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sort things out, unasked and uninvited.
    Across the channel, a pinpoint of reflection wreathed in a bow wave of white foam was heading her way. As she watched, it resolved into a rigid inflatable. Two figures sat forward, leaning on the gunwales, one the dark and heavily muscled shape of a once wess’har rendered almost unrecognizable by the changes c’naatat had made to him, the other a smaller blur of lovat green combats, a human male.
    How will we ever get back to normal after all this?
    Normal was relative; other people’s normal had never been hers anyway, but the last few years had shifted it much further along the spectrum. Now she wondered if she was actually irreparably damaged by accepting that you could suck hard vacuum or cut your guts open and still carry on as if you were human. The only reference point of sanity that she had was two lovers who were as altered as she was, and probably about as well adjusted. Their shared purdah seemed a powerful bond. Now, after the abortion, it seemed fragile.
    Yeah, maybe a bit of discussion beforehand would have been a good idea. But what if you’d talked me into keeping it?
    It could never be. It was a girl, but Shan hung on to the neuter, the nameless, and made damn sure she didn’t start sentimentalizing. It wouldn’t change a thing. As she focused on Ade, she also made sure she didn’t wonder if the kid would have looked like him. That was the path to becoming a fucking lunatic like Lindsay.
    By the time the inflatable slowed down in the shallows Shan could see that neither Ade nor Aras were happy. If the wind had been in the right direction, she was sure she could have smelled them. Ade jumped out of the boat as it ran up onto the beach, and lifted its outboard clear to haul up the pebbles for Aras to step out.
    Now Shan could see why. Aras was cradling something in his arms. It was a makeshift container of folded plastic, full of vegetation and soil.
    He’s rescued something. He’s found some animal. He’s so bloody soft.
    Wess’har generally expressed their strict vegan outlook by unsentimental avoidance of other species, but Aras had insisted on looking after the lab rat colony he’d liberated from Rayat before surrendering them to Shapakti. He found their little paws fascinatingly like human hands. Shan got to her feet and walked towards him, expecting to see something helpless and rare in the container, something Aras wanted to nurture.
    She peered in. It was just wet earth and vegetation coated in what looked like raw albumen.
    â€œWhere is it?” she said. “Come to that, what is it?”
    Ade had that studied lack of expression that said he had bad news, but his acid scent of anxiety conveyed the real message just fine. “I think we need to get Shapakti to take a look.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Aras—far from the seahorse-like elegant wess’har he had been, now more a heraldic beast overlaid on a man, magical and tragic—still had that tendency to tilt his head to indicateintense interest. “I believe there are trace cells on this piece of riverbank that are from a bezeri.”
    Shan heard riverbank and bezeri . She was no biologist, but bezeri were ocean dwellers, saltwater animals. “What’s driven them inshore? Are they beaching themselves?”
    She expected more bad news about their numbers. They were down to the last forty or so individuals of a population that had already declined to tens of thousands before the cobalt-salted neutron devices scoured Ouzhari and contaminated the sea round it. They would never recover.
    Aras tilted the container. Shan reached out automatically and the lights in her fingertips sparkled in a complex pattern of blue and amber pinpricks. The display distracted her briefly from the wet mess in the plastic box.
    â€œWhat’s in there?” she asked.
    â€œTraces of mucus from the mantle of a bezeri,” said Aras. “From the banks