor and climbed the stairwell past the second floor, where Vincent and Michelangelo were temporarily housed. Sweat trickled down her neck by the time she reached the third story and stopped in her own room.

It was full of evening light. Walter dozed in his basket, warmed by a filtered ray of sun, and for three or four ticks she contemplated activating the beacon in his collar and sending him after Katya. But that would hardly be subtle; it wasn’t as if he could be told to hidefrom her.

Lesa would have to track Katya herself, after she spoke to Elena. That would give Katya enough of a head start. In the meantime, Lesa combed her hair, changed her shirt, and went to talk to her mother.

Elena’s solar was at the top of Pretoria house, and Lesa took the lift. That climb was above and beyond the call of casual exercise in the service of keeping fit.

The room was pleasantly open, airy and fresh, with the windows on the sunset side dimmed by shades currently and the other directions presenting views of the city, sea, and jungle. Elena stood at the easternmost side, staring over the bay and its scatter of pleasure craft and one or two shipping vessels cutting white lines across glass blue.

“How much trouble are we in?” Elena asked before Lesa could announce her presence.

Lesa crossed the threshold, stepping from the smooth warmth of House’s imitation of terra‑cotta tile to cool, resilient carpetplant. “It’s less bad than it could be. Antonia Kyoto has injected herself into the situation.”

“What?” Elena’s voice shivered; through the careful modulation, Lesa read the blackness of her mood.

“She’s Parity. Robert was doubling for her.”

Elena laid her hands on the window ledge and tightened her fingers until the tendons on her wrists stood out. “Of course he was. I’ll have him flogged for that.”

“It gets worse.”

Elena turned away from the window. “By all means, draw out the suspense.”

“He didn’t run away to Antonia.”

“Then where, pray tell?”

Lesa held her hands up, open and empty.

She heard Elena take two slow breaths before she spoke again. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

“There’s good news,” Lesa added hastily. “I’ve talked with Katherinessen, and it seems I was wrong about Kusanagi‑Jones. He’s sympathetic, and brings Free Earth assets to the table.”

The latest indrawn breath hissed out again in a sigh. Elena closed her eyes briefly and nodded. “That is good news. And the deal with Katherine Lexasdaughter?”

“Proceeds. She stands ready to present a united front with us. Vincent–Miss Katherinessen–came very well prepared. Kusanagi‑Jones less so, in that he’ll have to carry word of our plans to his contacts on Old Earth personally.”

“Of course, out of twenty named worlds, the defiance of three won’t make much difference in terms of military might.”

“No,” Lesa said. “But House will protect us. And it will mean something in terms of leadership. We just need to show that the Coalition canbe opposed. I’ve provided a full report on the Coalition agents, anyway.” She stretched her back until it cracked, and pitched her voice higher. “House, would you send the report to Elena’s desk, please?”

The walls dimmed slightly in answer, and Elena nodded thanks. “There’s something else.”

“News travels fast.”

Elena’s smile only touched one corner of her mouth. “Agnes said Kusanagi‑Jones received a challenge card.”

“From Claude, yes.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

It was Lesa’s turn for a collected smile. “I’m going to fight for him.”

“Wait?”Vincent snapped, but Angelo met his gaze with that infuriating impassive frown. Vincent’s fingers tightened against his palm, as if there were any way in the world he could make Angelo do anything he hadn’t already meant to do.

“Can you think of a better plan?” And oh, his voice was so damned reasonable when he said it. “Cheaper than a war.”

“It’s not what I would call ethical,” Vincent said. He glanced up at Kii for support, but the Dragon only watched them, feathered brows beetled over incurious eyes. “You’ve no way to control it, and it will cost a lot of innocent lives.”

“It will,” Michelangelo said, folding his arms, his face relaxing into furrows of worry and grief. “And at least one not so innocent one.”

He meant himself. And he was letting Vincent seehim, the whole story, nothing concealed. The intimacy rocked Vincent in sympathetic waves of Michelangelo’s fear and desperation. He was scared sick. It was in the creases beside his eyes, the crossed arms, the slight lean back on his heels. Scared, and he thought it was worth doing anyway.

Killing off nearly half the population of Old Earth would sure as hell limit the threat of the OECC as a conquering power, Vincent would give Michelangelo that. He still didn’t think it was the world’s greatest solution to the problem.

“You’re not doing this,” Vincent said. “That’s an order.”

“The alternative is letting Old Earth drag the Coalition worlds into a fight that Kii and the Consent would end when it got to New Amazonia. Probably get twice as many killed on both sides. Nuclear option, Vincent. It will save lives.”

Kii’s feathered tufts ruffled and smoothed. “We would not be pleased to do so.”

“No,” Vincent said. “I don’t imagine you would. Kii, I have another option. Would the Consent, uh, consent to teach my people to create Transcendent matrices such as yours?”

“Your species may not be suited.”

“What do you mean?”

“My species chooses to copy our psyches into an information state, and to permit our physical selves to grow old and fail.”

“Of course,” Vincent said. It wasn’t as if one could actually uploadone’s personality, stripping the man out of the brain and loading it into a computer like a Raptured soul ascending bodily to heaven. One made a copy. And that left the problem of what to do with the originals.

“We accepted that to do so, our physicalities must die without progeny. The Consent was given, and so it was…wrought. No, so it abided.” Kii angled its nose down at them. “Kii thinks biped psychology is unamenable to such constraints.”

“Bugger,” Angelo said into the silence. “Shove it down their throats if we have to–”

“No,” Vincent said, rubbing his hands through his braids so the nap of his hair scratched his palms. “We’d have to sterilize the lot. An entire planetary population for whom procreation is the most cherished ideal? It wouldn’t change anything, except we’d have Transcendent copies of them in a quantum computer leading productive virtual lives. The plague’s a better idea. Which is not to say it’s not a lousy idea.”

He glared at Michelangelo, and Michelangelo unfolded his arms, a gesture of acceptance but not surrender. “We’ll wait,” he said. “For now. Try to come up with something better.”

“You’re content to walk around breeding retrovirus for the next two weeks?”

Angelo echoed Vincent’s gesture, palms across his scalp, but his version added a yawn. “Sounds a regular vacation, doesn’t it?”

On the way out, Lesa stopped in her room, discovered that Walter had apparently gone to the courtyard to stretch his legs, and got a leash before heading down to collect him. Far from gamboling with the children, the khir was sprawled in a sunbeam, sides rising and falling with steady regularity.

Awakened from his nap, he stretched lazily front and back and trotted around her twice on her way to the door, as if to prove that lesser khir might need to be leashed, but he certainly didn’t. All his blandishments were in vain. She clicked the leash to his collar as they stepped out the front door, and then crouched to tap the veranda with her forefinger and say, “Find Katya.”

Walter whisked his muzzle across the deck and picked his way down the stairs, pausing at the bottom to sniff again before angling left, toward the bigger thoroughfare, threading between merrymakers at a rate that had Lesa hustling to keep up. She trotted, too, keeping the leash slack, though Walter occasionally turned to glare. “I’m running as fast as I can!”

He didn’t seem to believe her, but he was too well trained to lunge at the lead, even when irritated by streets clotted by buskers and food vendors. It had been Lesa’s idea to train the household khir as messengers, when she was Katya’s age, an idea that had turned out well. So well that other households had copied the trick once they found out how adept the khir were at memorizing routes.

The pace he set was better than a jog. Her honor jarred on her thigh with every footstep; her hair disarrayed and stuck to her forehead with sweat. She clucked to Walter, slowing him as they threaded between people so they wouldn’t accidentally trample other pedestrians and spark a duel, or overrun Katya and have rather a lot of explaining to do.

That Katya had gone on foot heightened Lesa’s suspicions. If she’d called a car–either public transport or Pretoria house’s communal one–her destination would have become a matter of record. Walking for exercise was one thing, but it was early for parties, even in Carnival, and if Katya weregoing to parties, she wouldn’t want to arrive sweat‑saturated and stinking.

Lesa had always encouraged Robert to know her children, to develop relationships with them, far beyond the customary. He had, and both Robert and the children had seemed to enjoy it.

And now Katya was making Lesa pay for it.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

After their dead‑end conversation with Kii, Vincent had happened to be watching when Lesa appeared in the courtyard, whistled for her pet, and snapped a leash onto his collar. “Angelo,” he’d said, without turning, “follow her.”

Which was how Kusanagi‑Jones came to be slipping through the steadily increasing press of cheering, staggering, singing men and women behind Lesa and her animal like the sting on an adder’s tail, following the rest of what he took to be a long and somewhat complicated snake. Vincent remained at Pretoria house, nursing his sunburn and wrenched knee and covering Kusanagi‑Jones’s tracks, but the drop from their balcony was only four meters and Kusanagi‑Jones could have done it without tools, stark naked and on a sprained ankle.

Fully equipped, he could almost take it as an insult how easy escape had been.

Robert’s decampment was more interesting, and Kusanagi‑Jones was still trying to comprehend it. Based on his imperfect understanding of the layout of Pretoria house, the men’s quarters were isolated well up the tower and guarded. It was a descent that could not be made inobviously on ropes, especially in the middle of a festival, and if the guard had not been overpowered, the obvious solution was that somebody inside the house had assisted Robert in getting out.

Kusanagi‑Jones wasn’t surprised to discover that Vincent wasn’t sanguine as to Lesa’s involvement. Robert certainly wasn’t the only double in Pretoria house, and neither Vincent nor Kusanagi‑Jones wanted to trust Lesa more than necessary.

Which was somewhat ridiculous, given how much Kusanagi‑Jones was trusting Vincent. But at this point, if he wasn’t going to choose to trust Vincent he might as well go home, hand in his commission, and wait to be surplused. For the first time in his life, political and personal ideals were aligning, and if that wasn’t worth dying for, he was in the wrong line of work.

And so as they left the side street graced by Pretoria house, he dropped the camouflage function on his wardrobe as he stepped into a shadow, and stepped out again dressed to blend with the Carnival crowd. His wardrobe had no license of a mask, but it could provide something that would pass for a street license, barring inspection–and, it being Carnival, there were a lot of men on the thoroughfares. Though Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t think he’d have cared to try it any other time of year.

The moderately illegal modifications to the cosmetics subroutine he carried–under Cabinet seal, as patching a wardrobe was beyond even Vincent’s skills–made it easy to change his skin tone and alter his facial features. Programs for haircut, color, style, length, and texture came standard.

He couldn’t do much about his height–beyond heeled shoes–or his build, and those were distinctive enough to cause him worry. Fortunately, Lesa Pretoria was either stringing along any potential tail, or she just wasn’t very good at spotting one. She knew what she was supposed to do–the techniques were there–but the application was crude. And even had she been more accomplished, she was hampered by the animal that accompanied her. An animal that was going somewhere.

The streets filled as sunset approached, the air growing heavy with perfume, food smells, and the slightly rancid aroma of flowers fermenting in their garlands. Kusanagi‑Jones saw khir other than Walter, some of them accompanied and some of them alone, all moving with a sense of purpose that reminded him of footage he’d seen of Earth predators. Moreover, all of them seemed to be treated with a casual respect that surprised him. People and vehicles granted the khir the right of way, to such a degree that Lesa made better time jogging through the crowd beside the animal than she would have on her own. Kusanagi‑Jones was hard‑pressed to keep up.

The game of follow‑the‑leader ended when Lesa and the khir turned off the main road down a curved, narrow, unpopulated street that Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t enter without becoming obvious. He hung back, waiting for Lesa to round the corner, and didn’t step into the mouth of the street until her silhouette slipped out of sight.

If he were her, he’d have paused then, on the chance that he might get a glimpse of anyone following. So he didn’t race after. Instead, he chose a sedate path along the inside curve of the street, maintaining the wall’s cover for as long as possible. He paused to listen at the most extreme point of the arc–one of the drawbacks of New Amazonian architecture was the lack of useful reflective surfaces at street level–and mused briefly that eyes on the back of his head were all very nice, but he really wished that one of the tricks his wardrobe could perform was generating a periscope. For the space of three heartbeats, he listened, but heard nothing, not even the patter of a woman’s boots and a khir’s paws.

And then voices, softly, but too low for him to make anything useful of, given the echoes off tight walls. With careful steps, he rounded the corner. Lesa was not in sight, but the street ended in a T‑intersection, and a pedestrian was moving toward him on hurried steps, her eyes fixed on the street as if she needed to pay close attention to where she was putting her feet. She walked steadily, though–no trace of staggering.

It was reassuring to encounter other traffic. He nodded deferentially as she passed, even stepping aside to provide her a comfortable margin, but she paid him no notice. He continued on, allowing himself to hurry now, and paused before entering the intersection.

Another patch of ground where a couple of nice, big, street‑level windows would come in very handy. Kusanagi‑Jones frowned and stared at his feet. “House,” he murmured, “which way did Miss Pretoria go?”

He was not answered, not even by a flicker of color absorbed from the deepening sky overhead.

He licensed a hand mirror and used it to check both ends of the cross street, crouching so when he extended it, his arm lay parallel to and near the ground. There was movement to the east, but the mirror was too small to reveal more.

His fisheye, however, showed him that the pedestrian was safely out of sight. He released the mirror and touched his wrist, keying the wardrobe back into camouflage mode. Then he stepped forward.

Lesa Pretoria was there. Back against a wall, her hands spread wide but not raised, exactly, so much as hovering, and Walter beside her, balanced on his hind legs like a miniature kangaroo, with his forelegs drawn under his chest and the feathers on his long, heavy tail fanned wide. They were surrounded by five armed women, and a man Michelangelo knew from the reception the first night: Stefan, a light‑complected fellow with unusually fair hair, more so even than Vincent’s.

The man had his back to the alley and his bulk hid part of the scene. Beyond him, what Kusanagi‑Jones had taken to be two attackers was revealed as an attacker and a hostage with her arm twisted behind her back, her own confiscated weapon by her ear.

The hostage was Katya Pretoria. Which explained Lesa’s careful, motionless poise.

Vincent would have known the instant he saw the bystander hurrying away. He would have read it in her gait, the guilty downcast of her eyes, the haste.

Kusanagi‑Jones wouldhave to walk in on a mugging blind.

Or maybe not a mugging. Having Katya as a hostage–miserable, trying with pride not to flinch away from the muzzle of her own weapon–would tend to indicate that something more complex was occurring. Lesa had made casual comment about people kidnapped by pirates, after all, and not in a sense that indicated she was, entirely, joking. And there was the incident with Vincent–

As Kusanagi‑Jones moved, he obtained a more complete perspective. The stranger was holding the weapon cocked beside Katya’s head. Not actually in contact, but close enough to make the point in a professional manner.

Lesa’s weapon was still holstered, but the other women were all armed, and only one of them hadn’t drawn. Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t take her for the ringleader, though. More likely a scout.

A poorly trained scout. She repeatedly glanced over her shoulder at the confrontation, rather than facing the approach, weapon ready.

Actually, her right hand was bandaged and splinted, and though her weapon was rigged for left‑hand use, he thought that hand flexed awkwardly over the holster.

Sometimes you got a lucky break.

Well,Michelangelo thought, at least I’m invisible.

For now. He thought he could rely on the New Amazonians to figure things out once he acted. And while his wardrobe couldstop bullets, it couldn’t do it forever. It cost in power and in foglets, and the technology needed time to recharge and repair.

He wasn’t without assets, though. She might be female, but Lesa was deadly enough with a sidearm to win Vincent’s respect, as Vincent had impressed on him after the discussion in Lesa’s office. Katya was another factor. Duelist or not, Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t think she was the sort to just stand there and weep. And, of course, the khir. Kusanagi‑Jones could only guess from old media how useful it might be in a fight, but he knew police and military had used dogs as attack animals before Assessment, and the khir was bigger than any image of a dog he’d seen.

He hoped they hadn’t overstated the case.

If Lesa was the…gunslinger…Vincent had intimated, she’d initiate something when she saw an opening. Which meant Kusanagi‑Jones needed to giveher that opening, while being alert for any moves she might make on her own, and standing ready to abort and follow her lead. He just hoped she didn’t do anything hysterical, or freeze up because of the gun to her daughter’s head.

He was getting blasted tired of trying to second‑guess people smarter than he was. And it wasn’t made any easier when they were women.

If this was the same crew that had attempted to abduct Vincent–as the lousy perimeter guard’s bandaged hand tended to indicate–they might be armed chiefly with nonlethal weapons. They would want everyone alive.

Which would be why the woman controlling Katya was using Katya’s weapon. Because itwould be loaded with lethal rounds, and Lesa would know that. If one meant to threaten, it never hurt to reinforce your intention with a little evidence.

If one meant to act, however, sometimes the element of total surprise came in handy.

Kusanagi‑Jones moved forward. The wardrobe’s camouflage function was designed to bypass automated security. Mere human senses never stood a chance as he picked his route between the attackers. The target was of average height, for a New Amazonian. Her dark brown hair was cropped short and brushed forward into a coxcomb, dyed cherry‑red at the tips. She held Katya’s weapon with confidence, and her voice carried.

