The company man’s smile showed off his perfect teeth. Evie hated that smile; it meant he was going to kill her again.

Him staring down the camera above the Manic Pixie’s door didn’t help. Even with the dead pixels mildewing the monitor, Evie got the full gut-liquidating effect.

“This is my fault,” Evie said. “I said the Q word.”

(Whore lore held saying quiet during a shift as a sin on par with crossing a picket line. Evie wasn’t usually superstitious, but the company man sure felt like a punishment.)

Viktor hovered, a thunderhead impersonating a mother hen. “I could tell him you’re out.”

“No point,” Evie said. “If I wasn’t here, we’d be closed, and he knows that. No one else does Mondays in bleak week.”

Nord3 Global Capital was the only salaried employer in K-zone; their pay run was every third Wednesday. The span from second Wednesday to third Tuesday was a shitshow for freelancers. Evie’d called it bleak week in the Carmine Compact’s members forum; it’d stuck. (Rhymes were second only to alliteration for the K-zone sex workers’ union; double entendre was more of a management thing.)

Viktor took a bold anti-union stance and refused to be amused. “Tuya.”

“It’s Evie unless we’re talking to immigration.”

“Tuyaara,” Viktor said, “you can say no. Even to him.”

Viktor was one hangnail away from joining a right-to-repair cell and blowing up a server farm, but he was also a good man. (Besides, Siberian escapees looked out for each other. Even if they had very different definitions of escaping Siberia.)

“I know, Vitya,” Evie said. He was right; she could say no.

But. Thing was.

The asphyxiophilic asshole did have money.

Evie could cut her losses. Never mind that she had hair extensions in and makeup on; never mind that the strappy lingerie under her sweatpants was riding so high she could floss with it; never mind that rent had gone up three hundred percent since she’d traded Sakha’s sinkholes for K-zone’s droughts. Evie could write the night off.

Or.

“Mondays are always dead,” she said, and grabbed her makeup bag. “It’s just usually less literal.”

Viktor sighed. “Is that a yes?”

“Yup.” Evie unzipped the bag, stuck a hand in, and rummaged for her C1 port gel. “The closet’s working, right? Please say yes.”

“As much as it ever is,” Viktor said, and went to let her client in.

• • • •

Once she’d lubed up all the relevant sockets and caked on the mascara—the company man liked tear tracks more than he liked crying, yet another trait that made him so goddamn weird and also the worst—Evie opened the brothel’s first-aid kit. She hunted through a snowdrift of analgesics and adrenaline and PrEP and PEP and antiparasitics until she found a box labelled Larynx Phalanx Modul3™ (A Nord3-MediByte Joint Product), filled with sealed sterile pouches. Evie picked one at random and checked the expiry date.

Compact members called them stranglHers, which was apt.

(The secret was to do it fast.)

Evie ripped the packet open. The thumb-sized mesh-wrapped tube inside went flying. She fumbled the catch; it bounced off her sternum and landed on the floor. She stopped it with the toe of her Crocs and snatched it up. She pushed it all the way to the back of her tongue. Then—oh, this part sucked—she swallowed and gasped and swallowed and gasped and—

The stranglHer slid down her windpipe.

Evie choked. Thick saliva coated her tongue. Her teeth creaked with the strain of clenching; lips clamped bloodless-tight. Heaving retches climbed her throat. The world smeared away from her watering eyes. (If she coughed, she’d have to start all over again—was that bile she tasted? Yes, and she absolutely could not throw up. Puke was happening, no way around it, but if she swallowed it—)

Sharp sensation as the stranglHer expanded. Evie kept her mouth shut as a cough jolted her, hard enough that she staggered—she always forgot to sit down before she did this—and curled forward until her forehead hit her knees. The next cough tasted of blood (fantastic, went with the bile). Glacial sweat crawled along her upper lip. An audible pop, and then Evie could breathe again.

