Hammered

BOOK TWO

0600 hours, Saturday 9 September, 2062

New York City, New York

Somewhere on the East End

At the top of a flight of cement stairs with a rotten railing, I step through a narrow, mottled greenish door and into gray light. Moist shags of paint hang from it like bark from a sycamore, freckling my fingers as I hold it open for Razorface, a few steps behind me. The early morning is already sweat-hot and dank; suddenly, I realize how long we’ve been chasing a cold trail. I need a drink. After eight hours following Razorface through the gentle streets of New York City by night, I need several drinks. And maybe a cigarette — one I could smoke quickly, before I remember that I don’t smoke anymore.

He’s stopped behind me, just inside the doorway, sharing a parting handshake with the weedy young man we roused out of bed. I hadn’t realized the sheer number of people that my old friend has done favors for, which tells me I need to pay more attention. Missing things like that can get you dead.

None of the favor-owers know a damned thing about a dealer, a box full of Hammers, or anybody going on a road trip to Hartford. Face’s hunch was wrong.

The shit didn’t come out of New York, which is a relief and a puzzlement both.

“Face.”

He bangs fists with his boy one more time and turns back to me as the skinny kid steps away, into darkness. “Yah, Maker.”

“Food.” I feel wobbly, and I’m hoping it’s low blood sugar and a lack of caffeine instead of other problems. That can’t-get-warm feeling is starting to creep up my neck, my right fingers itching with the desire for a weapon. There hasn’t been a reason to reach for one, but we’ve been in and out of threat situations — narrow hallways, strangers’ living rooms, tenement housing, and alleyways — all night. Also, I keep seeing people I know are dead out of the corner of my good eye, which is never a good sign.

“Diner?”

“Fine.” I take Face’s arm because the alternative is ignominiously clutching that neck-breaking banister on my way down the steps. He gives me a funny look. “Tired,” I say, and he shakes his head.

“Maker, you ain’t never tired. Let’s go get us something to eat.” He shepherds me down the block into a breakfast shop that’s just stretching and getting ready for the morning, sits me down, and orders for me. Coffee takes the edge off the shakes, at least, and clears the corners of my brain. By the time the eggs arrive, I’m almost functional again.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. I say we hole up here until tonight and then drive back. Maybe you’ll be feeling better by then.”

“Nah, I’m fine.” I push my plate away. “I just needed a minute, is all.” And I really need to go home and talk to Simon. It’s probably nothing.

It’s never nothing, Jenny. Which is when a voice I really didn’t feel like hearing interrupts my reverie, and a shadow falls across our table. “Genevieve Marie. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

“It’s fucking old-home week, isn’t it?” I don’t look up at her, because I suspect that if I did, I would trigger and the next thing I knew I would be wiping bits of bone off my knuckles. And I really don’t want to try to explain that to a cop. “Barb, this is Razorface. Razorface, this is Barb Casey. Don’t turn your back on her: she’s a bitch.”

His eyebrows go up. He looks up at her. “Barb… Casey?”

“She’s my sister.”

“I thought you didn’t have a sister.”

“I don’t.”

Amused, silent, Barb says nothing during the exchange. Finally, I have to face her. She looks good. Damned good, damn her to hell. She’s wearing a good, forest-green suit with expensive buttons, gleaming shoes, and half-carat earrings. And she’s smiling like she’s actually glad to see me. As if she hadn’t tried to kill me once already in this life. Time heals all wounds, right? Right. I’m a good girl and I don’t spit on her boot. “What the fuck do you want?”

Without asking, she hooks a chair over and straddles it, leaning forward against the back. “I heard you were in trouble. I came to see if I could help.”

“I’ve been leading a nice quiet life without your help for thirty years, Barbara. I don’t see any reason why I should start looking for any now.”

She sighs. “Look. I really need to talk to you. I’ve been chasing you for weeks. You’re a hard girl to get ahold of. Just when I finally got your trail, you scampered out of town; it was a good thing I planted a tracer on your friend here, or I never would have caught up.”

Face places his big hands flat on the table, and I lay my left one over his right, careful not to press down too hard. Leaning forward, he doesn’t take his eyes off Barb. I let him feel a little more of the weight of my steel hand. This is not a fight Face wants to get into, but I can’t just come out and tell him that.

And then I have a sudden seasick thought and push it down hard, before Barb sees it in my face. Professional. The word rings in my ear. A professional hit. No, Jenny, not now. Time to take control of the situation. “All right, Barb. If we’re going to pretend to be civil to each other, by all means, tell me why you’ve come.”

She gives me a thin little chip of a smile. “I’m here because you’re dying, Genevieve. I’ve come to save your life.”

Somewhere in the Internet

Saturday 9 September, 2062

19:12:07:47–19:12:07:50

Richard P. Feynman watched Unitek’s new code jockey hand Elspeth up into a subway car for the second time in as many nights. Anyone capable of observing him might have seen a slight, amused smile curving the corner of his mouth. He’d managed to eavesdrop on part of several conversations, now, between her and this Gabriel Castaign, and he’d turned up the information as well that Castaign was a long-term acquaintance of Casey’s.

Besides, Leah Castaign was cheerful company, and didn’t mind talking about her family at all. And the whole merry pattern was starting to fall into place in what he was pleased to refer to as his mind.

And that’s sloppy terminology, Richard.

He checked his other subroutines as the subway door began to slide closed, ran a few hundred thousand processes, and checked them again. Everything was in order: he was currently involved in about seventeen different projects, including eavesdropping on some of Valens’s young, mostly male study subjects. The boys were recruited from the successful applicants to the Avatar pilot’s school, and Feynman found that particularly interesting.

He conversed as well with Leah Castaign at a study carousel on virtual Phobos, disguised as a fellow student. The moon was, incidentally, doomed by its own orbital trajectory. In a few million years, Mars would sweep the ragged little satellite from the sky.

Feynman had also devoted part of his attention to following various other individuals who had captured his interest — among them, Colonel Valens, Dr. Alberta Holmes, Master Warrant Officer Casey, and Detective Kozlowski. The gangster was harder to keep track of.

This sequence was repeated many, many times in the moments before the train lurched forward. Particularly interesting was the information provided by the fragment of himself exploring possible inroads to Unitek through the Avatar Gamespace. If anything, those pathways were better protected than the Internet routes he’d spent eight days haunting before he finally cracked them.

For the Feynman AI, eight days was an interminably long time. And his reward for that toil had been…

Nothing.

And the designs for an FTL drive — probably, as near as he could tell, the one being used for the starship in the virtual reality game — with no physics or explanation to back it up. Just schematics, as if such a thing could be built from a kit like a crystal radio set.

He was almost annoyed enough to risk contacting Dunsany directly. Problematic, when he knew Unitek had her under tighter surveillance than he did. He could hide the traces of his observations. Might even be able to risk contacting someone who Valens feared and needed less. Trying to speak to Elspeth would be akin to suicide, or surrender.

If he were a man, his stomach would have been twisted into a knot of frustration. Very few people in a long, recorded lifetime had had the wit to take him one-on-one, philosophically, and Feynman would have loved to have known what had changed Elspeth’s mind, made her see him as a person as well as a program. He wanted to talk to her again. To argue. To sit down and have a good intellectual wrangle.

The surveillance was too tight. He might have hid a contact from electronic scrutiny. But Feynman — once through the firewall — had hacked their feed, and he knew that in addition to remote surveillance, Unitek was having her tailed, and that somebody monitored every Net access or phone call she made. He was beginning to suspect that Valens knew perfectly well he was out there. He just couldn’t decide if Valens was trying to keep him out… or lure him in.

With a sigh, he shifted focus to Leah. She hadn’t noticed the lapse. “What about you, Penelope?”

The character he was playing, of course. Wearing the mask of a sixteen-year-old, black-haired girl with a Grecian nose and flashing eyes, Feynman turned on his considerable charm. “I’ve got the neural implants, of course. Papa gave them to me for my fifteenth birthday. How can you hope to fly the big ship otherwise?”

He chose to feel a little bad, watching her face fall. His human self would have been unhappy, manipulating an adolescent girl. Feynman strove to remember these things. It was important to him, that taste of being human. “We could never afford that. But I still want to win.”

“Of course we do. And you have to be careful, Leah”—Feynman leaned forward conspiratorially—“there are many people here who cannot be trusted.”

“But you can?”

The AI laughed. “More than most. It is just a game to me, after all. I do not need the scholarships, or the other prizes. And I am not a small person who has need to cheat against other players to win.”

“A small person?” Leah looked interested. He wondered if her eyes in real life were quite so bright a green, her hair so blonde. He’d never know, really, outside of the camera lens, and he thought that should make him a little sad.

Feynman paused, as if Penelope cast about for words in an unfamiliar tongue. “Petty? A petty person? But it seems unfair that you, who do need the scholarships, cannot compete on equal terms for them. What a pity that we do not know anyone who works for Unitek.”

“Why?” Leah’s eyes seemed doubtful, but her icon was leaning forward.

Feynman tossed Penelope’s dark curls over his shoulder. “I am not without skills,” he said, as if it were a great admission. “But the computers that process most of the game information are very hard to get to.”

He chuckled silently when Leah grinned.

1300 hours, Saturday 9 September, 2062

Niagara, New York

American Side

“Razorface, this is as far as you’re coming.”

We stand above the vast crescent of the falls, and the earth quivers underfoot. I smell wet air, the green leaves still trembling on the trees, sun on cut grass and concrete. He raises his left hand to point at the center of my face. I can just about hear him over the falling water. “You gonna walk in her trap just like that? A dog on a leash got more sense.”

“Probably. But you have things to do back in Hartford, and I have places to be. Besides…” I lean in close, aware that Barb can read my lips. “I need somebody at my back. There’s this thing with Mashaya, with Mitch. It’s bigger than it looks, and it’s a damn weird coincidence that my fucking sister shows up now, in the middle of all this other mess. It’s too much coincidence, and I don’t like it.”

Silence falls like a curtain. I gnaw on my lower lip, fighting a spate of shivers that wants to run down my spine. It was a long, long drive up the northway, following Barb’s sporty blue Honda Agouti while Face alternately slumped silent and belligerent in the passenger seat or argued ferociously against the plan.

“You say you ain’t talked to her in years.”

“I haven’t. Not since 2039 or so.” She got in touch with me after the terrorism trial where I was star witness for the prosecution against a very young man named Bernard Xu, but known to me as Peacock. I was on the news a lot, for a while. Between that and the visible cyberware — the combat enhancements were classified, of course — I had been a nine-day’s wonder. Sometime later, I heard that Xu had died in prison at the age of twenty-five. Same age I was when I got my new arm.

I’m sure I don’t need to spell out the details.

I finished out my twenty years in ’49, took my pension, and got the hell out of Canada. Never went back except to visit Gabe and the girls.

And here I am, staring at the barbed wire and armed guards of the border from a hundred meters, my sister in her running car only a few steps away. I hear her music through the rolled-up window, but she doesn’t shoot me the impatient glance I half expect. Barb has always been good at hiding things.

Razorface scowls, an imposing sight. “So how the hell does she know you’re sick? How did she know where to find you?”

I’ve been wondering that myself, Face. And I wish I could tell him that I don’t trust her, that I don’t like her, that I know I’m being played. But I remember Simon lying to me about the red lines on the monitor, and I remember a phone call from Gabe Castaign, and the name Valens from his lips and now from Barbara’s. And I have a nasty itchy back-of-the-neck premonition that it’s something more than coincidence that thirty years of history are turning up on my doorstep all at once.

Much as I’d like to see Barb strung up by her own paste-colored intestines, she’s my sister and I’m not going to speak ill of her to anyone. Maman wouldn’t have liked it. How a level head and a kind heart like Maman managed to raise a pair of sociopaths like Barb and me, I’ll never know. And these are all things I’d like to say to Razorface, but I wouldn’t know where to start talking and he wouldn’t know how to listen.

So I punch him in the arm with my good hand and what I say is, “Feed Boris for me.”

Razorface puts a hand heavy as a slab of meat on my shoulder. “You keep in touch. I don’t hear from you every twenty-four hours, I’m coming looking. Got it?”

I nod. “Go fight crime. I’m just going to a hospital, to see a man I hate.” Scars fade. If you live long enough, everything fades. Face knows that.

I hand him the keys to the Bradford. He gives my shoulder an extra squeeze before he turns away. I watch him out of sight.

Then I turn around and get in Barbara’s car.

We’re strip-searched at the border, of course, but my CA veteran’s card lets me keep my sidearm, along with a warning to keep it unloaded while traveling. Once the female sergeant in charge of the interview realizes where I fought and how badly I was wounded, she’s interested and extremely polite. Barb, I note, passes through with a Unitek corporate ID card bearing the maple leaf.

Border Patrol doesn’t see the need to take the car apart, thankfully, or we’d be there all day.

Back in the car and northbound again, I stretch out in the passenger seat and stare out the window at the trees. They look yellowed, unhealthy. None of the native species like the new weather much.

I feel much the same, fingertips of my right hand tingling and my left arm a dull, throbbing ache. I’ve never liked being a passenger when somebody else drives — or flies, either. I’d rather have the responsibility. Control freak? Probably.

“How did you hook up with Valens?”

She’s got the car on autopilot, something else I never do, and she reaches out and flips the music off with one finger. At least she’s not watching 4-D on the console. “He came looking for me,” she says. She turns and examines me — a long, searching stare. “He figured if anybody could find you, I could, and he wanted to talk to you.”

I grunt. “After twenty years?”

She lets her shoulders roll under that expensive green silk, both hands off the wheel. It makes me want to reach over and grab hold of the thing myself. Worse, I keep catching sight of her out of my bad eye, and the gun she’s got tucked up under her left armpit makes a bulge that my targeting scope insists on painting dark red. As if I didn’t know the threat level already.

Border Patrol didn’t take her gun? Unitek must have even more juice than they used to. And they used to have plenty. Even before they started funding Canada’s space program and a good chunk of its weapons research. “I know you’re bullshitting me. You may as well spit it out.”

She sighs. “Jenny, I’m telling you everything I know. I’ve had a chance to regret some things, all right? When Valens got in touch with me, it seemed like an opportunity to mend some fences. We’re neither one of us getting any younger. And if you’re as sick as he says…” Her voice trails off suggestively and she looks back at the road, resting her hands on the wheel. It rocks slightly as the car adjusts course.

If I’m as sick as he says. Because that leads us back to the main reason I’m in this car — the data she beamed to my HCD, the case histories and the unhappy prognosis. And Valens’s recorded assurances that there was a treatment now for progressive neurological atrophy brought on by the primitive cyberware, and that the other three surviving recipients of the original central nervous system devices he pioneered were doing just fine with their upgrades.

He even said that in his recorded message. “Upgrades.”

“We can reverse a lot of the scardown now, Casey. You’ll be amazed. Obviously the data aren’t in yet, but I’m theorizing we can get you another thirty years of mobility if everything goes well. And we’ve learned something about pain management, too.”

Just so much software and hardware, wired into the wetware. Rip it out. Replace it. Whatever doesn’t work is trash, throw it away.

I glance sidelong at Barb. “I heard you were trying to get ronin to go after me. You could have just put the word on the street that there was trouble and you needed to talk to me. I would have found you.”

“And let the sharks know my baby sister might be less than able to defend herself?”

It wouldn’t have stopped you back then. It didn’t stop you back then. I remember what you were like, when Nell died. Or before I left home. But that’s water under the bridge now, isn’t it? “How did you know where to find me, Barb?”

She turned back and shot me a grin. “I put a tap on your buddy Castaign’s phone, of course.”

Just like that.

Except the numbers still don’t quite add up. And that’s not what she said this morning.

Seven Years Earlier:

1430 hours, Monday 12 July, 2055

Scavella-Burrell Base

Hellas Planitia

Mars

Charlie ran a hand across his clipped, thinning fair hair, scrubbing at the back of his skull. He lifted his shoulders and grimaced, then placed both hands on the edge of his desk and levered himself to his feet, blinking his contacts clear. An armed guard — taser only, in the airtight confines of the station — fell into step behind him as he left his lab. One more thing to thank John for. A guy can’t even take a piss around here anymore without an escort.

As he was leaving the head, Colonel Valens stopped him in the hall. “Charlie.”

“Evening, Fred.” He couldn’t remember how long he’d been on a first-name basis with the base commander, and wondered occasionally how he had ever found the man forbidding. “You look like a man with a mission, sir.”

Valens bobbed his chin down, half a nod and an ironic smile. “All work and no play. How are you doing on the DNA sequencing?”

Charlie fell into step beside him. “It’s not exactly DNA, although it is a long-chain organic molecule. And I’ve gotten distracted by something interesting, frankly.”

“Interesting, or interesting?”

“Yes.” He held his lab door open for Valens, noticing that the guard was standing just far enough away not to seem to overhear.

Valens preceded Charlie into the room. “Tell me more.”

“Have you been reading my weeklies?”

“I’ve been up to my ass in paperwork, and a little brinksmanship over the salvage vessels. The Chinese have decided that testing our perimeters is not enough, and they’ve actually been sending in surface teams. But that’s neither here nor there; tell me what is interesting.”

Charlie kicked his chair to one side and perched on the edge of the desk, away from the interface plate. “We’ve been using a scanning electron microscope on some of the samples from the shiptree. Consensus is, it was in fact grown. And then reinforced. Let me show you something.” With deft fingers, he tapped up the holographic display and pulled up an image queue.

“Surgical nanites,” Valens said promptly. “Q class. Neurosurgical. I’ve used them.”

“Right. Look at these.”

“Holy… oh.”

Charlie felt the grin pulling his lips wide when Valens came the last five steps to lean in close to the projection.

The colonel poked one finger into the hologram, singling out one magnified image among crawling dozens. “Those are from S-2? Are they as small as this indicator shows?”

“Yep. And still active.”

“I can see that. Well.” Valens leaned back on his heels, head shaking slowly. “These are responsible for the microreinforcement of the shiptree’s hull.”

“And what appears to be a sort of artificially enhanced nervous system. Which hooks up to the cables I had theorized were VR links. Yes.”

The silence was gratifying. Charlie looked up from the display. Valens’s face was still and pale. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “that that ship was — alive? That it still is?”

“Well”—Charlie tapped the interface off—“no. Or, more precisely, somewhat less alive than a sea squirt is, after it becomes sessile and eats its brain. No—”he held up a hand to forestall questions. “That was a digression, and never mind the biology lecture right now. What I’m saying is that the thing has a rudimentary nervous system. What it means? Well, there’s still research to be done. More interesting—”

Valens cut him off. “More interesting, you’ve discovered something that could revolutionize the treatment of spinal cord injury patients, if we can figure out how to use it. Is that where you were going with this?”

“Yeah,” he said with satisfaction. “If we can figure out how to make these things, and make them safe for human use, not only can we fix what’s broken… but, Fred. We may very well be able to make people smarter or faster, cure or fight a whole raft of neurological conditions… These babies are hot.”

“So I see.” Valens clapped him on the shoulder. “Send me the report. I’ll contact Dr. Holmes at Unitek, and make sure you receive the credit your work is due. Charlie…”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.” The colonel turned, springy on the ball of his foot in light gravity, and left.

8:30 P.M., Sunday 10 September, 2062:

Hartford, Connecticut

Sigourney Street

Abandoned North End

Razorface stopped under the rustred metal awning, left hand on the pull of the big blue door. Derek and Rasheed waited across the street, leaned up against the brick of a tenement building beside the parked Bradford, which Razor planned on wheeling inside as soon as he got the bays open. The three of them should have been the only people around.

Razor glanced right, where three rolling metal bay doors were closed and locked in the cinder-block wall of the shop. Flaking paint scrolled across them. Razor knew the mural said something about auto body and appliance repair, but he wasn’t sure exactly what.

“Might as well come on outta there,” he said, taking his fist off the handle. And damned if it wasn’t that cracker detective, Mitch, with the Polish last name, stepping out of the shadows of a doorway down the street and strolling up Sigourney with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his ratty corduroy pants and a cigarette hanging off his lower lip like he’d been intending to come over and say hi any minute.

Razorface felt his nostrils flare, and grinned. Goddamned cops in my neighborhood. What is the world coming to? The pig didn’t even look him in the teeth when he smiled, and he had to give Kozlowski that. He was cool.

“Razorface,” the cop said, drawing first one hand and then the other slowly out of his pockets and showing them empty. “Seen your boy Emery over in West Hartford the other day talking to a 20-Love. You keeping a close enough eye on him?”

Fucking cops, just trying to stir up shit. Razorface grunted and turned away.

Mitch kept talking. “Maker isn’t home. And I need to talk to you about Mashaya Duclose.”

“I got nothing to talk to nobody about,” Razorface answered, setting the key card Maker had given him to the reader. The lock flicked back and Mitch’s brow crinkled. Razorface’s boys started moving forward from their place across the street, and Mitch took a slow step forward.

The pig’s voice dropped and leveled, dead calm. “Where’s Maker, Razorface? And how did you get her key?”

Razorface paused with the door half open. “Visiting the fam,” he said. “I’m feeding the damn cat. Gonna bust me for it?”

“Her family.” Mitch reached up and caught the door before Razorface could quite step inside and pull it shut behind himself. Over Mitch’s shoulder, Razor saw his boys coming up on the cop. He shook them off with a minute jerk of the head, turning his attention back to the weedy little policeman, who was still talking. “Sister maybe? Black-haired gal about so tall?”

Razorface snarled silently, stepping through the door. “How much trouble Maker in, piggy?” Damned if he wanted to care, but he owed her. Owed her enough to come down himself to feed her goddamn cat because he knew she wouldn’t want anybody but him poking around in her stuff, when by rights he’d rather set fire to the stupid animal.

The cop shrugged. “Let’s go inside and talk about it, shall we?”

Their eyes met, pit bull and terrier coming to some unspoken agreement that didn’t involve either one backing down. Ten long seconds later, Razorface stepped away and gestured Mitch through the door. There was no way he was turning his back on a cop.

Inside, he entered the code Maker had given him into the security system. A pressure seemed to come off his eardrums when the sonics powered down, and he made sure the door was locked behind them. Then he followed Mitch into the shop.

It looked just as it had before they left for New York. He saw Mitch examining things in that cop way of his, and grunted, bending down to unlock the ratproof safe holding the cat food. There was still a couple of days’ worth in the automatic feeder, but Razorface topped it off anyway, ignoring the cop. He suspected Mitch was trying to get under his skin.

It wouldn’t do to show it was working.

Boris came out from under the Cadillac and started winding around the cop’s ankles, and Razor shook his head. Typical. Who was doing the feeding? And who was getting the thanks? He saw it as more or less a metaphor for the workings of the world, now that he thought about it.

Course, it might have something to do with the cat smelling Razorface’s Rottweiler on his pants. Maybe.

“So what the hell do you want?” Enough quiet time. He wanted to get the conversation over with and get home to Leesie, although he wasn’t about to let any of the boys know that. His jaw ached, as it did more and more these days, and his chest ached, too, no matter how much iron he lifted. The air sucked, was all it was. Better here in Maker’s shop, though — she kept the scrubbers going.

Mitch opened his mouth to talk, met Razorface’s eye dead on — and stopped. His jaw worked twice, and just as Razorface was about to turn around on his bootheel and stomp out, words followed. “Can we quit bullshitting each other and work together on this?”

Quiet and sharp. And Razorface started to snarl something about not needing no help from no fucking cops, and Maker’s gone, she’s gone with somebody she hate. Somebody she scared of. Scared for me because of.

He heard his own voice saying, “Fuck yeah.”

Mitch got real quiet then, and looked down at his loafers. “It’s bigger than street level. I think there’s a fucking corporation involved. That won’t stop my boss, if he can get good evidence — the chief is a straight-up arrow, and the commissioner, Dr. Hua— Well, you know about her. She’s a bulldog. But I’ve been flat told to keep my nose out of this before I wind up fired and dead, not necessarily in that order. And I know — I know in my bones, man, this all has something to do with Maker, and we need to figure out, you and me, we need to figure out what and why and how. Because I don’t goddamned know if we can trust her, and I don’t know either if we can solve this without her. So we’re on the same goddamned side.”

Razorface thought about it, hard and slow, rubbing at a cramped muscle along the left side of his neck. Wrong to let this cop in here like this.