“Please place your hands on your head, Miss Pretoria, and turn to face the wall.”

Lesa seemed to be obeying, slowly and with deliberation. Her hands rose, her eyes unswerving on the gunwoman’s face. Walter’s leash still slid looped around her left wrist, and the khir hissed as she turned, its nostrils flaring. Michelangelo wondered how long it could balance on its hind legs–it showed no signs of strain yet–and he wondered also why the cherry‑haired woman didn’t just drop it. Whatever need kept them from harming Lesa, he couldn’t imagine it applied to her pet.

That was, he hoped, secondary. He found a position behind the gunwoman before Lesa finished her hesitation‑march pirouette. His moment would come when Lesa’s back was fully turned. The target’s attention should shift, momentarily, from controlling Lesa and Katya to ordering her troops.

That would be the moment when Katya would be at the least risk from his intervention. And he saw it coming in the shifting of the target’s weight, the instant when she drew a deeper breath, preparatory to speaking.

New Amazonia had specified that the negotiators come unarmed, all security to be provided by Penthesilean forces. And so Vincent and Kusanagi‑Jones had carried no obvious weapons. But a utility fog was, by its very nature, adaptable technology, and they carried data under diplomatic seal. And among those data were licenses for weapons banned on every Coalition world.

The cutting wire that formed between Kusanagi‑Jones’s hands as he raised them wasn’t actually a monofilament. It was composed of a single chain of hand‑linked foglets, and it was neither as strong nor as sharp as a monomolecular wire.

It didn’t need to be.

He formed his arms into an interrupted loop, as if to capture her in a surprise embrace, and brought the wire down.

It caught the target below the elbows. Slight resistance shivered up the invisibly thin wire as it made contact, and Michelangelo jerked down.

The target made no sound. For a hopelessly long time–a third of a second, longer–she stared in shock at the abrupt termination of her arms. Both her hands fell, and Michelangelo had just enough time to hope the pistol didn’t discharge from the shock when they hit.

And then the target’s heart beat and blood sprayed from her stumps, soaking Katya and spattering Lesa, Walter, and the wall. A thin moan filtered through her teeth, cut off abruptly as Michelangelo slit her throat, passing the wire through flesh with a quick, sliding tug that didn’t sever her spine because he snapped the filament off before it pulled completely through.

He stepped clear as she fell. Shock would buy him split seconds, but there were five more enemies to account for. With any luck, Katya would reclaim her weapon and help even the odds.

Michelangelo surrendered to the mercy of trained reflexes. He spun, moved to the next target, slipping in blood. Its pewter stink and the reek of urine rose as he took a second woman down, striking nerve clusters in the neck and solar plexus. A bullet sank into his wardrobe, the sting unbalancing, but he recovered as she fell. Lesa’s gun spoke; the fair‑haired man grunted as Walter plowed into his chest.

It would be good to have at least two for questioning. Michelangelo used feet and fists and elbows, gouged and kicked. A tangler splashed against a wall, shunted aside by his wardrobe. He heard a second one discharge, but it wasn’t close. He didn’t see where; it was a blur of motion in his fisheye, and he was distracted by the passage of blows with a gap‑toothed woman whose hair lay in flat braids behind each ear.

She couldn’t see him, but she could fight. Air compression or instinct, she parried six blows, each one flowering blue sparks as his wardrobe shocked her. She gave ground as he advanced. She would have caught the seventh on the cross of her arms if she hadn’t slipped in blood.

The grin was a rictus as she raised her hands, seared patches showing on her forearms, one foot coming up, bracing to roll her over and aside. Too slow. Michelangelo stepped forward between her knees and kicked her hard, in the crotch.

Her expression as she coiled around the pain was almost worth three very long New Amazonian days of being treated like a child‑eating monster, and a not very bright one at that.

Lesa’s gun was silent, and as Michelangelo kicked his latest target in the temple to keep her quiet, he saw her snared in webbing, writhing against the strands in an effort to free her weapon hand. Walter was down, too, sprawled on his side with a gash through feathers and scales across his ribs. Katya pushed herself to her feet, so drenched in blood as to be barely recognizable, but with her sidearm clutched in one sticky hand. The last two assailants left standing were casting left and right for any sign of their invisible attacker.

Katya lifted clotted hair from her eyes left‑handed as she brought her weapon up. “Stand down,” she said.

The women stepped forward. Michelangelo kicked the one on the left under the chin; they ducked sideways as the other woman discharged a chemical firearm. The three‑shot burst stuttered against his wardrobe, transferred shock emptying his lungs.

“Stand down!” Katya yelled, before he regained his balance, but the other woman didn’t lower her weapon. He turned, moved toward her–

–and Katya shot her through the heart. Michelangelo didn’t even see an impact. Flechette rounds, maybe. She went down anyway, looking shocked, and hit with a liquid thud.

“Shit,” Katya said, wiping her bloody mouth on a hand that wasn’t any better. “Shit.”

Kusanagi‑Jones spared a glance around the battlefield. “Nice shooting for a girl who doesn’t duel.”

Katya put a hand down and pushed herself to her feet, then planted both hands on her knees and stood doubled over, panting, for a moment. “Mom made sure I knew what I was doing with weapons. It isn’t her fault I think shooting people for points of honor is stupid. Michelangelo?”

“It’s me,” he said, snapping off his wardrobe’s filters as she came upright.

She blinked, looked down at the weapon in her hands, and back up at him. “Wow.”

“Good trick, huh?”

She swallowed and didn’t nod. Instead she came toward him, pistol hanging from half‑curled fingers, shaking so hard her shoulders trembled. He looked down, frowned, checked one more time for enemies in a position to do damage, and uncomfortably dialed his wardrobe down to offer the girl a hug.

Not even shaking, shuddering,from the nape of her neck to the soles of her feet, and the only reason her teeth weren’t clacking was because her jaw was clenched so tightly the muscles stood out under her ears. “Never killed anybody before?”

She shook her head.

He squeezed her roughly and backed away, pushing her in the direction of the downed khir. “Gets easier. I’ll untangle Miss Pretoria.”

She went, silently. He checked the casualties one more time while picking his way between them to get to Miss Pretoria. It never hurt to be sure.

And Katya was a good kid, for a girl. He was even more impressed if this was her first fight.

He left the wardrobe dialed down. He’d need to touch Lesa to get the tangler off. “This won’t take long,” he said, picking through licenses as he crouched beside her, looking for the right antiadhesive formula.

He was loading it when Katya shot him in the back.

18

AT DINNERTIME, THE HOUSEHOLD DISCOVERED MICHELANGELO was missing, and Vincent was subjected to a brief, cursorily polite interview with Elena on a wicker‑furnished sun porch overlooking the central courtyard.

“He left with Lesa,” Vincent said, shading the truth.

Elena, seated with her back to the courtyard, the evening’s balmy air blowing the scents of fireworks and wilted flowers around her, frowned over her datapad.

“Lesa’s not answering her com,” she said with the air of one bestowing state secrets. “And Walter, one of the household khir, is missing.”

“Let me guess,” Vincent said, unable to keep the dryness out of his voice. “Lesa’s especial pet.”

“It would be a mistake to think of khir as pets, exactly.”

She had kept him standing, and he consciously arranged himself at parade rest, weight on his heels, body relaxed, spine hanging from his skull like a string of beads straightened by gravity. “Though you collar them?”

“We identify who the responsible humans are. But the khir are perfectly capable of resettling if conditions don’t suit them. They have their own packs and family arrangements. It’s considered unwise to intervene.” She pushed idly at the iced drink resting on the low table before her, tracing fingertips down the glass‑beaded side. “This was their city first. In any case, in the light of yesterday, we must consider foul play.”

Vincent folded his arms, firming his mouth. Nothing as daunting as Michelangelo’s frictionless mask, but he wouldn’t be much of a diplomat if he couldn’t lie with a straight face. “I find it surprising they would have left without security.”

“They didn’t make you aware of their destination, then?” The furrow between Elena’s eyebrows creased deeper. She sat back abruptly, flicking moisture off her fingers like a cat. “I assumed the lack of security meant it had something to do with”–a dancing gesture, back and forth–“private matters.”

“Between you and me?”

She nodded.

“It might have,” he said. “I presume Lesa passed along the substance of our conversation last night.”

“She said you were unforthcoming enough about your partner’s politics to make her curious.”

“I was,” he said.

Elena sat forward. “I’ll have contact codes for your mother, documents, a timetable. Coordination is going to require discretion and effort.”

“Elder Pretoria,” he said, leveling his voice with far more effort than he allowed to show in it, “what about Angelo and your daughter?”

“Katya and Agnes have taken out search parties,” she said. “I’ve informed Miss Delhi and the rest of her security team, and no doubt they are scouring the city as well. In the meantime, it’s not as if our other business will wait.”

“In the meantime,” he replied, “I don’t suppose you’ve made any progress in locating the missing statue.”

“Phoenix Abased?”She studied her fingernails. “I believe security directorate is looking into it.”

“If it’s not located,” he said, “I may have some difficulty convincing the Coalition Cabinet that it’s wise to repatriate the rest of the liberated art. To a city that can’t manage to keep track of the jewel of the collection for twelve hours, once it’s released to their authority.”

“That would be unfortunate,” she said. “Because New Amazonia would no doubt interpret that as further evidence of the Coalition’s perfidy. And I think even Claude would find it challenging maintaining generalized acceptance of neutrality or appeasement under those circumstances.”

“The Christ,” he said, biting his lip to keep the grin under control. “That’s worthy of my mother.”

Elena tipped her head. “It’s hard to imagine a higher compliment.”

Lesa had said it. Only a member of Parliament could have pulled off the theft. One such as Elena Pretoria, the Opposition leader. “So you have a plan to foment revolution. Convenient. What do you plan to do about Robert?”

She spread her fingers wide. “He’s just a stud male. An unusual male, but a male. His chances of successfully accusing three well‑placed women are slim. Unless he had hard evidence–which I don’t believe–his testimony is easily discredited. It’s a minor scandal how much Lesa spoils him, anyway.”

The chill that crawled across his shoulders might have been the sunburn. “So you’re unconcerned.”

“Honestly,” she said, “given Claude’s blunder in challenging Miss Kusanagi‑Jones, I find it hard to see how our situation could be better. Assuming, of course, that they are located quickly.”

“Assuming.” He took it as leave to go when she lifted her drink and turned to the window. She could mask her worry from her family, but not from him, and it made them both uncomfortable.

Still, he managed to avoid panic until after nightfall, when a commotion in the courtyard roused him from unprofitable ceiling staring, watching the reproduced image of the Gorgon slowly color the darkening periwinkle of a crepuscular sky. He rolled off the bed quickly and hurried to the arch, his injured leg lagging. The pain medication helped, but couldn’t obscure ongoing twinges.

He came out under the real sky, washed by city lights until it shone less bright than the reproduction inside, and paused with his hands on the balcony railing. A stem of carpetplant stuck between his toes, and he momentarily forgot the ache of his knee and the seared shivers crossing his tender back. Below, several dark heads gathered, women rushing barefoot from the house, and a doorway in the courtyard wall–a sort of garden gate without a garden–stood open on the street beyond, two girls observing through the crack with gamine eyes.

He spotted Elena easily as she strode into the courtyard, the others giving way before her, except for one. Katya Pretoria stayed crouched beside an exhausted, bedraggled khir. The animal’s head curled up on a long neck, trembling, but otherwise it lay spread on its side, and Vincent could see the white glare of bandages against scaled, feathered hide.

“Dammit,” he said, stepping back. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

A few limping steps brought him inside, into the gentler light projected from the ceiling. He stopped, stared up at the pale colors of the nebula, and forced himself to breathe slowly.

The door irised open at his approach. An alert and concerned‑looking guard met him, setting aside the datapad she was reading to rise from her bench. “Miss Katherinessen?”

“Why wasn’t I informed?” he snarled. She stepped back, arms crossed, and he sighed and modulated his tone. “I’m sorry,” he said, through the taste of gall. “I need to speak to Elder Pretoria immediately.”

“I’ll see what I can do. If you’ll return to your room…”

“No. I’m going with you.”

She stared, but he refused to glance down. She wasn’t wearing a weapon, unlike most women, and he was glad. Otherwise, he thought she might shoot him if he stepped any closer. At least he had height and age on her. He lifted his chin and folded his arms, feeling like the heroine in a Victorian drama.

Her arms dropped to her sides. “This way.”

He followed meekly, rubbing grit from the corners of his eyes. He was notlosing Michelangelo. Not with long‑elusive dreams about to settle on his hand like butterflies. War, revolution, treason–these seemed minor considerations now.

He almost didn’t recognize the emotion. It was hope. And it was also hope settling into his gut with a painful chill. He’d forgotten what it was like having something to lose. But apparently he hadn’t forgotten how much it hurt to lose it.

Along the walk, he learned that the guard’s name was Alys, and that she wasn’t a member of Elena’s family, but was raised in a less wealthy household and working in service until she could afford her own citizenship stake. She led him down stairs and along another curved corridor tiled in faux terra‑cotta, which combined with the thicketed landscape of the walls to suggest a jungle path. At least the movement eased the ache in a knee further strained in descending the stairs.

“Your culture believes in the beneficial power of walking,” he said as they paused for Alys to consult her datacart and locate Elder Pretoria.

“Saves on chemical antidepressants,” she quipped, and frowned slightly when he didn’t laugh.

“And I would have guessed the jungle was rich in useful pharmaceuticals.” He knew he should have bitten his tongue, and couldn’t be bothered. Michelangelo was still missing, he was being kept deliberately in the dark, and she had the nerve to look disappointed at his lack of attention to her jokes.

“I believe you should discuss that with Elder Singapore,” she said coolly. “Elder Pretoria is on the porch, Miss Katherinessen. She’ll see you.”

Her pique amused him, and it might have been impolitic to let her see it, but he was beyond caring. So he nodded and smiled as he walked past her down the short corridor to the veranda, through an open archway and into the still‑warm night.

Elena waited as promised. She placed a rough pottery cup in his hand before he spoke a word. The shape clung to his fingers, and the contents perfumed the air above with the fermented tang of alcohol. He set it down without tasting it, brushing garlands off the ledge to make room, and drummed his fingers beside it.

“Katya must have checked in, mustn’t she? Before she brought the khir in for medical treatment.”

“We didn’t want to distress you with imperfect data.”

“Of course not.” The ledge was very smooth, and lattice laced with flowers and sticks of incense stretched above it to the veranda’s overhanging roof, so he had to peer through the chinks as if through a veil to see the courtyard beyond. The khir had been brought inside. Neither Katya nor any of the household staff and family members who had descended to assist her were present. “I understand that you wouldn’t want to disturb my fragile emotional equilibrium.”

The finger drumming was unlikely to convince her that he was calm. With an effort, he smoothed his hands and curled them around the base of the cup. The pottery wasn’t cool, but compared to the sun‑retained warmth of the ledge, it seemed so.

“My apologies, Miss Katherinessen. It was thoughtless.”

He licked his lips, lifted the cup, and turned back. She stood as he had left her, hands folded around a similar cup–he couldn’t be sure of the color in the dark–and her face half shadowed, half picked out in pinpricks from nebula and courtyard light filtering through the lattice. “Tell me now,” he said.

“Katya found Walter in a street about six kilometers from here. In Cascade, which is not the best neighborhood. He was wounded, unconscious, and there were signs of a fight.”

Vincent realized the cup was at his lips only when it clicked against his teeth. “What signs?”

Elena rocked back on her heels. “Blood. A great deal of it. Marks of bullet ricochets and tangler fire.”

“Bodies?”

“None.”

He closed his eyes, breathed out, and breathed in across the liquor. The sting brought tears to his eyes. “What now?”

“There may be a ransom note,” she said. “Or an extortion demand. Security directorate is investigating. A house‑to‑house search has been authorized–”

“Unacceptable.”

“Miss Katherinessen,” she said, her dignity unmoderated by the interruption, “my daughter is missing as well.”

“Yes,” he said. “You haven’t even been able to find one ‘stud male’ in a city where he can’t legally walk the streets without a woman’s permission. And I’m supposed to take your efforts to ensure Angelo’s safety seriously?”

“It’s Carnival,Miss Katherinessen. You’ve seen what the streets are like this time of year.”

“And yet nobody witnessed anything? I want to see the scene.”

“And expose yourself further?”

“You had no qualms about exposing me when I was shot at–”

“Now we do,” she said. She looked down at the surface of her beverage. He wondered what she saw reflected. “Relax,” she said. “Not only is Elder Kyoto very interested in getting Miss Kusanagi‑Jones back, but Saide Austin has become involved. And she is verywell connected. If anybody in Penthesilea can find Lesa and your partner, it’s the pair of them.”

Of course Saide Austin wants him back,he thought. It’d be a crying shame if her time bomb died on New Amazonian soil, far from the people he was meant to infect.What he said was, “I wish to return to the government center. I will feel safer there, under proper security.”

