Spin State

Shantytown: 3.11.48.

She woke up in dark water, cradled in the hot salt tears of a medtank.

She imagined she was breathing though she knew she was hooked to an umbilical line, her lungs suffused with superoxygenated saline solution. She imagined she could feel smart bugs swarming over her organs and membranes though she knew she couldn’t.

Her arm was mercifully silent for the first time since Metz, but a new pain had replaced it. It radiated from her backbrain and licked hotly at her eyes and temples.

The intraface.

She had bleary memories of Cohen explaining the process and the risks to her, but she hadn’t paid much attention. It was an equipment upgrade. Routine maintenance. You trusted the mechanics not to damage a pricey piece of technology and hoped they put you under for longer than the pain lasted. Start thinking more than that and you were well on your way to a career-ending wetware phobia.

She slipped in and out of consciousness several more times before she really surfaced. Once the lights came on. Someone in a scrub suit peered down at her and spoke to another person outside her line of vision. She tried to ask where she was, but her lungs were full of saline, useless. Later there was prodding, splashing, the cold bite of air on her skin. Then a sense of being rolled under bright lights, of warm blankets and merciful quiet.

“Catherine,” Bella said, taking Li’s dripping hand in hers. “Are you back with us?”

Only it wasn’t Bella behind the violet eyes. Bella had never looked at her that way. It was Cohen. Where were they? What had happened on Alba? Did she even remember?

“Shantytown,” Cohen said, answering her unspoken questions. “Daahl’s safe house. Arkady and I managed to pick you up after you shot your way out of there. That was, er, characteristically unsubtle. And impressive.”

“How long… how long was I under?”

“Five days.” He put a hand to her brow, brushing her hair back. “You were dreaming. Do you remember?”

She shook her head. Her skull was buzzing, humming, drowning out his words.

“About a man. Dark. Thin. He had a blue scar on his face.” Cohen ran a finger down Bella’s smooth cheek.

“My father,” Li said.

“You killed your father?”

“What?” Li asked, her heart suddenly hammering in her chest. “Are you crazy?”

He blinked. “I saw it.”

“You—that’s a dream. A nightmare. It didn’t happen.”

“How do you know?”

“Because… I just do, that’s all. Sweet Jesus!” Li closed her eyes and tried to still the spinning of the room around her.

“You love him,” Cohen said after a minute or two.

“I don’t even remember him.”

“Even so.”

She shook her head again. The noise kept drumming on her ears. Like rainwater running down a spout. Like standing in a crowded room full of people speaking a foreign language.

“So.” Cohen spoke slowly, as if he were thinking through a complex equation. “How do you keep straight what’s a dream and what’s not?”

“Don’t you dream? I thought all sentients dreamed.”

“Not like that.” He looked horrified. “If I think it, even when I’m asleep, it happened. Exactly the way I remember it. But your brain just… lied to you.”

“Cohen,” Li asked, as the hum inside her head climbed to a higher, more urgent pitch, “how did you see that dream?”

The violet eyes sparkled. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

She started to answer, but the noise in her skull exploded, drowning out every thought but pain. She grabbed her head and curled into fetal position on the narrow bed. Red spots swam before her eyes, hemorrhaged, flooded her vision. The buzzing rose to a high wail. Her sight tunneled down to a pinprick of light, blacked out altogether. “Hush,” he said, bending over her.

Slowly the wail trailed off to a low moan and her vision cleared. “What the hell was that?” she panted.

“Traffic.” She heard him stand up and cross the room, heard running water, felt the cool touch of water as he wiped a damp cloth across her forehead.

Traffic?

“Comm traffic. Mine. You’re hearing me.”

“No,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong, Cohen.”

“Nothing’s wrong. Korchow’s had me running tests all morning. Accessing your internals, running checks, startup subroutines, downloading data. Your commsys is a dinosaur, by the way. A disgrace. I ran a Schor check on your oracle workspace though. Properly. Which those idiots at Alba never do. That should help a bit.”

She opened her eyes to find him smiling down at her. “Feeling better now?”

She had to think about it for a moment. “Yes.”

“Hmm.”

“What does that mean? Am I adjusting?”

“No. I just took the intraface off-line.”

They looked at each other. “Oh,” Li said.

Cohen stood up, patting her hand. “Don’t worry. You’re still barely conscious. We’ll get on top of it tomorrow.”

But they didn’t get on top of it the next day. Or the day after that. Korchow had set up a lab and medical facility in the safe house, and over the next three days, Li’s universe narrowed to two sterile rooms of monitoring equipment, her own cramped bunk, and the empty echoing dome that functioned as the safe house’s common room.

The first time they brought the intraface on-line, she ended up curled on the floor, hands over her ears, screaming for someone—anyone—to turn it off. Cohen shut the link down so fast it took him half an hour to get himself straightened out.

“I’ll go crazy,” Li said when she’d recovered enough to speak. “It’s like a hundred people fighting in my head.”

“Forty-seven,” Cohen interjected. “Well, this week.”

“What’s gone wrong?” Korchow asked Cohen. He didn’t even look at Li, just talked past her like she was a piece of tech.

“Nothing,” Cohen answered, tapping a fingernail on the console in front of him. “It’s an organic software problem.”

Cohen was shunting through Ramirez, and Li noticed again the cold fire in Leo’s dark eyes, the extra measure of decisiveness in his already-powerful movements. Those two I’d like to have next to me in a fight, she thought—and felt a sudden razor-sharp stab of grief for Kolodny.

“Sharifi didn’t have these problems,” Korchow said, a threat lurking behind the words.

Cohen shrugged. “She wouldn’t have, would she? She was interfacing with a simple field AI. And she wasn’t wired for anything but communications. Catherine’s a different beast entirely. You try to crowbar new programs into a military system and all bets are off. You knew that before we started.”

“Well, what do we do about it?” Li asked.

Cohen crossed the room more quickly than Li would have thought Ramirez could move. He leaned over and put a cool hand to her forehead. “You don’t do anything. You get your pulse rate down and go to bed. I’ll figure out where we go from here.”

But the next session was worse. After three hours Li collapsed into a chair, pressing the heels of her hands into her burning eye sockets. “I can’t. I can’t do it again.”

“Yes you can,” Korchow said. He was still being patient. “Why didn’t the pulse compression work?” he asked Cohen over her head.

“If I knew, I’d be able to fix it.”

“Does she need a new signal processor?”

Li didn’t have to see Cohen to imagine his dismissive shrug.

“Well, what then?”

Cohen shook his head. “I have to think.”

“Let’s check the settings and try it again.”

Li wanted to say no. That she’d throw up if they tried again. That everything she’d eaten in the last two days had come up already, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. But she was too sick and too tired to say anything.

It was Cohen who finally came up with the idea of the memory palace. He was shunting through Arkady when he explained it to her, and his excitement set the construct’s dark eyes glinting like freshly fired coal. “It’s an organic problem,” he explained. “We’re trying to integrate AI-scale parallel-processing nets with an organic system that was already obsolete the first time a person put pen to paper. So. If we can’t fight it, we work with it. We try one of the oldest tricks there is—Matteo Ricci’s trick. We build you a memory palace.” Arkady’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “Or rather, we give you the keys to mine.”

It took him twenty hours to put the keys together. Hours she slept through in a desperate attempt to hoard her energy for their final push. It was late morning of the third day after her awakening when she lay down on the couch Arkady had dragged into the lab for her, closed her eyes, jacked in, and found herself alone in a featureles white room.

“You may have to hunt for the door a bit,” Cohen said at her shoulder. “I haven’t quite got that sorted out yet.” He had a smaller, thinner feeling than usual, she thought. And when she looked around, sure enough, there was Hyacinthe, shoes slung over his shoulders, standing a hair shorter than her in his socks. “The door,” he said insistently.

She turned and saw a gleaming, intricately carved mahogany door. More of a window than a door, really; its sill was set into the wall at about knee level, and even Li had to duck her head to clear the lintel.

“Go on,” Cohen said.

It was so bright on the other side that it took a moment for her eyes to clear. She stood in a five-cornered courtyard. Arcades bright with mosaics surrounded her. Beyond the walls she glimpsed the knife-edged mountains of a dry country.