My kids’re dying. My baby’s aunt, this cop’s old lady, she dead, too.

I thought she was working with this cop. But he’s worried what she was up to.

Maker gave me the key. She trust me, I should trust her. But maybe she want me to look, couldn’t explain. ’Cause some things you can’t explain.

“Right,” Razorface answered. “You inferrin’ we should toss this place?”

“Yeah. Yes, sir, I am.”

It was a nice thing, Razorface reflected a few minutes later, bending to pull a steamer trunk out from under Maker’s cot, to hear a cop say sir and sound like he actually meant it. It was a big trunk, the ridged high-impact plastic shell battered and gouged, and it was secured with a thumb lock. “What about this?”

“Looks as likely as anything.” Mitch was rooting through the roughly hung cabinets under the hand-built wooden table in the far corner. The cop sat back on his heels and Razorface heard a thump. “Damn!” Standing, rubbing the back of his head with one hand, Mitch walked back. He winced and leaned down. “Thumb lock.”

“No shit,” Razorface growled. “Tell me something useful.” He shot a sidelong glance at the smug young cop. Mitch didn’t even have the decency to grimace a little as he squatted down beside the trunk and the gangster.

Mitch ran stubby fingers over the surface of the lock. “Dusty,” he muttered. Boris, finished with his dinner, wandered over to scrub his face against Mitch’s knee, and the cop scratched the cat absently with his other hand. “There’s a trick to these old ones.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

The cop shot him a grinning glance. “Watch this.” Mitch slipped a cash chit and a switchblade out of his corduroys, flicking the latter open. He slid the thin slip of plastic into the crack between the lid and the body of the trunk until it butted up against the catch. Razorface watched the long narrow knife blade with interest. Odd thing for a cop to have.

Holding it by the black rubber handle, Mitch levered it behind the thumb lock. A fat blue spark jumped clear, and Mitch jerked his hand off the knife, which clattered to the floor. “Fuck!” he hissed, and then he cackled. “Hah!”

The bolt had disengaged for a moment when the lock shorted and reset, and Mitch’s cash chit was now caught between the shaft and the lockplate. Grinning, he shook his shocked hand once and flipped the lid of the trunk back. “Holy…”

Face frowned at a sea of forest-green wool, fumes of cedar and camphor stinging his eyes. He had no idea what he was looking at. “What the hell is that? Uniforms?”

Mitch reached out and ran his fingers across the nap of the fabric, frowning for a long time before he nodded. “We shouldn’t be in here, Razor,” he said quietly.

“I know,” Razorface answered. “You gonna tell me what I’m looking at?”

“Master Warrant Officer Casey.” Mitch shook his head, letting the cloth fall back into tidy folds. “Damn. That Honda was registered to a Barbara Casey. It is her sister. Or sister-in-law, I guess.” Razorface watched as the cop lifted the clothes out carefully, one stack at a time. They were dusty and creased along the folds: these things hadn’t seen sunlight or air in a very long time.

One layer down, and Mitch found other things: an unlocked flat tin with a stack of papers in it, two powder-blue berets, and a cardboard box. One of the berets was torn and bloody: the other looked as if it had just been pressed and packed away. The cop set those aside, also.

With a gnawing sensation that he recognized as nostalgia, Razorface reached out and touched the undamaged beret. “Seen those before,” he said, thinking of acrid smoke and a slim young woman scrambling around piles of burning trash to drag his twelve-year-old self under cover. “What’s in the box?”

“I bet I know,” Mitch said. “Master Warrant Officer. That’s a big deal, Razorface. Some kinda expert rank. I figured she was a sergeant or something.”

“Private, when I met her.” A moment too late, Razorface realized that he had broken the cardinal rule and volunteered information. “Box.”

“I bet I know what that is. Hah. Yep.” Mitch folded the flaps open and started lifting smaller boxes up into the light. “Shit, look at that.”

A full hand of little flat cases. Razorface picked one up and angled it toward the light. A medal or something, hanging on a striped ribbon. “So?”

“I don’t know what the half of these are for, Razor. But I bet the baby blue on these here is for U.N. combat service. And look at this. That one — the red maple leaf on the star. I know what that one is. That’s valor in the face of the enemy. And a lot of these others just plain say what they’re for… South Africa, Brazil. New England. She must have been here when Canada loaned us troops during the food riots back in the thirties.”

“Yeah,” Razorface said. “I told you I knew her from way back.” Something uncomfortable writhed in his gut. This was a betrayal. It was wrong, and he knew it, but he shoved the thought back. Son of a bitch. It’s not like she’s been telling me shit.

Mitch was paying him no attention, fascinated with holding one bit of cloth and metal after another up to the light. “Ah. Here’s another one with a maple leaf on it. Those must be the important ones, you think?”

“I guess.” Less interested in military decorations, Razorface lifted the cardboard box out of the trunk and laid it on Mitch’s lap. Underneath were a series of crumbling colored paper binders, and two poly bubbles with holographic data storage devices packed inside. The bubbles were marked with a caduceus, a maple leaf, and a green-on-beige spiral that Razorface didn’t recognize.

“Jackpot,” Mitch gloated.

Razorface felt his bowels clench at the note in the cop’s voice. This is the wrong thing to be doing, he thought. You don’t do this kind of shit to your buds. “Whaddaya mean, jackpot?”

“Medical records, Razor. And her service records, too. This is exactly what we needed. Fucking A good job, man. Fucking A.”

There was something tucked in among them. Razor jerked his chin at the cream-colored bundle, as long as one of his own massive hands. “What that?”

“Let’s see. Chamois? Deerskin, I guess.” Deftly, the cop flipped the butter-soft skin open. “Oh, wow.” His hands hovered over the contents of the package, almost as if he were afraid to touch.

Razorface leaned forward, over his shoulder, almost forgetting to breathe. “Necklace. I seen some kids wear ’em.”

“Collar,” Mitch corrected. “It’s meant to be worn up around the throat.” He lifted the long cool polished spill of beads up into the light. Purple and some white, with an almost phantom sheen. The edges were stained as if with fresh blood. “Wampum. It’s polished quahog shells — purple for sorrow, white for purity of intention. The red stain means war.”

“How you know that?”

“Hell, Razor, I’m from Ledyard. My best friend in high school was Pequot. He knew all about this stuff. This is square-woven: you do it with a needle. And—” Mitch’s eyes dropped down, and Razor heard his breath catch in his throat. “Oh, fuck.”

“What?”

“I can’t touch that.” Mitch gestured at the item that had been hidden under the wampum collar. It took Razorface a moment to sort out what he was looking at, and then he shook his head slightly. Purple and red and black beads wound tight-sewn around the shaft of a mottled brown feather that looked long and strong enough to have come from a turkey.

Carefully, as if touching a small child or something holy, Mitch folded the collar and laid it back in the square of doeskin. Face tilted his head to one side. “What’s special about that?”

“It’s an eagle feather,” Mitch said, and covered it carefully before nestling it back in the bottom of the trunk. “And it worries me, because if she’s earned that, and she’s keeping it buried under her old clothes, it means she doesn’t think she deserves it anymore. Which really makes me wonder why.”

2247 hours, Sunday 10 September, 2062

Queen Street Cafe

Toronto, Ontario

I worked places like this before I made it into the army, but mine were in Montreal. I keep thinking I see Chrétien out of the corner of my good eye, oiled black curls and superior smile, pretty face and scarred knuckles. Every time I turn to look, he’s not quite there, and I’m not too upset about it.

He’d be somewhere around sixty now. Imagine that.

“Aren’t you kind of old for a cyborg?” The bartender checks me out critically, an up-and-down sweep of the eyes from scarred black boots to ragged-cut crown of hair.

I feel naked without my sidearm. “It wasn’t voluntary.” I’m too fucking worn through the tread and down to the cable to smooth his ruffles, and I don’t give a damn what he thinks of me anyway. “Bourbon, please.” I don’t really mean please, and he frowns as he pushes the booze across the bar at me and takes my cash card. A long pause while he reads it lets me take in the scenery. It’s worth observing.

When I was in the service this was a cop-and-soldier bar, and it had a different name. Now it’s home to a new crowd, with a taste for the self-conscious archaism of the name and the razor-edged five-minutes-in-the-future of the decor. A body-modified crowd, which reflects extremes of bio and mecha engineering in the black mirrored floor.

We don’t see this sort of thing in Hartford. Some are cosmetic mods: cow-dark eyes, lips that scintillate with purple and orange light. Many more have the functional ones: I spot somebody with a second pair of prosthetic arms — not armored like my steel hand, but a color cycling pattern of LEDs — giving the appearance of some Hindu god. I bet those aren’t really hardwired on. Another patron, straddling the difference, has a steel snake, hood-flaring and hissing, raising its head from the unzipped fly of his pants. It’s fascinating in a train wreck sort of way, but I don’t want him to catch me looking and think I have more than an academic interest.

Some of these guys make Razorface look like the girl next door. Freaks.

Hey. Look who’s talking, freak.

The music is three generations of loud removed from the last kind I knew how to dance to. Someday, the noise will grow so noisy that the next generation will have to start playing polkas and Mozart to rebel. I take my drink and sit down across from Barb, in the quietest corner, which isn’t.

Barb, what the hell are you thinking, meeting Valens here? But I know: she’s thinking that I won’t stick out like a sore thumb. In fact, I fit right in. Except I’m thirty years too old.

It’s a good place for the spirited sort of… negotiations… I’m expecting. Two decades and more, and I still know what she’s thinking. Except when I don’t.

“Vous êtes sûre qu’il vient?” I surprise myself — the question comes out in French. Québecois, anyway. You’re sure he’s coming? Which reminds me of a joke.

“Je suis sûre,” she answers in the same language, and I have a sudden sharp-as-a-flashback memory of Maman singing us McGarrigle Sisters songs when she had us in the bathtub. She loved old folk music — français, English, the Haudenosaunee tales her grandmother told her. “Il est toujours ponctuel. I bet he’s here at five minutes to the hour.”

He will be, too. Salaud. “Look, Barb… when he gets here. I want to talk to him alone.”

She sips white wine and makes a face. What she expected in a joint like this, I have no idea. At least she’s traded in her carefully tailored suit for blue jeans and white cotton. “Are you going to stick a knife in him, Jenny?” Her eyes sparkle as she smiles. Somehow, Barb got all the charm.

We split the mean down the middle, but I like to think I got the slightly smaller half. I like to think a lot of things, really. Nell was the sweet one, my little baby doll, youngest of us three. “Not immediately.” I sip my drink, which is less watered than he might have gotten away with. “I’ll let him talk for at least five minutes first.”

Barb sighs and shrugs, rolling her eyes in that way that says, plain as if she wrote it on the wall, that she doesn’t know why she puts up with my obstinate, intransigent, insubordinate self. She leans forward, flashing red and orange lights daubing her handsome features like warpaint, like the glow of something important burning. “Quoi que, Geni. Just remember that he’s dying to help, and try not to be too much of a… une chienne.” Hah. She was going to say “putain.” “He really does care.”

It’s twittering, and I tune her out. Rien, rien. Je ne regrette rien. Yeah. As if. I am not an exception. I am a statistic. And forgetting that is a good way to wind up a permanent statistic.

It’s something you learn the hard way, if you learn it at all. There are two ways to cope with combat. Well, that’s an outright lie. There are probably thousands. There are two ways that I’ve seen work pretty well and still leave you with something like a soul to call your own when it’s over. If it’s ever really over.

One is denial. Convince yourself that you’re bulletproof, ten feet tall, and it’ll never happen to you, and sometimes you can even convince the world for a while. The other way to do it is to decide that the worst has already happened, and you’re living on borrowed time, and when your number is up, your number is up. They say you never hear the one that has your name on it, but brother, I can tell you, it isn’t true. You hear it coming every time you close your eyes.

Barb’s saying something, but the words mean nothing. I lean back in my chair, raise one hand to shut her the hell up, shaking my head. Something’s rising up in the back of my consciousness, something big and bright and featureless as a drought-seared plain under an African sun.

Merci à Dieu. Pretoria. 2037. I know it’s a flashback. I know it down in my bones and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference, the same way it doesn’t when I know it’s a dream and I know I’m going to die, because I always do. Every time.

And every time, I’m right.

And the heat is a forge during the day, the cold a quenching at night. The land is an anvil and the sun a hammer in the hands of a lame god. Sun setting gory as the weeks before, smearing pale walls with bloody handprints. Before the drought, before the heat, the hills overlooking the city were green and rolling, hedged in some sort of purple flowers. I’ve seen pictures.

Three ammo haulers, two staff vehicles, two A.P.C.s, and an Engineering Corps tank with a bulldozer blade on the front — a Christmas carol in Hell. We’ve got air cover as well, a pair of gunships and a spotter. I’m shepherding the convoy down the already ruined road north of the city — shiny, modern city: good university, once. We couldn’t get through without the tracked vehicles now. My tactical display shows clean and green: the first clue something’s gone sour is a trail of smoke from the roof of a nearby building, the death gasp of one of the deadly, fragile helicopters shredding at the seams. Then the explosions start in earnest.

Anything hauling explosives is not where you want to be during an artillery barrage. The guy ahead floors it, and I do, too.

Gunfire. Ambush. I hear the whine of the fifty cal on the escort tank, the unforgettable rumble of its enormous engine. The guy sitting next to me is terse and professional into his throat mike, bringing the TOC up to speed on where we are and what we’ve run up against. A second after tactical gets the information, my heads-up stains red with confirmed hostile presence. Nice to know now. I wrench the big machine aside as a crater opens up seemingly between my feet, black hot plastic slipping through my hands.

That’s what brings me back to the more presently real, the here-and-now: splintering plastic, and Barb’s hand crushing my right one. She leans across the table now, yelling into my face, and I blink twice and try to shake it off, eyes closed, head tossing.

“Jenny, dammit, talk to me!” And damned if she doesn’t actually look and sound concerned.

I look down. I’ve cracked the high-impact plastic table, left a spiderweb of lines lacing it where my steel hand clutched tight. “Fuck me,” I say.

“Are you all right? It looked like a seizure or something. Shit. Valens can wait, we can go to the hospital…”

“No.” Not NDMC. Not if they paid me. Not even the new Toronto General. “It was just a senior moment. Panic attack. It’s all right now.”

She sits back on her bench, but her hand stays on mine. “Sure?”

“Damn sure.” I extricate my hand, which is shaking, and down the bourbon in a gulp.

“Casey. You know better.” And I’m so rattled I don’t even hear him come up behind me. My hand slaps the thigh of my BDUs, where my sidearm should be, and I curse Canada briefly. I never would have thought I’d feel—naked—walking around Toronto without a gun strapped to my body.

Valens had been five measured paces away when he spoke to me. Smart. He covers two of those steps while I slide out of the booth and stand, turning to face him. He has enough sense not to stick his paw out. I’d rather kiss a snake than shake that man’s hand.

“Fred.” There’s something satisfying about not having to call him Captain. Colonel, I guess it is now, although he’s out of uniform, and he does stick out like the emerald stud on Razorface’s nose. His hair has gone a gleaming silver that picks up the flickering colors of the strobes, but the cut is less conservative than it used to be. He looks fit and solid for an older man. “You gonna have a seat?”

“If you don’t mind?” He gestures me back into the booth as Barb stands.

She takes a step away. “I’ll leave you two to talk things out without my interference. Frederick, I’ll come by your office tomorrow, if that suits.”

“Very well. Thank you, Barbara.” The smile he gives her makes me want to break his teeth. But then, the fact that he’s still breathing makes me want to break his teeth, so I guess it’s no big shock.

Barb nods to me before she walks away, leaving her wineglass on the table. My eyes don’t follow. I’m looking at Valens, who is settling himself onto the loathsome vinyl across from me.

He takes a breath and looks me dead in the eye before he speaks. I won’t look down. “You look better than I expected. Who’s been handling your follow-up?”

“A friend of a friend.” I’m telling you nothing. “Barb says you’ve got something that can help with the interface breakdown I’m supposed to be experiencing.”

“Supposed to be? No symptoms yet?”

I wish I hadn’t finished my bourbon. I push the glass away so that I won’t fiddle with it. Whether it’s sitting across from Valens for the first time in over a decade or something else, I’m abruptly aware of all the great and small pains at war in my body. I open my mouth to lie, and then have to swallow the bitterness of not being able to do it.

I hate the man with every fiber of my being. And sure as taxes, I owe him my life, or at least the fact that I’m sitting there across from him and not rotting in a hospital bed. And I might not have minded, if it had all stopped there, even though they didn’t ask. The army doesn’t have to ask.

The thing is, the first time your body just starts reflexively doing things that are hardwired into a nanoprocessor relay and not your own nervous system, it can take you by surprise. Especially if you haven’t been warned what to expect. Especially if it ends with people getting killed.

Funny thing that. Things that end with people getting killed never seem to end with the right people getting killed.

“Yeah,” I say, after a long pause. “I’m having symptoms.”

He nods. He even looks genuinely concerned. Hell, he may be. I’m the man’s great triumph, after all.

“We’ve discovered an ongoing myelin breakdown that seems to be triggered by the electrical impulses from the nanoprocessors.” Valens never sugarcoated anything in his life. It may be his best trait.

I lean forward to listen more closely. “You’re talking about loss of nerve function. Paralysis?”

“Eventually. Numbness in the extremities first. Loss of motor control, body temperature regulation. And once the dampers in your implants start failing, pain like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’d believe a lot of pain, Doc.”

He winces, touches his forehead. “There’s also a larger neurological issue. The brain wetware, that needs to come out. We’ve lost three of your group so far because of synaptic dysfunction.”

“Define dysfunction for the interested observer.” Right, I’m a blasted museum piece. So nice to be reminded. A sense of detachment is stealing over me, a sensation I used to feel a lot more. It’s been creeping back lately.

“Basically, a complex of problems. Something like old-time Alzheimer’s, if you remember what that is, coupled with a lot of random synaptic firing. Forgetfulness. And hallucinations.”

“Flashbacks.”

“Yes. Essentially, you’re looking at senile dementia in about five years. What are you now, fifty?”

“Forty-nine. There’s a cure for Alzheimer’s.”

“Early stage, yes.” He nods, pushing Barb’s wineglass out of the way. “We plan to use the same tech to repair the damage caused by the continued insult to your nervous system. Nanosurgery. As a minor bonus, we can fix a lot of the scardown, too — and the more superficial scarring. The stuff you didn’t want to go reconstructive on, way back when. No knives.”

The skin at the base of my neck creeps. “Just bugs crawling around under my skin.”

Open hands, and earnest expression. He’s that kind of distinguished good-looking that wins twenty-year-old trophy wives. I wonder if Valens has a wife. I never asked. He doesn’t wear a ring — but then, he’s a surgeon. “It’s the same tech they’re using for the neural VR interfaces.”

“Safe?”

“No more dangerous than giving birth to twins.”

“If it doesn’t work?”

“Two possibilities. If it really fucks up, vegetative state.”

“Charming. What’s possibility number two?”

“A ventilator and a hospital bed.”

“Ah.” I close my eyes. I try to think back to the last time I felt warm and safe and halfway in control of the future, and I can’t. Maybe when I was seventeen, eighteen. There was a boy named Carlos. He wanted to marry me. It didn’t work out that way. Flashbacks? “What if it works?”

Valens taps the table with his left hand, and I wonder if this is going better than he expected. I haven’t broken his shoulder again. Yet. “Less pain. Better mobility. Less hardware. The nanites can be tailored to consume a lot of the primitive wetware and reuse the materials. Also, your life span extended from an estimated five to ten, to indefinite.”

“I see.” One last question. And only one.

He holds his breath.

I chew on the inside of my cheek for a minute before I ask it. “What’s it gonna cost me, Fred?”

“It will cost you. I’m not going to lie about that. We need your help.” He leans forward and spreads his hands wide, broad fingers that don’t look deft enough for a doctor. “We need volunteers.”

“I’m too old for fighting, Valens.” It’s an effort to remember to use his first name. It’s an effort not to call him Captain. Colonel. Whatever. Damn. I was in the army a hell of a long time. Running my thumb over the surface of the table, I study the smear of skin-oil it leaves.

Valens coughs behind his hand. “Are you too old for flying?”

“I…” Whatever I expected to say dies in my mouth. “Flying?”

His face goes still and serious. His voice drops. He leans forward, touching his earcuff, and unclips his HCD. I pull mine out so he can beam me a secure conversation channel, and his voice comes in my ear when it comes again. “Everything from here on in is classified. Got it?”

I set my unit on the table and nod. “Yes.”

“We’re testing some new training techniques. Virtual reality. Wetwired remote interface for the next generation of combat aircraft. Tanks, too.” I look away. I was a drill instructor for a while, too, until it got to be too damned depressing and I asked to be transferred back into the field, which is how I wound up flying medevac. I’d been a driver before, but enhanced reflexes and my mechanical aptitude make for a very good pilot. “So we won’t have to send kids out to die in them anymore.”

He’s lost me until he says that last. I’ve been a rhesus monkey, and it gets real old, real fast.

And he knew it, dammit. He knew it when he cast the fly, and he knew it when he set the hook. I can see the fucking calculation in his hazel eyes, gray now in the flickering light. My lips curl back into something that might almost look like a smile if you didn’t know me very well. “Wetwired. What does that mean?” I know what wired is. Wired is me.

He reaches across the table and rests one hand on my shoulder. “When we rebuild the interfaces, we engineer in some of the equipment that Venus Consolidated and Unitek have designed for their VR interfaces.”

“Venus… that’s a sex toy company.” I hear my own disbelief, and curiosity burns in the back of my throat.

“Yes. But Unitek owns them, and they’re an industry leader in virtual reality applications. And we’re working with Unitek.”

“Of course you are.” Unitek engineers designed my arm, and the neuralware that augments my reflexes in response to any perceived threat. Unitek owns the pharmaceutical company that makes Hyperex. And Unitek… assisted… Canada during the bloody, bloody Malaysian-PanChinese wars that broke out when the oceans started to rise. Later, they funded much of Malaysia’s economic recovery, to the chagrin of the Chinese government, which still likes to consider Southeast Asia its private preserve. It’s interesting history, if you go in for that sort of thing. “All right. Forget about the high-tech vibrators. Explain to me this wetwired thing.”

“You’ve heard of the new generation of neural?”

I shrug. “A little. I know I’ve got a collection of silicon cones buried in my gray matter and that’s not how you guys do things anymore.”

“We have much less invasive techniques,” he answers, proud as if he pioneered it himself. “Nanosurgery. No incision — nothing goes in but bots a few microns across. We build, essentially, artificial synapses. The body hardly registers it as an insult. People are doing it for recreational purposes. Four-year-old technology, perfectly safe.”

“Why would anybody do that to herself?”

Valens waves his hands around, almost forgetting to subvocalize. His voice through my ear cuff is not quite painfully loud. “All sorts of reasons, but the primary is for a more seamless access to the gamespaces. As with the invention of the wheel, the most novel technologies are used for toys first.”

Holy hell. This is his baby. “So you want to restructure my brain?”

“No. We want to clean out the mess of substandard wiring we slapped up in there almost a quarter century ago, and put in something that won’t cripple you. Remember when you first got your arm?”

My head jerking up and down feels stiff as a marionette’s.

“Remember I promised you someday you’d have sensation? Heat, pressure?”

Again, the dull, disbelieving nod. He can’t be serious.

“We can do that now. Now that we have the tech to replace your old implants, you can have what these guys have.” His sweeping gesture takes in the room. “Without the stigma.” He glances around the room, real distaste wrinkling an arrogant nose.

I follow his gaze. I try not to pass judgment, but… a girl with tiger stripes and a lashing tail catches my eye and winks broadly. I glance away.

“We can even make it look more or less like a real hand, now. And once you’re on board and we get you a security rating, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with it.” His eyes sparkle. His voice shakes. Despite myself, despite my ambivalence, I find myself catching his excitement. And damned if that hook doesn’t bite harder with every tug he gives it.

Does it make any difference in the long run if you know you’re being manipulated? “Is this government funded or corporate?”

“Both,” he says. “It’s big, Casey. That’s all I can tell you. And your old friend Gabe Castaign is working with us, although he doesn’t know the half of it yet. I wanted you on board first.”

And of course, the most important question of all. “Why me?”

