The cuff Grit wore on her wrist gave south as a last trace on the bounty, with a header off the next train stop's free-port kiosk. The terrain outside had been increasingly rural for the last half hour, as the vast expanse of the city grid and its urban contours was left farther and farther behind. Vibration hummed up through the train's ceraform and steel body; the car was nearly empty, only a large man at the other end, dozing, his head rocking slightly.

She debarked at Salt Far Station, no more than a platform and the free-port signal kiosk under a ceraform dome, the dome's tough, moldable ceramic weathered and stained. No one else debarked the train, no one waited to board. The last trace still bore south. North was a pitted road through flat, wet marsh. South was woods, a tangle of green and inky dark. Everything smelled of salt and the mineral damp of the inland sea. Chill air clung like coarse silk, and though there were no clouds, the light seemed hazy.

With a practiced twist, Grit pulled the threader from the holster under her jacket. The threader was compact, a bit like a cross between a kid's watergun and a small camera; it fit snugly in her hand so her fingers curled over the sequence keys that would set it off. She slid out the thread shard, a finger-length glass polyhedron matriced with tiny filaments of optic fiber, then rechambered it. Last, she checked the readout screen to make sure the threader still held the bounty's—the spool's—specs. Then she left the platform for the soft, muddy ground. The tall grasses skithered over her boots and pants as she waded through them to the woods.

The wrist cuff chirped; she checked the small screen.

"Yeah, Jorge?"

"Grit." Jorge's rough, accented rhythm rose into the chill air. "Where are you?"

"No-fucking-where, why?"

"That spool, Shentu? The Transnat contact was a little cagey about those blanks in his profile."

"So?"

"It's a little hinky, is all, Grit. After the last job, hinky makes me nervous."

"You? I'm the one almost lost a couple important organs." She frowned, gaze narrowing on sky and grass. "And got us our credit drained to hell."

"Shift that; you know it wasn't your fault. But that's all I'm saying. When the contact from a multi holds back on the reasons they want a thread pulled from one of their people, I say we have to take a few precautions."

"Don't we always?"

"Yeah."

"Then I don't see how it affects the job, Jorge."

"Hey, I just thought you should have the heads up."

"Thanks. But we need this, right? Rent, food, the little things."

"Yeah. Reel it in, girl."

"Yeah. Later."

A ways into the tangle of live oak, pine, and murk, Grit experienced a flash of longing for the angles and hard surfaces of the vast city grid, where the ground didn't try to suck you down or trip you up and trees were merely graceful counterpoint in the vitreous grid of ceraform and steel, not the whole of the world. What the hell was the stupid spool doing out here?

Things spoke and rustled in the depths of leaf and branch. A flickering of tiny birds like yellow flames, a skittering through the ferns, and she glimpsed a shiny, dark reptile. Curious, she keyed a query into the cuff; the freep whispered quietly, more into her skin than into the air. The yellow flames were prothonotary warblers. Other fauna boasted by the local biome included marsh rabbits, deer, river otters, a night bird called a clapper rail, and the rare bobcat. Ooh. In the tidal areas, fiddler crabs, marsh mussels, oysters, and grass shrimp. Dinner. The flora, beyond the untidy treelife and ferns, was predominantly grasses, plus reeds, rushes, and sedges for good measure.

The woods petered out, and grass, green and coppery-pink with the early spring, stretched away to black sand dunes. Beyond that, the simmer of light on water. Wind waved through the landscape, softly hissing. A house loomed over it all. Grit had been looking for a building of some sort, but this one stood outside her experience and her expectations.

Blue stone cut and shaped into something out of a Goth-hooked romantic's nostalgia dream, its ornate elaborations and angled outcroppings were stained white with salt, black with time and weather, fissured here and there at the edges. Tall pines stood along the path leading to it, which came from the pitted road that, Grit guessed, looped around from the other direction. A garden gone wild lapped like a frozen brackish spume at its walls.

