“Right! Out! Out, I say!” Ferd positively shouts me off his operating table. He rushes us into a back passage that I hadn’t noticed on our way in. “Grab a wig and an outfit on your way! Be seeing you, Dachus! Ha-ha!”

I pause to loot my pockets and grab a shoulder bag, then pick up a copper-gold wig and a frilled red lace leotard.

“New identity time,” calls Daks. “You’re called Kate, you’re an exotic dancer. You work in” — I pull on the leotard — “the Blue Moon on Kirovstrasse, and your specialty is aristo fetishists. Everything’s set up for you already.” Typical. I scramble to fasten the outfit, texture my skin to sketch in underwear and shoes beneath it, and grab a somewhat battered jacket with built-in heaters. Then I hurry after Daks (who hasn’t stopped moving).

“Where now?”

“We split.” He thrusts a wallet at me. “If they’re coming after you openly, then your existing bolt-hole is blown. Shit’s hitting the turbine, full force. Jeeves says Mars isn’t safe for anyone, least of all you. Give her this kit and tell her to meet him on Callisto. He’ll be in touch later if it’s safe.”

“Callisto?” I blink my aching eyes and heft the wallet. We’re back out in the cold, walking past a row of doss houses and cheap body shops.

“Don’t worry, you’re on payroll now. There’s a soul chip in there that explains everything: It’s an update from Juliette. Plus there are three changes of identity. Boss wants you in Jupiter system, stat. You call in when you get there, but try not to take more than four years over it. ’Kay? Thanks. Bye!”

With that, Daks lifts on a jet of compressed gas and zips away across the moonlit shantytown, staying in nap-of-Mars. I shiver for a moment, look around, notice the lengthening shadows, and slide into them, doing my best impression of a nonvictim who knows what she’s doing in the barrio after dark.

Coin-Operated Boy

I MAKE IT to the nearest tube station. En route, nobody tries to mug, assault, rape, enslave, or strip me down for spare parts. Which is no bad thing, really, because I am in no mood for it. I walk the whole way with my hand in that shoulder bag, clutching the gun I took from Stone, and I’m angry, which is a bad combination. (It’s not just a gun. You can fold the chamber back, stick your fingers through the holes in the skeletal butt, and it’s a knuckle duster; flip a catch and twist and it sprouts a stiletto blade. And there’s always the revolver. His choice of weapon says it all about Stone, I think — flamboyant, but not necessarily effective.)

I use the Maria Montes Kuo cashcard for the first ride, but it’s a private capsule, and I’m only going as far as a public interchange, and by the time I bounce out onto the platform, I’ve activated the card in Jeeves’s little care package and gotten my story rebooted.

The card in the wallet Daks passed me isn’t just gilt-edged; it contains a line of credit on an account that claims to have the thick end of fifty thousand Reals in it. That’s more money than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life. I could live modestly on the capital for a century, or invest it foolishly and lose my glad rags again in a matter of months. It’s not quite enough to charter a fast yacht back to Earth, but it’s not far short. This demands some serious thought — when I get to stop running.

I catch a public train to Downwell Terminus, then buy a first-class ticket on the Ares Express to Lowell. From the lounge car of the train, I buy a classier outfit, for delivery when I arrive, and a subhop ticket to Barsoom, at the far end of Valles Marineris. Then I notice the chip in the bottom of the wallet. Stricken, I remember, The graveyard! It’s back in my room. What should I do?

I take a calculated risk and wait until we’re nearing Lowell, then call a public factotum service, two steps down from and entirely unconnected with JeevesCo. “I need a parcel abstracting from a rented apartment and mailing to a third party,” I say, and zap them the Maria Montes Kuo ID. I pay with her wallet, then leave it in the lounge car’s trash recycler when I exit the train. The graveyard will, perforce, have to go to Samantha in Denver or Raechel in Kuala Lumpur. For now, it’s just me and Juliette… and the strange soul chip Jeeves has sent me.

I must have FOOL tattooed on my forehead in mirror writing. I pause in one of the travel-temples at Lowell for long enough to change into my new outfit, then slip the new chip in to replace Juliette’s. Then I head for the departure lounge to await my suborbital flight and settle down to catch half an hour’s nap while I wait.

I WASN’T EXPECTING to dream myself into Juliette’s mind so fast — not after I just replaced her older chip with a newer release — but my expectations don’t seem to have much to do with what happens to me these days. And so I find myself remembering being Juliette, reliving her own memories recursively: specifically, a memory of floating with Jeeves in his command module, contemplating the memory chip that she’s just handed to him. (Although I am somewhat surprised by it. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing the back of your own head.)

“Thank you, my dear,” says Jeeves, carefully tucking the chip away in a pocket of his immaculately tailored jacket. “She’s going to have adventures, too — whoever she is.”

“You’re going too far, boss man,” says Daks. Turning to me: “You realize that alienating our labor isn’t enough for him? Now he’s trying to alienate our identities…”

“Stow it, spacehound,” Jeeves says, not unkindly. He glances at me — Juliette — and scowls. “One might think from his attitude that we owned him.”

“His bark is worse than his bite,” I say automatically, all the while hoping like hell that Jeeves doesn’t know what he’s got in his hands — or rather, what he doesn’t have. Because if he does, I could be in a world of hurt. “What next?”

Jeeves smiles and proffers me a new soul chip. “You might as well put this in. Your next mission…”

I — Juliette — open my eyes. (Which is bizarre and disturbing to do when you are dreaming, but bear with me. Please?)

We’re sitting on a chaise at one end of a grand ballroom, the centerpiece of some aristo’s dream of decadence on Mars. Someone — our host — is throwing a party on an epic scale. I’m here under an elaborate and expensive cover identity that feels familiar, as if I’ve used it before, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. The theme is historical: Our host is in character as the mistress of a South American dictator, who, on the eve of a disastrous war, held a grand ball and demanded that all the nobility of her nation attend, with their wives and daughters wearing their family jewelry. Our host has spared no expense to re-create the original event. We are all costumed after the fashion of the court of Eliza Lynch. As long as there are no firing squads in the courtyard outside I shall be content, for the diamonds on my jeweled hair combs are synthetic, and the metals themselves are industrial commodities. But as for the rest of it…

She’s built a replica of the grand palace in Asunción on the Hellas Basin, beneath a geodesic dome paned in sheets of sapphire-coated glass. Turbid river water steams beneath a Fresnel-lens-focused sun, surrounded by artificial macro-sized green replicators, their dendritic structural members and fractal photovoltaic converters supporting splashes of very un-Martian hues. Tiny dinosaurs flutter and scream in the branches, adding yet more period color, for this was the high era of unrestricted DNA replication, before the big dieback that preceded our Creators’ own exit. Crowds of dark-skinned servants carry trays laden with drink and small morsels of intricately structured feedstock through the crowd of resplendently gowned and tailored aristos. There are more tall people here than I would normally see in a year — our Creators tended to build their personal assistants to their own scale, and thus, giants are overrepresented among the aristocratic elite — but there’s no shortage of doll-sized tyrants, the new blood incarnate.