UNDERTOW

The author would like to thank her first readers, especially Jaime Voss, Kat Allen, Leah Bobet, Amanda Downum, Chelsea Polk, and Sarah Monette (all of whom really ought to be demanding boxes of cookies at least by now); her agent, Jenn Jackson (who provides her own cookies, which are much better than the author’s in any case); her editor, Anne Groell, and copy editor, Faren Bachelis, and the rest of the Bantam Spectra team; and enough other people that the orchestra would be playing her off before she got halfway down the list.

And of course the readers, without whom this wouldn’t be any fun at all.

1

THE MORNING AFTER HE KILLED EUGENE SHAPIRO, ANDRÉ Deschênes woke early. Before his headset warble ended, he rolled from the bed and landed palms-down on the deck of his bedroom. He slept in loose white trousers; nudity implied vulnerability. The raw breeze through the long windows above his bed roughened his shoulders, scalp, and nape. A clap punctuated each push-up, and he followed the set with five sun salutations to warm up and release his muscles.

He dressed and skinned and was out the door in minutes.

His footfalls chased him through the leaden morning. Roaches and rats scattered before him: humanity’s companions all the way to the stars. The air was thick with the promise of rain; André’s skin steamed before he’d run five hundred meters. The tide was in, the streets riding high on the pilings, and though he ran through a commercial zone, his filters held. Just one pop-ad penetrated, and he squelched it with an eye-flick.

In André’s neighborhood, the streets were wood slat, floating piers independent of the houses and shops moored to them. They echoed under his running shoes, a hollow thump-thump-thump still unadulterated by other sounds.

He might have been the only one awake in all of Novo Haven. If he lived on Bayside, he would have seen the fishing boats and tenders sliding gulfward with the first light of morning. But from here, only thin channels of bay were visible between the floating streets and under the bridges, and the dinghies and scooters and small boats were still moored by the various steps that led up to street level. He passed more shops than houses; above them on the flat-decked, seaworthy cruisers were second-floor apartments with lifts or spiral walk-ups, but the lower levels had shuttered windows suitable for opening to catch sunlight and the attention of passersby. Ladders and gangplanks ran down to the water, where small craft waited and taxi drivers read the news and drank their coffee.

André ran by greengrocers and tackle shops, a geomancer’s, an interface outlet, two brothels, a fixit shop for headsets and other implants, a skin-and-fashion store, a corner clinic, a beautician’s parlor, and a Chinese restaurant. The bakery on Seagrove wasn’t open yet, but good smells emanated from the back, and the clang of pans on counters rattled through the screen door.

He almost tripped crossing up onto the sidewalk beside the 400 “barge”—actually, a twenty-meter cruiser ringed with boardwalks and lashed to pilings. The barge was lower in the water than code permitted, and loosely moored. The sidewalk dipped alarmingly when his weight hit it, but he skipped a step and kept running. More cooking smells now, the distant sound of engines, lights flicking off over doorways as the landward sky paled gold. Someone ran on ahead, a woman with golden skin and black hair clubbed at the nape of her neck, her small breasts bouncing in a crimson sport top. He magnified her, recognized her, and decided she was a good enough reason to run faster. But she turned to port, down Amaryllis, between the white-and-pastel apartment blocks, and his road lay straight on. He didn’t want to look too eager.

He wasn’t jogging now but running, hard out, breath whistling between his teeth in misty streamers. His heels hit staccato, the street rocking under his stride. He counted breaths, pulling his elbows back each time his arms pumped, feeling the pivot and snap of each foot as it landed, as it left the slats again.

Running was good. Mornings were good. The wet air scraped his throat, chilled his lungs as he sucked it in, shoved it out again. Running hard, running cold, running over the water as the sun warmed the roof peaks and the streets began to hum.

His route was a circle. Or a ragged ungeometric circuit, which brought him panting back down Seagrove just as the bakery’s armored shutters glided up, revealing the cheery blues and yellows of an interior bathed in full-spectrum light. Awnings, also automated, fanned out to shade the street. The light off the water would be brutal when the sun got past the rooflines. The fortune-teller next door wouldn’t open until after lunchtime, but his awnings rolled out as well. A public service.

André let his pace drop to a trot, a jog, a stumbling amble. Sweat, and perhaps some condensation, slid down his chilled face, stung his eyes, and scattered off his nose. He slapped his biceps and thighs to get some heat into the skin, which felt like wax fruit. He set his status as unavailable when he ran—he liked the morning clean—but only an idiot would completely drop connex. So it was uncomplicated to check the price of bread on his headset. Citywide, it was a bit lower than the Seagrove bakery broadcast, but this was fresh and here and it smelled good. He transferred credit as he was walking up; one of the bakers, wearing a tall white hat and a skin that made blue and gold sparkles in the depths of her irises, handed him a warm semipermeable bag over the window ledge. “Thanks, Jacinta,” he said. She winked at him, that eye flashing for an instant, brilliant gold.

André wasn’t wearing a cosmetic himself, so he contented himself with a grin. He wiped sweat on his bare arm, flicked the droplets over the channel, and watched the ripples as some lurking fish disappointed themselves on the mouthfuls.

Jacinta tapped a golden loaf steaming gently on a cutting board. It made a hollow sound. The scent rose sweetly. “Want a slice?”

It smelled of cinnamon and raisins. “Can’t eat until I wash,” he said. “But thank you.”

Back at his house—the 1100 barge of Redbridge—he walked through the security field, which recognized the hard code access in his headset and let him in without so much as a tingle. He dropped off the loaf of rye, showered, depilated his scalp, trimmed his beard, and dressed. The sharp suit of gold-shot scarlet was Earth silk with an autofit. He inspected his image as rebroadcast into the headset, activated his stock ticker, chat boxes, news scroll, and the standard informational detritus of his daily connex. His cousin Maryanne thought he was weird to leave it off in the morning—she probably reached for her connex the way her great-great-grandfather would have reached for his glasses—but the run with nobody in his head kept him centered. He thought of it as moving meditation, one brief chance to arrive at silence before swimming into the currents of the day.

He patted his house on the door to let it know he was leaving, stepped into his work shoes, picked up his walking stick, and went.

It was early yet, and André was his own boss. But there were messages to be answered, and he had rules about bringing work home.

It took him longer to walk in than he’d anticipated, and not because he strode through morning traffic now. Halfway down Fairview, when the shakes from exertion had finally settled out of his calves, an attention signal pinged at the corner of his field. His heart skipped painfully when he caught the ident.

He slowed, turned as if watching a bird dip-glide across the water. He crossed wavering slats and balanced by the rail, the red blooms of a genemod geranium brushing his ankle. The woman who walked toward him through the crowd wore saffron: flowing trousers and an ankle-length open tunic over a white, square-necked blouse. Gold and citrine sparkled along the hollow of her throat; her hair was as sleek and black as it had been when he saw her running, but now it fell forward, framing her cheekbones and chin.

“M~ Zhou,” he said, as she hooked the right-side locks behind her ear. “How kind of you to see me in person.”

“Let’s walk,” she answered, taking his elbow and turning him with her fingertips, so he fell into step alongside her. They walked in silence along the awning-shaded street until he cleared his throat and glanced at her sidelong.

“Are we drawing out the anticipation, mambo?”

“Oh, very funny.” There were more geraniums, their red as bright as snapping banners. The shopkeepers along this stretch had interplanted the stainless-steel city beautification buckets with kleenexplant and paperwhites, and the sweet aromas mingled with the sharp herbal note of the geranium.

Which made André sneeze. He filtered them out.

“Actually, it was a serious question. You must have thought about my offer.” Or she’d not have come to find him, even if she had noticed him giving chase that morning.

“I wonder why you think you want to conjure.”

Not an unexpected question, but he gave it a show of consideration. “Why I think I want it? Or why I do want it?”

“That’s a question I can’t answer for you.” Her fingers had gone from resting lightly on the bone of his elbow to threading through the crook. He permitted her to steer him.

The crowds thinned as they walked, but the second wave would emerge soon—those who did not choose to separate their home and work lives but who telepresenced, and who came out for their daily bread and fish and produce after the rush had faded. Or those who worked on other planets, and could do as well sitting in a café under a parasol, uplinked lag-free through a quantum connection, as they could in an overpriced office on Bayside, where you paid for the view and walked sixty barges to the nearest coffee shop because the rents were so high.

“Croissant?” Ziyi Zhou asked him, gesturing to an open-air café with a few lingering customers.

“Maryanne will kill me if I don’t eat at the office,” André said, excusing himself with a one-shouldered shrug. M~ Zhou was holding his right arm. He rubbed at his beard with the left hand. “But I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee.”

She stepped back, but not before she squeezed his arm. “You’re good at that.”

“Dodging questions?”

A good try, but she gave him not even a quirk of smile back. “Establishing a claim on people.”

He shrugged again, acknowledgment this time, and spread his hands. He had to squint at M~ Zhou through the sunlight. Fat biting flies zoomed overhead, hunting in pairs; he swatted them away backhanded. Somewhere back there was a reptile brain that never quite trusted technology. She did smile this time. “Does that mean you’re ready to answer the question now, André?”

“I can’t imagine an answer that isn’t something you’ve already heard a thousand times, M~ Zhou. Should I tell you that it’s because I applied to Rim’s Exigency Corps for training as a coincidence engineer when I was twenty, and the god-botherers wouldn’t take me? That I never wanted to be anything else? That I grew up on the idea of the corps as the people who were going to save the universe? It’s all quite embarrassing when you try to put it into words.”

“So you’re a romantic?”

He crossed his arms and felt the sun on his shoulders. The biters came back around, but this time zoomed off in pursuit of someone wearing a blue-lavender sunblouse before they got within swatting range. “I have to be.”

Eyes wide, she looked up at him. “Would you hand a child a loaded gun, André?”

“Depending on the child—”

“—exactly. Depending on the child. Maybe one in a thousand, you could trust to do more good than harm with such a thing. So prove to me that you’re that one in a thousand.”

He hadn’t expected it to be easy. “A virtuous life by example isn’t enough?”

She snorted. “I know what you do. You have your own ways of influencing the future, M~ Deschênes.”

A retreat from the first name. Calculated, like everything else about her. “It’s a living. And that concerns you? Because I do adhere to certain ethical standards.”

The twist of her mouth told him everything he needed to know. There was no point in arguing situational ethics in a society in which skinning, data mining, and routine privacy invasions were a matter of course.

André dated an archinformist. Personally, he thought what he did was more ethical. He just killed people. Cricket took apart their lives, everything they might have backed up, relegated to hard memory, recorded on their headsets or in the data holds. Only wet memory was safe from her and her data-mining fellows, both those who worked for Rim and Core—the Rim and Core of the Earth-settled territories, not the rim and core of the galaxy, though to judge by popular entertainment broadcasts a lot of people didn’t know the difference—and those who went freelance.

And without people like her, without the absolute knowledge of the stuff of people’s lives, the kinds of manipulations conjures like Ziyi Zhou and licensed coincidence engineers performed would be impossible.

Never mind skinning your boss into an anteater, or secretly holocording the girl in the next cube so you could take her home and do whatever you wanted to her avatar…Compared to what M~ Zhou did in running people’s lives for them, determining their fates, André’s professional modus operandi of a quick, un-telegraphed, painless death was as humane as it got.

For one thing, if his subjects ever so much as knew he was coming, he had erred badly. He didn’t take cruelty jobs. And an encounter with him was the best most of his subjects could have hoped for.

If he came looking for somebody, they’d earned the visit.

It was a more honest trade than conjure, he thought bitterly. How dare Zhou hold that over him?

But there was no way to say that, not when he was asking her to teach him. Because he knew what the next question would be, then—a reiteration. So if you think it’s wrong, why do you want to do it?

And he knew the answer, too. Not just passion, though the passion was there, and he would have sold himself to Core to get it and taken their damned destiny lock, let himself be chained to their service forever. But something else, the thing he was scared of losing. And yes, he was aware of the conflict implicit in that as well, though he wouldn’t call it—quite—hypocrisy.

Maybe bargaining.

What André wanted was control. And self-defense, of course, but to pretend that was all of it would be self-deception. He gave her the second half.

“I want to be able to take care of myself,” he said. “I’ll run up on people who have the mojo working for them. Who’ve paid somebody like you or Jean Gris or one of the others”—one of the lessers, because every other conjure in Novo Haven, hell, every other conjure on Greene’s World, was lesser than Ziyi Zhou or Jean Kroc, who they called Jean Gris—“or who’ve sold themselves to Rim for the protection. And I need a little mojo of my own.”

“And it’s that simple for you?”

He shrugged. Omitting wasn’t really lying.

It was enough to make her nod a little. But the razor lines beside her eyes didn’t soften, and it wasn’t just a squint into the sun. “Fine,” she said. “But I am in a precarious position.” As an unlicensed conjure, she meant. It wasn’t illegal to know how to do it. But it was illegal to try, or to own the necessary equipment. “And you do work for Rim, and for Charter Trade.”

“I’m not going to sell you to Jefferson Greene, Ziyi.”

She turned so that her shoulder was to him, her back to the sun. Their shadows stretched ahead on the decking as she started forward. He hurried two steps and caught her. “That’s not why I’m concerned. As I said: maybe one in a thousand children can handle the responsibility that comes with that gun.”

“I already carry one of those.”

“Was that a threat, André?”

As if that would get him anywhere. “It was a plea for lenience. As you very well know. Are you trying to see if you can pick a fight with me?”

The arch of her eyebrows confirmed it. “My situation is complicated by another issue. Of those thousand children, maybe five of them can actually operate this gun with professional skill.”

“Everybody gets lucky once in a while.”

“You can teach most people to carry a tune, but one in a thousand is born to be a singer.”

He stopped. She walked three steps more before she did likewise. She didn’t turn back to him. “So it’s no, then?”

I’m sorry, André, he prayed for. Maybe if you could prove to me I can trust you—

But what he got was a flat shake of her head, the glossy blunt-cut ends of her hair whisking over golden-yellow-clad shoulders. “You’re not a child I can hand a gun, André. I hope…I hope this won’t prejudice our relationship.”

“If you mean,” he said, “am I likely to respond in a manner you might regret? M~ Zhou, I don’t bring my work home.”

She glanced over her shoulder and gave him a tight little smile and a nod. “Good then, that’s settled. Come talk to me if you need some work done. Or send Cricket.”

“I will,” he answered, and watched as she walked on, until the crowd swallowed her. When she passed out of sight he turned and knotted his hands on the rail, leaning over the channel. Fish flocked to his shadow, hopeful of crumbs, wary of an opportunistic seabird that swung around to see if any would pass too high. “Shit,” he said, and kicked the upright with the instep of his shoe.

A passing businessman chuckled under his breath and rolled a sympathetic eye. André caught it and rolled one back, and they shared a rueful grin for a moment before the businessman was past him.

Women.

What are you gonna do?

But women might be the answer, too. He composed a message to Cricket, thought about it, and added a paragraph on either end. Her connex was down; either she was sleeping, blocking, or busy. So he sent it head-mail rather than instant message.

She’d get it the next time she checked in. One of the interesting things about Cricket was that Cricket knew everyone.

In the meantime, another one of his messages was from a man named Timothy Closs. And that one might mean a paycheck, if everything played out right.

Coincidence made Timothy Closs tired.

And it was only due to an awkward coincidence that there was more than a minimal loss of life when the barge exploded. It blew up between twelve and thirteen, the darkest time of the morning, when neither diurnal humans nor crepuscular ranids tended to be awake. The recruitment barge should have been empty except for a night watchman, who was scheduled to be on deck when it exploded—and if he had been where he was supposed to be, he would have lived.

But the evening crew had stayed behind for some impromptu overtime. The sort where “working late” was a euphemism that even the most naive spouse would be unlikely to believe, given a good whiff of the miscreant’s breath. So there were four men aboard, in the control cabin.

The rear of the barge would have been empty, too, had not one of the native affairs coordinators, insomniac and behind a deadline, also been working ridiculously late. Uneuphemistically, in her case.

She’d been in the interview room, open to the water and astern of almost everything—a sealed bathyspheric bubble accessible only via an airlock or the warm waters of Novo Haven Bay. But what exactly she was doing there three hours after midnight was a question that Closs knew would probably never be answered.

Cold, freak chance: there wouldn’t be enough recovered of Lisa Anne Angley for a decent burial. Let alone any possibility of recovering her hard memory. The Bose-Einstein condensate processor and solid-state core of her headset were so much particulate in the sea air Closs breathed.

His sunrise came on like war. Recovery teams were already moving over the wreckage, illuminated under the glare of sodium-vapor lights. The gray dawn couldn’t compete.

Closs watched from the deck of a Charter Trade cruiser a half-kilometer off, shoulders squared in a smart-fabric wind-cheater. The day should heat up later, but for now the morning was cold, and suppressant foam dotting the water had quenched the floating fires.

Technically speaking, Closs didn’t have to be here. He curled his gloved hands on the rail, steel conducting heat from his palms. Technically speaking, he’d probably get a better view of the proceedings on the screen wall of his office.

But technicalities weren’t going to boost shattered morale the way having an officer on scene would. An officer of the corporation, rather than a real officer, these days, but Closs still had enough sense to stay the hell out of the incident commander’s way. And it didn’t hurt to show up and look interested and confident. It was good when the team was comfortable with the boss, knew how to respond around him, knew that the chain of command was strong. It saved on time and precision lost to panicked errors when one wandered down from the ivory tower and startled those who weren’t accustomed to one’s majestic propinquity.

His headset plinked, the reserved code for his staff archinformist, Maurice Sadowski.

“Hello, Maurice.” There was visual. He must be calling from a desk.

“Hello, Major.” Maurice was fortyish, square-jawed, his hair ponytailed at the nape of the neck. He wore a lightcoil spiraled through the rim of his left ear, but he’d deactivated it in observance of the tragedy. It shone dull bronze. He picked at it with a thumbnail, frowning. “Nobody’s claimed responsibility.”

“Well, the forensic team says the night watch was fucking around belowdecks, so anybody could have sailed up and tossed a grenade. But that isn’t what happened.”

“The bomb was placed?”

Closs leaned his elbows on the rail and steepled his fingers. Maurice’s translucent image floated before him, projected into his brain because that was a less complex feat than projecting it onto his retinas. “The blast originated in the engine compartment,” Closs said. “There wasn’t any bomb.”

“Mechanical failure?”

“Anything’s possible,” Closs said. “The barge was serviced three weeks ago.”

Maurice flinched. “Freak accident,” he said. “A freak accident that somebody engineered.”

“Yeah,” Closs said. “I think we’ve got an unlicensed conjure on our hands.”

It wasn’t earth, the stuff Cricket Earl Murphy spaded through, that gritted under her fingernails and left damp brown patches on the knees of her trousers. It wasn’t earth that she scratched clawed fingers into, raked up moist and crumbling, black as the void between stars and redolent of rotting. It wasn’t earth; Earth was on the other side of a long irrevocable relativistic slide, her old life receding like a missed train station.

It wasn’t earth. But people used the word anyway.

Cricket found it—alien was an ironic word, when she was already on another planet—but alien to work so with her hands, unskinned and unconnected, only sensing the texture of the soil with her fingertips. At home, she gardened, but she did it with all her skins and augments intact. She could zoom in to examine the fine grains of sand among the loam, check chemical composition, gather data effortlessly.

Here, in Lucienne’s garden, she did not use connex. She felt, and smelled, and cocked her head to listen to the sound the grains made when she rubbed them together. A different kind of parsing, almost medieval.

She was getting the hang of it. But she still couldn’t quite get used to it.

It was almost pointless to compost such soil as this, but she didn’t let that stop her, folding the crumbled dark mixture into earth that was no lighter, aerating the soil, laying it down in soft beds, ready for the hungry roots. She never would have done this in her old life, deep in the chaotic, elegant Core. Where houseplants were tended by hired gardeners or service bots, and were lacy froths of greenery or slick broad-leaved, jade-colored exotics, orchids hung with flowers that looked like they would bruise in a strong breath—things that were toxic to gnawing children and unwary pets.

Not tomatoes, leeks, ramps, radishes. Not maize, red and white and golden, single kernels pushed down in their mounds with a thumb, the hole closed and scattered round with bean and squash seeds. Not marigolds, just as effective against the native pests of Greene’s World as they were against those of Earth, and which Cricket was planting now, seating each one in its carefully dug hole amid the vegetables, a scatter of compost under the roots. She pressed each one into place with the side of her thumbs and smiled. Not much in the way of tomatoes, but the early peas were almost ready, their billowing pink and white flowers faded. She should pick some now, while they were sweet.

As if reading her mind—which might, in fairness, have been possible if both of them hadn’t had their headsets and connex shut down—Lucienne came out of the minifab with a bucket in her hand. It was Lucienne’s garden, though not Lucienne’s house. Or, more precisely, Lucienne stayed there. But the house belonged to her lover, Jean.

The garden, however, he stayed out of, except for purposes of rambling through—and, when they were ripe, picking the occasional tomato. It was Lucienne’s, and Lucienne shared it with Cricket.

And that was pretty good.

Lucienne crouched beside Cricket and held out a damp rag. “Is that the last of the marigolds?”

Cricket, wiping her hands, nodded. “It should be all in.”

“Good.” Lucienne Spivak rattled the bucket as she rose to her feet. “Let’s take some back out again.”

Lucienne was a tall, curvy sort of woman, the skin of her brown thighs slightly dimpled below the ragged hems of her white shorts. She wore real cloth, old-fashioned, which was a side effect of living with Jean as well. He liked to talk about mature technologies, the redundancy and robustness of biological systems over technological ones. A human being is more than just a biomechanical machine.

Cricket was never exactly sure if she believed him, or if all the world really was predetermined, and consciousness some cruel joke of the wide ironic universe. Jean had to disagree: he was a conjure man, and changing the future was his livelihood. But Cricket knew a fair number of scientists who would swear that even the measurable statistical effects of coincidence engineering meant nothing about free will, because the act of the engineering and its outcomes had already been determined.

Of course, as far as Cricket was concerned, it didn’t make any real difference. You were still stuck not knowing one way or the other until it happened, and even if it didn’t matter what you did, when the anxiety hit, it sure felt like it.

She picked up the watering can and watered the last marigold, then stood, pushing herself off her knees flat-handed. Lucienne caught her under the elbow and gave her a boost. Lucienne’s thick, dark-brown braid fell over her shoulder, banging Cricket on the ear. Lucienne’s first name was French and her last name was Ukrainian, but she herself looked Indian or Pakistani. And Cricket still had to keep reminding herself that none of that mattered on the Rim, where there were no nationalities.

Or rather, there were. There were the important nationalities. Like, Rim company man, and alien, and colonial, and Coreworlder, and criminal. By which the Rim meant people like Lucienne. Revolutionaries, Greens, fair-trade activists, native-rights agitators.

But not like Cricket. No matter what Cricket had done in her other life.

Though if Lucienne kept asking, you never knew. She might become a criminal again. Of a better sort, this time.

They moved along the row of peas in stooped, companionable silence. Pods pattered into the bucket, first a thin layer and then handfuls. Some plants still held sprays of blossom among the nearly ripe legumes and their curling tendrils. Cricket snapped one off and tucked it into her thin creepery hair; Lucienne, laughing silently, copied. The flowers were baby-pink, breath-white. They smelled so sweet that Cricket kept looking around for the lilies.

“Did you know your boyfriend sent a message to Jean?” Bluntly, without games or preamble. That was Lucienne.

Cricket, on the other hand, was a liar. But maybe not to Lucienne. Well, not often. “André’s not my boyfriend.”

“So you knew, in other words.”

She nodded. She slipped her hand among the leaves, found a spray of round, firm pods. They cracked off the stems when she twisted them. The surfaces were not quite as smooth as they looked, and stuck to her fingers slightly when she shook them off into the pail. “You’re not granting me any great revelations.”

“Do you think—”

Cricket shook her head. “He told me, actually. And I—”

Lucienne pressed both fists into the small of her back, the bucket swinging against her hip. She arched, stretched, stooped again. “He wanted you to put in a word for him, did he?”

Cricket shook her head. “I wouldn’t trust him. He’s not like you. Not an idealist.”

“I trust you.”

“And I sleep with him, so he must be okay?” When Lucienne looked up, Cricket was smiling at her, worrying the string out of a pea pod with her thumbnail. “You realize that doesn’t follow.”

“No,” Lucienne said. “Anyway, whatever you think of André, I wish you’d come with us. At least to meet them.”

Us meant Lucienne and Jean. Them…

Them was a temptation. Cricket dropped the pod in the pail and reached for another one. “The froggies.”

Lucienne glanced over her shoulder, as if somebody could possibly be listening. “Tonight. Stay to dinner; come out after.” She shook the bucket. “Damned if we don’t have enough peas.”

Some men stop believing in love as they grow older. Some simply stop expecting it to find them.

Jean Kroc had never succumbed to the first failing, though the second had seemed likely. Whether he had any use for the emotion himself had remained an open question, one complicated because the image of happy domesticity did not fit the role of conjure he portrayed. Which was an odd thing; if people came to you for happiness, wouldn’t they expect you to be able to provide happiness for yourself?

Which had always been the sorcerer’s secret. Knowledge might be power. But power was a long walk from joy.

But today, there was Lucienne standing beside him, her elbow brushing his elbow, her long almost-black hair braided thick as his wrist down her back, with her high cheekbones and her almond eyes and the beauty mark in the corner of her mouth, looking like Durga come to life, without the tiger. And so, as Jean helped Lucienne shuck peas in the kitchen, and Lucienne’s slight, riverine friend Cricket boiled the salted water, the settled domesticity of the scene amused him.

It might have been four hundred years before, some randomly selected afternoon in the first century B.G. The kitchen was gas and electric, no smart appliances, no adaptive fab. He lived off the grid, Jean Kroc did. Lucienne teased that if he could sink a well, or if the river water were halfway safe, he’d haul buckets rather than palm a tap.

It was a pleasant kind of teasing, though; keeping the house unconnexed served her as well as him. The lives lived within it were safe from registry in any data hold, which was a necessary thing for anybody who wanted to keep a secret. Cricket’s research skills were proof enough of that. Jean had seen her generate a complete list of a Rim associate manager’s sex partners, accurate—by Cricket’s estimate—to 95 percent, simply by hacking her security monitor. Which had still been registered to one of sixty-four thousand factory presets.

Elapsed time, thirty-five seconds.

However, it also meant that when a hum of motors was followed by the crunch of footsteps up the clamshell path—Greene’s World bivalves, not real Earth clams, but people, Jean included, were sloppy about terminology—he couldn’t snap on a smart perimeter with a headset command and have six methods of disposal at his fingertips. Black security was illegal, which wouldn’t stop anybody who thought he needed it.

