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“You're trying to manipulate a machine now?” Althea advanced toward him, thinking only to break his attention away from Ananke even if she had to physically stand between them. When she came into Ivan's range of vision, his blue eyes moved to her like a switch being flicked, electric. “Are you that desperate?”

“I was trying to stop Constance,” said Ivan with desperate force, as if he had to push the words from himself. He was leaning forward in the same degree that Althea had leaned away, but at least, Althea thought, he was looking at her again and not at Ananke.

“If I'd been there with her,” Ivan said harshly, the words coming out of him with visible physical effort, “if you sons of bitches hadn't caught me, she wouldn't have done it. I would've convinced her not to do it. I could have changed her mind, I know I could have. I've been trying to change her mind for years.”

Althea could not have moved if she had wanted to.

“If I turned her over to the System, she'd be killed, and Mattie, too, and everyone they had ever met or might have ever met, their home moon wiped out; the System would be ruthless. The only chance I had of saving my planet and saving her was to convince her not to do it. And I could have done it.” He looked up at her and spoke with utter certainty, with confidence, as if the two of them shared an understanding no one else did. “You know I could have done it.”

It was hard to stay angry; it was bitterly hard. Althea wished again that she were far, far away.

“But without me?” said Ivan, and Althea saw the minute jerks of his hands against the restricting length of his chain, seemingly unconscious, uncontrollable. His breath was unsteady. “Who was going to talk her out of it without me? Mattie? Mattie's never said no to Constance in his life.”

Ivan stopped and took a long shaken breath. Althea looked away, but there was nothing else for her to see but red on white, Ida's congealing blood.

“One time,” Ivan said, his voice eerie, soft in the bloodstained silence of that terrible white room, “the three of us were on Eris, and Mattie and I stole a case of bombs for her.”

Althea closed her eyes.

“When I found out what we were stealing,” Ivan said in that same strangely distant tone, “I blew them up. All of them except for one, and I gave her that one bomb to see what she would do, if she would really go through with whatever she was planning.”

Althea could see that moment of transfer: Ivan holding out fire and death in the palm of one hand with the same look of suppressed fear she saw in him now and Constance Harper, who in Althea's head looked rather like Ida Stays although the two women were physically unalike, Constance Harper reaching out to take it with no expression at all.

“She used it,” said Ivan, his voice bleak, and Althea opened her eyes to stop the images from coming. “She went and used it, blew up a bunch of System administrators. I thought that maybe if I'd given her the whole box, if I'd given her all the bombs, she wouldn't have actually done it, she wouldn't have felt like she needed to prove something to me, and she would have stopped herself.”

He took another one of those unsteady breaths.

“I was wrong,” he said.

Althea nearly spoke to him then. She could almost understand, perhaps she could, why he had done the things he had done, why he had lied, why he had used her; she could almost understand him and his pain and his fear—

The door opened, and Althea flinched as if she had indeed been caught in midsentence.

Domitian was carrying something strange, and it took Althea a moment to recognize it as being some sort of medical equipment.

Domitian placed the bundle on the table with a clatter of metal and plastic.

“What are you doing?” Althea asked as Domitian unfurled the wires, revealing the needles and the IV.

“No,” Ivan said, and there was such bare horror in his voice that Althea was afraid in reaction. “Stop.”

“Ida was not allowed to use this until you lied so that it hurt her investigation,” said Domitian. He paused in his assembly to stare Ivan down, still ignoring Althea. “You lied.”

“What's going on?” Althea pressed, hoping for some explanation that was not what she saw.

“You want information,” Ivan said. “I'll tell you the truth now. I don't have any more reason to lie. I will tell you what you want to hear.”

“I don't believe you,” said Domitian, and took Ivan's elbow in his hand. Ivan tried to jerk away but could not go far, certainly not far enough to escape Domitian's iron grip as he slid the needle beneath his flesh. Althea felt light-headed, watching as the needle flashed silver and then welled up red as it sank into Ivan's arm.

