“Hello. Pay no attention to Zire, he gets possessive.” She looks me up and down with a professional eye. “What do you need?”

I toss her a memory stick. “What’s on there. I think it’ll take you a while to arrange everything, yes?”

“Hmm.” She pops it into her arm and glances at the palm of her hand. “You’re not joking. Cold weather kit’s easy enough, but radiation hardening? What are you planning, a skiing holiday on Pluto? Or maybe you’re taking a job supervising a reactor plant?”

“Close enough,” I say lightly. “Can you do it, is the question?”

“Hmm.” She keeps reading. I see the point where she pauses, does a double take, and continues. “Expensive. Some of this is going to be difficult to get hold of.” I’m pretty sure she’s thinking of the Block Two requirements — the added techné to bring me up to the same spec as my secretive sister. “The cryotolerant kit isn’t exotic, just not particularly common. It’s the other stuff that may be problematic. It’s going to attract attention,” she says apologetically.

“I was thinking twelve thousand Reals ought to cover it,” I say carefully. That’s about thirty percent over the odds.

She stares at me, unblinking. “Fifteen thousand.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fifteen, and not a dollar or centime less.” She pauses. “I’ll need the money to grease some joints. Getting some of these subsystems without anyone noticing officially—” She shrugs. “I assume that’s what you want?”

I nod. “Alright. Deal.”

I spend roughly the next week in and out of Red’s chop shop, being prodded and poked. Most of it isn’t too bad, but I am extremely unhappy about remaining conscious when it’s time for her to crack my thighs open and replace their fab lines with new assembler arrays. Also, having all the joints in my body realigned and resocketed is tedious in the extreme, and occasionally agonizing when she misplaces a pain block. Which, to be fair, isn’t her specialty.

When she’s through with me, I don’t look very different on the outside — I’ve got the same bishojo eyes and feathery blond hair I’ve been wearing since Mercury, the same too-perky nipples and narrow waist as the original Katherine Sorico and my sister Juliette the impersonator — but internally there have been some big changes. I won’t freeze until you get right down to liquid-nitrogen temperature, and given appropriate footwear and clothing, I can go singing in the methane rain on Titan. My Marrow techné is able to fix a whole lot more radiation damage than I hope I’ll ever be exposed to, and there are some other surprises. Like the distributed reflex net Red has spliced into my peripheral nervous system. Its responses are dumb and stereotyped, but if someone’s sneaking up behind me with a knife, that’s all I need. I’ll leave the fancy disarming techniques to Juliette’s reflex set, when it fully imprints on me. In the meantime, I am becoming Kate, hair-trigger splitter of skulls and ice-cool frigid bitch.

There comes a morning when Red looks in on me. “Oh, still here?” She makes shooing gestures. “Go on, get out! I’m not running a hostel!”

“I thought you still wanted to fine-tune my—”

“Nope.” She doesn’t smile. “I took the air-conditioning down to minus a hundred and twenty while you were sleeping, overnight. There are no hot spots, so you’re ready to check out.”

“Oh,” I say, slightly crestfallen. “Well, thanks.” And I pick up my coat and walk out of her body shop — for good, I hope.

It’s time to go to work.

TWO DAYS AND three deliveries later I get my first actual evidence of who Jeeves is trying to draw out. (Not that I didn’t have a list of suspects already, but the first rule in both of the two oldest professions is “don’t make assumptions.”)

The work is mostly trivial stuff: Go to venue Alpha without being tracked, accost person Bravo and give recognition sign Charlie, accept payload Delta, proceed without being tracked to venue Echo, locate person Foxtrot, and complete. There’s a rhythm to it. It’s a soft-shoe shuffle of a job, and it’s singing in my nerves as I hop transport routes, change outerwear and the more easily adjustable physical signifiers, touch base, and dance on. Really, I’m not doing anything a million other couriers could not do; I’m just trying to be as discreet as a giantess half as tall again as the average citizen can be. Which is to say, not very.

I collect the fourth item (an encrypted soul chip — what a surprise!) from a shibeen in the warrens under Metropolis, and check the delivery instructions on a local classified ads bulletin board. And that’s when I get the first shiver down the spine. The destination’s in Hellasport, the railhead town in the Hellas Basin that’s the closest city to Her estate. I’ve been there before. Or Juliette has. And the delivery instructions? Even creepier.

I’m to go to the Riesling Hotel, check in under false identity number four, and hand the stick over to “Petruchio.” A name that I promptly go and look up, and that tells me nothing… except that the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. Oh my! I think. My own response takes me by surprise. Can you catch love by proxy? I suddenly realize that I’m anxious to see this Petruchio for entirely unprofessional reasons, and that’s a far-more-unwelcome revelation than even the worst possible answer to the questions about Jeeves’s motivation that I’ve been asking. There are layers of game being played above my head, that is true, but it is up to me to look to my own self-preservation. That’s why I hung on to the Swiss army handgun, and make sure I don’t sleep in the same room two nights running.

Hellasport is over five hundred kilometers away, and I am still running a day behind schedule. There’s — I check the assignment — a time window attached to this delivery. I’ve only got six hours to make it; I didn’t notice it was time-critical earlier. I swear at myself, do a hasty twice around the block to check for tails, then dive onto the overhead suspended tramway and make my way to the railway station. Luckily for me, there’s an express leaving in less than an hour. I buy a second-class seat on it, then dive into the concourse to grab my travel kit from left luggage. Second class is for respectable working independents who have to carry their own stuff and can’t simply order new (or send a slave to buy it) at the other end. Even though I’ve got a strong suspicion that I’m bait in a trap, I can’t resist this one. Because if Petruchio is who I think he is, it’ll help me get a handle on the unsettled feelings Juliette has inflicted on me.

I try not to tap my fingers on the tabletop as the train finally pulls out of the station. “Express” can cover a multitude of sins on Mars, and there’s nothing terribly speedy about this behemoth — it just rumbles along steadily without stopping between major cities. What if he is Pete? I daydream (bad Freya, bad!). I can almost feel his maddening, tantalizing ghostly fingertips running across my skin. I shiver. How do I avoid succumbing when just thinking about him raises secondhand memories of his incubus touch?

Spung. I shudder and cup my left breast with one hand, feeling dampness. I glance around, mortified. Luckily, I’m alone in this compartment, so there’s no one to witness my embarrassment. My left nipple hasn’t been quite right ever since that fly-by-night toastwit Ferd overfilled it. Arousal was supposed to make it firm up; now it triggers an emergency pressure-release valve and I end up oozing hydraulic fluid. It’s really disgusting. Arousal? I am having some difficulty sitting still. “This is going to be bad,” I mumble to myself as I massage my malfunctioning mammary. “There must be something I can do…”

Then it hits me. What happened to Juliette wasn’t the standard obedience reflex everyone feels in the presence of a master; it was the more specialized submission reflex, locking on to her actual designated personal owner. We were trained for service in two modes, and while we are normally open and eager for affection, when one of them chooses one of us and acquires ownership, we have no option but to love them exclusively. I remember Rhea learning to her surprise and chagrin about this mode — in the abstract, though, because as template-matriarch for the lineage her teachers could not risk exposing her to premature love.