Which was why everything Jean would have killed to protect, other than himself and Lucienne, was fifteen miles away.

He slicked a thumbnail up the inside of the pod he still held, let the peas drop into the bowl and roll down the little pyramid there while their green musk rose, then cast the husk aside. It turned over in midair, sideslipping, and landed in the stained white sink. Jean wiped his hands on a towel and thumbed a keypad hung on his belt.

He didn’t use connex, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have screens. The big one on the wall by the window lit up, showing a speedboat moored at the end of his rickety parawood dock. The boat was a four-seater, ivory and rust in Rim Company livery.

“Corps?” Lucienne asked softly, cracking open another pod with her nails.

The piping below the gunwales was jade-colored, for the Greene’s World Charter Trade Corporation. Not the Exigency Corps. Salt stains curling along the boat’s bone-colored flanks gave the incongruous appearance of medieval embroidery. A woman in a Rimmer sunshade, her clipped hair blue, sat in the back, bent over with one finger pressed to her ear and the expression of somebody in heavy connex. Two men were tromping up the white path to the door. “Local,” Jean answered, and watched Lucienne’s shoulders pull back.

Cricket gave a quick twist of her neck to stare at him sideways, lids wide enough that white rings stood around her water-brown irises. “You sure?”

He took the slotted spoon from her hand. “You have some reason to be scared of the Corps? Turn the stove off; I don’t think this will take too long.”

She did what he said, silently, and went to sit on the creaking wicker sofa while he and Lucienne went to the door. He timed it just right; the Rimmer had started to knock when he pulled the door open.

Jean granted the medium-brown, medium-height man who leaned back so suddenly a certain amount of credit. He didn’t fall over and he recovered himself fast. “Jean Kroc?”

“I am he.”

The Rimmer glanced over Jean’s shoulder. His own backup stood at the bottom of the steps, off to the port, covering both his partner and the door. “And is this M~ Spivak?”

“M~ Spivak can speak for herself,” Lucienne said. She didn’t step forward out of the shadows, however.

The Rimmer cleared his throat. “I’m David Kountché,” he said. “My identification—”

Which was connex, of course, and Officer Kountché colored under his café-au-lait complexion when he realized the reason for Jean’s slight, incurious smile. He dug into his hip bag and came up with a warrant card, holoplastic, chipped at one edge, with his retinal print and image indelibly recorded on the surface. He was, Jean reassessed, a Dayvid with a y.

“If you’d like to come in, you have to take your shoes off,” Jean said, handing back the warrant card.

“I’m sorry?”

“No shoes in the house,” Lucienne said. She pushed past Jean and came out under the awning. Kountché stepped back to give her room, without seeming to realize that he’d handed her control of the situation. Lucienne continued, “And unless you have a warrant, I’ll have to ask you both to power down. Jean has a religious objection to connex in his home. Do you want me to come out instead?”

“We didn’t say it was you we needed to speak to, ma’am,” the Rimmer said. Jean could not fault him on politeness, anyway. Which wasn’t as rare a trait as you might expect, in cops.

“No, but you talked around me, so I guessed. Coming in or staying out? And who might your partner be?”

Officer Kountché cleared his throat. And, gamely, sat down on the plascrete steps and touched open the tabs on his shoes. “Officer Garnet Spencer, ma’am,” he said, and Officer Spencer tapped his sunshade just below the speckled band. Lucienne was too much of a lady to show it publicly, but Jean Kroc echoed her concealed wince. Somebody’s mother had watched too many romances.

“Delighted to meet you, Officer Spencer.” He looked a bit like a boiled fruit: his eyebrows made pale swipes in the redness of his face. Lucienne pointed to his feet. “There’s tea inside, or I can bring you a lemonade on the porch.”

After trading one quick look—backed, no doubt, by connex—Officer Kountché finished pulling his shoes off and powered down. Officer Spencer opted for the hospitality of the front stoop, and Jean brought him a lemonade while Lucienne led the other one inside. When Jean returned to the living room—the kitchen was more an alcove off the side than a separate space—Cricket had taken herself back out to the garden and Officer Kountché was perched uncomfortably on the edge of a wicker slouch chair, maintaining a stiff spine as if in defiance of the urgings of the household goods. Lucienne had turned the burner back on under Cricket’s teakettle, and was measuring leaves into a pot. “Whatever questions you wanted to ask me,” she said, “you can ask in front of Jean.”

The officer looked uncomfortable, but folded his hands over his knee. “Where were you last night, M~ Spivak?”

“Please. Call me Lucienne.”

“You don’t stand on ceremony?”

“I don’t stand on much,” she answered. “Occasionally, my principles. Sugar, Officer?”

“Sugar, please. And answer the question. Please.”

Lucienne frowned, as if measuring spoonfuls of white crystals into the cup was an unwonted effort. “I was here.”

“You can confirm?”

She shrugged. “No connex,” she said. “I live here. I wasn’t anywhere else.”

Officer Kountché glanced at Jean, who leaned, arms folded, beside the door. “I’ll testify to that,” Jean answered.

“M~ Kroc,” the officer asked, “what’s your means of support?”

“I’m a prospector,” Jean answered. “And I consult.”

“No work in the, ah, service industry?”

Jean just smiled. “Not what I would call it, no. Does that have any bearing on your investigation of my partner?”

“Now, M~ Kroc,” Kountché said, apparently having recovered himself, “I’m sure I never said your partner was under investigation.”

The smile Lucienne gave Kountché was almost as plastic as the one she got back. “Jean,” she said, “there’s nothing here you need to defend me from.”

He unfolded his arms and said nothing. She turned back to face the counter and poured the tea. She served him and offered a cup to Jean, who waved it away with the back of his hand, then poured for herself. A delaying action, and a few moments later she ensconced herself across from him, her mug cradled between her hands. “So,” the officer said, “you can’t prove where you were last night?”

Whatever floated in the depths of her tea must have been extraordinarily interesting. She dipped a finger into the steaming surface and bit the resulting droplet from the tip. “Can you prove I was somewhere else?”

“What’s your relationship with the ELF?”

“The Extee Lib Foundation? I give them money. I volunteer in the front office. It’s a perfectly legal and registered charity. Officer.”

“Blowing up a native worker recruitment station is a charitable function?”

“Is that what exploded last night?” Lucienne leaned forward, between her knees, to set her cup down on the plascrete not far from the edge of the braided rug. “You think I had something to do with that?”

“I’m not suggesting any such thing.” He sipped his tea. If he was a hunting dog, Jean thought, his ears would be pricked up. “Do you know anything about it?”

“No connex, remember?”

He shook his head, as if it was a little hard for him to understand the implications. No instant news, no instant messages. No instantaneous communication with people on other planets, halfway across the galaxy.

No constant hum of commercials in the back of your brain. No hacked perceptions, showing you a woman in a red dress and heels when she was wearing a pantsuit and thongs, and weighed fifteen pounds worth of muscle less than the image projected into your brain.

No connex. Alone with the silence inside your own brain.

Not too long ago, of course, it would have been alien to Lucienne, too. But she’d adapted, as Jean had expected she would. If nothing else, it gave you time to think.

“You’ll answer questions under a lie sensor, if necessary?”

Lucienne smiled. “If you subpoena my cooperation. I know my rights, Officer.”

The answering tip of his head was tight. “Are you certain you don’t wish to call your solicitor now?”

“Why should I?” she said. “I’ve nothing to hide.”

3

OVER THE YEARS, ANDRÉ HAD COME TO ACCEPT THAT HIS luck was often ridiculous, but he hadn’t expected a shot at filling the contract his first night out. He folded his forearms over the handlebars of his wet-dry scoot and let it bob, lights dark, on the moonlit water of the bay. The floor pushed his feet as it yawed. He hid behind the faring so his head wouldn’t silhouette on the horizon. The craft was low-profile; without the brightness of the sky or of Novo Haven’s lights behind him, André was nothing more than a blacker patch on the water.

About that luck, he thought, watching Lucienne Spivak and her guest come chattering down the floating dock. Ridiculous wasn’t the half of it. Epic, maybe. Operatic. Farcical. Because even by moonlight, with his lowlight adapt kicked up, he recognized the woman walking alongside Spivak, leaning into her so that their shoulders brushed, ducking down as they shook their heads over some joke funny enough that André could hear their laughter across the water.

“You know,” he murmured under his breath, “you couldn’t make this shit up.”

He wasn’t going to kill anybody in front of his girlfriend. Some things were beyond the call of duty, and it would be difficult to make it look like an accident if Spivak suddenly went down clutching her throat. And he wasn’t in a hurry. Impatient men often didn’t do well in André’s line of work. Luck will only get you so far. Even ridiculous luck—

With his lowlight, he could make out the hunched shape of a minifab at the top of the dock, a white shell path leading up to it. The residence itself was in a sheltered inlet that a high tide would turn into an island, not quite up the bayou—as Nouel had suggested—but on a channel and away from the open bay. A paramangrove swamp cut sight lines to the city, and the approach path of descending lighters lay directly over the house, which explained why this wasn’t more popular property. That, and the inconvenience of being an hour and a half by scoot or boat from the city.

He’d wait for Cricket to leave, and then he’d slip close enough to get an overview of the location. It would be better if he could catch Spivak away from home, but it didn’t hurt to know the turf. He’d have to be careful, though; Jean Kroc’s house was a homestead, no plans on record, and he had no idea what sort of security devices the conjure man might use. Anything from tiger pits to tracking lasers were possible, and it would be embarrassing to take a load of buckshot in the fundament.

André folded his arms and waited, listening to the women laugh. The breeze across the water was cool, carrying a taint of the heady sweetness from the parasitic flowers that swathed the paramangrove limbs. The scent carried over miles, and right now it told André that the wind was offshore. Which was also helpful to him; even if Kroc had a sniffer or a smart guard dog, it wouldn’t pick up André’s scent.

Yep. Luck was wonderful.

Pity he couldn’t talk any conjure on Greene’s World into helping him train it.

He wondered if he should have turned down this job. Closs would just have found somebody else, of course. Somebody who might botch it, or somebody who might be the kind of sadistic bastard who got his kinks out in his work.

He shifted on the hard seat of the scooter, pretending resignation as if he could convince himself. No matter how much of a hurry Closs was in, it wasn’t as if André had to kill anybody tonight.

Except it didn’t look like Cricket was leaving alone. She climbed into the passenger chair of the waiting flashboat and Spivak followed, settling in the pilot’s seat. If she was just running Cricket down to the ferry, about fifteen minutes, then—

—André might not need the research after all. More luck, that he hadn’t mentioned it to Cricket.

It could have put a strain on the relationship.

The engine of the flashboat was faster and louder than the caterpillar drive on the scoot. André waited until his prey was in motion before powering up. His scoot was dark gray, and the topcoat had a gloss-or-matte option that got a lot of work on night jobs. With the lowlight, he didn’t need the running lights.

He concentrated very hard, thinking of Spivak dropping Cricket off at the ferry landing just the other side of the paramangrove swamp and turning back for home, maybe a little careless and tired. He couldn’t take a blacked-out scoot into the city; if he didn’t get run down by a barge, he’d get pulled over by traffic enforcement—and Cricket might recognize him or the vehicle under conditions of more light. The ideal, of course, would be for her to drop off Cricket, turn around, head home, and run into engine trouble. Unfortunately, André didn’t think his untrained mojo was enough to pull off that set of coincidences, but he held the thought anyway, sharp and fine, visualizing in detail.

Such things happened, after all. More often than anyone admitted. His own childhood was a kind of anecdotal proof.

But Spivak guided the flashboat toward the lights of Novo Haven. The universe wasn’t listening. Or somebody else’s free will was getting in the way again. Just plain inconvenient.

She opened quite a gap as she headed inward—his craft wasn’t as speedy—but André wasn’t worried. It shouldn’t matter, as long as he could spot her running lights and the silhouette of her boat across open water.

Traffic was light at first, and there were no street—or channel—lights on the outskirts, other than the occasional door or dock lamp. But the traffic regs ensured that Spivak couldn’t just flash off and leave his slower vehicle behind. André flicked on his running lights to be legal, made up some of the distance, and slotted his scoot in behind a water taxi two vehicles back from Spivak and Cricket.

He didn’t even need to follow that closely. It was obvious pretty quickly that they were going to Cricket’s new flat. André hadn’t been there yet, but he had the address, and it was a neighborhood he knew.

He stuck close anyway, though, the tactile rubber of the scoot’s handlebars molding his palms, the engine softly vibrating his calves. He pulled a hooded sweater on one arm at a time—keeping his eye on traffic—and slipped on eye protection. Too dark for dark glass in the goggles, but they changed the line of his face a little. He skinned the beard off, which wouldn’t help if neither woman was running connex, but he knew Cricket at least usually kept her skins live. She hypertexted like a mad thing in conversation, her agile brain tending to shoot off in six unrelated directions at once.

The scoot was a quiet little craft, and André was glad of that as he ducked it out of the traffic stream one bridge shy of Cricket’s flat and diagonally across the channel. They unloaded quickly—a small favor from fate—and Cricket gave Spivak a one-armed hug as she climbed past her before turning away. André crushed a pang of conscience. He’d be there to console her.

It might even bring them closer together. Cricket had this unnerving tendency to flit just out of reach, as if she were covered in something slick and transparent. You could brush against her surface, but there was never any way to get a grip.

A minute later, Spivak finished fussing with her safety belts and pulled away from the landing. Headed in the opposite direction, not back across the side channel where André lay in wait. He twisted the throttle and sent the scoot forward, pulling into traffic smoothly to avoid attracting attention.

Now his heart thumped his breastbone. The crackle of tension spidered up his back to grab across his shoulder blades, and his stomach seemed to sway in his gut like a ballast bag of wet sand. His skin crawled taut across his thighs and groin; nausea chased bitterness up the back of his throat.

This was it.

The luck was running now.

It was ninety minutes before he got his shot. Spivak stayed in the city, visited a tavern André didn’t follow her into—it was on a decommissioned ferry, moored along the east side of Broadbrook, and there was no way off it that wasn’t immediately obvious—and returned to her flashboat after less that forty-five minutes. It might have been the meet, but his job wasn’t to stop the meet, or identify the other party. He didn’t do that sort of thing.

Afterward, she headed west, out of the city on Bayside. Not back the way they had come, but this was a shorter way and she could always cut across the shipping lanes for a nearly direct route back to Kroc’s house—a shortcut that would be ideal for André’s purposes. Not only did lighters kick up a hell of a splash when they touched down—a splash that could turn over a small craft—but big ships sometimes didn’t notice little boats, and accidents could happen.

André didn’t like to smile over his work; it seemed disrespectful. But it was hard to keep this one down: maybe prayer was good for something.

He should have stuck to his demand to be paid a bonus for a twenty-four-hour closure.

The only potential problem was the top speed of his scoot. If Spivak raced home, there was no way he could keep up. But if she was cutting the lanes, she’d want to proceed cautiously, with one eye on the sky. That would be better.

And it seemed to be her plan. André hung back almost a half-kilometer, trailing Spivak until they were well clear of Novo Haven. The submerged lights of the shipping lanes glowed beneath the surface of the bay, but there was no real danger of being caught against them; they were meant to be seen from above. Only one lighter splashed down during the transect, and that one well off to the south and gently enough that by the time the wake reached André, he cut across it diagonally and noticed only what the skip and lurch did in his already nervous belly. The night was calm, still warmer than he’d expected, and the breeze from landward had faded off, leaving a few late-traveling sailboats motoring along the placid surface with their white sails hanging slack. Spivak, charting a stately progress, seemed inclined to enjoy the night. André had no problem with letting her do it. It was a point of honor with him that his targets never even knew they were in danger. Necessity did not have to be cruel.

Around the middle of the landing field, he goosed it. The caterpillar drive wasn’t fast, but it was fast enough if Spivak didn’t hear him coming, and quiet enough that she shouldn’t. He set the autocruise, looped his hard memory, and—keeping one eye on the sky and the other on his quarry—began to assemble his weapon.

In most cases, André killed with a long-barreled sniping weapon, a combination rifle brand-named Locutor A.G. 351, for the year the design had been introduced. It adapted to either caseless standard ammunition—jacketed projectiles fired by a chemical accelerant—or crystalline slivers of hemorragine fired by compressed air, which dissolved in the victim’s blood, causing symptoms of a cerebral aneurysm, then broke down into innocuous organic compounds within the day.

That was what he would be using tonight. He preferred a bullet; it killed instantly if you did it right, whereas the hemorragine left the victim sometimes as long as 120 seconds to feel fear. And that was ugly and cruel.

The other issue with the damned things was that they didn’t fly far, and a fairly light cross-breeze could deflect them. He’d have to be within a hundred meters, and he wouldn’t get more than a couple of shots. People tended to notice when someone pointed a rifle at them and fired poisoned needles at the back of their heads.

He’d put one needle into her back, wait for her to go down, approach with caution, and download her hard memory for Closs—as instructed, just to be sure. Then he’d capsize her boat, lose the body someplace where it shouldn’t be recovered for at least a day (long enough for the hemorragine to break down, and for her hard memory to wipe), and pretend, in the morning, to be shocked when he heard the news.

The scoot purred forward. André extended the telescope rest and slid the weapon-mount onto the peg. He squinted through the sight, focusing down through the scope because only an idiot would connex this—though idiots did—and took a sighting.

Lucienne Spivak was sitting upright in the pilot’s chair, her braid whipping behind her, her shoulders square and facing him. Easy. The only way he could miss was a divine intervention.

He measured his breathing, matched it to the regular rise and fall of the swells, tugged his glove off with his teeth, slid his finger under the trigger guard. He waited for the moment, the moment when his breath would pause naturally just as the scoot topped one of the gentle waves.

The moment came. He squeezed the trigger. A jet of cool grease-scented air stroked his cheek.

There was no sound.

The sun wasn’t up yet when someone hammered on Cricket’s door frame. No doorbell, no chime of connex and the name of the importunate visitor, just the thumping of fist on paramangrove paneling.

“Oh, fuck,” Cricket murmured, twisting her legs into the cool air. She slept nude; she dragged the robe she kept on the bedpost over chilled skin and stumbled barefoot across a morphing rug that this morning was off-white and shaggily looped. Her toes curled as she stepped onto the decking, as if she could somehow protect the tender instep of her foot from the crawling chill. “Fuck, who is it?”

“Kroc,” came the voice from the other side of the door, which answered the question of why he was knocking. No connex to ring her chimes. His voice shivered, high and sharp, almost shrill. “Is Lucienne with you?”

“Shit,” Cricket said, and palmed the lock plate faster than she should have. “She left me around one hundred and one. She was going to get a drink and go home.”

“She didn’t make it,” Kroc said, unnecessarily, because sometimes it was better making a noise. He ducked under her arm into the flat, and she locked up behind him. “Check your messages. If she sent anything—”

It would have been to Cricket, because Jean was not connected. She tightened her robe and scrubbed her eyes on the sleeve. “One second.”

She dropped her connex at night, except for the flat security and a couple of emergency codes. If it had been really important, Lucienne would have spared the couple of extra keystrokes and sent to one of those.

But there were messages waiting. The one from André, which she hadn’t answered. One or two from connex acquaintances, people she knew from online groups. And one from Lucienne.

She looked at Jean, so he would know. His face paled under his stubble, but he didn’t speak.

Cricket opened the message.

And would have fallen if Jean had not caught her.

It was a sense-dump, night water and darkness, the smell of lubricant and the texture of the flashboat’s controls in her hands, all subsumed by a hypodermic stab to the left of her spine, the building pressure of a migraine like the handle of a knife pressed to her eye. She gasped but couldn’t make her diaphragm work. Jean’s hands on her shoulders guided her back, cushioning her until she slumped against a chair. The robe was everywhere, he must be getting an eyeful, but he caught her under the chin and made her look into his eyes. “You need EMS.”

“No,” Cricket said, a shrill spasming whine. She couldn’t lift her hand to push at him, so she thumped the heel on the deck for emphasis. She felt him jump. “No doctor. Just…a minute.”

Dying. Cricket—no, Lucienne was dying. Lucienne knew she was dying, and she knew why. And there was no time to explain.

So she showed.

The file was encoded, and Cricket’s breath came back into her with a rush as the flood of numbers washed away the swelling pain in her head. Lucienne had swamped her connex, a massive core-dump—

Corrupt. Corrupt. Corrupt.

“Shit!” The word of the day, apparently. Cricket scrambled to save, to back up, to dump what Lucienne had sent her into a protected hold. Cricket was an archinformist. She had better security protocols than most governments. And she knew how to sling data, and how to repair it—

She went after it, the bones in Jean’s wrists creaking as she clenched her hands. But the file was incomplete. And a nonholographic transmission, so what she had was a chunk of data, but not the sort of chunk that could give you a fuzzy picture of the whole. This was a linear string. Though Cricket was pretty sure she could find the key, because Lucienne would have wanted her—or Jean—to crack the code, she only had part of it.

And now was not the time for trying to patch out a crack on what she had. Not when Jean was leaning over her, moving his hands inside her slackening grip to tug her dressing gown shut over her breasts, breathing so shallowly that listening to him made her lungs hurt.

She let her hands loosen. He touched her shoulder and sat back. “Jean,” she said. She opened her eyes. His, water-colored behind his rimless glasses, looked back.

He sighed, short and sharp. “No.”

She put a hand down and picked herself off the floor. She’d bruised her shoulders on the chair. When she extended her hand to pull Jean off his knees, the stretch of muscle made her wince. “I—”

“It’s not your fault.” Abruptly, preemptive.

“It had to be André.”

“It’s still not your fault.” He straightened, fist pressed into his side like a runner with a stitch. “His responsibility. Did she…send you anything else?”

“Part of a file.” She swallowed. “It was coded. The connex cut off.”

“Shit.” With exactly the same inflection she’d said it, too. Her smile hurt more than frowning had. He opened his mouth, looked at her, shut it.

She couldn’t stand the look on his face, the wary softness of it. Jean Gris should never look so unguarded. “You’re not even going to recite the stupid parable about the snake at me, are you?”

He snorted, a pained laugh that didn’t open his mouth. “No.” And then a pause. “He’s got the knack, doesn’t he?”

“Could he have got past what you hung on Lucienne if he didn’t?”

Untrained, unassisted. Jean shook his head. Cricket’s heart twisted in her chest.

Nobody’d ever loved her like that. “Do you think you can—”…save him…fix him. She didn’t even know the word she wanted.

Jean shrugged. Not a dismissal. A maybe. Even now. “I’ve known men as bad, turned out better.” Jean’s brand of revenge didn’t run to murder. “Once you send me that file, I’ll let you out of it. I know you didn’t want to be involved.”

“In what you and Lucienne were doing?”

He nodded. Even here, it didn’t pay to be too specific.

“Actually,” Cricket said, balling her hands in the pockets of her robe, “I was kind of changing my mind.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, they drank a great deal of tea. Cricket hunched over her mug, sipping distractedly, while Jean filled and refilled it. “So tell me about André,” he said, when her fingers were no longer clenched so tightly on the cup that they whitened at the edges.

Her eyes were red, the lid-edges slick inside the lashes when she looked up. “What do you need?”

“Why does he want to conjure so bad?” She opened her mouth a little too fast, and Jean held up his hand. “Not the facile answer, please. You’re an archinformist”—she laughed—“don’t tell me you didn’t pull his records back to first grade before you got involved with him.”

The corner of her mouth quirked. Touché. “He’d never tell you. He’s got a sister he can’t stand. Left home in his teens, after his older brother got killed in a gang fight and he didn’t pass evaluation for Exigency Corps training.”

“So he wanted to be a god-botherer. He’s got the talent—”

“His mother was a conjure.” She pushed the cup away with her fingertips. Jean felt it scrape through the table and lifted his hands. “His sister is, too. He doesn’t talk about them. I can only speculate…”

“So? Speculate.”

She snatched the teacup and drained it. “I think he blames his mom for…He had a brother. A year older. Honoré. A tough boy, ran with a bad crowd. And whether their mom could actually conjure or not, she couldn’t keep Honoré home.”

“Or André from running with him.” Jean lifted the pot. She held her hand over her cup.

“Or keep Honoré alive,” Cricket said. “André got pretty badly beaten up around the same time. I think he blames his mother and sister for, you know.” She waved at the ceiling.

“Not keeping Honoré alive?”

“Sure. So he tried to get into the Corps, and they wouldn’t take him because of his family background. And he wants nothing to do with Zoë—she’s his sister. She’s a conjure, too.”

“Any good?”

Cricket shrugged. “Are any of them? I mean, other than you?”

“There’s a few,” Jean allowed. He cleared his throat. “So André grew up a killer instead.”

Changing her mind, Cricket reached for the teapot after all. “So it would seem.”

The morning was hotter, humid, and bright. André was intent enough on his interface that he jumped when Maryanne bumped the door open with her hip, though he didn’t look up until she set a tin tray on the steel edge of his desk. The napkin-covered outline of an antique revolver lay beside the coffeepot, the china cup, and a doughnut on the gold-rimmed plate.

Wordlessly, stiff-backed, Maryanne turned on a pointed shoe and left him staring at the thing. He reached out and brushed the napkin aside, then checked the load. One bullet.

Maryanne let the door snap shut behind her audibly. She had to give it an extra little push to get that click, and André read the message in it. Maryanne was his cousin, as well as his employee. Normally, she kept her opinions to herself, and her work for him met both their needs. He got to give something back to his family, and in return got help he could trust.

But Maryanne lived with André’s older sister, Zoë, a charlatan conjurer like their mother, and—

There were family differences. Leave it at that.

He set the revolver aside. There was a real paper envelope underneath, his name in actual handwriting, actual ink. M~ A. Deschênes.

Shit, he thought. And also, at last.

This was more usually a graduation test, as he understood it. A message as plain as the gun: you are playing in the big leagues now. He spun the cylinder, closing his eyes while he listened to it whir, picturing the chamber with the single cartridge dropping to the bottom, away from the hammer, pausing there as the cylinder ratcheted to a halt.

If Kroc knew about Spivak, the weapon was bait. The fix was in, this was no test, and accepting the challenge would mean his death. If Kroc didn’t know—if Cricket had spoken to him about André—then this was André’s chance. He might be able to affect the spin of the cylinder. He might just—get lucky.

Unlike the cat in the box, he did not know if he was dead.

The gun might be archaic, but the antitampering lock was not. The diamond-tipped drill zinged into metal as the cylinder stopped. The weapon shuddered as the bolt slipped home, a delicate warble alerting him to the activation of the transmitter. Kroc would know if he cheated.

