Forty minutes or so later, we drove over to the safe-house that Khonu, Themia, Irrush and Liero had been using. If Themia or Liero had already been interrogated, the secret police might already know about the place. But Themia at least had been left in solitary, and probably was only being interrogated about now. Biansurru drove slowly past the house, a rickety old place in the middle of the aboriginal ghetto with peeling paint and broken porch steps. There were no cars in the driveway or parked in front, and no lights in the windows, but there was smoke coming from the chimney.

I'd been darkening my skin and adjusting my face on the way over, and shifting some mass from my breasts to my hips and belly, leaving my overall build the same so I wouldn't have to break and reform any bones. A couple of blocks past the house, Biansurru let me out and I walked back to it, cutting through a couple of back yards and approaching the back door. If the secret police were already watching the house, they wouldn't recognize me.

I gave the code-knock at the back door: three raps, pause, one, pause, and two. Nobody answered. I pressed against the back window, not only my ear (which was mainly for show, though its cupped shape did mean it picked up sound a little better than the rest of my skin surface) but the whole right side of my face and both hands. No voices, no footsteps; just a faint hum that was probably a refrigerator.

After listening a minute, I picked the lock and entered. It was as I'd more or less expected: the stash of money was gone, with Khonu's go bag. Any papers that might have been incriminating were gone, either taken along by Khonu or burning up in the wood stove. If I hadn't been a lunar, I'd have checked to make sure they'd burned thoroughly and didn't need a little kerosene or something to help them along, but I gave the stove a wide berth and got out of there as soon as I was sure Khonu was nowhere around.

I cut through a different couple of back yards to get to the next street over, walked back to where Biansurru had parked and got in. "He's gone," I said. "Drive."

"We can look for him at the Cross-Eyed Okapi tonight before work," he suggested.

"Yeah, he won't leave town. He'll be planning to rescue Themia, if I know him. We've got to find him before he tries something stupid, let him know we've got it covered."

"Do we?"

"I've got a plan, but I need a little more information. And I'll need your help, and Khonu's if we can find him in time."

By the time we returned to Biansurru's house, I'd returned my face and figure to normal. We went inside and sat down on the sofa. Biansurru's shoulders sagged suddenly and he started trembling.

"I don't know if I can do this," he said. "I -- I've got to do it. We can't leave Kim in there -- they're probably already torturing her by now..."

"Shh," I said, putting my arms around him. "Get some rest. Themia's been trained to resist torture; she can't hold out forever, but she'll hold out long enough that we can rescue her before they give up on her and decide to extract her brain."

He'd stiffened for a moment when I hugged him, but then relaxed. "Um, Edward?"

"Call me Surrethia, please."

"How much do you remember about, um... about Biansurru and Surrethia? Or the person you are, I mean, both before and after you became Surrethia?"

"Before Surrethia I was Urreshi. We used to sleep together, back before Surrethia died and I took over her identity. Then you didn't want to anymore, and you told me to sleep in Surrethia's bed... I said I didn't mind, and I still mean it." Lunars got pleasure from contact with each other, or with humans, but with humans it didn't matter much what kind of contact; this hug was as good as the sex used to be when I didn't look like his sister. I didn't have a particularly high concentration of nerves in my vagina or breasts, no more than in my arms and hands. "I'm happy to be your sister."

"Oh God, Edward, I didn't intend that. You know it wasn't on my character sheet and I swear I wasn't thinking it either... I just suggested you could be my sister because I knew as a lunar you'd need a cover ID, and it would be convenient if we shared a house in case the mission lasted several days, but I *didn't* want us to be lovers... I didn't even think about you having replaced my original sister when she died, much less about -- what happened with Urreshi --"

"Biansurru, you didn't do anything wrong. Neither did Bill, I'm sure. I know that Edward didn't invent every detail of my three centuries of memories. And I don't know how, but I'm sure they're real -- what we had when I was Urreshi was real, and what we have now that I'm your sister is a little different, but just as real. Bill and Edward didn't create us, any more than Gerald could have created this whole world."

"But where else did we come from?"

"Probably the same place the other world came from. Have you thought about how we're speaking Omreshi? Gerald showed me his dictionary once, you know, a few weeks ago when the campaign had just started. It's only about a hundred and fifty words, and a few rules for making compounds and phrases -- not even enough grammar to write complex sentences. And I can speak four aboriginal languages too, which Gerald never created a word of."

