Spin State

AMC Station: 20.10.48.

Li decided not to go, then changed her mind again at least eight times.

She told herself she was getting too old to follow her hormones everywhere they led her, and that her excuse for accepting the invitation—asking about Sharifi—was nothing short of pathetic. If she really wanted to blow off some steam, she’d be better off picking up some stranger in a bar than chasing after a woman that any sane person in her position would know enough to steer clear of.

In the end she arrived two minutes early and dithered on the doorstep wondering if she should buzz or just walk around until it was time. Just as she was telling herself it wasn’t too late to turn around and leave, Bella opened the door.

She wore white: a long fall of silk that flared around her ankles in the station’s low gravity. Somehow, Li was quite sure Haas had bought the dress for her.

“Are you sure he’s off-station?” she said, and cursed herself for asking.

Bella just smiled serenely, took the flowers Li had brought, and led her through a narrow door into the kitchen.

“He’s in Helena,” she said as she poured water into a vase for the flowers. “AMC managers’ meeting. It runs until the day after tomorrow. So…” She flicked her dark hair back and leaned over to cut the flower stems, baring the long pale line of her neck.

Li caught her breath. “So you’re a free woman,” she said, and bit her tongue again. She couldn’t put a foot right tonight.

“Free,” Bella repeated without a trace of a smile. “I have never understood what humans mean when they use that word.”

Dinner was good, though Li didn’t have much appetite. She felt like she was in a play, the stage already set, the lines already scripted. Eating Haas’s food on Haas’s china. And across the table, Haas’s… what? Mistress? Employee? Indentured servant? One thing was certain: this wasn’t headed for a happy ending.

Bella talked, mostly. She seemed desperate to talk, terrified of the charged silences that hung between them. She talked about her childhood, her schooling, her life before the contract. None of it was what Li had expected. She had expected one of those mythical constructs you heard about in OCS classes and mission briefings. Brilliant, single-minded, every speck of individuality trained and programmed and disciplined out of her from the instant her tank’s umbilical cords were severed. Instead, she heard a lonely young woman stranded a few hundred light-years from her home planet.

Bella described the same things Li had seen during the Syndicate Wars. Gestation tanks, crèches, study labs. But she described them as home, spoke in words that made Li wonder if she’d seen what was really there on Gilead, or just what she wanted to see.

“The night I came here was the first night I spent alone in my life,” Bella said. “I couldn’t shut my eyes. I heard voices, noises. I thought I’d gone mad.”

“Did it get easier?”

“No.”

“Then why stay?”

“It was my part.”

Li blinked, thrown back to the interrogation rooms on Gilead, to the D Series soldiers she had seen mouth those same words. My part, they always said, as if the phrase had been stamped into them. My part to serve. My part to kill. My part to die. She felt a sudden, unwilling kinship with Bella: a murky intuition that, war or no war, the Syndicate soldiers she’d spent nearly a decade killing were closer to her than the Ring citizens it was her duty to defend against them.

“How did you end up with Haas?” she asked, seizing on the first change of subject that came to mind.

“With—? Oh.” Bella’s eyes dropped. “It just… happened.”

“You make it sound like a spilled drink.”

“It’s in my contract.”

“Your contract requires—?” Li couldn’t bring herself to voice any of the possible endings to that question.

“The contract doesn’t require anything. But… he told me he would be displeased if I didn’t. And that if he were displeased, he would terminate the contract and ask for a replacement. I… I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t be one of those. Terminated.”

“Having an affair with your boss seems a little above and beyond the call of duty, Bella.”

“It’s not an affair,” Bella said sharply. When Li glanced up her face was flushed, furious. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m not… I’m not abnormal.”

Abnormal. Li considered the word and the peculiarly ominous ring it had coming from a Syndicate construct’s mouth. She wondered what the source of Bella’s shame was. That Haas was foreign, unplanned, male? All three things? “You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” she told Bella. “You’re a long way from home here. You wouldn’t be the first person in history who adapted to survive.”

“No,” Bella said. “You don’t understand. You can’t understand, coming from… where you come from. It was a privilege to be sent here. All of us who were chosen knew the risks, the hardships. Even the Ds. They told us it was the most important thing we would ever do for our home Syndicates. I can’t fail after that. No matter how bad it is.”

“And how bad is it?” Li asked.

Bella’s fork lay forgotten on her plate rim. She picked it up, made a halfhearted attempt to eat something, then gave up entirely. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was just now and then, at first. And Haas can be… very charming. Then I met Cory.”

She fell silent for the space of a few breaths, looking down at her plate. Li said nothing, reluctant to break the thread of the memory that gripped the woman. “He was a surveyor,” she continued. “Cory Dean. Is that Irish?”

Li nodded.

“I thought so. He was nice. He didn’t stare. And he talked to me. He’d tell me jokes while we worked, stories. Haas got it into his head that he was my lover. He never said anything, but he thought it. It was ridiculous, of course.” Her nose wrinkled in obvious distaste. “I didn’t want him. Not that way, at least. But I hadn’t lived with humans long enough to see how it looked.

“Cory was missing for days. They checked the whole station, the mine, Shantytown. Voyt found him.” Bella’s face twisted as if it hurt to say Voyt’s name. “Someone had beaten him. Stolen his credit chip and then just left him in the gutter. He drowned in his own blood. I didn’t know you could do that.”

Bella shifted in her chair. When she spoke again, her voice was as hard and unyielding as virusteel. “The Shantytown watch had him for days before they called the station; they thought he was just a drunk miner. They said he’d gotten in a fight, but Cory would never have done that. Still, they’d found witnesses somehow, people who were willing to say they’d seen him fighting. You don’t have to throw around much money in Shantytown to get people to say what you want.

“Haas told me. I still remember how he looked when he did it. Like he was proud of it. Like he was daring me to say something. The next day he moved my things here, and it’s been… what you see now, ever since.”

Bella had given up even pretending to eat. Li watched her twist her napkin between white-knuckled fingers and thought about Haas, and about the blank impersonalness of Sharifi’s quarters and the single unexplained initial Sharifi had written in her datebook the week she died.

Maybe it was time to risk a shot in the dark.

“Did you tell Sharifi this story when she came to dinner?” she asked.

“What?”

“When she had dinner with you. The night before she died. Was Haas here? Or was he conveniently off-station that night too?”

Bella stared, her mouth open, her face white. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t.”

“You were lovers, weren’t you?”

“I never said—”

“You never had to. It’s all over your face every time you talk about her.”

Bella scrubbed at her mouth with her napkin. The skin of her face looked as pale as the bleached linen. “You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “Haas would… I don’t know what he’d do.” Her hand twitched toward the faint remnant of the bruise on her cheek, but she forced it down into her lap again.

“Doesn’t he know already? Isn’t that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“No.” Bella stood up so quickly she jostled the table and set the glassware ringing. “No. Not possible.”

She moved to the side window and leaned her face against the viewport. Li followed.

It was second night, and the Companion cast its faint light into the room, etching the angles of Bella’s face in a red so dark it was almost black. “What can I do?” she whispered.

“Can’t you just go home, tell them you can’t finish it out?”

She shook her head violently.

“Well, then—”

“Forget it. You can’t help. No one can help.”

Bella turned. She was so close now, the light behind her, the beautiful face lost in shadow. Li touched her cheek, and the feverish heat of the pale skin shocked her.