The question being asked had a yes or no answer. Did he want to conjure enough to die for it?

André slid the room-temperature barrel into his mouth, tasting gun oil, sleek and unpleasantly aromatic. He pictured misfire. He pictured a misaligned chamber, a hammer bent enough to miss contacting the primer. A revolver was a primitive machine, an effective machine. Not much could go wrong.

He was dead or he wasn’t. A closed box. About time, he thought, and opened his eyes for one long look at the screen across from his desk, the one that showed the endless blue expanse of bay, the contrail of another lighter towing its string-of-pearls cargo pods toward the spaceport after splashdown. Up and down, up and down, never getting anywhere.

The wake hit; his office rose and dropped, the stylus rolling across his interface stopped by the lip on the desk.

His finger convulsed.

It was the best damned coffee André had ever tasted.

He gulped the first cup in three painful, searing swallows, then poured another and soaked broken bites of doughnut. It was a ritual, a discipline, and he didn’t pick up the envelope until he’d tossed back the crumb-laden dregs and poured himself a third cup, oily and black. By then, his hands were shaking too badly to drink and machismo was satisfied, so he set it aside and picked up the envelope in its stead.

Hand-addressed, as he’d noticed. The writing was smooth and controlled, not jerky the way most people’s was when they were forced to use archaic tools. He knew before he opened it that the note inside, like the envelope, would be real paper, dead trees and cloth fiber, rather than epaper. There would be no data trail.

André read over the address and the invitation and drank his third cup of coffee while memorizing both. Wet memory, not hard.

No etrails.

The fourth cup of coffee was the last one in the pot. It steamed thickly into the humid air while André tapped the last few droplets free and then unscrewed the element from the bottom of the pot. It wasn’t hot enough to glow when he laid the insulated cap down on the tray, but it was hot enough to blacken paper, and—when he bent forward and blew softly on the thin ember—to set it brilliantly aflame.

The invitation burned the envelope, and both scorched André’s fingertips before he dropped them in the recycler and poured half the last cup of coffee on top. What remained was bitter, and there were grounds in it. André could afford the real, imported bean. Not a stunning expense—coffee went through a transmitter just fine—but supplies were limited and that made it a not insignificant one.

He savored those last swallows. Then he stood, and set the cup aside on the painted tin tray, and summoned his weapons and his coat. He walked past Maryanne on his way out; she caught his wrist so he turned and met her gaze. She shook her head so her earrings rattled on her earpiece, lips pressed tight, conservative bleached dreadlocks caught back in a bun.

“Thank God,” she said, and squeezed tight enough to leave nail cuts in his flesh before he pulled back. The half-moon marks blanched, then reddened on pale gold skin inside his wrist—so much lighter than his scarred knuckles, than the back of his arm.

“Nothing to do with God,” he answered, and patted her on the shoulder, feeling her bones shift as she shrugged, before he moved away.

“I’m glad you survived Kroc’s invitation, André. And by the way, I quit.” She smoothed her hair, and then invoked the unholy, the name of André’s sister. “I have to live with Zoë.”

André parked his scoot in front of Jean Kroc’s minifab and paused at the bottom of the floating dock, looking around. He wasn’t surprised to see Cricket sitting spread-kneed on the second step, shucking peas into a bucket set between her sandals. She looked up when he crunched up the seashell-and-broken-plascrete path.

She never changed. Her eyes were still the brown of weak tea or swamp water, and you could see the flecks in them when you got close enough, like loam or bits of leaf. She was skinny and not too tall, blue veins visible under the skin of her throat. Her fine black hair rat-tailed in the humid heat.

She stood up, bucket swinging, colander full of peas set aside on the steps. “Jean’s waiting for you.”

“You know,” André said, before he pocketed his shades, wiped the sweat off his temples, and stole a kiss, “you can buy those.”

“Taste better if you grow them yourself,” she answered, and grabbed a fistful of beard to kiss him back. Her shoulders were tense under the light-colored blouse, though, and her back hunched as if she fought the urge to cringe.

He didn’t withdraw until she’d smoothed one hand across his bald scarred scalp. “Oh, I have time to do that search for you tomorrow if you still need it.”

“No,” he said, shifting his weight. “I took care of it myself.”

A tight smile and a small nod. “Power down, André. No devices inside.”

He blinked. “All I’ve got is a headset. You know—”

“Power down.” She bent over enough to pick up the colander and balanced it inside the bucket, and André didn’t brush against those promising haunches. This time. “Nothing that happens in Jean’s house enters a data hold.”

She swung the bucket into his hand. He took it reflexively, then watched her ass sway up the steps. She paused with her hand on the door, eyebrows raised as she glanced over her shoulder. He sighed and rolled his eyes skyward, where a sticky haze did nothing to cut the heat, and toggled his headset off.

The world went flat. Isotherms, stock ticker, weather report, chat group, reality skins dropped off his display, leaving his head and his vision curiously empty. Even in the mornings, when he ran, he wasn’t this naked.

As if it were a security blanket, he kept the sense augment on. Not even Jean could complain about that. “You want my hardware, baby?”

“No,” said Cricket. “Jean Gris isn’t worried about your guns.”

The body was tangled in the cables, halfway down.

And every time Gourami let the nictitating membranes flicker across se eyes, se remembered. So Gourami tapped the slate on the bar beside se cup to summon another glass of poison, and drew webbed fingery feet up in the rung of the humen-type stool where they wouldn’t get stepped on, balancing awkwardly with knees drawn up to either side of se shoulders.

Gourami was the only person in the tavern. Not that persons were forbidden to enter humen taverns, but generally they kept to themselves, slept wet, stayed low. The contractors didn’t like it if the persons caused trouble. And a lot of humen didn’t care to take the time to understand, to parse a slate or study hand gestures.

But the people’s bars weren’t open yet; everybody was still on shift. And Gourami had badly, badly needed a drink.

Because the body had been tangled in the cables, halfway down, and none of the humen on the tender had been particularly concerned. They’d given Gourami the rest of the day off when se’d brought it up—all limp dangling and waterlogged mammal flesh. But what se’d seen cutting across the green water toward the anchor platform wasn’t a humen hearse or ambulance, but a black-windowed limousine—

The bartender slid a clean glass of cold green tea across the bar and retrieved the dirty one. It wasn’t as poisonous to people’s physiology as alcohol, but had enough of a sting to make one woozy—a pleasant recreational toxin rather than a life-threatening one.

The humen had brought all sorts of interesting things.

Including disrespect for their dead.

Gourami nursed the tea, cupping the humen-shaped drinking vessel between spidery handfingers, the webs tucked together so they wouldn’t cling to the glass. Se rolled the fluid around se mouth, pushing it back and forth through the same fluted cartilaginous plates used for straining water weed and insects from the marshes, if one did not have soup.

It made gums and tongue and palate numb.

Se swallowed and became aware of a shadow darkening the sun-warmth that dappled se back. Gourami disentangled handfingers from the glass and turned, nictitating for a better view. A human stood there, tall and male, by the ringlets of fur on his face. He dropped his hand on Gourami’s shoulder, the dry mammal warmth chafing through se protective mucous gloss.

Gourami pulled back automatically.

—Stand up, the human mouthed. Stand up, frog.

Lips moved, breath brushed across Gourami’s face. Se heard nothing but squeaks and rumbles, and could not have duplicated them to save se life. The frequency of humen voices was all wrong. But se could lipread much humen speech from se job as liaison. And humen body language, too, after a fashion.

Se was in grave trouble.

Gourami could have run; could have fought, exploded off the bar stool and barreled through the big human that stood making exaggerated lip movements and calling se “Froggie.” The humen who weren’t contractors always said they couldn’t tell one person from another.

Except the human was making eye contact, was making physical contact, and while Gourami knew that humen did that to intimidate, between the tea and the endorphins released by the kinesthetic signals, se was too relaxed to initiate violent movement.

—Stand up! The human shaped again, and then made some other short noises and tossed his head, shaking shaggy mud-brown fur out in every direction. Then he reached for Gourami’s slate, grabbing with frustration.

But Gourami did not wish to relinquish it, and so, with the eye and hand contact broken, stood.

The human stepped back a pace, fumbling at his belt. But then Gourami wobbled—standing at full extension required balance, and after…several…helpings of poison, se had little left—and sank back.

Se toefingers curled on the hard dry floor, contracting automatically to protect the delicate webs, but still seeking purchase. The bar rose on the swell of a taxiing lighter. Gourami could have run, again, but still fumbled with the slate, hoping to explain or to obtain an explanation of the human’s odd behavior, when the human managed to slip the shocker from his belt and touch it to the base of Gourami’s skull, above the retracted neck, behind the ear membrane.

Nobody intervened. It was a humen bar.

6

“HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT FINDING ONE NAKED AMPHIBIAN on a whole muddy goddamn world?” André shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “It’s not as if I can go around DNA-typing every frog I meet. And the insurgents use disguises, don’t they? If I were your ranid, Tim, frankly I’d dig in deep in the swamp and go seven kinds of native. You don’t need me; you need a good old boy from back in the delta.”

“We can make sure you find the ranid,” Closs answered. He wasn’t pacing. Instead, he stood before his wide windows, hands folded, watching the light glint off the water. The bay lay pellucid beyond the polarized display glass, water limpid enough that André could make out shells and stones on the pale sand bottom. The water might run down the New Nile muddy and rich, but most of its sediment dropped out in the broad wandering delta, and what flowed into the sea was almost polished.

Beyond the zone of riverine admixture, where the brackish water clouded, in good weather the bay was clear as quartz. The sleek pewter outline of a long-necked animal glided past, sunning itself just below the surface. André caught a glimpse of its creamy belly and snaggle teeth as it banked down and away, curving in sudden pursuit. A nessie. They usually haunted deeper water and avoided industry, as shy as they were toothy, but this one looked young. And there were bigger predators in the deeps.

“If you can find the ranid, then I don’t see why you’d be willing to pay my fee.”

“You misapprehend me.” Closs turned around, beckoned André with two curving fingers. André stood, leaving behind his untouched glass. When he was an arm’s length away, Closs continued. “We can make sure you find it, though. The capabilities of Rim—”

“You’re talking about running a manip.”

Closs didn’t answer.

“A manip. On me.” A probability manipulation might bring him right down on the missing coolie’s doorstep. And it also meant staff, and Rim personnel, and processor time, and paperwork.

Met with continuing silence, André tried again. “I don’t want that kind of a data trail—”

Closs shook his head. “There won’t be one.”

Still. André had a bad feeling about this. Too far outside of his usual line of work. Too many ways to get killed, chasing ghosts through the bayou. “I can’t take it.”

Closs stepped forward and caught his forearm. André paused. The grip was not restraining or sharp; a request rather than a grab. “Do me one favor.”

André did not answer. But he also did not pull away.

Closs let him go, first giving his forearm a quick friendly squeeze. “Wait until tomorrow to refuse. Sleep on it.”

“I don’t need the money, Tim.”

Closs smiled, showing whitened teeth. “I know you don’t. But the thing is, I need the help.”

A hell of an offer. Jefferson Greene’s first mate—and, everybody knew, the brains of the Greene’s World Rim operation—acknowledging a personal debt. That was the sort of thing careers rose and fell on. And nobody was more aware than André that he wasn’t going to stay young forever.

On the other hand, very few people were more aware than André that once he let Rim plant its hooks, he would not be working for himself anymore. Operating under the occasional contract was one thing. Assisting them in conjuring his future—allowing himself to be entangled—well.

André wasn’t a superstitious man. But if he wanted to learn from Jean Gris, it would be an unwise thing to let Rim rule his fate. And the whole prospect reminded him uncomfortably of his mother’s tactics. Not that Zoë Deschênes could have backed up any threat of ruining his luck.

But Charter Trade could.

“I’ll think about it,” André said. He stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets. “Don’t worry. I can show myself out.”

Out in the sun again, he gasped sharply. He dropped his elbows on the railing and put his head down, let the light bake his scalp and neck muscles. The sun picked darker scars out in heat until he shielded his skull with his palms. His blinked-up sunshield helped ameliorate the glare off the water. One more breath, then he shuddered and drew himself up, shoulders square.

He’d wanted to learn. He’d placed a loaded pistol on his tongue and pulled the trigger. That was a commitment.

But instant death was easy. Killing people—painlessly, efficiently—was what he did. Who should not matter.

He couldn’t take this contract. Because he needed Jean Gris’s goodwill, and he wasn’t going to get that by assassinating ranid revolutionaries and allowing Rim to run a manip on him. Not when he was already mixed up in learning how to conjure.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess that coincidence might proliferate, should one cultivate a conjure man. He who touches pitch besmirches himself.

All he could do was hope Rim would be understanding about finding someone else to take the contract. And that they wouldn’t botch it, or, if they did, that the trail of testimony never led back to one André Deschênes.

He pursed his lips as if to whistle. Perhaps that could be his first real experiment in conjuring.

Another blow to the image of the hedge-wise conjuror: Jean Kroc had never been a patient man. Actually, he was rather bad all around at conforming to stereotypes. So by evening, when his new apprentice arrived, he was worrying the hard semiflexible skin from a pulpy fruit the size of his finger joint, a pile of others white and waxy on a rectangular green-glazed plate by his left hand. The fruit’s skin was rough, reddish-brown, marked in dimpled hexagons. He picked it off with gnawed thumbnails, trying to keep the pieces as large as possible. A matter of pride, or meticulousness, or just a cheap distraction.

He knew the newcomer was André by the purr of his wet/dry scoot. Jean’d left the front door propped; when André called through it, he didn’t bother to get up, just yelled back. “Take off your shoes.”

The thumping told him André obeyed. A moment later, bare feet padded from the entry. “Cricket said you wanted me.”

Jean smiled, not showing what it cost him. He held up a peeled wax fruit so André could identify it, pinched between finger and thumb. A sticky trickle of nectar crawled across the pad of his hand. He flicked the berry into a long tumbling arc.

André snatched it from the air on its descent, leaning away from spattered juice. He inspected it quickly and popped it into his mouth, then spat the pit into his palm. “When you told me you wanted information, how did you know?”

“Know?” Jean slit another fruit with his nail. The pulp was too tender to squeeze out without pureeing, so he worried at the skin until it flaked. He sucked the juice off his thumb and the pulp off the seed, and laid the shiny dark brown nut on the table beside the bits of skin. “Am I assigned psychic powers?”

André came forward and dropped into the chair across the table. His pit joined Jean’s with a subdued click. “Did you know that Rim was going to offer me a contract on a ranid?”

Jean, licking his fingers, smiled. “You said you wouldn’t tell me about contracts.”

“I’m not taking this one,” André answered. “The thing is, Rim wants to run a probability manip to give me a fighting chance to find the coolie. It’s affiliated with some froggie terrorist group—”

“Gourami.”

“Excuse me?”

Jean pursed his lips, forced to admit that perhaps not all the stereotypes failed him. He was enjoying André’s slack expression slightly more than was healthy or smart. Although he had to admire the man’s gall—well, admire was the wrong word. And respect wasn’t exactly right either. “The ranid’s name is Gourami.”

“You know it?”

“I talked to it last night.” Jean ate another wax fruit, letting the pulp burst into fluid as he pressed it to the roof of his mouth with his tongue. The seed felt as slick as it appeared, and he squeezed it out between his lips. For a moment, he turned it on his fingertips, watching the light gloss it. He pretended he didn’t notice the way André’s shoulders jerked.

“Whoa. Well, I’m glad I said no.”

“I’m not. Go back tomorrow. Tell him you’ll take it on.”

“You realize what you’re asking me?”

“Yes,” Jean answered, flicking him another fruit. “I’m asking you to lie to Timothy Closs. And buy me some time to operate.”

“He’ll want me to take the entanglement.”

Jean wondered if André knew he was shaking his head like that, a slow oscillation.

“I can lock that off,” Jean said. “We’ll set up a countervalent field; the entanglement can spend itself on that.”

André’s attention snapped to him like a shivering compass needle to a magnet. “And I’m better off letting you entangle me?”

“Just a safeguard. Not an entanglement. But take the contract. For me.”

André swallowed. “What exactly are you planning, Jean Gris?”

Jean rolled his shoulders up and back. “I’ll handle the rest. Just keep Closs thinking the situation is under control.”

Jefferson wasn’t often the first one into the office, but he was usually among the last ones home. He got a lot of work done in the evening, when things were still and quiet—dark in winter and golden in the summertime. He’d trickle the news, talk to his kids in chat, drink a few cups of coffee or kesha or a martini or two, and plow through business decisions with a ruthless efficiency that got him home in time for supper, just.

Today should have been no different. The to-do list was actually a little shorter than usual; everyone was distracted by the bombings, and as he’d delegated that to Closs it was off his desk until Closs finished the investigation and handed it back. The first item, it looked like, was to return a call to the station. Not the Slide; no problem with that. Lighters came and went, raw materials flowing freely outbound and manufactured goods coming in. The call was from one of his gurus, the Greene’s World station chief of the Exigency Corps, Amanda Delarossa. Head god-botherer.

She must have set his code to autoanswer, which was gratifying. She had a chipmunk-cheek of sandwich and a bag of pop lifted to her mouth when her image shifted, and she swallowed hastily and cleared her hands. “Chairman,” she said, as soon as she could. “I didn’t think you’d call back until tomorrow, sir.”

“I like to be responsive,” he said. “You seem to think your issue requires immediate attention.”

“Immediate awareness,” she said. She drank again, quickly, as if her mouth were dry from swallowing before she was quite ready. “I’m not sure what we could actually do about it at this point. Realistically speaking.”

“Intriguing,” Jefferson said, because it’s what he had trained himself to say when he really meant get to the fucking point. “Tell me more.”

“Well…” she paused, set her drink aside, and twisted her fingers together, “we’ve got a massive spike in side effects, and we’re not quite sure what to make of it. But some of our best theorists are on it.”

“By side effects, you mean…”

“Probability pollution. Weird coincidences. Synchronicities. We track them, you know, and attempt to mitigate. But the problem is, you get a chaotic butterfly effect with even the smallest manipulation. So you patch it up, attempt to introduce a little more randomosity into the system, and it breaks out somewhere else. Rains of toads. God knows what.”

“And we’re getting more of this?” He rubbed the edge of his desk and thought about Patience, which had been a lovely Earthlike world before the Corps got done with it.

“Some of it, yeah. You have any old coins lying around?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Collector’s pieces, talismans, bits of old Earth. Metal from the bones of the homeworld. They had no value as legal tender anymore, but people liked them.

“Next time you think of it, flip one a couple of times,” she said. “Anyway, Dr. Gupta thinks it’s linked to omelite mining, either due to waste tanglestone escaping into the atmosphere, or a reduction in the worldwide omelite load causing some sort of shift in Greene’s World’s…equilibrium, for lack of a better word. We’re working on it.”

“And if you can’t get it under control quickly?”

She shrugged, dipping her ear toward one shoulder, and bit her knuckle instead of her supper. “Well, it’s not like we can stop exporting tanglestone.”

Of course André argued. It didn’t matter; Kroc was always going to win. He had the superior bargaining position.

He also had the mojo. And something else that André would need to learn, before Jean would teach him too much. Jean Kroc had the moral unassailability of a god, as was necessary for the power he held.

It was always the way. In premodern societies, those who wielded power beyond oversight were bound by oaths and forms and divine wrath and sacrosanct relationships. In the modern day, there were oaths, and forms…and codes of ethics, to which professionals might more or less loosely adhere.

And divine wrath, of course. There was always that.

Jean Kroc’s God most certainly did play dice. And Jean was not the only one loading the toss.

Still, he was rather well satisfied with the way the game was going. If André could learn, there might even be a chance of—well, not winning. It wasn’t the sort of thing one won—but making some things a bit better in the short run. As a conjure man, his professional opinion was that that was often the best one could hope for.

At some point in human history, somebody had figured out that you could change the future by staring at it hard enough. The problem with the power of prayer was that it was never exactly quantifiable, though research was suggestive. And then there were the odder aspects of certain studies, where an average taken of ten thousand amateur best guesses turned out to be closer to the truth than any single expert’s considered and researched opinion.

In a really profound cosmic irony, it was the failure of A-life consciousness research that finally provided the key. They couldn’t make a self-aware computer, but they did find out what the I was good for.

The I was the evolutionary consequence of the observer effect, the power of luck, the denial of everything ten thousand generations of mothers passed down to ten thousand generations of daughters. Wishing hard enough did make a difference. Not a big difference. Not a profound difference. And not a difference every time.

But a few tenths of a percent, a difference almost indistinguishable from experimental error.

It was just that little bit of an edge that let one species thrive when another one perished. Black wings on a should-be-white moth, concealing it against a soot-blackened tree.

The practical application of quantum engineering made it replicable. The technological outgrowth of mojo satchels and washing the car to make it rain. A bit more than an edge, these days. Call it a necessity, rather.

People with both the knack for being lucky and the courage to do it right were not, in Jean’s experience, common. And they were often opportunists, because their gifts made it possible for them to do very well by living on their wits.

A certain moral flexibility had needed to be shocked out of Jean as well, when he was young.

André Deschênes might do. And if he couldn’t be salvaged, well, Jean couldn’t exactly leave him wherever he fell. But he’d execute that problem when it became unavoidable.

In the meantime, he had a frog to catch.

After André left, Jean pulled his boots on again. The leftover wax fruit went into the cooler; the peelings into Lucienne’s…into Cricket’s compost bucket under the sink. If he felt up to it, he’d turn the pile over for her tonight, aerate the rot. It was what he was good for.

The boots sealed over his pantlegs, he made sure he had a light, slung his hip pack around his waist, and locked the door behind him. He’d have been three times through the swamp from sunset to sunset, but twenty years wasn’t enough to make him a real creature of the bayou. There were men and women who’d grown up here, who could vanish among the reeds without a ripple, soft as a ranid slipping underwater. Jean knew a few: Old Mike, Sally Feathers. Both born when Greene’s World was the sort of place you went to lose the records, both stubborn and self-reliant enough that their names were what they said they were, that they’d never nursed on the crystal teat of a reality skin.

Greene’s World was still a new enough planet that folks mostly knew each other, and still a wild enough planet that they mostly stayed out of each other’s way. Outside of Novo Haven, anyway, where the corporate boys played politics and pretended that instantaneous communication meant they had any idea what was going on in the Core, or any influence that was heard there.

A delusion, Jean admitted with a rueful shake of his head, he was prey to himself.

Reeds cracked where he stepped, the spongy ground oozing water. The sky over the bay was streaked in seashell colors—coral, salmon, dusky clouds like the indigo lip of a mussel shell—by the time he reached the distributary nearest to his minifab, the one where the ranids came to talk.

He crouched on the riverbank, folded his arms across his knees, and waited. When the evening star—technically, the planet Endymion—shimmered ice-white on the horizon and the last pearlescent light was draining down the darkening sky, a gleaming dart-shape broke the water. One ring of ripple heralded the ranid’s arrival, so faint it smoothed before it reached the reeds.

Jean dabbed at the water. His ripples passed over where the ranid’s had been, flowing in the opposite direction, and lapped its skin below the eyes. The eyes—great light-gathering half-orbs—blinked. One stem-fingered, four-digited hand reached above the surface, the fingertip pads slightly enlarged, sticky.

Jean reached slowly to lay his waterproof wrist slate in the ranid’s grasp. It did not flinch, but rose from the water as if drawn to an anchor. The hand rotated as the eyes came level, both swiveling forward so binocular vision focused on the face of the slate. The other hand emerged from the water as the ranid climbed the bank, crouching between angled knees, its pale ridged throat swelling.

Jean did not hear what it said, but he felt it, the low-frequency words shivering his nape hairs. The ranid was deft with the slate; more literate and practiced than Jean. He thought it might even be the one called “Gourami” by humans who could not replicate its given name.

He waited until it was looking at his mouth. If this was the liaison, it could lipread. “I’m Jean Kroc,” he said. “I think we met last night.”

The ranid bobbed one fingertip, pausing in what it was doing with the slate. —Yes.

It was Gourami, then. He fumbled in his hip pack. The ranid didn’t draw back, but waited, curious and impassive, while another star or two slipped out of the twilight. “I have something for you,” he said, careful to lift his chin and shape the words formally. He might just have mouthed them, but it seemed to help it lipread if he put the voice behind them.

Again the pulling gesture, one finger raking the words in.

“Mojo,” he answered. His hand closed on the box, protective cling-sheeting adhering to his skin. Plastics, of all things, were imported to Greene’s World. Petroleum was mined here but there was no significant manufacturing.

He pulled the box from the pack, extended his arm, and opened up his hand. Palm skyward, fingers cupped slightly, offering the plastic-wrapped object to Gourami.

It was not a gesture a ranid could make. Their arms did not rotate at the elbow.

Carefully, Gourami lifted the box from his palm. Still holding the slate, it untwisted the plastic and peeled it back, but stopped before lifting the lid of the box. Its head and shoulders canted back slightly. It wrote a word and turned the slate. —Mojo?

“Luck,” he answered. The ranids knew about luck, although Jean could never hope to duplicate their word for it. The sounds of their language echoed through an expanded throat that served as bellows, sounding board, and voice-box all in one, and were meant to be heard through bone conduction and the vibrations of water or air on skin and tympanic membrane, not by a mammal’s seashell external ear. They knew about all sorts of things; theirs was not a material culture, but in their physical abilities made up for it. They could communicate across half a world, read each other’s physical health with pulses of ultrasound. They could build fires, forge metal if it moved them, though the activity was even more risky than it might be for a human; a ranid could not afford to dry out too much, or too often. They built their blast furnaces on rocky beaches, and tended them during short dashes up from the waves.

—Thank you, Gourami said, and folded the plastic back into place. It did not care to commit, Jean understood.

“You’re welcome.” Jean leaned forward, strengthening the connection with the ranid, but careful not to make eye contact. He did not wish it to feel coerced. “I’m going to bring a man to you tomorrow. He’ll go with you upriver. Protect you.”

—Safer in the swamp.

“You’ll be in the swamp. He’ll stay in the swamp with you.”

—Humen are easy to track.

“It will be all right. He’s being paid to kill you, Gourami. If they think he is chasing you, nobody else will come after.”

The ranid’s fingers didn’t twitch on the slate. They didn’t have to. Its stolid froggy regard was enough. The ranid thought it would be safer in the swamp with the savages, trading in its web belt and company housing and advanced medical care and access to connex—all the benefits of Rim technology that the ranids worked for—in return for belts of shells and pearl-and-carnelian necklaces and stories murmured in reedy backwaters through jaws that need not move to make words.