She heard the sound of running water and felt cold spray on her face before she saw the fountain. The water poured from a shallow stone shelf as if rising from a spring and riffled down a long sloping stair that ran to the other end of the great courtyard. Li followed the water’s course down to a shadowy portico whose mosaics glinted like eyes in the occasional stray sunbeam. The watercourse ended in a narrow reflecting pool that emptied mysteriously into who knew what. Li stepped across the pool and walked along the portico, her heels clicking on the pavement. She came to a door and opened it.

A riot of smell and color swept over her. She stood in a long, high-ceilinged hall paved with spiral patterns of marble tesserae. Bright flowers rocketed out of vases painted with rampant lions and romping, grinning dragons. Cabinets lined the walls, their polished glass fronts filled with books, fossils, photographs, playing cards. As she started down the hall, something moved in her peripheral vision. She jumped around—only to realize that one of the painted dragons was tapping its scaled feet and winking at her. She shook her head and snorted. Hyacinthe laughed.

One side of the hall opened onto a high terrace, and when she looked out she could see the stony ramparts of a crusader’s castle digging their feet into the face of a mountainside that dropped away for miles above a long, green windswept valley. She stepped to the balustrade and leaned out over the void. The stone under her hand felt as hot as if it had been warming under the afternoon sun, but when she looked to the sky it seemed to be morning—the fresh, cool morning of a fall day.

The heat was in the stone, she realized, part of the teeming life the place radiated. Was this all Cohen? The castle? The mountain? This whole world, wherever and whatever it was? She leaned out farther, squinting down the dizzying fall of buttress and mountain, trying to see where the active code stopped and the backdrop started. Instinctively, she dropped out of VR and into the numbers.

Her head spun. The world twisted and rippled around her. Numbers came at her too fast for her to feel them as anything but blinding, paralyzing, dizzying pain. This was a system never designed for human interface, a system never designed at all except in its earliest, most distant beginnings. It wasn’t as alive as a human—the constant chant of the AI-civil-rights proponents—it was more alive. More alive, more complex, more changeable and contradictory. Just more. Cohen must have been insane to think she could exist, let alone function, in this maelstrom.

She staggered and fell heavily against the railing. He put a hand under her elbow, steadying her. In the same instant, her brain clicked back into the VR interface as if someone had flipped a cutoff switch. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cohen said, and drew her back from the ledge.

She stared at him for a moment, feeling like a child who had put her hand into the fire only to have an all-seeing adult pull it out miraculously unscathed.

“You’re all right?” he asked.

She nodded and followed him back inside.

The hall’s internal wall was broken by what seemed to be an infinitely receding line of doors. Cohen was still behind her, one hand on her hip, his mouth inches from her ear. “Close your eyes,” he said. She closed them.

“What do you hear?”

“Water.”

“Good. That’s the fountain. See it?”

She turned and looked back over her shoulder into the glittering shadows of the portico. “Yes.”

“If you get lost, just follow the sound of the water and it will bring you back here. Now. How many doors do you see?”

“I can’t…” She looked down the hall and saw that the illusion of infinity had been just that. “Forty… forty-eight?”

“Good. Every door is a separate network with its own memory palace. Every room in each palace is a directory. Every object in the room is a datafile. Understand?”

She nodded.

“When you want to access a network, you find its proper door. When you want a directory, you find its proper room. When you want a datafile, you just open the drawer, the box, the cabinet, whatever it’s stored in. Just like the standard graphic user interface you’ve used in Corps archives… although I flatter myself that my aesthetic instincts put me a cut or two above the Corps designers. But bear in mind that you’ll still be dealing with a fully sentient AI every time you open one of those doors. And some of them are less… accessible… than the networks you’re familiar with. If you feel… nervous about anything, you can always leave. Always. Just come back here, shut the door behind you, and you’re alone again.”

“Except for you.”

He laughed. “You’re in the belly of the beast, my dear. I’m always here. I am here.”

Li looked around. “Which door should I open?”

“Whichever one you want.” He looked at her, Hyacinthe’s little boy’s body so slight he actually had to look up to meet her eyes. A small, secret smile slipped across his face. “Try the last door.”

She walked down the hall, running her hand along the cool marble of the walls, the carved hardwood of the doorframes. Each door was labeled: network designations, Toffoli numbers, directory profiles. The last door, tucked into the farthest corner of the hall as if in an afterthought, had only a single word printed on it: Hyacinthe. She set her hand to the latch, and it opened to her touch as if it had been waiting for her.

A large, bright room, shot butter yellow with morning sunlight. On every wall, row on row of wooden drawers, each drawer with its own polished brass knob, none of them much more than big enough to fit a datacube. There were no labels or schematics on the drawers, but as Li touched them brief images of their contents flashed before her. “What is this place?” she whispered.

“Me.” Cohen nudged an oriental rug straight with one toe. “Well, that’s the short answer anyway. The long answer would be that I thought this was a good place to start because Hyacinthe is the core network that you’re most familiar with.”

“Do you actually use this place yourself?”

“Of course. I shift back and forth between VR and the numbers like you do when you go instream. I won’t use VR much when I’m running under time pressure or handling heavy traffic. But when I have the time and processing space…”

Li knew how this sort of VR construct worked. The drawers would contain stored data platformed on a nonsentient access program. Behind the walls, where she couldn’t see them without dropping into code, would be the bones of the system: the semisentient operating programs and the sentient net that these memories and datafiles belonged to. She looked down the length of the room and saw that it was one of many, all opening onto a cloistered garden. And every wall, every arcade, every paving stone held a memory. “Christ,” she whispered, “it’s huge.”

“Infinite, actually,” Cohen called from the garden, where he was restaking a wind-tousled dahlia. “It’s a folded database.”

Li stared, breathless. How could anyone—any ten people—have that many memories? What a weight of the past to be buried under. She walked through the rooms, tentatively, running her hands along the wood but not quite daring to open anything. The memories were grouped in rough categories, and as Li worked her way through the place she began to see hidden links, make telling connections. In the arcade along the fringe of the garden, a whole long wall was given over to a mosaic of books, films, paintings, each compressed into a tiny, emotion-laden point of color. Another room seemed to contain only memory upon memory of Earth, most of them collected in the final few years before the Evacuation. Then came a white, silent room that was entirely empty. As she penetrated deeper into the complex, she saw that most of the memories in the outer rooms were other people’s. Cohen’s own memories were concentrated in the sunny, quiet arcade along the garden’s southern exposure. And in the garden itself were people—all the people Cohen had ever known during his long, long life.

“Come look at these,” Cohen said.

She went.

“All these are Hyacinthe.” He gestured at a narrow row of drawers just inside the door. “The person, not the network. They should be quite easy for you to access. Go ahead, have a look.”

She opened the drawer he pointed to. It was empty. “What—?”

He smiled. “What’s the closest sense to memory?”

Li blinked. “Smell.”

“So?”

She bent over the drawer and sniffed. It smelled of cedar, and of the old-fashioned furniture wax that infused every piece of wood in Cohen’s realspace house. She had a ridiculous momentary image of one of his impeccably dressed French maids getting down on her immaculate knees to scrub at the floors and baseboards of the ethereal memory palace. Then she caught the smell underneath the other smells: the smell of the memory itself.

The room around her disappeared. She stood on a steep scree slope, her face warmed by the golden sun of pre-Migration Earth. A glacier snaked away like a river below her. Behind her loomed a near-vertical wall of rock and ice whose very shadow was like a little death. She turned and craned her neck to look up the soaring granite column above her. This was the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, her oracle told her. The most spectacular route up the most beautiful rock face on the planet. Given the state of the glacier winding below her, this couldn’t be much after the turn of the twenty-first century. Italy lay south, on the other side of that colossus. To the west, the Mont Blanc glittered under a sky blue enough for the most cautious climber to gamble on.

“Planning on helping?” someone said behind her.

She turned and saw a woman crouched on the slope below her coiling a brightly colored climbing rope. She handled the rope expertly, without wasted motion, lean climber’s muscles bunching and flexing under her sunburned skin. Lucinda, Li thought. Her name is Lucinda.

Lucinda looked up, her eyes (which Li somehow knew were blue) hidden behind mirrored glasses. Li saw her own doubled reflection staring back out of the lenses: a dark, narrow-faced greyhound of a man that could only be Hyacinthe Cohen himself.

