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I woke to Aresh knocking at the bedroom door. The sun was well up. I asked for a moment, and took it to throw on a long simple dress, suitable for work.

She asked, "Where were you last night? I thought I'd be out late, but you..."

"Work happened. Big events. I'm going in to see if they need me again. You might want to come too."

She nodded slowly. "It's a rest day, but you're expected to go in anyway?"

"When there's a multinational emergency, yes. Fazo lost a regiment of troops that were supporting Weld."

That got her - she was from Fazo, and knew people in the army. After grabbing a bite to eat and giving my inert body a drink, we got going. I explained what I knew as we went down to the office.

When we got in, Ben was taking a message at the side desk; Mezo was coiled up at the front desk, shifted full snake while still in his shirt, and seemingly asleep. He shifted naga and clasped his hands as we entered. "Ah, I was wondering when you'd get back, beautiful dreamer! Are you all right?"

"Much better, thanks. How did it go last night?"

"Heh. Not so good. Ask Renna. I'm sure she could use a break. And you... must be Aresh. Why don't you show me what you know?"

I left her with him, and went back. I found Renna and Kuni hard at work on some disassembled lines. "Whoa, what happened here?"

Renna looked up. "We don't know. My line wore out without warning about an hour after you left. The self-repair sheath was still good. Then line 4 went, and its self-repair sheath was good too. So we're checking them all. Line 1's good, looks like."

Jenya called down from the roof, appearing in the hatch. "The distributor is on its last legs."

Kuni muttered, "The petfucker! If that goes, we're not sending anything." Kuni clearly wasn't around in the old days. It wasn't that bad, really. Still, that would mess us up if only because he and Ben don't know how to do without one.

Jenya continued, "And its self-repair sheath is A-OK. Did the sheaths just... stop working? How? Why?"

I said, "Explain how and why magic works, and I can get back to you on that. Anything we can do?"

"Add capacity. Use it less." I didn't much like the 'obviously' tone in her voice - I didn't know what it was for.

Renna suddenly yelped and began sucking a finger - we all looked her way. "Hot! I tried... ow... I tried to take line 4 from its sheath, and it's boiling!"

Jenya said, "That could do it. Still don't know why the self-repair didn't handle it - but okay. Let's try cooling the distributor off and see if it keeps getting worse. Before you take off any sheaths, pass a heat shunt spell through. But do get rid of the sheaths - they're not doing good, whatever's causing this. We'll need water, a big sheet of cloth, stakes..."

I went out to Aresh and Mezo, explained the problem we needed to solve, set them to getting parts, and went back in. "Isn't line 1 the old one? The one that used to be a long-lasting voice line?"

Kuni said, "Yeah. That thing's older than I am."

"Could be that when we began cutting corners to optimize for telegraphy, we left a vulnerability."

Renna looked to me sharply. "A vulnerability?"

"We could be under an attack trying to cripple our communications. If so..." I tried to work out the implications. What would help in that case?

Renna nodded slowly. "Buffers."

"It's a start. Shall I?"

Renna yawned. "It's simple. I think that's more my speed right now. You cast some new lines." She gestured to the stack of molds.

I gathered the elements and thought about what to make. The press had three slots, so I could make three lines at once, and they didn't need to be all the same kind. I started on one with no shortcuts, and during the long waiting steps, prepared two more with different shortcuts. If we were going to be constantly replacing these lines, something that lasted half as long but took a tenth the time to make might be best. By evening, it was just time to press them.

And I couldn't operate the press. I simply wasn't heavy enough to turn the main wheel. I could pick myself up off the ground, hanging from it, and nothing would happen.

I called for some help - focused in my work, I hadn't really noticed that the office was nearly empty. Then I recalled that to save the distributor, they had completely halted it, and, exhausted, gone home. I slipped out to the front office.

Mezo had his ear to a keystone in an amplifier/deamplifier ripped from one of the dead lines - basically he'd recreated a gigantic, high quality, hot-switchable reader for a call pendant with a lousy keystone - and was scratching something out. Around him was the mass of all our other keystones, maybe fifty, each in its protective casket. I wrote a 'help 1 m' note on the wax board and set it in front of him.

I checked a stone, opening its casket carefully and putting my ear up next to it. Nothing, so I moved on. Most were silent - more silent than a distributor's idle. A line with nothing on it, just like they'd hear from these disconnected caskets.

The stone from Alsail was softly clicking, requesting attention. It wasn't a person, but their distributor trying to ask ours to place a call. I picked up the box, figuring what to do with it. <Best do this properly. Why isn't he using the tool for this very purpose?> I went to the back and found the old line conditioner - it had barely escaped being trashed a few years back - and hooked it up to the stone. I tapped out the distributor override code, but the stone went silent instead. Unsure where the problem lay, I returned the stone to the heap and kept searching for activity.

