“It’s a hell of a lot more attractive than thinking you have a right to float through life and break all the rules without ever explaining yourself to anyone!”

Arkady looked back and forth between the two of them, feeling the emotional undercurrent in the fight but completely unable to make sense of it.

“You want explanations?” Gavi said. “Here’s one. My wife was a doctor at a hospital on the Palestinian side of the Line. We lived over there so Joseph could go to Palestinian school. And don’t give me that look, little Miss Ashkenaz. You don’t know what it was like to be an Arab child in Israeli schools, even before the war. When the border crossing started getting sticky, we kept telling ourselves it would blow over. But it didn’t blow over. One day I went to work…and I couldn’t get back across. At first I could talk to them on the phone. Then the satlink was cut. Then I stopped getting any news of them at all. The last thing I heard was that Leila’s hospital had been bombed. Accidentally, of course. It’s amazing how often hospitals seem to get in the way of bombs. They found her body in what was left of the pediatric ward. The children were much harder to identify. But one of the survivors said she’d taken Joseph to work with her that morning because she thought it was safer than leaving him home.” He stood up, moving as clumsily as Arkady had ever seen him move. “So that’s how I deserted my son. Hope you enjoyed our little session of show-and-tell as much as I did.”

“Osnat—” Arkady began when Gavi had stalked out.

“Oh shut up, Arkady! What the hell do you know about anything, anyway?”

It took most of a day for Osnat and Gavi to start talking to each other again; and when they did it was with the quiet caution of a bomb squad tiptoeing around a possibly live piece of ordnance.

“I think we ought to at least put out a feeler,” Gavi said, talking mostly to Arkady. “There’s no reason I can’t drop by to see Cohen and feel him out a bit.”

Osnat raised one eyebrow. “You think you can find out more about him than he’ll find out about you in the first five seconds?”

Gavi got a funny look on his face. “Well…yes, actually. You know the old saying about AIs. It’s not that they’re smarter than us…”

“It’s just that they can be dumb so much faster. But that doesn’t mean you can lie to him and get away with it.”

“I’m not going to lie. I’m just going to offer what Cohen would call a selective sampling of the available data.”

“Are you sure that’s safe?” Arkady asked, thinking of Safik’s warnings about the AI.

Gavi gave him a quizzical look. “What’s he going to do, steal my lunch money?”

They kept Li awake until she’d never been so tired, even in combat. Exhaustion smeared thought and twisted perception. Sleep was the enemy. Sleep was the monster of all her childhood nightmares, hunting her through a distorted landscape while she ran and ran, unable to stop though she knew she would fall sooner or later.

And through the long fight with exhaustion, in the brief lulls between those nightmare flights, came the interrogations.

She was hooded of course. But she didn’t need to see her torturers to know them. Their attentions to her were invasive and intimate, and by the end of the second day she knew the three men better than their own wives did.

There was the one who laughed and joked and obviously enjoyed his work. There was the one who handled her with the brusque impersonalness of a butcher slinging meat. And there was the one who apologized. He was the worst by far because he reminded Li of the last thing she wanted to remember: that there were people on the other end of those cruel hands.

What they wanted was easy enough: her passwords.

They wanted the keys to her hard memory, her procedural backups, her archived spinfeeds, her accumulated knowledge base of past UNSec operations.

But she couldn’t give them the passwords because she no longer had them. They’d been changed by a deeply embedded Peacekeeper security loop the moment her internals processed the fact of her kidnapping. She’d heard rumors that UNSec built such things into Peacekeeper psychware, but until now she hadn’t entirely believed in them. Unfortunately, her captors didn’t seem to believe in them either.

And all the while, they kept hammering at her about some meeting with Turner that she couldn’t remember—any more than she could remember how she’d gotten here. Li, a connoisseur of memory loss, could feel the gap as clearly as she would have felt a missing tooth. And she could locate what was missing, more or less. Not that she really needed to, because her captors questioned her about it almost as incessantly as they questioned her about her passwords and security programs.

Where had she gone before she went to meet Turner?

Who had she spoken to before she spoke to Turner?

Who knew she had gone to see Turner?

Where had the woman and the clone gone to after she’d passed their location on to Turner?

It was no use. She remembered the call from Osnat and Arkady. Then nothing. And the more they asked about Turner, and Turner, and Turner, the harder it got to believe that she could have agreed to meet with him in the first place.

She couldn’t say just when she began to realize that there were other people attending the interrogation sessions. The watchers were silent and invisible—at least to Li, whose whole universe had narrowed down to a few centimeters of burlap darkness. But they exerted a tidal pull on the interrogators, as unmistakably as an eclipsed planet tugging at its neighbors in the dark. Li’s torturers were playing to their audience, like the miners of Li’s all-but-forgotten childhood picking up the pace at the cutting face when the straw boss was watching.

It was the watchers who made them start in on her hands.

They didn’t need to do much. Ceramsteel filament was as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel and much harder. When a filament snapped and its severed ends started floating free against fragile flesh and bone, you’d better pray to whatever gods you believed in that you were within tossing distance of the surgical tanks. And no part of your body outside your relatively protected spinal column was as impregnated with monofilament-thin virally embedded ceramsteel filament as your hands. So when they strapped her hands down, she’d known immediately where the game was headed. The only question in her mind was how far the unseen watcher would allow it to go.

Answer: pretty damn far.

Far enough to make her glad she was blindfolded and couldn’t see what was happening at the far ends of her arms.

Far enough to trigger the memory that had somehow become intimately and inextricably associated with what they were doing to her.

Far enough to send her mind spinning back to Gilead.

The whole operation on Gilead had been fractally fubard. Fucked up beyond all recall in every spatial scale and at every hierarchical level of complexity.

The UNSec spin doctors had made it out to be a positive orgy of heroism, and the war correspondents had bought their spin hook, line, and sinker. But in Li’s opinion Gilead had been just like almost every other episode of storied heroism in every other war she’d ever read about: a bloody mess that would never have been necessary if the deskbound lords of war had done their jobs right.

Most of Li’s colleagues had seen it differently—or at least pretended to. They’d started loudly celebrating the heroic dead of Gilead before the bodies were even buried. And if there were whispers behind closed doors about broken supply lines, endemic communications failures, and blue-on-blue orbit-to-surface strikes, then they only made the public celebration louder and the medal inflation higher.