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  Tentatively, the touch returned to her forehead.

  “You were here before, weren't you? While I was still asleep?” Angie relaxed under the stroking tendrils. “I remember someone singing...” A feather, she thought, and the thought made her want to laugh. Angie, the tough-assed troubleshooter, stroked to wellness by a bird. Sally would enjoy that one.

  She wondered what her favorite troubleshooting partner had learned about the source of that mountain fire. She knew Sally would run a full investigation of the event, regardless of any official Company report. Troubleshooters kept a closer eye on Company activities, and on each other, than most admin execs realized.

  “You talked in your sleep,” Pua said.

  Angie realized the comment was meant as an answer to her question.

  “Mostly about trees and mountains and stuff. That was kind of boring, but sometimes you talked about a guy named Nori.”

  Angie opened her eyes.

  “You talked about stuff you used to do together up in that tower.” Pua lifted a questioning brow. “Weren't you supposed to be working up there?”

  Angie blinked, wondering if it was possible to blush in an EM field.

  Pua giggled suddenly. “I liked it better when you talked about Sally Goberlan. Sally was the best.”

  That made Angie laugh, too. “Sally is definitely the best,” she agreed. “But what—”

  A pneumatic doorlock hissed. Pua backed quickly away.

  “Damn it, girl! I told you to stay out of here!” It was a man's voice. Loud and angry. Angie could just make him out at the edge of her vision. Very dark skin, tall. His features remained indistinct because of the angle.

  “I wasn't hurting—”

  “I warned you, Pua...”

  “Leave her alone,” Angie said.

  “What?” The man moved closer quickly, obviously startled to hear her speak. As he stared down at her, his anger turned quickly to concern. He called over his shoulder, “Waight, get in here! She's awake! Pua, you get out.”

  His eyes were too pale for the color of his skin to be natural. A thin scar ran from his right temple to his chin. A doctor? Angie thought. Somehow, she didn't think so. He acted more like admin. What would a Company man be doing in a reconstruction hospital?

  “What's going on, Crawley?”

  A woman appeared at Angie's side. An old woman, with eyes even paler than the man's. She blinked, and Angie caught the telltale glint of gridded lenses. Visual implants, she thought. Good ones. The woman leaned over her.

  “You are awake!” She sounded genuinely surprised.

  “Is there some reason I shouldn't be?” Angie asked.

  “No, I...” A lie. Angie saw it clearly in the woman's expression. “Of course not, Warden. You're just a little ahead of schedule, that's all. How do you feel?”

  “I don't feel anything,” Angie said.

  “Can you...”

  “Move my head?” Angie said when the woman hesitated. “Yes. The girl helped me break through the paralysis. Why was I—”

  The almost colorless eyes shifted abruptly. “Pua, what are you doing here? What did you do to her? Tell me exactly what happened when she woke.”

  “I didn't do anything, Doctor Waight, I just—” Pua paused. When she spoke again, her voice had grown tight, calculating. “I'll tell you everything, if you let me go home.”

  The woman cursed softly, and shifted her look back to Angie. “My name is Doctor Ruby Waight, Warden. I did the surgery on your hands. You do remember what happened to your hands, don't you?”

  “Yes,” Angie said softly. And thank you very much, Doctor, for your compassionate concern.

  “Good.” Waight motioned toward the man. “This is Walter Crawley, our administrative liaison. You'll have to pardon our momentary confusion. The drugs normally hold people under a day or two longer than this. It must have been your troubleshooter's conditioning that made the difference. I should have taken that into account.” She flashed a light in Angie's eyes and touched a flickering monitor that Angie could just barely see.

  “Now, this is important, Warden,” Waight said. “I want you to tell me everything you remember about waking up. All the details.”

  Angie disliked the woman immensely. She was tempted to repeat Pua's conditions for speaking, but decided she had better deal with her own needs first. She said, “I could remember better with the EM field turned off.”

  Waight's curse was the same one she had offered the girl.

  “I'd like to get up,” Angie said.