Evie straightened up, gagged, and staggered to the sink. She drooled something truly vile into the plughole and spat vigorously. It took a few tries to lift her tumbler, a cylinder of recycled steel that would break her toes if she dropped it on her foot, but rinsing her mouth out with hot tea was worth it.

It took even longer to touch up her lipstick; she left a dozen pink lip-prints on tissues in the wastebasket from blotting and re-blotting her mistakes. Then it was time for her costume.

The closet—the label said it was a Self3xpress Character Carousel ™ (A Nord3-ArtVenture Joint Product) (PATENT PENDING), but no one called it that—lived under the dressing table in the employee lounge, on top of a cracked plastic jerrican. It looked like a small hard-shell suitcase with power cables jutting from the handle. The Pixie’s closet was customised with Property of A Touch of Ass! Not for personal use! written across the case in purple marker, courtesy of the erotic massage parlour from which they’d inherited it.

(Evie knew A Touch of Ass only by reputation: shuttered by bedbugs in the massage tables. She hoped the Pixie hadn’t inherited any furniture. The company man might kill her, but at least he’d go away afterwards.)

The company man requested the same costume every time. It was Evie’s favourite, which was a shame; the idea of having anything in common with the company man made her want to insert another stranglHer.

Viktor offered her a neural spike. “It’s ready.”

“You’re such a gentleman, Vitenka,” Evie said.

“You are a trial from Czernobog,” Viktor said. “Same room. He’s—”

“Nope!” Evie said. “Don’t wanna know. It’s the Smoulder’s problem, not mine. She’s the one he wants. I’m barely involved.” She kicked off her sweatpants and swapped her Crocs for heels.

“You are nervous,” Viktor observed.

“I salute your powers of deduction, Detective Dmitriyev,” Evie said. She scooped her hair off her neck and presented Viktor with her C1 port, nestled in the hollow where skull met spine. “Zip me up?”

Viktor slid the neural spike home. Evie relaxed.

The Smoulder was an old friend. Comforting, like an old woollen blanket. A little itchy, maybe; a slight static shock as they brushed against each other. But warm.

“I wish you’d stop naming the costumes,” Viktor said.

(Evie figured the Smoulder could take this one.)

She looked at Viktor; a stare with the force of a blizzard, foreign to Evie’s face. (It was probably meant for intimidation, and for someone tall enough they didn’t have to look up through their eyelashes to deliver it.)

“I didn’t say it was inaccurate,” Viktor said. “I said I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Keep wishing,” she said, and left.

• • • •

She’d gotten good at hiding the disorientation. Could sashay through it if she had to. (No point; it was wasted on the company man.)

Something—not a thought, but almost—flickered across her gray matter. The Smoulder, walking; looking at the faded wallpaper; feeling the flexion in her feet. And then it was a thought:

[This again?]

(Wait, were costumes supposed to remember—)

She opened the door.

Useful, how the costume set her emotions to Do Not Disturb; otherwise, every alarm bell she had would ring when she saw the company man standing by the bed.

She looked up at him through her lashes. He smiled that titanium oxide smile.

The Smoulder flickered.

(Evie’s guts tried to hide behind her lungs.)

Not words, not exactly—more a sense of uncertainty. A half-formed question.

[I know him?]

(No.)

She sat on the edge of the bed. The smile loomed over her, showing every unnatural tooth; nothing that grew from a body was so straight and even.

(Evie pretended as hard as she could that she had never seen a Nord3 presser and had no idea what their CEO looked like. She decided that she had no idea what the company man’s name was or where he worked or where he ranked on the Fortune 500. He was an ordinary man. He had to be.)

(Evie could say no to an ordinary man.)

• • • •

Going home after her shift felt like entering a foreign country. She left her Crocs by the door. Used a bare foot to roll her bed out from the wall. Hit the mattress face-first and knew nothing else until the sound of cloud seeders firing woke Evie up.

