Glasshouse

17. Mission

IT'S raining when I wake up the day after the murder. And it rains—gently, lightly, but persistently—every day for the rest of the week, mirroring my mood to perfection.

I've got the run of the house and doctor's orders to take things easy—no need to go in to work in the library—so I should be happy. I made up my mind to be happy here, didn't I? But I seem to have messed things up with Sam, and there are dark, frightening undercurrents at work around me—people who've made the opposite choice and who'll pounce on me in an instant if I don't tread a careful line. Now that I have time to think things through, I'm profoundly glad that Fiore wasn't paying attention when I tried to tell him about Janis. Life is getting cheaper by the week, and there are no free resurrections here—no home assemblers to back up on daily.

Am I really that worried?

Yes.

I manage to make it through to Thursday morning before I crack. I wake up with the dawn light (I'm not sleeping well at present), and I hear Sam puttering around the bathroom. I look out the window at the raindrops that steadily fall like a translucent curtain before the vegetation, and I realize that I can't stand this any more. I don't want another day on my own in the house. I know Dr. Hanta said to take the whole week off to recover, but I feel fine, and at least if I go in to work, there'll be something to do, won't there? Someone to talk to. A friend, of sorts, even if she's behaving weirdly these days. And even if I feel uncomfortable about what I'll say when I see her.

I dress for work, then head downstairs and call a taxi, as usual. I'm half-tempted to walk, but it's raining, and I've neglected to buy any waterproof gear. Rain aboard a starship, who'd have imagined it? I wait just inside the front porch until the taxi pulls up, then rush over to it and pile in on the backseat. "Take me to the library," I gasp.

"Sure thing, ma'am." The driver pulls away, with a bit more acceleration than I'm used to. "Wonder when this weather will stop?"

Huh? I shake myself. "What did you say?"

"I heard from Jimmy at the public works department that they're doing it because they discovered a problem with the drainage system—need to flush out the storm sewers. I'm Ike, by the way. Pleased to meet you."

I just about manage to recover gracefully: "I'm Reeve. Been driving cabs long?"

He chuckles. "Since I got here. You're a librarian? That's a new one on me. I can get you downtown from here, but you'll need to show me which block it's on."

"The merger," I manage to say.

"Yeah, that's the deal." He taps a syncopated rhythm on the steering wheel, keeping time with the windscreen wipers, then hauls the cab through a sharp turn. "What does a librarian do all day?"

"What does a cab driver do?" I counter, still shaken. Those are manual controls! They put one of us in charge of a machine like that . . . They must be serious about turning this into a functioning polity. Which means they probably figure they've got the scoring levels loaded into our implants just about right. "People come in and they ask for books and we help them find them." I shrug. "There's more to it than that, but that's it in a nutshell."

"Uh-huh. Me, I drive around all day. Get a call on the wireless, go find the fare, take them where they want to go."

"Sounds boring. Is it?"

He laughs. "Finding books sounds boring to me, so I guess we're even! Downtown square, City Hall coming up. Where do you want to go from here?"

It's not raining in the downtown district. "Drop me off here and I'll walk the rest of the way," I offer, but he's having none of it.

"Naah, I need to learn where everything is, don't I? So where is it?"

I surrender. "Next left. Go two blocks, then take the first right and park. You're opposite it."

I arrive at my workplace thoroughly shaken and not quite sure why. I already heard Yourdon talking about police sergeants and judges. Are we going to end up without any zombies at all, doing everything for ourselves? That would be how you'd go about running an accurate dark ages social simulation, I realize, but it means things are happening on an altogether larger scale than I'd imagined.

I'm a little late—the library is already open—but there are no customers, so I walk straight up to the counter and smile at Janis, who is nose-down in a book. "Hi!"

She jerks upright, then looks surprised. "Reeve. I wasn't expecting you today."

"Well, I got bored sitting around at home. Dr. Hanta said I could come in to work today if I wanted to and, well, it beats watching the rain, doesn't it?"

