He looks at me skeptically. "Bad day at the office?"

"It's always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place."

He frowns. "What's this about a hobby?"

"Extreme metalworking, or something like that. Have you seen my copy of The Swordsmith's Assistant ? I was going to throw it out when I wasn't feeling myself, but I never got round to it."

You can almost see the light come on above his head. "Reeve? Is that you?"

"I had a crap day at the office, too. Reading poetry out of boredom, you know? ‘Last night I met upon the stair, a big fat man who wasn't there; he wasn't there again today: inside my head he'll have to stay.' Ogden Nashville. Apparently, the ancients seem to have liked him for some reason. C'mon, let's go and round up some supper."

Sam retreats back into the house ahead of me, lips moving soundlessly as he turns it over in his head. I have been reading poetry at work, I just hope my improvised doggerel gets through. (Poetry really gums up conversational monitoring systems. Parsing metaphor and emotional states is an AI-complete problem.)

We end up in the kitchen. "Were you thinking about cooking again?" Sam asks cautiously. Thinking back to days past, I suspect he wasn't too enthusiastic about being subjected to some of my experiments.

"Let's just order a pizza instead, hmm? And a flask of wine."

"Why?" He stares at me.

"Do you have to turn every suggestion for what to do of an evening into an impromptu therapy session?"

He shrugs. "Just asking." He begins to turn away.

I grab his shoulder. "Don't do that."

He turns back sharply, looking surprised. "What?"

" ‘Last night I met upon the stair, a big fat man who wasn't there; he wasn't there again today: inside my head he'll have to stay' . . . I haven't been myself lately, Sam, but I'm feeling a lot better today." I frown at him, willing the words to sink in.

"Oh, you mean . . ."

"Shh!" I hold up a warning finger. "The walls have ears."

Sam's eyes widen, and he begins to pull away from me. I grab at his shoulder, hard, then step in close and wrap my arms around him. He tries to push back, but I lean my face against his shoulder. "We need to talk," I whisper.

"About what?" he whispers back. But at least he stops pushing.

"What's going on." I lick his earlobe, and he jolts as if I've stuck a live wire in it.

"Don't do that!" he hisses.

"Why not?" I ask, amused. "Afraid you might enjoy it?"

"But we, they—"

"I'm going to order food. While we're eating, let's keep things light, okay? Afterward we'll go upstairs. I've got a trick or two to show you. For avoiding eavesdroppers ." I add in a whisper: "Smile, please."

"Won't it be obvious?" He's lowered his arms and is holding me loosely around the waist. I shiver because I've been wanting him to do that so badly for the past week—no, let's not go there.

"No it won't be. They use low-level monitors to track normal behavior. They call in high-end monitors only if we act funny. So don't act funny."

"Oh." I look up as he looks down for a startled instant, and I kiss him. He tastes of sweat and a faint, musty aroma of dust and paperwork. A moment passes, then he responds enthusiastically. "This is normal?" he asks.

"Whoa! Dinner first." I laugh, pulling back.

"Dinner first." He looks at me with a dark, serious expression.

I phone for a pizza and a couple of glass jars of wine, and while Sam heads for the living room, I try to catch my breath. Things are moving too fast for comfort, and I'm suddenly having to deal with a mass of conflicted emotions at a time when all I was wanting to do was recruit another dissatisfied inmate to the campaign. The thing is, Sam and I have too much history for anything between us to be simple—even though we haven't actually done very much together. We haven't had time , and Sam's got big body-image issues, and then she/me nearly fucked everything between us completely while under the influence of the pernicious Dr. Hanta—oh, hindsight is a wonderful tool, isn't it? Thinking about it, Sam's dissatisfaction and passivity has been a running sore between us, and I half suspect it took my apparent co-option to kick him into doing something about it.

I feel guilty as I remember what I was thinking at the time. I can surrender  . . . yes, and they'll make my life a living hell, won't they? Did I really want to hand complete control over my life to the likes of Fiore, Yourdon, and Hanta? I don't think I explicitly intended to do that, but it amounted to the same thing. It feels like a moment of cowardice in my own past, a voluntary moment of cowardice, and I feel oddly dirty because of it. Because it's not far out of my normal character to feel that way inclined—Hanta didn't rebuild her/me, she just tweaked a few weightings in my mind map. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" in spades. And Sam got to see that side of me. Ick.

The closet bings for attention and I take the pizza tray and wine out of it. On my way through to the living room I kick my shoes off, strewing them in the hallway. "Sam?" He turns round. He's nesting in the sofa again, the television turned to some sports channel. "Turn the volume up."

He raises an eyebrow at me but does as I ask, and I sit down next to him. "Here. Garlic and tofu with deep-fried lemon chicken steak." I open the box and pull out a slice, then hold it in front of his mouth. "Eat?"

"What is this?"

"I want to feed you." I lean against him and hold the pizza in front of his face, just out of reach. "Go on. You're begging for it really, aren't you?"

"Gaah." He leans forward and takes a bite at it—I try to pull my hand back, but I'm just too late and he gets a mouthful. I laugh and lean closer and find his arm is around my shoulders. Chewing: "You. Are. Intolerable."

"Manipulative," I suggest. "Annoying."

"All of the above?"

"Yes, all of it by turns." I feed him another mouthful, then change my mind about letting him have the whole slice and eat the rest of it myself.

"Every time I think I understand you, you change the rules," he complains. "Give me another . . ."

"Not my fault. I don't make the rules."

"Who does?"

I point a finger at the ceiling, waggle it about. "Remember our chat in the library?" After I came out to Janis, last Tuesday, she phoned Sam and asked him to come visit. He was very surprised to see me-as-Fiore, almost as much as when we showed him the basement and the A-gate. "Remember my face?" He nods, looking dubious. "Janis and I sorted everything out. Settled the slight difference of opinions. I'm feeling a lot better now, and less inclined to give up on things."

His arm tightens. Warm, comforting, presence. "But why?"

I take a deep breath and offer him another slice of pizza. Better keep it short. At this rate he's going to eat it all. "You don't want to live like this."

"But I—" He stops.

"Do you?" I prod him.

He looks at me. "Watching you, this past week—" He shakes his head. "I'd love to be able to settle in like that." He shakes his head again, underscoring the ironic tone in his voice. "What alternative is there?"

"We're not supposed to talk about where we came from." I pause to chew for a moment. "And we can't go back." I flick a warning glance his way. "But we can make ourselves more comfortable here if we rearrange our priorities." Will he get it?

Sam sighs. "If only we could do that." He glances down at his lap.

"I've got a new priority for you," I say, my heart beating faster.

"Really?"

"Yes." I put the pizza box down and plaster myself against him. "We can start right here by you picking me up and carrying me upstairs to the bathroom."