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“Eat your salad,” said Mrs. Ivory, smiling at him.

Bruce grinned, then popped the forkful into his mouth. “So we’re out there in empty airspace,” he said around the chicken. “I’m riding shotgun, Cadan’s flying. And they send six of the things after us.
Six
. We thought they must have decided they’d been babying us so far, or someone in Control was having some fun with us.” He finished his mouthful and took a long swallow of water. “We took five of them out—no problem, just like the sim, and it’s not like we haven’t done it in the air before. But the sixth—I hit it,
and it kept coming. Cadan started laughing, he said even the robo-wing knew I was shooting like a girl. But then he took a shot square on its flank; if we’d had real firepower, it would have split it in two. And it still kept coming. We were blasting it, and it wasn’t registering any of the hits—it just kept on in its attack pattern. We were pretty sure it must just be malfunctioning, and it wasn’t like it could do any real damage, but every time it blasted us, it would rock us, you know? And we were getting pretty pissed—” He checked himself, glancing at his mother. “Sorry, Ma. Pretty annoyed.” He took another mouthful of salad, chewed, and swallowed. “Cadan said he was damned if we were going to lose grades because of some piece of faulty AI. He told me to hang both of you, ”rt tight. Hey”—he shrugged—“I’m in a five-point harness, you know? No one’s hanging tighter than me.”

“And then what did he do?” asked Mrs. Ivory.

Bruce laughed. “He just drove the ship toward the ground. Full speed. The robo-wing comes after us, still blasting. Cadan takes us right down to the ground. I swear, I could smell the dust. He judges it to a hairsbreadth, then yanks the nose right up and takes us into a climb. We’re going up, almost vertical. Our bodies are used to most of what we put them through now, God knows, but my nose started bleeding, and Cadan’s face went green—I thought he’d throw up, which is no pretty sight when you’re flying that pattern! Then there’s this god-awful crash from behind us, and a fireball—I could see the flash reflected in all the mirrors. He’d led the robo-wing straight into the ground.”

His mother put a hand to her mouth. “He
destroyed
it?”

“Oh, yeah. Wiped it out. It’s scrap.”

“But, my goodness, aren’t they terribly valuable?”

Bruce laughed again, nodding, tearing a piece off a roll to mop up the last of his salad dressing.

“Is he in trouble?” asked Elissa, interested in spite of herself. Cadan Greythorn was an arrogant pain—she didn’t care about his high-flying career, but she wouldn’t mind hearing how someone had finally cut him down to size, maybe told him that, after all, he wasn’t God’s gift.

“I thought we’d both be, for sure. We were had up before the chief, and I thought—well, I didn’t know what they were going to do. I was pretty damn nervous, and Cadan was nearly as green as he’d been in the air. He said later, once he’d crashed out of the adrenaline rush, all he could think about was how much it was going to add to his debt if they made him pay for it—and whether they were going to dock his grades, too.”

He grinned at Elissa. “They made us sweat for a good five minutes before they put us out of our misery. Turns out the robo-wing
wasn’t
faulty. It was part of the test, and we’d aced it.”

“By
destroying
the robo-wing?” Elissa’s voice went high with indignation.

“Exactly that. That’s what they were testing us on, thinking outside the box. In a real combat situation it could have saved our lives.” He leaned forward. “Imagine it was a pirate ship, Lissa, huh? They’re not going to give up till they’ve torn your ship to pieces. If you can outmaneuver them like Cay did—”

Elissa managed not to roll her eyes. Bruce and Cadan had been friends since their early adolescence, when they’d met at the SFI-sponsored pre–flight training academy. Cadan, the only one on an all-inclusive scholarship, had thought he was all that back then, and unfortunately, Bruce had
always taken him at his own evaluation. And when they’d both started expecting
her
to do the same, as if she had nothing better to do than be cheerleader to a pair of boys with toys . . .

“If he had to drive the other ship into the ground, I guess it was just as well you weren’t practicing in space.” She tried to keep her voice neutral so no one would accuse her of being pettily critical both of you, ”rt. Which she
wasn’t
; it was just freaking
Cadan
who, even more than Bruce, never put a foot wrong. He destroyed SFI property, and it turned out even
that
was the right thing to do. Of all the people on the whole planet, he was the only one who could annoy her when he wasn’t even there.

