I begin to panic, because being trapped in this cell with him has brought memories flooding back in, memories that he cunningly suppressed in order to avoid triggering Curious Yellow's redaction factories. It's a movable feast of horrors and exultation and life in the large. It's too much to bear, and it's too intense, because now I remember the rest of my earlier dream of swords and armor and the reversible massacre aboard a conditionally liberated polity cylinder. I remember the way our A-gate glitched and crashed at the end of the rescue as we threw the last severed head into its maw, and the way Loral turned to me, and said, "Well shit ," in a voice full of world-weary disgust, and how I walked away and scheduled myself for deep erasure because I knew if I didn't, the memory of it all would drag me awake screaming for years to come—

—And I'm awake , and I make it to the toilet just in time before my stomach squeezes convulsively and tries to climb up my throat and escape.

I can't believe I did those things. I don't believe I would have committed such crimes. But I remember the massacre as if it was yesterday. And if those memories are false, then what about the rest of me?

NOT entirely by coincidence, the next day is my first run with the shoulder bag. It started life as a rectangular green vinyl affair. It now sports a black nylon lining that I've stitched together with much swearing and sucking of pricked fingertips to conceal the gleaming copper weave glued to its inside. It looks like a shopping bag until I fold over the inner flap. Then it looks like a full shopping bag with a black flap covering the contents. Right now it contains a carton of extremely strong ground espresso, a filter cone, and several small items that are individually innocuous but collectively damning if you know what you're looking at. It's a good thing the bag looks anonymous, because unless I'm hallucinating all my memories, what I'm going to take home from work in that bag today will be a whole lot less innocuous than coffee beans.

I get in to work at the usual early hour and find Janis in the staff room, looking pale and peaky. "Morning sickness?" I ask. She nods. "Sympathies. Say, why don't you stay here, and I'll get the returnssorted out? Put your feet up—I'll call you if anything comes up that I can't handle."

"Thanks. I'll do just that." She leans back against the wall. "I wouldn't be here but Fiore's coming—"

"You leave that to me," I say, trying not to look surprised. I wasn't expecting him so soon, but I've got the bag, so . . .

"Are you sure?" she asks.

"Yes." I smile reassuringly. "Don't worry about me, I'll just let him in and leave him to get on with things."

"Okay," she says gratefully, and I go back out and get to work.

First I pile yesterday's returns on the trolley and push them around the shelves, filing them as fast as I can. It only takes a few minutes—most of the inmates here don't realize that reading is a recreational option, and only a handful are borrowing regularly. But then I skip the dusting and cleaning I'm supposed to do today. Instead, I grab my bag from behind the reception station, dump it on the bottom shelf of the trolley, and head for the shelves in the reference section next to the room where the Church documents are stored.

Into the bag goes a dictionary of sexual taboos, held in the reference shelves because some weird interpretation of dark age mores holds that libraries wouldn't lend such stuff out. It's my cover story in case I'm caught, something naughty but obviously trivial. Then I leave the trolley right where it is with the bag tucked away on the bottom shelf, where it's not immediately obvious. I head back to the front desk. My palms are sweating. Fiore is due to visit the archive, which means advancing my plans. Janis has always handled him before—but she's ill, I'm running the shop, and there's no point delaying the inevitable. I've got all my excuses prepared, anyway. I've barely been able to sleep lately for rehearsing them in my head.

Around midmorning a black car pulls up and parks in front of the library steps. I put down the book I'm reading and stand up to wait behind the counter. A uniformed zombie gets out of the front and opens the rear door, standing to one side while a plump male climbs out. His dark, oily hair shines in the daylight: The white slash of his clerical collar lends his face a disembodied appearance, as if it doesn't quite belong to the same world as the rest of his body. He walks up the steps to the front door and pushes it open, then walks over to the desk. "Special reference section," he says tersely. Then he looks at my face. "Ah, Reeve. I didn't see you here before."

I manage a sickly smile. "I'm the trainee librarian. Janis is ill this morning, so I'm looking after everything in her absence."

"Ill?" He stares at me owlishly. I look right back at him. Fiore has chosen a body that is physically imposing but bordering on senescence, in the state the ancients called "middle age." He's overweight to the point of obesity, squat and wide and barely taller than I am. His chins wobble as he talks, and the pores on his nose are very visible. Right now his nostrils are flared, sniffing the air suspiciously, and his bushy eyebrows draw together as he inspects me. He smells of something musty and organic, as if he's spent too long in a compost heap.

"Yes, she has morning sickness," I say artlessly, hoping he won't ask where she is.

"Morning sick—oh, I see!" His frown vanishes instantly. "Ah, the trials we have to suffer." His voice oozes a slug-trail of sympathy. "I'm sure this must be hard for her, and for you. Just take me to the reference room, and I'll stay out of your way, child."

"Certainly." I head for the gate at the side of the station. "If you'd like to follow me?" He knows exactly where we're going, the old toad, but he's a stickler for appearances. I lead him to the locked door in the reference section, and he produces a small bunch of keys, muttering to himself, and opens it. "Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?" I ask hesitantly.

He pauses and gives me the dead-fish stare again. "Isn't that against library regulations?" he asks.

"Normally yes, but you're not going to be in the library proper," I babble, "you're in the archive and you're a responsible person so I thought I'd offer—"

He stops being interested in me. "Coffee will be fine. Milk, no sugar." He disappears into the room, leaving his keys with the lock.

Now. Heart pounding, I head for the staff room. Janis is snoozing when I open the door. She sits up with a start, looking pale. "Reeve—"

"It's all right," I say, crossing over to the kettle and filling it up. "Fiore's here, I let him in. Listen, why don't you go home? If you're feeling ill, you shouldn't really be here, should you?"

"I've been thinking about thinking." Janis shakes her head. I rummage around for the coffee and filter papers and set the stand up over the biggest mug I can find. I scoop the coffee into the paper with wild abandon, stopping only when I realize that making it too strong for Fiore will be as bad as not getting him to drink it all. "You shouldn't think too much, Reeve. It's bad for you."

"Is it really?" I ask abstractedly, as I peel the foil wrapping from a small tablet of chocolate I bought at the drugstore and crumble half of it into the coffee grounds as the kettle begins to hiss. I wad the foil into a tight ball and flick it into the wastebasket.

"If you think about getting out of here," says Janis.

"Like I said, I'll call you a taxi—"

"No, I mean out of here. " I turn round and she looks at me with the expression of a trapped animal. It's one of those moments of existential bleakness when the cocoon of lies that we spin around ourselves to paper over the cracks in reality dissolve into slime, and we're left looking at something really ugly. Janis has got the bug, the same one I've got, only she's got it worse. "I can't stand it anymore! They're going to put me in hospital and make me pass a skull through my cunt, and then they're going to have a little accident and I'll bleed out and they'll give me to Hanta to fix with her tame censorship worm. I'll come out of the hospital smiling like Yvonne and Patrice, and there won't be any me left, there'll be this thing that thinks it's me and—"