The corridor led to a laboratory.
At first she took it for a storeroom. It was a long room with a low ceiling, lit by the same every-second light as the corridor, and it was full of racks. Steel racks, floor to ceiling, in rows, like the shelves in the records hall, with a narrow aisle between each row. And on the racks, in fitted slots, things.
She walked the first row slowly, with her hands in her pockets so she would not touch anything.
The things on the racks were interfaces. She had the word from Eshel, who read it behind her from a label on the rack’s end in the Compact’s standard script: neural interface, Founder pattern, copy. Each one was a shape she recognized from Lorn, from the cradle, from the harness in her mother’s trunk: a frame of fine wire and pale metal, curved to fit something. A head. Each one was shaped to fit around a human head, with a band across the brow and two curved pieces that came down behind the ears, and where the curved pieces met the skull, a small round plate.
Behind the left ear.
Mara put her hand up to her own graft without meaning to. Under her fingers the old scar was cool and smooth, as it always was.
