“Sleepless. Neither Sanctuary nor that group on Huevos Verdes. La Isla, I mean.”

Huevos Verdes. Green Eggs. I bent over and pretended to adjust my sandal, to hide my grin. I’d never heard that Sleepless had a sense of humor.

I said, through rising excitement, “Why does Gravison’s disease provide the perfect cover? What is Gravison’s disease?”

“A brain disorder. It causes extreme restlessness and agitation.”

“And immediately you thought of me. Thank you, darling.”

He looked annoyed. “It often leads to aimless travel. Diana, this isn’t a joking matter. You’re the last of the underground agents who we’re positive doesn’t show up on any electronic record anywhere before Sanctuary cultured these so-called SuperSleepless on their protected orbital. Well, it’s not protected anymore. We’ve got it crawling with GSEA personnel. The labs we dismantled completely; Sanctuary will never pull those dangerous genemod tricks again. And that treasonous Jennifer Sharifi and her revolutionary cell will never get out of jail.”

Colin’s words struck me as understatement: a peculiarly gray-toned, governmental sort of understatement. What he’d called Jennifer Sharifi’s “dangerous genemod tricks” had been a terrorist attempt to use lethal, altered viruses to hold five cities hostage. This incredible, daring, insane terrorism had been an attempt to coerce the United States into letting Sanctuary secede. The only reason Sanctuary hadn’t succeeded was that Jennifer Sharifi’s granddaughter Miranda, from God-knows-what twisted family politics, had betrayed the terrorists to the feds. This had all happened thirteen years ago. Miranda Sharifi had been sixteen years old. She and the other twenty-six children in on the betrayal had supposedly been so genetically altered they don’t even think like human beings anymore. A different species.

Exactly what the GSEA was supposed to prevent.

Yet here the twenty-seven SuperSleepless were, walking around alive, a fait accompli. And not even “here” — a few years ago the Supers had all moved to an island they’d built off the coast of Yucatan. That was the word: “built.” One month it was international ocean, no “there” there, the next month there existed a genuine island. It wasn’t a floating construct, like the Artificial Islands, but rock that went all the way down to the continental shelf, which was not especially shallow at that point. Luckily. Nobody knew how the Sleepless had developed the nanotechnology to do it. A lot of people passionately wanted to know. Nanotechnology was still in its infancy. Mostly, nanoscientists could take things apart, but not build them. This was apparently not true on La Isla.

An island, says international law, which predates the existence of people who can create one, is a natural feature. Unlike a ship or an orbital, it doesn’t fall under the Artificial Construct Tax Reform Law of 2050, and it doesn’t have to be chartered under a national flag. It can be claimed by, or for, a given country, or can be assigned to it as a protectorate by the UN. The twenty-seven Supers plus hangers-on settled on their island, which was shaped roughly like two interlocking ovals. The United States claimed La Isla; the potential taxes on SuperSleepless corporate businesses were enormous. However, the UN assigned the island to Mexico, twenty miles away. The UN was collectively unhappy with Americans, in one of those downward cycles of international opinion. Mexico, which had been getting fucked over by the United States regularly for several centuries, was happy to receive whatever monies La Isla paid to leave the inhabitants strictly alone.

The Supers built their compound under cover of the most sophisticated energy fields in existence. Impenetrable. Apparently the Supers, with their unimaginably boosted brainpower, weren’t geniuses at only genemodification; they included among their number geniuses at everything. Y-energy. Electronics. Grav tech. From their island, officially if unimaginatively named La Isla, they have sold patents throughout a world market on which the U.S. can offer only the same tired recycled products at inflated prices. The U.S. has 120 million nonproductive Livers to support; La Isla has none. I’d never before heard it called Huevos Verdes. Which translated as “green eggs” but in Spanish slang meant “green testicles.” Fertile and puissant balls. Did Colin know this?

I stooped to pick a blade of very green, genemod grass. “Colin, don’t you think that if the Supers wanted Jennifer Sharifi and their other grandparents out of prison, they’d get them out? Obviously the successful counterrevolutionaries want the senior gang right where you’ve got them.”

He looked even more annoyed. “Diana, the SuperSleepless are not gods. They can’t control everything. They’re just human beings.”

“I thought the GSEA says they’re not.”

He ignored this. Or maybe not. “You told me yesterday you believed in stopping illegal genemod experiments. Experiments that could irrevocably change humanity as we know it.”

I pictured Katous lying smashed on the sidewalk, Stephanie laughing above. Cookie! Please! I had indeed told Colin that I believed in stopping genetic engineering, but not for reasons as simple as his. It wasn’t that I objected to irrevocable changes to humanity; in fact, that frequently seemed to me like a good idea. Humanity didn’t strike me as so wonderful that it should be forever beyond change. However, I had no faith in the kinds of alterations that would be picked. I doubted the choosers, not the fact of choice. We’d already gone far enough in the direction of Stephanie, who considered sentient life-forms as disposable as toilet paper. A dog today, expensive and nonproductive Livers tomorrow, who the next day? I suspected Stephanie was capable of genocide, if it served her purposes. I suspected many donkeys were. There were times I’d thought it of myself, although not when I genuinely thought. The nonthought appalled me. I doubted Colin could understand all this.

“That’s right,” I agreed. “I want to help stop illegal genemod experiments.”

“And I want you to know that I know that under that flip manner of yours, there’s a serious and loyal American citizen.”

Oh, Colin. Not even boosted IQ let him see the world other than binary. Acceptable/not acceptable. Good/bad. On/off. The reality was so much more complicated. And not only that, he was lying to me.

I’m good at detecting lies. Far better than Colin at implying them. He wasn’t going to trust me with anything important in this project, whatever it was. I was too hastily recruited, too flip, too unreliable. That I had left my training before its completion was de facto unreliability, disloyalty, unacceptability for anything important. That’s the way government types think. Maybe they’re right.

Whatever surveillance Colin gave me would be strictly backup, triple redundancy. There was a theory for this in surveillance work: cheap, limited, and out of control. It started as a robot-engineering theory but pretty soon carried over into police work. If there are a lot of investigators with limited tasks, they won’t cohere into a single premature viewpoint about what they’re looking for. That way, they might turn up something totally unexpected. Colin wanted me for the equivalent of a wild card.

I didn’t mind. At least it would get me out of San Francisco.

Colin said, “For the last two years the Supers have been entering the United States, in ones and twos, heavily disguised both cosmetically and electronically. They travel around to various Liver towns or donkey enclaves, and then go home, to La Isla. We want to know why.”

I murmured, “Maybe they have Gravison’s disease.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said, have you made any progress penetrating Huevos Verdes?”

“No,” he said, but then he wouldn’t have told me if they have. The sexual innuendo he missed completely.