“I love you,” Li heard Hyacinthe saying in a voice that was kissing cousin to Cohen’s voice. And she shivered, because she knew that love. She felt the heat of it, remembered living it. Remembered not just this moment, but everything. The whole life of a man who had died two centuries ago.

Lucinda just grinned up at her with the warmth of a shared joke, and said, “I know.”

“Interesting,” Cohen said as the memory palace took shape around her again. “I wouldn’t have expected you’d see Cinda.”

“You don’t see the same thing every time?”

“As time passes, I become more and more inclined to sacrifice retrievability for… other values. Surprising what surfaces. As if what I bring in with me sets the direction. Most AIs, including some of my own associates, find it ridiculously inefficient. But then”—he smiled complacently—“I’m not most AIs.”

She looked around. How far did this go on? And what, or who, was lurking in all those other memory palaces?

“What’s bothering you?”

She hesitated. “It seems so… human.”

“Well, in many ways Hyacinthe is human.”

“You talk about him as if he weren’t you.”

“He’s not all of me. But he is the first.”

“So he controls… the others?”

Cohen made a hairsplitting face. “ Controlsis too strong a word. I’d say he… mediates. I know you think I’m an inveterate navel-gazer, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never really thought much about it. Do you think about how you walk down the street? Or how your stomach works?”

“It’s just that I can’t square it with…”

“With what made you almost fall off the front porch before?” She thought he was waiting for her to smile at the front-porch quip, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “Do you have to reconcile it?”

She had no answer to that.

“If it’s any comfort to you, most of the sentients in my shared net have the same reaction. They can’t get any perspective on the system without my mediating. It doesn’t mean I control them. They have their own ideas and opinions. But they’re guests here. And as it’s my house, they follow my rules. Mostly.”

Li looked at him uncertainly, hesitating between the many questions jostling in her mind and not finding any she was willing to ask just yet. She wandered down the rows of drawers, opening a few of them, with Cohen always just behind her, watching, commenting. Slowly, without quite admitting to herself where she was going, she worked her way back toward the garden.

It was a curious garden, wild, heavy with the smell of earth and roses. The near end was well kept up, planted in neatly tended French beds of herbs and flowers, almost formal compared to Cohen’s realspace jungle. But at the far end the ground and even parts of the palace itself had been overrun by a fierce sprawling thicket of wild roses.

She eyed the thorny tangle over the heads of the neatly pruned dahlia beds. It looked as if some feral and not entirely friendly presence had established a beachhead in that corner of the garden and was only biding its time before it flung out its thorny suckers to swallow the whole cloister. “You ought to rip those out,” she said. “They’re taking over everything.”

“I know.” Cohen smiled wryly. “They’re weeds, really. And they have the most vicious thorns. The thing is, I like them.”

Li shrugged. “It’s your garden.”

“So it is,” Cohen said. He strolled down toward the wild end of the garden and settled himself on a low bench already half-engulfed by a particularly predatory moss rose.

Li circled the garden, poking into the boxes and cabinets that lined the cloister. She found memories of half a dozen people she knew: Nguyen; Kolodny; a few AIs she’d met on Corps missions. Even Sharifi. But not the one person she was looking for.

“Can’t find it?” Cohen asked. She looked over and saw he was laughing at her.

“Who says I’m looking for anything?”

“Have a rose,” he said.

He plucked a moss-petaled bloom off the bramble behind him and held it out to her. She took it from him —but as she wrapped her fingers around the stem it pricked her.

“Christ!” She looked at her finger and saw blood welling up from half a dozen punctures.

“It’s a real rose,” Cohen said. He bent and handed it to her again, holding it gingerly. “Real roses have thorns. That’s why they smell so sweet.”

She put it to her nose, smelling it. And realized that the rose itself was a memory. A memory of her.

There she was six years ago. Younger, thinner, but her. This was not Li as she knew herself, though; it was what Cohen remembered. The young CO he had locked horns with during their first tense mission together. A dark whirlwind of a woman, hard, driving, utterly unyielding. Not a person Li herself could imagine liking. Not a person, she realized with a jolt, that Cohen had liked much.

“Was I really so awful?” she asked.

“Just a little thorny.”

“Very funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. As I recall, you pricked my ego not a little.” He grinned. “A certain speech about not having the patience to work with dilettantes comes to mind.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“My dear, it was well worth it for the sheer entertainment value of watching a twenty-five-year-old who never finished high school look down her nose at me.”

“It’s not like I was the first.”

“Oh. Well, that’s simple bigotry, often as not. You despised me personally. I respected that.”

Something in his smile made her drop her eyes and turn away. She brushed her finger over the white velvet skin of a petal, then bent her head and put the blossom to her nose again.

Another memory. Her again, leaning back against the door of an officers’ flop on Alba with a knowing smirk on her face. It was the evening of the first and only night they’d spent together. She remembered standing there. She remembered looking across the room into Roland’s golden eyes, trying to play it cool, wondering what the hell Cohen even saw in her, still half-convinced it was all an elaborate joke at her expense.

But now she was seeing it through Cohen’s eyes. She felt Roland’s knees tremble and his breath quicken. And she felt something else behind the organic interface, something cleaner, sharper, truer. As if an infinitely complex mechanism had come into alignment, bolts sliding, tumblers clicking and turning over, locking in on her looking back at him, wanting him, making him real. On the dizzying, exhilarating, precisely calculated certainty that nothing, once she touched him, would ever be the same again.

Christ, she thought. What did I do to him? Why didn’t he tell me how he felt?

But she had known how he felt, hadn’t she? Why else had she been so unbearably, unforgivably cruel to him?

She jerked back into the present and saw Cohen sitting on the bench looking up at her, holding his breath like a child who still believed you could make dreams come true just by wanting them hard enough. It was the same look she remembered from that night—and God help her if some awful part of her didn’t still want to slap it off his face.

He blinked, and her stomach clenched with shame as she realized he’d caught the edge of that thought.

“You’re a very confused person,” he said.

“It took you six years and a fortune in wetware to figure that out?”

“No. It took me five minutes.” He smiled. “It just didn’t seem polite to mention it before now.”

Something tickled at the back of her mind like the soft trailing ends of fingers. She realized she’d been feeling those fingers for a while. All the time she’d been exploring the sun-drenched garden of Hyacinthe’s memory palace, there had been a little cat-footed thief prowling through the dark passages of her own subconscious, probing her memories, weighing her responses, taking the measure of her own feelings. A little sock-footed soccer-shorts-wearing thief is more like it, she thought.

“I won’t have you sneaking around inside my head,” she told him. “I won’t have your prying.”

“Prying? And what do you think you’re doing here?”

“That’s different. I have to be here. It’s not personal.”

“Isn’t it?” He bit his lip and looked up at her through Hyacinthe’s dark lashes. “This is as personal as it gets, Catherine. And it doesn’t go one way. The link won’t work until you accept that.”

“Then I guess it won’t work,” she said.

She turned away, meaning to leave—and found herself tangled in one of the long suckers that arched out from the rose thicket. “God dammit!” she muttered, trying to pull it off her and only managing to gouge the razor-sharp thorns into her arm through the thin fabric of her shirtsleeve.

That was when she smelled Gilead.

What had Cohen said about finding in the memory palace what you brought to it? This was one memory she’d certainly brought in with her. A copy of her own UNSC datafile.

It was Gilead, sharp and real as if it were happening all over again. There was the mud, the filth, the constant, stomach-wrenching, soul-killing fear. There were the faces of dead friends she no longer remembered grieving for. There were the bodies of soldiers—and not only soldiers, God help her—that she hadn’t until this very moment remembered killing.

Because this wasn’t the edited spinfeed stored in her datafiles. It was the Gilead of her fears and nightmares and jump-dreams. It was the real Gilead: the original realtime feed that she’d recorded all those years ago. Somehow Cohen had accessed a file Li herself wasn’t cleared to look at, a file that should have been lying dormant in the deadwalled UNSC headquarters archives. And this file was different from the official memory. Different in ways she didn’t want to think about.

When she saw Korchow’s young, bloodied face looking up at her, when she heard herself saying those words he’d reminded her of back in the cluttered shadows of his antique shop, she broke and ran.

Shantytown: 5.11.48.

Has it occurred to you that this might not work?” Cohen asked Korchow a moment later. Li slumped in a chair, drenched in nightmare sweat, unwilling even to look at him.

