Glasshouse

11. Buried

MONDAY is a working day, and it's also usually a lunch date, but I'm not about to break bread with Jen after yesterday's events. I head for work with the brass key hidden in my security bag. Once inside I rip into the filing and cleaning immediately. It's midmorning before I realize that Janis hasn't arrived yet.

I hope she's all right. I don't remember seeing her yesterday, but if she's heard about what happened—well, I don't know how close to the victims she was, but I can only imagine what she must be going through if she knew them well. She was feeling ill a couple of days ago—how is she now?

I head for the front desk. Business is dead today, and I haven't had a single visitor, so I have no qualms about flipping the sign on the door to CLOSED for a while. In the staff room there's a file of administrative stuff, and after leafing through it for a bit, I find Janis's home number. I dial it, and after a worryingly long time someone answers the telephone.

"Janis?"

Her voice sounds tired, even through the distortion the telephone link seems to be designed to add. "Reeve, is that you?"

"Yes. I was getting worried about you. Are you all right?"

"I've been sick today. And to tell the truth, I didn't feel like coming in. Do you mind?"

I look around. "No, the place is dead as a—" I stop myself just in time. "Listen, why don't you take a couple of days off? You were going to be leaving in a couple of months anyway, there's no point overdoing it. If you want, I'll drop round with some books on my next day off, day after tomorrow. How about that?"

"That sounds great," she says gratefully, and after a bit more chat I hang up.

I'm just shifting the CLOSED sign back to OPEN when a long black limousine draws up at the curb outside. I manage a sharp intake of breath—What's Fiore doing here today? —before the Priest gets out, and then, uncharacteristically, holds the door open for someone else. Someone wearing a purple dress and a skullcap. I realize exactly who it must be—the Bishop: Yourdon.

The Bishop turns out to be as cadaverously thin and tall as Fiore is squat and bulbous. A stork and a toad. There's a peculiarly sallow cast to his skin, and his cheekbones stand out like blades. He wears spectacles with thick hornlike rectangular frames, and his hair hugs his scalp in lank swatches the color of rotten ivory. He strides forward, skeletal-looking hands writhing together, as Fiore bumbles along huffing and puffing to keep up in his wake. "I say, I say!" Fiore calls. "Please—"

The Bishop pushes the library door open, then pauses. His eyes are a very pale blue, with slightly yellowish whites, and his gaze is icily contemptuous. "You've fucked up before, Fiore," he hisses. "I do wish you'd keep your little masturbatory fantasies to yourself in future." Then he turns round to face me.

"Hello?" I force a smile.

He looks at me as if I'm a machine. "I am Bishop Yourdon. Please take me to the document repository."

"Ah, yes, certainly." I hurry out from behind the desk and wave him toward the back.

Fiore harrumphs and breathes heavily as he waddles after us, but Yourdon moves with bony grace, as if all his joints have been replaced with well-lubricated bearings. Something about him makes me shudder. The look he gave Fiore—I can't remember having seen such an expression of pure contempt on a human face in a very long time. I lead them to the room; the Grim Reaper stalking along behind me in angry silence, followed by a bumbling oleaginous toad.

I stand aside as we reach the reference section, and Fiore fumbles with his keys, visibly wilting under Yourdon's fuming gaze. He gets the door open and darts inside. Yourdon pauses, and fixes me with an ice-water stare. "We are not to be disturbed," he informs me, "for any reason whatsoever. Do you understand?"

I nod vigorously. "I, I'll be at the front desk if you need me." My teeth are nearly chattering. What is it with this guy? I've met misanthropes before, but Yourdon is something special.

Fiore and the Bishop hang out in the archive, doing whatever it is they do in there for almost three hours. At a couple of points I hear raised voices, Fiore's unctuous pleading followed by the Bishop hissing back at him like an angry snake. I sit behind the desk, forcing myself not to look over my shoulder every ten seconds, and try to read a book about the history of witch-hunts in preindustrial Europa and Merka. It contains disturbing echoes of what's going on here, communities fractured into mutually mistrustful factions that compete to denounce one another to greedy spiritual authorities drunk on temporal power. However, I find it hard to concentrate while the snake and the toad in the back room are making noises like they're trying to sting each other to death.