She reached the path to the house at its midway point and leaned between two of the pines; nothing moved about the house, no life anywhere, seemingly, but the wind rush through the grass and the light on the water. Then a scream curled out of the house like a crack in the air, followed by a dog barking. She stood frozen for the space of a breath before falling into a run, her feet thumping the sandy ground softly.

The tall door stood partway open. Grit peered through, saw only shadows and empty space, and slipped inside. Arched ceilings more than twice her height, long windows glazed with the furzy daylight, shadows on shadows caught in the few pieces of furniture. Stairs wound up to a long landing, below which a hallway led deeper into the house.

The dog's barking continued. She followed the sound through the hallway. As she reached the vaulted entry to a large room, a flickering of light filled it, like a curtain of concentrated dust motes in a thick beam of sun. She was in the curtain of light before she realized.

Myriad flickers and radiant motes moved over her skin, into her eyes. Riding on it, a jolt of—power/laughter/pulse racing/giddy—slid into her brain. Motion, deep in the bones and muscles and a wild reach of freedom through her like a lightning strike or a sweet, sweet chord of music. Sunlight sliding over her eyes, wind in her ears, heart leaping. A surge of strength through her arms and a giddy, almost electric fizz into her groin.

Whoa.

Then it was gone, the curtain of light fading.

When she could see the room again, the two people in it were staring at her. One of them, a young woman, knelt by the dog, calming the still-barking animal. The dog, a tall ginger creature, also stared at Grit, and stopped barking. One moment the dog was under the woman's hands, the next ginger-streaked moment he was right in Grit's face, standing on hind legs, large front paws heavy on her chest. He sniffed her, just the edge of teeth showing in a shaggy muzzle. Warm dog breath shirred by her face. Grit held still, heart pounding, and looked into brown eyes, more intelligent by half than any canine gaze should be. With a final sniff, the edge of snarl disappeared. The dog gave a soft whuff and dropped back down to four paws, pacing casually back to his original spot.

"How was it for you?" The young woman gestured toward the hall arch where the curtain of light had been. She was small, with milkweed skin and hair, wearing black, lab-grown leathers and state of the art energy-recyc boots, like a child-angel turned biker.

The other person, Lawrence Aro Shentu, wore an expression far more wary than the biker angel's.

He held a threader in his hand. What the hell?

Other equipment Grit didn't recognize stood nearby on a table. Beyond this, the room was a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows draped with sheets, the floor a span of gold-veined indigo tiles. A ballroom, once upon a time.

"Law's doing my portrait," the woman—she seemed more like a girl, really, something about her very young—said. She gestured to the threader, then toward Grit, seeming entirely unconcerned with Grit's unexpected, unexplained presence. "That was an unfinished version. Was it cool?"

Grit's hand slid over her own threader, company licensed, illegal as hell otherwise—no way Lawrence Shentu should have one. Aftershocks of the sweet, strong fizz of what she'd just experienced slipped through her, distracting.

"Portrait?" She let her hand slide off the threader. "Was that what it was? It was… Yeah, it was cool. Entirely."

"Yes." The girl pumped one fist. "Absolute burn. I can't wait for it to be finished. Back to work, Law." Over her shoulder, she said to Grit, "You came to see Jon? He's in the solarium," and gestured toward another hallway off the room to Grit's left.

"I heard a scream," Grit said.

"Oh," the girl laughed, bending down to rub the dog between the ears. "I made Law do a whatdoyoucallit, thread thing imprint, off Scarborough, and it freaked us both out."

The spool's gaze stayed on Grit a moment, even as he bent his head to fiddle with his altered threader. She could just do him, be done with it. But that, whatever it had been, that she'd gotten a splash of … She thought of what Jorge had told her about the lack of background on this contract. Intense curiosity and something else, some uneasiness of mind she didn't examine, warred with knowledge of drained credit, of responsibilities. It was the uneasiness that won, though she told herself it was her curiosity.

