Meira released a breath she didn't know she was holding and let the pistols fall to her sides. She felt suddenly weak, and extraordinarily hungry, as though she had run for miles. A thousand questions ran amok in her mind; the first to make it out of her mouth wasn't the one she meant to ask. "Are they going to want their guns back?"

            Morpheus was silent a moment. "No. There will always be more. Come, sit."

            Numbly, Meira sat in one of the chairs, set Switch's pistol on the table by the glass of water, and tucked the other one inside her jacket. She placed her hands on her knees and breathed deeply, trying to get her head around what was happening. But too much was happening, and her body wasn't cooperating. I just need time to think. I need time to sort the events of the last few hours into discrete categories and analyze each in turn. She shook her head. Even the language in her head seemed alien. No. No, I need to sit down and cut up what happened tonight into small chunks and tackle each part separately. That's what I do. That's what I always do.

            "Are you all right?" Morpheus asked, preternaturally calm.

            "No. No, I can't say I'm all right."

            "I can understand that."

            "What the hell are you people? What happened to Mouse? What happened to me? What have you done to me?" Each question became more desperate than the last. She struggled to keep a hold of her senses.

            "I will do my best to answer those questions, but some of them I cannot answer. We are resistance fighters. Mouse has gone back to the Nebuchadnezzar. I don't know what happened to you, but I might guess. And we have not done anything to you. I doubt that we could have." He leaned back in the chair and steepled his fingers, the leather of his coat creaking and rustling against the leather of the old chair.

            Anger cut through her exhaustion and disorientation. "Those are not answers, and you know it."

            "You're displeased with me. I can understand that. The answers are not easy, Meira. But perhaps you will know the right questions after I ask some of my own. May I?" Meira nodded curtly. "All right. You have been following us, my comrades, for some time now. Why is that?"

            "To get to the Suits," Meira replied quickly. "I've been watching them. And wherever you are, they inevitably are too."

            Morpheus nodded. "Why do you think that is?"

            "Because you are criminals, and they are . . . secret police, maybe, or soldiers. I never hear them talk about what agency they come from." Morpheus smiled for some unfathomable reason. Was it something I said? "I never hear them talk about anything personal at all. All they ever talk about is finding you . . . criminals, terrorists, whatever you are." Meira ran a hand up her sleeve and avoided looking at the reflective orbs in front of Morpheus' eyes. "They are there because they mean to catch you, to stop you from doing the things you do."

            "And what sorts of things do we do?" he asked, his manner relentless.

            "You . . . you steal things, sometimes. Small things. Or sometimes people."

            "People?"

            "Children. Teenagers. Sometimes they're older."

            "What would we want with children? And teenagers?"

            She raised an eyebrow. "I shudder to think of it."

            He smiled. "Have you ever seen anyone taken against their will? Do they seem to struggle? Or, if we find ourselves running away from the . . . from the Suits, do you see the children, the teenagers running with us? Running for their lives?"

            Meira frowned and was silent a moment. She watched Morpheus turning a slim silver case over and over in his hands. "Well, I can't say I understand it," she said finally. "And anyway, I'm watching them, not you. You people are incidental. Dangerous, sometimes violent, and always fashionably dressed, but incidental. The Suits are what I'm after."

            "Why?" Morpheus' tone was whisper-soft. There was an incomprehensible sadness in his face.

            "What?" She knitted her brows. "Well, that's my business, anyway."

            "They're dangerous. More than we are."

            "I know. I've seen you people die. They're incredible, and I've never seen such determination. Like their entire purpose in life is to track you all down and kill all of you." Meira was silent in thought for a moment, then shook her head. "That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to figure them out, why they can do things that should be impossible, and why . . . why . . ."

            Morpheus leaned forward and clasped his hands together around the silver case. "Perhaps you are trying to figure out why you are trying to figure them out."

            It took Meira a moment to decipher that. "Yes, perhaps."

