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length, with the tips sharply angled. The makeshift needles gleamed tooth-hungry in the partial dark.
    “Rest your stump on your knee, tendons facing down,” Muhad said then, and Nissaea complied. She admitted to curiosity: there were different schools of acupuncture in Contemplating Orthodoxy, and she had heard that the disruptions caused by the implants, or even by the city’s very nature, had altered the map of meridians that the original settlers had brought with them.
    One by one Muhad inserted the needles. It had a delicate touch, and if any of the needles penetrated far below the surface of her skin, Nissaea couldn’t tell. Only partway through did she notice an almost pleasing numbness, and the fact that her arm was now locked in place.
    “I’d tell you to relax, but—” Muhad said, not without irony. It stroked her unaffected arm once, twice. Then it brought the harvested hand out of the tank where it had spent so little time, toweled down the pink dripping fluid, and connected up wires and vessels with a briskness that would have been surprising if Nissaea had still been capable of surprise.
    “I’m relaxing,” Nissaea lied.
    Muhad’s sudden grin flashed at her. She smiled back reflexively. Muhad pressed some cluster of nerves without warning and slammed the hand into place. She cried out as the hand activated. It was like a white spiked star in the back of her brain, and then the pain dwindled and she opened and closed its fingers, giddy with relief. “Oh,” she said articulately, and then, after she had a chance to stare dazedly at the fingers’ delicately molded tips, the responsive joints, “Thank you.”
    It seemed as tongue-tied as she was. First it ducked its head as it removed all the needles. Then, hesitantly, it reached down, its own hand hovering over her newly attached one. It flinched away at the last second.
    The absurdity of the situation struck Nissaea. Who knew how late into the night it was, and here they were surrounded by a garden of hands, with tools pitifully inadequate to harvest them all. She couldn’t think of any sustainable way to derive benefit from the lode, never mind that it was Muhad’s find and not hers. Even though she should have been calculating matters of profit and survival, all she could do was look into Muhad’s eyes, suddenly petal-soft. Her pulse beat loudly in her ears as she brought her palm up to meet Muhad’s. Its breath caught.
    “Tell me,” Nissaea said, meaning it, “what is it that you want?”
    She didn’t care that she still had no idea what offense would cause a scrap surgeon to be expelled from its home circle, or that it made no sense for Muhad to be going around like a vagabond when it had casual access to this kind of wealth. All she saw was the way it met her eyes, as though she were the only lamp in a world of shadows.
    We could be found here tomorrow morning all carved up, she thought; but that didn’t matter either.
    Muhad’s answer didn’t come in words, which wasn’t unexpected. It drew Nissaea down above it, pausing midway so they could arrange their limbs so they didn’t gouge each other with elbows and knees. Nissaea had slept with circle-kin in years past, but it had been a lonely year since she had known another’s embrace. Muhad’s mouth was, if anything, hungrier than hers, and at the same time, she was aware of its hands reaching up to dig into her spine so hard it hurt, if pain ever felt this close to breathless joy. She knew she must be pressing the breath out of it, and her weight was stamping the pattern of its joins into her skin, metal and glass and plastic riveted to flesh, map begetting map.
    Its lips parted wide as they each drew back from the kiss, and it breathed something that might have been her name. Nissaea resumed the kiss before it could say anything else. “Shh,” she said, desperate and happy and incoherent with the desire not to know more than she knew right that moment, “don’t, don’t