It was nine-thirty when we finished studying Gerald's notes and creating our character sheets, and handed them to Gerald for his approval. He tweaked all the stats upward a few points -- "I'll bend the rules for you guys, I want you to have every advantage. But Edward, are you sure about this?"

"Sure about what?" Bill asked.

"If Kim and Sandor both got captured, they'll be in separate wings of the prison," I said. "We need both a male and female guard, so we can get at both of them."

Bill looked like he was going to make a bawdy joke, but then he said: "No, I should do it. Let's swap. I need to rescue Kim, you can look for Sandor."

"Bill," I said, "tell me this. If the only way to get Kim out of that prison is to kill her, can you do that? Especially if there's no time to explain, and you can't tell her she's going to pop right back here?"

He looked taken aback. "Oh... yeah, we might have to do that. I was thinking we'd get them out of the prison first, but..."

"Let me do it," I said. "We can explain later for sure, we hope we can explain ahead of time... but I don't want you to do anything you might regret, something that might hurt your relationship with Kim. Or worse, that you might hesitate... and then get both of you captured and your brains sucked out."

He chewed it over for a few seconds. "All right. You're sure you aren't doing this because you want to find out what it's like to be a woman?"

I shrugged, trying to act casual. That was part of my motivation, but I wouldn't let on. "I don't think I'll really get much chance to find out -- I hope we'll be in and out pretty quick, without a lot of time to, um, test out the new equipment. Kill Kim and Sandor and then ourselves, or if we can, tell them what's going on and give them weapons to off themselves with. But somebody has to be female to infiltrate the women's side of the prison."

"Why a lunar, though?" Gerald asked.

"Shapeshifting could be useful," I said. "If I get caught trying to rescue Kim, it could help me get away. And it ensures that I won't end up as a brain in a tank -- the worst they can do to me is kill me, so I'll end up back here."

Lunars were Gerald's answer to werewolves, invented for his game setting. They could shapeshift as long as the moon was above the horizon, day or night; when the moon set, they were stuck in whatever form they happened to be in until it rose again. The government of Omruthia hated lunars and was waging a genocidal campaign to root them out and kill them all -- to kill us all, I should say, as I was starting to get into character. And lunars didn't have a distinct brain; they thought as well as moved, breathed and digested with every cell of their body.

"And if we wind up staying there longer than we expect," Bill noted, "it means you won't be stuck as a girl if you don't like it. You can shapeshift into a guy form."

"Maybe, although I probably won't do that unless my first cover ID is compromised. You about ready?"

"I might want to make my character a lunar too..."

"It might not be a good idea," I said. "You said you were disoriented when you first became Irrush -- it'll probably be worse for me, being a different sex and species. Maybe crippling. I don't want that to happen to both of us at once. And lunars have those vulnerabilities as well as powers -- a human-lunar pair would be more versatile than two lunars."

"Yeah, you're right."

We went over each other's character sheets, and hashed out a few more details about how our characters knew each other. Then Gerald took a deep breath and started.

"It's just before sunset when you arrive for your night shift jobs at the Kantheria Center for Correction and Amendment. Your contacts in the resistance have warned you that agents of one of the other resistance organizations may be trying a foolhardy prison raid --"

"Hey!" Bill said. I shushed him.

"-- and if so, you should try to cover for them with a little bit of well-timed incompetence, but don't risk blowing your cover to save them. If they get captured, try to silence them before they can be made to talk. They're unlikely to know anything about the more effective resistance organizations, but better safe than sorry. You each report to your posts and everything goes normally until about eight... Roll versus perception."

Bill and I both made our rolls. "You hear what might be gunshots from the direction of the records office, followed by a faint scream."

"I'm going to check it out," Bill said.

"I'll --" I began, but I got no farther.

-----

I must have looked startled when I suddenly realized I was Edward Kettlestone as well as u-Rimikhal Surrethia, and a flood of memories from Edward Kettlestone's life distracted me from what I was doing -- walking my rounds with Mierra. I tried to cover for it as she looked curiously at me: "Did you hear that?"

The sound continued, a faint screaming coming from somewhere to our left. She shook her head. "You can't let it get to you, or you won't last long here. Come on."

"I don't just mean the screams -- didn't you hear the gunshots?"

"No... But we shouldn't leave our posts. Whoever it is can call reinforcements from the floating guards, and if it's so urgent they need us to drop everything and come, they'll ring the alarm."