“I’ll see to it tonight,” she said. “Go make your farewells to the house, if you have any.”

He went quietly. The guard Alys was not waiting in the hall. He glanced left and right, but saw no trace. She must have expected Elder Pretoria to send for her when she was required.

Or Elena had sent him out intentionally unescorted for some purpose of her own. He paused in the hall, recalling the route back to his borrowed rooms unerringly. He could retrace it…or he could do a little unofficial wandering under the guise of being lost.

Don’t be silly,he told himself, following the corridor back the way he’d come. You’re inventing busywork to keep your brain off Michelangelo. It’s as likely an oversight; she’s a crafty old creature, but not everything is conspiracy, not even on this planet, and not even everything in Pretoria household happens to Elena’s plan.

Lesa Pretoria was proof enough of that.

He paused at the foot of the stair, one hand raised to rub at his nose, and froze that way. Of course. Elena couldn’t arrange for him to visit the scene of the kidnapping, if it were a kidnapping and not a murder–and the Christ damn this outpost of hell for its archaic technology anyway. If they could manage an engineered retrovirus, they ought to be able to swing a twelve‑hour DNA type. But she could buy Vincent a sliver of time in which to speak to Katya in private about what she’d seen. And Katya would doubtless be with the injured khir.

“House,” he asked, “which way to the infirmary?”

The ripple of brightness was expected this time, a pattern of motion designed to catch a predator’s eye just the way light snagged on the V‑shaped track of a big fish underwater.

If he had to take a guess, he’d wager that was what Dragons ate. It made sense of the jaw full of slender, needle‑sharp back‑curved teeth, the sharply hooked talons. Following the light, he thought about that, distracted himself with images of arrowing, broad‑winged green‑and‑blue beings hauling great silver fish squirming from the protected waters of the bay.

They were far superior images to the one that persisted when he did not force himself to think of something frivolous.

The rill led him through cool rooms and several corridors, his feet passing over carpetplant and what passed for tile the way the strand of light passed over moving images of jungle understory. He memorized this route, too. It was always good to know how to get out of whatever you were getting into.

He smelled cut greenery, and then cooking, and finally the hospital reek of antiseptic, adhesive, and synthetic skin. The pale glow lingered around a closed iris. Vincent paused and rested his fingertips against the wall beside the door.

“House, open the door, please.”

It spiraled obediently wide. This was a public space, and there was no reason for House to forbid him entrance.

The murmur of voices washed out as he stepped inside. Or a voice, anyway. Katya bent over a flat‑topped table covered with layers of folded cloth, one hand on the neck of the animal she whispered to and the other on his muzzle. It looked as if the bandages had been changed.

Girl and khir were alone in the room. Katya glanced up, tensing, at the sound of the door. Walter might have lifted his head, but she stroked his neck and restrained him, and he relaxed under her hand. She also seemed to calm when she saw Vincent, but he knew it for a pretense. Her shoulders eased and her face smoothed, but no matter how softly she petted the khir’s feathers the lingering tension in her fingers propagated minute shivers across his skin.

Vincent cleared his throat. “Just how smart is a khir?”

She smiled. “Smart.”

“As smart as a human?”

“Well,” she said, stroking Walter’s feathers back along the bony ridge at the back of his skull, “not the same kind of smart. No. They don’t use tools or talk, but they understand fairly complicated instructions and they coordinate with humans and with their pack mates.”

“So they must communicate.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Pity he can’t talk,” Vincent said, sadly.

Katya colored, olive‑tan skin pinking at the cheeks. “Miss Katherinessen,” she said, “I’m sorry about Miss Kusanagi‑Jones. I want to offer my personal assurances that I and everyone in Pretoria house will do everything we can to find him and bring him home safe. Agnes is coordinating the search now, and I’ll relieve her in the morning.”

As if her words were permission, he stepped over the threshold and came fully into the room. The white tile floor was cool, even cold, shocking to feet that had already grown accustomed to carpetplant and the blood‑warmth of House’s hallways. “I shall be praying for your mother,” he said, “and her safe and timely return.”

“Thank you,” she said after a hesitation, and licked her lips before she looked up again. “Do you pray often?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ur is a Christian colony.”

“Founded by Christians. Radicals, like New Amazonia.”

She kept her eyes on the khir, as if watching him breathe. He lay quietly, the nictitating membrane closed under outer lids at half‑mast. She smoothed his feathers again. “We’re taught that Christians were among the worst oppressors of women. On Old Earth. That they held women responsible for all the sin and wickedness in the world.”

He chuckled. “Not my branch of the Church. We’re heretics.”

“Really?” She brightened as if it were a magic word. “Like Protestants?”

He shook his head and reached out slowly to lay his hand on Walter’s flank behind the bandages. The khir’s hide was soft and supple under scales like beads on an evening gown, pebbled against his fingertips. The khir sighed as another breath of tension left his muscles. Vincent’s own heart slowed, the ache across his shoulders easing in response.

“Descended, philosophically speaking, from the very first heresy of all. One that was eradicated by the Paulines about two and a half thousand years ago, for being prone to sentiments that were thought to undermine the authority of the Church.”

He had her interest. She brushed the back of his hand and he could feel her trembling, though she restrained the appearance of it well. “But was it really a…church yet?”

“There was a bishop.” She laughed, so he continued. “Who didn’t approve of their ideas, such as that the Christ might speak to anyone and not solely through the Apostles, and that God was both masculine and feminine and thus women might serve equally as well as men, and that the passion of the Christ was a physical ordeal only, and did not affect his divine essence, and so martyrdom was kind of silly. You know, the usual heresies.”

“And you believe all that?”

He smiled and turned his hand over, pressing it to hers palm to palm. “I was raised to. My mother’s philosophy is a utilitarian one. She believes the purpose of religion, or government, is to maintain the maximum number of people in the maximum possible comfort. And so it suits her to believe that what the serpent offered Eve in the garden wasn’t sin, but self‑knowledge. Enlightenment. Gnosis.”

Katya shook her head. “That’s supposed to be the story that was used to justify oppressing women.”

“But what if the snake did her a favor?”

“Then Eve’s not the villain. Your mother’s supposed to be some kind of a prophet, isn’t she? On your home world?”

“Gnostics believe that anyone can prophesy, if the spirit moves them. She is”–he shrugged–“very good at getting people to listen to her. On Ur, and elsewhere. Enough so that even Earth has to deal with her.”

She squeezed lightly before she pulled her hand away. “Okay, you said you were raised to believe that. But you didn’t answer my question.”

He grinned and let her let go. “Do you believe everything you’re taught, Miss Pretoria?”

When she paused and swallowed, it was all there in her expression, for far longer and much more plainly than she would have liked. How Lesa had missed it, Vincent couldn’t imagine.

Of course, he’d missed Michelangelo’s duplicity. And even for a Liar, that was an impressive trick. The hardest people to read were the ones one was most emotionally attached to, because one’s own projections and desires would interfere with the analysis. One would see what one wanted to see.

There was no surprise in not noticing the knife in Brutus’s hand.

Katya Pretoria stepped back, shaking filthy locks of hair out of her eyes. Flecks of blood stuck the strands together. “Of course I don’t,” she said. “Now, if you will excuse me, Miss Katherinessen, I’m going to get Walter upstairs and try for some sleep myself. I have to relieve Agnes in the morning.”

Kii watches the rust‑colored biped climb. Its heartbeat is fast, blood pressure elevated, serotonin levels depleted, blood sugar dropping, lactic acid levels high, breathing shallow. It is, in short, exhausted, hungry, and dangerously emotional.

Kii waits until it regains its temporary refuge and is alone, in what the bipeds call privacy. Then he clears the wall and appears. “Greetings, Vincent Katherinessen.”

“Kii,” it says. “I was just about to call you. I know the Consent is that you will not assist me–”

“You wish to know if Kii can locate Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones.”

“I wish it, yes.” The biped pauses its speech, but not its motion. If anything, the short quick steps appear to Kii like a futile struggle against the inevitable edict. “And Lesa. Katya Pretoria knows what happened.”

“It shoots Kusanagi‑Jones in the back,” Kii says.

The russet biped rounds on Kii’s projected image, manipulators clenching. “What?”

“Your mate is unharmed,” Kii adds speedily. “It is struck by a sedative capsule. No permanent damage inflicted. Lesa Pretoria is also uninjured, and is restrained in a tangler.”

This linear, discursive mode of communication is vastly limited and inefficient, prone to misparsing. It requires finesse to communicate accurately in this fashion. How much more elegant to present information in poem matrices, with observed, stipulated, speculated, and potential elements clearly identified and quantified by the grammar of the construct.

The Katherinessen biped sinks on the edge of the bed, elbows on its legs, manipulators that seem powerful for its size dangling between its knees, knuckles facing. “Where are they?”

Kii accesses records, flicks through House’s files. At last, reluctantly, Kii says, “They are not in range of House’s nodes.”

“They’re out of the city. In the jungle?”

“That follows as a strong potential.”

“Hell,” the biped says. “Now I have to tell Elena that her granddaughter is a traitor. I do not get paid enough for this.”

19

LESA WOKE COLD, A NOVEL EXPERIENCE IN PENTHESILEA in summer. Her hands in particular were numb (the left one beyond pins‑and‑needles and into deadness), her ankles sore, her neck cramped from lying slumped on her side. The hair that dragged through her mouth was foul with blood and dirt and the acrid bitterness of tangler solvent, and she spat and spat trying to clear it away.

She lay on an earthen floor, and she could smell the jungle. Smell it–and hear it. Night sounds, which explained why her eyes strained at darkness. The canopy filtered daylight, but blocked the Gorgon’s light almost entirely. She heard birds and insects–and a fexa’s warble, closer than she liked, even if she was lucky and there was a stout stockade between them.

She flexed and kicked but didn’t learn anything that surprised her. Her wrists were bound at the small of her back and her ankles strapped. When she lifted her head, her neck amended its status from painful to excruciating, and she fell back, trying to ease the spasm, crying between her teeth.

Incapacitating pain was the first priority. That, and getting her weight off her left arm.

A wriggle of her hips flopped her onto her back, yanking her wrists against the cords. This position was no kinder to her hands, but she bore the pressure and the cutting tautness for the sheer, blessed relief of letting the earth support the weight of her head.

Something feather‑quick and many‑legged scurried across her ankle, but she managed not to react. Pointless caution. She’d made enough noise already that one little thrash and scream would cause no harm. But most New Amazonian “insects” were completely disinterested in any Old Earth fauna that wasn’t actively forcing them to defend themselves. Lesa guessed that when it came down to it, human type people just smelled wrong.

Something stretched on her left side, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from it and hear the slow hiss of breathing, in and out. Now that Lesa could concentrate on something other than the pain in her neck, she smelled unwashed male over her own sweat and tangler solvent. The solvent explained why she was cold. The stuff was something like 95 percent isopropyl alcohol.

Michelangelo. She got her knees drawn up, straps cutting the tendons of her ankles, and with one hard shove flopped onto her right side. Pain seared up her neck and her left arm sizzled violently to life. She had preferred it, she decided, when it was flopping from her shoulder like the corpse of a dead animal.

Kusanagi‑Jones wasn’t cold. She pressed against his back, but he breathed regularly, his body swaying in response to her nudges with the fluidity of deep unconsciousness. Her right shoulder and upper arm scraped earth painfully as she squirmed closer, writhing over broad shoulders to press her face against the close‑clipped base of his skull. As she cuddled up, she realized she heard two sets of snores–Kusanagi‑Jones’s, faintly, and muffled as if through walls, a louder rasp.

I hope Vincent’s not the jealous type.Gallows humor. The pain of one bitten‑off chuckle brought tears to her eyes.

“Miss Kusanagi‑Jones.” She heaved herself against him. Every movement jostling her neck felt as if somebody had run electrified wires under her skin. “Miss Kusanagi‑Jones!”

His breath caught and a light moan fluttered at the back of his throat, but he didn’t wake. She lowered her head and shoved, smacking her head into his neck. “Dammit, Michelangelo.”

He vanished.

A second later, air cooling against her chest, she realized she hadfelt him move. One moment, Kusanagi‑Jones was a yielding obstacle rocking in time to her efforts. The next, she was alone in the dark, and something thumped–a meat‑on‑bare‑earth sound–followed by silence.

And then a voice, barely a breath. “Miss Pretoria?”

She sighed, trying not to dwell on the strength it would have taken to flip himself to his feet while bound wrist and ankle. “Very impressive. So how are you at square knots?”

Michelangelo’s wardrobe wasn’t functioning, information delivered quite unceremoniously by the weight of imitation cloth on his shoulders. He couldn’t tell if it had failed due to power drain or because of exposure to an electromagnetic pulse weapon of some sort.

The wardrobe was shielded, but shielded was not invulnerable. His low‑light add‑ons, his watch, and his other sense enhancements weren’t functioning either, which told him it was a power problem and not just the wardrobe. But in the case of failure, the fog assumed a default configuration. In Kusanagi‑Jones’s case, his gi–and that was what hung around him now with a strangely materialweight.

A quick triage would not rank a malfunctioning wardrobe as the greatest of his problems. The foglets would have made short work of his restraints, but he was trained to operate without them. No, the immediate problem was one of where he was being held, and how to get out of there.

“Keep talking,” he said. “I don’t want to step on you.”

“What would you like to talk about?”

The voice located her. He sat in a different direction, with as slight a thump as he could manage. The rammed earth didn’t give. He rolled onto his back, lifting his legs, forcing his arms down against cords that cut at his wrists.

“Talk about anything,” he said, keeping his voice as level and soft as he could. She didn’t need to know about his pain.

“I heard someone snoring before you woke. I think our guard is napping against the wall.”

“Who do you think is holding us?”

“Right Hand,” she answered immediately.

Discomfort escaped him on a hiss as he stretched to work his arms around his hips, dragging his shoulders down. “Why?”

“Well,” she said, “we know it’s not Parity. And whoever it is has dragged us off to a hut in the jungle, where you might expect bandits and runaways.”

His hands were free suddenly, with a scraping pop. Or, not exactly free, but bound behind his knees rather than behind his back. Awkward, but easily remedied, and once he got them around his feet, he had teeth. A bloody good thing they hadn’t had shackles. “You weren’t kidding about pirates.”

“No,” she said. “Damn Robert to a man’s hell anyway.”

Kusanagi‑Jones brought his legs up, hooked his hands under his heels, and stretched and wriggled until blood broke through his scabbed wrists and trickled across the skin. If he had Vincent’s loose‑limbed build, this would be easy, but long flexible arms were another of the advantages that hadn’t made it into Kusanagi‑Jones’s heritage.

He made it happen anyway, and then sprawled on his back, panting as quietly as he could manage while blood dripped off his thumbs and spattered his chest. It wouldn’t soak into the gi the way it would real cloth, but it could seep between the minuscule handclasped robots that made up the utility fog, and there was no way he was getting it out of there–short of wading into the ocean–until he found a power source.

“Ow,” he said. “Ever noticed this doesn’t get easier?”

“Indeed,” she said. “I have.”

A good smearing of blood and sweat hadn’t made the thin cords binding his wrists any simpler to manage. They were tight enough that they’d be more accessible if he gnawed his thumbs off first. Also tight enough that he wouldn’t even feel it much.

Which would defeat the purpose of getting his hands free. Instead, he dug at the cords with his teeth, scraping at the fibers and working as much mayhem on his own flesh as on the bindings. But eventually he heard a pop and felt a cord part, and the constriction loosened.

The next thing he felt, unfortunately, was his fingers. Which made him wish for one long, brutal instant that he’d just been a good well‑behaved secret agent and lain there peaceably waiting for the firing squad.

The pain filled his sinuses, flooded his nostrils, floated his eyes in their orbits. It was physically blinding–he couldn’t see the darkness for the flashes in his vision. Beyond pain, and into a white static he couldn’t see or move or breathe through. Michelangelo gritted his teeth, pressed his forehead to thumbs while tears and snot streaked his face, and held on.

It would crest. It would peak and roll back.

All he had to do was live through it.

All he had to do–

He wheezed, hard, when his diaphragm finally relaxed enough that he could get a breath, and then threw his head back, panting. “Bugger,” he said indistinctly, and let his hands fall against his chest.

His fingers felt thick and hot, and they bent only reluctantly, but he could feel them, and they hurt less now than did his wrists.

“You ever needed to disprove the existence of a Creator God,” he said, “the miracle of efficiency that the human body isn’t would be a fucking good place to start.”

“Miss Kusanagi‑Jones?”

Deities or not, there was obviously still room in the world for miracles. Miss Pretoria honestly sounded scared.

“Under the circumstances, call me Michelangelo. Will you roll onto your stomach, please?”

Her wrists were more important than his ankles. He knelt over her, hands on either side of her waist, and used his teeth on these cords, too. His fingers weren’t strong enough.

