“Sig pattern match,” Flire says and hands me the system read-out she and Gri and Mesta were huddled over when I came in. I press my fingers together, hard, on either side of the read-out to make sure I won’t drop it.

  “System’s up again?” I say

  “For the last half-hour,” Gri says. She barely comes to my shoulder and the lines on her fleshy face are still shallow. “A couple of click/agent pairs rerouted through backup pathways. The central core is still down for at least another three days. It’s running a lot slower, and Defense is still issuing physical Priority notices for another four hours.”

  Flire says, “Lisha had Gri and Mesta pick up the click whose sig matched the one at the jack-in point. We also contained the agent. They’re in interrogation room 101.”

  The click is naked and blindfolded in the cell, and his hair is white, cropped short. He has fleshy openings on his wrists, the back of his neck, and the base of his spine for hooking up with agents and systems.

  “You have background on him?” I ask.

  Lisha looks at me out of the corner of his eye. I realize it’s all probably on the read-out in my hand.

  “Usual for a click,” Lisha says. “Raised in the compound. Pelan’s his first agent, and her Suit overseers gave them a long-term pairing.”

  “How does Kel feel about that?”

  “He’s a click. He’s not allowed to feel anything about it.”

  “So we have breeding records on Kel going back to the breeding compounds,” I say. “We have a mixer’s report detailing his mixing, conception, and birth?”

  “Just like every other click,” Lisha says.

  Something isn’t right.

  “Relationships with any of the other interrogated clicks?”

  “All cressin clicks, including this one. All tailored to work on the main Defense system hub.”

  “We know who their mixer is?” Clicks are made in batches.

  Lisha pauses. It’s something none of us thought of before. I don’t know why. The connection feels obvious now.

  “There are about six different mixers for the cressin clicks,” he says. “The sig patterns of these ones … it’s a familiar sig combo, I remember it from Ethics. Their mixer is, what, the foreigner—Trist.”

  “Trist mixed all these agents?”

  “I have to look into that. Agents aren’t tailored for specific ops like the clicks were.”

  “Go get Mesta and Gri working on it, see if you can find a way to link them. Run cross-referenced patterns on the Defense database.”

  He walks back out into the hall.

  I step through the bubble filter. The click flinches.

  I squat down a couple of feet from the click. “You know why you’re here, Kel?”

  He cringes from my voice.

  “I do what Pelan says.” He’s shaking.

  A common click defense, blaming actions on an agent, but all it means is that if the agent’s purged, so’s their click.

  “She says Keli told her to do it, in her dreams, in one of those rooms,” Kel says.

  I stand and nearly fall again. My legs are shaky, half-asleep. I need to stop it with the kaj.

  Lisha pops through the filter. Before I can say anything, he pulls me out of the filter.

  “You have to see this,” he says, and he takes me back into the interrogation offices. Flire is there, standing over the main system screen.

  “Narsis,” she murmurs, but she doesn’t get anything else out because I’m already there, pushing past her, gazing at the screen. There are names. Names of mixers, Suits, Council Members, agents, clicks.

  “There are links,” Lisha says. “I programmed the system to look at them, thinking about what you said, about the mixers of both being the same.” He points out Trist, who mixed the cressin clicks, and the woman who mixed Trist, Gell, who mixed eight of fifteen of Keli’s turned agents and eight of the ten council members. One of the council members, unnamed per the Privacy of Elite Act, mixed Trist and Gell, who were both agents first linked to five clicks now bound to eight of the thirteen agents sent into Jabow for Liberation.

  “You say there’s more connections?” I say. “Were we … breeding people specifically for the liberation of Jabow?”

  “I don’t think we were supposed to find these,” Lisha said. “The Council is all the way at the top.” As if I don’t know that, as if I’m too blind to see he’s only skimmed the surface of an elaborately linked … system corrupting our own operations.

  I’m on the cusp of something, but right now these links are merely superficial. It doesn’t mean anything.

  “I have to go back to Jan,” I say.

  I’m shaking, but it’s not for lack of kaj.

  Catalyst: Jan

  She comes back. She has to come back. We are bound together. We are one and the same, she and I, two halves of a whole, click and agent, in the crudest of terms.

  I wait for her, sitting up in my bed, with my back against the wall. And finally, there she is, her form taking up most of the doorway. Her face is hardened into a deep frown, but instead of looking ugly, she looks strong. She, all that I am not.

  “Tell me about the system, about the Keli system, and how it works.”

  “Do you know what you are?” I ask.

  “I’m an interrogator,” she says. “I’m a Suit.”

  “What do interrogators do?”

  “They use any means necessary to get the answers to their questions.”

  She steps closer to me, comes to the end of the bed. She is trying this time, trying to understand more than she has the other times.

  “You were once an agent,” I say. “You’ve been part of a click and agent pair. You became a system.”

  “I became part of a system,” she says, “yes.”

  “Then you weren’t an agent anymore. You became a Suit. How did you become an interrogation Suit?”

  “I was bred for it,” she says. “Being an agent was just passing through one stage to another. All Suits have to go through it. Defense had me pegged for interrogation from my mixing.”