Bella leaned into her, sighing, and Li shuddered at the soft flutter of breath against her skin. Bella’s lips played along her neck, around the angle of her jaw, over her earlobe, and Li turned her head for the kiss she wanted so badly.

But in the last breath before their lips touched, she looked into Bella’s wide-open eyes—and saw something that stopped her cold. Not fear. Not reluctance. But… something. Something as deliberate and calculated as the blue-on-black MotaiSyndicate logo set into the outer perimeter of the violet irises.

Li stepped back, hands dropping to her sides. The hot desire that had taken hold of her a moment ago was gone, replaced by a clammy, after-fever chill. “Who killed Sharifi, Bella?”

Bella turned back toward the window, and it seemed to Li that the hand she put on the sill was trembling. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I told you, I don’t remember.”

“You remember something,” Li said. “Or you suspect. Why else would you have told me about Cory? Why else tell me the bodies were in the glory hole when they weren’t? Because they weren’t, were they? And you must have known they weren’t. You’re laying a trail for me. The only thing I can’t figure out is if you’re leading me to Haas or away from him.”

“I’m not leading you anywhere! I don’t know. I told you that!”

“And I don’t believe it. Lovers talk. Sharifi must have told you things. That she found something. Some new piece of technology. Some new information.” Li paused, then went on. “Something Korchow wanted you to get from her.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bella said stubbornly.

“Then how was it?”

Bella moved impatiently. “Is that all you came for? To ask questions?”

“What did you expect?” Li asked.

She waited, but Bella didn’t turn around, and only the slight tremor in her shoulders told Li she was crying again.

“Hannah didn’t go to Korchow about the crystals,” Bella said finally. “And there was nothing illegal about it. She was going to buy my contract, with her own money.”

Li stood speechless for a moment, unable to muster a response. “She couldn’t have bought your contract, Bella. She couldn’t have afforded it.”

“She was rich,” Bella insisted, with the blind certainty of someone who didn’t understand what the word meant, what money meant.

“Not that rich.”

“You’re wrong. She was going to. She promised.”

“So what went wrong, Bella? What happened to the happy ending?”

“She changed,” Bella said after a long silence. “She found something that made her happier than I could.”

Halfway back to her quarters Li realized she wasn’t even close to sleep and turned aside to catch the next surface-bound shuttle.

The pithead guards knew her by now; they searched her perfunctorily, almost apologetically. Twenty minutes later, just as the graveyard shift was turning, she climbed down the ladder into the glory hole.

The crystals were in full voice, overloading her internals, wreaking havoc on her scan systems. By the time she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder her infrared and quantum scans had cut out completely. She could have lit her lantern, but she didn’t want to. There was something terrible about the smallness of a light in this ancient airless darkness. She sat in the dark with her back against the ladder and retraced the twisting course of the investigation.

She saw no straight sight lines, no clear cause and effect, nothing but blind corners and dead drops. Had she accomplished anything at all here? Or was she just stuck in rewind, projecting her own ghosts onto Sharifi, dredging the sterile runoff of a dead girl’s pathetic memories?

Ask yourself who the players are, Cohen had said, and what they want. Well, what did they want?

Daahl and Ramirez wanted what the union always wanted. To wrest control of the mines away from the UN defense contractors, to build their workers’ paradise—a paradise that Li didn’t want any part of but that would probably be no worse than anyone else’s misguided little piece of heaven on earth.

Cartwright’s goals were tangential to the union’s, as Korchow would say. But he’d stand with the union —if only because the union was most likely to protect his precious crystals. If Daahl and Cartwright had to take Li down to get what they wanted, they would. Otherwise, they’d stay clear of her, if only because of their loyalty to the family she barely remembered.

Haas wanted to keep the mine running. And, when he thought he could get away with it, he’d wanted to keep Li out of the glory hole. Why? To avoid drawing the miners’ attention to it? No; they already knew, thanks to Cartwright and the wagging tongues of the miners Sharifi had paid union scale to dig it out for her. Was it simply the fierce multiplanetary’s drive to prevent a slowdown and protect profits? Or was it something more personal? Hiding his embezzling? Avenging himself for Bella’s betrayal?

Nguyen wanted Sharifi’s dataset. And she wanted to make sure no one else got it. That she knew things she wasn’t telling Li was a given, part of the price of working for her, of trusting her. But what were those things? Did she know what Sharifi had found in the mine? Who she had talked to about it? Did she know about Korchow? Was it just paranoia for Li to think she was following a track Nguyen had foreseen, even laid down for her?

And what about Korchow? He wanted the same information Nguyen wanted. He wanted it desperately enough to take the chance of approaching Li, of risking the sting he must know was a real possibility. And he had suggested—more than suggested—that Sharifi had already betrayed some of her secrets to him.

Bella was the wild card, of course. Did she know about Korchow? Was she working for him? What was there really between her and Haas? What had Voyt done to make her hate him so much? And what was the cold calculation Li had seen in her eyes? Grief over Sharifi, or something deeper, older, darker?

Something moved in the darkness.

Li’s eyes snapped open. Nothing.

Then she heard the faint but unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She slid a hand into her coverall and eased the Beretta out of its holster. She flicked the safety off, inching the lever back with agonizing slowness in order to muffle the dry little click of the catch snapping open.

“You’re not going to shoot me, Katie,” said a familiar voice.

A match flared. Li smelled sulfur, saw a monstrous shadow loom across the vault high above her. The shadow bent, shifted. A rusty pin squeaked, and a Davy lamp flared into life. “Hello,” Cartwright said from where he sat cross-legged on the gleaming floor. “So you heard them too, did you?”

“Heard who?” Li asked breathlessly.

“The saints, Katie. Her children.” He smiled. “Rejoice, for we know the hour and the day of Her Coming. It’s beginning.”

“Save the sermons for your sheep, Cartwright. It has nothing to do with me.”

Something drew her eyes into the inky shadows behind the priest. Some movement, so faint that she felt rather than saw it. But when the voice spoke out of the darkness she felt so little surprise that she realized she’d known Daahl would be here.

“If it has nothing to do with you,” he asked, “then why are you down here?”

“Just doing my job, that’s all.”

“There are a lot of people who are wondering just what that job is. A lot of people who’d like to know which side you’re on.”

She didn’t answer.

Cartwright began scratching at a patch of dry skin on his wrist, and something about the movement—the sound of fingernails on flesh, the dead skin flaking off and glittering in the lamplight—made her feel ill. He’s crazy, she thought. He always was crazy.

“Well, Katie,” Daahl asked, “don’t you have any answer at all for me?”

Li rubbed a clammy hand across her face.

“I’m going to show you something,” Daahl said. “I may regret showing it to you. A lot of people have told me I will, in fact. But I think you have a right to see it. I think you have a right to know what’s on the table here.”

Li saw the UNSC seal on the letter before he’d finished handing it to her. “This is a classified internal memo,” she said. “Where the hell are you getting this stuff?”

“Just read it.”

It took several reads for the sense of the thing to come through to her—and even then she wasn’t sure what the cautious, bureaucratically vague words really meant. Someone else had been sure though. Some other reader had been there before her, had scored through the critical lines with a strong confident hand:

In conclusion, the presence of live Bose-Einstein strata on Compson’s World is both an internal and external security threat. It is vital, both in relation to Syndicate industrial espionage activities and for reasons of political stability (vis-à-vis the IWW and other outside agitators) to transfer the production of transport and communications-grade condensate off the planet and into a controlled laboratory setting. This goal presents a compelling reason, in and of itself, for supporting Dr. Sharifi’s research.