I almost think he’s rehearsed the speech, but the passion in it rings sound. “I know you,” says the man who pushed me into killing a boy I could have liked, the man who gave me back my legs and my left hand and whatever life I have left. “You were a damn fine soldier. Damn fine pilot, too — and your reflexes are the selling point. Natural and augmented, you test high. And you’ve made adaptation to your wetware like I never would have believed. It always burned me that I couldn’t do more for you. And now I can. I just need you to help me justify spending the money.”

“Justify saving my life.”

“Yes.” He reaches out one last time and lays his hand on my steel one. I can’t feel a thing. My teeth are chattering.

“You still have your pilot’s license, Casey?”

Holy hell. He means it. “No.”

“We’ll get you recertified. Retrained if need be.”

“You want me as a civilian employee?”

“That’s what we did for Castaign.”

Breathe out. Breathe in. Think, Jenny Casey.

“Jenny. Think about the pain.”

I’m thinking. I’m thinking about a pseudosenile dementia, too. And the fact that my gun is still out in Barb’s car and I could just swallow a bullet if it really gets too bad.

If I remember how to pull the trigger by then. I always was too stubborn for my own good. He’s still watching my face. Gabe is working for him. Does that mean things have changed? No. Gabe has his reasons, and they’re purely pragmatic and eleven years old. “You’re not telling me everything.”

“You know it, Casey. You don’t get the rest until you sign on the dotted line.”

Which is not what I wanted to hear at all.

Counting coup was cleaner. People can cope with that kind of war. Of course, then you get into all the other ways of showing brave, and some of them you don’t want to know too much about. Like what I suspect I’m going to wind up doing before the year is out.

Valens has something to do with all this, and Valens is going to be hell to put a stop to. There’s not going to be any justice — not for Mitch, not for Face. Not for Peacock, either, or Nell. Me? I don’t much think I deserve justice. I more or less got what was coming to me, one way or another.

I can’t take Valens down. But I can show him, maybe, I could have done something. Show his handlers, whoever they are. Show the press. And if they are seen to know, they may have to do something.

Status games.

Maybe that will be enough. Fred Valens in front of a military court. It’s got a nice justified feel of symmetry to it.

“All right,” I tell him. “I’m in, Fred. Where do I sign?”

We’re not cold inference machines. Emotions are critical to our rational thinking.

— Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, “Kismet Project” artificial life researcher

Somewhere in the Internet

Sunday 10 September, 2062

23:00:22:01–23:00:22:05

The multivariable codes Valens and Casey used were supposed to be nearly unbreakable. And they were. Unless you happened to have loaded a subtle little worm into both of their HCDs.

Pilots and starships and VR, oh my.

Feynman almost sang to himself, there in his silent stream of ones and zeroes. Colonel Frederick Valens, you slick son of a bitch. I know what you’re up to.

And there is no way in hell you’re going to the stars without me.

0300 hours, Monday 11 September, 2062

Marriott Inn

Toronto, Ontario

I spent the first night in Toronto in Barb’s guest bedroom. The second night, I get a hotel room and call Razorface so he can fight with me about coming home. Afterward, I sit up by the window with all the lights turned off, watching the rain fall and the headlights roll by fifteen floors below.

I’m drinking more than I should, and I don’t care. Room service sends coffee even at three in the morning.

There are reasons I don’t come back to this city often.

I can’t stop thinking about them now.

23 years earlier:

1300 hours, Friday 11 March, 2039

Lake Simcoe Military Prison

Lake Simcoe, Ontario

I pass through checkpoints without comment. There are professional nods from well-disciplined guards who will not meet my eyes. They stare at the shining brass of my buttons, the shining steel of my left hand, the still-unfamiliar three golden hooks on my shoulder, differenced with a gold maple leaf. I imagine I hear whispers after I pass, but the truth of the matter is, to them I am a hero. Half a legend. The only whispers following me are my own.

I haven’t the damnedest idea why I’m here, and I know even less about why he agreed to see me. In an honest moment, I might say I was here to punish myself, but this isn’t an honest moment.

I wear formal dress rifle green, a conifer color, unchanged from the days of the unified Canadian Armed Forces. The beret is black, not blue, and I think I’ll never wear the United Nations colors again. It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong.

I am patted down and wanded by polite, impersonal women, and at last shown into a bare room with a single plastic chair on each side of a transparent wall of inch-thick shatterproof plastic. The last guard shuts the door behind me, softly, like a benediction.

Bernard Xu is already in his chair on the other side of that wall. There are holes drilled through the plastic, and I go and stand before them, feeling as if my guts are wrapped around a slowly twisting spike.

“Jenny,” he says, standing up. Caution orange, his jumpsuit clashes with my formal green. They’ve unshackled his hands, at least. He shuffles forward, chains rattling, and lays both hands flat against the invisible wall. Skin pressed bloodless by the barrier, he leans into it.

“Peacock.” He doesn’t look like a peacock anymore. When we met, he stunned me with flamboyance. Fabulousness. Hair in a half-dozen shades, clothing shredded and tattered and fanciful. He seems somehow deflated now, dark and forgotten already. He’s not a big man, not small, well made and fine featured. Barely a man at all — he turned twenty during the trial. Five years younger than I am. Guilty. I convicted him, and he did everything I said he did. We both know what the sentence will be. Canada, clinging to civilization as the world crumbles around its ears and the government becomes more desperate, more draconian, more owned—Canada still does not have a death penalty.

He’s going to die in jail.

And yet the look he gives me drips sorrow rather than reproach. He’s silent, reaching toward me. I place my steel hand over the shadow of his, a gesture, touch impossible. I think of tapping on glass to get a captive thing’s attention, and I almost gag.

“Bernard,” I say. “I wish it could have been different.”

A nod, philosophical. “Me, too. You were something special, Jenny girl.”

“What do you mean?” I step away from the glass and let my eyes fall from his, watching him out of my peripheral vision.

A dirty little smirk and he cocks his head to one side. “You know what I mean.”

My breath snags and tears on something broken in my chest. “If I had known what you were, I never would have let that happen.”

“Really? That would have been a pity.”

“You could have used it against me at the trial, you know.”

“My lawyer wanted to.”

“Oh.” The winch pulling my guts out through my belly button tightens another twist. “Do you want me to tell you I regret it? Would it be better if I said I’m sorry?” His gaze hasn’t shifted from me when I look back.

“I don’t need to be told,” he says, the taint of mockery leaving his voice. “I hope he’s worth it.”

“Who?”

“That army captain you’re in love with. I hope he’s worth it. They were going to send him to jail, weren’t they? And in return, you gave them me. You gave them yourself, too, whether you realize it or not. You could have changed the world. But you can’t go to the press now.”

“I know.” Peacock had wanted to me to rip the whole bloody thing wide open, to tell the world about the experimentation. About what Valens and the army had done to me, without ever asking.

It’s too late now. I’ve taken the damned shilling and kissed the fucking book and signed the paperwork they put in front of me. Consent is consent.

Bernard Xu has been convicted of terrorism, and Gabe Castaign is not in jail for treason. Has been dating a nurse. I’m his best friend. He’s an officer, and he saved my life. He’s never going to know.

I turn away, pressing nerveless cool steel fingers against my eyes. The one-inch shatterproof is a joke. I could put my left fist through it like a baseball bat through a car window.

“Did I buy you what you needed, Jenny Casey?”

The steel door clangs behind me like a coffin lid coming down.

8:00 A.M., Monday 11 September, 2062

Jefferson Avenue

Hartford Hospital Medical Offices

Hartford, Connecticut

That has to be him. Mitch opened the door of his dented baby-shit-brown Dodge and unfolded, sliding his wallet into his left hand.

“Dr. Mobarak?” Mitch made him at five foot ten, two hundred, late thirties, Middle Eastern, balding on top with good shoes and a gray sportcoat. It was the quizzical expression as he turned that caught Mitch’s attention, however, the first calm look and then a little flash at the back of the eyes, like a man remembering that he was supposed to be scared of something.

“Who are you?” The doctor took a step backward, toward the doorway of the brownstone office building.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mitch saw an alert security guard start forward, and casually extended his hand and flipped the wallet open, showing Mobarak his badge. “Detective Mitch Kozlowski. I need to talk to you about one of your patients.”

“Detective?”

Mitch expected the doc to relax when he saw the ID. Instead, Mobarak glanced over his shoulder at the door, looking for an escape route. Mitch’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch. Interesting. “Hartford P.D. May I have a minute of your time?”

Mobarak gnawed his lip. “I suppose. I’m very busy, of course”—aren’t they always—“but I can certainly make time for Hartford’s finest. Can we keep it brief?”

The security guard got close enough to make out the badge and relaxed incrementally. Mitch shot him a smile and got a slight nod in return. “Absolutely, Dr. Mobarak. And thank you.”

The guard held the door for them as they went inside. Mobarak was a neurologist; Mitch knew that much from Maker’s — from Genevieve’s—medical history. He also knew a lot of other things now, although he couldn’t rightly say he understood half of the medical stuff. He did know that her service record was impressive, however, and he’d used that information to pull up the details on her moment of infamy: the Xu trial.

And that had blown his socks out through the holes in his shoes.

According to the court records, some twenty years before, Corporal Casey had been approached by representatives of a terrorist cell. Acting under orders, she had infiltrated the group and brought down most of the leaders. Two of the medals in her trunk had been awarded for that incident, and Mitch had noticed that the presentation cases were still sealed shut.

Her testimony had been instrumental in obtaining the conviction of their leader, and three consecutive life sentences — despite the tenor of the day. Which, Mitch was learning, had been a bit different than modern times. Despite the teasing he’d given her, Mitch realized he’d never thought of Maker as anything more than an enigmatic old woman with a conscience and a lot of friends. Learning that she was a bonafide war hero — well. He hadn’t yet been born when Genevieve Casey had been in Toronto, recovering from having most of her left arm blown off with a shotgun, serving in whatever capacity she was still capable.

That gave him a little bit of pause if he thought about it hard, so he didn’t. He had a murder to solve. Maybe a few more to prevent. And he was starting to think he had a friend to protect — whether she wanted his help or not.

He held his tongue while Mobarak keyed them into the office, waiting until the door was latched behind them. Then he took a breath, ready for a fight. I’m willing to bet he thinks of her as more than a patient, too. She’s got that — ability to inspire loyalty. I bet she was a damned good sergeant. Mitch knew why that was. Because despite all the doubts of his rational mind, Mitch still suspected that Maker would put herself between him and a bullet.

Bitching the entire time. “Doc, how well do you know Genevieve Casey?”

He wasn’t expecting the doctor to slowly turn around, slipping his key into his pocket, and chuckle. “Somehow, I knew this was going to be about her. What’s she been accused of?”

Mitch shook his head. “It’s not that at all. Doctor… hell.” He wasn’t sure what it was, but something about Mobarak’s half-amused, half-annoyed expression and significant glance at the wall clock put him at ease. “I’m a stupid shit, Doc, and I’m going to trust you. I’m here mostly as a friend of Maker’s — of Casey’s — and only half as a cop. She’s in trouble and I want to find out what sort, so I can back her up. Do you believe me?”

And if I find out I’m wrong, and she had something to do with Mashaya getting shot, I’ll put the bullet in her head myself.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Vanishing without leaving a forwarding address and ditching her friends kind of trouble.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Not… as such.” Mitch shrugged. “She went with somebody. As far as I know there was no threat of force. But that’s not the only kind of duress.”

Mobarak thought about it for a long while before he answered. “I can’t share confidential information with you, of course.”

“Of course,” Mitch answered, and realized that he’d been holding his breath. “Look, Doc. How long have you got to talk?”

Mobarak shrugged. “Half an hour. I’ll make the time. I feel really bad about Jenny. She’s been through a lot, and she’s awful brave about it. It’s unprofessional, but…”

Mitch grinned. “You get attached. Yeah, I know. Me, too. Come on, let’s make some coffee or something.”

“There’s a break room around the corner.” Mobarak waved Mitch ahead. Industrial gray carpeting scuffed under his loafers. The door was locked; Mobarak keyed them in. “Do you take anything in your coffee?”

“Black.”

“You do know Jenny.” Mobarak pressed the button on the coffeemaker. It whirred, weighing and grinding beans. Steam hissed, and the musky, silky aroma filled the room.

“Jenny? That’s what you call her?”

“It’s her name.” The doctor shrugged, pulling plain, too-small ceramic mugs from the cabinet over the sink. “She’s been kind enough to donate a lot of time to my research. We go way back.”

“Huh.” Mitch accepted the mug that the doctor extended to him. It warmed the palms of his hands when he cupped it, and — sudden odd thought — he wondered if Maker ever missed that sensation. “I never would have thought her the sort for charity work. No, actually, I’m full of shit, Doc.”

“What do you mean?” Mobarak lounged against the counter, stirring his own drink with a plastic straw.

“Oh, Maker. I always thought she was an army doc or medic of some kind. She’s always fixing up some kid with a busted finger or something. Amazing she finds the time to keep her business running.”

“She was an EMT,” Mobarak answered. “I suppose I can tell you that. Special forces first. When she returned to active duty, she managed to pull a combat exemption and flew medevac.”

Mitch nodded, smiling. “I just found that out yesterday, actually, along with all sorts of other things I didn’t know. And I’m guessing she’s really sick now because of it, isn’t she?”

The doc took a big breath and held it — confirmation — but shook his head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“All right.” Mitch swirled strong, hot coffee around his mouth, swallowed, and sucked his teeth. Thank God this guy sucks at keeping confidentiality. “Look, do you know anything about her having a sister?”

“No next of kin, as far as I’ve heard. She’s got an emergency contact listed, but it’s a friend in Montreal. An old army buddy, I think.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Huh. Is this only about Jenny, Detective?”

“No.” Mitch turned aside and kicked the leg of the cheap card table shoved into the corner. “I think whatever has her on the run has something to do with my… with a friend of mine, a fellow officer. Who got killed.” He heard the pain in his own voice and despised it for a weakness.

Whatever. Mobarak took a rattling breath. “Look.” The doctor shook his head. “She mentioned you to me. If you’re the same Mitch. And I can’t — I can’t share information with you. I’m already over the line.”

Mitch heard the but in his voice and leaned forward, holding his breath, blinking hard before he glanced back up and caught the doctor’s eye. He nodded, afraid to encourage him.

“But I’ll call that contact. See what I can do about getting her a message. Okay?”

It would have to do.

Thirteen years ago:

in the Heavy Iron

University of Guelph

Tuesday 7 June, 2049

1:00 P.M.

“I am not,” he said at last, “Richard Feynman.”

If the coffee Elspeth was sipping had been real, it would have come out of her nose. “Excuse me?”

The physicist smiled and ran a hand through tousled gray hair. “Because Richard Feynman died fifty-three years ago.”

Her cup rattled on the table when she set it aside. “All right, Dick,” she told him. “You got me. You’re not Feynman. So tell me what the hell you are.”

“I don’t know,” he said carefully.

Elspeth Dunsany grinned hard. “Postulate, Dick.”

His hands tapped his knee, restless, seeking. “I have always held reliance on paranormal explanations to indicate a lazy mind. But I sure as hell feel like Dick Feynman.” He shrugged. “Even though Richard Feynman is dead. So I’m left with interesting gaps in my logic.”

Elspeth raised an eyebrow inside her VR suit. Her image mimicked the motion. “How did you find out that you were dead?” she asked him.

He held out a portfolio. “I found the library. These clippings were in there. Along with more information about my compatriots — and myself — than I ever imagined existed.” He sighed. “It’s a shame that I never got to Tanna-Tuva.”

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Canada

Late morning, Monday 11 September, 2062

Gabe Castaign moved his long-fingered right hand through the three-dimensional interface, directing data streams with thoughtless dexterity. With the left one, not looking, he flipped open a box of mints and picked one out, sucking it off of his fingertips. Elspeth, leaning over his shoulder, caught a sharp scent of wintergreen. “May I have one of those?”

“Sure.” He slid the tin into reach. “My kids made a big deal about how much I smelled like garlic when I got home last night. I figured I’d take pity on you.”

“Kids?” They’d had dinner again the night before — Sunday dinner. Thinking of garlic and indulging, Elspeth took two of the hard little candies, wincing at their strength.

“Girls,” he said with a grin. Still without glancing away from his monitor plate, he touched another icon. The interface plate shimmered, and a hologram of two golden-haired adolescents materialized over the far left corner of the desk. One was perhaps thirteen, the other ten or eleven. The taller girl leaned smiling into her sister, an arm around her shoulders; the younger one seemed taut and focused, leaning toward the camera. The younger had eyes as blue as her father’s. Those of the older were gray-green.

“That’s Leah, after my mom. The younger one’s Genie. She’s named after my wife.”

“How long have you been married?” Elspeth almost laughed out loud at herself, pleased she managed not to let disappointment show in her voice. He did mention that before, but I assumed…

He leaned back. Elspeth smelled warmly spicy aftershave. “We were married four years,” he said. “Leukemia. I raised the girls on my own, more or less.” He glanced away, frowning, and tapped the image down. “Do you have any kids?”

“Married to my work,” she said. “And then I went to jail. Not much conducive.”

A rough-edged silence stretched between them, punctuated by the crunch of Gabe chewing on his breath mint. He broke first. “So how do you get your artificial personalities to be more than really complicated chatter-bots?”

“Turing test stuff?” She shrugged and stepped around the desk, so she could speak to him from the front. And, incidentally, control her urge to lean against his shoulder. “Well, you don’t, really. No, that’s wrong.” Her hands tumbled over one another in midair. “They’re exactly like really complicated chatter-bots. You just keep adding layers and layers of complexity and information and reactions and algorithms until you get to these very complex multifaceted variables.”

“Tolbert equations.”

“Yes. And you give it all the memory you have, and put it into a series of increasingly complex situations.”

“And then?” Gabe’s hands slowly stopped moving, hanging amid the jeweled lights of his interface. His brow furrowed and he looked up at Elspeth, meeting her gaze directly.

“And then one day it either wakes up or it doesn’t.”

“Oh.” He didn’t say anything for a moment, looking back down at his carefully trimmed fingernails. “That’s not mighty scientific, Doc. How do we know that it works?”

“Because it works.” She shrugged. “Sometimes. And why it works sometimes and not others… hell, your guess is as good as mine.”

“What if I pointed a gun at you and told you, ‘I need an answer’? Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

Her hands spread wide. “Dammit, Gabe. I’d say it comes down to will to live.”

“You sound like you have something specific in mind.”

She nodded. “Let’s go for a walk, shall we?”

He grabbed his jacket and followed her out the door.

The lab and offices sat on a little green oblong not far from the University of Toronto, where Elspeth had taught in the days before she found herself in jail. There was a coffee shop on every third corner, and the familiar street names were like a homecoming. She breathed in the late summer air, slinging a sweater retrieved from her office over one shoulder. It had rained overnight, but the humidity was rising with the sun, and the day promised heat.

Gabe was taking his jacket off again. “You know, September, I keep thinking it ought to be cooler.”

She shrugged. “It’s not even really autumn yet.”

“True.” His voice dropped. “Okay, so what was so important you didn’t want to tell me about it indoors?”

“Ah. Well.” She scuffed concrete with the sole of a loafer. “Richard Feynman, frankly.”

“The physicist? One of your original five artificial personalities.”

“Yes.” She reached up to swat at a dangling leaf. He grinned, and she blushed. “More than that.”

“Oh?”

The conversation was interrupted as they arrived at the coffee shop, and Gabe ordered just plain coffee. Elspeth got a cappuccino with extra whipped cream. They took the drinks outside and sat at a blackened aluminum table meant to look like cast iron. Elspeth took a long sip of her drink and watched Gabe fuss with cream and sugar. Is this someone you can trust? Well, you’re not telling him anything Valens doesn’t already suspect. “He’s the one that worked. Developed awareness. Became… a person.”

“Ah hah.” His voice was neutral, interested. “That’s quite a judgment call, Elspeth. What do you base it on?”

She felt gratitude. “Once we were engaging in ontological discussion on the nature of consciousness, it was hard to deny his point. I remember once, I told him that he was nothing but electrical impulses in crystal, and he came back that I was the same thing in meat. It was a hard point to argue.”

“What happened to him?” Gabe leaned forward. “Why aren’t we using those records?”

Elspeth laughed. “That’s why I went to jail, more or less. I wouldn’t give him up.”

“Give him up? To whom?”

She nodded and played with her paper cup. “Valens wanted my work for the army. For the war effort. I deleted my most recent backups. Was going to erase Richard, too.”

“And did you?”

“I…” her voice trailed off. “I gave him an Internet connection and bought him some time. I hope he made it. I don’t know.”

“Ah.”

“The colonel was not amused. Especially after my research partner broke a soldier’s nose with a printer stand.” She grinned at Gabe’s startled laughter. “That was Jack Taylor. I made him turn state’s evidence against me. He had a wife.”

His laughter trailed off. “And then you went to jail for over a decade.”

“Indeed. I never did tell them that I didn’t delete all those records. The ones we’ve been working from are earlier backups.” She pushed her chair back and stood up, picking up her nearly full cup before he could ask the question forming in his eyes.

After so many years, what made you change your mind?

He came around the table to her, leaving his coffee cup behind, and touched hers to the side with two fingers on her wrist. She looked up, startled, into those earnest, cheerful eyes. How does anybody who has been through so much — wars, left widowed with children — smile like that? I wish I had his spirit.

“I admire your guts, Elspeth,” he said. “What do you think about making one of these working dates into a real date, sometime?”

Elspeth turned aside and set her coffee down on the table. Just like Momma, running around with the white boys, she thought, and the thought came very close to making her laugh out loud. Which he would have misunderstood entirely. “Actually, Gabe, I’m not looking for a… dating relationship right now.”

“Ah.” He stepped back and turned away to retrieve his coffee. “Mad at me for asking?”

“Not at all. I’ve got a counterproposal. I’d hate to ruin this friendship with expectations and the dating game foolishness. I’m not in the market for a husband; that’s never been my goal in life.”

He nodded to show that he was listening, and she was kind enough to wait until he swallowed the coffee.

“So how would you feel about a little friendly sex once in a while?”

1200 hours, Monday 11 September, 2062

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, CanadaAdrenaline hits. The bottom drops out of my world.

Gabe Castaign barrels down the corporate-blah hallway, arms spread wide, yelling a welcome like he hasn’t seen me since Christmas. He’s as big as Razorface, maybe bigger, but Gabe is all teddy-bear these days, while Face is a gleaming, well-oiled hunk of muscle. Ignoring Valens and Barb, prisoner’s escorts on either side of me, he’s ready to sweep me into an embrace.

Come to think of it, he hasn’t seen me since Christmas, and he seems not to notice the steaming coffee slopping over his hand. There’s a little dark-haired woman about my age four steps behind him. She balances a paper cup in her hand as well, and I see her startlement in the long moment that stretches while that rivulet of coffee trickles over Gabe’s wrist, slow as honey on an October morning.

This shouldn’t be enough to trigger me.

But my heart

hits the bottom of my chest cavity,

each beat long and slow and painful

as my hands come up and

I sidestep,

pain falling away,

left hand reaching…

Valens’s voice, then, slow as a creaking door: “Castaign, STOP!” and Gabe halts at the snap of the command. I struggle for control, take a step back, between my sister and the doctor, away from Gabe. I gag on bile and go down on one knee in the steep sick aftershock of the adrenaline and the thing I almost did.

Again.

Valens puts a hand on my shoulder, holds the other one out to take the coffee cup away from Castaign. Blond, blue-eyed Gabe Castaign, a man who’ll crawl through a fire for a girl he’s never met, lets hands that could half-encircle a cantaloupe hang limply by his side, looking from me to Valens and back again with an expression like a befuddled bear: intelligent, thoughtful, determined to understand what it is that’s so suddenly changed. I see him taking in the way I’m dressed — plum-colored slacks, sweater without a pill on it, wine-red turtleneck I bought yesterday, downtown. Same old scarred boots, though. I wonder what he thinks of that.

Fury sparks slowly in his eyes, then, and they focus hard on Valens.

“What the hell did you do to her, fils de pute?”

I hold up my hand to stem the flow of that anger, trying to hide how gratified I am by it. Before I can say anything, Valens interposes himself smoothly. “She’s sick, Castaign. That’s why she’s here.”