  That brought a quick, hard laugh. “You'd fall flat on your face if you tried to get up now, Warden. Give the drugs time to clear your system. You'll be out of here soon enough.” She did something below Angie's field of vision, and abruptly Angie felt sensation in her legs, her arms, her hands—her hands didn't feel right.

  “It would be best to keep your hands in the gel for a few more days,” Waight said. “Until you get used to the feel of them. The EM stimulation has kept the rest of your body in reasonably good shape. You should be fully recovered and functional in a few weeks.”

  Angie blew out a slow breath. She hated lying still. “How is Chandler?”

  “Who?”

  “The lineman she rescued,” the admin man said.

  The doctor's eyes darkened for an instant. “He's alive. He's been moved to rehab.”

  “In Houston?”

  Waight glanced at Crawley.

  “Hawaii,” he said.

  “Hawaii! Why isn't he at a burn center? How long have I been here?”

  The look that passed between Waight and Crawley left Angie feeling suddenly cold.

  “Five months.”

  “Why was Chandler sent to Hawaii?” Angie demanded.

  Again the quick exchange of dark looks. “His lungs were too badly damaged to be restored without full reconstruction,” Crawley said. “He was re-formed in the waterfarm tanks.”

  “The waterfarm—You replaced his lungs with gills!”

  “Total regrowth of full body parts is very expensive, Warden,” Crawley said. “Not to mention time-consuming. It's only done when the Company can be reasonably assured that the worker's future earning potential warrants the cost. Chandler was only a lineman. He had no special skills.”

  “He was only eighteen years old! How could he possibly have developed special skills?”

  “He had signed the standard Company contract, Warden,” Crawley said. “We were entirely within our rights to invoke the alternate-employment clause when he couldn't make the decision for himself.”

  “He would never have selected water work as an alternate. He was a mountain man.”

  “He's been fitted with high-grade gills and webs,” Waight broke in. “He'll be trained for midlevel management, so his salary will go up. And he's received a substantial disability bonus, of course.”

  “A disability bonus!” Angie cried. “You turn a man into a fireloving squid, and then offer him a disability bonus?”

  “Don't say that!”

  Angie turned her head at Pua's sharp command. She blinked away the dizziness, then blinked again to bring the girl's image closer. Pua's smooth skin had gone pale; her dark eyes flashed.

  “Pua,” Waight said. “Go outside.”

  “Don't say what?” Angie said.

  “Damn it—”

  “Don't call that man a squid!” Pua's cold stare no longer resembled that of a child.

  “What—”

  “Shut up, Pua. Crawley, get her out of here!”

  “Only a real waterworlder has the right to call a man a squid,” Pua said. Crawley reached for her, but the girl hissed and lifted a hand toward his face. He jerked back as a fistful of writhing tentacles snaked forward. They coiled back one by one until only the central one remained extended. It was a gesture as old as time. Presented by the sweet-faced girl, it was as obscene a thing as Angie had ever witnessed.

  “Suck reef, Admin,” Pua said. She backed toward the door, th
e fringes on her shirt swinging in time to her smooth steps. She met Angie's look again, for just an instant, before she disappeared.

  Crawley went after her.

  “Who is that?” Angie cried as the door hissed shut behind them. “What have you done to her!”

  “Don't try to lift your head, Warden,” Waight said.

  “She's only a kid! It's against the law to change—”

  “Lay back, Warden, or I'll turn the EM field back on.” A barely perceptible tingle spread across Angie's back.

  “No!” She dropped her head back onto the softly yielding surface of the EM platform. “Who is she?” she asked.

  What is she? she asked silently. What is going on here? A shiver slid along Angie's arms. She tried to make herself believe it had been caused by a fluctuation in the fading electromagnetic field.

  “Pua is a waterworlder,” Waight said.

  “I could see that!” The girl's waterworld alterations were more than obvious. But her hands were unlike any waterworlder's Angie had ever seen. Her fingers had been so long, so ... Angie thought suddenly of a holo she had once seen of an octopus in open water, its graceful, twisting tentacles outspread. She pushed the image away.

