“I got in touch.” Leap One is leaning against the kitchen island. Behind him is a large, hardbound book with a metallic silver cover adorned with two bright yellow X’s, made to look as though they’ve been applied with dripping paint.

Fortyish, short, and lean, Leap One has dark brown hair and a full beard, both starting to gray. He moves slowly, as if containing agitation. Chance Two is sitting at a breakfast table across from Leap One, her back to a window. The calm and lack of sentimentality that reads as a hard edge in Leap Two has always struck Chance as slightly creepy in Leap One.

“What do you mean you ‘got in touch’?”

“I vidcast the Directorate and filed a formal Friend of the Deceased brief on behalf of your Three drive.”

“What?”

Leap One waves a hand, then says, “I think it’s important that they—”

“But that could have led Rope to this home!”

“I guess it could have.”

“While I’m here!”

“Yes,” Leap admits.

“Christ,” Chance says. “You put us both in danger. Are all of your drives really here, in this house, Leap?”

“That’s right.”

“Leap, he killed my drive and at least one of his own, but very likely several of his own. He’s sick. Really sick. He may have a meme virus. Whatever’s wrong with him, it’s at that level. If all of your drives are here, he could clean you up completely, just by coming here.”

“No. He’s under arrest, and the Directorate is hunting for him. He’s busy saving himself. And we’re on an underpopulated island with limited access. I have perimeter surveillance and video-alarm defenses. If someone were approaching the house, I’d know.”

“At least two of his drives are still out there, running around.”

“I’d know.”

Chance is thin on resources right now, and she keeps seeing the two Ropes grinning as their Twenty-One drive’s head hit the table.

She says,  “There are at least three theoretically foolproof ways to locate all of a join’s drives if you have custody of one. Why can’t the Directorate find two of Rope’s drives? Why? Rope has influential friends. And there’s something about him that’s not right. He is not a normal join!”

“I think you may have just answered your own question.”

“What?”

“You said, ‘theoretically.’”

“Oh, don’t give me that alternate tech crap again!” says Chance, frustrated by Leap’s unrepentant lack of intellectual discipline, Leap’s gullibility. “You are killing me,” she says softly.

“No, cowboy. The cancer’s doing that. And this Rope guy.”

Chance can’t think of anything to say. Leap continues, “I know you don’t believe in a lot of it. A lot of it is crap. But there are real results that contradict what the Directorate is telling us. A quantum network implant? Do you really know what the hell that is? Do you actually know? The materials do something predictable, so you trust them. A scientist stumbles across a material with ridiculously powerful properties, and then it’s been forty years since the first join and we still don’t have a theory that really explains it!”

“We do,” says Chance.

“And the psychotropics we take during cooldown,” Leap says. “Chance, all you really know—and you were an actual join doctor—is that there’s a predictable interaction between consciousness and quantum phenomena. You don’t even know how the drugs help!”

“Of course we know how they help.”

“Break down rigid modes of perception? Establish conditions favorable to reimagining the self? Fine, but how exactly does your state of mind influence the network?”

“You make it sound like we’re children playing with fire,” Chance says. She stands and walks to the kitchen island, across from Leap. She grabs the silver book. “And you’re reading science fiction by feral solos who can barely fabricate basic plastics!”

“‘God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.’”

“God?” They stare at each other for a moment, neither backing down. Then Chance says, “We know more than that.”

“Oh, really? What else do you know?”

Chance sets the book back down.

“What else do you know, Chance? Try me.”

“I’m not going to get into it,” Chance says. She walks back to the table.

“Oh, okay.” says Leap One. Chance notices that Leap Two, in her nightgown of yellow cotton, is leaning against the threshold to the kitchen. Leap Three, a tall, rangy man in his late thirties, is standing behind her. “You’re not going to get into it,” Leap One says, drawing Chance’s attention back to him, “because you don’t believe I’ll understand it.”

“No,” Chance says, “it’s not that.”

“It’s not?”

“No! We just don’t have time.”

“You think I wouldn’t understand,” says Leap One, bitterly. Chance is struck again by how alien Leap seems, how unlike her old friend. As if reading her mind, Leap Two takes a step into the kitchen and says, “As for time, that’s all we have. We’re right here, in my house. And because of that storm and your little incident while we were flying through it, we probably won’t have another flight for at least a couple of days. Chance, you might not have any more flights at all. You’re worried about Rope, but after our flight today, you should be worried about your job.”

“He’s out there, Leap! He’s out there, and now you—and this house—have popped up on his radar!”

Leap Two speaks slowly, enunciating each word. “No. No. No. He. Is. Not. Coming. Here. Chance.”

Chance’s fingers are cold. She wants to close her eyes. Leap’s anger, combined with a sense of injustice that Chance hasn’t felt from Leap before, seems aimed at her. It’s like she’s talking to a stranger. Chance Two says, “Why do you have three drives in the kitchen right now?”

Leap Two gestures at herself and Leap Three. “These two are hungry.”

The quiet sound of footfalls. Chance turns back to Leap One as Leap Four enters the room behind him. Leap Four is a young Japanese woman with hair dyed the color of rust. Squat, powerfully built, with a broad, thoughtful face.

“You’re all here,” Chance says.

Leap Four says, “It’s my home.”

Then, in unison, as if in a scene from a vidcom or a nightmare, all four Leaps convulse at the same time. Their upper lips rise. Their shoulders jump. They pant loudly. Then all four are looking at Chance as if nothing has happened.

The trial of one thousand was the first public demonstration of Join. Five hundred pairs of prequalified volunteers were chosen by lottery to become five hundred individuals. It was a sensation. Despite the emergence of megastorms and indisputable new evidence of an imminent catastrophic rise in water levels, those five hundred new individuals and their “I am both of us!” campaign dominated international news for months. The public was transfixed. “Would you?” seemed the only relevant conversational gambit.

There were also immediate questions about which agencies could regulate Join. The government’s positions were weakened by the debate about what Join was and what it meant and by a fragmented international response. Vitalcorp had also recruited influential investors. In the end, despite committed resistance, the public’s enthusiasm for the sheer audacity of the product proved decisive. Only a year after the last couple in the one thousand became a single individual, Join was approved for, and released to, the general market.

In that initial release, Vitalcorp included a prohibition against a join of more than two, with exceptions allowed for research. The process had been discovered almost by mistake. Vitalcorp wanted to introduce it in stages. But people petitioned for exceptions and squeezed into rapidly proliferating studies. Within a few years, the largest legal join was Excellence, the CEO of Vitalcorp, who was a twelve. (Excellence also set the tradition for naming joins.)

Since then, the science has progressed. While Vitalcorp discourages large joins through its fee structure, the legal limit for “active,” or living, drives is now twenty. (A join may include more than twenty people if some drives are deceased.)

But the largest join ever recorded was illegal and kept secret for most of its existence. It had one hundred fifty-three drives, some of whom had been key scientists at Vitalcorp and all of whom had been early investors. It called itself Music.

While negligible for legal joins, it’s now clear that the likelihood of a dangerous failure increases rapidly above twenty drives and becomes certain just above two hundred. There are two main categories of join failure: collapses—in situations like a flip, a cumulative coma, or a beta-wave resonance collapse—and meme viruses. Both are deadly. Music was the first known incidence of a meme virus.

Before much of this was understood, the One Hundred Fifty-Three revealed itself. The drives started buying yellow paint and painting two yellow X’s anywhere within reach. They painted nonstop, literally without rest. They didn’t sleep, didn’t eat. Several wandered into traffic as they were painting. Some wandered off cliffs. A few electrocuted themselves.

There was no record of them being joined, but this was just before the government merger, and Vitalcorp was a behemoth, distorting international politics. Excellence, combining the resources of a titanic corporation and the personal influence of twelve wealthy and highly connected individuals, was among the most powerful people in the world. Vitalcorp really had nothing to fear, even in the face of the scandal.

To end the painting incident, Vitalcorp put Music’s eighty-one remaining drives on ice and seized all of Music’s corpses. Two years later (and after the government takeover), Vitalcorp revealed that Music had fallen victim to a previously unknown pathological agent. Vitalcorp’s forensic team found the same prion, a self-replicating form of protein, in the brains of each of Music’s drives. Unlike other prions, which replicate until the host dies or until all available raw material—e.g., the brain matter within a given skull—is altered, this one appeared to reach a nonlethal steady state and then stop growing. In each drive autopsied, examiners found a lattice of interconnecting molecules so similar as to be a statistically impossible expression of prion growth. And yet there they all were.

The disease, referred to in most research as “reflective spongiform encephalopathy,” was termed a meme virus by the popular press, though it only distantly implicated memes and was not in any way a virus. Infected joins would develop an absolute fixation on an idea or complex of ideas. Vitalcorp said that in the previous two years it had found other cases, though it did not release evidence. It provided studies showing that joins of fewer than twenty active drives are perfectly safe. The Roman numeral for twenty—two X’s—in yellow became a new symbol of terror.

Many years after those events began to change the world, Leap was created through an act of love—the joining of Ian, who became Leap One, and Aurora, who became Leap Two. When the two met, Ian was twenty years old and Aurora was eighteen. They discussed how they both felt about Join in their very first conversation. They fell in love, and with each successive day the two of them grew happier and more certain that they wanted to join.

Aurora’s parents were easy to convince. They had divorced when Aurora was in elementary school. Aurora’s mother, Colleen, had remained single and hadn’t made her mind up one way or the other about Join. Her father, Winston, had spent every penny he possessed to buy into a join with three college-aged women. Aurora’s parents were also easy because she didn’t really care what they thought.

Ian was an only child, and his mother, Josette, was firmly against it. “No divorce if you join,” she would say. “Why would you eliminate the single greatest satisfaction of marriage?” Ian’s father, Josette’s second husband, had died that year of a venous thromboembolism. It should have been detected, but he didn’t like doctor visits.

Joins often say that the very first moment that they are aware of themselves as a join is disappointing and not significant in memory. They experience a period of disorientation from the surgery and drugs, and then events resume with a familiarity that belies the radical change they’ve undergone. Their access to other bodies, another gender, other memories—each of these things comes with a feeling of lifelong intimacy. Every body and every memory is brought to a join with the experience of possessing it since the day it was created. Because everything is familiar, there is no remarkable experience to create an initial threshold in memory. Joins create the threshold afterward as they experience the advantages of having multiple bodies and reflect on the magnitude of their change.

During her teenage years, Aurora believed she got too much undeserved attention. She didn’t feel particularly good at anything. People might listen to her, but they also assumed they could direct her, and they’d throw in offhand comments about her looks. She didn’t know how to respond. She resented it.

Months after the join, Leap realized that those feelings were no longer a concern. Rather, Leap felt a confidence that neither Ian nor Aurora alone had possessed. Leap decided that the confidence was from their faith in each other. Their love had fused into a new source of strength.

A decade after Leap One and Two joined, Leap decided to join with Brian Dearing, and become a three. Brian and Leap Two met in a hospital ER when Leap Two’s mother had a sudden low-insulin event. Brian told Leap Two that the old name for the now-treatable disease was diabetes. Of course, Leap had already known that. Everyone knew what diabetes was. Still, Leap was disarmed by Brian’s earnest attention to Colleen and the absorbed and candid way he discussed the implications of her treatment.

