But she was alive. Alive enough to sit in the rain, skin stained with pictures of herself, and remember everything.

A taxi hummed past.

She did not call out, but she was not sure if that was because she was too weak, or because she was afraid. The taxi driver might recognize her. He would know what they had done to her. He would have seen it. Everyone would have seen it. They would look at her and know. She could not call her family. They had all seen her suffer, too. Every time they looked at her they would see the pictures, and she would see them seeing it, and she would wonder why they had not paid her ransom.

Her hair was plastered to her head. The rain sheeted down. She crawled into a doorway, realized she was whimpering. She had to be quiet, she had to hide. She had to lose herself. Think. What would give her away? She pulled herself up to her knees and tried to look at her reflection in the shop window, but the rain made it impossible. She scrabbled around in the corners of the doorway until the dirt there turned to mud on her wet hands. She smeared the mud onto her hair. After thirty days, the nanomechs coloring her head and body hair would be dying off and the natural gray would be showing. Only the very few, the very rich wore naturally gray hair. What else? Her Personal Identity, DNA and Account insert. But when she held out her left hand to the fiickers of light flashing in the doorway she saw the angry red scar on the webbing between her thumb and index finger. Of course—the kidnappers would have removed the PIDA on the first day to prevent a trace.

She was alone, hurt, and moneyless. She needed help but was afraid to find it.

It was almost dawn before she heard footsteps. She peered around the doorway. A woman, with dark blond hair tucked into the collar of a big coat, walking with a night step: easy, but wary. One hand in her pocket.

“Help me.”

Her voice was just a whisper and Lore thought the woman had not heard, but she slowed, then stopped. “Come out where I can see you.” The kind of voice Lore had never heard before: light and quick and probably dangerous.

“Help me.” It came out sounding like a command, and Lore heard for the first time the rounded plumminess of her own voice, and knew that she would have to learn to change it.

This time the woman heard, and turned toward the doorway. “Why, what’s wrong with you?” The hand shifted in its pocket, and Lore wondered if the woman had a weapon of some kind. “Stand up so I can see you.”

“I can’t.” Trying to imitate the slippery street vowels.

“Then I’ll just walk along home.” She sounded as though she meant it.

“No.” Lore tried again. “Please. I need your help.”

The woman in the long coat seemed suddenly to shrug off her caution.

“Let’s have a look at you, then.”

When she stepped closer to the doorway and saw Lore’s muddy hair and nakedness, she grinned. “You need to get rid of the boyfriend or girlfriend that did this to you.” But when the light fell on Lore’s bloody back, the woman’s tace tightened into old lines, and her eyes flashed yellow and wise in the sodium light. She fished something out of her coat pocket, slid it inside her shirt, and took off her coat. She held it out. “This might hurt your back, but it’ll keep you warm until I can get you home.”

Lore pulled herself up the metal and glass corner of the doorway, and stood. The woman caught her arm as she nearly fell.

“Hurt?”

“No.” It was numb now.

“It will.” That sounded as though it came from experience. “It’s too cold to stand around. Just put this on and walk.”

Lore took the coat. It was heavy, old wool. The lining was dark silk, still warm. “It smells of summer,” and there were tears in her eyes as she remembered the smells of sunshine on bruised grass, a long, long time before this nightmare began.

“Put it on.” The woman sounded impatient. She was glancing about: quick flicks of her head this way and that. Her hair, free of the coat collar now, swung from side to side.

Lore struggled with the coat. She flinched when the warm silk touched her back, but all she felt was a kind of stretched numbness like the opening of a vast tunnel. “My name…” Shock made her dizzy and vague. “Who…”

“Spanner.” Spanner was scanning the street again. It was noticeably lighter. Another taxi skimmed by. “Fasten the damn thing up. And hurry.”

On that first night it seemed to Lore to be miles and miles from the city center to Spanner’s flat. She learned later that it was barely a mile and a half. It was not that she had a hard time moving—on the contrary, she seemed to skim along the pavement without effort—it was more that the journey stretched endlessly and the false dawn blended with the sodium streetlamps to form a light like wet orange sherbet that always seemed just a moment away from fizzing, boiling off, leaving no oxygen. Lore knew she was ill. She remembered the blood, hers and his, the sharp plastic tick as it dripped onto the plasthene.

She had a vague impression of a shop window and railings, and then stone steps. The stairwell was made of unfinished brick. The mortar looked old. Spanner must have opened the door then, because she found herself inside.

Spanner did not turn on any lights; it was bright enough with the streetlights washing in through unshuttered windows. Lore swayed in the middle of an enormous L-shaped room. Several power points glowed at one end, like red eyes.

“You need to sleep,” Spanner said, “not talk. Here’s some water. Some painkillers.” Her voice sounded different in her own room, and she seemed to appear and disappear, reappearing with things—a glass, some pills; showing Lore the bathroom. It was like watching a jerky, badly edited film. “Here’s the mat.” A judo mat, by the west wall, under the windows opposite the curtained opening to the short limb of the L, the bedroom. “I’ll turn up the heat. You won’t be able to bear anything on that back for a while. I don’t think we can do much about it tonight. Looks like it’s scabbing over. I’ll get a medic for you in the morning, and we’ll talk then.”

Lore knew she must be saying things, responding in some way she assumed reassured Spanner, but she was not aware of it. Spanner touched a pad of buttons on the wall. “I’ve set the alarm. If you need anything, or want to leave, wake me.”

Then Spanner went into the bedroom and closed the curtain behind her.

Lore was alone. Alone in a room filled with shadows of furniture she had never seen before, things that belonged to a woman she did not know, in a city that was strange to her. Alone. A nobody with nothing, not even clothes. It was like being kidnapped again, but this time she had no escape to dream of, nowhere to run to. Her sister had killed herself. Her father was a monster who had lied to her, year after year after year.

She stood in the middle of the room, aware of the strange smells and temperature, and knew clearly that she needed this woman Spanner; depended upon her, in a way that was shocking. Lore’s fear was sharp, undeniable as a knife pressed against her cheek. It woke her up a little from her dreamy shock state. She was thirsty.

The bathroom was enormous, its window bare; It was too dark outside to see much, but she thought there were perhaps walls, and the remains of a path. She did not want to put the light on, but she could make out a yellowing, old-fashioned tub and huge, cracked black and white tiles. The water ran from the bulbous taps under low pressure, twisting like crossed fingers. She let it pour over her fingers automatically, tasted with the tip of her tongue. Salty. Ions: probably chloride and fluoride and bromide… and suddenly she was crying.

Her fingers turned cold under the tap as she wept. She would have to drink this water that wheezed out from old lead pipes, would have to accept what she was given from now on, and she would have to like it.