"Are you still awake?"

He didn't answer at first, and she went back to rifling through the contents of the med kit she had just bought from the First Business District convenience store. She had told him to wait here, on the deserted upper level of an open-air parking structure off the main pedestrian thoroughfare, while she made a run for provisions, using her anonymous credit account so the purchases couldn't be traced back to her.

On the way to the store, she had walked past an AMN screen displaying a headline in large red type along with the most unflattering hologram of herself she had ever seen. She couldn't decide which was worse, the picture or the ungainly attempt at alliteration in the headline--"Madwoman Mizrahi missing"--but she was suddenly glad she had left her overcoat in the garage with Ziggy; the Mizrahi emblem stood out like a bull's eye on the back. Her appearance was plain enough that she tended not to stand out in crowds--not the way he did, at least--and she was even less recognizable without the coat and belt she wore as regularly as a uniform, and with her hair in disarray from their escape; still, she didn't feel safe wandering around the city alone. When she returned to the garage with the supplies from the convenience store, she had found him waiting where she had left him, seated in a dark corner of the lot.

"I'm awake. Sorry. I guess I drifted off for a minute."

Juli paused, still holding the canister of nanospray. He had turned his head aside and wouldn't look at her, but there was nothing else around for him to stare at; she followed his gaze to a blank wall, then gave up and went back to what she was doing.

She loosened the right side of his vest and pulled it back from the shoulder, where the impact from the bullets had bruised the skin without breaking it. "Tell me if this makes you uncomfortable."

"I don't mind." But he kept staring at the wall, his face hard and ashen with suppressed pain.

In all the time they had been together, as close as they were, Juli had rarely ever seen him out of uniform--strange, she thought, because in many other ways she knew him more intimately than anyone else she had ever known. She had overseen his maintenance routines countless times, so she had no illusions about what went on under his skin; it wasn't very pretty, cybernetic engineering of the previous century being what it was. The science of the early Life Recycling era had been crude and experimental compared with the sterile efficiency of modern Realian technology, but Juli had never understood what embarrassed him more--that most of his body had been replaced with machines, or that a part of it was still human.

He didn't speak or make eye contact again until Juli had finished treating his injuries. Thanking her, he pulled up his sleeve and re-fastened the straps on his collar, then stood. He had peeled off the ill-fitting Federation Police jacket and dropped it somewhere between here and the freeway, and for once she had to admit that his usual attire was an improvement. Until they got off Fifth Jerusalem, though, it would make him too conspicuous. She handed him one of the other packages from the convenience store. "Put this on."

He complied without asking for an explanation. The new coat reached to just above his ankles, concealing the clumsy architecture of his legs and making him look passably human. Juli had ordered a change of clothes as well, more casual than the style she usually wore; she put them on over her dress and combed out her hair, trying to get it to part on the opposite side.

"We'll probably have to rent a car to get to the apartment," she said, still fighting with the comb, "and definitely to get to the base. It's a long way out from the city proper."

Ziggy nodded, staring down at his coat; it stuck out suspiciously around the thighs, as if he was trying to smuggle machine parts underneath it by strapping them to his legs, and Juli hoped no one would notice. He blinked and pushed his bangs out of his eyes; he'd been doing that a lot since they left the office. "Do you mind if I use that comb when you're finished?"

∞

The rental car hovered to a stop in front of the apartment complex late in the afternoon, when the distant buildings of the capital reared like gold mountains out of the dimming light. Juli had to use her personal identification card to get through the entrance, so anyone checking the access records would know she had stopped here; but she intended to be long gone by then.

When the elevator doors opened on their hallway, Ziggy stepped out ahead of her. "Someone's been here. Recently."

"You can tell that?" She followed him across the hall, keeping her voice low. "Are they still here?"

"I don't think so." He keyed the access code into the wall console by the door, and they walked into the apartment.

The living room resembled an alien landscape in the reddening glow from outside. Juli realized she was almost never home at this time of the day; she worked until later in the evening, when the light had already faded. It startled her to see the place she had called home for the past year rendered suddenly unfamiliar, as if she had never lived here before. She tried not to look at the heavy, draped form in the center of the room, but its gravity took up most of the space around it and drew her gaze against her will.

She felt his hand come to rest on her shoulder again. "Come on," he said gently. He left her and went over to the glass door that gave onto the courtyard; when he opened it, Alby appeared from nowhere as usual, limping now, and whining a frantic alarm. Whoever had been here must have shoved him outside to keep him out of the way of their investigation. Ziggy bent down and gathered the dog into his arms.

Carrying Alby, he followed Juli into her office. Clusters of screens flickered above her desktop, disgorging the contents of her confidential files across the room, and the sight made her feel ill. They must have been in such a hurry that they hadn't bothered to shut down the computers after they'd ransacked the data for whatever they were looking for.

While she downloaded the remaining data to her connection gear and erased it from the terminals, Ziggy peered into MOMO's room across the hall. "It looks like they checked her files too. Was she working on anything involving sensitive information?"

