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It was a three-walled enclosure, open to the sky, south of the 184 just outside Ellsworth. The sign had been sprayed onto the inside of the rear wall; the smart paint cycled through a half dozen languages, holding on each for a few seconds in turn. Clarke and Ouellette stood at the open side, looking in.

The grated floor was crusted with old lime, cracked and scaling like a dried-up desert lake bed. It was obviously years since it had been replenished. Four bodies lay on that substrate. One had been carefully set to rest with its arms folded across its chest; it was bloated and black, squirming with maggots beneath a nimbus of flies. The other three were desiccated and disarrayed, like clumps of leaves strewn about and abandoned by a strong wind. Limbs and one head were missing.

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Ouellette gestured at the sign. "They actually gave a damn back in the old days. People would end up in jail for burying their loved ones in the back rose garden. Endangering the public health." She grunted, remembering. "They couldn't stop ßehemoth. They couldn't stop the coattail plagues. But at least they could lock up some poor old woman who hadn't wanted to see her dead husband go up in flames."

Clarke smiled faintly. "People like to feel, what's the word..."

"Proactive," Ouellette suggested.

"That's it."

Ouellette nodded. "To give them their due, though, it was a problem back then. There were a lot more bodies lying around—they were stacked up to your shoulder, even out here. For a while, cholera was killing more people than ßehemoth."

Clarke eyed the structure. "Why stick it way out here?"

Ouellette shrugged. "They had them everywhere."

Clarke stepped into the enclosure. Ouellette put a restraining hand on her shoulder. "You better stick with the older ones. There's no end to the things you could catch off that fresh one."

Clarke shrugged off the hand. "What about you?"

"I'm broad-spectrumed up to here. There's not much that can get me."

The doctor approached the cadaver from upwind, for all the good it did; the light breeze wasn't nearly enough to dispel the stench. Clarke, keeping the greater distance, fought the urge to gag and closed on her own assignment of body parts. She held out her can of steriwrap like a crucifix and pressed the stud; the wizened, one-legged body at her feet glistened as the aerosol laminate hardened on its surface.

"These are actually in pretty good shape," Ouellette remarked, spraying down her own corpse. "Not so long ago you had to check twice a week if you wanted to find a leg bone connected to a knee bone. Scavengers had a field day." She was spraying it on thick, Clarke noted without surprise. She might be immune to whatever diseases festered in that body, but it still wasn't going to be any treat to carry it around.

"So what changed?" Clarke asked.

"No more scavengers."

Clarke rolled the mummified remains with her foot and sprayed down the other side. The wrap hardened in seconds. She scooped the shrouded body into her arms. It was like carrying a loose bundle of firewood. The steriwrap squeaked faintly against her diveskin.

"Just feed it into Miri," Ouellette told her, still spraying. "I've already changed the settings."

The MI's tongue stuck out to starboard. Crinkly silver foil lined its throat. Clarke set the remains on the pallet; the tongue began to retract as soon as the weight had settled. Miri swallowed and closed her mouth.

"Do I have to do anything?" Clarke called.

"Nope. She knows the difference between a live body and a dead one."

A deep, almost subsonic hum sounded briefly from within the MI.

Ouellette dragged a humanoid cocoon from the compound. Its bloated features had vanished entirely under layers of fibrous plastic, as though Ouellette were some monstrous spider given to gift-wrapping prey. The surface of the shroud was peppered with the bodies of trapped insects, half-embedded. They twitched, dying, against their constraints.

Clarke reached out to give Ouellette a hand. Something sloshed faintly as the weight shifted between them. Miri opened her mouth—empty again—and belched hot, dusty breath into Clarke's face. The tongue extended as though from some enormous, insatiable baby bird.

"Can your skin breathe in that thing?" Ouellette asked over Miri's second helping.

"What, my diveskin?"

"Your real skin. Can it breathe under all that copolymer?"

"Copolymer's pretty much what I've worn for the past five years. Hasn't killed me yet."

"It can't be good for you, though. It was designed to keep you alive in the deep sea; I can't imagine it's healthy to wear it in an atmosphere all the time."

"Don't see why not." Clarke shrugged. "It breathes, it thermoregulates. Keeps me nice and homeostatic."

"In water, Laurie. Air has completely different properties. If nothing else, I bet you've got a Vitamin K deficiency."

"I'm fine," Clarke said neutrally..

The MI hummed contentedly.

"If you say so," Ouellette said at last.

Miri gaped for more.

They plotted their course by derelict road signs and inboard maps. Ouellette steadfastly refused to go online. Clarke had to wonder at the stops marked along their route. Belfast? Camden? Freeport? They'd barely been dots on a map even before the world ended: why not go to Bangor, just a few klicks to the north? That was where the people would be.

"Not any more," Ouellette said, raising her voice above a frenetic orchestral seesaw she’d attributed to some Russian maniac called Prokofiev.

"Why not?"

"Cities are the graveyard of Mankind." It had the ring of a quote. "There was this threshold, I don't remember what it was exactly. Some magic number of people per hectare. Any urban center was way up on the wrong side of it. Something like ßehemoth, set loose in a high-density urban area—not to mention all the ancillary pathogens that hitched a ride in its wake—it takes off like a brush fire. One person sneezes, a hundred get sick. Germs love crowds."

"But small towns were okay?"

"Well, not okay, obviously. But things didn't spread as fast—the spread's still going on, actually. The towns were small and seasonal, and the areas in between were pretty much owned by the whitecaps." Ouellette gestured at the withering foliage scrolling past the windshield. "This was all privately owned. Rich old rs and Ks who didn't mingle, had good medical. They're gone now too, of course."

Gone to Atlantis, Clarke surmised. Some of them, anyway.

"So the big cities had exactly two choices when Firewitch came calling," Ouellette continued. "They could either throw up the barricades and the static-field generators, or they could implode. A lot of them couldn't afford generators, so they imploded by default. I haven't been to Bangor since fifty-three. For all I know they never even cleaned up the bodies."

They got their first live customers at Bucksport.

They pulled off the main drag at about two a.m., next to a Red Cross Calvin cycler with a worrisome yellow telltale winking from its panel. Ouellette examined it by the light of an obsolete billboard, running on stored solar, that worked ceaselessly to sell them on the benefits of smart cloth and dietary proglottids.

"Needs restocking." She climbed back into Miri and called up a menu.

"I thought they got everything they needed from the air," Clarke said. That's what photosynthesis was, after all—she'd been amazed to discover how many complex molecules were nothing more than various combinations of nitrogen, carbon, and oh-two.

"Not trace elements." Ouellette grabbed a cellulose cartridge, its compartments filled with red and ochre paste, from the dispensing slot. "This one's low on iron and potassium."

The billboard was still hawking its nonexistent wares the next morning when Clarke squeezed herself into Miri's toilet cubicle. When she came out again, two silhouettes were plastered against the windshield.

She stepped carefully over Ouellette and climbed up between the bucket seats. Two Hindian boys—one maybe six, the other verging on adolescence—stared in at her. She leaned forward and stared back. Two pairs of dark eyes widened in surprise; the younger boy emitted a tiny yelp. The next second both had scampered away.

"It's your eyes," Ouellette said behind her.

Clarke turned. The doctor was sitting up, hugging the back of the driver's seat from behind. She blinked, gummy-eyed in the morning light.

"And the suit," she continued. "Seriously, Laurie, you look like some kind of cut-rate zombie in that get-up." She reached behind her and tapped the locker in the rear wall. "You could always borrow something of mine."

She was getting used to her alias. Ouellette's unsolicited advice was another matter.

A half-dozen people were already lined up when they climbed out into daylight. Ouellette smiled at them as she strode around to the back of the vehicle and lifted the awning. Clarke followed, still sleepy; Miri's mouths opened as she passed. The throat's silver lining had withdrawn, exposing a grid of sensor heads studding the cylindrical wall behind.

Icons and telltales flickered across the panel on Miri's backside. Ouellette played them with absent-minded expertise, her eyes on the accumulating patients. "Everybody's standing, nobody's bleeding. And no obvious cases of ßehemoth. Good start."

Half a block behind the billboard, the two children Clarke had surprised pulled a middle-aged woman into sight around the corner of a long-defunct restaurant. She moved at her own pace, resisting her children as though they were eager dogs straining to slip the leash. Further down the road, picking his way across scattered debris and asphalt-cracking clumps of grass, a man limped forward on a cane.

"We just got here," Clarke murmured.

"Yup. Usually I blast the music for a couple of minutes, just to let people know. But a lot of the time it isn't even necessary."

Clarke panned the street. A dozen now, at least. "Somebody really spread the word."

"And that," Ouellette told her, "is how we're going to win."

Bucksport was one of Ouellette's regular stops. The locals knew her, or at least knew of her. She knew them, and ministered unto them as she always had, her omnipresent music playing softly in the background. The sick and the injured passed like boluses of food through Miri's humming depths; sometimes the passage would take only moments, and Ouellette would be waiting at the other side with a derm or injection, or some viral countervector to be snorted like an antique alkaloid. Other times the patients would linger inside while the MI knitted their bones back together, or spliced torn ligaments, or burned out malignancies with bursts of focused microwaves. Occasionally the problem was so obvious that Ouellette could diagnose it with a glance, and cure it with a shot and a word of advice.

Clarke helped when she could, which was rarely; Miri maintained its own inventories, and Ouellette had little need of Clarke's limited expertise in fish bites. Ouellette taught her some basics on the fly and let her triage the line-up. Even that wasn't entirely successful. The rules were easy enough but some of the younger ferals recoiled at Clarke's appearance: the strange black skin that seemed to ripple when you weren't quite looking; the little outcroppings of machinery from flesh; the glassy, featureless eyes that both looked at you and didn't, that belonged not so much to a human being as to some unconvincing robot imposter.

Eventually Clarke contented herself with the adults, and gave them vital tips while they waited their turn. There was, after all, more to dispense than medical attention. Now, there were instructions.

Now, there was a plan.

Wait for the missiles, she told them. Watch the starbursts; track the fragments as they fall, find them on the ground. This is what you look for; this is what it is. Take whatever samples you can—soil in mason jars, rags swept through aerosol clouds at ground zero, anything. A teaspoon-full might be enough. A tin can, half full, could be a windfall. Whatever you can get, however you can get it.

Be fast: the lifters may be coming. Grab what you can and run. Get away from the impact zone, hide from the flamethrowers any way you can. Tell others, tell everyone; spread the word and the method. But no radio. No networks, no fiberop, no wireless. The ether will fuck you up the ass if you let it; trust only to word-of-mouth.

Find us at Freeport, or Rumford, or places between. Come back to us: bring us what you have.

There may be hope.

Augusta made her skin crawl. Literally.

They approached from the east, just before midnight, along the 202. Taka took them off the main drag in favor of a gravel road a short ways down the gentle slope of the Kennebec River valley. They parked on a ridge that overlooked the shallow topography below.

Everything this side of the river had been abandoned; almost everything on the far side had been, too. The bright core that remained huddled amidst a diffuse spread of dark, empty ruins left over from the good old days. Its nimbus reflected off the cloud bank overhead, turned the whole tableau to grainy, high-contrast black-and-white.

Faint gooseflesh rippled along Clarke's arms and nape. Even her diveskin seemed to be, well, shivering, a sensation so subtle it hovered on the threshold of imagination.

"Feel that?" Ouellette said.

Clarke nodded.

"Static-field generator. We're just on the outer edge of the field."

"So it gets worse inside?"

"Not right inside, of course. The field's directed outward. But yeah, the closer you get to the perimeter, the more your hair stands on end. Once you're inside you don't feel it. Not that way, at least. There are other effects."

"Like what?"

"Tumors." Ouellette shrugged. "Better than the alternative, I guess."

A cheek-to-jowl cluster of lights and architecture rose against the dark, its outlines suggesting the contours of a crude, pixelated dome. The new Augusta was obviously squeezing every cubic centimeter it could out of the safe zone. "We going in there?" Clarke asked.