She hadn’t kept her voice neutral enough. Bruce leaned back, raising his eyebrows at her. “Trust me, Cadan would have worked out a way in space, too. And if you think pirates don’t pursue ships into planets’ airspace, then you haven’t been paying attention to the news. There’s a whole lot of planets that don’t have orbital police, you know, let alone flying patrols within the atmosphere.”

“
Yes
, I know. Jeez, I’m not stupid—”

“All right,” said Edward Ivory, cutting across the conversation that was not quite—yet—an argument. “So, your grades?”

“Still all-but-perfect. In fact”—Bruce grinned, his face alight all over again—“we’re looking at our first sole-charge flight in the next couple of days. There’s an opening in one of the trade routes—a pilot and copilot both out of commission. It’s not a complicated job—just as far as Mandolin. Two days there, two days back—but no one in the regular corps can be spared, so we’ve been told that they’re likely to jump
a couple of cadets up to full service, just for the duration.”

“Really?” Mr. Ivory’s eyebrows went up a little. He often seemed somewhat removed from everyday life, detached, as if half his awareness were moving in a place elsewhere. But right now he was fully present and interested.

Elissa reached for the water, not saying anything,
not
being petty. The movement made the bruise at the base of her neck twinge, a tiny stab of pain that sent a needle of nausea up into her head. “Why do you think you and Cadan will get it?”

Bruce gave her a look again. “Oh, only because we’re the highest-scoring flight pair in the whole of the training school? Take it from me, little sister, we’re going places you can’t even imagine.”

Elissa flushed.

“Bruce.” Mrs. Ivory’s voice was sharp.

“Jeez, Ma, I didn’t mean because she was sick. I meant because she’s not SFI.”

Which, to be fair, was probably the truth. He was sometimes completely irritating—mostly because of the whole let’s-worship-Cadan thing—but Bruce had never been spiteful. Elissa bit her lip. She shouldn’t have said anything.

“Okay.” Mrs. Ivory stood up. “Has everyone had enough? Bruce, would you bring in the leftover salad, please? Lissa, you take the bread. I made lemon-meringue pie, Bruce.”

“Amazing.” He followed her into the kitchen, holding the salad bowl. “You know, Ma, I kind of think the food at school is improving, but it’s still got nothing on home cooking.”

“Oh, Bruce.” She laughed. “Well, you know I like to cook . . .”

The lemon-meringue pie had come out perfectly, the meringue even and crunchy all the way through, melting to
sweetness on Elissa’s tongu from the kitchen at the backArte, the lemon layer silky, sweet, and sharp on its crisp base. Bruce left—
at last
—the subject of Cadan and told a couple of other funny stories about life at the training school. Mrs. Ivory talked about a woman she’d seen at the Skyline Club who’d had six different procedures on her face and who now looked so completely different that the first time she came back, the club ID system didn’t recognize her and wouldn’t let her in.

After dessert, as they slid the plates and dishes into the center of the table and Elissa’s mother touched the clean switch, Bruce turned to Mr. Ivory. “Any souvenirs today, Dad? Or have I missed out on this month’s collection?”

Edward Ivory gave his faint smile. “You haven’t missed out. I do have some in my bag.”

The center of the table sank, whirring softly out of sight, and a fresh surface slid across to fill the gap before the whole table lowered its position and the hidden cleaning program came on. Their chair seats softened, armrests hummed up from the sides to settle into position, and the chair backs reclined slightly. Behind where Mrs. Ivory sat, the coffee machine switched itself on.

“Once we have our drinks,” she said, her voice firm. “I refuse to look at illegal gadgets without coffee.”

Edward Ivory was a police officer, high up in the tech-crime unit. When Bruce and Elissa were younger, they’d been endlessly fascinated by his stories of the criminal ingenuity some of the tech-criminals used, and with the impossibly clever confiscated gadgets he occasionally brought home for a more leisurely analysis than he could manage at work.

This time, he had a window-melter that would soundlessly rearrange the molecules in a sheet of glass, dissolving
a window. He produced another gadget that would send a signal to jam slidewalks or elevators, forcing them to a halt, and one that would deactivate safety fields.