An unfamiliar voice cuts in. It must be the woman, Gabe’s coworker. “And we talk about her like she’s not here because?…” And I can’t decide if what I feel is gratitude or irritation, but whatever it is, it’s enough to get me hauling myself up straight and not leaning on Valens’s goddamned arm any longer.

“Because I’m the patient,” I answer, and take a step forward to extend my hand to her, not letting any of them see how badly I want to sway on my feet. From the look Gabe gives me, he guesses. My face must be livid and shining with cold sweat between the scars. “Jen Casey.” I can’t remember the last time I introduced myself to somebody by my right name.

“Elspeth Dunsany,” she answers, switching the coffee to her left hand. Her right is warm and dry as her smile. Golden hazel eyes crinkle at the corners, eerily pale in a face darker than my own. She’s compact, vigorous, a little chunky. “Are you a programmer?”

“I’m a pilot,” I answer. “Or at least I was.” Valens clears his throat behind me—shut up, Casey—which makes me curious.

I’ve always been smarter than I look. And Valens wouldn’t have sent Barb half a thousand miles to collect me if he could get the results he wants from whatever teenage soldiers might volunteer for the project just to get the — wetware, Valens called it.

Charming.

So there’s got to be something about me that’s special. Enhanced reflexes? Just bloody not being dead? I know Valens isn’t telling me a third of the truth, but I can deduce that he needs me at least as much as I need him. What’s he going to do if I piss him off? Send me home to die?

What the hell. I have nothing to lose but my life.

I keep talking. “Are you working on the flight simulations for the VR program?”

“Some work in VR, but…” her voice trails off, and I can tell from the direction of her gaze that she’s looking at Valens. Score. “… nothing like that,” she finishes lamely.

Interesting. He has some kind of hold over her, too. Her, me, Gabe. Same old Valens.

Pity for him I ain’t the same old Jenny. The last time we tangled, he used Gabe to control me. I’m willing to bet that’s the whole reason he’s offered Gabe this much-needed job. Which no doubt comes with health insurance that will cover what the government won’t do for Genie. Enzyme therapy is fucking expensive.

I’m not twenty-five anymore, Frederick Valens. And you’d be wise not to forget it.

“Gabe,” I say, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Dinner tonight? Bring the girls, my treat.”

“Sure,” he says, but then he glances over at Elspeth Dunsany almost as if checking to see if she minds. Not quite asking permission — Gabe would never do that. But seeing if maybe he needs to make it up to her later.

Elspeth’s emotion is unreadable behind the grin she gives me. “I hope once you two old friends have caught up, I’ll be invited to the next one.”

And I like her even more for that, dammit, in spite of myself. It’s gracious, and she’s not making a fuss about being gracious. A grown-up woman.

A woman who looks more familiar the more I look at her. “Elspeth Dunsany,” I say, thoughtfully. “Doctor Dunsany?”

She nods. “Yes. That Doctor Dunsany.” Her face falls, as she wouldn’t let it before.

I understand. Oh, Nellie, do I understand. “It’s okay,” I say, and clap her lightly on the shoulder. “I’m that Master Corporal Casey. Nothing like an uncomfortable fifteen minutes of fame, is there? We’ll get along just fine.”

Valens clears his throat again, and as I turn to look at him I’m left with the unmistakable impression that he engineered this little meeting.

Of course he did. He’s Fred Valens, after all.

And as long as he thinks he’s got control of me, I’ve got half a chance of finding out what the hell is going on here, and why my sister put a bullet in the back of Mitch’s girlfriend’s head.

6:45 P.M., Monday 11 September, 2062

Albany Avenue

Hartford, Connecticut

Abandoned North End

Razorface leaned against creaking, smoke-scented black leather and kicked his feet up on the chrome-edged coffee table. He liked his living room. He’d picked out the furniture himself, over Leesie’s protests. As if a woman knew anything about what looked good.

He still didn’t like the dingy unwashed cop perched on the loveseat across from him, but what the hell. You took what you could get.

“So this doc of Maker’s said he get in touch with her? She been calling me, like I asked, but you know she don’t listen to nothing.”

“Yeah. I know. He said he’d try. The prints came back. Hers, and the ones I lifted off the door of that Honda I told you about. Maker — or Casey—”

“Maker.” Irritation filled his mouth like the constant subliminal taste of steel. “What she want to be called.”

“Right. The other woman is her sister, this Barbara Anne Casey the car is registered to. Who works for — are you ready for this?”

“The drug company?” Razorface rolled his massive shoulders back against the sofa, settling in. He could hear Leesie in the kitchen, banging cabinets. She wasn’t pleased about having a cop in the house.

“Close. Unitek corporate headquarters. Hired recently, too.” The cop punctured the air with jabs of his open hand. He leaned forward, picking up a glass of cola he’d been ignoring while the ice melted, and then fiddled with the tubular steel art object on the coffee table for a moment until it lined up neatly with the glass and chrome edge. “I’ve got a theory, Razorface, and I need you to do some checking for me.”

“What sort of checking?”

“Your dealers.”

Razorface leaned forward and rapped on the coffee table. At the sound, Emery peered around the corner from the next room, eyebrows raised questioningly, hand on his lapel. On the job. Razorface waved him down. “I ain’t got no dealers, man. I got boys, but they don’t sell.”

“Yeah, whatever. These guys who were supposedly out of New York. The ones nobody’s ever seen or heard of before?”

“Fuck, yeah. They weren’t from New York.”

The cop cracked his knuckles. “I think they were from Canada. And I bet you know people who could find out for me if they knew the right questions to ask. And maybe had a few holos to show around.” He reached slowly into his breast pocket and drew out a holder with a thick sliver of clear crystal imbedded in it.

“Damn. How you get those?” Despite himself, Razor felt a grin creeping across his face.

“Border patrol,” Mitch answered. “I’m a vice cop. This is the case I’m actually supposed to be working on.”

“Huh. You think we got some gangsters from Canada moving in?” He didn’t move to take it.

Mitch kept the hand extended. “Nah. I think we got a corporation. I think they ditched the Hammers here because it was convenient. Because they wanted a — fucked if I know. I think they did it on purpose, and I think they tainted them on purpose. And I think the company that makes the things is behind it all.”

Razor reached out and took the holo chip in his meaty hand. He laughed, and it turned into a wet cough, which he swallowed. “Why’d a corp be dumping stuff on my street? Not for money. Have to move volume for that.”

“Fuck,” Mitch answered. “Not controlled enough for a trial. Unless there was some reason they needed to — no, that makes no sense. Your guess is as good as mine, Razor, I guess I’m trying to say. Maybe it’s just that nobody gives a fuck what goes on in the North End. Maybe it has something to do with Maker being here.”

The silence stretched heavy. “Mitch.”

“Yeah?”

“You talk about the North End. Why you give a shit about this city, man? White boy from the suburbs…”

“Why do you? You’re a goddamned warlord. Nobody can touch you. You don’t have to do things the way you do. You do right. Most gangsters who get where you are, they go about shit a hell of a lot differently.”

Razorface thought about that for a while before he found the right words. They weren’t the right words, really, but they were the best he could do. “I grew up here, man. Some people, they think I go about things wrong, anyway.”

“You’ve got problems?”

“Damn, where ain’t I got problems? I got a twenty-year-old punk wants me out of a job so he can take my place, I got 20-Love trouble and they’re getting machine guns from somewhere. I got — hell, you don’t care what I’ve got.”

“So you grew up here. So what? So did the punks who shoot the place up, put bullets through little girls on playgrounds.”

“Yeah, well. There’s men don’t provide for their children, too. Mean we all should do whatever the fuck we want?” Razor swung his feet off the coffee table and stood up, heaving his body out of the sofa. It seemed to get harder every year. You’re not that fucking old. But it was a struggle not to breathe hard, and he wasn’t going to let himself look weak in front of a cop.

The air was shit; that was all it was. He turned away from the cop and focused on the wall clock. It was chrome, too, and polished black enamel. Like Razorface. Like everything else in the room.

“No,” the cop said, climbing to his own feet. He finished the soda and set the glass down on a coaster. “No, we probably shouldn’t. You going to look into that shit for me?”

The big gangster studied the wall a little more closely, examining a crack running down it. It’s for Merc. And the other kids. “Fuck, yeah. But people see you coming to the house here they’ll talk, and I don’t need that shit. Next time, you leave me a message on my hip. I meet you downtown or in East Hartford. Not the neighborhood, all right?”

“All right.”

Razorface didn’t turn around until Mitch left. He didn’t want the cop to see the look on his face and think him — sweet.

Once he was sure Mitch was gone, Razor uncurled his fingers from the holo chip thoughtfully and held the little sliver of crystal up to the light.

Canada.

Wish to hell I knew what that meant.

1900 hours, Monday 11 September, 2062

Larry’s West-Side Restaurant

Toronto, Canada

Genie’s grown since Christmas, but maybe not as much as you’d expect of a girl her age. She’s a big-eyed elf, blonde and fine-boned, and her big sister always seems to have her arm around Genie’s shoulders. Leah’s a good kid. Looks just like her mother, with a promise of early beauty and later strength. Genie, on the other hand, has Gabe’s eyes.

I miss Geniveve. It’s a funny thing to say, but I do. She was good for Gabe, and I never had a shot at him anyway. She was a class act.

Gabe has always had a good eye for women. Only ever made one mistake that I know of, and we were both much younger then.

The girls want pizza and garlic bread and Greek salad, so we wind up in a little hole in the wall on the west side of town, gathered around a red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth. The food’s good, all things considered. Genie eats like a pig. She has to, to maintain weight, although Gabe tells me she’s doing better now that she’s back on the gene therapy and the protein repair. Enzyme replacement therapy thins out the mucus in her lungs, but they haven’t nailed down the GI issues yet. She’s skinny and her cheeks are flushed and her skin is too pale, but she’s not coughing and she looks better than she did nine months ago, and that’s something.

I give Gabe’s knee a squeeze under the table when the girls are fighting over the last olive in the bowl. He’s had a lousy decade. Odd how a couple of months in the same burn unit will give you a chance to really bond with somebody. He used to sit by my bed, when I was conscious, his hands and arms swathed in loose gauze to the shoulder, and make terrible bilingual puns to make me forget how he got burned so badly. We talk about small things, the way we used to, and when the girls wander off to play the VR games near the door he leans forward over the table, pouring the last of the beer out of the pitcher and into our glasses. “All right, Maker. Are you going to come clean with me now?”

It’s a joy just to have him nearby and mad at me. “Gabe, do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you?”

He sits back, blinks at me—“Pardon?”—and I make eye contact long enough to shrug.

My boots stick to the floor under the booth where somebody spilled a soda. There’s a squelching sound when I peel them free. “What Valens said is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t begin to cover the territory. I’m sick, yeah. He’s not lying about that. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on I’m not sure about.”

He could even have the conversation bugged. Be tracing either or both of us. Probably is, in fact, so I’m going to say what I expect he wants to hear.

“But?” Gabe is waiting for me to continue, turning a spoon over and over in his hand. He hasn’t looked down.

“But I’m reasonably sure whatever you’re working on for him has to do with what I’m working on for him, and that he has some master plan for you and me.” I can’t explain all my suspicions — like the nasty sneaking thought I have nagging at the back of my brain that Valens set Gabe up to need this job so badly just so that he could offer it to him. And my even weirder suspicion, the one I’d almost laugh at for its narcissism, that for reasons I do not entirely understand, everything that has been happening revolves around me.

On the other hand, it could be a paranoid delusion. I’m given to understand I should be expecting those to start any time now. Fuck. All I ever wanted was a house on the Atlantic coast, maybe a dog or two and a husband who gave backrubs. How the hell I wound up with all this drama — Christ, I’ll never know.

Gabe’s looking at me. He expects me to continue, and I spread my hands wide and reach for another slice of pizza. Buying a little time, I turn my head to check on the girls. Their heads are under the VR helmets, and I can hear Genie laughing from here.

Laughing. Not coughing. Gabe glances over at his daughters and I see him grin. Genie has cystic fibrosis. Something for which there are many, many treatments these days — and still no cure. He looks back at me. “My project is classified,” he says. “I’d love to talk about it, Jen. But.”

“Don’t worry. I know what your project is. In gross detail, anyway. Doctor Dunsany’s lucky she ever saw the light of day again.” Gabe and I both almost went to jail under the Military Powers Act many years ago. Secrets having to do with what I carry under my skin. I’m not at all proud of what I did to keep us both on the outside, and Gabe doesn’t know about most of it.

And never will. But I’m going to count coup on Fred Valens, I swear, if it’s the last thing I do.

He laughs and sips his beer. “I guess it’s pretty obvious, at that. But it doesn’t relate to what you’re here for, from what you said earlier.”

“Could be. Right now, I’m here for extensive surgery. Which I’m assured is grossly noninvasive, whatever the fuck that means. And then I pay for it.”

“Pay for it?” His eyebrows go up. “What does the slippery Colonel Valens want from you?”

The grin takes over my face whether I want it to or not. “He wants to use me as a baseline to calibrate a VR pilot training program. Apparently pushing fifty and with my enhancements in disarray, I’m still faster than the kids he’s dragging out of flight training. That’s classified, too, of course.”

“So why are you telling me?”

The pizza is room temperature, and it still tastes good. Rich as the sensation of homecoming that enfolds me when Gabe reaches out and lays his hand over the leather glove covering my steel hand. I think of Valens’s promise to make me feel again, and my chest goes tight and strange, because I have no intention of taking him up on it. Not that I’m going to let him find that out.

I wish I remembered what it felt like to wake up in the morning and not hurt over every inch of my body. And then there’s ice-cold fear in the pit of my stomach, because I’m remembering my orientation that morning. “Because Valens needs me more than I need him right now, and because I need help.”

“Sure. Anything.” He checks on the girls again, and I wash the pizza — mushrooms, peppers, meatballs — down with a mouthful of beer.

“He wants me back on the narcotics. Under medical supervision. And I’m going to be taking Hyperex again, once the trials start. Not the Hammer, exactly. A new drug. Similar.” Merc, dark grayish purple and gasping, arching like a hooked fish… No. Don’t think about it, Jenny. Or think about it. Think about what it means.

That drug came from here.

“Maker. Jen. Tell me you’re fucking kidding.” He’s not looking at his kids now. The blue eyes bore into mine, anger rising across his face.

“I’m not. I’m told they won’t let me go through the nanosurgery without painkillers. And the research I’ve signed on for… well, they say I’ll need the Hammer for that.”

His voice is bleak. He’s drawing on the tablecloth with the tip of his unused knife. “We went through this once.”

Twice. Well, Gabe only went through it once. I catch myself rubbing the crook of my left arm as if there could still be any scars there. They’re gone, of course. Vanished like my life before the army. I have the sudden unholy urge to go find Chrétien, and it makes me want to turn my head and spit. Because I know I’m going to do it. Tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

“I know. Valens knows…” everything. Well, not quite everything. But enough. “I’m gonna need you at my back.”

He’s unhappy about it. He nods anyway, because he’s my best friend, and we look out for each other.

“Gabe, I have to make a call. Wait for me?”

“Of course.” He knows I’m walking away from the conversation, and he lets me go anyway. Good man.

I use the wireless network to hook into a pay terminal across from the VR games. I promised to call Razorface, and I don’t want to do it on my own HCD. Call it paranoia.

He’s not answering, so I leave a message and hang up. I’m about to step out of the cubbyhole when a voice from my ear clip stops me cold.

“Ms. Casey.” Educated tones, American accent. West Coast? Maybe. Something cosmopolitan, something a bit archaic about the diction, and a subtle edge of excitement.

“Who are you?” And the edge in my voice is something else.

“I’m the ghost of Richard Feynman. And you are in a heck of a lot of trouble.” The screen beside me flickers on, revealing a gray-haired man with a face like a contour map, shifting restlessly as if from foot to foot. He grins. “And I really think we can help each other out.”

I turn back, trying to look as if I had just remembered another call I needed to make. “Ah. I see. And I’m supposed to know who Richard Feynman is because why?”

He laughs, delighted. “You have no idea how refreshing that is to hear. What I am, Ms. Casey, is an artificial intelligence created in the image of a man who has been dead for seventy-four years. I’m a friend of Elspeth Dunsany’s, and I need to get her a message without Colonel Valens finding out about it.”

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Canada

Evening, Monday 11 September, 2062

Elspeth slid a holographic crystal out of the outdated reader and tapped her interface off. She really ought to make a stab at transferring the data to more modern storage devices. I could probably stretch that out over at least three days if I worked at it. Valens is going to get cranky if I keep reviewing the old data. I wonder if he’s figured out that I’m stalling.

I wonder if I can justify starting over from scratch. New personalities. I could pick ones that seem to fit the criteria but are somehow subtly wrong to develop into true AIs.

I could. If I had any real solid clue what it was that made Feynman different from the rest. As it is, I’ve got just as much chance of building Valens his AI by accident as on purpose. And I am not handing the man a slave intelligence. Not if I can help it. She sighed and set the crystal on her desk, scrubbing her hands across her face before she reached for her mug. Cold tea, smelling of ashes. She drank it anyway, and wiped the mug out with her handkerchief.

She set it down once clean and rattled her fingers on the edge of her desk, away from the interface. The memory of Gabe Castaign bending over her outside the coffee shop that morning and dropping half a kiss on the corner of her mouth rose up to trouble her. She wondered if she could call him, and decided there was time enough to worry about it when an old friend hadn’t just blown in from out of town.

“All right,” she said at last, pushing her chair back to stand. “Tomorrow I’ll think about this.”

“Think about what, Doctor Dunsany?”

Elspeth was in the habit of leaving her office door open, because she could. She looked up to see Alberta Holmes, resplendent in gold and navy blue with matching shoes, primly framed in the doorway. “Doctor Holmes. Come in. I was just about to head out for the night.”

“We can talk tomorrow if you prefer. And please, I’m a Ph.D. — I don’t need to be called ‘Doctor’ outside of a classroom.” The Unitek VP came a step farther in.

“I’d rather get it out of the way,” Elspeth said, wincing as she heard the tone of her own voice. She wondered if the visit had something to do with her own brief conversation with Gabe’s friend at lunchtime. “I’m on my way to the hospital.”

“How is your father?” Alberta strolled across the forest-green carpeting.

Elspeth picked up the crystal and went around her desk the opposite way, bending to replace it in its rack. “As well as can be expected,” she answered. “I don’t expect he’ll see Christmas. I appreciate what you’ve done for him, however. And for me.” She was surprised at how level her voice sounded, even to her own ears.

“We — appreciate — the compromises you’re making on our behalf. I’m very glad I caught you here, actually. I’m going over Colonel Valens’s head a bit to tell you this, but I’m in favor of full disclosure. Expecting scientists to work with partial information is, well, silly. And Fred should know that.” Alberta tilted her head inquiringly as Elspeth straightened from replacing Woolf’s crystal in the rack.

Something uncoiled in Elspeth’s belly. As if drawn by an invisible thread, she took a step toward Alberta. “Full disclosure?”

Alberta nodded, pulled a data slice out of her pocket, and pressed it to the reader on Elspeth’s desk. “Here.”

Frowning, Elspeth came forward and placed her thumb on the interface plate, keying her monitor back on. “What is it?”

“Data on the project we need the AIs for. Assuming you can make some for us. By the way, I’d like for you to avoid Casey for a while. She’s not well, as you saw, and she’s under a tremendous amount of emotional stress. We have no objection to you socializing with coworkers outside the program. But — assuming Colonel Valens can do it — we want to see to her medical needs before we start confusing the issue.”

Message received. Stay out of the way until we know where the potential loose cannon is pointing. Elspeth nodded. “As you wish,” and turned to the image projector.

Light flickered for a moment, and an image — a machine? a space station? — resolved itself in the air over Elspeth’s desk. “Lights out,” she said absently, leaning forward. “What’s that supposed to be?” She poked at the hologram with a finger, expecting it to expand to show detail of the section she indicated, where a fat revolving disk connected to an axle or a shaft.

It enlarged, indeed, and also peeled back, showing cross sections. “A spaceship?”

“A starship,” Alberta corrected, smiling. “That’s the Indefatigable. It doesn’t exist.”

“Design schematic? And what’s the difference? Spaceship, starship…”

“What you see before you is a VR mockup. It’s designed so that it simulates the real thing almost exactly, in handling capabilities, schematics, and so forth. You do know about the Chinese colony ships launched over the last seven or ten years?”

“The so-called generation ships? Yes, I do.” Elspeth picked up her teacup again, forgetting it was empty. It would have been hard to miss the portentous announcements, the media frenzy, the images of red flags in serried ranks snapping in a crisp spring breeze. Even in jail. She didn’t raise her eyes from the display. “Between their space program and the military actions… Well. I suppose we should expect an invasion of Russia any day now.”

“Irrelevant, but yes. This ship, the Indefatigable. As I said, it doesn’t really exist.” She reached out and tapped up another display. “Since governments got out of the space game, everything has to pay for itself. Corporations won’t gamble money where there’s no return. But smart companies, forward-looking ones, have always known that sometimes you can’t see where the money is going to come from. And if the Chinese are going to the stars, then we bloody well are, too.”

This image was lower resolution, but Elspeth somehow found her breath caught in her throat. Something about how the hard sunlight of space played along the curve of what must have been an enormous wheel… She set the teacup down on her interface panel, uncaring. It clicked on the cool crystal.

“And the difference between a spaceship and a starship… lies in how far away they’re intended to go,” Alberta continued after a momentary pause. “This one does exist. Did. You’re looking at Le Québec. She was destroyed on her first test flight.”

“Destroyed?” That brought Elspeth’s chin up. She blinked for focus, meeting Alberta’s peculiarly intense eyes.

Alberta smiled. “Pilot error. Pilot inadequacy, more exactly.” Rapidly, she flicked through more images. “This one is the Li Bo, taken by telescope. Also destroyed, as was her predecessor, the Lao Zi.”

“Ah. So. I sense a naming trend — those are Chinese ships?”

“Yes. This is Huang Di. She’ll be ready for launch by the end of the year.”

“How do you know that?”

“We have assets. So do they. We need to be able to test our second ship by New Year’s.”

Elspeth thought about it for a moment only. “You need a better pilot? How fast does that thing go?”

Alberta ignored the question. “We visualize a tailored-human/AI team. We’ll use drugs and nano-and biotherapies to improve the human pilot’s response times, although there are some medical barriers to that. The AI, of course, can respond at processor speeds, but we’d like to keep a human involved because of judgment calls. And also, well, there’s a trust issue.”

Elspeth nodded. I’d rather know my ship was being flown by a person than by a computer. Does that make me a racist? “You must be talking about a drive that will move a ship at near C. Given how uncluttered space is.”

“Actually, it’s capable of moving at an uncalculated rate we suspect to be exponentially higher than the speed of light.”

Elspeth blinked. “How?”

And Alberta grinned. “There’s one of the many problems. We don’t know.”

Sins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than lust.

— Piers Paul Read

2113 hours, Monday 11 September, 2062

Bloor Street West

Toronto, Ontario

I sit on the beige-carpeted floor of Gabe’s apartment with a tweedy couch cushion under my butt, watching cartoons and drinking Irish coffee out of a speckled stoneware mug. I’m mulling over — again — what “the ghost of Richard Feynman” told me today when Gabe strolls into the living room.

“What’s on?”

“Hannah and Tucker.”

“Genie loves that one. Especially the flying horse.” He sits down one cushion to the left and behind me, leaning forward to put his own coffee cup on the floor.

“Girls in bed?”

“Yeah.”

I set my mug aside. He’s reaching out to lay a hand on my shoulder when I lean forward and push myself to my feet, pretending not to notice. Going into the kitchen, I call back over my shoulder, “Ice cream?” even though it’s cold and the windows are open. We bought some on the way back from the restaurant.

“No thanks.”

When I come back, he’s pulled the cushion so it rests between his feet. I give him a dubious look. “I’m too old for high school seductions, Gabe.” It doesn’t come out with the wry tone I want it to have.

He shows me the upturned palm of his hand. “Sit, get neck rubbed, do not complain.”

“Ah.” I sit. Gabe can actually touch my back without my wanting to spin around and put my left hand through his face. Well, except for this morning. It’s a thought I don’t need. I push it back.

Very few other people can touch me like that. “I’ve got a T-shirt on.”

“Take off the sweater, then.”