They began spending time together. Brian said he loved all of Leap. Leap was flattered and quickly found Brian—his unexpected prickliness, his enthusiasms, his love of rock climbing, of guitar music, and of the abundant and confusing lore of physical health—indispensable. It wasn’t the same kind of love that Aurora and Ian had felt for each other, but it was powerful and genuine.

After the join, when Leap asked Chance what was different about Leap as a two and Leap as a three, Chance started with easy things: Leap’s new understanding of medicine and Leap’s ability to describe what it’s like to free-climb El Capitan. More subtly, Chance thought Leap might have become more adventurous, a bit more of a romantic, perhaps more aggressive.

A coworker of Brian’s told Leap Three that it was as if he went away and then came back after fifty years, changed by experience. He was very different, but still the same person.

The night after Leap One’s father died, his mother, Josette, discovered a surprising second set of books that covered the family businesses. Then a desperate creditor tried to claim her husband’s casket on the day before his memorial service. Leap One’s father had apparently been forced to be more honest with some of his creditors than he had been with his family.

Josette fired her dead husband’s accountants and attorneys and was immediately confronted by her husband’s brother, Chuck, who was determined to part out what remained of the family businesses for cash. For years, Josette fought a long series of acrimonious legal skirmishes against Chuck and other members of the company’s board.

Large swaths of land were becoming toxic. One point of bitter dispute between Josette and Chuck was her desire to obtain and preserve a string of carefully selected parcels of land. As the years passed, the value of areas she had bet on spiraled upward. The company leased its properties, or sold at premium prices, and used the income to speed the growth of its bank. After a final, decisive judgment against Chuck and his faction, Josette would say that she and her husband had made a bonbon together. He’d made the empty wrapping, and she’d made the chocolate and ice-cream treat.

Josette and Chuck met one final time, shortly after receiving the judgment, to discuss Chuck’s belief that he was being treated unfairly.

Josette is motionless, watching Chuck across the conference table. She’s the cat. He’s the mouse. As recently as last month, he’d thought he was the cat.

“Look at it from my perspective,” Chuck says.

“I’m trying, Chuck,” Josette says. “But, to be honest, I don’t hear anything that sounds like perspective.”

“What I’m saying”—Chuck glances at Leap One; Leap almost detects a break in his façade—“is that I’ve spent my life building this company. You and Ian”—he checks himself—“Leap, I mean—”

“Thank you,” Josette says, causing Chuck to hesitate. Leap recently became a Three and Join has been a fact of life for years, but Leap One’s family continues to resist its reality. Despite her own reservations, however, Josette enjoys defending Leap to other family members.

“What I’m saying is that you and Leap now own the fruit of my labor.” Chuck waits, creating an opportunity for acknowledgment, which isn’t given. “Look, I honestly can’t make sense of what Mark did.” Mark Pearsun is the attorney Josette trusted with her business. Chuck’s admission is surprising. He’s not one to purposefully expose a weakness. “You leveraged a minor technicality—”

“We leveraged the law,” Josette says. “And a big problem from the beginning is that you weren’t paying attention to it.”

Chuck is tiring. Even at the start, while he was recounting his successes over the years and his sacrifices—not marrying, not raising a family—he looked as though he hadn’t been sleeping.

“I guess I can’t fault you for using leverage where you found it,” he says. “Mark is a capable attorney. But after what I’ve given, I do deserve, at least, a stake.”

“What do you think you deserve?” Josette asks.

Chuck straightens, believing he has finally worn her down. “The five percent I asked for. I think that would be fair.”

“You sold two percent.”

“I didn’t know it was you I was selling to.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It was the same thing.”

Josette turns to Leap One. “Ian . . .” She closes her eyes and cocks her head, then corrects herself. “Leap,” she says, “do you believe that your uncle deserves a three percent stake in our company?”

“No,” Leap says.

“Do you believe he merits any compensation, beyond what we’ve offered?”

Leap shakes his head. No.

“Chuck, I’m sorry,” says Josette. “It looks as though we didn’t need to have this meeting.”

Chuck, holding his aggravation in check, says, “I’m an asset.”

“Then our parting should be easier to accept,” says Josette. “You’ll have other opportunities.”

“There are things you don’t want me to talk about.”

“I think this meeting is over. Don’t you?”

“No, I’m not sure that I do.”

“You and Mark should work out final details,” Josette says.

She pushes back her chair and stands. Leap stands and, after a moment, Chuck does as well.

“This isn’t right. We’re family,” Chuck says, but almost chokes on the final word. When she doesn’t respond, he straightens, scorn quickly replacing vulnerability.

“Okay, then. We’re done here,” he says. “Goodbye, dear.”

After Chuck is gone, Josette asks, “How did I do?”

“Maybe a little bitter,” Leap One says.

“But, overall, pretty well, considering?”

“Yeah, I think so. Considering.”

Josette looks out the window at her property, the landscaped green-and-yellow flank of native plants bordered by a strip of cherry trees, a small apple-and-pear grove, and then a steep drop into Pacific coast rain forest. “Tomohiro can be a pill,” she says, referring to her master gardener, “but he is a brilliant man. He made this place beautiful.”

“Yes, he has,” says Leap, admiring it with her.

“We’re done with him,” she says, meaning Chuck.

After a pause, Leap says, “Mark said that Chuck’s completely broke. He won’t be able to cover medical—”

“Are you defending him?”

“Not him, just the—”

“Good, because he wanted everything when he deserved nothing. He and your father left a mess that it’s taken me a decade to clean up.”

“I understand—”

“Do you know what else I’ve done during those ten years?”

“No, I—”

“Nothing. I haven’t done anything else. This, what we won last month, is mine.”

Leap finally becomes a four about a year after affairs with Chuck are settled, and following a confusing conversation with Tomohiro, Josette’s master gardener. Tomohiro asks Leap to meet for lunch at a barbecue place called the Joined Pigs. Tomohiro and Leap have never met for lunch before.

After greetings and a brief preliminary chat, and after they’ve ordered, Tomohiro says, “I am . . . planning to go.”

The way he says it indicates that the news is significant, but Leap doesn’t understand why. “Do you mean you’re going to work for someone else?” Leap asks.

“No,” says Tomohiro. “I mean I’ll leave. This.” He makes a small and graceful gesture that manages to encompass the entire Pacific Northwest.

“You’re going to move?”

“Yes, I am going to move.”

“Well, are congratulations in order? Are you retiring?”

“In a way, retiring, yes.”

“I see.” Leap realizes that it’s not just nervousness he’s sensing. Tomohiro seems frightened. “My mother will be very sad, I’m sure.”

“That is why I wanted to talk with you. One reason.”

“Have you told her yet?”

“I have not told her. I think, I don’t want to worry her yet. She and I have things to discuss, and at that time, she will find out.”

“Okay,” says Leap, trying to keep up, “but—”

“I am in trouble,” says Tomohiro.

“Oh,” Leap says. “I see. Well, what kind of trouble? I’m sure she would—”

“No. No. I don’t want to worry her. Leap, I am sorry I must ask, but this conversation is very important to me. Before we go any further, I must know it will be confidential.”

“You don’t want me to tell Josette?”

“I require you do not tell anyone.”

If Tomohiro is in trouble, it seems odd to ask Leap rather than Josette for a favor. Leap has had the impression that Josette and Tomohiro are close. But Josette has enough on her mind, and Tomohiro would know that.

“Okay,” agrees Leap, “if that’s what you want, I’ll keep it in confidence.”

“Thank you. Please know I am not exaggerating. Believe me, I have spent many, many hours considering what to do in this situation.”

“Okay.”

“You have heard me talk about my niece?”

“Yes.”

“She is sixteen. I do not want to leave her, but I think she should stay here.”

“So you’re saying you’ll be taking a trip,” Leap One says, “and you need someone to look in on your niece?”

“Yes, but not quite.”

“All right.”

“I will be gone for at least two weeks. Then I will move, and I will send for my niece.”

“Okay. So you need someone to help her move?”

“Yes,” Tomohiro says, “that is what I mean, almost.”

“Why is this difficult?” Leap asks. “I can help. After all you’ve done for us, I’d be happy to. I’m pleased that you thought of me.”

“Thank you.” Tomohiro’s voice is rough.

“What am I missing?” asks Leap. “Why are you concerned?”

“I want you to know I appreciate what you are doing. Very much so.”

“Of course.” Confused, but thinking the purpose of their meeting accomplished, Leap reaches for the sandwich that arrived as they were talking and takes a bite.

“There is another thing,” Tomohiro says.

“Okay.”

“I think it might be better if my niece did not live by herself while I am gone. I want to ask if, perhaps, she might stay with you.”

Leap lives in the house where Leap One grew up. He prefers solitude, but the house is large enough for guests. Tomohiro’s niece is sixteen and presumably reasonably independent. She might not be too much trouble for only two weeks. Leap says, “Doesn’t she have friends that she’d prefer to stay with?”

“I don’t know their families,” says Tomohiro. “I am very sorry to ask.”

“It’s okay,” says Leap. “She can stay with me. But can you at least tell me why you don’t want to talk about your trip?”

“I would like to tell you more,” Tomohiro says, “but it’s a personal matter. Not something I can discuss. But it is a good reason. Your trust is the difficult thing I am asking for.”

The strangeness of the modern world. There are so many tragedies in so many people’s lives. For fifteen years, the Olympic Archipelago has been an oasis of relative calm. But the gears of the world grind on. Leap considers. And then says, “All right.”

“Thank you,” Tomohiro says, his relief visible.

“So when would all this happen?”

“Today, after lunch.”

“What?” says Leap. “This is too much, really.”

“As soon as possible,” Tomohiro says quickly. “Today would be best.”

Leap has already said yes and can see how much it means to Tomohiro. “Okay,” he says at last, “I can get a room ready, I suppose. I think you could probably bring her over this evening.”

Tomohiro’s niece, Himiko, arrives late that night. It quickly becomes clear that the change has surprised her. Himiko was told only that she would stay with a friend while Tomohiro is at a conference.

She seems very shy and stays in her room. Leap tries to message Tomohiro after Himiko’s first night at the house, but he doesn’t respond. On the second night, Himiko tells Leap Two that her uncle was frightened. They share their confusion about what might be motivating him. Leap admits that Tomohiro hasn’t provided a list of family contacts as he’d promised.

Because Tomohiro hasn’t responded to repeated attempts to contact him, Himiko and Leap One drive to his cottage. All of his things are gone.

As Himiko walks slowly through the empty rooms, she says, “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“He left me?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Everything is gone. He’s gone.”

“Yes,” Leap says.

“Even things he didn’t like.”

Leap dreads accepting what is becoming painfully obvious. He follows her into the garden—rhododendrons, camellias, jasmine, roses. Two healthy rows of herbs.

“Could he be with your family?” Leap One asks. “Do you know where your family is?”

Himiko shakes her head, then says, “In Ulaanbaatar.”

“Okay, where? You know which city, but where in the city?”

“I don’t know anything else. Or even if they’re in the city, really. He was finding out.”

“Names, or . . .” Leap’s voice trails off as Himiko watches him.

After a brief investigation, records of travel to Central Asia turn up. Tomohiro has gone to Ulaanbaatar, of his own accord, and then purchased a general rail ticket. He is not a missing person. Messages to his central account bounce.