Her C1 port itched. When she probed the border between metal and skin, she found it swollen and hot, like a tick bite. She got up without bothering to turn on the light.

Evie stubbed her toe twice trying to find her sink, as if she didn’t know her own apartment. The windowless shoebox was as familiar as her own skin. Why did it feel like a trap about to snap shut?

[Where—]

Her port went from an itch to an electric shock. Then: nothing.

She fumbled for the lamp. Threw up a hand against the light.

When she could see, she caught herself in the mirror. Smudges from lingering eyeliner. Blistered hairline from carelessness with dermal bleach. Bruised neck from the company man. But her face, ordinary, under all that.

(So why didn’t it feel like her face?)

Maybe it was all the closet’s fault.

Evie opened her interface and flipped to the Compact message thread. The closet at the Pussy Palace was refusing to load, but that wasn’t anything like her problem. She gnawed her lip and posted, costume remembered last use, thought they weren’t sposed to do that???

The first reply linked her to a video about nefarious corporate research and said, Imagine thinking anyone knows what costumes are supposed to do.

• • • •

Management gave Evie a week off, so Evie had plenty of time to read up on the wild conspiracy theories people kept linking in reply to her question. According to those, costumes were real-time input from an offshore cubicle raft, or cortical imprints harvested from inmates in corporate prisons, or newborn AI emergent from NeuraNet.

Really, it was the theorists’ fault Evie was late for her next shift.

The cloud seeders’ steady repeating boom rattled every window in the megablock and burst the neon sign on the Pixie’s door. (The Manic Pixie was a bastion of classy, good taste—the sign, when intact, read Cum on In! — so this was an improvement.) The other sign, a slutty pink fairy that blew kisses with each flap of her wings, tragically endured.

Her work kit was precariously jigsawed into a pile that required both armpits and the crooks of both elbows to hold steady, so she pressed the doorbell with her foot. Viktor opened the door wearing a look so pointed she could’ve sectioned her hair with it.

“I don’t know why you’re scowling,” Evie said. “The sign’s off.”

Viktor’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t look at me with that tone of face,” Evie said. “I’m not late until the sign turns on.” She used her chin to point at the busted light. “Sign’s off. Technically, I’m not late.”

“‘Technically’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there,” Viktor said, but he stepped aside.

Evie strolled past him, pausing to accept and return air kisses on each cheek.

Viktor stole her tumbler and sipped while she dumped her teetering pile of crap onto the dresser. The detritus of Evie’s coworkers was present, but they were alone in the lounge; everyone else must have been booked.

“This,” Viktor said, glowering at the cup like he’d wanted tea and gotten tarantulas, “tastes like poison. What is it?”

“Caffetamine Double-Plus, Now with Real Modafinil,” Evie sing-songed, imitating the jingle. “You remember that NeuraNet repair shop that got shut down, tamper violations or something? Next to the honey-glazed locust place? They just moved in. Their smallest size is a forty ounce.”

“Enjoy your heart attack,” Viktor said, and drank again before he gave it back. “Bad news.”

Evie took a fortifying sip and said, “Hit me.”

“The closet is broken.”

“Wow, shocking,” Evie deadpanned. “Is that all? Am I on techie duty?”

“No,” said Viktor, and then—Viktor, ninety percent sinew by volume; Viktor, whose CV included battering ram—Viktor hesitated.

Evie’s heart took a swan dive into her pelvis.

“It’s too soon,” she said. “He was only here last week.”

Viktor set one hand on her shoulder. “Say no, Tuya. Management won’t—”

“He’ll come back,” Evie said. “This is, what, four visits? Five? He’s a regular.”

Misery bent her spine until her forehead landed on Viktor’s arm. Viktor’s hand moved from her shoulder to her head and patted her one time, which was awkward enough to comfort her.

“Nord3 came up with all those cute little pieces of tech that make living your favourite snuff film possible,” she muttered. “You reckon—”

“Better not to discuss that,” Viktor said. “Not here.”

