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All this, and no sign of her hand. She fixed the stranger with a stare.

The stranger wasn’t stupid. “It was infected,” it said simply. “That wasn’t just a cut you took. The nano-rot introduced by your wound was drawn to the faulty components in your hand. I removed it as a precaution.”

Nissaea narrowed her eyes at it. In full light, its features possessed the same patchwork sense of balance she had noted before, human and machine parts alternating with each other as though they were being weighed against each other. “If you’re a scrap surgeon,” she said, “what were you doing abandoned like a slab of meat gone bad?” Surreptitiously, she tensed and untensed the muscles of her afflicted leg. The cut still throbbed distantly, but otherwise most of the pain was gone.

Even a half-competent surgeon was usually valued enough that some circle would retain them. “Scrap surgeon” was a derogatory term, but the stranger showed no sign of offense. “I was always there,” it said in a voice tinged with sadness. It raised its chin, considered her, then shook its head.

Maybe its former circle had gotten rid of it because its mind wasn’t all there. Still, she raised her wrist, steeling herself, and inspected the amputation. A very clean job, the bone sawed and the stump capped with a bright green-gold metal. She had a brief phantom sensation of locked fingers, but that was old news. “Thank you,” she said. The truth was that she couldn’t afford work this good.

“I would have harvested a prosthesis for you already,” it added, “but I didn’t want to leave you unattended in case the fever got worse.”

Nissaea drew her breath in, not sure she had understood correctly. “I can’t pay—”

“It’s not a question of payment,” it said. “I want—” Its voice became unexpectedly scratchy on
want.
“I want a roof.”

“You mean sponsorship into a circle,” Nissaea said after she parsed the archaic word. She made herself look at it straight-on. “This is terrible recompense, but I can’t give you that. I’m not a circle-breaker, so the enforcers won’t shoot me, but my circle revoked my membership. I don’t have any connections.”

Looking into the stranger’s mismatched eyes told her only that its desire was real, but why wouldn’t it be? Even scavengers like Nissaea, even fences and circuit-cutters belonged to circles. It was the order of things.

“You gave me water and helped me out of the dark,” it said. “You didn’t have to do either. It’s not a circle’s companionship I want. It’s yours.”

She gentled her voice. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. My name is Nissaea-of-the-Slant.” She’d been withholding it all this time, since you didn’t casually introduce your name-chant to a stranger, but it had probably saved her life and she didn’t see any point in being coy. “What should I call you?”

“I never needed a name before,” it said.

Did it come from one of the more esoteric circles where people called each other by numbers? There were a few of those. “Well, you could pick something you like?” she suggested.

“Muhad,” it said after a moment. “I don’t have a chant.”

“Muhad,” she said, being as careful with the name as she would with a delicate piece of jewelry. “Have I got it right?”

She was rewarded by Muhad’s smile, a curve made beautiful rather than perfect by its asymmetry, one side of the mouth a nudge higher than the other.
Oh, do that again,
she thought in spite of herself.

“Of course it’s right,” Muhad said, shyly. It would have been flirtatious coming from anyone else. Its gaze went to Nissaea’s stump. “I meant it, about a hand. You shouldn’t go without one.” It paused, suddenly uncertain. “Unless you wanted a different appendage?”

Pincers, tentacles, integrated guns . . . Nissaea had never been attracted to the more exotic options, which cost more anyway. “No,” she said hastily. “Just a hand. If I can find a compatible one without having to raid a parts bank.” Not that they’d have any luck doing that. They’d be safer picking a fight directly with the Watch.

“I can do that,” Muhad said. “I know of a lode in the deep places, now that you are well enough to travel.” It spoke as tranquilly as if it had made a simple statement of arithmetic, were it not for the shadow in its eyes.

“Then I’ll need supplies,” Nissaea said. “I’m out of confounders. I’m not going out without any.” She didn’t ask what Muhad meant by the “deep places,” and didn’t want to know until the last possible moment. There was no way such a harvest could be legal, even by the undercircles’ codes. But she found that she cared less and less. She’d followed the codes and worked hard at her profession, only to be tossed out like scrap. At this point, she might as well look out for herself and the one person who had showed her kindness.