"Not that I know of," Juli called back, watching the progress bars on the file-transfer screens creep agonizingly toward completion, "other than decoding that program from the Patmos base." Any proprietary data related to the AMN project was kept under AAA-class encryption in the databases at Vector and the AMN Administrative Bureau, and Scientia had an even higher level of encryption for its own top-secret files; of course, it was all irrelevant if the shadow network could pass through any level of classification indiscriminately. Juli had kept her own files at home behind a partition inaccessible to the rest of the AMN, in order to deter any hacking attempts, but anyone seeking access could still reach the partitioned area from her home computer if they managed to break through the password protection.

When the files had finished downloading, she took her connection gear and stepped into the hallway. For a moment she thought of going back to her bedroom to pack her belongings--she didn't know how long she would be gone or whether she would be able to come back--but decided against it. They couldn't afford to waste time here. She headed in the opposite direction, into the living room.

Ziggy walked in behind her, struggling to keep Alby from leaping out of his arms; the dog seemed agitated, squirming and pawing to be let loose. Suddenly Ziggy flinched and drew a sharp, cut-off breath, and Alby bounded out of his hold and half-ran, half-limped to the courtyard door, barking and turning circles around himself in his frenzy.

"Are you all right?" Juli asked again.

Ziggy nodded absently, staring at the two semicircles of tiny indentations in his glove. "I think that's the first time he's ever bitten me." Juli wondered whether he had even felt it--he had already endured enough gunshots today to kill an ordinary man several times over, and had escaped with only a few bruises--until she realized it wasn't the physical pain that startled him. He let his hand drop and looked over at the door. Alby's barking grew increasingly frantic; he reared on his hind legs and battered the glass with his forepaws.

"I wonder what he's so upset about." Juli walked to the door and gazed outside. The light had gone from the courtyard, and the vast sloping canyons of the city glowed neon in the dusk.

"Juli, get back! Someone's out there!"

"What?" She backed away from the glass, but she had already seen it, a silhouette rising above the courtyard wall against the glare of the city lights. The courtyard doors opened automatically, triggered by an outside mechanism--probably the same they'd used to force their way into the apartment before, Juli thought, in the moment she had to think before the intruder cleared the wall and drifted down in front of her. Alby cowered at her heels, his entire small body trembling as he barked himself hoarse.

"You really ought to teach that little brute some manners." Sellers aimed a disapproving look at the dog, and Alby whimpered and backed away in silence, favoring his injured leg. "Good evening, Dr. Mizrahi. I almost didn't recognize you in that awful disguise. But I'm afraid you got here too late to secure your precious data; it's all in the hands of my employers now. And we intend to make good use of it."

Juli dug her fingernails into her palms. "So you're still profiting by stealing other people's work, you shameless fraud. I should have known you were involved in this."

"Get away from him, Juli," said Ziggy from behind her. "That man is insane."

"I know." She didn't turn around or step aside. "And if I'd known he was still alive, I would have suspected his involvement with Ormus from the beginning."

Sellers pulled a grimace. "It seems there are some advantages to being legally declared dead. For the past year, I've been able to pursue my research with impunity. I've all but surpassed Joachim Mizrahi's work now."

"How dare you show your face here," she said, feeling her pulse rise with her anger. "What are you plotting with Ormus?"

"As if I'd tell you. I only waited for you to get here so I could see the look on your face when you realized your life's work had been snatched out from under your feet. I don't know where you plan on going now, but it had better be someplace where they've never heard the name 'Mizrahi'--if there even is such a place left in the universe." He sneered and tipped forward in his hover-chair. "The world won't remember you for your contributions to science, Dr. Mizrahi. Not after today. You'll be cursed in the same breath as your madman husband."

She heard Ziggy's breath catch and knew he was at least as enraged as she was, but he appeared to have abandoned trying to convince her to stand down.

"Joachim never liked you," she said, "and now I see why. It seems there's at least one thing he and I would have agreed on." She forced a bitter laugh. "You were the real madmen, you and all the others who unleashed that nightmare on Miltia. You destroyed the world and let my husband take the blame for it."

One corner of Sellers' mouth stabbed upward in wry amusement. "Well, now, this is unexpected. I never thought I'd hear you of all people defending his reputation. As I recall, you were one of his most vocal detractors in the early years after Miltia. I daresay you were the first to turn around and spit on his grave."

"Maybe I was," she said fiercely, and he looked taken aback for a moment; he must have expected her to deny it. "I never said he was blameless. For my part, neither was I. But his crimes were nothing compared to yours."

He laughed. "How flattering of you to say so. But I've hardly even begun. When I've completed my life's work, I'll have achieved more than that feeble-minded old fool ever dared to imagine."

"Project Apocryphos," said Ziggy, his voice raw with dismay. "That's what you're working on, isn't it? You're in league with Voyager!"

Sellers inclined his head, reflections sliding over the dark shells of his glasses. "I don't know who you're referring to," he said, "but I'm in league with myself. Everyone else is just a means for me to achieve the desired end."