Jean let his lips pull askew, aware the expression would mean nothing to the ranid. He hunkered lower, dropped his chin against his chest. “It’s not for you,” he said. “It’s for him.” He paused; the next was hard to say. “And for Lucienne.”

The argument with Caetei took longer than the one with Jean Kroc, despite the awkwardness of communicating with the human. But humen were manageable; all Gourami had to do was keep saying no. Whereas arguing with Caetei was like arguing with the tide. And there was the small matter of Gourami owing se self’s life.

—They killed se mate, Caetei finally said. Which was unfair because Gourami had brought back her body, and owed weal to the human’s band. Which meant, se guessed, in humen terms, her mate, her children, if she had any. Her siblings, though se wasn’t sure how much store humen set by siblings. Their reproductive system was so invested, it made everything about their biology and society peculiar, locked up, committed.

A humen mate…Gourami flexed fingers in the muddy channel bottom, where se and Caetei had retired to argue. It would be like having only one endosib, se thought.

What a terrible thing to lose.

Se came back up through the water and found the human sitting cross-legged on the reedy bank, reading something on a paper book he’d folded back on itself. Stories. Humen stories, Gourami thought, mouth watering.

Se lifted a hand from the water, catching the human’s eye. He looked up from the book quickly, and se thought he held his breath. At least the rushy rasping sound it made through his air passages halted. He dropped his hands into his lap.

—Yes, Gourami gestured.

And the human closed his eyes.

7

HUMEN WERE TERRIBLY STRANGE. THIS WAS NOT A REVELATION.

Not just strange because they came in all sorts of pigments, but very few patterns—unless one counted the rather bland, irregular melanistic speckles displayed by a few of them. Nor strange because of their stubby supernumerary fingers, their long bodies and stubby legs, their habit of walking upright on short curved feet with almost atrophied fingers. Not even strange because they were endothermic from birth, inefficient though that seemed for a large terrene animal without any particular evolutionary strategy for coping with extremes of climate, so that even in temperate areas they hung themselves in insulating layers or smeared lotions on their hide to protect it from sunlight.

The mammals that Gourami was familiar with were small dense-furred darting things, prey to reaverbirds and redcaps. But humen were big—mostly bigger than a person, although they had a tremendous dimorphism between their reproductive subcategories, so that some of the small ones were about Gourami’s size and some of the big ones more than twice as big as anything but a great-parent—and Gourami understood, from talking with some of the friendlier ones, that on their home-world there were even bigger mammals. Some bigger than a full-grown nessie, which was the biggest living thing Gourami had personally seen.

This particular human was a large one, though not the biggest. His name, according to the humen liaison who had pleaded Gourami’s help, was André Deschênes. And despite Jean Kroc’s warning that he would be helpless, he paddled better than Gourami had dared beg luck.

Gourami was not in the skiff with André. The humen had sky-eyes, things that saw as well as any winged predator, and anyway se preferred to glide in the skiff’s shadow, directing from below. Se had rid self of every bit of Rim equipment; se slate and the other accoutrements of se trade were slagged—carried off by friends or new allies in three directions and scorched over fire. Se would not trade them; humen technology had tracking devices in it, their equivalent of the air-filled metal tongue-bell roped to the harpoon one hunted greatfish with, so that one could swim down the wounded animal by sound. Any person to whom se offered the devices would have been at risk. Se had strapped in place only a knife, a slate of the sort intended for humen offspring, se belt and carrybag, and a (cocked, locked) harpoon crossbow with five extra quarrels.

Se was a “civilized” person, having metamorphosed near Novo Haven and been around humen all se life. Se had never been without their toys and shelters before, and se kept stroking the crossbow for reassurance. If the worst happened, at least se could shoot something.

Se mottles were back to a skin-plain pattern, however, which was comforting. Se had been a little worried se would be green for half the season. It had faded with a gelpaper Caetei had given se; one that Gourami had let dissolve on se tongue, because se did not care to stay out of water long enough to adhere it to se shoulder until it melted in the mucus. So se had chosen to ingest it, though that seemed an oddly reptilian way to consume medication when one was still perfectly fit, and permeable.

The water was too fresh. Persons had euryhaline tendencies, able to tolerate ocean or river water, or the brackish regions between…but saltless water tended to osmose into a person’s body, which meant a lot of spitting and urinating as one’s body processed it back out again. It was, anyway, better than becoming waterlogged.

But Jean Kroc had asked, and his reasons had been good. And so André paddled, and Gourami glided, and the gray light of dawn pricked through the reeds and made the surface reflective as they moved upriver, divided, side-by-side.

They were not alone. Caetei and Tetra swam before and behind, an honor guard masquerading as a reconnaissance team. They were part of the disguise; André could claim that the persons accompanying him were hired guides, coolies who had agreed to bring the hunter through the bayou and help find the renegade. If they were stopped, seriously, Gourami would have to disappear. Se genetic material was on file; se could not submit to a scraping.

Se fingered the box Jean had bestowed. Inside was a waterproofed ampoule, continuing the theme of things-to-be-internalized. It held luck, the human said. Luck being one of their humen words that meant nothing, or meant four hands of things that were all importantly different. For example, they used it to mean chance, randomness. And they used it to mean a beneficial break in the same. And they used it to mean a repeated pattern, either for good or ill, that seemed in contravention of randomness. Which Gourami found philosophically opposed rather than allied concepts.

And, even more confusingly, they also used it to mean the manipulation of random chance and of probability, and the ability to manipulate it. Which is what Gourami would call luck. If se had to try to think in humen words. And they had other words that could mean some or one or several or all of these things, and which overlapped other concepts or sets of concepts as well.

The humen mind was quite incomprehensible. As if they did not recognize continuums of individual things, but rather assigned things to lumpish discrete sets and made a game of putting each one into as many sets as possible.

In any case, Gourami was certain from context that it was the last of these definitions that Jean Kroc intended. Mojo, that was another word for it. A better word, closer to the skin of the idea, like a bolt-hole one could just squeeze into.

Se could inject the luck, internalize what it offered, accept the contagion. Accept the mojo, choose entanglement, and accede to Jean Kroc’s influence over se fate. Just about the time that se was concluding that enfouling self in the humen world—more than se was already—was a poor sort of plan.

Se scratched the underside of the skiff to let the human know se was swimming away, and tucked the rewaterproofed box into its pouch. Se would decide later. Right now, se was going to get something better to eat than could be filtered from the reedy water. A sweet fish, which could be shared with Caetei and Tetra if it was a big one, that would be nice.

And maybe it was technically poaching. But hadn’t this been the people’s home, the people’s river first? And wasn’t se already an outlaw?

Fine then.

Upriver se would take the human. To the greatparent-self, if need be. If Jean Kroc thought it important, thought André needed to learn, then so would it be done.

For a human, Jean Kroc was nearly a civilized thing.

The next day, a little after lunchtime, Jefferson Greene went for a walk. The suspended, slat-construction streets and the canals between the barges were almost deserted in the heat of afternoon, and the creak of the city pulling at its moorings and rubbing against its bumpers almost drowned out the distant laughter of a pair of children, though what little breeze there was blew the voices across the water.

It was still enough that the city stank, though Rim’s offices were in a desirable spot on Bayside. Upwind of the bulk of Novo Haven, and with a clear view of the pale blue bay and beyond it, the long blue arc of the horizon, broken by the black slashes of drilling platforms silhouetted against the darker blue of the gulf.

Things got caught between the ships, though, ground up and trapped there, and there they rotted. Seaweed, sea animals, algae, the floating bodies of birds. Nobody was supposed to dump trash or offal in the bay, of course, but that happened, too—householders frankly more often than the crews of fishing craft. And when the city hadn’t been broken up for storm in six or twelve months, as happened coming up to the hot months after a quiet winter, the stench grew oppressive.

Jefferson wrinkled his nose and hung over the railing, resting his forearms on the top. He had a slip of silver and zinc and copper in his right hand, and he flipped it off his thumb and caught it over and over and over again. Heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails, heads. The sequence had only broken twice since he started experimenting the night before.

With a sigh, he folded the coin in his fist and resumed walking, elbows pulled back and hands tucked into his pockets. The street rasped under his steps, slats dipping a little. Not too much, and Rim kept its walks matted with springy white nonskid, so he couldn’t hear his footsteps, just the pivots rubbing against the office barge. The laughter came again; it must be riding on an air-current coiling one of the other barges, because there was nothing to Bayside but the butter-yellow sails of a dark-green pleasure boat, tacking to windward with silver stickle-backed torpedo shapes darting through its wake. The sails moved in the breeze, rippling, but there wasn’t enough wind to bell them out.

A cracked shell lay on the nonskid next to a pinkish stain. The remnants of some bird’s lunch, and Jefferson swept it into the bay with the instep of his shoe. Things falling into water made a satisfying plonk.

The thought made him sick after a second. He turned and kept walking.

It wasn’t that Jefferson didn’t trust Closs, exactly. But he did know Closs thought he was an idiot. That Jefferson held a 53 percent share in his grandfather’s company, as licensed from Rim, and so Closs had to do what Jefferson told him to do had no bearing on it. Closs would only protect him so far.

You couldn’t buy loyalty. Not loyalty of the sort that Anchor Greene had commanded as the head of an explorer’s crew and then the patriarch of the initial Greene’s World Charter Trade Company, the sort of loyalty—and deference—that Jefferson had been raised to expect.

Anchor Greene had possessed that gift of leadership. And a not insignificant portion of the network of friends and associates that he had assembled was still in place. But Jefferson had never had his grandfather’s knack for inspiring loyalty, or for identifying the sorts of people in whom it could be inspired.

He chose to believe that he did not care to trade on his grandfather’s name. He had attended school offplanet, by telepresence at a Core university where his name meant as little as any Rimworlder’s. Whatever Closs thought of him, he had earned his degree, his grades, his position.

It wasn’t cloudy and the sky wasn’t growing dark in any dramatic fashion, but the temperature had begun to drop. With the awareness of those who live on the water, Jefferson thought there might be some weather coming.

He’d fire Closs if Timothy wasn’t one of his grandfather’s protégés. That might be more ill-will than the fragile remainder of Anchor’s circle could support without the vibrant presence of the man himself. And Closs knew too much, anyway. Such as, all about the decision to eliminate Lucienne Spivak once Rim’s monitoring of her connex, her contacts, and her movements indicated that they had no choice except to silence her.

Tails, heads, tails, heads.

That sailboat had found a wind Jefferson didn’t feel. The half-slack sails snapped, cupped and taut, and the little craft scudded over the bay like a symbol of freedom and self-determination. He followed it with his gaze; they were going the same way.

The sight ached under his breastbone, a lifting sensation. It didn’t matter, after all, how ugly things had gotten, what mistakes had been made. He’d find a way out of it.

The wheeling gulls followed the sailboat, but after watching it a moment longer Jefferson turned away. Closs wasn’t ruthless enough, when it came right down to it. He couldn’t see—and do—what needed to be done. And if he didn’t manage to catch up with the ranid witness, it would be up to Jefferson to field the contingency plan.

His hands were back in his pockets as he walked downtown, toward the center of the spiderweb of moored vessels that comprised most of Novo Haven. This wasn’t something he’d ever want on connex, but there were still people he could call on. And some of them were in town.

André probably shouldn’t have admitted it, as a city boy at heart, but he was enjoying the exercise. The skiff slipped through the water like a minnow, his paddle barely rippling the surface, and he only saw the froggies who were his constant silent companions when the tall one—Tetra—showed itself ahead of him to direct his route.

The work was like a meditation. Dip, dip, glide, the occasional brush of reeds against his bow as Tetra led him through a narrow gap, the sun on his shoulders and the nape of his neck beyond the shade of his hat.

He had no illusions that the trip would stay pleasant once it began to be measured in days. Or even possibly past lunchtime. And he wasn’t wrong. By afternoon, clouds piled teetering against a stiff breeze from landward, high enough that he could see them over the tops of the arching reeds. Classic thunderheads, and if the breeze failed they would tumble in off the ocean on a wave of low pressure that would make a man’s joints pop and groan.

He didn’t paddle any faster, though. He struggled toward no shelter, in fact did not even have a destination. The storm would catch him if it caught him, and if not it would slide north and make landfall at Dabrey, where the continental shelf dropped off more steeply and sharp waves pounded crumbling red cliffs.

He was going to get wet sooner or later. Though the timing was inconvenient; his freshwater stores weren’t down more than a couple of liters, and with good luck seeming to be at a premium, it would likely rain tonight and then in ten days he’d be down to purifying swamp water in the still.

It was a pessimistic thought. He didn’t want to be paddling around a swamp in ten days.

Well, if he wanted out that badly, he could always bring Closs the frog’s head on a stick. And forfeit his chance at learning from Kroc.

You paid your money and you picked your poison.

He was thinking about that, the poison and the taste of it, dipping his paddle and gliding, when not just Tetra but Tetra and one of the other two emerged from the water about ten meters upstream. The smaller one—Gourami, he thought, his proposed victim, though both of the little ones were of a size—swam forward and extended its wrist, with the slate.

—storm coming

He nodded, leaning away to balance its long-fingered weight clinging to the gunwhale. “Are you certain?”

It flexed its hands, a singular beckoning gesture that he thought was an irritable confirmation.

—not safe for humen on the water, it slated. Follow. Shelter you.

It slipped back, skull-deep in the channel before he could answer, and stroked away. Awkward and incongruous as they were on land, ranids moved through water with a stroke and glide his clumsy manipulations of the paddle could only mock. He followed, though, paddling harder now that he was not intent on setting a pace he could maintain all day.

The wind died as he passed through the next belt of reed, and now he smelled the storm. Funny to think you could, over the fermented reek of the bayou and the nearby salt of the bay, but the smell of rainwater and ozone was as sharp and strong as that of his own sweat.

No matter how hard he paddled, the froggies were faster. It almost became a kind of game, straining over each stroke, making it long and smooth, leaning into the next one, digging at the water with all his weight. The temperature dropped, cooling the sweat on his neck, and now the sun must be occluded, because its warmth vanished.

The third shape darted past him, green and mottled just beneath the soft brown water. And then he heard something pattering behind.

A hailstorm.

Brilliant.

When the precipitation started to hit, it stung even through his hat. At first that was all; the leading edge of the storm raised goose pimples—a stiff updraft tugging André’s brim—and what fell was fat, shocking drops of water. It might have been refreshing after the heat of the day, if it hadn’t gusted sideways into his eyes to prick and blind.

But behind him, he could hear the reed canes cracking like twisted straws. Two of the froggies swam backward, legs moving with long sculling strokes and pop-eyes above the water bearing an expression he would have thought worried, if they hadn’t looked that way as a matter of course.

The channel grew choppy under his bow, the skiff lurching drunkenly as the wind hit it crosswise. Hailstones rattled around his feet. One smacked sharply above his knee, a blow solid as a fist. The skiff rocked violently to the other side. André grabbed the gunwale left-handed, almost losing his paddle as the little craft pitched.

Another big hailstone glanced off the crown of his hat and left him stunned, shaking off scattered bright flashes. One more struck his shoulder, numbing his arm to the elbow. If I’m not lucky the next one’s going to crack my skull.

What the hell.

Lucky.

He stared at his left hand, made the fingers close though he could not feel them, lifted the paddle, and dragged it through the water. The skiff rocked forward. André ducked his head against the blinding rain. Luck.

It would be lucky if the big hailstones missed him. It would be lucky if the wind swung round to his back. It would be lucky if he didn’t get brained by a fist-size chunk of falling ice—

He hunched his head between his shoulders, regretting the return of sensation in his arm. Numb was better than prickling flashes of electricity.

A storm was a chaotic system. No way to model the whole thing, not without a more powerful computer than his headset. No need to model the whole thing, though. Messing around with weather systems as a whole tended to have long-term repercussions. And nobody could hold that in his head.

Not even Jean Kroc.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to. Because the only thing he had to affect was this particular corner of it, this microcell. Just blunt the force, angle it around him—another hailstone rabbit-punched him, and he rocked forward, gagging. All it would take was a series of lucky coincidences and the wit to take advantage of them.

He had the knack. He’d always had the knack. Jean Kroc wouldn’t have taken him if he didn’t have the knack—

Sideways, swirling, eddies, angles, wind and rain, random chance. Not so random. You could feel it when it clicked, Jean said. Like a wave pushing, like a wind filling your sails. You grabbed it and you rode.

Had it, had it, balanced, fine-line, the wind parting the rain before him, the hail bouncing harmlessly to either side, cold numbing his fingers, stinging his face. He got the paddle in the water and his weight behind it, shoving the skiff forward, the froggies slick shapes in the water, greeny-brown.

One of the ranids popped up out of the water like a prank snake from a can. It hunkered, wincing, head sunk against its shoulders, short neck completely retracted. The hands paddled, wide-webbed, in an unmistakable beckoning gesture.

Solid earth. Land. A little hillock rising between the reeds, a green bulge rising out of the channeled swamp, the reeds parting on either side. The ranid winced and meeped as falling ice struck it, kicked off with a powerful leap and splashed down five meters closer to the skiff. The shock of impact nearly sent André face-first into the water.

Had it. Had it. Riding the edge—

The hailstone that struck him roundly between the shoulder blades knocked even the thought of breath away. He held onto the paddle mostly because he was doubled over it, wheezing, failing, struck again, again.

And then the skiff surged forward, propelled from behind, strong ranid kicks driving the prow onto the muddy bank. André spilled forward over the gunwales, rolled, pushed himself up with the paddle, gasping. Ooze dripped down his face as he grabbed the skiff and hauled, and then one of the ranids was beside him—Gourami, the smallest of the three—helping haul, flinching at the smack of ice. It pushed, and André heaved, and the skiff flipped over. As the froggie slithered down the bank, André dropped back into the mud and writhed under the edge of the skiff, a hailstone bloodying his mouth before he made it.

He retreated into the shelter, the mud soaking through his shoulders, and listened to the hail smack against the hull of the skiff.

It was not going to be a pleasant evening.

10

JEFFERSON WOKE TO THE SHRIEK OF AN EMERGENCY CONTACT alarm and a blue light winking by his bed. He came up clear-headed and with his hands trembling; his headset read the coded transmission and dumped epinephrine into his system. A call waited; he swung his feet to the floor, covers tangled around his ankles, and scrubbed granules from his eyes. “What the hell is it?”

Amanda Delarossa, the god-botherer. “Chairman, we have a problem.”

He stood, turned off alarm and flasher with a thought. His wife rolled over and pulled the pillow over her head. “Fill me in,” he said, heading for the closet. “What’s going on?”

“Did you notice the earthquakes?”

“I’m afloat,” he said. “I don’t hear the tsunami siren.”

“No,” she said. “No tsunami. Here”—she hypertexted a link—“look at this.”

Once upon a time, humans had bothered to use different terms when they studied of the dynamics of different planets. Now, it was all geology; separate names get unwieldy when you’re talking about more than ten or fifteen worlds. The site Dr. Delarossa sent him to was the Greene’s World seismic and vulcanology monitoring project, usually quite heavily dotted with recent activity. Jefferson thought it had something to do with the planet’s astounding tides, but he wasn’t even remotely a scientist.

He knew where his drill platforms were, however, and the three yellow star shapes on the globe that indicated quakes in the last quarter were all centered firmly along the edge of the continental shelf, offshore of Novo Haven, where his omelite wells blossomed. “That’s unusual.”

“Dr. Gupta has a secure packet for you,” Delarossa said. “He’s produced a very unsettling hypothesis.”

“Send it,” Jefferson said. His call-waiting blinked. “Closs is on the other line. I have to go.”

In the morning, Cricket went to see a fortune-teller. She knew better, but you couldn’t always let that stop you.

Nouel had warned her to lie low before he went out, but she couldn’t stand another quarter stuck in a cabin on his barge, trying to get some work done with the clunky manual interface he’d scrounged for her. She couldn’t risk connex, even with her hard memory downloaded; whatever was leading Rim to her might not be gone. She’d have to scrub the whole thing and reformat, which she should do anyway, before she installed her new history. So she spent maybe three quarters click-clacking on the keyboard and then got up, found her shoes on their sides under the sofa, and stuffed her feet into them while she skinned. She made herself a blue-eyed blond and about a half-decimeter taller, and used the good stuff—high-grade wearez, implants she wasn’t supposed to have. She’d gotten them on Earth, after she ducked out of jail. Or sent her clone to prison in her place, to speak precisely.

She didn’t use them often; mere possession was illegal. She’d run light-years to stay out of prison, created a whole new person and betrayed her. Whatever self-knowledge she’d found, it wasn’t the sort that left one eager to pay for one’s mistakes.

The skin would hide her from just about anything, though. An ordinary cosmetic skin affected the perceptions of the viewer through his headset. This was a nanotech hack, and physically altered her fingerprints and retinal scan. She’d have to drop it to get out of Nouel’s house and back in: he’d introduced her to his expert system, which expected her to look and smell and scan like herself.

Every plan had its flaw. But sometimes, living in the future was damned cool. Even if she couldn’t get a rocket car.

She wandered through a too-warm morning, window-shopping geomancers and fortune readers. No friend of Jean Kroc’s could take a storefront tarot reader seriously, but it beat waiting by the door for Nouel to come back.

And she had never been good at waiting for men.

She picked a place at random and pushed through the half-door, which was hung with bells and chimes made of silicate shells so that a layered tinkling surrounded her. Inside, she stood in shadowy coolness; fans moved air across her skin, soothing her nape. She peeled sticky strands from her neck, rubbing fingers smearing sweat rather than relieving her discomfort. “Hello?”

A thin, stooped man came out of the back, his hair a colorless fringe against his weathered forehead. “Early riser,” he said. “What’s your pleasure, M~?”

“Tell me a story,” she said, and took the three-legged stool he gestured her toward.

“Your own or someone else’s?”

She shrugged. It didn’t matter. One lie was as good as another. “Whatever’s more interesting.” She extended her hand, in case he wanted it. He ignored it, and instead lit a candle with a gestured flame. Just a neat bit of wearez, but pretty. She wondered where he’d gotten the candle, and if it was the same place Jean Kroc went for his.

There was a mirror on the table, facedown on black silk. The fortune-teller turned it over with a flourish. Cricket was unsurprised to see nothing reflected in it but rippling black.

“Twenty,” the fortune-teller said, and Cricket chipped him the cash from an anonymous account. He blinked crystal projection contacts over his irises—checking his balance, she guessed, and not wired for connex or hard memory. A lot of mystics got fussy about things like that, though most not as hardcore as Jean. Others didn’t seem to care at all, and some had swallowed as much wire as Cricket had. “It works better if you ask a question.”

“It works better if I give you hints, you mean,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest and leaned back in her chair, aware how defensive her body language was and not caring at all. “Sorry. You’re on your own.”

After all, where was the entertainment if she gave it all away? Far more fun to watch him thrash.

A real conjure wouldn’t play these games. This wasn’t how the mojo worked. It wasn’t for parlor tricks.

“You’re not a believer?”

“Let’s say I’m willing to be convinced.” Jean Kroc had convinced her. Lucienne had convinced her—

Oh, hell. She sniffled as he bent over his water-dark mirror, studying the reflection of the flame. It was the only thing that showed there. A pretty good trick, Cricket thought. Probably a skin as well. Still, it was pretty.

Which made it better than half of everything in the world already. Maybe better than two thirds.

“There’s a man,” he said, after a few quiet moments. She caught the wet flicker of his eyeballs through his lashes as he glanced up to check her reaction. It was as good a starting point as any, and unless she was an orphaned lesbian, likely to provoke some kind of a response.

“Of course there is,” she answered, amused. As long as you didn’t take it seriously, you could look at these little trips as a cheap sort of psychoanalysis. And it sure beat the stuffing out of talk therapy with an idiot expert system. “Are you going to tell me that he’s tall, dark, and dangerous?”

“Actually,” the fortune-teller said, sitting back and crossing his own arms in mirror of her own, “I was going to tell you to look out for a frog to kiss. But you seem to have arrived with a narrative intact.”

It set her back on her heels, or would have, if she had been standing. Instead, she tossed her hair back and tucked her chin in, and started to laugh. “All right,” she said. “You get points for that one. I’ll quit giving you a hard time.”

“Oh, just be yourself,” he said, bending over the mirror again. “I enjoy a challenge.”

It was still bullshit, but once they decided they liked each other, he spun her a pretty good story. It even ended happily ever after, though there were trials and tribulations enough in the midgame to make the solution seem earned. Cricket left in a much better mood than when she had arrived, promising to keep an eye out for kissable frogs. She bought a cinnamon-sugarcrusted bagel from a street vendor and ate it steaming warm as she walked back to Nouel’s barge, wondering if he would even notice she had gone.

He was waiting for her in the sitting room, with a slender man she knew by reputation, a soft-cheeked archinformist with a coil of neon light up one ear like the stripped half of a DNA helix. They’d never met in the flesh before, but that didn’t mean anything to a data miner.

She hadn’t known, even, that he lived on Greene’s World. But she did know that he worked, almost exclusively, for Timothy Closs. Betrayal was a stone in her belly, and she couldn’t shift it just by swallowing, even when she told herself that she’d expected Nouel to hand her her head and had just been too fucking tired to really care.

Sorry, Lucienne.

“Fuck,” she said, as the door hissed shut behind her. “I should have gone out looking for that fucking frog prince instead.”

André woke mostly dry, mostly clean, and muzzy-headed. Before he opened his eyes, he let himself lie still, breathing, assessing the place in which he found himself. He was pin-and-needle prickles from the waist down, which was both reassuring and unsettling; if he was badly enough hurt to need a neural block, he was badly hurt indeed.

Except—

Whatever he was lying on smelled more like compost than a hospital bed. Green and sour-sweet and heavy, and so when he opened his eyes he wasn’t expecting the papery green of trauma wards. It was green, green and fawn, and he jerked reflexively when he saw the reed-woven roof overhead, thatched with feathertree leaves.

Whatever numbed him, it wasn’t narcotics. His movement brought sharper pain, an agonizing twist up his leg that he felt in his eye sockets and across the bridge of his nose. His hands curled into the bedding he lay on; a rank scent arose. It was moist and soft, and it wasn’t at all the sort of thing he would normally sleep on.

The pain was vast. He lay back, balling his fists against his eyes, and concentrated on breathing. His leg throbbed; the pain paled and ebbed while he out-waited it.

He opened his eyes again. Everything was flat—undetailed, unaugmented—and real. The colors were off, the sounds muddy. This was a disconnect beyond merely shutting down his connex. Visual detail was sparse and undefined: he could not see the fronds of the feathertree thatch stirring in the breeze. Rather, a general sense of movement told him what must be happening, two meters over his head. He caught motion, and some part of his brain extrapolated it into an image.