“You understand what that means, don’t you?” Daahl asked. “They’re saying that the very presence of live crystal on-planet is a security risk. That as soon as they can manufacture it off-planet they’ll destroy the deposits that are left in the ground here.”

“This memo doesn’t say anything like that, Daahl.”

“Doesn’t it? Then what does that mean, ‘the presence of live strata is a security risk’?”

“It means nothing. Some paper pusher producing overblown verbiage for a departmental meeting. And anyway, you have no guarantee this thing is genuine.”

“My source was too good for it to be anything else.”

“If you want me to take that claim seriously, you’d better tell me who this ‘source’ was and let me make up my own mind.”

“You know, Katie. Think about it.”

Li stared at the sooty fiche, her mind spinning through the possibilities. Station security. Mine personnel. TechComm itself. But almost by definition no one cleared to see this kind of document could have come from a place like Compson’s World, let alone cared enough about it to risk their job and freedom for it.

“Who?” she asked, looking up to see Cartwright and Daahl both watching her. “Who was it?”

Daahl smiled. He took the memo back, pulling it from her fingers so gently that she hardly realized she’d let go of it, and folded it carefully away into his shirt pocket.

“Hannah,” he said. “Hannah Sharifi.”

AMC Station: 23.10.48.

Li woke to the sound of people running down the corridor outside, banging on its alloy walls hard enough to set them echoing: the universal spacer’s manual alarm system.

She rolled out of bed just as the station lit up her livewall and started talking to her. Her first thought was that there’d been a blowout, but as the calm automated voice droned on she realized it was calling all rescue and medical personnel to the shuttle bays. Whoever was in trouble, they were on the planet below.

She reached over to her cabin’s one chair and started pulling on the uniform she’d flung over it a few short hours ago. She was just lacing her boots up when the station put up a planet-side call for her.

Sharpe.

“You have medical training, don’t you?” he asked abruptly.

He was in his office at the hospital, and he looked as if he’d been hauled out of bed by the same crisis that had the stationers running for the shuttle bays. A mournful keening rose and fell on his end of the line like the Doppler-distorted navigational beacon of a drive ship pushing lightspeed.

“Just the usual,” she said. “CPR. Trauma response. My oracle has a combat med praxis it can load. What’s happened?”

“The Anaconda blew again.”

Suddenly Li recognized the wail coming over the line behind Sharpe’s voice for what it was: the pit whistle.

“How bad?” she asked.

“Pit 3’s gone. And 4’s burning. The above-ground foreman told me he’s got four hundred and twenty miners on the logs, all but seventy still underground. The closest doctor besides me is in Helena, three hours from here. More, if the weather doesn’t clear. If you can open a burn wrap and find a vein, I need you.”

Li stood up, realized she still had one boot left to lace, sat down again. “When’s the next open shuttle seat?”

“Gate 18. And hurry. They’re holding it for you.”

As the shuttle plunged toward the planet, the copilot scanned the surface channels for news of the fire.

No one they could raise had time to talk to them, but little by little they began to piece together the long slide through miscommunication and mischance to disaster.

The first step was the breakdown of the Pit 4 chippy lift. With a ten-meter-square lift floor that took up half the breadth of the main shaft, the chippy lift was the only way in and out of Pit 4 for every one of the miners who worked her two-hundred-odd cutting faces. With its chippy out of action, Pit 4 had to fall back on the double drum lift—a heavy-duty lift built to carry muck, ore, and waste rock, not miners. Eager to keep cutting, management stopped pulling waste up on the double drum and swapped in the eight-man emergency evac bucket.

That was the first link in the chain: four hundred miners underground with a lift that carried only eight men per trip instead of the chippy lift’s forty-eight.

The first shift foreman then made a decision that, only a week ago, would have been the right one. He consulted the airflow maps and rerouted Pit 4 evac through Pit 5’s main shaft, two and a quarter miles southeast of the Pit 4 headframe. What he didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that the maps he was looking at were four days out of date because of a glitch in the AMC data system. And two days ago, a work crew had closed off the 642 crosscut to Pit 5 in an attempt to fix the ventilation problems that had contributed to the last fire.

Haas knew about the closures, of course. He would have known the maps were out of date, would have been able to put the pieces together and turn things around if he’d been there. But Haas was at a Mine Safety Commission hearing in Helena. And with Haas gone, no single person on-site was in a position to see what was coming.

And that was the second link in the chain: an entire shift sent downshaft with evac instructions that dead-ended thirty-two hundred meters underground in front of two locked-down steel ventilation louvers.

Meanwhile, Pit 4’s double drum lift was still being used to haul miners—and all the coal, waste rock, and condensates those miners were hacking out of the ground had to go somewhere. The miners began routing their carts through the 531 crosscut to Pit 3’s still-operable double drum lift. Coal and waste carts began piling up in Pit 3’s central gangway, directly under the main air intake, whose Vulcan fan pumped forty-two hundred cubic meters of air per minute through the entire active workings of Pits 3 and 4.

That underground traffic jam was the third link in the chain. That, and a simple physical fact: coal is a rock that burns.

At 3A.M. a flash fire flickered through the 4100 level of the Trinidad, almost six kilometers from the Pit 3 headframe as the crow flies. The fire crew suited up and went down, but they couldn’t find a point of origin—and though they shut down the nearby brattices, air was still coming in from somewhere. They called up to the Pit 3 fanhouse to report the fire. The fan operator checked his maps, saw that the fire was on Pit 3’s main ventilation circuit, logged the time, and flipped the safety shutoff on his fan, cutting all forced-air ventilation to Pits 3 and 4.

On any other day, the shutoff would have been the right thing to do. It would have given the fire crew additional time to find the flash fire’s source, and it would have stopped the big fans from pumping suffocating smoke through the rest of the mine until they got the crystals under control.

But today wasn’t any other day. Today there was a freight-train-sized traffic jam of coal and refuse carts lined up down the length of the 3100 gangway just below the intake shaft.

As long as the fans were running, the fresh air flowed through the gangway fast enough to catch the highly flammable coal dust rising off the carts and blow it out the Pit 4 outtake before it could stagnate and become volatile. When the fans shut off, however, the dust began to thicken in the unventilated gangway and climb toward ignition temperature. All that was missing now was a spark. A spark, and fresh air to feed the fire the spark would start.

At 3:42A.M. by the clock in the Pit 3 fanhouse, the fire crew called up top to report that the fire in the Trinidad was out.

At 3:47 the above-ground foreman ordered the fans back on.

At 3:49 the Anaconda crossed the line that every mine crosses sooner or later: the line where only the dead know what really happened.

All the living knew was that at ten to four a shock wave rippled through the coalfield, breaking windows and knocking people off their feet in the streets of Shantytown. People ran out of bars and flophouses, still half-asleep, and saw lightning over the coalfield, followed by a black billowing thunderhead of smoke that could only mean one thing: the mine was burning.

As the rescuers started pulling up the maps and putting the pieces together, they faced a critical situation. Over six hundred miners had gone into Pits 3 and 4 at the start of first shift. Seventy-odd miners, many of them badly injured, were huddled in Pit 4’s 3400 loading bay waiting for the spreading smoke to catch up with them. Hundreds more were scattered through the long miles of unventilated drifts and gangways that were rapidly filling with smoke. And the only way in or out of the mine was Pit 4’s excruciatingly slow emergency cage.

