It was sickening enough to stand there and listen to him talking in that flat, impersonal voice, his eyes never quite focusing on me, but where did he get the gall to complain about how he had been treated?
    "I do not want to hear you talking about what you've gone through in the course of this project," I informed him in a voice shaking slightly with anger. "You son of a bitch." I left him alone before I could be further tempted to give him something to remember me by. Like a punctured lung.
    At least one issue has been resolved: I no longer need wonder about any prospect of opening a dialogue with my creators someday.
    Hours turned into days. We were debriefed by the feds, watched prisoners and witnesses being questioned, and avoided or basked in the media glare according to our various personalities—at least by the time the press cornered me someone had found me some clothes. I didn't have any comment, of course. The story that eventually made it into the news didn't mention me being kidnapped and brainwashed, but assumed that we were just doing our jobs.
    Phoenix Talon made sure to mention the World Crime League, but no one seemed to give it much credibility, and I didn't even bother. The feds thought this was a huge break in tracking a particularly nasty organization that calls itself The National Human Advancement Council. I was rather surprised I hadn't heard of them before, given that they're one of the more well-known unethical experimentation types. Kidnapping homeless people from shelters to use as subjects, that sort of thing. Judging from what was found as we started going through the rubble more carefully, SB 1-10 represents a significantly rare success for them. The number of body parts doesn't add up right, I'll leave it at that.
    Speaking of them, the FBI is going to have some questions for me some day soon, I'm sure. They've got Shannon and Susan, and they're not stupid. Justin, I think, figured out three quarters of it all if not more with a single look around the place and took me off for a talk on the morning of the second day. I hadn't slept well for a variety of reasons, and my arm was stiff and sore from forced immobility and near-dislocation, but at least they had coffee on the site.
    "How much do you want the feds to know?" he asked me simply, looking very James Bond in his tuxedo. I was unavoidably reminded of Zachriel, by both that and by his air of implicitly knowing everything that was going on. I hadn't said more than three words to him before this conversation, but for some reason it didn't cross my mind that he might not know what he was talking about.
    "How much do they need to know?"
    "They're going to infer some of it. But to prove their case here against these people, not a lot, since there's so much physical evidence. It's your background, your history, your life," he said firmly.
    I'm not sure he realized how much that acknowledgement meant to me, that I might actually have a right to some level of privacy. Then again, he's a very observant man. I owe him.
    "You don't have to go into an extreme level of detail. I know people who can throw a security blanket over this."
    I gave him a half-impressed, not-quite-believing look. "Really?"
    "Yes."
    "If this can be kept quiet, I'd just as rather. There's the press as well, back home." I had been planning to tell the Senate committee everything, but only because I didn't see any other choice. I suppose that's why Winters decided I needed to be reeled in for readjustment‹in fact I'm pretty sure that they'd started preparing for this the day I asked her advice on making a statement. I've since been told, by the way, that the committee had no intention of questioning me about my background that night. I can't say I'm all that surprised.
    "They'll never know," he assured me.
    "Thank you."

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