Janis nods, but she looks unamused. She closes her book and puts it down carefully on the desk. "Yes, I suppose it does." She stands up. "Want a cup of coffee?"

"Yes please!" I follow her back into the staff room. It feels really good to be back—this is where I belong. Janis is feeling low, but I can help sort that out. Then we've got a library to run! And what could be better than that? Ike can keep his smelly, dangerous cab.

"Well then." Janis switches the kettle on and looks me up and down critically. "I may have to go out for a couple of hours. You going to be all right running the place on your own?"

"No problem!" I straighten my skirt. Maybe it was some lint?

She winces, then rubs her forehead. "Please, not so much enthusiasm this early in the morning. What's gotten into you?"

"I've been bored!" I manage to keep myself from squeaking. "It's been boring at home, and it's been raining all week long." I pull out the other chair and sit down. "You can't go shopping every day of the week, there's only so much cleaning and tidying you can do in one house, the television is boring, and I should have stopped here to borrow some books but I thought . . ." I wind down. What have I been thinking?

"I think I see." A wan smile tugs at the corners of her eyes. "How's Sam?"

I tense. "What makes you ask?"

The smile fades. "He was here yesterday. Wanted to talk about you, wanted to know my opinion . . . He doesn't feel he can talk to you, so he has to let it out with someone else. Reeve, that's not good. Are you all right? Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Yes, you can change the subject." I say it lightly, but she just about freezes right up on the spot. "Sam's taken offense to something I said, and we need to sort it out between us." My stomach churns with anger and guilt, but I bite back on it. It's not Janis's fault after all, but Sam should know better, the pig. "We'll sort it out," I add, trying to reassure her.

"I . . . see." Janis looks as if she's sucking on a slice of lemon. Right then the kettle comes to a boil, so she stands up and pours the hot water into two mugs, then scoops in the creamy powder and mixes it up. "I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Reeve, but you seem to have changed since you came out of hospital. You haven't really been yourself."

"Hmm? What do you mean?" I blow on my coffee to cool it.

"Oh, little things." She raises an eyebrow at me. "You've gained a certain enthusiasm. You're more interested in exteriors than interiors. And you seem to have lost your sense of humor."

"What's humor got to do with it?" I glare at my mug, willing myself not to get angry. "I know who I am, I know who I was."

"Forget I said it." Janis sighs. "I'm sorry, I don't know what's gotten into me. I'm getting really bitchy these days." She falls silent for a while. "I hope you don't mind my leaving you for a few hours."

I manage a forced laugh. Janis's issues aren't my business, strictly speaking, but—"What are friends for?"

She looks at me oddly. "Thanks." She takes a mouthful of her coffee and makes a face. "This stuff is vile, the only thing worse that I can think of is not having it at all." Her frown lengthens. "I'm running late. See you back around lunchtime?"

"Sure," I say, and she stands up, grabs her jacket from the back of the door, and heads off.

I finish my coffee, then go back to the front desk. There's some filing to do, but the cleaning zombies have been thorough—they didn't even leave me any dusty top shelves to polish. A couple of bored office workers drop in to return books or browse the shelves for some lunchtime entertainment, but apart from that the place is dead. So it happens that I'm sitting at the front desk, puzzling over whether there's a better way to organize the overdue returns shelf, when the front door opens, and Fiore steps in.

"I wasn't expecting you," he says, pudgy eyes narrowing suspiciously.

"Really?" I hop off my stool and smile at him, even though all my instincts are screaming at me to be careful.

"Indeed not." He sniffs. "Is the other librarian, Janis, in?"

"She's out this morning, but she'll be back later." I get a horrible sense of déjà vu as I look at him, like a flashback to a bad dream.

"Hmm. Well, if I can trouble you to turn your back, I have business in the repository." His voice rises: "I don't want to be disturbed."

"Ah, all right." I take an involuntary step back. There's something about Fiore, something not quite right, a feral tension in his eyes, and I'm suddenly acutely aware that we're alone, and that he outweighs me two to one. "Will you be long?"

