“Oh bullshit,” the man said. “They’d’ve caught you already if anybody knew you were missing yet.” Rebel yanked her arm free and found that her new, unfamiliar body was trembling with adrenalin reaction. The man smiled condescendingly. “Listen, I know somebody who can help you out of this mess. Do you want to meet her or not?”

They were on the spine of their habitat island, where the giant druid oaks grew. One spread its limbs over the commercial maze of shops and taverns bordering the hospital. Its trunk reached halfway to the axis. Looking up as they strolled, Rebel saw stars blinking in its upper reaches, appearing and disappearing in the gaps between leaves. “Hell of a stunt, escaping from full therapeutic paralysis,” the man said. “I’d love to know how you did it.”

Then, when she did not respond, “Hey. My name’s Jerzy Heisen.”

In among the branches, leaves descended slowly, barely moving through the suspended dust, as if the air had thickened to hold them up. In the soft light, the dust and leaves shared a stillness that was actually slow, tirelessmotion, an endless eddying as ponderous and inevitable as the rotation of spiral galaxies. “Is that so?” Rebel wished she could climb up the tree, in among the floating twigs and detritus, so like the vast tidal fronts of home. “I take it from your knowing hints that I needn’t bother introducing myself.”

“Oh, I know all about you.” They passed between displays of body jewelry: silverplated armbands gleaming softly under blue spots, some sparkling with Lunar diamonds, impact emeralds, even Columbian tourmaline.

“You’re a persona bum, currently suffering from a major personality erasure—self-induced, by the way—and held together by a prototypical identity overlay that is, properly speaking, the property of the Deutsche Nakasone Gesellschaft. Your name is Eucrasia Walsh.”

“No, it’s—” She stopped, bewildered. The name did sound familiar, in a crazy kind of way, as if Heisen had put a name to all that was ugly within her, to all the self-pitying and wounded hatred she sank into when her mood turned dark. The stale, dusty smell of defeat and weary guilt rose up within her, and she ducked her head.