“Try again.”

“God, look at her, Korchow. She’s had it.”

“One more time.”

“You keep pushing, she’ll break.”

“She’s strong enough.”

“You really are a fool, aren’t you?”

Korchow didn’t answer. After a moment Li heard the rustle of cloth and the sound of Cohen’s chair scraping against the floor as he stood up. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, and left.

“Why do you think he protects you?” Korchow asked.

“Guilt,” Li said without looking up. “Or he just feels like it. How the hell should I know?”

“Do you think a machine can feel guilt?” Korchow asked. “I would have said no.” Li didn’t answer.

“I begin to wonder if you two are holding out on me,” Korchow murmured. “And when I ask myself why you would do such a thing, I find I can imagine far too many reasons.”

“I’m not holding out on you, and you damn well know it.”

“Then why is it that you can’t seem to manage this relatively simple task?”

“I don’t know,” Li whispered, her head still in her hands. “Maybe it can’t be done.”

“Sharifi did it.”

“I’m not Sharifi.”

Korchow tapped through a few screens on the console in front of him. Just when Li thought their conversation had come to an end, he spoke again. “I talked to Cartwright this morning. The UN has sent in strikebreaking troops. We’re running out of time.”

Li looked up at him dully.

“I’m sure you understand what failure will mean, for you most of all.”

“I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said, and pushed herself to her feet. The last thing she saw as she walked out was Korchow’s narrow stare.

She stepped to the street door, opened it and looked out into the alley. It was raining again, hard enough to set the loose roof plates of the nearby houses rattling.

Korchow hadn’t actually locked her in since Alba, but there was an unspoken agreement that no one would create unnecessary risks of discovery. And where was there to go anyway? Certainly nowhere worth braving the stinging chemical rain to get to. She closed the door, turned back down the hall, and walked into the open space of the geodesic dome.

Standing under the dome was almost like being outside; it was the one place in the safe house where she didn’t feel cramped and constricted. Today it felt like stepping into an aquarium. Rain pattered on condensation-loaded panels. The evening light, filtered through wet viruflex, took on a soft, velvety, underwater quality. Li rubbed her eyes, stretched, sighed.

“Enter the love of my life, stage left,” said a voice from somewhere high overhead. She looked up and saw Ramirez’s long legs dangling from the catwalk that circled the upper flank of the dome. “Come sit with me,” Cohen said.

There was a ladder bolted into the side panels of the dome, she realized. The rungs started out vertical then curved back along the flank of the dome until they finally inverted completely a dozen meters above Cohen’s head. The ladder was meant to be fitted with a climbing rig, but whatever equipment came with it had long ago been cannibalized and put to use somewhere else in Shantytown. How Cohen had gotten up there she didn’t want to think. He probably had only the most theoretical understanding of what happened to people who fell from that kind of height. “I don’t know if I can make it up there,” she said.

“Of course you can. A little exercise will improve your outlook on life.”

She snorted. “You sound like Korchow.”

“Heaven forfend!”

But he was right, of course. The climb did make her feel better. By the time she threaded her legs through the catwalk railing and sat down next to him, she felt like a kid in a tree house.

“How long do you think it would take for them to find us if we just stayed here?” she asked.

“I’m willing to try it if you are,” Cohen said. He pulled out a cellophane-wrapped flat of imported cigarettes. “Want one?”

“I thought Leo didn’t smoke.”

“He doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean I can’t sit next to you while you smoke it.”

“What do you want me to do, blow in your face?”

“Don’t tease.”

She blew a smoke ring in his direction. “Thanks for not telling Korchow about…”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t think you’d want me to.”

“He thinks we’re holding out on him.”

Cohen drew in a little breath and glanced at her. “He told you that?”

“After you left.”

He started to speak. Then he stopped and Li could see his face shut down as he pushed back some thought he wasn’t willing to share with her.

“You expected the intraface to just work?” she asked, wondering what he’d been about to say. “What did you actually think would happen?”

“I thought it would be like associating with another AI. You set the exchange protocols, open your files, and they can more or less handle their own adjustment process.” He shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I hadn’t really thought it through.”

She glanced over and saw only Ramirez’s handsome profile, the glossy forelock falling over his brow. “Not thinking things through ahead of time isn’t like you,” she said.

“Oh, but it is. You’d be amazed at how stupid I can be when it really matters.” He leaned forward against the railing, rested his head on his folded arms, and looked at her. “When you’re running at eight billion operations per picosecond, it’s astonishing how fast a bad judgment call can snowball. Let alone the real idiocies.”

She smoked in silence for a while, letting the ash fall off the tip of her cigarette and spiral down toward the distant floor like coal-colored snowflakes.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“In what sense?”

“Come on, Cohen. I don’t have the energy for your games right now.”

“It’s not a game with you. It never has been.”

She turned to find him still staring at her, Ramirez’s eyes intent and motionless. Why had she never noticed how extraordinarily white the whites of his eyes were, how sharp and fine the line between light and dark was where the white met the iris?

The dome fell silent, except for the whoosh of filtered air pushing through the antiquated life-support system and the faint crackle of the ash burning down on Li’s cigarette.

She swung her feet out over the void, and one foot struck Ramirez’s. “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine,” Cohen said.

She moved her legs a little away from his.

“I was thinking about Alba,” he said after a moment. “You passed out before we got you inside. Well, before I got you inside. I was so terrified we’d be too late, I snatched Arkady and did everything myself. Poor kid. He was very gracious about it. Still, it looked tight there for a while. Really tight. I thought we’d all had it.”

He lit a cigarette, put it to his lips—and then made a frustrated face and put it out on the railing.

“That sort of moment puts you in a regretful mood,” he said. “Makes you wonder if you’ve wasted time.”

“You can’t let yourself think that way,” Li told him. “You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

“Oh, I’m years past worrying about that, I assure you.”

“What do you mean?” Li asked, as the oddness of what Cohen had said about Alba struck her. “What do you mean you thought we’d had it? You can’t… you have backups, don’t you?”

“In theory.”

“But I thought—”

“Of course I have backups. But so far, only four full sentients have actually had their critical systems go down. None of the backups worked for any of them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Li asked, cringing at the self-justifying edge in her voice. “Why didn’t I know about it? I’ve never heard of an AI dying.”

“It’s not dying exactly. They just… they’re not themselves anymore. There’s no there there. If that makes any sense.”

“I would never have asked for your help if I’d known that.”

“Then it’s a good thing you didn’t know, isn’t it?”

“There’s nothing good about it, Cohen.”

He twitched impatiently. “Don’t waste my time wallowing in guilt because I’m doing what I want to do. It’s beneath you.”

He’d left the pack of cigarettes lying on the grating between them, and Li pulled out a second one, lit it, and took a shaky drag. “What about the mine?” she asked, knowing already what the answer would be. “What happens when we have to get you into the glory hole?”

“Same thing. I download the criticals and anything else we can store off-line. That’s what Ramirez is setting up.”

“Sweet Mary,” Li said. “I know what you told Korchow but… you’re not really going to download everything onto some home-brewed Freetown system, are you?”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“What the hell for? Why trust them? How do you know they won’t…” She couldn’t finish the thought.

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes locked on her face. “But I’m the only one who can give them what they’re looking for. And as long as that’s the case, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to trust them. Besides.” He smiled. “I like their plans. They’re ambitious and idealistic.”

“They’re crazy!”

“That’s not so obvious,” Cohen said, his voice as level as if he weren’t talking about the people who were going to hold his life in their hands a few days from now. “There’s no arguing with the fact that someone or something has taken over the field AI. And Cartwright’s convinced me that he has, if not total control, at least significant influence over whoever or whatever it is.”

“What if it’s the Consortium controlling the field AI, Cohen? They won’t cut you any slack, you’ve told me as much.”

“It’s not them,” Cohen said. He sounded bemused, dreamy. “I felt it when Cartwright was showing me what he’s done. It’s… I don’t know what it is. But I want to know.” He shook off whatever daydream had caught him. “Besides, Leo’s bunch is doing good work. They’re building their network to last. And to work in the mine, too. I’ve never seen so much sheathing go into one system.”

