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★★Do I look like a dumb blonde?★★ she snorts. ★★Pale Grace™ is for department store sales clerks and middle-management types trying to glam up their suits.★★

★★Good for you, because he’s got a contagious proximity-awareness binding mixed in with it—that’s what he married Eileen for, that’s why he bankrolled her business. The goddamn seagulls weren’t how he was watching us, they were just cover: it was all the thirty-something tourist women. All of them, at least the ones who take the free samples down at the promenade. And I reckon if he’s got any sense, all of the crew on this boat will be using it, or something similar.★★

★★At least they’ll all have beautiful complexions.★★ She pauses. ★★So what does he want with us? Why are we still alive?★★

★★You’re alive because he wants you to do a job. Me . . . probably because he needs someone to monologue at. He said something about a geas, but I’m not sure what he meant. And we’re still entangled, so I guess ... ★★

I stop. While I was wibbling, Ramona realized something. ★★You’re right, it is the geas,★★ she says sharply. ★★Which means nothing’s going to happen until we arrive. So go to sleep, Bob. You’re going to need all the sleep you can get before tomorrow.★★

★★But—★★

★★Lights out.★★ And with that, she pushes me out of her head, blocking me off from that sudden flash of understanding.

12.

POWER BREAKFAST

I AWAKEN IN A STRANGE BED THAT FEELS AS IF it’s vibrating slightly, with a head like thunder, and muscles I didn’t know I had aching in my arms and legs. The thin light of dawn is pouring in through a porthole. Sleep held me down and tried to drown me, but waking comes as fast as a bucket of seawater in the face: I’m on Billington’s yacht!

I roll out of bed and use the bathroom. My eyes are bloodshot and I could strip paint with my chin, but I’m not even remotely sleepy. I’m out of touch with Control! That fact is sitting on my shoulder, screaming in my ear with a megaphone; forget little organizational tics like Griffin, I need to talk to Angleton and I need to talk to him right now, if not about six hours ago, and especially before the upcoming power breakfast. Last night’s sense of apathetic passivity is a million miles away, so alien that I frown at myself in the mirror: How the fuck could I do that? It’s not like me at all!

It’s got to be something to do with this geas that Billington’s running on me, the one Ramona refuses to explain in words of one syllable. I can’t trust my own reflexes. Which sucks mightily. Billington is racing headlong towards a full-scale sanity excursion, he’s penetrated the Black Chamber, the auction for JENNIFER MORGUE is a decoy, and I’m in the shit just about up to my eyebrows—and not a snorkel in sight.

“Right,” I mutter to myself. I look at my clothes from last night in distaste. “Let’s see,” I pull on my trousers and shirt, then pause. Gadgets. Pinky was talking about . . . toys. I snort. I pick up the bow tie, meaning to flick it across the room, then notice something lumpy in either end. That’d be the USB drives with the dog-fucker kit, right? “Ludicrous,” I mutter, and roll the thing up. It’d be bloody handy if they’d locked me in a cell with a computer plugged into Billington’s shipboard network, but they’re not that stupid. I stare longingly at the bare chunk of space on the desktop. There may be a keyboard stitched into the lining of my cummerbund, but without a machine to plug it into it’s about as much use as a chocolate hacksaw.

With nothing to do but wait for breakfast, I sit down next to the flat-screen TV and glance through the titles on the shelf. There’s a bunch of paperback thrillers with titles familiar from the movie series: Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Next to them, a bunch of DVDs. It’s all the same goddamn series about the most famous non-existent spy in history. Whoever furnished this room had a James Bond fixation. I sigh, and pick up the remote, thinking maybe I can watch a mindless movie for