His eyes flicker past my shoulder. "No, this won't take long, Reeve." Then he turns and lumbers toward the reference section and the secure document repository, not bothering to look at me. For a moment I don't believe my own instincts. It's a gesture of contempt worthy of Fiore, after all, a man so wrapped up in himself that if you spent too long with him, you'd end up thinking you were a figment of his imagination. But then I hear him snort. There's the squeak of the key in thelock, and a creak of floorboards. "You might as well come with me. We can talk inside."

I hurry after him. "In what capacity am I talking to you?" I ask, desperately racking my brains for an excuse not to join him. "Is it about Janis?"

He turns and fixes me with a beady stare. "It might be, my daughter." And that's pure Fiore. So I follow him through the door and down the steps into the cellar, a hopeless tension gnawing at my guts, still unsure whether I'm right to be worried or not.

Fiore pauses when we get to the strange room at the bottom of the stairs. "What exactly do you think of Dr. Hanta?" he asks me. He sounds tired, weighed down with cares.

I'm taken aback. What is this, some kind of internal politicking? "She's"—I pause, biting my tongue, acutely aware who I'm talking to—"refreshingly direct. She means well, and she's concerned. I trust her," I add impulsively, resisting the urge to add, unlike you . I manage to maneuver so my back is to the storage shelves on one wall. If I have to grab something —

"That's not unexpected," Fiore says quietly. "What did she do to you?"

"She didn't tell you?"

"No, I want you to tell me in your own words." His voice is low and urgent, and something in my heart breaks. I can't pretend this isn't happening anymore, can I? So I play for time.

"I was having frequent memory fugues, and I picked up a nasty little case of gray goo up top in the ship's mass fraction tankage. That set my immune system off, and it began taking out memory traces. Dr. Hanta had to put me on antirobotics and give me a complete memory fixative in order to stop things progressing." I move my hands behind my back and slowly shuffle backward, away from him and toward the wall. "I'd say she's a surprisingly ethical practitioner, given the way everyone else here carries on in secret. Or do you know differently?"

"Hmm." Fiore—fake-Fiore—leans over the assembler console and taps in some kind of code. "Yes, as a matter of fact I do."

While he isn't watching I take another step back until I bump up against shelves. Good. I'm already mentally preparing what I need to do next.

Fiore continues, implacably. "One of your predecessors here—yes, they're still around in deep cover—got it worked out. Dr. Hanta isn't her real name. She, or rather it, used to be a member of the Asclepian League." I give a little gasp. "Yes, you do remember them, don't you? She was a Vivisector, Reeve. One of the inner clade, dedicated to pursuing their own vision of how humanity should be restructured."

"Thanks for reminding me what I came here to get away from," I say shakily. "I'm going to be having nightmares about that for the next week."

He turns and glares at me. "Are you stupid, or—" He stops himself. "I'm sorry. But if that's all it means to you, you really are beyond—" He stabs at the console angrily. "Shit. I thought you'd be at least vaguely concerned for the rest of us in here."

I take a deep breath, trying to get my nausea under control. The Asclepians were another of the dictatorship cults, a morphological collective. Much worse than the Solipsist Nation. They restructured polities one screaming mangled body at a time. If Dr. Hanta is an Asclepian, and she's working with Yourdon and Fiore, the future they're trying to sculpt is a thing of horror. "She can't be. She just can't."

"And I suppose you think Major-Doctor Fiore is just a fat, egocentric psychiatrist?" He grins at me humorlessly. "Stop that, Reeve, I know what you're up to. Hanta fucked with your head really well, didn't she? Probably got you to give your consent first, too. They're hot on formalities, Asclepians. Fiore and Yourdon are war criminals, too. Shit, most of the people here did things so nasty they want to forget everything. Do you remember why this is an experimental polity?"

"Remember?" That's a new one on me.

"Oh. A memory fixative, that makes sense." He takes a final poke at the console. It dings and turns luminous green. "Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything. ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?' " He takes a step back. "Listen, we'll have to break whatever conditioning she loaded your implant with."

