"Hey." He jerked away his leg. "What are you doing?"

"They might work on yours."

"You don’t think that’s dangerous, carrying bugs in your body that take things apart?"

"They aren’t bugs. They’re just enzymes. And they’re no more dangerous than being trapped here."

He knew it was probably true, but even so, he was having second thoughts about his amorous impulses. People sweated when they made love. A lot.

"Jato, don’t look like that," she said. "The chompers are produced by nodules in my sweat glands that only activate when I go into combat mode. Besides, they can’t take apart people. Our composition is too heterogeneous."

He sat on the ledge, near her but not too close, and motioned at his still-chained ankle. "Wrong lot, I guess."

"I guess so." She tugged the manacle on her wrist, managing to slide it up about a centimeter. The skin on her wrist was more elastic than normal tissue, not a lot, but enough so she could drag it out from under the manacle. He saw what she was after, a small round socket in her wrist.

"You have a hole," he said.

"Six of them, actually. In my wrists, ankles, lower spine, and neck."

That explained the neck and waist bands. "What do they do?"

"Pick up signals." She held up her arm so the socket faced the console across the room. "If I insert a plug from that node into this socket, it links the computer web inside my body to the console."

That didn’t sound like much help. "The plug is there and you’re here."

"That’s why consoles transmit infrared signals." Her face had a inwardly directed quality, as if she were running a canned routine to answer him while she focused her attention elsewhere. "The sockets act as IR receivers and transmitters. Bio-optic threads in my body carry signals to the computer node in my spine. It processes the data and either responds or contacts my brain. Bio-electrodes in my neurons translate its binary into thought: 1 makes the neuron fire and does nothing. It works in reverse too, so I can ‘talk’ to my spinal node."

He suspected Nightingale was probably flooded with IR signals. "How can you stand so much noise hitting you all the time?"

"It doesn’t. Only if I toggle Receive." Her full attention came back to him. "The signals do get noisy and it isn’t as secure as a physical link. But it’s enough to let me interact with a node as close as the one over there."

"And?"

She made a frustrated noise. "This room ought to be bathed in public signals. But I’m getting nothing at all."

He doubted Crankenshaft would cut himself off from the city. "Maybe he did something to you."

"My diagnostics register no software viruses or tampering." She paused. "But you know, my internal web is engineered in part from my own DNA. Maybe he infected it with a biological virus." Without another word, she lifted her wrist and spit into its socket.

Dryly Jato said, "Insulting it won’t help."

She smiled. "The nanomeds in my saliva may be able to make antibodies if there’s a virus loose in my biomech web."

"Are you getting anything?"

"Nothing." Several moments later she said, "Yes. A notice about a ballet." Her concentration had turned inward again. "I still can’t link to the city system… but I think I can get into the node in that console over there."

Jato stared at her. "Not a chance. That’s Crankenshaft’s private node. Everyone knows his security is unbreakable."

A cold smile touched her lips. "Security is my game."

A moment later she said, "I can call up his holosculpture of you if you want."

Jato swallowed. She might as well have hit him with that ancient proverbial ton of bricks. "Yes. I want."

She indicated the center of the studio. "That’s it."

He turned-and almost gasped.

The air above the pool was glowing with a rainbow-hued mist. It drifted across the glistening white cones that stood in the water, like shadows made on outcroppings of rock by clouds obscuring a sun. This, from a man who had lived his entire life in the night. Holos of Jato appeared on every cone. On the tallest, the one with the circular cross-section, he sat with knees to his chest, shivering, his clothes and hair dripping. He was younger, eight years younger, only a husky teenager. His face cycled through emotions: rage, confusion, resentment.

An older Jato stood on the next cone, the one with its top cut off at a slant, giving it an elliptical cross-section. He remembered when he had modelled for it, how he stood for hours on a narrow shelf protruding from the surface. Crankenshaft had since removed the shelf and erased it in the image, so the Jato holo simply floated in the air, with red and blue clouds scudding across his face. He was shouting, fists clenched at his sides. No sound: just his mouth moving. With the play of light, it was hard to make out words, but he knew what they were. He had been cursing Crankenshaft in his native tongue.

The Jato by the parabolic cone was sitting, submerged to his hips in the pool. He trailed his hands back and forth in the water, a habit he had developed to cope with the boredom. He was kneeling by the hyperbolic cone, up to his waist in water. Crankenshaft had doctored the holo to make him look old. Ancient. His face was a map of age untouched by the biosculpting the rich used to sustain youth during their prolonged lives. Gusts blew brittle white hair around his head. Stooped, gnarled, decrepit: it was a portrait of his mortality.

That tableau remained frozen for a few seconds. Then all the Jatos stood up and began stepping from cone to cone, passing through each other while multi-colored clouds flowed across their bodies. Some raged, others shivered, others moved like machines.

Each figure split, becoming two Jatos, all continuing their strange march. They split again, the original of each quartet stepping from cone to cone while the others kept pace in the air. New images appeared like shadows, all different by just a small amount, creating a feathered effect. A younger one was crying. He remembered that day; he had told Crankenshaft about his family, how he loved them, how they must think he had died. Another Jato image was laughing. Laughing. Yet there were times he had laughed-even had civil conversations with Crankenshaft.

Holos of water augmented the pool, overlaid on the real water like multiple exposures: waves in impossibly sharp points, or serrated like a saw, glowing phosphorescence in red, purple, green, blue-green, gold, and silver. Gusts in the studio whipped the true water into peaks that added random accents to the holos.

The Jatos split again, along with their shadows. They all stopped and raised their hands, the motion feathered among the images, as if it portrayed multiple quantum universes, each projecting a future that diverged from the original. The image of a rainbow-hued waterfall sprayed over the figures, making them shimmer. But no blurring could hide the fury on those faces.

"Saints almighty," Soz said. "It’s spectacular."

Jato tried not to grit his teeth. "That’s why he’s so famous."

"I can see why he wanted you for his model."

"You can?"

She motioned at the holos. "You couldn’t get that purity of emotion-that fury-from a Dreamer. From most anyone. But from you, it’s perfect. Pure passion unadulterated by civilization."

"Am I supposed to be flattered by that?"

Soz winced. "I didn’t mean-" She stopped, staring at the sculpture. "Jato, look at your eyes."

"That would be a feat." But he knew what she meant. He studied the images-and when he saw it, he nearly choked. Crimson. Ruby hard and ruby cold. The eyes on each image had turned red. The hair was changing too, going from dark brown to crystalline black. He couldn’t believe it. Crankenshaft was making him look like a Trader.

He stood up, his fists clenching at his sides. "I’ll kill him."