Her face is unreadable in the near darkness. “Leave us,” she calls down to the bottom of the steps. “Yes, I did. Sit down, Kate.” I obey hurriedly. She turns to the candelabra and flicks a heated wire at one of the perchlorate candles. It ignites with a burning-metal hiss, fizzing and sputtering as it pumps oxygen into the air. She breathes deeply, then turns to stand in front of me, chill and silent in a silver trouser suit of archaic cut, her hair drawn up in a chignon secured with a flawless icicle. “My factor has acquired a lease on a suitable ship, and we will be departing shortly, Kate. I thought we should have a little heart-to-heart first.”

A heart-to-heart? I’m confused. She owns me — isn’t that enough? She stares at me with cool regard in her too-big eyes, and I stare back at her uncertainly. “Mistress?”

She slaps me across the face so suddenly that I have no sense of the blow coming, no time to tense. I fall sideways and catch myself heavily on one elbow. “That’s for Pete, bitch,” she says, her voice congested and indistinct with emotion. I cringe away from her in abject humiliation, and she steps back. “Excuse me.” She thrusts her striking hand into the opposite armpit. “Sit up, Freya. Kate. Please.” She’s so volatile I don’t know what to do. From fury to remorse in seconds. I lean away from her, distressed and uncertain.

“What did I do?” I wail quietly. If it was anyone else, I’d be at her throat, but against Granita’s wrath I’m as helpless as any arbeiter serf. I’m not sure which aspect of it is worse: not knowing what I’ve done to offend her, or being unable even to imagine defending myself.

“Hush.” She sits down just beyond arm’s reach, staring intently at me as if she’s looking for something. “Pete isn’t yours to take. Remember that. He should be—” She stops and cocks her head to one side, as if listening for something, but she doesn’t hear it, and after a few seconds she shakes her head. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have done that. You’ll have to forgive me if I ask, won’t you? But I’m sorry. Love is toxic to our kind. It destroys us. I’ve seen it happen. Never again.”

I shake my head, confused. This is utterly incomprehensible, utterly unlike the Granita I knew aboard the Pygmalion, who was about as volatile as a uranium ingot. I should know. She courted me for months. What’s gotten into her?

She inhales, then tenses as she speaks. “This is an instruction, Kate: You must not speak to anyone about what I am going to tell you here. Once we embark, it is likely that our conversations will be monitored. When we arrive, we will definitely be monitored. We won’t be safe until we return here, and even then there may be spies or worse within my household.” She gives me a meaning-laden look. “Do you understand?”

There are spies here? “Let me root them out!” I offer, eager to redeem myself. “I can lure them—” It’s the opening I’ve been looking for, the mission to offer at her feet for the sake of my own peace of mind.

“No,” she says firmly, looking almost spooked. “Conducting a purge would be just as much of a giveaway as talking in front of eavesdroppers. I’ve got something else in mind for you to do when we arrive.”

“Where?” I can’t help myself. I need to know what I can do for her.

“We’re going to Eris,” says Granita, just as matter-of-fact as if she’d announced we were going to visit a gambling casino on Ganymede or a sulfur mine on Io.

“Eris?” I echo stupidly.

“Yes, Eris. Where they build starships and harbor black laboratories. Nicely outside the reach of the Pink Police, don’t you think? I’m going there to participate in an auction. And you’re coming along because I need someone I can trust at my back.”

A shock transfixes me. She wants me! I’m flustered but happy. “What do you want me to do?”

“Several things.” She smiles now, as dry as the mummies in the Martian desert. “The auction is being run by a consortium of black labs, led by an individual or lineage known as Dr. Sleepless. I don’t know precisely who they are — nobody does — but what they’re offering is nearly priceless. They claim to have a working Creator, and a support kit that will keep it alive. They built it out there in the freezing cold among the Forbidden Cities. It’s not a one-off — if they can do it once, they can do it again — but it’s unique right now, and that’s a precious commodity. I’m going out there to work with, to meet, some fellow investors. If possible, we’re going to acquire the creature.”

