"We need." His voice is congested with emotion. "Reeve."

"Come with me," I say.

He stands up. "Where? What is this about?"

"Come on." I reach out and take his necktie and gently tug. He follows me into the hallway. "This way." I take the steps slowly, going up, listening to his hoarse breathing deepen. He doesn't try to pull away until I reach the bedroom door.

"We shouldn't be doing this," he says hoarsely. "I don't know why you're doing this, but we mustn't."

"Come on." I give him a little tug and he follows me into the bedroom and I finally let go and turn to face him. I feel a looseness in my innards as I look up at his face, a warmth at my crotch. "Kay. Sam. Whoever you are. I love you."

I freeze, my eyes wide as I see his pupils dilate and he looks puzzled: I realize he didn't hear me! "The magic phrase, Sam." And I realize that I mean it. This isn't the stinger-ampoule side effect of Jen's malice, it's something more profound. "What you said to me the other day, I'm saying it right back to you." His expression clears. "Come here."

He looks confused, now. "But if we—"

"No buts." I reach over to him and tug at the knot on his necktie. It unclips from his collar, and I fumble at the top button. He chews his upper lip, and I can feel him trembling under my fingers, warm and immensely solid and reassuring. I take a step closer until I'm leaning up against him, and I feel through his clothes that he's as excited as I am. "I want you, Sam, Kay. I don't want to have any barriers between us, it hurts too much. I've nearly lost you twice now, I'm not going to lose you again."

His hands on my shoulders, huge and powerful. His breath on my cheek. "I'm afraid this isn't going to work, Reeve."

"Life's frightening." I get another button undone, then I look up to see his face above me, and I stop. I was about to stretch up to kiss him, but something about his expression isn't right. "What is it?"

"What's wrong with you?" he hisses. "This isn't like you, Reeve, what's happening?"

"I'm doing what I should have done last week." I wrap my arms around him and lean my forehead against his shoulder. But he's started a train of thought going, running on rails right through my lust simple: "I've had a bad experience. It put a lot of things into a new perspective, Sam. You ever had one of those? Done something stupid and crazy and maybe a bit evil and only realized afterward that you'd jeopardized everything you ever cared about? Been there, done that—more than once—most recently the day before yesterday, and I don't want to be defined by my mistakes. So I'm walking away from them. I want us to work, I don't want to—"

"Reeve, stop it. Stop this. You're scaring me."

Huh? I pull back and stare at him, offended. It's like a bucket of ice water in the face.

"This isn't you speaking, is it?" he asks. He sounds certain.

"Yes it is!" I insist.

"Really?" He looks skeptical. "You wouldn't have thrown yourself at me like this last week."

"Yes I would! In a moment, if I wasn't so conflicted." Then what he's trying to tell me without actually saying it in so many words sinks in, and I jam one hand across my mouth to keep from screaming in frustration.

"So you're not conflicted now," he says, gently leading me over toward the bed and pushing me down on the edge of it, sitting next to me so we're shoulder to shoulder. "But you were conflicted when you went into the hospital, Reeve. You've been conflicted as long as I've known you. So you'll pardon my momentary suspicion when, the moment you get home, you throw yourself at me? After swearing off sex entirely just a week ago."

It's there in front of me, a yawning abyss of my own making, no longer avoidable since Dr. Hanta applied her fixative. I am stuck with the me that I have become, unable to restore that which is missing. "I'm not who I was a week ago," I say tightly. "She fixed the memory leakage, for one thing. And I've acquired a restored sense of my own mortality from somewhere I don't want to talk about, except it's not anything that they did to me. I think." But a cynical corner of my mind says, You said "I love you," didn't you? Last time you did that, your CY-hack was triggered. Someone's tweaked your netlink, haven't they?

The cold horror that steals over you when you wake up unsure whether you died in the night has just stroked its bony hand along my spine. Somewhere between the cooling puddle of blood in the library basement and Dr. Hanta's sly consent, I seem to have lost something. Sam's right, old-me wouldn't be doing this. Old-me would be scared of different things, and rightly so—and I'm still scared of Fiore and Yourdon, and I still want out of their perverse managed society, but we're on board a MASucker, and I know what that means.

"I still want you," I tell him. Although a worm of doubt adds, "I'm just not sure I want you for the same reasons I wanted you last week."

"They've gotten to you."

I laugh shakily. "They got to me a long time ago. I just didn't notice until now." I clutch at him, but as much from terror as lust. "Why are you here, Kay? Why did you sign up for the experiment?"

"I followed you."

"Bullshit!" I can see it now. "That's not enough. And don't tell me it was to get away from your time with the ice ghouls. Why did you go there? What were you running away from?"

Sam is silent and unresponsive for a while. "If I tell you, you'll probably hate me."

"So?" I see an opportunity. Shuffling up onto the bed I pull my legs up under my dress and sit cross-legged with my hands in my lap. "If I listen to your story and I don't hate you afterward, will you let me fuck you?"

"I don't see what that's got to do with—"

"Let me be the judge of my motives, Sam." Even if they're contaminated. "You keep trying to second-guess me. It's getting to be a bad habit. Before, I didn't want to sleep with you for reasons that made sense at the time. Then when the reasons no longer apply, you say I'macting out of character. You don't give me credit for being able to change of my own volition."

He shakes his head.

"Have you any idea how insulting that is?"

"That's not what I meant—"

"I am capable of change, that's why I'm here!" I draw a deep breath. "I'm not who I was during the war, Sam, or before it, or even after it. I'm who I am now, which is the end product of all those other people becoming one another. They can put you into the dark ages, but they can't put the dark ages into you, not short of truncating your life expectancy to about three gigasecs or erasing so many memories you might as well be . . ." I trail off. I've got a strange feeling that I just realized something vitally important, but I'm not sure what.

He looks at me oddly. "You'll hate me," he says. "I did terrible things."

"So?" I shrug. "I did bad things, too. People out there wanted to kill me, Sam. I thought it was something to do with a mission I was on and had accidentally erased, but now I'm not so sure; maybe they were just after me because of, well, one of the people I used to be. A person who fought in the war. A combatant."

He rocks back and forth thoughtfully. "Nobody here but us war criminals," he says.

It is very interesting to discover that the phrase "my blood runs cold" actually reflects a physical sensation. It is much less pleasant to do so while sitting next to someone you love unconditionally and currently can't share a room with without needing a change of underwear, and who's just triggered that sensation in your head. And it's even worse when you realize that what he said applies to you, too. "Nobody here but us monsters," I say, trying to be flippant. "Or amnesiacs haunted by the ghosts of their past lives."

"Has it occurred to you that YFH-Polity might be very convenient for a certain type of person?" Sam asks slowly.