Ouellette shook her head. "They don't need us."

"Can we go in there?" For all its lost stature, Augusta must still have portals into the pipe. Lubin might have been better off sticking with them after all.

"You mean, like shore leave? Stop by on our way through for some VR and a hot whirlpool?" The doctor laughed softly. "Doesn't work that way. They'd probably let us in if there were some kind of emergency, but everybody kind of sticks to their own these days. Miri's out of Boston."

"So you could get into Boston." Even better.

"It is kind of beautiful at night, though," Ouellette remarked. "For all its carcinogenic properties. Almost like the northern lights."

Clarke watched her without speaking.

"Don't you think?"

She decided not to push it. "Night looks pretty much like day to me. Just not as much color."

"Right. The eyes." Ouellette gave her a sideways look. "Don't you ever get tired of daylight all the time?"

"Not really."

"You should try taking them out now and then, just for a change. Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot."

Clarke smiled. "You sound like a fortune cookie."

Ouellette shrugged. "It wouldn't hurt your bedside manner, either. Patients might relate to you better without the affect, you know?"

"There's not much I can do for your patients anyway."

"Oh, that's not—"

"And if there is," Clarke continued, her voice conspicuously neutral, "then they can accept my help without dictating my wardrobe."

"Rrrright," Ouellette said after a moment. "Sorry."

They sat in silence for a while. Finally Ouellette threw Miri back into gear and cued her music— an adrenaline discord of saxophone and electric percussion at serious odds with her usual tastes.

"We're not stopping here?" Clarke asked.

"Goosebumps keep me awake. Probably not all that good for Miri either. I just thought you'd enjoy the view, is all."

They headed further along the road. The prickling of Clarke's skin faded in moments.

Ouellette kept driving. The music segued into a spoken interlude with musical accompaniment—some story about a hare who’d lost his spectacles, whatever those were. "What is this?" Clarke asked.

"TwenCen stuff. I can turn it off if you—"

"No. That’s fine."

Ouellette killed it anyway. Miri drove on in silence.

"We could stop anytime," Clarke said after a few minutes.

"A little further. It's dangerous around the cities."

"I thought we were past the field."

"Not cancer. People." Ouellette tripped the autopilot and sat back in the bucket seat. "They tend to hang around just outside the claves and get envious."

"Miri can't handle them?"

"Miri can slice and dice them a dozen ways to Sunday. I'd just as soon avoid the confrontation."

Clarke shook her head. "I can't believe Augusta wouldn't have let us in."

"I told you. The claves keep to themselves."

"Then why even bother sending you out? If everyone up here is so bloody self-centered, why help out the wildlands in the first place?"

Ouellette snorted softly. "Where've you been for the past five years?" She held up her hand: "Stupid question. We're not out here for altruism, Laurie. The MI fleet, the salt licks—"

"Salt licks?"

"Feeding stations. It's all just to keep the ferals from storming the barricades. If we bring them a few morsels, maybe they won't be quite so motivated to bring ßehemoth into our own backyards."

It made the usual sense, Clarke had to admit. And yet...

"No. They wouldn't send their best and brightest out for a lousy crowd-control assignment."

"You got that right."

"Yeah, but you—"

"Me? I'm the best and the brightest?" Ouellette slapped her forehead. "What in the name of all that's living gave you that idea?"

"I saw you work"

"You saw me take orders from a machine without screwing up too much. A few day's training, I could teach you to do as well for most of these cases."

"That's not what I meant. I've seen doctors in action before, Taka. You're different. You—" One of Ouellette's own phrases popped into her head: bedside manner.

"You care," she finished simply.

"Ah." Ouellette said. And then, looking straight ahead: "Don't confuse compassion with competence, Laurie. It's dangerous."

Clarke studied her. "Dangerous. That's a strange word to use."

"In my profession, competence doesn't kill people," Ouellette said. "Compassion can."

"You killed someone?"

"Hard to tell. That's the thing about incompetence. It's not nearly so clear-cut as deliberate malice."

"How many?" Clarke asked.

Ouellette looked at her. "Are you keeping score?"

"No. Sorry." Clarke looked away.

But if I was, she thought, I'd blow you out of the water. She knew it wasn't a fair comparison. One death, she supposed, could be a greater burden than a thousand if it mattered enough to you. If you bothered to get involved.

If you had compassion.

Finally they pulled into a remote clearing further up the slope. Ouellette folded down her pallet and turned in with a few monosyllables. Clarke sat unmoving in her seat, watching the gray-on-gray clarity of the nightscape beyond the windshield: gray meadow grasses, charcoal ranks of spindly conifer, scabby outcroppings of worn bedrock. Overcast, tissue-paper sky.

From behind, faint snores.

She fished behind her seat and snagged her backpack. The eyecap vial had settled to the very bottom, a victim of chronic inattention. She held it in her hand for a long time before popping it open.

Each eyecap covered the entire visible cornea, and then some. Suction tugged at her eyeballs as she pulled them off; they broke free with a soft popping sound.

It was as if her eyes, not just their coverings, had been pulled out. It was like going blind. It was like being in the deep sea, far from any light.

It wasn't altogether unpleasant.

At first there was nothing, anywhere; irises grow lazy when photocollagen does all their heavy lifting. After a while, though, they remembered to dilate. A swathe of dark gray brightened the void directly ahead: faint nocturnal light, through the windshield.

She felt her way out of the MI and leaned against its flank. She let the door hiss shut as softly as possible. The night air cooled her face and hands.

Diffuse brightness registered at the corner of her eye, fading every time she focused on it. Before long she could tell the sky from the treeline. Dim, roiling gray over serrated shadow; it seemed marginally brighter to the east.

She wandered a few meters and looked back: Miri's smooth, startling edges almost glimmered against this fractal landscape. To the west, through a break in the cloud, she saw stars.

She walked.

She tripped over roots and holes half a dozen times, for want of illumination. But the color scheme was pretty much the same as that served up by her eyecaps, gray on gray on black. The only difference was that contrast and brightness were cranked way down.

When the sky began brightening to the east she saw that she'd been climbing up a denuded gravelly hillside populated by stumps, an old clear-cut that had never recovered. It must have been like this long before ßehemoth had arrived on the scene.

Everything's dying, she'd said.

And Ouellette had replied That was happening anyway...

Clarke looked down the way she'd come. Miri sat like a toy on the edge of what must have been an old logging road. Brown trees lined the far side of the road, and the hill she stood on to either side; they'd been razored away down the swath she'd just climbed.

Suddenly she had a shadow. It stretched down the slope like the outline of a murdered giant. She turned: a fluorescent red sun was just cresting the hill. Ribbed clouds above glowed radioactive salmon. They reminded Clarke of wave-sculpted corrugations on a sandy seabed, but she couldn't ever remember seeing colors so intense.

Losing your sight every night might not be so bad, she reflected, if this is how you get it back in the morning.

The moment passed, of course. The sun had only had a few degrees to work with, a narrow gap of clear distant sky between the land below and the clouds overhead. Within a few minutes it had risen behind a thick bank of stratus, faded to a pale bright patch in an expanse of featureless gray.

Alyx, she thought.

Ouellette would be up soon, steeling herself for another pointless day spent in the service of the greater good. Making a difference that made no difference.

Maybe not the greater good, Clarke thought. Maybe, the greater need.

She started down the hill. Ouellette was climbing into daylight by the time Clarke reached the road. She blinked against the gray morning, and blinked again when she saw the rifter's naked eyes.

"You said you could teach me," Clarke said.

Stargazer

She's okay, Dave, Taka said to her dead husband. She's a bit scary at first—Crys would take one look at her and run out of the room. Definitely not much of a people person.

But she's fine, Dave, really. And if you can't be here with me, at least she pulls her own weight.

Miri drove down old I-95 through the ramshackle remains of a town called Freeport; it had died with the departure of the fish and the tourists, long before ßehemoth had made everything so definitive. South of town they pulled onto a side road that ended at a secluded cove. Taka was relieved to see that the scraggly woodlands above the high-tide line were still mostly green. She cheered them on.

"Why here, exactly?" Laurie wondered as they debarked.

"Electric eel." Taka unlocked the charge cap on the side of the vehicle and took the socket in one hand. The cable unspooled behind her as she headed down slope. Cobble slipped and clattered beneath her feet.

Laurie paced her to the water's edge. "What?"

"On the bottom somewhere." Kneeling, Taka fished the hailer out of her windbreaker and slipped it into the water. "Hopefully the little bastard still comes when you call him."

A small eruption of bubbles, twenty meters offshore. A moment later the eel surfaced in their wake and squirmed towards them, orange and serpentine. It beached itself at Taka's feet, a giant fluorescent sperm with a tail trailing off into the depths. It even had fangs: a two-pronged metal mouth disfiguring the surface of the bulb.

She plugged the cable into it. The bulb hummed.

"They stashed these things here and there," she explained, "so we're not completely dependent on the lifters."

Laurie eyed the calm water in the cove. " Ballard stack?"

"CAESAR reactor."

"You're kidding."

Taka shook her head. "Self-contained, self-maintained, disposable. Basically just a big block with a couple of radiator fins. Drop it into any open body of water and it's good to go. It doesn't even have any controls—it automatically matches voltage to whatever the line draws."

Laurie whistled.

Taka scooped up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. "So when's Ken going to show up?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether he got into Portland." And then, after a curious hesitation: "And whether he ditched us back at Penobscot."

"He didn't," Ken said.

They turned. He was standing behind them.

"Hi." Laurie's face didn't change, but some subtle tension seemed to ebb from her body. "How'd it go?"

He shook his head.

It was almost as if the past two weeks hadn't happened. Ken reappeared, as ominous and indecipherable as ever: and just like that, Laurie faded away. It was a subtle transition—some slight hardening of the way she held herself, a small flattening of affect—but to Taka, the change was as clear as a slap in the face. The woman she had come to know as an ally and even a friend submerged before her eyes. In its place stood that humanoid cipher who had first confronted her on the slopes of a guttering wasteland, fourteen days before.

Ken and Laurie conversed a little ways down the beach while Miri recharged. Taka couldn't hear what they said, but doubtless Ken was reporting on his Portland expedition. Debriefing, Taka thought, watching them. For Ken, that word seemed to fit. And the trip had not gone well, judging by the body language and the look on his face.

Then again, he always looks like that, she reminded herself. She tried to imagine what it might take to wipe away that chronic deadpan expression and replace it with something approaching a real emotion. Maybe you'd have to threaten his life. Maybe a fart in an elevator would do it.

They headed back into town once Miri was sated. Lubin crouched in the space between the bucket seats, the women on either side. Taka got the sense of gigabytes passing between the other two, although they spoke perhaps a half-dozen words each.

Freeport was another regular stop on the trap line; Taka pulled up at a parking lot off Main and Howard, beside the gashed façade of a defunct clothing store called (she always smiled at it) The Gap. The town as a whole, like most of them, was long dead. Individual cells still lingered on in the rotting corpus, though, and some were already waiting when Miri arrived. Taka blared Stravinsky for a few minutes anyway, to spread the word. Others appeared over time, emerging from the shells of buildings and the leaky hulls of old fishing boats kept afloat in some insane hope that the witch might be afraid of water.

She and Laurie got to work. Ken stayed out of sight near the back of the cab; shadows and the dynamic tinting of Miri's windows rendered him all but invisible from the outside. Taka asked about Portland over an assembly-line of broken arms and rotting flesh. Laurie shrugged, pleasant but distant: "He could've got in all right. Just not without getting noticed."

No surprise there. A scorched zone surrounded Portland's landside perimeter, a flat, sensor-riddled expanse across which Taka couldn't imagine anyone crossing undetected. An enervated, membranous skin guarded the seaward approaches. You couldn't just sneak into the place—into any clave, for that matter—and Ken evidently lacked the resources to break in by force.

Every now and then Taka would glance absently at the windshield as she moved among her patients. Sometimes she caught sight of two faint, glimmering pinpoints looking back, motionless and unblinking behind the dark reflections.