It's well into my normal lunch hour when Fiore and Yourdon surface. Fiore looks subdued and resentful. Yourdon appears to be in a better mood, but if this is his good humor, I'd hate to see him when he's angry. When he smiles he looks like a skull someone's stretched a sheet of skin over, colorless lips peeling back from yellowing teeth in a grin completely bereft of amusement. "You'd better get back to work then," he calls to Fiore as he strides past my desk without so much as a nod in my direction. "You've got a lot of lost headway to make up." Then he barges out through the front door as the long black limousine cruises round the edge of the block, ready to convey its master back to his usual haunts.

A few minutes later Fiore bumbles past me with a sullen glare. "I'll be round tomorrow," he mutters, then stomps out the door. No limousinefor the Priest, who staggers off on foot in the noonday heat. My, how the mighty are fallen!

I watch him until he's out of sight, then walk over and flip the sign on the door to CLOSED. Then I lock up and take a deep breath. I wasn't expecting this to happen today, but it's too good an opportunity to miss. I go fetch my bag from the staff room, then head for the repository.

It's time for the moment of truth. Less than a hundred seconds after Fiore left the building, I slide the laboriously copied key into the lock. My heart is pounding as I turn it. For a moment it refuses to budge, but I jiggle it—the teeth aren't quite engaging with the pins—and something falls into position and it squeals slightly and gives way. I push the door wide, then reach for the light switch.

I'm in a small room with no windows, no chairs, no tables, one bare electric bulb dangling on a wire from the ceiling, bookshelves on three walls, and a trapdoor in the middle of the floor.

"What is this shit?" I ask aloud, looking round.

There are box files on all the shelves, masses of box files. But there are no titles on the spines of the boxes, just serial numbers. Everything's dusty except the trapdoor, which has been opened recently. I inhale, then nearly go cross-eyed trying not to sneeze. If this is Fiore's idea of housekeeping, it's no wonder Yourdon was pissed at him.

I look at the nearest shelf and pull down one of the files at random. There's a button catch and I open it to find it's full of paper, yellowing sheets of the stuff, machine-smooth, columns of hexadecimal numbers printed in rows of dumb ink. There's a sequence number at the top of each sheet, and it takes me a few seconds to figure out what I'm looking at. It's a serialized mind map, what the ancients would have called a "hex dump." Pages and pages of it. The box file probably holds about five hundred sheets. If all the others I see contain more of this stuff, then I'm probably looking at about a hundred thousand sheets, each containing maybe ten thousand characters. Whatever is stored in this incredibly inefficient serial medium, it isn't very big—about the same size as a small mammal's genome, maybe, once you squeeze out all the redundant exons. It's three or four orders of magnitude too small to be a map of a human being.

I shake my head and put the box file back. From the level of dust on top of it, it hasn't been touched for quite a time. I don't know what this stuff is, but it isn't what Fiore and Yourdon came here to look at. Which leaves the trapdoor.

I bend down and grab the brass ring, then lift. The wooden slab hinges up at the back, and I see a flight of steps leading down. They're carpeted, and there are wooden handrails to either side. Okay, so there's a secret basement under the library, I tell myself, trying not to giggle with fear. What have I been working on top of?

Of course I go downstairs. After what Fiore did to Phil and Esther, I'm probably dead if they find me in the repository. Taking the next step is a logical progression, nothing more.

The steps go down into twilight, but they don't go down very far. The floor is three meters below the trapdoor, and there's a light switch on the rail at the bottom. I flick it and glance around.

Guess what? I'm not in the dark ages anymore.

