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wearing this strangely sexy, silky slip dress. And her handcuffs had already been torn free. Why? And why had no charges formally surfaced?
    Finally, Dax uncovered his own file.
    He had a wonderful, awful idea.
    With the three sheaths of paper-thin gold pressed to his chest, he returned to his station with a grim vigor.
    He knew he was ineligible. He’d always been ineligible. Born ineligible. His material had never been entered, because what would it matter? At best, the marriage application would be denied and he’d be fired for gross misconduct. At worst, he’d be in direct violation of the Companion Law, which was a felony.
    But at the same time, who gave a damn? There had to come a point where all the legal chatter fell away, and the human condition surged forth unscathed. And he’d reached that point.
    Limiting the data pool of his difference engine to these three matrices alone, he carefully inserted each page, and began the turning of the crank.
    The numerical spines whirled together, tabulating. Comparing. Deducing.
    He hardly noticed the way the room began to blur. The sweat prickling his brow. The vague odor of smoke in the air.
    But are the engines infallible? he wondered. After all, they placed Liam and Legacy together, and those two are just –
    “Dax!” Miss Sotheby cried, puncturing the bubble of his daze. The woman approached at a run, flinging a stack of notices onto his personal desk. “Dax, stop!” She raised the hem of her petticoat in a manner most uncharacteristic, fanning at his machine, which was when Dax blinked and stepped back into his right mind. The engine was fuming. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
    “I – I thought I’d run Earl Kaizen’s numbers again,” Dax explained. “I had the extra time on my break – and I –”
    “For God’s sake!” Miss Sotheby cried. “I thought I told everyone to stay out of that boy’s file until we were ordered – and besides, there is plenty enough to be done without – and that’s the last thing on the duke’s mind at this moment, I assure you!” He hadn’t often seen Miss Sotheby mad, but she was sputtering through rebuttals, and she had such an excess of counterpoints. “If you want something to do, Dax, why don’t you go for a walk and clear your head? Here!” She stopped fanning the overheated engine only long enough to thrust the stack of notices into his hands. “Deliver these!”
    “Are you –”
    Miss Sotheby pointed at the door. “Just go! It’s fine!”
    Dax grimaced, but took his leave, shuffling through the pile of notes. They involved Companion reassignment, which was a constant pain in the lab, but not one with which he often dealt. People were reassigned for a whole host of reasons, from aging to mental breakdown to incarceration.
    Dax exited the CCSS laboratory, pivoting toward CIN-3 before he realized to whom this notice of reassignment was addressed.
    Liam Wilco.
    Exa Legacy’s status had officially been updated to “ineligible.”
     
                  Meanwhile, Liam Wilco was alone in the radio station’s third floor prep room, glaring down at a glossy strip of filament strung between his thick fingers.
                  In the photo negatives, skin was ink black, the shadows where their bodies met a burning ribbon of white. His Companion with her legs wrapped around the Earl of Icarus. A stranger’s mouth buried in her neck, and that sickening expression of ecstasy on her face. Sprawled on the foot of a goddamn staircase, in public, like animals, when all she’d ever graced him with was that humiliating display of apathy in the very hallway outside this door.
    “But this?” She grabbed his hand and pressed its palm over her heart. “I feel nothing,” she told him. “I feel nothing at all . . .”
    Still, he’d felt compelled to protect her when the slusher came to him the following Monday, elated with the explosive footage. It was hard to explain why. Frustrating? Yes.