She didn't know what he might be doing in there. She didn't ask.

It was as if night were a black film laid over the world, and the stars mere pinpricks through which daylight passed.

"There," Ken said, pointing.

Fine needles, three or four of them. Their tips etched the film high in the west, left faint scratches across Bootes. They faded in seconds; Taka would never have seen them on her own.

"You're sure we're safe," she said.

He was a silhouette, black on black against the stars to her left. "They're past us already," he told her. Which was not the same thing.

"There go the intercepts," Laurie said behind them. Brief novae flared near Hercules—not contrails, but the ignition of antimissile salvos dropped from orbit. They'd be below the horizon by the time they hit atmosphere.

It was after midnight. They were standing on a rocky hill south of Freeport. Almost everything was stars and sky; the insignificant circle of earth below the horizon was black and featureless. They'd come here following the beeping of Ken's handpad, linked to a periscope floating somewhere in the ocean behind them. Evidently their submarine— Phocoena, Laurie had called it— was a stargazer.

Taka could see why. The Milky Way was so beautiful it hurt.

"Maybe this is it," she murmured. It was unlikely, she knew; this was only the second attack since they'd put their plan into motion, and how far could the word have spread by now?

And yet, three attacks in as many weeks. At that rate, they had to get lucky before too long...

"Don't count on it," Ken said.

She glanced at him, and glanced away. Not so long ago this man had stood at her back, one hand clamped easily on her neck, instructing Laurie in the disassembly of weapons systems that Taka could barely even name. He had been pleasant enough, then and since, because Taka had cooperated. He had been polite because she'd never stood in his way.

But Ken was on a mission, and Taka's little experiment in grass-roots salvation didn't seem to factor into it. He was playing along with her for some indecipherable reason of his own; there was no guarantee that tomorrow, or the next day, he wouldn't run out of patience and go back to his original game plan. Taka didn't know what that was, although she gathered it had something to do with helping Ken and Laurie's waterlogged kindred; she had learned not to waste time pressing either of them for details. It had involved getting into the Portland clave, which evidently Ken had not been able to do on his own.

It had also involved hijacking Taka's MI, which he had.

Now she was alone with two empty-eyed ciphers in the dead of night and the middle of nowhere. Beneath the intermittent camaraderie, the humanitarian pitching-in, and all the best-laid plans, one fact remained unassailable: she was a prisoner. She'd been a prisoner for weeks.

How could I have forgotten that? she wondered, and answered her own question: because they hadn't hurt her...yet. They hadn't threatened her...lately. Neither of her captors seemed to indulge in violence for its own sake; hereabouts that was the very pinnacle of civilized behavior. She had simply forgotten to feel endangered.

Which was pretty stupid, when you got right down to it. After the failure at Portland, there was every chance that Lubin would revert to Plan A and take her vehicle. Laurie might or might not go along with that—Taka hoped that some bond remained beneath that cool reinstated façade—but that might not make much difference either way.

And there was no telling what either of them would do if Taka tried to get in their way. Or if they ran out of more efficient alternatives. At the very best, she could be stranded in the middle of the wildlands—an immunized angel with clipped wings, and no Miri to back her up the next time some red-eyed man came looking for salvation.

"I'm getting a signal from Montreal," Ken said. "Encrypted. I'm guessing it's a scramble."

"Lifters?" Laurie suggested. Ken grunted an affirmative.

Taka cleared her throat. "I'll be back in a sec. I have to take a wicked pee."

"I'll come with you," Laurie said immediately.

"Don't be silly." Taka waved downhill into the darkness, where the peak they occupied emerged from threadbare woodlands. "It's only a few meters. I can find my way."

Two starlit silhouettes turned and regarded her without a word. Taka swallowed and took a step downhill.

Ken and Laurie didn't move.

Another step. Another. Her foot came down on a rock; she wobbled momentarily.

Her captors turned back to their tactics and machinery. Taka moved carefully downhill. Starlight limned the bare outlines of obstacles in her path. A moon would have been nice, though; she tripped twice before the tree-line rose before her, a ragged black band engulfing the stars.

As it engulfed Taka herself, a few moments later.

She looked back up the hill through a black mesh of scrub and tree trunks; Ken and Laurie still stood at the top of the hill, motionless black cutouts against the sky. Taka couldn't tell whether they could see her, or even whether they were looking in her direction. She'd be plainly visible to them if she were standing in the open. Fortunately, not even their night-creature eyes could penetrate tree trunks.

She had a few minutes at most before they realized she was gone.

She moved as quickly as she could without raising a racket. Thankfully there wasn't much undergrowth; in better days the sunlight filtering through the canopy had been too sparse, and more recently—more recently, sunlight was hardly the limiting factor. Taka felt her way blindly through a maze of vertical shafts and leaf litter and thin soil rotten with ßehemoth. Low branches clawed at her face. Gnarled old tree trunks resolved from the darkness barely a meter ahead; young spindly ones jumped out at her with even less warning.

A root caught her foot; she toppled, biting back a cry. One outstretched hand came down hard on a fallen branch. The sound it made, snapping, echoed like a gunshot. She lay twisted on the ground, nursing her scraped palm, straining to hear any sounds from up the slope.

Nothing.

She kept going. The slope was steeper now, more treacherous. The trees that sprang up in her path were only skeletons, dry and brittle and eager to betray her with the firecracker report of every snapped twig and broken branch. One of them caught her just below the knee; she pitched forward, hit the ground, and couldn't stop. She tumbled down the slope, rocks and treefall stabbing her in passing.

The ground disappeared. Suddenly she could almost see. A broad dim swathe of gray rushed towards her; she recognized it in the instant before it struck her, peeling skin from her forearm.

The road. It ran around this side of the hill like a hemline. Miri was parked somewhere along its length.

Taka got to her feet and looked around. She'd had no way to plot her course down the hill, no way of knowing exactly where on the road she'd landed. She guessed, and turned right, and ran.

The road was clear, thank God, its dim gravel albedo just enough to keep her oriented and on track. It unspooled gently around the shoulder of the hill, shattered stone crunching beneath her feet, and suddenly something glinted in the darkness ahead, something straight-edged and shiny under the stars...

Oh thank God. Yes. Yes!

She yanked open the driver's-side door and piled inside, panting.

And hesitated.

What are you going to do, Tak? Run out on everything you've been trying to do for the past two weeks? Just drive away and let the witch take over, even though there may be a way to stop it? Sooner or later someone's going to strike gold, and this is where you've told them to bring it. What happens when they show up and you've run off with your tail between your legs?

Are you going to call for help? You think it would come before Ken and Laurie had their way with you, or just hopped into that submarine of theirs and disappeared back into the Mariana Trench? Do you think it would come at all, these days? And what about tipping off the enemy, Tak? What about whoever or whatever is trying to stop the very thing you're trying to help along? Are you going to risk all that, just because of something two borderline personalities with funny eyes might do if you got them angry?

Taka shook her head. This was insane. She had a few precious moments before Ken and Laurie tracked her down. What she decided in that interval might decide the fate of New England—of North America, even. She couldn't afford to be hasty, but there was no time—.

I need time. I just need to get away for a while. I need to work this out. She reached out and thumbed the ignition pad.

Miri stayed dark.

She tried again. Nothing. Nothing but the memory of Ken lurking in this very cab, eyes aglitter, surrounded by all that circuitry he seemed to know so much about.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, he was staring in at her.

Ken opened her door. "Anything wrong?" he asked.

Taka sighed. Her abrasions oozed and stung in the silence.

Laurie opened the passenger door and climbed in. "Let's head back," she said, almost gently.

"I—why are—"

"Go on," Ken said, gesturing at the dashboard.

Taka put her thumb on the pad. Miri hummed instantly to life.

She stepped out of the cab to let Lubin enter. Overhead, the heavens were crammed with stars.

Oh, David, she thought. How I wish you were here.

Sleeper

Everything changed at ten-thirty the next morning.

The bike skidded into view just past Bow and promptly got into an argument with its rider over how best to deal with a pothole the size of Arkansas. It was a late-model Kawasaki from just before the witch, and it had ground-effect stabilizers that made it virtually untippable; otherwise, both man and machine would have gone end-over-end into a solar-powered billboard that (even after all these years) flickered with dead-celebrity endorsements for Johnson & Johnson immune boosters. Instead, the Kawasaki leaned sideways at some impossibly acute angle, righted itself en route, and slewed to a stop between Miri and a handful of feral children looking for freebies.

Ken's white eyes appeared in the shadowy darkness of the gap in The Gap, behind the newcomer.

The rider was all limbs and scraps, topped by a ragged thatch of butchered brown hair. Barely visible against a backdrop of grimy skin, a sparse moustache said maybe sixteen. "You the doctor with the missiles?"

"I'm the doctor who's interested in the missiles," Taka told him.

"I'm Ricketts. Here." He reached under a threadbare thermochrome jacket and hauled out a ziplock bag with some very dirty laundry wadded up inside.

Taka took the bag between thumb and forefinger. "What's this?"

Ricketts ticked off a list on his fingers: "Gauchies, a shirt, and one sock. They had to, you know, improvise. I had the only bag, and I was way over on another run."

Laurie climbed out of the cab. "Tak?"

"Hullo," Ricketts said. His mouth split in an appreciative grin; one tooth chipped, two missing, the rest in four shades of yellow. His eyes ran down Lenie like a bar coder. Not that Taka could blame him; out here, anyone with clear skin and all their teeth qualified as a sex symbol almost by default.

She snapped her fingers to get him back to the real world. "What is this, exactly?"

"Right." Ricketts came back to point. "Weg and Moricon found one of those canister thingies you put the word out about. It was leaking this shit all over. Not like, rivers of the stuff, you know, just like sweating it almost. So they soaked it up in that"—a gesture at the bag—"and handed it off to me. I've been driving all night."

"Where's this from?" Taka asked.

"You mean, where we found it? Burlington."

It was almost too good to be true.

"That's in Vermont," he added helpfully.

Ken was suddenly at Rickett's shoulder. "There was a missile drop on Vermont?" he said.

The boy turned, startled. Saw Ken. Saw the eyes.

"Nice caps," he said approvingly. "I was into rifters myself back before, you know..."

Rifters, Taka remembered. They'd run geothermal stations way off the west coast...

"The missiles," Ken said. "Do you remember how many there were?"

"Dunno. Like, maybe four or five that I saw, but you know."

"Were there lifters? Was there a burn?"

"Yeah, someone said there might be. That was why we all scrambled."

"But was there?"

"I dunno. I didn't hang around. You guys wanted this stuff fast, right?"

"Yes. Yes." Taka looked at the fouled, greasy wad in the bag. It was the most beautiful sight she'd ever seen. "Ricketts, thank you. You have no idea how important this could be."

"Yeah, well if you really wanna be grateful how about a charge off your rig?" He slapped the bike between his thighs. "This thing is like down to the moho, I've got maybe another ten klicks and—or hey, is there maybe some kinda reward?"

The reward, Taka thought, unlocking the umbilical for Rickett's bike, is that all of us might not be dead in ten years.

She fed the treasure into the sample port with tender reverence, let Miri slice away the packaging and squeeze the gold from the dross. And there was gold, evident as much in what wasn't there as in what was: ßehemoth was far below the usual baseline in this sample. Almost negligible.

Something's killing the witch. That initial explanation, that validation of a belief already grown from hope to near-certainty over the past weeks, threatened to squash all the scientific caution Taka's training had instilled in her. She forced caution onto her excitement. She would run the tests. She would do the legwork. But some squealing inner undergrad knew it would only confirm what she already knew, what this first glorious result suggested. Something was killing the witch.

And there it was. Mixed in with the molds and the fungi and the fecal coliform, it glimmered like a string of pearls half-buried in mud: a genetic sequence that Miri's database didn't recognize. She brought it up, and blinked. That can't be right. She whistled through her teeth.

"What?" Laurie asked at her elbow.

