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the actions of a child who had never been a child?
    “Are you finished with the barricades, Mindle?” Jeffer asked.
    “With the barricades? Yes.”
    “Then wait outside until dawn. Stand watch from the second-story window.”
    Mindle stepped inside the room. He licked his lips. “Yes, sir. But first I thought we might interrogate the prisoner.”
    “The prisoner will be dead soon.”
    “Then we must be quick – quicker, even,” he said, and took another step into the room.
    “Take up your post on the second floor,” Jeffer ordered.
    Mindle took a third step into the room.
    Before Jeffer could react, Balzac snatched up Con Fegman’s rifle from the floor. He aimed it at Mindle.
    Balzac said: “Go. Away.”
    Mindle smiled sweetly and turned to Jeffer, one eyebrow raised.
    “Do as he says, Mindle,” Jeffer said. “And Balzac – put down the rifle!”
    Mindle shrugged and turned away.
    Balzac tossed the weapon aside and hunkered over the flesh dog’s body. His brother’s gauntness, the way the autodoc’s light seemed to shine through him, unnerved Jeffer. Such an odd tableau: his brother crouched with such love and such gentleness over the massive body of the flesh dog, as if it were his own creation.
    Jeffer tottered forward under the spell of that image, his intentions masked even from himself, but Balzac waved him away.
    “Please, let me be,” Balzac said. “Watch the window. Watch Mindle.”
    Even as he nodded yes, Jeffer hesitated, wondering for the first time if he could aim a rifle at his own brother. He walked over to the balcony and watched Balzac and Jamie from the darkness. Jamie’s face was pale, her lips gray. The beast’s flesh surrounded her like a rubbery cowl.
    He marveled at the affection in Balzac’s voice as his brother touched the creature’s face and asked, “How do you feel?”
    “Cold. Very cold. I can’t feel my legs. I think I’m dying. I think I’m already dead, Balzac. Why else should I feel so cold?”
    Balzac flinched, and Jeffer thought: Think? Feel? Can it do either?
    “It’s a cold night,” Balzac told her. “You need a blanket. I wish I had a blanket for you, my love.”
    “Cold. Very cold,” she said, in a dreamy, far-off voice.
    “I’ll find something for you,” Balzac said, his voice cracking with grief. “Jeffer, I’m going to look through the supplies downstairs – maybe there’s a blanket. Watch her for me?”
    “She’s almost . . . I mean, I don’t think we have a blanket.”
    “I know! I know that. Just watch her.”
    Balzac scrambled to his feet and fled through the ruined doorway, leaving Jeffer with the enemy. As he circled her, he wondered if he should kill her.
    “Who is there?” Jamie said. “Are you cold too?”
    At the sound of that voice, Jeffer stepped away from her, made sure she couldn’t see him. What if she recognized him? What if she spoke his name again? What then?
    In the corner, Con Fegman stirred and said, in a singsong voice, “The sand toad told the sand itself and the sand told the toads and the toads told the sand and . . . and . . . and . . . ” He faded back into unconsciousness, the myth trapped between his withered lips.
    Jeffer tried to ignore Con Fegman. He had so resigned himself to the old man’s death that he sometimes started in surprise during Con Fegman’s moments of lucidity, as if a ghost had drawn breath.
    “I want to get up,” Jamie said, face tightening as she strained to move the flesh dog’s leg muscles. “I can’t seem to get up.”
    Jeffer knew better than to interrogate her. If he couldn’t shoot her, he would have to content himself with watching her.
    In the early days, before the full-fledged invasion, he had volunteered to help capture and interrogate such surgically altered specimens. They never had much to say and, anyhow, who could tell if what the prisoners said was authentic or preprogrammed? The heads when separated from the bodies would live on unimpaired for two or three