My stomach churns for real this time. I feel sick. He's a monster, and he wants to drag me back down into the turmoil I was in before Hanta sorted me out. And I've been up the ladder now, I know there's no way out. We're stuck here. Resistance is futile. I really ought to run for it, call the Bishop and get the police to take him away. But that'd be like betraying myself, too, wouldn't it? "Did you kill Mick?" I whisper. "How did you get in that body?"

"Will you feel better if I say yes?" His voice is surprisingly gentle. "Or will you feel worse?"

"I'll—" I take another gulp of air. "I want to know."

Fake-Fiore, Robin, blinks slowly, pudgy eyes closing: I tense but he opens them again before I can gather my wits to move. "It was after you killed Fiore," he says. "I got into the assembler and backed myself up, programmed in a body merge and neural splice, so I'd come out in Fiore's skin instead of like . . ." He nods at me. "I put a two-hour hold on it to give you time to get the mess sorted out, but you must have blanked in between. So I wake up inside the gate and find the basement has been partially cleaned, and you're missing, and I had to finish the job. Fiore's backed up in the gate, and I've got his biometrics, so I manage to get a dump of his implant, and when one of him showed up to check on you, I told him you'd just gone missing. He believed me. He's not very good at handling multiplicity.

"On Sunday morning I went to visit Cass in the hospital," he says quietly. "It turns out I wasn't her first visitor that morning. I haven't heard anything about it through the rumor net, but it was pretty bad: I think Hanta covered it up afterward but if you were wondering . . . I caught Mick. He'd been living in the basement of an empty house, stealing stuff from folks' kitchens while they were at work—we're a trusting bunch, have you noticed that? We leave our back doors unlocked. He'd gagged her and you saw the tissue scaffolds Hanta had her legs in. She couldn't do anything. I mean, she was trying to get away, but not getting very far. He was raping her again, Reeve, and you know what I think about third chances."

I nod, gulping for breath. The horror of it is that I can see everything in my mind's eye: me-in-Fiore's-flesh creeping up on Mick as he humps away, Cass thrashing around helplessly—Mick's probably tied her arms out of the way—and me-in-Fiore's-flesh saps Mick at the base of the skull. He doesn't do it very carefully, because he's beyond fury at this point; beyond caring about inflicting subarachnoid hemorrhages. He doesn't care at all whether Mick wakes up again. In fact he thinks Mick's waking up would be a very bad idea, at least for Cass, and maybe come to think of it he can use Mick to send a message to any borderline sociopaths who are thinking about following his example—

It's very me. Me as I used to be, not me as I was before (quiet, peaceful historian, devoted family man) or me as I am now (slightly squirrelly, evanescent with the joy of discovering what it's like to surrender after fighting for what seems like my entire life), but me as I was in the middle, the grim-faced killing machine. But then I meet his eyes, and I see an awful sadness in them, a sick sense of guilt that mirrors what I feel at the knowledge that I'm absolutely going to have to shop him to the Bishop because we can't afford to have a murderous doppelganger of one of our most respected citizens running around—

I grab the first thing my fingers scrabble across: a heavy file of paper hardcopy, part of the dump of Curious Yellow from the closet upstairs. I take two brisk paces forward as I raise it and bring it down on top of his head as hard as I can. He sags and falls over, but I don't stick around to finish the job. Instead, I turn and run for the stairs. If I can make it to the top and slam the door, he'll be trapped down here for long enough to call—

"Going somewhere?" drawls Janis, pointing a stungun at me from the top step. I can see her trigger finger whitening behind the guard.

I start to raise my hands. "Don't—"

She does.

I groan and reach up to touch my head, which hurts like hell where Reeve thumped me. Someone grabs my wrist and tugs experimentally, and I open my eyes. It's Janis. She looks concerned. "What happened?" I ask.

"I caught her running up the stairs, in a real hurry to get somewhere." Janis peers at me. "What about you?"

I touch my head finally and wince at the sharp pain. "She thumped me with something, a box file I think. I fell over." Stupid, stupid. I feel a bit sick. Looking round brings a stab of pain to my neck. "Hit my head on the A-gate plinth."