She whimpered once or twice, but overall, he thought she made less noise than he had.

When he was done, and she was taking her turn coiled shaking around the agony of returning circulation, he sat up and began fumbling at the strapping on his ankles. It was adhesive, wound tight, but he managed to feel the torn edge. It came off noisily, along with a generous quantity of hair.

A ripping sound in the darkness, followed by a series of half‑breathed “ow”s, informed him that Miss Pretoria didn’t need any instruction in order to follow his example. “Now I understand why males complain so much about waxing their backs for the Trials,” she murmured, barely audible under the sawing and bowing of whatever animals infested the jungle night.

Kusanagi‑Jones stifled a laugh. “Hold onto that strapping,” he said. “Might come in useful.”

“It’s sticky.”

“And strong,” he answered, attempting to disentangle his own length so as to wind it around his waist. “See anything yet?”

“Now that you mention it, it might be graying. Slightly.”

He thought so, too. If the walls were boards, as he suspected, and the roof was thatch, the slivers of faint brightness he saw might very well disclose the first grayness of morning. The exotic noises outside were increasing in volume, frequency, and complexity.

Dawn was coming.

“You don’t have a theory why pirates would want to kidnap a couple of diplomats, do you?”

“Not yet,” she answered, and now he could make out enough of her silhouette to see her, head bent, tucking the strapping around herself like a sash. “I’m also curious about how they’ve come to recruit so many young women.”

“Including your daughter.”

She lifted her head to stare at the dimly outlined wall. Her lips were pursed. Her eyes caught the growing light, glistening. She didn’t blink. “Maybe they’re all the daughters or sisters or lovers of males associated with the Right Hand. Maybe…” She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know. If they can infiltrate Pretoria house, they could be anywhere.”

“Could be facing a revolution.”

She licked her lips, turned, and blinked at him. “Did you think for a moment there was a possibility we aren’t? Come on. Let’s make a break for it.”

She shook herself and moved toward the door they could now see outlined against the far wall, her hand twitching toward a nonexistent weapon. The door was chained around the post, but Kusanagi‑Jones thought he could handle it. He touched the chain, stroked it, rust rubbing off on his fingertips. That chain would hold against anything he could manage barehanded.

The planks of the door, on the other hand…

“Sneak, or rush?” he asked Miss Pretoria.

She crouched beside him, examining the door. “There will be a stockade,” she said. “If they have any sense. A kind of barrier of cut thorn trees.”

“A zareba.”

She blinked at him. “I don’t know that word.”

There was enough light now to show a smile, so he made it a good one. “If you had ever lived in Africa, you would. Before the Diaspora, people walled themselves in with stockades made of thornbushes, to keep out predators like hyenas. Village was called a kraal or enkang. Stockade was a zareba.”

For a moment, he thought she was about to ask him what a hyena was, but instead she returned his smile and dusted her hands on her knees. “Miss Kusanagi‑Jones, I think that’s the longest speech I’ve heard you make.”

He grunted his answer and stepped back, gesturing her to one side as he squared himself before the door. She went, standing with her back against the wall, but the curve of her lip told him she wasn’t about to leave it alone.

“Why do you let people assume you’re the lump of dumb meat on Vincent’s elbow?”

“Suits me,” he said, after a long enough pause to let her know she’d overstepped. His own fault for giving her the opening. “You never said: got a better route out of here than kicking the door down?”

“No,” she answered, rubbing her wrists. “I don’t.”

She’d missed the opportunity to really see him move when he’d saved Claude Singapore’s life, and during the previous evening’s skirmish she’d been only peripherally aware of what he did, the phenomenal efficiency and speed with which he’d managed three armed women.

“Farther left,” he said, waving her aside. “Splinters.”

Another time, she might have taken him to task for his lack of deference, but she didn’t want to break his focus, so she edged two more steps away from the door frame and flattened herself against the wall, breathing steadily, ready to spring out and intercept the swinging panel on the rebound. She shielded her face with her hand, but couldn’t resist watching between her fingers as Kusanagi‑Jones took one deep breath.

“If I go down,” she said, “run and keep running.”

He didn’t spare her a glance. “Try not to be the one that goes down.”

Without breaking the steady rhythm of his breathing, he took two fluid steps, spun, and kicked out, hard. The door shattered against the chain, and Lesa kicked off the wall and slung herself through it, catching the rebound on her flat hand. Flesh tore on splintered wood, but she didn’t hesitate.

As she cleared the doorway and broke into a bare, scuffed‑dirt yard, the unwary guard lunged for her and missed. The unshod footsteps behind her were Kusanagi‑Jones’s. She heard the grunt and thud as he slammed into the sentry and hoped Michelangelo had body‑checked him hard enough to break bones.

Not hard enough to shut him up, unfortunately, because he was shouting before he’d picked himself up on his elbows. But Michelangelo was still with her, pulling up beside her, running hard as the camp boiled like a kicked nant’s nest.

Gunfire spattered around her, ended by a curse. Chemical accelerant had a distinctive sound. These were lethal loads, and they came close enough to sting her with kicked‑up earth and splinters. Kusanagi‑Jones grunted as he dropped back a step, falling in behind her, shielding her body with his own.

She wasn’t going to get him shot by running slow. Lesa dodged around the side of a low hut constructed of thatch and daub over a wooden frame and dove past two unarmed males, elbowing the nearer in the jaw as she went by. Judging by the collision, Kusanagi‑Jones took the other one down without breaking stride.

“Go,” Kusanagi‑Jones yelled as she slid around the second corner, between the shelter and the thorn wall. She could see green jungle through the gaps in the canes, and the wall was no more than a meter beyond the hut. His footsteps stopped, his breathing no longer close on her heels.

He was buying her time to get out, turning to make a stand.

Below the edge of the overhang, Lesa bent her knees and jumped. Not for the thorn wall–the long curved spines of wire plant rendered it as impossible to climb as a heap of razors–but for the roof. Her fingers slipped in rain‑slimed thatch, and insects and shreds of vegetation showered her face and shoulders. The top layers were wet, but underneath the fronds were dry–old enough to need replacing–and her hands sank through to latch onto the beam underneath. Wood cracked under her weight, and for a moment she dangled, cursing. Then she got her motion under control, pumped her legs, and half swung, half scrambled up, arms trembling and chest aching with the strain.

This was not a roof built for walking on. She lay flat and turned to pull Kusanagi‑Jones after her.

“Go,” he said, with a glance over his shoulder. He had a weapon in his hands that he must have liberated from the first, unwary guard, and he was bleeding, red dripping from the right sleeve of his gi and spreading over his fingers, more than his torn wrists could explain.

There was no time for thanks, for apologies.

She went.

She slithered across the hunchbacked roof on her belly, turning so she faced the thorn wall, and paused where rafters gave way to the unsupported fringe of thatch. The flat sharp cracks of three more gunshots echoed through the trees, the birds of morning shrieking and then silent. The bullets came nowhere near their position. Encouraging, because the hut wouldn’t offer Kusanagi‑Jones anything except visual cover, but she hoped the partisans might think they were working their way toward the gate.

Kusanagi‑Jones conserved his ammunition, making them find him and thendeal with his ability to shoot back. Smart boy. She’d seriously underestimated the Coalition males.

Lesa clenched her hands around that last flaking roof beam and drew her feet forward into a crouch. It was hard to judge distances in the gray morning light, but she could hear calls through the camp now. Another two or three random shots might serve to raise the alarm for any distant sentries. She stared at the thornbreak one last time, closed her eyes, and jumped for her life.

She might have made it if she could have gotten a running start. As it was, she kicked off hard, stretched, tucked, rolled, and almost cleared the wall. She made it over the top, but the sloped sides were too wide. Thorns tore her shins and forearms, lacerated her shoulders, pierced the hands she raised to shield her eyes and throat. Brittle canes shattered under her weight, and momentum sprawled her clear, lungs emptied, diaphragm aching from the impact.

She gasped and shoved herself up, shaking off bits of twig and barb, driving thorns into her palms and knees as she scrambled to her feet, piercing her unshod soles as she staggered forward through the rubbish. She was leaving a trail of blood and bits a girl could follow, but there was nothing to be done for it now.

Tears and sweat stinging her lacerated face, she ran.

20

ELENA HANDLED KATYA’S ARREST HERSELF. SHE SUMMONED Agnes–a Pretoria cousin who had the same stocky build and epicanthic folds as Lesa–and requested Vincent wait for their return. He was left alone on the sun porch that served as Pretoria house’s center of operations, but deemed it unwise to wander about the house with Elena in the mood he’d put her in. So instead he paced the length of the veranda, reviewing documents on his watch that he already knew by heart.

He’d accomplished everything he’d come here to do–the real reasons, not the surface justifications. He’d met his mother’s opposite number, deemed her honest, established a secure line of communication, exchanged the necessary codes.

Now all he had to do was wrap up two kidnappings, a sabotage operation, a first‑contact situation, a duel to the death, convince Michelangelo he didn’t want to play kamikaze, and figure out exactly how he was going to get rid of the Governors andprotect Ur and New Amazonia from the imperial ambitions of the Coalition. Oh, yes, and at least give his ostensible task–that of reaching some sort of dйtente with whoever was in charge of the New Amazonian government by the end of the week–enough of a lick and a promise that he could justify declaring the mission accomplished and heading home. Or, potentially, blow it so badly that he and Angelo were both discharged in disgrace, which would save him the additional delicate operation of prying Michelangelo loose from the OECC.

Because Michelangelo wascoming home with him.

Just as soon as Vincent reclaimed him.

Piece of cake.

He closed the documents and stood in the darkness, running fingertips along the slick leaves and soft petals garlanding the lattice. A flicker of movement in his fisheye alerted him to company, and he turned his head, but it wasn’t Elena or any of her servants. Instead, a child stood framed in the doorway, pressed close to one of the posts as if he thought he could meld into them. A boy child, nine or ten Old Earth years, six or seven New Amazonian.

Lesa’s son, the one she so desperately wanted to be gentle.

“Hello,” Vincent said.

“Hello,” the boy answered. He came forward a few more steps, from the lighted hallway to the darkness of the porch. “Are you really a diplomat?”

Vincent smiled. The boy–Julian–was hesitant and calm, but the lilt in his voice said he was curious. And Lesa thought he was a genius, and wasted on New Amazonia.

She might even be right.

In any case, if Vincent was likely to wind up smuggling the kid home in his suitcase, he might as well get to know him. “I am, among other things. Your mother’s very proud of you.”

The child sidled along the wall sideways, back to the house but meeting Vincent’s eyes defiantly. “She says if I want to be a mathematician I have to be like you.”

“Like me?”

Julian nodded, his hands linking behind him, shoulders squeezing back as he crowded against the wall. “Gentle. Otherwise I’ll be sent to foster and train soon, and then I’ll go to the Trials and be chosen by another house.”

“And you won’t have time for mathematics then?” As Vincent understood it, not everybody was as…permissive…with their stud males as Pretoria house. His heart skipped painfully while he waited for the answer. Poor kid.

“Mother says,” Julian said, tilting his head back as he recalled her words, “that women don’t like males who seem too smart. They find them threatening.”

What an elegant little parrot she’s created,Vincent thought, and wanted to bury his face in his hands.

“So she says I can only play with computers and numbers when I grow up if I’m gentle,” Julian continued, still childlike enough to take his silence for rapt attention. “Like you. So I must be gentle…”

“Because you love numbers so much.”

Julian nodded. “But it’s not bad, being like you, right?”

Vincent found the edge of Elena’s wicker chair, sat down on it, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. The cosmic irony of the moment didn’t elude him. This child was no more a budding homosexual than Michelangelo was thick‑headed, and Vincent had to fold his hands together to keep them from shaking as he thought about Julian embarking on a life of sexual deception so he’d have an option of careers. “No,” he said. “People can be cruel. But being like me isn’t bad. I had to lie about it for a very long time, though, and pretend to be something I wasn’t to keep my job.”

The boy’s eyes were wide. “I thought you were a diplomat because you’re, you know, because you don’t fight.”

It cost Vincent a painful effort to keep the smile off his face. The last thing this fumbling child needed was to think somebody he was looking to as a role model found him amusing. “Things are different on Old Earth,” he said. “Gentle males are…stigmatized. Do you know that word?”

“The stud males run everything and don’t like gentle ones.”

“Yes.”

“Like the other boys make fun of me for playing with numbers.”

“Yes.”

“How come?” An earnest question, not plaintive, as Julian’s hands fell to his sides as he forgot himself enough to step away from the wall.

It deserved an honest answer. “I don’t know.” Which was as honest as he could be. “Your mother says you’re very talented.”

The boy’s skin was dark, darker than Lesa’s if not as dark as Robert’s. In a better light, Vincent wouldn’t have been able to see him blush. “She said that?”

“She did. She asked me if I would sort of be a mentor for you.” Not too much of a stretch, and Vincent didn’t feel bad about it. The child’s mother and father were missing, his sister was under arrest, and if he felt alone and frightened, he didn’t have to feel thatalone and frightened.

Julian glanced over his shoulder toward the door, the sidelong look of somebody operating under a guilty conscience. “Do you know anything about programming quantum arrays?”

“Not a thing,” Vincent admitted. “But I listen well. You can teach me.”

He set his watch to record, and let the boy chatter on about transforms and quantifiable logic and fractal decision trees and a few thousand other things that might as well have been Swahili. No, not even. Urdu,because thanks to Michelangelo’s remarkable–and habitually concealed–gift for languages, Vincent actually spoke a fair amount of Swahili.

In any case, Julian talked, and Vincent made encouraging noises. And before too long, he started to wonder exactly what Julian was doing wandering around the house alone in the middle of the night, when from what Vincent had seen even young males didn’t go about unescorted. Except, of course, during Carnival.

The boy had to pause for breath eventually. “Julian,” Vincent said, “how did you get out of the Blue Rooms to come talk to me? Did somebody give you a pass?”

Julian’s mobile mouth thinned and he shook his head jerkily. “No pass.”

“So how?”

Because as far as Vincent knew there was supposed to be only one route out of the harem, and it was supposed to be guarded. By Agnes, usually, who had been out of the house trying to locate any trace of Lesa and Michelangelo, and whom Elena had just summoned home to help deal with Katya.

“Did you just walk out?”

“My sire showed me,” Julian said, quietly. “There’s a secret stair. I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”

Which explained how Robert had escaped. “Julian,” Vincent said, “I think you’d better go back before your grandmother catches you out of bed.”

“But–”

“It’s okay. I promise we’ll talk some more tomorrow.” He stood up, slouching enough to minimize his height advantage on a kid who hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, and came over to Julian, hunkering down a little to speak to him eye to eye. He put his hand on Julian’s shoulder and felt the boy shudder, as if the companionable contact was a threat.

In his society, a sane reaction. “It’s okay,” Vincent said again. “I’ll help. Right now, we have to get your mom back, and my partner. After that–”

Julian nodded jerkily and stepped back into the doorway. They stared at one another for a moment, and then a moment later Julian sidestepped and was gone.

Kii is restless.

This is not a sensation Kii is any longer accustomed to, and Kii is some time in identifying it. Restlessness is not one of the emotional routines that Kii finds useful in Kii’s work.

Kii is somewhat disconcerted at first. Inspection, however, reveals the source of the emotion; it is an outflow of the Consent. The Consent wishes more information regardingKaiwo Maru and regarding the life forms that inhabit her.

They are made things, like the khir, and like the khir, they are guardians. They are intelligent, and they are designed, but they are not people.

There are differences. The khir serve. They guard the Consent’s endless dreamings, but these Governors, while designed to serve a purpose, serve it by ruling over theesthelich creatures who created them.

It is an inversion.

Perhaps the bipeds are truly alien enough to place their destiny in the hands of monsters. Or perhaps there is a miscalculation, and this is the result. Kii cannot yet be sure, and the Consent is chary of deciding on so thin a pattern.

Kii continues to research. The Governors are an advantage to Kii’s bipeds–the local colony, that is. The bipeds Kii identifies as Kii’s pets, and which the Consent is to abet.

The Governors advantage Kii’s bipeds because they severely curtail the growth of the nonlocal population.

But they are a disadvantage as well. They create a population that is extremely creative and active, without the drain of substandard individuals. In other words, by ensuring that only extraordinary and accomplished individuals survive, and by skewing that population toward those most practically creative, the Governors nourish innovation. They force the Coalition outward, groping, grasping, subsuming other colony worlds.

They are the engine that drives the expansion that Kii has informed Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones that Kii will not permit in local space‑time.

The Consent is temporary. The potentialities are complex, the patterns not yet emergent. The current solution is to prepare for three eventualities deemed likely. The first requires no action, as there are possibilities in motion that carry the Coalition away from local space‑time for the foreseeable potentialities. The second is the need to eradicate the Governors as a species, which will alleviate immediate population pressure on the Coalition worlds and thus the immediate threat to the local colony. This solution carries an attendant ecological cost and an eventual pattern that may mean dealing with stronger and larger Coalition feelers. The third is to prepare to exterminate as much of the nonlocal population of bipeds as is deemed necessary to prevent their encroachment, if the emerging pattern proves them belligerent.