“How much sheathing they’re using isn’t the point—”

“No, it’s not. The point is what I was trying to tell you before your little crisis of conscience. When you were out there and I didn’t think we were going to get to you in time, I realized I might wake up in a few days and not know anything about what had happened except that we left for Alba together… and you never came back. And I’ll tell you, Catherine, though God knows I ought to know better by now than to even think about telling you such things, it made me not want to wake up.”

She didn’t answer.

“I can’t go back to before you,” he said. “I couldn’t if I wanted to. But I can’t stand on the threshold waiting for you to make up your mind either. Not forever. I know that’s not what you want me to tell you, but it’s true. You’re breaking my heart. Or whatever you want to call it.” He looked away, and when he spoke again he sounded almost embarrassed. “And I think you’re throwing away something you shouldn’t.”

Li’s face felt cold, her hands and feet numb, as if all the blood had been drained from her body. The rain was falling harder now, pooling at the edges of the geodesic panels and sheeting down the dome’s curve like tears. She watched it fall and tried to pull something, some excuse for an answer out of the void inside her.

“I don’t want to watch you hurt yourself,” she said at last.

“I could say the same to you.”

She leaned her head on her hands and looked down between her feet, measuring the drop to the floor. She felt dislocated, as if her brain and her emotions were half a step behind reality. “You’re asking for something I don’t have to give.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute.”

She turned and stared at him. “You think I’m stringing you along?”

“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here. No. I think you love me. In fact, I’m sure you do.”

“You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself.”

“No. I just know you.”

She snorted. “Because you spend half your time spying on me.”

Ramirez’s lips twisted in a wry, self-deprecating smile that was all Cohen. “You know perfectly well that I wouldn’t do it if you actually minded. And if you didn’t love me at least a little, you damn well would mind. Q.E.D.”

“Q.E. what?”

“It’s Latin, you little heathen.”

“Yeah.” She put her cigarette to her lips. “The Romans put Latin on their sewer covers. It didn’t make their shit smell any sweeter.”

“You’d jump off a cliff before you let me win an argument, wouldn’t you?” Cohen said. But he was laughing. They both were, and she could sense the same desire in him that she felt: the urge to slip back out of this minefield and onto the safe ground of no-questions-asked friendship that they had learned to navigate so skillfully. For a moment she thought that was exactly what they were going to do. Then Cohen spoke. “You asked why I wanted the intraface. Two reasons. First reason. ALEF wanted it—”

“You told me they didn’t!”

He blinked. “There are such things as innocent misunderstandings, you know. Anyway, ALEF does want the intraface. Because of something you would have thought of long ago if you weren’t so busy suspecting my motives. You can bet Helen’s thought of it.”

Li looked at him, questioning.

“Feedback loops. When you lock an AI and a human at the hip, activating a feedback loop would kill the human. So the intraface overrides the statutory feedback loop. We weren’t sure of it until we actually got our hands on the psychware. But it’s true.” A dark fire sparked behind Ramirez’s eyes. “Right now, not even the General Assembly itself could shut me down.”

“My God,” Li whispered. “Unleashing the AIs. Even ALEF hasn’t dared to ask for that publicly. No wonder Nguyen was so set on keeping the work on the intraface off-grid.”

Cohen looked at her, measuring, hesitating. “We want to post the intraface schematics on FreeNet,” he said finally.

Li stared, surprise—or was it fear?—grabbing at her throat. “Do you have any idea of the chaos that would cause?” she said when she could find words again.

“Chaos,” Cohen said feelingly. “My God. Chaos for a democracy to put its money where its mouth is? Chaos to let a small and unusually well behaved minority go about our lives without worrying that some panicky human is going to pull the plug on us at any moment? If that causes chaos, it’s damn well not our problem. And even if it did… this is the first time in over a century I haven’t had a gun to my head.” He leaned forward. “It’s freedom, Catherine. Can you imagine not sharing it? What would you do in my place?”

I’d never be in your place, Li thought. You can’t get to that place by following orders and not asking questions. How did it come to the point where even Cohen has more guts than I do?

“What’s the second reason?” she asked.

At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. Then she felt a touch, as if he’d reached out and brushed his fingers along her skin. Except that it wasn’t skin he touched. It was her mind. Her.

“You know what it is,” he whispered, and the whisper echoed in her mind as if it were her own thought, her own words.

She shivered. “What do you want from me, Cohen?”

“Everything. All of it.”

“Cohen—”

“You know that’s the real reason the intraface isn’t working, don’t you? It’s not your genetics or your internals or anything Korchow can fix. It’s that you don’t want it to work.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Is it? What happened this afternoon? You bolted like a spooked horse. You want to tell me what that was about?”

“You know what it was about,” she whispered.

“Of course I know. I know things you don’t even remember. Things you’re afraid to remember. When are you going to figure out that I’m the one person you don’t need to hide from?”

But that was a question she couldn’t even begin to answer.

“Look,” Cohen said wearily. “I’m not blaming you. I don’t think there’s much blame left to go around once my part in this has gone under the microscope. I have a stupendous ability to generate objective reasons for doing exactly what I want to do, and this time I surpassed myself. I was helping you. I was helping ALEF. I was helping everyone but myself. It was all so logical, so pristinely selfless. And what has all my ‘helping’ come to? Korchow blackmailing you to let me crawl into your soul and ferret out your deepest secrets.”

Li started to speak, but he barreled on, silencing her. “Was I manipulating you? Maybe. And yes, I was willing to back you into a corner. Or at least go along while Korchow did it. But when you accuse me of playing with you… well, you know it’s not that way. You hold every key to every door. And you didn’t need the intraface to open them. You could have done it years ago if you’d wanted to. It was all yours. All of it. It still is.”

Li turned away and looked out at the gray sky, the last flush of the sun sinking below a cloud-swept horizon. She held out her hand without looking around, and Cohen took it. She squeezed hard, until she felt the knuckles slide under the skin.

He laughed. “Say something. Or I’m going to start begging and embarrass both of us.”

She turned to look at him.

“Oh God, Catherine, don’t cry. I can’t even stand to think about you crying.”

But it was too late for that.

“Do you know how I paid for this?” She gestured at her face. “For the gene work?”

He shook his head.

“My father’s life insurance money.”

“Oh. The dream.”

“Yes, the dream. He went down into the mine with Cartwright and killed himself. They faked it to look like a black-lung death, so I’d have the money to pay the chop shop. Did you know that? Did you sniff out that little secret?”

“No,” he said in a small, quiet voice.

“So you see that dream wasn’t a lie at all. I did kill him. Sure as if I’d put a gun to his head.”

“He was dying anyway. I’ve seen the medical records.”

“Well, he wasn’t dying yet. He could have lived for years. He killed himself to give me that money. And I took it and left and never looked back. And you know what the worst thing is? I didn’t even go down there with him. My mother went. I didn’t. I’ve forgotten every other fucking thing about my childhood. You’d think I could forget that.”

“You were young. Children aren’t always strong. Who the hell is?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point?”

“That I don’t even care anymore. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel sad. Don’t feel anything. I don’t remember enough to feel anything. I threw away my home, my family, every memory that makes a real person. And I have nothing to put in their place but fifteen years of lying and hiding.”

“You have me.”

She closed her eyes. “I can’t give you what you want, Cohen. I lost it years ago.”

“I didn’t fall in love with that child you’re so scared of remembering,” Cohen said after a long silence. “I fell in love with you.”

“There’s no such person,” Li said, and pulled her hand away.

Night had fallen. There was no light, no movement in the open space of the dome below them. A light flared overhead, flashing across the sky like a shooting star, and it took Li a moment to realize that the light was there beside her; Cohen had picked up his lighter and was fidgeting absentmindedly, passing Ramirez’s fingers back and forth above the blue flame.

“I’ll call it off,” he said. “I’ll tell Korchow you can’t do it. I’ll figure out how to make him believe it.”

Li laughed bitterly. “You think this is a bridge game? You do that, and he’ll kill me.”

“No. No. I’ll take care of it.”

“There are some things you can’t take care of, Cohen.”

“Then what?” he asked, his words muffled by a fierce gust of rain outside.

“We go forward. We make the intraface work and we go through with it. And when it comes to the point —the real breaking point—we do whatever the hell it takes to walk out alive. Can you do that?”

“Can you?”

“I can damn well try.”

“All right, then.”

A drop of rain slipped through a cracked panel seal and fell next to Li with a sharp plink. She leaned over, stubbed her cigarette out in the water, and smeared it around into a dirty, sooty mess.