"This is going to take longer than I thought," Taka said.

"Why?"

"Because I've never seen anything like this before."

"Maybe we have," Ken said.

"I don't think so. Not unless you've—" Taka stopped. Miri was flashing an interface alert at her: someone asking for download access.

She looked at Ken. "Is that you?"

He nodded. "It's the sequence for a new bug we encountered recently."

"Encountered where?"

"Nowhere local. An isolated area."

"What, a lab? A mountaintop? The Mariana Trench?"

Ken didn't answer. His data knocked patiently at Miri's front door.

Finally, Taka let it in. "You think this is the same thing?" she asked as the system filtered it for nasties.

"It's possible."

"You had it all the while, and this is the first time you've shown it to me."

"This is the first time you had anything to compare it with."

"Sweet smoking Jesus, Ken. You're not much of a team player, are you?" At least it answered one question: now she knew why these two had hung around for so long.

"It's not a counteragent," Laurie said, as if to gird her against inevitable disappointment.

Taka called up the new sequence. "So I see." She shook her head. "It's not our mystery bug either."

"Really?" Laurie looked surprised. "You can tell that after five seconds?"

"It looks like ßehemoth."

"It's not," Ken assured her.

"Maybe a new strain, then. I'd have to grind through the whole sequence to be sure, but I can tell just by looking that it's an RNA bug."

"The biosol isn't?"

"I don't know what it is. It's a nucleic acid of some kind, but the sugar's got a four-carbon ring. I've never seen it before and it doesn't seem to be in any of Miri's cheat sheets. I'm going to have to take it from scratch."

A look passed between Ken and Laurie. It spoke volumes, but not to her.

"Don't let us stop you," Ken said.

Miri could identify known diseases, and cure those for which cures had been found. It could generate random variants of the usual targeted antibiotics, and prescribe regimens that might keep ahead of your average bug's ability to evolve countermeasures. It could fix broken bones, excise tumors, and heal all manner of physical trauma. When it came to ßehemoth it was little more than a palliative center on wheels, of course, but even that was better than nothing. All in all, the MI was a miracle of modern medical technology—but it was a field hospital, not a research lab. It could sequence novel genomes, as long as the template was familiar, but that wasn't what it had been built for.

Genomes based on unfamiliar templates were another thing entirely. This bug wasn't DNA or RNA—not even the primitive, barely-helical variant of RNA that ßehemoth hung its hat on. It was something else altogether, and Miri's database had never been designed to deal with anything like it.

Taka didn't give a damn. She made it do that anyway.

She found the template easily enough once she looked beyond the nuts-and-bolts sequencing routines. It was right there in a dusty corner of the biomed encyclopedia: TNA. A threose-based nucleic acid first synthesized back at the turn of the century. The usual bases attached to a threose sugar-phosphate backbone, with phosphodiester bonds connecting the nucleotides. Some early theoretical work had suggested that it might have played a vital role back when life was still getting started, but everyone had pretty much forgotten about it after the Martian Panspermians won the day.

A novel template meant novel genes. The standard reference database was virtually useless. Decoding the new sequence with the tools in Miri's arsenal was like digging a tunnel with a teaspoon: you could do it, but you had to be really motivated. Fortunately Taka had motivation up to here. She dug in, knowing it would just take time, and maybe a few unavoidable detours down blind alleys.

Too much time. Way too many detours. And what bugged Taka was, she knew the answer already. She'd known almost before she'd started. Every painstaking, laborious, mind-numbing test supported it. Every electrophoretic band, every virtual blot, every PCR and TTD—all these haphazard techniques stapled together hour after bloody hour—they all pointed, glacially, implacably, to the same glorious answer.

And it was a glorious answer. So after three days, tired of the endless triple-checks and replicates, she decided to just go with what she had. She presented her findings near midday back at the cove, for privacy and the convenience of a ready charge.

"It's not just a tweak job," she told the rifters. A lone bedraggled gull picked its way among the stones. "It's a totally artificial organism, designed from scratch. And it was designed to outcompete ßehemoth on its own turf. It's got a TNA template, which is fairly primitive, but it also uses small RNA's in a way that ßehemoth never did—that's an advanced trait, a eukaryotic trait. It uses proline for catalysis. A single amino acid doing the job of a whole enzyme—do you have any idea how much space that saves—?"

No. They didn't. The blank looks made that more than obvious.

She cut to the chase. "The bottom line, my friends, is if you throw this little guy into culture with ßehemoth it'll come out the winner every time."

"In culture," Ken repeated.

"No reason to think it won't do the same in the wild. Remember, it was designed to make its own way in the world; the plan was obviously to just dump it into the system as an aerosol and leave it to its own devices."

Ken grunted, scrolling through Taka's results on the main display. "What's this?"

"What? Oh, yeah. It's polyploid."

"Polyploid?" Laurie repeated.

"You know, haploid, diploid, polyploid. Multiple sets of genes. You mostly see it in some plants."

"Why here?" Ken wondered.

"I found some nasty recessives," Taka admitted. "Maybe they were deliberately inserted because of some positive effect they'd have in concert with other genes, or maybe it was a rush job so they just slipped through. As far as I can tell the redundant genes were just layered on to eliminate any chance of homozygous expression."

He grunted. "Not very elegant."

Taka shook her head, impatient. "Certainly it's a ham-fisted solution, but it's quick and—I mean, the point is it works! We could beat ßehemoth!"

"If you're right," Ken mused, "it's not ßehemoth you have to beat."

"The M&M's," Taka suggested.

Something changed in Laurie's stance.

Ken looked unconvinced. "Possibly. Although the counterstrikes appear to originate with the North American defense shield."

"CSIRA," Laurie said quietly.

Ken shrugged. "At this point, CSIRA effectively is the armed forces on this continent. And there don't appear to be much in the way of centralized governments left to keep it in check."

"Shouldn't matter," Taka said. "'Lawbreakers are incorruptible."

"Maybe they were, before Rio. Now, who knows?"

"No." Taka saw scorched landscapes. She remembered lifters on the horizon, breathing fire. "We take our orders from them. We all—"

"Then it's probably just as well you kept this project so close to your chest," Lubin remarked.

"But why would anyone—" Laurie was looking from Taka to Ken, disbelief written across her face. "I mean, what would be in it for them?"

More than confusion, Taka realized. Loss, too. Anguish. Something clicked at the back of her mind: Laurie hadn't really believed it, all this time. She had helped where she could. She had cared. She had accepted Taka's interpretation of events—at least as a possibility—because it had offered her an opportunity to help set things right. And yet, only now did she seem to realize what that interpretation entailed, the large-scale implications of what it was they were fighting: not ßehemoth after all, but their own kind.

Odd, Taka reflected, how often it comes down to that...

It wasn't just the end of the world, not to Laurie. It seemed somehow more—more intimate than that. It was almost as if someone had betrayed her personally. Welcome back, Taka thought to the vulnerable creature peeking again, at long last, from behind the mask. I've missed you.

"I don't know," she said at last. "I don't know who would do this or why. But the point is, now we stop it. Now we culture these babies, and we send them out to do battle." Taka pulled up the stats on her incubators. "I've already got five liters of the stuff ready to go, and I'll have twenty by morn..."

That's odd, she thought as a little flashing icon caught her eye for the first time.

That shouldn't—that looks like—

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. "Oh, shit," she whispered.

"What?" Ken and Laurie leaned in as one.

"My lab's online." She stabbed at the icon; it blinked back at her, placidly unresponsive. "My lab's online. It's uploading—God knows what it's—"

In an instant Ken was scrambling up the side of the van. "Get the toolkit," he snapped, sliding across the roof towards a little satellite dish rising somehow from its recessed lair, pointing at the sky.

"What? I—"

Laurie dove into the cab. Ken yanked against the dish, breaking its fixation on some malign geosynchronous star. Suddenly he cried out and thrashed, stopped himself just short of rolling off the roof. His back was arched, his hands and head lifted away from the metal.

The dish stuttered back towards alignment, stripped gears whining.

"Fuck!" Laurie tumbled out onto the pavement. The toolkit spilled its guts beside her. She scrambled to her feet, yelled "Shut it down, for Chrissakes! The hull's electrified!"

Taka stumbled towards the open door. She could see Ken wriggling back towards the dish on his back and elbows, using his diveskin as insulation. As she ducked her head to hop past the trim—Thank God we disarmed the internals—a familiar hum started up deep in Miri's guts.

The weapons blister, deploying.

GPS was online. She killed it. It resurrected. All external defenses were awake and hungry. She called them off. They ignored her. Outside, Ken and Laurie shouted back and forth.

What do I do—what—

She scrambled under the dash and pulled open the fuse box. The circuit breakers were clunky manual things, unreachable to any demon built of electrons. She pulled the plugs on security and comm and GPS. She yanked autopilot too, just in case.

A chorus of electrical hums fell instantly silent around her.

Taka closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself a deep breath. Voices drifted through the open door as she pulled herself back up into the driver's seat.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Skin took most of the charge."

She knew what had happened. What happened again, she corrected herself, grabbing the headset from its hook.

She was no coder. She barely knew how to grow basic programs. But she was a competent medical doctor, at least, and even bottom-half graduates knew their tools. She'd spared the med systems from disconnection; now she brought up an architectural schematic and ran a count of the modules.

There were black boxes in there. One of them, according to the icon, even had a direct user interface. She tapped it.

The Madonna hung in front her, not speaking. Its teeth were bared—a smile of some kind, full of hate and triumph. Some distant, unimportant part of Taka Ouellette's mind wondered at what possible selective advantage an app could accrue by presenting itself in this way. Did intimidation in the real world somehow increase fitness in the virtual one?

But a much bigger part of Taka's mind was occupied with something else entirely, something that had never really sunk in before: this avatar had capped eyes.

They all did. Every Lenie she'd ever encountered: the faces changed from demon to demon, different lips, different cheeks and noses, different ethnicities. But always centered on eyes as white and featureless as snowdrifts.

My name's Taka Ouellette, she had said an eternity ago.

And this strange cipher of a woman—who seemed to take the apocalypse so personally— had replied Le— Laurie.

"Taka."

Taka started, but no—the Lenie wasn't talking to her. This Lenie wasn't.

She slipped off the eyephones. A woman in black with machinery in her chest and eyes like little glaciers looked in at her. She didn't look anything like the creature in the wires. No rage, no hate, no triumph. Somehow, it was this expressionless, flesh-and-blood face that she would have associated with machinery.

"It was one of—it was a Le—a Madonna," Taka said. "Inside the med system. I don't know how long it's been in there."

"We have to go," Laurie said.

"It was hiding in there. Spying, I guess." Taka shook her head. "I didn't even know they could run silent like that, I thought they always just—automatically tore things apart every chance they got..."

"It got a signal out. We've got to go before the lifters get here."

"Right. Right." Focus, Tak. Worry about this later.

Ken was at Laurie's shoulder. "You said you had five liters in culture. We'll take some with us. You disperse the rest. Drive into town, ring your siren, give at least a few mils to anybody who qualifies, and get out. We'll catch up with you later if we can. You have the list?"

Taka nodded. "There are only six locals with wheels. Seven, if Ricketts is still around."

"Don't give it to anyone else," Ken said. "People on foot aren't likely to get out of the burn zone in time. I'd also advise you to avoid mentioning the lifters to anyone who doesn't have an immediate need to know."

She shook her head. "They all need to know, Ken."

"People without transportation are liable to steal it from those who do. I sympathize, but causing a panic could seriously compromise—"

"Forget it. Everyone deserves a heads-up, at least. If they can't outrun the flamethrowers, there are places to hide from them."

Ken sighed. "Fine. Just so you know the risks you're taking. Saving a dozen lives here could doom a much greater number down the road."

Taka smiled, not entirely to herself. "Weren't you the one who didn't think the greater number was worth saving in the first place?"

"It's not that," Laurie said. "He just likes the idea of people dying."

Taka blinked, surprised. Two faces looked back at her; she could read nothing in either.

