“Have you come up with a plan for escape yet?” she asked, and set her flashlight down on the sink.

I followed suit with my flashlight, and told the truth extravagantly to make more believable a lie. “Of course I have. It’s flawless. You’ll never see it coming.”

“Do not mistake my indifference to your survival for complacency, Mr. Wren.”

I doubted I could mistake anything about her for complacent. Her face, strangely lit by her collar-light and the faint reflections of her flashlight on the counter, was beautiful and terrible at the same time, inhuman and unearthly in its sexless perfection.

My imp grabbed at my throat with both hands. “The Ministerial council in Maria Nova doesn’t know you’re here, does it?”

Her silence emboldened me. “There must be some Ministers who speak Ameng as a first language. But none of those Ministers are here. You’re the oldest of this group, aren’t you? And you aren’t old enough to remember the old language. Maria Nova didn’t send its oldest Ministers with you, because Maria Nova doesn’t know you’ve come.”

One gazed at me with owl-eyes, the violet glow of her light settling like a shroud over her skin. “I’ve often found,” she said, “that in humans who have suffered a great trauma, they become trapped in that moment. Forever seeking to right what went wrong.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I started to say, but One was not done speaking, and the moment I saw she meant to continue, my jaw shut of its own accord, biting my own tongue, my imp cowed.

“Provoking me will not give you any kind of control over me,” One said, deliberate as a funeral march. “Whoever sent you here did not particularly care whether you and your friends live or die, or he would not have sent you here so ignorant. My mission has been sanctioned by the Ministerial council. I imagine the Republic knows nothing of yours. Who sent you? Some Republican snake, looking to gain an edge over his opponents in the pit of vipers they call a Senate? Do you even know?”

I saw my own arm moving in the mirror over her head, slow, like in a dream, until my fingers could brush against the nape of my neck, the explosive implant hidden beneath my skin. I could see my own face, the stubble growing; could see her faceless back and my wide eyes reflected back and back and back, fading with distance, the two of us stretching into the invisible past.

One watched the motion with attention but no interest. “What have you been blackmailed with? Citizenship? A criminal past?”

I dropped my arm. “What do you want?”

“I am seven hundred years old, Mr. Wren. I have seen terrors you cannot imagine and I have kept them from humanity like a shield in the dark. And what do humans do? Rebel, and resist, and murder. It is a bitter thing when the people you are trying to protect are ungrateful. I want you to stop trying to escape me.”