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  “I know,” Yi said, with a slight grin. “Trust me. I have an idea.”

  She sighed, an affectation she’d had to relearn. She could take in air with her new body and let it go, even if she didn’t need it. Forcing minor human mannerisms gave her comfort. “Go ahead. Tell me what to do again.”

  “This time I want you and Jason to try it. We’ve been trying it with me, since I have a little experience. But maybe you two can do it while I talk you through.”

  Jason looked at her warily. “I’m game.”

  She had never really been able to refuse Yi anything. “Let’s try it.”

  The pulled their chairs closer together so that their bare knees touched in a big circle. Jason took her right hand and Yi took her left. “Close your eyes,” Yi said. “Humor me. Forget your bodies. Forget that you have bodies.”

  He was so sure of himself. Yi the engineer, certain of something that seemed more art than science, more mystical than mathematical. He muttered in low tones, in a slightly melodious rhythm that was different from his usual speaking voice.

  “Let go of all of the things that you feel. Become larger. Become larger than you are. Reach out for each other with no boundaries, as if you were blending into each other’s skin.”

  Katherine would have been good at this, she thought.

  She would have, Yi replied. I miss her.

  They were becoming better at talking to each other in their heads. Yi had explained that they must all share the same networks with the whole ship, maybe even the whole Edge society.

  Yi remained convinced the braiding was more, almost to the point of obsession. “Become one with each other. Share your perceptions. Try a simple one. Share what my voice sounds like.”

  Even though they could both hear it?

  As if he heard her question, Yi said, “You both experience the same thing differently. This is an opportunity to share the experiences of the other. Chrystal. Concentrate on the way that Jason hears me.”

  She did. Nothing.

  “Jason. Concentrate on how Chrystal hears me.”

  She felt the faintest whisper of Jason inside of her, a feeling rather than a specific thought like those they had learned to exchange in conversation. It was both like and unlike the presence of Jhailing Jim, but if she’d had to explain how it was different, she wasn’t sure she could.

  Yi kept talking. “Let go of yourselves. You’re safe. You’ll return home wholly yourself after you touch each other’s essences.”

  At least he hadn’t said each other’s souls.

  That wasn’t her thought even though she was thinking it.

  Yi has become more human since he became a robot. I want to hear how Chrystal thinks, to touch Chrystal, to fold her up and protect her from whatever happened to Katherine. Sounds like. Focus on what Yi sounds like. Desperate. And good. Yi sounds desperate, and good. I want this to work for him.

  She was feeling Jason’s feelings. It wasn’t exactly words. But if she had to write it down she’d manage an approximation. She heard Yi from two points of view, as if Yi’s voice was isolated in two separate speakers and they each rendered him differently. I love you, she thought at Jason. Only she wouldn’t describe it that way. That would be like saying she loved herself. She felt lost here, felt the missing fourth that was the absence of Katherine more than she herself felt it, felt Jason understand that she felt guilty for that, felt Jason sending her—sending Chrystal—a scrap of forgiveness and she sending back comfort and thanks.

  They were two people still, but she could move between Jason’s point of view and her own.

  Yi guided, his voice sounding happier to them both, as if he knew they were feeling this together. “Stay simple. Think about when you met. Think about how you felt when you first saw each other. Remember that your minds work faster now. You can do many things at once, share and listen.”

  Chrystal wasn’t interested in Yi right now, she was interested in Jason. In the night they met. Years ago. Maybe five years. She had already been with Katherine, the two of them together in a bar, dancing. She had seen Jason moving across the room toward them, and he had seen them as two beautiful women so clearly in love that he envied them. Katherine’s long hair attracted him, and the dragon tattoos they both wore. Sometimes in the light the two tattoos blended as if the dragons made love when they danced close and Jason coming toward them was large and bright and warm and he had a smile that stopped them both—they had been having this talk, she and Katherine, about how they loved each other more than light, more than music, more than dance, but they needed a balancing force, a third or a pair to add spice and the two women were looking at him like they might fall out of their world and actually notice him maybe even invite him and Katherine whispered in her ear that they should offer the man a drink and the smaller one smiled a smile so welcome he suddenly liked them both the same and when she asked him if he wanted a drink he told them he did.

  It felt like magic. She was him and herself at the same time, remembering things she had forgotten and not sure if they were her memories or his.

  After a time Yi’s voice rose and intruded. “Start to talk in sentences to each other, start to separate.”

  Separation meant falling into her own voices and her own memories, looking at Jason and feeling herself, and then feeling the room they were in and the way all three of them touched knees.

  Yi had a huge smile pasted across his face. She understood now why this mattered. Braiding. She felt bigger than herself, bigger than she’d ever felt before. She felt closer to Jason now, too, of him. Most importantly, she hadn’t lost her sense of self. Even when she was in Jason and seeing through his eyes she had been able to tell Chrystal from Jason and yet also be Jason and Chrystal all at once.