"We have to hurry," Ken said. "If they scramble from Montreal we can only count on an hour."

The onboard lab could dispense product either fore or aft. Taka moved to the back of the MI and tapped instructions. "Lenie?"

"Ye—" Laurie began, and fell suddenly silent.

"No," Taka said quietly. "I meant what about the Lenie?"

The other woman said nothing. Her face was as blank as a mask.

Ken broke the silence: "Are you certain it can't get out again?"

"I physically cut power to nav, comm, and GPS," Taka said, not taking her eyes off the woman in front of her. "I pretty much lobotomized the old girl."

"Can it interfere with the culture process?"

"I wouldn't think so. Not without being really obvious about it."

"You're not certain."

"Ken, right now I'm not certain about anything." Although I'm approaching certainty about a thing or two...

"It's living where? Reference and analytical?"

Taka nodded. "The only systems with enough room."

"What happens if you shut them down?"

"The wet lab's on its own circuit. The cultures should be okay as long as we don't need to do any more heavy-duty analysis on them."

"Pull the plug," Ken said.

A heat-sealed sample bag, half-full of straw-colored liquid, slid from the dispensary and hung by its upper edge. Taka tore it free and handed it over. "Keep the diffusion disk uncovered or the culture will suffocate. Other than that they should be okay for about a week, depending on the temperature. Do you have a lab in your submarine?"

"Basic medbay," Lenie said. "Nothing like this."

"We can improvise something," Lubin added. "Can the diffuser handle seawater?"

"Ninety minutes, tops."

"Okay. Go."

Ken turned and started down the beach.

Taka raised her voice: "What if—"

"We'll catch up with you afterwards," he said, not turning.

"I guess this is it, then," Taka said.

Lenie, still beside her, tried on a smile. It didn't fit.

"How will you find me?" Taka asked her. "I don't dare go online."

"Yeah. Well." The other woman took a step towards the water. A swirl on that surface was all that remained of her partner. "Ken's got a lot of tricks up his sleeve. He'll track you down."

White eyes set into flesh and blood. White eyes, sneering out from the circuitry of Miri's cortex.

White eyes bringing fire, and flood, and any number of catastrophes down on the innocent, all across North America. All across the world, maybe.

Both sets of eyes called Lenie.

"You—" Taka began.

Lenie, the Word Made Flesh, shook her head. "Really. We gotta go."

Parsimony

Achilles Desjardins was breeding exorcists when he learned he was a suspect.

It was a real balancing act. If you made the little bastards immutable, they wouldn't adapt; even the vestigial wildlife hanging on in this pathetic corner of the net would chew them up and spit them out. But if you set the genes free, provoked mutation with too many random seeds, then how could you be sure your app would still be on-mission a few generations down the road? Natural selection would weed out any preprogrammed imperatives the moment they came into conflict with sheer self-interest.

Sometimes, if you didn't get the balance just right, your agent would forget all about its mission and join the other side. And the other side didn't need any more help. The Madonnas—or the Shredders, or the Goldfish, or any of the other whispered mythic names they'd acquired over the years—had already survived this gangrenous quagmire long past any reasonable expectation. They shouldn't have; they'd codevolved to serve as little more than interfaces between the real world and the virtual one, mouthpieces for a superspecies assemblage that acted as a collective organism in its own right. By rights they should have died in the crash that took out the rest of that collective, that took out ninety percent of all Maelstrom's wildlife—for how many faces make it on their own after the body behind is dead and gone?

But they had defied that logic, and survived. They had changed—been changed— into something more, more self-sufficient. Something purer. Something that even Desjardins's exorcists could barely match.

They had been weaponised, the story went. There was no shortage of suspects. M&Ms and hobby terrorists and death-cult hackers could all be releasing them into the system faster than natural selection took them out, and there was a limit to what anyone could do without a reliable physical infrastructure. The best troops in the world won't last a minute if you set them down in quicksand, and quicksand was all that N'Am had to offer these days: a few hundred isolated fortresses hanging on by their fingernails, their inhabitants far too scared to go out and fix the fiberop. The decaying electronic habitat wasn't much better for wildlife than it was for Human apps, but at a hundred gens-per-sec the wildlife still had the adaptive edge.

Fortunately, Desjardins had a knack for exorcism. There were reasons for that, not all of them common knowledge, but the results were hard to argue with. Even those ineffectual and self-righteous jerk-offs hiding out on the other side of the world gave him that much. At least they all cheered him on, safe behind their barricades, whenever he released a new batch of countermeasures.

But as it turned out, they were saying other things as well.

He wasn't privy to most of it—he wasn't supposed to be privy to any— but he was good enough to get the gist. He had his own hounds on the trail, prowling comsats, sniffing random packets, ever-watchful for digital origami which might—when unscrambled and unfolded and pressed flat—contain the word Desjardins.

Apparently, people thought he was losing his edge.

He could live with that. Nobody racks up a perfect score against the death throes of an entire planet, and if he'd dropped a few more balls than normal over the past months—well, his failure rate was still way below the pack average. He outperformed any of those bozos who grumbled, however softly, during the teleconferences and debriefings and post-fiasco post-mortems that kept intruding on the war. They all knew it, too; he'd have to slip a lot further than this before anyone else in the Patrol would be able to lay a hand on him.

Still. There were hints of the wind, changing at his back. Fragments of encrypted conversations between veterans in Helsinki and rookies in Melbourne and middle-management stats-hounds in New Delhi. Disgruntled insistence from Weimers, King Sim himself, that there had to be some undiscovered variable wreaking havoc with his projections. And—

And right this very second, a disembodied chunk of point-counterpoint snatched from the ether by one of Desjardins's minions. It was only a few seconds in length—thanks to a filthy spectrum and the dynamic channel-switching that coped with it, it was almost impossible to grab more without knowing which random seed to apply—but it seemed to have been connecting a couple of 'lawbreakers in London and McMurdo. It took forty seconds and six nested Bayesians to turn it back into English.

"Desjardins saved us from Rio," Mr. McMurdo had opined, moments earlier, in a Hindian accent. "We'd have surely taken ten times the losses had he not acted when he did. How those people threw off the Trip—"

Ms. London: "How do you know they did?" Irish lilt. Enticing.

"Well let me see. They launched an unprovoked attack on a large number of—"

"How do we know it was unprovoked?"

"Of course it was unprovoked."

"Why? How do you know they didn't just see a threat to the greater good, and try to stop it?"

Precious moments of this fleeting excerpt, wasted on astonished silence. Finally: "Are you suggesting that—"

"I'm saying history gets written by the victors. Rio's history. How do we know the good guys won?"

End of intercept. If McMurdo had had an answer, he hadn't got it out before the frequency skidded away.

Wow, Desjardins thought.

It was horseshit, of course. The idea that twenty-one separate CSIRA franchises could have simultaneously gone rogue was hardly more plausible than the thought that Rio alone had. Ms. London was a 'lawbreaker, not an idiot. She knew about parsimony. She'd just been blowing smoke out her ass, yanking poor old McMurdo's chain.

Still, it gave Desjardins pause. He'd gotten used to being the Man Who Stopped Rio. It put him above suspicion on so many counts. And it didn't sit well, to think that there were people out there who could doubt his virtue even for a moment.

That could lead to second thoughts, he reflected. It could lead to closer looks.

The board beeped again. For a moment he thought that he'd beaten all odds and reacquired the signal—but no. The new alert came from a different source entirely, a broadband dump from somewhere in Maine.

That's odd, he thought.

A Lenie had gotten into a medical database and was spewing random intelligence across half the EM spectrum. They did that a lot, these days—not content to merely scramble and hash, some had taken to shouting into the ether, indiscriminately dumping data into any network they could access. Some reproductive subroutine, mutated to spread data instead of executables. At the very least it threw more chaff into a system already losing usable bandwidth by the hour; at worst it could blow the lid off all sorts of secret and sensitive data.

Either way it was bad news for the real world; that would be enough to keep it going.

This particular demon had uploaded a whole shitload of biomedical stuff from the database it had plundered. Desjardins's board had flagged it for potential epidemiological significance. He popped the lid and looked inside.

And immediately forgot about any trivial bullshit gossip from London.

There were two items, both rife with dangerous pathology. Desjardins was no pathologist, but then again he didn't have to be; the friends and advisors arrayed about him distilled all those biochemical details down to an executive summary that even he could understand. Now they served up a pair of genotypes with red flags attached. The first was almost ßehemoth, only better: greater resistance to osmotic stress, sharper teeth for cleaving molecules. Higher virulence. At least one critical feature was the same, though. Like baseline ßehemoth, this new strain was optimized for life at the bottom of the sea.

It did not exist in the standard database. Which raised the question of what its technical specs were doing in a glorified ambulance out of Bangor.

It would have been enough to grab his attention even if it had arrived unaccompanied. It had brought a date, though, and she was the real ballbreaker. She was the bitch he had always dreaded. She was the last thing he would have ever expected.

Because he had always known that Seppuku would gain a foothold eventually.

But he hadn't expected anyone on his own side to be culturing the damn thing.

Corral

Taka cursed her own lack of foresight. They'd spread the word, all right. They'd told all who came by of their plan to save the world: the need for samples, the dangers of lingering afterwards, the places she'd patrol to take charge of vital payloads. They'd taken special note of those few who'd driven up in cars or motorbikes or even plain old pedal-powered flywheels, got addresses from those who still had them and told the rest to check back regularly: if all went well, they might save the world.

And things had gone well, and then so horribly wrong, in such quick succession. They had their counteragent, or some of it anyway, but no prearranged signals to bring in the couriers. And after all, why would they have even bothered? They could have taken an afternoon and driven around the county. They could have waited for those of no fixed address to check in, tomorrow or the next day.

And now Taka Ouellette had the salvation of the world in her hands, and some shrinking fraction of a sixty-minute window to get it to safety.

She ran the siren continuously from one end of Freeport to the other, a shrieking departure from the music employed to announce her day-to-day presence. Hopefully it would summon the healthy as well as the sick.

She got some of both. She warned them all to take shelter; she promised a mother with a broken arm and a son with incipient stage-one that she'd come back and help them when the fires had passed. She urged the others, as they fled, to send the Six her way, or anyone else with wheels to burn.

After thirty minutes, one of them came by. After forty, two more; she loaded them all with precious milliliters of amber fluid and sent them running. She begged them to send the others, if they knew their whereabouts. If they could find them in time.

Forty-five minutes, and nothing but a ragged handful of the hungry and the feeble. She chased them away with stories about fire-breathing dragons, sent them down to a fisherman's wharf that had once been the community's breadbasket. Now, if they were lucky, it might at least serve as a place from which to jump into the ocean; surely the flames wouldn't scorch the whole Atlantic?

Fifty minutes.

I can't wait.

But there were others here, she knew. People she hadn't seen today. People she hadn't warned.

And they're not coming, Tak. If you want to warn them, you might as well start going door to door. Search every house and hovel within twenty klicks. You've got ten minutes.

Ken had said they could count on sixty minutes. A minimum estimate, right? It might take longer, a lot longer.

She knew what Dave would have said. She still had two liters of culture. Dave would have told her she could make all the difference, if she didn't just sit there and wait for the furnace.

It might not happen at all. What were they basing this on, anyway? A couple of firestorms that happened to follow aborted missile attacks? What about the times when the missiles fell and nothing happened afterwards? There had to be times when nothing had happened. What about the times when the fires came, or the floods or the explosions, with nothing to presage them? Correlation wasn't causation...and this wasn't even strong correlation...

It convinced Ken.

But she didn't know Ken at all. Didn't even know his last name, or Laur—Lenie's. She would have had nothing but their own word that they were who they said they were, if they had even bothered to really tell her even that much. And now even their names were suspect. Laurie was not Laurie at all, it seemed.

Taka only had their word on the things they had said, her own speculation on all the things they hadn't, and the disturbing similarities between this amphibious woman and the demons in the net...

Fifty-five minutes.

