“Only this time,” Heisen said, “we’ll be on the market first, riding all that publicity free. They’ll have to pick upon our wafer, and they’re just not geared for speed the way we are. We can skim off the top profit for a good week before…”

Rebel’s skin crawled at the thought of a hundred thousand strangers sharing her thoughts, her face, her soul. Experiencing her innermost feelings, her deepest emotions. She pictured them as pasty white insects, swarming in blind heaps, biological machines without will or individuality. “No,” she said. “Forget it. I won’t whore my mind.”

“No, but damn it, you have no room to—” Heisen leaped up, reaching for Rebel, and she started to her feet. She found her balance and drew back a fist. She’d never been trained in heavy gravity fighting techniques, but the muscles of her new body integrated well with each other, and she didn’t doubt that she could drop Heisen where he stood. Smash his nose first, and then—

“Stop.” Snow’s arm shot out from her cloak (a flash of corpse-white skin stretched taut over bones, small black nipples on fleshless breasts) and formed a barrier between them. The arm was long, anorexic, and covered with silver filigree-exoskeletal muscle multipliers.

Powered on, she’d be able to punch her fist through a slag wall or break bones without thinking. “So far I’ve been speaking hypothetically; no offers have been made.”

Those unblinking eyes fixed on Rebel, as if she were a mystery that they could penetrate by sheer force of will.

Without turning her head, she said, “She could be a trap, Jerzy. Didn’t you think of that?”