She tries to connect to the building’s network, out of habit, but finds her way blocked. This thing is just another piece of clothing. She feels her temple. Her Whistle is gone. It’s probably somewhere in the bag. Or maybe there’s a tabletop somewhere in this room with a tiny bag on it containing her Augment. When she tries to turn her body onto her side, she feels the helmet on her head. It holds her head in place for the most part, and when she feels around it with her hand, she can find no groove or button to disengage it. Which means she’s stuck until a nurse can come to free her.

She relaxes, lets her muscles loosen and her body melt further into the depths of the mattress. If her clothing isn’t customized for her, then at least this bed seems to listen to her body.

When she tries to remember what happened before she woke up here, she catches only snatches of memory. Like bursts of static. But each shard of memory reveals only chaos. Shouting, an explosion of colors . . .

Explosion.

She sees it in her head, the desk with its attendant and his bowl of chin-chin. She remembers him being rude. Or maybe she was simply impatient with him. She remembers they spoke and Ify had made a commotion. Everyone stops. That’s why she remembers that moment. Almost like the hush of calm before the storm hits. She’d embarrassed herself, everyone had turned to watch, then the sounds of warfare.

Feeling her arms, her wrists, fingers, chest, ribs, she can find no holes. Even her face is without scars, from what her fingers tell her. They must have put her in a healing bath.

Bit by bit, she pieces together what led her to here.

But why was she in that police station? What was she doing there?

Panic starts to rise like ocean water sweeping her under, but she closes her eyes tight and tries to reclaim that looseness she’d felt earlier, that calm, that assurance that wherever she was headed, she was facing the right direction. Panic won’t help her now.

The door to her near-featureless room whisks open. Two men in slim black kaftans enter, moving with the efficient grace of cyberized law enforcement. Ify sees no weapons on them, but that likely means that their bodies have been outfitted for whatever they would need to do should they encounter a threat. Their faces aren’t too wrinkled or too smooth. Ify judges them safely middle-aged at first, but they carry an agelessness about them in the smoothness of their movements combined with the learned stare of practiced interrogators—so that Ify is no longer sure. They could be just a few years older than her. They could be almost a century older. In those bodies, wearing those uniforms with those manufactured faces, she can hardly tell the difference.