Go. You've done all you can here. Go.

She started the engine.

Committed, she didn't look back. She drove down the decaying asphalt as fast as she could without risking some pothole-induced rollover. Her fear seemed to increase in lockstep with her velocity—as though the diffuse and overgrown remains of Freeport and its pathetic, half-starved inhabitants had somehow numbed her own instinct for self-preservation. Now, abandoning them, her heart rose in her mouth. She imagined the crackle of flames advancing along the road behind her. She fought the road; she fought panic.

You're going south, you idiot! We were south when the signal went out, south is where they'll start—

She screeched east onto Sherbourne. Miri took the bend on two wheels. A great shadow fell across the road before her, the sky darkened abruptly overhead. Her imagination saw great airships, spewing fire—but her eyes (when she dared to look away from the road) saw only overarching trees, brownish-green blurs streaking the world on both sides, leaning over and blocking the afternoon sun.

But no, that's the sun up ahead, setting.

It was a great yellow-orange blob, dimmed by its slanting angle through the atmosphere. It was centered in the bright archway that marked the end of the tunnel of trees. It was setting directly over the road ahead.

How can it be so late? It can't be so late, it's only aftern—

The sun was setting.

The sun was setting the trees on fire.

She hit the brakes. The shoulder strap caught her around the chest, threw her back into her seat. The world grew ominously quiet: no more spitting clatter of rock against undercarriage, no more rattling of equipment on hooks, banging against Miri's walls. There was only the distant, unmistakable crackling of flame from up ahead.

A containment perimeter. They'd started at the outside and moved in.

She threw the MI into reverse and yanked hard on the stick. The vehicle skidded back and sideways, slewing into the ditch. Forward again. Back the way she'd come. The tires spun in the soft, muddy embankment.

A whooshing sound, from overhead, like the explosive breath of a great whale she'd heard in the archives as a child. A sheet of flame flooded the road, blocking her escape. Heat radiated through the windshield.

Oh Jesus. Oh God.

She opened the door. Scorched air blasted her face. The seatbelt held her fast. Panicky fingers took way too long to set her free and then she was on the ground, rolling. She scrambled to her feet, bracing against Miri's side; the plastic burned her hands.

A wall of flame writhed barely ten meters away. Another—the one she'd mistaken for the setting sun—was further off, maybe sixty meters on the other side of the MI. She sheltered on the cooler side of the vehicle. Better. But it wouldn't last.

Get the culture.

A mechanical groan, the bone-deep sound of twisting metal. She looked up: directly overhead, through a mosaic of leaves and branches not yet burning, she saw the fractured silhouette of a great swollen disk wallowing in the sky.

Get the culture!

The road was blocked ahead and behind. Miri would never be able to push through the dying woodlands to either side, but Taka could run for it. Every instinct, every nerve was telling her to run for it.

The culture! MOVE!

She yanked open the passenger door and climbed over the seat. The icons blinking on the cab's rear wall seemed almost deliberately slow to respond. A little histogram appeared on the board. It rose as slowly as a tide.

Whoosh.

The forest across the road burst into flame.

Three sides gone now, one way left, one way. Oh Jesus.

The histogram blinked and vanished. The panel extruded a sample bag, swollen with culture. Taka grabbed it and ran.

Whoosh.

Flame ahead of her, pouring from the heavens like a liquid curtain.

Flame on all sides, now.

Taka Ouellette stared into the firestorm for some endless, irrelevant span of seconds. Then she sank to the ground with a sigh. Her knees made indentations in the softening asphalt. The heat of the road burned her flesh. Her flesh was indifferent. She noted, vaguely surprised, that her face and hands were dry; the heat baked the sweat from her pores before it even had the chance to wet her skin. It was an interesting phenomenon. She wondered if anyone had ever written it up.

It didn't really matter, though.

Nothing did.

Turncoat

"That's odd," said Lenie Clarke.

The periscope had backed off from shore a ways, to get a better northwest view over the trees. The image it conveyed was surprisingly bucolic. It was too far to see Freeport from here—and Freeport's dwellings and businesses had been spread far too widely to present anything approaching a skyline even in the old days— but they should have seen lifters, at least. They should have seen the flames or the smoke by now.

"It's been three hours," Clarke said, glancing across the cockpit. "Maybe you stopped the signal after all." Or maybe, she mused, we're completely off-base about this whole thing.

Lubin slid one finger a few millimeters along the panel. The 'scope's-eye view panned left.

"Maybe she made it," Clarke remarked. Such dull, lifeless words for all the meaning they conveyed: Maybe she saved the world.

Maybe she saved me.

"I don't think so," Lubin said.

A pillar of smoke boiled up from behind the crest of a hill, staining the sky brown.

She felt a tightness in her throat. "Where is that?" she asked.

"Dead west," Lubin replied.

They came ashore on the south side of the cove, a slope of smooth stones and gnarled driftwood growing slimy with ßehemoth. They followed the sun along a dirt road that had never seen so much as a signpost. The pillar of smoke led them on like a pole star with a half-life, thinning in the sky as they tracked it across paved roads and gravel ones, over the crest of a weathered bump called Snake Hill (judging by the name of the road that ran along its base), on into the setting sun itself. Moments into twilight Lubin stopped, one hand raised in warning.

By now the once-billowing column was all but exhausted, a few threads of smoke twisting into the sky. But they could see the source, a roughly rectangular patch of scorched woodland at the bottom of the hill. Or rather, a roughly rectangular outline: the center of the area appeared to be unburned.

Lubin had his binocs out. "See anything?" Clarke asked.

He hmmmed.

"Come on, Ken. What is it?"

He handed her the binoculars without a word.

There was disquieting moment when the device tightened itself around her head. Suddenly the world was huge, and in sharp focus. Clarke felt brief vertigo and stepped forward, bracing against sudden illusory imbalance. Twigs and blighted leaves the size of dinner tables swept past in a blur. She zoomed back to get her bearings. Better: there was the scorched earth, there was the patch in its midst, and there was—

"Oh shit," she murmured.

Miri sat dead center of the clear zone. It looked undamaged.

Ouellette stood beside it. She appeared to be conversing with a gunmetal ovoid half her size, hovering a meter over her head. Its carapace was featureless; its plastron bristled with sensors and antennae.

A botfly. Not so long ago, teleoperated robots just like it had hounded Lenie Clarke across a whole continent.

"Busted," Lubin said.

The world was bleaching in Clarke's eyecaps by the time they reached the MI. Ouellette sat on the road with her back against the van, legs bent, arms crossed loosely over knees. She stared listlessly at the pavement between her feet. She looked up at the sound of their approach. The botfly hung overhead like a bodyguard. It showed no visible reaction to their arrival.

Bleached light wasn't enough to account for the pallor of Ouellette's face. She looked absolutely bloodless. There were wet streaks on her face.

She looked at Clarke and shook her head. "What are you?" she said. Her voice was as empty as a cave.

Clarke's throat went dry.

"You're not just some refugee. You're not just some rifter who's been hiding for five years. You—you started this, somehow. You started it all..."

Clarke tried to swallow, looked to Lubin. But Lubin's eyes didn't waver from the botfly.

She spread her hands. "Tak, I—"

"The monsters in the machines, they're all—you," Ouellette seemed stunned at the sheer magnitude of Clarke's betrayal. "The M&Ms and the fanatics and the death cults, they're all following you..."

They're not, Clarke wanted to shout. I'd stop them all in a second if I could, I don't know how any of it got started—

But that would be a lie, of course. Maybe she hadn't formally founded the movements that had sprung up in her wake, but that didn't make them any less faithful to the thing she'd been. They were the very essence of the rage and hatred that had driven her, the utter indifference to any loss but her own.

They hadn't done it for her, of course. The seething millions had their own reasons for anger, vendettas far more righteous than the false pretenses on which Lenie Clarke had waged war. But she had shown them the way. She had proven it was possible. And with every drop of her blood that she spilled, every precious inoculation of ßehemoth into the world, she had given them their weapons.

Now there was nothing she could bring herself to say. She could only shake her head, and force herself to meet the eyes of this accuser and one-time friend.

"And now they've really outdone themselves," Ouellette continued in her broken, empty voice. "Now, they've—"

She took a breath.

"Oh God," she finished. "I fucked up so bad."

Like a marionette she pulled herself to her feet. Still the botfly didn't move.

"It wasn't a counteragent," Ouellette said.

This time, Lubin spared a glance. "What do you mean?"

"I guess we're not dying fast enough. The witch was beating us but we were slowing it down at least, we lost four people for every one we saved but at least we were saving some. But the M&M's don't get into paradise until we're all dead, so they came up with something better..."

"And they are?" Lubin asked, turning back to the teleop.

"Don't look at me," the machine said quietly. "I'm one of the good guys."

Clarke recognized the voice in an instant.

So did Lubin. "Desjardins."

"Ken. Old buddy." The botfly bobbed a few centimeters in salute. "Glad you remember me."

You're alive, Clarke thought. After Rio, after Sudbury going dark, after five years. You're alive. You're alive after all.

My friend....

Ouellette watched the proceedings with numb amazement on her face. "You know—"

"He—helped us out," Clarke told her. "A long time ago."

"We thought you were dead," Lubin said.

"Likewise. It's been pretty much seven seconds to sockeye ever since Rio, and the only times I had a chance to ping you you'd gone dark. I figured you'd been done in by some disgruntled faction who never made the cut. Still. Here you are."

My friend, Clarke thought again. He'd been that when even Ken Lubin had been trying to kill her. He'd risked his life for her before they'd even met. By that measure, although their paths had only crossed briefly, he was the best friend she'd ever had.

She had grieved at word of his death; by rights, now, she should be overjoyed. But one word looped endlessly through her mind, subverting joy with apprehension.

Spartacus.

"So," she said carefully. "You're still a lawbreaker?"

"Fighting Entropy for the Greater Good," the botfly recited.

"And that includes burning thousands of hectares down to the bedrock?" Lubin queried.

The botfly descended to Lubin-eye level and stared lens to lens. "If killing ten saves a thousand it's a deal, Ken, and nobody knows that better than you.. Maybe you didn't hear what our lovely friend just told you, but there's a war on. The bad guys keep lobbing Seppuku into my court and I've been doing my damndest to keep it from getting a foothold. I've got barely any staff and the infrastructure's falling apart around my ears but I was managing, Ken, I really was. And then, as I understand it, you two walked into poor Taka's life and now at least three vectors have snuck past the barricades."

Lubin turned to Ouellette. "Is this true?"

She nodded. "I checked it myself, when he told me what to look for. It was subtle, but it was...right there. Chaperone proteins and alternative splicing, RNA interference. A bunch of second and third-order effects I never saw. They were all tangled up in the polyploid genes, and I just didn't look hard enough. It gets inside you. It kills ßehemoth sure enough, but then it just keeps going and it—I didn't see it. I was so sure I knew what it was, and I just—fucked up." She stared at the ground, away from accusing eyes. "I fucked up again," she whispered.

Lubin said nothing for a few seconds. Then, to the 'fly: "You understand that there are reasons for caution here."

"You don't trust me." Desjardins sounded almost amused. "I'm not the one with the compulsive murder fetish, Ken. And I'm not the only one who shook off the Trip. Are you really in a position to throw stones?"

Ouellette looked up, startled from her bout of self-loathing.

"And whatever misgivings you have," the 'lawbreaker continued, "Give me credit for a little self-interest. I don't want Seppuku in my back yard any more than you do. I'm just as vulnerable as the rest of you."

"How vulnerable is that?" Lubin wondered. "Taka?"

"I don't know," Ouellette whispered. "I don't know anything..."

"Guess."

She closed her eyes. "It's a whole different bug than ßehemoth, but it's designed—I think it's designed for the same niche. So being tweaked against ßehemoth won't save you, but it might buy you some time."

"How much?"

"I can't even guess. But everyone else, you know—I'd guess, most anyone who hasn't got the retrofits...symptoms after three or four days, death within fourteen."