Now it was a simple matter of mathematics. The cage’s eight-man capacity meant that eight rescuers could go down each trip and send eight injured miners back up to the surface in their place. Nothing anyone did now could change that—any more than it could stop the fire ripping through the drifts and galleys.

But even with the disaster staring them in the face, Li couldn’t help wondering about the now-forgotten flash fire down in the Trinidad that had started it all.

They set down on the Pit 9 helipad, over six kilometers from the fire. Even so, they made their final descent through a solid curtain of smoke, and the touchdown, when it came, was as sudden as stepping off an unexpected stair flat-footed.

Li spotted Sharpe in the lee of the breakerhouse, surrounded by a half dozen still-unloaded trucks of medical equipment. She grabbed the strap of the medic’s kit he flung at her and followed him.

She counted almost eighty injured miners lying on stretchers lined up in haphazard rows around the trucks. One of Sharpe’s interns was moving down the rows already, tagging them. Green for mildly wounded victims whose treatment could wait until the first crush was over. Red for urgent cases. White for hopeless ones. There was a lot of white out there already—and the rescuers wouldn’t gain access to the immediate area of the explosion for hours, possibly even days.

“At least it looks like they’re getting them up fast,” Li said.

Sharpe gave her a grim tight-mouthed look. “They’ve only brought two loads up so far. The rest of these are above-ground injuries.”

“Oh God.”

“Haven’t you been listening to the pit priests, Major? We’re out of God’s jurisdiction.”

Li lost track of time after that. The underground cases came in slowly at first. Then the rescuers started rappelling down the Pit 4 shaft and hauling the injured up by hand. Within minutes, the triage unit was overwhelmed. Li’s oracle loaded its med praxis, and she sank into a long dark automatic tunnel of bending, cutting, injecting, bandaging.

At some point, the stretchers got short. Rescue crews started raiding the lines of wounded, checking for white tags, then pulses, pulling stretchers out from under the already dead.

“Hey!” Li shouted when a young miner dumped a white-tagged burn victim off a stretcher near her.

“No time,” the rescuer said. He sounded young, and furious. On the ground between them, the burn victim woke briefly, called out someone’s name, and died. “Christ Almighty, I thought he was dead already,” the rescuer said, then turned aside and vomited.

Li watched him for a moment, then wiped her face on her sleeve and went back to work.

“Hey!” someone said behind her, she wasn’t sure how much later. She felt the weight of a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Ramirez, barely recognizable under a mask of caked coal dust, blood, diesel oil.

“We could use you downstairs,” he said.

Li looked around for Sharpe and saw him talking to the newly arrived Helena medics. “How shorthanded are you?” she asked.

“What we’re short of is equipment. Rebreathers, mainly. Can’t recharge the ones we have fast enough to keep up with the rescue teams.” He hesitated, then went on, speaking quickly. “And the mine blew on the graveyard shift.”

For a moment Li didn’t see what Ramirez was aiming at. Then she felt a chill run down her spine. Graveyard shift was the bootleggers’ shift. It was night shift, station time and planet time alike: the only shift that both started and ended under cover of darkness, and the easiest time for the independents to smuggle their cuttings out of the mine through all the unmaintained drifts and boreholes that never showed up on the company maps.

This time of night there would be dozens, maybe hundreds of independents below ground who had never logged in or left their tags at pit bottom. The shift foremen might know where the bootleggers were, more or less—but admitting it would mean admitting they’d taken bribes in cash or condensate to keep quiet. And, bribes or no bribes, most of the shift foremen were dead anyway.

Worst of all—and this was what Ramirez really meant—most of the constructs still working in the mines were independents. If the pit had blown on any other shift, there would have been a host of genetics among the rescue crews—experienced miners who could survive the poisoned air without rebreathers at least long enough to pull out a few survivors. Now those very miners were the ones trapped below ground waiting for rescue, and the men above ground needed rebreathers. Rebreathers that probably wouldn’t arrive in time.

Li looked over at the Helena medics, already spreading through the triage area, bending over stretchers, setting down crates of burn bags and bandages.

“There’s two hundred and seventy logged-in miners still unaccounted for,” Ramirez said, letting the number hang in the smoky air between them. “Maybe another hundred independents in the back tunnels.”

“All right,” Li said. “Just give me a minute.”

Half an hour later, she felt the bump of the cage hitting pit bottom, jerked the gate open, and stepped out into hell.

The rescue was an exercise in controlled chaos. Searchers surged in and out of the staging area, often returning to report not survivors but additional rescuers lost to smoke inhalation and rockfall injuries. Dogs sniffed through the stench of coal smoke and burnt electrical wiring, barking with excitement at the rare live find, whining anxiously when the bodies they discovered didn’t sit up and talk to them.

Li spent the rest of the night working side by side with Ramirez. To her amazement, he kept up with her. More than kept up with her. And, unwired as he was, it could only be nerves and raw determination that were holding him together.

As the night wore on she began to notice that the men at pit bottom always made sure Ramirez had a stretcher when he needed it or a fresh tank when he came back to turn in his empties. He was getting special treatment, and for good reason: he was finding people. Finding survivors and getting them out with a speed that could only mean he was taking chances the others weren’t willing to take.

So. He was a hero—down here, anyway. Li had long gotten over being surprised by anything people did when lives were on the line. She’d seen hard-bitten veterans fall apart under fire, and she’d seen more than a few soft-looking rich kids reveal themselves as born heroes—or born killers. Some people were just wired for crunch time. So far it looked like Ramirez was one of them.

Li herself was a survivor, not a hero. Any illusions she’d had on that score had been scorched out of her back on Gilead. But down here she didn’t need to be a hero. Down here she just needed to keep breathing. And keep breathing was exactly what she did, as night paled to smoky daylight at the top of the shaft three kilometers above them.

She and Ramirez outlasted three different rescue teams, ran into McCuen somewhere toward dawn and kept on searching with him. They followed pointing fingers and hoarse-throated directions. They listened for the dogs’ barking. They helped dig through rockfalls and shore up dangerously loose lagging. They hefted bodies, live and dead, and carried them until they found someone to hand them off to.

Meanwhile, Li’s internals monitored the contaminated air, beeped warnings at her—warnings she ignored—and sent out suicide armies of virucules to combat the contamination that was clogging her lungs and flooding through her body. After the first few hours of exposure, the nonceramsteel components in her internals started overheating, and her oracle shifted all nonessential systems into powersave. At four hours she started coughing up coal black chunks of phlegm loaded with dead virucules. At fourteen hours, she had to go back above ground and sit hooked up to the oxygen feed for most of an hour to catch her breath and give her systems a chance to reboot. Then she went back down, forcing herself not to think about the damage she was doing, and started the whole process over again.

In every rescue or battlefield cleanup Li had ever worked, there came a point of diminishing returns. It might come after only a few hours, or it might take days to arrive, but sooner or later it always did come. Then the rush of saving survivors was replaced by the grim obligation of retrieving bodies, and you started to wonder just what it was you were risking your own life for. Li always felt sorriest for the dogs when it got to that point, and this rescue was no exception. There was a shattering sincerity in their reactions: the hesitation, the doubtful whining note that slipped into their barking, the worried licking of hands and faces that were long past reviving. Even at the end, even after every human rescuer had shut down and given up inside, the dogs couldn’t stop hoping.

