“You okay?” Zefla asked.

The bluebird flew away. Miz appeared, dressed in trunks, squatting down. “Called the-” he started to say to Zefla, then saw Sharrow’s eyes were open. “Well, hi,” he said softly, putting one hand out to her face and touching her cheek. “Back with us again, are you?” he asked, smiling.

“I’m all right,” she said, rolling over and trying to sit up. Zefla put an arm to her back, helping her. She shivered and Miz wrapped a towel round her shoulders.

“All that wasn’t what you’d call natural, was it?” Zefla said.

She shook her head. “It was the same as the last time. In the tank. Exactly the same. A recording.” She tried to laugh. “They did say they’d be in touch.”

Miz looked over to the pool. “Could be a nerve-gun or something down there, in the valley; beaming straight up.”

“Or something in the house,” Zefla said, patting at Sharrow’s hair with a towel.

“Maybe,” Sharrow said. “Maybe.”

“If I ever get my hands on whoever’s doing this,” Miz said quietly. “I’m going to kill them, but I’m-”

Sharrow put her hand out, held Miz’s arm, squeezing it. “Ssh, ssh,” she whispered.

Miz sighed and stood. “Well I’m going to take a look round the house, starting with the next floor up; I’ll get Dlo or Cen to take a look down in the valley.” He reached down, put his hand on Sharrow’s head for a moment. “You going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

“Good girl.” Miz walked quickly away.

“Girl,” Sharrow muttered, shaking her head.

“Let’s get you to bed, eh?” Zefla said.

Sharrow used Zefla’s shoulder to help her get up. Eventually she stood, supported by the other woman. “No; I was having a swim. It’s gone now; I feel fine.”

“You’re crazy,” Zefla said, but let Sharrow shrug off the towel she was holding round her shoulders, and walked with her to the side of the pool. Sharrow stood there for a moment, composing herself, drawing herself upright and flexing her shoulders. She dived into the water; it was a rather ragged dive, but then she surfaced and struck out strongly for the far side.

Zefla sat down on the side of the pool, her dark red-brown legs dangling in the water. She grinned at the pale, lithe figure forcing its way through the lime-glowing water to the far side, and shook her head.

“How’s our patient, Doctor Clave?” Bencil Dornay asked.

“Fit and healthy, it would seem,” the elderly clinician said, entering the lounge with Sharrow at his side.

Bencil Dornay was a compact, clipped man of late middle years with small green eyes set in a pale-olive face; he had a neatly trimmed beard and perfectly manicured hands. He dressed casually, almost carelessly, in clothes that were of the very best quality, if not the last word in fashion. His father had left the employ of Gorko, Sharrow’s grandfather, when the World Court had ordered the dissolution of the old man’s estate; Dornay senior had gone into business and been highly successful, and bought himself a shorter name. Bencil had been even more successful than his father, reducing his own names from three to two. He had no children but he had applied to the relevant authorities to be allowed to clone himself, and hoped the succeeding version of himself might be able to afford the next step, shedding one more name to instigate a minor noble house.

“Fit enough to dance, perhaps, Doctor Clave?” Dornay asked, eyes twinkling as he glanced at Sharrow, who smiled. “I was planning a small party in the lady’s honour tomorrow evening. This little dizzy spell won’t prevent her from dancing, will it?”

“Certainly not,” Doctor Clave said. He was rotund and heavily bearded and had an air of amiable distraction about him. He seemed so much like how Sharrow remembered doctors were supposed to be that she wondered just how much was an act. “Though I’d-” The doctor cleared his throat. “Advise having medical attention on hand at this party, naturally.”

Bencil Dornay smiled. “Why, Doctor, you didn’t imagine I would dare conduct a soiree without you in attendance, did you?”

“I should think not” The doctor looked at a small clipboard. “Well, I’d better see if those lazy techs have got all that stuff back in the plane…”

“Let me see you out,” Bencil Dornay offered. “Lady Sharrow,” he said. She nodded. He and the clinician walked to the elevator. She watched them go.

Sharrow could just remember Bencil Dornay’s father from a single one of those seasons when she had visited the great house of Tzant while the estate had still technically belonged to the Dascen family yet its administration-and fate-had been in the hands of the Court.

Dornay senior had left Gorko’s employ twenty years earlier, and had already become a rich trader; it had been his particular pleasure to revisit as an honoured guest the residence he had served in as house-secretary. He had been a stooped, kindly man Sharrow remembered as seeming very old (but then, she had been very young), with a perfect memory for every item in the vast, half-empty and mostly unused pile that had been house Tzant. She and the other children had played games with him, asking him what was in a particular drawer or cupboard in some long-neglected room of some distant wing, and found that he was almost invariably correct, down to the last spoon, the last button and toothpick.

Breyguhn had said she thought he was a wizard and had had every grain of dust numbered and filed. She delighted in moving things from drawer to drawer and cupboard to cupboard and room to room, trying to confuse him when the others came running back, breathless with the news that he was wrong.

Sharrow couldn’t honestly claim that she remembered Bencil Dornay himself; he had been sent to college before she was born, and if they had ever met, she had quite forgotten the occasion.

Dornay senior must have been in Gorko’s genetic thrall for over four decades by then. The code that would-according to Breyguhn-tell Sharrow where the Universal Principles was had been added to the message in his cells shortly before Gorko had fallen; just by the very act of fathering him, Dornay senior had passed that message on to his son, where it waited now-if Breyguhn was right-half a century later.

And all it needed-she thought, with a kind of bitterness was a kiss.

Sharrow turned and walked to the far end of the lounge, where a glassed-in terrace looked out onto an ocean of cloud. The others sat watching a bolo-screen.

“Well?” Miz said, attempting to guide her into a chair. She gave an exasperated tut, waving his arm away, and sat in another seat.

“What’s the news?” she nodded at the screen, where a map showed what looked like a schematic of a war.

“The Huhsz are playing things down,” Cenuij said. “They’ve apologised for the accident on the train; said some munitions went off accidentally; denying there was any attack. They say the Passports will be initiated to a few days’ time, after a period of mourning for the Blessed Ones killed on the train.”

“Hey,” Zefla said to Sharrow. “We saw that house you had on the island. It looked really nice.”

“Thanks,” Sharrow said. “Still standing, was it?”

“Dammit, Sharrow; what did the doctor say?” Miz said.

She shrugged, looking at the war-map in the screen. “There is something in there.” She tapped her head. “In here.”

“Oh no,” Zefla breathed.

“What, exactly?” Cenuij said, sitting forward.

“Some crystal virus, probably,” Sharrow said, looking round them. “Just a molecule thick, most places, growing round and into my brainstem. One thread disappears down my spine and ends up in my right foot. The rest branch…”, she shrugged, “into the rest of my skull.”

“Gods, Sharrow,” Zefla breathed.

“A crystal virus,” Cenuij said, eyes wide. “That’s war-tech.” He glanced at the corridor leading to the elevator. “How did that old duffer know-?”