I found another call made by distributor, which I ignored, and one direct. I didn't remember where this was from, and the label was faded. Hooking it up to the conditioner, I tapped out, <You have Getta direct.>

<Hello, finally! Did your distributor burn out too?> I wasn't even sure what language that was in, but the code was transparent enough to me that he translation came through - and, apparently, vice versa.

<Nearly. We halted and disconnected it. Who is this?>

<KLR from Ainonos. You?> I hadn't realized we had a direct stone to Ainonos. That was so far south that there were some days the sun didn't come up. I wasn't sure we had ever placed a call on this line, and I wondered how or why we had exchanged the keystones in the first place.

<I'm Famir.>

<Good afternoon to you.>

<And a good evening to you.> Evening. I looked down at my fingers. I had to get the body back to the refitter. <Shoot. I have to go. Definitely talk later!>

I carefully put the line away and dashed home to get my body. After taking Renna's hand off its head, I loaded it into the shopping cart. Fortunately the trip to the refitter was downhill, and not too steep - I did not need any help - and on main roads, so I had no concern about being accosted.

When I arrived, the waiting room had three women, a man, and two huge bundles of cloth in it. These latter were presumably people overwhelmingly interested in privacy. One of the others, a fox woman, seemed embarrassed and wishing she had had the same foresight.

"Oh great, another one. You're in for a wait." said one of the other women, a middle-aged naga, her hair a bit of a mess and the buttons on her vest done up not lined up properly. She was seated close next to the man, another naga.

A 2:1 black kitty in two tight strips of cloth that made the outfit I'd been wearing yesterday look like a nun's habit was pacing about; she said, "I have to go to work tomorrow. I can't go like this."

One-upping him (I presumed it was really a him), I said, "I had to go to work today, unexpectedly."

"Then what's the rush? They know who you are. And they're giving free extensions to anyone who's willing."

I tapped the cart with my body in it. "I didn't opt for storage."

The kitty waved me off. "Snake form, you can handle ten days without trouble. If you were normally a fox, yeah."

"I don't want to mess around."

A fox woman rushed in from the back and said, "Ready for another. Due to high volume, we're having difficulty keeping up. Anyone who wants a free extension on their rental, I can write a receipt for you to come back tomorrow or next week."

I raised my hand. "Quick question. Have you... Actually, could I ask it privately? It is quick."

She sighed and gestured me back. I followed her. Once we were out of the waiting room, I asked quietly, "I work at the telegraphers' office. We had a lot of trouble with things failing today. Are you having a problem like that? If you are, we could compare notes and maybe figure out what's going on and what we can do about it."

She pursed her lips. "If we have mysterious failures, we will consider contacting you. As I said, we are experiencing high volume, it being the first rest-day after a major holiday."

I wasn't entirely sure that make sense, but I let it drop and turned to go back to the waiting room. The fox-lady took one of the cloth bundles. After a minute, I asked, "I was out of town for a while, so I don't know anything about the history of this body. Has anyone heard of it?"

The man laughed. "Yeah, but who knows what really happened there? We're pretty sure it was sold by a poor pretty girl from the hills. Rented by strippers and whores. One of them murdered someone."

The kitty snarled, "One of the renters murdered someone. Not necessarily 'one of the whores'."

I held up a finger. "How do you not know who was there at the time?"

The kitty rolled her eyes. "We know who was in the body when, but not when the murder was. Only found out a month after the fact, and the poison could have been sitting there for a while."

The fox woman put in, "And we're not entirely sure that body even delivered the poison. She could have been visiting the home for some other reason and come in contact with the poison then."

All the others looked at her strangely.

"You seriously don't see it? Suppose Abeesh, their first suspect before they found her..." (she gestured to me) "... was the poisoner after all. Ruby rents the body, goes on a house call, and touches the poison but not enough to get sick."

The man pointed out, "That would make Ruby a perjurer."

"Sure. I didn't say she was blameless. Or it could have been one of the others. Some had the chance."

I cut in, "So, who's getting the profits from this rental?"

The kitty said, "The exchange."

"So the little lady who attacked me and said I was supporting a murderess was off her rocker?"

The disheveled naga woman rolled her eyes. "Is-so's fingernails! You ran into Ailis. She's on a crusade against this place. Tried to burn it down."