Li hit her own point of diminishing returns somewhere in Anaconda’s 3700 level, creeping down a shattered drift with a pulse locator that hadn’t spiked on a live person in fourteen hours. Even Ramirez had started to at least talk about packing it up.

Then, finally, they got the hit they almost stopped believing would come: a locator beacon in a relatively undamaged section of corridor well off the main circulation paths—and, they hoped, out of the worst smoke. But when they reached it, they found only empty corridor running away into the darkness.

“What the hell?” Li said, her locator still blipping at something that clearly wasn’t there.

McCuen pried a piece of lagging away from the wall and pulled the beacon out of a niche in the wall.

“Bootleggers,” he said, his voice muffled by his rebreather mouthpiece. “If they’re still alive, they’ll have been working within shouting distance of it.”

The three of them stared at each other, hardly breathing. Then they started shouting.

When the reply finally came, Li thought it was an echo. She forced her pickup to maximum and heard it again. It was shouting, although it sounded too faint to be anywhere near them—certainly too faint for unenhanced ears to hear.

“Sshh!” she said.

Ramirez and McCuen stopped shouting and looked at her.

“What?” McCuen whispered.

She heard it again. Two voices, muffled by rock and dropped coal, but voices all the same. And above the shouting, a second sound. A buzzing, vibrating sound that came from much closer.

They tracked the sound along the corridor and up a rough side tunnel that ended in a roof fall. And when they called out there, even McCuen and Ramirez thought they heard it.

As soon as they heard it, they went crazy. McCuen ran back toward the main gangway to get help and spread news of possible survivors. Li and Ramirez began a furious race to collect all the timber and lagging they could find within carrying distance and start shoring up the roof and chipping their way into the rubble pile.

“Right, then,” Ramirez said when they had cleared a passage through the first big blockage. He unbuckled his kit and started stripping off his bulky safety gear. “I’ll go take a look around.”

Li shook her head. “Forget it. I’ll go.”

“No way,” he said, tugging at a stubborn buckle.

Li put a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to prove anything, Leo.”

He stopped and gave her an incredulous half-angry stare. Then he grabbed the end of the cord and clipped it onto his belt. “I’m not trying to prove anything,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m trying to get those people out safely.”

Li felt her face heat up. “If that’s what you want, you’ll let me go. I’m smaller, stronger. And I can get by without my rebreather if I have to. Wherever they are, I’ve got a better chance of getting to them, and that’s God’s truth.”

She took the cord out of his hands, tugging a little to free it from his clenched fingers. As she unclipped it from his belt and attached it to her own she kept her eyes fixed on his. “Just feed me rope and come dig me out if the roof falls on me,” she said. “All right?”

As if in response to her words, the roof boomed and cracked—the sound of a mountain’s weight of coal and rock shifting above them, seeking a new equilibrium now that the ribs had been burned out of the deep tunnels.

“Don’t worry,” Ramirez said grimly. “I’ll be here.”

The tunnel behind the rockfall was dark but not too smoky. Li guessed that the roof had caved in so quickly that not much smoke-tainted air had made it into this section.

She crept forward through air so close and hot that her infrared gave her only a blurred sketch of the path before her. The tunnel was relatively clear once she was past the rockfall; it was just a matter of squirming around the rubble that had been ripped off the walls and ceiling when the fire had come through.

The posts and lagging littering her path were more than inconveniences, of course. They were what had been holding up the ceiling before the fire. And now that they had come down it was only a matter of time until the mountain took the tunnel back.

The trick, of course, was not to be there when that happened.

She was ten meters down the passage when she heard the roof crack again. A sound like tearing paper rippled through the dark toward her. Rocks pummeled the ground a few meters ahead. She crouched in the partial shelter of a fallen timber and waited.

“Okay?” Ramirez called when everything but the roiling dust had subsided.

“Okay,” she called, as loud as she dared. She pushed her hard hat down on her head, waited a few moments to make sure the fault wasn’t spreading, then pushed forward.

Just as she started forward, the noise started again. This time it was a scratchy rasping sound, not like anything she had heard before. She dove back under the shelter, expecting more roof fall. The noise stopped, then started again, repeating at regular intervals. It wasn’t the roof shifting at all, she realized; it sounded more like a switch turning.

She tracked it to the drift’s far wall, behind a twisted piece of lagging that had once been pressure-bolted into the ceiling. She didn’t dare move the lagging; even her ceramsteel-reinforced muscles and tendons couldn’t hold the immense metal plate if its few remaining bolts came loose. She ran her hands up behind it, trying to find the source of the noise. Finally her fingers touched what she had not allowed herself to hope for: a phone box.

It had been bent by the weight of the fallen lagging, its speaker half-crushed. She had to make her way back down the corridor and pull a metal rod out of the rubble to pry it open and get her hands on the receiver. When she put it to her ear, it had already stopped ringing, and she got nothing but the rough static of a damaged line.

“Christ,” she whispered. She twisted around to get her arm farther under the lagging and felt something pull and strain in her shoulder. Finally, she got her hand on the cradle and held it down, keeping the receiver in her other hand. It was three painful minutes by her internals before the phone rang again.

“Hello?” she said, jerking her hand off the cradle and pressing the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said a disembodied voice over the crackle and whine of the wire.

“Where are you?” Li said.

“Where the hell do you think I am?” the voice asked.

Li shivered. “Who is this?”

“Come on, Katie.”

“Cartwright?” she said. “Cartwright?”

But the line had gone dead.

“Let’s get you up top,” Ramirez said when she told him about Cartwright. Even in the lamplight, she could see he was looking at her like she was crazy.

“No. I’m telling you. I talked to him. He’s in the glory hole.”

“That’s nonsense. We’re nowhere near there.”

“Yes we are.” Li shook her head stubbornly. “I’ve got the wiring charts for this pit pulled up. I’m looking at them. The phone line they laid in for Sharifi runs down this drift and into a borehole that connects to the Trinidad just south of the glory hole. That’s how we heard their voices: through the boreholes the wiring team ran down from this level.”

“Let’s just call it into pit bottom and let a closer team handle it,” Ramirez said.

And that was when she figured it out.

It wasn’t that Ramirez didn’t believe her. He believed Cartwright was down there, all right; he wasn’t even surprised to hear it. He just didn’t want her to know about it.

“You crazy bastards,” she said. “What the hell have you done?”

“Come on. We need to go up.”

“How does it feel to kill a few hundred people, Leo?”

“It’s AMC that’s killing them, not Cartwright.”

Li turned and started walking toward the slant down to the Trinidad.

“Where are you going?” Ramirez asked.

“To find that son of a bitch and beat the truth out of him.”

“No, wait.” Ramirez was chasing after her, stumbling in his haste to catch up to her. “It’s not what you think. I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you everything you want. But please, please let Daahl handle this. It’s for him to handle. And if you tell anyone, it’ll only get more people killed. It’ll only mean they all died for nothing, for AMC’s damned bottom line!”

Later, she wished she had insisted. Wished she had gone straight down to the glory hole, no matter what Ramirez had said or how reasonable it had sounded. But later was too late, because when they went up to find Daahl they got more than they bargained for.

