A Darker Place by Laurie R. King

seemed to have no effect on her, and as time went on her strangeness began to worry him and inflict him with a compensatory anxiety, until he almost felt as if he were the one about to set forth in the morning.
    It seemed odd to Glen that he did not know Anne well enough to tell what her behavior meant. On one level, he knew her better than he knew anyone else in the world. He was intimate with her physical history, her psychological profile, her finances, training, and personal history, her family and friends, her strengths and her weaknesses. He knew what size shoe she wore and what kind of blouses she liked, her taste in cosmetics and where she bought her furniture. He knew in general what men she had relationships with, and could, if he wanted to, find out a great deal more about them. He even knew why she liked men of their particular physical type, big and strong and preferably hairy, since he had seen pictures of her husband.
    On another level, though, Anne was as much of an enigma to him as she had been the first day he had sought her out fifteen years before. How could he know, really know, what essential shifts would be made when a mother saw her own beloved daughter laid out on the ground beside a row of other children? How could he even begin to guess at the dark areas she hid so efficiently inside her? Nothing truly bad had ever happened to him personally—hell, both his parents were even still alive. He understood how Anne worked well enough to make use of her, but he could not say that he knew her. He did not even think that he wanted to.
    When the table was clear and the dishes stacked by the sink, Glen brought out his briefcase and gave Anne her identity. She studied the California driver’s license with its address in a town where she had actually lived, ifbriefly and many years before. The photograph on her passport was a different one, more recent than that on the license, with an issue date three years earlier and a smattering of European and Asian stamps on the pages—again, all countries she had at least visited in the past.
    She now possessed a checking account, two credit cards, a telephone card, an assortment of memberships to video rental places she had never heard of, an REI sporting goods member number, and three library cards (two of which were expired) from far-flung towns. He also gave her half a dozen letters and communications from mythical relatives and an insurance company, bearing forwarding labels to “general address” at a number of post offices up and down the West Coast. Ana Wakefield had kept an account with a mailbox service in Boise, Idaho, for the last four years, set up automatically when Anne had ceased being the last identity, Annette Watson. Glen had apparently thought it worth maintaining a new name for her even though she had made it clear at the time that she would not work for him again. Well, she had been wrong, and he had been right, and here was Ana Wakefield with a history ready to slip into. She pushed away the bundle of old letters, unable to face the new relatives and the paperwork from a minor accident Ana had had in Seattle. Glen drilled her on the methods of getting in touch, ranging from postcards addressed to her imaginary Uncle Abner to the extreme use of the panic alarm that was wired into Rocinante’s chassis. Although they had been over this already, he decided that they had to review it again and check on the gun safe, so Anne turned on the floodlights and they went out to the barn.
    She watched in silence while Glen fussed with the gun’s compartment, which was indeed invisible and which did work perfectly, but when he stretched out onthe floor and began to prod at the panel that hid the transmitter, she studied his legs for a minute and then withdrew to go back out to the woodpile. The crash of an armful of split logs dropping into the wire cage on the back of the bus, a device she had asked Eliot to weld on over the engine panel, brought Glen to