Himiko has nowhere to go. She is quite clearly crushed. She seems shy, but when she speaks she is decisive and opinionated. She will occasionally lie to see how people react.

When Himiko was six, her family sent her alone from Ulaanbaatar to find her uncle, Tomohiro. Growing up in Hawaii, Tomohiro had distinguished himself sufficiently in high school to earn a foreign-student scholarship at Keio University, in Tokyo. He earned a Ph.D. in psychiatry, then returned to Hawaii because the thought of living in another place deadened him inside. He found work at a community college. He would say he always knew where he wanted to live but had never asked himself why. Then his fiancée left him two days before their wedding and, for a short time, he went mad.

As he pulled himself out of a depression deep enough to destroy his standing, his reputation, and his sense of meaning, he felt a need to reinvent himself. Those were years of rising water levels, unprecedented hurricanes, and the coastal diaspora—a movement of populations that eventually included the exodus from Hawaii. The other survivors of Tomohiro’s family, who had learned to be terrified of oceans, joined renewal projects in Central Asia. Tomohiro hopped a boat to the Pacific Northwest and secured a position as an apprentice gardener on a large estate in what was now being called the Olympic Archipelago.

When Himiko arrived, Tomohiro shared his small, meticulously clean cottage with her, and his firm insistence on meeting expectations. Not expectations around performance in school, but around making conscious choices.

“Always ask why,” Tomohiro reminded her tirelessly. Now she imagines that Tomohiro, who rescued her once, has left her with three strong guardians, the three Leaps. After several frustrating conversations with her friends, she asks if she can continue to live with Leap.

Leap enjoys her presence in the home, her unexpected perspectives. Josette takes to Himiko immediately and without reservation, and Josette is never wrong about people, so she herself says. When social workers finally come, Leap says Himiko can stay until she gets on her feet. Josette’s attorney helps Himiko file for emancipation. Leap wonders whether this is what Tomohiro had in mind from the start. After her twenty-first birthday, Himiko joins Leap, and her body becomes Leap Four.

From four different childhoods, Leap remembers different kinds of cruelty and different kinds of love. For example, Tomohiro could be relentless, keeping Leap Four awake all night, not allowing her to close her eyes until she finished her chores, a long and detailed list that he regularly updated. She must clean the kitchen floor. It was her job. She must clean once a week, and there are only seven days in a week, no more. If Tomohiro had high standards for what “clean” meant, then those needed to become her standards. And Tomohiro could put everything he had lost, all of the possible things that were impossible because she was with him, into a simple look. His lips would turn down, and his eyes would soften. Tomohiro never talked about what was in that look, but over the years Himiko learned some of it.

Leap Three’s childhood was different. His parents didn’t create schedules and task lists. They ridiculed certain things and offered sparse praise for others. During three years in rural Montana, he joined a clique that ran the social scene at the junior high. He became cruel because it felt like success. But memories of things he did followed him during the years after. A feeling grew of being without a reference—of not being able to trust himself. It wasn’t until a college girlfriend told him that his smile resembled his father’s that the pieces suddenly fell together. His family had operated through intimidation, like the clique.

He wanted to change something fundamental. He went into emergency medicine to help people. But it was the join with Leap that gave him real perspective. As Leap he could compare childhoods. Now Leap believes that any choice that moves you away from cruelty moves you closer to love.

Chance feels as though the world has blinked. There is no acknowledgment of the convulsion that just gripped all four of Leap’s drives.

Leap One is saying, “Where else would I go? I’ve never been scared enough to rent an apartment somewhere just to make sure my drives aren’t all in the same place at the same time.”

Chance Two closes her eyes to focus on remembering what she has just seen—the spasm that Leap apparently didn’t feel. She tries to compare it with symptom panels for join pathologies. After Chance Three’s death, she’s still able to find her way through the literature, but her ability to recall information has been blunted.

When a drive dies, research suggests a diminution of expert skill that is roughly proportional to lost brainpower times a coefficient dependent on the level of join integration. The integration of Chance Three was excellent—there were few kinesthetic barriers. Chance is confident that she is still extremely well informed on join pathologies and treatments, and Chance is very sure that whatever the hell Leap just did was the result of a join pathology.

Chance Two says, “You know, you did it. Just now. The twitch thing.” She waves at all of Leap’s drives. “All of you did.”

A nearly imperceptible shudder passes through Leap’s drives, a weakening of confidence. Then Leap Four, whom Chance hasn’t spent much time with, says, “I’m aware that I do that.”

Chance is silent and then says, “I’m glad, because if it is what I think it looks like, it could be very, very dangerous.”

Leap Two says, “My One and Two drives are physically tired. Two stayed up for a while after we got in last night. I’m going to rest them. My Three is getting ready for a shift. He’s going to be making something to eat. You’re welcome to have some—tofu scramble?”

“Are you changing the subject? I’m a friend, Leap. You know, I might be able to help you.”

Leap One yawns. Leap Three yawns and says, “Great, we can talk while I make breakfast.”

Chance watches Leap One and Two leave the room. There’s been a lot of research done on the physical space joins leave between drives. Drives will stand closer to one another than solos of most cultures would. They often touch as they pass. As Leap Two passes Leap Four, she stops for a moment to brush at Leap Four’s eye, an almost unconscious gesture.

That kind of intimacy among drives is mocked by solos. Before most solo resentment hardened into religious resistance, there was a famous sketch comedy show, Howard, Howard, Howard, Howard, Howard, Howard, and Howard, that parodied the closeness. The seven Howards would stand in a circle, five men and two women, picking one another’s noses.

“Okay,” Chance says when Leap One and Two have gone, “tell me what’s going on.”

Leap Four sits across from Chance at the table. Leap Three is moving between the refrigerator and the stove.

Leap Four says, “You mean the . . .” She pulls her shoulders up and raises her upper lip for a moment, then says, “It’s probably what you think it is.”

Chance says, “I don’t know what I think it is. I haven’t diagnosed it. I’m not sure that I can anymore. Have you been to someone for an opinion?”

“No,” says Leap. “And I think you do know what it is; you’re just saying you don’t know what sort of join pathology or how far advanced it is. But you know it’s join related.”

Chance is still getting used to speaking to Leap Four. Drives eventually share the gestures and expressions of a join, but each drive also maintains a distinct style. For example, some drives’ faces are great for conveying reserve, some for contempt, some for perseverance, etcetera. Each drive’s nervous system is different. Each drive’s body proportions are different. The length of each drive’s limbs is different. Even things as simple as the quality of a drive’s teeth can contribute to a drive’s ability to communicate a particular message.

Leap Four appears introspective, physically awkward, almost unaware of the possibility of being observed. She often looks as though she’s remembering something funny. Like all of Leap’s drives, she shows contempt fluently—a swiftly passing shadow.

Leap Four glances down. Chance can see her eyes moving as she thinks through whatever concerns she has. Leap Four says, “I may know a little more about it.”

Chance says, “To me, it looks like a network break. I can’t help thinking about it. This is recent—it must be your most recent join—your Four. But that was years ago, and it’s happening only now. I know this is difficult to talk about, but could your Four have a latent dementia, or another kind of issue like that, that’s been getting worse, that wasn’t diagnosed when you joined? Things have moved fast in the last five years. We know how to treat this sort of thing.”

Leap Four laughs. “I know. I probably know as much about it as you do. I don’t think the problem is with my Four.”

They watch each other for a few moments, neither speaking. Then Chance says, “I’m a”—Chance takes a moment before beginning again—“I was a join doctor. It’s what I did for several years. And I’m your best friend. You could have talked to me.”

“No. I’m sorry. I love you, but you would have told the airline.”

“They have to know! We’re flying live cargo!”

Leap says, “There are at least three independent systems checking everything that happens.”

“And the weather still almost just got us. Last night!”

“No, no. Do you really think we were in danger?”

“Yes!” Then Chance does a few quick mental calculations and says, “I don’t know.”

Leap says, “You know as well as I do. The odds are astronomical.”

“No, about one in three-point-six-two million. For each flight we pilot.”

“Okay. Yes. That’s probably the number.”

“It is.”

“But that’s the number whether or not I’m in the seat.”

“You know, I felt like shit,” Chance says. Her voice rises. “I’m already close to the edge. Now I’m dealing with a murderer! You made me think it might have been me. I doubted myself.” Chance is trying to calm herself.

“I’m sorry,” Leap Four says. “I’m so sorry.”

Again, neither says anything for a while. At the stove, Leap Three is slowing. He looks tired and unhappy. Leap Four continues, “I was scared. I felt like I needed to protect myself. It’s no excuse. I’m sorry. One reason I asked you to come here was to tell you about it.”

“How long have you known? How long has it been going on?”

“A few months.”

“Shit. It’s progressive, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I think so,” Leap Four says.

“Leap, you can’t ignore this. These things can—there’s a decent likelihood it could kill you.”

“Yeah, if Rope doesn’t.”

“I can’t understand you right now. Rope just killed one of my drives. How can you make that joke?”

“I don’t know that it was a joke.”

Chance is hurting. Each of her drives feels physically sensitive; each drive’s stomach is upset; each drive has a low-level headache. Chance Five is sweating and unable to sleep.

Chance forces herself to concentrate on Leap’s problem. To try and ignore the threats to herself. “You think that you do know what’s going on?” she asks. “What the problem is?”

Leap is reaching a decision. Leap Three stops moving. He’s standing in front of the stove. Leap Four says, “Yeah, I think so. I think I know. I’m sorry I lied. Like I said, I was scared.”

Leap Two is suddenly standing behind Leap Four, at the entrance to the kitchen. “Come on,” Leap Two says. “I’ll show you what happened.”

As Leap Three punishes an egg, Leap Two leads Chance from the kitchen. Leap moves hesitantly. She almost seems to be reconsidering whether to bring Chance to wherever they’re going. They stop at the bottom of the staircase in the house’s main entrance.

“You need to prepare yourself,” Leap says, “and understand that I already know everything you’re going to want to tell me. I know you’ll still say something about it, and the truth is that I want to talk about it, and I want your thoughts. But try to avoid the obvious, please. I’m well aware. It’s painful.”

Leap Two starts up the stairs. At the top is a short hall surrounded by five doors. One of Leap’s mothers had this house built. It’s three stories and a basement, but Chance hasn’t thought about access to the third floor. Two of the five doors are open, including the one to the room where Chance was sleeping. Leap opens another door, revealing a staircase that leads up to the home’s third floor.

“You’re hiding your secret in the attic?”

Leap closes her eyes and cracks a very small smile. “Yes,” she says.

When they reach the top, they enter a single large room. The light is dazzling. Chance’s eyes need a moment to adjust. Light floods in from a wall of windows set into gabled dormers near the top of the stairs. Beyond the windows are blue sky and the rising sun. Another bank of windows lines the opposite wall.

The room is filled with creams and faded greens, an over wing chair—a wing chair with arms flattened and flared to allow perching, so two or three drives can share—two slipper chairs, and a single large sofa. A long bronze coffee table, glass topped and filled with sparkling chunks of geodes, sits in front of the sofa. Scattered about the room are tall, wave-shaped, polished glass sculptures that drape thin, semitranslucent shadows over one another and everything else. Near the far end of the room is a bed. Josette lies in it, her thin white hair spreading in snaggly luxury around under her frail, wrinkled head. Leap Two turns toward Chance. Chance sees Josette smiling at her in the distance, sees Leap Two smiling right beside her.

