The girl stopped struggling, but the boy continued to strain against his ties. Sextant sighed. "Very well, if you insist."

He put two fingers high on the back of the boy's neck, and pressed, feeling for the nerve. He found it, and pressed harder. The boy's body jerked violently, arching on the bed, and falling back. The breath went out of him, and his eyes rolled. It was as if he had been given an electric shock.

Surprised, Sextant removed his fingers. The reaction was extreme. He had used that touch many times, but he had never seen it work that way. He checked pulse and respiration, and watched as they came back to normal.

"Now will you lie still?"

The boy nodded weakly.

Sextant turned to the girl. "Are you going to behave yourself?" She nodded. On an impulse of curiosity, he put his hand on her breast. She flinched away from him. "I told you not to do that."

She lay still. He kneaded her breast gently, and after a moment he felt her nipple rise under his palm. As he continued to stroke her, he searched himself for a feeling. Any sort of feeling. Lust? Eagerness? Anything? No, nothing. Nothing at all. He could have been kneading dough to make bread.

Still kneeling on the floor, he turned to the other bed. He put his hand on Chicken's thigh, and the boy flinched just as the girl had. He slid his hand between the boy's thighs, and felt for his genitals. He cupped them, and began to stroke. Once again he searched himself for feeling, and once again he felt nothing at all. More flesh, more meat, that's all.

He shook his head, irritated with himself for having tried the experiment. It had been years since he had tried an intimate touching of a male or a female, and there had been no reason to suppose that anything had changed. He had always been that way, and he always would. He could play the charade. He could go through the motions either straight or gay, but that was all he could do. In the end he could do nothing, because he felt nothing.

What do they feel? he wondered.

He looked into the girl's eyes, and then into the boy's. Hers were filled with fear, but he noted with approval that the boy's eyes were narrowed into slits of concentrated hate. Good boy, he thought. If you're angry enough, you don't have time to be afraid. It was a lesson that he had learned early, and he had learned it so well that it had been many years since he had felt either anger or fear. He took no pride in the accomplishment. Anger and fear were simply two more of the emotions that he lacked. And yet, he did not think of himself as a robot, devoid of all feelings. Could a robot be thrilled by a Mozart quartet? Could a robot enjoy the patterned complexities of a Pirandello? Could a robot… He broke off the thought. He was what he was, and what he was most of all was the creature created by David Ogden. A man of ice.

He tried to remember what it had been like in that short period of his life before David Ogden came into it, but his memory stopped at his life in the caves. The people of Cankar's partisan band were mostly countrymen, small farmers and woodsmen who had taken to the mountains in July of 1941 when the call had gone out for resistance to the invaders. Few of them were Communists, but they all supported the right of the Communist Party to direct the resistance. All of them detested the king, the government-in-exile in London, and the rival Chetnik guerrillas operating under Mihajlovic. Even the youngest of them felt that way, and the youngest had been Vlado Priol.

It was, in many ways, a wonderful time for him. To live in a cave, to eat by an open fire, to wear goatskins, wash rarely, and roam the mountainside was a dream come true for a six-year-old boy. And if the caves were often cold and damp, the fires sooty, the goatskins itchy, and the diet a monotonous routine of bread and beans, still he had a loving mother who held him close in the night, a father who was brave and strong, and as the older brother that every boy needs and rarely has, he had David Ogden.

And he had the safety of his mountain. There was a war going on all around him, brutal and savage, but he saw little of that. The men went down the mountain to raid, they returned, and sometimes a familiar face would be missing; but, in truth, the war had little impact on him. Mountain born, he knew as much from instinct as from being told that he was safe on the heights of Mount Krn, for the caves were unreachable to anyone not a son of that soil, and it was unthinkable that one of their own might betray them that way to the Germans. Unthinkable, until it happened.

And it happened, it definitely happened. He looked down at the girl, and at the fear in her eyes. "And it's going to happen to you, too."

Lila heard the words, but she didn't know what they meant. Chicken also heard them, but he knew all too well. He knew not only because he had been explicitly briefed on Sextant's intentions, but because for the past few minutes he had been inside Sextant's head. Inside, tapping, and receiving the man's thoughts loud and clear. As clear as it had been in the old days, his young days when he was twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen years old, when tapping had been a part of his nature, and never a chore. Back before the power had started to fade. As clear as that.

At first he couldn't believe his luck. At first he thought it was only luck. At first he thought it was just for the moment, and that it would fade. But it didn't fade, it stayed loud and clear, and after a while he began to understand that something strange had happened. It had happened when Sextant had touched his neck, had pressed those nerves and caused the pain. The pain had been bad, but there had been something more, an electric shock that had shot to the top of his head, and then had… changed something. He didn't know what, but the change was there.

And now, for the past few minutes he had been tapped into Sextant's head, listening loud and clear to the childhood memories of Vlado Priol, the memories of a horror that had come in the night. Through Vlado's six-year-old eyes, he saw most of the band leave the caves that afternoon, off to hunt and to raid with Cankar leading and Ogden as second-in-command, barreling down the mountain on their short and stubby skis and leaving behind only those men who had families. He saw the mountain day blend into mountain night, the familiar routine of fire and food, the mother stirring the pot and the father oiling the parts of an ancient Enfield. He felt the silence of the night, the embrace of trust and safety, and then the sleep. And then he saw the rest of it.

Memories, thought Sextant, and again he wondered if these memories of his were made up of things that he actually had seen, and heard, and felt, or if they were only recollections of the stories that Ogden had told him later on. He tried to sort them out. He remembered the pop, pop, pop, of rifle fire in the night, the rush of his father to the mouth of the cave, and the harsh, quick words of his mother ordering him to lie quietly as she buried him in a mound of goatskins. He remembered the cries of alarm that went up around the camp, the orders shouted in German, and the crack of a grenade rolled into a nearby cave. He remembered peeking out from under the goatskin pile to see the three German soldiers rush into the cave and club down his father before he could fire a shot. He remembered watching the soldiers taking turns with his mother, and that when the first one did it to her she screamed and struck at him with her fists, that when the second one did it he hit her until she stopped screaming, and that when the third one did it she did not scream at all. He remembered when they shot his mother and his father. He remembered when the fire went out, and he lay there in the cold as the Germans left the mountain. He remembered when his own people came back the next day, and when David Ogden found him half frozen under the pile of skins. He remembered it all, but never clearly, only as a story that someone else had told him. He did not question that it had happened, he knew that all too well, but there were times when he found it hard to believe that he had actually been there, and had seen it with his own eyes.