  She and Jason looked at each other, and in that moment and for the first time, she found his robotic self—his electronic self—as beautiful as she had found the man who swept them away in the bar all those years ago. A part of her wanted to fall right back into Jason’s experiences and learn more about him, and a part of her wanted to pause and reflect on all that she had just learned.

  It had felt like the moments after great sex, after a shared explosive orgasm when two people lay together, almost part of each other. Only this had been better, deeper.

  And less sweaty.

  The thought made her laugh, and broke the spell of it. “Why did that work?” she asked Yi. “That time? Me and Jason instead of you and me or you and Jason?”

  “I don’t know why it worked for you and Jason and not you and me so far. I suspected fear of intimacy kept us from succeeding, so I picked a memory you had each talked about to me, that I knew you liked, an event I thought you might like to share with each other.”

  “We did,” they said almost simultaneously, and then they laughed, and Chrystal found herself unable to stop laughing. That hadn’t happened to her since the capture of the High Sweet Home. The few times she’d tried, laughing had felt wrong in this body, like you couldn’t laugh if you didn’t breath. It still sounded wrong, but she recognized it and it made her smile and laugh again, and Yi joined in, and it took a few moments for them to get each other straightened out and in a position not to start laughing again as soon as they looked at each other.

  “That could be one hell of a drug,” Jason said.

  Yi nodded.

  Chrystal felt a little sick to her stomach.

  The alarm went off, a blatting screech she had chosen to interrupt the game. They had an hour to get ready to board the Satwa.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHARLIE

  Charlie sat in the big chair in the corner with Nona on his lap, her head lolling on his shoulder as she dozed. He had failed to protect anything or anyone so far, and although he reveled in the warmth of the woman he held, it didn’t bring him much comfort. Being trapped made him edgy.

  Nona had started angry and afraid, and by the end of a long talk she had simply looked white and exhausted and heartsi
ck. She didn’t have the experience for this. No one did.

  He didn’t either, but he should have been more wary, and have built more alliances on the Savior. He’d stepped back so Nona could find her own leadership legs, get them under her. Maybe he should have given her more advice.

  She moved against him, adjusted her position, burrowing. He wanted to tighten his grip on her but he didn’t let himself.

  Nona’s talk with Amia reinforced the idea that Shoshone was working against Gunnar.

  He hadn’t had a chance to visit with Amia, so he hadn’t been able to size her up. But if he understood power structures at all, he would bet that Amia’s information was better than Gunnar’s. If he needed to know how things stood in a situation, he always tried to ask the grunts, not the bosses. Gunnar scared him, and awed him, but Charlie doubted he was ultimately that different than any other boss.

  His right arm started to go to sleep. He inched to the edge of the chair, leaned forward, and stood up carefully, balancing Nona like a child. He carried her to the bed and laid her down. He sat down near her, not touching her.

  He wanted to touch her, to smooth the hair from her face. To let her know he was here, watching over her.

  To do so would diminish her power. No matter how he looked at it, she had the power and the resources and he had the experience. They would have to work it out, but they couldn’t do it as lovers. Not now, anyway.

  Probably never.

  The Bleeding Edge was surely about to dock or had docked, and they wouldn’t know a thing about what Shoshone said to the ice pirates.

  It struck him that the power differences between the pirates and the inner system were a lot like those between him and Nona. The people of the inner system had all of the apparent power. They held most of the cards that looked the strongest. They lived in the sweetheart orbits and their stations had as much living space as the largest planet. But they had been too self-absorbed to notice changes in the far reaches of the solar system. And now they were going to have to deal with something bigger than they imagined.

  They had to succeed.

  He didn’t really see how it was going to happen, and so much of it was out of his control. Space was huge. They might succeed or fail here, but something different might happen in another orbit, weeks away in the fastest ships, and change the whole situation. He could only do his best, focus on now, and here, and what he could affect.

  He imagined Jean Paul and Cricket in one of their favorite places, standing together on top of a ridge that overlooked rolling hills that led to the ocean, the moon shining on the water. The tongat needed him to save Lym, and Cricket had come to count on him for all things. He couldn’t let her down. He couldn’t die out here locked in a room and out of information.

  He got up and opened the door, crossed the hall, and went into his own room. Amia was there, seated in lotus position. “Will you go watch over Nona for a while? I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Amia nodded, flowing gracefully out of the room.

  Charlie started looking for the way out that Gunnar had used.

  PART FOUR

  BEING CHRYSTAL CLEAR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHRYSTAL

  Chrystal felt Jhailing Jim drop into her shortly after they finished the braiding experiment. She half-expected him to react to the success she and Jason just had, or at least to react to her reaction to it, but he didn’t. It’s time, he told her. Be in the landing bay in twenty minutes. Clothes are being delivered to your rooms for you.

  For all of us? It mattered.

  Yes. Then he was gone again.

  She glanced at the others. “Let’s go. Jhailing’s sending us with the landing party.”

  Yi and Jason looked as excited and dismayed as she felt.

  They hadn’t worn clothes since they were changed. They didn’t get cold or hot and they didn’t eat or have sex or have any other reason to cover up body parts. They moved freely.

