ANN AND THE OTHERS were checked out by medical personnel, pronounced healthy, and given separate living quarters within the company. They stayed there for several days, recuperating and being taken to various rooms for interviews.

Ann told her own story three times, to three different people. Each of them stopped her when she came to her meeting with Meret at the cemetery, and each asked her the same questions. What did Meret tell you about Core? Did she invite you to join?

She had trouble breathing; the air seemed filthy after the clean skies of Kaphtor. And she slept badly, and her dreams were filled with snakes and drums and axes, each shape shifting into another like the waxing and waning moon.

Finally one morning she was shown into a fourth room, where to her surprise she saw Da Silva waiting for her. Da Silva went to sit in a fat upholstered chair, and indicated to Ann to take the chair opposite.

“Well,” Da Silva said. “You’re probably exhausted by all those questions.”

“I guess,” Ann said.

“I know I am. I hate it, but it has to be done. The company has to know everything that happens, on every assignment. And especially this one, because, well, because we failed.” She scrunched up her face in mock distress, and Ann smiled.

“Does that mean they won’t send us on any more assignments?” she asked.

“Not at all. None of the things that went wrong were your fault, not by any stretch of the imagination. The first problem was Gregory’s death, and things just got worse from there.”

Ann hadn’t told the interviewers one of the things that bothered her, which was that Walker had been so incompetent. From the very beginning, when she was thrown by Itaja’s statement that they had to bury Gregory, to when the queen’s police had followed the Minos to their inn, Walker seemed at the center of a lot of the things that had gone wrong.

Should she say something now? But they probably didn’t like people complaining about their superiors—and she wanted to stay with the company for as long as she could.

They talked a little about the assignment, Ann repeating the things she had said to the others. But she found herself opening up, going into more detail about some of the things that had happened. Da Silva looked at her sympathetically, nodding and smiling as Ann talked.

“What did you think about the things Meret told you?” Da Silva asked.

“We thought she was some kind of whack-job, to be honest. Franny and me. We didn’t really know what to make of her. When Walker said that there really was some kind of shadowy organization—well, I have to say I was surprised.”

“And Meret didn’t mention Core?”

“No, nothing. Like I said, I’d never heard of Core by the time I talked to Walker.”

She’d been asked this question so many times that her mind began to wander. Why did they call it Core? What was it supposed to be the core of, anyway? Core, corps, Kore … Of course Kore was pronounced with two syllables—Kor-eh— but still …

Meret had mentioned Kore, hadn’t she? “Kaphtor’s goddesses are peaceful, Potnia, Eileithyia, Kore, all of them.” What if it was some kind of a password, what if Meret had been trying to see if she or Franny belonged to Core as well, if they were allies?

And hadn’t Gregory brought up Kore too? “I always liked the Greek gods and goddesses, Kore and Demeter …” he’d said once during lunch. She remembered that because at the time she hadn’t heard of Kore, and she’d wondered if it was a god or goddess, and how Gregory had heard of him or her.

So did that mean … No. No, it couldn’t be. Her mind hurried from one idea to the next. Gregory was a member of Core. Gregory had died while traveling through time. Meret thought the company might have killed him.

“Ann?” Da Silva asked. “You look like you’ve remembered something.”

She forced herself to pay attention. “No. No, sorry. Just thinking about Meret, and if she said anything else. But I’m pretty sure I told you everything.”

She couldn’t stop herself from following the thought to its conclusion, though she tried to listen to Da Silva at the same time. What if Meret was right, what if the company had somehow arranged Gregory’s death? Did that mean she was right about everything? Was the company lying to them, did they have some agenda that only benefited an elite few? All she knew about the company was what they had told her, after all. Maybe there had never been any climate change or nuclear war, maybe they had lied about that too.

No, it was ridiculous. Secret conspiracies, evil overlords, death sentences …

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Of course,” Da Silva said.

“Why was the company on the side of the Achaeans? I mean, the people in Kaphtor had pretty good lives—they hadn’t been at war for hundreds of years, and no one ever starved, and their art was as good as anything I’ve ever seen. Why did the company support the invasion?”

“Weren’t you debriefed on this?”

“Yeah, but I still don’t get it. It seems like we need more of the Kaphtoran way of thinking, not less. Like the Achaeans were a step backward.”

“Well, the Achaeans were the forerunners of the ancient Greeks. And the Greeks gave us so much, philosophy and art and drama and mathematics …”

Ann nodded. That was what the first interviewer had told her too. But it seemed a shame—no, a tragedy—that the Kaphtorans had disappeared from the world. She thought of their easy grace, their strength, the way everyone had seemed to fit in, to belong. She wondered how they took care of their orphans.

“Anyway, we can’t know exactly why the company does certain things,” Da Silva said. She looked tired, as tired as Ann felt. And she seemed to have had difficulty returning hern as well; the skin on her arms was red with some sort of inflammation. “It’s the result of hours of computer modeling—I don’t know if they understand it themselves, up on the fifth floor.”

Maybe they should, Ann thought. Maybe they should have to visit the worlds they were condemning to extinction.

She wanted to tell Da Silva her conclusions about Meret and the password, wanted the other woman to admire her intelligence. But Da Silva belonged to the company, after all, and the company might have sent Gregory to his death.

ANN RAN INTO FRANNY the next day, on her way to the cafeteria. “Listen,” she said, when they had gotten their food and were sitting out on the lawn. “I figured something out, or I think I did. Remember when we saw Meret that first time, and she said something about Kore? About the goddesses in Kaphtor being peaceful, like Potnia and Kore?”

“Sort of,” Franny said. Her voice sounded scratchy and she cleared her throat, as if trying to get the twenty-first century out of her lungs. “Wow, this pizza is good. I can’t believe how much I missed tomatoes.”

“So I was wondering, well, what if it was some kind of password? Kore, I mean. Like Core.”

“Sorry. If what was a password?”

“The word Kore. If Meret used it to tell us that she was in Core, and to ask if we were too.”

“That’s a pretty big stretch, isn’t it?”

“Okay, but look. Gregory said something about Kore once, at one of our lunches. So what if he was in Core too?”

“You’re starting to sound like her. Like Meret.”

“Well, suppose Meret was right? Suppose the company did kill him?”

Franny shook her head. She had gotten her broad smile back; she seemed to have put Gregory’s death behind her somehow. Was that how she was able to live with her husband, by ignoring anything painful or upsetting?

“I don’t want to talk about Greg anymore. Anyway it was an accident, everyone said so.”

“Yeah, but they wouldn’t tell us if it wasn’t, right? They wouldn’t say, Hey, we killed Gregory, and we can do the same to you, anytime we want?”

“Why would they want to kill us?”

“I don’t know. If we joined Core, maybe.”

“Look—the company was the best thing that ever happened to me. And you said the same thing, that you were unhappy, that you’d jumped at the chance to leave your old life. They aren’t killers—I mean, the idea’s ridiculous.”

“Okay. Okay, I guess it is stupid. Don’t tell anyone what I said, all right?”

“Sure,” Franny said.

“So what about your husband? Are you going back to him?”

“Yeah. We’ve been talking on the phone, and it sounds like he really missed me.” She laughed, then cleared her throat again. “Da Silva and I worked out a cover story, something to tell him while I’m recuperating. If only he knew!”

She had hoped that Franny would be her ally, that she could share her suspicions with the other woman. But it looked as though she had no allies, that she would be alone with her questions.