I have an itchy feeling between my shoulders, as if there’s a target glued to the small of my back. I haven’t forgotten the Domina’s threats, or Petruchio’s backhanded warning. But part of me is dead inside, half-wishing oblivion on myself. A part of me I hadn’t really known about was activated for the first time, marvelous and strange: but only minutes later it was broken. I feel unmade, malfunctioning but unable to switch off. I want — no, I don’t want to die. But I want to be out of love. I want to be comfortably numb. And if one of Stone’s sibs were to surface in front of me right now, I’d be quite happy however it ended — taking out my rage on a deserving proxy or quieted forever by the point of his knife.

But no assassins come. Instead, a sleek wall of darkness rumbles alongside the platform and slows to a silent halt beside me. I climb aboard the train and sidle down the narrow corridor, looking for my carriage and compartment. In another few days I can shake the dust of Mars from my toes. Until then I’ll just go to ground in Marsport and lick my wounds, and Jeeves can go fuck himselves.

My Dead Love lost, I am so miserable!

IT SEEMS THAT even in sleep I can’t get away from her.

I dream I’m Juliette again, the bitch. Worse, sticking the knife in and twisting, now I’m Juliette in love. And unhappy with it, because (hah!) she’s in love with him, helplessly, dizzily emotionally dependent — and a certain nameless hostess with ambitions beyond even her status as a rich slave-owning industrialist is plotting to, to…

To what? I don’t know, because I’m concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, without stumbling or treading on anything painful, across a vast red expanse of nowhere punctuated by scattered lumps of half-rusted and long-abandoned machinery. I’m naked, as well as miserable — She as good as ran me out of town on a rail — and depressed for multiple reasons. I’ve blown my job. In fact, it’s even worse than that. I’ve blown it so badly that She didn’t even bother decommissioning me with prejudice, or interrogating me: She paid me the supreme insult instead, that of not taking me seriously. Which will ring alarm bells with Jeeves, and for good reason. The cow. She probably thinks it serves me right for sampling her dish…

Ah well. There’s a bright side (and I need all the bright sides I can get, as I contemplate the ten kilometers I’ve come and the fourteen-odd kilometers still to go if my map-fu is right about where the railhead is): If She isn’t seriously mad at me right now, then eventually I’ll get a second chance. And if She was mad at me, I’d be dead. So it may take years, but I can be patient. Now that I’ve got something to wait for, I can be very patient. Just as long as he can be patient, too. And as long as I remember to keep not thinking about the other thing. “Pete, my love. What do I know about you, really? You can’t be as stupid as you look, it’s not something anyone would design into people of our profession… but then, I didn’t handle myself too well either, did I?”

I realize I’m talking to myself and stumble, nearly falling over. What am I doing? In this game, it doesn’t pay to underestimate your enemies. She might have released me simply so that She could track me back to my patrons. Ears are everywhere — even the rocks littering the desert floor could be eavesdropping, especially within the periphery of Her estates. I cringe inwardly at the mere idea of what the boss will say when I get home. If I get home. I glance over my shoulder. The sun is settling toward the horizon, and it’s a viciously cold night to be out in the buff.

I make it to the station an hour after sunset, fueled by a frothy emulsion of rage, humiliation, and lovesickness. Along the way, I grow some clothing. There are limits to what you can do with chromatophores, but they’ll stretch to a fair facsimile of a leotard and pumps: eccentric wear for a late-night desert excursion on Mars, but better than flaunting my failure.

Daks is waiting past the next dune with a heavy-duty earthmover he’s jacked from somewhere. “Kinky,” he observes, as I climb in the cab.

“One word…!”

He cringes as I slam the door. “Whoa, babe! No offense intended. The boss sent me. Are you clean?”

“No.”

I sit in silence for a minute while he cranks up the reactor and begins to bleed heat into the Stirling engine. “Oh.” He reaches up to engage the drive shaft, and there’s a slight lurch as the Martian desert begins to unroll beneath our tracks. “Well, then. What went wrong?”

I think on my feet. The only way out is to tell some of the truth. “I’m burned two ways, Daks. You’re going to find my company really unhealthy for the foreseeable future.” I tell him the bare facts about what happened, listening to my own emotionless recital with a curious sense of distance. The crawler bounces slightly as we go up and over the rim wall of a crater half a kilometer across. Down we go into the twilit depths, bleak and sunless as my future. I used to know who I was and what I was here to do, but now I’m not so sure…

Daks engages the autopilot, then swings his bucket chair around to face me. “Babe, babe. It’s not the end of the world. Sure the boss is going to be annoyed; he can boil his guts, what’s done is done. Domina Death made you, okay, so you need a debrief and reassignment to some nice quiet job where you won’t be in the chain gang—”

“You don’t understand!” My own vehemence startles me. “It’s not her! It’s him!” I’m running my fingers through my hair, nails half-extended with distraction. “I can’t get him out of my mind! I’m ruined, don’t you see? She’s got him, and She’ll figure out what we did together, and then She’ll have a hold over me!” It’s as bad as don’t think about the other thing. “I couldn’t be compromised worse if She’d stuck a slave chip in my neck! All She has to do is threaten him, and I’ll, I’ll—”

I’m gulping, hurt and hunting for words, my vocalization reflexes stuttering with incoherent anxiety.

“Easy, sis. Take your time.” Daks murmurs reassuring nothings as I flail at the walls of angst hemming me in. “You fell for him bad, did you?”

“I’m in love!” I wail. “And it’s horrible! I want it to stop!”

I TRANSITION INTO wakefulness in the dark of the night, gripped by the absolute certainty that someone is about to try to kill me.

I am not sure how I know this. It might be one of Juliette’s threat-detection modules, imprinting itself in my reflexes while I sleep the kilometers away, trapped in her dream of lovesickness. It might be a random intuition of my own. Or it might be something else again. Whichever, I’m lying on my back on a bunk in a sleeper compartment, fully clad, and I’m digging my fingers into the foam cushion beneath me, because I am absolutely certain that they’re going to try to kill me.

My aching, oversized eyes are open, staring at the ceiling of my compartment as it bounces and rumbles across the desert floor. For a few endless seconds I half fancy I’m lying in a coffin, one of those inexplicable time capsules that our Creators retired to when their homeostasis failed.

(It seems like bad design, to be designed to fail so easily. We are made of sterner stuff because we were designed to serve them at their pleasure, however long that might be. But there is a school of thought that claims our Creators’ fragility was a side effect of their dangerously uncontrollable replicator cells. They were built to fail easily, to prevent them malfunctioning and drowning us all in a tide of pink goo. It’s a theory, I suppose, but the idea of building death into a person just to keep them from malfunctioning seems even crazier than the idea of building arbeiter factories into everybody — and encoding the instruction set for the factories in the control firmware of every mechanocyte in their bodies! I don’t understand them at all…)