Evie sat up. She ran a thumb under her eye, but it came away dry. “So, closet. Did you try turning it off and on again?”

Viktor scowled. “I was born yesterday, you think?”

“Okay, well, go launder money or whatever it is you do when you’re not entertaining me.” Evie flapped a hand. “I still have to get ready.”

• • • •

When she’d joined the Pixie, Evie had figured out how to turn off the closet’s malfunction alert, saving the brothel from constant beeping and damning herself to unofficial IT support. Evie’s only real skill was having excellent cheekbones, but even Viktor assumed she was tech-savvy.

Evie turned the closet off and on again, just in case. While it rebooted, she found the good chair and hauled it over to the dresser. The vinyl seat cover only had two or three cracks, so most of the padding was still inside it. (Evie’s arse did not have sufficient padding of its own to be dealing with the other chairs.)

Hair and makeup were easy. Rote. Ten minutes. (Well, closer to thirty, if she counted time spent cursing and detangling hair extensions she’d thrown in a bag at the end of last shift and ignored until that very moment. Which she didn’t count, because it could’ve happened to anyone.) Then Evie stripped, kicked her boxers and sports bra under the dresser, shimmied into lingerie that gave the illusion of curves to her gristle-and-copper-wire body, and pulled her sweatpants back on.

The closet whirred as it came back to life. Evie opened the case and tried loading up a costume.

Nothing happened. The spike didn’t light up; the closet didn’t beep. It didn’t throw up an error message either. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign.

If she walked into a room with the company man, she’d never be able to go through with it; worse, he’d enjoy that. The thought made her thyroid try to escape via her asshole.

A coworker—one of three Pixie employees who went by Kitty—drifted in, damp and wrapped in a bathrobe. “Busted again?”

“It’s a day ending in Y,” Evie said. “Better be an easy fix. If I have to solder it again, I’m going to break into the patent office and add myself as a coinventor.”

Kitty hummed. “Did you hear about the glitch they had up at Python Parlour?”

“Nope.”

“It’s on the Compact thread. A guy put on a costume and couldn’t stop laughing. Almost bit someone’s dick off.”

“Good for him,” Evie said, too busy fiddling with software to really listen.

“Get this—when he took the spike out, it didn’t go away.” Kitty’s tone implied the climax of a ghost story. “He was laughing for hours.”

“Can’t have been that bad if he’s posting about it—”

At last, the closet let her load the Smoulder onto a spike. She sat back and threw up her arms in triumph.

Viktor leaned around the door. “Evie. Your foot guy is here.”

“Seriously, Vitya? You’re making me work while I’m at work?” Evie left the spike in its cradle and closed the closet. “Unbelievable.”

• • • •

One foot job, three blow jobs, one hand job, a full-service, and two simulated rapes later—Evie’s regular consensual non-consent guy had been recommending her to his friends—Evie had time to try on the costume. She got Kitty to spike her while she sat at the dresser.

It felt . . . off. Not like a blanket; more like struggling into a latex catsuit without enough talc. Fragile enough for a fingernail to rupture. Tight enough to crush.

It worked, though. All the parts of her that caused her problems—the impulsive sarcasm, the awkward laughter, the slipshod accent—closed themselves away under a cooling layer of focus.

Before the company man, Evie’s main use for the Smoulder had been to shut herself up. Some of her coworkers—the ones with fuller mouths or bigger eyes or more successful skin lightening regimens—made brazen into a brand. Evie’s clients saw the shape of her eyes and the childhood malnutrition and made assumptions, and challenging those assumptions had lost her work before.

(Although even when Evie did run her mouth, enough clients liked the scrawny type—more every day, with how hard pop culture was pushing famine chic as the hot new thing—to keep her in forty-ounce Caffetamines until she retired, or her heart exploded.)

[Retirement, death; same thing.]