Chance says, “Oh my God, Leap.”

Leap Two says, “Oh, don’t be a prig.”

Chance knows what is happening to Leap. She can roughly characterize when it all started. She can reasonably estimate the rate of progress and Leap’s current state. And there can be no doubt about the pathology’s future trajectory (and it is a join pathology). The condition itself is mysterious, but its progress is copiously documented.

As a child named Ian, Leap remembers hiding under an end table.

“Okay, Chuck, then you take him!” His mother’s words freeze him there.

He doesn’t like his uncle Chuck. Chuck has been telling Leap’s mother how she spoils Leap, how she coddles him. Chuck thinks there’s something wrong with Leap; that he may be retarded. He thinks Leap’s mom lets him get away with too much; doesn’t push back when Leap says he’d rather not go to the baseball game or when Leap decides to read instead of watching football or playing bridge with the family. It’s an old theme.

Leap’s mother knows that suggesting Chuck do anything at all to help will shut Chuck up. This time, though, she’s angrier than usual, and her words plant a suggestion of emptiness in Leap, even though he knows she doesn’t mean it.

He hears his father laugh, the warm, assured laugh of a man who can negotiate a bitter family feud with a smile and a wink. Or at least thinks he can. The retro cuckoo clock is ticking directly across the room from Leap. Otherwise, the voices of the adults and his own breathing are the only sounds in the world that he hears.

“You know, she has a point,” Leap’s father says. “No one else could do what Josette has been able to do with our boy.”

“Ah.” Leap hears his mother snort contemptuously.

“What?” his father asks. Leap imagines his mother shaking her head and miming waving away the smell of bourbon.

“Well, he is freakishly slow,” Chuck says, and laughs. Leap hears his father’s weak chuckle. Chuck is goading Josette. He says, “I mean for a village idiot.” For the two brothers—Leap’s dad and Chuck—family conflict is often the start of their fun.

There’s an electric silence. Leap imagines the look on his mother’s face. Then he doesn’t have to imagine it; he hears that look in the tone of her voice: the low, level, even voice she uses to end conversations and make people squirm with almost physical discomfort.

“Chuck, one day I will cut your beating heart out of your chest for saying that.” And Leap hears what she leaves unsaid as well: for saying that while he is in the room.

Even Leap’s father cannot respond to that voice.

A warm September evening. Leap is sixteen. His father is away. Leap got his driver’s license yesterday, and the first dance of the new school year starts in three hours. Josette’s curly black hair spills haphazardly around her amused face as she turns to see what he’s wearing. Strands float up around her head, creating a hazy nimbus in front of the kitchen light. Her eyebrows go up, and her look goes from disorganized amusement to clear and genuine appreciation.

“You look great,” she says.

Leap smiles and is surprised to realize that smiling is the only way he knows to show her how much he appreciates her saying that. He suddenly imagines the whole universe around him, stretching out to infinity in every direction and still expanding. He thinks of a picture of the Horsehead Nebula, mounded and uncurling in pastel colors against the vastness and darkness of space. He isn’t even an iota in all of that grandeur. And then he sees the look on his mother’s face.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Do you want to drive?” she asks him, and holds out an authorization badge for the car. “I keyed you in a few minutes ago. You can start it now.”

“Yeah, sure,” he says.

He had thought he was full up with appreciation for her. But in some impossible way, his gratitude actually increases.

The old woman leans back, away from the spoon, her angry glare focused on her son. “I’m your mother, dammit. You’ll do what I say.”

“Technically,” says Leap One, pushing the spoon closer to her again, “you’re one of my mothers. One of four. So I’ll do about a fourth of what you say.”

The old woman, Josette, grimaces, accentuating her pallor and the mottled violet rash on her cheek and on the bridge of her nose. “Who decides?” she asks.

“What?”

“Who decides which fourth?”

“I do.”

“Humph. I’m shut out again.”

The skin of her face has a papery quality. There are sores at the tips of her fingers. Leap sees the nearness of her extinction and wants her to be angry like this. Leap wants more of her, wants her to flare up and fill the room with her anger, the intense white light that has been her for so many years. Leap wants more of her than what is left.

“Look,” Leap One says, “you haven’t eaten anything today.”

“Of course not. I’m not hungry.”

Leap sits back in his chair. “Mom, you’ve got to eat something.”

“I ate a lot yesterday. You even told me I did well.”

Ah, how love can sharpen to condescension at the touch of a master. She sees his glum response.

“I’m sorry, Son,” she says. “If that’s what you are. I’m just not hungry. Why don’t you leave me be for an hour or so, and then I’ll try again? What do you say, an hour? I promise.”

She’s been saying this for about eight hours now, since he first tried at seven this morning. First, “In a little bit.” Then “Come back in twenty minutes.” Now “In an hour. I’ll try then. I promise.”

Leap has always known that unmet promises are rarely empty; rather, they’re filled with the unspoken things people don’t want to do or can’t do. Both of Leap One’s parents, as they grew older and could do less, promised more. His father’s promises, like banknotes from a failed state, all ended null and void. His father did many things before passing on, but none of them involved cleaning up his affairs. His mother continues to print promises like a central banker, but at least she’s transparent about her attempts to use them.

Two years ago she was diagnosed with an advanced, degenerative autoimmune disease. Rare, debilitating, it includes severe arthritis as well as symptoms similar to lupus and Raynaud’s syndrome. It’s one form of a collection of pathologies that had all been classified as mixed connective tissue disease. In the two years since her diagnosis, her symptoms have been progressing relentlessly. Now when it’s bad, she stays in bed for most of the day.

Josette has just woken up. She’d been severely constipated and groaning in pain for hours. Jenny, her home-care nurse, helped her get through that. Afterward, Josette had the longest uninterrupted sleep she’d had for days.

Jenny says the constipation is normal, as is her lack of appetite. Which leaves Leap in a dark mood and wondering how useful eating actually is now. It’s almost a ritual the two of them are practicing so they can share something by pointing together at hot soup and saying to each other, Life! We’re miming living by arguing over whether to eat! But Leap’s mother isn’t playing today. The ritual is tiring her out.

Josette won’t take more morphine, and Jenny hasn’t been willing to intervene. Puzzled and powerless, Leap has watched as his mother’s pain has gotten worse. There are times when he’s reading to her or sitting by her bedside and she starts to talk to herself, first about how bad the pain is, then about other things. Her childhood. The argument she had with Hattie about draping for the rodeo. The argument with Chuck about selling the bank. It’s almost always arguments, and almost always very bad ones.

Leap wonders at the irony of leading a long, good life and then, near the end, rather than being able to stand back and appreciate the whole, endlessly revisiting the difficulties. At this moment, how much is his mother benefiting from the life she lived? And if not now, when? Well, Leap thinks, at least he can be here.

“You can do something about it,” she says, shocking him out of his reverie.

“What?”

“I don’t deserve this. I loved you. I raised you. You can do something about this.”

For a moment, Leap can’t follow. If she’s referring to what he thinks she’s referring to, then they’ve had this conversation. He thought she understood and that she had ultimately found the idea revolting. Her word. He says, “You didn’t want that, and unless you want it, I can’t do it.”

“Can’t? Which one can’t? Who can’t? My boy could! My boy could. Who are you? I don’t know you. Do I know you? Get out. Until you’re ready to help me, get out of here!”

Leap One places the spoon back in the bowl and stands. He puts the bowl on a large yellow doily on her dresser top. He rubs his hand through his beard, the kinked hair rough against his fingers and his palm. He pulls at it as he thinks about what his mother is asking.

“Help me,” she says. “Help me or get out. And ask Jenny to come here. I need her. She’s so sweet.”

Leap walks to the door. “Jenny’s gone for the day,” he says. “She’ll be back tomorrow. You’ll have a new nurse tonight.”

“Okay,” says his mother. “Explain to her about the morphine before she gets in, will you. How I don’t want it. Will you, love?” Her voice has become distant again. She is distracted.

Leap stops at the top of the staircase and turns to look back at his mother. Her eyes are closed.

Her face is damaged by the disease, discolored in patches. She is making an effort for each breath. In her tight forehead, clenched jaw, and rigid throat, pain uncoils and coils.

“I’ll talk to her,” he says.

Josette has two weeks of nightmares. Each night she lies groaning. Now he hears her screaming at the top of her lungs. Leap Three rushes into the room to find the nurse beside her trying to soothe her, to quiet her. Her body is so frail. But she’s bolt upright, and she’s still screaming, terrified of something that’s followed her out of her dreams, and Leap is afraid that the knotted threads of muscle in her neck will snap through some brittle tendon or bone that holds the rest of her together.

A few very long moments later, and she’s quieted. She asks for tea. She won’t discuss it. None of them has slept. They’re all exhausted and on edge.

Josette and Leap Two are driving home together from a dinner out. She’s had several days of improvement. Now she’s quiet, tending her own personal garden of care. When they’re almost home, she turns to Leap Two and says, “I’m not sick. I’m just dying. And I don’t want to.”

“You are sick, but you’re not going to die. You can still get better.”

Josette laughs. There’s no bitterness in it. “You’re not going to die,” she says, “but I obviously am. When I made my decision, I could accept it. Millions of years of inevitability. None of us had had any choice. That was how we accepted it. Your kind changed all that.”

Leap says, “You chose to stay solo.”

They drive for a while, skimming low over the forests of Douglas fir and western hemlock. In the distance, on their right and left, the forest curves up toward the slopes of low mountains. Across the mountain range on their right is the Pacific Ocean, tossing and wild, but here the day is muted, broken by broad, visible shafts of sunlight falling through high, drifting cumuli.

Neither of them is connected at the moment. Both of them are musing. Leap Two looks over at Josette to see the old woman watching her. Leap smiles.

“God, you’re beautiful,” Josette says. “You must have had men lining up. I was never nearly that beautiful.”

Leap gives a half smile and turns away, aware that Josette is still watching her.

After a few more minutes, Josette says, “How the hell could you be my son?” Leap isn’t offended. It’s a common refrain.

Josette steps into the kitchen slowly. The arthritis is not as bad this morning, and she’s dressed for walking, but she’s still moving slowly. “I’ve changed my mind,” she says.

Leap One is making breakfast. Leap Four is down; Two and Three are both working. Josette’s nurse had the night off and is running errands this morning. She’ll be back this afternoon.

Leap One asks, “About what?”

“May I have some coffee?”

Leap says, “Okay,” and reaches over to switch on the espresso machine.

“No, dammit, not about coffee,” says Josette, following Leap’s train of thought. “I just want some coffee. I’ve changed my mind about everything else.”

Leap says, “Okay.”

Josette sits at the table. “You know, for a long time, I thought I could just think of you as a married couple with very eerie telepathy. Good boy. He found himself a real peach, I could think, on my more moon-addled evenings. Then he came along, the tall one. And then the cute one joined you. I can’t think of you as married anymore. I have to see you for what you are. You’re my son, but also you’re something else. I have to understand that. I need to accept. And I need to change my mind.”