“Get it out of me,” Ivan demanded.

“It's too bad you broke the polygraph,” Domitian said, and seated himself in Ida's chair across from Ivan, and only then did he acknowledge Althea.

“Leave,” he said, and Althea flinched hard at his voice, driving startled, reflexive tears from her eyes and down her cheeks, tickling her skin.

Althea looked from Domitian to Ivan as his head rolled back under the first dizzying rush of the drug.

There was nothing she could do here. This was not her responsibility; this was not her place.

She fled.

“You'd be a lot easier to talk to if you had a face,” Ivan had said, and Ananke had heard. It made her conscious of that thing she had been missing, that other people—like Ivan, like Mattie, like Althea—all had: a face. A form.

In the end it had not been very difficult to create. She had used the base of Ida's hologram, and it had been only a matter of a few alterations to change the face and figure from Ida Stays into a shape Ananke thought was more fitting to herself. She had the faces of Matthew Gale and Althea Bastet scanned in her database from every angle as part of System security measures, and so it had been very simple to imitate the Punnett squares of human genetics to create a combination of the two, with an alteration here and there as Ananke thought fit.

Voice had been equally simple: taking the tones and inflections of the people who had been on board—whose voices she had recorded—and smoothing out the differences, choosing to present herself as female and so picking a higher timbre. There was a slight bias toward Ivan's turns of phrase, but of course he had spoken the most of all her crew. Emotional expression was a different thing entirely, of course, but Ananke was certain she would learn, as she had learned everything else.

There were glitches still, flaws in her invented form to write out of the programming, but she would find those only when they happened. If every now and then the holograph reverted to a distorted Ida Stays, jaw unhinged like a snake, or Ananke's adopted voice ran over itself into high white noise like a thousand screams overlaid, it was simple enough to compensate for.

So Ananke did not understand, not really, why Althea's eyes went round and frightened when she stepped out into the hall from the white room and saw that a young woman stood in the holographic terminal, features an even mix between Althea and Mattie but with Ivan's clear blue eyes. It was a surprise when Althea gasped more in fear than in wonder when Ananke scattered photons so that her projected face might smile and said, image a beat out of phase with voice, “Is it not easier to speak to me now that I have a face?”

In the white room, where Ananke also watched with her eyes and her attention equally all over the ship, Domitian had commenced his interrogation.

“What's the point of this?” Ivan demanded. He was trying to hold on to some sort of intensity, but the drug was running through his veins now, driven by the beat of his heart, and Ananke knew that it would take full effect swiftly. Even now he was wavering, his eyes growing unfocused.

“The System will need to know what you know,” Domitian said. “All about Constance Harper and her organization. All the people she knows, all the resources she has.”

“That doesn't matter anymore,” said Ivan.

“Do you think that one woman alone could destroy the System? The System has suffered a blow. It will come back better, stronger, and it will destroy all those who attempted to harm it.”

“It will never come back; the System is gone,” Ivan said. “It's a new world, and nothing I know will do you any good.”

“The System,” said Domitian, implacable, “will rise again, and it will destroy all who oppose it. You interrupted Miss Stays's interrogation before it could be completed. The System needs to know what she wanted to find out from you.”

Ivan laughed. There was a mania to it, a lack of control, that Ananke had not yet recorded in him. “Ida completed her damn interrogation,” he said. “She figured it out in the end. Who Constance was. She came in here to gloat. That's why I killed her. I wouldn't have done it if she hadn't known, and she wouldn't have died if she hadn't come back in here.”

Domitian's shoulders were tense; his hands were curled into claws. Ananke registered that he was a threat to Ivan even though Domitian seemed very small to her.

“Tell me,” he said.

“She figured it out,” said Ivan. “She figured it out, that Connie was…the Mallt-y-Nos. And she came in here to make me beg. She kept her camera off. Only Ananke saw.”

“And you killed her.”