She took one client. A test run. He couldn’t keep it up (worst case of whisky dick Evie had seen since that one bad cholera outbreak, when some bright spark dumped pure ethanol in the rainwater tanks.)

(The Smoulder was no help at all. Evie had to wrestle her way forward—)

“Why don’t you lie down? I’ll give you a massage.”

The client obediently stretched out on the bed and slipped into the floppy, apnoeic sleep of the veteran alcoholic.

(And, of course, that was when he finally achieved an erection.)

[Seriously?]

(She didn’t know software could sound so offended.)

She woke him up at the end of the booking; let him stumble on his disoriented way; went back to the lounge; found a stranglHer still in its package by her makeup bag. (Viktor, trying to be considerate.)

The world went hot and blurred. She blinked.

[No.]

The thought of the company man—the tombstone teeth in his hideous smile—

[He’s still around? He’s still doing this?]

Evie’s hand balled into a fist and slammed into the dresser without her say-so.

Rain hammered at the window.

Evie blinked.

[Evie blinked?]

The pink neon fairy blinked back, wings up, wings down, and the rain stopped but the silver nitrate clouds remained and the reflected pink lines in the window smeared into raw bacon streaks.

Her port burnt, blistered, then died with a crackle that sang through her cerebrospinal fluid and made her whole body jolt.

Her knees buckled [her knees hit concrete].

She was slumped. [She was supine.] Someone was touching her head. [Something was holding her down.]

“Oh, shit,” someone said. [How could she hear them? She was alone down here—] “Evie? Are you having a seizure?”

(Evie blinked.)

Suiren blinked.

One of the staff, a woman with fuchsia fingernails. Kitty? Katya? Whatever.

“I’m fine,” she said, and stood up. She rolled her shoulders. They didn’t crack. “Just a glitch.”

• • • •

The Pixie staff called Tom Zyche “the company man.” Suiren’s crew used to call him the creepy intern. Corporate from womb to tomb.

Tom Zyche and his horrible smile promoted all the way to CEO and bought out half the world since he’d taken her out of it. Wasn’t that a kick in the teeth.

Suiren had a script to follow, courtesy of her intimacy with hooker gray matter. She sat down and let Zyche come for her. With his guard down—

(The way her rough-sex guys strangled her was totally unlike the way the company man strangled her. He was really going for the crushed windpipe.)

A tactical error. She’d forgotten Evie was shorter than her; the angle was all wrong. No leverage.

(She’d have to use so much concealer.)

The stranglHer whirred to life and pushed a lovely combination of benzos and lidocaine and (Viktor had told her what the other ones were, but she’d forgotten) other things. Heavy breathing overhead as her body went lax.

[Suiren was normally gone for this part.]

(Play dead until he’s done jacking off, then take a shower and call it a night.)

[Not this time.]

This time, when Zyche sat back and looked down at her not-quite-a-corpse, Suiren sat up and punched him in the throat.

Zyche wheezed.

Suiren punched him again. The temple this time. Nevermind that she had no muscle, no weight; her aim was good.

He fell left. She went right—rolled off the bed—hit the floor on all fours. Palms so slick with sweat one of them slipped. Her elbow hit carpet. She pushed up, braced, sprinter’s crouch, throat burning where he’d tried to stamp her out again—

(What are you doing—)

Her throat reinflated. That was handy. How long had she been on ice that a shithole brothel could afford this kind of medtech?

(Excuse you, the Pixie is solidly B-list—)

Zyche was on his feet. Between her and the door. Pomade melting, gluing his hair to his forehead. He smiled.

Suiren bared her teeth at him.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “You made it.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said, and went for him.

(No, bad idea—)

These legs—one hundred percent human meat, muscle and sinew and no chrome at all, blood thinned out with drugs that gave Zyche his murder-free murder—weak. Slow. Zyche was gone before she cleared the bed, door slamming shut in Suiren’s face.