Understanding suddenly, Leap takes a deep breath. He moves his pan off the burner and turns to her. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

Josette’s look is searching. Her eyes narrow as she concentrates on Leap. Finally, she says, “No, no. It’s too weird.” Then “Would you make eggs for me too?”

Leap goes to the refrigerator for eggs. He doesn’t pursue the subject.

So because he hasn’t pursued it, it isn’t until the next evening—when Leap One is in his study and Josette knocks on the door—that he knows she’s really going to ask about it.

He opens the door. She’s dressed in her powder-blue Armani suit, the one she’d wear to board meetings. She looks utterly miserable. “I’ve made up my mind,” she says, frowning. “I want to join.”

They talk about it. It’s clear to Leap that Josette is scared, and it’s hard for him to know how to tease the fear apart from the desire.

“The caduceus is an extremely sensitive instrument,” he says at one point, “that depends on consent. The consciousness of both individuals has to be committed to the join to enable the connection. It only works if you really want it to work. You can’t fool it.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re such a schoolteacher,” she says. “You always have been. I know all that. I’m not stupid. I’m just scared, is all.”

Leap says, “Fear can be managed”—an expression Josette uses.

Josette grunts affirmatively. She’s sitting on the love seat across from Leap One’s recliner. Her body is upright, rigid. In the old days, she used to sprawl on the love seat, pull up her legs, and lie across one arm. That was before the arthritis thickened in her joints.

“You’ve never wanted to before,” Leap says. “Why now?”

His mother shoots him an angry look, attempting to push him back, silence him.

“At this point,” Leap says, “it may be hard for you to find someone who wants to join.”

“I know. But I want to try.”

Join can be a capricious technology. Under certain conditions, it’s reliable and safe—a change dependably situated between beneficial and miraculous. But step outside that range of conditions, and things become complicated very quickly.

For many years, there were broad restrictions on how joins could be performed and who could join. Vitalcorp was clear on the ingredients that created the greatest possibility of success—among them, the ages of increased opportunity. Joins with solos between sixteen and twenty-five years old and between forty-four and fifty-four were almost always successful. When Join initially rolled out, only people in those age groups were allowed to use it. Certain kinds of psychological issues could also increase risk, though usually not beyond manageable tolerances and, in those age groups, not significantly. A very small percentage of the population was just not suited for Join and possibly never would be.

Over time, the Directorate reduced the requirements for join approval. The first to go were most age restrictions. Agencies developed more sophisticated measures of likely success than a blanket prohibition on certain ages. The technology improved, and many early obstacles became negotiable. Still, an upper limit, fifty-nine years old, remained for a long time—primarily to reduce the risk of attempting a join with a mind suffering from undiagnosed illnesses, such as certain kinds dementia.

A medical specialty in prejoin risk developed. A profession. A certification. Soon, the cost of a join included the licensing fees paid to the Directorate and large supplemental fees for medical clearance paid to a CJA, a certified join adviser. The advisers were expert in guiding join candidates through the paperwork and medical examinations required to characterize risk and mitigate liability. Eventually, the remaining age limit became avoidable with adequate precharacterization. A certified join adviser would meet both candidates, review every aspect of the application, and issue a recommendation that could be used to apply for an exception to the age rule. And then a black market for CJA services emerged.

There have been several well-publicized, successful joins of drives over seventy years old. One thing they have in common is a person or a join wanting to help an elderly solo avoid death. Leap is pretty sure that another thing many of them have in common is a large payment. Well, Josette can afford it.

Josette asks Leap to talk with her attorney, Mark Pearsun. She’s heard (Leap never knows where she hears this kind of thing) that there’s a CJA whom Pearsun has had some business with who might be able to help her. One who specializes in gray areas. Leap and Josette discuss it. Assuming the adviser will clear her, Josette’s challenge won’t be with legal considerations; it’ll be finding a join she’s interested in. She must act quickly. Join decisions should never be made quickly. Which goes without saying, so they don’t discuss it.

From the other side of his small maple desk, Mark Pearsun is leaning back and watching Leap One closely. Late fifties, with thick sandy-blond hair cut shapelessly short and untidy bangs pulled to the left across a broad forehead, Mark has surprisingly monochromatic gray eyes and is regularly unshaven. Leap has seen him only in his office, in a rumpled dress shirt that’s always half tucked into expensive slacks. He’s been Josette’s attorney for over twenty years.

“You don’t mind if I call you Ian?” he asks.

Leap has heard variations of the question; all joins have. Mark Pearsun knows it’s the cliché used most often to characterize clueless solos. Mark dislikes joins. Leap One smiles.

“You know I don’t approve of this,” Mark says.

“Mark, you basically work for me now.”

“No, I work for the trust.”

“My trust.”

Mark sits forward in his big rolling chair and puts his elbows on the small desk. “This is very disappointing to me. Up to this point, your mother has been an example for me. What she did, the way she thought, have helped me to think about things.”

“I know, Mark, but—”

Mark holds out his hand as if tamping down Leap’s sentence. “Just let me finish. She helped me make a decision, about eight years ago, not to join.”

Leap digests that. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. I don’t imagine she would have told you. You know I’ve been married twice?”

“Yes.”

“Well, about eight years ago, I thought about getting married again. But my girlfriend wanted to join. Now, the way I was raised, well, my father was a Fundamental Individualist before anyone knew what that meant. My sister and I, we both always believed we’d lead natural lives.”

Leap bridles at the term, but manages to suppress it. “Natural life” is a term one uses carefully around joins. Individualists consider a join a manufactured being.

“I never wanted more than what I was born for,” Mark says. “My years are my own, not borrowed or stitched together—”

Leap cuts him off. “Mark, you’re my mom’s attorney, not my pastor. I’m sorry you chose to listen to my mother instead of making up your own mind when it was important for you to do that. Now I’m trying to respect her wishes. Her wishes.”

Mark’s stubbornness is one reason Josette has kept working with him, so Leap isn’t surprised when Mark continues.

“She told me, when she was in her right mind,” he says, “that she would be ready to go when her body gave out.”

Leap says, “She’s still in her right mind. She told me, yesterday, that she wanted me to ask you to help. Can you help, Mark?”

“What about the risks?”

“It’s legal now.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, that’s why we need the name of a good CJA.”

Pearsun stands and walks around Leap to his office window. “And if I don’t give you a name?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’d go to the darknet.”

“Do even you know how to find the darknet?”

“I’ve never tried.”

Mark puts his hands in his pockets and leans back on the windowsill. As executor of Leap’s trust, Mark Pearsun would be an important part of Leap’s life if Josette died.

“She should just leave me the money,” Leap says. “The trust is a mistake.”

“I told her the same thing,” Mark says. “But you know her. She wants the money to go to Ian, not Leap. She’s not sure she knows you.”

“She said that?”

“Yeah.”

Leap could say, I am Ian, but his argument is with Josette, not Mark. He says, “My mother once told me you were comfortably amoral.”

Mark laughs. “She’s said that to me. One of my charms, alongside very thorough research. I try not to be offended. But this isn’t about morality. I’m solo today because I listened to your mother. I can’t believe she wants this.”

“That sounds like you’re trying to do the right thing. She wants you to do what she asked.”

“You’re wrong. I’m not trying to do the right thing. I’m the kind of attorney who does what my clients pay me to do. But your mother wouldn’t ask for this.”

“Mark, you could just send me the name of an adviser. I’m here because you wanted to meet. Have you gotten what you needed to get off your chest?”

Mark becomes still. He watches Leap One, appraising him, then growls, “I’m gonna find a pencil and write it down on a piece of paper.”

They have a short video conference with the adviser, Oceanic, a Three who suggests they meet in person at one of the recreation buildings at a community center. When Josette and Leap One arrive, Oceanic Two, a short, heavy, middle-aged woman dressed in a loose pantsuit and paisley blouse, waves them over to her table. She’s got a square face, dark, flattened hair, and red cheeks. When she smiles, Leap imagines her with an elf’s hat. It doesn’t quite fit. She’s a little more expressive than an elf would be.

“Hi, I’m so happy to meet you,” she gushes. Out of the corner of his eye, Leap One sees Josette pulling back a bit.

•

Leap Two, flying with Chance Two, has been casually warming up to the topic of risks for an elderly join. Now she says, conversationally, “So some kinds of undiagnosed dementia could be a problem for someone joining with an elderly person. But we have pretty good detection for that kind of thing. If you have good testing, why are people really frightened of it?”

“Yeah, that’s really interesting,” says Chance Two, believing she’s in a relaxed, early evening conversation during a routine flight. “It’s because elderly people can be less flexible in their outlook—”

“Is there a technical term for that?”

“Uh, sort of, yeah, believe it or not, it’s called attitudinal plasticity in the literature.”

•

In the community room, Leap One says to Oceanic, “We’re concerned about attitudinal plasticity.”

•

On the airplane, Leap Two asks, “How much of a problem is it?”

“Well, not much of one.” Chance Two takes a moment to dislodge something from between two front teeth, then continues, “Sorry. That was bugging me. By itself it probably wouldn’t present complications, but elderly patients usually have other tendencies that make low attitudinal plasticity difficult to manage. So, for example, feelings of loss of control can engender emotional volatility that . . .”

•

Oceanic’s lower lip pushes against her upper lip in something between disapproval and a pout. “Oh, we’ll talk it over, but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. First of all, attitudinal plasticity isn’t a problem by itself. And on first impressions, and from what Mark Pearsun has told me, I don’t see Josette as likely to have lower than normal plasticity for her age. And, well, she seems perfectly happy.”

Josette’s eyes narrow.

•

Leap Two says to Chance Two, “So, okay, what are we really concerned about? I mean, what would someone really have to look out for?”

“Well, the biggest danger, particularly with an elderly join, is the danger of a flip.”

“Okay,” says Leap.

Chance says, “Yeah, you’ve probably read all about it.”

•

Leap One asks Oceanic, “How do you guard against a flip?”

Oceanic has lowered her chin, pushing it against her neck so her head is bent forward and her eyes are rolled up toward her brows. “Well,” she says, “in the past I would have said that that’s our biggest risk. But I think things have improved to where that’s unlikely.”

•

Leap Three is tired. It’s been difficult staying focused and effective in the ER while One is talking with Oceanic and Two is flying with Chance. He has a half hour left, then will get a two-hour sleep, then four more hours of work, then home. He needs to find someone to trade those final four hours with. If he tries to do that shift, he’s afraid he might hurt someone.

“There you are!” It’s Gnosis Two, a patient Leap stitched up earlier that night. He’s a man who claims to have incredible talents as a psychic distance viewer, and a woman who does tarot and palm readings. While Gnosis One had been reading a client’s palm, Gnosis Two had slashed his own palm on a drainpipe.

“No coincidences!” Gnosis said several times, fiercely, as Leap sutured.

•

On the plane, Chance is saying, “The best way to avoid a flip is to be certain that both parties to the join are committed. That they genuinely want the join. Technically, there are different kinds of flips. Any change or weakness in conviction state can end in a minor flip. A minor flip, one that happens early, simply prevents the join. The risk for older people, when attitudinal plasticity is low, is that the flip might not occur until values compatibility at the sixth layer.”