I suddenly felt very dizzy and uncomfortably warm around the top of my chest. The conversation continued around me, but I focused on what was happening to me. I tried to ask for help, but couldn't. I simply couldn't move my mouth, or raise my hand, and my neck was feeling hotter and hotter.

I panicked and tried to get up, but failed to move. Finally, I thrashed about and rolled out of the bag onto the floor. The hot feeling peaked. I was in my own, snake body, and that the body I'd just been in was beginning to topple. I simultaneously moved to keep her from toppling, and tried to shift naga form. I couldn't shift, because the collar was too narrow. I reached around with my tail and pulled it down and off. Then I shifted naga form and put my hand to my neck, which had gotten hot sympathetically.

The kitty grabbed me by the arm. "What do you think you're doing?"

"It's really hot. The collar. I think it's broken anyway. I'm intact here."

"You can't take that off. Just because the line's long..."

"Touch it." I gestured to it, in the center of the stone floor. How bad an idea that was suddenly became apparent as it began smoking.

Already, the others were banging at the service door, demanding attention. The kitty and I watched as the necklace continued to smolder. She frowned at it with serious concern. "That's not good."

Why me? This was not a complaint, but a serious question. I'd been only in the body for a day, and the necklace failed. And... "What's really odd is that they said I would be based out of that body, not my own. If this failed, I should be in it."

The kitty snorted. "Lies. What they mean is, after a few hours your mind is more used to being in the new body than it is to your own. But it's still contained in your own body. To do a real switch takes more than a collar. Bet you're feeling weird not being her, though."

"Ah." The explanation had flowed over me for the most part after 'lies', and I had returned to figuring out what was going on. It could be that I was at the telegraphy office, and if we were under attack, some of it splashed off onto me. But... but... does that make sense? The attack was very peculiar. Didn't hit the keystones at all. Took out the distributors and some of the reader lines but not others. Basically, all of the newer stuff went down. If we were hit by someone from Periten, that's the opposite of what one would expect.

Maybe there's no way to attack keystones. Or this isn't from Periten. Suppose when Geltiassen found that Periten wasn't a threat, they turned around and attacked their uneasy ally Fazo, including cutting off communications... well... no. That fellow off in Ainonos said everyone was down. Geltiassen wouldn't do that, though Periten could. Or Geltiassen is framing Periten. To add to confusion, they hit the telegraphy grid in a way that would slow down but not stop communication. It fits... but it's an awfully complicated conclusion to draw from so little evidence.

The kitty declared, "Here you are, Monin! Over here."

"Are you okay?" I looked up - she was an older fox-woman, and looked official.

"Yes, I'm okay. I mentioned before that I saw some confusing trouble with certain magic earlier, and offered to help sort it out."

Monin nodded. "We already know what the problem is, but thank you."

"Really? What is it?"

"The 'send' family of spells became unstable over short distances."

The naga-woman client jumped in. "What do you mean 'became unstable'?"

Monin ignored the question, and added, "It started some time last night, got more intense up to around noon, then held steady."

The old lines were excessively long, so that's why they could survive. The keystones do use 'send', but over a huge distance. The distributor is just loaded with 'send', and all of it short. And the self-repairs are triggered by 'send' that's practically contact-range. And the pendant burned out while I was spending a long time near myself. But... I spent all night with myself too, even closer than this. And doesn't the old line conditioner have some very very short 'send' in it? It was fine well into the evening, while the distributor had only longer 'send' and had failed badly. Maybe use factors in somehow. Or perhaps the 'send' did fail but it turned out to be superfluous to the operation of the line conditioner, somehow? Being dependent on activity would explain how I got through being asleep.

I pulled out of my reverie as Monin addressed everyone, "Full swaps are totally unaffected, as they never used 'send'. Body storage is totally unaffected as well - your bodies are safe. Rapid temporary transfers should be possible again, but we will have to change some methods to avoid using 'send', and this could take some time to work out. Sensory shares are harder and we may not find a solution.

"Now. Who's next?"

The two nagas raised their hands.

"It was a direct swap, or are you disagreeing about who's next?"

The woman said, "Swap."

I asked, "I'm back in my own body. She's wearing clothing that belongs to my wife. Can we get her changed back, so I can go?"

Monin said, "Yes, that should be quick." She reached over and put her hand on the strange body's neck and it stood up. She led it out of the waiting room.

The kitty sighed. "Well. That was your first time, right?"

"Yeah. How did you know?" I put on the vest I had left in the bag.

The kitty bowed slightly, ignoring my question. "Nice to have someone else in the club. Sorry your first time was so messed up."

"See you around."

"Maybe, but you won't know it."

"I might."

Monin came back and tossed me the dress I'd been wearing. I caught it, nodded, and left.