I might have preferred to venture upward a touch more carefully, but that's me; Jena takes the steps in a few heartbeats and puts her shoulder to the door of the commandant's office without even checking if it's locked. It judders open, revealing a room that might have been picked up from a City villa and dropped out here in the desert. A massive desk of real wood, cultivated at catastrophic expense in a family greenhouse. Precious wool and linen used for carpets. A dozen occasional tables stacked with little works of art. The goal of high-end City fashion, as always, is a tastefully understated made out of stuff that costs a year's salary per sniff. The amount of labor that went into making the things in this room -- not to mention transporting them however many hundreds of miles across the waste -- might be on par with building the fortress walls.

  And, at the back, a glass decanter the size of my forearm shedding soft blue light across a sideboard cluttered with liquor bottles.

  The commandant himself is sitting at the desk, talking urgently into a small golden cage made of tightly woven wire. Something shuffles and moves inside. At the sound of the door slamming open, he jumps out of his seat and frowns at us. His water-of-life earring dangles teasingly, its blue light glittering on the braid of his uniform.

  "What is going --" he begins, then halts, his mouth hanging open, when he realizes we aren't his subordinates.

  Jena stalks across the room toward him, bloody knife in hand. Agni and I follow more cautiously, looking around for hidden bodyguards.

  "We're here for , motherfucker," Jena says. "You remember me?"

  "I'm certain I've never seen you before in my life," the man says.

  "I'm not surprised you'd think so," Jena says. "I was twelve. Twelve years old, and they were dragging me down to the mine. You know what happens to little girls down there? And I got loose and grabbed you and I you to help me. All you did was scream for your guards to pry me off your leg."

  I frown. "Jena --"

  "That couldn't have been me," the commandant says. "I've only been in this post for eighteen months, and you must be twenty by now. Direct your anger at one of my predecessors."

  There's a moment of silence. Jena stares at the man, her jaw working. Apparently satisfied that this has won him the argument, the commandant turns his attention to Agni. I feel her instinctively stiffen under his gaze.

  "Captain!" he barks. "What is the meaning of this? I demand an explanation."

  "The explanation is that I quit, ." Agni reaches up and rips the insignia off her shoulder. "And you're coming with us."

  "I think not," he says. "When this is resolved, you'll be severely punished, depend on it. And --" He pauses, looking down at his chest, which now has the handle of Jena's knife sticking out of it. His expression turns to disbelief. "You me!"

  "So you're the wrong fucking guy," Jena says. "That just means you did the same thing to somebody else."

  "I …" The commandant staggers back against his fancy desk. "I … I had …

  "And I'm going to go to your City," Jena snarls, "and I'm going to burn it to the fucking ground."

  Something goes . After a moment, it happens again, and I hear the ping as a small, hard objects caroms off the wall. Again, and a decorative mug shatters by my side. A little round thing hits the floor and rolls along until it bumps my foot, and I automatically bend to pick it up.

  It's a button.

  "I had this uniform tailored by Chrystophran himself," the commandant says. His voice seems unaccountably deeper. "Chrystophran! Do you know what I had to to get an appointment?"

  "What in the --" Jena says.

  The rest of the commandant's buttons give way, the uniform jacket coming open across his swelling pectorals. His arms are growing as well, straining the sleeves until the expensively tailored seams give way with long ripping snarls. His hands now look out of place, dainty, at the end of limbs like overgrown tubes of sausage.

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  Fleshsculpted. Of he's fleshsculpted. A great family wouldn't send one of its scions out into the Sinister Waste without a little bit of emergency insurance. Recovery must be horrific, but who cares when water-of-life can fix you up instantly? In the City, grandees prefer to travel with hulking, obvious bodyguards, thick with layers of other people's muscle, but I suppose that's less practical out here.

  The knife in the commandant's chest apparently no longer bothers him. Before Jena can recover from her shock he grabs her by the throat, lifts her off her feet, and slams her down on his desk with a bone-cracking thump. Pens and correspondence scatter. The commandant puts his palm on her face, muffling her scream, and his mighty stolen musculature heaves. Her legs kick wildly, then go momentarily rigid as her skull gives way with a horrific crunch, spraying gore in every direction.