If I was still in the dark ages, this would be a musty basement with brick walls and wooden lath ceiling, or maybe poured concrete and steel beams. They weren't big on structural diamond back then, and their floors didn't grow zebrastripe fur, and they used short-lived electrical bulbs instead of surfacing their ceilings with fluorescent paint. There's a very retro-looking lounger in a mode that I'm sure went out of fashion some time between the end of the Oort colonial era and the first of the conservationista republics, and some weird black-resin chairs that look like the skeletons of insects, if insects grew four meters tall and supported themselves with endoskeletons. Hmm. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, if Yourdon and Fiore were having a knockdown shouting match in here with the hatch open, I might just about have heard it at the front desk.

The other items in the basement are a lot more disconcerting.

For starters, there's something that I am almost certain is a full military A-gate. It's a stubby cylinder about two meters high and two meters in diameter, its shell slick with the white opacity of carbonitrile armor. There's a ruggedized control workstation next to it, perched on a rough wooden plinth—you use those things in the field when you'reoperating under emission control, to make field expedient whatever it is you need in order to save your ass. Got plutonium? Got nuke. Not that I've got the authentication ackles to switch the thing on—if I mess with it I'll probably set off about a billion alarms—but its presence here is as incongruous as a biplane in the bronze age.

For seconds, the walls are lined with racks of shelving bearing various pieces of equipment. There's what I'm fairly certain is a generator pack for a Vorpal sword, like the one on the Church altar. That brings back unpleasant memories, because I remember those swords and what you can do with them—blood fountaining out into a room where the headless corpses are already stacked like cordwood beside the evacuation gate—and it makes me feel nauseous. I take a quick breath, then I look at the shelves on the other side of the room. There are lots of them, some of them stacked with the quaint rectangular bricks of high-density storage, but most of the space is given over to ring binders full of paper. This time, instead of serial numbers on the spines, there are old-fashioned human-readable titles, although they don't mean much to me. Like Revised Zimbardo Study Protocol 4.0 , and Church Scale Moral Delta Coefficients , and Extended Host Selection Criteria —

Host selection criteria? I pull that one off the shelf and begin reading. An indeterminate time later I shake myself and put it back. I feel dirty, somehow contaminated. I really wish I didn't understand what it said, but I'm afraid I do, and now I'm going to have to figure out what to do with the knowledge.

I stare at the A-gate, speculating. There's a very good chance that it's not infected with Curious Yellow, because they wouldn't want to risk infecting themselves. But it still won't help me escape, and it probably won't work for me anyway unless I can hold a metaphorical gun to Fiore's head, threaten him with something even more frightening than the prospect of Yourdon's revenge—and if I've got the measure of Yourdon, any revenge he'd bother to carry out would truly be a worse fate than death.

Shit. I need to think about this some more. But at least I've got until tomorrow, when Fiore returns.

BUSINESS is dead, literally dead. After I go back up top and lock the repository, I flip the door sign to OPEN and sit at the front desk for a couple of hours, waiting tensely to see if the zombies are going to come and drag me off to prison. But nothing happens. I haven't tripped any alarms by my choice of lunchtime reading matter. With hindsight it's not too surprising. If there's one place Fiore and Yourdon and the mysterious Hanta won't want under surveillance, it's wherever they're hiding their experimental tools. Their kind doesn't thrive in the scrutiny of the panopticon. Which, as it happens, gives me an idea.

Midway through the afternoon I lock up for half an hour and hit the nearest electronics shop for a useful gadget. Then I spend a nervous hour installing it in the cellar. Afterward, I feel smug. If it works, it'll serve Fiore and Yourdon right for being overconfident—and for making this crazy simulation too realistic.

Business is so dead that I go home half an hour early. It's a warm summer evening, and I've got about two kilometers to walk. I barely see anyone. There are some park attendants out mowing the grass, but no ordinary folks. Did I miss a holiday or something? I don't know. I put one foot in front of the other until I hit the road out of the town center, follow it down into a short stretch of tunnel, then back into daylight and a quiet residential street with trees and a lazy, almost stagnant creek off to one side.