Few people gave Nissaea so much as a pitying look when she showed up with a missing hand, even the ones who recognized her. Instead, they ignored her pointedly. Muhad drew more attention, although Nissaea stood protectively near it at all times. She knew they couldn’t linger. The local undercircles didn’t keep formal registries the way the high circles did, but the stranger’s presence would be marked, and sooner or later someone would be sent to investigate. Sideways Hano did attempt to draw Muhad into a discussion of heterodoxies in Chamberish theology when Nissaea was buying them grub fritters, but he did that to everyone, and after several rambling lectures, even he figured out that Muhad’s polite bewilderment wasn’t faked.

Getting together supplies didn’t take long, mainly because Nissaea had been flat broke before and she was still flat broke now. But they obtained confounders and a few other basics because Muhad matter-of-factly volunteered to have the decorative inlay work on its face removed. The angry-looking scar left behind saddened Nissaea. Silently, she promised to make it up to Muhad.

One of the things that Nissaea insisted on was shoes for Muhad. They didn’t fit very well. The soles were worn thin and the canvas looked all but translucent, and not in the aesthetic way either. Muhad didn’t seem to mind, however.

Nissaea’s nerves finally gave out when they slipped down into the mazeways. She asked about the lode: Would it be underwater? Flooded with acid? Require special breathing apparatus or hacked frequency keys? These were all things she should have asked before they went shopping, except for the fact that they couldn’t afford specialized equipment anyway. Even when she’d been in good standing with Addit’s circle, she’d only ever touched that kind of thing on loan, for particular assignments.

At last Muhad said, after a series of patient reassurances, “Nothing down there will harm you, Nissaea-of-the-Slant. I don’t think there’s even much to trip on.”

Nissaea opened her mouth to protest, then caught Muhad’s almost-smile and realized she was being teased.

They left for the lode during nighttime. The city’s cycles were signaled along the major thoroughfares by clocklights that changed color from morning pink to noon gold to alluring evening blue. According to a past circle-sister, the color scheme mimicked that of the original planet’s skies, something that reproductions of very old paintings and photographs suggested might have some basis in fact. Every few years one or another of the high circles petitioned to have the colors reprogrammed to match their livery (undercircles didn’t bother with livery), and the rest of the high circles quashed the notion. Nissaea wouldn’t have minded the variety, but she didn’t get a say. Besides, tonight’s dim blue glow was pretty enough.

The light faded behind them as they entered the mazeways beneath the statue called Embracing Birds. One of Nissaea’s former circle-kin stood guard in the hollows by the gate, collecting the toll. He was a cadaverous man, each rib emphasized by a pitted metal stripe, and his leg was ribbon-thin all the way up to the joint at his hip. A clear covering exposed the organs of his torso, but Nissaea had seen stranger things than a man’s inner workings.

“You know the toll,” the man said in a voice like stone scraped thin. The toll would be higher now that she was an independent.

In answer, Nissaea made an abbreviated gesture of respect and pressed her palm twice against his, once for herself and once for Muhad. There was a tiny beep as the transaction went through. She raised her eyebrows at the man, wondering if he would make trouble for her.

She was lucky, or in any case, not unluckier than she already had been for the last few days. The man shook his head, although the gleam in his eye suggested that he was thinking of reporting her and Muhad. Well, she could deal with that later. She nodded to Muhad, and they slipped into the mazeways together.

The transition into the mazeways always caused Nissaea’s breath to stutter in her lungs even after all these years. Great whippy tendrils of fiber and hungry iron-jawed mouths grew from the gate’s throat, slick with the dew of anticipated carrion. They were careful to walk precisely down the middle of the passage, so as not to attract the tendrils’ attention.

After years of being the one handling the navigation, Nissaea was dismayed to discover how rapidly she got lost following Muhad. If she hadn’t known better, she would have suspected that the mazeways had reshuffled themselves like a cheater’s hand of cards, except she’d never known them to do so with such haste. She paid attention to the scissored shadows, the malevolent gleam of fetal sensors, the grit beneath her feet the way she hadn’t since she was a small child clinging to her sister’s hand.

She couldn’t help wondering if they would run into another corpse, whether one neatly cracked open like the last one, or smashed into stains. It took an effort to make herself breathe evenly instead of hyperventilating. But the only human reek was her own rank sweat. Even Muhad, perhaps because its modifications were more extensive than her own, smelled only of pale salt.