When the waves collapse, Kii will be glad to no longer worry. But they are not yet resolved, and so Kiiis worried, and the Consent is not open to Kii’s advice.

Kii believes that a preemptive strike would be more effective.Kaiwo Maru is the nexus of probabilities, the center of the indeterminacies. IfKaiwo Maru is destroyed, so many waves collapse–

Kii is overruled. The Consent is that there are too manyesthelich intelligences aboardKaiwo Maru in addition to the Governors, and theesthelich do not act yet in belligerence. The Consent is to observe and prepare.

The Consent takes hold, and Kii ceases to recall why Kii, in an alternately collapsed wave, would have felt differently.

When Elena returned in the growing light of morning, Vincent’s fisheye showed that she’d been crying. He hadn’t resumed her chair after Julian left, and instead stood in the shadows near the lattice, watching things like moths and probably named for them come and go among the dead, plucked flowers, ignoring what threads of music and laughter drifted in from the streets. They were jangling, frantic sounds. Have fun quick, before someone comes and stops you.

“You don’t like the garland,” Elena said, when he realized she was waiting for him to notice her, and turned. Her voice rasped. She coughed and rubbed her mouth with her hand.

“They’re dead. It strikes me as macabre to hang murdered plants all over your buildings. How much longer is Carnival?”

“Seven days,” she said. “Ten all together. And the flowers are dead because nothing grows in a Dragon city. Except carpetplant. They do their own weeding.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“That’s how the cities survived intact.” She came closer and joined him at the lattice, peering through the blooms to the empty courtyard. “Katya’s not talking,” she said. “We’re going to have to go to Claude.”

“Not an option,” he said, and bit his lip. “I didn’t mean to say that. Some sneaky, underhanded diplomat I am.”

She didn’t step closer, but he felt her warmth against his arm. It reminded him that his shoulders itched, and he tightened his fingers on the ledge of the porch railing.

“You’re more worried about him than you pretend.”

He looked at her standing there, open‑eyed, empty‑palmed, and for a moment almost managed to think of her as human.

“We need to involve security and the militia,” she continued when it became apparent he had nothing to say. “I can’t do that without Claude.”

“Elder Kyoto is on our side.”

“Elder Kyoto wouldn’t keep her job long enough to be of any use to us if she tried to sneak this past the administration. Why are you so opposed to involving them?”

“Other than her challenging Angelo to a duel?”

“Political maneuvering,” Elena said with a wave of her hand. “There’s more.”

“All right,” Vincent said, and let his hands fall open, too. “I believe she and Saide Austin are aware of–no, in collusion with–the operators of an illegal genetics lab somewhere on New Amazonia. And that they used that lab to create a retrovirus with which they then infected my partner, with the intent of spreading a deadly epidemic across Old Earth.”

“You have proof?” Elena asked, as of course she would.

“It’s in Angelo’s bloodstream,” Vincent answered. “We hadn’t had time to get it taken care of yet.”

“Oh.” She took a half‑step forward, belly against the railing, her hands curled hard on the edge.

“Yeah,” Vincent said. “I’m not sure talking to Claude is the best possible solution.”

“No,” Elena said. “The genetic engineering, though. If we could prove that, we wouldn’t even have to have her killed.”

“So all we have to do is find a genetic lab so well hidden nobody in Penthesilea knows where it is.”

“You’ve never had to find an illegal drug lab?” Elena said. “Somebody always knows. I just wish Lesa were here.”

“Out of danger?”

“To help find it. Security directorate is what she does.”

21

LESA KNEW HER WAY THROUGH THE BUSH. UNARMED, barefoot, injured, and clad in the rags of city clothes, she managed to stay ahead of the pursuit for almost twelve hours, through the afternoon rain and well into the evening of the long New Amazonian day, until the sounds of voices faded and the only man‑made sound she heard was the occasional distant, echoing signal by gunfire, followed by a crescendo of animal complaint.

She regretted not having a bush knife most of all. A gun would have been nice, and it chafed not to have her honor at her hip, but a knife would have made travel infinitely easier. It also would have left a defined trail, of course, but crawling under still more thorny wire‑plant, her scratched hands and forearms swelling with infection, she didn’t think she’d care. At least the tender redness was likely just her own skin flora; most New Amazonian bacteria didn’t like the taste of Earth meat any better than did the New Amazonian bugs.

Once the sun was up, she had managed a good bearing, though that wasn’t much use without a reference point. Then, for lack of options, she had headed east. If the Right Hand hadn’t brought her too far from Penthesilea, she’d find a coast in that direction. And if they’d transported her any distance–well, this looked like home jungle, and if it wasn’t, something was very likely to eat her before she starved.

Unlike the “insects” and the “bacteria,” some of the larger New Amazonian life had absolutely no objection to the taste of mammal. And fexa were quite territorial.

In any case, it was bound to be a long walk.

At least she could entertain herself as she picked her way over borer‑addled trunks and through drapes of waterlogged vines by trying to decide how she was going to explain to Vincent that she’d left Kusanagi‑Jones behind.

The conscious edge of her brain wasn’t helping her anyway. What she needed was the inner animal, the instincts tuned to shifts of light and the cries of big‑eyed, ringtailed treekats awakening for the night and the black‑and‑violet, four‑winged Francisco’s macaws settling down in their roosts. She thought about fashioning weapons, but that would take time, and her advantage right now was in staying ahead of her pursuers–well‑armed men who knew the lay of the land.

She did pick up a stout branch, green and springy. It had a gnawed, pointed gnarl at the base where it had been disarticulated by a treekat after the infestation of bugs in the heartwood. The smaller twigs had withered since it fell, but only a few rootlets protruded; she stripped them away, broke the slender end off, and found herself possessed of a serviceable three‑foot‑long club.

The rich scent of loam rose from under her denting footsteps, and insectoids scurried from overturned litter. She made an effort to walk more lightly, picking past clumps of moss that would show her footsteps, hopping between patches of wild carpetplant that flourished where sunlight managed to pierce the canopy in long, flickering rays. It wouldn’t bruise, even when she jumped on it, and it beat sticking to game trails. Those would lead pursuit right to her.

She needed to find a place to bed down for the night.

Lesa had slept rough before, but she had no illusions about her odds of surviving a night in the jungle unarmed, without shelter, and without daring to build a fire even if she had the wherewithal to do so. It might keep off animals, but it would be as good as a beacon to the Right Hand.

At least being dive‑bombed and picked clean by sirens or strangled by a fexa would be quick.

She found a crevice under a fallen log big enough to cram herself into, heaped leaf litter under it to conserve warmth, and hauled a drape of living wire‑plant over the top to serve as a barricade to any wandering animals, savaging her hands further in the process. She picked the thorns out of her palms with her teeth, and dropped them in the cup of a rain‑collecting plant among wriggling tadpoles so the water could help hide the scent of her blood.

The pungent stinging scent of wire‑plant sap would serve to conceal her own body odor.

She crammed herself into her impromptu shelter as dusk was growing thick under the trees, controlled her breathing, and resolutely closed her eyes.

Kusanagi‑Jones sighed and tugged idly at his shackles, galling his wrists and pulling at the shallow knife cut on his forearm. He didn’t shift either the three‑centimeter‑thick staple they were locked to or the beam behind it. Apparently better bondage equipment had arrived during the night. And when he’d been lying on the ground in the center of camp, flat on his back from the paralytic agent the insurgents had used to bring him down, he’d seen several more good‑sized shelters all overhung with holographic and utility fog camouflage. At least two aircars had gone out after Lesa. The entire camp was under a false rain‑forest canopy, all but invisible from the air, probably protected by IR and other countermeasures.

Coalition technology. Which also explained how they’d managed to shut down his wardrobe. Miss Ouagadougou wasn’t the only Coalition agent on the ground here.

Somebody was running guns.

And the nasty, suspicious part of Kusanagi‑Jones’s mind–the one that tended to keep him alive in situations like this–chipped in with the observation that he and Vincent hadn’t been trusted with the information. Which told him that they weren’t the primary operation in this theater.

They were the stalking horse. And the real operation was an armed insurrection.

Who’d miss a couple of disgraced old faggots anyway? And if Vincent happened to get himself killed in theater by enemy action, it wasn’t as if Katherine Lexasdaughter could complain, no matter how much pull she had with the Coalition Cabinet. Which made sense of yesterday’s unutterably stupid grab for Vincent in Penthesilea, too. It gave the Coalition one more big black check mark in the invade New Amazoniacolumn to present the Governors.

At least he was more comfortable now. They’d permitted him access to a privy, and the shackles gave him enough slack to stand, sit, or even stretch out on his back if he crossed his arms over his chest–and enough slack to kick the “food” they’d brought him almost far enough away that he didn’t have to smell charred flesh every time he turned his head.

The water, he’d drunk; it was clean, and there had been plenty of it, and if they wanted to drug him they didn’t need to hide it in his rations when another dart would work just fine. He had tried a few bites of the bread, but there was something cloying about the taste and texture that made him suspect it contained some ingredient he didn’t care to consume.

He’d wait. He wasn’t hungry enough for it to affect his performance, yet.

It was best that Lesa had escaped. She had a better chance of getting back than he did, and a better chance of being heard when she did so. And Kusanagi‑Jones was safer in captivity anyway. Less likely to be raped or tortured–and they hadn’t tried anything yet, though he wouldn’t bet his ration number on it–and more likely to survive the experience if they wanted to use him to extract something from Vincent.

He wouldn’t be held as a bargaining chip, though. Not if they were already receiving Coalition aid. Presuming they knew who they were receiving it from. Which was presuming a lot.

He shifted again, wishing he could rub the torn skin under his manacles or his cut shoulder. His docs weren’t dependent on the power supply of his watch or his wardrobe; they used the kinetic energy of his own bloodstream to power themselves, a failsafe that kept them operational as long as his heart was beating. And they were doing an acceptable job of preventing infection, and even speeding healing, but the wounds could hardly have itched more.

Another damned irritation, like the hunger and the dehydration making him light‑headed in the heat.

He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the post, and tried to think as Vincent would. What purpose would holding him serve? What was he doing alive?

There was the obvious answer. Bait.

“You know,” Kusanagi‑Jones said to the air, “he really only brings me along so they’ll have someone to take hostage.”

He was bait. A hook in Vincent. Because the Right Hand had missed Vincent, and the Right Hand was taking aid from the OECC. And if anything happened to Vincent, while Katherine Lexasdaughter couldn’t very well take the OECC to task for it, she could certainly demand some kind of retaliation against New Amazonia for so carelessly disposing of her son. And if she didn’t, the Coalition could.

Vincent’s abduction and death was probably a good enough excuse that the Governors would allow the OECC to go to war against New Amazonia. And if anybody in the Cabinet suspected that the recalcitrant leader of the Captain’s Council on Ur was plotting with a bunch of hysterical and heavily armed Amazons, the death of Katherine’s son at the hands of such might be seen as a good enough way of putting an end to any revolutionary alliances.

And wasn’t it just a damned shame that Lesa had already left, and Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t have any way of transferring that particular startling deduction to Vincent.

He could reconstruct the scenario easily enough. Lesa had followed Katya, caught her about to join Stefan and the rest of the revolutionaries, and Katya’s controller had taken Katya “hostage” with a weapon they both knew was loaded with stun capsules, but which Lesa would think lethal. After Kusanagi‑Jones rode to the rescue, Katya had had the presence of mind to establish herself on the winning team by incapacitating her colleagues…until Kusanagi‑Jones let his guard down long enough to get shot in the back like a rookie. And the Right Hand had seen a chance to reset its trap for Vincent.

Kusanagi‑Jones closed his eyes again, settled his shoulders against the unfinished wood of the beam, and tried to ignore the pain in his shoulder enough to nap. It looked like he’d be wanting to escape after all.

He dozed intermittently through the heat of the afternoon. His disabled wardrobe dragged at his body and trapped the heat against his skin, raising irritated bumps, but the docs were working well enough to seal his wound. Occasional shadows across the gap under the door told him when he was observed, and the sweat rolled across his forehead and down his neck to sting his eyes and his cuts.

He didn’t think they’d unsecure him after dark, and was surprised when, as the light was failing, the chain around the doorpost finally rattled and slid. A moment later, the door cracked open and a big silhouette filled the frame.

The door shut behind it and Kusanagi‑Jones heard the chain refastened by someone outside.

“Michelangelo,” the man said, as Kusanagi‑Jones was still blinking his eyes to refocus them after the light. “I am truly sorry about this.”

It was Robert. As he approached, Kusanagi‑Jones pushed himself up the post, determined to meet him standing.

He found the apology somewhat specious, but this didn’t seem the time to explain. So he grunted, and considered for a moment how best to absorb the injury if it came to blows.

But instead, Robert crouched just out of range of Kusanagi‑Jones’s feet and began pulling things from the capacious pockets of his vest. He laid them on the floor, bulbs of some cloudy yellowish fluid and three pieces of unfamiliar fruit. One was knobby and purple‑black in the dim light, the other two larger and creamy yellow, covered in bumps that reminded Kusanagi‑Jones unpleasantly of his current case of prickly heat.

“I brought something you can eat,” Robert said, without rising. His shiny black boots creased across the toes as he balanced lightly, the insteps and toes daubed with clotted mud. Bloused trousers were tucked into the tops just below the knees. His head jerked dismissively at the flat leaf Kusanagi‑Jones had shoved as far away as he could. “I didn’t expect they would have taken any care about it.”

Robert edged the offering forward, while Kusanagi‑Jones watched, feet planted and chained hands hanging at his sides. He kept his eyes on those creases across the toes of Robert’s boots, and not on the hands, or on the food. Or, most important after the endless heat, the liquid.

“What’s in the bulbs?” he asked when Robert had pushed them as close as he meant to and settled back on his heels.

“Dilute bitterfruit. Electrolytes, sugars, and water. Factory sealed, don’t worry.”

“Can’t exactly pick it up,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, moving his hands enough to make the shackles clank.

Robert folded his arms over his knees and looked up, mouth quirking, the faint light catching on the scars that marked his shaven scalp. “Don’t you know how to juggle? Use your feet.”

Kusanagi‑Jones sighed. But he knew how to juggle.

He leaned against the pole, angled one leg out and braced it beside the offerings, and used the ball of the other one to roll the first bulb onto the top of his toes. Then he planted the second foot, shifted his weight, and used the first to flip the bulb into his hands.

Robert applauded lightly, so Kusanagi‑Jones lifted an eyebrow at him and angled his body from the waist, a bow amid clanking. Then he raised his hands to his mouth, the cool, sweating bulb turning the filth on his palms into mud. He tore through the stem with his teeth.

The beverage was an acquired taste. It stung his mouth like tonic water.

It might be nasty, but it cleared his head. He drank slowly, so as not to shock his system, and then retrieved the second globe the same way as the first before he said anything else to the patient, motionless Robert. “So,” he said, weighing the soft‑sided container in his palms, “what price charity?”

“No price.” He hesitated. “If you gave me your promise of good behavior, I could see you moved to better quarters.”

“Don’t pretend concern for my welfare.”

“I am concerned,” Robert said. “We’re freedom fighters, not barbarians. And I’m sorry your arrival here was so rough. It was improvised. They were under instructions not to harm you or Vincent, or Lesa.”

“You make it sound almost as if we’re not bargaining chips.”

Robert smiled, teeth flashing white in the darkness. “You’re almost not. You won’t give me your word?”

And Kusanagi‑Jones opened his mouth to lie–

And could not do it.

He could justify his failure in a dozen ways. The simplest was to tell himself that if he gave Robert his word and broke it, here, now, under these circumstances, he would become useless as an operative in any capacity relating to New Amazonian culture, forever. Their system of honor wouldn’t tolerate it. But it wasn’t that.

“Thanks for the drinks,” he answered, and shook his head.

And Robert grunted and stood, and made a formal sort of bow with folded hands. “Don’t forget your fruit,” he said, and turned to rap on the door, which opened to let him leave.

By the time Kusanagi‑Jones finished the fruit, the hut was as dark as the one he’d woken up in. He dried slick hands on his filthy gi, and then clutched his chains below the shackles, holding tight. Leaning back on his heels, pulling the heavy chain taut, he began to rock back and forth against the staple, trying to limit the pressure on his wounded arm.

Something sniffed Lesa’s lair in the dark of night, the blackness under the shadow of the trees. Whatever it was, it found the wire‑plant discouraging and continued on its way. Lesa slept in fits, too exhausted to stay awake and too overwrought to sleep. She’d never spent a longer night.

In the morning, the cheeping and whirring of alarm calls brought her from a doze as the skies grayed under an encroaching sun. Lesa froze in her paltry shelter, jammed back against the leaf litter that cupped her meager warmth, and held her breath.