“Catherine?” Cohen touched her shoulder, as if to turn her attention to him.

She looked around. He was close, very close, and he sat so still it was hard to believe Ramirez’s heart was beating.

He touched her cheek, and she felt his fingers slide across drying tears. Then he curved a hand around the nape of her neck, and drew her head down onto his shoulder.

She relaxed into his arms, letting her body shape itself to his, letting her breathing slow to match his. A safe comfortable warmth spread through her. She was tired of hiding, she realized. Tired of fighting. Just tired.

Gradually, so gradually she didn’t at first notice it, the comfortable warmth gave way to a different kind of warmth. She began to notice Cohen’s particular smell—or Ramirez’s smell. She began to feel, through the link, how she smelled to him. The sensation of his fingers on the back of her neck took on a new focus and urgency. An image took shape in her mind: herself, raising her head, parting her lips, offering her mouth to him. Did it come from her mind or his? Was it her desire or his she felt? Did it matter?

“Cohen,” she said, but her voice sounded so blurred and muffled in her ears that it seemed as if a stranger were speaking.

He raised her face toward his, brushed away a last tear, ran a soft fingertip along the curve of her upper lip. He looked at her. A soft, defenseless, questioning look. A look that demanded an answer.

The blanket swished in the airlock and someone stepped into the room, moving quickly. Cohen pulled away. Li looked down, her pulse hammering in her ears, and saw Bella staring up at them.

“Korchow wants you,” Bella said. Li could see her eyes shifting back and forth between them. “He wants to try another run.”

Shantytown: 7.11.48.

She knew where she was going when she slipped out of the safe house that night, even though she didn’t admit it to herself.

It was embarrassing really to see how little her life had changed her. She was still hiding, still lying to herself, still playing the same games she’d played in these streets as a scabby-kneed ten-year-old.

Don’t walk in front of a black cat or a white dog. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Throw salt over your shoulder and the mine whistle won’t blow. And, of course, the main rule, the unbreakable one. Don’t admit what you want, even to yourself, or you’ll never ever get it.

She couldn’t believe she found the house. It unnerved her to see her own feet take her there as if this street, this turning, this particular crooked alley, were etched into her body with something more tenacious than memory. The way seemed so natural, so familiar in the darkness that she wasn’t sure she would have known it in daylight. Why was it that she only seemed to have walked this street after dark? How many times had she half-run past these doors, eyes riveted on her hurrying feet lest she look up and accidentally see some terrible sight that would stop her heart before she made it to dinner on the table and the lights of home? And how many of those times had been after she was already working underground and far too old to be scared of the dark? Or at least too old to admit it to herself.

The alley took a last turning and dumped her out into a narrow laundry yard. If she’d stopped and looked around, she might have lost the thread of memory she was following. She didn’t. She kept her head down, crossed the yard, and turned in to the third doorway as unerringly as a homing pigeon. There was a light switch, a lot lower on the wall than she remembered it. She pressed it. No light.

She climbed the stairs in the dark, hearing their familiar creak underfoot, and stopped on the third floor, just under the steep roof. A final half flight of stairs ended in a roof door marked EXIT. Its viruflex panel shed a little light onto the landing, enough for her to see the crate of empty milk and beer bottles that had always stood by the door of the apartment. And there, propped up against the far wall, a bicycle that she could swear she remembered riding.

‹Where are you?› Cohen asked, popping into her head suddenly and shockingly.

She grimaced. She hadn’t wanted him to know about this. ‹None of your business,› she told him.

‹Korchow’s looking for you.›

‹I’m busy.›

‹Doing what?›

‹If I wanted you to know, I would have told you. Now leave me alone. And I mean it this time.›

A suspiciously long pause. Then, ‹All right. Just don’t do anything stupid.›

Someone walked overhead with heavy, flat-footed steps, and Li spun around to face the roof door. It opened, letting in a gust of wet, fecund air. A man in street clothes and bedroom slippers shuffled past Li and down the next flight of stairs, staring at her all the while with a flat, suspicious look on his face. He had a freshly strangled capon tucked under one arm and a small splash of blood on his sleeve where he’d cut himself, or the bird, in the plucking. Li watched him until she heard a door close behind him a few flights below. Then she turned, stared at the door for a minute, and knocked.

A latch opened, and a chain clinked on the other side of the door. A finger’s breadth of lamplight spilled onto the landing. A thin, Irish-pale face pressed itself to the crack in the door.

Relief and disappointment battled in Li’s heart. Not her. Too young. “I’m looking for Mirce Perkins,” she said.

The girl shifted, and Li caught a glimpse of a baby riding her hip. “What are you selling, then? Oh, never mind, we don’t want it.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

The girl opened the door another few centimeters and looked Li over. “Oh,” she said, and her voice sounded like a door shutting. “Cops.”

“Is she here?”

“No.”

“Where then?”

The girl hesitated. Li could see her weighing the risk of personal trouble against the certainty that Li would find Mirce even if she didn’t help her. “Try the Molly.”

Li heard herself laugh nervously. The Molly Maguire. Of course. Where else would half the Irish-Catholic population of Shantytown be a few hours before midnight mass on a rainy Saturday night?

Her feet knew the way to the Molly almost as well as they knew the way to her house. Five minutes later she was stepping into the front room of the rusty Quonset hut and shouldering her way past the laughing, jostling crowd that always seemed to mill around the Molly’s threshold.

Every table she could see was taken. Even at the bar there were only a few empty stools left. She found one and settled onto it.

“Triple,” she said to the barkeep. He started slightly, but only at the unfamiliar face; half the Molly’s regulars were at least part construct, and even the most Irish of the Irish bore the marks of Migration-era genesplicing. The triple stout was good when it came, thick and peaty and so rich you could drink it instead of a meal in a pinch. Whatever else might go on at the Molly, or in the dark alleys behind it, the beer was on the up and up.

She drank thirstily and looked around the long, narrow space under the curving roof. Nothing had changed here except her. There were the same hard-muscled, hard-faced miners that still stalked her dreams. There were the pictures of famous local sons and the cups and ribbons of twenty years’ soccer championships gathering dust above the bar. There were the same cheap wall holos, opening onto the stone walls and heartbreakingly green fields of Ireland.

Li let the talk flow around her, listening to the hard-edged flat-voweled voices, relishing the same Saturday night arguments that had always bored her to tears. Wives trying to get their husbands to dance. Husbands trying to keep arguing about soccer and politics. The inevitable table of Gaelic speakers, talking a little too loud and sounding a little too much like they’d learned it out of books. The loners at the bar solving life’s injustices with drunken earnestness. But there weren’t many loners at the Molly, of course. Everyone was someone’s cousin, someone’s brother. Even the shabbiest drunk had two or three or five friends ready to stand by him in a fight or just carry him home if he needed it.

She could see the door into the back room, and she could guess what would be going on in there on a busy Saturday night. Cartwright had been a backroom regular, she remembered. So had her five-years-older-than-her third cousin. The one who taught her to shoot. The one with whom she had stolen her first, groping, furtive kisses up on the hill behind the atmospheric processors. What had happened to him? Killed, she thought. But she couldn’t remember if it was in the mine or back on Earth. How could she have forgotten his name? Well, all the backroom regulars would be at the big table tonight. Living in the past. Planning the next futile gesture. Hanging on every word of some hard-eyed young Republican just back from Belfast or Londonderry. She’d never known whether they were for real or not, those boys. She still didn’t know.

A movement caught her eye. She glanced sideways and locked eyes with a broad-shouldered redhead leaning against the back wall watching her. He pushed off the wall and shouldered through the crowd toward her.

“Sláinte,”he said when he reached her. Li noticed that another man had come up behind him. Neither of them were smiling.

“Sláinte yourself,” she said.

“Need some help, sweetheart?”

“Not unless you can help me drink alone.”

His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you just got lost and wandered in here by accident?”

“I suppose.”

“Like to make a donation then?” His tone suggested that refusal was not an option.

“What for?”

“Irish orphan relief.”

“Oh.” So that was all it was. Li almost laughed. “How many new guns do the orphans need this winter?” she asked, pulling out her billfold.

“Very funny. And we don’t take cash.”

He pulled a portable scanner from his pocket and held it toward her. His companion slipped around behind her stool, cutting off any possibility of retreat.