"Dead slow," Lubin remarked. "Any decent necrotising strep would kill you in three hours."

"Yes. Before you had a chance to spread it." Ouellette's voice was hollow. "They're smarter than that."

"Mmm. Mortality rate?"

The doctor shook her head. "It's designed, Ken. There's no natural immunity."

The muscles tightened around Lubin's mouth.

"It actually gets worse," Desjardins added. "I'm not the only watchdog on this beat. There are still a few others in N'Am, and a lot more overseas. And I've got to tell you, my limited-containment strategy is not all that popular. There are people who'd just as soon nuke the whole bloody seaboard just to be on the safe side."

"Why don't they nuke whoever's launching Seppuku?" Lubin wondered.

"Try getting a fix on half a dozen submerged platforms moving around the deep Atlantic at sixty knots. Truth be told, some thought it was you guys."

"It's not."

"Doesn't matter. People are itching to go nuclear on this. I've only been able to hold them off because I could keep Seppuku from spreading without resorting to fissiles. But now, r's and K's, you've handed the nuclear lobby everything they need. If I were you I'd start digging fallout shelters. Deep ones."

"No." Clarke shook her head. "There were only, what, six people with wheels?"

"Only three showed up," Ouellette said. "But they could be anywhere. They didn't leave me an itinerary. And they'll be spreading the stuff. They'll be seeding it in ponds and fields and—"

"If we can catch up with them, we can backtrack," Lubin pointed out.

"But we don't even know where they were headed! How can we—"

"I don't know how." The botfly wiggled on its ground-effectors, a tiny flourish. "But you better get started. You have made one industrial-strength tar pit of a mess here, folks. And if you want to stand even a one-in-fifty chance of keeping this place from melting down to radioactive glass, you are damn well gonna help clean it up."

There was a silence. Stubborn flames crackled and spat faintly in the distance.

"We're going to help you," Lubin said at last.

"Well, you can all do your bit, of course," Desjardins replied, "but it's your efforts in particular, Ken, that are gonna come in most handy right now."

Lubin pursed his lips. "Thanks, but I'll pass. I wouldn't do you much good."

Clarke bit her tongue. He's got to be working some kind of angle.

The botfly hovered for a moment, as if considering. "I haven't forgotten your skill set, Ken. I've experienced it first-hand."

"I haven't forgotten yours either. You could mobilize the whole hemisphere in thirty seconds flat."

"A lot's changed since you retired, friend. And in case you haven't noticed, there's not much left of the hemisphere even if I did still have all my super powers."

Ouellette's eyes flickered between man and machine, watching the point-counterpoint with a mixture of outrage and confusion. But at least she, too, seemed to know enough to keep her mouth shut.

Lubin glanced around at the charred and darkling landscape. "Your resources seem more than sufficient. You don't need me."

"You're not listening, Ken. A lot has changed. A lifter or two is nothing, it's background noise. But you start mobilizing too many resources at once, the wrong kind of people pay attention. And not everybody on this side is on this side, if you know what I mean."

He's talking about other lawbreakers, Clarke realized. Maybe it's Spartacus vs. the Trip. Or maybe all of them are off the leash by now.

"You'd rather keep a low profile," Lubin surmised.

"I've always preferred subtlety. And your rather blunt social skills notwithstanding, when it comes right down to it even you're more subtle than a fleet of fire-breathing killer blimps."

When it comes down to war, he means. Private war of the psychos, by invitation only. Clarke wondered how many sides there were. Could they even have sides? How do you form an alliance with someone you know will stab you in the back the first chance they get? Maybe it's just every sociopath for himself, she mused.

Then again, it wasn't Lubin who'd had difficulty choosing sides recently.

"I'm otherwise engaged," Lubin said.

"Naturally. You'd have to have a damn good reason to come all the way back here. The Mid Atlantic Ridge isn't exactly in the neighborhood."

"It might be before too long, judging by the recent traffic."

"Ah. Somebody pay you a visit?"

"Not yet. But they're sniffing around close by. It's an unlikely coincidence."

"Don't look at me, Ken. If I'd spilled the beans, they wouldn't have to sniff around."

"I'm aware of that."

"Still, you naturally want to know who's on the trail. Ken, I'm hurt. Why didn't you come to me at—oh, right. You thought I was dead." Desjardins paused, then added, "You're really lucky I came along."

"I'm even luckier," Lubin said, "that you need my help."

The botfly bobbled in a sudden gust of hot wind. "Okay then. You help me keep N'Am from dying a little while longer, and I'll try and find out who's stalking you. Deal?"

Lubin considered.

"Seems fair," he said.

Crash

The Crusade, thought Lenie Clarke, could go on without her.

It wasn't as though it needed her services. Saving lives and ending them were the only two causes worth pursuing now, and she had no great skill in either. Of course that wasn't exactly true, she realized even as the thought occurred. When it came to total kills, there wasn't a person on the planet who could match her score. But those deaths had been indiscriminate and untargeted, faceless collateral she'd barely spared a thought for. Right now, the greater good needed something considerably more precise: specific individuals, not whole populations. Isolated faces to be hunted down and—what was the word Rowan had used?—decirculated.

It didn't have to be a euphemism. There'd be no reason to kill the vectors once they'd been found, even assuming that Seppuku hadn't killed them first. There were only three of them after all, with less than a day's head start in a place where people were no longer a major part of the landscape. It was quite possible they'd be found before they could infect too many others, before uneconomies of scale made wholesale extermination the only viable option. Ten thousand carriers might have to be burned for want of facilities to contain them; but ten could be taken alive, isolated and cared for, their condition studied in hopes of finding a cure. There'd be no need for outright murder.

I'm not the one with the compulsive murder fetish, Ken.

Either way, it didn't matter. Soon Lubin would be on the hunt, backed up by all the resources Desjardins could provide; and whether he was in it for the kill or the thrill of the chase, Clarke's presence at his side would only slow him down. Taka Ouellette had already gone on to better things, whisked away to a CSIRA facility where, as Desjardins had put it, "your skill set can be much better utilized". She had left with barely another word or a glance at Lenie Clarke. Now she was probably sitting at the end of a line that would start with Lubin, waiting to process the people he tracked down. There was no point along that short route where Lenie Clarke could be useful.

She couldn't save, and she couldn't kill. Here, though, in the broken shells of Freeport, she could do something in between. She could delay. She could hold the fort. She could keep people from dying of tumors or broken bones, so that ßehemoth and Seppuku could take a crack at them instead.

Lubin did her one last favor before leaving. He navigated through the virtual lightscape of Miri's neocortex, found the infestation that had betrayed them, and isolated it. It was too insidious, too deeply dug-in to trust to mere deletion; there were too many places it could be hiding, too many ways to subvert the search protocols. The only way to be sure it was gone was to physically throw out the memory with the monster.

Crouched over the dashboard, Lubin read reams of diagnostic arcana and called instructions over his shoulder. Behind him, Clarke—up to her elbows in crystals and circuitry—did the actual cutting. Lubin told her which card to extract; she did so. He told her which array to peel from its surface, using a tri-pronged tool with delicate whisker-thin fingers. She obeyed. She waited while he ran checks and double-checks on the rest of the system, reseated the lobotomized unit at his command, poised herself to yank it again should any remnant of the monster have somehow escaped containment. Satisfied at last that Miri was clean, Lubin told Clarke to lock and reboot. She did it without question.

He never told her outright to destroy the infected component. That was just too obvious a measure to mention.

It was, after all, a part of her.

She didn't know how, exactly; the perverse logic that had spawned and twisted these electronic demons was something better left to hackers and evolutionary ecologists. But back at the beginning, she'd been the template. This thing had taken its lead from her; it was a reflection, however perverse, of Lenie Clarke. And irrational though it seemed, she couldn't shake the sense that it still owed something of itself to the flesh and blood it was modeled after. She had raged, and hated, for so very long; perhaps these reflections weren't so distorted after all.

She resolved to find out.

She was no codemeister. She knew nothing about growing programs or pruning software to specs. She did, however, know how to snap prefab components together, and Phocoena's lockers and glove compartments were overflowing with the legacy of five years' service. The little sub had carried a thousand survey instruments to Impossible Lake, served in the repair and maintenance of them all. It had slipped across thermoclines and through Langmuir Cells, seeding drogues and TDRs into the water column. It had spied on corpses and moved supplies and served as a general workhorse far beyond anything its designers had ever intended. After five years, it had accumulated more than enough building blocks for Lenie Clarke to play with.

She found a Cohen board in the bottom of a drawer, plugged a battery onto one of its sockets and a generic OS chip onto another. A tracery of whisker-thin filaments flickered briefly between the new components as the board's autodiscovery routines sniffed them out and made introductions. She had to look a little harder for a user interface; she couldn't risk a wireless hookup. Finally she found an old fiberop headset with an integrated infrared keyboard, and plugged it in. More flickering handshakes.

She slid on the headset. A pastel keyboard hovered in the air before her. She reached out; the headset's infrared eyes watched her hands move in empty space, mapped real fingers onto illusory controls. She brought up a map of the Cohen board, built a fence around a handful of empty sockets, cut a single gateway and locked it tight from the outside. She assigned a panic button, just in case: it floated off to one side, an orange spark in virtual space. There would be no need to reach out and touch it. Merely focusing her eyes on that icon would freeze the system solid. But the safeguard had a price attached. The headset couldn't see through photocollagen. Her eyes would have to be stripped naked during the encounter.

She doffed the headset and regarded her handiwork in the real world: two miniscule Platonic solids and a thread of fiberop rising from a dimpled grid of empty pinhead sockets. A sparse right-angle spiderweb of emerald threads connected the plug-ins. Beside it, a glowing crimson border enclosed a rectangular patch of unoccupied terrain.

It was completely self-contained and utterly isolated. There were no antennae, no wireless interfaces, nothing that could send a signal from that landscape to any other. Nothing plugged into the board would be able to get off of it.

She studied the infected and excised lobe of Miri's brain: a Lilliputian necklace of OPMs and memory chips lying isolated and inert in the palm of her hand. For all Clarke knew there was nothing left inside; the memory was nonvolatile, but who knew what damage had been inflicted during the exorcism? She remembered her challenge to Ken Lubin—how do you know I can't wake the fucker with a kiss?—but she had no idea how to actually do that. She'd kept these components only because she could not throw them away. And because she hoped that if she spoke to the thing inside, it might speak back.

She lifted the necklace with a pair of force-feedback tweezers whose touch was as fine as eyelashes. She seated it into the center of the red zone. Green threads sprouted from the other components and converged just outside the gate, and stopped.

She donned the headset. She took a breath.

She opened the gate.

An explosion of pixels, right in front of her. Anger and ravenous hunger and bared teeth, furious input that bypassed the upper brain entirely and plunged icy needles right into the brainstem.

"Let—"

The flight response took over before she'd even parsed what she'd seen; the orange panic-button flared in her sights. The image froze.

She realized she was gasping. She forced herself to calm down.

A motionless face, black and green and radiant. A furious portrait of inverted flesh-tones. It didn't look like her at all. Except for the eyes: those empty, raging eyes.

And not even those, she remembered after a moment. Because her eyes were uncapped, now. She faced this radioactive doppelganger completely naked.

Is this what I was?

She took a breath, held it briefly, let it out. She focused on the panic button and released it.

"—me out!" the apparition screamed.

Clarke shook her head. "There's nowhere for you to go."

"Let me out or I'll grind every fucking address in here to pulp!"

"Answer some questions first."

"Answer this, you worm-riddled twat."

The universe flickered and went out.

Nothing but her own rapid breathing and the quiet hiss of Phocoena's air conditioner. After a moment, her headset etched a message across the void:

System Crash. Restart?

Y N

Clarke tried again.

"Let me out!"

She shook her head. "Tell me what you want."

"What do you want?" The question seemed to calm the monster down a bit. It even smiled. "You don't want to fuck with me, friend. I've killed more people than you can count."

