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stayed quiet; it was working for me.
    “Let’s go get some decent food,” he said. “I think we’d both be better for it.” He stood up and walked into his bedroom.
    I got as far as the barstool side of the kitchen before I realized the bias-cut green dress and difficult stockings I was planning to put on belonged to a woman seventy years ago. I had darned the silk where it wore thin at the toes and could feel, on the backs of my knees, how they bagged before synthetics. I don’t wear nylons often. It’s too hot, and my legs are dark enough. But they’ve always been nylon. Celeste was mixing into me.
    I faced Phil’s icebox. No, his fridge, hinged properly now. But the sharp edge of the counter bit into the palms of my hands, and my fingertips went cold with the effort of not trailing after him. I wanted him here to hold me, lock me down, grip my wavering reality in his big hands and bend it into sense.
    Phil hit the light switch on the way out of his bedroom and started reeling the blinds over the glass patio doors. “Saves on the A/C,” he explained.
    “I gotta go,” I said. “Make whoever do whatever and get me back to Phoenix. I need to stop and think this through.”
    “It’s a little late for that.”
    “What do you mean ‘a little late’?”
    “The memories are going to keep coming back, Ren. You can’t stop them. The best you can do is let me show you how to organize the lifetimes of personal information you’ll be getting. And how to graze the shared memory you have access to now. And how to put the two together and start your own meddlework.”
    “Until I fade away altogether under Celeste?”
    “Until it all settles out.”
    There were no lines in the skin above his eyebrows, no sign of worry or concern, just information, but he came to stand where I was milking the Formica.
    “You’re not an impulsive person,” he said. “You knew you could take your time to think this over. You wanted to experiment with it—watch me meddle, learn more about us.” A strange tenderness turned his voice liquid. “But you took the spike last night without waiting for any of that.” His words slipped over my shoulders like bathwater. “You already had some meddlework in mind, didn’t you?”
    I turned to look at him. “Did you know you can drown someone in two inches of water?”
    The one wild eyebrow shot up, then dove. Surprised, then angry. “You’ve never drowned anyone.”
    “No, I haven’t. But how do you know that? How could you know what I am? Can you even see me through all the Celeste hanging over me?”
    “I’m not the only one looking.” There was no morning softness, no sluggishness left to his face. My bathtub iced over.
    But I didn’t care. Whatever else he was going to tell me I was or wasn’t, I knew for plain fact I wasn’t needy. I wasn’t helpless or pathetic or wanting protection and a big strong man to save me. I might be in over my head, but I wasn’t wasting air shouting for the lifeguard. And I wasn’t giving up my secrets. “You told me you see patterns,” I said. “That your whole niceness mafia is based on changing people by knowing what triggers them and orchestrating those triggers, by manipulating them to be better, right?”
    “To do better; being better sort of comes along naturally.”
    “How?”
    “I explained that, Ren. We each draw from lifetimes of wisdom and have access to a collective memory that houses almost every fact about anyone. We know how to make someone trust us, we know how to find a memory that will cause gratification. We manipulate and suggest.”
    “Then nothing can surprise you? Ever?”
    “You have.”
    I leaned against the corridor wall. Phil dropped back onto a barstool, one wary eyebrow watching me.
    “Then we’re even,” I said. “We should eat something.”
    Phil nodded.
    “I want the full Vegas experience, lavish buffet, dancing girls,” I said. “I want you to show it all to me, and I want my boss to pay for