Between one passage (paint peeling away like butterflies in transition, the occasional white mass that
oozed
when you didn’t look at it directly) and the next (a blast of acrid vapor from a hole in a pipe, rattling as of librarian lizards realphabetizing their movements), they arrived in a vast pulsing garden of hands. Nissaea had never seen anything like it before. She bet that even the high circles’ harvesters hadn’t seen anything like it in generations, either.

A braidweave splendor of limbs made up the walls. Even the floor pulsed with rhythmic lights. Nissaea was tempted to close her eyes and sink into the pattern, deeper, deeper, until nothing was left of song and synapse except a dross of decaying static. Instead, she was captivated by the limbs and, more importantly, the hands that sprouted from them.

They weren’t all hands, although some were. Great gun muzzles with their barrels pointing obsessively at her heart; you’d need to replace the entire arm with a specialized rig to bear that kind of weight. The ever-popular tentacles, except Nissaea had never seen any with integrated syringes up close before; some kind of medical appendage, or perhaps intended for drug-fests? Claws in a variety of configurations and lengths, some jewel-tipped and some bladed. Of the most interest to Nissaea were the quotidian prostheses that resembled ordinary human hands if not for the exacting angles, the unsoft curves.

“Muhad,” Nissaea said wonderingly, “you’re
rich.
” Aside from the matter of finding a reliable fence, and paying protection money, and organizing shipments, and—well. She was certain Muhad didn’t have any of those things set up, or it wouldn’t have been lying in the mazeways having given up all will to fight.

“It has nothing to do with wealth,” Muhad said absently. “Nissaea-of-the-Slant, which one do you want?”

Tempting though it was to linger over the choices, Nissaea had already picked one out. She pointed to a slender hand of dull blue-silver, not a bad match for her born-hand, and—she hoped—not too greedy. It was, however, beautifully articulated and its knuckles were ringed by shimmering bands. “What do you think of that one?” she asked.

Muhad, apparently, had no problems walking right up to the wall of limbs. They stirred and several of them beeped disharmoniously, but nothing disastrous happened. Muhad tapped the hand’s joints, squeezed it, ran its fingers over the sleek surfaces, frowned thoughtfully. “It will serve you well,” it said. “Most of them would.”

They set up the harvesting equipment. Simple enough: the small reinforced tank and its clear pink fluid, the selection of screwdrivers, the saws, the neural stimulators to ensure that the hand’s internals didn’t sputter dead during the transfer. Oddly, for all Muhad’s deftness, it didn’t seem to have any experience with the knifework of harvesting. Nissaea ended up doing most of it, although it was more soothing than she would have expected to have a companion while listening for the Watch, or carrion maws, or other mazeway hazards.

This will be my hand,
she thought. A freshly harvested hand from the richest imaginable lode, a hand she had picked out herself. The luxury was inconceivable.

One by one they freed the connectors and the sensory hookups, and the fingers clenched slightly as Nissaea eased the hand from its former home. She weighed it in her born-hand for a second, marveling that its weight was so perfect: not too heavy, not too light.

“I don’t know of a safe place for the operation,” Nissaea said at last, her voice hushed.

“This is safe enough,” Muhad said. “I hear no footsteps.”

Nissaea listened again, just in case, but all she heard was the low thrum of the confounders and the occasional slithering friction of tubes crossing tubes. “We didn’t purchase anesthetic,” she said after a juddery pause. While she could survive a little pain, the moment of hookup could be agonizing.

“We won’t need it,” Muhad said. “We can use needles.”

Acupuncture? Well, she knew it worked, and it wasn’t improbable that a surgeon would know the techniques. Nissaea inhaled, then said, “What should I do?”

Muhad took her shoulder and steered her, not ungently, toward the center of the chamber. “Sit,” it said. Nissaea sat. After a moment, she heard Muhad humming to itself, a sequence of notes at the threshold of melody. It picked up the snippers and moved among the hands, harvesting over a dozen fine wires. Each was cut to precisely the same length, with the tips sharply angled. The makeshift needles gleamed tooth-hungry in the partial dark.