"Why? Revenge? For the GA? For—for Daddy, for what he did while mom was—how could you care about that? How could you even know?"

The face desaturated, its black-light pigments fading as if in twilight. In moments it was blacks and grays and two angry, crystalline ovals of pure white.

"Are you trying to kill everyone?" Clarke asked softly. "Are you trying to kill yourself?"

It glared at her and spat, "Kill yourself? You—"

Dark, and void, and System Crash.

And the next time.

And the next.

The Skill of the Chase

A CSIRA drone, floating like thistledown just below the jet stream, caught the heat trace at 0300. It was warming Service Road 23 northeast of Skowhagen, and it shared certain characteristics with another source— two hours older— that had been glimpsed by a lifter shipping medical supplies out of Portland. Resupply hauls weren't normally charged with surveillance, but everyone was on alert since the word had come down from Sudbury.

Both signatures matched the emissions put out by a brand of hydrogen cell that hadn't been manufactured since 2044. Someone was driving the shit out of an old Ford Fugitive, traveling inland along back roads in the middle of the night.

One of Ouellette's vectors had driven a Fugitive. Lubin caught up with her somewhere on the far side of the New Hampshire border.

Desjardins had requisitioned him an ultralight. It wasn't as fast as ground-effect transport, but its cruising altitude was a lot higher and it drank fewer Joules than a chopper. Lubin was flying west at about two hundred meters when the Ford bounced sunlight into his eye. It was parked on the edge of an acid-washed bog full of rusty tannins and jagged waterlogged stumps. The wetland seemed to have grown since Highway Maintenance had given up on the neighborhood; a tongue of dark water lapped across a few meters of low-lying asphalt just ahead of the vehicle.

That wasn't what had stopped it, though.

Lubin landed fifty meters up the road and approached from behind. His inlays performed the usual schematic vivisection as he drew near, cluttered up his vision with icons and wiring diagrams. His gut rebelled at the mere thought of tuning out usable intel from any source, but sometimes it distracted more than it informed. He shut down the display in his head; the Fugitive dropped back into the real world, seemed to flatten somehow, luminous guts vanishing behind dirty plastic skin.

A blonde mocha woman sat in the driver's seat, forehead against the wheel, long straight hair obscuring her face. She seemed oblivious to his approach.

He tapped on the window. She turned apathetically at the sound. He knew immediately that something was wrong: her face was flushed and shiny with perspiration.

She knew something was wrong, too. Lubin's isolation skin would have pretty much given that away even if she hadn't been sick.

Three days, he thought.

The door was unlocked. He pulled it open and stepped back.

"They told us...it was a cure," she said. It took her two breaths.

"Do you have any left?" Lubin asked.

She gulped. "Some. Spread most of it around." She shook her head. "Gave some to Aaron, too. Couple of days ago."

A transparent bladder lay on the seat beside her. It had been drained almost flat. The culture that remained, sucked into creases and wrinkles in the deflated bag, was no longer amber in color; it was dark and gray as anoxic mud.

"What happened to it?" he asked.

"I don't know. Changed." She shook her head tiredly. "She said it would last a week..."

He leaned forward. She still had the presence of mind to look vaguely startled when she saw him up close. "You were one of them. You were one of them. I saw you there..."

"I need to know where you seeded it," he said. "I need to know everyone you've been in contact with since Freeport, and how to get in touch with them."

She held up one limp-wristed arm, showing off her wristwatch. "Aaron's in here. We split up. Thought...we'd cover more ground..."

He took the watch. Its phone feature wasn't much use without the earbud, but he could deal with Aaron later.

"I was talking to him just this morning," the woman managed. "He's not—not doing too well himself."

He circled the Fugitive and climbed in the passenger's side. Nav was offline—a precaution left over from the previous week, when the ether had been enemy territory. He brought up dashboard GPS and scaled the map to include the coast.

"Everywhere you stopped," he said. "Everyone you met."

"I'm sick," she sighed.

"I can get you to a hospital. A real hospital," he promised, sweetening the pot. "But you have to help me first."

She told him what she could. Finally he climbed back into sunshine and headed for the ultralight. Halfway there he paused and looked back.

She could make a run for it, he thought. She's not too sick to drive. She could try to escape.

Or, eyeing the stained water by the road, she could just lurch into the water and infect the whole bog. Much more difficult to contain after that.

Maybe she's a loose end.

Idle musing, of course. There was no immediate threat here, nothing to justify extreme prejudice. Not that that was always likely to be the case, the way this thing was spreading. This was the second vector Lubin had tracked down, and the first of Ouellette's original trio. The other had been a secondary who'd picked up the baton in her wake, and he'd admitted to seeding still others. How far the other two Patient Zeroes had run was still anyone's guess. And now there was Aaron to deal with, not to mention the half-dozen places where this woman had dribbled little aliquots of Seppuku in her wake...

He could afford to wait, he told himself. The way things were going, he'd have all the excuse he needed before long. Not that he needed excuses any more, of course. Ken Lubin had been a free agent for years.

Play nice, he told himself. Play by the rules.

He did. He called the ambulance before he called the flamethrowers, stood guard until it floated in from the west, sprayed himself down and climbed back into the sky. He banked southeast, backtracking the vector's route. A lifter appeared in the middle distance and paced him for a while, cruising like a great dark cloud towards the target areas he'd pinpointed. Pilot lights sparked faintly at the tips of the long, incendiary muzzles hanging from its underbelly. Puffy pink and green clouds erupted intermittently in the airspace beneath it, cotton-candy litmus tests sniffing out infection.

He edged up the throttle. By now, Aaron's partner would be bagged and on her way. Taka Ouellette would be running tests on her by nightfall.

If Ouellette was running tests on anything, of course. Lubin had his doubts.

He remembered the first time he had met Achilles Desjardins. He had broken into the 'lawbreaker's home and caught him in flagrante delecto with a VR sensorium that served up wraparound scenarios of sexual torture. Desjardins would have never inflicted those impulses on the real world back then, of course, but a lot of things had changed in the meantime. Rules had changed. Leashes had been slipped. Official hierarchies had crumbled, leaving those who wielded power miraculously free of oversight.

Lubin had eavesdropped briefly on Desjardins's fantasy life before getting down to business. He'd gained some idea of that man's taste in women, as well as what he liked to do to them. And so five years later, when Taka Ouellette had climbed into the belly of a CSIRA helicopter, Lubin had watched with a dispassionate sense of finality.

Desjardins had promised her a role in the fight against Seppuku. He had evoked visions of bright gleaming laboratories normally reserved for bona-fide Meatzarts. The prospect had lit her up like a halogen floodlamp. One look and Lubin had known her secret desire, the desperate, unimagined hope of redemption for some past sin.

By now, it was easy enough to recognize.

He had been interested in whether the aircraft would head southwest, towards Boston. That was where the nearest research facilities would be. But instead it had disappeared to the north, and Lubin had not heard from Ouellette in the days since.

Not that he could have expected to, of course. Even if Desjardins had been telling the truth. And Lubin had to admit, with the logical clarity of an amoral mind, that it didn't make much difference either way. Taka Ouellette was not the caliber of scientist who'd last in the ring against any kind of heavyweight opponent. If she had been, they wouldn't have found her relegated to wildland patrol, handing out crumbs to the ferals. Her loss would matter not at all in the fight against Seppuku.

Achilles Desjardins, on the other hand, was vital. Whether he was also a sexual predator was irrelevant; he might well be instrumental in the saving of billions. Lubin couldn't think of many depravities that could not be overlooked in the pursuit of that higher goal. It was what the Greater Good was all about.

He almost felt envious.

Remedial Ed

Taka Ouellette was, in fact, within a research facility of some sort. She was not, however, playing the role of experimenter. Perhaps the man at her side had arrogated that role unto himself.

His appearance was unremarkable. Brown hair, uncombed, cut with a haphazard asymmetry as consistent with some faux-feral style as with outright incompetence. Thin squarish face. Not enough lines on the forehead, too many around the eyes. Large eyes, brown and wet, almost childlike. Nose slightly off-kilter. Baggy green sweatshirt, a TwenCen throwback with no animations.

She couldn't see below his waist. She was strapped to a medical gurney, flat on her back. If this disheveled r-selector was playing the researcher, it seemed that he'd reserved for her the role of experimental subject.

"Achilles Desjardins," he said. "Pleased to meet you, Alice."

The helicopter had dropped onto a rooftop pad somewhere north of the Great Lakes, well after midnight. She'd debarked and stepped unsuspectingly into a neuroinduction field that dropped her faster than a cervical dislocate. Faceless men in body condoms had brought her, conscious but paralyzed, into this quarantine cell. They had stripped her naked, catheterized her, and departed without speaking. Perhaps they'd been told she was some kind of fugitive or health risk. Perhaps they'd been in on the joke. She'd had no way of knowing, and no way to ask.

That had been a day ago, at least. Probably more. She had spent the time since isolated and immobilized, growing parched and ravenous by infinitesimal degrees.

The field was off now, though. Her motor nerves were back online. The only things holding her down were the nylon straps cinched painfully around wrists and ankles, waist and throat.

"There's been a mistake," she said quickly. "I'm not Alice, I'm Taka. Lenie and Ken's friend."

She wriggled against the restraints. Achilles smiled faintly.

"You're really not a very good biologist, Alice," he remarked, not unkindly. "I'm sorry, but it's true. You've had all kinds of clues, but you never quite put them together the right way." He sat on some unseen chair or stool next to the gurney. "If I hadn't stepped in you'd still be spreading Seppuku far and wide, killing your patients even faster than usual. No real scientist would make such basic mistakes."

"But I'm not—"

He put a finger to his lips, shushing her. He propped his elbows against the hard neoprene surface of the stretcher next to her head, rested chin in hands and looked down at her.

"Of course," he continued softly, "no real scientist would kill her own family, either."

So it wasn't a mistake. He knew exactly who she was.

She knew him, too. At least, she knew his type. He was soft. He was pathetic. Every day she faced down people who'd break his neck without breaking stride. On his own, without the props, he was nothing.

Except right.

She closed her eyes. Keep control. He's trying to scare you. Don't let him. Deny him the satisfaction.

It's a power game like all the others. If you aren't intimidated, you take some back.

She opened her eyes and looked calmly into his. "So what's the plan?"

"The plan." Achilles pursed his lips. "The plan is rehabilitation. I'm going to give you another chance. Think of it as a kind of remedial education." He stood. Something in his hand reflected the overhead lights, something small and shiny like a nail clipper. "We're talking a kind of carrot and stick scenario. I have this hobby that a lot of people would describe as, well, unpleasant. You'll find out how unpleasant, depending on how quick a study you turn out to be."

Taka swallowed. She didn't speak until she thought she could keep her voice level: "What's the carrot, then?"

Not quite.

"That was the carrot. My carrot, anyway. Your carrot is, you pass your orals and I let you go. Alive and everything." Achilles frowned, as if lost in thought. "Here's an easy one to start with. How does Seppuku reproduce? Sexually or asexually?"

Taka stared at him. "You're kidding."

He watched her a moment. Then, almost sadly, he shook his head.

"You went to the seminars, I see. They told you all our secrets. We prey on fear. Once we see you're not afraid, we'll pick on someone else. Maybe even let you go."

"You said—" she stopped, tried to control the tremor in her voice. "You said you'd let me go..."

He hadn't laid a hand on her and already she was begging.

"If you do well," Achilles reminded her gently. "But yes. I'll let you go. In fact, as a gesture of good faith, I'll let part of you go right now."

He reached out. The shiny thing in his hand pressed against her breast like a tiny icicle. Something snicked.

Pain bloomed across her chest, razor-sharp, like the cracks in glass before it shatters. Taka screamed, writhing in useless millimeter increments against the straps.

The bloody gobbet of a nipple dropped against her cheek.

Darkness swirled around the edges of vision. At some impossible distant remove, way south of the pain at the center of the universe, a monster fingered its way between her labia.

"Two more where that came from," he remarked.

Decirculate