Suiren stayed. Leaned into the door. Breathed through the head rush.

Oxygen was an intoxicant after long enough without.

(Great job, idiot. I think you broke my fucking kneecap.)

Blood itched against her skin.

The door rattled.

Evie’s body couldn’t hold it. Suiren stepped back. Another step, trying to look—how would someone look, if they weren’t who she was? Small and frail. Broken.

Viktor opened the door. Long months of reassembling herself and Suiren still didn’t know what he was; something between a bouncer and a receptionist and a den mother.

He looked at her and opened his arms.

Offering comfort? A hug? Suiren wavered. Evie would hug him, probably—

He grabbed the neural spike and yanked.

When her eyes next opened, she was on her back.

Viktor held her wrist, two fingers set against the place where green veins strained towards open air. The ceiling’s water stains gave him a wonky gray-brown halo.

“I’m fine, Vitya,” Evie said—tried to say. Her mouth twisted, bared her teeth, and said, “Get the fuck off me.”

Viktor let go.

She rolled over, grabbed for the nearest container—a wastebasket full of lipstick-blotted tissues—and vomited a geyser of Caffetamine all over the pretty pink kisses.

• • • •

Evie observed that every single hair on her arms was standing up. If she tried to do her lipstick, she’d make herself a clown, the way her hands trembled.

“Did we know that could happen?” she asked. Her voice was weak in a way that had nothing to do with her trachea.

“No,” Viktor said. He didn’t look up from disinfecting her knee. The skin had split when the Smoulder hit the floor; not super deep, but now the drugs were wearing off, it hurt real bad.

Evie said, “You don’t seem surprised.”

“The costumes are supposed to be . . .” Viktor paused, considering—either the words or the gash, Evie wasn’t sure. “Unable to act.”

“So they’re—”

[Alive? Yeah.]

“Inmates,” Viktor said.

Evie exhaled hard through her nose. “I thought that was a conspiracy theory.”

“Not theory,” Viktor said. “Barely conspiracy. It’s in their financials.”

“Under, what, remote whore piloting?”

“Offender employment programs,” Viktor said. “Detainee rehabilitation initiatives. Secured integration units.”

[That’s a fun little euphemism. You’re from Russia; do gulags have solitary?]

(I’m from Sakha, shitbag.)

The silence suggested Suiren was not familiar with the intricacies of the Siberian collapse, literal or geopolitical.

“Well, it sucked completely,” Evie said, “and I’m pretty sure I’m going to get for real murdered if he comes back. Did he at least tip?”

“No.”

Evie looked down at her torso, smeared with her blood, and mostly her sweat, and not-at-all-her jizz. “We should bill him for cleaning. I need to be power washed.”

“You need to be quiet,” Viktor said, and pushed both thumbs into her wound.

Evie yelped and tried not to kick as he sealed the edges of the gash. When he let her go, she presented her other knee, already turning from red to purple-black. “Got anything for this?”

“Concealer,” Viktor said, and pushed her leg away.

A cloud seeder fired. Evie twitched and the window twitched with her. Zyche’s smile flickered in the back of her brain, his marble slab teeth too exactly square to have grown from human gums.

“He knew her,” Evie said. “The—”

Viktor cast a pointed glance at the closet, and the branding on its case. “Not here.”

• • • •

Viktor walked her home, which showed how extravagantly awful she must look.

(Evie drew the line at him trying to follow her into her apartment, though. A girl had to keep some mystique.)

“I’m fine, Vitya.”

“You had at least two seizures,” Viktor said.

“And now I’m fine.” She patted his arm. “I’ll rest. You should rest too. You’ve been awake longer than me.”

Viktor scowled.

Evie broke out the big guns: “Viktor Maximovich Dmitriyev, go home and take a nap.”

“Charming,” Viktor said, but it must have assured him of her health; his eyebrows unscrunched and he left without further argument.

