Those locations, she saw now, had always been one and the same place. She could see her tank, EMC’s corporate idea of what a thirteen-year-old girl would want: a coffin decorated with gold mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons, all making heroic self-sacrifices over and over again, as if death wasn’t a permanent state and heartbreak could always be risen above. It had a thick hinged lid—impossible to open from inside, as if they had been frightened all along she might get out—and sheaves of inlet pipes. She was above it, inside it, and behind it too: she was in the tiny shipboard surveillance cameras which fell like dust through every ray of light. As she watched, the upper body of Dr. Haends bent itself slowly into the central window. His white shirt was freshly starched; his jet-black hair shone with brilliantine. After he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could, Dr. Haends winked at her. This time, instead of bowing himself out, he threw one long, elegant leg across the windowsill and clambered into the room.

“No,” said Seria Mau.

“Yes,” he said.

In two strides he had reached her tank and thrown open the lid.

“No!” she said.

She thrashed and raged, what was left of her, so that the fluid in which she was suspended—thick and inert as mucous to absorb the Newtonian forces to which even a K-ship was sometimes prone—slopped over the side and onto his patent leather shoes. Dr. Haends didn’t notice. He reached down into that stuff and pulled her out. In the microcameras she saw herself for the first time in fifteen years. She was this small, broken, yellowish thing, its limbs all at odd angles, curling and uncurling itself feebly against the pain of the open air. What she heard as a scream of horror and despair was only a faint rough groan. The skin stretched over her like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. There was no flesh between that and the bones beneath. The withered lips drew back over small, even teeth. The eyes glared out of tarry sockets. When she saw the thick cables trailing from the core-points in the scoliosed spine, she felt numb and disgusted. She felt the most awful pity for that thing. She felt the most awful shame. To begin with, that was why she fought him: she simply didn’t want him to see her. Then, when she saw what he was doing, she fought him for that, too.

He had landed the ship. The cargo ramp was down. He was taking her outside. Terror fell across her like the light from the Kefahuchi Tract. What could she do, if she was no longer the White Cat? What could she be?

“No! No!”

The Tract pulsed above her.

“There’s no air,” she said pitiably. “There’s no air.”

The sky was on fire with radiation.