  Agni, sensibly, shoots him. The shell hits the commandant in the shoulder and opens a dripping hole, but it only seems to irritate him. He lumbers across the room, reaching for her with a hand still dripping Jena's brains, and Agni throws herself to one side to stay out of range. The commandant, unused to his new top-heavy configuration, stumbles a little and steadies himself on the doorframe, just in time to meet Crank coming up the stairs.

  Jena's huge brawler instinctively punches the monstrous grotesque the commandant has become. The officer stumbles backward, his mouth a red ruin showing the gaps of missing teeth, but again he seems unbothered. Whoever sculpted him must have been good; in addition to the muscle, his emergency mode includes some kind of pain deadening to keep him in the fight. He rights himself and goes for Crank, who sets his feet and grabs the commandant's forearms, trying to force him to his knees.

  Where am I in all of this? Trying not to throw up, first and foremost, and then staying out of the way. I reconvene with Agni at the base of the desk, next to Jena's still-twitching feet. While the two titans struggle, Agni cracks her pistol open and slams in another shell.

  "You got a plan?" she says.

  "A plan for ?"

  The commandant is forcing Crank backward, step by step. Crank looks more puzzled than worried, never having encountered an opponent who could match his strength, but he's only one man, while the commandant has the layered muscle fiber of dozens.

  "Then we're fucking dead, aren't we?" she snarls.

  "Um. Um." An old conversation comes back to me. It's a really bad idea. Why is it always a really bad idea? "Okay. Hold your shot. Can you buy me sixty seconds?"

  "Sure. I can let him pull my head off."

  "Try to avoid it."

  "Right." She looks at me and takes a deep breath. "Sixty seconds. Let's go."

  For a moment, I'm too stunned to move. The look in her eye is …

  Trust. The word I'm looking for is .

  It's not that I'm unfamiliar with the notion. People trust me all the time. people to trust me is my whole job. But those are , it's different. When among my … colleagues, I suppose you could call them, trust is impossible; who'd be foolish enough to trust anyone at a party of professional liars? When you're working with someone, you always have a backup plan, an out in case they're running a game on .

  But Agni trusts me, and there's no out. She's not even the first one. Theo trusted me to help her brother, and Atrax trusted me to be his second. Raz trusts me enough to follow wherever I want to go.

  Why? Don't they know I'm --

  Of course, they don't know, do they?

  With a roar, the commandant gives a shove, and Crank loses his footing. The huge man stumbles backward down the stairs, bellowing, until he hits the bottom with a final-sounding crunch. The commandant takes a step after him, but Agni has drawn her sword, a long military-issue straight blade. She cuts a long, bleeding slash across the officer's back, slicing through the remains of his Chrystophran uniform. He roars, an odd mix of cultured voice and bestial rage, and spins to face her.

  Right. The terrible, terrible plan.

  Agni backs away, slashing at the commandant's arms and hands as he gropes for her. He comes forward, scattering occasional tables and shattering priceless knick-knacks. His attention is all on her, which gives me a chance to slip around them, borrowed knife in hand.

  I had a friend, once, who was a more traditional sort of thief. A street fighter; not a bruiser but lithe and skinny and quick with a blade. I told him a knife wasn't much good against the fleshsculpted bodyguards of the very rich, and he gave a noncommittal shrug.

  "A lot of fleshsculpts are unbalanced," he said. "All power, no finesse, right? Look like a mantis, big scary arms and skinny little legs. Get around 'em, give 'em a few cuts in the right places, and down they go."

  My friend died a street fighter's death long ago, but I feel like he'd be pleased to know that I finally found an occasion to test his theory.

  Agni slips behind the desk. The commandant plants his feet and shoves at the heavy wooden thing, tipping it over and sending Jena's body tumbling. Even for him, it's an effort, so he's distracted when I come in behind him.

  The iconic stab in the back is overrated, too hard to hit anything vital. A cut to the hamstring, however, always pays dividends. I slash through the commandant's muscle just above the top of his boot, feeling the edge of my knife grate on bone. For a critical second, however, he doesn't know what's happening -- he's not feeling any pain, thanks to his sculpting, and his attention is still on Agni. It gives me a chance to get to his other leg and repeat the procedure just as he tries to take a step.

  It's like a mountain falling. He lands on his hands and knees, and looks up just in time to see Agni put her pistol against his forehead.

  "Wait a moment," he says. "Now see here!"

  She pulls the trigger.