Once we go outside into the open air, I grab a glass of wine and down it rapidly, keeping close to Sam. Sam watches me, worried. "Something wrong?"

"Yes. No. I'm not sure." There are butterflies in my stomach. Cass is the most isolated of the wives in Cohort Four, the one who hasn't been allowed out anywhere—and could Sam stop me doing anything if I felt like it? Mick is poison, not the subtle social toxin of a Jen, but the forthright venom of a stinging insect, brutal and direct. "There's something I want to check out. I'll be back in a few minutes, okay?"

"Reeve—take care?"

I meet his eyes. He's concerned! I realize. Abashed, I nod, then slide away toward the front of the Church and the main entrance.

Mick is talking to a little knot of hard-looking men, wiry muscles and close-cropped hair—guys I see digging or operating incredibly noisy machinery, chewing up the roads then filling them in again—he's gesticulating wildly. A couple of the Church attendants stand nearby, and there're a couple of women waiting in the doorway. I sidle toward the front door and go inside. The Church has emptied out, and there's only one person still there, loitering near the back pew.

"Kay? Cass?" I ask.

She looks at me. "R-Reeve?"

It's dark, and I can't be sure but there's something about her heavy eye shadow that makes me think of bruising. Her dress would effectively conceal signs of violence if Mick's been beating her. "Are you all right?" I ask.

Her eyes turn toward the entrance. "No," she whispers. "Listen, he's—don't get involved. All right? I don't need your help. Stay away from me." Her voice quavers with a fine edge of fear.

"I promised I'd look for you in here," I say.

"Don't." She shakes her head. "He'll kill me, do you realize that? If he thinks I've been talking to anyone—"

"But we can protect you! All you have to do is ask, and we'll get you out of there and keep him away from you."

I might as well not have bothered talking to her: she shakes her head and backs toward the door, her shoes clacking on the stone floor. Behind the veil, her face isn't simply frightened, it's terrified. And the white powder on her cheek isn't quite enough to conceal the ivory stain of old bruising.

Mick is waiting outside. If he sees me emerging after Cass, he'll probably go nuts. And I'm beginning to wonder if I'm right about her. When I called her Kay, she showed no sign of recognition. But would she? Kay is an alias, after all, and with her being just out of memory surgery, and me not being Robin but Reeve in this hall of mirrors—if after these tendays someone called me Robin, would I realize they were talking to me at first?

I glance around frustratedly, wondering if there's a back exit. I'm alone in the Church nave. It's not my favorite place, you understand, but right now it lacks the almost palpable sense of hostility it exudes when we're all herded together in our Sunday best, wondering who's going to be today's sacrificial victim. Waiting for Mick to lose interest and leave, I walk around the front of the big room, trying to get a new perspective on things.

I've never been forward of the pews before. What does Fiore keep in his lectern? I wonder, walking toward the altar. The lectern, seen from behind, is quite disappointing—it's just a slab of carved wood with a shelf set in it. There are a couple of paper books filed there, but no robocatamite to account for Fiore's peculiar mannerisms. The altar is also pretty boring. It's a slab of smoothly polished stone, carved into neatly rectilinear lines. The symbols of the faith, the sword and the chalice, sit atop a metal rack in the middle of the purple-dyed cloth that covers the stone. I look closer, intrigued by the sword. It's an odd-looking thing. The blade is dead straight, with a totally squared-off tip, and it's about a centimeter thick. With no edge on it and no taper it looks more like a mirror-polished billet of steel than a blade. It's got a basket hilt and a gray, roughened grip, suggesting a functional design rather than a decorative one. Something nags at me, an insistent phantom memory stump itching where a real one has been amputated. I'm certain I've seen a sword like this before. There are faint rectangular grooves in the outer surface of the basket, as if something has been removed. And the flat "edge" of the blade isn't quite right—it shines with the luster of fine steel, but there's also a faint rainbow sheen, a diffractive speckling at the edge of my gaze.

I break out in a cold sweat. My blouse feels like ice against the chill of my skin as I straighten up and hastily head for the small door that's visible on this side of the organist's bench. I don't want to be caught here, not now! Someone is having a little joke with us, and I feel sick to my heart at the thought that it might be Fiore, or his boss, Yourdon the Bishop. They're playing with us, and this is the proof. Who can I tell? Most people here wouldn't understand, and those that did—we've got no way out, not unless the experimenters agree to release us early. But the exit leads straight back into the clinics of the hospitaler-confessors, and I have a horrible gut-deep feeling that they're involved in this. Certainly they're implicated.

I've got to get out of here , I realize, aghast. The thing is, I've seen swords like that before. Vorpal blades, they call them, I'm not sure why. This one's obviously decommissioned, but how did it get here? They don't rely on the edge or point to cut, that's not what they're for. They belonged to, to—Who did they belong to? I rack my brains, trying to find the source of this terrible conviction that I stand in the presence of something utterly evil, something that doesn't belong in any experimental polity, a stink of livid corruption. But my treacherous memory lets me down again, and as I batter myself against the closed door of my own history, I walk back into the light outside, blinking and wondering if I might be wrong after all. Wrong about Cass being Kay. Wrong about Mick being violent. Wrong about the sword and the chalice. Wrong about who and what I am . . .

7. Bottom

TIME passes glacially slowly. I don't say anything to Sam about the events in Church, not about Cass's black eye nor the Vorpal blade on the Church altar. Sam is comfortable to live with, happy to listen to my depressive chatter about the women's world, but there's always the worm of worry gnawing at the back of my mind: Can I trust him? I want to, but I can't be sure he isn't one of my pursuers. It's a horrible dilemma, the risk/trust trade-off. So I don't talk about what I do in the garage, or on the basement exercise machine, and he doesn't volunteer much information about what he does at work. A couple of the ladies who lunch are talking about organizing dinner parties, but if we invited ourselves into that kind of social circle they'd expect us to reciprocate and the stress would be—well, I don't think either of us is up to it. So we live our lonely lives in each other's back pockets, and I worry about Cass, and Sam reads a lot and watches TV, trying to understand the ancients.

When we get home after the abortive meeting in Church, I use my netlink to check our group's public points. Jen is leading on social connectedness, while Alice is second on that score—her helping me with clothes seems to be good for her. To my surprise I see that I'm at the bottom of the cohort. There's an activity breakdown and it looks like everyone else is having sex with their partner: Forming stable relationships is a good way to jack up your score, easy points. I backtrack a week or two and see that Cass is regularly active with Mick.

For some reason I find this unaccountably depressing. The others are watching, and I'm supposed to be involved with Sam, and I don't want to do anything that might give Jen any sense of satisfaction whatsoever. It's an immature attitude, but I'm really conscious of the fact that they're keeping an eye on my score, waiting for me to surrender. Waiting for me to give Sam what they think he ought to want. Too bad they don't really know us.