"That was the carrot. My carrot, anyway. Your carrot is, you pass your orals and I let you go. Alive and everything." Achilles frowned, as if lost in thought. "Here's an easy one to start with. How does Seppuku reproduce? Sexually or asexually?"

Taka stared at him. "You're kidding."

He watched her a moment. Then, almost sadly, he shook his head.

"You went to the seminars, I see. They told you all our secrets. We prey on fear. Once we see you're not afraid, we'll pick on someone else. Maybe even let you go."

"You said—" she stopped, tried to control the tremor in her voice. "You said you'd let me go..."

He hadn't laid a hand on her and already she was begging.

"If you do well," Achilles reminded her gently. "But yes. I'll let you go. In fact, as a gesture of good faith, I'll let part of you go right now."

He reached out. The shiny thing in his hand pressed against her breast like a tiny icicle. Something snicked.

Pain bloomed across her chest, razor-sharp, like the cracks in glass before it shatters. Taka screamed, writhing in useless millimeter increments against the straps.

The bloody gobbet of a nipple dropped against her cheek.

Darkness swirled around the edges of vision. At some impossible distant remove, way south of the pain at the center of the universe, a monster fingered its way between her labia.

"Two more where that came from," he remarked.

Decirculate

Clarke had learned a fair bit at Ouellette's side. She was no doctor, but she still had the rudimentary medical training she'd received as a rifter and the MI did most of the diagnostic and prescriptive work anyway. Miri's exorcism had cost them a few thousand patient records, half a year's downloaded updates, and all the vehicle's uplink capabilities—but whatever remained still knew enough to scan a body and prescribe basic treatments. Clarke wasn't up to dealing with much more sophistication than that anyway; even lobotomized, Miri was hardly the rate-limiting step.

People trickled through town, seeking Ouellette's ministrations but settling for Clarke's. She did what the machinery told her, played doctor as best she could. At night she'd sneak offshore and bypass Phocoena entirely, sleeping breathless and exposed on the bright, shallow bottom. Each morning she came ashore, stripped her diveskin down to the tunic and pulled Ouellette's borrowed clothing overtop. The strange dead fibers rubbed loosely against her limbs as she moved, an ill-fitting travesty full of folds and stitches. Removing the 'skin always felt a little like being flayed alive; this, this substitute might as well have been shed from the flanks of some great poorly-proportioned lizard. It wasn't too bad, though. It was getting easier.

It was pretty much the only thing that was getting easier.