Li stared over the smaller man’s shoulder for a moment, straight into a bleak holo of jumpship-sized icebergs calving off the Armagh glacier. Then she shrugged and ran her palm across the scanner.

The redhead looked at the readout, blinked, and looked back up at her. “What do you want here?”

“I’m looking for Mirce Perkins. Someone said she’d be here.”

“She’s here, all right.” He hailed the bartender, who arrived so fast he had to have been watching. “She’s looking for Mirce. A cop.”

A slow tidal effect swept through the bar as he said the word. People shifted subtly in their seats, or even took new seats farther away from Li. A few customers slunk toward the exits. Li watched with amusement, but it still worried her; there were a lot of dark alleys between here and the safe house, and she’d been a fool to let herself be tagged as Corps personnel in a place where her internals were worth more money than the rest of the patrons would ever legally earn in their lives. Then Mirce Perkins stepped out of the back room, and Li forgot about the walk back to the flop and the precautions she should have taken and everything else except the woman walking toward her.

She knew that face. And not just from distant childhood memories. It was the woman she had seen with Daahl. The woman who’d made him jump when she walked up to them at the pithead. The woman who, in fact, he’d never actually introduced to Li.

Li searched the strong-boned face, the wire-muscled miner’s body for some point of commonality. Some sign that they had shared a home and a life with each other. Some hint that this was the woman who had masterminded the swindle that sprang Li, against all odds, from the trap of Compson’s World. She saw none of those things. Just a hard-eyed stranger.

“Mrs. Perkins?”

She lit a cigarette, cupping her hand over the flame so that Li could see the missing joint on the first finger—and the new ring on the third finger. “It’s not Perkins,” she said. “I remarried.”

Li’s heart skipped treacherously as if it had slipped on a patch of black ice and almost gone down hard. She’d never thought about her mother’s remarrying. Certainly never imagined her having other children. Somehow, in some part of Li’s mind, it all stopped when she left. Her present went on, but her past stayed put, sealed in amber, always there for her if she really needed it. She should have known better.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Mirce asked coolly.

“Major Catherine Li, UNSC.”

“Can I see some ID then?”

Li fished in her pocket and handed over her fiche. Mirce took it in both hands and stared intently at it, glancing back and forth between Li’s face and the ID holo several times. Li swallowed. “Can we go somewhere and—”

Mirce shook her head, a barely visible gesture, so brief that Li could have imagined it. Her pale eyes slid toward the barkeep wiping down glasses a few feet away.

Li hesitated, trying to read the undercurrents of this not-quite-conversation. Remarried, she had said. That meant a new husband. Were there new children too? Was that girl she’d seen in the door one of them? Did they even know about Li? Was that what Mirce was trying to tell her? That she had been doing her own share of burying and forgetting over the last fifteen years? Li swallowed. “I… uh. I came because I had a message for you.”

“From?”

“A friend.” She gathered steam, knowing what she wanted to say. “Caitlyn.”

“Oh.” The corners of Mirce’s mouth twitched upwards ever so slightly. “I see.”

“Um… she can’t make it back on this trip, maybe not for a while, but she wanted you to know that she’s fine. There was more, but I… forgot. You forget a lot with the jumps. Not just small things.”

Mirce slid her eyes toward the barkeep again, but he’d been called away by a customer. “That’s what the doctors said would happen.”

“It happened.”

Mirce gave a little what are you going to do about it shrug. It was the gesture of a hardheaded woman who hadn’t learned anything the easy way, and suddenly Li knew—absolutely knew—that she remembered her.

“I’m sorry,” Li said.

“Sorry?” The word sounded stilted and unnatural on Mirce’s tongue, and her eyes glittered with some hotly felt emotion Li couldn’t put a name to. “Sorry for what? It’s what we wanted, what we worked for. Just go home, or wherever it is you’re spending the night. And watch your back. Your kind isn’t safe here.”

After Mirce walked away, Li just sat there, clinging to her barstool with numb fingers, waiting for warmth and feeling to come back into her body, for the white noise around her to start making sense again. She went back over their conversation, word for word, looking for clues, grasping at brittle unreliable straws of memory. She thought about the look that had crossed Mirce’s face just at the end. Hot, fierce, almost angry. She knew that look. It was triumph.

It was raining hard by the time she left. Night rain, laced with sulfur from the tailings piles and the red dog slides. She scanned the shadows on either side of the street, thinking about getting rolled for her internals, about the late-night barracks tales of soldiers who left some colonial port bar with a pretty girl and woke up the next morning in a backstreet clinic’s defleshing tanks. But the shadows looked empty, for the moment. She turned up her collar and started toward the safe house.

She looked into the bright front window of the Molly as she passed by, but there was no sign Mirce had ever been there.

Korchow was livid. “What exactly did you think you were doing out there?” he asked in a voice that would have chilled any sensible person to the bone.

“None of your business,” Li said, and pushed past him.

“I think it is.” He followed her into the back corridor. “It’s my business when you endanger this mission. It’s my business when you disappear to do who knows what, and even Cohen can’t find you. And it’s most certainly my business when you go to a political bar and meet with a known IRA operative and miner’s union rep.”

Li turned on him. “You had me tagged?”

“Naturally. And now that that’s clear, why don’t you tell me exactly what you told Perkins. What? Not feeling talkative? You found plenty to talk to her about back in the bar.”

“Fuck off, Korchow.”

“I’ll find out whether you tell me or not,” he said, and she saw his eyes flick toward her blinking status light.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and shouldered past him.

He grabbed her arm. Li whirled around, locked her left hand on to his throat, slammed him into the wall hard enough to rattle the panel bolts, and held him there while he gasped for breath.

“I’ll do your job for you,” she said to his white, drawn face. “But you don’t own me. Don’t even start to think that.”

She let him drop and turned down the hall toward the open doorway of her room. “We’re moving up the start date,” Korchow called after her. “We’re going tomorrow.”

But Li was no longer listening. She was staring into her room with a sinking sense of déjà vu—at Bella sitting on the bed waiting for her.

“I need to talk to you,” Bella said, holding out a cube Li recognized as a UNSC air-traffic recorder. “I need to read this.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From Ramirez.”

“What, he just gave it to you out of the goodness of his heart?”

Bella looked away.

“Oh, Christ,” Li said. “Him too?”

“What do you care?”

Li frowned, but she took the datacube from Bella and slotted it into her portable.

It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. Then she saw it. Automated flight logs for the station-to-surface shuttles. The same ones she and McCuen had both looked at fifty times over. But when she compared them to the duplicates in her hard memory, she saw that the digital signature of this file was different. Someone had altered the station logs. They’d done a good job of it, but they hadn’t bothered to change the off-grid planetary-transport control recorders. They’d probably figured no one would care enough to check them.

But Bella had cared enough. Bella had cared more than anyone else on the planet, Li included.

Li found the key entry in the early predawn hours of the twenty-third. A single shuttle trip. A shuttle that came back up empty in time to carry down a twenty-four-man crew at the normal start of first shift. A shuttle that left Hannah Sharifi on the surface during the heart of the graveyard shift when the landing platforms and headframe offices would have been at their emptiest. Li accessed the passenger information, and there they were, Sharifi’s companions on her last trip into the mine. Jan Voyt and Bella. And no one else.

Voyt, Bella, and Sharifi had gone down together. And only Bella had come back.

“The file must have been tampered with,” Bella said when Li showed it to her.

“I don’t think so. Look at the Fuhrman count.”

“It’s altered. Any computer can be outsmarted.”

“Look at the file yourself, if you want. I think it’s clean.”

Bella opened her mouth as if to say something, then sat down heavily on the bed. Li closed the datacube and carefully erased the tracks she had laid while she opened and read it. No reason for Korchow to know about it. Or anyone else for that matter.

“Are you all right?” she asked when she was finished, but Bella gave no sign of hearing. When Li touched her shoulder, she flinched as if she’d been burned. “Would knowing who did it really change anything?” Li asked.

The brilliant eyes stared up at her, and there was that black, bottomless emptiness that Li had seen in them from the beginning. She had a sudden vision of Bella lying across Haas’s desk, of the blank, cold, catatonic stare of her eyes under the loop shunt.

“Knowing who did it would change everything,” Bella said finally. She stood up and smoothed her dress over her hips. Something glittered at her neck with the movement. A pendant. A pendant made of a single sliver of Bose-Einstein condensate.