"Then it was lucky I was in time."

"Huh. There's no such thing as luck where you're involved."

"That was in another life," she says pensively. "Are you going to be all right on your own? I need to close up shop."

"Get it closed, already." I wince and push myself upright, breathing heavily. This body has a lot of momentum, and a lot of insulation, but it's not built for bouncing around. "If anybody finds us—"

"I'll sort them out."

Janis vanishes upstairs. I sit up and manage not to retch. Reeve almost ruined it for both of us, and I'm horrified at how close I came to blowing it. If I hadn't figured out who Janis was, I'd be on my own down here and Reeve would have killed me without blinking. Doctor's orders.

I'm going to have to do something about Reeve, and I'm not looking forward to this. Surely Hanta—let's make that Colonel-Surgeon Vyshinski, to give her her real name—got to her, but losing a week isn't something that I take lightly, and besides, she knows stuff that might come in useful. Dilemmas, dilemmas. If there was some way to trivially reverse the brainwashing that Hanta's applied . . . shit . Hanta's an artist, isn't she? It'll be some sort of motivational/value abreactive hack, subtle as hell, leaves the personality intact but tweaking the gain on a couple of traits, just enough to turn Reeve into a good little score whore.

I sit with my legs apart, panting a trifle heavily over my enormous wobbling gut-bucket, and try to come to terms with the fact that I'm going to have to kill my better half. It's upsetting, however often you've done it before.

There's some clattering upstairs. I stand up, wheezing, and waddle over to see what's going on. I hate this body, but it's been useful for getting me into places none of us could otherwise go—they've been letting their internal security get sloppy, forgetting the authenticator rhyme: something shared, something do, something secret, something you? I suppose settling for something you is sufficient if you've got control over all the assemblers in a polity, but still. I wait at the bottom of the stairs. "Who is it?" I call quietly.

"Me," says Janis. "I need a hand with her."

"Humph." I haul myself up the steps. Janis is waiting at the top with Reeve, whose wrists and ankles she's trussed together with a roll of library tape. Reeve is twitching a little and showing signs of coming to. "What are you thinking we should do with her?" I ask.

"Can you get her downstairs?" Janis asks breathlessly.

"Yes." I lean forward and grasp Reeve by the ankles: For all that this body is grotesquely overweight, it's not weak. I lift and drag, and Janis holds Reeve's arms up enough to stop her head banging on the steps. At the bottom I pull her toward the A-gate. By this time her eyes are rolling, and she's turning red in the face. Hating myself, I lean forward. "What would you do?" I ask her.

"Mmph! Mmmph."

Defiant to the end—that's me. I look up at Janis. "Why didn't you kill her?"

"I didn't want to," says Janis.

"What, you're going to just—"

"Just put her in the gate!" She sounds stressed.

I get my hands under Reeve's armpits and lift. She goes limp, trying to deadweight on me. "I don't like this any more than you do," I tell her. "But this town's too small for both of us."

As I dump her into the A-gate, she kicks out with both legs, but I'm expecting that, and I punch her over the left kidney. That makes her double up. I swing the door shut. "Well?" I glare at Janis. "What now?" I feel like shit. Killing myself always makes me feel like shit. That's why I'm deferring to Janis, I think. Pushing the tough choice off onto someone else's shoulders.

Janis is bending over the control station. "Figuring this out," she murmurs. "Look, I'm going to lift a template from her, okay?

"Fuck." I shake my head, a parody of resignation. There's a thud from inside the A-gate, and I wince. I feel for Reeve: I can see myself in her place, and it's horrifying. "Why?"

"Because." Janis looks up at me. "Fiore's going to suspect if we keep you running around in drag. Don't you think it's time for you to go back?"

"Back?"

"To being Reeve," she says patiently.

"Oh," I echo. "Oh , I see." Being thumped on the head has left me sluggish and stupid. Janis is right, we don't have to kill her. And suddenly I feel a whole lot better about punching Reeve and dumping her into a macro-scale nanostructure disassembler, for the same reason that punching yourself in the face never feels quite as bad as having someone else do it for you.