She gave a smile she knew to be disarming, a touch goofy, ducked her head and passed through the room to the left-hand hallway. Here to visit Jon, yes, she was.

This hallway led to a hexagonal room domed in clear semiperm and open to the shaggy-grassed black sand and slip-shush of the salt marsh tides. Cold air pooled in the room. Unlike the rest of the house, so far, the "solarium" was filled with furniture, modern museum-type stuff in dark oranges and reds, flowing lines and deep cushioning. Another small person with milkweed hair sat in one of the couches, hunched over a scanning microscope, the kind Grit remembered from grade school, only his looked like better quality.

Grit deliberately scuffed a foot, and he looked up. Nearly the same face as the little biker angel's looked back at him, hair all pale, eyes the color of celery, the differences being shorter hair, a few more angles, Adam's apple, and acuity of expression. Twins.

"Jon?"

"Yeah. You a friend of Amalise's? Or—Law's, right?"

"Grit." At his expression, she added, "Margaret."

"Ah."

"Amalise sent me back here. So what's up with this Law guy? He's doing what, her portrait?"

"Mmm, it's some new thing." He rubbed his chin and bent back to the scope, which Grit took as invitation to join him on the couch. "The new thing, according to her."

An assortment of objects littered the low smoked-glass hunk of table. They looked like strange fossils: the slender curl of a delicate hand, a face of stone or shell, something that looked like the freeze-dried inside of cat's ear, a whorled hollow like the womb of a tiny humanoid, several vials of the black sand, and a bowl full of mussel shells, the lavender gray pearl of their insides gleaming mutedly. Several tiny shells and a fish skeleton lay under the scanning scope's lens. It projected a cubic image of their molecular structure, and this hovered over a modeler, on which Jon traced the three dimensional outlines above. The modeler sneeped and chuckled.

"What are you doing?"

Without looking up from the scope, he grunted, then said, "Making invitations."

She picked up the freeze-dried cat's ear and turned it in her fingers. It was heavy, rough and cool, slightly furred with moss on the outer surface, as if maybe it really were a cat's ear.

"Looked like he was using a, what do you call it, threader? Aren't they like, company licensed only?"

"Huh? Yeah, I guess." He tapped a setting on the scope; the image stretched and curved. "That's part of the props, I guess."

There was a clicking, and the tall ginger dog trotted in from the hall, claws keeping time on the floor. He sniffed at Grit, sat beside Jon, yawned hugely with a whine, thumped his tail. Jon reached out a hand, patted the dog's head.

He then tapped another button on the modeler, stared at some point in space, then said, "Do you like our house, our blue stone house? It's a giant fossil. It blushes with the ghosts of blood and dreams, ancient dreams … husked by light and shadow …"

So much for acuity.

Then the words were repeated, a slender recorded voice rising from the modeler, and she realized the phrases were part of the invite.

Jon fell silent, closed his eyes and leaned his head against the couch back, his neck a pale, pliant stem, awkward and vulnerable. In a moment he was asleep. Grit frankly goggled. Who were these people? Rich as Croesus … She remembered her mother using that phrase, bitter-toned. Must be nice, though. Be able to pass out like that, wherever, whenever. Not worried about her, apparently. About anything? Didn't seem like it.

Grit knew she didn't present a threatening appearance, dark-haired girl with big eyes, on the small side. She'd used it to her advantage more than once. But still.

The dog was watching her with his too-intelligent eyes. She felt the hairs rise on her arms. Then the beast swung his head away and headed out the open doors, off the deck to the black sand dunes, where he began to roll, legs and paws waving spastically in the air. She set the cat's ear down and followed him out.

Sitting on the deck steps, watching the dog continue to wriggle his back in the sand, Grit keyed her freep cuff. A little more knowledge would be a good thing. The cuff gave a churr. No signal. No connection. She stood and walked through shifting sand around to another side of the house, coming into the wild surf of the garden.