•

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this one.” Oceanic is smiling kindly at Josette. Her voice is subdued, steady. “If a flip were really to happen, well, it could be fatal. For both you and whoever you’re trying to join with. Now, even though it’s rare these days, it’s still the main reason that I would recommend that you find a join as your other half. A flip is less likely if you complete the procedure with someone who has already joined.” Oceanic reaches a hand across the table toward Josette. She says, “Usually, someone in your position wants to join to escape death, as it were.”

Josette says stiffly, “That’s right.”

“Well,” says Oceanic, “even though there’s a lot at stake, it’s still very important to be careful and not to rush into it. You have to be confident that your join partner is someone that you do want to join with.”

•

On the airplane, Chance Two is saying, “A bad flip, the truly catastrophic kind, is really fascinating, one of the most interesting conditions in all of join science. The network connection is both established and not established, leaving the join incomplete. The most concise way to describe it is that the join is trapped almost between two different alternatives of the present moment, one in which the join is working, and one in which it isn’t.”

“That’s concise?”

Chance laughs. “Well, for join technology that’s uncommonly concise. That’s as elegant as it gets.”

Leap is thoughtful. So far, the weather has been unsurprising, and they’re flying into evening. The sun has been setting behind them so that the sky in front is becoming darker and more transparent, stars fading into sight like beacons in a dream of perfection. Leap watches for a few moments and then says, “Okay, cowboy, hit me with the long version.”

Chance answers slowly, “Okay, then. Most of what gets talked about in Civ News, in stories about join science, are old risks. Things we can avoid these days if we’re careful. We understand most of them. But this, a flip, is . . . just mysterious. Like the join itself, and like a lot of the science around the network, our real understanding of it is fragmentary.

“We don’t have the tools to test it. Everybody knows the punch line here: observational bias blows up our experiments. Knowing what you’re testing skews your results. The results of any single experiment might show an irrefutable relationship, but the quality of the relationship isn’t reproducible. The first time through, the results don’t disprove your hypothesis. The next time, they do, unmistakably. Bottom line, the network seems to operate through consciousness and even across time. I mean, that one really bends me. There are seriously debated theories of join science that describe the caduceus as, in a very limited way, a kind of quantum time machine.”

As the light outside fades, the window’s polarity changes, ensuring that it remains fully transparent. Chance watches the stars brightening. She says, “A flip is one of a very small class of join-related issues that give us a peek into a reality where we can’t seem to distinguish the reflection from the observer.”

•

Josette leans forward, one elbow on the table. “What happens?” she asks.

“I’m going to tell you what happens,” says Oceanic. “This isn’t what might happen or what would happen if you didn’t get treatment. If you flip, this is what happens. The theory is that your psyche is oscillating very quickly, in very small fractions of a second, between a joined and not-joined state. At first, the oscillations are rare, and you might feel a little more tired than usual, maybe more irritable. In most cases, it seems to people as if the join has succeeded. But the integration is still partial.

“Slowly, the effect of the oscillations increases, bringing on any number of side effects. It usually becomes noticeable with an increase in memory loss, slight nausea, fatigue—which joins may be able to get around for a while through improved cycle management. So it can go on for a while during this period. But then you progress to tics, like simultaneous sneezing by all of the joined drives, and then to minor convulsions and seizures, bloody noses, uncontrollable bowels, blackouts. Pulmonary fibrillation is very common. Mood swings. Paranoia. Really, anything unpleasant you can think of that happens to a body could eventually happen. Each case is slightly different. Some happen very quickly; some take a few years. But every case is progressive.

“In the final stage, you see symptoms that look like paranoid schizophrenia, psychosis, and then ruptured internal organs. It can get very painful. I don’t like to talk about it too much. It can be very gruesome. It almost always happens to all of the join’s drives, but there have been two documented cases in which a single drive survived. And, of course, distress this severe has additional victims. Family members and other caretakers can have a very hard time. The join may become violent.”

“Well, aren’t you an hour of sunshine,” Josette says, her face reddening.

“There’s no treatment?” asks Leap One.

“Nothing worth discussing,” says Oceanic.

“What are the odds?” asks Josette.

“Of a flip?” says Oceanic. “With proper vetting, and with someone who understands herself well, is clear about her motivations, and is honest with the process, the odds are very low. But it’s still one reason why there aren’t many joins with people above seventy. About one percent of joins with people over seventy results in any kind of flip, but most of them are minor. And I can tell you right now, if I approve the join, a flip will not happen. That’s my job, the job of a CJA, to make sure we don’t get in that situation.”

•

On the airplane, Chance yawns for a long time, fans her open mouth. When she’s done, she chuckles. “Sorry. That was a surprise. I need my second cuppa.” She smiles at Leap, then continues, “Our only useful strategy, really, to reduce flips, has been subject profiling and screening. Without pre-screening, we think some kind of flip would happen in about ten percent of joins with elderly solos. These days, though, we can screen out most people who are likely to flip. With the most at-risk group, people older than eighty, say, and the most careful screening—using modern multidimensional testing and integrative techniques in the very best labs—we probably can’t get the odds of a destructive flip below one in one hundred thousand, or one one-thousandth of one percent.”

Leap doesn’t look tired at all. She looks very alert. Very interested.

•

After describing a variety of ailments, and then claiming that none of them was quite what he has, Gnosis Two has finally turned and begun ambling out of the hospital. He also offered Leap Three many different opportunities to have his fortune told for free. Now, as Gnosis leaves, he calls enthusiastically over his shoulder, “You know, you’re one in a million! No, one in a billion!”

•

Josette turns almost pointedly away from Oceanic and toward Leap One. She says, “I’m scared. What do you think?”

Leap can hear the fear in her voice. He knows how painful even the smallest things have been for her as the arthritis has worsened. He knows it will get much worse. “I think those aren’t bad odds,” he says.

Josette hesitates for only a moment, then her fear blows away.

“I’m ready,” she says. “I’ll do it.”

•

On the plane, Chance Two squints at Leap Two. “Why are you asking all these questions? What got you interested in all this? Anything?”

“No. Well, maybe the lovely scenery we’re always flying through inspired musings on the nature of existence.”

“It’s almost like you’re reffing me.”

“Reffing” means surreptitiously using a casual social encounter to extract reference information while simultaneously using that information elsewhere. It’s an old term, not heard much anymore because the practice has become so common.

“Ha!” says Leap.

Finding a join for Josette becomes an urgent priority. Leap and Josette begin to make inquiries. They run ads. They meet people for short interviews, for long interviews, for meals. They talk with solos; they talk with large and small joins.

Oceanic is mindful and efficient. With her help, they quickly finish Josette’s prejoin clearances. Leap has the impression that Oceanic has done everything by the book, hasn’t spent any time in gray areas, hasn’t fudged anything. Despite that, Leap is left with the uncomfortable suspicion that they’ve only gotten through the clearances because of Oceanic. That any other CJA would have rejected Josette.

Josette’s condition is a serious problem. When her body becomes a drive, it won’t be very useful. Her mind, however, is healthy and sharp. Still, many of those willing to consider a join seem motivated by money. Josette rejects all of those candidates.

One candidate named Elevation, a join of three, sends over a contract that includes an agreement to euthanize Elevation Four, as Josette’s body would be known, the day after the official integration period ends. Leap is astounded—after a join, Josette would be Elevation, so a prejoin contract is meaningless. Josette rejects Elevation on principle. (She calls it the bozo principle and says it’s been very helpful over the years.) Several other candidates bring up the topic of euthanizing Josette’s body. Josette isn’t ready to confront that possibility, so those discussions create another category of rejection.

And Josette flares up at any hint of pity. Sometimes the heat of her anger is just barely perceptible. Sometimes she produces withering death rays of scorn in the midst of what had seemed like civil conversation. The end result is always the same: no join. Her condition worsens. She is spending more time in bed.

After the final vidcon with Elevation (Josette to Elevation, “I hope that’s not too much of a letdown”), Leap One goes to fetch Josette’s medication. As he’s leaving the room, he hears Josette ask Oceanic in a hushed voice, “So, tell me quickly, how does sex work?”

“Mutual consent is an explicit requirement of the join procedure,” Oceanic says. “After the procedure, all of an individual’s needs for intimacy, both emotional and physical, can be addressed by the join directly . . .”

It’s clear that both Oceanic and Josette would prefer a private chat. Leap One moves beyond earshot, then waits a few extra moments before returning.

Leap Four is dreaming. Leap is both in the dream and outside of it. Leap One is also sleeping, but not dreaming. Leap Two is in a cafeteria. Leap Three is talking with an orderly. The drives are like the hands of a pianist. They accomplish incredibly difficult tasks without conscious intervention. Leap experiences everything simultaneously. The experience of dreaming while awake is akin to feeling an emotion. Leap pays attention to the world each drive experiences. Leap says things. Leap makes decisions. Leap deliberates on responses, or weights the inclinations that shift a drive one way or another. Leap can do many things at the same time. Leap is not a core, not a trunk. Leap is an idea, a coherence, an overlap.

In Leap’s dream, the Vitalcorp logo, four birds in flight, becomes a flock of thousands of starlings streaming across the bright afternoon sky. The dark ribbon of their bodies encloses space and the stars. Deep within that darkness, beyond what is possible, at the end of space and in the last few feet of time, is a decision that Leap must approach.

Leap Four and Josette are walking a trail that passes by the distantly spaced neighbors’ spreads and across the cold autumn slopes at their steading’s edge. They’ve walked for forty minutes to the Benthic Bench, one of nine benches installed by the steading. This one is covered with colorful paintings of the old sea life of Puget Sound—crabs, anemones, clusters of mussels, oysters, purple curving millipedal worms, corals, the long-necked geoducks. Josette sits; her face is pale. She’s wincing with pain, and her breathing is ragged.

“I need one of the large blue ones. I need it now.”

Leap fumbles in the knit bag to find one of the large blue ampoules.

“Here,” says Josette. Her crabbed hands scrabble at the black lining of her coat as she pulls its edges and the tear-away fleece beneath to expose the soft, loose skin of her neck above her clavicle. “Just quickly, please.”

Leap Four touches the cold metal contacts of the ampoule’s dispensing end to activate it. She carefully rubs it against Josette’s skin for a moment, and then holds it still. It vibrates subtly with the faint ticking of a tiny pump as its nanowires fire thousands of microscopic doses into capillaries beneath Josette’s skin. When Leap lifts the ampoule, Josette’s skin is moist and reddened. Leap drops the ampoule back into the knit bag and watches Josette.

Josette’s breathing becomes more regular, shallower. She sits back against the bench.

“I can’t walk back,” she says.

Leap says, “I’m sending for a pod.”

Josette closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them and breathes deliberately, slowly.

“How is it?” Leap asks.

“Not too good,” she says.

After that, Josette spends more time in bed. Oceanic continues to come by daily to talk with her. Leap sits in on most of their conversations. Oceanic almost seems to be visiting a friend, but she asks specific kinds of questions, and her questions aren’t always guided by the flow of conversation. Her questions both invite reminiscence and request factual responses. “What did the back of that church look like?” “Did you have a favorite neighborhood store?”

Leap has always known Josette as a private person, or at least a person who shares the morsels of her life sparingly and deliberately. The type of conversation Josette’s having with Oceanic is something she would typically resist. Instead, she plays along.