I hear voices and catch a faint smell of cooking food from one of the houses as I walk past. People are home—I haven't mysteriously been abandoned all on my own. What a shame. I briefly fantasize that the academicians of the Scholastium have figured out that all is not well in YFH-Polity and arrived to evacuate all of us inmates while I waited behind the library counter. It's a nice daydream.

Pretty soon I come to the next road tunnel linking hab segments. This time I pull out a flashlight as I pass out of sight of the entrance. Yes, just as I guessed—there's a recessed doorlike panel in one wall of the tunnel. I pull out a notepad and add it to my list. I'm slowly building up a map of the interrelated segments. It looks like a cyclic directed graph, and that's exactly what it is, a network of nodes connected by linesrepresenting roads with T-gates along their length. Now I'm adding in the maintenance hatches.

You can't actually see a T-gate—it's just that one moment you're in one sector and the next moment you've walked through an invisible brane and you're in another sector—but the positioning of the hatches can probably tell me something if I'm just smart enough to figure it out. Ditto the order of the network: if it's left-handed or right-handed, or if there's a Hamiltonian path through it. In the degenerate case, there may be no T-gates at all; this might actually be a single hab cylinder, divided up by bulkheads that can be sealed against loss of pressure. Or all the sectors may be in different places, parsecs apart. I'm trying to avoid making assumptions. If you don't search with open eyes, you risk missing things.

I get home at about my usual time, tense and nervous but also curiously relieved. What's done is done. Tomorrow Fiore will either notice my meddling, or he won't. (Or with any luck he'll assume Yourdon did it, which I think is equally likely. There's no love lost between those two, and if I play my cards right, I can exploit their division.) Either way I should learn something. If I don't . . . well, I know too much to stop now. If they knew how much I've figured out about their little game, they'd kill me immediately. No messing, no ritual humiliation in front of the score whores in Church, just a rapid brainsuck and termination. Fiore's playing with fire.

Sam is in the living room, watching TV. I tiptoe past him and head upstairs, badly in need of a shower. When I get to my room I shed my clothes, then go back to the bathroom and turn the water on, meaning to wash today's stresses away.

Seconds after I get in I hear footsteps, then the bathroom door opening. "Reeve?"

"Yeah, it's me," I call.

"Need to talk. Urgently."

"After I finish," I say, nettled. "Can't it wait?"

"I suppose."

Small torments add up; I'm now in a thoroughly bad mood. What's life coming to, when I can't even take a shower without interruption? I soap myself down methodically then wash my hair, taking care to rub the inefficient surfactant gel into my scalp. After a couple of minutes of rinsing, I turn off the water and open the door to reach for my towel, to be confronted by a surprised-looking Sam.

"Pass me the bath sheet," I tell him, trying to make the best of things. He complies hastily. Months of living in this goldfish bowl society have done strange things to my body-sense, and I feel surprisingly awkward about being naked in front of him. I think he feels it, too. "What's so important?" I step out of the shower as he holds the towel for me.

"Phone call," he mumbles, trying to look away—his eyes keep drifting back toward me.

"Uh-huh. Who from?" He folds me in the towel as if I'm a delicate treasure he's trying not to touch. I shiver and try to ignore it.

"From Fer. He and El, they've heard something bad from Mick, and they're talking about sorting it out."

"Bad." I try to concentrate. The water on my skin is suddenly cold. "What kind of bad?"

"It's Cass, I think." I tense up inside. "Mick gave them some crazy story about hearing from Fiore. Said the Priest told him that one of the rules in here is, what was it, ‘be fruitful and exponentiate.' That you can get a gigantic score bonus for having children."

"That's not good," I say carefully, "but it might just be Mick acting in character."

"Well, yes, that's what Fer said, but then Mick told El he was going to get that bonus whether or not Cass wanted it." He sounds apprehensive. "El wasn't sure what that meant."

My mind races. "Cass wasn't at Church yesterday, Sam. Last time I saw her she wouldn't talk—she seemed afraid." I have a nasty feeling that I know what's going on. I really don't want it to be true.