  “Pua's waterworld alterations were done while she was still in utero,” Waight said. “Her parents ran a research farm on Lesaat. Pua was the one success they had in trying to create a second generation not dependent on Earth's reconstruction labs. We didn't even know she existed until a year ago, when a Company crewman discovered her tying up holes in one of the algae nets.”

  Angie remembered Pua's proud acknowledgment of her ancestry. Pacific Islanders were the most sought after recruits for the Lesaat waterfarms, Angie knew, because both their physiological and psychological makeup had proved to make them the most adaptable immigrants. They were also, as a group, among the poorest of Earth's residents, and were thus the most easily conscripted.

  Angie tensed her back and shoulder muscles, then her legs and her arms. Only her hands did not respond. Or she didn't feel them if they did. She forced herself to relax.

  “Pua's parents are dead,” Waight went on. “Pua mistakenly fed them a poisonous variety of sea cucumber about six months ago. We transferred all three of them back here immediately after they were stricken, but only the girl lived.”

  Waight removed something from the side of Angie's neck.

  “That makes my shoulder itch,” Angie said.

  “It's just your locator implants,” Waight replied. “One of them was probably triggered by the EM field.” She touched one of the line of monitors behind her and the itch faded.

  “Children aren't allowed on Lesaat unless they're with immediate family,” she said, “so we've been forced to keep Pua here. She's a dreadful child. She's full of superstitious nonsense about ghosts and sea creatures. She thinks it was her spells that kept you alive in the dep tank. And she has absolutely no respect for property or privacy. Even keeping her decently dressed has proved impossible.”

  Angie shifted her gaze back to the ceiling. The woman's face and voice were so full of lies she could no longer bear to watch.

  “Still, her presence here is providing me with an invaluable research opportunity. Until now, waterworld reconstruction work has been restricted to the growth of webs between the recruit's existing fingers, and a minimal extension of the fingers themselves. But if I can find a way to reproduce Pua's—”

  “This is Hawaii, isn't it?” Angie said. “That's why there's mildew on the ceiling.” She felt, more than saw, Waight's startled upward glance.

  A scream trembled at the back of her throat. Hawaii! World Life Company's corporate headquarters. Site of its primary waterworld reconstruction station. The image of Pua's grotesque fingers writhed sinuously against the backdrop of the mildewed ceiling. At the back of Angie's mind, a child's voice asked, Do you have Polynesian ancestors?

  “What did you do to my hands?”

  There was a long pause. “Your injuries were such that standard reconstruction wasn't possible,” Waight said finally. “Your hands were crushed beyond surgical repair. They had to be removed. We considered attempting full regrowth, but that would have taken at least three years, even being pushed.”

  Another pause. “Bionic prostheses would have been simpler and faster, but we judged that, being a troubleshooter, you wouldn't be satisfied with those.”

  Angie squeezed her eyelids tight.

  “We tried something new,” Waight said. “A cloned transplant.”

  “From her?”

  “We also took the opportunity to augment your oxygen intake capacity.”

  Gills! The thought of the distant mountains was like a knife sliding through Angie's soul.

  There was a sound from the direction of the door. Waight looked up as Crawley walked to Angie's side. He met her look and smiled. “I see you've heard the good news, Warden.”

  “You won't get away with this,” Angie said. To her relief, her voice remained dead steady. The more serious the problem, the calmer the tone. She could still hear Sally's entirely toneless monologue carrying her through the eternity of the fire.

  One of Crawley's thin brows lifted. “We're not ‘getting away’ with anything, Warden. Everything we've done fits within the legalities of your contract.”

  “I work for the U.N.,” Angie said. “Not World Life.”

  He shrugged. “Under the circumstances, the U.N. was only too happy to lease us your services in return for providing you with our expert medical care.”