  “Who was your mixer?”

  She hesitates. I can see her thinking it over, trying to make the connections.

  “One of the Council Members. He’s a Council Member now, I know.” She pauses. She sees the connection. “He’s the same one who mixed Gell or Trist, isn’t he?”

  “Why send specifically tailored clicks to the liberation of Jabow?” I say.

  “To retrieve you,” she says, and until that moment, I didn’t think she would phrase it that way. The world has stopped for me since I last saw her.

  “Opposition doesn’t believe in organic tech, but you’re as organic a tech as they come,” she says.

  “So whose weapon am I, Narsis?”

  Opposition: Narsis

  What is Opposition? Have I ever really known? Has anyone ever sat down with me and given me a definition? Opposition has always been just that. They don’t believe in organic tech. They want the resources that we want. But no one says what the Opposition looks like. By the time Liberation parties move into Opposition areas, the Opposition is always gone, pushed out when their mechanized lines break.

  We … We, Keli, tailored people to retrieve Jan.

  Our weapon.

  What is Keli? He is Opposition. What is Opposition? Opposition is us.

  I look at Jan. He reaches out to me, one skinny hand escaping from the bundle of sheets.

  I am numb and trembling, but my fingers twine into his. A burst of green webbing moves across my field of vision.

  We. I. We:

  We, system totality.

  Jan reached for her.

  We.

  She broke. I’m broken! He heard her and he called out and she could not hear.

  We are going to die alone and apart, broken, rent, twisted. We’ll die alone if we don’t come together.

  She does not fear being alone. She fears coming together.

  I fear.

  I deny.

  We, system totality … No.

  No.

  Me. Strong, singular, apart, complete.

  I need no one and nothing. I am no one and nothing.

  We. I. Me.

  I.

  Alone. Singular. Complete.

  “I don’t need you!” I say, and he falls away from me.

  We liberated our own fucking weapon.

  I won’t become one, too.

  I sit down on the end of the bed. I feel like something heavy has been dragged over me. I am watching agents pissing themselves. I am watching myself cutting out their tongues. I’m waking up alone every morning and vomiting in the sink after every interrogation, believing I’m cleansing out the dregs Defense couldn’t get to, Defense couldn’t control. I’m watching agents chew off their own fingers and make alters to their dead clicks for the whim of Council members who can’t live without an Opposition.

  “What are we, Jan?” I say, and it comes out garbled.

  He worms over to me, still wrapped in his sheets, and he tries to touch me again, but I pull away, and I see that he’s crying.

  “We are their monsters,” he says.

  System Totality: Narsis

  “I’m going to be purged, Jan,” I say.

  He is sobbing now, and the sobbing wracks his whole little body. I have never despised what I am, who I am, like I do now because I cannot touch him, I cannot stay. I will leave him like I have left everyone.

  I stand on shaky legs.

  I leave him.

  I leave him and he is still crying, and the nurse watches me go and her eyes are so very, very black.

  I don’t want to go to Defense now. I want to sleep. But when I finally get to my narrow room, Lisha is waiting for me inside. I left my filter on green. The room is dark, but there’s pale orange light coming in from the globes in the hallway. He is sitting on my bed, and he stands when I enter.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  He pulls a blue Defense Priority paper from his coat pocket and hands it to me.

  I open it up. It’s a missive with my tag number on it:

  GREEN THREAD

  “I didn’t know what it meant,” he says, “so I came down here to meet you.”

  “I didn’t send that,” I say.

  “What happened?” he says.

  “I’m going to be purged,” I say.

  “Narsis—”

  I laugh. It comes out a bark. “If I tell you about the case, they’ll purge you too.”

  I sit on the bed, run my hands over my face. With my hands over my face, I don’t see Lisha kneel in front of me, but I feel the pressure of his face against my thigh. When I look down, I see him kneeling on the floor, pressed against me.

  I hesitate. Then I rest my hand, gently, on the back of his neck. I close my eyes and bleeding agents dance behind my lids, clicks with missing fingers. I see Lisha shoving ear mites into agent eardrums. This is our job. This is what we do. Interrogation, body politic.

  And it was all just someone’s joke. It was Us and Opposition, fighting no one but ourselves.

  “Goodnight, Lisha,” I say, and take my hand away from him.

  He stands and walks to the door and leaves the Priority paper on the floor. He does not turn before he leaves. He says nothing. I wonder if he saw the same things when he closed his eyes.

  Defense sends me a summons at dawn.

  My system is functional now and wakes me up, displays the message:

  INTERROGATION ROOM 101 DEFENSE SUMMONS IMMEDIATE

  I am still dressed. I walk down to the interrogation offices and palm open the door. The offices are empty.

  I sit at one of the system consoles and wait. I don’t want to go into room 101. I know I am waiting for someone who is not yet here.

  A shadow appears at the door. One figure. No more Left and Right.

  She is thin and wiry and wears black. Her hair is sandy brown, topping a lean brow, narrow face. She slips into the office and hands me a blue Priority paper.

  It has my tag number on it, identifying the sender:

  I FOUND KELI

  I stare at the paper.