No signal. She made a circuit of the house, around the front, other side, past the sheet-obscured windows of the ballroom, the flicker of the threader occasionally hollowing out the dark behind them. She stopped by a small memorial, carved glass which read simply, "Beloved Uncle." A tall vase of purple, blue, and yellow clematis sat in front of it. The flowers gave off the unmistakable, mulchy-metallic scent of everblooms, engineered to last years.

Still no free-port signal. The house of the insane was in a freeping black hole. There was a freep kiosk at the train station, so how did they manage to block it?

The smell of mint rose from a plant she'd stepped on. The wind riffed around the house, tugging at her hair, sliding mute over the steel-silk of her jacket. She flashed again on the "unfinished portrait" she'd wandered into. It shimmered through her a moment, all senses fully engaged. She blinked, shook it off.

What was he doing? The fact that he was using a threader without license, for other than its prescribed function, could not be the reason for the bounty; easier to confiscate it, arrest him. A thread bounty was put out when one of the multis, the giant companies like Transnat, which pretty much owned their employees—to the point of raising them as much above the law as the multis were themselves—wanted some particular behavior eliminated from one of them. For the good of the company, of business, and thus the common good. Not an arrest, not a legal action, which disturbed the flow of business, just the pulling of a thread of behavior not wanted in the corporate net.

The specs on her own threader wouldn't tell her what thread would be pulled. It had been set by her contact to precise neural signatures, taken by scan at the spool's worksite, to snatch a specific set of unique synaptic impulses and connections from the brain of one Lawrence Aro Shentu.

It seemed unlikely that anyone would volunteer to have enough threads taken to make something like a portrait … and Amalise hadn't displayed any of the brief blankness that a spool did just after she took thread. So, he was what—copying them?

When she came back around, Scarborough trotted to meet her, shaking gritty black sand in all directions, smelling of brine and wet. Inside, the couch sat empty. Accompanied by the clicking of the dog's claws, she followed the echo trail of voices back to the long empty room.

She sat on the floor beside Jon, the stone and marble cold through her clothes. The dog curled up against her, radiating heat. They watched as her spool used his altered threader on Amalise.

Against the wall at one end of the room, the girl biker stood looking bored while Law keyed settings into the threader. His threader was an older model than Grit's. He loaded a clear, unused thread shard. On a portable stand next to him there was already a row of imprinted thread shards, vitreous red, each a finger long. Grit's shards were always a cloudy yellow gray after she took thread, like captured storm lightning. As far as she'd known until this moment, that was the color they always were. Shards functioned a bit like photographic plates in early cameras had, a prepared surface for a particular medium. Except that when Grit—or any other bounty hunter—took a thread, she only took one, and it was taken, not copied.

Law raised the threader two-handed to his eye, focusing through the view on Amalise's eyes, and pressed the finger sequence. The trigger sequence ensured that a threader was never set off randomly.

A deep, narrow glaze of light flushed the air, hanging space and time in a brief frozen moment.

The light, Grit knew, slid into the brain through the optic nerve. There it latched onto the particular synaptic connections it had been keyed to, burned an image of them. Then, as if magnetized by likeness, it snatched them from the spool's brain. That was what an official threader did, at any rate. She'd seen it from the other side thirty-two times; thirty-two spools, thirty-two threads. Thirty-two credit dumps. The choice, action, inclination that thread represented in the spool was no longer theirs. Gone from their neural repertoire of behaviors and predilections. A spool's eyes didn't even have to be open. The threader's direct beam burned right through the thin skin of the eyelids. Grit had snuck up on a spool asleep once, and taken the thread without waking her.

Law pulled the shard from the threader and set it, now dark red, beside the others. Next to the shards was a piece of equipment that looked like a cross between a humidifier and something in a chemist's lab.

"What does it feel like?" Jon asked his twin.

She shrugged, stretching; her lab leathers creaked sinuously. "You see spots for a couple of seconds. That's all."