There were three of them, two males and a woman. All carried long arms–the woman in addition to the honor at her hip, while the men had bush knives–and one of the males and the woman held them at the ready. The third had his slung and was nodding over a small device in the palm of his hand. They conferred too quietly for Lesa to make out the words, and then the woman leveled her weapon and pointed it at Lesa’s tree. “You might as well come out, Miss Pretoria. Otherwise I’ll just shoot you through the vines, and that would be ignominious.”

Lesa’s cramped limbs trembled as she pried herself from her cave, collecting more long superficial scratches from the wire‑plant as she pushed it aside. She stood hunched, her resting place having done nothing to help the spasm in her neck, and stared at the taller of the two males. His hair was unmistakable, a startling light color that Lesa was almost tempted to call blond, though nobody classically blond had survived Assessment. He was out of context, though, and it took her a moment to place him. The shock of recognition, when it came, was disorienting. Stefan. Stefan, the gentle male who worked as a secretary in the Cultural Directorate. Under Miss Ouagadougou.

Not a direction in which Lesa had been looking for conspiracy.

“Your hands,” the woman said, continuing to cover her while the second male slid his detecting equipment into a cargo pocket and came forth to immobilize her wrists. No cords this time, but ceramic shackles joined by a hinge that allowed only a limited range of motion.

At least he cuffed her hands in front of her and the smooth ceramic didn’t irritate her lacerated wrists. He stepped back three quick steps and grabbed Stefan by the shoulder, turning him away.

The woman didn’t let her rifle waver, and Lesa watched her for several moments, and then sighed and sat down on the mossy log, her bound hands in her lap.

Backs turned or not, she could hear more than they intended her to. And it wasn’t reassuring. Robert’s name was mentioned, followed by a mumble that made the woman snap over her shoulder, “I don’t give a damn what shethinks.”

“If we take her back to camp, it’s just one more decision to make in the end,” Stefan said. He turned, and caught her gaping before she could glance down. His mouth firmed over his teeth, an expression she understood. A duelist’s expression, and one she’d seen on the faces of stud males before a Trial.

“It’s too much risk to keep her alive,” he said, and Lesa let the breath she seemed to be holding hiss out over her teeth, and, for a moment, closed her eyes.

“And too much risk to shoot her,” the woman said. Lesa opened her eyes in time to see Stefan answer her with a flip of his hand, but she continued. “She has family in the group, Stefan. I don’t think anybody’s going to be comfortable with the idea that their relatives aren’t safe–”

“Do you suppose they thought we’d be able to overthrow the government without bloodshed?”

The woman bit her lip. “I don’t think they expected their lovers to be shot out of hand.”

Stefan nodded, still staring at Lesa, who managed another shallow breath around the tightness in her throat. “It’ll have to look natural, then,” he said. “That’s not hard. There are plenty of ways to die in the jungle. Exposure, fexa, sneakbite.”

He glanced around, and Lesa wobbled to her feet. The woman leveled her rifle again, her squint creasing the corners of her eyes. Thank you,Lesa mouthed at her, but she only shrugged and shifted her grip on the rifle.

“Here,” Stefan said. “Mikhail, give me your gloves.”

The second man pulled a pair of hide gloves from another cargo pocket and passed them to Stefan. He tugged them on, his eyes on his fingers rather than Lesa as he made sure they were seated perfectly. And then he walked toward her, past her, and began tugging at the mess of wire‑plant until the bulk of it was on the ground, the long stems dragging down from their parasitic anchor points in the canopy. Nests fell in showers of twigs and twists of desiccated parasitic moss, two yellow‑gray eggs shattering on the ground and one bouncing unharmed on a patch of carpetplant.

When he’d freed most of the vines, Stefan placed his hands carefully between thorns and gave the plant a hard, definite yank, enough to sway the strangler oak it rooted in and bring another shower of twigs and dead leaves down. A glistening black Francisco’s macaw swooped down, shrieking, and made a close pass at his head, fore‑wings beating wildly and the hind‑wings folded so close to its body that the gold primary feathers merged with the tail plumage.

Stefan ignored it completely, even when it made a second pass, close enough for the claws of its hind‑wings to brush his hair. “Bring her up here.”

Mikhail and the woman started forward, though she waited until Mikhail had a good grip on Lesa before lowering the rifle.

Lesa made them drag her. A few scuffs in the earth might be revealing, if the right person found her body.

If anyone ever found her body.

She shook her head. Negative thinking. She wouldfind a way out of this.

Mikhail unlocked her cuffs, but by then Stefan had her arms too tightly restrained for her struggling and feet‑dragging to make any difference. But she kept squirming and kicking anyway, until fighting made the thorns of the wire‑plant Stefan wound around her bite that much deeper. Then she sagged, dead weight, but he hung her on the plant like so much laundry anyway, vines winding her wrists and crossing her chest, thorns sunk like hooks into her skin.

When Mikhail released her and the thorns took her weight, she couldn’t even scream. She choked out a whimper, bit her lip, managed to pull it back to the barest whine. Her flesh stretched against imbedded thorns.

Mikhail backed up, scrubbing his palms against his capaciously pocketed trousers, and the woman looked down as Stefan draped a few more vines artistically across her chest. Then he also moved away, frowning at his handiwork. Lesa could barely see him, though the morning had grown bright. Her vision was empty at the edges, and every breath, no matter how shallow, sank the vine’s three‑centimeter thorns more deeply into her skin. Some of them shattered, stripping off the vines, but there were many more, and they were fresh and green.

They took her weight.

Stefan dropped out of sight. Lesa heard scuffling, but couldn’t turn her head. A moment later, he reappeared, sliding from under her log with her improvised club in his hand. He weighed it across his palm, and then took good hold of it and smashed at the ground with a croquet‑mallet swing.

Whatever he was doing, a few blows satisfied him. He whirled the club overhead, and slung it tumbling deep among the trees. Mikhail stared down at his feet, and flinched when Lesa couldn’t hold back another whimper.

“Right,” Stefan said, grabbing the woman’s wrist in a liberty that would have shocked Lesa under other circumstances. “Come on,” he said, and paused long enough to smile up at Lesa. “Pleasant dreams, Miss Pretoria.”

Then he herded his companions away.

They were out of sight, and Lesa considering her options for the least painful method of breathing, when she felt the first savage, stinging bite on the edge of her foot and jerked stupidly against the thorns, and cried.

Stefan had broken open a nant’s nest. And while they might not think humans were good eating, they were more enthusiastic about driving off something that might be the predator that had attacked their home.

Except this predator didn’t have anyplace to run.

22

KUSANAGI‑JONES WAS STILL AT IT LONG AFTER SUNRISE, but he thought the staple might be loosening. He heard a faint clicking now when he rocked it against the wood. When it went, it would go all at once, and he’d find himself sprawled flat on his back in the dirt. At least the chains and the staple were steel, unlike the manacles. They’d make a reasonably effective weapon, once the other end was no longer bolted down.

The clatter of the door lock left him plenty of warning that somebody was about to enter, if the murmur of voices hadn’t been enough. He released his grip on the chains and began pacing, wearing out the brief arc permitted. Two steps and pivot, two steps and pivot the other way. Exactly what Vincent would have been doing in his position.

He had less than a meter of slack.

Light spilled in when the door opened with the brilliance of midmorning. Kusanagi‑Jones averted his eyes, staring toward the darkest corner of his domain, and waited until the door banged the frame again and the brightness dimmed.

“Michelangelo.” Robert again, standing by the door, his left hand cupped beside his thigh as if he held something concealed in the palm.

“Breakfast already?” Kusanagi‑Jones asked. “Seems like you just left.”

Robert’s smile was tight. “Do you remember what I said about the Right Hand not being the barbarians we’re painted?”

Kusanagi‑Jones folded his hands in front of him and nodded slowly, the chains pulling against his wrists.

“I was wrong,” Robert said, and flipped something through the air.

Kusanagi‑Jones caught it reflexively. A code stick, the sort that worked as a key. He held it up inquiringly, the shackles stopping his hand before it came level with his face.

“Go ahead,” Robert said. He crouched, and began digging in the capacious pockets of his vest. Objects piled on the packed dirt before him. Kusanagi‑Jones recognized emergency gear, a primitive datacart of the sort that seemed ubiquitous on New Amazonia, a two‑foot knife that Robert pulled from under his vest, a pocket lighter, and the crinkly packaging of a sterile med‑kit.

He didn’t stand and gawk. He skipped the code stick over the manacles and pried them open with a sigh, careful not to let the chains clang against the pole when he lowered them. He dropped the code stick on the floor and kicked dirt over it, and stepped toward Robert.

“You’re helping me escape.”

“We’re going together,” Robert said. “The team that went after Lesa came back.”

“Without her?” Kusanagi‑Jones sank onto his haunches and began picking items out of the pile and slipping them inside his gi, where the belt would hold them in place. Robert had also provided socks and a pair of low boots, which Kusanagi‑Jones jammed his feet into.

“Stefan and Mikhail said they found no sign of her.”

Kusanagi‑Jones was not Vincent, but even he could read the irony in that tone. He hefted the knife–he would call it a machete–and shoved it through his belt like a pirate’s scimitar. The hilt poked him under the ribs.

“There was a third with them. Medeline Angkor‑Wat. The tracker. Who told me the truth, after Stefan and Mikhail went to get coffee.”

Kusanagi‑Jones waited.

Robert lifted his head, fixed Kusanagi‑Jones with a look that froze his throat, and filled the silence, the way people did. “We might have a chance to get to her while she’s still alive,” he said, and shoved a water bottle into Kusanagi‑Jones’s hand. “There’s a GPS locator and a map in the datacart. If we get separated. Medeline’s best‑guess location for where they left Lesa is plotted. It won’t be off by more than a few hundred meters. She’s good.”

Unless she’s lying to you. Kusanagi‑Jones pressed his elbow against the pad inside his gi, without voicing the comment. “What about the guard?”

“I brought Chun breakfast,” Robert said. “He should be unconscious by now. And the guards at the gate won’t know you. Here.” He produced a wadded‑up dark green shirt from somewhere, and tossed it at Kusanagi‑Jones’s chest.

Kusanagi‑Jones shrugged it on over his gi. It looked less out of place, and the bottoms were dirty enough to pass for the same sort of baggy tan trousers that Robert was wearing.

Robert stood and rattled the door. “Chun?”

There was no answer. Kusanagi‑Jones breathed out a sigh he knew better than to have been holding, and waited while Robert pulled the chain through the hole in the door and used another code stick to unfasten the lock.

They had to heave Chun’s unconscious body aside to slip through. The sentry had passed out leaning against the door with his plate in his lap. Kusanagi‑Jones carefully reclosed the door, pulled the chain free and slipped it into his pocket, and propped Chun back up as he had been. There was no need to leave the place looking like an escape in progress.

And then, side by side, Robert chatting aimlessly about some sporting event, they headed for the gate.

“Easier to steal an aircar,” Kusanagi‑Jones suggested in low tones. “I can hotwire those.”

“They all have beacons. Besides, it’s only about fifteen kilometers. We’ll be fine.”

The boots were too tight and pinched across the ball of Kusanagi‑Jones’s feet. He could already feel every step of that fifteen kilometers. “I hope you can run,” he quipped, which earned him an arched eyebrow.

He wondered what Vincent would have made of that look, of the jaunty set of Robert’s shoulders.

And if it would have meant anything. Because if Robert had been fooling Lesa for as long as he must have been, the only explanation was that either he was a Liar, too, or he’d been very lucky never to find himself in a context that Lesa could pick up what he was concealing from her.

Of course, it was possible that the New Amazonian women just didn’t talk to their men very much.

The guard at the gap in the zareba barely gave them a glance. They emerged into a camouflaged clearing that extended a few meters beyond the stockade, and crossed it quickly, Kusanagi‑Jones blinking gratefully when they entered the shade of the trees. He slid a hand under the borrowed shirt and retrieved the datacart, wincing at the beep when it activated.

Amateurs.

Something took flight overhead, invisible among the branches.

“What are you doing?” Robert asked.

“She’s east?”

“So Medeline said.” Robert stepped into the lead, using his own long knife to lift vegetation out of the way rather than slashing at it. Of that, at least, Kusanagi‑Jones approved.

The map was easy to use. Lesa’s estimated position was marked by a yellow dot, that of Kusanagi‑Jones and Robert by a pulsing green glow. All he had to do was make the second match the first.

He’d done harder things in Academy.

Robert never knew what hit him. Michelangelo stepped left, the chain from the door doubled in his right hand, the lock swinging freely. It struck Robert at the base of the skull, on a rising arc that snapped his head forward and sent him crashing forward into the brush. His knife went flying.

Michelangelo had to search to find it, after he straddled Robert and broke his neck.

It was a pity, because Michelangelo had sort of liked him. But he’d already proved he would switch sides over a woman he’d betrayed at least once, and unlike Vincent, Michelangelo didn’t believe in redemption.

And you couldn’t trust a Liar.

Lesa would have taken the night before over the day that followed. At least nants weren’t much for climbing, and few of them bothered to scale the inside of her trousers past where they bunched at the knee. After a while, the scathing agony of each individual bite, like a heated needle slipped into her skin, dulled into consistent pain as her flesh puffed up, honeycombed with lymph.

And when she could manage not to flinch reflexively at every bite, she didn’t wind up imbedding the thorns farther into her skin. Thrashing wouldn’t help her anyway. The wire‑plant’s barbs were backcurved like fishhooks, and every twist impaled her more. But if she could get her hands around the vines…

They were strong enough to take Stefan’s weight. If Lesa could manage a grip on them while she still had the strength, she could lift herself off the barbs. They hurt,but they weren’t long enough to threaten her unless they tore her throat or eyes, or punctured her inner thighs where the femoral arteries ran shallow.

It meant freeing one arm, however, while her entire weight rested on the wire‑plant wrapping her other arm and her torso, and every movement earned her anguish.

The thorns didn’t come out any sweeter than they’d gone in. She closed her eyes in concentration and lifted, edged, bending her wrist in an arc that encouraged the burred vine to drag down the back of her hand. She couldn’t just yank herself off the thorns without impaling herself on others; she had to coax it.

It was like giving birth, one centimeter, two centimeters. A slide and a moan and a fraction closer to freedom.

Flecks of sun dotted her face through the fluttering leaves of the strangler oak, and her tongue swelled in her mouth by the time she got the last serrated coil to scrape down her arm and drop away. She swayed with reaction and gasped painfully, the vines crossing her torso tightening.

Lifting her head, blinking sweat from her lashes, she studied the vines on her right side, looking for a place with fewer thorns. The motion made her light‑headed, the jungle a green whirl around her as she tilted her head back. But it would go faster now. She had a hand free, through careful work and resolute refusal to panic, and there was a spot about a half‑meter to the right and slightly over her head where the thorns might be thin enough that she’d only shred her hand grabbing onto the vine, rather than crippling it.

It beat dying here.

She reached out and took hold, gritting her teeth against the pain as she forced herself to close her hand.

Some of the thorns broke, while others cut deep, but she held on. Held on, and tensed the shoulder, and flexed the biceps, and pulled. She felt the tendons in her forearm take the strain, the searing heat flash up her neck, blinding white static, and a concomitant lessening of pain as her weight came off the thorns.

This might just work.

When Vincent had asked to talk to Katya, he hadn’t expected Elena to consent. They both knew talkwas a euphemism. But she showed him into the room and left him there, and almost two days later, there he still sat, across a low table from Katya, his bare heels resting on the strictly decorative rungs of a stool that was an outgrowth of House rather than a piece of individual furniture. He was already growing accustomed to single‑purpose objects, wasteful as they were. The little cultural differences could seem absolutely homey, compared to the big ones.

Katya stared sullenly, her hands folded in her lap as if to hide the manacles linking her wrists. She wouldn’t shift her gaze from his chin, which was meant to be disconcerting.

Vincent wouldn’t permit it to succeed.

She was good. Very practiced, very serene, offering open, neutral body language nearly as controlled as Michelangelo’s despite exhaustion that had her swaying in her chair. Many years of practice in lying to her mother had given her that edge.

But Vincent wasn’t Lesa, and he didn’t have a mother’s blindness, her self‑deception.

Katya Pretoria had no power over him.

They had been sitting here, with brief intermissions, for sixty‑one hours, most of two New Amazonian days. Katya had been sitting longer than Vincent, because Agnes took over when Vincent left the room, and Katya…didn’t leave the room.

Agnes, Katya would plead with. Vincent didn’t envy the older woman that.

Vincent could have taken longer breaks, but he contented himself with catnaps barely longer than microsleeps, because they were in this together. She needed never to realize he had been gone long enough to rest…and when she broke, he needed to be there. He needed to be making a difference, doing something, anything. Even if it was wrong.

And besides, he had something neither Katya nor Agnes had. He had chemistry, and his superperceiver’s skills.