Peculiar as all hell. It left him feeling half blind.

And unable to call for rescue. His headset was as useless as a pair of empty seashells strapped to his ears, as useless as his leg and his goose-egged, aching head. He didn’t know how long he’d lain unconscious, but it was awhile, if the froggies had managed to throw a shelter over him.

But it was still daylight. Unless it was daylight again.

The leg was splinted uncomfortably, the padded ends of flat restraints pressing André’s thigh above the knee. When he stretched even slightly, nauseating ripples of heat rolled up his leg from his shin again. Definitely broken. He grunted and closed his eyes until the pain subsided, then cautiously lifted himself onto his elbow.

The shelter had no walls. By the sun, he guessed it was late morning or early afternoon, and he could see enough mud to know that he was on a different island. If a mud spit in a swamp could be dignified with the term.

This one was larger and dryer and taller, though it still bore signs of periodic submersion. Half a dozen ranids clustered before the reeds, crouched or sprawled, their green and yellow mottles almost invisible against green and yellow leaves.

André couldn’t tell them apart. Except maybe the tall one, draped in a net vest hung with old treasures, pierced trophies, jingling shells. That might be Tetra. Beside it huddled a crippled ranid, missing an arm from long ago, one side a ragged mess of scar tissue and proud flesh. André wondered if it had caught up with the wrong end of a nessie.

Another ranid bobbed forward, not as strikingly long and lean-limbed as the one he thought might be Tetra. If he could get a good look at the mottles on its back he might be able to tell, but for the meantime, as it extended a slate, he decided to risk it. “Gourami?”

It had to repeat that peculiar hand-puppet-like motion of its body before he realized it was imitating a human headshake. Pain dropped from his immediate awareness, replaced by an uncharacteristic spike of worry. “Is it safe?”

A scritchy-looking affirmative, from its free hand. André let his breath out slowly, wobbly with dumped adrenaline. Everything seemed muted, gray. And what were you going to do if it wasn’t?

Panic, obviously. He did not want to be the one who explained to Jean Kroc that he had lost Jean’s froggie. And anyway, the frog was…kind of engaging.

Not that he needed to be getting paternalistic about alien amphibians. Getting soft wasn’t a good way to succeed in André’s line of work, or even a good way to stay alive. He spared a moment to picture Timothy Closs or Jefferson Greene worrying about a coolie, and shook his head to clear it.

Getting soft wasn’t the way to get ahead in anybody’s line of work.

A moment’s thought lead him to the obvious conclusion: “Caetei?”

And that was better: this time, it scritched affirmation with one hand, then thrust the slate at him again. It hurt even more to prop himself on one elbow and accept the device, so he dropped his shoulders back against the pallet. It was surprisingly comfortable, if a bit moist. His shirt adhered to his shoulders and his trousers—with one leg cut away midthigh—adhered to his buttocks and legs. He didn’t think it was all blood or sweat or swampwater. Whatever the ranids used for bedding, on the other hand…

—Good u wake, the ranid’s slate said, as he raised it in front of his eyes. —Tide rsng.

They couldn’t be too far upriver, then. The New Nile boasted only a shallow gradient, and as far as André knew, if it hadn’t been for the mitigating effects of the rushy bayou and the paramangrove, the tides might roll miles up the broad, placid river. But those features existed, and even Greene’s World’s embarrassment of lunar influences couldn’t quite push the ocean through them. The New Nile remained an outflow channel.

The ranids must have moved him out-bayou, closer to the bay, because the tides had been minimal at the overnighting island. The move was good, a smart thing; it would make it easier for a rescue team to reach him.

“Move where?” he asked slowly, enunciating.

He couldn’t heads-up the time or a tide chart, but Caetei had no reason to lie to him. That didn’t reassure him as he metaphorically picked his way around the fissures in his mind caused by his headset. Even his hard memory was out of service, leaving an unsettling gap. He wondered how much was irretrievably lost. He had backups, of course. He was sane and careful and not as thoroughly paranoid as Jean Kroc, nor the sort to take mad risks. The backups were a vulnerability, of course, the sort that somebody like Cricket could exploit if she knew where to find them, which was why André’s were hidden, physical access only, and key-coded.

Unfortunately, that meant he had to get to them to get them back.

“I can’t move myself,” he continued, when Caetei did not reach to answer.

This time it typed quickly. —We move b4.

It reached down and tapped a stick by its foot; André, in a moment of disconnect, realized that he was lying not on a pallet as he’d assumed, but on a sort of stretcher. “I need medical help.”

—We take u grtprnt.

…whatever that was. A witch doctor? Some sort of ranid village elder? A bayou-living human? The froggie equivalent of Sitting Bull?

It sounded very significant. But he needed a doctor more than the answer to a coolie xenocultural exam. “Have you sent someone to bring help? I need an evacuation now. The leg will fester.”

Caetei might not know that word, but there was probably some kind of translation protocol in the slate. But Caetei stayed stolid and pulled the slate back. It hung it on its belt and crouched beside the shaft of the stretcher. Three more ranids hopped from the weeds. Tetra was not one of them, and all those who came up wore not vests but web belts strung with tools. André remembered that Tetra had some sort of special status in the group, a dominant reproductive and social role. Which perhaps exempted it from work.

Or perhaps it was just tired, and he was reading too much into things. Other ranids were surrounding them now, more than he had noticed waiting, so that his stretcher—his litter—was borne in the midst of a sort of hopping, weaving green honor guard. While Caetei was still looking at him, he asked again, “Where is Gourami?”

But Caetei’s hands were full, and it didn’t answer.

Gourami, it transpired, was already where they were going. It lolled in a shallow backwater, the ridges of its hips and its protruding eyes and nostrils breaking the surface. André didn’t see it until the others set his litter down on a pair of cross-braces that must have been prepared in advance. A fair amount of planning had gone into this operation.

Gourami paddled to the bank and stood, water sheeting down its sides. It came up to the litter—now a sort of crude couch—and lifted itself up so it met André’s eyes directly. It held its slate alongside its face, and blessedly constructed complete sentences containing entire words, vowels and all. —Are you feeling better, André?

“I need medical care,” he said, for the tenth or eleventh time.

—Your bone is set, the ranid answered. —Tetra did it, and the greatparent remembered-ahead for you. It will heal. You are safer here. There is too much coincidence surrounding you.

“Shit,” he said. But he wasn’t entangled. He hadn’t taken Closs up on the offer. He couldn’t be…

The hail storm. The bad fall.

Somebody was trying to kill him.

It was a wonderfully clarifying realization. A conjure man was after him. Kroc, or somebody from Rim, or another freelancer: it didn’t matter. Somebody was trying to kill him.

Good: a circumstance he knew how to deal with. And one he couldn’t do much about right now. On the other hand—greatparent. There was a word that made some sense of Caetei’s incomprehensible string of consonants. What a greatparent might be was another question, and “remembered-ahead” sounded suspiciously like conjuring. If it wasn’t superstition and sorcery. But Gourami was blinking at him intently, nictitating membranes flickering across glossy eyes, and he thought it was waiting for an answer.

“What’s a greatparent?” he asked.

Gourami chirrupped. One of the other ranids—not Caetei, he thought, but one that was in the water—picked up the noise and made it again, and again. Like clicking one’s tongue to summon a pet, almost. —old personage, Gourami typed, with amazing speed, its fingers skipping across the controls of its slate. —se remembers. I have been telling se new stories, that se may keep them safe.

A pause, as if Gourami revealed a confidence. —Someday Tetra may be a greatparent, too, Gourami finally said, and André thought it wasn’t exactly what it might have typed. —Tetra has many stories: se may grow very old. If se can give up swimming. That is always hard, and some do not.

Gourami typed more, but André did not see it. Because something was rising from the water, great-backed and amorphous, green and dripping with great strings of algae. Its back was as broad as the islet André sat on, and it seemed to have no limbs, only a glass-clean, mucous-slick fringe about its edges, pulsing softly. And eyes: not two only, but all around the rim, and under them mouths, toothless mouths from which water squirted as it rose. Ballast, and probably food, and maybe respiration…

He would have stepped—hopped—back if he were standing. As it was, he startled hard enough to rock his improvised seat.

Gourami held up a marked slate again, as Tetra—he was sure it was Tetra, the only one wearing a decorated vest—trilled to the monstrosity rising from the mud. —André Deschênes, meet the memorizeur…

The symbols that followed were musical notation, a chord progression overlaid by a quick run of simple notes. A ranid’s real name, written in the only human language that could handle them.

“Delighted,” he said, his hands flexing on the carry poles of the litter where they ran along its sides. “Please, ah. Extend my regards. Or whatever the protocol is.”

Gourami bobbled, a movement he was starting to anthropomorphize into laughter. —Se wants to meet a human, it typed. —Se has been told much about you, but has never seen one before. Please, sit up straight so se can look. I am sorry for your pain.

“It’s a crater,” Greene repeated, and despite temptation, Closs—leaning back in a chair in Greene’s office—didn’t make the chairman go back and explain it a third time. “The whole damned gulf. The Bay of Novo Haven. That’s what Gupta thinks, anyway. The omelite deposits are around the rim—which tells us where we might want to drill inland, by the way, because while the river’s backfilled some of it, you can see where the original line would have extended—and that’s also where the recent earthquakes are centered.”

Greene was dressed with particular care, but his eyes were red-rimmed, pupils pinpricked from too much stimulant. He paced, gesticulating at the screen on his office wall with first one hand and then the other, using a light-wand to outline features on a projected detail map. He paused, tapping the wand on his fingertips, and directed a stare at Closs, as if checking to see if Closs had followed him this time.

“And the probability effects our engineers have been struggling with for the past year?” Closs asked, to make Greene say it out loud, to get it into the discussion.

“Strongest at those sites, yes. And radiating out. But are you seeing the implications, Timothy? Gupta’s map suggests that the omelite is the side effect of an explosion.”

“An impact? It came from space?”

Greene shook his head, hands fanning wide, the tip of the light-stick leaving a dazzled streak across Closs’s vision. Something wrong with his connex; there should be antiglare protection. “Gupta thinks the explosion was ground level.”

“A tanglestone mine. Blew up. An alien tanglestone mine.” Closs tried to get his brain and his tongue to wrap around the concepts at the same time. “A ranid tanglestone mine? You’re telling me they had, what, a technological society? Industrial mining?” It was hard to imagine worse news for Charter Trade. Not that Rim had encountered one yet, but there were rules in place for dealing with technological societies.

And they did not involve colonizing their planets.

“Omelite mines don’t just blow up. I’m telling you they had a production facility. Whether it was the ranids or some other alien species, hell, maybe colonists here before us. Maybe there was a dominant land species…it doesn’t matter. The omelite is a…a by-product. Of whatever they were doing. Of the explosion.”

“There’d be an archaeological record,” Closs said, very slowly. “If there had been a technological species on Greene’s World.”

“There might be. Someplace we can’t get to it.”

“Spare me the Chinese puzzles, Jeff.”

Greene took a breath. Closs tensed: he knew that expression. “I have to tell you something about Greene’s World. Something important, that almost nobody knows.”

“This is going to keep me up nights.”

“And how,” Greene said, seeming as if he nerved himself. “When I say it’s secret, you should know—I mean a proprietary secret. Covered by your nondisclosure clause. Some of the coincidence engineers and physicists are aware. Dr. Gupta is one of them. Other than that, just my grandfather’s descendants. And whoever spilled the story to Lucienne Spivak. Not even my wife. Do you understand?”

There was no end to the things Greene’s wife didn’t know about him, but this didn’t seem the time to mention it. “It’s that hot?”

“The hottest. Greene’s World is potentially unique in the universe.”

And other planets aren’t? There was something about Greene that made biting your tongue harder than it might be under other circumstances. “Explain, please.”

Greene dropped his chin and looked up at Closs through his lashes. “What do you know about the theoretical phenomenon of forking?”

“Like alternate histories?”

“Sort of. I’m not the guy to explain it well—that would be Gupta—but…There’s one multi-universe theory that postulates that the timestream is constantly forking, and rehealing—so things come back together again, and refork, and rejoin. So time is like a braided rope where strands keep getting switched around. Except maybe sometimes, after a really catastrophic event, it forks completely. And never reheals.”

“Parallel dimensions.”

“Sure.”

“So?…”

Green sniffled a bit and rubbed his nose. “So an early survey team postulated that Greene’s World is partially forked. By which I mean this, this catastrophe…”—he waved vaguely at the lighted map—“almost shook the planet into another dimension. But not quite. There are two of them, in other words, and they…sort of overlap. A quantum bifurcation. And if whatever caused the catastrophe wasn’t destroyed in it—”

“It’s on the other branch.”

“Yes.”

It might be early, but Closs suddenly found the idea of a drink supremely attractive. He stood and went to the stand in the corner, but poured himself a cup of coffee instead. “You just explained where tanglestone comes from.”

“It’s not my explanation.”

“What could…cause something like that?”

Greene winced. “There’s a reason we don’t put Slide facilities on planets, Tim.”

On second thought, maybe it wasn’t too early for a little whiskey in his coffee. He added cream on top, stirred it meticulously, and turned back to Greene when he was sure he had his face under control. “A Slide failure.”

“A prehistoric one. We theorize.”

“Can those aliens get back here?”

A shrug. “The probability storms are getting worse—”

“No shit.” The coffee was strong, sweet from the whiskey, scalding hot. Closs drank down half the cup in three slow swallows and wiped his mouth against the side of his hand. “The dimensions are…what, pulling apart?”

“Or remerging, as we consume the omelite. If it’s the first, pretty soon, no tanglestone. If it’s the second—”

Morrow’s aliens. What if they didn’t come from…somewhere else, exactly? But right here, right…alongside? He poured and stirred, aware of Greene coming up beside him, holding his own cup.

“If the Slide theory is right, we can manufacture omelite.”

There wasn’t enough whiskey in the inhabited galaxy for this conversation. “By blowing up a planet.”

Greene’s shoulders rose and fell. “It doesn’t have to be an inhabited one.”

But what if it did? What if you needed…observers on both sides? What if it only worked if you had, say, the ranids and the mysterious theoretical technologists?

Closs put his coffee cup down again. He rubbed his palms over tight curls and turned to Greene. You looked a man in the eye when you admitted a mistake. “Deschênes has dropped out of contact,” he said. “I think we have to prepare ourselves for failure on that front.”

Cricket could have run. But she was inside Nouel’s house, at the mercy of his expert system, and she hadn’t had the foresight—or the equipment—to wire this place to blow. So she put her back to the sealed door, folded her arms across her chest, and waited. Nouel stood up and turned to her. “Fisher,” he said, shocking her. “I’m sorry; you weren’t here, and I couldn’t contact you to let you know I was bringing Maurice home. Maurice Sadowski, this is Fisher.”

Not even a hesitation to hint that it was a brand-new name. Cricket let her brow crinkle, and her first stuttering panic recede. There was, obviously, more going on here than the evident. She stepped forward and extended her hand, and Maurice stood as well.

“We’ve met,” he said, only a crinkle at the corner of his eye—half smirk, half wink—betraying any amusement at her change of name. “Virtually speaking.” His hand was warm, broad-palmed, the grip certain. “I’m not here for Rim.”

“Of course, if you were—”

“I would say the same thing.” He had a good, flickering smile. “Honey, there’s one way I know I can prove I’m on your side. I can tell you what was in the file I gave Lucienne.”

She really shouldn’t have been so surprised. It had to have come from somewhere. Somewhere close to Closs or Greene, specifically, or somebody who had stumbled across the information. But—

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

And Maurice clucked his tongue. “Lucienne took a risk to meet with me,” he said. “I took one to meet with you. Take a risk yourself: this is too big not to.”

Nouel stood back. Cricket studied Maurice instead, watching his eyes, the corners of his mouth.

Rim, she thought, would just have killed her. The way they had killed Lucienne. They didn’t need to talk to her. Unless they somehow thought she could lead them to a bigger fish, but that hadn’t been a concern in the past. Quick, ruthless, but not prone to long-term strategy—that was the Charter Trade Company.

“Do you have any proof? Anything we can use to force the media to follow up?”

He glanced at Huc. Huc, jowled head lowered, seemed not to notice. “I purged the file once I transmitted it. You don’t keep something like that in your head. I can promise, however, that the tracker didn’t come from me, or with that data.”

“You say that as if it was good news.” Cricket snorted. “It also doesn’t help us sell this to Com.”

“People love conspiracies.” Huc, without raising his head.

“They also,” Cricket said calmly, “tend to think they’re full of shit. Tell me something, Maurice. What could Lucienne have done with your information that an archinformist couldn’t?”

“Give it provenance,” he said. He rubbed his palms together, fiddled a gold bracelet. “I could connex it. But not without revealing myself—and we’ve seen how that works out.”

“Lucienne?”

Maurice’s eyebrow went up. He glanced at Nouel, who was still simulating withdrawal. “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s okay if I tell you now. Lucienne was an agent.”

“Oh, no,” Cricket said, gulping against bitter nausea. She hadn’t trusted anyone, not since Patience. Not since Moon Morrow’s confidential secretary had turned out to be not so confidential, after all. “Core? Not Rim, or Rim wouldn’t have killed her. What, infiltrating the insurgents?”

“You are not analyzing the evidence,” he said. “Think again.”

She did so, paused, staring at the back of her hands. “Holy shit. Unified Earth.”

“Yes. Apparently some senator or another actually thinks bringing down a corrupt Charter Trade Corporation might just be a ticket to reelection.”

“Earth thinks it can bring legal proceedings against Rim? Against Core?”

“Monopolies,” he said, echoing Huc, “make people nervous. You don’t know who she was reporting to? You can’t get us in contact?”

Cricket shook her head. “I can’t.” She turned away, folded her hands behind her back, and stared at the wall. Nouel had withdrawn against it and was still waiting with his arms folded. “I’ve got no authority.”

“You’ve got Lucienne’s froggie friends, don’t you? What about Jean Gris? Would he know?”

Ah, of course. That was the thing she could give Rim that they couldn’t get without her.

Assuming Maurice wasn’t trustworthy. A big assumption, because if he was, they needed him. On the other hand, Lucienne had been shot immediately after meeting with him. And he was conspicuously healthy. “No,” she said. “With Lucienne gone…and anyway, what news feed is going to care what a ranid has to say for itself? We could manufacture a provenance for the documents, if they’re authentic.”

“They are.” No trace of impatience. “There’s more I need to tell you, though. There’s another thing I find unlikely to be coincidental, and extremely fascinating.”

Slowly, Cricket turned her head and stared, not at Maurice but at Nouel. It was thirty seconds at least before he lifted his head, returned her gaze, and shrugged. “You’re looking at the wrong man, Fisher.”

She rotated on her heels. Maurice had been staring at the back of her neck. “What do you know?”

“I know this,” he said, and pulled a flat chip of hard plastic from his pocket. He flipped it at her; she caught it out of the air reflexively, and slapped it onto the back of her left hand. It was an Australian dollar from A.G. 50 or so, when they were still using the old notation:2048.

Tails. “So what?”

“Do it again.”

Heads. Tails. Heads. Tails.

“Trick coin.”

“It’s not.”

She tossed the coin at him. He fumbled the catch, and it rolled off his fingers and under a chair. Cricket almost heard Nouel roll his eyes, but nobody went after the coin. “So what?” Cricket asked again, though she knew, more or less, so what.

So they were neck-deep in a probability storm, and there was no telling what might happen. And as if to prove her conjecture, what Maurice said next was an almost complete non sequitur.

“So you’re a quantum clone of Moon Constancy Morrow.” And while she stood there, blinking at him, he continued: “And Closs almost knows. He’s this close to figuring it out, and when he does, I have no idea what he’ll do about it. Also, I wouldn’t connex if I were you until we scrub your head completely; the real Moon has ways of finding you when you do that. Which is why I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t my data.”

“Thank you,” she said. Her throat hurt; after a moment she realized that it was because she was dry-swallowing, over and over. “I figured that out.”

No, no point in playing it cool at all. And Huc hadn’t known either, based on his reflexive step forward and then the cringe that started in his neck and shoulders and traveled his length. “But I’m not a clone. I’m the original. She’s the clone.”

“From what I understand,” Maurice said, “I would guess she told Closs the same thing. There’s only one problem with that.”

“Yes?”

“If it’s so, how did you get here?”

12

GOURAMI SPENT FAR TOO LONG THINKING ABOUT WHAT TO do with the human. But se couldn’t have left him to be shot. Se had brought him to the village. Se had brought him to the greatparent’s attention. Se had left him stranded on the bank.

Se hadn’t expected Tetra to be the one to help. Se hadn’t expected Tetra to crouch beside se, hunkered under the overhang of a bank of reed bound together by cutthroat weed and broken at the root by the hail.

—They are hunting the greatparent, Tetra said, bleakly, as the killing machines made another pass. Gourami flinched, but Tetra laid a hand on se thigh. —And they are hunting us. Watch what happens.

They crouched low, lifting the human from the water so he could breathe and see. He huddled, quiet despite what must be enormous pain, floating between them. The tide was in. Gourami caught self rattling fingers against the reeds and stopped, an act of will.

And bore witness.

The helicopters came over, gunning, churning the water where the greatparent lay submerged. The bullets could not reach it, and the people stayed out of sight, under cover, under water. But then the explosions began, and Gourami, unwitting, would have started forward if Tetra had not restrained se. Reflex. Programming.

The elder was in danger. Egglings were expendable, but the old were the memory of the race.

Others did not have a far-swimmer to caution them. Some rushed forward heedlessly; they would not be herded by bullets, and some of those were cut down. The water grew violet; it all tasted of blood, like a hunter’s kill. Gourami ducked and shivered, rocking back and forth against Tetra’s touch. Se could not pull free, se could not stay where se was.

Se had to help, and se distress rolled up se throat in ringing harmonics, quickly damped. Tetra took the human’s hand and put it on Gourami’s other arm. The human’s weird irises ringed with white. He held on, as if he meant to do it gently, but he only had one leg to tread water with, and he bobbed up and down, tugging skin.

The first wave of defenders schooled wherever the humen cared to drive them. Vibrations through the water heralded the phalanxes of scoots, roaring up the channels. But it wasn’t the scoots themselves that made Gourami cringe; it was the billowing net each pair dragged between.

The throb of engines was confusing. Se thrashed and warbled—go to them, go to them—but Tetra, far-swimmer, less programmed for clanweal, would not let go. Tetra and the human held on, bruising, breaking tender skin, and dragged Gourami farther into their fragile shelter, where the bank was undercut.

The scoots were not moving as fast as they could. They zigged and zagged in unison, keeping the nets untangled, scooping up persons willy-nilly. Gourami saw the captured persons struggling to hold one another up, despite the entangling nets, pushing one another’s noses above water.

Se could not watch. Se could not look away. Se trembled.

If Gourami had been a far-swimmer, if se own reproduction had become important to bandweal, it might have been easier to abide. Se might have maintained Tetra’s presence of mind. But se was a young adult, and not carrying egglings. Se thought of the greatparent, of the babies, of the village.

Se bore witness, and moaned low chords of agony.

These were not se sibs, at least, which made the slaughter and seizure not less terrible, but less compelling. Se had no ties by blood or water here. Except Caetei.

Where was Caetei?

Although the humen were well armed, the persons were not helpless. The second wave of defenders consisted of far-swimmers as much as adults, and many of these had taken the time to arm.

Se tugged the crossbow from se web belt. Tetra, gently, lifted it from se hands, chirruping.

Gourami saw the attack in slashes of action through the reeds. The humen had apparently not expected automatic-weapons fire. Several jerked from their scoots, which cut off as they were meant to when the rider fell. Persons, no longer dragged through the water, struggled free of the nets, bleeding from abrasions and holding wrenched limbs awkwardly. One scoot pilot, insufficiently attentive or lacking adequate reflexes, lost control when his partner’s vehicle stalled. The net swung him into a channel bank. A person Gourami did not know impaled him with a reed spear as he struggled up the bank.

Smoke and fire pillared from one hillock; Gourami’s view of the target was obscured by mats of overhanging reed, but se heard the roar and felt the heat as a helicopter died screaming. Another scoot passed so close Gourami felt the wash, and André flinched against se. He made some whining humen sound; Gourami did not turn her head to see if it was a curse or a cheer.

Gunfire scattered ground to air and air to ground. André yanked again, and se was about to shake him away, send him surging back through the water, but then Tetra tugged, too—Caetei, where was Caetei?—and the violet water churned. A great black thundering belly lowered, flattening the reed shelter against their heads, and Gourami caught confused glimpses of hanging cables, of humen thrashing awkwardly through water, dragging steel rings wired to drawn nets. Another circling chopper died, but then the remaining ones were hovering over the heart of the village, where the netted ranids and the submerged greatparent were.

Something sizzled—a chopper returning fire—the rocket trail a long tumorous arch of smoke, cracked with flame. A flattening boom shook bits of plant on Gourami’s head. Se did not flinch.

There were no more losses among the humen machines.

Tetra and André were still pulling at Gourami. Se turned to the human and saw the shapes his mouth was making, how they resolved into words. Tetra might be croaking something. Gourami could not hear it over the explosions.

—We have to go, the human said. He jerked his paw up. —We have to run.

Gourami did not understand, but the human was confident—and projecting urgency—and Tetra dragged at se other arm. Se let self be moved, pulled through the swamp, bobbing low, slinking from tussock to tussock. They made short dashes underwater, only as long as the human could hold its breath. Tetra was really the only one directing, the only one swimming. André was almost dead weight, and Gourami could only think of Caetei, and the greatparent, of the egglings and adults they were abandoning.

A few other persons ran with them; they caught glimpses of far-swimmers, and of one adult so full of egglings se would have sloshed, risking rupture, if se climbed out of the water. The others, the young adults, had run inward.

Into the trap.

The thrumming, the straining thunder of choppers, the sound of explosions took a long time to soften behind them. They sheltered under vegetation when the choppers passed over, hanging nets dripping water, squirming with green bodies. André finally floated behind Gourami, clinging to se back, his hands over se eyes to force them retracted and closed. It helped when Tetra led.

Se still kept wanting to turn back and look for Caetei.

They had not been running long when both André’s and—he presumed—Tetra’s instincts were proven brutally correct. The explosion flattened all three of them, the compression shock wave through the water thankfully attenuated by distance and topography, or they would have been dynamited like fish. It took both André and Tetra to keep Gourami moving. The froggie was like a sleepwalker; it would paddle despondently as long as somebody directed, but if not provoked and cajoled, it began drifting aimlessly. André wished he could talk to Tetra, ask questions, anything. But there was no means of conversation; damaged Gourami had the slate, and André was not sure Tetra knew how to use it even if it was so inclined.