"Yes, well, Fer called me when El told him Mick had made some kind of joke about stopping Cass trying to escape for good. He wasn't sure just what it was but said it didn't sound right. Reeve, what's going on? What are we going to do if it turns out he's been tying Cass up while he's been at work, or using physical force, or something?"

For someone living in a dark ages sim, Sam can be heartbreakingly naive at times. "Sam, do you know what the word ‘rape' means?"

"I've heard it," he says guardedly. "I thought it had to involve strangers, and usually killing. Do you think—"

I turn round. "We've got to find out what's going on, and we've got to get her out of there if it's true. I don't think we can count on the police zombies, or Fiore for that matter, to help. Fiore's messed up in the head anyway, even Yourdon thinks so." I pause. "This is very bad."

The thought of what Cass might be going through horrifies me, especially as I can guess how some of our cohort will react if we try to rescue her. Before last Sunday I might have been more hopeful, but now I know better than to expect anything but gruesome savagery from our neighbors if they think their precious points are at risk. "I think Janis would help, but she's ill. Alice, maybe. Angel is scared but will probably follow if we approach her right. Jen—I don't want Jen around. What about you guys?"

"Fer agrees," Sam says simply. "He doesn't like the idea either. El, maybe not. I think if I ask, I can get Greg and Martin and Alf involved. A team." He looks at me oddly.

"No killing," I say, warningly.

He shudders. "No! Never. But—"

"Someone's got to go find out if it's true, or if it was just Mick making a joke in bad taste. Right?"

He nods. "Right. Who?"

"I'll do it," I say flatly. "Tonight. I'm going to get dressed. You get on the phone to people. Get them round here. I want to sort out what we're doing before I go in, that way there won't be any nasty surprises. All right?"

He nods then looks at me, an odd expression in his face. "Anything else?"

"Yes." I lean forward and kiss him quickly on the lips. "Get moving."

THREE hours later, we're holed up in a vacant house on a quiet residential side street across the road from what we now know is Cass and Mick's home, thanks to an obliging zombie taxi driver. This street is still three-quarters unoccupied. We pile out of our three taxis at five-minute intervals and go to ground. Fer was among the first to arrive. He got us into the empty house with a crowbar. There's not a lot of furniture, and everything is dusty—not to mention dark, because we don't want to turn on the lights and risk alerting Mick—but it's better than trying to hide in the front garden for a couple of hours.

There are only five of us—me, Sam, Fer, Greg, and Greg's spouse, Tammy. Tammy is determined and very quietly furious—I think it's because she didn't realize how bad things really were until Sam phoned Greg. It's nearly midnight, and we're all tired, but I run through the plan once again.

"Okay, one more time. I'm going to go across the road and ring the doorbell. I'll ask to see Cass. Depending how Mick reacts, Sam and Fer, you'll rush him or hang back. I've got the whistle. One whistle means come in and get me, I need help. Two means get Mick." I stop. "Greg, Tammy, you take the stockings, pull them over your heads. We don't want him to recognize you if you have to take Cass and look after her."

"I hope you're wrong about this," Tammy says grimly.

"So do I, believe me. So do I." I glance sidelong at Fer.

"Mick's not been right in the head since I've known him," Fer mutters.

"Anything else before we go?" I ask, standing up.

"Yes," says Fer. "If you don't whistle, and you don't come out within ten minutes, I'm going in anyway." He grips his crowbar.

"I should hope so." I nod, then get up and head across the road.

Mick's garden is overgrown with weeds, and the grass is long. There are no lights in the windows, but that doesn't mean anything. Like our house, there's a conservatory at the front. The door stands open. I step inside and look at the front door. There's a new lock drilled into it, big and chunky-looking. I ring the doorbell. Nothing happens. I ring it again, and a light comes on in the hall. I tense up, ready for it as I hear a key turn in the lock, then another key, and the door opens.

"You." It's Mick. He belches at me, and I smell sour wine on his breath. He's wearing a dirty T-shirt and boxers, and he's clutching ametal canister with an open top. "What do you want?" He leers at me. "Din't I tellya not to bug me?"