He was silent for a few moments; I stroked his hair soothingly, and it had some effect. "Maybe you're right. Gerald must have discovered this world, somehow... and you and I discovered our other selves here when we tried to create new characters...?"

I wondered. Did that mean that Liero, who I had no real memories of, was also a part of me? And what about the twenty or more other characters Edward had played in various games over the years?

"Enough philosophizing," I said. "Go get some sleep, and by the time you get up, maybe I'll have figured out if my plan will work."

-----

I went into Surrethia's room, which I hadn't changed much since she died, and sat down with the city directory and a map book. I didn't need as much sleep as a human, and as long as the moon was up I was too wired to get to sleep easily. I looked up Ziebi's surname in the directory and figured out where the people with that name lived. I could rule out all but two of them based on what I'd heard from Ziebi and her friends over the last few months; I knew she lived fairly close to the prison, and that she lived in an apartment, not a house. I adjusted my vocal cords to a low alto, narrowed my tongue a bit, and dialed one of the numbers.

"Who speaks?" a gruff man's voice said.

"Doserra speaks. Is Ziebi there?"

"You've dialed wrong."

I called the other number, heard Ziebi say "Who speaks?", and apologized for dialing wrongly. I made sure to put my tongue and vocal cords back to normal before the moon set, and got to sleep not long after.

--------

When I woke that afternoon, I got up and made breakfast for me and Biansurru, to have it ready when he got up.

"So," he said, sipping his coffee and blinking. "You said something about a plan?"

I told him.

"That should work. You know Ziebi well enough to impersonate her?"

"Not with her close friends. With other guards at the prison, yeah, I think so."

"So you can get into Block S, and... and give Kim a way out. And --" He glanced at the clock. "With any luck we'll have made contact with Sandor first."

I didn't like the way he kept talking about them by the names of the people who'd pretended to be them, but I wasn't sure what to say about it. I said only, "We'll do what we can. What about this..."

We discussed our plans during breakfast, and refined them further on the way to the Cross-Eyed Okapi. It was a bar catering mainly to people of mixed aboriginal-Omru ancestry, where Khonu and Themia's resistance organization used to meet up and exchange messages. Nobody in the organization knew everybody else, so an unfamiliar person asking after Khonu and giving the right passcodes wouldn't look suspicious.

Biansurru drove past it and parked a little way down the street. He got out first, and I followed him at a distance. He entered the bar; I paused to admire the displays of cheap jewelry and hats in a couple of storefront windows, and passed with concealed distaste by a propaganda poster -- "Is Your Neighbor a Lunar? Know the Warning Signs!" I gave Biansurru time to case the place thoroughly, and when he came out, I paused by another window and saw him, out of the corner of my eye (lunars have better peripheral vision than humans), take off his hat and mop his brow -- a signal we'd agreed on to say that the place looked safe enough but Khonu wasn't there. I continued down the street to the bar and went inside, while Biansurru turned the corner to circle the block back to his car.

"What'll you have?" the bartender asked. He was a small wiry man with aboriginal-pattern facial hair, heavy on the chin and sparse on the cheeks. I'd had a beard like that one time.

I described the rather improbable drink I supposedly wanted, a code telling him I was part of his organization and needed him to pass on a message. He made an elaborate show of mixing up a root beer with spices -- secret agents can't drink on duty, or anyway they shouldn't. Not that alcohol would affect me like a human, anyway.

"You know a guy named Giasho who comes in here sometimes?" The name Giasho didn't matter, just that it was a man's name.

"Yeah, I haven't seen him in a while though." That told me he was ready for my addressee's actual name.

"If you see him, tell him Khonia was asking about him." The fact that I'd mentioned a random man's name meant he needed to turn "Khonia" into its masculine equivalent, Khonu.

"I'll try to remember. -- That'll be two kroner."

I slipped him two one-kroner notes, with the message I'd written out earlier sandwiched between them. He deftly put the bills in the cash drawer while slipping the note into a hidden compartment underneath them. I poured a libation into the funnel of the shrine by the radio, bowed, then sat down and drank enough of my root beer to be plausible.

A few minutes later I was with Biansurru, on the way to work. I told him what I'd learned, which was basically nothing.

"But I'm pretty sure Khonu will be in there sometime in the next few days; he'll need his contacts in the organization to organize another raid to free Themia, and he'll get the note then."

The note said, in English: "Bill and Edward are taking care of Kim. We'll look for you here every evening at five, if we aren't being followed." (It took a lot of concentration to think and write in English, but we could do it.)

