“I do want to be with you! But you underestimate m’lady—”

There’s a sudden draft of chilly outside air as the door swings open. “Well! How absolutely fascinating.”

I turn around as Pete sits up beside me. “I w-was showing her the orchids,” he says, stuttering faintly. He’s got Creator biomimicry, too; he flushes when he’s embarrassed.

Eliza Lynch, the grand lady of Paraguay — or her present-day impersonator — is distinctly unimpressed. She stands in the doorway, antique peacock feather headdress nodding against the ceiling, and if looks could kill, the venom squeezing out of her blackly gleaming bishojo orbs in our direction would be enough to poison a city. “I’ll deal with you later,” she says coldly, and turns her head minutely to stare at me: “As for you, making free with my chattels—”

I roll to my feet, skin hardening into defensive scales, but her bodyguards are already between us — dwarfish black-clad sadists, tittering as they unsheathe their power maces. “I don’t answer to you,” I throw in her face. “Let’s make this a matter of honor.”

It’s sheer bravado — I’m genuinely afraid, my skin flushed and shivery. It’s bad enough that she’s on the verge of wigging out completely and ordering her arbeiter thugs to kill me, not to mention wrecking all my carefully laid long-term plans, but that’s trivial compared to the gaping horror that is the prospect of losing Pete so soon after I’ve found him. (And a sidelong glance shows me that I might be losing him already — he’s cringing away from my suddenly changing form. The love between us that burned so bright was sustained by our mutual pheromonal feedback. If I stand too far away to smell, will he reject me?)

But she doesn’t seem to realize it’s a bluff. A sudden upward jerk of her chin. “I know who you claim to be, ‘Katherine Sorico.’ And I know what you are. Impostor,” she adds, for the benefit of the peanut gallery. “Get out of my house before I lose my temper, whelp!”

I gape. She’s letting me go? I move to pick up my clothes, but she shakes her head, and there’s a guard standing before me, weapon raised. “Don’t push your luck.”

I take a step back. She glides forward, into the greenhouse, and her guards circle with her, forcing me to retreat through the open doorway. Her face warps in a distorted smile. “I’ve got what you want, child. If you come back without my permission, I’ll break him in front of you — and then I’ll break you. Just remember that. Now get out before I change my mind.” Her smile turns ugly. “Remember, I know what you’re made of, Juliette.”

I stumble out into the maze seething with anger and humiliation, dread, and a terrible new emotion I can’t quite name. The mission is a wash, but I have a new goal now. The only problem is, I’m not sure it’s one I can achieve…

AFTER I WAKE shuddering from that dream, sleeping is pretty much impossible. I feel stupid and tired. Am I going to need yet more cosmetic surgery? Certainly my current disguise is useless. (And why didn’t Juliette tell Jeeves that the Katherine Sorico identity was blown? Or did she? A paranoid corner of me wonders.) At least now I know why Stone and the Domina are after me. It was simply my bad luck she was on Venus, and he tagged me as Juliette’s kind. It’s so like an aristo to send her rival a message written in the dead flesh of an innocent sib.

And as for the events aboard Pygmalion… I flash on a memory of the Domina, Pete’s owner. I’m certain, now, that she’s one of Granita’s sibs: they’re too much alike for it to be a coincidence. Granita, who casually seduced me in body if not soul, then ordered her minions to fire on my presumed location? I twitch. What have I stumbled into? If Granita has told her sister the Domina that she met Katherine Sorico on a Mars-bound liner, and they successfully tagged me as Maria Montes Kuo, then—

Why does Jeeves want me to run errands for weeks, until the Indefatigable is ready to leave, using a blown cover identity?

I’m pacing around the bedroom like a clockwork toy, chewing on a knuckle as I think furiously. I don’t like the shape of this. I mean, I really don’t like it. If I was a nasty paranoid person like Juliette, I’d think Jeeves was trying to set me up. Having me charge around all over my enemy’s home territory, looking very much like the sib she swore vengeance on? That’s not funny! But… what’s in it for Jeeves? I can’t see any reason why he’d want me dead — if so, why the elaborate setup? And who’s trying to sue me into a hole in the ground and establish a claim on my body?

He’s using me as bait. Or, he’s the mole in the organization.

Neither prospect is reassuring. But I need that ticket out to Jupiter, don’t I? If I head back to, say, Earth, there’s no telling which of the Domina’s sibs will run across me next — or which of their bodyguards, the flamboyant aristo thugs or the munchkin space ninjas she leans toward. I’ve done surprisingly well to stay alive so far — but mostly because I’ve had help. If I cut and run on Jeeves, I might not be so lucky next time.

I sit down on the bed and think furiously. Can I do it without exposing myself? I summon up Jeeves’s letter and read it again. Then I double-check the travel itinerary. He wants me to run some errands around places as far apart as Carter City and Lowell and… Yes, one of me thinks, this could work.

And so I begin to plot.

THE NEXT DAY, good-time Kate checks out of the decrepit hotel and hops aboard a slow southbound train. The train makes numerous stops en route to the destination she paid for, near the south polar city of Bougainville. She is no longer aboard by that point. Maria Montes Kuo — who is presumably on several watch lists — boards a suborbital to Fashoda, a maglev to Maxwell, and a train to Tribeca. I do none of these things and in fact buy a battered thirdhand spider with money from the wallet of Jennifer Sixt, one of the flimsier of Jeeves’s courier identities.

Did I say that Mars is big? Three days later, exhausted and sleepless and with every joint in my body shaken half-loose from the off-road driving, I ride my spider into the outskirts of Hellasport, nearly three thousand kilometers from where I bought the craft. I’ve had lots of time to think and brood and read and reread my instructions from Jeeves. And I’ve decided that if he wants cages rattling, then I’m going to really make them rattle — but not at the price of letting myself fall into the Domina’s hands.

I’ve done my research from a battered gazetteer, and it doesn’t take me long to locate the correct backstreet market; rows of kiosks and dingy shop fronts jostling elbow to elbow with power-distribution substations and vendors of assorted substances. I walk in, rather than taking the spider. What I’m looking for is slightly upmarket from Ferd’s dive in the backstreets of Marsport, but otherwise not dissimilar. The waiting room is painted black and sparsely furnished, the better to highlight the display of limbs, heads, torsos, and structural boning that adorns the walls and ceiling. All the organs are embellished with the surgeon-engineer’s signature. The location is cheap and nasty, but word is that Red spends her profits on her practice, not on a fancy paint job.

“Anyone here?” I call, sitting down on a bench seat with remarkably lifelike feet.

A munchkin pops out of a hole in the floor and chatters at me angrily. “What you want? Red not in!”

“I’m wanting to give Red some money,” I say calmly enough. “If he’s not in, tough.” I stand up, ready to go, just as the inner door opens.