  “I didn’t send that,” I say, but I did. Of course, I did.

  She smiles, and the smile crinkles the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

  “That’s your tag number, Narsis,” she says. “You’ve done well. We’re happy with your progress, but it appears there’s one last obstacle in the linear progression of your education toward becoming a complete communication system, unbound by mechanical interference.”

  She leads me to room 101.

  I expect everyone to be in that room. I expect agents. I expect clicks. I expect Lisha. Flire. Gri. Mesta. I expect all of them.

  But she pushes open the door and there, inside, without a filter, is my twisted little bird.

  Jan sits in the center of the floor, tearing at the organic mesh blindfold on his face, squealing and whimpering. He is naked, all limbs, just a broken stick, nothing substantial.

  “We had to kill the cats, of course,” the woman says. “We locked him down there long enough to form a bond that became a linking system. Rudimentary, incomplete. He was never fully functional.”

  I stare at Jan. I can’t stop staring because I can’t bring myself to move.

  “When we killed the cats, though,” the woman says, “it released him, so to speak. There was a great deal of initial turmoil, of course, hence the imprisonment, but we were confident we could bring him here and get him to bond and train his replacement.”

  I realize I haven’t had any kaj for over four hours. I am not numb, I just have a pounding headache and the sickness in my gut has gotten worse, not better. Some part of me knows I’m supposed to be connecting things, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t because if I do … oh, fuck, oh, fuck if I do …

  The little woman looks at me, smiling a little as Jan whimpers on the floor, tearing at the mesh on his face. I want to tell Jan to stop pulling on it, to leave it alone.

  “I’m Keli,” I say.

  “I know,” the woman says. “We gave you your orders. Now it’s time for you to become more. It’s the kaj that’s held you back. We didn’t anticipate your addiction. You learned how to connect with our systems and sabotage them, Narsis. Jan’s your catalyst, just as the cats were his.”

  “Stop pulling at that thing, Jan,” I say, finally, but he’s still pulling, and I can see blood at the edges of the blindfold where the skin is detaching from his face.

  The woman steps toward me, rests a hand on my arm. “You’re my system, Narsis. My perfect system. Who do you think drew together all those invisible system strings and tugged those agents into doing Opposition work?”

  Me. I did it. Me.

  I am afraid of needles, of myself, of jack-in knives. I wear steel-toed boots. Glass ceilings. Green thread.

  “Narsis?”

  I am a weapon of the Opposition. I am our weapon. I turned the same agents I interrogated for turning. I’m as mad as Jan. A mad little bird am I.

  “You’ll never understand the nature of our conflict,” the woman says, and when she smiles, I see my own face, the face of an interrogator, she with a license to question, to hurt.

  I hear Jan scream. A long, long scream that turns into a howl. He has pulled the mesh off his face. He’s pulled the skin of his face off with it.

  He holds his face in the palm of his hand.

  I want to burn this woman and watch the country smoke. I want to unfurl the world and repaint it.

  I can do none of those things.

  I walk to Jan’s tortured body. Blood oozes from his skinned face. He’s missing bits of his eyelids.

  I pick him up.

  “What are you doing?” the woman says.

  “Finishing,” I say.

  The woman smiles.

  I carry Jan. He is not heavy. The woman does not follow us. I walk and walk, into the belly of the Defense compound and out, down the long curl of walkway into the Kettering compound. We go through a filter, but Jan is listless, and he is oblivious to the red welts that begin spiraling out across his torso, down the lengths of his arms; his body’s reaction to organic tech.

  I walk past the vast tower of the compound, up to the spiral of residences on the hill, to Jan’s prison. The gate is open. The nurse is gone.

  Jan has his hands curled up into fists. One fistful of my hair, the other fistful of my coat.

  I take him to the bathroom and draw lukewarm water into the bath. His blood is on my collar, my face.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t know what for. What could Jan be sorry for? We were made. We did not create ourselves.

  The loss was mine, though. I could have joined him. If we became our own system when he reached for me, we could have fought them. But that would mean giving up myself. I would rather destroy the world than myself.

  When the tub is almost full I turn off the water and place him in the tub. Water sloshes over the lip.

  He closes what he has left of his eyelids and his body lies in the water, languid. He does not struggle against me. He does not question me.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  And I say, “I’m sorry they killed the cats.”

  I press him gently beneath the water. One hand on his chest, the other on his head, and he opens the bloody bits of the eyelids then, and the big blue-green eyes stare up at me from the shimmering surface of the water. Air bubbles leave his mouth, his nostrils. We stare at one another through the surface of the water. Me above, him below.

  A system, apart.

  He does not struggle much. He has no strength left to struggle.

  I leave the drowned body in the tub and walk out into the front garden, back to the gate. From there I stare out at the Kettering compound. The woman will come for me, her perfect system, without Jan. She will take me off the kaj and I’ll be able to feel everything, see everything, be everything, then. My twisted bird is dead, leaving me and the rest of this twisted world.

  I take the silver jack-in knife from the inside pocket of my coat, the one Lisha wanted me to send for printing. I go back to Jan’s body because there is nowhere else to go.