“First of all,” Arkady said after a stunned pause, “my dissent paper didn’t even remotely say that.And, second, how can you possibly compare political dissent, which, yes, I admit there might be a place for, with…well, deviance?”

Arkasha jumped up off his lab bench and started straightening already obsessively straight papers. “I have to get back to work, Arkady. It’s been nice talking to you. Let’s do it again next week.”

“Arkasha!”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just…” He floundered, unable to bring himself to speak the unspeakable. “I want…”

Arkasha sighed. “What do you want from me, Arkady?”

“I want…I likeyou, dammit! As a person. We should be friends, but every time it seems like we’re about to be, you…Oh for God’s sake, will you put your stupid notes away and sit down?”

Arkasha sat down, drawing his feet onto the bottom rung of his lab stool and crossing his arms over his chest like a child who’d just been yelled at for fidgeting.

“I mean if I bore you or something, let me know,” Arkady went on.

“I can live with it.”

“You don’t bore me,” Arkasha whispered.

“And I don’t care about the sex either.” There, he’d said it. It couldn’t get worse than that, could it? He plunged on. “I mean, of course I care. But I don’t care if you’re—I don’t care what you are. And I’m not going to report you, or anything like that. Maybe that’s wrong, but…I’m just not, okay? So if that’s why you’re avoiding me, you can stop worrying about it.”

Arkasha blinked. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s okay with you if I’m a sexual deviant?”

“Yes.”

“Failure to report is a crime, Arkady. You could land yourself in a renorming center that way.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should care. You could get yourself into a lot of trouble if you talk like that to just anybody.”

“I’m not talking to just anybody. I’m talking to you.”

“Arkady—”

“I mean it. I don’t care. And you don’t have to explain yourself to me. It’s over. We never have to talk about it again.”

“Arkady!”

“What?”

“I’m not.”

Arkady frowned at him for a moment, not understanding.

“I’m not.”

“Oh.”

One corner of Arkasha’s mouth quirked upward. “You sound disappointed.”

“I, uh…feel really stupid.”

“You don’t look so clever either. No, no! I’m joking! Seriously, Arkady, why should you feel stupid? There’s nothing to feel stupid about.”

“Well, I mean, I just assumed. And I’m not one of those guys who thinks he’s so devastatingly attractive that anyone who doesn’t fall into bed with him has to be a pervert.”

“I didn’t think you were one of those guys. Though you arepretty devastatingly attractive.”

The room suddenly felt hot and very small. He looked up to find Arkasha watching him intently.

“But this is a really long assignment, Arkady. A long time to live in each other’s back pockets if things go badly.”

“I wouldn’t be…difficult.”

“I know you wouldn’t. You’re much too nice for that.”

“I love you.”

Arkasha shrank back into himself again. When he finally answered his voice was muffled and he wouldn’t meet Arkady’s eyes. “You only say that because you don’t know me,” he said. “When you know me better, you won’t say it anymore.”

“Am I interrupting something?” Bella asked coolly from the door.

Arkady jumped, dropping his glass, which shattered deafeningly. Razor-sharp splinters of glass scattered to the room’s four corners. The place reeked of guilt and alcohol.

“Have you seen my sib?” Bella asked, casting a suspicious eye around the lab as if the two of them might have secreted her missing crèchemate in a file drawer.

“Should we have?” Arkasha asked.

Bella ignored him. “Well?” she said, looking at Arkady as if he were the only person in the room.

“Uh…no. Sorry.”

“She saidshe was coming down here to have you run a sample from the seed bank.” Typically, she managed to make the statement sound like an accusation. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her these days. Her mind is on everything except her job.”

Which probably meant that her mind was on everything except her crèchemate, Arkady thought uncharitably.

Meanwhile, Bella was still ostentatiously ignoring Arkasha. Embarrassed, Arkady stood up and ushered her out into the corridor so that Arkasha could get back to work if he wanted to.

But apparently he didn’t want to. He padded across the lab to take in the conversation over Arkady’s shoulder. Bella muttered something huffy about people sticking their noses in where they didn’t have any business to be.

“Am I interrupting something?” Arkasha inquired sweetly.

Bella glared at him.

“Have you tried paging her?” Arkady asked.

“Of course I have!” Now, for the first time, and quite inexplicably, she seemed embarrassed herself. “She doesn’t answer.”

“Have you talked to the Ahmeds about it?”

“I’m not disloyal!”

Right. Not disloyal enough to lodge a formal complaint against her crèchemate. Just disloyal enough to talk her down with every other construct on board.

“Well, if she shows up, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

And after a few more complaints and accusations, Bella finally took herself off.

“I loathe that woman,” Arkasha murmured, tracking her progress down the hab ring.

“You shouldn’t provoke her,” Arkady said. “She already hates you. And she’s the type who gets people put on euth wards.”

Arkasha stared down the corridor. He looked wounded and brittle and terribly in need of protection. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I wish…”

“You wish what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Listen, Arkady. I really do have work I need to get done tonight. Is it going to hurt your feelings if I go do it?”

“Of course not,” Arkady lied.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Thanks, Arkady. And don’t leave the light on, okay? I don’t want to keep you up.”

“I’ll leave the light on.”

“You don’t have to leave the light on.”

“I want to.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Arkady forced a grin that didn’t come out nearly as shaky as he’d thought it would. “Are you going to argue with me about this all night, or are you going to go do your work?”

INFORMATION COSTS

Its official name was the Institute for the Coordination of Intelligence and Special Tasks, but most Israelis called it the Institute, or, in Hebrew, the Mossad.And the inconspicuous, close-mouthed, suspiciously fit men and women who worked at the Institute called it simply the Office.

The first time Cohen had walked into the shabby lobby off King Saul Boulevard and ridden the clanking elevator to the eighth floor he’d been in the real Hyacinthe’s body. It had been a week after the fateful doctor’s visit—and a week before Hyacinthe had worked up the courage to tell his wife about the diagnosis. Hyacinthe Cohen (Hy, predictably, to his Israeli friends) had been a pigheadedly rational man. And yet he had felt in his gut, at some level below words, that the disease wouldn’t really be real until he told his wife about it. How strange, Cohen thought now…and how human. Almost as human as the feeling the memory aroused in Cohen: that only now, when it was far too late, was he finally beginning to understand the man.