"Going somewhere?" drawls Janis, pointing a stungun at me from the top step. I can see her trigger finger whitening behind the guard.

I start to raise my hands. "Don't—"

She does.

I groan and reach up to touch my head, which hurts like hell where Reeve thumped me. Someone grabs my wrist and tugs experimentally, and I open my eyes. It's Janis. She looks concerned. "What happened?" I ask.

"I caught her running up the stairs, in a real hurry to get somewhere." Janis peers at me. "What about you?"

I touch my head finally and wince at the sharp pain. "She thumped me with something, a box file I think. I fell over." Stupid, stupid. I feel a bit sick. Looking round brings a stab of pain to my neck. "Hit my head on the A-gate plinth."

"Then it was lucky I was in time."

"Huh. There's no such thing as luck where you're involved."

"That was in another life," she says pensively. "Are you going to be all right on your own? I need to close up shop."

"Get it closed, already." I wince and push myself upright, breathing heavily. This body has a lot of momentum, and a lot of insulation, but it's not built for bouncing around. "If anybody finds us—"

"I'll sort them out."

Janis vanishes upstairs. I sit up and manage not to retch. Reeve almost ruined it for both of us, and I'm horrified at how close I came to blowing it. If I hadn't figured out who Janis was, I'd be on my own down here and Reeve would have killed me without blinking. Doctor's orders.

I'm going to have to do something about Reeve, and I'm not looking forward to this. Surely Hanta—let's make that Colonel-Surgeon Vyshinski, to give her her real name—got to her, but losing a week isn't something that I take lightly, and besides, she knows stuff that might come in useful. Dilemmas, dilemmas. If there was some way to trivially reverse the brainwashing that Hanta's applied . . . shit . Hanta's an artist, isn't she? It'll be some sort of motivational/value abreactive hack, subtle as hell, leaves the personality intact but tweaking the gain on a couple of traits, just enough to turn Reeve into a good little score whore.

I sit with my legs apart, panting a trifle heavily over my enormous wobbling gut-bucket, and try to come to terms with the fact that I'm going to have to kill my better half. It's upsetting, however often you've done it before.

There's some clattering upstairs. I stand up, wheezing, and waddle over to see what's going on. I hate this body, but it's been useful for getting me into places none of us could otherwise go—they've been letting their internal security get sloppy, forgetting the authenticator rhyme: something shared, something do, something secret, something you? I suppose settling for something you is sufficient if you've got control over all the assemblers in a polity, but still. I wait at the bottom of the stairs. "Who is it?" I call quietly.

"Me," says Janis. "I need a hand with her."

"Humph." I haul myself up the steps. Janis is waiting at the top with Reeve, whose wrists and ankles she's trussed together with a roll of library tape. Reeve is twitching a little and showing signs of coming to. "What are you thinking we should do with her?" I ask.

"Can you get her downstairs?" Janis asks breathlessly.

"Yes." I lean forward and grasp Reeve by the ankles: For all that this body is grotesquely overweight, it's not weak. I lift and drag, and Janis holds Reeve's arms up enough to stop her head banging on the steps. At the bottom I pull her toward the A-gate. By this time her eyes are rolling, and she's turning red in the face. Hating myself, I lean forward. "What would you do?" I ask her.

"Mmph! Mmmph."

Defiant to the end—that's me. I look up at Janis. "Why didn't you kill her?"

"I didn't want to," says Janis.

"What, you're going to just—"

"Just put her in the gate!" She sounds stressed.

I get my hands under Reeve's armpits and lift. She goes limp, trying to deadweight on me. "I don't like this any more than you do," I tell her. "But this town's too small for both of us."

As I dump her into the A-gate, she kicks out with both legs, but I'm expecting that, and I punch her over the left kidney. That makes her double up. I swing the door shut. "Well?" I glare at Janis. "What now?" I feel like shit. Killing myself always makes me feel like shit. That's why I'm deferring to Janis, I think. Pushing the tough choice off onto someone else's shoulders.

Janis is bending over the control station. "Figuring this out," she murmurs. "Look, I'm going to lift a template from her, okay?

"Fuck." I shake my head, a parody of resignation. There's a thud from inside the A-gate, and I wince. I feel for Reeve: I can see myself in her place, and it's horrifying. "Why?"

"Because." Janis looks up at me. "Fiore's going to suspect if we keep you running around in drag. Don't you think it's time for you to go back?"

"Back?"

"To being Reeve," she says patiently.

"Oh," I echo. "Oh , I see." Being thumped on the head has left me sluggish and stupid. Janis is right, we don't have to kill her. And suddenly I feel a whole lot better about punching Reeve and dumping her into a macro-scale nanostructure disassembler, for the same reason that punching yourself in the face never feels quite as bad as having someone else do it for you.

"I'm going to template from her, and then you're going to follow her, and I'm going to take a delta from your current neural state vector and overlay it on Reeve. You'll wake up back in her body, with both sets of memories, but you're going to be the dominant set. Think that'll work?"

There's another muffled thump from inside the A-gate, then muffled retching noises—Janis has triggered the template program, paralyzing Reeve via her netlink, and the chamber is filling with ablative digitizer foam. "It had better," I say.

"I'm worried Fiore may suspect what's going on. The thing with Mick could blow it completely if he puts two and two together."

I sigh heavily. "Okay, I'll go back to being Reeve. I suppose that makes sense."

"You agree?" She looks haggard in the dim light from the ceiling bulbs. "Good, then it's not entirely stupid. What then . . . ?"

"Then we sit down and figure out how to nail down the lid on this mess. Once I know what she knows."

"Right." Her lips quirk in a faint smile. "Your direct, no-nonsense approach is always like a breath of fresh air."

"Once a tank, always a tank," I remind her.

"Right," she echoes, and for a moment I can see a shadow of her former self. That sends a pang through my chest.

"The sooner I'm myself again, the better."

We sit in silence for long minutes while the gate chugs to itself, then finally the console chimes, and there's a click as the door unlatches. I walk over and swing it open: as usual, the chamber is bare and dry. I glance over and see that she's watching me.

"Ready?" she asks.

"See you on the other side, Sanni," I say as I close the door.

That's all.

SECURITY Cell Blue used to be part of the counterespionage division of the Linebarger Cats. It was supposedly disbanded, all memory traces erased, at the end of the censorship wars. I know this is not the case because I'm a member. We didn't disband, we went underground—because our mission wasn't over.

This is a risky business. Our job is to do unpleasant things to ruthless people. Covering our tracks costs money—lots of it, and it isn't always fungible across polity frontiers these days. Local militias and governments have reinvented exchange rates, currency hedges, and a whole host of other archaic practices. Some polities are relatively open, while others have fallen into warlordism. Some place great stock on authentication and uniqueness tracking, while others don't care who you think you are as long as you pay your oxygen tax. (The former make great homes; the latter make great refuges.) As a consequence of the postwar fragmentation, we end up moving around a lot, shuffling our appearances and sometimes our memories, forking spares and merging deltas. At first we live off the capital freed up by the Cats' liquidation; later we supplement it by setting up a variety of business fronts. (If you've ever heard of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or Cordwainer Heavy Industries, that's us.) Operationally, we work in loosely coupled cells. I'm one of the heavy hitters, my background in combat ops meshing neatly with my intelligence experience.