Why hadn’t she noticed this before? Alice knew she should feel a cold horror at this—a level of revulsion to match that she had felt in Takamatsu’s hidden abattoir—but her body remained calm, heart pulsing a steady sixty, breathing metronomic. There was no shock, just a deep curiosity as if she were studying a medical textbook. Four had altered her emotions, made them so she accepted this violation as natural, and try as she might, no rage came from this intrusion. Before, the idea of being reprinted, of having an interlink, had seemed a dead end, a way to refuting her humanity. Now that appeared the thought processes of another person—a younger, simpler one.