He hadn’t seen Elena Pretoria since the interrogation started, and he didn’t blame her. He didn’t have a granddaughter, but if he did, he didn’t think he’d care to watch her browbeaten, cajoled, misled, manipulated, and entrapped by the likes of Vincent Katherinessen.

Especially if his child’s life hung in the balance.

He could only hope that wherever she was, Elena was putting as much effort into locating Saide Austin’s illegal genetic engineering lab as Vincent was into prying any potentially useful information out of Katya. And having better success.

He thought she might be weakening, though. The pauses were growing longer, the disconnects between her sentences had become disconnects between phrases, and she could no longer maintain the thread of a lie–or even a narrative. Her wobble on the stool had become a sway.

She would break. All he needed was time. And to put away the sinking, invalid knowledge that Michelangelo could already be dead. Thatwas unbearable, the idea that something could have happened, and Vincent would not know. He wanted to believe there was some connection, that somehow he’d understand if anything happened. It was self‑delusion. Magical thinking.

Even breaking her wasn’t without risks. After a certain point, she’d tell him anything just to get him to leave her alone. If she lied, he was counting on his ability to catch it. Almost as much as he was counting on her actually possessing the information he needed, which might be a little more problematic. But he’d deal with that crisis when he got there.

“Katya,” he said as he hopped off his stool and came around the table to stand beside her, “if you tell me where they took your mother, I can let you sleep. I can get you something to drink and put you in your own bed. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

She blinked, wrapping her fingers around each other, her legs splayed wide as she tried to balance herself. Her toes curled into the carpetplant, flexing tendons playing across the tops of her feet. “Can’t tell,” she said, in a tired little‑girl voice that could have broken his heart. “S’important.”

She sounded drunk. But she still wasn’t to the point of giving him any old answer he asked for just to placate him.

“Your mother’s life is in danger,” he said, and managed not to frown when Katya shook her head.

No impatience. It wasn’t his style. And however long it was for him, it seemed twice as long to her. Katya couldn’t know it, because House had been asked to conceal time cues in the ceiling and walls (which Vincent also hoped was disconcerting to someone who had spent her life under, more or less, natural light), but the sun was setting outside, and Lesa and Michelangelo had been in captivity since the afternoon of the day before yesterday.

And the evening and the morning were the second day,Vincent thought, and stroked her hair, pushing dark strands off her clammy forehead. Admittedly, the insurgents had taken great care to capture them alive, and if it was the same group that had tried to snatch Vincent, they had been almost solicitous.

But his training and his experience told him hostages that weren’t rescued within seventy‑two hours usually weren’t rescued. The logistics of keeping somebody alive in detention started to wear on the captors, arguments started, and mistakes…were made.

“Your mother needs you. You can save her, Katya.”

“My mother’s fine,” she insisted, words slurring out after such a delay that he startled at the sound.

“What if she’s hurt? What if she needs medical attention? You made some bad choices, Katya. But nothing we can’t fix, if we get to her in time.”

“They wouldn’t hurt her.” A chink, the first admission she’d made that she knew who had Lesa. She didn’t seem to realize her error. Instead, she waved her hands for emphasis, but the manacles brought her up short and the weight of her own arms overbalanced her. Like Vincent’s, her stool was an extension of House. It didn’t tip.

But Katya did, flailing, and fell hard. Vincent caught her, cushioned the impact, but he was tired, too, and she slipped through his hands and landed on her shoulder on the carpetplant with a sharp sound. She pulled her knees up as if to hide her face against them.

Vincent crouched beside her, none too steady himself. He had to pause and adjust his chemistry, or he would have joined her on the floor. Energy rose through him like sap. It didn’t fool him; he could feel the ache of weariness in his bones, the sensation of every joint in his hands swollen and fouled with grit. The itch and ache of peeling skin on his back, thighs, and shoulders wasn’t helping. At least the sun toxicity had faded, and his fever, muscle pain, and nausea had broken. If he wasn’t so damned tired, he might even be thinking clearly.

It was a small enough consolation.

Katya giggled as he got his hands under her armpits and hauled her upright. It morphed into a sob when he deposited her back onto the stool, balancing her carefully before he stepped away. Agnes, wherever she was watching from, was probably scandalized. Vincent really didn’t care.

With Katya swaying behind him, he crossed to the door and tapped it open. As he’d predicted, Agnes waited there, arms crossed, chin tilted belligerently when he stepped into the corridor.

“Would you get us a drink?” he asked. “Something sugary. Fruit juice. With a stimulant in it.”

She nodded and turned away. He waited just outside the door until she came back, two cups in her hand. He took only one of them, smiled, and stepped back into the small chamber that had become an interrogation room.

Katya, miraculously, was still on her stool. He set the cup down on the table, out of her reach, and stood between her and it. “Come on, Katya,” he said, quietly. “Help me out here.”

She lifted her eyes, focused on his face. Another crack in the armor. His heart rate picked up. Sometimes, when they broke, it happened all at once. Like pebbles rolling down a hill. “I want to sleep,” she said, more distinctly than he would have thought she could manage.

“Me, too.” He reached around behind him, picked up the mug, took a sip of the juice. It was cold and sweet, with bits of pulp that burst on his tongue when he swallowed. By an act of will, he managed not to drain it.

Katya watched what he was doing, and couldn’t stop herself from licking her lips. She wouldn’t beg, though.

He came to her, put his hip against her shoulder, and with one hand encouraged her to lean back against him. He brushed her hair, stroked it gently, smoothed the tangled strands. “Talk to me, sweetie,” he said. “We both want to sleep. You can end this, you know, anytime.”

“Can’t,” she said. Her hair was dirty; the greasy strands coiled between his fingers when she shook her head. She probably would have fallen over again if he hadn’t braced her.

His fingers wanted to tighten in frustration, but hurting her wouldn’t net him anything. “Not can’t,” he said. “Won’t. I can save her, Katya, but you have to let me.”

She leaned her head against his belly, and he stroked her hair and held the cup to her mouth so she could drink. Her manacled hands cupped around his, and she drank in long, lingering swallows, licking the edge of the empty cup before she’d let him take it away.

The sugar and stimulants worked fast. He felt her stabilizing before he finished reaching over her to set the empty cup down. She shifted on the stool, but didn’t fall or pull away. Instead, she leaned her head against his stomach, closed her eyes, and sighed.

He didn’t say anything, just kept stroking her hair. Gently, impersonally, as he would stroke a child’s hair. She was relaxing, slowly.

People were surprisingly easy to tame, when you knew how to go about it. A little kindness at an unexpected moment could create a bond. An interrogation was a relationship, and relationships were based on developing trust. All seductions worked the same way; the seducer must create empathy with his target. He must project himself into the target’s emotional space and create a connection. Such connections were only effective when they ran both ways.

Vincent couldn’t remember if this had ever bothered him.

“Would you like another drink?”

“Please.” She hesitated. “Could I use the toilet, please?”

She hadn’t been so polite thirty hours ago. “In a moment,” he said, and steadied her with one hand before he stepped away. He made sure to collect the empty cup before going to the door. It was light and rounded, shatterproof, not much of a weapon–but any weapon was better than none.

He’d once seen a man killed with an antique paper fan. It was the sort of experience that stayed with a person.

He exchanged the empty cup for the full, ignoring Agnes’s glower, and returned. Katya’s eyes were closed. This moment of clarity would be brief, and before long she’d crash harder than ever. Borrowed energy would be repaid with interest.

He held the cup for her again, and again her hands came up to cover and control his, the ceramic of her manacles warm against his wrist. She drank half, paused, and drank again, licking her lips when he took the empty cup away. “Do you really think she’s in danger?”

Vincent turned and put his backside on the edge of the table. He folded his arms over his chest and waited, letting his silence be his answer.

“You’re really worried.” Her voice still had that vague, frail note, more strained now though the hoarseness had faded.

“I’m scared stiff.” He made it into a confidence, leaning forward over his folded arms. “And I do want to help. Your mother, and Robert. And my partner.”

She bit her lip. He crossed his ankles and waited, insouciant though it was everything he could do not to jitter against the table edge.

“Whatever they told you, there will be bloodshed,” he said.

“Claude’s going to sell us out to you. To the Coalition.”

“Claude’s your best hope of keeping the Coalition out,” he said. All Kii’s confidence aside, Vincent wasn’t certain that the Dragons could handle the combined might of the Governors and the OECC. “Claude, or your grandmother. If the people you’re working for succeed in overthrowing the government, who do you think will be here to pick up the pieces? A civil war is exactly what they would want.”

“What you would want, you mean. I don’t think so.” She still wasn’t thinking well. It was evident in her squint, in the pauses between her words. “If the Coalition wanted a, a change of government, you wouldn’t be arguing against it.”

He sighed and straightened, came to her, and smoothed her filthy hair again. “Sweetheart, I don’t work for the Coalition.”

Her eyes were closed. She was listening.

“I work with your mother,” he continued. “And I agree with you, things have got to change on New Amazonia. But wiping each other out for the convenience of the Governors is not the way. Trust me on this, as one born on a repatriated world.”

She pressed her face into his wardrobe.

“Get me a map,” she said. “And a pot of coffee.”

Vincent craved a shower, long and hot and decadent and New Amazonian. Anything to wash the deceit off his skin. Instead, he bent down and kissed her on top of the head. Agnes was already on the way in with a datapad in her hand when, silently, her shoulders shaking, Katya started to cry.

When Kusanagi‑Jones found Lesa, he judged by the drag marks that she had hauled herself at least fifty meters after disentangling herself from the thorns. The sun was high, the air breathless and heavy under the great arched trees, but the afternoon had not yet dimmed with the clouds that might bring rain, and Kusanagi‑Jones had not heard thunder. Lesa lay curled among the arched roots of some smooth‑boled, gray‑skinned tree, her hands locked over her face, her back wedged into a crevice more of a size for a child.

Kusanagi‑Jones could smell the blood from two meters off. He couldn’t see her breathing. And he was panting hard enough that he couldn’t have heard her.

His knees ached, his calves were shaking, his heart pounding hard enough that he saw its rhythm in his trembling hands. His feet were chafed raw and blistered in the boots, the borrowed socks soaked to uselessness with sweat and serosanguinous fluid. He’d run the fifteen kilometers.

He wasn’t as young as he had been.

Time to get out of the field,he thought, and considered for a moment the serious possibility that he might be suffering a myocardial infarction. But the hammering pulse, the stabbing pain across his chest, and the dark edges around his vision faded rather than worsening, and he managed to stumble close enough to go down on one knee beside Lesa, even as he didn’t quite manage to avoid thinking of her as the body.

And now, finally, he heard thunder and a distant pattering like dry rice shaken in a container that might be the sound of leaves brushed aside by rain. The jungle was big and disorienting, full of things to trip over and ground too soft to run on without twisting your ankle, the trees teeming with flickering animals, black birds with feathered hind‑limbs that they used like a second pair of wings and screaming green‑feathered lemurs with bright, blinking eyes.

Too late,he told himself as he gathered himself to touch her, bracing for disappointment, taking in the seeping, swollen lumps of her feet, the glossiness of the infected scratches on her hands. He could kill without hesitation, but it took him seconds to gather the courage to reach out and push her matted hair away from her face.

Warm.

Of course, she would be. The air was hotter than his skin. She didn’t stir, and he reached to brush her hair back, to afford her whatever privacy in death he could.

But something caught his attention and held it, and he heard himself bringing in a slow, thoughtful breath, full of the scents of blood and infection and the warm sweet yeasty smell of the moss and the fermenting earth.

Her eyes were closed. Closed all the way, closed softly and completely, the way a dead woman’s eyes would not be.

He grabbed her wrists and dragged her huddled body out from under the curve of the root, laying her flat on her back as rain began to patter on the leaves overhead, not penetrating the canopy at first but then pounding down, splashing his face, soaking a dead man’s shirt, washing the grime and sap and blood off the deep angry scratches on Lesa’s face.

Kusanagi‑Jones leaned back on his heels, gathered Lesa up in his arms so the water wouldn’t pound up her nose, and tilted his own face to the warm rain, mouth open, feeling her heart beat slowly against his chest.

She awoke fifteen minutes later, while he was dragging her into a hastily constructed shelter, rain still smacking their heads. The first thing she did when she blinked fevered eyes and saw him bent over, half carrying and half‑shoving her under a badly thatched lean‑to, was start to laugh.

“One thing I never understood,” Lesa said, rainwater dripping down the back of her neck. “Why the Coalition is so set against gentle males–”

“What’s not to understand?” Michelangelo might seem brusque and hardhanded, sarcastic and cold, but he touched her damaged skin with exquisite care. He’d gotten a medical kit somewhere, and a shirt he was tearing into bandages. Whatever he was doing made her feet hurt less. Which wasn’t surprising; her ankles looked like the trunks of unhealthy trees, and could hardly have hurt more.

He had started at the soles of her feet, mummifying her from toes to ankles, and was now dabbing the red, swollen bites on her calves.

“It’s not like you contribute to population growth,” she said, frowning. He pressed the sides of a bite, clear fluid seeping between his fingertips. “Ow!”

“Sorry.” He smeared that wound, too, glossy leaves dimpling and catching under his knees as his weight shifted. The motion tumbled another scatter of rain down Lesa’s neck, and a few jeweled drops made minute lenses on his close‑cropped cap of hair. “No, it’s not. Not by accident, anyway.”

“But?”

“You’re operating on spurious assumptions, so your conclusions are flawed.”

“How–Ow! How so?”

“One, that sexual preferences have anything to do with reproduction. Doesn’t matter who you fuck. Only way to have an unauthorized baby on Earth is to plan it.” His hands shook as he tucked in a stray end of bandage, and she thought, startled, that he wasn’t lying to her now.

“Two?” she pressed, when he’d been silent a little longer.

“Human societies aren’t logical. Yours isn’t. Mine isn’t. Vincent–” He coughed, or laughed, and shook dripping water out of his hair. “–well, his is at least humane in its illogicality.”

“So why?”

“You want my theory? Worth what you pay for it.”

She nodded. He looked away.

“Cultural hegemony is based on conformity,” he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. “Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions–or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren’t one of us, you’re one of them.” He shrugged roughly into her silence. “I’m one of them.”

“But you worked for…‘us.’”

“In appearance.” He reached for another strip of cloth.

It was damp, but so was everything. She shivered when he laid it over seeping flesh. “How long have you been a double?”

The slow smile he turned on her when he looked up from the work of bandaging her legs might, she thought, be the first honest expression she’d ever seen cross his face. He let it linger on her for a moment, then glanced down again.

“I can tell you one way your society does make sense,” Lesa said. “The reason Old Earth women don’t work.”

“And New Amazonian men? But some do. Not everyone can afford the luxury of staying home.”

“Luxury? Don’t you think it’s a trap for some people?”

“Like Julian?” Harshly, though his hands stayed considerate.

She winced. “Yes.”

The silence stretched while he tore cloth. She leaned against rough bark. At least her back was mostly unbitten. “During the Diaspora,” Lesa said, “there wasn’t workon Old Earth. Industry failed, demand fell, money was worth nothing. The only focus was on getting off‑planet. Then, after the Vigil, after the Second Assessment, when the population stabilized, there was an artificial surplus of stuff left over from before. The Old Earth economy relies on maintaining that labor shortage. So women’s value to society is not as professionals, but as homemakers or low‑paid labor. And then you fetishize motherhood, and tell them that they aren’t all good enough for that…”

She trailed off, looking down to see what he was doing to her legs. More salve, more bandages. Meticulous care, up to her knees now. That was the worst of it.

“The Governors’ engineers were mostly female,” Michelangelo said, as if to fill up her silence. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“And Vincent didn’t know about your sympathies?”

“To Free Earth? He didn’t. Not the sort of thing you share. If I wind these, it’ll make it hard to walk.”

“Just salve,” she decided, regretfully. The pressure of the wraps made the bites feel better. “He knows now, though.”

“We both know. Delicious, isn’t it?”

She’d never understand how he said that without the slightest trace of bitterness. “So you grew up gentle on Old Earth, and you became a revolutionary.”

“Never said they were linked.”

“I can speculate.” She touched his shoulder. His nonfunctional wardrobe couldn’t spark her hand away.

He tucked the last tail of the bandages in, and handed her the lotion so she could dab it on the scattered bites higher on her legs, her thighs and belly and hands. He sat back, and shrugged. “It’s not common. Maybe 4 percent, baseline, and they do genetic surgery. Mostly not an issue to manage homosexual tendencies before birth. In boys. Girls are trickier.”

His tone made her flinch.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No,” she said. “Just…genetic surgery. You’re so casual.”

“As casual as you are about eating animals?”

It wasn’t a comment she could answer. “And your mom didn’t opt for the surgery?”

“My mother,” he said, sitting back on his heels as the imperturbable wall slid closed again, “planned an unauthorized pregnancy. And concealed it. I wasn’t diagnosed prenatally. And I don’t think anybody expected me to make it to majority without being Assessed.”

“And you weren’t.”

“No,” he said, quietly. “She was.”

