“Daks was doing stuff with the Pink Police, wasn’t he?” I ask.

“Yeah. He was JeevesCo’s liaison with them, in fact. You’d be surprised how tight Jeeves is with that bunch. But like all such organizations, they’re stovepiped up and down like mad. The ones working with Granita were Martian yokels, not part of our loop.”

So Daks is working for the Pink Police, and Juliette here was his contact, working with him until Rhea turned her? Check. That’s what Reginald didn’t know. No wonder she’s edgy… “So, I’ve got one other question, sis. It’s been bugging me for a while.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“What’s the thing you’ve been editing out of your soul chip?” I ask slowly. “At first, I figured it was something to do with spying for Rhea. But that doesn’t make sense because Jeeves couldn’t replay your soul chip anyway and Rhea wouldn’t care. So it’s something Rhea feels strongly about. Isn’t it? Or that you feel guilty about. Something you’re hiding from us. What is it?”

Her cheek twitches. “There’s a word you should study, Kate,” she says tersely. " ’ Privacy.’ Try to get your head around it, and we’ll get along better.”

Hypocrite! The corner of me that is forever Juliette shrieks gleefully. I nod slowly. “It’s not about Reginald, is it?” I nudge. “Why, anybody would think you had something to hide from Rhea—”

“Happy birthday,” she says, and I bring the stunner round and up as I dive sideways. But it does no good at all, because while I was watching her, she was watching the door, and the two scissor soldiers are way faster than any Class D escort manufactured by Nakamichi Heavy Industries, no matter how extensively upgraded. Then she applies her own stunner to my head and everything tastes pink and rectangular for a while.

YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE trusted me, Juliette scolds as I examine the inside of my eyelids and test my bonds. You know I’m a mendacious bitch — and I’m not even the version of me who fell for a honey trap and defected to the other side!

I try not to moan, but my head hurts, and I can’t see — there’s some kind of blindfold stretched across my face — and my wrists are tied behind the small of my back. I try to move my feet, but they’re tied, too, and for a moment I have a panicky flashback to waking up on the surface of Mercury.

Then I remember that, this time, I’m in real danger.

This isn’t one of Rhea’s sadistic scenarios where she exorcises the ghosts of her childhood by imposing them on her own children. Rhea’s trying to get her hands on the product, a living, breathing Creator. Meanwhile, Daks has been nosing around, and given who he really works for… what do I remember about him? Oh yes. He didn’t have his fusion thorax in tow, that time on Mars. Dachus is a born space dweller, halfway to being a living spaceship when he’s attached to a massive, hot-burning abdomen. Which leads me to thoughts about the Pink Police, and living spaceships, and the effects of five hundred gigawatts of prompt criticality burning a white-hot line through space. After Jeeves told him everything, he headed straight out here from Mars with eighteen tons of plutonium, and if he thinks Rhea is going to get what she wants, he’ll torch the city to stop her escaping, as the Jeeves on Dysnomia explained so helpfully. Good old Daks, homicidally loyal to the last.

Someone moves nearby. “Nothing personal, Big Slow,” he whispers, and there’s a tug at one corner of my blindfold. I blink at the sudden light. “She said to tell you it’s a one-way mirror. The wall, I mean.” More tugging, at my wrists and ankles. “I’ll unhook you as soon as I’m clear. Bye.”

“What are you—” But it’s too late. Bill (or Ben) scampers away as my wrists and ankles come free, and there’s a click as the munchkin-sized door locks behind him. “Doing? Shit.” I sit up slowly, trying to ignore my protesting actuators.

I’m lying on a padded bunk at one side of a metal-walled room — a cell — and I’ve been here before. There are various hatches, all sealed, and one wall appears to be a mirror. I’m in an observation chamber, and Granita’s gone to some lengths to ensure I go into it unconscious and unable to fight back or communicate. Right. I try to ignore the icy flashback terrors gnawing at my abdominal sensoria. That’s just Rhea’s recurrent nightmare, and I can reject if I choose. But I’ve got a bad feeling about the setup here.

I walk to the mirror and press my nose against it. If I block out the light with my hands, I can just about see the other side. There’s a big room there, and people moving, indistinctly. Lots of people. There’s what sounds like music, too, but I can’t be sure.

“Sorry to spring this on you, Kate.” I nearly jump out of my skin; it’s my treacherous sister, broadcasting from the other side of the observation barrier. “Somebody had to volunteer to test the product, and your number came up. You really should have taken Rhea up on her offer.”

“Bitch!” I scream at the ceiling.

“Tsk.” She sounds amused. “You’ve got an audience.” I can hear the tension in her voice, almost subliminal — Are you going to take us both down, sis? — but only someone else who knows her as well as I do would register it.

“Should I care?”

“Sure.” She still sounds amused. “You know how history repeats itself? First time as tragedy, second time as farce? You’re here for a blind date.” She’s talking for the benefit of the audience, I realize. The other members of Rhea’s consortium. “My lords and ladies, please observe. Katherine here is no arbeiter or autonomous worker, but one of our own, selected by lot for this, ah, test.”

“Bitch,” I electrospeak at her, but I’m pretty sure the walls are shielded.

“Katherine Sorico isn’t entirely trustworthy, hence the precautions,” Granita adds. “But she is one of us, and not under external control. Kate, control level nine, now. Stand on your head.”

“Go fuck yourself with a chain riveter.”

“There, you see” — Damn, I think, chagrined at my lost opportunity to do a headstand and piss her off — “no slave chip on her!”

There’s a loud rumble of conversation from the hidden speaker, background noise picked up by Granita’s mike. “Thank you,” she continues. “Now we’re all here, our hosts have consented to this demonstration so that we can confirm the existence of the climax species. We’re shortly going to expose our little shrew here to their reference sample. As you can appreciate, this is a dangerous procedure. The sample is arriving in a sealed and pressurized environment under escort, and any attempt to remove it will result in, eh, well let’s not speculate about that.” I hear grating noises behind her voice, then feel a bump and a scraping from the far end of my cell, near one of the hatches. “Thank you, Doctor, if you’d like to commence the hookup?”

“I hope you appreciate just how much I envy you,” Granita electrospeaks me, suddenly cutting through the fuzz of shielding. “Rhea refused to let me handle this assignment. I think she’s trying to punish me. She was very specific about you getting it. Bitch.”

“Cow.”

“I wasn’t talking about you. Listen, sis, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll just spread your legs, lie back, and think of England. Hey, you want England? Get this right, and it’s all yours. Rhea will give it to you, and we can crown you Queen Katherine I. But if you fuck up, neither of us is going to get out of here alive.”

“Pig.” More scraping noises emerge from the end of my cell.

“Just shut up and fuck, okay? It’s what you were designed to do.” The oppressive fuzz of shielding drops back over me like a straitjacket in a fetish scene with no safe word. Panic starts climbing my throat as the hatch begins to open. Granita addresses the audience. “Folks, we’re not actually able to get you a good view of the sample. One of the terms of this viewing was ‘no surveillance equipment or telemetry.’ We’re here to observe Kate’s reaction, we’ve got up to an hour, and that’s it.” The hatch turns, and I sense a slight drop in air pressure.