“That doesn’t look good,” Ramirez said as they stepped out of the pithead office.

Li followed his glance to the triage area where Sharpe and the other medics had been. It was deserted. The wounded had been evacuated while she was underground, and the medics with them. All they had left behind was a fluttering trash field of steriwipes and used IVs and torn burn wrappings.

She looked toward the helipads and saw a group of company employees clustered nervously around the single station shuttle still on the helipad. Everything else was a sea of coveralled miners and ragged Shantytowners.

Daahl greeted Ramirez’s news without even pretending to be surprised by it. He sent Ramirez off to gather a group of rescuers—though it looked to Li like Daahl didn’t much think Cartwright needed rescuing.

“Get on the shuttle,” he told Li when that was done. “You can’t do anything else here, and this doesn’t concern you.”

Li stood her ground. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“Like I said, nothing that concerns you.”

“Bullshit! Cartwright’s messing with live crystals, and you’re standing around chatting on top of a mine that’s already blown once!”

“Cartwright knows what he’s doing, Katie. He doesn’t need your help.”

“Help wasn’t what I had in mind, Daahl. I don’t know what little game you two are playing but—”

Daahl met someone’s eyes over Li’s shoulder, froze for a split second, then relaxed again as if he’d made a conscious effort to look natural. Li turned to see who he was looking at and found herself staring into a pair of ceramsteel-cold blue eyes set in the face of a tough-looking woman in EMT gear.

The woman nodded to Daahl, gave Li a measuring look, then just stood, hands thrust into her overall pockets, sharp eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them.

Li looked at Daahl, then glanced at the woman, hesitating. Should she know her? She shook her head and turned back to Daahl.

“Go ahead,” he said, without introducing the woman. “No secrets here.”

“No secrets?” Li snorted. “You must be joking. I can’t walk a step without tripping over one.”

“Just because something’s none of your business doesn’t mean it’s a secret.”

“None of my business? People are dying down there.”

“People have been dying down there every day since you left here,” Daahl said, his voice as hard as Shantytown’s gypsum flats in August. “I haven’t noticed that you cared until now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You can’t fight in two armies, Katie.”

“I—”

“I’m not laying blame. Hell, I’m proud of you, of what you’ve accomplished. But in a few days there’ll be UN troops dropping in here. And they’ll be aiming at us. So don’t ask me to trust you because of some little girl I knew way back when. She’s dead. You killed her the day you enlisted.”

That brought her up short. She looked at the unnamed woman and saw ice-blue eyes staring back at her. She looked back at Daahl and saw the same pale eyes, the same cold mistrustful look. He despises you, she thought. The words floated to the surface of her mind before she could suppress them. He despises you, and he’s right to. When did you become such a hypocrite?

She shoved the thought down savagely. “You make it sound like war,” she said.

“It is war. And you chose your side fifteen years ago.”

She looked out the window toward the helipad and saw a group of guards clotted around the perimeter.

No. Not a group. A line. Behind the line stood the white-and-orange coveralls of company techs, the blue of pit management. This side of the line there was only a roiling tide of miners and Shantytowners.

They stood, heads down, shoulders hunched, not quite facing the company men. A low buzz rose from their mouths, a sound as subtle and menacing as a wasp’s nest waking to a careless footfall.

Li knew that sound. It was the sound of a mob getting ready to hurt someone. The strike had begun.

“Go!” Daahl said.

As she walked away, she felt the two pairs of pale eyes boring into her back, as if they could see right through skin and ceramsteel to the coward she had somehow become.

She must have slept on the shuttle; she had no memory of the journey back to the station.

When they finally docked, she stumbled to her quarters, ignoring the littered corridors, the open doors, the rescue personnel flooding in from every other mining station in-system. She could barely see straight, and her eyes and throat felt like they’d been peeled.

She pressed her palm to her door seal and swayed unsteadily in the corridor while it read her implant. She had stepped inside before she felt the faint twinge of alarm that told her something was out of place.

Before she could react—before she could even think about what had triggered the feeling—a hard hand closed over her mouth.

“Leave the witch alone,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear, “and don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

She scanned to see if her attacker had a weapon and found none. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had the kind of probe shielding that could only go with a wire job.

He spun her around and slammed her head into the wall hard enough to make her eyes water.

“Accidents can happen on-station too,” he whispered, “not just underground.”

Then he was gone—just in time for Li to realize that the stink filling her nose was Kintz’s cheap aftershave.

AMC Station: 25.10.48.

The knock came at her door well after two in the morning station time.

“Who is it?” Li asked hazily, trying to remember if she’d put on enough clothes when she went to bed to be decent now. The whispered reply was enough to jolt her wide-awake and halfway to the door.

Bella all but fell into Li’s arms as the door hissed open. Li supported her to the bed. Bella clung to her as if she were drowning while Li brushed her hair back from her face to reveal a new bruise blossoming over the old ivory stain of the last one.

Her first thought was that Haas had done it. Then she caught herself. Had Bella ever come out and accused him? Had she ever done more than deal in hints and innuendo? Haas had been off-station for days, first in Helena, then dealing with rescue operations on the surface. Did this mean he was back? Or had someone else done it? And what, in the end, did she really know about Bella?

“Haas doesn’t know I’m here,” Bella said, shuddering. “He… fell asleep.”

“Let’s go down to Security, Bella. You can file a report.”

“No,” Bella whispered. “You’ll leave, sooner or later. Then there’ll be no one to protect me.”

Li stared at her, knowing what she said was true, hating it, hating herself for not being able to change it.

Bella started and pulled out of Li’s arms.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, picking up Sharifi’s copy of Xenograph from the floor where Li had dropped it when she fell asleep. “It’s Hannah’s.”

“I took it from her room.”

Bella looked at her, and that calculating look drifted across her face again. “Read to me,” she said. “Like Hannah did.”

Li hesitated.

“Please. I just need to hear your voice.”

Li thumbed through the book, wondering what passages Hannah would have read to Bella. What she would have said about them. She remembered the secretive habits she’d developed during a childhood of reading library books: cracking their spines so the next person who checked them out couldn’t spot her favorite passages, couldn’t read over her shoulder and trace her own reactions in the rut of her reading. Had Sharifi been like her, a private, furtive, guilty keeper of secrets? Li doubted it; the Sharifi she remembered watching, the Sharifi that Bella and Sharpe and Cohen talked about, hadn’t been interested in hiding.

She held the book up and let it fall open. Sure enough, she saw a line of Sharifi’s neat writing in the margin. She read out the words Sharifi had underlined:

I write these words sitting in our field camp. Behind me rise the eight thousanders of the Johannesburg Massif, still unclimbed every one of them. To my left lie the salt flats of that ancient ocean whose banks I spent two years walking. To my right, the highlands that Cartwright and Dashir mapped. All untouched, alien, perfect as it was on the first day we saw it.

But on my way to camp, I passed the terraforming plant. I passed algae flats, the furrows of farmers’ fields. And I have now a wheat ear lying across the page I write on. I plucked it from the trailside. Life in a blade of grass.

Life for another planet. For this one, death—and the slow, fatal rot that follows the map of our best intentions.

We were mapmakers. Monks and worshipers. We came into the country like saints coming to the desert. We came to be changed.

But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.

And in the margin, Sharifi’s scribbled words—words Li didn’t read to Bella:

But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?

Li raised her eyes from the page to find Bella staring at her. She closed the book, started to speak. Bella put a finger to her lips.

