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I found the dead woman—where else?—in the bathroom.

The bathtub was the standard diamond-glass scoop that rose and sank into the floor, to provide everything from a spill lip for a shower to a full tub for a relaxing soak. Janet Dodds had raised hers to its full height, filled it full of memory liqueur, and then drowned in it.

Or so it appeared.

The rainbow swirl of liquids had preserved her like a damselfly in amber, a look of awe and wonder on her face. I recognized some of the colors: the sop pink of a sunrise, the greens of walks through woods in spring. Miss Dodds's thick red hair driped in curls around her like something out of John Singer Sargent, and her hands were raised soply to the surface of the liquid as though reaching out to cradle something that would vanish if grasped too tightly.

It was all very pretty and very tragic, and could not have been more obviously staged.

It was the prettiness of it that convinced me: this was a romantic's notion of death by overindulgence. None of the graceless poses or unpleasant smells that usually came with corpses. People who drowned in memories also forgot where they were: they splashed and thrashed and spilled liquors all over in the throes of their final confusion. But the bathroom around me was pristine—as if it had been cleaned up, wiped down, and presented to a jury like a painting in an exhibition.

We detectives had seen a great deal of this kind of death in the early days, when people were still adjusting to their new reality of life on board ship. The temptation toward consciousness-altering experiences was very human, and the existence of the Library meant even fatal experiments didn't stay fatal. Our bodies were temporary—at least until that distant day of planetfall, when we'd pick one to keep until real, permanent death overcame us.

But being temporary was not the same as being disposable. And that was how Janet had clearly been treated: as something to be gotten rid of. A nonmystery with all the bows tied up nice and neat for whoever was first to find her.

It was an affront to any detective's soul, even if they weren't—possibly—walking around with the hands that had done the deed.

Murder had happened before on the Fairweather. We were all still human, after all. The first century of the crossing had seen several famous incidents: a fraudster, a jealous lover, a brawl in a pub that went too far. But murder trials were quite different when the victim could be brought in to testify in court—or when the shipmind could subpoena the killer's own memories as evidence. One victim had even been able to name her murderer, since she'd realized she'd been poisoned and managed to make it to the Library and update her memory-book in the last instants before her body's death.

And since killing someone no longer removed them permanently but still came with many of the old punishments, the payoff was generally not deemed worth the effort.

Unless someone had come up with something clever to ship that calculus.

It was a thought to send a chill through all my borrowed bones.

'Maybe Gloria's not a killer,' I thought. Grasping at straws, but it helped shake off the paralysis. 'Perhaps the two of them were just having a little fun, and something went wrong, and Gloria panicked. Perhaps some third party was involved.

And after all, Miss Dodds could be restored from her memory-book.

Couldn't she?

What was it Ferry had said? I'd been put in Gloria's body because someone had erased my book from the Library. What if other books had been damaged as well? By the storm, or by sabotage?

Those questions would be the first ones I'd ask once Ferry was, well, sober again.

In the meantime, I could start pulling threads on the other mystery: the secret copy of my mind that Ferry had brought forward when my real copy was erased.

And I knew precisely who was to blame.