"Then he's using you too, do you realize that?"

"I don't doubt that he is." The chair rose higher off the courtyard floor, the glow from the lighted circle at its base spreading out like a flashlight beam. "That's just the way the world works, I'm afraid. So long for now, Dr. Mizrahi; perhaps we'll meet again. In the meantime, make sure you check the news tomorrow. You'll be in it." He pushed a button on the armrest of his hover-chair, and the glass door swished back into place. Juli watched until he had vanished over the wall, and then the anger and tension went out of her and she sank to her knees.

She was aware of Ziggy standing behind her. After a moment he knelt as well and brought his arms around her. "I'm sorry," he said. The unexpected tenderness pushed her over the edge, and her view of the courtyard blurred behind her tears. He must have sensed it, because he held her closer as if to steady her. "I know it's hard, but try to get a hold of yourself. He was manipulating your emotions, trying to make you react. The things he said--"

"Were true. You don't have to make excuses for me. I'm paying for the things I did wrong, just like my husband." She wrung her eyelids shut and wiped her face. "There's no excuse for ignorance; I'm just as bad as the ones who knew what they were doing all along. Do you remember Senir last year?"

He nodded. Senir had been the destination of one of Juli's diplomatic visits on behalf of the DIRE, one of several on which Ziggy had accompanied her because the situation on the ground was too dangerous for her to go alone. They had spent a week sequestered in a run-down conference hotel in the planet's bombed-out shell of a capital, startling at the sound of gunfire in the streets below until it became part of the background noise, the shots as frequent and predictable as the sounds of traffic.

Night after night they had stood by the window in their hotel room; in the darkened streets of Senir's capital, under the leaden canopy of clouds that never lifted, in neighborhoods lit only by the red haze of burning buildings, Ziggy had monitored the skirmishes between militarized street gangs and local peacekeeping forces deployed by the planetary government, the anthill struggles of innumerable radar signals. Juli had stood beside him in darkness--they had to keep the lights turned off at night because the mobs on the street would hurl homemade explosive devices at any lighted window they saw--while he narrated to her, as best he could, in the cold language of statistics and combat formations, the self-destruction of a world.

The scheduled reconciliation talks had never happened, and at last the Federation had pulled its representatives from the Senir region, evacuating Juli and Ziggy and the other DIRE personnel from the city by air transport. They had emerged from the hotel shaken and irritable and sore; their week-long confinement had exhausted even their patience for each other, and they had said little on the way back to Fifth Jerusalem. It had been a relief just to get above Senir's permanent cloud cover; from below, it was easy to forget there was a world beyond the war in the streets.

Senir became one of the Federation's most widely publicized diplomatic failures. After its government collapsed, a local post-Ormus group had seized control of the planet and imposed an AMN blackout on the region, cutting off communications and attacking any Federation ship that gated out within its range. Now Juli wondered if the timing had been more than just a coincidence; the militants had seemed unusually well-supplied and coordinated for a region that had been isolated until a few months prior.

She stared into the darkness falling across the courtyard. "I wonder if our entire civilization is going to end up like they did. Maybe we're doomed to spend our last days throwing bombs at each other in the dark."

"Are you thinking about the war resolution?"

"Not just that," she said. "The DIRE .... Even our attempts at bringing the world back together were just a cover for tearing it apart. I don't believe this is all their work, either--I mean Ormus, Voyager, whoever's behind all this, it's not only their fault. I think it's human nature to seek our own destruction. They're just exploiting the weaknesses that exist in all of us."

"You're not the same as them. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you are, just because ...."

Juli raised her head. In the glass she could just discern the outlines of their reflections, a hollow conjoined shape superimposed on the empty yard. "Jan, you're .... Right now, this is all I have left. You, and us. So whatever happens now, I want ...." She didn't go on, and she realized she didn't have to.

"I know." Standing, he helped her to her feet. "We can't stay here any longer. They may already know we're here."

She nodded and looked back over the courtyard wall. "He made it sound as though he was offering us a chance to escape. I'd say it was generous of him, but he was probably just toying with us."

"Where should we go?"

"Where did you go? The first time, I mean."

He seemed startled, and for a moment she regretted having brought it up again, remembering how it had upset him before, when he tried to tell her about it. Then his expression firmed. "Right. We should head to the base and try to get a ride back to the Dämmerung, to Vector and Scientia. We'll be safe there for now."

"Scientia," said Juli, with a hollow laugh. "I guess they would know what to do with a couple of suspected terrorists."

"She'll know, anyway." He turned away as he spoke, and Juli had the feeling he was talking to himself, for his own reassurance. Kneeling by the piano, he tried to coax Alby out from under the bench, where he had retreated shortly after Sellers arrived. Juli took a last look around the apartment; in the thickening shadows, lit only by the glare from outside, it had already settled into an air of abandonment. She felt like a trespasser, a stranger in a place that was no longer home.