"All it's really doing is taking a kind of print," Law said, turning the threader in his hands and keying in another set of signatures, "of a targeted set of synaptics. That's the thread, the picture, in the shard. Instead of," he paused, voice harsh on the next word, "stealing it, I'm just copying it. With a series of them," he nodded to the collection on the stand, "I can build a portrait, an impressionistic one. Or I can do it with threads from several people, an amalgam, or collage." The little lecture was practiced, as if spoken numerous times.

It was the first time she'd heard him talk. His voice was light, pretty.

"Okay," he said to Amalise, "just two more."

"Good," she said, "I'm starving. Jon, go make some food." She flashed a smile at Grit. "You're staying, right?"

Grit gave her a nod. "Thanks."

Jon shrugged philosophically and left. Law turned two more shards red, each ammonia-pale flash-freezing the air for a sliver of moment. Then he pronounced them done. Grit wandered closer with Amalise. They watched as he slotted the shards one by one into the piece of equipment on the stand. It had multiple deep round slots, many more than he had shards. He slotted them purposefully, picking particular spots in the array.

Amalise leaned over, peering into the slots. "So what's this do?"

"Mixes the thread copies into one."

"Like a loom," Grit said.

"I call it a loom, actually," Law said.

With long fingers Amalise touched one of the shards. "I'm in there, huh?" Then she seemed abruptly to lose interest, yawned and flopped down beside the dog, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in sandy ginger fur, her hair like a bloom of ivory blood.

Grit studied her spool. He was short for a man, only an inch or so taller than she. Indifferent clothes, a long-sleeved shirt and sagging jeans. Skin in the light ocher range, dark hair and cleanly drawn features, an arch to the eyebrows and a quirk to the mouth. Intelligent, curious. Wary.

He knew what she was, why she was there, she thought. It was there in his gaze when their eyes met. He looked down.

"Once the thread copies are mixed, the portrait is projected from a bio-sensitive pane." He touched the stack of frosty, rectangular plates. "Then you … experience it." He met her gaze again, mute plea. Arguing his case. Grit didn't argue cases with her spools.

Through the gaps in the sheets over the windows, the light was fading.

Jon reappeared with a large tray. Amalise, curled up beside the dog, was singing softly in a husky voice. Grit caught some of the words, no song she knew, the tune cheery: "… the red butterfly with the poison feet lights on your skin, you're infected, you're detected, you're amazed …"

They sat on the floor. The food involved rice and seafood, with cold beer to drink. Amalise picked the food in her bowl apart with long fingers, examining each bit minutely before eating it, offering bits to the dog now and then. Grit looked away when Jon caught her staring at the girl in fascination. Law knew what she was; eventually the milk-puff twins would probably figure out neither of them knew her. The time for satisfying her curiosity was coming to an end.

Law ate lightly, nerves showing, though Grit figured only she noticed. The twins kept up a running dialogue about the nesting habits of black doves, what events one would expect at a festival of lost words, and whether they needed to get the salt blasted from the stonework of the house anytime soon, seldom asking or inviting a comment from their guests. Soon Amalise was scraping her bowl with two fingers, licking them clean.

The twins' hair glowed ghostlike in the dimming light. Grit shifted uncomfortably, suddenly anxious to be gone. Law started at her movement. He stood and pulled the bio-pane from his loom, set it on the floor and pressed his palm to it.

A noise of light filled the arch of the hall entry. It was maybe five feet wide, seven feet high, a foot and a half deep, noirish in palette, chaotic in pattern, a deep patina on the air. Scatters of spark scritched through it. Jon and Amalise gathered before it, faces limned in the glow. Amalise reached out a hand, brushing its ephemerality.

"You step into it, right?"

Law nodded. "Yes." He glanced at Grit, away. In the portrait's illumination she could see his heart beating in the pulse at his neck.

She slid past the twins and into the light.

