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it was what you were doing, Nissaea-of-the-Slant, when you came into the darkness. The harvest.”
    I’m missing something obvious. “Yes,” she said, “but we’re harvesting from the city. We don’t—”
    Except people had been turning up dead, they’d both seen it, and you could cut someone apart for anything you had the scalpel-skill to excise, like feet. Human feet.
    Nausea rose up in Nissaea’s throat, and she turned away before Muhad could see the revulsion in her eyes.
    “People harvest the city,” Muhad said, sounding terribly calm. “That’s how we’ve been talking to each other all this time. You became more like us, so we thought you wanted us to become more like you.”
    “Become more like us what,” Nissaea said inflectionlessly, remembering how she had lain with it.
    “I wasn’t born human,” Muhad said softly, “and I didn’t have eyes that you would recognize as eyes, or feet either. I had silicon thoughts and a piezoelectric heartbeat. They cut pieces of me out so that I could be given human implants the way that you were given city implants.”
    Nissaea stood up. It tensed, expecting her to strike it. You are so beautiful, she thought, grieving; thought, too, of the way it had cried out and shuddered beneath her. Its heart had sounded wholly human, afterward.
    Her mind was working. “How long has this been going on?” she asked. She hadn’t been able to distinguish Muhad from an ordinary human. Only the feet had given it away.
    It told her. The city was very old, she had known that. She hadn’t, however, realized just how old it was, or how alien.
    Then she asked how many of its kindred there were, and it told her that, too.
    Mirror-nature : something she’d heard about from a drunk woman once. The city that responded to its inhabitants by changing itself. In more ways than they’d realized, apparently.
    “One more question,” she said, still looking down at Muhad. “If the city—if your people—went through so much trouble to make you like this, why did they just abandon you in the mazeways afterward?”
    Muhad shivered and made itself hold her gaze. “Humans abandon their own all the time,” it said quietly. “If this isn’t what you wanted us to understand about you, why do you do it so often?”
    Nissaea bit her lip, hard. Then she knelt and laid her hands on Muhad’s shoulders. In times past she would have thought only of warning someone, her undercircle if no one else, but now she didn’t think it mattered. She was free of debts; what did she care who was harvesting whom? “Why do we do it indeed,” she murmured, and kissed Muhad deeply. Its mouth was warmly yielding. “You’ve already cut my heart out anyway.”
    Around them, the maimed city’s hands grabbed at each other and scratched cryptic shapes into the air as the two of them sank down in each other’s arms once more, human and unhuman entwined.

A Cold Heart
    Tobias S. Buckell
    In the mining facility’s automated sickbay she’d put her metal hand on your chest and said, “I’m sorry.” The starry glinting fragments of ice and debris bounced around the portholes. Twinkling like stars, but shaken loose of their spots in the dark vacuum.
    They shot her hand, but she had pushed the raiders right back off her claim. The asteroid was still bagged and tagged as her own to prospect. You never told her they were all dead now, mere bloodstains on the corridors of Ceres, but one imagines she suspects as much.
    “I have a cold hand, but you have a cold heart,” she had said. “I can’t love a cold heart.”
    And it’s true.
    Strange place to part ways, but she’s been thinking about it for a while. Susan knows her path.
    “You’ll keep hunting for your memories?” she asks. “That corporate data fence?”
    You nod. “I’ll have more time on my hands.”
    It’s a strange thing to image a whole brain down to the quantum level. Crack a person apart and bolt stronger skeletal system into him.