“Hush,” she murmured, leaning into Li, ducking her head so that her hair brushed Li’s mouth and tickled her nose.

“How I can help you, Bella? Tell me. What can I do?”

“Just hold me.”

So Li held her, her pulse racing at the smell and the feel of her, her stomach curling with shame at what she couldn’t help wanting.

They sat that way for so long that Li began to think Bella was asleep when she finally spoke again.

“How strong are you?” Bella asked.

Li frowned, caught off guard. “Strong.”

“Stronger than a man?” A warm hand slipped under Li’s T-shirt, slid over her flanks and stomach.

“A lot stronger,” Li said.

The hand paused in its exploration. Bella looked up at her intently. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

Li started. She thought of Korchow of all people, half-expecting a joke or an accusation. “Of course I have,” she whispered.

“What’s it like?”

“Not nice.”

“Do you ever feel guilty about it?”

“Sometimes.” She saw Gilead’s brilliant sunrise, its snowcapped mountains rushing up at her in the split second before her auxiliary chute popped open. “Some of them.”

“But then you jump to a new star, a new planet, and you forget all about it. That’s a gift. To be able to leave a place behind forever. To forget the person you became there. Some people would give anything for that.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Li protested, but Bella wasn’t listening anymore.

“Kiss me,” she said.

Li swallowed.

“Don’t you want to?”

“Listen,” Li began—but whatever she’d been about to say caught on an indrawn breath as Bella’s fingers circled her nipple.

“You look at me like you want to,” Bella whispered into her ear, a whisper that was itself a caress.

“Looking isn’t doing,” Li said with the last rational part of her brain. But those were just words, and Bella knew it as well as she did.

Instead of answering, she dropped to her knees in front of Li and kissed her stomach, her waist, the point of one hip.

The book fell to the floor and lay there unnoticed. I can stop in a minute, Li told herself as she drew Bella to her. If I want to. I can stop anytime I want to.

Then she pressed her mouth to Bella’s pale face and buried her hands in the dark torrent of hair and found the lips that were searching for hers.

Bella cried afterward and talked about Sharifi.

Li asked herself what else she’d expected when Bella showed up on her doorstep, what she’d imagined Bella saw in her besides the echo of the other woman. Neither the questions nor their too-obvious answers made her feel any better.

“Hannah was a construct herself,” Bella said. “Not part construct, like you. All construct.”

Li nodded, wondering if Bella knew enough about UN politics to feel the weight of the difference between the two things, to know what mandatory registration meant and what went with the red slash across Sharifi’s passport cover.

“She was the first person who talked to me, who understood what it was like to be here, alone. To have no one. She went through all that to get where she was. Gave up her sisters, her friends, her world. Everything. You can’t imagine how hard that is.”

Li said nothing, just lay stroking Bella’s hair, trying to get over feeling ashamed of herself. As she listened to Bella’s memories of Sharifi, she saw that she’d been fooling herself all along. All Bella remembered were the small ordinary things that lovers always remember. And none of that mattered now. Not to Nguyen or Korchow. Not to Li herself. Bella was the only one of them for whom Sharifi was still alive—maybe the only one for whom Sharifi had ever been alive. And in that strangest of moments, Li thought of Cohen and felt even worse.

“It’s not knowing that’s so hard,” Bella said in a voice that still threatened tears. “If I knew what happened to her. If I knew why. That it was politics. Or money. Or anything.”

“What does it matter why?”

“Because,” Bella said, suddenly wracked with sobs, “because I don’t want her to have died trying to help me.”

After that, there was no more talking. Bella cried herself to sleep. Li lay awake far into the night, holding her frail shoulders, listening to her call out the dead woman’s name in her dreams.

AMC Station: 25.10.48.

“Hello, Catherine.”

Li jerked awake to find Bella sitting across the room in her only chair, fully dressed, legs crossed, smoke from one of Li’s cigarettes curling lazily around her head.

“Forgive the familiarity, Major, but I feel I know you too well for titles. You don’t mind my calling you Catherine, do you? Or would you prefer Caitlyn?”

The voice had none of Bella’s nervous edge, and the hand holding the cigarette moved with a slightly jerky quality, as if it were being pulled by strings. Bella was wired for a shunt, and someone was along for the ride. A bodysnatcher.

Li shouldn’t have been as rattled by it as she was. Of course Bella was wired. Probably more subtly and pervasively than Li herself. Still, it wasn’t quite the morning-after breakfast-in-bed scene she’d imagined. She sat up and groped for her clothes, lost somewhere in the tangle at the foot of the bed. Whoever or whatever had gotten hold of Bella, Li wanted to be dressed before she talked to it.

“Nice tattoo,” the snatcher said while she pulled her shirt over her head.

“Fuck off.”

But Bella’s voice kept talking to her. “You ought to be more careful. You can catch things in tattoo parlors.”

“Is that a threat?”

“But then you don’t worry much about catching things, do you?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that it’s always nice to see a XenoGen construct. I feel a certain familial affection for you. Bella’s geneset, for instance”—Bella’s hand gestured at her own body—“is at least 40 percent prebreakaway. Without you she would never have been possible. So unfortunate that the UN lacked the vision to carry that work to its logical conclusion.”

Li stared at Bella’s face, looked for some clue beneath it to confirm her sudden suspicion. “Korchow?”

He smiled a cold smile that had nothing of Bella in it at all. “Clever girl.”

“Leave Bella out of this, Korchow. She has nothing to do with it.”

“She has everything to do with it. The choices you make here affect the patrimony of every construct in UN space and beyond it. If you honor what you are—and I very much hope you will—it all changes. If you turn aside and pass by, nothing changes.”

“Stop talking in riddles, Korchow. What do you want?”

“Don’t you know?” Bella’s eyes widened in amusement. “Don’t you even suspect?”

“I can’t give you Sharifi’s dataset,” Li said through clenched teeth. “I don’t even have the thing. As far as I know, she ripped it up and flushed it into orbit.”

“It’s not about the dataset, Major. It’s gone beyond that.” Bella’s lips stretched into a narrow smile. “Nguyen really doesn’t tell you anything, does she? Is it you she doubts? Or the AI? I wonder. Well. What I want is simple. I want to run Sharifi’s experiment again. Or rather, I want you to run it for me.”

Li stared at him.

“It’s not all that complicated. I need three things to pull it off.” He ticked the items off on Bella’s slender fingers as he named them. “Item one, a glory hole. Item two, the intraface. Item three, an AI-human team to run the intraface.” He looked up at Li as if he expected an answer, but she had nothing to say. “It took Sharifi years, and a lot of legally questionable maneuvering to put these three necessities together. However, a series of fortuitous coincidences have placed me in a position to, shall we say, stand on her shoulders? I already have half the intraface—the wetware, in fact, which you were so kind as to extract for me.”

Li caught her breath.

“Surely you suspected our pretty friend here,” Korchow said. “Bella has been so useful in so many ways. A credit to her Syndicate. In any case, I have the wetware. I also have the glory hole Sharifi found… at least until that idiot Haas starts tampering with it. And”—he smiled triumphantly—“I have you.”

“So I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Far from it. You would see it yourself—would have seen it long ago—if you hadn’t been lying to the humans so long that you yourself have become confused about who you are. The hardware we have was grown for Sharifi. It would take months, years possibly, to redesign it for someone else. But we don’t have to do that, do we? Because we still have Sharifi.” He gestured toward Li. “She’s sitting right in front of me.”

