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buzzing hum beneath the words.
    "My name is Lunae."
    "What are you?" The woman stepped up to Lunae and thrust her face close. Lunae moved back and around her; she noticed that people were starting to edge away. She heard someone mutter,
    "Possession!"
    There was a low, uneasy susurrus of sound from the crowd. Lunae, becoming frightened, tried to turn, but the woman reached out and grasped her by the arms.
    "I asked you what you were!" The woman was even more blurred now, as if shaken in agitation.
    "I do not understand you," Lunae answered. She pulled away, but the woman clasped her by the hand.
    Lunae felt her fingers enveloped in something hard and spiny. Startled, she looked down and saw the woman's small fingers and bitten nails, but it felt nothing like a hu-man hand. She felt as though she was clutching a lobster. She tried to tug free, but the woman's grip was too strong.
    The next moment, the street cracked open, splitting with soundless speed. The apartment blocks, the crowds, were all gone. Lunae was standing on a great plain, gazing toward the banks of a river. The grass was hazy with pale flowers; there was no sign of sun, or moon, or any living thing. Then something brushed her face and the grass rip-pled as though a bird was flying across it. She thought she glimpsed a shadow moving swiftly over the land.
    "Where am I?" she asked aloud, but the words van-ished into the empty air. She could not breathe.
    She spun around, panicking, but there was no one to help her. The plain stretched into an immensity of distance, the horizon a faint black line.
    Then she was back in the street, gasping for breath.
    "What are you doing?" someone cried. An armored hand reached over her shoulder and struck the woman in the face, sending her bloodied into the gutter. The crowd vanished like a conjuring trick, fleeing into doorways and beneath awnings. "Lunae? Are you all right?" Dreams-of-War's face was a mask of fury.
    The woman clambered up from the gutter and fled. The Martian sprang forward, but the woman was gone into the maze of the lower Peak. Lunae looked up at her guardian with grateful trepidation.
    "What was that woman?"
    "A Kami." Above the throat-spines of her armor, Dreams-of-Wars face was pinched and pale, but her eyes were firecracker-bright. With alarm, Lunae realized that Dreams-of-War was not only angry, but afraid.

CHAPTER 2
    Nightshade
    Upon the day of her nineteenth birthday, Yskatarina hastened through Tower Cold, heels tapping across the metal floor, sending out glassy codes to the ever-present listeners, the ears of the Elder Elaki.
    Devices flickered within the walls, monitoring, reporting back. They could be fooled, and she had learned how to do so, but Yskata-rina could still hear them at night—or, perhaps more ac-curately, when she slept, for there was no such thing as day on Nightshade. And sleep was fitful, often disrupted by the murmuring, spined embrace of the Animus. The Animus's needs were becoming insistent. He was, after all, a male.
    Yskatarina did not mind, however. She had needs of her own, and moreover, it marked the Animus as something that was truly hers, even though they were both supposed to be the property of the clan.
    Her aunt was always trying to make more: coaxing embryos out of the growing-skins, mingling monkey and dragonfly and bee, scorpion and marmoset with the old genes of Earth. But although the An-imus had been a success, the great-eyed, thorn-armed crea-tures lived for no more than a night before expiring with a sigh.
    Elaki made others, of course: the mute-kin that worked on the production lines, the disposable workers who were sent out into the Sunken Plain. All of these beings slid without difficulties from their growing-bags, overseen by the mourn-women. But these were lesser creatures, with limited sentience or none at all, and they did not live long. The Animus had been her greatest success, and Yskatarina knew that this infuriated Elaki. She was aware that her aunt