“Oh, child!” she sighed at last, swallowing the last remnants. “There have been times when I’d have killed for less!”

Zetha helped herself to the other extra one, gulping the treat down with less fervor. Food was food, sustenance to keep one going until the next meal.

“There’s nothing mortal I would kill for,” she remarked, licking her fingers, knowing that both her bad manners and her words would earn one of Aemetha’s cutting looks. They did. She shrugged. “I’ve never been that hungry.”

“Then you’ve never been hungry enough” was Aemetha’s opinion. Her fingers reached for a second jelly, then stopped. She sighed. “Mustn’t. We can give these to Blevas in part payment for mending the roof. Though where we’re to get the tiles…”

“Way ahead of you,” Zetha said, more than a little smugly. “The jellies go to Rexia in exchange for a bolt of good quilted brocade.”

“Stolen, no doubt, from the uhlans’ stores,” Aemetha offered.

Zetha shrugged. “Where she got it is Rexia’s business, as is how.” Rexia, they both knew, had a weakness for officers, though she could be friendly to a uhlan if need be.

“And what are we to do with the brocade thus acquired?” Aemetha wondered, though she had a fair idea.

“I’ve promised that to Metrios in exchange for a partial shipment of roof tiles. His wife wants it for winter jackets for the children. She’ll dye it with blue-bark and turn it inside out so no one will know it’s military-grade, hence stolen. Metrios will deliver the rest of the tiles after I procure him two tickets for the heptathlon semifinals.”

“Which you will acquire how, exactly?”

“You probably don’t want to know that, either.”

Aemetha sighed. “Very well. Let us assume Metrios does deliver the other half-shipment of roof tiles…”

“No need to wait for that,” Zetha assured her. “Blevas has agreed to start working on the roof as soon as the first shipment arrives. With luck, the roof will be finished before the winter rains.”

The roof in question was the roof of Aemetha’s ancestral villa, a great drafty shell of a building which was the only thing her family had left her before having the bad taste to back the wrong side in an old senatorial election and disappear in the small hours of one morning. That Aemetha had been allowed to keep the villa was indicative of how little she or it meant to the Powers That Were.

Aemetha kept to the old religions, and repaid the gods for their beneficence to an old woman without offspring by using her ancestral home as a not quite licit hostel for Ki Baratan’s street urchins. Barter, outright theft, and the odd anonymous donation by the occasional aristocrat with a conscience kept the walls standing and, usually, the children fed. The roof had been another matter, until now.

Aemetha’s eyes were moist, from more than just the gift of kaliajellies. “You do more than you should for me, child!” she said now.

“It’s not for you, it’s for all of us,” Zetha said practically, repacking the jellies to keep them moist. Sentimentality made her nervous. “I have to deliver these.”

“Take something with you,” Aemetha fussed. “I set aside a tunic and some trousers for you. They may be a little large, but they’re almost new…”

She pulled herself to her feet and went searching.

“Here you are. The trousers are decidedly too wide, but that can be amended. And they’ll need washing.”

Zetha examined the tunic thoughtfully, making no mention of a split seam she could mend when the old woman wasn’t looking, and held the trousers up to her waist.

“They’d fit two of you!” the old woman clucked.

“I’ll tie them with the sash you gave me,” Zetha said. “They’re fine. Thank you, Godmother.”

“Grateful even for that trash!” Aemetha sniffed, her nose running more from emotion than the morning’s chill. “You’re too grateful, child. That’s your problem.”

“Grateful to be alive, and no longer beholden to a House, thanks to you,” Zetha said, bundling the clothing under one arm and leaning down to kiss the old one’s furrowed brow. “I have to go now.”

“Be careful!” Aemetha whispered.

“Always,” Zetha said, slipping through the door curtain and away with no more motion than a breeze.

Life is a game,she thought, threading her way through back alleys, avoiding the sunlight (mindful of the Scroungers’ First Law: Never run when you’ve stolen something), a game whose stakes are nothing more than the game, which is life itself.She lived in shadow, blending herself with the crazed stone walls, slipping from light to shadow and back again.

There was so much to do. Stop at an unmarked door, slip a broken datachip under it. The person on the other side would have the matching piece; spliced together they said: You can trust me, and another transaction would be begun.

Or slip a calling card that said “The poet Krinas holds a recitation in the Square today. All are welcome.” It meant “The uhlan on the third watch at the North Gate is a friend.” A different card, “Music canceled on account of rain,” meant “They’ve posted extra guards. Avoid.”

Those who are born between worlds live in the between world. They are as comfortable in this neither/nor as in their own skins, and sometimes even more so. They learn to slip between the cracks of time and space, to be where they are not and not be where they are.

But those who live this way of necessity, who learn by doing, cannot always anticipate the wiles of those who live this way by choice.

Even as she watched, Zetha was being watched. Koval saw her shadow slipping between the shadows, and made note.

“How did you come to be in Cretak’s employ?” Tuvok asked carefully.

“You mean how did a street urchin with no identity come to the attention of someone so important?” Zetha stalled. This was the question she had to answer most carefully, the answer she had been rehearsing since the skipper of the freighter had shown her to a makeshift pallet behind some containers that reeked of dried fish and left her alone—she’d had to find the communal shower and the food dispensers on her own—rehearsing it until it sounded not rehearsed but spontaneous and totally true.

“Godmother had friends. Old family connections despite what had become of her family. There was one rich patron who came every year at the same time and left enough currency to support the entire household through the winter. I never saw his face or learned his name, but he had a beautiful voice.” And have wondered ever since who he was, and whether it was guilt money he left,she thought, confident in her storytelling, because every word, so far, was true.

“Was this patron related to Cretak?” Tuvok’s voice did not change, but some nuance suggested he knew she was stalling.

“How can I know that if I don’t know who he was?” she shot back.

“Then what is his relevance to my question?”

Damn you!Zetha thought, though whether the thought was aimed at Tuvok or at herself, she wasn’t sure.

“Only by way of explaining that Aemetha knew people. She used to tell us stories about the dinners her family gave. Half the senior officers in the Fleet used to attend, she said. She was old enough to remember the time when your people stole our cloaking device.”

“And Cretak?” Tuvok persisted.

Now,Zetha thought. But carefully.

“She intends to run for reelection at the next session. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s common knowledge in Ki Baratan, at least. She will require more aides than she already has, and was looking to train a new one. Aemetha recommended me.”

Tuvok weighed this against what little anyone in the Federation knew about the workings of government and social caste and custom within the Empire. On that basis alone, it was impossible to know for certain if Zetha’s answer was truthful. However, he had noted no change in her pulse or respiration. Again, the veracity of her answers depended on whether she really was what she appeared to be—a rank amateur telling the truth as she understood it—or an operative so skilled she could lie with impunity.