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workroom. Doors led into a sleek, minimal bedroom and a tiled bathroom. Vyn stopped to kick off her boots and let her bare feet touch the smooth luxury of the wooden floor. She curled her toes, enjoying the warm slide, the grain, the slight curve to each wide board.
    “This way.” Paul’s gaze dropped to her bare feet. He frowned. “Even there.”
    “What?” Vyn looked down. The slime from the skip had seeped into her boots and coated her toes, her ankles. “Muck gets everywhere.”
    “Not that. Your scars.”
    The jagged trace of white lines cut under the sludge. She’d lived with them for as long as she could remember. It was the way her skin had always looked. People’s responses—usually fear and revulsion—caught her off guard now. Living in S-District had blunted her defensive reaction. Skanks didn’t care what she looked like, not if her product worked.
    There was…something in his gaze. She’d never seen anything quite like it. It wasn’t revulsion, and it didn’t have the edge of pity. Still, it formed a tight knot in her gut. Vyn shrugged, denying that she cared about his reaction. He’d enjoyed her simulacrum. He had no interest in her true body. “I’m used to them.”
    She padded onto the deep carpet of the bedroom, the shining tiled bathroom pulling her towards it.
    “Who did it?”
    She waved her hand over a gleaming metal tap that jutted out of the wall. It splashed steaming hot water into the deep bath. A hint of mint and eucalyptus drifted up from the water and she pulled it deep into her lungs. The Corporation’s elite home fixture. For a moment, she had to close her eyes. It was too much, evoking her childhood, her own bathroom, splash-fights with her older brother.
    Vyn pulled in a tight breath. “I thought you knew everything about me.”
    “I have my suspicions.” He stopped in the bathroom doorway, a dark shadow that ran a nervous heat under her skin. “But the information is buried under security walls.”
    “Andrew and David March-Goodman.” She pressed her teeth to her lip. Even as she said it, the unreality of it hit her. To put the blame on two such prominent men felt like a lie on her tongue. But it was the truth. “They took me when I was six. Wanted to perform some ceremony, some magical rite. Wealth and influence.” She let out a soft huff of air. “I was meant to be sacrificed.”
    Paul’s silence forced her to look at him. He’d stilled, his expression frozen. It wasn’t horror or disbelief, but something in it chilled her.
    It forced her to look away. “I’d like privacy.”
    “No.”
    Her fingers paused on her jacket tabs, her shoulders tensed to shrug off her backpack. “Is this what you want then? You’re curious about what my skin looks like.”
    “Something like that.”

    Vyn turned to face him, tucking her jacket back to her spine and easing the simulacrum case into a pocket. She let him see her palm one of her hard currency packets and slide that into her jacket. She swung her backpack from her shoulder and quickly secreted her currency.
    She hung the bag from a silver hook to the side of the bath and shrugged off her jacket. It dropped to the floor, followed by her trousers. Paul’s unreadable gaze travelled the length of her bared legs. Treatment had smoothed out the worst of the ridges and tightness of the scar tissue, but it hadn’t taken out the snaking silver pattern or the discolouration of her skin.
    “Good enough?”
    He nodded towards the sink. “There’s a clean toothbrush there.” He paused. “And your bath’s full.”
    Belatedly, Vyn waved her hand over the wide tap and the water slowed to a trickle and stopped. She rinsed her mouth. “As I said, I’d like privacy now.”
    “I need your shirt and your underwear. I’m incinerating everything but your jacket.” He glanced at it, slime oozing in slow strings to the anti-slip floor. “Since you’ve packed it.”
    “You’re making me strip completely?”
    “Yes, I