I hurry after him. "In what capacity am I talking to you?" I ask, desperately racking my brains for an excuse not to join him. "Is it about Janis?"

He turns and fixes me with a beady stare. "It might be, my daughter." And that's pure Fiore. So I follow him through the door and down the steps into the cellar, a hopeless tension gnawing at my guts, still unsure whether I'm right to be worried or not.

Fiore pauses when we get to the strange room at the bottom of the stairs. "What exactly do you think of Dr. Hanta?" he asks me. He sounds tired, weighed down with cares.

I'm taken aback. What is this, some kind of internal politicking? "She's"—I pause, biting my tongue, acutely aware who I'm talking to—"refreshingly direct. She means well, and she's concerned. I trust her," I add impulsively, resisting the urge to add, unlike you . I manage to maneuver so my back is to the storage shelves on one wall. If I have to grab something —

"That's not unexpected," Fiore says quietly. "What did she do to you?"

"She didn't tell you?"

"No, I want you to tell me in your own words." His voice is low and urgent, and something in my heart breaks. I can't pretend this isn't happening anymore, can I? So I play for time.

"I was having frequent memory fugues, and I picked up a nasty little case of gray goo up top in the ship's mass fraction tankage. That set my immune system off, and it began taking out memory traces. Dr. Hanta had to put me on antirobotics and give me a complete memory fixative in order to stop things progressing." I move my hands behind my back and slowly shuffle backward, away from him and toward the wall. "I'd say she's a surprisingly ethical practitioner, given the way everyone else here carries on in secret. Or do you know differently?"

"Hmm." Fiore—fake-Fiore—leans over the assembler console and taps in some kind of code. "Yes, as a matter of fact I do."

While he isn't watching I take another step back until I bump up against shelves. Good. I'm already mentally preparing what I need to do next.

Fiore continues, implacably. "One of your predecessors here—yes, they're still around in deep cover—got it worked out. Dr. Hanta isn't her real name. She, or rather it, used to be a member of the Asclepian League." I give a little gasp. "Yes, you do remember them, don't you? She was a Vivisector, Reeve. One of the inner clade, dedicated to pursuing their own vision of how humanity should be restructured."

"Thanks for reminding me what I came here to get away from," I say shakily. "I'm going to be having nightmares about that for the next week."

He turns and glares at me. "Are you stupid, or—" He stops himself. "I'm sorry. But if that's all it means to you, you really are beyond—" He stabs at the console angrily. "Shit. I thought you'd be at least vaguely concerned for the rest of us in here."

I take a deep breath, trying to get my nausea under control. The Asclepians were another of the dictatorship cults, a morphological collective. Much worse than the Solipsist Nation. They restructured polities one screaming mangled body at a time. If Dr. Hanta is an Asclepian, and she's working with Yourdon and Fiore, the future they're trying to sculpt is a thing of horror. "She can't be. She just can't."

"And I suppose you think Major-Doctor Fiore is just a fat, egocentric psychiatrist?" He grins at me humorlessly. "Stop that, Reeve, I know what you're up to. Hanta fucked with your head really well, didn't she? Probably got you to give your consent first, too. They're hot on formalities, Asclepians. Fiore and Yourdon are war criminals, too. Shit, most of the people here did things so nasty they want to forget everything. Do you remember why this is an experimental polity?"

"Remember?" That's a new one on me.

"Oh. A memory fixative, that makes sense." He takes a final poke at the console. It dings and turns luminous green. "Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything. ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?' " He takes a step back. "Listen, we'll have to break whatever conditioning she loaded your implant with."

My stomach churns for real this time. I feel sick. He's a monster, and he wants to drag me back down into the turmoil I was in before Hanta sorted me out. And I've been up the ladder now, I know there's no way out. We're stuck here. Resistance is futile. I really ought to run for it, call the Bishop and get the police to take him away. But that'd be like betraying myself, too, wouldn't it? "Did you kill Mick?" I whisper. "How did you get in that body?"

"Will you feel better if I say yes?" His voice is surprisingly gentle. "Or will you feel worse?"

"I'll—" I take another gulp of air. "I want to know."

Fake-Fiore, Robin, blinks slowly, pudgy eyes closing: I tense but he opens them again before I can gather my wits to move. "It was after you killed Fiore," he says. "I got into the assembler and backed myself up, programmed in a body merge and neural splice, so I'd come out in Fiore's skin instead of like . . ." He nods at me. "I put a two-hour hold on it to give you time to get the mess sorted out, but you must have blanked in between. So I wake up inside the gate and find the basement has been partially cleaned, and you're missing, and I had to finish the job. Fiore's backed up in the gate, and I've got his biometrics, so I manage to get a dump of his implant, and when one of him showed up to check on you, I told him you'd just gone missing. He believed me. He's not very good at handling multiplicity.

"On Sunday morning I went to visit Cass in the hospital," he says quietly. "It turns out I wasn't her first visitor that morning. I haven't heard anything about it through the rumor net, but it was pretty bad: I think Hanta covered it up afterward but if you were wondering . . . I caught Mick. He'd been living in the basement of an empty house, stealing stuff from folks' kitchens while they were at work—we're a trusting bunch, have you noticed that? We leave our back doors unlocked. He'd gagged her and you saw the tissue scaffolds Hanta had her legs in. She couldn't do anything. I mean, she was trying to get away, but not getting very far. He was raping her again, Reeve, and you know what I think about third chances."

I nod, gulping for breath. The horror of it is that I can see everything in my mind's eye: me-in-Fiore's-flesh creeping up on Mick as he humps away, Cass thrashing around helplessly—Mick's probably tied her arms out of the way—and me-in-Fiore's-flesh saps Mick at the base of the skull. He doesn't do it very carefully, because he's beyond fury at this point; beyond caring about inflicting subarachnoid hemorrhages. He doesn't care at all whether Mick wakes up again. In fact he thinks Mick's waking up would be a very bad idea, at least for Cass, and maybe come to think of it he can use Mick to send a message to any borderline sociopaths who are thinking about following his example—

It's very me. Me as I used to be, not me as I was before (quiet, peaceful historian, devoted family man) or me as I am now (slightly squirrelly, evanescent with the joy of discovering what it's like to surrender after fighting for what seems like my entire life), but me as I was in the middle, the grim-faced killing machine. But then I meet his eyes, and I see an awful sadness in them, a sick sense of guilt that mirrors what I feel at the knowledge that I'm absolutely going to have to shop him to the Bishop because we can't afford to have a murderous doppelganger of one of our most respected citizens running around—

I grab the first thing my fingers scrabble across: a heavy file of paper hardcopy, part of the dump of Curious Yellow from the closet upstairs. I take two brisk paces forward as I raise it and bring it down on top of his head as hard as I can. He sags and falls over, but I don't stick around to finish the job. Instead, I turn and run for the stairs. If I can make it to the top and slam the door, he'll be trapped down here for long enough to call—