“I picked Althea's pocket when she made the mistake of coming too close to me,” Ivan said. “When Ida made the same mistake, I killed her for it.”

He could no longer keep his head quite upright and, dizzy, let it fall back against the chair so that he could blink up at Ananke.

“How did she figure it out?” Domitian asked.

Ivan closed his eyes. “She realized that Abigail was a pseudonym for Constance.”

“What?”

“Abigail Hunter,” Ivan said, slitting his eyes open to emphasize his condescension with a look, “is a pseudonym. For Constance Harper.”

“Every time you mentioned Abigail,” Domitian said slowly, “you were talking about Constance.”

“Yes.” Ivan considered him. “How much did Ida tell you?”

“Everything,” said Domitian. Because there was only one camera in the room, Ananke could see only Ivan's face and not Domitian's, but it did not trouble her overly much. Ivan's face was more interesting to see.

Ivan smirked. “I doubt that,” he said.

“Why the pseudonym?” Domitian asked, his voice cold and hard as steel.

“For the same reason anyone ever has a pseudonym,” Ivan said wearily. “So that she could do things that wouldn't be connected back to her. In Constance's case, illegal things.”

“But there was once a real Abigail Hunter.”

“Yes,” Ivan said. “She died in the fire.”

Domitian said, “Tell me exactly what happened on the day of the fire.”

Ivan said, sweetly, his words slurring and his face pale, “I wasn't there, Domitian.”

Domitian's fist slammed down on the table, rattling the table and rattling Ivan, who jumped as if the drug had eroded his self-control along with his inhibitions. Domitian, other than the swift downward swing of his fist, did not move and remained a dark gray figure hunched like a shadow, watching as Ivan's breathing steadied again and Ivan said, “Constance was the one who had been planning to burn the place down. They were abusing all three of them, especially Mattie. The foster parents noticed the accelerants but thought it was Mattie. Abby distracted them while Constance took Mattie away—probably Constance convinced her to do it; Connie has that way with people. Constance went back. She says Abby was already beyond help. So she burned the place to ash.”

“So hot that there were no bodies,” Domitian said. “What else?”

Ivan frowned. “What?”

“What else do you know?”

Ivan rolled his head back against his chair again. “What does it matter?”

“The System needs to know.” Domitian was inexorable.

“It's done, Domitian.” Ivan sounded dazed, dizzy, half awake. From above, Ananke could see that the bandage on his leg was stained red. “What's the point? It's done.”

“The System needs this information, now more than ever,” Domitian said. “And I will take it from you.”

“The System,” said Ivan, “is dead.”

Ananke had files in her database pertaining to Aletheia, and what files she didn't have she could access in System servers that were still operative, harvesting their files and taking them for her own, learning.

With Ivan fading, Ananke started to pay more attention to the side effects of the drug.

Hallucinations, nausea, fever, disorientation, prior mood problems worsened. Things Ananke could not feel and could understand only in the abstract. She did understand, however, that the experience was a living hell.

Domitian said, “I want to know everything that has happened on this ship.”

Ananke watched Ivan grin. He had lost weight since coming on board less than two weeks ago, and the grin had a disturbing quality to it, near to that of a skull.

“You want to know all the ways you failed?” he asked.

Domitian moved with such speed that Ivan did not have time to brace himself, and Ananke watched him struggle with his momentary jolt of fear as Domitian forced him back against the chair by the neck again.

Domitian would leave marks if he kept doing that, Ananke thought.

“You said Gale didn't leave the ship by the escape pods,” Domitian said as evenly as if he were not holding Ivan by the throat. The IV continued to pump clear liquid into Ivan's veins. “He was in the maintenance shafts. Where is he now?”

Ivan said something too quietly for Ananke to hear, and Domitian released him. Sucking in a breath, Ivan repeated, “Gone. He's gone. He left.”

“What was he doing in the maintenance shafts? Was he passing on information from this ship to the Mallt-y-Nos?”