We continued on our rounds and I took stock of my new memories. As Edward, I'd been thinking of all this as a game -- not just my ostensible life as Surrethia, which only went back a few months, but my whole life as *me*, the real person under all the male or female human masks, with no name that humans could utter. But my own memories were centuries-deep and too vivid for me to discount them. Neither Edward nor his friend Gerald had invented all those memories; they had been in too much haste to get started to put as much thought into character backstories as usual. Edward and Bill had decided that Surrethia's human cover ID would be as Biansurru's sister, but I remembered so much more that they hadn't thought of: how I'd been friends with Biansurru for twenty years in my previous human ID, as a woman named Urreshi; how I was exposed as a lunar and barely escaped the police, fleeing to Biansurru and Surrethia's home for refuge; and how, when Surrethia died of typhus a few weeks later, I took over her identity, working with Biansurru to bury her secretly in the dead of night. I remembered other human faces and identities I'd worn in the past decades and centuries -- and the animal forms, too -- and the people, human and lunar, I'd known.

And I remembered how Biansurru had gotten me this job, a couple of months after I took over his sister's identity, and how quickly I had gotten used to the screaming. As Edward, I thought it was probably Irrush screaming after getting shot by one of the guards, and maybe Themia or Khonu were screaming from non-fatal wounds as well, but as Surrethia I knew it could just as easily be one of the prisoners over on the men's side being tortured, or screaming at the memory of recent torture. It wouldn't do to show undue curiosity about it.

Mierra and I continued our rounds, inspecting all the cells on our block. The prisoners were all locked in, by ones and twos, and they'd had their evening meal; some of them were trying to sleep, others were talking quietly with their cellmate or the prisoners across the hall, one was singing in an aboriginal language I knew well (I'd been a member of that tribe for more than a century), but which as Surrethia I couldn't admit to knowing. None were making trouble, anyway, and we returned to our guard post to rest for a few minutes before starting the next round. Mierra rolled a cigarette and lit it, but didn't offer to share; Surrethia used to smoke, but I "quit" when I took over her life. I took the magazine I'd been reading out of the desk and found my place, but I couldn't concentrate on the article, still flooded with disparate memories.

Within an hour or so, Themia would probably be hauled in to the women's side of the prison; she might be interrogated right away, or they might throw her in a cell to stew for a few hours first. Meanwhile Khonu would be imprisoned and questioned in the men's side, and quite possibly Liero too -- I remembered pretending to be Liero, but I couldn't remember being him, not like I remembered being Edward. With any luck, Themia would be on my cell block, and I'd have a chance to get at her before she was questioned... what if she was on another block, though? I'd need to plan for that too.

As Edward, I'd been curious about what it would be like to be a woman, to have breasts and wide hips and a vagina. As myself, though, this shape was nothing new -- I'd worn it almost every hour of the day and night since I took over Surrethia's identity, and I'd worn so many other female shapes that the novelty, if there had ever been any, had long since worn off. I remembered the old days when I could safely shapeshift every time the moon was up, when the humans didn't have a good way to detect us except by trying to kill us and seeing if the usual methods for killing humans didn't work. But since they invented X-rays, microscopes and blood tests, we'd had to learn to form human skeletons inside ourselves, and stable fluid sacs that would look like human internal organs, and to produce a fluid just under our skins that looked like human blood under the best microscopes the humans had. Changing shape wasn't something we could afford to do casually, not if it involved breaking up and reforming our skeletons, which might not pass on an X-ray until they'd stabilized in the new shape. Guards at the prison were randomly X-rayed about once a week and subject to blood tests once a month, while private citizens might be randomly X-rayed any time they visited a government office to pay their taxes or apply for a permit. (The government of Omruthia required a lot of permits.)

Our break was about over and we were about to walk another round when someone rang the bell at the heavy steel door leading from our cell block to the central atrium of the women's side. It was the sequence of rings, two short and one longer, which meant guards escorting a new prisoner. I went to the door, looked through the periscope at the people on the other side, and gave Mierra the clear sign; she lowered her pistol and I unlocked and opened the door.

Two male guards escorted in a female prisoner. She'd had bruises all over her face, arms and chest, and some teeth had been knocked out; her shirt was gone and her bra was loose on one side, but she wore the trousers of a female guard's uniform. As Surrethia, I'd never met Themia, but I remembered Kim's description of her from her character sheet, and I was sure this must be her. She was a couple of inches shorter than me, with straight black hair and the kind of nose that indicated she had an aboriginal grandmother somewhere in her ancestry. But not recently; you couldn't get a job as a guard unless you were at least seven-eighths Omru, or plausibly impersonate one if you didn't at least look like it.

"Caught this one sneaking in, oddly enough," said the guard who was holding the chain attached to Themia's manacles. "Her and two men, all in uniform, with fake ID. Commandant says she's to be in solitary for a while, and you've got a free cell --"

"No, we don't," Mierra interrupted. "We just put a new prisoner in solitary during the day shift; the records must not have been updated."

"Oh..."

"We can move a couple of other prisoners around, double up some that have their own cell, and block this one's cell off with portable partitions if we need to," I suggested.