"I want to see Cass," I say evenly. There's stuff piled in the hall. Looks like empty food cartons, rubbish. It smells sickly sweet. "She wasn't at Church on Sunday."

"Yeah?" He raises the can and takes a drink from it, then looks at me slyly. "Come in."

I step over the threshold as he backs into the house. It looks like it started out as a mirror image of the one Sam and I live in, but it's been trashed. The hall is stacked with ripped boxes of ready meals and bits of decaying food. Something upstairs has leaked, and there's a smelly stain spreading down one wall. "She's upstairs, resting," he says, gesturing at the staircase. "Whyn't you go up an' see her?"

I stare at him. "If you think she won't mind."

"She won't."

As I set foot on the staircase he sidles round below and closes the door, then twists both keys in the locks. "Go on," he tells me, "nothin' to worry about." He giggles.

That does it. I've got the whistle on a cord round my neck, hidden under the jumper I'm wearing. I pull it out and blow two sharp blasts as I take the steps two at a time. Mick winces, then turns to look up at me, his face a picture of confusion slowly turning into anger. "Whatyuh do that for?" he shouts. Then there's a loud thump from behind him as someone hits the door.

I make the top step and glance round quickly. The master bedroom is on the left, just like in my own house. There are piles of filthy clothing mounded up along one wall, and I take in the sick-but-sweet stench of blocked drains overlying something else, something less identifiable. I dart into the bedroom, and my hand goes to the light switch. Something squeals.

There's a splintering crash downstairs and a bellow of inarticulate rage, but I'm too busy staring at the bed to pay attention. Most of the furniture in the room has been trashed, like someone threw it about or took an axe to it. The bed is the sole exception, but it's been stripped down to the mattress. It stinks of excrement and stale urine, there are flies buzzing about, and it's occupied: Cass is lying on it naked. Her arms are tied to the headboard, and her legs to either corner of the bottom of the bed. She's filthy and there are bruises on her thighs and her face looks like she's been repeatedly punched. That's where the squealing noise is coming from. I think he's broken her jaw.

"Up here," I yell through the doorway. I turn back to her. "We'll get you out of here, my friend." I bend over her and pull out the switchblade I brought along for emergencies. "This is going to hurt." I begin sawing on the cord around her arms and she whimpers. As she moves there's a horrible stench from the encrusted mattress and I realize she isn't just skinny, she's half-starved, and there are sores on her arms, angry red rope burns.

I hear more crashes and bangs from downstairs, then an angry yell. Cass whimpers, then moans loudly as the last cord parts; her arms flop limply, and she moans some more. Her hands are puffy and bruised-looking, and I've got a bad feeling about them, but there's no time to waste. I move to the foot of the bed and start sawing away at the rope around her right ankle, and that's when she screams and I see what he's done to stop her from running away. There's blood on the rope because he's slashed the big tendon on her ankle, and her foot flops uncontrollably, and every time it moves, she tries to scream, gurgling around her broken jaw. He said you get lots of points for having a baby. I yell with fury, then there's someone in the doorway. I look up and see it's Sam. There's a cut on his cheek that's bleeding, and one eye is half-closed. That gets my attention, and I'm in control again. "Over here," I say tensely. "I need you to hold her leg still . . ."

When we go downstairs, Greg phones a number I don't know about and calls an ambulance. Everyone is a bit the worse for wear, except for Greg and Tammy. Sam is going to have a beautiful black eye tomorrow, and Fer caught a kick in the ribs while he and Sam and Greg were taking down Mick. They've laid him out on the floor of the conservatory while we figure out what to do with him. I'm really regretting my earlier stand against lynching, but the first priority is to get Cass to safety. We'll have plenty of time to deal with Mick later, assuming he doesn'tchoke on his own vomit while he's unconscious. That would make things easier all round.

"How is she?" asks Tammy. "I'd better—"

"No." I stop her by standing in the way. "Trust me. We need to get her to the, the hospital. This isn't something you can do at home."