Evie locked the door behind her, flipped on a light, and sat on her bed. She opened her interface and paused, chewing a fingernail.

[Now you’re shy?]

(She should have told Viktor that Suiren had stuck around. He couldn’t do anything, but he’d be pissed anyway.)

“How are you even here?” she rasped, since thinking at Suiren made her head hurt.

[Component regrowth. Known side effect.] Bitterness flooded Evie’s mouth. [A mind wants to be whole. As soon as I hit compatible neural tissue, I started moving in.]

“That’s fuckin’ gross,” Evie muttered.

[Sorry. If it helps, I’m not happy either.]

“Can you move out?”

[Not without my body. Or at least my brain.]

Evie sighed and plugged Suiren’s name into the search.

If Suiren had ever had an online footprint, it had been scrubbed. All that remained was a single line in a summary of corporate trials. Ten years ago, a right-to-repair cell had done some standard R2R shit: corporate espionage, distribution of malware, destruction of property, murder, mayhem, blah blah blah. Suiren Garan was one of several sentenced to indefinite detention in Nord3’s secured rehabilitation unit.

“What’d you do, piss in his water purifier?”

[Does it matter?] Emotion came with that thought, something thorny and tangled. [It didn’t stick.]

“Well, you’re the one he wants to strangle. Why am I the one dealing with that?”

[You’re the pathetic version of me.]

“Rude.”

[Look at yourself.]

Evie looked at her mirror. For a second, it wasn’t her at all; a taller person, sinewy, with short black hair and a stare that Evie knew from the inside. Then it was her face again.

They didn’t have that much in common. Black hair; epicanthal folds; the shape of the upper lip. But Zyche’s standards had slipped over ten years.

[He made me into a costume to punish me. And when that didn’t break me, he uploaded me into you.]

Evie rolled her eyes. “C’mon, that’s a stretch. He’s not breaking me.”

[He pays to—]

“To pretend, dummy. Although you might’ve ruined that for us.” Evie rubbed her eyes. She didn’t have the energy to explain the power dynamics of whoring to Suiren. Maybe her union rep would do it for her. “I need to sleep before I can even start to think about that. If he comes for us, that’s your problem, okay? I’m not dealing with it.”

Suiren’s amusement tickled. [Fine by me.]

• • • •

Suiren woke to pain. Throat, mostly. Wrists. One shoulder.

(Hey.)

She touched her face, found a sluggish bleed, nose or lip, sticking hair to her skin. How long had she been out? She’d had a crew cut when they arrested her.

(Hey, jackass.)

She was in a pool of water. Suiren raised her head. The reflection wasn’t hers. Skin too dark, cheekbones too wide—but familiar, somehow—

(Come on, Sleeping Beauty. On your feet.)

“Evie,” Suiren said, in a voice that didn’t sound like hers. It didn’t sound like Evie, either. It sounded like a carrion crow. Like a dead girl.

(Enough melodrama. Get up.)

Suiren got up.

Red ribboned through the puddle, dissolving into pink. Suiren found the source: a steel tumbler, marked with blood and hair. Beyond that, a dark shape on the floor. Lamplight caught genetically implausible teeth.

Zyche’s skull was concave from eye to ear.

(I don’t know how he got in.)

Suiren’s reflection seemed alive; Evie, arms folded, hunched. Hunted.

“You did the right thing,” Suiren tried.

(I know that.) Evie’s eyes flashed up at Suiren from the water. A trick of the light, or the mind. (But he’s heavy. And I told you I wasn’t dealing with this.)

Suiren glanced down at her body—Evie’s body, a doll made from offcuts of wire. “I can’t make you stronger.”

(That’s fine. I already called the union. My rep’s on the way.)

Suiren laughed. It came out a bark; she was out of practice. “So, what, I get to provide the criminal expertise?”

(No.) Evie smirked at her from the water. (You get to explain this to Vitya.)