Again, that small lizard-movement. “Then…” Snow said.

“Yes. Yes I see. Interesting.” With the small, electric thrill of remembering something she couldn’t possibly know, Rebel realized that Snow was accessing her system, that a tightly-aimed sonic mike or subcortical implant was feeding her data. “How did you manage to lift her?” Snowasked.

Heisen shrugged. “Blind luck. She broke herself out, and I happened by.” He told what he knew of her escape.

“Now that is interesting.” The woman stood. She was tall and impossibly, ethereally thin. A wraith in white, she kept her cloak clutched tight. Two long, fleshless fingers ghosted out to touch Rebel’s forehead. They were hard and dry as parchment, and Rebel shivered at their touch.

“What kind of mind are we dealing with here?” Snow fell silent.

“Take a look at her specs.” Heisen yanked a briefcase from a cloak pocket and punched up a holographic branching-limb wetware diagram. It hung in the air, a convoluted green sphere, looking for all the world like a tumbleweed. Or like a faraway globular tree… It looked exactly like Rebel’s home dyson world, and the image hit her hard. “Okay, this is a crude representation,” Heisen said eagerly. “But look—see where the n-branch trines?

You’ve got a very strong—”

The green sphere burned in the air like a vision of the grail, and Rebel flashed to that light-filled instant when her persona had flooded her skull, and she had picked up a glass and upended it over the programmer. The water writhed in the air, sparkling, and the supervising wettech twisted around in horror, mouth falling open, panic in her eyes as Rebel threw back her head, feeling the rich, full laughter form in her throat. It felt good to be alive, to sense the thoughts warming the brain like sunshine, and to know what she had to do. But then, even as the water splashed into the wafer’s cradle and the tech shrieked,