This time, when he touched her ankle, she shivered. But not because of him. She covered his hand with her own, leaning forward to do it, breaking open the crusted cuts on her palm and not caring. “I’m glad you weren’t,” she said. And then she leaned back against the smooth gray aerial root of the big rubbermaid tree that formed the beam and one wall of the lean‑to, and slowly, definitely, closed her eyes.

23

VINCENT COULD SEE NOTHING FROM THE AIR, BUT THAT failed to surprise him. He perched on the observer’s seat of the aircar, beside the pilot, and made sure his wardrobe was active and primed. The Penthesileans wouldn’t give him a weapon, but as long as he had his wits, he wasn’t helpless.

A weaponized utility fog didn’t hurt either.

“They must have a camouflage screen up,” he said over his shoulder.

Elena, in the backseat, grunted as the aircar circled. “Or Katya lied to us.”

“Also possible,” Vincent admitted, as the pilot reported finding nothing on infrared. “I don’t suppose any of these vehicles have pulse capability.”

“This one does,” the pilot answered, after a glance to Elena for permission.

There were seven aircars in the caravan, armored vehicles provided by Elder Kyoto through the Security Directorate. According to Katya, that should be more than enough to handle the complement of this particular Right Hand outpost.

And again, Katya might be wrong. Or she might be decoying them into a trap, though Vincent’s own skills and instincts told him shebelieved she was telling the truth.

Of course, he’d also trusted his own skills and instincts about Michelangelo. But Angelo was the best Liar in the business–and close enough in Vincent’s affections that any reading would be suspect anyway.

“Take us higher, please,” Vincent said. The pilot gave him a dubious look, but when Elena didn’t intervene she shrugged and brought them up. Somewhere down there, indistinguishable from the rest of the canopy by Gorgon‑light, had to be the camouflage field. Invisible–but not unlocatable.

Vincent’s wardrobe included licenses for dozens of useful implements, among them an echolocator. It was designed for use in situations where there was no available light and generating more would be unwise. In this case, he was obligated to patch through the aircar’s ventilation systems to externalize the tympanic membranes, but that was the work of a few moments.

The readout projected to his implants was many‑edged, shifting, translucent, but perfectly detailed, each individual leaf and branch discernable over the spongy reflection of the litter‑covered ground. And just off to the south was a gap in the fragile, shadowy echoes of the canopy, a mysterious, rough‑edged hole floored with sharp regular echoes and softer elevated patches.

“There,” Vincent said, and pointed. “South by southeast, 40 degrees descent.”

“It’s all trees,” the pilot said, and Vincent frowned at her–the frown he reserved for people who obviously couldn’t have meant to disappoint him, and so must have done it through some oversight. “It’s a utility fog,” he said. “A limited‑license one. It pattern‑matches the surrounding territory. Look, see that tree?”

There was one, in particular, a bit taller than the rest and a bit paler in color, as if it hadn’t entirely leafed out yet or were growing in iron‑poor soil.

The pilot nodded. Elena leaned over the chair back to see better, laying a possessive hand on Vincent’s shoulder.

“There’s another one,” she said, and pointed left. The angle was different, and so the silhouettes didn’t quite match, but there they were, as alike as if cloned. “Which is real?”

Vincent indicated the second one with a jerk of his thumb, making an effort not to shrug her hand away, no matter how it irritated. Andreminded him of the tenderness of peeling skin.

At least the damned sunburn hurt less than it had and his wardrobe was doing an adequate job of coping with the sloughing epidermis. Which was unpleasant. But, by comparison, didn’t hurt enough to be worthy of the term.

“Is it safe to descend through the canopy?”

He hesitated. “Theoretically.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s a utility fog, and they can be weaponized. Elder Pretoria–”

Her hand flexed on his shoulder. He hid a flinch. “Yes, Vincent?”

Not Miss Katherinessenanymore. “Does anybody on New Amazonia use fog technology? Because something Lesa said led me to believe it wasn’t warmly considered–”

“No,” Elena said. “They don’t.”

He nodded. “Then I can’t guarantee what we’ll run into.”

“Right,” she said, and released him. “Jayne?”

“Elder Pretoria?”

“Bring us down onto the canopy, would you? And let the others know what we’re doing, and why.”

The aircar didn’t have the flexibility of programmable vehicles that Vincent was used to, but he had to admit that the landing nets were impressive. Jointed insectile limbs unfolded, stretching glistening mesh between them, and the aircar settled onto a forest canopy made mysterious by nebula‑light. The trees dimpled and groaned under the distributed weight, and Vincent heard wood creak and twigs snap wetly, but they bore up under the weight. On each side, the other aircars settled into the canopy, surrounding the camouflaged clearing, pastel swirls of night sky reflected in their glossy carapaces so they looked like enormous, jeweled beetles resting on spinners’ webs.

“How do we get out?” he asked, because he knew it was expected of him.

And Elena smiled, ducked down, folded the center rear seat up, and tugged open a hatch in the floor.

The camp was deserted, which surprised Vincent even less than its invisibility. The security personnel had body armor, weapons, metal detectors, and khir trained to sniff for explosives and hidden people, and he was content to let them conduct the search. He stuck close to Elena and to Antonia Kyoto, who had arrived in a separate car, and eavesdropped on incoming reports with their complicity.

It took them less than half an hour to secure the camp, which showed signs of having been abandoned with great haste and insufficient discipline. Supplies had not been taken, and one of Kyoto’s people uncovered a cache of weapons under a bed in one of the ten or eleven huts clustered within the zareba.

It was Shafaqat Delhi who found Robert Pretoria’s body, though, and hurried back into the camp to inform Vincent and Elena–and then had to jog to keep up with him on the way back out, while Elena followed more sedately.

Somebody had rolled Robert over, but that wasn’t how it had fallen. Vincent crouched beside crushed greenery and traced the outline of the body in the loam, running fingers along the deeper, smoother imprint where someone had shoved Robert’s chest into the ground while he broke his neck.

Vincent turned and ran his fingertips across the base of Robert’s skull, below the occiput. The distended softness of a swelling met his fingertips, exactly where he expected.

“Vincent?”

“Blow to the head,” he said, wiping his hands on Robert’s shirt before he stood. The dead man’s pockets had been rifled, and any gear he had with him taken, and the leaf litter in the area of the body was roughed up as if from a scuffle.

There hadn’t been any scuffle. He’d been as good as dead the minute he turned his back.

Vincent stood, his feet where Angelo’s feet would have been when he struck, and turned a slow pirouette. And there it was, exactly at a height to catch his eye. A single hair, black and tightly coiled, snagged in the rough bark of a tree about four meters from the murder scene.

It could have been Robert’s hair, if his head wasn’t shaved. But it wasn’t.

Vincent covered the distance in three long steps and stopped. The forest floor was undisturbed, leaves and sticks and bits of moss exactly as they should be. He crouched again, feeling alongside the roots of the trees, combing through the litter with his fingertips. Worm‑eaten nuts, curled crisp leaves, sticks and bits of things he couldn’t identify–

–something smooth and warm.

His fingers recognized the datacart before he unearthed it, although Michelangelo had wrapped it in a scrap torn from a dirty shirt. Vincent brushed it carefully clean, aware that Shafaqat and Elena were watching him in breathless anticipation. A sense of the dramatic made him hold his silence until he could turn, drop one knee to the ground to brace himself, and raise the datacart into their line of sight before he powered it on. There was a password, but Vincent could have entered it in his sleep.

He had been meant to guess it.

It didn’t beep. Somebody had disabled that function. But it did load something: a glowing electronic image of green and golden contour lines and insistently blinking dots.

“What’s that?” Shafaqat asked.

Elena put one hand out, pressing her palm to the bole of a tree to steady herself, and sighed as if she could put all her pain and worry onto the wind and let it be carried away. “A scavenger map,” she said. And then she stood up straight and rolled her shoulders back. “Come along, Miss Delhi, Miss Katherinessen. No rest for the wicked yet.”

Even by Kusanagi‑Jones’s standards, it was a pretty cinematic rescue. He awoke from a fitful doze at dawn, when a frenzy of animal cries greeted half a dozen digital‑camouflage‑clad New Amazonian commandos rappelling through the canopy. They landed in the glade where Lesa had been half‑crucified on the thorn vines and unclipped, fanning out with polished professionalism. Half a dozen commandos–and Vincent, dapper and pressed and shiny‑booted as always, handling the abseiling gear as if he spent every Saturday swinging from the belly of an ornithopter.

Kusanagi‑Jones rolled onto his back and reached out to nudge Lesa awake, but she was already propped up on one elbow, peering over his shoulder. Her face, if anything, looked more lined with tiredness than it had the night before, and more of her scratches were inflamed, but the smile curving her lips was one of relief. “Come on,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, holding out his hand. “I’ll carry you down there.”

“Fuck that,” she answered. “I’ll walk.”

And she did, or hobbled, anyway, leaning on his elbow harder than either of them let on.

Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t even really mind when the first thing Vincent did was hug him hard enough that it knocked him back a step. Especially when the second thing he did was piggyback their watches together, and give Kusanagi‑Jones’s wardrobe a kick start and a recharge to baseline functional levels.

Later, after the medics had seen to his injuries, and while he was still tucked into bed hydrating on an IV while they worked on Lesa’s more serious wounds, Vincent brought him a tray, and spread jam on crackers for him to eat. They sat silently, shoulder to shoulder. Kusanagi‑Jones had edged over to make room, and Vincent leaned against the headboard with one foot on the floor and one propped up on the bed.

“Can’t go home yet,” Kusanagi‑Jones said at last, over their private channel, when it became evident that Vincent wasn’t going to bring it up.

“No,” Vincent answered, after letting the statement hang for a bit. And then he said out loud, “Eat the soup. It’s good.”

“I hate lentils.” But he ate it, thick and pasty and full of garlic, and it was better than he expected. He needed the protein, anyway. And the salt. “There’s Claude to deal with.”

“There is,” Vincent admitted, “still a negotiation to complete. And a duel to fight if we can’t find that lab, and link Singapore and Austin to it.”

Kusanagi‑Jones glanced down at his watch. Every light shone clean and green, except the blinking yellow letting him know fatigue toxins were building to the point where chemistry wasn’t cutting it anymore. He held it up so Vincent could see. “There’s also this.”

“You know what I think,” Vincent answered, his voice chilly and flat. Kusanagi‑Jones reached out and curved his fingers around Vincent’s wrist, and Vincent didn’t shake him off.

Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t remember how he’d ever decided anything on his own. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d just done what other people told him. “What are we going to do?”

Vincent shrugged to hide his shudder, and pushed another cracker in front of Kusanagi‑Jones.

“There are no limits to brane technology,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, ignoring the cracker.

Vincent slid off the bed, but gently, and moved away. There was a window in the room, shaded by louvers that broke the tropical sunlight into bars. He stood before it and laced his hands behind his back. “Once there were no limits to what you could discover with a sailing ship.”

“False analogy–”

“Fine. It’s false. What’s the moral implication of the damage we do to the planets we colonize? What about gravity pollution,for the Christ’s sake? Can you even begin to come up with a list of potential ill effects? Black holes? Supernovae? Planetary orbits? It’s not a clean technology. It just pollutes in ways we can’t begin to cope with.”

“Are no clean technologies,” Kusanagi‑Jones reminded.

Vincent continued as if he hadn’t said a word. “What if we expand into species less companionable than the Dragons? There’s a lot of what‑ifs.”

“Do what we’ve always done,” Michelangelo said. “Trust the next generation to solve their problems the way we’ve solved ours. Risk is risk. We live with it.”

“By hitting the cosmic reset button one more time. That’s a technical solution to an ethical problem. Hell, it’s not even a solution–it’s a delaying action. That’s what got us into this situation in the first place.”

“Entropy,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, “is a bitch. There’s still the retrovirus–”

“Angelo, I will shoot you myself.”

Their eyes met. Vincent wasn’t a Liar. He meant every word. “All right,” Kusanagi‑Jones said. “There isn’t the retrovirus.”

“There’s another solution,” Vincent said coolly, although the pit of Kusanagi‑Jones’s own stomach lurched when he realized what his partner meant. “We leave the Governors in place.”

“No!”

“Yes,” Vincent said. “Listen to me. There’s magic in it. Because once we learn to control ourselves–”

“Oh, no. Vincent, you are not sayingthis.”

“–the Governors become obsolete. On their own. If we clean up after ourselves, Angelo, they have no reason to intervene.” Vincent let his hands fall and squeezed them into fists, as Kusanagi‑Jones squeezed back against the headboard, as if he could crowd himself into the wall and somehow get away.

“Then we all die in a fucking Colonial revolt. You, me, your mother, Lesa, Elena. For a bunch of geniuses, you’re all idiots for thinking you can stand up to the Coalition.”

“New Earth stood up.”

“New Earth had help. And even if the Governors wouldn’t permit an open Coalition intervention, how many New Earthers do you suppose died in the covert retaliations for what I did to Skidbladnir? Wasn’t me that paid that price.”

Vincent’s answering silence was long. “The Dragons?”

“Might defend the New Amazonians. Not Ur. And this is the human society you want to protect? I don’t think so.”

He could hear Vincent breathing. He wondered if he knew what Kusanagi‑Jones was about to say. Kusanagi‑Jones, his eyes shut, rubbed his knuckles across his face.

His voice dropped. “Consent.”

Vincent’s flat expression, when Michelangelo opened his eyes again, seemed an attempt to convince himself that he hadn’t actually understood. Kusanagi‑Jones’s face felt numb.

He kept talking.

“Kii won’t give us the brane tech. What if we offer him another way out of a war? He’s ethical. We offer Kii the opportunity to engineer a virus that modifies the human genome, that inducesConsent, and we get the fucker to downgrade self‑interest as a motivating force.”

“The Christ,” Vincent whispered. They stared at each other.

“Vincent. This is…this has to be exactly–”

Vincent’s larynx bobbed as he swallowed, a shadow dipping in the hollow of his throat. “They were the first ones to die, you know. You can’t accuse them of hypocrisy. The Governors Assessed their creators first.”

“Cowards,” Michelangelo said. He shoved the tray aside and swung his feet out of bed, wincing as blistered flesh contacted the tiled floor. “Cowards who didn’t want to watch their program carried out. Could cause a genocide, but couldn’t stand to live through it.”

“This is just how they felt.”

“Heady, isn’t it?”

“Angelo–”

“No. Don’t argue. Think. What do you have that’s better?”

“Who are we to choose for an entire species?”

Michelangelo gave Vincent his sweetest smile. “Who better?”

Vincent backed up to lean against the wall and folded his arms. “Every solution is going to present us with new problems down the line. And this would put an end to Lesa’s problem, too. The way to stop men from preying on women without treating the entire sex as criminals is simply to remove the predatory urge. If we can’t be trained, we can be broken.”

“You’re Advocating.”

Vincent winked, but Kusanagi‑Jones saw his hand shake when he checked his chemistry, taking a moment to revise the adrenaline load down to something manageable. “All right. I’ll Advocate. I’m Lesa. She would say it was immoral to tamper with human biology, and more defensible to institute social controls to the same effect.”

“So slavery is more moral than engineering out aggression.”

“It’s not chattel slavery.”

“No,” Kusanagi‑Jones said. “An extreme sort of second‑class citizenship.”

“Not much worse than women in the Coalition.”

“Women in the Coalition can vote, can work–”

“Can be elected to the government.”

“Theoretically.”

“Practically?”

“Doesn’t happen.” Kusanagi‑Jones swallowed. “Who’d want a woman in charge?” Except on some of the repatriated worlds. But Ur was the only one with the nerve to send a woman to the Cabinet. The conviction had dropped from his voice. “I can’t even Advocate this anymore, Vincent. It’s just wrong.”

“No fanatic like a new fanatic,” Vincent said. He came to Kusanagi‑Jones and crouched beside him, and patted him on the knee. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Scared,” Michelangelo said, a raw admission meant as much for himself as for Vincent.

And Vincent knew it. Michelangelo could tell by his expression, the arched eyebrows, the line between them. “Having your preconceptions rattled is unsettling.”

“No,” Michelangelo said. He dropped his face to his hands, pushed fingertips against his eyelids until the pressure hurt. The pain didn’t help his focus, so he dropped his hands and looked up instead. “Scared we’ve already figured it out.”

Vincent stood, all lithe grace, and let his hand rest warmly on Michelangelo’s shoulder. “Whatever,” he said. “Let’s at least talk to Kii about getting that weapon cleaned out of your bloodstream, shall we?”

Michelangelo nodded. “And then tell Lesa about Kii, and see what shebloody thinks.”

Vincent and Michelangelo found Lesa on Elena’s beloved veranda, her bandaged feet propped on the softest available cushion, a plate on her lap and a sweating glass beside her as she watched Julian and some other children romp in the courtyard with a couple of khir. Vincent didn’t think Elena would have left her alone willingly. It must have taken a spectacular temper tantrum.