Christ was someone Lenie Clarke had met before. She'd first encountered him in darkness much deeper than this, a prisoner of Ken Lubin. Back then, Achilles Desjardins had been a man convinced he was about to die.

It had been so much easier to read him, then.

Clotting blood cracked around Lubin's lips. His chest rose. Clarke shut down her own implants, yanking the plugs from her nose before the tide had fully receded within her. In the center of the room, in the heart of a high-tech horseshoe, Desjardins watched them approach.

"I thought I could make up for it," he said.

In some strange, twisted way it was actually good to see him again.

"For being a monster," he explained, as if someone had asked. "Why I joined the Patrol, you know? I couldn't change what I was, but I thought—you know, if I helped save the world, maybe that could make up for it somehow." His mouth spread in a rueful smile. "Pretty stupid, right? Look where it got me."

"Look where it got everyone," Lubin said.

Desjardins's smile vanished. There was no shielding on his eyes, and yet somehow he was suddenly as opaque as any rifter.

Please, Clarke thought. Let this all be some monstrous, stupid mistake. Tell us we've misread everything. Please. Prove us wrong.

"I know why you're here," he said, looking at Lubin.

"You let us in anyway," Lubin observed.

"Well, I'd hoped to be at a bit more of an advantage by now, but whatever. Nice trick with the implants, by the way. I didn't even realise they'd work without your diveskins sealed up. Pretty stupid mistake for Achilles the Master Pattern-Matcher, eh?" He shrugged. "I've had a lot on my mind lately."

"You let us in," Lubin repeated.

Desjardins nodded. "Yeah. That's far enough, by the way."

They were four meters from his fort. Lubin stopped. Clarke followed suit.

"You want us to kill you?" she asked. "Is that it?"

"Suicide By Rifter, huh?" He snorted a soft laugh. "There'd be a certain poetry to that, I guess. But no."

"What, then?"

He cocked his head; the gesture made him look about eight years old. "You were the ones who pulled that kin-selection trick with my Lenies, weren't you?"

Clarke nodded, swallowing on the realization: So he's behind those too.

He's guilty after all....

"I figured," Desjardins admitted. "It's the kind of thing that would only occur to someone who knew where they came from. Not many of those left up here. And the thing of it is, it's easy enough to do but it's not so simple to undo." He looked hopefully at Lubin. "But you said you knew how to—?"

Lubin bared his teeth in a bloody rictus. "I lied."

"Yeah. I kind of figured that too." Desjardins shrugged. "So I guess there's only one thing left to talk about, isn't there?"

Clarke shook her head. "What are you—"