She stops smiling.

“There will be other bidders at the auction. Other factions who want to obtain the Creator. Including, if I am not mistaken, your former employers. Don’t look so shocked; Jeeves is nothing if not mendacious. (What kind of butler can he be, without a master to serve?) But that’s not important. What you need to know is, we’re not going to wait for the auction. There’ll be a viewing, beforehand, and that’s when things will most likely turn messy. So I need someone I can trust — someone like you — to control the Creator.”

“Me?” I squeak. A Creator? My Dead Love, undead?

“Yes.” She reaches out and takes my hand. “You’re one of Rhea’s Get, and unspoiled at that. You’ve met Pete, but you didn’t imprint on him fully. Your love is a secondhand thing. You’ll imprint on Dr. Sleepless’s Creator easily enough, but you’ve got some resistance. You’ll obey my instructions. They won’t know what you are — you’re disguised well enough — but you’ve got the necessary skills to control a Creator male.” She strokes a fingertip across the back of my wrist. For an electrifying moment I can see the naked hunger in her eyes — hunger for him, who she proposes to give to me?

“But… but…!” I’m speechless. “What if it’s female? Or not interested in me?”

“My allies have a contingency plan for that.” She squeezes my hand reassuringly. “But I don’t expect the black labs to sell a female replicator; they aren’t idiots.” She pats the seat cushion beside her thigh, and I slide closer, attentive. “In any case, as I said, things will get messy. I don’t intend to leave the other factions behind to stab me in the back, and I need to know that the Creator is in reliable hands. Hands that will manage him exactly as I would myself, without any need for me to be” — a shuddering breath — “in love.”

“Wow,” I say faintly. I lean against her shoulder, dizzy with need. The mere thought of what she wants me to do has me in a whirl of delicious anticipation. And I thought I wanted Petruchio? I ask myself. She slips an arm around me; I barely notice.

“How much of your Block Two reflex set did you acquire from that soul chip before you got here?” she whispers softly in my ear. “Fifteen months, wasn’t it?”

“My reflexes?” I frown. It’s like a wake-up call, dragging me back from the brink of delirium. “Yes, about that. I was in slowtime for most of it—”

“That won’t have stopped the reflex loops imprinting. Do you know how to wire up a string of charges to blow down a building? Infiltrate a killing zone and turn the tables on your enemies? Can you kill with your bare hands?”

“I’m not sure,” I say slowly, leaning against her. I have a strange, unpleasant sense that if she had not stamped the seal of her ownership on my soul, I would be able to. I can almost taste the hot, quivering rage of that other, potential me that is chained in the back of my head — kill her, whom I adore — “I think maybe. Who do you have in mind?”

“You’ll see.” I can feel her tongue, trailing across my earlobe. “But not yet.” She’s melting against me, and alarm bells are ringing in the distance. I feel hot and cold, transfixed simultaneously by aroused anticipation and something else — a sure, creeping certainty. “You may kiss me now, Kate. If you want to.”

I turn my face slowly, working around the smooth velvet of her cheek until I can taste her lips. I find myself buoyed up by her barely controlled lust. It’s an enormous relief to be needed again, and the wash of physical arousal as she slowly works at the fastenings on my clothes leaves me blissed-out and happy for the first time since I arrived on this Creator-forsaken snowball. But as she gently pushes me back onto the circular bench beneath the pitiless, unwinking stars, a nasty virus of doubt delivers its payload. I’m not sure when I first became aware of it, but I’m certain of it now; this rich and terrible aristocrat, sharp-tongued and cynical, is not the same as the one who cringed for my orders in the owner’s stateroom of the Pygmalion. Granita Ford may have bankrupted my corporate self and stamped her ownership upon my helpless brain, but the woman in my arms, who wears her face and occupies her estate, is someone else.