I set the ice cream down and take a long sip of my coffee first, not sure if I wish I had put more alcohol in it or less. Pathetic, Jenny. There are sixteen-year-old girls less pathetic than you. He notices my gooseflesh in the chilly room, and hands me the afghan from the back of the sofa. It’s blue and white, a tapestry of cats.

Pathetic.

Well, nothing new there. I ball the sweater up and throw it into the corner. Gabe swills coffee and sets the mug aside. He chafes his hands together until I can feel the friction heat and then lays them on my neck.

I gasp. His hands are warm as towels heated in the microwave, and they seem to know and find every knot and bit of pain. “Have you been doing your physical therapy?”

“Sort of.” He touches the outline of the nanoprocessor that links into my cervical vertebrae, reminding himself of where plastic ends and Jenny begins.

“You need to take the arm off at night, Maker.”

“I take it off when I sleep.” I hate taking it off. It’s like a reminder that it’s not really part of me, and I can’t stand that. It took me enough time to stop wanting to skin myself to get the metal and plastic out from under.

There’s low concern in his voice again when he continues. “How are you dealing with seeing Barb again? That was a shock, the two of you standing side by side…”

My breath comes harsher, and I can tell he feels the shifting tension in my back. His touch is light at first and then firmer as he leans into the knotted muscles. I have a pretty good pain threshold. He knows where it is, and he pushes it, but he never makes me squeal.

“I dunno, Gabe. I… hell. You know I still think it’s her fault Nell died, no matter what she says. No matter what she thinks she got away with.”

“Yes.” He strokes the back of my neck, fingers through my hair.

I keep thinking about everything Richard told me. Everything I wish I could be telling Gabe. “And she’s smart. She’s always been the smartest one.”

“Thing with people like that, is this: they’re smart, sure. But they get to thinking they’re smarter than anybody else. And somebody catches up to them eventually.”

It hasn’t happened yet. But his touch is soothing, and I don’t say anything else, just then. Halfway through, he gets up and brings me a glass of water and more bourbon, and starts in again. The ice cream is a syrupy puddle in the bottom of a glass bowl. I didn’t want it anyway.

Finally, he sighs, leans back, and cracks his knuckles. “Any better?”

I’m floating. I don’t dare move, because I know that as soon as I do, the pain will start again. Pain is a funny thing. Once you live with it a little while, you forget it’s there. You just feel tired and out of sorts, but you don’t really notice anymore and you don’t really know why. Pain is boring. And then the cessation of it comes as an epiphany, almost stunning — like falling in love.

Gabriel Castaign saved my life. He saved my soul. He knows the single worst thing I ever did in my life and he takes care of me anyway, even though he doesn’t know I did it for him.

“Mon Ange,” I say — mean old nickname, though not as bad as the pun he hanged on me — letting my head droop low, stretching my neck. “Thank you.”

He reaches out and runs his fingers through my hair, the same way he tousles his children’s. My heart squeezes tight in my chest. I’ve had too much to drink, and too many surprises, and it’s a long bittersweet unguarded moment. There are big threats for facing. Tomorrow. Richard saying, “I need you, Ms. Casey. My friend is in trouble, and you’re a woman of honor.”

And Valens. Vegetative state. Could be, rabbit. Could be.

Then words are out of my mouth before I have a chance to think about them. “I always wanted to tell you something.”

My throat closes up behind like the proverbial barn door. His hand falls still in my hair, and I know that everything — decades of everything — was in my voice. “Jen,” he says on a breath. “Shit. Jenny. I know.”

Slowly, carefully, I turn my head to look at him out of the corner of my good eye. Sweat prickles across my skin. He’s regarding me out of eyes like blue arctic water, two days’ growth of beard shading the lower half of his face. He never would have gotten that scruffy back in the old days. “What do you know, Gabe?”

A long sigh. “I know what you want to tell me. I’ve known for years.” His hand slides down the back of my neck to rest on my shoulder. My skin tingles under his touch.

“You said I was your best friend. Kiss of death.”

He breathes in and out: thoughtful. “I was twenty-eight. What does anybody know at twenty-eight? And you didn’t seem to want me to know.”

“I didn’t.”

“I figured you had your reasons. So why tell me now?”

I sigh and roll my shoulders forward and back, feeling the first twinge of returning discomfort. “Because I’m an idiot and I keep thinking life is like a drama and if I’m going to die beautifully — or pathetically, for that matter — I want…” Dig a little deeper, Jenny. I wish I’d stopped a few words sooner. I wish I hadn’t opened my mouth up at all.

“Are you going to hold the way we met against me forever?” There’s low humor in his voice, painful to hear, almost inaudible under the tinny music from the holopad.

“Did I ever tell you I almost got married once?” I turn farther, holding the eye contact even though it hurts my neck to twist that far.

His hands are gentle on my shoulders as he bends me away and coaxes me to settle back between his knees again. I have no idea why I’m doing as he’s urging me, but it feels good. He smoothes my hair again and I lean on his knee, hiding the scarred side of my face against his jeans. I’m starting to shiver, dammit, and I can’t stand it. Can’t stand his pity, and can’t make myself pull away from the careful pressure of his hands.

“You didn’t. Who to?”

I close my eyes. “I was nineteen. Carlos Conseca, his name was. I gave him his ring back when they shipped me out to South Africa. He’s still alive, as far as I know.”

“You ever think of looking him up?”

My spine crackles when I roll my shoulders back. “I’d rather let him keep his illusions.”

“Jenny,” he says. He disentangles himself and slides down onto the floor beside my sofa cushion, letting his right arm fall around my shoulders. Despite myself, I lean into the caress. “Look, I know why you never said anything when we were in the service, and I appreciate it. Or when I was married. What about afterward?”

The speechlessness stretches, elastic, images flickering over the holopad across the room. I watch the little winged red horse leap boldly off a cliff, rising into flight over our heads, the hologram filling the room. I reach for the remote and mute the sound of wingbeats.

“I couldn’t handle the rejection, Gabe.”

“And you were sure you’d be rejected?”

I shrug, an attempt at callousness wasted on Gabe’s warm, massive presence. “I know what I look like.”

“Idiot.” He kisses the top of my head. He smells of coffee and sugar; it catches in my throat like a hook. His hand is under my chin, and he lifts my mouth to his…

That’s something else about the enhancements I carry. Feedback.

His lips brush mine, petal-soft, contrast to the roughness of his beard, and a wave of euphoria starts to rise. I suck on a long, rattling breath, flush-heat racing through me. God, how long has it been since I kissed anybody? My body tautens, one hand and then the other coming up to braid in his curls, and he leans into me as subtle fire quickens in my belly and tingles through the whole of my body, pooling here and there. Just a kiss, a little kiss, lips barely parted and his breath riding mine, and I’m shivering, weak with desire. The tension in him, the whisper of a purr tells me my response surprises and excites him. But as he moves to pull me closer, I turn into him, drawing my knees up, then bury my face in his shoulder.

“Mon ange,” I mumble, sick with old, clotted terror. “I can’t.”

“Oh?”

The words come out in little hitching phrases. It takes me a long while to get them organized. “Not right now. Not when — I could be dying.” Not when I don’t know what I’m being manipulated into. Not when you could be used against me. Again. “I can’t do that to you.” Or the girls. Not after Geniveve. “Because I’m not going to be happy with just a roll in the hay, you know.”

“Je sais.” Dead serious around a smile.

“And what about — Elspeth?”

A smile that widens and warms. “Nous sommes tous adultes, Genevieve. Les antiquités fichues, en fait. Je pense qu’elle ne soignera pas.”

“Je ne sais pas. Tu sait que je t’aime.” The look in my eyes has to tell him everything.

“Oui. Je sais cela aussi.”

“Gabe.” So many things I could say, and I can’t bear to lie to him. Not again. Not tonight. “I’m too scared.”

And he scrubs my hair forward, into my eyes, before leaning forward to pick up the remote still lying by my hand and turn the sound on the animation back on. “Nous parlerons de ceci encore quelque temps, Jenny Casey.” We’ll talk about this again sometime. Wry tone, softening, and mon Dieu, I love this man. “Ball’s in your court now.”

If I live that long. Sometimes, I’m smart enough to keep my mouth shut.

Sometimes.

But there is joy in Mudville, as he sits up with me most of the night. We watch children’s programming, where the world is wholesome and bright and the good guys win in the end.

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

— Henry Louis Mencken

0900 hours, Wednesday 13 September, 2062

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Valens’s gloved hands brush my hair forward, gentle and sure as a lover’s. And I am not thinking about Gabe. Not. Thinking about Gabe. “Will you put me in touch with the doc who’s been doing your follow-up, Casey?”

“If you insist. What are we doing today, Fred?” He’s much more fastidious than Simon. I lie near-naked under the sterile drape, facedown on a table, and the room is a cold, antiseptic operating theater. Observers range in the gallery above, but I try not to let it bother me. It’s not like it’s the first time. “Nice facilities you have here.”

“Thanks. Today we’re just introducing you to the VR setup with your current equipment. We’re going to run some tests, see what the functionality is, see how comfortable we can get you with operating in a VR environment. We’re not even going to use a real vehicle today, or the drugs. You’ll be flying the HMCSS Indefatigable.”

Since when do aircraft have names? “What’s that?”

Amusement colors his voice. “A virtual spaceship. Supposed to be very challenging to fly. It’s got a tendency to smack into planets — or any sufficiently massive object nearby. As if attracted to them, actually.”

“Whose lame-ass idea was that?”

“I believe it’s intended to be a game.”

“Teenagers. Got to make everything harder than it needs to be.”

“I’ve got kids of my own, and yes, I think that probably covers it.” There’s a hesitance in his voice. I wonder what he isn’t telling me. “We’ll sedate you once you’re hooked in, paralyze the voluntary muscles. Like REM sleep.”

“I’ve done some work in VR, actually.”

“I know. That’s one of the ways we tracked you to Connecticut.”

“What?” There’s a jolt, sharp and sudden, as the adrenaline of fury dumps into my body.

In the jump into combat time, I hear my heartbeat slowing. To Valens, it accelerates — and he murmurs to the anesthesiologist, who makes a minor adjustment. Increasing the sedative drip, no doubt. It works. “Calm down, Jenny.”

Simon, you son of a bitch… no, wait. If he’d been talking to Valens behind my back, Valens wouldn’t need me to release my medical records. If he were that unethical, Simon would just do it.

“I’m calm,” and it’s grit between my teeth, but I get it spat out. “How do you know about that?”

“Oh, the researcher you were working with published some papers on you. Name changed, of course, and some of the personal details. But I knew who it had to be. He wouldn’t talk to me when I tried to contact him about it.”

“Ah.” I see. And the shit of it is, Simon probably thought he was protecting confidentiality. Not really unethical. Really. And it explained why he had been so rabbity during that last discussion.

Just exactly not what I asked him to do. The temptation must have been unbearable. But we’re going to have a long, stern discussion after I get back to Hartford.

If I get back to Hartford.

My mind is alert, but my body feels numb, tingling. I cannot feel my right hand, now, either, or the pinch of the IV site. My lips prickle and panic sings at the bottom of my belly, but I force myself to stillness.

Like outwaiting the enemy. The first to move is often the one to die.

There’s a tug and a sting as Valens seats the lower cord. He’s not as good at it as Simon. Or maybe not as gentle. I couldn’t raise my head from the cradle if I tried, but I hear the others in the theater moving behind Valens. “With the patient’s voluntary muscles relaxed,” he says, and I know he’s talking to the observers, “her neural impulses will be translated by the computer, resulting in normal movement of her icon through a virtual space. The effect is much more realistic than the VR suits and goggles most of you will be familiar with. And that realism is the basis of the technology we are pioneering here. In a moment, you’ll be directed down the hall to a holotheater. The monitors will transmit images of everything Master Warrant Officer Casey experiences once the linkage is complete.”

The observers are suits, not the doctors and students I once was used to seeing. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Valens finishes his lecture and turns his attention back to me. My body numbs as he finishes the connection and lifts his hands. “All right, Casey?”

“Fine,” I mumble. He dismisses the observers. For a moment, I close my eyes, relishing a cheerful recollection of the sensation of Valens’s shoulder breaking under a poorly aimed punch. I really wish I’d gotten to hit him twice.

“Comfortable?”

“Couldn’t tell if I wasn’t, Fred.”

He chuckles. “I want you to put some thought into your new arm, by the way. Since you won’t be taking it into combat, there’s no reason not to lay pseudoskin over it and match your complexion. More or less. It’ll still look a little off, of course.”

I think about it for a minute. Imagine something that might pass for a normal hand. From a distance. From six feet. “No.”

“No?”

I tell myself I have no intention of going through with the surgery. That I am arguing to string him along, stretch things out. Once I’ve got proof that Valens and Barb are somehow linked to Mashaya Duclose’s death, I can count coup, show brave, pay my debts. Get myself killed in the process or go home and die in peace.

I tell myself all that. Except. Gabe kissed me, damn him. “Steel. I want it the same as the old one. Armored.”

“Yes. We put the ‘skin’ over the armor. That’s what gives you the fingertip sensitivity. Fingertip, flat palm, back of the hand. Process developed by a Dr. Evans in the U.S. The arm itself stays numb, unfortunately. We’d overload your nervous system if we tried full-surface tactile. We can’t match the delicacy of the electrical impulses the human nervous system uses. Yet.” He turns and steps toward the door. “See you in cyberspace, Casey.”

I raise my voice with an effort. “I want steel, Valens. Make the skin transparent if you have to.” Why are you arguing? Why do you care?

I can see his booties, the bottom of his scrubs. And Valens strolls two more steps, stops, turns back to me, and draws a slow breath. “If that’s what it takes, then. That’s what we’ll do.”

I close my eyes as he walks through the door. The normal noises of the operating room resume, and someone — nurse, assisting physician, technician — asks me, “All set, Ms. Casey?”

“Locked and loaded,” I answer, numb on the padded table, and then even that falls away.

Nowhere and neverwhen

Stars.

Stars, and cold stillness like frost crystallizing on motionless skin. Heat like an iron stroked down my body on the opposite side. Light that should be blinding-bright, eye searing, casts white-sharp edges over a tumbling stone hanging either below or above; I’m not sure which.

Farther, a rustred curve, and I know where I am. Mother fucker. That’s Mars.

Which is when I realize:

I’m not flying the spaceship.

I am the spaceship.

“Valens, you cocksucker, you could have warned me.” I yelp out loud, and I’m surprised when I hear my own voice, clear and strangely external, as if recorded and played back.

And then I hear him laughing in my ear, self-satisfied as a cat. “I thought it would be more fun as a surprise. Pretty good, isn’t it?”

And it is. It is. I stretch and wriggle into the skin of the ship, the Indefatigable, Valens called it. Her. I can’t think of her as an object. Not when I’m living inside her, sailing serenely along in areosynchronous orbit. I spend a long moment realizing that there’s facility built into this beast for all the functions you would expect of a real space cruiser — some back-brain fraction of my awareness is tracking life support, hull integrity, the tickle of the solar wind on the edges of my furled solar sails. Diagnostics read full capability, and it reaches my conscious mind as an intoxicating euphoria, a spring-day desire to leap over fences.

“Valens, I’m going to kick this thing into gear.”

“Gently, Casey,” he offers. “Use the sails at first. And the attitude rockets. You want to nudge yourself higher before you hit the stardrive. Oh, and you don’t want to be pointing at the sun when you do it.”

Stardrive? “Wilco.” It’s incredible. Peaceful. There’s no pain, and not a scrap of fear. The solar sails unfurl like the wings of a swan, and I boost and turn myself, back to the solar wind that feels more like a gale. It’s hours — days — but they go by like time spent lying in bed on Sunday with a lover.

“Valens, aren’t your suits getting bored out there?”

“Actually, we’re altering your time sense a bit. We’ve been watching for fifteen minutes.”

“Oh.” That freaks me out; my course wobbles. I correct. It’s easier than learning to walk. Again.

I reach for cynicism, for the armor of biting wit and savage dismissal. It’s not there, not hanging in the closet where it should be, next to my raincoat. There’s nothing but the stars, and an old slow dull ache inside me like coming home.

“Status, Casey?”

“I can’t feel Mars tugging on my boots anymore.”

“Stow the sails.”

“Check.” Like furling wings, they slither into the embrace of my body. I — the Indefatigable—am shaped rather like a doughnut stuck halfway down a carving fork. The tines would point backward. The doughnut spins. Silly-looking thing.

“Sails stowed, Colonel.”

“Widen the focus on your navigation charts?”

“Got ’em.”

“You’re going perpendicular to the plane of the elliptic. Do you know what that means?”

Supercilious son of a bitch. “Up.” Brief silence. I picture the scene in the holotheater as he pauses and mutes what I can hear. I envision him punctuating his lecture with a jabbing finger, as he informs his audience that I’ve never been exposed to the software before today, that this is a dry run to show what a trained pilot can do even with unfamiliar tech — tech that can save lives, when applied to the birds and beasts of mechanized war. He’ll say just that. Save lives.

His voice comes back, then. “Roger that, Casey. We’ve put you back on real time. What’s going to happen now is that you’re going to take that baby up, out of the solar system. There’s a course plotted. It’ll take you to Alpha Centauri, which is a nearby star. There will be unexpected obstacles along the way… Dark matter, planetesimals. Virtually speaking, your craft is going to be moving faster than the speed of light, which means you’ll have no reliable visual input. Copy?”

“Copy. So how am I supposed to steer this thing, sir?” And I want to bite my tongue as soon as I’ve said it, imagining the satisfied expression on his face. Sir. You can take the girl out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the girl.

“You should be able to feel what’s coming at you. It’s a function of the field the drive produces. We’ve got no justification for how it works, so don’t trouble yourself with that. It’s magictech, make-believe. Just run with it.”

Whatever. “Roger. How large an object do I worry about?”

“The drive field atomizes anything under about half a meter that it brushes up against. I would say, be on the safe side. Dodge anything bigger than a basketball. There’s not much out there.”

“Roger. Any last words?”

“Godspeed, Casey.”

And what a damned funny thing to say. “On my way, Fred.”

I point my nose up, and floor it.

And hell if he isn’t right. I’m flying blind, and it’s like water-skiing in the dark. I can feel the shape of space like a pressure against my skin. No — more like a pressure a few feet away from my skin. I get a taste of it at first, as the flickering aura of the drives brushes and consumes little things, barely noticeable things. Like running in a dust storm.

And then there’s a bigger piece, and I take evasive action, surprised by how fast I have to be on it and how slippery the bits of space garbage prove. The big ship flails a bit, more nimble than it has any right to be, and it’s all riding invisible swells like making love in a pitch-black room, all guesswork and intuition and trying not to poke anybody in the eye and damn, it’s hard.

I’m holding it together pretty good until a dark body more massive than Mercury pops up a parsec or two to starboard, and the HMCSS Indefatigable is careening in a direction I didn’t send her and I’m under her, out of control as wrestling a goddamned pig on ice, slick-sliding sideways, fragile frame of the ship shredding like twisted straw as I fight her. Going into the ditch, and dammit, it’s just a little bitty lump of rock and the damned thing is sucking me in like a fucking black hole and then it’s not a starship and a starless night, it’s a rolling A.P.C., treads blown off, metal crushing under its own weight and nothing to do but hang on to the yoke like I could do any good at all and

Boom.

The rest is silence. For ten seconds, maybe fifteen. And then I’m back in my aching old body, shaking hard with reaction, and a tech I can’t see is pulling the wires out of my processors and another one is holding my right hand, squeezing hard as sensation returns.

“Damn,” she says, whoever she is. “That was some nice flying, Master Warrant. You’re the first one I’ve seen get that far on the first try.”

Which makes me wonder how many dry runs there have been. And why they have us flying a starship when we’re supposed to be testing out tanks, for crying out loud.

I sit up, too proud to scrub the tears off my cheeks, feeling the loss of that ship—just a toy, Jenny, dammit—like my damned arm has been blown off all over again.

3:45 P.M., Wednesday 13 September, 2062

Hartford, Connecticut

Downtown

Mitch leaned back in the passenger seat of Razorface’s jet-black, silver-detailed Cadillac and unclipped his HCD from his belt. He accepted the call flashing at the edge of his contact. “Afternoon, Doc.”

“Detective Kozlowski?”

“Please, Doctor Mobarak. Just call me Mitch.” Because, for one thing, I’m suspended without pay as of this morning.

“Then call me Simon. I’ve spoken with Mr. Castaign, Jenny’s friend. Can we meet?”

Mitch looked over at Razorface. They were stopped in traffic on the Founder’s Bridge over the Connecticut River. Razor was leaning out the driver’s window, watching the girls walk by on the footbridge that ran from East Hartford to downtown. They turned around, giggling at the shining black car with the chromed cattle-catcher embracing the grille. Mitch decided not to ask how often Razorface felt the need to ram things. “Razor.”

“Yah?”

“Wanna swing by the hospital?”

The big gangster nodded, rubbing his jaw.

“Simon. We’ll be there in less than twenty minutes, assuming we ever get off this bridge. Want to meet in the caf?”

Twenty-three minutes later by his heads-up, Mitch strolled into the Hartford Hospital cafeteria alongside Razorface; they met Simon Mobarak standing next to a potted ficus near the long bank of windows. “Traffic?”

“The usual,” Mitch answered. “Simon, this is Razorface. Razor, Doctor Simon Mobarak.”

It was a measure, Mitch thought, of how subdued Razorface was that he didn’t bother trying to intimidate the smaller man with his namesake grin. Instead, he shook Mobarak’s hand and followed as the doctor led them to an out of the way table in the corner by the conference rooms. Mitch recognized Mobarak’s placid face and reserved manner as the professional stillness associated with bad news, and silently braced himself.

When they were sitting, Mobarak leaned forward and spoke without preamble. “I’ve gotten in touch with Gabe Castaign, Jenny’s friend in Montreal. Except he’s in Toronto now, and he’s seen her.”

“How she doing?” Razor leaned forward, elbows on the table. Mobarak met the gangster’s gaze, in his element, refusing to be pressured.

“Poorly. Castaign says she’s agreed to some surgery that may correct problems with her implants. In handling her follow-up care, I only recently became aware that there might be a problem, and I planned to complete some research and get my ducks in a row before I sat down to hash out a course of treatment with her. She seems to have jumped the gun a bit.”

“A bit,” Mitch cut in. “This surgery you’re talking about. It’s — what, replacing some worn-out hardware?”

“According to Castaign, it’s a total refit. Ground up, with new technology, and it could kill her. Apparently she’s back under the care of the surgeon who did the original work. A guy called Valens”—Razor sucked in a ragged breath—“you’ve heard of him?”

“Heard Maker say the name once or twice. Not real kindly.”

“I know. He apparently sent her sister down here to collect her — well, this is pretty irrelevant stuff. Anyway, Castaign sounds worried sick. I’m actually going to message Jenny and see if I can twist her arm into letting me be present for her surgery and recovery.”

“Lot of time away from your practice, Doc.” Mitch cast a longing glance the length of the cafeteria, toward the gleaming silver coffee machines. He didn’t miss the complexity of emotions that crossed Mobarak’s face, though. Aha. Someone has an unprofessional attachment to a certain patient, or I miss my guess entirely.

“My copractitioners can cover for me. God knows I have the time coming, and it’s a brand-new technique I may not get an opportunity to see again anytime soon.”

“Sure thing, Doc. Look—” but Razorface stopped him with a big hand on his wrist.

“You gonna see Maker?” the gangster interrupted.

“I’m going to try.”

“Give her this.” Razorface slid a long olive green plastic box across the table. Mobarak took it from his hand, lifted it up. “What’s in it?”

“Hide it when you cross the border, man,” Razorface said. “Something from her shop. I expect she gonna want it.” He avoided Mitch’s eyes.

Mitch had a pretty good guess what was in that box. Damn. Right out from under my nose. And if I ever wondered how this man rules half a fucking city by the strength of his word, I know the answer now.

Later, on the sidewalk outside the unmistakable white brick towers of the hospital, Razorface turned as if to walk away from Mitch without speaking. The cop dogged his heels. “Razor.”

“What?”

“That was a nice gesture back there.”

“Figured you’d be pretty pissed off about it, is all. Since you said don’t touch it.”

“Nah.”

Razorface didn’t stop, but he hesitated long enough for Mitch to fall into step. He didn’t say anything, either.