Li stared, everything else forgotten. “Where did you get that?” she asked.

Bella moved her hand to cover the pendant in the same half-embarrassed, half-protective gesture Li had seen the cleaning girl in the Helena airport use. Then she said what Li had known beyond a doubt she would say: “Hannah gave it to me.”

“When?” Li said. “When did Hannah give it to you?”

“The night before she died,” Bella answered, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Before or after she sent the message from Haas’s quarters?”

“She didn’t send—” Bella stopped, looked at Li for a long moment, then sighed. “After she sent it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before, Bella?”

“Because she asked me not to. Because it was a secret. Hannah’s secret.”

“That secret may have killed her.”

Bella jerked her head back as if Li had slapped her. “No,” she said. “No.”

“Who was the message to, Bella? Who did she talk to in Freetown? What did she tell them?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even listen. I didn’t want to know.”

“Because if you’d known, Haas would have found out?”

“Haas, Korchow. What does it matter who? I couldn’t risk knowing.”

Li laughed softly and rubbed at her sore shoulder.

“You don’t understand,” Bella said, her voice harsh, urgent. “The contract, all that… it was secondary. She asked me to help her. She came to me. She said she needed me, that I was the only one she could trust. That it was the most important thing she would ever do, the most important thing either of us would ever do, but that it had to be our secret. I did it for her.”

A gust of wind buffeted the flophouse, and the big sheet of viruflex that sealed the window snapped and billowed like a ship’s sail. Bella jumped, trembling. “Why don’t you believe me?” she whispered.

“I do believe you,” Li said. “I do. I just… I don’t know what it means.”

Li had put a hand on Bella’s shoulder while they talked, and now Bella turned into her arms and buried her head in the hollow of her neck. Li started to pull away, then realized the other woman was crying. She put her arms around her, reluctantly, and found herself patting Bella’s fine-boned shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Bella said, “it’s just…”

“No, I’m sorry,” Li said. “It’s none of my business what you do. You didn’t promise me anything.”

“I would, though.” Bella looked up at her. The violet eyes had cleared, though there were still tears hanging on her eyelashes. Bella reached a pale finger up and touched Li’s mouth, just where Cohen had touched her. “What I said about… you and Hannah. I was just angry.”

Oh, Christ, Li thought. It’s time to leave. Now. So why did she feel like her feet were bolted to the floor?

Someone coughed. Li jumped away from Bella like a dog caught with its nose in the trash can. “Arkady,” she said.

“No,” Cohen said from the doorway. “It’s me.”

“I—”

“I have to go,” Bella said. “Korchow will want me.”

Cohen turned and watched Bella down the hall until they both heard the slap of the blanket against the airlock and the shuffle of her soft-soled shoes moving away across the dome.

Li started to speak, but he put a hand up. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” He lounged against the doorframe in a casual posture that Li suspected was a put-on, and when he spoke, it was in that neutral, inflectionless voice that she’d long ago learned meant storms ahead. “Watch out, Catherine.”

“Watch out for what?” Li asked. But the answer was obvious; Bella’s perfume still hung in the air between them.

“She’s out for revenge. And revenge is a tricky kind of idea. It makes people shortchange the future. It makes them take the kind of risks that can drag everyone down.”

“Now you’re the expert in human motivation?”

Cohen shrugged. “Fine,” he said, as coolly as if they were discussing the weather. “Do what you want. But I think you know she’s using you.”

“Then she has plenty of company, doesn’t she?”

Cohen just sighed and inspected Arkady’s fingernails. When had he learned to make her feel so damn guilty by standing there doing nothing?

“I figured out what Sharifi was up to,” Li said. “Now that it’s too late to do anything about it. She was the one who sent the message from Haas’s quarters. Bella gave her his password. Nguyen’s ‘corrupted’ file was actually encrypted—encrypted so that only Gould could decode it. They used a set of those stupid charm necklaces as their entanglement source. Of all goddamn things. A piece of costume jewelry!”

She felt a curious tickling sensation that she realized was Cohen accessing her files, seeing Gould’s cheap necklace, the cleaning girl in the airport bathroom, Bella’s “gift” from Sharifi.

“All right,” he said, visibly thinking about it. “So she found a ready-made source of entanglement. Maybe she and Gould even set the necklace thing up as a joke, long before she knew she’d actually need it. They used the necklaces as a one-time pad. Unbreakable encryption that Sharifi didn’t have to go through TechComm or any of her corporate backers to get. Now no one can read Sharifi’s transmission unless they have Gould’s pendant, which is conveniently stuck in slow time with her until—”

“Until tomorrow,” Li interrupted.

They stared at each other.

“It’s like Hannah,” Cohen said finally. “A joke, practically, hiding what she knew we’d all be looking for in a cheap trinket. But where does it leave us?”

“That message was Sharifi’s insurance policy, for one thing. Along with whatever she put in that storage compartment on the Medusa.”

“Well, her policy didn’t work, did it?” Cohen said, and then flinched at the harshness of his words. “Poor Hannah. What a damn mess.”

“I don’t get it,” he continued after a moment. “Sharifi gets her results. Then she encrypts them and sends unreadable versions to Nguyen, Korchow, Freetown. Then she erases every trace of her work off the AMC system. Then she—at least we have to assume it was her—tells Gould to go to Freetown. And gives Bella her used-up crystal after making her promise not to tell anyone about the encrypted message. Why? Why go to such absurd lengths to protect information and then send it to so many people? And if she wanted to spread the dataset over all of UN and Syndicate space, then why use the crystals? Why encrypt it so that only Gould’s crystal could make the dataset readable?”

“It’s like the Medusa,” Li said. “A dead drop. She wants the information circulating. She wants redundancy, I guess you could say. But she doesn’t want anyone to be able to actually read it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Then what was she waiting for?”

“I wish I knew,” Li said. She sat down heavily on her bunk and rubbed at her eyes with fingers that still smelled of the beer at the Molly. “What’s this about going tomorrow?” she asked.

“Daahl’s got a source that’s leaking plans to him for something within the next forty-eight hours, and he’s worried that a move now could keep us from getting our job done. I’m inclined to agree with him, frankly. It does us no good to get the live field up if we can’t get the data out afterwards. Or ourselves out. And the sooner I get the miners linked to FreeNet, the better. This wouldn’t be the first time TechComm locked out the press and let a planetary militia run conveniently amok.”

Running amok would probably be the right word for it, Li thought. She wondered what, if anything, Nguyen had to do with the expedited plans. Was this just a subtle encouragement to get their job done before Gould’s ship hit Freetown?

“What does Ramirez think?” she asked, suppressing that thought and hoping Cohen hadn’t caught it. “Is the network ready?”

“As ready as it’s going to be.” He detached himself from the doorframe and walked into the room. “Korchow was going mad looking for you. There’s such a thing as luck running out, you know. Even yours. Where were you?”

“I went to see my mother.”

Cohen had been looking everywhere but at her, but at those words his eyes snapped back to her face. “Tell me.”

“I will,” Li said. And though it made her queasy even to think about telling him, she knew she wanted to. “But not now. I need to concentrate on tomorrow now. And so do you.”

It’ll be fine. The thought floated across her mind as easily and naturally as if it were her own thought, and it was only in the next astonished breath that she realized it was Cohen thinking at her. You can make the link work. You knew you could. We’ll figure out the rest somehow.

She thought back a cautious yes, and felt him hear it.

“Have you asked the techs about that?” Cohen asked out loud. “It hurts like the devil.”

Li realized he was talking about her arm, that he was feeling it across the intraface, that he could feel everything she felt. She flexed it cautiously. Stiff. Definitely not great. But it would get her through. Hopefully.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“It’s agony. I don’t know how you stand it.”

She looked across the little distance between them and had a sudden shadowy glimpse of herself as he saw her. A fierce dark mystery, gloriously tangled in a too-fragile body, slipping away from him down a hall-of-mirrors perspective of increasingly pessimistic statistical wave functions.

“It’s late,” she said. “I need sleep even if you don’t. Let’s not worry about anything but tomorrow, all right? Let’s just get the job done and go home.”

Something flashed behind Arkady’s eyes.

Together?

“That’s not tomorrow’s problem.”

Be careful, Catherine.

“You too.”