            A self-satisfied smile spread over Morpheus' lips. Anger kindled in Meira at the idea that Morpheus might think he was "making progress" with her. "What ever made you interested in them to begin with? Most people would never give them a second look. They don't exactly . . . stand out in a crowd." Meira pursed her lips, willing herself to not speak. "You're not comfortable talking about it. Very well. Or perhaps you're just not comfortable with me. In any case, let me tell you a story about the Suits. We call them Agents.

            "I've only seen this once. Most of us who ever see this . . . well, it's one of the last things they see. I was making my way to an exit, much like the one on this table." He gestured with an upturned palm at the antique telephone. "It was in a public telephone booth. It was dark. I was running, and my Operator was guiding me over a cell phone, so I wasn't looking too closely. I rounded the corner and opened the door of the booth, and saw a man in there finishing a call. He hung up, and turned around, perhaps to curse at me. He opened his mouth, but then pain twisted his face; something was happening to him, something I find hard to describe now. The man's shabby jacket and torn jeans somehow changed into a well-tailored brown suit. Where his face was stubbled and he had no glasses, now he was clean shaven and had sunglasses on. Everything about him changed in an instant.

            "Most of us would have frozen in panic, or drawn a gun, or run away. Why I did none of those things, I cannot explain, but the telephone rang just then. We both reached for it -- I for the receiver, the Agent for the cord, to rip it out of the phone. They're strong, you know that. It happened so fast," Morpheus said, clearly lost in his memory. "Something happened outside the phone booth; a colleague of mine named Hagar fired her pistol into the air and shouted at me to pick up the telephone. It distracted the Agent for less than a second, but it was enough for me to take the receiver and get away. Hagar, though, she . . ."

            "She didn't make it back."

            Morpheus looked away. "No. She did not."

            The question of back where? bubbled through Meira's mind, but she pushed it away. "Why are you telling me this?"

            "I never thought much about the man in the phone booth since then. That is, I never thought about the man he was before the Agent . . . subverted him. I haven't thought about him until I saw how easily you dodged Switch's fire and disarmed her. I must wonder now, what happened to that man after all of us had either made it back or died?"

            "Nothing," Meira said, her own voice echoing in her ears. "After the Suit was done with him, he probably just came to. His mind made up some sort of event to explain the gap in his memory. He was drunk, or got mugged and hit on the head, anything."

            "He woke up, and believed whatever he wanted to believe." Morpheus' voice sounded distant.

            "Yeah." Half-remembered hallucinations roiled through Meira's mind. After a moment, she composed herself. "Yeah. I've seen that happen, though not in any great detail. Sometimes the Suit would be standing there among the bodies, and then he was gone, and some guy who didn't belong there at all would just be kneeling there, trying to figure out why there was blood on his hands and shell casings at his feet. Panicking. Running. Talking to himself."

            Morpheus studied her for a moment longer. "Perhaps you find it easy to identify with such a man."

            Meira stiffened. The observation, reasonable as it sounded, hit a little too close to home. "My turn," Meira said, gripping the armrests and leaning forward. "I want you to explain to me just what the hell you are. I've seen some crazy things in the last year, but tonight takes the cake. Why am I not a corpse right now, the way Switch tried to kill me? Where exactly have those three gone?"

            Morpheus steepled his index fingers and pressed them to his lips. He replied, "Those questions are difficult to answer. Especially the question of why you're not dead. I've only seen a few people ever move that fast, and they are all Agents."

            "I am nothing like them," she said, her teeth clenched.

            "I know you aren't. I have never seen an Agent spare one of our lives out of compassion, or perhaps fear, or simple common decency. You could have easily killed all of us. But if you did, you wouldn't be able to ask me those questions."

            "That's not the only reason." They were silent a moment. Meira continued, "You said it would be difficult to answer, but you will answer me, right?"

            He smiled. "I will try. Suppose you believe what I say and what you see. Suppose the Agents subvert and control the bodies of regular people to catch us. Several questions must arise from those assumptions. One is, did such a subversion happen to you?"