"I hope he's all right," Biansurru said. "As bad as this is for us, it's got to be worse for him..."

Not as bad as for Themia, I thought, but didn't say.

-----

I was nervous all night during my shift, but I tried not to let it show. Mierra probably thought the screaming from the interrogation rooms was getting to me, and it was; I was thinking it might be Themia. And we had orders to keep one of the prisoners in cell fourteen awake all night, so she'd be ripe for interrogation on the day shift; we had to take turns going in and shouting at her, and shaking her by the shoulders when that wasn't enough, every hour or so. Her cellmate kept waking up too, and cursing us more vigorously than the poor woman we were supposed to be keeping awake.

I'd had to do that several times since I started this job, although I hadn't had to actually torture anybody; but with the sudden infusion of Edward's memories and personality, I was starting to rethink this whole business of going undercover as a prison guard for months or even years. The only real good I'd done in all this time was to carry messages to and from prisoners on my cell block, and keep the organization informed about who was imprisoned and what their condition was. Supposedly we were going to do a really big prison break, much more professional and likely to succeed than the amateurish job Khonu, Themia, Irrush and Liero had tried, once we got enough people in place; but I had no idea who else was involved, except Biansurru, or how many more people we needed to get hired and promoted before we could break the prison wide open, kill the torturers and technomancers and free the political prisoners. And how much damage was this job going to do to me spiritually before then?

Toward the end of my shift I excreted some fluid from my nostrils, sniffled a lot, adjusted my vocal cords to hoarseness, and told Mierra I thought I was coming down with something. "If it doesn't get better, I might call in sick tonight," I said.

I kept my eye on Ziebi as we left at the end of our shift, following her at a little distance through the checkpoints to the parking lot. She got on the number eleven bus along with several other guards and interrogators; I noted it and then hurried to meet Biansurru at the car.

"Drive as fast as you can without drawing attention," I said. "She's taking the bus home; this is perfect. We can get there ahead of her and wait."

By the time we reached her apartment building, I'd changed into a copy of her. I told the concierge that I'd lost my key; she let me in to the apartment and told me she'd have a replacement key by the time I left for work that evening, but I'd owe twenty kroner extra on next month's rent. I apologized and thanked her profusely; when she was gone, I waved to Biansurru from the window and he came on up.

Ziebi arrived home just five minutes later. She barely had time to register astonishment at seeing me when Biansurru grabbed her from behind and chloroformed her. We had her bound and gagged a few minutes later.

"Go on home now," I said, "and try to get some sleep. I'll see you at the bar tonight, right?"

"Good luck," he said, shifting from one foot to the other.

"Don't forget to call in sick for me," I said, realizing I couldn't do it now that I had Ziebi's voice.

"I won't."

I gave him a hug, and he left.

After moonset I took a nap. When I got up, I helped Ziebi use the toilet, and tied her up more securely again afterward.

"I could leave your pants down around your ankles," I said while I was drying off after my shower, "so you can go whenever you need to while I'm out being you. Would you like that?" She nodded, then shivered and shook her head.

"I'll get you a blanket," I said, and brought her a couple from her bedroom. I covered her bare legs and left her sitting on the floor next to the shower. I also left the shower head dripping so she could dampen her gag and then suck the moisture from it.

I caught the number six bus to the stop nearest the Cross-Eyed Okapi, and walked down the block to the bar. I smelled Biansurru and a few moments later saw him sitting at a table near the back with a shorter man with a full beard. I joined them at the table.

The other man looked nervous as I approached, but Biansurru said in English, "Don't worry, that's Edward. I told you not to be too surprised when you saw him." He sounded strange when he spoke in English, and with the Edward part of my mind, I realized he had an Omreshi accent.

"Your new character is a woman?" I figured Khonu was mostly Sandor, if he was talking about me as if I were just a character.

"We needed someone in the women's side of the Pit to get to Kim," I said, forcing myself to use her player-name. If English felt strange in my ears, it felt even stranger in my mouth; as Surrethia, I'd never spoken it before. "I think I'm going to have a chance to get to her tonight. Has, um, Bill already told you about how he got back to Gerald's house...?"

"Yeah. I guess once we've got Kim out, we'll all have to die here to get back home..."

They brainstormed about the most painless methods of suicide and murder they could think of, and I kept my mouth shut. There wasn't any painless way for a lunar to die.