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talk, don’t.” And then she began to undress it.
    They slept afterward, or anyway she did. Her dreams were full of organs made of puzzle pieces, or puzzle pieces made of organs: here a tessellated liver, there a lung made of dodecahedral crystals.
    Nissaea woke parched. Muhad had pillowed its head on her shoulder, and her arm had fallen asleep. For a long moment Nissaea admired its eyelashes, the long curving sweep of them, then eased its head to the floor.
    She stretched, massaging the tingling arm, then padded over to their supplies and treated herself to a few careful sips of water. It was lukewarm, but tasted sweet.
    Then she returned to Muhad’s side. Its shift was a crumpled pile, its shoes on opposite sides of the chamber, and it was, unclothed, almost a work of art. Some warning whispered at her awareness, but she was too busy smiling at its slim curves—it was not quite angular enough to be a man, but too narrow to be an adult woman—to pay it heed at first.
    Nissaea didn’t have any illusions about her own beauty, although there had been advantages to being plain when she belonged to an undercircle. She did, however, appreciate beauty in others—who didn’t?—and she looked admiringly at Muhad now that they weren’t clutching each other in the heat of hunger. Whoever had done its modifications had cared very much about aesthetics, about gradations of color and nuances of luster. The diagnostic lights that wound around its torso, for instance, like twin subtle snakes.
    She drew a hand across its skin and paused at its hip. Muhad sighed in its sleep, mouth curving up. Slowly, she walked her fingers down its thigh, then to the artificial joint at the knee, and all the way down to—
    That was odd. Nissaea frowned at the two human feet. She didn’t expect one to be artificial; Muhad hadn’t been designed around that kind of petty symmetry. But something about the feet seemed wrong. She scooted over and peered at them.
    Muhad’s feet didn’t match. She would have expected some deformity to be the issue, but the fact was that both were perfectly normal feet, just different from each other. One was significantly longer than the other, and the other had broader, stubbier toes, and a different skeletal structure. She hadn’t noticed before because people looked at faces and sometimes hands, but feet?
    Her heart went cold. She examined both feet more closely, not sure what she was looking for. Two scars caught her attention. The first ringed an ankle, so faint that she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been checking for something like it. She wasn’t positive she’d find another on the other leg, but there it was, circling the calf about a third of the way up to the knee. It was pale, with a clumsy jagged mark, as though the surgeon had been careless with the stitches.
    She crawled away, almost to the wall, then hugged her knees to her, willing herself to interpret the evidence. Instead, she started breathing to the clap-slither rhythm of the hands.
    “Nissaea-of-the-Slant,” Muhad said. Its eyes had opened, and it rolled over, then sat up. It had spoken her name like a prayer, but this time the prayer was a desperate one. “Are you hurting?”
    “Not the way you think,” Nissaea said. “Your feet, Muhad. What happened to your feet?”
    I should leave, she thought, but she couldn’t bear to, not yet.
    “My born-feet were taken away from me,” Muhad said, very steadily. Then, as if it were aware of the inadequacy of this explanation, it added, “It didn’t hurt.”
    She knew she would regret asking this, especially since all she could see in her mind’s eye was the corpse back-bent, splayed, sterile of smell. “Why would you replace human feet with human feet?” Especially since the last regenerative tanks had run out generations ago. You couldn’t grow human parts that way anymore.
    “Because it’s always the harvest,” Muhad said. “Because it’s what we learned people do. Because