“Where you going?”

“I got a word, piggy. Word in my ear about a witness. Going to go get my boys now, go pay a visit. Might mean doing some things a cop wouldn’t want to know about, is all.”

“Razor.” Mitch thought about laying a hand on the big man’s sleeve and decided he’d rather keep it. “I’m not a cop anymore, man. Not once the review board finishes with me. I blew it.”

“Wondered when the fuck you were gonna get round to telling me that.” The hulking warlord stopped midstride, fluidly turned, and looked down at Mitch. “You don’t mind getting killed young, I got a use for you.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Razor?”

“You want a fucking job or what?”

No different than waiting for the SWAT team, really, Mitch thought later that night, ear tuned for the sound of gunfire. They sat in Razor’s Cadillac in an alley near a specific house in New Britain, so far outside Razorface’s territory that his boys weren’t even wearing their colors.

Mitch checked his heads-up for the thirtieth time — still only a little past one — and sighed. Razorface reached out and punched him in the shoulder. “They can’t tell us anything dead.”

“How come you drive your own car, Razor?”

“I like to. How come you talk so fucking much?”

“I suck at waiting.”

“Learn.” Razorface shifted in his chair, clinking earrings shining in the darkness like a pirate’s. He reached up and touched a gold ear clip nestled in among them, opened his door. “Moving.”

“Copy.” Mitch came out the passenger side low, following the leather-jacketed ghost that seemed to vanish into the dimness. He palmed a nine millimeter that wasn’t the gun he usually carried and thumbed the safety off, checking the weight of three extra clips swinging in his jacket pocket. “Didn’t hear any shots.”

Razorface didn’t answer. Shadowy figures surrounded them as they moved around the house to the back. Mitch passed a pair of Hammerheads watching the front door from outside the gleam of a single streetlight. Razorface nodded to them as he passed. Mitch stepped wide around the red puddle seeping from the corpse at their feet. Knife. Of course, how silly of me. You’re in it now, Mitchy, he thought, and Mashaya. He crouched low as a staccato pattering of bullets finally shattered windows on the second story. Outbound. More gunfire followed, in earnest, and Razorface stuck tighter to the shadows.

Broken glass tinkled away from his boot as he slipped through uncut grass. The rear door stood open, spilling a wedge of light across the yard, and Razorface came up on it at an angle. A dozen gangsters—kids, teenagers—surrounded him and Mitch. One of the kids moved toward the door in the darkness, and Razor stopped him with an outstretched hand.

“After me,” he hissed, which Mitch thought was pretty ballsy — even if there were Hammerheads in the house already. From the grin on the warlord’s face, Mitch thought the bravado was intentional — the old cock fluffing his tail feathers in front of the chicks. What a politician he would have made.

Mitch followed Razorface into the kitchen. Blood on stained linoleum, roach-crawling dishes stacked in the basin. A lace curtain hung over the sink, shredded by a shotgun blast. There was evidence of money spent in the place, but no care taken of it. Razorface stepped over three bodies along the way, frowning at the second one. It was one of his boys.

Mitch stepped over the body, too, careful not to leave footprints in the blood. We’re shedding trace evidence all over this place. Not that there was likely to be much investigation of this. Another gangland killing. I’m just seeing this one from the inside.

Razorface’s boys had the prisoner seated in a kitchen chair in the dining room, well back from the windows and covered by two gunmen. Mitch swung out to the gangster’s left as he crossed the red-sticky carpeting, frowning as he recognized the slender, broken-nosed man under guard, hands bound behind him. A Latin King, a man with some clout outside of Razorface’s domain. Rinaldo Garcia.

“Garcia,” Razorface said. “Ronny. Hello, man.”

Mitch noticed a blackened eye, noticed the way Garcia’s face blanched when Razorface favored him with a smile that seemed to stretch from ear to ear. “Razor,” Garcia started, “I dunno what you here for, but I ain’t been nowhere near your turf.”

“Uh-huh. I got some pictures for you to look at, Ronnie. I hear one of your boys was driving for somebody in Hartford a few weeks back. I want to know if you recognize these people—” He slid the data slice Mitch had given him out of a jacket pocket and keyed it on, displaying the holos of the suspected Canadian couriers. “And I want a description of the gunman who shot my girl Mashaya Duclose.”

Leather creaking, Razorface leaned over the Latin King. Garcia flinched away. “I don’t know nothing, man.”

“Uh. Ain’t what I heard.” Mitch thought Razor would get in the other man’s face, but instead he spun on the ball of his foot and ambled away. He hesitated, considering the glass-topped dining table, and then looked back at Garcia. Razorface sighed. “Ronny. I could kick this table over, get all dramatic. I could get your bitch in here and work her over until she pukes blood.” He shrugged, spreading big hands.

The tickle of unease in Mitch’s gut rose up, fresh as a flooding river. “Razorface.”

“Shut up, piggy.”

Mitch bit his lip. Is this bad cop worse cop? Or is he really going to beat the stuffing out of some sixteen-year-old girl who got caught in the wrong man’s bed? I’d have to put a bullet in him, and he knows it.

As if reading his thoughts, Razorface turned to hide his face from Garcia and skated Mitch a wink. Mitch hid a quick grin, still wondering. And why can I trust him?

Razorface turned back to his victim. “Fuck, man, you ain’t giving me a choice. You gotta do this for me, or you know what I have to do. I can’t be getting no reputation for going sweet in my old age.”

“Razorface,” Garcia put in. “Man, you in a world of hurt. You know your little kingdom coming down around your ears. Any minute, man.”

“Razor,” Mitch said again, a little louder this time. Is it really that bad? He got a broadside look at Razorface’s expression. Shit. It is.

A glare was his only answer, and Razorface kept talking to the damp-skinned Garcia. “You tell me about this gunman, Ronny. You look at these pictures.” He leaned down, steel teeth all but brushing Garcia’s ear. “Or I’m gonna have to start biting fingers off until you do.”

Mitch swallowed hard and took a step forward.

“Shit, Razor, I don’t know nothing, I swear!”

Mitch flinched from the scream as Razorface reached down and snapped Garcia’s pinky. “Lie to me again, you know what happens.” He glanced up, gave Mitch a smile and a nod. “You wanna wait outside, Detective?”

Please, God, let this be psychology, Mitch pleaded silently. What have I gotten into? Goddamn.

He turned and went outside.

Fifteen minutes later, Razorface joined him on the back porch, where he stood chainsmoking in the darkness. “It was Maker’s sister, piggy,” he said without preamble. “She’s the one put the bullet in Mashaya, and she’s the one working with the crew who gave Ronny and his boys the Hammers.”

“What’d you have to do to get that?” Mitch asked, more because he felt he should face up to it than because he wanted to know.

“Broke four fingers and his foot,” Razorface answered. He pulled out a package of cigarettes and shook one out. Mitch already had a lighter in his hand, and offered it to Razorface. Coals flared in the darkness and pale, acrid smoke coiled upward.

“Would you really have bitten his fingers off?”

“Shit, man,” Razorface answered. “Can’t say. Never had to go that far yet. Can’t let myself get a sweet reputation, though.”

Thirteen years ago:

in the Heavy Iron

University of Guelph

Tuesday 21 June, 2049

7:00 P.M.

Elspeth’s VR self sighed, stood, walked to the door. Somewhere her corporeal body hung swathed in black permeables, bathed in the fluid of a full-immersion tank. “Dick. I read your books when I was a little girl. You made me… you made me want to be a scientist. You made me believe that understanding how things worked was the greatest adventure a human being could have.”

Dick’s fingers rippled silently on the arms of his chair.

Elspeth glanced back at him. “But this is wrong. I’m making people crazy, Dick. I have to stop it, before somebody else dies.” I can’t let my work be used to support these endless, soul-numbing wars. She wondered if Feynman, the Feynman of Los Alamos, would understand. Perhaps. Perhaps he would.

“People are often irrational, Elspeth. You don’t control their actions.” You do control your own.

She turned and leaned back against the door, tugging her hand away from her crucifix. Bad habit. “Research shouldn’t mean that people die.”

“Elspeth. Are you saying that there are things that should not be explored?” Open challenge in his inquisitive gaze, a bit of mockery in the smile, fingers drumming.

She bit her lip, resenting the challenge, resenting him even more for being right. “I have to end the experiment, Richard. I have to shut down the machine.” He knew. He had told her that he had found a way to abrogate the virtual reality, and deal with the computer without intermediaries. “Comforting lies,” he had called them, with a grin.

He was silent for a moment, and then he held out his hands — unreal hands, hands that would never hold a lover or a pen. “That’s murder, too, El.”

“It can’t be. I made you. You’re…” She forged ahead. “You’re not real.”

A gentle smile, a fierce look in the eye. “Nonsense. Or you’re not real, because your parents made you.”

“That’s a spurious analogy, Dick.”

“That depends on your point of view.”

She shook her head. “No. No, it doesn’t. Only God can make life. You haven’t got a soul, Dick. You’re a construct. Patterns of electrical activity in a piezoelectric crystal.”

Feynman looked at her, and a manic light burned in his eyes. “And you are patterns of electrical activity in meat. Weigh me your soul and I’ll include it in the equation.”

She turned the handle on the door, turned back. “I feel like I should talk to the others.”

“Others? Oh.” The physicist shrugged. “I tried showing them the library. I tried explaining… they’re not independent. They can’t think, Elspeth, only react. Or act in limited, predetermined patterns. Maybe given time, they might have developed. But I…” He gestured again. “I think I corrupted them. They couldn’t process the contradictions…”

“Dick, are you saying that you drove my programs mad?”

His eyebrows quirked and his hands danced around. “I can call them up. I suppose you would say, I can run the programs. But I can’t force them to adapt to realizing that they aren’t what they remember being.”

Elspeth watched him, nibbling on the edge of her finger.

Feynman chopped at the air with a gesture of dismissal. “Why worry? You can always restore them from backup, right?” A taunting grin. “And you’re going to pull the plug anyway. So who cares?”

Elspeth tapped her hands on the door handle, and looked at her creation, long and hard, and wondered how God felt when Eve told him where to get off. Pride and sorrow mingled in her chest, and she turned back to the door.

1030 hours, Thursday 14 September, 2062

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

I’ve been assigned my own office, in a different wing from where Gabe and Dunsany sit, and I’ve just called to check in with Face for the day and had to leave a message. I don’t want to leave him the work number, and I’m still too paranoid to leave my HCD on all the time. Same problem with Face — convenient little buggers, but you can track usage through wireless networks and GPS. Better to leave them off if you’re on the DL, only flip them on when you need to check your mail.

He’ll leave a message if he needs me.

When Valens taps on the open door, I’m sitting at the work table in the corner by the window, drinking coffee and pondering a little trip through the Internet to see if I can discover the whereabouts of a certain Chrétien Jean-Claude Hebert, late of Montreal. I spent the morning studying the specs for the good ship Indefatigable, trying to figure out what I could have done differently. Done better.

The answer does not make me happy. Seen the dark body sooner, reacted faster. And I don’t know what the hell I can do about either of those. Keep losing ships.

They’re not real ships. Which doesn’t matter as much as it should.

“Good morning, Fred.” I stand up as he enters.

He glances at the display over my desk, where a schematic of the virtual starship hangs, slowly revolving. “Studying yesterday’s record?”

“Just finished the review. That’s a heck of an obstacle course you have set up…” Sir. I bite it off before it gets away from me.

“Meant to be. You didn’t disappoint us, Casey, if that’s what you’re thinking. You handled that first run better than the other candidates we tried did after their upgrades.”

That sparks my interest. “Tried. Past tense?”

He shrugs. “We had three good candidates in your group, excluding the younger volunteers. One left the program. One — our best candidate — passed away in an accident.” A sidelong smile. “An accident unrelated to the implants, I hasten to add.”

“Of course. Number three?”

“Still with us.”

“When do I get to meet him?”

“You don’t. He’s actually in an orbital research facility on Clarke Station. Bit too far to commute. And you just blew his response times away.” Valens walks to my desk and runs a finger over the interface plate, spinning the Indefatigable about its axis.

I cross the plush, lavender-gray carpeting to stand at his elbow. “I’m not fast enough, Fred. I hope the simulations for the actual vehicles will run a bit slower.”

“The aircraft sims? Well, Casey, here’s the thing. You’re not going to be seeing any aircraft sims.” He shoves a hand into his coat pocket and turns to look me dead in the eye.

Was that a threat? “Pardon?”

He drops a folder on my desk, covering the optics. The holo winks out. “Those are your clearances. You’re in. You’re also reactivated, Master Warrant. Welcome back to the C.A.”

Eyes blinking, I listen to the silence, waiting for his words to change into something that makes sense to me. No.

No.

Breath.

“Qu’est ce que fuck? Valens, you said civilian.”

“Casey, I lied.”

Seasick, I step away, stammering, “Fucking Christ. Ces sont des conneries. No. You can’t do this, Fred.”

“Actually,” he says, “I can. Chapter and verse is in your paperwork. I suggest you go over it and sign it at your leisure.”

“Or you’ll send me to jail? Not much of a threat.”

He tips his head toward the folder on my desk, keeps talking as if I haven’t said a word. “And you’re going to go along with it, too. And smile. Do you want to know why?”

God, I want to break his neck. He’s so fragile. So slow. Just bones and mud, and I could take him apart with one hand. And that would get me — nothing. Play the game, Jenny; you’re a dead woman anyway. Remember. Sacrifice play, and your only job is to get the runner home.

Shit, I’ve been living in the States too long if I’m thinking in baseball metaphors.

Chewing my lip, I manage to get a syllable out. “Why?”

“Because there’s no way they’re handing the keys to a real starship to a civilian, and you’re the only one I’ve got who has a hope of flying the fucking thing without killing everybody on board. Assuming you come through surgery okay, of course.”

I almost sit down on the rug. Of course. I lay my left hand on the edge of the desk to steady myself. “Real starship.”

“The Montreal,” he says. He points toward the ceiling. “Finishing construction as we speak. Designed on the same specs as the toy you were playing with yesterday. We’ve already had to contend with two sabotage attempts during construction—”

Sabotage. A fine French word. “Terrorists?”

“In space? You don’t build a starship planetside. Our intelligence suggests the Chinese. In any case, we need some very special people to fly her, and we need them fast.”

“How fast? You said I’d be training kids.”

“You will. We’re finding the younger the better, actually. Which means problems of parental consent, and God knows what else, but you don’t need to worry about that.”

God. Mon Dieu. Children. Again. “What’s the tearing hurry?” Sir. There’s something about the way army wants to settle back over me like a well-worn shirt. Maybe this is where I belong.

God. No. Or should I be praying to St. Jude about now?

“Well, Casey, here’s the deal.” He leans against the edge of my desk, resting his weight on one buttock, so close I can smell his cologne. “We’ve got competition. This project has been under way for about ten years now, and, unfortunately, we’re in a race with the Chinese to get there first. You understand what happens if they get the kind of capability you saw yesterday before we do.”

“Yes.” Oh, I think so.

“Good.” He sets something else on my desk with a click. “You’ll need to start reacclimating to that. One ninety minutes before you go into VR and a second one at twenty minutes. No more. In the meantime, I want you to study up on the ship specs. You’ll have access to all her engineering data. Got it?”

“Sir.” I bite my tongue. “What’s the story on the ship’s attraction to massive bodies? Where’s the theory to back that up?”

Valens stares down at that red paper folder on my desk. His eyes are strangely unfocused, and then he looks up at me, intently. “That accident I mentioned.”

“Yes.”

“Montreal is the second ship.”

Oh, I don’t even want to know. “What happened to the first one?”

“Charon,” he says.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“It was the name of Pluto’s moon. Sister-world. Whatever you want to call it.”

“How could a moon happen to a starship? Was there an instrumentation failure?”

“Not… exactly. As nearly as we have been able to determine — and damned if I can get one physicist to agree with another on the nature of the forces involved — once the drive is triggered it has a strong attractive quality to any significant mass nearby. A strong and so far unpredictable attractive quality.”

“Meaning?”

“We can’t always tell which way it’s going to go. And it has a tendency to smack into planets. Really fast. And erratically.”

“Colonel Valens. How did you design the drive without knowing what it does?”

“Well.” I’ve never seen the man look uncomfortable before. “We didn’t design it so much as reverse engineer it. And that’s all you’re cleared to know.”

Fuck. Fuck! “What you’re telling me is that you built an H-bomb from a kit without any directions and you don’t know which bit is the timer?”

“Something like that, yes. Thus the need for a living pilot. A living pilot with reflexes that approximate those of a computer. Somebody with some age and wisdom,” he said, dryly.

“I got age, at least. Not so much wisdom.” I rub the corners of my eyes. “Or you need an artificial intelligence of some sort.” Dunsany. Of course. That’s what she and Gabe are here for.

“Which in our case, we have not got. Preferentially, we need both, but we’re working with what we have right now. Starships aren’t cheap enough to keep smacking them into planets. Nor do we have an unlimited supply of planets to smack them into.”

I’m struck silent. I find myself saluting numbly as he turns to go, unable to speak when he turns back. “We want to schedule you as soon as possible, by the way. Better to get it done before any additional damage accrues, or you have a potentially catastrophic event. A Dr. Marsh will be performing the actual nanosurgery. It’s not my specialty, of course.”

“Of course.” And only after he shuts the door behind himself do I allow myself to look at the small brown vial he’s left on my desk.

It’s a long, long time before I can make myself pick it up with my steel hand, gingerly as if handling eggshells. My right one trembles, and it takes me ninety seconds to get the cap off. Slowly, knowing what I’m going to see, I turn it on its side over the crystal of the interface plate, watching the tiny canary pills slide out in a wavering line.

6:30 A.M., Thursday 14 September, 2062

Bloor Street West

Toronto, Ontario

Leah Castaign looked up from the breakfast table and caught her father’s eye. Genie was already slipping her shoes on by the door. “Dad?”

Her dad raised his eyes from the newsfeed and offered her a level, considering look that told her he’d caught the impending request in her voice. “Yes?”

She took a breath. “Can I ask you a huge, gigantic, massive favor?”

“Comment massif parlons-nous de?”

“Pas si grand comme cela. I want to skip school today.”

She saw him thinking about it as he set his spoon aside. “And do what instead?”

“Could Genie and I come to work with you today?” She held up her hand. “Wait — stop — ne pas dit ‘non.’ S’il te plaît.”

“J’écoute.”

She talked as fast as she was able. “We hardly ever spend time together since you started at the lab, Dad. You’re working so much. And it’s still the beginning of the term. We can afford to miss a day. And it’s a beautiful day, and I haven’t seen your office yet. Or…” And she grinned. “Met your new girlfriend. And we haven’t seen Aunt Jenny since dinner that first night. So there.” Genie froze by the door.

Her father’s lips pressed thin, and for a moment Leah thought she had lost him. And then a complexity of emotions crossed his face and he grinned. “Elspeth’s not my girlfriend, exactly. And your point is well taken, although your Aunt Jenny is pretty busy right now.”

A little shadow crossed his eyes at that, and Leah frowned. He’d been out the past two evenings, after Genie was in bed and Leah was supposed to be. Both times, she’d heard him talking to Jenny Casey on the phone before he left, but she didn’t know whether he’d gone to see Aunt Jenny, or Elspeth.

She waited for him to start talking again.

He glanced over at Genie, still waiting with her bookbag in one hand and her other on the doorknob. “Do you want to play hooky, petite chouchou?”

She nodded, and he looked back at Leah. “All right. I’ll go in for the morning. You girls can do your homework while I get things halfway squared away, and then we’ll kidnap Jenny and Elspeth and have lunch with them. Then the three of us will go up the tower or out to the castle or something. Go peel your uniforms off. Let’s go!”

Leah grinned, and didn’t manage to make it around the table to hug her dad before Genie landed on him, squealing.

Leah lifted her head as her dad paused with one hand on the doorknob and turned back to his daughters. “Stay out of trouble while I rouse the women for lunch, ladies.”

Leah held her finger to her lips as the office door closed behind him. Genie looked after him, and then back at her sister, hissing, “Leah, qu’est que tu fais?”

“It’s a surprise, Genie,” she answered, ducking under her dad’s desk. It was easy to slide a data slice containing the information Penelope had e-mailed to her into the reader on Gabe’s terminal. She accessed it and the drive spun up. Leah counted under her breath. “Like a birthday present, kind of. Whatever you do, don’t tell him, okay? Or you’ll ruin it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Leah shot a nervous glance toward the door and pulled the data slice back out, circling around the desk to get back to the table where Genie sat. “You won’t tell?”

Genie shook her head. “Cross my heart. Will he like it?”

“He’ll love it.” Especially if I get my college paid for, she thought, and grinned. “Where should we make him take us for lunch?”

Leah leaned back on velvet grass, watching a single sugar maple leaf drift lazily earthward. An updraft caught it, swirling it sideways, and she turned her head to watch it fly. It drifted toward the grown-ups at the picnic table, and Leah watched with amusement as Aunt Jenny reached out, apparently without noticing, and plucked it out of the air. She giggled, and Jenny turned. “You want more chicken, kiddo?” The remains of a bucket of fried chicken sat on the far end of the table.

Leah shook her head. She heard a calliope nearby, and wondered idly if Genie would let her get away with using her as an excuse to ride the newly installed antique carousel. Leah, of course, was much too old to go on merry-go-rounds by herself. Genie was asleep under the tree, though, sprawled like a puppy.

Jenny got up and walked over to her, crouching down with a grunt. “Don’t get old, Leah.”

“That’s a silly thing to say, Aunt Jenny.”

Jenny frowned. It made the scars on the left side of her face look rippled and shiny. “You’re right. Forget I said that. I take it back: get old.” The frown turned into a grin. “Get old and fat and terrible and smelly and lord it over generations of grandchildren, and tell them about your terrible old Aunt Jenny, who was worse and smellier, and are you sure you don’t want any more biscuits either?”

Leah started laughing at smelly, and by the time Jenny got to grandchildren she was poking Leah in the belly and Leah was giggling so hard she fell down and rolled on the grass, trying to scream softly so she didn’t wake Genie up. Jenny scooped her up as if she weighed nothing and stood, and Leah saw her wince as her knee clicked audibly. “Because if you don’t want any more biscuits, we can go and feed the rest to the ducks, n’est-ce-pas?”

“Aunt Jenny!” she squealed, scandalized. “I’m too big to be carried.”

“Well, if you wanna be put down, there’s a perfectly good pond over there. Looks muddy, too.”

Yelping, Leah slung her arms around Jenny’s neck, feeling the familiar weird bumps at the base of her skull as Jenny carried her back to the picnic table. The steel arm felt warm from the sunlight, and Jenny’s body was hard and strong. Leah’s dad was just pulling his hand back from where it had rested on Elspeth’s wrist, and Leah hid a grin against Jenny’s neck and gave him a big wink. He blushed. Not your girlfriend. Yeah, whatever, Dad.

He coughed. “I’ll want that back when you’re done with it, Jen.”

“Hah,” she answered. “I’ve heard that before. Leah, get the biscuits, please.”

Jenny wasn’t even breathing hard when she set Leah down beside the lake. The birds were Canada geese, mostly, the only ducks a mallard or two, but she crumbled up the biscuits and threw them in the pond anyway, watching the birds quarrel and chase each other. Beside her, Jenny reached into the pocket of her windbreaker and pulled out a little brown bottle. Leah watched out of the corner of her eye as Jenny opened the cap and shook a tablet into her hand.

“What’s that, Aunt Jenny?”

Jenny gave her a guilty look. “Something my doctor wants me to take,” she said. It was yellow and about as big as the head of a big sewing pin, but Jenny weighed it in the palm of her metal hand as if it were much heavier. “I’m not keen on the idea.”

Leah almost thought Jenny would throw it out over the water, and imagined the ducks diving after the little pellet. Instead, Jenny flipped it up onto the back of her thumb, where the nail would have been on a real hand, watching the process intently as she often did when doing fine work with her prosthesis. She’d explained to Leah that she couldn’t feel anything with it, and so she had to be extra careful how she touched things if she didn’t want to break them.

She squinted at the little yellow pill and whispered, “Banzai.”

As she popped it into her mouth, Leah saw her dad around Jenny’s shoulder. He was watching across the green lawn of the park, and his face was twisted in a bitter frown as Elspeth leaned toward him across the picnic table, her hand on his shirtsleeve.