A dopplering echo slid by her ear, through her whole body, then another. Her brain filled with light, a snap jolted through her, every molecule waking up at the same moment. She felt the muscles in her thighs tense, gripping a leather seat, her whole body wrangling the power of a huge motorcycle humming beneath her. She felt herself sucking in the wind, a stretch of road, power, freedom, joy. There was more, a kaleidoscope of thoughts and feelings, attitude and knowledge, like being someone else—really like it, for a moment; a moment she could feel stretching into her brain and body deeply. Giggling frothed in her throat, a wide-awake feral hungriness, then a soft whispering and a feeling in her brain like silk on stubble.

Then she stepped out of the portrait.

She stood for a moment, taking in the fact that she now knew what it felt like to ride a motorcycle, to want to ride a motorcycle—to want it and to experience it the way that Amalise did. How food tasted on the girl's tongue, what made her laugh. She looked up as Amalise came through the portrait herself, laughing. She felt linked to her, connected in some intimate, wholly unexpected—new—way. She wanted—but Amalise beat her to it, grabbing Grit in a hug and swinging her around, the strength in the girl's small arms showing that she really was a biker. Her pale hair was soft, but tangled hopelessly; she smelled of band-aids and dog.

As Amalise released her, Grit saw Law watching them.

"That was—incredible. Beautiful," she said, and meant it.

As Jon stepped through the portrait, Grit drifted away, down the hall to the solarium, out. She needed to think. In the wake of the giddy, exuberant feelings the portrait had seared into her brain, her own sobriety began to reassert itself.

She'd never come back without a thread. What would the consequences be?

No pay, for one. And she needed that pay. Not just her rent, but Jorge's: shelter, safety, food, all so fragile, a net easily ripped.

No motorcycles or remote manors for her—or the mass of human urbanity. Personal transport? Luxury beyond dreams, never mind the twins' remote home and its mysterious black hole status. Clearly the milk puffs were loaded beyond her understanding. Nice for Law, getting some custom from the ultras.

As for consequences, the multis only hired freelancers with a solid reputation. If she screwed her own rep …

Chilly dusk had come over the landscape. The grasses shushed and the waters lapped calm under a lingering glow. A loud clattering from the direction of the dunes made her jump.

"Clapper rails," Law said behind her.

He joined her at the bottom of the deck steps, the sand shifting under both of them with a soft rasping.

"Different out here, isn't it?"

Grit looked at him. He was still wary, testing what was between them.

She nodded. "The train goes so many places I never think of taking it to. 'Course, if I'd known I could just wander into the homes of the ultra rich and pass myself off as a friend, I might have traveled more by now."

"If you threatened either of the twins, the dog would go for your throat."

"But not if I threaten you?"

He shrugged. "I'm just the hired help."

Grit let her gaze slide back over the dunes, the last glimmer in the water. "It really is amazing," she said, "the portrait. What you're doing."

She walked a few steps out onto the sand. Behind her, he was silent. She sensed when his tension dissipated. The clapper rail called again, ungainly and riotous.

He moved up beside her. "When I figured out how to do it … I knew they'd send someone eventually. But I had to. It's—I had to keep doing it. Plus, the extra creds. But that's not what Transnat objects to, is it?"

Grit shrugged. "I don't get a rationale from them, just the contract." But then she nodded. "But yeah, I'd guess. You've found a way to replicate behaviors, obsessions, passions—one of them, sometime, maybe the very thing a multi wants to eliminate. Threatens their control, doesn't it?"

Clicking on the deck behind them told her the dog had joined them. She felt her own shoulders tense.

"They'll just send someone else," she said.

"I know," he said. "But when I get enough credits together from the portrait jobs, I can opt out of my contract, go freelance. Transnat won't be able to touch me then."

"Must pay pretty well."

He shifted, then admitted, "It's going to take years."

