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cupped in her hands.
    It was the last of the bars made by the colonists of Constantine before they were evicted from Bezer’ej. The scant lather smelled faintly of lavender and lemon oil; but there were no lemon trees left now. The biobarrier that had kept the colony enclosed in a cocoon of terrestrial conditions had gone, and the alien wilderness of Bezer’ej had reclaimed the island.
    It didn’t matter. She knew how to make more soap. But it was another symbol of how Earth was slipping further away.Nearly eighty years adrift from home, everyone she knew and served with now dead, and her own body so fundamentally changed at the cellular level that she could survive in space without a suit, how much further could it slip?
    She’d almost stopped noticing the play of bioluminescence in her hands. Violet light shimmered in her fingertips and vanished again, a legacy of one brief foray into the world of the bezeri. Aras had never picked up the photophore genes, even after so many years of contact; she couldn’t work out why she had.
    You slipped. You slipped right across the line. You’re on the wess’har side now. Or maybe the Eqbas. Not human, anyway.
    There was more than just 10,000 years of rapid evolutionary separation between the two kinds of wess’har. They didn’t even think the same way sometimes. But wess’har identity was defined by what you did, not what you thought.
    â€œBreakfast!” Ade called.
    â€œOkay,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
    She soaped herself. Apart from the lights and a lack of body hair and a little more muscle—and she had always been fit—her body looked much the same as it had been when she was a regular human. She made a point of checking daily. The claws had come and gone, and nothing truly and visibly alien had emerged. C’naatat had carried out minimal tinkering: it hadn’t radically reshaped her appearance as it had Aras’s. What went on beneath the skin, though, was another matter, and that still disturbed her at times because she saw the color spectrum of a wess’har, and the images of heat in darkness, and sensed the world in ways that reminded her she was no longer fully human.
    She’d survived in conditions that only bacteria and lichens seemed to be able to tolerate. Deep space. What would happen at the end of time? The bloody thing kept you alive for centuries, maybe millennia.
    How am I going to die?
    She’d never worried much about that as a normal, fragile human being, even in a job where she risked being shot each time she went out on the streets.
    But you got the gene bank. You did it. Even if bloody Perault conned you, even if that was just a ruse to get you out here, you did it. Go dance on her grave sometime.
    But she wouldn’t be going back to Earth to do any dancing. C’naatat had to stay here.
    Above the steady rain of water, she could hear Aras and Ade outside in the main room, talking in subdued voices punctuated by the occasional chink of glass bowls. They weren’t happy. She didn’t need to hear that: she could smell it.
    Go and deal with it.
    Shan wrung the water from her hair, toweled herself dry, and pulled on the remnant of her uniform. The brown riggers’ boots didn’t go with the black pants or jacket, but that was all she had now, and nobody out here cared if she was wearing the wrong uniform order.
    Maybe Ade did. He still wore his Royal Marines’ rig, minus the badges of rank. He gave her a nervous smile and indicated the plate set out for her.
    â€œBeans,” he said. “Did my best with the sauce.”
    There was a limit to what you could achieve with soy beans, tomato pulp and the local food crops, but Ade had pushed the envelope. He was a resourceful if eccentric cook. The Corps had taught him how to live off the land, so making do with a limited larder was no great challenge.
    â€œGreat.” Shan uncovered something black and