  “Time to play pretend,” Jason said, as he slipped a blue dress over Chrystal’s head. She helped both Jason and Yi pull on soft black pants. Jason wore a white shirt and Yi a brown one, both flowing and soft and piped in white, and each with the insignia of the Edge on the pocket: A pinprick of white perfectly centered in a bright yellow corona, with a significant circle of black between the two. The void between the sun and its rays was certainly meant to represent the inner system, only in this case there was no light. She looked down at her own breast to see the same sigil, and drew in a breath.

  I am not them. But she didn’t say it out loud.

  That was, after all, why they had kept her alive, why they had brought them to this place. Maybe it was her chance to help humanity. Or betray them. She felt uneasy.

  The landing bay was merely a large empty room near the lock where the ship and the station would join. When they arrived, there were at least twenty robotic bodies already there. Three were an expensive shape-shifting model where metal flowed from one form to another. She had seen similar bots on the Deep in the hands of the very rich and of the ruling Council. Beside them, Chrystal’s small and humanoid form seemed like a toy. Others were humanoid or many-limbed or simply cylindrical.

  Two true-humans stood across the room from her, lost in quiet conversation. They glanced up curiously when she and her family entered and then looked away again quickly. Some of the Next’s pet smugglers? She had never met any—as far as she knew—but she had heard rumors of them in bars on the High Sweet Home.

  One of the shape-shifting robots created a tiny appendage on the top of its rounded form and waved at her. At the same time a Jhailing spoke in her head. I have taken this body.

  Jhailing Jim formed them into a line, with Chrystal and her family almost last. The two humans followed them, and then Jhailing Jim followed them all like a rear-guard.

  As they started forward, Chrystal realized that she wanted to see Nona, but she didn’t want Nona to see her. Her uneasiness deepened when she realized she wasn’t afraid to see Nona. She was ashamed.

  They flowed through the door in the order that Jhailing had placed them, filling a hangar-like space just inside the station. Three uniformed men had come to meet them. After formal greetings that Chrystal couldn’t see or hear very well, the leading robot went with the men.

  One of the shape-changers became a screen and shortly the view from the one who had gone further into the ship played on it. The uniformed men were there, and three other people, including a painted-face woman she’d been shown a picture of. The woman reminded her of a doll, or perhaps of a clown.

  The display technology fascinated her as much as the picture itself, until Yi poked her in the side and whispered, “This is for us. Most of the others can be there in part, in the room. It’s likely they can all share space in at least some of these bodies.”

  It was obvious once Yi said it. “That’s more than braiding?”

  “It’s different. When everyone is software there are a myriad of relationships people can have with each other, and ways to send parts of yourself out and leave real-time threads. To be . . . distributed.”

  She held up her hands. “We’re not just software.”

  Yi grinned. “No. Not yet, we’re not. But already we can be closer to each other than we ever were.”

  “You sound happy about that,” she whispered back.

  “Aren’t you?”

  She and Jason shared a glance. Neither of them had accepted this new state as willingly as Yi, who had begun to relish it. But she had loved braiding with Jason.

  A raised, robotic voice turned her attention back to the screen in front of her before she had to answer Yi.

  The leading Next had started speaking. “Thank you for inviting us to come here. I am Jhailing Jim, a representative of the Next.”

  Sometimes it seemed like half of the Next were Jhailings.

  The one who was speaking to the leaders from the Satwa said, “We are here to prepare you for what will happen next.”
>
  That didn’t sound like a negotiation.

  She searched the room for Nona.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHARLIE

  Charlie ran his hands over every doorframe in the room Gunnar had gone into when he disappeared. Nothing. He knocked on walls, sliding from room to room, checking them low and high. They all sounded the same. He tugged on air vents. Wherever the door was, it had to be big. Gunnar had used it.

  He finally found a secret panel in the privy, on the wall that included the shower head. It folded in when he leaned on it.

  The doorway led into a tunnel, with smooth walls and pale lighting. Peering in, he could make out that the tunnel turned left almost immediately. It barely looked big enough for Gunnar.

  He almost took the step. Instead, he pulled the door closed and crossed the hall to get the two women. The guards had their backs to him, watching a screen showing a group of robots on a podium, and didn’t turn when he crossed the corridor.

  Chrystal and Amia followed him immediately when he whispered in their ears. Amia gave out a long, low whistle when he showed her the doorway. “You found that pretty easily,” she hissed.

  He said nothing, slightly offended that she hadn’t expected him to find it.

  The tunnel door was easy enough to close behind them, and after a quick sideways sidle through dim light, they came to another door. It led to the back of a cleaning supply closet just across a corridor from a lift. If they went down, they’d reach the ship’s bays. “What should we do?” he asked Amia.

  “Follow me.” She led them to the same bar they’d been in before the dinner, with the view out over the docks. Now the big dock held an even bigger ship, which had to be the Bleeding Edge. No one tended the bar, but about a third of the tables were full. Amia chose a tall table near one of three screens, which were playing the landing speeches. It also had a good view toward one door.