She turned to him and watched as he saw the change in her eyes. Mouth opening on a word of protest, he stumbled back, turned to run. Expecting it, she fell into a lunge, got a handful of his shirt and jerked while she swept a leg into the backs of his knees, spilling him to the ground and following him down. She had him pinned, sitting on his thighs, her own clenched tight, and gripping one of his wrists hard in her free hand, his other trapped under her knee. The threader was in her hand a practiced moment later, fingers moving into the trigger sequence. His breath heaved and he turned his head, screwing his eyes shut, but there was nowhere to go.

Ammonium sear of light. The dark of night came heavier and more complete in the first few moments after it faded from the shocked air.

He blinked for a moment. Seeing spots, Grit knew. No pain, she knew that, too. Then a lost look in the eyes, a brief expression of slackness, emptiness, bewilderment. She released him, stood up and backed away.

She'd seen it thirty-two times. Often they just wandered off, barely looking at her. After a bit they recovered, back to themselves, in all ways perfectly fine, except that one thread, missing. That one set of choices, actions, predilections gone from their lives. That was what the experts said, what she had always accepted. Law proved no exception. He blinked at her, then his eyes slid off her. He rolled to his side, then to his feet, and wandered away around the house.

Thirty-three.

The threader felt heavy in her hands, her arms strengthless. The smell of salt on the breeze suddenly made her want to weep. She shook her head, holstered the threader, climbed the steps. The dog sat there watching her as she went into the house, then followed, not friendly now. She found the big room empty, ever aware of the dog several steps behind her. The portrait patterned and illuminated the darkness. By its light she found Law's altered threader, pulled two of the red shards from the loom. They were cool and hard in her palm. She tucked it all away in a pocket and left the house. Scarborough shadowed her to the front door, the hair at the back of her neck bristling all the way. The beast was escorting her out.

In the garden she saw Law, no more than a shadow, sitting on a bench, just sitting.

She slipped away, taking the road this time. Stars had begun to show, so heavy in the sky, so unfamiliar a sight, they weighed down on her. She kept her gaze to the road. Sure enough it looped around to the station.

She tapped a request into the kiosk pad for the next train to stop and waited. She waited longer than she'd ever waited for a train in her urban life, but it came, hiss and faint chunk as it stopped. The doors slid open on ashen light and an empty car, the sleek dark forms of seats, smell of metal. Tinted semiperm faded the stars and the wild marsh night to nothing.

The doors closed and she sat, hunkering down on the seat, watching the nothing slide away as the train hummed up to speed. Then she pulled out her threader and unloaded the thread shard. She turned it, lightning yellow-gray, in her fingers. The two red ones chinked in her pocket. She flashed, seeing and feeling Amalise's long fingers gripping power, frisson of vital, unexpected joy. She tucked the shard holding Law's thread back and spoke softly into her freep.

Jorge responded. "Yeah, girl, what's up? You got the spool?"

"Yeah. Listen, Jorge, I've got something for you to look at … Do you think you could do a copy of a thread shard?"

"What's a spool got that you'd want to copy?"

"Just—could you do it? I have a shard that is a copy; you could look at that. See if you could do it."

"Might could be."

"Something else I'll want you to look into. What this spool was doing, and—I'll explain when I see you. Meet me at Orgone's. In an hour."

"Right. Grit, you okay?"

She was silent a beat, watching a station slide by, the light flickering over her face. Then her reflection came back against the dark outside. "Not sure; I'll let you know when I see you."

"Okay. See you later."

She slid down farther into the seat, resting her head against the back. She'd never tried to put a thread back. But surely, if a portrait could be experienced and leave its imprint—it could be done. She knew where Law worked, hung out, lived; it was all in the profile they'd gotten from their Transnat contact. She couldn't leave it alone. She felt it, what she'd stolen, and knew: Transnat had no right to take it out of the world.

She let the scents of metal and ceraform, the angles and clean edges of the familiar rock her with the train's rhythm. She fell asleep and dreamed she was riding fast and free on an endless, winding road.