Robin stared up at Creek for a few seconds before she slugged him in the jaw. "Goddamn it!" she said, retreating into the bathroom.

Creek massaged his jaw. "I really wish you would stop hitting me," he said.

"I am not a goddamn sheep, Harry!" Robin yelled.

"I didn't say you were a sheep, Robin," Creek said. "I said I thought I was looking for a sheep. But you have some of the same DNA as the kind of sheep I'm looking for."

"Do I look like I have sheep DNA?" Robin asked. "Do I look especially woolly to you?"

"No," Creek said. "All the sheep DNA you have is switched off. It's junk DNA. It doesn't do anything. But it doesn't mean it's not there, Robin. It's there. Just a little under twenty percent of your DNA is taken from breed."

"You're lying," Robin said.

Creek sighed, and crouched down, resting his back on the bathroom door. "I saw pictures of your mother, Robin. Your biological mother. She was a genetically engineered hybrid between human and animal. She was one of several hybrids some sick bastard created to blackmail people. This man let your mother get pregnant, and he modified your embryo in utero—designed you to be a viable birth. She wasn't fully human, Robin. I'm sorry."

"That not what my parents told me," Robin said. "They said she was homeless and died giving birth to me."

"I don't think they knew the details," Creek said. "But she did die giving birth to you."

Robin grabbed the edge of the sink and collapsed onto the toilet, sobbing. Creek went over to her and held her.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. Fixer poked his head in. "Everything all right?" He said.

"Everything's fine," Creek said. "It's just been a busy day."

"We're not done being busy," Fixer said. "We need to get those pictures taken, so I can make your passports. Are you ready?"

"A couple more minutes," Creek said.

"No," Robin said, and grabbed onto the sink again, this time to pull herself up. "We're ready. We're ready now."

"Okay," Fixer said, and looked at her hair. "After we take these pictures, I've got a hat you can use." He left.

"There goes his tip," Robin said, and smiled weakly at Creek.

"You okay, then?" Creek asked.

"Oh, sure," Robin said. "Today, people have tried to kill me, the police are looking for me, and I've just discovered every Easter of my childhood, I ate one of my relatives with mint jelly. I'm just fine."

"Well, is a very rare breed," Creek said.

"So?" Robin said.

"So they probably weren't close relatives," Creek said.

Robin stared at up at Creek for a few seconds. Then she laughed.

Where's Chuckie? Fixer thought as he fell backward down his basement stairs. Where the hell is my dog?

Fixer was worried about his dog because when he opened the door of the basement into the ground floor of his shop, there were two men and a very large thing waiting for him on the other side. This simply shouldn't have been; Chuckie was an Akita, and while the breed was silent enough near family or friends, they bark like mad when strangers invade their personal turf. Chuckie was so good at alerting Fixer to people in the store that for the last five years Fixer hadn't bothered with a door alarm; there was no need. Fixer had been in the basement, loudly destroying incriminating evidence and preparing for his departure, so he may not have heard Chuckie bark when people came into the store. But Chuckie wouldn't have stopped barking until Fixer heard him, came up the stairs, and told him to settle down. Ergo, something was wrong with Chuckie.

Fixer would have asked the men in the store about it at the top of the stairs, but the one closest to him punched him viciously in the face, staggering Fixer backward and down the stairs. All thoughts of his dog left Fixer's mind as his head connected with the concrete floor at the bottom of the stair with a retina-whitening crack; when Fixer recovered his eyesight, the man who had slugged him was standing over him, gun in his face. The man looked like hell.

"Where's my dog?" Fixer asked.

The man cracked a lopsided grin. "Well, isn't that sweet," he said. "Takk!"

A high-pitched voice responded from the top of the stairs, out of Fixer's sightline. "Yeah?"

"Give the man his dog," the man said.

About 30 seconds later Chuckie came tumbling down the stairs, landing with a thump next to his master. His tongue, purplish-black, lolled from the side of his mouth. Fixer reached over to stroke Chuckie's fur; it was damp and matted.

"Oh, Chuckie," Fixer said.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said the man. "Very fucking sad. Now get up."

Fixer got up. "What do you want?"

"You had a couple of visitors today," the man said. "I want to know where they went."

"I have a lot of visitors," Fixer said. "I have a very successful repair shop."

The man took his gun off Fixer and fired at Chuckie, mashing brains and the top of the dog's skull into the stairwell.

"Jesus Christ!" Fixer said, and held his ears. "What did you do that for?"

"Because you're pissing me off," the man said. "And just because your dog's dead doesn't mean I can't make a mess with his fucking corpse. So let's stop being coy, if you don't mind, and we can all get through this with a minimum of drama. What do you say?"

Takk wedged his monstrous body into the doorframe at the top of the stairs. "Everything okay?" he asked.

"Everything is fine," the man said. "Come down here, Takk, and tell the geek to get his ass down here, too. He's got work to do."

Takk called back to the other guy and started walking down the stairs. Fixer gaped at him. The man holding a gun at him grinned. "He's a big one, isn't he," the man said. "He's a Nagch, and you wouldn't know it, but he's kind of runty for his species. But he's big enough for what I need him for."

"What do you need him for?" Fixed asked.

"For starters, to beat the crap out of people who piss me off by not answering my questions," the man said.

Takk came down off the stairs and stood next to Fixer, which to Fixer felt vaguely like standing next to a Kodiak bear.

"Hi," Takk said. His voice came, not from a mouth—the Nagch didn't appear to have one—but from a diaphragm like patch where his neck joined his body.

"Hello," Fixer said.

Another human came down the stairs. "There's nothing in the computer upstairs," this other human said. "It's connected to a network but the only thing on it is invoices and business-related files. Are there computers down here?"

The man with the gun turned to Fixer. "Well?" he said. Fixer gestured in the direction of his computers and machines, which he'd already covered up. "Get to it, geek," the man said.

"He's not going to find anything," Fixer said. "I don't keep records of anything I do down here."

"Well, I appreciate the heads-up," the man said, "but he's going to give it the old college try anyway. Now. Back to our two friends. A man and a woman. I have it on good authority they were here."

"They were here," Fixer said.

"Excellent," the man said, and smiled. "See? Now we're getting somewhere. What did you do for them?"

"I gave them new identities and got them passage off the planet," Fixer said. "They apparently had some sort of run-in at the Arlington Mall that required a quick exit. You know anything about that?"

"Fucker broke my wrist," the man said, and Fixer was suddenly aware the man had indeed slugged him with his left hand and was holding the gun in the same hand.

"Looks like he broke your nose, too," Fixer said.

"Thanks for the diagnosis, asshole," the man said. "Where are they now?"

Before Fixer could answer the other human came up to the gunman. "There's nothing here. The computer's wiped and the memory's been reformatted. Whatever was there is gone for good."