"I'm going to template from her, and then you're going to follow her, and I'm going to take a delta from your current neural state vector and overlay it on Reeve. You'll wake up back in her body, with both sets of memories, but you're going to be the dominant set. Think that'll work?"

There's another muffled thump from inside the A-gate, then muffled retching noises—Janis has triggered the template program, paralyzing Reeve via her netlink, and the chamber is filling with ablative digitizer foam. "It had better," I say.

"I'm worried Fiore may suspect what's going on. The thing with Mick could blow it completely if he puts two and two together."

I sigh heavily. "Okay, I'll go back to being Reeve. I suppose that makes sense."

"You agree?" She looks haggard in the dim light from the ceiling bulbs. "Good, then it's not entirely stupid. What then . . . ?"

"Then we sit down and figure out how to nail down the lid on this mess. Once I know what she knows."

"Right." Her lips quirk in a faint smile. "Your direct, no-nonsense approach is always like a breath of fresh air."

"Once a tank, always a tank," I remind her.

"Right," she echoes, and for a moment I can see a shadow of her former self. That sends a pang through my chest.

"The sooner I'm myself again, the better."

We sit in silence for long minutes while the gate chugs to itself, then finally the console chimes, and there's a click as the door unlatches. I walk over and swing it open: as usual, the chamber is bare and dry. I glance over and see that she's watching me.

"Ready?" she asks.

"See you on the other side, Sanni," I say as I close the door.

That's all.

SECURITY Cell Blue used to be part of the counterespionage division of the Linebarger Cats. It was supposedly disbanded, all memory traces erased, at the end of the censorship wars. I know this is not the case because I'm a member. We didn't disband, we went underground—because our mission wasn't over.

This is a risky business. Our job is to do unpleasant things to ruthless people. Covering our tracks costs money—lots of it, and it isn't always fungible across polity frontiers these days. Local militias and governments have reinvented exchange rates, currency hedges, and a whole host of other archaic practices. Some polities are relatively open, while others have fallen into warlordism. Some place great stock on authentication and uniqueness tracking, while others don't care who you think you are as long as you pay your oxygen tax. (The former make great homes; the latter make great refuges.) As a consequence of the postwar fragmentation, we end up moving around a lot, shuffling our appearances and sometimes our memories, forking spares and merging deltas. At first we live off the capital freed up by the Cats' liquidation; later we supplement it by setting up a variety of business fronts. (If you've ever heard of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or Cordwainer Heavy Industries, that's us.) Operationally, we work in loosely coupled cells. I'm one of the heavy hitters, my background in combat ops meshing neatly with my intelligence experience.

About fifty megs after the official end of hostilities, I receive a summons to the Polity of the Jade Sunrise. It's a strictly tech-limiting polity, and I'm in ortho drag, my cover being a walkabout sword-fighting instructor. I've got access to enough gray-market military wetware that I can walk the walk as well as slice the floating hair, and my second-level cover is as a demilitarized fugitive from summary justice somewhere that isn't tech-limited—which sets me up for the Odessa Introduction if I see a target of opportunity and need to run a Spanish Prisoner scam on them. I've been doing a lot of that kind of job lately, but I'm not sure what this particular one is about.

The designated rendezvous is the public bathhouse on the Street of Orange Leaves. It's a narrow, cobbled, mountainside road, running from near the main drag with the silversmith's district down toward the harbor. It's a fine spring afternoon, and the air is heavy with the smell of honeysuckle. A gang of kids are playing throw-stick loudly outside the drunkenly leaning apartment buildings, and the usual light foot traffic is laboriously winding its way up and down the middle of the road, porters yelling insults at rickshaw drivers and both groups venting their spleen on the shepherd who's trying to drive a small flock of spidergoats uphill.