  “It's not uncommon for new recruits to wish they could change their minds at this point,” Waight said. “But remember, this is a tremendous opportunity for you. If you injure these hands, they'll regenerate on their own, very quickly. You'll have exceptional grip strength and flexibility—”

  Angie's manufactured calm fled. “I don't give a firefly's damn about flexibility! I am not a recruit! I had nothing to do with this decision!”

  “Mr. Yoshida assured us this is the course you would prefer,” Waight said.

  “Who the hell is—” She stopped. “Nori?”

  Waight nodded. “Nori Yoshida. Your second-in-command at the forest preserve and,” she added with a slight frown, “personal companion. Ordinarily, I disapprove of sexual alliances at the work site, but in this case it proved advantageous, since he was privy to your personal desires.”

  Angie stared at her. “Nori did this?”

  “Mr. Yoshida came here immediately after you arrived,” Crawley said. “When we showed him the extent of your injuries, he insisted you would be grateful for the opportunity to work on Lesaat. He explained how eager you were to find a field position off-planet.”

  “That's a lie!”

  Again, Angie tested the muscles of her lower body. Without actually moving, she couldn't be certain if they were actually reacting, or if the response was only in her mind. She found it difficult to breathe.

  “I won't go to Lesaat,” she said.

  “According to our records, you owe the Company a lot of credit,” Crawley said. He waved a loose-wristed hand toward Waight and the shelf of monitors beyond the EM platform. “Completely aside from all this, I mean.”

  “I owe half the cost of my last visual implants,” Angie said. “Call the debt, Admin. I have more than enough to cover it. And don't think you can charge me for the rest of this sham. I'm not a fireline grunt like Chandler. I'm fully insured.”

  “Of course you are,” Crawley said. “By World Life itself. For all medical treatment made necessary by injuries incurred while performing your standard duties.”

  “Which include the rescue of endangered crewmen,” she said.

  “Not when there's an official rescue team on-site,” he said. “You flew into the danger zone over the stated and recorded objections of your own tower partner, and you repeatedly refused to leave the area, even after being ordered to do so by a U.N. troubleshooter equal to your own rank.”

  Angie remembered Nori's smooth, white
fingers touching on the tower recorder—just before he recommended not going to the fire, just after their discussion concerning off-planet work. And Sally ... They had used her, too, but without her knowledge. Angie knew Sally would never have been a conscious part of this.

  “Your actions put an entire rescue crew in jeopardy, Warden. You could face criminal charges for that,” Crawley said. “But you're fortunate. In exchange for taking part in Dr. Waight's transplant experiment, the Company has agreed not to press charges and to waive the cost of your treatment and rehabilitation, contingent on your cooperation—”

  Angie sat up. Her vision spun, but to her immense relief, her body responded.

  “Stop her!” Waight called.

  Her right shoulder smacked Crawley squarely in the chest. There was a quick, sharp pain in her right arm, and others at her side. EM patches, she thought. And other things? She hoped she had done herself no permanent damage, then almost laughed at the absurdity of the thought. Metal and plastic clattered to the ground.

  “Don't let her fall!” Waight cried.

  Angie kicked toward the voice. Her foot struck something soft, and there was a grunt of pain. Waight's hand slipped from her left arm. Angie continued her forward movement. Her hands moved along with her, startling her because she had expected them to be restrained. The sudden return of sensation below her wrists confused her momentarily.

  Crawley grabbed her right shoulder and she used him as a lever to help her roll from the platform. The floor had the resilience of concrete. The room went dark, then brilliantly bright again.

  “Be careful of the hands,” Waight called breathlessly.

  “I'll show you my hands!”

  Angie swung at the advancing Crawley as hard as she could, trying to form her hand into a fist. The blur of flesh-colored tendrils that registered on her already spinning vision proved that the mental command had not reached her new fingers. The strength of her swing was powerful, however. The thin strands of her newly grown fingers snapped across Crawley's face like a whip.

  His scream was sharp and shrill. He threw himself bodily atop her to stop her from hitting him again. At any other time, she would have been able to escape him easily, but now her drug-laden system failed her. She flailed at Crawley with limp, useless hands.