“I’m not Sharifi,” Li said.

“To the intraface you are. None of the cosmetic surgery and camouflage splices, nothing that chop-shop hack did to you changed that.”

Li’s insides turned over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll return to that later,” Korchow said evasively. “In the meantime, you will steal the intraface operating program—software you’ve already stolen once on Nguyen’s orders. Surprised? What did you think you were doing at Metz? Then we will do one final run of Sharifi’s live field experiment. Just to answer a few unresolved questions.”

Bella’s fingers teased a cigarette out of the pack Li had left on the table and lit it. To Li’s adrenaline-honed senses, the crackling tobacco sounded loud as gunfire.

“Of course, you will have to undergo a minor surgical procedure,” Korchow said. “But we needn’t worry over details.”

“I won’t do it,” Li said.

“Ah, but you will. And let me tell you something more, Major.” Korchow leaned forward confidingly. “I continue to have faith in you. I believe you will help us of your own free will. Because it is what history demands of you. And though you may resent me now, you’ll thank me for helping you to see it. I’m quite, quite sure of that.”

“You crazy fuck.”

He smiled. “Just idealistic. Have you read any syndicalist political philosophy? Alienation? The Decline and Fall of Species? ”

“I saw the movie. And don’t waste your time feeding me some line about gene duty and gaps in the ranks and choosing my part. I’m not playing.”

“Unfortunate. Though, I must confess, not entirely unexpected.”

Korchow lifted Bella’s hand, and a pale ideogram appeared under the curve of her palm. It rotated, unfolded, blossomed into a dog-eared piece of yellow paper covered with close-set numbers.

“What is that?” Li asked, and even she could hear the tremor in her voice.

“I think you know,” he said as he handed it to her.

It felt real in her fingers, so real that she imagined for a moment she could just rip it up, burn it, get rid of it somehow. But she knew that the rough nap of the paper under her hands, even the slightly musty smell of it, was illusion. The original was somewhere far away. Down on Compson’s where Korchow was. Maybe even back on Gilead.

“I don’t know what you think this is,” she said, though of course she did know.

“Read it,” Korchow suggested.

Block letters ran across the top of the page: REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES, S.A., J.M. JOSS, M.D.G.P., B.S., SPECIALIZING IN ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND REMEDIAL GENETIC ENGINEERING. Below the letters were a series of numbers: medical codes to the left, prices to the right. The prices were given in both UN currency and AMC scrip.

Li didn’t have to check her oracle to know what the codes stood for; she already knew. And even if she hadn’t known, there was her own signature, or rather Caitlyn Perkins’s signature, scrawled below the tightly printed boilerplate of the medical release.

“Where did you get this?” she whispered.

“Where do you think, Major?”

“I watched Joss burn my file. He burned it in the sink. I wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.”

“Apparently,” Korchow said, “he didn’t burn everything. People are so untrusting in human space.”

She sat, head down, staring at the paper. When Korchow reached out to take it back, she made no effort to stop him.

“Well,” he said, folding the slip of paper and whisking it back out of realspace. “We all make mistakes. The thing now is to put regret behind you and go forward.”

“What do you want?”

“I want this little venture to work out satisfactorily for all of us. But at the moment I just want you to make a choice. If you decide to help me, then you will go to Shantytown twelve hours from now and meet with a man who will give you the data you need for the first stage of the operation. And you will bring the AI with you. Or at least an assurance that he will participate.”

It took Li several moments to realize he was talking about Cohen. “He’s not under contract to us,” she argued. “He’s a freelancer. I can’t make him do shit.”

“I imagine you can make him do quite a lot, actually.”

“You’d imagine wrong, then.”

“Oh? Why don’t we ask him?”

“Oh, sure,” Li said mockingly. “What do I do, draw a pentagram and say his name three times?”

Korchow smiled. “What an amusing idea. I think a simple and sincere call for assistance will suffice, however. Try it.”

She stared at Korchow. But then she did try it. And there Cohen was, real as a government paycheck.

He wore a summer suit the color of pomegranates. Wherever he’d been when she called him, he was in the middle of getting dressed. He leaned forward, still peering into a mirror that was no longer there, knotting a mushroom brown silk tie around his throat.

“Oh, my,” he said. He cocked his head in apparent confusion and turned slowly around until he caught sight of Li. “This is a nice surprise,” he said, blinking and smiling.

Then he took in her state of undress, the rumpled bed, Bella sitting across the room. His smile vanished.

“Korchow,” he said in a voice of terrifying gentleness. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure, so I won’t say anything.”

“I thought we talked about this, Cohen,” Li said. “I thought you were going to stop spying on me.”

He turned back to her. “What a nasty little word. Of course I would never spy on you. And if I do assign an autonomous agent or two to keep an eye on you, it’s only to prevent unpleasant people”—he glanced in Korchow’s direction—“from making trouble for you.”

Bella cleared her throat meaningfully, and Cohen looked at her again.

“So,” he purred. “Korchow. I almost didn’t recognize you behind that cheap shunt. You really should get the Syndicates to pay you better. You are still working for them, no? Or has your alleged idealism worn thin enough that you’re taking UN money too?”

“Cohen,” Li said. “You can go now.”

Cohen gave her a pained and innocent look.

“You can go, I said.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, glancing at Korchow.

“Yes I am. I can take care of this. And don’t eavesdrop!”

He cast a last look at Korchow, frowning. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with him, Catherine. He’s… well, he’s not nice.”

“Go home, Cohen.”

“Going,” he said. And then he did go, leaving a subtle whiff of hand-rolled cigars and extra-vielle behind him.

“Well,” Korchow said. “I think we understand each other.”

“What if I don’t show tonight?”

Korchow merely moved Bella’s fingers in answer, and the tattered yellow receipt reappeared, fluttering as if it had been caught by a stiff breeze. “That would be regrettable.”

Li looked at the thing in his hands and shivered. If that receipt ever ended up in front of the Service, they would check it out. They would have to. And when they checked, it would be over.

Fifteen years ago she’d had high confidence. The chop-shop geneticist hadn’t been much, but he’d been the best the meager payout on her father’s life insurance could buy; and his work, if not inspired, had at least been competent. Now, she knew its limits. Knew them in her gut with a wrenching certainty. She’d seen the gene work the best Ring-side labs could do, the work the Corps techs at Alba did. She’d slipped through the cracks this long only because there was no real proof—no proof damning enough to justify testing her. One fifteen-year-old scrap of paper could change that. And when it did, the whole crushing weight of the Security Council bureaucracy would fall on her like mine overload dropping into a collapsing tunnel. Losing her commission would be the least of it. She’d be lucky—or irretrievably indebted to Cohen’s high-priced lawyers—if she escaped without a prison sentence.

So what? She had other chances, other possibilities. It wasn’t all or nothing anymore. She had options.

But did she? What else was there for her, really? She loved her job. Was her job. Couldn’t imagine any other life. She thought about private security, about Cohen’s well-paid bodyguards. She remembered the high-tech muscle on the Calle Mexico.

No way. Not for her.

She sat on her rumpled bunk looking at the receipt, barely an arm’s length away from her, in the hands of a woman she had just made love to. And she knew she’d do anything, kill anyone, to get it.