"How bad?" Tammy demands.

"Hospital." I don't want her to see what Mick did to Cass's legs. I don't want to be responsible tonight.

The ambulance arrives within five minutes, a boxy white vehicle with stylized red crescents on it. Two polite zombies in blue uniforms come up to the front door. "This way," I say, leading them upstairs. For once I'm glad there are zombies everywhere—they won't ask the kind of awkward questions someone with cognitive autonomy might raise. Sam is up there with Cass, and a minute later the zombies pile back downstairs to fetch a folding wheeled platform for her.

"Who is next of kin?" asks one of the zombies as they come down the stairs with Cass lying on the stretcher.

Fer begins to point toward Mick, and Tammy bats his hand away. "I am!" she says. "Take me with you."

"Request approved," says one of the zombies. "Ride up front, please." They wheel Cass out toward the back of the vehicle, and Tammy follows them.

Greg watches her for a moment, then turns to look back at Mick. "What are we going to do with him?" he asks.

There's a hard expression on Fer's face. "Nothing," I say quickly, before Fer can open his mouth and stick his foot in it. "Remember what we agreed? No lynching." I pause. "What we do tomorrow is another matter."

"Will the police do anything?" Fer asks after a moment.

"I don't think so," says Sam, coming downstairs. He's holding a damp towel to his eye. "I really don't think they're programmed for this sort of thing. If we're unlucky, they'll come after us for trampling on the flower bed and breaking down the door, but I don't think you can really expect a zombie to cope with this sort of . . . thing." He looks very sober as he stares at Mick's prostrate form.

"Let's go home," I suggest. "How about we meet up tomorrow evening to talk about it?"

"That works for me," says Greg. Sam nods.

I eye Mick's prostrate form. "If he tries to come after any of us, I think we should kill him."

"You sound as if you're not certain." That's Fer.

"Certain?" I stare at him: "Shit, I've got half a mind to cut his throat right here! Except, Sunday"—I swallow—"has kind of put me off." I stare at him some more. "You kicked the shit out of him. Think he'll come back for more?"

Greg shakes his head. "I hope he tries something," he says, a curious half smile on his lips. I shiver. Just for a moment he reminds me of Jen.

"Come on, let's go." I take Sam's free hand. "Fer, would you call two taxis?

It's close to one in the morning when Sam and I get home, filthy and tired and bruised. "Go on in," I say, pausing in the conservatory. "This shirt's going in the trash." Sam nods wordlessly and goes indoors, leaving me to strip off under the cool moonlight. I feel numb and tired, but also satisfied with the night's work. I correct that—mostly satisfied. I unzip my trousers in case any of the crap on the bed rubbed off on them, then I follow him inside.

Sam's standing in the living room doorway, holding a bottle of vodka and two tumblers. He hasn't turned the lights on, but he's shed his shirt, and the moonlight shining through the tall glass windows outlines his bare shoulders in silver. "I do not want to dream tonight," he says, holding the bottle out to me.

"Me neither." I take one of the glasses, then brush past him into the living room. I'm tired, I realize, but I'm also wired with excitement and tension and apprehension about tomorrow, and a burning hot anger for Cass—Why didn't I go round to see her before? —and a fresh hatred for Fiore and Yourdon, and the faceless scum who created this nightmare and expect us to live in it. "What are you waiting for?" I drop onto the sofa and hold my glass out. Sam tips colorless spirit into it. "C'mon."

He sits down next to me and fills his own glass, then caps the bottle. "I should have listened to you earlier," he says, taking a mouthful.

"So?" I raise my glass. "I hope the hospital can help. She was—"

There's a long moment of silence. It's probably only a couple of seconds, but it feels like hours.

"I didn't know."

"None of us did." But these sound like feeble excuses to me right now, so I take another mouthful of vodka in order to have something else to occupy my mouth with.