"I'm pretty sure they've got an empty solitary cell in Block S," Mierra returned, giving me a dirty look.

"All right, no need to trouble you ladies further. Good evening." And they were gone.

"Why'd you say we could double up some others and make room for that one?" Mierra asked.

I shrugged. "I didn't remember they had a free cell in Block S. And I wanted to look cooperative; this is the best-paying job I've ever had, and I don't want to lose it."

"If you're trying to make nice with Puenkho, don't bother; he's bad news. Tharrashi over on Block T dated him for a while and she said..."

I tuned out Mierra's rambling about Puenkho, the guard who'd been holding Themia's leading-chain. If Themia was in solitary on another cell block, I'd have trouble getting at her. Probably they'd leave her there for some hours, then pull her out and interrogate her; hopefully they'd interrogate her several times before they sent her over to the technomancers to do as they liked with her brain. I thought over various possibilities, none very promising, as we made another round of the block and took another break.

A couple of hours after Themia was captured, I felt the moon rise. I couldn't see it in our windowless cell block, but that didn't matter; I felt the possibilities of change through every part of my body. But I was long used to the discipline of maintaining a consistent shape throughout the day and night -- those of us who hadn't learned that had either fled over the mountains to Ekynia, or died. I resisted the impulse to change, kept doing my job, and kept brainstorming.

Moonrise made it possible to get to Themia, but it still wouldn't be easy. Every method I could think of either had a high risk of failure, or would take several days to prepare, or both. If I didn't care about blowing my cover ID, I could probably get to Themia tonight, silence her -- freeing Kim from this world she undoubtedly thought of as a "dystopia" -- and maybe even get out of the prison alive, though in need of a new ID.

But if I were exposed as a lunar, Biansurru would be suspected of being one himself, or of knowingly collaborating with me. Once they started investigating him and interrogating him, they'd find out about his own connections with the resistance, and he couldn't stand torture the way a lunar could. So I'd have to come up with something else.

-----

It was about dawn when our day-shift replacements relieved us. I lingered for a few moments in the atrium, saying good morning to the other night-shift guards as they left and the day-shift guards as they arrived; then I picked my target and went over to Ziebi, one of the guards on Block S who was pretty near my height and weight.

"Any plans for the morning?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Go home and crash for now. I've got a date on my next off day, though; this guy I met at Shuenia's nameday party."

"Good luck. Say, you've got something stuck to your sleeve, here --"

I brushed her left sleeve and touched her hand and wrist for a moment. That moment was enough to taste her skin and learn how to take her shape, if I needed to -- and if I had the chance.

A few minutes later I met Biansurru by his car in the parking lot.

"Anything interesting happen?" he asked, opening the door for me.

"Some guys brought in a new prisoner, but we didn't have a solitary cell free," I said, getting in. "I'll tell you about it later."

I assumed the car might be bugged, and didn't volunteer anything about Edward and Bill. Biansurru started to say something once we were underway, but I cut him off.

"I'm kind of tired; let's deal with that later." I brushed my left hand against my left earlobe and yawned, a signal the resistance used to warn of listening ears. When we got to Biansurru's row house and went inside, I walked through every room with my sleeves rolled up and my shirt partly unbuttoned, tasting the air with every patch of exposed skin.

"Nobody's been here since we left last night. So no bugs. We can talk."

Biansurru let out a sudden breath as he sat down on the sofa. "Edward? Is that you?"

"Kind of," I said, sitting down next to him. "I remember being Edward and I remember being Surrethia, and Urreshi and Tushorro before that... what about you?"

"I remember being Bill and Biansurru both. Mostly Bill, I think, but I'm not sure... this is so confusing. Did you find out anything about Kim?"

"Themia's in solitary on Block S," I said. "I've thought of ways to get at her, but the best case is I'd probably lose my job at the prison and probably my cover ID as Surrethia. At worst I'd get killed without killing her first. And if I'm exposed, you'd be exposed too -- I think we need to coordinate, and both of us go after Khonu and Themia at the same time tomorrow night."

He shook his head. "Liero got captured, but Khonu got away. Liero's in the fishbowl cell in Block M."

Some cell blocks had a cell whose walls were of technomantically reinforced glass. Prisoners were usually put in it naked, exposed to the view of the guards and other prisoners.

"We ought to silence him, too, if we can do it without blowing our cover."

"What? But -- he won't pop back into the other world when he dies. And I can't see how to get at him when he's in the fishbowl, even if it were on my cell block."

"Well, he probably doesn't know enough to be dangerous anyway."

"I think we should go look for Khonu now. If we can't find him, we'll try again tonight before work -- we need to tell him what happened when I got killed as Irrush, and about that film actor -- what was his name?"

"It doesn't matter. You want to eat something before we go back out?"

"I guess we'd better."