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couldn’t have found himself on a
more appropriate planet.”
    She should get up, undress, get ready for bed. She was much
too comfortable to move. Sleep had been harder and harder to come by lately.
Tonight she thought she might manage it. She might even keep the nightmares
down to a statutory minimum.
    She lowered her hands. Her arms stung. She did not remember
cutting them.
    She sat up and stripped off her shirt. There were scars on
top of scars, up and down her forearms. The new ones crept close to the veins
again, to the deepest and oldest scars, the ones she had almost died of. Would
have, if Max had not been there to—
    Max was dead. So were Sonja and Kinuko and John Begay.
    Because she made a mistake much worse than contaminating a
genetic sample. Much, much worse. So much worse that she could not let herself
die for it. She had to live. To remember. Because there was no more fitting
punishment.
    Her nails were cut to the quick, to keep her from doing what
they tried to do now: claw the skin off, let the blood out.
    It was all perfectly reasonable. She had been repaired.
Psych had smoothed over the rough edges, cut away the worst of the mental proud
flesh, lasered off the scars. Just a little therapy, they had told her when
they discharged her, and she would be as fit as she ever was.
    All of this—side effects. Normal. Nothing to trigger alarms.
The blood was a nuisance, but when it was all gone, so would she be. Then there
would be no alarms at all.
    Fingers closed around her wrists. Their grip was light, but
it was too strong to break.
    There was no mistaking whose they were. She raised her eyes
to Rama’s face. “Don’t you know what it means when a door is locked?”
    “Yes,” he said.
    The lock on this door was nothing to what else he could hack
into. He was wearing the torque she had found on him that first night. “That
was in the vault,” she said.
    “It’s mine.”
    “Technically,” she said, “it’s the property of the
Department of Antiquities for Ceti quadrant.”
    “It belongs to me,” he said.
    “So that’s what you are,” said Khalida. “An interstellar
thief. I’d had you down as a mass murderer.”
    “I took what was mine.”
    He was stubborn. She already knew that. “You’re the thief,”
she said. “I’m the murderer. Do you know how many people died because of me?
Two hundred thousand six hundred and fifty-four. The last four were my direct
responsibility. I looked them in the eyes when I hit the trigger. They knew
exactly what I did to them.”
    He said nothing. His face was blank.
    “You’re lucky,” she said. “You got the mindwipe. I didn’t
qualify. I acted to the best of my capacity to forestall a greater disaster.
That’s how they put it. Word for word. I appealed. They said, You performed a service. You also committed
a substantial error. The decision is just. It stands.
    “Just,” she said, “but merciful? Not even slightly.”
    “Sometimes there are no right decisions,” he said.
    “What, are you the wise sage now? How many people have you
killed?”
    “With my own hand? Hundreds. By my order? Thousands. More
than you, maybe. I stopped counting.”
    She gaped. Then she laughed, sharp and bitter. “Don’t make fun
of me.”
    “I never do that.”
    “They seeded you with false memories,” she said. “In extreme
cases, that’s what they do. Wipe the mind clean, give it a new set of
programming, drop the result somewhere out of the way. If he survives, he’ll
never know what’s real and what isn’t. If he doesn’t, how convenient.”
    “Memories find their way out,” he said. “Even through this
thing you people do.”
    “‘You people’? Who do you imagine you are? Some alien
warlord pulled out of a tomb?”
    “Something like that,” he said.
    “I can’t deal with you tonight,” she said. “Go away. Go to
sleep. Forget I ever said anything.”
    “No,” he said.
    She would have knocked him down, if he had not still been
holding