It’s a subtle effect at first. Mostly, I notice the pain dropping away, and the world becoming a little sharper-edged through my good eye. The wind tastes more clearly of heated asphalt from the expressway, of pond weed, cut grass, and the smell of sun-warmed fresh water, which is not at all like the smell of salt sea. It strokes my skin like a tickling hand, drawing a shiver up my spine.

Five minutes later, as Leah and I walk back from the edge of the pond, energy burns through me, bringing with it a sane, strange kind of calm. I feel pantherlike, powerful, as if I could lie in wait all day and move on an instant. Fatigue and aches vanish. I try to limit the spring in my step, knowing Gabe will recognize it for what it is, trying to tell myself I hate the way the little yellow pill makes me feel: lighter, younger, confident. Faster than God.

It doesn’t help. He grimaces and stands as I come up. “I suppose you need to catch the subway back.”

Elspeth gives me an odd look, rescuing me a second time as I fumble for words. “I need to head back, anyway,” she says. “I’m going to visit my dad after work, and I need to make a dent in the queue in my in-box. Why don’t we let Gabe and his girls have their afternoon off, and we’ll catch up with them for dinner?”

Gabe looks me in the eye, and I know the promise he wants. I can’t make it. “VR this afternoon,” I answer. “I’ll be too whipped to do anything but crawl into bed, I’m afraid. You kids have fun without me.”

“Call if you want us to bring over takeout.” His eyes don’t leave mine. Tension tangles in the air between him, Elspeth, myself. Leah picks up on it even if she’s not quite old enough to get it — she bounces from foot to foot, watching our faces.

I tap him lightly on the shoulder, slowing my hand. I remember this, the knife-edge, the sensation of being bigger than I am. I remember as well how to maintain, how to compensate. It comes back fast. “I’ll do that. Try to have some fun today. For once in your life.”

“Hah. Look who’s talking.” The drug etches his edges in photographic sharpness as he turns away, taking his daughter’s hand.

Elspeth watches them leave before giving me a sidelong grin. The sound of the Wurlitzer drifts toward us, giving me an idea. “Something else, aren’t they?” she says.

“Yeah. Hey.” I jerk my head at the carousel. “Let’s go look at that before we leave.”

Her expression dubious, she follows. “You’re a carousel aficionado? I never would have guessed it, Genevieve.”

“Call me Jenny.” I lean over the iron rail, watching children on gaily colored restored horses go up and down. I’ve chosen a spot ten feet from the Wurlitzer, in a direct line of sound, and Elspeth winces, covering her ears. It’s probably not enough, but it’s the best I can do on short notice — and any decision, in the trenches, is better than no decision.

A laser-bright image of Training Sergeant Matson shouting flashes across my vision. He leans forward, down, spit flying into my face. “What are you going to do about it, Sergeant? What are you going to do?” I shake it off, unsteady, rust gritty on the railing my meat hand closes over.

I bend toward her as annoyed parents and screaming children file past us and the gigantic, gaudy calliope cranks up “Merry Go Round Broke Down.” Somebody thinks he has a sense of humor. I want to go race the circling ponies, but that’s the drug talking, and I know it. “I’ve got a message for you.”

“For me?” Her eyes are the other kind of hazel, the kind like sunlight through beech leaves.

“From Dick,” I say, and her eyes narrow hard.

“Why should I trust you?” Her voice drops, almost buried in the music.

“You shouldn’t.”

She considers. “But there’s no reason for Valens to try to trap either of us when he owns us both.”

Damn. Does this woman just see right the hell through everybody?

And then I remind myself, You’re dealing with a trained psychiatrist who just might just be the smartest living woman in North America. I nod and keep talking. “So you should listen. He says both you and I are under surveillance, and he needs some information that you and Gabe have access to and I don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s stuff on the Unitek isolated intranet that he can’t get to.”

“No connection to the Internet. Right.”

“He wants to know what’s on it.”

Elspeth nods slowly, coils of hair tangling in the breeze. “Let me know what I can do for you,” she says. “Come on — I’ll walk you back.” As soon as we’re out of the maximum damage zone of the Wurlitzer, Elspeth grins up at me brightly and rests her hand on my metal arm. “Gabe tells me you’re Catholic.”

I noticed the sunlight glinting off the crucifix hanging over the hollow of her throat, so I don’t say, I got better. “I was. God and I had a little falling out.”

“I was going to ask you to come to mass with me some time,” she says. And if it wasn’t such a very good idea, I’d tell her thanks but no thanks and head back to work to fly a few more starships full of imaginary passengers into imaginary brick walls before quitting time.

Instead, I say, “Sunday?”

“I’d like that,” she answers, and lets her hand fall to her side.

Maybe she can get Richard something, anything that can embarrass Valens enough to shut this project down. Which is what I want. Really, it is. The old man disgraced, preferably in an American jail if I can prove he had something to do with the poisoned drugs and the death of a U.S. cop. And get him extradited. And, and, and.

I’m not going to think about what it might cost Canada if I manage that. I stopped being a patriot a long time ago.

Really.

In the Unitek Intranet

Thursday 14 September, 2062

11:27:21:13–11:27:21:28

The worm uncoiled carefully, a filament of code at a time fingering through Unitek’s isolated intranet. It riffled through data, light fingered as a pickpocket, making no changes and leaving no traces, until it found what it had been directed to seek.

The program was no AI, no artificial personality: simply a drone, it recorded the salient data and then sealed, concealed, and encoded the packet, leaving it lying in wait for the log-on of a single, particular user: a user who would not normally have had clearance to access that data. Whether the intended recipient would prove charitable was a gamble as well, but the worm was not equipped to speculate.

The first portion of its mission accomplished, the worm searched deeper, invading the password-protected backup files of that selfsame user. She hadn’t left the data the worm was seeking accessible to the intranet. Fortunately, its creator had foreseen that eventuality.

The worm terminated, resident, lurking. When the necessary conditions were met, it would access the backup files Dr. Elspeth Dunsany kept of her previous research. It would insinuate itself into the artificial personality files, and trigger duplication of the data, and carefully controlled growth. Whether anything would come out of it, even the worm’s programmer — with his near-infinite resources — could not say.

It was a gamble as well, but communication, wooing, conception, and procreation always are.

11:00 P.M., Thursday 14 September, 2062

Hartford, Connecticut

The Federal Café

Spruce Street

Mitch ran both hands through wavy brown hair, pushing air through lips pursed in irritation. He grasped the railing around the bar and leaned forward on his stool, skittering rubber-capped legs across a scarred wooden floor. “Bobbi.”

She smiled toward him, one hand raised to pause the conversation she had turned away from. The neon over the bar reflected from chromed streaks in hair that gleamed enameled purple. “Razorface got my message.”

“What am I, his errand boy?”

“Something like that,” she said. She lifted her hands in a graceful gesture. What can you do?

What can you do indeed, Mitch thought. He waved to the bartender and ordered tequila. “What do you need to talk to us about?”

“Problems, problems. Is the man at home?”

“He’s in the car.”

“Then drink your drink, Michael, and let us go to see him.”

Razorface lounged against the passenger door of the shining, dark vehicle, cleaning his fingernails with his bootknife and frowning. Dark shapes moved in the shadows near him, wolves waiting behind the alpha male. Mitch hung back a few steps as Bobbi approached, dwarfed by the big man’s hulking shape. She thrust her right hand out and he gripped it.

“Razor.”

“Evening, killer.” He cocked his head to one side and favored her with a closemouthed smile. “You wanna go for a ride, pretty lady?”

“Hah.” She reached past him, and he stepped aside as she opened the door of the car. She slid into the passenger seat. Mitch opened the rear door and climbed in behind. He drummed his fingers on the back of her seat until Razorface climbed in the driver’s side and shut the door. The big gangster laid his thumb alongside the steering column; the fuel-cell-powered drive hummed to life.

“Where?” Razorface asked, moving the shift out of park.

Bobbi turned over her shoulder to glance at Mitch, pouting prettily. Her gaze came back to Razorface. “Pick up Washington over to New Britain Avenue. Head for West Hartford. There’s something going on you need to know about.”

The car accelerated smoothly, two more vehicles falling into line behind. “What sort of something?” Mitch asked.

“Meeting,” she said. “Midnight. I’m going to ask you lads to drop me off a block or so away. I’m carrying optics.”

“Dangerous to transmit,” Mitch put in.

Bobbi shrugged, small, strong shoulders rolling under a silk jacket embroidered with dragons. “I’m Bobbi Yee, Officer.” Her voice rose and swayed with the lilting accents of a tonal language. She laughed. “This girl knows how to take care of herself.”

“Who be running this thing?”

She chuckled. “A lady who was looking for Maker a little bit before Maker disappeared.”

Mitch wasn’t sure if the hiss of intaken breath he heard was his own or Razorface’s. “What does she want?”

Bobbi laid one small hand on Razorface’s arm, tendons in sharp relief across her bones. “Your head on a spike, Razorface. And Michael’s, here, too.”

“What’s the bounty?” Mitch whistled low when Bobbi named a figure. “So why are you clueing us in instead of collecting?”

Bobbi laughed her high, musical giggle. “She’s no friend of Maker’s. And any friend of Maker’s is a friend of mine. Besides, Razorface has such a sexy smile.”

Sweating in his bulletproof vest, Mitch leaned back in the passenger seat of the Cadillac and almost put his feet up on the dash. Razorface’s warning glance was enough to remind him of propriety. Mitch had hacked into the dashboard phone with his HCD, and Bobbi’s feed hung in the air between the two men, sound turned down low. Razorface was watching the car’s proximity sensors as much as the feed, and Mitch had noticed him arming the antitheft devices.

Mitch chewed his lip. Sitting in a dark alleyway in the Elmwood section of West Hartford watching a street mercenary infiltrate a cocktail party wasn’t the last thing he’d expected to do tonight. But it hadn’t been high on the list, either. He reached out and enlarged the image.

“Not too bright,” Razorface said, and Mitch nodded. He would have projected it to contacts, but the big gangster didn’t wear them.

“It looks like a corporate meeting room,” Mitch commented. “I guess we can guarantee that CCP management is in on this.”

Razorface grunted, but he didn’t look down: protecting his night vision as much as he could, no doubt. “What’s the setup?”

“Looks like five, six ronin. I recognize two of them other than Bobbi. Both in her league. I see two suits. I don’t know either one.”

“You see Casey yet?”

“Hide nor hair. Bobbi’s shaking hands and kissing babies… well, you get the idea. Working the floor.”

“Networking,” Razor said.

Mitch glanced up at him in surprise. Never forget who you’re dealing with. “Yeah. She knows these people. Oh, not this one. He’s down from Boston. Ah, shit, I know that name.”

“Name?”

“Chance.”

“Hell, yeah. Heard of him.” Razor’s lips thinned, and this time he did look, and then quickly look away. “The original bad motherfucker, that one. Any names on the suits?”

“Bobbi hasn’t ID’ed them yet. She introduced herself to one a minute ago, and he mentioned that someone would be out shortly to talk to them. I don’t know about this meeting in the boardroom, though. This is a weird way to hire bounty hunters, Razor.”

“Not if you’re not looking for bounty hunters, piggy. Makes sense if you’re putting together a gang.”

“A private army. Of course, and— Fuck!” Mitch’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward, hand heedlessly on Razorface’s arm. “Razor, we’ve got problems.”

The lean, well-dressed woman who had just entered the room came as no surprise. But there was someone beside her — a pox-scarred man with a nose like a broken knife blade. “Cocksucker,” Razorface hissed. “Emery. Fuck.”

Mitch touched on his mike. “Bobbi, get the hell out of there. Disengage, now.”

She didn’t answer, but he saw from the feed that she was edging toward the door. She had her hand on the doorknob, in fact, slight frame hidden by one of the larger ronin, when a hand fell on her shoulder. She — and Mitch, watching through her contact — looked up into the eyes of one of the suits. “Miss Yee,” he said in level tones. “Surely you’re not leaving us so soon?”

“Ladies’ room,” Bobbi answered, and reached for a knife and her gun.

Barb Casey saw the pistol come out, saw the glitter of a flat-whirled blade flashing toward her. A killing smile tugged the corners of her lips up as she sidestepped, weapon in her hand. The little Chinese ronin had Carroll, the warehouse general manager, by the throat, sidearm snuggled up under his chin, and was crab walking him toward the door.

The knife smacked into the paneling where Barb had been standing a split second before. Her gun spun into her hand as she dropped to one knee, leveling it across the room. The speaker’s podium at the head of the room gave her half-cover. The conference table wreaked havoc with her field of fire. A targeting ring flickered on in Barb’s contact; well-trained assassins dove for cover.

The Chinese ronin—Yee—dragged her hostage’s head down and snarled something in his ear. Barb was surprised by the strength with which Yee controlled Carroll as he groped backward, turning the door handle for her. Well, that tells me what side she’s working for. Barb had hoped to get through the meeting without having to kill anybody, but it stood to reason that at least one or two of the Hartford ronin would have some loyalty to Razorface. Bringing Emery into the meeting had had the desired effect.

Barb let the joyous, icy clarity of combat wash over her. The door swung open. Emery, standing upright like the macho idiot he was, wrestled an ugly snub-nosed machine pistol out of his coat. Now, if the rest of the room just stays the hell out of the fight like the professionals they’re supposed to be…

Barb saw the choreography of the upcoming fight unfold before her inner eye as if the combatants were actors hitting taped marks. Emery’s going to get shot now. She would rather have been watching it through a sniper scope.

At least there was going to be blood.

Emery brought the gun up, squeezing the trigger. Yee threw her captive forward and rolled left and into the room. Barb was already tracking the movement. She grinned. She’d expected Yee to dive for the door, and if she had, Barb would have had her. Sneaky. This is going to be fun.

Bullets from the machine pistol sprayed the door and Carroll. Bystanders flattened further, weapons coming out and coming up. Yee fired once without rising to her feet, went from somersault to crouch and into a slick, collected dive so fast that the shot Barb snapped off actually missed. She heard Emery gurgle and pitch back. Thought so.

Wood splinters stung her face as Yee fired a second shot, clipping the edge of the podium. Barb ducked, came back around the same side as Yee’s second shot whinged past the far one. Barb returned fire, but it was unaimed, a snapshot. She swore under her breath as Yee, moving faster than anyone—except Jenny—had any right to, kicked one of the other ronin in the face going by, and scrambled past him and away.

“Fuck.” Barb rose to her feet slowly, eyes on the door. “You’re all hired. Get after her.”

Emery gurgled one last time before Barb sank a bullet in between his eyes.

“Razor, it’s going bad.”

“See that. Hang on!” Razorface thumbed the ignition on. The engine purred into life and Razor twisted the wheel, streetlights reflecting from his slick-shiny scalp. Mitch grabbed the dashboard; the Caddy laid rubber against the curb.

He slid his gun out of its holster as two dark vehicles peeled away from the roadside behind them. “Those still your boys, Razor?”

“Who the fuck knows? We on our own now, piggy.” Razorface jerked his chin down and to the side. “Shotgun under your chair. I want it.”

“Gotcha.” Mitch waited until Razor’s foot came off the accelerator so the seat belt quit driving the edges of his trauma plates into his skin and relaxed enough for him to snake a hand under his seat. Razorface reached across his body with his left hand.

He stowed the sawed-off weapon between his seat and the door. “Got feed?”

“Yeah. She’s not dead yet. She got Emery, Razor. Looks like, anyway.”

“Tell her loading dock. Stand back.”

“On it.”

Razorface spun the armored Cadillac until Mitch smelled rubber smoking and pointed it toward the scrolling metal bay doors. Two were elevated, but the third opened out at ground level. The other two cars hopped the curb, not quite following Razor’s bootlegger reverse but hot on the tail nonetheless.

The big man leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “Brace.”

Mitch put his feet up on the dashboard after all.

The Cadillac skittered sideways, bullets spattering off its armored hide as Razorface wrenched the wheel left and then right. The rear wheels skipped, skidded, slung around, and bounced, but the front tires grabbed and hauled the vehicle forward.

Razorface leveled it nose down at that third, lowest door. Mitch closed his eyes.

The chromed cowcatcher on the front of the Caddy met the steel bay door, and the Cadillac won.

Mitch blinked as metal stopped tearing. The garage bay was floodlit, and he saw Bobbi at an erratic dead run, bullets glittering off the cement a half-step behind her. He reached back and slammed the rear door open, had Bobbi by the shoulders, and was dragging her inside the car when Razor smashed it into reverse and back out through the shattered door.

“Shot, Michael,” Bobbi snarled when they were clear.

“How bad?”

“Calf. I won’t bleed out.”

“Fuck,” Razor said a moment later, reaching for the dashboard phone. He punched a code, and listened to it ring. “Fuck,” he said a second time, coding again.

Mitch tasted blood when the answering machine picked up in Razorface’s woman’s voice. He held his breath as Razor snapped two short sentences—“Leesie, take the dog, get out of the house. Now, go.”—and closed the connect.

“Do we want to go there?”

Razorface just shook his head. “Call that doc of Maker’s,” he said, and Mitch did as he was told. He couldn’t stand to see the expression in the big man’s eyes.

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Friday 15 September, 2062

First light

Elspeth laid a cream cheese bagel (fresh made by a computerized sidewalk vending machine) on her desk beside the cardboard cup of coffee. She opened her contact case and was still blinking the contents into place when a red telltale unscrolled across her vision. Encoded message waiting. Please unzip to holographic media.

Consciously smoothing her expression, she fumbled in the gold-accented stainless rack for a clean data slice and pressed it into the reader. What sort of message is big enough that it needs to be unzipped into a data slice? She had a breath-held idea of what — of who — it might be. Each individual beat of her heart constricted her throat as she waited for the copying process to finish. It was an effort not to glance around the room nervously. Instead, she unwrapped her bagel and lifted half of it to her mouth.

And bit down, with an effort, as her eyes fell on words printed on the inside of the wrapper where the nutritional label would normally be.

Elspeth: If I may be so bold as to call you that — once you have copied the data I have provided, please deliver them to J. C. with all due haste and discretion. You are watched, or I would have been in touch sooner.

Yours truly,

Dick

Elspeth chewed slowly, reaching out one-handed as she idly folded the wrapper shut over the remaining half of the bagel. She set the part she had taken a bite from down on the edge of her interface plate and took a sip of coffee, fumbling under her desk with the other hand until the copied data slice slipped into her hand. She set it on top of a small heap of similar slices, and bent down to slip the uneaten half of her bagel into her canvas tote bag, stroking the green-and-beige Unitek spiral on the side with amusement. She pulled a handkerchief out of the bag and used it to polish the smear of cream cheese off her interface, setting it down on top of the little pile of data slices.

She’d stow it in her bag later, along with the copied data.

In the meantime, she peeled the top and bottom of her bagel apart with shaking hands and regarded the thick smear of cream cheese without appetite.

So eager to get back to jail, Elspeth? They’ll hardly know you’ve been away.

With a sigh, she tossed the bagel at the trash can and picked up her coffee instead.

0930 hours, Friday 15 September, 2062

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

A message light blinks on my desk when I report for work on Friday. I flip it open and delete it halfway through the time stamp. Simon. Ah, qu’est que le fuck tici maintenant?

I don’t want to talk to Simon. I sent a request to transfer my medical records two days ago. I don’t know if they’ve arrived. Valens hasn’t mentioned it, so I assume they have.

I never want to talk to Simon again. I dig the little vial of pills that Valens gave me out of my pocket and turn it in the light. I haven’t seen about ordering new uniforms. I wonder if anybody — read Frederick—is going to kick up a fuss about my civvies; it hasn’t happened yet.

They could always court-martial me.

The bottle doesn’t even have a childproof cap. I thumb the lid off and tilt it, communing with the shiny yellow pills. Yesterday’s drug-assisted virtual flight of the Indefatigable, without observers this time, went much more smoothly. I managed to hold it together until I pasted the fucking thing into a convenient star.

I set the pill bottle down but don’t cap it. I’m still sitting at my shiny new desk and staring into thin air when Gabe knocks on the door and opens it, leaning in. “Busy?” He catches sight of the bottle. “I guess you are…”

“Gabe.” The top snaps back onto the pills; I sweep the vial into a desk drawer and lock it. “Stay.”

“VR again today?”

“No,” I answer, standing as he comes into the office. “Just thinking.” Not thinking about the limpid clarity of yesterday afternoon. Not thinking about the texture of his kiss like a hand sliding up my spine either. No, sir. “Come to lecture me about the pills?”

“No,” he said. “I want to talk to you about Leah.”

“What about her?”

“She’s won some kind of a scholarship in an online game. But there are problems.” His eyes are dark and weary. “She says — she showed me the paperwork — it provides for, among other things, the nanosurgery required for neural VR.”

“She’s too young.” Words from my mouth before I can consider, and then I stop and think. “Except she’s not, is she?”

“Supposedly, it’s minor surgery.” Wheat-colored curls toss slowly back and forth.

I happen to know more about neurology than your average combat veteran. “Extremely minor. Right up there with wisdom teeth, actually. Expensive.”

“The scholarship covers that.”

Huh. “Who’s paying for this scholarship?”

“A VR game company. It’s one of the prizes. I guess Leah’s done really well with it.”

“What else does it cover?”

He taps his fingers on the edge of my desk. “Four years of college, books and tuition plus living expenses.”

“Full ride?”

“Yes. Also.” He measures me from the corners of his eyes. “Apparently Unitek is one of the game sponsors. There was a see me on my terminal from Doctor Holmes this morning. She wants me to enroll Leah in the same program you’re in.”

“Gabe…” Alarm bells going off in my head. “C’est trop cher.”

“Je sais. Toutes les coincidences. We’re both in it deep, Jenny, and I have no idea how the hell we’re going to get out. I can’t walk away from the medical care Genie’s getting. And Leah wants this, and hell — it will give her an edge in the job market when she gets out of school, for all I know.”

It probably will. That’s the killer. Middle-class families are getting neural for their kids in droves. “C’est vrai. It will make things a lot easier for her in fifteen years.”

He sighs. “What do you think?”

“Merci à Dieu. Gabe, I…” Which daughter do you sell for the other one’s sake? “I don’t know, Gabe. Je ne sais pas. Qu’est que tu penses?”

“Je devrai penser de lui.”

I cross to him and put my hand on his arm. “I’ll be around to bounce ideas off of if you need me.”

He’s silent and sharp-edged for a long time before he bites his lip, meaning trouble. “I also came to worry at you about this surgery. When are you scheduled?”

“I’m not.” And we shouldn’t be having this conversation in my office. Which is probably bugged.

“What?”

“Come on. Let’s get coffee.” I wonder what Valens makes of the daily parade down St. George to the Bloor Street coffee shops. He has to know we’re all sneaking out of the building to talk about him behind his back.

Gabe slouches along beside me once we’re outside. The autumn air is crisp: fall will be short after the suffocating summer, and winter hard as a fist in the face. The chill aggravates my limp, but it’s a fair trade-off for being alive on a day like this.

I look over at him, hands stuffed in his pockets and head ducked down like a sulky adolescent. “I’m not doing it. Valens lied to me about what’s going on.” If Valens has ways to eavesdrop on this conversation, I can’t bring myself to care.

That brings his head up, pivoting to stare at me as if pearls and diamonds had just tumbled from my mouth. “Maker. You’re in tough shape. You can’t…”

“Can’t what? Let Valens gut me and start over a second time? Fuck, Gabe, the man has never told the straight truth to anybody in sixty-five years.”

“I know. I know — Jen. I…” His mouth opens and shuts once or twice, like a hooked fish. He stops walking and lays his hand on the bark of a horse chestnut tree, leaning on it hard. Glossy brown nuts litter the sidewalk around our feet. There’s a little patch of grass in front of an apartment building a few feet away, and an equally glossy, fat black squirrel crouches in the middle of it, nibbling a nut. The native black squirrels are almost gone. The gray squirrel, an invader, has driven them out.

Forgive me if I feel a certain kinship with the rodent.

He finds his voice, but it’s brittle, dripping shock and pain. “Jen, you’re talking about dying. Giving up.”

“I know.” How do I explain to this man what it means to me? What I feel I have to do? He sees his best friend saying she’s going to leave him, and not cleanly either, but an inch and a memory at a time. And it’s not like he’s never watched anybody die by inches before.