Josette tires quickly, but each day when she leaves, Oceanic looks satisfied. Until one day when Oceanic draws Leap One aside after her conversation.

“You know, the sea isn’t full of fish anymore. The two of you have rejected a lot of options. I don’t know how many more will come along.”

“She’s not doing well,” Leap says.

“No, she’s not,” says Oceanic.

Leap One says, “I try to keep her walking, at least for a while each day, but she’s in pain, even with the medication.”

“She’s also depressed.”

Leap would never have said that about Josette, never have thought of her in that light. He says, “She doesn’t think we’re going to find someone for the join.”

“No.”

“How close . . . should I be thinking about hospice?”

“I don’t think so,” says Oceanic, “but that’s not really my area. Her health is getting worse, but I think she’s still okay, and her mind is fine. Even where things stand now she could have years left.”

“We’ll keep looking then,” Leap says.

Oceanic doesn’t respond. She’s just watching Leap calmly. Not hinting at a response.

Leap is thrown for a minute but is not sure why or what to say. “We’ll keep looking,” he says again.

“Okay,” says Oceanic.

Leap One says, “I can’t do it for you. You have to say yes to someone.”

Leap One and Josette are stepping out of the house on a cold autumn afternoon. Leap One has been reading a history of popular a cappella music and is a bit logy. Josette started the walk by telling him he was not doing enough to find her a join.

“Mark should help me,” she growls. She’s dressed in a shiny black down coat that falls to her calves and makes low rustling and squeaking sounds as she moves. “Without me, he wouldn’t have had a goddamn practice. Sanctimonious bastard. I probably sent him a third of his business over the years. Said he appreciated it. Sends me champagne at Christmas. Of course, it hasn’t been real champagne since the first bottle. Oh, God, what have we done to our world.”

From Civ News this morning, they know that a superhurricane has split off one of the southern storms and ripped through the Cordial spire community in the El Coahuilón Mountains in Mexico. Over forty thousand bodies are dead or missing. Rescue operations are impossible as the hurricane is “squatting,” with its eye just half a mile from the community. Once again, weather is the story, as it has been since the drowning of Dhaka.

And, of course, the Champagne region is completely arid—one more place on a long list of places—and no longer produces grapes. For years, a synthetic champagne—the pressed juice of closely engineered bacterial sediment formulated to produce the effects of terroir—has been the nearest thing to the traditional drink that’s available.

They walk slowly and in silence for a while.

“It’s all going to hell.” Josette scowls. After a little while, she looks over at Leap One and says, with genuine curiosity, “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

Leap is surprised, and it takes a moment to find a thought that might lead to a response. “If you mean am I satisfied with what I have, then yes.”

“I’m not,” Josette says. “I’m fucking not.” She’s quiet for a few more moments, then she stops walking and turns to face him. “And I don’t understand how you can be! Forty thousand bodies died. You can bet there were a lot of joins down there who aren’t feeling very immortal anymore. And a lot of—” She stops, as if she’s heard herself and is disappointed.

“You know,” she says, calming herself, the discoloration on her face starker, the tendons of her neck taut, “when I was a girl, before you were born, we didn’t have megastorms.”

Leap remembers Josette’s voice reading from a children’s story, “. . . before them was a lovely, sunny country that seemed to beckon them on . . .”

Josette snorts, “Yes, you know. Of course, you know. You spend all day reading. You and the cute one, Himiko.”

“Mom, she’s me.”

Josette waves a hand dismissively and winces in pain.

“Yeah,” she says. Then she stops walking. “I love you, you know. I just can’t see past this pain. I can’t walk today.”

Leap tries to change her mind, but she turns around and slowly walks back toward the house and then inside. He follows.

She hasn’t taken her coat off. Her back is to him.

“You want me to ask?” she says stiffly.

“Mom—”

“You need me to ask?”

“Mom, I—”

Her voice is dry, stressed, reedy.

“You can’t bring it up, so I will. I’ve fought enough battles. I’m not going to stop at this one. You can’t bring it up, so fine! I want to join with you. You should let me join with you.”

Leap One’s throat and chest constrict. “I can’t believe you want that,” he says quietly.

She turns around. She’s shaking, staring at him. He’s afraid that she’ll fall.

“I do. That’s what I want,” she says.

“I don’t think it would work,” he says.

“Why not? You’re not a stranger. I’ve known everyone who’s joined with you. I love you all.”

Leap takes his jacket off as she watches. He’s trying to think of a response that will make sense.

She says, “Ah, to hell with you.”

The next two weeks are difficult. The arthritis is in retreat. For another person, dissatisfaction with Leap might be an excuse to exaggerate her discomfort, to emphasize her anguish and his guilt at not being able to relieve it. At not being willing to. Instead, what follows are many good days for Josette. She’s more active. She’s in a good mood. She’s more of her old self, the self Leap remembers from when she was fighting with the corporate board and growing the company. She’s gracious around all of his drives, but not excessively so. She’s gracious to her normal degree.

She even spends a week back at her own home. She brings in help to pack it, and she works hard at getting things straightened up, stored, cleaned, arranged. She says that no matter what happens, her home should look good.

They interview a few more candidates. She seems ready to accept one, a join of nine who has achieved a minor international reputation, first as a logistics expert and now as a philanthropist. The join, Accord, is enthusiastic about her, believes she will strengthen it. But she can’t bring herself to agree. She says the join is just too attentive. She can’t see herself joined with a psyche that’s so nice.

During this time, Leap tries to forget that she asked about joining and attempts to return to a more typical routine, with Leap One studying, Two and Three working, and Four spending some time doing both.

It’s not that family joins are more or less risky than any other kind. It’s just that something about joining with family members trips a boundary wire that sets off dull thudding explosions of disgust in most people. Leap can’t imagine joining with a parent. Leap mentally inventories each drive’s parents, all of the people who raised someone who joined Leap, in search of one who won’t provoke the reaction, but all of them do.

Though Leap tries to behave as though the question weren’t asked, it’s not quite possible. Leap takes breaks from other readings to peruse articles and discussions about intrafamily joins. Most people avoid them, but they are done occasionally. There are many otherwise unremarkable joins who have added parents or children as drives. There are even some joins who raise children specifically to join with them. They’re sometimes associated with evolutionist sects—fringe groups who aggressively proclaim that joins are the next step in human evolution. Who believe society should be designed around that central tenet. But there are others as well.

Leap notes an insistent internal hum of queasiness. There are plenty of published intellectual justifications for avoiding it, but none of them is fully satisfying. It just strikes Leap as wrong.

Josette is struck down. The weather has changed. It’s a damp, cold, and windy November. Josette’s arthritis is stopping her completely. She doesn’t return Leap’s calls, but her nurse, Jenny, tells Leap that she’s in great pain, and she wants to come back to Leap’s house. That night, she returns.

Leap is shocked by the sight of her. Her nurse wheels her in. Her lower jaw won’t stop trembling. Her eyes are half open, and she wears an expression of deadening effort, as if just sitting requires all of her focus and attention. The nurse takes Leap Three aside and tells him that Josette has made arrangements to poison herself but will need help.

The next day, at around 4:00 p.m., Leap One goes into the room where she’s lying on the bed. She has recovered a bit, as if the change of location is doing her good. She smiles when she sees him and says weakly, “You keep a good inn.”

“It surprised me when you asked,” he says. “It never felt right to imagine that. Jenny tells me you’ve made other arrangements, though.”

“You don’t have to be here,” Josette says. “Jenny and I can manage it. I just hate the thought of it. I’m having trouble bringing myself to do it. I’m being weak, so it’s taking longer.” She tries to smile, but her lips are trembling and won’t quite curl upward.

“Mom, what I want to say is, it’s okay. If you want to do it, I do. I think Oceanic would help us join.”

There’s a long silence as Josette digests the news. “I’m ready to go, Leap. I don’t need to stay or to join,” she says. “I’m ready.”

Leap is struck that she says his name without a modifier or sarcastic addition. Leap knows that despite what she has just said, the two of them will join. Leap is relieved.

Oceanic is calm and supportive. As if she knew things would come to this. Josette is still in terrible pain, so they’re very careful to work slowly, trying to ensure that she’s making the decision she intends. She wavers at first, and then she says, “I’m curious,” and from that point forward she’s firm. Oceanic has an inventory of questions for both Josette and Leap that she patiently works through. Some are asked individually and privately, some jointly.

They’ve talked about the effect of Josette’s body joining while it’s in so much pain. Oceanic isn’t concerned. “A join can be very healing for a drive. I’m sure you’ve heard that. Terrible, terrible conditions sometimes heal. I’m not aware of cases where the join wasn’t a positive for someone who was ill. Now, it might not make a difference, or much of one, but it won’t put you in further danger, or her.”

There is one topic that Oceanic is adamant about. “A family join is a very sensitive thing. I have access to a privacy filter. I’m going to do the work required to mask this join. You will have the ability to hide the fact that you’ve done it. I think it’s also important that it happen quickly, because Josette is so ill. So we’re going to have to fudge the licenses a bit. We can fix them easily enough after. No one needs to know that you’ve joined. Your records won’t show the join. Then, when you’re completely comfortable, you can submit the form and officially become a five. But when you do, that will be your decision.”

Later, Oceanic tells the two of them that after the join, Leap will need coaching in special cycle-management techniques to handle the burden of Josette’s body. “Have you ever had a drive with a serious physical injury?” Oceanic asks Leap. Leap is certain that Oceanic already knows the answer. If a drive has had a serious injury, there is almost always a record of it available to a CJA. If she’s at all decent at her job, and Leap believes she is, she’ll have done the research.

“No,” Leap One says, “I never have.” Josette is listening carefully. Leap expects Oceanic to go into detail, more for Josette’s sake than for his.

Oceanic says, “Well, a join can kind of leave a drive. When you’re focused, when you feel rested, you can leave a drive to sort of be and trust it to not do something terribly stupid. It can be very surprising at times. Sometimes, you might find that a drive has been talking, and you’re not quite sure of what it’s been saying, or it’s been saying things that surprise you, or maybe a drive has been reading, and you, you remember reading through the words, but you don’t really remember any of the content.”

Seeing that Josette is interested, Leap says, “Yes.”

“That’s the kind of state you’ll take advantage of with Josette’s body. It’ll require attention, willpower, but you’ll learn to separate the body Josette has now from the rest of what you’re doing, like an injured arm that’s in a sling. Pretty soon you stop trying to use it.”

“It all sounds very unlikely,” Josette says with satisfaction, happy to play the skeptic in the face of Oceanic’s reassuring certainty.

“I know. Before joining, I didn’t believe it either. None of me did. But I see that it’s true now. I don’t think a solo can really imagine it. The experience of join is the good part of what you think it will be like, without the bad part. You’ll go under, with the anesthetic. Then you’ll experience the powerful psychotropic drugs, and when you come to, you’ll find that you can naturally manage the activities of multiple bodies. You’ll feel yourself blessed with companionship, even though you’re the only person around. You’ll begin to get used to the idea that you don’t have to die.

“Some things that you believe strongly, you will probably no longer believe. For example, many people either become more religious or less. People’s habits change. Their tastes often change. The changes are different for everyone, of course, because each join is a unique individual. But I have never talked with a join who regretted the changes. In my personal experience, the difference of perspective is most often compared to the change in perspective that a solo can experience after having a child. It can be a complete change of view, of values.”

