I COULD NOT SLEEP in my bed that night, nor upon the couch or in the winged armchair. Instead I spent an hour on the floor of the shower there, scalding myself, as if heat and pain could wash out the memory of her hands. I tried washing my mouth, but the taste of soap only reminded me of what had been done to me. The memory of Naia lingered with her perfume. I wrapped myself instead in my old coat in a corner of the room when the suite’s other doors would not unlock. It would not hide me from Kharn should he return—in one guise or another—but I was as far from the memory of the homunculus and her white arms as I could manage.

I missed Jinan. And missing her made it worse.

When I did sleep, I dreamed again, and dreaming was conscious of a wet wind blowing out of darkness and the sound of waves. I was not in my body. I was only a mote, like an ember cast from unseen fires, hurtling through the night. I sensed deep water below me, and the sky above was clouded and close as the roof of some limitless cathedral. Witch-lights the precise, greenish hue of those I’d seen on our descent from the orbital platform shone in the depths. They illuminated a round and broken arch, like the ring of some giant shattered but standing still.

Hadrian . . .

I stopped, hearing the voice—the same voice I had heard in my dream when we first arrived on Vorgossos—and called out, “Who’s there?” But I had no voice.

Listen.

The word echoed in eternity. Infinity.

Listen to me.

“Who goes there?” I tried to say.

Listen!

I had a body then. Without warning. Mass and weight. I fell like a stone, like a turtle dropped by an eagle. Plunging into the depths. I woke with a start before I hit the water.

I did not explore the palace the next morning. I awoke to find food laid out for me—and the remains of the last night’s unfinished meal cleared away. I tuned my terminal to read to me and tried to pick up where I’d left off with Impatian’s First Emperors, but the life of Victor Sebastos held little shine for me, and I soon surrendered to the quiet.

Somewhere far above, Valka and the others were returning to the Mistral, beyond the misshapen statues of the Furies at the top of the hightower. I imagined them stepping through the airlock back into known territory. Back onto familiar ground, back with familiar faces. I longed to leave with them, to take Otavia Corvo up on her offer: to leave this place and this foolish mission and never look back.

Who did I think I was?

I was no great hero—am no great hero. I was only a foolish young man very far from home. Forget the Mistral, I’d have given all I had to wake up in my room at Devil’s Rest, beneath my painted stars. This was all a nightmare, it had to be. I was in the palace of Kharn Sagara, a myth old almost as the Empire itself. I had seen demons and xenobites and imagined I could contend with them.

Kings and pawns, I thought again.

We’re all pawns, my boy. Gibson’s words echoed back to me. But remember, no matter who moves you, your soul is in your own hands. You have a choice.

None of us has a choice, Naia said. Or was it Kharn? Had the Undying lurked behind her eyes from the very start?

Choice.

That is the question, is it not?

Those who say we are only flesh must reason that we have no will of our own, that we serve our impulses, which are rooted in our brains and nowhere else. Such thinking gave rise to the homunculi, who are made happy in their servitude. After all, to such thinking we are all slaves, if only to our breeding. Thus it is no crime to create creatures such as Naia. And yet it is clearly a crime. Evil needs no explanation. You know it by its smell. That knowledge—that apprehension of the Truth which is there and obvious—spoke to me of something more. To us. In us. A quiet thing.

I wonder now what I looked like to Kharn. He who had lived so long and so variously, who was no longer truly human. I suspected then and know now that much of his mind was given over to machines. That they sustained him in his old age and ordered what flesh and chemistry would have long ago destroyed. Being so old and so much machine, I think we must look to him as dogs do to us. Animals do not think as we—cannot be said to think at all. Rather they inhabit their world and respond to it.

They do not create.

They do not choose.

What Kharn had done was clear. Create a sealed environment. Introduce a stimulus. I’d been a lab rat and my sleeping chamber the maze. It had not gone as Kharn expected . . .

However precarious my position, I had yet the will to choose. I was there, after all. Who would come to Vorgossos except by choice? Who would stay? I had made my choice, and had only to wait. My friends would return soon.

The door cycled open, and Yume appeared, leading a laden food trolley. Some part of me expected that it would be Naia again, or one of the girls who served the lords and ladies of the vestibule. The android smoothly deposited the steam tray and a pewter carafe and drinking cup on the table, making no comment. I watched it work, sitting with my back against the wall on a cushion in the corner. Yume cleared away the remnants of that morning’s breakfast—and with it the torn-up image Naia had forced me to draw.

It had been quiet a long while, and looking up I saw the golem watching me, unmoving.

The moment my eyes found its one, Yume’s head twitched to one side. “You are on the floor.”

“Well spotted,” I said, massaging beneath my terminal gauntlet with a finger. After the incident the night before, I’d kept my sword on my person at all times. It lay by my cushion then, near to hand, though I’d no notion how quickly the inhuman butler might move.

The gears visible through the glass at Yume’s hips and shoulders turned over, filling the silence with the ticking of jeweled mechanisms. In its clear, patrician tones, Yume said, “The Master has asked that I apologize for the events of the previous evening, and he hopes no offense was given.”

“Offense?” I repeated, half-rising from the cushions. But I thought about Tanaran, about Valka and Switch and the others. They ought to be on the hightower, descending. “No,” I said at last, unable to curb all the sarcasm from my voice, “no offense.”

Yume clasped its delicate hands before itself. “The Master was worried when you did not leave your chambers.”

“So he sent you?” I asked. “Surely he knows where I am.” I raised a hand, described a circle with one finger to indicate the cameras I felt sure were everywhere. “The King with Ten Thousand Eyes and all.”

“If you mean to imply that you are under surveillance, I can assure you there is no monitoring equipment in the diplomatic suite.”

I confess I snorted. “You expect me to believe that?”

“Belief is not required.”

“Is that so?” I said, struggling to my feet. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not convinced.”

The golem said, “I cannot lie.”

“I’m supposed to believe that, too?”

“Belief—”

“Is not required, yes.” I turned my sword over in my hands, recalling how Kharn had done that very thing on our first meeting. It had a pleasant weight, and the wine-dark leather grip was sweet to the touch, her silvered fittings only somewhat tarnished by time and hard use.

“The Master considers it unwise to provide me with counterfactual data. It introduces error.” Something all liars should take into account, and something each of us forgets. Yume was not finished speaking. “In any case, indulging mistruth violates the laws which govern what you think of as my persona.”

I stared at the creature. “You mean to say that you do not truly think.”

“I am only what the Master made me. A high-order virtual intelligence and personal assistant. Genuine cognition is not required. Pursuant to which, I was asked to attend to any desires his lordship might have.”

The couch loomed beside me, and it was all I could do not to turn my eyes in that direction, for I knew all too well just what Kharn Sagara had in mind where the matter of desire was concerned. Instead I asked, “Where are my friends? Are they on their way back down?”

“They are still aboard your ship at the marina. We expect they will be underway shortly, provided we do not occupy the nine-percent-probability space where they leave without you.”

“Nine percent,” I repeated, not impressed. “And what data are you working off, precisely?”

“Only what is available.”

“Hmm.” If it were really true, if Kharn did not monitor my rooms, what a statement of power it was to permit his guests their privacy. All the same, I knew well that the single eye in Yume’s face was one of Kharn’s Ten Thousand, just as Naia’s two had been. For all I knew, the Undying lurked even then behind his servant’s face. And watched. And listened.

Tanaran’s arrival could not come soon enough.