She walks over toward the door of the teahouse and, as far as I can reconstruct later, this is the precise moment, when a swarm of eighteen thousand three hundred and twenty-nine wasp-sized attack robots erupt from the assembler in my family's home. We live in an ancient dwelling patterned on a lost house of old Urth called Fallingwater, a conservative design from before the Acceleration. There are doors and staircases and windows in this house, but no internal T-gates that can be closed, and the robots rapidly overpower Iambic-18, who is in the kitchen with the gate.

They deconstruct Iambic-18 so rapidly there is no time for a scream of pain or pulse of netlinked agony. Then they fan out through the house in a malignant buzzing fog, bringing rapid death. A brief spray of blood here and a scream cut short there. The household assembler has been compromised by Curious Yellow, our backups willfully erased to make room for the wasps of tyranny, and, although I don't know it yet, my life has been gracelessly cut loose from everything that gave it meaning.

After the executions, they eat the physical bodies and excrete more robot parts, ready to self-assemble into further attack swarms that will continue the hunt for enemies of Curious Yellow.

I know about this now because Curious Yellow kept logs of all the somatic kills it made. Nobody knows why Curious Yellow did this—one theory is that it is a report for CY's creators—but I have watched the terahertz radar map of the security wasps eating my family and my children so many times that it is burned into my mind. I'm one of the rare survivors among the millions targeted as somatic enemies, to be destroyed rather than edited. And now it's as if I'm watching it again for the first time, reliving the horror that made me plead with the Linebarger Cats to take me in and turn me into a tank. (But that was half a gigasecond later, when the Grateful for Duration made contact with one of the isolated redoubts of the resistance.)

I realize I'm awake, and it's still nighttime. My cheeks itch from the salty tracks of tears shed in my sleep, and I'm curled up in an uncomfortable position, close to one edge of the bed. There's an arm around my waist, and a breathing breeze on the back of my neck. For a moment I can't work it out, but then it begins to make sense to me. "I'm awake now," I murmur.

"Oh. Good." He sounds sleepy. How long has he been here? I went to bed alone—I feel a momentary stab of panic at the thought that he's here uninvited, but I don't want to be alone. Not now.

"Were you asleep?" I ask.

He yawns. "Must have. Dozed off." His arm tenses, and I tense, too, and push myself back toward the curve of his chest and legs. "You were unhappy."

"What I didn't tell you earlier." And I'm still not sure it's a good idea to tell him. "My family. Curious Yellow killed them."

"What? But Curious Yellow didn't kill, it edited—"

"Not everyone." I lean against him. "Most people it edited. Some of us it hunted down and murdered. The ones who might have been able to work out who made it, I think."

"I didn't know that."

"Not many people do. You were either directly affected, in which case you were probably dead, or it happened to someone else, and you were busy rebuilding your life and trying to make your struggling firewalled micropolity work without all the external inputs provided by the rest of Is-ness. A gig after the end of the war it was old news."

"But not for you."

I can feel Sam's tension through his arm around me.

"Look, I'm tired, and I don't want to revisit it. Old pains, all right?" I try and relax against the side of his body. "I've become a creature ofsolitary habits. Didn't do to get too close to anyone during the war, and since then, haven't had the opportunity."

His breathing is deep and even. Maybe he's already asleep. I close my eyes and try to join him, but it takes me a long time to drift off. I can't help wondering how badly he must have been missing contact with another human being, to share my bed again.

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?"