I've been here long enough to know what I'm doing, more or less. I spot a boy who's hanging back on the sidelines and snap my fingers. He comes over, not so much walking as slithering so that his friends don't see him. Grubby, half-starved, his clothes faded and patched: perfect. A coin appears between two of my fingers. "Want another?" I ask.

He nods. "I don't do thex," he lisps. I look closer and realize he's got a cleft palate.

"Not asking you to." I make another coin appear, this time out of reach. "The teahouse. I want you to look round the back alley and see if there are any men waiting there. If there are, come and tell me. If not, go in and find Mistress Sanni. Tell her that the Tank says hello, then come and tell me."

"Two coin." He holds up a couple of fingers.

"Okay, two coin." I glare at him, and he does the disappearing trick again. The kid's got talent, I realize, he does that like a pro. Sharp doubts intrude: Maybe he is a pro? We rounded up the easy targets a long time ago—the ones who're still running ahead of us tend to be a lot harder to nail.

I don't have long to wait. A cent or so passes, then lisp-boy is back. "Mithreth Thanni thay, the honeypot ith overflowing. I take you to her."

The honeypot is overflowing: doesn't sound good. I pass him the two coins. "Okay, which way?"

He does a quick fade in front of me, but not too fast for me to follow. We're round the back of a dubious alleyway, then into a maze of anonymous backyards in a matter of seconds. Then he goes over a rickety wooden fence and along another alley—this one full of compost, the stink unbelievable—and up to an anonymous-looking back door. "The'th here."

My hand goes to my sword hilt. "Really?" I stare at the kid, then at the two dead thugs leaning against each other beside the back step. The kid flashes a lightning grin at me.

"You did thay to check the back alley for muggerth, Robin."

"Sanni?"

He sketches a bow, urchin-cool. I raise an eyebrow. The muggers look as if they're sleeping, if you ignore the blood leaking from their noses. Very good work, for an intel type who isn't a wet ops specialist. "We don't have long. Authenticate me."

We do the routine, something shared, something do, something secret, something you—all the stuff the Republic of Is used to do for us. "Okay, boss, why did you call me?" Sanni isn't my boss these days, but old habits die hard.

"The honeypot is leaking." He drops the lisp and stands tall, Sanni's natural presence shining through the bottleneck of his three-hundred-meg body. "We—Vera Six, that is—got word about twenty megs ago that a bunch of familiar spooks were haunting the Invisible Republic. It all snowballed really fast. Looks like several of the memory laundries have been infiltrated and the glasshouse has been taken over."

I lean against the wall. "The glasshouse ?"

Sanni nods. "Someone's going to have to go in and polish the mirrors. Someone else. I forked an instance five megs ago, and she hasn't reported back yet. It's going to be deep cover, I'm afraid."

"Shit and pig-fucking shit." I glare at the dead muggers as if it's their fault.

The glasshouse is a rehab center for prisoners of war. The setup is designed to encourage resocialization, to help integrate them back into something vaguely resembling postwar society; it's a former MASucker configured as a compact polity with with just one T-gate in or out. Bad guys go in, civilians come out. At least, that was the original theory.

"What's going on?" I ask.

"I think someone's broken our operational security," says Sanni. I shudder and stare at the muggers. "Yes," he says, seeing the direction of my gaze. "I said we don't have long. A group drawn from several of our operational rivals have infiltrated the Strategic Amnesia Commissariat of the Invisible Republic and taken over the funding and operational control of the glasshouse. They discharged all the current inmates, and we no longer know what's going on inside. The glasshouse is under new management."

"I'm the wrong person, and in the wrong place. Can't you send Magnus? Or the Synthesist? Do an uplevel callback to descendant coordination and the veterans' association and see if anybody—"

"I don't exist anymore," Sanni says calmly. "After my delta went in and didn't report back, the bad guys came after my primary and killed me repeatedly until I was almost entirely dead. This"—he taps his skinny chest—"is just a partial. I'm a ghost, Robin."

"But." I lick my lips, my heart pounding with shock. "Won't they simply kill me, too?"

"Not if you're identity-dead first." Sanni-ghost grins at me. "Here's what you're going to have to do . . ."