At first, André thought Gourami might be physically injured. But when they had struggled far enough from the devastated village that Tetra allowed them to rest (not far enough that André felt safe, but he didn’t think he’d feel safe anywhere in the bayou) and André beached himself on the cleanest, least-muddy bank he could find, Gourami crawled up, too, and seemed remarkably unharmed. It sprawled alongside him, ribbiting repeatedly, sawing like a distressed insect. André sat up long enough to glance it over.

No lumps he could see, except the ones that were meant to be there. No twisted bits, no oozing wounds.

Did froggies suffer posttraumatic stress? They must; he was looking at the evidence.

If he’d had the sense to secure one of the abandoned scoots during the massacre—or if he could somehow either drag himself back or explain to Tetra what he needed—then he might make it to Novo Haven before fever in his wounds incapacitated him.

But that would mean leaving Gourami helpless. When it had risked its life coming back for him. When he had promised Jean Kroc he would look out for it.

Still, it was his life. And dying of gangrene in a swamp wasn’t as enticing as a single bullet through the brain.

He was unwilling to sell himself too cheaply.

He knuckled silt from his eyes and regretted it. He’d probably added more mud than he’d wiped away. If he could see himself, he’d be nothing but flaking clots; he felt cracked and itchy already.

Tetra had remained in the water. It swam back and forth restlessly, periodically submerging or darting out of sight, but always reemerging. André forced himself not to watch. It was too unnerving.

Beside him, Gourami also did not seem to be calming. Its distress, if anything, was growing; it shielded its eyes with its hands and curled tight.

At a loss, André reached out and laid a hand on it, as he might anyone.

The response was immediate and striking. Gourami breathed more slowly, scrunched eyes opening. It peeked between webbed digits without flinching.

“Gourami?”

It was looking at him when he spoke. It shuddered, a sort of releasing gesture, and leaned into his palm. He’d been thinking of pulling his hand back, but he left it there, although he knew he might be hurting the froggie.

Sometimes, you took your chances that you were doing more good than harm.

The froggie stared at him, silent, pouch taut and still against its throat. It extended its wrist, the one with the slate on it, and calmly, decisively, typed. André felt the muscle and tendon gliding under its slick skin.

—We have to go back.

He wasn’t about to argue, anyway.

André had never seen so many dead things. He was used to clean death, quick, in comprehensible quantities.

This was unfathomable.

The water he moved through was thick with dead ranids, and parts of dead ranids; the only reason it didn’t run red was that ranid blood, though violet when oxygenated, was otherwise nearly clear. Once the water diluted it, the color faded, and the river pushed what remained to the sea.

Tetra and Gourami moved away from him as they came within sight of the massacre. André hauled himself up on the bank, slithering like a snake, and tried not to think about his pain.

He tried even harder not to think about what was in the water saturating his open wounds.

He felt fretful, useless. He lay on the bank and watched as Gourami and Tetra worked among the dead, among the drifting chunks, and was sickly glad he could not help them.

They dragged the dead between them, weighted them down and sank them in the mud. Over each one, Tetra made some gestures; André could not tell if words were spoken. Every so often, fingers plucking deliriously through the water as if it tickled fish, Gourami scooped something up and swallowed it, sometimes with a glance at Tetra that André would have said was guilty, if Gourami were human.

Tetra, for its part, seemed unconcerned. André, on the other hand, was reasonably certain that this was one funeral custom he didn’t want a better look at.

He lay back and dozed in a not-too-muddy spot. He’d exhausted himself with the flight, and with the return. He’d salvage a scoot when his leg throbbed less, when he was rested.

But the splashing kept him awake. And a ranid somewhere was ribbiting, wasn’t it? Something was, anyway—a terrible cringing sound that made him want to cover his ears. He did, but he could still hear it, and it occurred to him that it must be a ranid crying somewhere. There was a quality to it that itched at him, demanding action, like the cries of kittens or of terrified children.

André opened his eyes. The body of a ranid floated past on the retreating tide, wreathed in gray loops of intestine, fish tugging at the drifting innards. Surely it couldn’t be making that sound. Surely it couldn’t still be dying.

André called out, but maybe he couldn’t make his voice carry or maybe ranids did not care to hear him. He clawed through mud for a rock to throw, anything to get their attention. When he rooted one up, it was slimed and muddy. He chucked it overhand; it plunked into the swamp a few meters from Gourami.

Gourami turned at the sound, and as quickly turned back again. André could not keep its attention. As soon as he stopped shouting, he heard the noise again. He pressed his hand to his mouth. His breath tickled his fingers.

He was the person making it.

Jefferson did not like to look at the cages. They were spacious and comfortable, the floors and walls moistened membrane, misters running intermittently for the comfort of the subjects who would soon be installed. A regular vacation spot, Jefferson told himself. He made a note to have the data trail amended so it would seem that Dr. McCarter had been the requisitioning authority for this equipment. An overstep of her authority, but the other option was Schaffner, and he was an old family friend.

Besides, it wasn’t as if anybody would ever check. Nothing was going to go wrong.

He checked his headset. Schaffner was just out of sight behind a bank of equipment that blocked the view of the processing floor. Jefferson didn’t particularly want to walk out there among the sedated ranids; he contented himself with sending a quick ping.

Schaffner responded immediately, and Jefferson opened the connection. “How are the facilities, Neil?”

Schaffner’s image straightened; he dusted off his hands. Jefferson was willing to bet that the real one hadn’t so much as looked up from whatever subject he was examining. “It’s fine, thanks. These specimens are a little the worse for wear.”

Jefferson smoothed a hand over a cool work surface, slick steel and slightly gritty black slate. The lab was new, sound-absorbent tiles making it pleasant. “Best we could do on short notice.” There was no point in picking a fight with Schaffner. A ping interrupted before either of them could speak again. “That’s Tim. Gotta go.”

It was Tim in a fury, too. That was evident as soon as Jefferson opened a screen. “Just what the hell do you think you’re trying to pull?”

“Tim? What are you talking about?” Jefferson arranged his icon in the most open pose he could manage, and waited.

“Your attack on the ranid village at”—a flashed map image, grid coordinates blinking—“using Rim security forces.”

“A retaliatory raid,” Jefferson said. “We have intelligence that that particular native colony was the staging ground for the recent terrorist attacks. We’ve retained prisoners for questioning. We have reason to believe that one of their elders may be responsible for the conjured explosion at the recruiting station.”

“You’ve started a war.”

“We’ve acknowledged one,” Jefferson answered. “Bring it up at the next board meeting if you’re unhappy. See you there.”

He closed the session before Closs could answer, and set his messaging to away.

Jean smelled the carnage before he saw it. The bayou had its own range of odors, from sweetly rotten to musky-cold, briny or gassy or sulfuric. But this was a battlefield reek of cold burned gunpowder, spilled bowels, and shed blood. Ranid blood, more redolent of sugar than iron, relied upon cooperatively bonding haemerythrin as an oxygen-carrying agent.

They bled fuchsia.

He let his skiff glide silently for a while, poling only when it threatened to drift to a stop or run aground. There was silence ahead, and he feared it.

A body floated by—a far-swimmer, still tangled in se nets. Jean wondered where this one had come from, originally, bringing with it the freight of its stories and its genes. After a moment’s consideration, he captured the dead froggie with a weighted rope and drew it close, alongside the skiff. Freshly killed, he thought; there was no sign of small crustaceans colonizing the wounds, so it could not have been dead for more than a couple of hours.

And yet, everything was silent.

Considering, he lashed it alongside the skiff, and poled on.

When he came out from among the reeds, he was braced for the worst. Jean Kroc had seen slaughter before. He had been on-planet when the Hogarth’s World Charter Trade Company had seen fit to put down a worker uprising there. Hoggie was surface-dry; most of the water was pumped from deep wells. In some of the newer homesteads, though, they were just drilled and capped, and operated with a hand-pump. Half the residents were transportees or the children of transportees; no one cared too much for their creature comforts.

Jean Kroc knew of three people who had been crushed to death—suffocated—when they and dozens of others had climbed into the well-shaft to escape the automatic-weapons fire.

Jean hadn’t been one of the civilians hiding in the well.

He’d been one of the militia holding the guns.

Not too long after, he’d found ways to get the money to emigrate. By the time he’d left, he’d had to. A soldier’s pay wasn’t the price of an emigration stake, even to a manpower-hungry world like Greene’s. And Jean Kroc hadn’t always been a conjure man. So he’d done what he thought he had to, and he’d gotten the funds to leave.

Jefferson Greene was not the worst rich man on the Rim. Jean Kroc had worked for the worst rich man on the Rim. For three years, before he’d wriggled loose.

But that was light-years and the best part of a century ago. It was just the smell of blood—even ranid blood—bringing back visceral, garish memories.

When he found where the greatparent had died, two froggies Jean knew were singing over it. And André Deschênes was passed out, fevered, on the bank.

When André awoke in the hospital, imperfectly washed and still gritty in the crevices, the first thing he did was call Jean Kroc a fool. “Rim is trying to kill me. Did you hang a target on the door?”

Jean rolled his shoulders in that way he had. “What makes you so sure it was Rim? Anyway, the hospital has a licensed coincidence engineer on duty. And I have been keeping an eye on you. Just in case.”

“Thanks,” André said, not bothering to conceal his sarcasm. An IV protruded from the back of his hand. He felt no pain; not even in his cast and elevated leg, despite an elaborate arrangement of screws and inflatable appliances that told him a little bit about the complexity of the surgery he’d missed while unconscious. His skin was cool where he pressed the back of his other hand to his cheek. “Good of you to care. Where’s Cricket?”

A sideways flicker of his eyes. Jean didn’t so much change the subject as refuse to allow André to change it. “Besides, I know who’s been gunning for you.”

“So do—”

“Not Rim.”

It was awkward to lift his head, to try to get a look at Jean while his leg was lifted in the air. His lacerated back didn’t hurt at all, but he could feel the cool resilience of a gel dressing laid on the mattress under him. He wondered how much glue and how many stitches it had taken to put him back together again, and whether they’d managed to match his skin tone with the stem culture or if he’d have tan spots he’d have to have corrected. Mottled like a frog, which would have made him laugh if it didn’t make his eyes sting.

Jean rose from the green-and-white hospital chair and touched the control to inflate André’s pillow slightly. André leaned back, let his neck relax. But he didn’t let his guard down. “Who, then?”

“None of your damned business.”

André jerked forward; the lack of pain tended to make him forget that he was incapacitated. He felt incredibly pleasant, actually; floating, but not disassociated. And so comfortable. It was hard to sustain the irritation, even when Jean put a hand on his shoulder and eased him back, one more time. “It’s my business when it’s my life at risk.”

“I handled it,” Jean said. “You’re my apprentice; you’re my problem. You worry about it when I say you do.”

A shock of cold water, that. He hadn’t gone to anyone else to fight his battles in fifteen years. And it was humiliating, infantilizing; now André’s cheeks burned. He glared and bit his tongue. “Whatever you say.”

Jean stepped back. His smile creased his prickled cheeks. “I know you’re just mouthing that, but I appreciate the effort.” He pulled a talker out of his pocket, the kind used by kids too young to be wetwired yet, pushed in the earbud, and clicked the activator. “Hello, yes, he’s awake,” he said, and paused to listen. “Why don’t you come on in?”

“Cricket?” André asked.

But Jean shook him off, and moved toward the door. “I’ll be back. Don’t worry, you’re safe here.”

The door hissed open, shut, open again. André bit down on his tongue, stopping the words before they got out, and was glad. It wasn’t Cricket.

It was Maryanne. And she wasn’t alone.

She came through the door first, but she was a scout, not the leader. And a meter behind her sailed a taller, older woman, straight as a mast, her broad shoulders and chin already set with disapproval. Zoë Deschênes.

Fucking Zoë.

She was cheaply dressed, under her dignity, and André flinched from it. “What are you doing here?”

“The doctor,” Zoë said, calmly, “says you shouldn’t even have a limp. How are you feeling?”

“I asked what you were doing here,” he said. She already had him on the run. Already.

“I’d ask the same,” she said. “But I know it. I wouldn’t be here—”

“You shouldn’t be.”

She bulled over him. “I wouldn’t be here if you…weren’t. You stupid bastard. If Mother could see you—”

“She can’t,” André snapped back, despite himself, so sharp. Under his skin, like that. Instantaneously.

Maryanne stood back against the wall and twisted her fists in her skirt. Chin tucked, eyes downcast. She was a cousin on his father’s side, not the same thing as being one of Zoë Asceline Deschênes’s children at all.

Of course Zoë could push his buttons. Her mother had installed them.

She didn’t smile; if she’d broken his defenses, he thought he’d snapped through hers just as completely. “You are such a bitch, André. Such a bitch. Such a child.”

He drew a breath, restored by it. “And you’re here to call me names?”

The frown deepened. And then she did smile, lips furling up to reveal broad white teeth. “No. And I shouldn’t have done that.” She paused. “I’m surprised you kept the name. When you were walking out on everything else.”

“Not fair.” He waved the back of his hand at Maryanne. “I was there for the family.”

“Don’t you bring me into this, André.”

“You brought her!” He made his hands lie flat on the sheet, when he wanted to point at his sister, wave them wildly. He made himself look steadily at Zoë. Too much like her mother. Even the name. As if the elder Zoë had been able to imprint her personality on her firstborn child. “I’m surprised you came to see me here. Or not surprised, come to think of it. Did you visit to gloat, or to rub my nose in my crimes?”

“I came because I don’t want to see you floating dead in the street,” she said. “And because if Mother were alive, she’d have come for you. Even now.”

“You’re like a reefcrawler,” he said. His fingers plucked the cool, slick bedding; he forced himself to stop. “You don’t want me near you when I’m strong. But maybe if I’m easy prey, you’ll come see what you pick off my carcass, is that it?”

Zoë hadn’t moved from her spot near the door. She folded her arms over her chest; the cheap fabric of her blouse pulled taut. “Is that what you think of me?”

“I think you’re a charlatan,” he said. “I think you’re a con artist. You wouldn’t know real conjuring if it sent you a birthday wish. You tell people what they want to hear, you keep them trapped in their fantasies, and you skim off whatever you can. You’re a profiteer, Zoë. Just like Mother was.”

She stared for a minute, her knuckles paling where her fingers laced over her arms. “An ethics lecture?”

“Leave me the hell alone.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” A thoughtful purse of her lips punctuated the slow rocking of her head. He was in for it. Good; that would make it easier.

Angry was better than shamed.

But she surprised him. She nodded, and unfolded her arms, and came to him. She didn’t sit on the bed; instead, she dragged over the chair that Jean had used and perched on the edge. On a smaller woman, it would have looked delicate. On her, it gave the impression of hunger. “You think you’re better?”

“I’m not in the gutter lying to people,” he said. “I’m not that.”

He’d almost forgot Maryanne was in the room until she snorted. He glanced over; she was looking at him now. She shook her head and looked down.

“You’re right,” Zoë said, and patted his hand before she stood. “You’re in a much better class of gutter now.”

The door whisked shut behind them both while he still lay, stunned, chewing on his tongue.

Where the hell did she get off being embarrassed by him?

13

THEY LET ANDRÉ GO HOME IN TEN DAYS; IT WAS TWENTY-FOUR before he was on his feet. He spent the interim flat on his back, at the mercy of a pair of home-care attendants whose visits never seemed to coincide with when he needed them.

He was fortunate; by the time doctors and diagnostics pronounced him fit for weight-bearing exercise and swapped him into a walking cast, he was free of pain and just waiting for the new bone to harden.

Not quite a miracle cure. But pretty effective.

Cricket didn’t call him during his recovery, and after a while, he stopped asking Jean if he knew where she was. Jean didn’t answer, and André figured that was a good an indicator as any that Cricket had found out more than she wanted to. Sometimes people couldn’t handle the truth.

He had a long time for thinking, though, between Jean’s lessons (mostly theoretical, at this point) and it occurred to him one morning as he struggled off the sofa and into the motorized cart that some truths were not of the nature that people could be expected to handle. He wished he could say it was some sort of a spiritual revelation, but mostly it was the wisdom born of nightmares.

You think you’re fine. You think you got through it all right. And then you wake up sure the cold sweat on your face is blood, so real you can taste it.

It was just as well Cricket wasn’t talking to him. He wasn’t sure, anymore, what he had to offer.

It was almost a relief when Jean came for him, the day after he was allowed to walk again, and told him to pack a bag.

Gourami glided forward alone in the ocean, and thought, I’m a far-swimmer now.

Tetra had gone another way. Every capable person that Gourami and Tetra had found in the aftermath of the massacre had swum, bearing reports to other bands, other clans, other greatparents as well. The greatparents would share information, of course, but this way many of them would have different perspectives.

Younger adults had traveled upriver or along the coast. It should have been far-swimmers who braved the open water, but there were not enough. So the older and stronger young adults had swum.

Including those who were pregnant. As Gourami had become.

So now they were far-swimmers. But not far-swimmers such as the bands had often seen. One did not take on egglings when one meant to journey.

Gourami had not considered the consequences when se first saw an eggling thrashing in bloodied water and realized what the birds were feeding on, among the dead. Se acted on instinct, in hope and terror; se netted the fearful eggling in handfingers and swallowed it. The shock of water stretching se virgin brood pouch was like pain. Gourami reeled.

And then seen and rescued another, another, another—

So many endoparents had jettisoned their broods in frantic hope of the young surviving. So many—and Gourami, no matter how se searched, even to examining the brood pouches of the dead, could save only a few.

And they could not live on their own. Gourami saw other young adults collecting egglings, one—Parrot—despite old crippling wounds, another with a broken forelimb lashed to se chest. None of them had any way of knowing which egglings were exosibs. They mostly could not even identify the endosibs. The young were all sizes, from first-hatched to almost-budded.

Gourami worried that the eldest would eat the youngest; they were not old enough to know better yet. And that happened sometimes when there was trauma or hunger.

So se must keep them well fed. Which was not a simple matter when one was swimming in open water.

The warm surface of the ocean coursed over Gourami’s back, buoying. When se could not fish, se filter-fed, shunting much of the greens and chlorophyll into the pouch-water for the proper development of the egglings. They needed to establish their skin flora before they could live on their own. Although Gourami’s crossbow dragged, se was glad to have it. With a coil of humen twine, it made fishing much easier. Sometimes great schools of silver-flashing jackharley or gray-gill surrounded Gourami, and se could shoot one without breaking stroke.

Se could not rest. Se sucked the flesh from the bones of the catch without stopping. There were larger predators in open water, and they knew the scent of blood. The fish-bones, se ground between jaw-plates until they powdered. Se enriched the pouch-water with it, so the egglings would grow strong, flexible skeletons.

This was especially important for the two egglings who were just budding, absorbing their tails and developing limbs.

Fortunately, the fish were plentiful. So the egglings thrived—except for three that Gourami lost and mourned and ate in the first week. Probably all the dead had been shocked or hurt beyond surviving at one-tree-island.

Only Gourami grew thin.

When Gourami reached the floating colony at two-half-moon-reef, se at first could not remember how to stop swimming. Se butted against the outer bladders, long muscles still twitching. The bladders floated lightly, taut, and Gourami bumped and bumped again.

But then there was splashing, the water slapping se flanks, someone touching, stroking a back Gourami had not known was sunburned until soft hands smoothed mucous over raw flesh. Strong hands lifted and led se, their owners patting and exclaiming as they brought se before the greatparent, who floated like an enormous stinging jelly in the midst of the colony. Se had heard the news, of course; Gourami had swum farther than many others.

But that was not the same as touching a survivor.

Cricket—Fisher—was starting to prefer her new name. Especially the way Nouel said it, with a little twinkle, as if it were a joke shared. As he said it now, sliding a drink across the desk to rest beside her hand.

“Fisher—” He waited for her to look up and smile. She appreciated the training. “Company’s here.”

She appreciated the warning, too. She pushed herself upright on his couch. In the back of her head, Maurice—present only in spirit—felt the shift in her attention away from the code they were double-teaming, and pinged.

She pinged back. All clear; your data.

The inside of her head was a changed place. When she’d scrubbed her headset and reformatted, she’d cleaned everything. Flashed the bios, sealed the old data and wiped it, reformatted, and sent Nouel out to purchase a new drive, memory, and parser off the shelf from a shop chosen at random. Her hardware felt chromed, and in the spirit of reinvention she’d done the same kind of purge and start over with the software. Over the course of years, one layered up clutter. Dozens of half-used programs and heaps of old files lurked in the corners of one’s mind: three or four different messengers or mailers, newsfeeds about things she used to care about, security codes to a house she hadn’t lived in since she was twelve.

All gone now.

“Fisher,” Nouel repeated, “that company. Still need a minute? How goes the war?”

She shrugged. Just under a month, and she was already Nouel Huc’s biggest fan. Except when she was Maurice Sadowski’s. Because Nouel could definitely beat up Cricket’s father. And Maurice could run him into the gutter. And the really shocking thing was that she honestly believed either one of them would do it for her.

Even though neither one of them wanted to fuck her. Nouel, as far as she could tell, was perfectly happy with his long-distance love.

Anyway, she had no glib answers for his questions. “They’ve incinerated Lucienne’s body,” she said. “Maurice thinks that if they managed to download her—I don’t know if we have any way to get that information out of André—”

“Who is in the living room—”

“Yes, I caught that. Thank you. Maurice thinks they’d have it on an isolated system. No connex. So hacking into it, unlikely to happen. Even for him.”

“Well,” Jean said, from the doorway, “then we’ll just have to break in. I’ve talked to Ziyi Zhou. She can get us coverage in the Core media if we can deliver the goods.”

She’d been braced, she realized. Ready with an emotional death grip on herself, ready to greet André Deschênes with a chill and perfect facade. She almost didn’t register what Jean said; she was too busy staring at the door.

André limped in, fifteen pounds thinner, one leg awkward in a green and blue walking cast, leaning on an orthopedic cane. He smiled when he saw her, a sweet childish expression that caught at her composure, fuzzed up its surface like burr-prickles snagging in silk. She couldn’t answer in kind; she looked at him, and saw somebody she used to like.

She licked her lips, looked back at Jean, and said, “That doesn’t help us if we can’t back it up, Jean Gris. If I’m legally Moon Morrow”—in the corner of her vision, André performed a perfect theatrical double take—“then I have access to Rim corporate secrets. If I can prove in court that I’m the new original. But I’ll bet you my bottom demark that my motherself has signed a nondisclosure agreement—”

“That matters?”

Maurice, listening over Cricket’s feed, seemed about to pop an icon into the room and explain. But Cricket beat him to it. “Technically, she has no rights,” Cricket said. “If I can prove I’m her quantum clone. When you sign the paperwork, you sign your identity over to the childself.” Cricket didn’t tell them that she remembered signing it, thumbprint and retinal scan and an old-fashioned ink pen, a thing you only used for wills and marriages and adoptions.

Ten thousand years of literacy as a species, and there was still something about signing your name that felt like a contract.

“Draconian,” André said, the first word out of his mouth.

Cricket almost looked at him, but stopped herself in time. “Keeps people from cloning themselves for fun, now doesn’t it? Anyway, if we’re going that route, I need to file papers. And then Rim will be after me for real. André—”

“André is retired,” André said.

“—is not their only gun.”

“Oh,” he said. This time, she did look at him, and found him lip-pursed, eyes half lidded, as if studying his arrogance from an interior angle. “You have a point.”

“The information has to come from somewhere, people.” Maurice, rezzing in the center of the room, threw up his hands. Cricket hid a smile; she’d been making herself bets on how long he could stay away.

André leaned around his image, looked Cricket in the eye, and said, “I’ll testify.”

The silence was palpable. Cricket heard her heart beat in her ears. The meta-visual clutter of her overhauled headset, even pruned, was suddenly unbearable. She shut it down, all of it, and focused on the three men and the one icon.

Nouel got up and crossed the room. He poured a finger of straw-colored liquor into a squat tumbler and knocked it back. The next one, he tried to hand to André, but he might as well have been pushing it on a mannequin. For André, it seemed as if there was no one in the room but Cricket.

“It will mean jail time,” Cricket said. United Earth didn’t have the death penalty, except for treason.

“Maybe life,” Nouel added. “On Greene’s World. Where Charter Trade can get to you.”

And that was a death sentence.

Jean took the untouched glass from Nouel’s hand and brought it to Cricket, who did accept. She let the rim rest against her teeth, the smooth glass warm from Jean’s skin, and watched André breathe and think. He still hadn’t dropped his gaze from hers when he shrugged and said, “Life? What else am I doing with it?”

Cricket set the glass aside, watching it click on a checkerboard side table. When she looked up, André was still staring. She crossed to him, put her hand lightly against his chest, and balanced up to kiss him on the corner of the mouth. Warm flesh, dry lips, the small curls of his beard.

“This doesn’t make me a better man than I was yesterday,” he said.

Cricket shrugged and stepped back. He loved her, and she didn’t love him, but that didn’t mean they had to be assholes about it. “See you in hell,” she said cheerfully, and leaned her shoulder against his arm.

Maurice would report to work in person the next day. He would bring Closs the final bombshell that they had been saving—the news that Lucienne Spivak had not been merely a local activist, but an agent of Unified Earth, a government agitator working for the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs. That she had been operating on Greene’s World under several identities, one of which was that of Lisa Anne Angley, who had faked her own death in the process of facilitating a coincidentally engineered explosion on board the ranid recruiting ship.

That she had, with the aid of ranid extremists, escaped underwater before the ship blew up. That she had been instrumental in the deaths of several men.

André listened impassively as Maurice laid out the information he would deliver. Only when the archinformist was done did he speak, shifting uncomfortably on the sofa where he reclined, his healing leg propped on cushions.

“Is that true?”

“Tolerably,” Jean said, when Maurice didn’t answer. Cricket gave him such a look, and he shrugged. “I knew who she was working for. Unified Earth would just love a legal excuse to get the omelite monopoly away from Jeff Greene. As you can imagine.”

We were friends, Cricket almost said. But she hadn’t told Lucienne who she had used to be either. Did that make her less a friend?

People had secrets. You lived with it or you didn’t.

André said it again, as if he needed to fix it in his head. “I assassinated a government agent for Jefferson Greene.”

“Still time to change your mind,” Nouel said, hands folded together so the sinews in their backs stood out. It was obvious what he thought the best course was, and Cricket was a little startled by his loyalty.

André shook his head. “Keep talking.”