"R-Reeve. There's something else I want you to know." I look at him sharply. He's looking right back at me, and I'm suddenly conscious that I'm nearly naked. And he's not wearing that much either, now I allow myself to notice it.

"Go ahead," I say, trying to keep my voice neutral.

"I'm. Oh." He looks away, looking pained. Inexpressive. "Yesterday I said some things I didn't really mean. Hurtful things, some of them. I want to apologize."

"No apology needed," I say, my heart beating painfully fast.

"Oh, but there is. You see, I didn't mean everything I said. But when I said * * * I was telling the—"

"Stop right there." I raise a hand. "Those words. You, uh, oh shit. " My head's spinning. It's late at night, I've been through a lot, I've been drinking vodka, and Sam's saying words to me that my ears refuse to listen to. "I didn't hear you just now, and I know for sure you said the same thing before, and I didn't hear the words." He looks puzzled, even offended. "I mean, I heard you speak, but I couldn't understand them." I'm beginning to worry. "You used the same phrase, didn't you? Exactly the same words? Could there be something wrong with my—" He stands up and strides over to the sideboard to retrieve his tablet, which has been lying there gathering dust for some time. "What?"

He says something to it, then holds it up in front of me. Dim letters glow on the screen:

I LOVE YOU

"You what ?" I say, "You're trying to say * * *—" And I know I'm saying the words, but I can't hear them. "Shit." I shake my head. "It's me. Sam, I'm so sorry." I stand up and hug him. "* * *, too. It's just, there's something really flaky up with my language module. Is that what you've been trying to tell me?" I lean back far enough to see his face. "Is it?"

"Yes," he admits. His face is a picture of worry. "I don't say that easily. And I can't hear it either, Reeve, I thought I was going nuts."

"I guess not." I'm close enough to feel his crotch. "And I guess you only say that to people you're serious about." He nods. "And maybe you're close enough that I can tell you that I'm flattered, and very happy, and, and—" I pause. I feel as if I ought to know what this weird inability to understand those three happy words means, but I can't quite recall it. "We've got to get out of here."

He nods. "I really don't like this," he says, miserably, a wave of his hand encompassing everything from his body outward. "I've—they should have spotted it. I don't feel right when I'm big and slow and fixed. I mean, they can patch it temporarily but I don't like that, either, it's easier just not to be. Only they didn't even give me a, a—" He's breathing too fast.

I feel a stab of anger, not at Sam but at Fiore and the other idiots. "You've got a big-body dysphoria, haven't you?" He nods. "Figures." Kay spent a whole lifetime as an alien, didn't she? And kept changing bodies, as if she couldn't quite settle on a form that she felt comfortable in. Doubtless it's fixable with therapy, but fixing people's problems isn't exactly what this polity is about. "Sam." I kiss him on the cheek. "We've got to get out of here. Where's your tablet?"

"Over there."

"I need to show you something." I let go of him and fetch it, intending to point out to him the myriad ways in which the polity constitution turns us into victims of a biologically deterministic tyranny. "Here—" I page through it quickly. "Hey, I didn't see this before!"

"What?" He looks over my shoulder.

"List of revealed behavioral scores. Gender-based. Huh." I stare. Sex with your partner gets five points for the very first occurrence, dropping off to one point each time after a while. In other words, it's a decay function. "Adultery," that bad word, gets minus one hundred. There are some other crazy items. Getting pregnant brings fifty points, bringing the baby to term brings another fifty. What's abortion? Whatever it is, it gets hammered as hard as adultery, which is what got Esther and Phil into—let's not go there. There are other things here, the most improbable activities, that get huge penalties. But rape isn't mentioned. Murder loses you just seventy points. What kind of sense does that make? It's ludicrous! "Either they're trying to generate a psychotic polity, or the people in the society they derived these scores from were off their heads."

"Or possibly both." Sam yawns. "Listen, it's late. We need to get some sleep. Why don't we go to bed and chew this over tomorrow? With the others?"

"Yes." I put the tablet down, not mentioning that tomorrow I've got other plans because Fiore is visiting the library again. "Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day."