Josette chews this over for a moment. She says casually, “Well, that sounds like it won’t be me then.” She asks, “What about when I die? I mean, my body?”

“That’s never easy,” Oceanic says. “And it may be especially bad in this case because of your illness. While your body may last years, there is a small chance it might go quickly. If that were to happen, you won’t have fully integrated with the body, but your mind, your psyche, will be completely integrated. So of your several bodies, Josette—this one—will still feel special to you. And because it feels special to you, it will feel special to the whole of you, to the join. Initially, it could be very painful, very traumatic, when it dies. But you learn soon enough how to function without it. You will be okay.”

One of Leap’s earliest memories after becoming a five is a conversation with Oceanic. It is also her final memory of the adviser. It happens near the end of the psychotropic phase, and the memory is a bit disjointed, but Leap remembers Oceanic’s voice saying, “It’s done. It took a while for the two of you to get there, but I knew you would when I first saw you. This is why people come to me.”

Chance has difficulty saying the words. “You joined with your mother.”

“Yeah,” Leap Two says quietly.

“And one of you changed your mind. One of you changed your mind, Leap!”

“Yeah.”

“Shit! Who was your CJA?”

Leap doesn’t answer.

“Who was your adviser, dammit! You flipped!”

Chance Two and Leap Two are staring at each other. Leap says, “Yeah, I flipped.”

“Oh, shit. Fucking hell,” says Chance.

She stretches out her arm, but there is nothing near to support her. She takes a few breaths, then searches for a chair, walks to one, and sits down. She looks at Leap Two, standing beside the bed, beside Leap Five.

Chance stands and walks to the bedside. She takes Leap Five’s hand and asks, “Does the join feel complete?”

“Yes,” says Leap Five.

Chance spends a few moments orienting to this new information. She recalls case histories. She thinks about how the pathology starts, how it develops, how it ends. She cannot find even a sliver of hope. She groans. Looking at Leap Five, she says, “There’s never been a cure.”

Leap Five closes her eyes. Chance turns to Leap Two, who appears calm.

“That drive is in so much pain,” Leap Two says. “I just keep it down, sleeping all the time. There’s some evidence that killing it could slow the disease.”

“There’s a lot of evidence of that. And the slowdown is significant.”

“Yeah, but I can’t do it. That’s me. I mean, it’s still weird to see that drive when I’m not looking in a mirror. I’m integrated, but that body isn’t. You, of all people, should know how I feel.”

Chance understands. Chance Five’s potential death has the morbid sense of permanent oblivion. Chance has been walking around choking on the risk of losing Chance Five and the trauma of losing Chance Three. Chance has been wailing about those difficulties to Leap, who all the while has been faced with an even-more-gruesome reality: a relentless and horrifying physical degeneration ending in complete join failure and psychic death.

Leap says, “To me, killing that drive would almost be suicide.”

“You joined during your vacation?” Chance whispers.

“Three and a half months ago,” says Leap.

The words that need to be spoken are heavy and sharp. Chance says, “You’ve got to kill that drive now.”

Leap nods, and then Chance understands what Leap is asking. “You want me to do it?”

Leap Two suddenly folds into herself. She collapses against the side of the bed, leaning on it near the sleeping drive that was one of her mothers and is now her. She cries as Chance stands silently by, shocked and immobile. Finally, Leap pushes herself up and sits on the side of the bed.

She says, softly, “I can’t do it.”

Chance doesn’t want to do it, doesn’t want to kill an old woman.

“No one—no one else?” she asks dully.

Leap doesn’t answer. She reaches out to take a pink tissue that rises from a green box on her bedstead like a perfect artificial lily. She wipes her eyes, pulls on her nose. She’s trying to catch her breath, then wiping again. Her voice muted, high. “I can’t tell anyone else about it. But I was dying. I had to do the join. And the adviser who helped us, it turns out she’d had her certification revoked. The whole thing was gray. It had to be. I had asked for that adviser; I found her because I knew there could be complications, and I knew it had to go quickly.”

Chance understands. Leap and Josette hadn’t prepared to kill Josette’s body after the join. Why would they? It’s only important now because of the flip.

“The licenses are legitimate,” Leap continues, “but from the emergency pool. I had to pay out a fee to reverse a data trace and convince someone to hide the licenses for up to a year. I’ll get real licenses in two months. They’ll go into the emergency pool to replace what I used, and no one will know. But I can’t officially be a five for another two months.”

“You borrowed licenses from an admin at Vitalcorp. Now you owe them licenses for a five, to replace what came out of the emergency pool?”

“Yes.”

“But if that drive,” says Chance, “is dead, how will you certify yourself as a five? You won’t get the licenses without showing five drives. You’ll have a Vitalcorp admin after you—”

“I know it. I figured I’d find an adviser who’s certified and willing to bend that rule just a little. I can record all the evidence, the video interview, the DNA samples, everything, now. The only issue will be date stamping. I’ve got two more months to find someone to help.”

“I don’t know how to help with that. They will—” Chance can’t finish the thought. She starts again. “Do you have connections? Who can help you with this kind of thing?”

“I do. I have some, from when I was building the bank.”

“This is crazy, Leap. Really, maybe worse than crazy. If I kill that drive, I’m a part of it.”

“I can’t kill myself. I’m not strong enough. I’ll just keep delaying. I’ve known something was wrong with the join. But I . . . Chance, I can’t see the spasm. I don’t know when it happens. For me, nothing happens. I don’t feel it. But I noticed that I had knocked over a cup. I had no memory of doing it, but I must have. Then I was brushing my teeth, and my toothbrush was suddenly jammed into the back of my mouth, and my mouth was bleeding. And then I . . . I saw the spasm on a vid. I’ve known for weeks now. I’ve known what was going on, but I can’t do it.”

Chance is cold, her voice remote. She says, “Just drink a calming poison.”

“It’s not that easy. I can’t do it. If I could, I would have.”

“What about the adviser who helped you, the one who had her certification revoked?”

“Oceanic. She said I couldn’t contact her after the join was complete. No matter what. She said we don’t know each other. She won’t respond to my messages. I think she blocked me.”

“And you can’t go to a hospital because the join was gray.”

“Chance, I can work through the licenses,” says Leap. “I know someone who can do that kind of thing, deal with the legal issues. But I can’t kill my drive. I am Josette. That’s me. I’m scared of dying.”

Chance remembers Nana rubbing her thumb across a birthmark on Chance Five’s left arm, a light stain on his copper skin in the shape of a quarter moon. Her thumb was gentle, and she rubbed it and then regarded his arm closely, holding it until he started to squirm a bit. Then she kissed him lightly on top of his head and said, “Javier, you have the moon on your arm. You know the moon is the mother of dreams.”

Within twenty-four hours of his death, Chance Three’s remains are properly identified. Chance, who is still enforcing a com block on personal contact, is informed about the correction through the office where Chance One works.

Then Chance One has a preliminary video interview about the incident. The poison Rope used has been conclusively identified, but as a result of some legal complications in Rope’s status, Directorate staff have raised jurisdictional concerns with local authorities. Those questions will need to be resolved, and once they are, Chance will be re-interviewed.

Chance One spreads Chance Three’s ashes into New Denver’s River of Reflection. A feature of most spire communities, the river is designed to receive the ashes of the dead. It is still and reflective at its sides, with a current just beneath the surface that draws water from the edges toward its center. At the center, ripples stretch and break the glassy stillness as the watercourse flows downstream.

Chance is still scared of attracting any kind of attention and scared of gathering all of the drives in a single place, even along the banks of the river. Rope is an unknown, both in motive and capability, so Chance has decided not to complete the full Ritual of Retirement.

Chance has also chosen not to shave the heads of the four remaining drives and does not commit the undivided attention of every drive to the process of saying goodbye, as is the custom. Instead, Chance One and Chance Four complete a shortened version of the ritual alone, in New Denver. The day is overcast and though Chance is spreading ashes an hour before sunset—the proper time for the ritual—the light is muted, the river dull and dark.

Chance doesn’t remember seeing Chance Three’s ashes falling from the vessel into the river, or the water carrying them toward the center and then downriver. Chance is thinking about security protocols and is talking with Leap.

After spreading Chance Three’s remains, Chance One goes home. He will complete various forms to register a change of status and to officially remove Chance Three’s network-access privileges.

Chance Four sits on one of the benches near the banks of the river. She is bundled up against the winter cold and watches the meeting place of the still water and the ripple in the center until long past sunset. To do as Leap asks, all that’s needed is a hypodermic needle. Chance already knows what to put in it, and how to use it.

All of Leap’s drives shave their heads. They each clip their nails and lay the hair they’ve shaved and their nail clippings in the casket with the body of Leap Five. Then they prepare for the Ritual of Retirement by cremating the drive that had been Josette.

Two days later, Leap’s four remaining drives stand along the banks of the River of Reflection. The river in the Olympic Archipelago’s spire community is a mile long, between forty and sixty feet wide, and languorously undulant at its center. It travels slowly from a slightly raised artificial wetlands in the east to a slightly lowered artificial wetlands to the west. Like every River of Reflection, it isn’t allowed to freeze over. Snow is removed from within twenty feet of the banks, which are rush lined and gently sloped but cut with paths to walk upon. No bridges cross the river, and no boats travel on it.

Leap’s drives, male and female, wear the identical, simple cotton shifts of mourners, modified with a heat-generating and -reflecting inner layer. Their shaven heads reinforce the image of unity among them. Each holds a bowl with a measure of ash from Leap Five’s body. Chance Two stands on the right side of the line of Leap’s drives, beside Leap Four. Leap’s drives step into the river in unison. They walk four paces in unison, into knee-deep or thigh-deep water. They bend toward the water at the same time. Each lifts the cover off their vessel and leans forward to tip the cremated drive’s ashes into the river.

Watching all of Leap’s drives acting in the river in unison, Chance knows that Leap is experiencing the sensation of the cold water underneath the still surface moving against four pairs of legs, each pair feeling the same river differently. She knows Leap is watching the four streams of ash fall simultaneously, each drive placing a similar but unique signature on the moment and the memory. Leap is memorializing the drive in a way that will recall not just Leap Five but also this period of Leap’s life. As Chance Two watches, she feels the loss of her own ritual, the proper ritual she neglected.

When the ashes are gone, the drives stand still in the river, cold water rolling slowly about them. Leap is very much in a “between” period. Josette’s psyche has joined but has not yet fully separated from her body. Unlike a healthy retirement ceremony, in which a fully integrated join says goodbye to a beloved drive, Leap’s trauma will have a surreal touch: the dream of attending one’s own funeral.

A tremendous shudder passes suddenly through all of Leap’s drives. Their muscles tense. Their backs arch. Leap One drops his bowl, which had held one-fourth of the ashes. It splashes softly into the water, tips, then rights itself and begins to float toward the center of the river, as it was designed to do. Leap’s drives straighten from the spasm. Chance is surprised that none of them has fallen into the river.

A moment later, Leap’s other drives purposefully release their bowls, gently setting them on the surface of the river and letting them go. As Leap and Chance watch, the bowls dissolve, drifting toward the central ripples where they roll, weakening, folding in on themselves, collapsing, and then thinning to nothing.