It was at its heart Cricket’s plan, and she thought it was a good one. Judging by their expressions, the men didn’t disagree. Jean let a faint smile deepen the lines between the corners of his nose and the corners of his mouth, and Nouel was giving Cricket that querying eyebrow. Maurice might be a bit less sanguine, but as it was his neck first on the block, Cricket couldn’t blame him. They would need an inside man.

There were two choices. Him, or André. And André was needed elsewhere.

To his credit, though Maurice went pale and tight-faced when Cricket made her suggestions, his only reply was a nod.

“Maurice goes inside,” Cricket reiterated, wishing she could just flash-highlight the relevant text. Not with Jean in the conversation. She could talk much faster than she could speak, and with much greater information density. Words are hell. “The rest of us, except André, come in from the outside on a data run, and get intentionally messy. Carefully. While we distract Charter Trade’s security, André waits on his scoot for Maurice’s transmission. Maurice recovers what he can off the internal systems and makes a handoff to André. André ferries the data personally to Ziyi Zhou and stays with her until she sends it to Earth.”

“And we vanish into the night like ninja,” Maurice said, and embarrassed himself with a karate chop.

She glanced around the room one more time, saw tight concentration, nodding. “Maurice told us something else,” she said, looking to Nouel for permission to continue.

Maurice took it as an invitation. “The god-botherers have a theory,” he said, “that the ranids used to have a technological civilization. That they possibly abandoned it by choice. It gives us another point of leverage against Charter Trade, if I can pull out some proof. Proof, even that Greene suspects and hasn’t reported it.”

For once, it was Jean looking most puzzled. André’s relief was almost palpable. Cricket took pity on them both. “You know the rule about planetary colonies.”

“Only on worlds where the natives are prespace,” Jean said.

Cricket nodded. She knew this through her motherself. It had been her job. “There isn’t a rule for worlds that have chosen barbarism. Nobody ever thought of that. If Charter Trade is suppressing that information, the scandal could last years.”

“Oh,” Jean said. And then, quite unnecessarily, he added, “Damn. I wish Lucienne were here.”

Cricket snapped away. She hadn’t forgiven André, not exactly. And she wasn’t going to let him see her cry.

Her hand caught her discarded glass on the edge of the table. It sailed into the air; she fumbled after it, felt her fingers glance off. Nobody else was close enough to catch.

They stood and watched it fall.

It landed upright on the floor and did not shatter. A narrow column of liquor followed it down, splashed inside, spat a thread up to catch the light, and fell into concentric ripples in the cradle of the glass. Not a drop spilled.

“Wow,” Cricket said. “That was convenient.”

It was Jean Kroc who murmured, “Oh, shit.”

15

THE CYCLONE SIRENS BEGAN TO WAIL IN THE SWELTERING dark hours of morning; Cricket almost overturned the chair she had been sitting curled in, her knees cupped in her hands. She stumbled but caught herself. “Crap. Just the siren.”

André nudged her thigh with his elbow from his spot on the sofa. She glared, then shook herself and settled. He meant to be comforting. She could tell by his eyebrows. He was trying.

“We’ll have to speed up our schedule,” Nouel said, leaving Cricket grateful that he’d filled the silence. “Inside of two hours, we’ll have to resort to a commando raid at sea, and I don’t think—”

“Right,” André said. “I’m on my way.” Cricket helped him up; his palm was cool and sweating. She wanted to pull away from the contact. It nauseated her to see him nervous. Human.

“I won’t be able to help you,” Jean said, and André waved it aside with the back of his hand. “The probability storm.”

“Careful—” Lucienne’s icon said, as wide-eyed as if blind to any irony.

Cricket wondered. Lucienne had been her best friend. Lucienne would have slipped Cricket a sideways glance as she said it, and Cricket would have been meant to understand that the comment had its barbs.

This Lucienne was not her friend. Nothing had changed; André had still killed the Lucienne Cricket cared for.

Why would you choose to die—really die—even if your motherself survived? It didn’t mean that you were any less dead.

Cricket couldn’t imagine dying for Moon Morrow. But then, maybe she was just the sort of person who couldn’t imagine dying for anyone. Or the sort nobody should be dying for.

André shifted his cane to the other side and wiped his hand on his trousers. Cricket stepped back. By the time he summoned up his bulletproof smile, she couldn’t look at it. “I’ll come back. I promise.”

Don’t come back for me. But she nodded, dry-mouthed, and touched the back of his hand. “Try not to get killed.”

And there was no more irony in it when she said it than when Lucienne had.

Less than sixty seconds later, he was out in his scoot, pulling away from the dock. He’d paused to put the top up. Cricket didn’t watch him from the window, other than one quick glance when the headlamp flashed on.

She was definitely way too jumpy.

Nouel cleared his throat and said, “Message from Maurice.” Cricket, despite her promise to herself to calm the hell down, shied from a sudden flash of memory: if everyone here except the impeccable Nouel had been better dressed before they started looking shopworn, this could be any UE situation room.

Nouel gave her a curious look and kept talking, once he had Jean’s attention. “He’s not quite at the office. Says they expect to be clear for breakup within two hours; the outermost barges on Bayside are already moving out. He says to tell André that he’s not going to be able to transmit once he’s in. They’ll notice the bandwidth if they’re locked down, and protocol is to lock down.”

Cricket flinched. “I’ll call him.”

“Also, he wants me to pass a message to you, Jean.”

“Go for it,” Jean said.

Half a second later, just as Lucienne was looking as if she was about to interject a comment, her image flicked off like a closed fan. And half—no, most of Cricket’s network dropped out of connection. Routes she used daily were truncated, chats—she’d had to find new ones, in the person of her reincarnation, and start working her way up again—were empty, and archives she’d been mining for fifteen years were nonexistent. Most of the data holds were gone.

“Jean—” she said, and then bit the rest of the sentence back as Maurice’s icon resolved in the center of the room. But Jean turned to her, and she had the answer ready. “Earth’s down. No, wait. We’re down. We’re off the fucking Slide.”

“No connex,” Jean said. And Maurice interjected, “Not quite none. I’m here. They shut down the station.”

“There’s a massive probability correction under way,” Jean said. “A storm of coincidence.”

“There’s more than that,” Maurice said. “I think the planet is forking.”

“Forking?” Everybody was looking at Cricket, which was how she knew she must have said it.

There was no way she could have felt Nouel’s house rocking on the swells yet, even if a storm was coming, but still she groped backward, sat down where André had been sitting. The dark red cloth of Nouel’s sofa was soft against her palms, though the nap caught her skin. “The fucking planet is cloning itself? Planets—” She bounced up again. She stalked toward him, and she thought if he were present in the flesh, she might have hit him. “—don’t just fucking mitose.”

She heard herself, and stopped abruptly. “Maurice. Sorry.”

He blinked at her. She saw him shudder, the kind of bone-deep flex your body makes when a chill grabs you by the nape. “Okay. You’re Moon Morrow’s clone daughter.”

“Touché. You were saying when I went orbital?”

“There’s not time to explain,” he said. “Some of our scientists”—Cricket tried not to think about how easily he referred to Charter Trade as we—“think that the source of the omelite is a prehistoric explosion. Caused by the ranids’ attempts to build a Slide on-world.”

“So they had a fairly high-tech civilization,” Jean said, but not as if he understood the tiny, shuddering epiphany that hovered at the edge of Cricket’s mind. “You mentioned that before. And they lost it in the disaster?”

“The planet…forked,” Maurice said. “Split. Incompletely. Got stuck halfway. I dunno, I’m not a physicist and I’m not a conjure. If we had six-dimensional eyes maybe we could see the other half of it. And on this side…”

“They took the technology apart,” Cricket said. “Right? They didn’t lose it. They decided not to use it. And Rim is covering it up?”

Maurice nodded.

“Wow,” Cricket said. “And we haven’t got any way at all to get that information to Lucienne?”

A stupid question; she knew it when she asked it. But sometimes, you still had to ask. “I’ll call André,” she said.

He picked up immediately. “Deschênes.” And listened impassively as she outlined the situation. She felt him looking at her, as if he were across the table, and not out in the prestorm calm.

“Right,” he said, after a moment’s consideration. “Tell Maurice I’ll meet him inside.”

If André had had the engine power to manage it, he would have been seeing a redshift. The scoot was full throttle as he zipped under folding sidewalks and between water taxis, threading the needle over and over without so much as a hard rub. He was in his element, and for a moment he could forget. Enough concentration, enough adrenaline, and the thick feel of water full of churned mud and blood dropped off his skin, the noises of the wounded and the grieving fell away from his ears.

If only he could spend the rest of his life running, he thought he’d be just fine.

At this hour, the streets should have been empty, but the claxons had ended that. People and devices scurried about, making ready; sidewalks were scrolled up, rolled up, and stowed, lines cast off, the city made ready to scatter under floodlights and the occasional arcing searchlight of an observing helicopter. The Bayside barges were already peeling away, their white and yellow and sea-green hulls turned shadowy in moonlight, the water curling phosphorescent from their bows. It was an eerie sight—a hundred outbound barges with their running lights red to port and green to starboard, moving in a purposeful ballet.

All channels led from Novo Haven.

In addition to the shipping lanes, three of the inbound lighter channels blinked red-blue-orange rather than their usual green, cleared for outbound surface traffic, though lighters were still coming in on the remaining two, trailing their cargo pods behind them. Tenders hurried to them; enough of the city had broken up that André got clear glimpses of the action through the moving lines of outbound cruisers, which stopped being “barges” as soon as they were no longer moored. His was not the only one-or two-man craft skittering through the larger vessels: escort boats, last-minute errands, and people playing the odds that they could make it home or to a loved one’s residence rather than sheltering in place.

He caught up with the Charter Trade flagship before she was unmoored, just as black water rippled with carnelian and ivory moon-paths and the broken green and red streaks of reflected running lights was opening up beyond her. Her sidewalks were stowed, her engines warming, the anchors rising at her bow and stern. It was a magic moment, if he’d been in the mood to appreciate it; the instant when an office building became a ship of the open seas once more, when an it became a her.

He hailed a crew member, and got a winch sent down to haul the scoot on deck. It weighed under a hundred kilos empty; they’d just lash it along the rail and forget it. Climbing the Jacob’s ladder in a cast wasn’t something he’d want to do twice, and he tried not to think about what the way down would be like.

He’d have to get this done before the wind picked up.

I hope Maurice is ready for me, he thought, and swung himself onto the deck with some assistance from the woman running the winch.

Jean sat down kitty-corner to Cricket and leaned his elbow on his knees. “Do you really think hacking into Greene’s system is going to make much difference?”

Her eyes were closed, her head leaned against the sofa back and propped on cushions. “Maybe yes,” she said, her lips barely shaping the words. “Maybe no. It all depends on the luck of the draw. But I’ve been running clumsy, unsuccessful incursions at them for the past two weeks. They should think of me as a part of the scenery by now.”

“Oh.” He sat back, feeling useless. She must have heard him shift, because he looked up and saw the shining crescents of half-open eyes through veiling lashes. She regarded him for a moment, and he was struck by how her displayed slender throat, her open slightly moving hands, should have seemed vulnerable but instead gave the impression of a lean, dozing predator.

“Jean, I realize you feel useless. Would it help to talk?”

He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder for Nouel. Their host was still out of earshot, topside, making ready to get under way. “Lucienne,” Jean said.

Cricket closed her eyes again, her face a convincing counterfeit of serenity except where her eyelid fluttered on the right-hand side. “That’s not her, back on Earth.”

“No, it’s not.” And of course it wasn’t fair to talk to Cricket about this, when she felt the loss as acutely as he did. “She thought of herself as expendable.”

“She wasn’t,” Cricket said, after she’d been quiet long enough that he thought she wouldn’t answer. And then she fell silent again, until without opening her eyes or otherwise shifting, she reached out and fumbled up Jean’s hand by memory. “Damn. Who’s going to pick the tomatoes?”

Jean squeezed her fingers and didn’t remind her that they’d be underwater by morning. She didn’t respond. A moment later, he stood and went to help Nouel cast off, leaving Cricket behind.

The water tasted like a coming storm, and the air was full of anticipated electricity. Along the horizon, behind the moving streams of humen ships, a shadow rose as if the edge of the bright night sky was rolling up like a blind, revealing the darkness behind.

Gourami waited in the shallows at the edge of the humen city, and felt se sibs move around se and the egglings move within. The latter swam easy, well fed and content. The former were more restless, their few vocalizations soft with wrath. No person had many words to say. The discussions were over. The decisions had been reached.

The far-swimmers and the young adults had argued it, and the greatparents had decided. Tolerance had extended as far as it might. The humen and their technology were no different—no safer—than the Other Ones. And the greatparents said that persons had driven out the Other Ones, when they would not relinquish the technology that had nearly destroyed the world.

Persons were not humen; they would not make war here as the humen had upon the one-tree-island-band. They would make their own kind of war. Directed, and precise.

It had worked before. It would work again.

The greatparents remembered ahead.

The humen craft continued running before the gathering storm. The breeze was from seaward, and freshening. Gourami felt it tickle when se bobbed high in the warm water. On each side, before and behind, others waited—sibs and bandmates and clanmates and persons to whom se was totally unrelated. Every one who could reach the humen city in time, who had been within the range of the swimmers and the greatparent summoning.

Se caressed the crossbow stock. Some person—se did not hear who—gave the order. It thrummed through the water, the first coherent word loudly spoken in hours.

—advance

The ship shuddered as she got under way, as if she were coming unstuck from the water. Between the cane and the walking cast, André rode over it with only a stumble. The ship boasted enough displacement and a deep enough keel that the interfering wakes of other vessels did no more than shiver her. André made sure of his balance with the cane anyway.

He didn’t want to talk to Closs, but he needed an excuse to be there. And then, he had to argue his way in. Fortunately, Closs’s position and paranoia warranted a living assistant rather than just an executary. She knew him, and he managed to convince her that the matter was urgent enough to interrupt Closs midcrisis. “It has bearing,” André said, leaning heavily on his prop. He managed not to sigh in relief as she eyed his battered self and nodded reluctantly.

He showed himself in past security, which was defanged by the bracelet she issued. No help from the expert system today; the ship was busy, unnecessary niceties shut down. Closs must have alerted the executary to detect André anyway, because the door eased open at his approach.

André stepped inside, and from the hushed, almost deserted corridor, found himself in a war room. Closs stood, spurning his desk and his chair, pacing slowly with his arms folded. As André came forward he raised a hand, one finger lifted, eyes focused on the middle distance and tracking rapidly. André swung his casted leg in time with his cane and Closs’s pacing, and stopped two meters from the near end of the arc the major wore in the carpet.

No more than thirty seconds passed before Closs glanced up, connection cut, and said, “Is it worse than thousands dead and downed communications?”

“No,” André answered. “But it’s not much better.”

“Thirty seconds,” Closs said flatly, André’s heart bloomed with joy that he had never developed a reputation for melodrama.

“Jefferson Greene is going to provoke a ranid uprising, if he hasn’t already. He destroyed one village that I know of. Took captives.”

Closs tipped his head back and let it loll for a moment, then took one deep breath and reassembled his facade. “I know,” he said. “How do you?”

André thumped his cane on the deck. “You sent me into the middle of his damned massacre. Hunting your renegade. He’s out of control, Tim.”

There was a pause. Then Closs said, “Thanks. It’s going to have to wait. Look, why don’t you ride out the storm here? There’s a skeleton staff in the galley. Go down, get fed. Are you armed?”

A loaded question. “Never without,” André answered.

Closs half smiled, then glanced away. It was a dismissal. André turned for the door—

—and almost walked into Maurice, who had a mug of coffee in each hand. He dodged André neatly, making André feel like a lumbering beast on his cane, and set one cup on Closs’s desk. The major, focused on the voices in his head, nodded thanks.

It seemed to be his only delivery, because—the other cup still steaming in his left hand—he followed André back out, without a word until the door was closed behind them. Then he said, “Going to the mess?”

“If I can find it.”

Maurice sipped his coffee left-handed. “I’ll show you the way. Maurice Sadowski.” He held out the right hand.

“André Deschênes,” André said, and took it. He was expecting the handoff then, but he pulled his hand back empty.

“Come on. We’d better eat before it gets too rough.”

André hesitated a half-step, and Maurice hurried to walk beside him. They made idle conversation through the corridor and down the lift.

The mess wasn’t busy, but a few crew and employees ate with haste and concentration at small tables. “Who would I see to volunteer?” André asked. They queued for food, André stumping awkwardly on his cane.

Maurice gave it an eloquent glance.

“I didn’t mean as a deckhand,” André snapped. Maurice grinned, and dropped a packet of chocolate pudding on his tray.

“It’s full of calcium,” he said, as André was about to lift it and replace it on the rack. But it was a glimpse of a black glossy data chit underneath that made André return it to the tray.

“Do you always mother strangers?”

“Always,” Maurice said. André snorted, and they flashed their cards at the cash register on the way out, pausing a moment to let it total the food. Maurice led André to an empty table. It rocked slightly when André set his food down: on gimbals. He’d have to watch his knees if they hit any discernable chop.

André palmed the chit and slipped it into a pocket as he moved the pudding off his tray. “I was raised right the first time.” He heard the glib words roll off his tongue and stopped speaking abruptly.

A perfect piece of luck, it turned out. Because he heard the flutter in the background noise of the mess, and started to his feet before he consciously registered the source of the problem. He dropped his fork on the tray, where it clinked dully, and let his hand drop to hover beside the butt of the short arm concealed under the hem of his tunic.

There were five Rimmers near the main entrance, and three more at the back door, all uniformed. They didn’t look hungry.

“André?”

He didn’t need to answer. Maurice had turned to follow his gaze, and as two members of the first team came forward, he lunged to his feet. The table rocked, creaking on its gimbals. He glanced over his shoulder. André, aware of their surroundings, already knew what he would see. There were two more armed women and a man behind them, blocking escape through the kitchens.

Should have seen it coming. Should have seen it coming when Closs asked him if he was armed, if he’d been operating at anything resembling normal capacity.

The one André took for a leader stepped forward and indicated his ID. “Dayvid Kountché,” he said. “Please come with us quietly, and you’ll be treated well.”

“Certainly, Officer,” André said, but what he tight-beamed Maurice was: “Well, I guess the time for subtlety is over.”

Maurice just gave him a wide-eyed stare. Brave enough in his own way, but not exactly an action hero. It was on André.

And then Maurice cocked his head, a funny sideways kind of gesture like acquiescence. André was cc’d on the message Maurice snap-sent Cricket: Fisher, now would not be a bad time.

Cricket’s agreement flashed green over both of them, and as Maurice shouted—squalled, really—and grabbed the edge of the table, snapping it up hard, the ship’s lights and engine sizzled and died. A split second’s silence broke on a startled scream; the dinner trays went up and out and over, and whatever had been on them spattered Kountché and the floor around him.

The link was still up. “André, go,” Maurice called down it, and threw himself at Kountché. They went sprawling, elbows and fists and grunting, a shot that ricocheted at least once. One shot, and then a woman shouting at whomever to put the gun up.

At least one of the Rimmers had a brain. There was one of André and one of Maurice, and eleven of them, and a couple dozen bystanders. The odds were not in the cops’ favor.

Nor were they in Maurice’s. And there wasn’t a damned thing André could do to help him. Harder choice than he would have expected, but he dove for the darkened galley, his pistol in his hand. André had an advantage: the only person in the room he minded shooting was lying on the floor.

His augments at least let him see where the tables were in the dark. But the Rimmers had that, too, and the ones by the galley must have seen him moving, because one stepped in and dealt him a stunning blow on the point of the shoulder with the butt of her gun.

So they wanted him alive.

André had no such scruples; without turning, he leveled his pistol in her face point-blank and pulled the trigger. The pistol took caseless ammo; he had a good thirty rounds. Her jerk backward was more dying reflex than recoil; her blood and bone still splattered him. The smell of iron made his gorge rise, acid stinging his sinuses. Shit.

The second one was also too close to control him with a gun. It kept her alive; André broke her forearm with his cane as he went by. The third would have shot him, but André heard the tap tap of a jamming gun.

He could run on the cast, after a fashion, swinging himself along with the cane. But it wasn’t pretty, and it wouldn’t help him long.

Skeleton staff, Closs had said. He hoped to hell there was a ladder up to the main deck in the back of the galley. They had to bring food in somehow, right? So, logically…

He laid down two shots over his shoulder to discourage pursuit. Something crunched. It sounded like bone. “Maurice?”

“Go!” said the voice in his head, and then a burst of pain and static ended the transmission hard. He winced. Maurice might have been knocked unconscious.

But in André’s professional opinion that wasn’t the case.

And the shocking thing—as he found the damned ladder, broke the security lock, ducked a badly aimed shot, and hot-wired the box—was that it hurt.

It wasn’t supposed to hurt. Maurice wasn’t anybody. Wasn’t anybody to André, and also wasn’t anybody in particular.

And he’d died so André could get out.

Fucking waste of a man’s life, was what that was.

He paused inside the door at the top of the ladder—you called it a ladder on a ship, but it was really a flight of stairs—and listened hard. Somebody out there, yes. And noise like the outside.

Lucky breaks, bad and good. His own luck; tonight, there was nobody pulling his chain.

Waste of a man’s life, to trade it for somebody like André.

Except André had nothing to do with it, did he? He could have been a paper airplane, flying from hand to hand. All that mattered was the information written on his wings.

André zorched the lock, was ready when the door snapped open. The Rimmers on the other side were not.

André shot them both.

Nonfatally.

They were just doing their jobs.

There was no way he was getting the scoot unloaded. He was going to have to jump, and swim for it until he could hijack a small craft from somebody.

Through choppy wake-slashed seas, in the teeth of an onrushing storm. Weighed down with his walking cast.

A thump of thunder rattled his teeth, so close he felt it as a blow.

Okay, so maybe he was paying for that luck after all.

Maurice spoke; Cricket snapped the Rim ship’s breakers and sent her into darkness, drifting. And into real, immediate danger of collision with the escaping vessels on either side of her and behind. And then Cricket had to duck, hard and fast, as Rim’s security protocols found her and grabbed, hard. She dumped herself out of the system, flicked a trailing edge of code out of their grasp like a coattail, and hoped like hell they hadn’t gotten a trace on her. There was transmitted pain, buffered by dampers; someone hit him, hard, again and again and again.

“Maurice?”

Sharp silence, and nothing. He might have dropped the connect, but it felt open—open, with nothing on the other side. His absence pushed over her like a buffeting wave, knocked her under, dragged her down. Not again, not again, not again.

The tail. Oh, hell, there it was. A trace on her signal, like phosphorescence curling in a wake. She dropped channel fast, and, oh God, Maurice. Maurice!

Mouth open, she spasmed, gasped, expecting lungs full of weighty pain, blackness, and dark water. The warm night air—her own continued existence—shocked her as much as brightness would have if she’d been drowning, and somehow kicked herself into daylight again before the black water could suck her down.

She lay on the couch and gasped, chest heaving, lank hair stuck across her face. Two minutes at least before she could move, before she could think of anything more than air in, air out, heaving as if she’d beached. Then elbows against the back of the sofa, hands on the lip, shoving herself to her feet.

“Jean!” Two more breaths, sucked deep enough to hurt, a stitch in her side as if she’d been running. “Jean! Nouel!” Scrambling barefoot over rug and parawood deck. They’d come for Maurice and André. That meant, that meant—

“They’re on to us, they’re—”

She burst through the hatch yelling and drew up so short she went to her knees. Hard on the wooden decking, toes bent under. The pain washed her vision, but couldn’t eradicate what she’d seen.

Jean and Nouel lay facedown on the deck, hands on their necks, legs spread wide. A man in Charter Trade green stood over each, both four steps back with their rifles nestled to their shoulders and angled down to cover the prone men.

Cricket herself stared down the barrels of two more leveled guns.

On her knees seemed like a safe place to stay. Slowly, she raised her hands. Jean’s head was turned; he looked right at her. She didn’t meet his eyes, and saw by the flinch along his jaw that he understood why.

At least she had the comfort of knowing she’d been wrong to suspect Maurice.

Maurice.

She would have pressed her fists against her teeth if she’d dared lower her hands. No more. Please no more people dying in my head.

“Cricket Earl Murphy,” said a fifth man, who held only a handgun and who wasn’t pointing it at anyone, “you are under arrest for sedition, terrorism, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, data trespass—”

In a moment, she thought with outlandish slow-motion lucidity, he would order her down on her stomach and kick her legs wide to make it difficult for her to rise. Then he would either handcuff all three of them and bring them in for a show trial, or he would order his men to fire two bullets into the back of each of their heads and leave their bodies on the drifting barge. The storm would handle the cleanup; sometimes people—and boats—didn’t make it back when the city ran before a storm.

“Please lie down,” the officer said. In the silence of a cocking rifle, the salt storm-wind lifting her hair, Cricket breathed a prayer. Along the horizon, rising clouds walked on insect legs of lightning. The crack that followed might have been gunfire, or thunder.

17

GREENE STEPPED THROUGH THE DOORWAY, WIPED HIS forelock out of his eyes, and stood dripping on the worn-out carpet. “Nice fucking evacuation, Tim.”

Closs thought of half a dozen schoolyard taunts—next time you start a war, check to make sure we have an army first— and remembered himself in time not to engage. He settled for parade rest and an impassive expression. “We lost,” he said, and waited for the emotions to cross Jeff’s face.

He was only slightly disappointed. Greene attempted to counterfeit innocence, but only managed to look angry. “The hell you say.”

I should have stayed in the service. “I had a conversation with M~ Morrow while you were…wherever you went, Jeff. Core knows that the ranids are posttech, or if they don’t, they will as soon as connex is back up. We have no rights to this world. We lost. It’s all over but the jail time. Assuming we survive what looks like a fucking alien invasion, Jeff. If the alien ships Slide back from wherever they just Slid off to and have another go at us. Have you paused to think about that?”

The silence dragged a little. Closs expected Greene to squirm, thrash, deny. Instead, he slipped both hands into his suit pockets and pushed them forward, ruining the line as the autofit stretched cartoonishly. He bit his lower lip, and then looked up at Closs and said, “The information being out doesn’t matter if the froggies don’t exist.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word. They’re ranids. What do you mean, ‘don’t exist’?”

“Because it’s so much less racist to call them ‘froggies’ in Latin? I mean, I have a bioweapon, Tim. We can get rid of the little bastards for good.”

“…and the aliens?”

“The aliens are ranids from the other fork, right? Well, let me tell you something else you probably haven’t been paying enough attention to notice, Major. The omelite wells are pumping sludge.”

“Sludge?”