            "The other is, why doesn't it happen to you? Why doesn't a Suit just take over one of your bodies and jump off a bridge?"

            "Those are good questions."

            "Okay. So, yes, I think that the . . . subversion did happen to me once. A year ago." When Meira did ever think of that troubled time, she never had such a clinical word as subversion to describe how being robbed of her own body felt.

            "Can you tell me more?" Meira said nothing for a long moment. "I did tell you my story."

            She sighed. "Yes. There was a riot, or something. Some sort of disturbance. A car chase. Shooting. Cars crashing. And then . . . this is the part that's a little hazy. I was trying to get away from all the noise, you know? I didn't want to get caught up. And then . . . and then it felt like the whole world got pulled out from underneath me. Something . . . some oppressive, powerful thing seemed to press in on me from everywhere, crushing me, making me very small and storing me away inside my own body, making me very numb. I could see, but only as through a glass, darkly. I could feel my body moving, but it all seemed so distant, so different." Her voice sounded mechanical and far away in her own ears now. "And then I was running, shooting, but the rebel eluded me, and then I was empty. I holstered the gun and kept running. I tackled her, the rebel, and beat her, and beat her, there in the middle of the street, right in the crosswalk. I was on top of her, leaning into her face, crushing her windpipe with my forearm, and I saw my reflection in her sunglasses. But it wasn't me." Meira stopped and shook her head. She couldn't say anymore.

            Morpheus waited a few seconds. "What happened then?"

            She looked up from her hands folded meekly in her lap. "And then, after she was dead, I stood up. Or the Suit stood up in my body -- God, this is crazy. We . . . I guess it's 'we.' We stood, and we could hear a motor gunning very close. We turned our head, but it was too late by then. A car hit us. It was a rebel driving it. I could see the anger in his face. We were thrown over the hood, and . . . and then I was myself again." She took a deep breath. "I don't much like to remember that feeling, Morpheus. The oppressive thing left me, and I . . . I expanded back into my own body. Going from the numbness of subversion to unspeakable pain was almost . . . almost welcome. But then the pain of my injuries, they were too much, and I passed out. For the first few weeks after that, I reckoned what happened to me as hallucinations. After I recovered, I wondered why the riot, or terrorist attack, or whatever it was, didn't appear in the news. Why did no one remember what happened?

            "That's what set me on the trail of these Suits. I didn't really believe that my body had been taken over, but I thought that if they could somehow make an entire afternoon of violence somehow disappear from public memory, then I needed to find out more about them." Morpheus said nothing, but seemed to be deep in thought. "Look, I really enjoyed this heart to heart, you know? But is there anything else? I wouldn't want a Suit barging in on our little tea party."

            Morpheus tucked the silver case into an inside pocket of his coat. "No, there isn't. I was going to suggest something, but perhaps that isn't to be right now." He stood. "It was a pleasure to meet you, Meira. I would ask you if you know how to get to safety, but if you've been following the Agents for this long, I think you must have that well in hand."

            "I'll just walk," she said wearily. "It might be lunchtime by the time I get back home, but hell, I couldn't sleep tonight anyway." She stood and took the glass of water. "Mouse will be all right, then? He's a good kid."

            Morpheus smiled benevolently. "He's fine. Thank you again." He retrieved his cell phone and slid open its panel, but stopped. "There is one more thing. Someone else perhaps you can talk to."

            "I'm listening."

            "One of us will contact you in a few days."

            "Who is this other person? How will you contact me?"

            "She is the Oracle. I expect you two will have a great deal to talk about. And don't worry. We will know how to contact you." Meira didn't much like either answer. "You are welcome to take any of the guns for your walk home, if you think they might help you."

            "No. The last thing I need is a cop hassling me for something while I've got a gun in my jacket."

            "That's wise of you. Very well. In a few days." He inclined his head towards her, his arms crossed behind his back.

            Instead of replying, she drank the glass of water in a single pull, keeping her eyes locked to his pince-nez, and set it delicately on the end table. Without a word, she turned her back and left the apartment.