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hours, and perhaps there was a hint of miracles in this delayed mortality, but surely nothing more.
    Locklin, the subject of Jeffer’s final interrogation, had believed in miracles, and as Jeffer stared at Jamie he could not help but see Locklin’s face superimposed over hers.
    Locklin had laughed at him even during those moments of the interrogation that most resembled torture. When asked a question, the creature would say its name and make a low, bubbling laugh through its flesh dog and human mouths. The violet eyes would widen, his craggy, heavily tanned and scarred face sprawled across the flesh dog’s forehead. “I am Locklin today, but tomorrow? You will all be me.”
    Locklin claimed to come from a crèche located in the far north, nestled against a frozen sea. Cliffs four hundred meters high sheltered them from the cruel winds, and from these same cliffs came the enemy in great numbers, on a winter’s day when many of the crèche were dying from cold; the heaters had failed and the crèche’s leadership had wavered on whether to wait out the weather or to abandon the crèche.
    “But the m’kat,” Locklin offered near the end, contempt for Jeffer poisoning his voice, “they fixed us up!  Ho! They surely did. Immortality in return for service – a fine, fine body that will run forever, and we said yes! We said yes, all of us shivering in that frozen place . . . as most of you will say yes in your turn.”
    Always it was flesh dogs fashioned from members of this particular crèche that Jeffer found least like a poorly animated holovid. If some responded like sand through a sieve to his questioning, then these hardened types were steel traps. For they had not just pledged allegiance to the “m’kat” but worshipped them, giving up their children to immortality and abandoning their old religions. This betrayal of species terrified Jeffer. Among the Con members it was the greatest of all fears: to be captured by an enemy that did not know mercy as humans knew it, an enemy unparalleled in the art of psychological warfare. To be sent back in the guise of a flesh dog, mouthing your own name or the name of your beloved as the creature fought you.
    Only now did Jeffer realize he had talked to Locklin too much, for as he watched Jamie, Locklin’s hypnotic words drifted in and out of his thoughts: “You could live forever this way, if you would only submit . . . ” A great sadness welled up inside Jeffer, for he and his brother had become estranged; it was there in Balzac’s words, in his face: that the love he had for Jamie had become monstrous, had taken him over and eaten him from the inside out. Did Balzac sense a truth to Locklin’s words that escaped him? A chill crept into Jeffer’s skin. He could already foresee an outcome monstrous beyond imagination and he told himself he would not help in that way – he could not – and he tried to convince himself this was because he loved his brother, not because he stood alone in the same room with a creature so familiar to him and yet so alien.
    Mindle had been Balzac’s hateful shadow as he rummaged through their meager cache of supplies for a blanket. The boy had said nothing, had followed almost without sound, but Balzac could feel that gaze blasting the back of his head, scorching his scalp. He didn’t mind; better to know where Mindle was than not. At times on his miniquest, he even tried talking to Mindle, and took a perverse pleasure in his facade of cheeriness, knowing it must make the boy burn even brighter. Burn, then. Burn up.
    But there was no blanket, and with each step back up the stairs, the facade faded a little more until he could barely walk for the weariness that pulled at him. On the third-floor landing, Balzac heard Mindle’s retreating footsteps and was glad of it, not wasting time with a taunt, but ducking into the room where Jamie still lay in the autodoc’s blue light. Jeffer stood to one side.
    “I couldn’t find a blanket. You