“All of them.” Greene waited three beats. “We’re out of business. And your alien invasion? I’m willing to bet it isn’t coming back.”

The humen argued while Gourami struggled to understand them. Se dared not press against the glass; instead se hunkered back in the darkness, se new net-vest making an irregular outline, licked by the rain and the wind.

Se companions hadn’t found the captives, or any sign, on the fleeing barge that the Company humen used as a village-heart. They had taken Caetei, and se would not leave Caetei in their dry, rough hands. So se had attached self to the humen leader’s helicopter as it fled the overrun barge. And se clung there, water sloshing in se brood pouch, se hand and toefingers wrapped in a deathgrip on wet metal until bone ran with traced flame and digits cramped in claws.

Se still shook from the flight. The storm, though it tugged se and would have tumbled self from the deck of this new ship if it could, was just a storm—rain and wind, safe enough if one were far from shore. Se’d already swum through the chop to reach here. Se could not have risked being spotted hanging on the skid of the arriving helicopter, and so se had dropped into the ocean and swum aboard.

The storm was se friend. There were almost no humen on deck, and when they emerged, they did so briefly. Se could endure the pitch and surge of the ship as it rode heavy seas. A bullet would have been harder to survive, and self had no illusions how the humen would feel about a stowaway person now.

But se could not leave while the humen leaders were arguing. Not when they were arguing about people, and when they were arguing also about the Other Ones. And Gourami struggled to read their lips through the rain-streaked glass. The light-colored one seemed to be defending an idea or an argument, waving away the dark-colored one’s objections. He pulled something from his pocket, a box that he opened to show one two three four five six silver tubes. He lined them up on the table and tapped the one on the end with his fingernail. They sat there, silent and small and inoffensive, frosting faintly on the outsides unless that was a smear of condensation on the glass.

Sometimes, Gourami caught the outline of words on the humen mouths. Mortality rate. Effective. All age morphs. Unethical. Retrovirus.

Genocide.

The dark one said that last, and Gourami, shaking, pained and frozen in brewing horror, was pierced by hope for a moment as the pale one drew back. The humen stared at each other, a contest of wills rather than support and assent. All Gourami heard was the rush of wind, the creak of the ship as it pitched and yawed.

I’m not going to jail for a bunch of frogs, the pinkish one said. It looked down and away from the other, at an angle, and Gourami saw what its lips shaped, clearly. We can’t lose this planet, Tim. And Core won’t protect us if there’s no tanglestone.

Fight him, Gourami willed, leaning one hand foolishly on the glass, the rain slashing se back like whips. As if se could press close to the human, influence him somehow. As if he would understand the words se thought at him so fiercely. As if it would matter at all.

Se was not a greatparent. Se did not have the skill of making luck.

For Christ’s sake, the one called Tim said. He turned his back on the pink one, and that let Gourami see what he said clearly. I don’t want to know what you do.

At first, Cricket tried to sleep. Her connex was damped—she’d get nothing as long as she was on this boat—and she could only play so much solitaire.

But she might as well try to fly to the moons, or swim to the bottom of the ocean, or turn back time. Actually, she thought—composed on her narrow cot, staring at the bulkhead where it curved in over her head—she’d have a better chance, statistically speaking, of any of those. She felt the ship move ponderously in the heaving ocean, its massive length and heavy keel a match for the fury of the cyclone—at least for now.

She’d left the windowless compartment lit, preferring to see anything that might come at her in the night. And because it made the creaks and shudders of the storm-tossed vessel easier to bear—if the light was on, it was just a ship being driven by the storm. In the dark, she would have been a rag tossed and shaken in the teeth of a beast.

When the door whirred open, she came to her feet. She was not expecting a crouched and shivering ranid, water pooling beneath it on the deck. “Don’t come in!” she said. “The door’s locked from the outside.”

The ranid—a far-swimmer, with the net-vest knotted about it like you saw on dramas, and pregnant, which they never were in the media—gestured at Cricket impatiently. She moved forward, shuffling and sore but not slow by any means, and stepped over the guard slumped against the wall. She didn’t ask if he was dead or unconscious.

All the corridors were abandoned, which did not surprise Cricket. The ship seemed to be running a skeleton crew, and they’d be needed to keep her together in the face of the cyclone. The ranid led her along its own backtrail of dripped water, but paused as they entered an aft ladderway. It drew Cricket into the shelter behind the ladder with the light grip of slimy twig-fingers, and held up a child’s waterproof slate. —Cricket Murphy, it keyed. —Humen call me Gourami. We must destroy this ship.

“There are people on it!” Cricket whispered, leaning forward so her face would show in the light of the screen. “The lifeboats won’t make it through this.”

The ranid hesitated. Then it turned the slate away from her and bent over it, fingers moving with precise rapidity. When it raised the slate to Cricket’s eye level. —Must. ?Tim? And ?Jeff? have virus to kill ranid people. All of us. We cannot let them. Please. I need your help.

“We stay with the ship or I die, Gourami. And—if we sink the ship, how do you keep the, the virus”—shit, Rim is using bioweapons on the natives? Fuck me raw—“from getting into the water?”

—Fire, the frog typed impatiently, goggling up at Cricket with beseeching eyes.—Virus is sealed in tubes, in refrigerated box. Help me sabotage the ship. And then we swim. It is only a storm.

“I can’t!” Panic, tightening her throat, her heart thumping like an angry fist.

—You will hold onto my vest, Gourami typed. —I will swim for you. All you need to do is breathe. And stay warm.

Easier said than done.

Cricket swallowed acid. “It’s not easy to burn a metal ship,” she said. “I don’t suppose you packed a bomb?”

The ranid shook its head, ducking apologetically. —Must, it typed, and Cricket thought if it were a human it would have been weeping in frustration.

How many people were on this ship? Closs and Greene. And thirty crew members? Fifty? “How do you know they have this virus? How do you know they’ll use it?”

It had to be a misunderstanding. A mistake. It was the sort of thing a villain in a brainimation might do. And Cricket held on to that self-delusion for almost a minute, until Gourami’s careful explanation and word-for-word account of what it had seen chipped away at her disbelief, and left her leaning against the bulkhead, gasping.

“He said that.”

—Yes.

“And Closs didn’t stop him.”

—Closs said he did not want to know anything about.

“Oh, fuck me running,” Cricket said. Thirty people.

Thirty.

Maybe fifty at the outside.

How many had she killed on Patience?

Was it different if you went in knowing you had made the decision to kill? Was it different if you did it in self-defense? In defense of another? In defense of a species?

Or was it still just murder, like what André had done to Lucienne, like what Closs had done to Maurice?

Like what Gourami had done to the guard?

“All right,” Cricket said. “If you don’t have a bomb, we have to get to the hydrogen compression tanks.”

—Cricket?

Cricket sighed exasperation. Bad enough to be here, doing this. Worse to have to stop and think about it. “Come on. Come on.”

The storm was going to kill him, and André thought he should probably be more upset about that than he was. But there was a certain element of justice in it, if you believed in such things, and he was pretty fucking tired. Ziyi’s barge would never survive the cyclone in the confines of the harbor, and André could not run before the storm without her codes—even assuming the electrical system had survived her death. Fire systems had extinguished her corpse; belowdecks, the surfaces were covered in a mixture of greasy soot and foam. He could not contact Nouel or Cricket—or Lucienne, for that matter—and he had no means of reaching Jean. The data that Maurice had died for was in his hands, and he had no way to get it where it would do any good.

So he stood on the bridge, behind the barge’s tall glass windows, and sipped liquor that Ziyi was never going to get around to drinking, and watched the green and red running lights stream away on either side. He had the stolen flashboat and nowhere to go in it.

He could run to Jean’s minifab. It would be watertight. If the storm didn’t wash it away. He could head for a refugee ship; there were always one or two, among the last vessels to clear the bay. They would be waiting for fishers straggling home from the bayou, for the crews of the last lighters to touch down.

Charter Trade ran the refugee ships. Charter Trade was going to be looking for André Deschênes. If he could make it through the rising wind, the falling rain.

The choices paralyzed him. He understood some of what had happened—the probability storm, the sharp brief moment where every choice had been made, where every potentiality had become real. But that was over now. When he chose, he was choosing. He was collapsing a wave.

And every choice could be the wrong choice. And then he’d be like Cricket—like Moon—with the blood of a world on his hands.

Or he could stay here, on this ship that had no chance of moving, and wait for the storm.

The anchor cables were already groaning, the waves breaking over the rail. It would not be long.

He finished the drink and dropped the glass on the floor. It didn’t break but rolled down the pitching deck to clink against the useless navigation pane. He should have thrown it against the bulkhead. In a moment, the barge rocked, the deck slanted the other way. The glass slid instead of rolling.

André brought his heel down sharply and cracked the glass under his cast. It shattered, skipping down the deck, and he grabbed the wheel so that he would not fall.

And then his headset blinked live with an instant message, and he accepted hastily and then laughed out loud. Because it was—of all the mad possibilities—from Jean Kroc. Typed, obviously, bereft of mood or context modifiers, containing nothing but the words.

André, follow my beacon. It will bring you in.

André ran before the wind, hunkered under the flashboat’s canopy, skipping across whitecaps like a spun stone. It would have been easy to get lost among the reeds and the narrow channels in the dark and the slashing rain. But Jean’s beacon came with a map.

He followed it, and tried not to think of the bayou and the unburied bodies sunk in its storm-churned mire. Faster would have been better, but he was pushing his reflexes and the autopilot’s, and if he ran aground there was no one to rescue him. And now he had a reason to live—half a reason to live, anyway—because he traded messages with Jean while he traveled, and Jean told him a lot of things.

“Will you do the time?” Jean asked, outright.

The chit André carried could be whatever tiny payback he could offer for Cricket and Nouel, whether they were alive or dead. Dead, most likely; he didn’t like to fool himself with false hope and denial.

He’d made some mistakes.

It still might be all right.

“I’ll testify,” he said. And plugged Maurice’s chip into the flashboat’s playback so he could upload the data to Jean as he drove, in case he didn’t make it in.

The storm covered any sound of the flashboat’s engine as André doused the lights and motored in near-darkness to within sight of the mooring, relying on his augments to find his way. The craft Jean had liberated at Nouel’s barge wasn’t the only boat tied up by the paramangrove roots. Not surprising, given the beacon; somebody in Rim must have gotten lucky. Through the coded channel, André said, “Jean, you have company on the way, if it’s not there yet.”

“Thanks,” Jean said. “I can see them on the motes. They’re unlikely to find their way in—shit.”

“What?”

“Well,” Jean said, reluctantly. “They appear to have brought equipment. And some of it looks like it might go boom.”

“Am I going to need this boat again?” André fought it into the shelter of a paramangrove, wincing as the wind blew it hard against the roots and something crunched.

“Anything’s possible.” André waited; Jean caved. “But we’ll probably be dead. Or gone out the back door.”

“You have a back door?”

“Every good fox has a back door, André. Can you handle the company? There seem to be about six of them. No, seven.”

“And one in the boats,” André said. “Sure. I can handle that.”

He checked his pistol.

He had five bullets left.

The trees looked easy, but not with his leg in that cast. André popped the bubble on the flashboat to get a little more room and hauled himself up on the gunwale. The boat tipped somewhat, but he extended his broken leg across the beam, and it didn’t rock more than once. There was an underdash light, dim and greenish. Rain lashed his scalp and trickled down his back as he bent forward to struggle with the straps on the cast. The boat was already shipping water. He didn’t expect to see it again—but then, he didn’t really expect to come back.

The bones were at least partially healed. If it had been a less complicated break, he would have been walking unassisted after three weeks. As he opened the clamshell halves of the cast, he told himself that his orthopod was being unnecessarily conservative.

His body heat evaporated in cool moisture, as if someone lifted a warm cloth from his skin and left only shreds of vapor behind. The flashboat had a first-aid kit; he dressed the calf in gauze where hardware broke the skin, and wound it with waterproof bandaging, trying to ignore how the shank had wasted. He’d be fine without the cast.

If the leg would hold his weight. If he could stop thinking about the fall that awaited him if he slipped, in the rain and the dark. If it wasn’t for the red memory of bone and blood and incapacitating pain.

Meticulously, André removed his other shoe. He placed it beside the cast in the flashboat, then checked to be sure his gun was securely in place. He thought about programming the autopilot to rev the engines to life after a five-minute delay—as a distraction—but either he’d be dead by then or he’d be better off with the Rimmers not knowing there was anybody home but them and Jean Kroc. The beacon was enough of a clue that somebody was coming.

The boat gave one more good wobble when he stood. He stabilized it; the effort sent a spike of pure white electricity up his leg.

This wasn’t going to be any fun at all.

The bark of the paramangrove was slick, but he managed to wriggle and slide into a low branch, kicking off from the spreading roots with his uninjured leg. From there, he could all but walk up the branches, though he limited himself to more of a painstaking sidle.

Before his adventure in the swamp, he would have skipped along the branches as if trotting along a sidewalk, sidling effortlessly from shadow to shadow. Now he stopped and calculated each step, lifting his good leg up first so he could heave the rest of him after, one hand always on a branch or the trunk of the paramangrove.

Good joke, that. André alone knew of three different worlds that had species called something like paramangrove, neomangrove, whatever. He guessed it didn’t matter, though, if you never got off the ground.

The rain and wind shipped about him, and farther from the trunk, branches lashed. He felt the vibrations through the soles of his feet; they thundered and thumped and itched in his healing bone until he felt like the bridge of a violin. He crept along the branches hunched, trying to present as small a silhouette as possible to the wind.

The guard by the boats was just as well ignored. He couldn’t spare a bullet, and the sounds of a scuffle would just alert the others. Assuming that André could win that argument in his current weakened state.

That was the most worrying question of all.

Well, he’d heal. Or he’d have more to worry about than a shattered limb.

“Jean, you still there?”

“Like a bog tick. And so are my friends by the door.”

“Do you have any weapons?”

“If they don’t blow the place apart around me, I can defend myself when they enter. But if they take the probability engine offline, then we’ve lost anyway. It’s our only way to get to Lucienne. I sent the data on ahead.”

The conversation was silent on André’s end; he willed his conversation into the headset. Jean, without implants, answered verbally.

“Good. Right,” André said. “Uplink me a schematic of the opposition, please?”

Jean did it, and André paused and considered. There were three on the branch, two covering, two—not counting the one at the boat—serving as a picket. And the most dangerous weapon on site wasn’t his sidearm, or that of any of the Rimmers.

It was the bundle of explosives that Jean had correctly identified, and that they were affixing to the trunk of one of the largest and most stately trees. It was a small enough package that he was reasonably certain it contained one of two or three shock-resistant high explosives, which would have to be triggered by a small quantity of more volatile explosive. If they had any sense, the Rimmers wouldn’t try to hook up the detonator—and the timer—to the bomb until it was secure. Then they’d place a blast shield over it, to shape the charge, and retreat.

“You don’t have any booby traps?”

“What do you want, killer robot squirrels? They already disarmed the weapon I had covering the door. You distract them enough for me to get this door open without getting my face blown off, and you’ll have all the help you’re crying out for.”

The officers had lit their work area with IR floods clamped to nearby tree limbs; these suited André’s augments fine.

“Yeah,” André said. “It’d be nice.” He wanted some elevation on the Rimmers, but not too much. And with his leg fragile and the wind threatening to sweep him from his slick-wet perch with every painstaking motion, he was asking for a noisy slip. Eventually, though, he found a limb he could straddle, a lateral branch crossing it at a forty-five-degree angle about a half-meter higher. It didn’t point in quite the right direction, but it would do.

The wind wasn’t going to help either. The labyrinth of branches made its gusts chaotic; it blew cold down his neck and rain into his eyes. And not only would he have to watch all those flickering leaves and try to outsmart the wind, he was shooting some twenty meters with a handgun. At night, amid trees that creaked and shifted and moaned as they rubbed together, on branches that thumped branches, sending showers of fat droplets through the canopy.

It was a crazy, impossible shot.

“Jean,” he said. “I need a little luck.”

“That’s still an extraordinarily bad idea.”

“If it wasn’t important—”

Jean’s silence implied much. As did the slow deliberation with which he said, “By which we prove ourselves no more capable, under pressure, of picking the hard and risky path than any Charter Trade exec.”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” Jean said. André heard clicking. Was Jean actually using a keyboard? “It’s all right because we’re the good guys, right? Consider it done. Look, just disable the charge and get inside the door, okay? Don’t worry about anything but speed.”

Oh, the implications in that demand. André steadied his hands on the cross branch and sighted, timing the whip of leaves, the sway of branches, the movement of the officer as he finished setting the charge against the door and turned to receive the detonator from his assistant. Waiting the moment. The gale still rose, the rain stinging hard. The limb the Rimmers stood on was as broad as a sidewalk, and it would take André at least five seconds to reach it, probably another second and a half to get to the door. If nobody shot him along the way. If he didn’t rebreak his leg. If…

The moment came, a lull, a luff, as if the storm drew a breath.

André caressed the trigger.

Loud as the end of the world, loud even over the roar of the storm through the trees, the gun wrenched in his hand. One shot.

The officer who had had the detonator in his hands—

—had no hands. He toppled backward, blood trailing like strewn confetti. The other two cleared the branch so fast that André couldn’t tell if they dove aside or had been blown clear.

It didn’t matter. He moved. Clipped the pistol into its magnetic holster, dropped three meters, caught himself on rough slimed wood, and swung. His shoulder wrenched, his left hand tore. His hot, bloody palm skidded on rain-cold bark. A weapon barked, and something drew a line of fire along his hip and thigh.

Flailing, swearing, André swung and fell to the lower branch, managing to take most of the shock on his good leg. The branch didn’t even dip under his weight. Blood oozed from the gunshot wound, made treacherous footing deadly. He went to one knee.

Luck. He felt the hiss of a bullet pass him, never even heard the report. The wind that had saved him frayed the sound. Leaving handprints in blood, André scrambled forward, crouched like a froggie. There was light ahead, suddenly, an oblong shape. He dove toward it, heard this gunshot, all right, as Jean unloaded the shotgun over his head. Once, twice, three times in under two seconds. Cold rain rivuleted André’s scalp, dripped from his eyebrows. Jean might have two more rounds, or five. André couldn’t clearly see the gun.

He fell inside the door. Jean grabbed him by the collar, backing up, and hauled his feet inside.

Blood smeared everything as André pushed himself to his feet. It was dark, opaque as milk. For a moment, he stared at it, stunned. “How bad?” Jean asked.

André shook his head. “Not bad.” And then he poked the wound in his leg to be sure, and hissed. No, not bad. “Stings like a bastard. You said you had a back way out?”

Jean handed him the shotgun. “Watch the door. Stay back.”

The officers might have another detonator. André and Jean shared a look; they didn’t need to share the words. André hauled himself up. “Lucienne?”

“She’s on the VR,” Jean said. “I don’t really have screens.”

The temptation to turn and see what Jean was doing, to ogle his bizarre hand-shopped console with its scorch marks and its rainbowed, heat-discolored metal, was unbearable. André folded his hands on the shotgun and watched the door. Five minutes, seven. “Can you see what they’re doing out there?”

“Bringing up another detonator,” Jean said. “Come here, plug into this thing. We’ll download your head to Lucienne.”

“She’s already got the stuff from Maurice?” André dug inside his shirt, found it in the pocket next to his skin. “God, got a chair? My leg—”

He’d have gnawed it off, given half a reason. It couldn’t hurt more. Jean rose, silently, and gestured him into the chair. “I got it to her. She wants your hard memory, too. Anything you have on Closs.”

“It’s all wet memory.” But he could dump some of it to hard. Most of it. As he settled himself and surrendered the shotgun back to Jean, he was already transferring. A matter of microseconds, once he set the pull variables. It wouldn’t get everything. It might get enough. “There’s no back door, is there, Jean? This is my fucking testimony.”

“Would I lie?” Jean said. He glanced at the door. André couldn’t hear what was going on out there, but the Rimmers had to have brought the fresh detonator up by now. “Put the headset on.”

You’d lie and lie again, André thought. Neither he nor Jean had had the time to get the device off the outside of the door. It was still stuck there, a deadly limpet mine.

He closed the VR set over his eyes and looked into Lucienne’s. “Hello, M~ Spivak.”

“Dump,” she said.

“Dumping,” he replied. He slotted the chit, gave her the unsorted contents of his head, all the information Maurice had died for, and Cricket, probably, and Nouel. Everything that he and Jean were going to die for now.

All his secrets.

André Deschênes felt naked, and full of a numinous truth. It took under ninety seconds. He felt nothing.

Lucienne had been looking aside, perhaps conversing with someone on another connection. But she glanced back and smiled when he was done, a wide, red-lipped, flashing smile. “I won’t be able to get you a suspended sentence, André,” she said. “But this might take off some time.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “That’s not what I did it for.”

She winked and cut the connection.

The chamber door blew in.

André lifted his head in a plain white room. “I’m dead,” he said.

“No,” Jean answered. “You’re on Earth. Feel the gravity.”

He lifted one foot, the other. There was no wound on his hip. His leg didn’t ache. His palm wasn’t torn. Blood, fatigue, and rainwater did not blur his sight.

“How?”

Jean smiled, bristled face sparkling like mica in the unforgiving light. “Same way Cricket got to Novo Haven.” He paused, but another voice filled his silence as the door whisked aside.

“You’re dead, M~ Deschênes,” Lucienne Spivak said. She wore a butter-colored jumpsuit a little paler and more golden than her skin, her black hair dressed up and sparkling with jeweled feather-pins. “Charter Trade officers killed you on Greene’s World, approximately seventeen seconds ago. I realize this comes as something of a shock.”

André Deschênes is dead. Long live whoever the hell I am. “Cricket?”

“We haven’t heard,” she said. “There’s no connex yet. I’m sorry.”

She was talking to André, but she was looking at Jean. And Jean was looking back at her.

“I’m not him,” Jean said.

Lucienne came three more steps, leaned in, turned her head and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’m not her either. You’d better know that from the top.”

André turned his back and walked away. There was bound to be someone in the area who could find him a shower and cot. And he couldn’t stomach standing there and watching them stare at each other anymore.

And he wanted a nap before somebody came to arrest him.

They were well clear of the explosion by the time the hydrogen tanks that Cricket had rigged went off. They heard it through the storm, and Cricket saw the column of flame, and some of the burning wreckage when it fell. None of it came close to them, though—Gourami was already swimming strongly away, and the lights of the cruiser had already been out of sight.

Cricket, at least, was praying they’d cooked off the virus rather than releasing it into the ocean. She didn’t know if ranids prayed, and it didn’t seem like a good time to ask. Wind whipped her; rain hammered her; the tall seas tossed them both. Cricket put her whole will into her hands, knotted in Gourami’s harness, and the ranid kept her head above water. She lost feeling in her fingers; she thought she might lose use of both hands. Water blinded her. Slammed her. Spun them like flotsam, like dancers, like foam on the curve of a wave.

The ocean under the storm was warm, warm as the bayou in sunlight. If it had been cold she would have died, rattling teeth, hard shivers, and then the calm chill of sleep in the dark dark ocean.

But it was warm, and Gourami kept her head above water. And Cricket lived.

The storm passed in fifty quarters. Dehydration was the worst enemy, though Cricket got some moisture from whitefish that Gourami hunted. She missed the storm, when the sun baked her. In the storm, she’d been able to catch rainwater in her open mouth, a little. She let her hair fall over her face to protect her skin as much as possible. Gourami hid them both under festoons of algae. They floated without moving when a nessie as long as the sunken cruiser glided past, its gray back just another long gliding wave…rolling in the wrong direction.

When it was gone, Gourami ducked underwater, and croaked over and over, calling, calling again.

They drifted a day and a half before the search volunteer ranids found them, a coast guard cutter gliding behind them. Of the ship Cricket had destroyed, there were no other survivors.

There was no contact with Earth; neither Closs nor Greene were there to demand her arrest and detention. When she was released from the hospital, she went free.

Some nine months later, the first liner arrived. And with it, the capacity for communication with Rim and Core were reestablished. It would take several years to repair and reconstruct the transfer station, but there were still more ships outbound to Greene’s World, and they could form the framework for a temporary system. The planet wasn’t dead.

The first thing Cricket did when she had connex was call Lucienne. She was sitting in a white cane chair on the outside deck of a little bar in Landward, waiting for Nouel, nursing a seabreeze that had cost a mint. Grapefruit juice wasn’t cheap, anymore.

It was meant to be a brief call; it had already been on the news that the Greene’s World Charter Trade Corporation was disbanded. Lucienne said there was no need for Cricket to testify. André Deschênes and Jean Kroc had served.

“Do you want to talk to André, Cricket? He’s awaiting sentencing, but I can get a call through.” She smiled. “He’ll do less time than Morrow. They’re not letting her out again.”

Cricket paused, and considered tangled emotions. She interlaced her fingers and rolled her neck to crack it. “Call me Fisher,” she said. “It’s what I go by now. And no. Not really.”

Lucienne nodded. “Do you still see the ranid called Gourami?”

“Sometimes,” Cricket admitted. “Se’s busy parenting. Thirty-six egglings. Apparently, none of them are related. ‘Gourami’s family.’ They were on the news.”

“André said he wonders if you will take it something from him.”

So Cricket knew that Lucienne had André in another chat. And that was fine; it was good to know he was doing all right.

“What sort of something?”

“Payment on a debt. A story, he says.”

A story. Gourami had told her a lot of stories while they drifted. And Cricket had told Gourami a few.

And they had stayed in touch, though Gourami was a parent and a far-swimmer now, honored among se kin.

Yes. Cricket could take Gourami a story. But she wanted to know something before she said yes. “Is it a good story or a sad story? I mean, how does it end, Lucienne?”

Lucienne’s eyes defocused briefly, her chin dropping. When she looked back, she shrugged. “He says he doesn’t know. He’s not sure yet. But he’ll let you know when he finds out, if you want.”

Cricket picked at the arm of the chair with a fingernail. Nouel was coming up the sidewalk, his hat cocked against the glare, a walking stick swinging in his left hand.

“He can call,” Cricket said, and waved Nouel over. When he caught her eye, she reached for her drink. He was wearing a big grin; he’d been talking to his girlfriend. “When he knows how it ends.”

About the Author

ELIZABETH BEAR was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with her childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, has led inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. Her hobbies include incompetent archery, practicing guitar, and reading biographies of Elizabethan playmenders.

She is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for best New Writer and the author of over a dozen published or forthcoming novels, including the Locus Award–winning Jenny Casey trilogy and the Philip K. Dick Award–nominated Carnival. A native New Englander, she spent seven years near Las Vegas, but now lives in Connecticut with a presumptuous cat.