When he took that out—a harmless-looking thing like a slim black pen—Mrs. Ivory gave an exclamation of concern. “Edward, you shouldn’t have that, surely? It’s terribly dangerous—”

He smiled a little across the table at her. “It’s neutralized—this and the window-melter. We wouldn’t let them out of custody while they’re still active, trust me. And I’ll be locking them in my study tonight.”

He put the pen thing on the table, where it rolled slightly back and forth before coming to a halt. He reached for another object.

“This one, though, this still works. And it’s a clever one. See, Lissa?”

It was a credit card, one of the sleek, translucent ones you had to reach a certain income bracket to even be considered for. The numbers across it, though, were all zeroes, and the tiny identipic in its corner showed nothing but an emoticon—a little smiley face.

Bruce was grinning. “Okay, so what? Tell us, Dad.”

“It’s the latest scam—well, two scams, put together. It’s a morph-card. We confiscated what must have been a sample batch—hopefully in time to stop them from flooding out into general circulation. Look.” He held it up to his face and spoke very clearly. “Changeling. Chameleon. Camouflage. Edward Ivory.
E-D-W-A-R-D
space
I-V-O-R-Y
. One, two, three, four.”

A ripple of color ran across the card, a haze both of you, ”rt like vapor on water. All the zeroes changed to a line of different numbers, and the identipic . . . Elissa leaned closer. The emoticon had
changed to her father’s picture, and the name stamped across the middle of the card was his.

“No
way
.”

Bruce leaned forward too. “That has to be the coolest thing. Total fake ID?”

“Fake money, too.”

“Seriously? But how? The minute you scan it—”

“The minute I scan it, the payment goes through. That last number I said, that becomes my private ID number, so I can put it in on the keypad.”

“It actually looks like it goes through?”

“No, it actually
does
go through.” Mr. Ivory grinned, pleased with having caught out his son. “I can go shopping with it, and money will change hands—well, change accounts. But at any point I want to, I can erase my ID from the card, and at that point the money will simply evaporate from the shop’s account.”

Bruce rocked back in his chair. “Evil
genius
. Can I have a try?”

Their father shook his head. “It can’t go out of my possession. I’m sorry. It’s—in its way—as dangerous as the field-jammer. It’s no good for access to anything high-security, obviously—they haven’t worked out a way to fake thumbprints, thank the Lord—but as far as we can work out, it has no spending limit. And of course it will get you access to plenty of lower-security places.”

Bruce shrugged, capitulating. “Okay. How does it work, then?”

“Ah, now that’s the
really
interesting thing.” And he was off into a long explanation involving security loopholes and hidden pathologies, leaving Elissa—and, she thought, probably
Bruce, too, despite all that nodding and “mm”-ing he was doing—way behind him.

The front door chimed as Elissa’s parents and brother finished their second cups of coffee, and Bruce got to his feet. “It’ll be Cadan. He said he’d be coming by and that he’d give me a lift back to the base.”

“Oh, ask him in for coffee,” said Mrs. Ivory.

Oh please, do we have to?

“I’m sorry, Ma, he won’t have the time to stop. Curfew’s early tonight—we’ve got some intense exercises tomorrow. I have to get going; no one
likes
to miss curfew, but Cadan is what you might call hung up on it!”

Mrs. Ivory smiled. “Well, you can understand that, given the circumstances.”

“Being the scholarship whiz kid? Well, yeah, sure.” He disappeared out into the entrance hall, and in a moment Elissa heard him greeting Cadan, and Cadan’s voice answering.

“Come through a minute while I say bye to the family . . .”

Elissa looked up as they came in, composing her face to politeness. Cadan Greythorn was not quite as tall as Bruce, and a little broader across the shoulders. His dark-blue SFI jacket was fastened up to the neck, and his fair hair, even as short as it was, stuck up from the kitchen at the backArt at the back where he’d pulled his helmet over it.

“Good evening, Mrs. Ivory, Mr. Ivory. No, please, don’t get up—I’m literally here just to kidnap your son. Hey, Lissa.”

Elissa gave him the merest possible smile.

“You’re on your skycycle tonight?” Mrs. Ivory asked.

Cadan nodded. “It’s a nice night for it. I was coming back from the east side as well, and it saves me a bit of time.”

“Visiting your parents?”

“My sister. She and her husband finally moved into family accommodation—I was visiting their new place.”

“Oh, that must be a relief for them,” Mrs. Ivory said.