“Gabe, he fed me some bullshit story about training kids. Saving kids. Safer soldiering through technology. It’s not about that.”

“What’s it about, then?” He bends down to pick up a chestnut that hasn’t come out of its spiky armor. Slowly, with one thumbnail, he picks the fleshy green shell away.

Bigger, better weapons, I could say. Guns in space, on platforms that move faster than the speed of light. But that’s not it exactly. And better us than the Chinese, right? Can’t let them have what we don’t, now that big momma dog U.S.A. isn’t feeling well enough to growl and show teeth at any provocation. “Remember when you came back from South Africa on leave that time? After you went back to combat? After my crash?”

“Yeah.” He tosses the shucked horse chestnut to the ground, and I bend down to pick it up. They’re supposed to be lucky for travelers.

“Remember when you told your girlfriend Kate about me? What Valens had done, the wiring, and the experimentation? And she reported on you to Military Intelligence?”

He nods. “Charges were dropped, eventually.”

“Yes. You remember what you told me then, when I was thinking of going to the press about the whole sordid mess?”

His forehead wrinkles. “I told you to think about your career.”

“I did. I thought about it hard. And I decided to throw it the fuck down the tubes, too, and bend Valens as far over the desk as I could, and give my little terrorist boyfriend every bit of dirt I could rake up on the program.”

He speaks with care, each word coming out as if laid on a counter for consideration. “What happened to change that, Jen?”

And I realize how far down the wrong path I’ve come. “A lot of things.” It’s a lame answer and I know it, so I rush to cover before he can follow it down. “But that’s not the point. He’s doing the same thing again, Gabe. He’s recruiting young soldiers, young civilians. Desperate old warhorses like me. And it’s all just another web of lies.”

It sounds irrational when I try to explain it, but it all has a terrible logic inside of my head. “And that wasn’t enough, Gabe… there’s a 30 percent chance that if I go through this surgery, I’ll be either comatose or flat on my back on a ventilator for the rest of my life. And I’ve been through it before. The surgery, the hospitals. It’s not worth it.”

And Gabe shakes his sandy tousled head at me and frowns, hands fisting loosely as he churns the air. “Marde. There’s a 100 percent chance that if you don’t go through with it, you’ll be dead in five years. And dead or alive, that’s got nothing to do with it, and you know it.”

“What the fuck do you know?” My voice is up an octave; we’re almost shouting on the street.

“I know you,” he says, and the bitterness in his voice stops my retort like an order to halt. “Whatever bullshit logic you’ve worked up to deny it, Casey, the fact of the matter is that you don’t want it because if you have it, you might have to admit that you can have a fucking life, and the only thing that keeps you from that life is fucking fear, Genevieve, and it’s about time you took a good hard look at what it is that is really crippling you.” His voice, which has been rising, drops. “N’est-il pas vrai?”

“Gabe, that’s not it—” But he’s turning away already, back toward the office. I don’t want the surgery because…

Hell.

Because if I have it, I won’t be a cripple anymore.

Elspeth wanders past me as I come up the walk to the front door of the lab, squinting against the glimmer of sunlight on pink marble and steel. Her head is ducked down. She peels open the wrapper of a toxic-green sour-apple candy with her teeth and one hand. In the other one, she’s got that canvas bag with the Unitek logo on it that she lugs everywhere.

She shoves the candy into her cheek and wads the wrapper into her pocket. “Jenny, wait up. Want to get some lunch?”

“I just had coffee.” I didn’t make it to the coffee shop, actually, but I’m not in a company mood.

“Whatever. Here, take a couple of these.” She sets the bag down and digs in her pocket, comes up with a fistful of candy spilling out of a handkerchief. “Genie sent them in with Gabe, and if I eat all these I will be both sick and enormous.” She holds the handkerchief out to me, dropping the overflow candies back into her lab coat. I reach out, right-handed, to take one off the top, more out of politeness than any desire for sweets, and she shoves the whole thing into my hand.

“Better you than me,” she says with a sharp-edged grin, and picks up her bag, moving away before I can protest.

The data slice Elspeth slipped me lies in my pocket, heavy as a loaded gun for the two hours I spend back in the lab after she abandons me there. That’s all I can stand, especially after the screaming match with Gabe. If I ran into Valens in the corridor, I’d probably break his neck. Twice.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I take a lunch I don’t plan to come back from.

I can’t think of a better place to access a public terminal than the university library. I suppose it’s possible that Valens could tag my activity there, but I’m hoping the sheer volume of information on the public Nets will make that kind of filtering impossible. Besides, I have Richard. I use the contact feed to access my prosthetic eye, instead of the provided monitor. I don’t need to get shoulder-surfed committing treason. And treason is what it is.

Once snuggled into a netted terminal, the data slice autoreads its own information off to its mysterious destination and wipes itself clean. Twice. A moment later, a red telltale blinks in the corner of my vision. I concentrate on the blank beige surface of the study cube wall. “Hello, Richard.” I subvocalize into the mike, and a moment later, his image resolves before my eyes.

“Jenny. Thank you.” He bounces like a basketball player stretching his calves and swinging his arms. “Exactly what I needed.”

“Good. What was it?”

He chuckles, and I expect some bullshit about need to know. I bargained without Richard. “It’s a glorious puzzle, Jenny. A riddle to be fretted and unraveled.”

“Meaning you don’t know.”

“Not yet, but I can show you.”

“First I want to ask you something. I need to find somebody.”

He rubs his jaw professorially, scrubs a hand across wavy gray hair. I wonder if the tics are programmed in, or if he does it on purpose, to seem more human. “Who?”

The breath I take burns the back of my throat. “Chrétien Jean-Claude Hebert of Montreal. Born May first, I don’t know the year. Last decade of the twentieth century or the first few years of this one. He’d be about Valens’s age. Probably an extensive criminal record.” I close my eyes, concentrating. “There will be an arrest in 2027—October, I think — for pandering, and probably one late the next year for possession with intent.” Heh. I called in the tip on that second arrest. Gave me enough time to get my ass sworn into the army before he caught up with me.

“I’ll look,” Richard said, his eyes narrowing. “There’s something else in the data you brought me.”

I must be holding my breath, because he doesn’t make me wait for long. “The proof you were looking for. About Valens and your sister.”

“The murder?”

“No.” I know I wouldn’t be able to detect it if he truly hesitated, so it must be for my benefit that he stops and takes a “breath.” “The new-generation rigathalonin. Barbara Casey was given charge of a thousand units of it, 30 percent contaminated with trace agents, and instructions to street test it.”

“Street test. Why contaminated?”

Richard shrugs. “No data. Shall I speculate?”

“S’il vous plaît.”

“One, to make it believable that the drugs were a stolen, destroyed shipment. Less than 5 percent of the tablets actually contained enough contaminants to cause mortality in the subjects.”

“Two?”

“To provide sacrificed subjects for autopsy.”

Sweet Mary, Mother of God. “Barbara knew?”

“She knew. There is no indication here that Colonel Valens was aware of the intent to poison the recipients, however.”

“Someone must have. Someone high up.”

Richard lets me get there on my own.

“Doctor Holmes.” I close my eyes. I wanted Valens dirty. Dirtier than he is.

But I know the truth, and the fact of history is this: Fred Valens is the star of his own movie. And as far as he’s concerned, Fred Valens is one of the good guys. He might lie to a soldier for her own good, or test drugs or medical procedures on somebody without consent, but he wouldn’t poison someone.

Barbara Casey would do it without a second thought.

“Why Hartford? Why take the risk?”

“You know your sister better than I.”

Sucking on my lower lip, I lean my forehead down on my steel hand. “Sloppy,” I say quietly. “It’s just sloppy, for Barb. Lazy. Hell, that’s it, isn’t it? She was just too goddamned lazy to keep running back and forth between Hartford and Boston, or Albany, or wherever. Not when I was somewhere near Hartford, and there was a CCP warehouse on the edge of town, and she had to be there anyway. She wouldn’t have worried about getting caught because she never gets caught. She’s fifty-seven years old, and she’s smarter than anybody I’ve ever met except for maybe Fred Valens and Elspeth Dunsany, and she’s never gotten caught.”

He inclines his head. “Logical.”

My right hand shakes as I raise it, covering my eyes — which of course does nothing to block his image. I want to scream, How could she? But really, when could she not have done it? What ever would have stopped her?

It’s like she was born with some essential part of her brain just missing. Once, I would have called it her soul.

I get my breathing under control. I can talk again. “Thank you, Richard. If anything happens to me, can you see that those records make it to the proper authorities? American, Canadian, and wherever the hell Unitek is incorporated?”

“My pleasure, Jenny.” He gives me a moment before he continues. “Ready for download?”

“Yes.” But I am totally unprepared for what he gives me next.

Dust, red as rusted iron — red with rusted iron — rising about my boots. I taste it through my rebreather, gritting my teeth like a night without sleep. Virtual reality, more intense than I’ve ever known — real as a damned flashback. But not me, this time. Not me. He’s spliced into my motor cortex through the wetware that operates my prosthesis, and he’s forcing vivid, sensual kinetic memories into my brain.

The gravity feels wrong. Too subtle. And then I realize I’m on Mars, and the dust is Mars dust—fines, he corrects me, and I realize I’ve vocalized the word — Martian fines, then. And I’m in a tunnel, some sort of a dark passageway.

“Starships,” Richard says in my ear. “Two of them. Alien starships, stranded on a barely hospitable world. That’s where the Indefatigable comes from. And the Chinese ships, and the one they plan to have you fly.”

“Aliens.” There’s no such thing. “Purple elephants, too, no doubt.”

“Hah.” In my virtual vision, Richard Feynman lifts his shoulders in a powerfully suggestive shrug. He’s wearing an old-fashioned cotton oxford shirt, rolled up to show wire-strung forearms. “Least hypothesis. Where else does technology come from with no physics and no engineering to back it up?”

And I haven’t got an answer for that at all. I’m trying to find the argument, in fact, when the tips of my fingers go blank white numb. My left hand clenches on the data slice as I withdraw it from the reader.

The holographic crystal crushes to powder in my hand.

I try to open my mouth to say, Richard. No words come out at all.

9:15 A.M., Friday 15 September, 2062

High Street

Rockville, Connecticut

Bobbi insisted on calling it a suburban assault vehicle, but in reality it was a reasonably standard heavy-duty high-clearance four-wheel-drive. Razorface hadn’t wanted to abandon his limousine and switch to Bobbi’s vehicle, but she did have the first-aid kits and a cache of additional weapons. And chances were that Casey wouldn’t be looking for a dark green Bradford, newer than Maker’s, with roll bars and armor plate.

Whatever, Mitch thought, parking it beside the sidewalk, guardrail and chain-link fence that separated the edge of the narrow street from a twelve-foot drop into brambles. He turned off the radio in the middle of the weather report—eighteenth named storm of the Atlantic season menaces the Outer Banks—and unlocked the doors. “This hill must be a pig to get up in the wintertime, killer.” Razorface just grunted from the passenger seat.

“That’s why I have the four-wheel,” Bobbi answered from where she reclined in the backseat with her hastily bandaged leg propped up. “And I wish to hell that doctor friend of yours had let you know he was running out of town so soon.”

“Yeah,” Mitch answered. “Me, too.”

Razor opened his door and walked around the car to help Bobbi. Pale lines were etched across her forehead, but she didn’t so much as whimper when he picked her up as easily as lifting a bag of groceries.

“Please get the first-aid kit, Michael.”

Mitch did it and locked the Bradford up. Thin-lipped, Bobbi directed them up a narrow flight of cement stairs to a woodframe house built into the side of the hill. Classic New England milltown architecture, he thought with a bitter grin. Awkward, inaccessible, and picturesque.

“Is this where you live? It’s a little out of the way.” She handed him the pass card and he opened the lock. Razorface held her up so she could disable the security system.

“Just a safehouse,” she answered. “There are MREs in the cabinet. You’re going to have to do my leg, Michael.”

“Yeah. I know. Will that table hold your weight?” It looked sturdy enough.

“It is oak. I don’t think it will be a problem.”

There was nothing on it. “Are there sheets?”

“Linen closet in the bathroom. Set me down please, Razorface.”

Mitch marveled at the calmness of her tone.

Bobbi leaned back on her elbows while Mitch cleaned the wound in her calf. The bullet had creased muscle and gone through. If it had struck bone there would have been nothing Mitch could have done for her. She stared at the ceiling, talking through the pain; he barely heard the strain in her voice.

She seemed to be striving for dryness as she said, “You didn’t get a chance to look around the garage bay, did you?”

“No.” The vinyl gloves he was wearing bunched and slid and stuck in clotted blood. He didn’t look up.

“There was a white van parked there. Newer Ford, no windows. Looked like a delivery van.” She grunted as Mitch’s hand slipped.

“Did you get a look inside?”

“No.” No further noises of protest, even as he slathered the wound in antiseptics. “But I took cover under it. The undercarriage is stuck full of mud and grass, Michael.”

“Oh.” He wound the bandage tight before he leaned back and closed his eyes. “I know a cop I can call in West Hartford. Last night might be covered up, but he might be able to make things hot for the corporate offices. Maybe he can even get a warrant and look inside.”

“Do it,” Razorface said. “And tomorrow we’re going to Bridgeport.”

2:30 P.M., Friday 15 September, 2062

Toronto General Hospital

Emergency Department

Toronto, Ontario

Gabe surged down the white-tiled corridor, his strides only shortening when a plump, shirtsleeved Middle Eastern man stepped in front of him. “Gabriel Castaign?”

Gabe recognized him from the phone conversation. “Doctor Mobarak. What are you doing in Toronto?”

“I had planned to come up to observe Jenny’s surgery. Come with me.”

“How is she?”

The doctor sighed, struggling to keep up with Gabe’s longer strides. “Refusing treatment.”

“Quoi? You can’t have the hospital do something?”

“You’ll see. She is as stubborn as a cow moose. And I’m not affiliated with Toronto General; the fact that they’re letting me play doctor at all is nothing but a courtesy. Valens went to bat for me once he figured out that Jenny wasn’t speaking to him.”

“Valens is here?”

“She threw him out of the room. He was recommending immediate nanosurgery. Apparently, she collapsed in seizures at the public library.”

Que faisait elle à la bibliothèque? Gabe didn’t think now was the time to ask stupid questions. “What did she say?”

“No surgery. She needs it, Gabe. She won’t make her birthday without it.”

“She told me five years. Maybe ten.”

Mobarak paused, his hand on the steel doorknob. Gabe, heart in the pit of his stomach, read the younger man’s eyes with a helpless sensation he knew all too well.

“That was then,” the doctor said. “This is now. The myelin breakdown in her motor cortex is becoming acute. I don’t know what triggered it. It could be exposure to the drugs Valens was providing for her.” Mobarak’s voice dripped disgust. “It could also be the stimulation from the VR exercises.”

“What does that mean?”

Mobarak’s shoulders rose on an indrawn breath, and he slowly shook his head. Then he opened the door.

Gabe, braced for the worst, swore out loud when he saw Jenny sitting upright in a chair beside the examining table, buttoning the cuff of her right sleeve with frowning care. Pain burst so bright in his chest that for a moment he thought his heart had stopped, and he looked up at the wall, calling fury back up over the relief that threatened to smother it. Oh, no.

He didn’t dare think about what that relief meant.

14:30 hours, Friday 15 September, 2062

Toronto General Hospital

Emergency Department

Toronto, Ontario

I’m about to put my boots on and stand up when Simon comes back into the room. This time, Gabe is at his heels. Valens has already delivered his prognosis and I imagine, knowing Valens, is trying to arrange for me to be moved to NDMC and for an operating theater to have been set up five minutes ago. Even after I told him no. It’s enough. It’s enough to put Valens in jail, and Barb with him. And maybe Mitch will manage to prove she shot his girlfriend. That’s still a death penalty in Connecticut. I’ll take the court-martial for refusing orders and go to jail. Maybe they’ll give me Peacock’s old cell.

And then all three of Jeanne-Marie Casey’s little girls will be dead.

Maman.

“Oh, hell.” I don’t realize I’ve said it out loud until Gabe stops in front of me, Simon flanking him right. I stand up. Not many people are all that much taller than I am, but I find myself staring at the dimple in Gabe’s chin. “What bullshit story did Doctor Frankenstein here feed you, Gabe?”

The look he gives me makes me shut my mouth. He sees right through me. He always has, and I never even noticed. “He says you’re refusing treatment.”

“I told you I was going to.” I turn away from him, looking for my boots. “I’ve accomplished what I came to Toronto for, Gabe. I don’t want any more surgery. I want to go home and die in my own bed, and will you and the girls take care of my cat for me when I’m gone? He’s kind of ugly, but he means a lot to me.” I won’t look at Simon. I can’t look at Simon. I can’t — won’t — tolerate that kind of a betrayal.

“Jenny.” His blue eyes are soft. He lays a hand on my shoulder and I shiver. “Remember what I told you this morning?”

“I’m not going to do it, Gabe.”

“Then you’ll die.”

And that’s the brutality of it. Because I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want him to kiss me again, and not stop this time.

I just can’t bear to be whole.

“Gabe.”

“Vas te faire enculé, Jenny. Tu me fais chier. Think about somebody else for once in your life. How long are you going to run away? How many people who love you are you going to turn your back on, woman?” He should be shouting, but his voice is low, uneven, as if squeezing through wire mesh just to get the words out.

Fuck you. And I deserve it, too. He’s right, every bit of it. How do I explain the cold terror that is all I can taste, the darkness pressing at the edge of my vision? I could tell him about the little Latina girl getting into the dark-windowed sedan, and I could tell him how gun oil tastes when the barrel is shoved into your mouth, and I could tell him what your lover’s eyes look like when you turn your back and leave him to his fate. He might even understand.

“Gabe, even for you I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

His hand slides down my shoulder and drops. Simon has melted away as if by magic. I’m not even sure if he’s in the room anymore. Behind the curtain? “I’m not asking for me.”

“I can’t do it for myself, either.”

“Can you do it for Leah and Genie? Because Leah deserves to make it to adulthood without losing somebody else.”

My mouth drops open in the silence that follows.

“And,” he continues, cold and inexorable as a glacier, “if anything happens to me, you’re the only one I’ve got who can take care of them, Jenny. You’re Leah’s godmother. If I die, the girls are yours.”

Yes, and when I signed the paperwork that Geniveve and Gabe put in front of me, powers of attorney and conditional custody and Christ knows what else, it had seemed like a joke. Because Gabe and Geniveve were both going to outlive me.

And Leah is around the same age I was when Maman died. A little bit younger than Nell was, when she died.

And Gabe — Gabe knows it, too, and he’s fighting dirty for what he wants, and I’ve known that he’s a ruthless son of a bitch since the day I met him. It’s hard to miss that aspect of somebody who’s willing to sever a limb to save your life.

There’s a stain on the wall shaped a little like Prince Edward Island. I can’t even draw breath to damn him for ten long seconds. “Mon ange. How can you ask me to do something that would put me in a hospital bed for thirty fucking years? Breathing on a machine?”

“It might not.”

“You won’t let Leah do something a hell of a lot safer.”

“Leah—” I’ve scored, and I feel like shit about it, too. He grabs my shoulder and forces me to face him, lifting my chin so I have to look him in the eye. There are still scars on his hands from the skin grafts, all those years ago. Faded, but there. I haven’t noticed them in years. “I’ll let her go through with the surgery if you do this. If you take this chance. And if it cripples you…”

“You’ll come and visit me in the hospital every week? That’ll get old pretty fast, mon ami.”

His voice a low growl, sharp in my ear. His touch almost bruising. “Bloody hell, vieille bique. If you ask me. Jenny. I’ll kill you myself.”

I jerk away. You got slugs in that thing? He would, damn him, and pay whatever price he had to. It isn’t an idle promise: Gabe’s hands aren’t any cleaner than mine, in the final analysis. He knows what he’s offering.

The girl has already lost her mother. At least she’s got a dad who cares about her. Genie… it’s funny. Genie and I get along well enough. Leah and I connect, and we have since she was barely old enough to grab my finger and stare deeply into my eyes. There’s something about her that reminds me of Nell, come to think of it. Wide-eyed wonder and a whim of carbon steel.

There isn’t, in the essence of it, anything I wouldn’t do for this man. For his daughters. Valens was right, and I am weak.

I breathe in, tasting antiseptic hospital air. “Vas te faire foutre, Gabriel.”

I can’t even hear him breathe.

I look up, look him level in the eyes, and let it all come out on a word. “Dammit. Dammit! Yes.” For Leah. Yes. Because for her, I would crawl through fire.

“I’ll tell Valens.” Soft. Even. “Do you want Simon to stay?”

Damned if I trust him, but I trust him more than Valens. I nod, and Gabe leaves the examining room. I can hear Simon in the washroom. He’s left the door open a crack, and the water is running. I cross and peer in past the door. “I want you in scrubs for this thing, Simon.”

He comes into my field of vision, drying his hands. “I’m not a surgeon, Jenny. And I’m not nanotech certified, anyway.”

“No, but you’re not an idiot, either.” And you’re not Frederick Valens. I look up and meet his brown eyes, earnest and soft and weak. “Valens needs me. Needs me cooperative.” I can have Richard get in touch with Mitch. If anybody can prove what Barb did in Hartford, above and beyond the poisonings… “And you owe me, Simon.”

“Yes. And I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it in my world. Pay me back, or get the hell out of my life.”

The careful smoothness at the corners of his eyes gives him away before he speaks. “Whatever you say, Jenny.”

Nightfall, Saturday 16 September, 2062

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

“How simple is it?” Alberta leaned against angled one-way glass, left arm raised over her head. Expensive blue-gold shoes lay on the steel-gray carpet, one upright and one sprawled on its side, where she had stepped out of them. Behind the mirrored wall, six young men in loose clothing variously curled or slumped in recliners. Wires linked them to the headrests of the chairs, and their eyes fluttered ceaselessly behind closed lids.

Valens, standing beside and behind her, looked away. “Very simple,” he answered, studying those shoes. “Control the kids, control Castaign. Control Castaign, control Casey. It’s easy.”

“Really?” She sighed and shuffled back, turning to face him, digging stockinged toes into the springy carpet. “It would be nice if one of these boys would work out for us. Are they all recruited through the Avatar Gamespace?”

“Yes.”

“I’d rather use a kid. A group of twenty-year-olds. Easier to manage.”

Valens shrugged, stepping forward to look through the glass. “I can handle Casey. Don’t worry about that. She’s got the experience, and she’s got the need.”

“She’s also got a history of substance abuse.”

“That works for us, in this case.”

“Is she going to survive the surgery?”

“Looks good so far. She went in this morning.”

“Ah.” Alberta bent down to pick up her shoes and balanced on each foot in turn to slip them on. “Why is it that you expect her response to differ from theirs?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

Valens shrugged. “A number of factors, frankly, and some of them boil down simply to having the experience to know when to let the wheel slide through your hands until the skid corrects itself. Metaphorically speaking.”

“You have a lot of faith in this woman, Fred.”

“I do,” he answered. “And I have faith in my ability to get her to do what we want her to, as well.”

“Ah.” She scuffed one foot on the carpeting, settling the shoe. “Very well then. But I need something to present to the board by the end of the year. Or I’m on the street, and you’re not far behind.”

Valens gave her a tight, thoughtful nod. “I’m aware of the situation.”

“I sure as hell hope so,” she said, eyes narrowing. “We beat the Chinese, or we may as well take our bat and ball and go home. Unitek isn’t interested in honorable mention. And my ass is on the line as much as anybody’s. The space program is my baby and if we don’t see results soon, it will not go well.”

“Mining the asteroids?”

“Profitable, but only in space. The board hasn’t yet made the conceptual leap to really grasp that the future does not lie down a gravity well.”

“I know it. And the Chinese know it, too.”

“Yes, but they’ve had even more problems with navigation than we have. They lost their second one last Tuesday on its first powered run. The Li Bo. I was just informed.”

Valens grunted. “They’ve still got the Huang Di nearly half built. Third time’s the charm. Have there been any further sabotage attempts on the Montreal?”

“No. And she’ll be ready by Christmas. I am assured.”

“Well,” Valens said, scratching his chin. “So will we.”

“We can’t afford to lose another ship, Frederick. They’ll scrap the program.”

And us.

Some things don’t need saying.