Pol felt a rush of fear-based adrenaline, but no one was watching him; no one was looking at him at all. Gyde’s head was tilted, his eyes half-lidded, listening to the dialogue.

“I’d know a Silver,” another Bronze agreed, “even with more than that missing! But who would do such a thing? In one of our own cities? Not even in battle!”

“Maybe he did something wrong,” a quiet voice said. Pol hazarded a glance. The speaker was a tall Bronze he’d seen before—hulking, mean-looking. His voice was dull with import.

The table went silent. “Doing something wrong” could easily be fatal. It was, in fact, not a very smart thing to even talk about it. The Bronze from Saradena looked around apprehensively. He saw Gyde and Pol watching him and paled. He began carving his steak.

“Not decapitated,” Gyde said calmly but loudly. “Not by the state.”

Gyde turned back in his chair and lifted the bare ridge above his eyes at Pol, as if to say, Look how I’m playing these children.

“That’s right,” someone at the next table ventured, emboldened now. “If he’d done something wrong he would have disappeared, not been found carved up like that. It must have been a private citizen who did it—a murderer, a lunatic.”

Pol slammed his hand down on the table with a painful bang. “Be silent!”

The Bronzies at the next table fell into a mute attentiveness to their food and, after a show of eating, rapidly dispersed back to their cubbyholes.

Pol’s plate came. Gyde leaned forward thoughtfully, chin on his hand. He was studying Pol with that damned inscrutable expression. His eyes were a soft sea green at the moment, but if you looked closer you could see the steel in them, the glint of a spear, even when he was relaxed.

Pol had the urge to say something, to justify what he’d just done, something like “they shouldn’t talk that way about the state” or “I don’t like that kind of talk while I’m eating.” But wisely, he said nothing.

“You ever heard about that case?” Gyde asked slowly. “A decapitated Silver? You were in Saradena, weren’t you? Before you were assigned here?”

“Briefly. On leave. And no, I never heard of it.” The knife was heavy as Pol picked it up to cut his meat.

“You’d get a lot of merits solving a case like that.”

Pol shifted his eyes to his partner in a cold, lazy stare. He brought the dripping meat to his mouth. “It’s in Saradena.”

“I know. Don’t they have the luck of the gods.”

“Should be some decent merits on our new case.”

“Yes,” Gyde said, brightening. “He’s been elevated to a full-blown state terrorist, our man. I want to solve this one quickly. Let’s put a few days on it starting now, drop everything else. After lunch we’ll sit down and make a list of all the angles.”

After lunch. There was still a long afternoon stretching ahead. Pol felt as though his mind were cracking in two. He really ought to sit through it, but he honestly didn’t think he could, and there was that darkening cheek to administer to.

“I thought I’d do some research after lunch. For an hour or two. We should make sure we have all the facts before we lay down a strategy.”

Gyde’s weathered, hairless forehead pursed into lines like those the tide leaves in sand. “Research?”

“At the Archives.”

The lines deepened. Pol felt Gyde’s eyes bearing into him, but his partner didn’t comment.

Pol managed to catch one of the Silver buses, its thick leather and cranked-up heat a welcome respite from the cold. It dropped him off at the gymnasium on the Silver grounds, the pool and spa visible and empty through the large glass panes. Inside, only a few recuperating wounded, their bare flesh pink from steam, were using the facilities. Outside, a unit of young Silvers, perhaps ten or eleven years old, was practicing hand-to-hand wrestling. Their Iron caretakers waited patiently to one side while Silver instructors gave the lesson. The children wore the woolen one-piece garments that fit them like a second skin. Similar garments were worn under the uniforms of Silvers in battle. Pol had one under his own black detective’s uniform. It was one of the many small details that distinguished a Silver from the other classes. Even warmth was a privilege of rank. Not that anyone was ever truly warm in Centalia.

The wrestling lesson was a small knot of activity on the endless gray parade grounds of the Silver compound. The dormitories were on either side, massive and silent in the dim afternoon light. There were few Silvers in residence this month. A big offensive push was going on over at the border with Mesatona, and most of the soldiers were in the field. Only the children and the older ones, like Gyde, reassigned to state jobs, still haunted the grounds. The old Silvers moved up the steps and across the frosty soil like shadows when it got this quiet, their eyes on distant blood-soaked battles they could no longer join.

And then there was Pol.

It began to hail in great icy lumps. He quickened his pace. He had two rooms on the third floor of building fourteen. The rooms were tall and elegant, the furnishings spartan, and there was no lock on the door. He had found a way around that. He went into his bathroom, taking along a small chair, and propped it against the handle. Alone at last.

His craggy face was bleak in the light that came in from the small window. He turned on the overhead. It made him look bloodless. He leaned forward, hands on the sink, staring into the mirror.

He’d been sweating, and he must have touched himself unconsciously. The blue at his temples was smeared.

He turned on the tap, waited for it to run hot. He took a few of the dark paper sheaves stored by the commode and wiped his temples. The light blue makeup, almost the same shade as his eyes, came off, staining black against the rough paper. He wiped again, wetting the paper, making sure he got it all. Then he flushed the paper down the commode. He splashed water on his face and poured it over his short blond hair (there was just a trace of black at the roots; he’d have to dye it again tomorrow night). He stuck his head fully under the spigot, wishing he could disappear in the flow.

Pol 137 was the name of the dead Silver in Saradena whose head and hands were never found.

He soaked a cloth with hot water and wrapped it around his entire face, holding it tight. He sat down on the commode and leaned back, waiting for the heat to soften his skin. With all this shaving, he was getting noticeably raw.

Silvers did not have facial hair or eyebrows.

There are aliens among us.

If only he could remember.

The darkness of the impostor of Pol 137 was more than skin deep, ran deeper than the hair on his face that he shaved or the hair on his head that he dyed. There was a black chasm in his mind, a schism that was torment to try to breach. He probed at that place now, the way a tongue probes at a painful tooth, only because he must, because he was in danger. That place was like a hole in reality. He could, with effort, take himself to the far side of that hole, that schism. And what he glimpsed there had a logic that he wouldn’t expect madness to have. And yet the logic of “back there”—that far side of the chasm—was not consistent with the logic of “here,” this side. And so it broke down; it all broke down. His memories fractured and fell apart. If he tried too hard and for too long he tottered on the brink of falling permanently into that hole and never coming out.

It was much more functional to not go there. And functional was what mattered. He had to have his wits about him at all times. But still, he knew that schism for what it was: a wound. He’d had a head injury in battle; that was the superficial cause. He had once believed that was all there was to it. Now he wasn’t so sure.

The first thing he remembered with certainty was wandering around in the gray blasted plains of a battlefield in utter confusion and terror. That was how Marcus had found him—greedy, slobbery Marcus. The merchant had been driving across the war zone during a ceasefire, his truck full of black-market goods.