“I was hired to help bring in Orchard. I posed as a would-be customer.”

The name drew my attention, turned my head.

“You know them?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tattletale said.

“Yeah,” I said. “They’ve come up in passing.”

“I don’t,” Chicken Little said, raising a hand. Tattletale put a hand on his shoulder, and he lowered the hand.

“They made an art of turning people into… people of another kind of aesthetic. Foresight and other teams are handling the remainder of the Orchard business,” he said.

“You posed as a customer, and… something went wrong?” Tattletale asked.

“I posed too well,” Big Picture said. “Because of my work as a civilian and rogue, internet circles I traveled in, I knew the language, I knew names, I knew the kinds of people they associate with or the kinds of people who would associate with them. It raised questions. I brushed it off as having to do with my power.”

“But it wasn’t,” I said. “You do associate with those people. The kind of people who really, really like Case Fifty-Threes.”

I was being polite because Chicken Little was in the room.

“I very much appreciate the beauty of Case Fifty-Threes, and other people with altered forms,” he said. “Unique shapes, appearances, traces of memories or accents from worlds we may never discover. But I want to stress that I think you’re putting me in the same category as people like Orchard’s customers, and that is not me.”

“But?” Tattletale asked.

No, not ‘but’, I thought. That was not the follow-up I would have used.

“But I’d researched Orchard on my own, for reasons having nothing to do with wanting to take away another individual’s choice. Because there was a period where I wanted to be one of them.”

He indicated with one hand, at where a print was mounted on the wall, of Gully, one of the west-coast Wards, if I was remembering right. Hunched back, overbite, and muscles that seemed to weigh her down until she could barely stand. In the art, she peered through dreadlocks with an eye that was framed to be bright and striking.

An old picture. Sveta had remarked that Gully wasn’t around anymore.

“But you didn’t,” Tattletale said.

“I couldn’t come to terms with the risks.”

“They brainwashed people. You were worried they’d brainwash you while you were at their mercy.”

“More or less,” he said, meeting Tattletale’s gaze with a level stare.

Fuck, this guy creeped me out.

“Foresight found out?” Tattletale asked.

“They were tipped off. They asked, and I was honest. There was a brief misunderstanding where I was taken as a photographer of an… adult sort. But that was never a focus.”

Sveta thinks you are, I thought. And so do I. I’ve seen pictures.