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"Ken." Machine voice, vocoder voice. It had been a while.

"Yes."

"What are we breathing?"

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"Flamethrower fuel."

"What!"

"It's perfectly safe. You'd be dead otherwise."

"But—"

"It doesn't have to be water. Hydroxyl groups contain oxygen."

"Yeah, but they built us for water. I can't believe napalm—"

"It's not napalm."

"Whatever it is, it's got to gum up our implants somewhere down the road."

"Down the road isn't an—isn't an issue. We'll be fine if they last for a few more hours."

"Will they?"

"Yes."

At least her diveskin had stopped moving.

A sudden tug of inertia. "What's that?" she buzzed, alarmed.

"Fuel feed. They're firing."

"At what? There wasn't any hot zone."

"Maybe they're just being cautious."

"Or maybe Seppuku was really there all along and we didn't know it."

He didn't answer.

"Ken?"

"It's possible."

The surge had pushed her against something soft, and slippery, and vaguely flexible. It seemed to extend in all directions; it was too smooth to get any kind of a grip.

They weren't in a tank, she realized. They were in a bladder. It didn't just empty, it deflated. It collapsed.

"Ken, when this thing fires...I mean, could we get sucked out into—"

"No. There's a—grille."

Vocoders stripped most of the feeling out of a voice at the best of times, and this syrupy stuff didn't improve performance any. Still, she got the sense that Lubin didn't want to talk.

As if Ken's ever been King of the Extroverts.

But no, there was something else. She couldn't quite put her finger on it.

So she floated there in amniotic darkness, breathing something that wasn't napalm, and remembered that electrolysis involved tiny electrical sparks. She waited and wondered if one of them would ignite the liquid passing through her and around her, wondered if her implants were about to turn this whole lifter into an airborne fireball. Another victim of the Lenies, she mused, and smiled to herself.

But then she remembered that Lubin still hadn't told her why she was here.

And then she remembered the blood on his face.

In Kind

By the time they reached their destination, Lubin was blind.

The frayed cable on the crane hadn't just gashed his face; it had torn his hood. The lifter's incendiary saliva had seeped through that tear before the diveskin could heal. It had diffused across his face. A thin layer had pooled beneath his eyecaps, corroding his corneas down to pitted jelly. A calm, mechanical voice in the darkness had told Clarke what he expected: the ability to tell light from dark, at least. Perhaps some vestigial perception of fuzzy blobs and shadows. The resolution of actual images was very unlikely. He would need her to be his eyes.

"Jesus Christ, Ken, why did you do it?"

"I gambled."

"You what?"

"We could hardly have stayed on top of the lifter. There are sterilization measures even if the wind didn't blow us off, and I wasn't certain how corrosive this—"

"Why didn't we just walk away? Regroup? Do it again later?"

"Later we could well be incapacitated, assuming your friend is still contagious. Not to mention the fact that I filed a false report and haven't called in since. Desjardins knows something's wrong. The more we delay the more time he has to prepare."

"I think that's gullshit. I think you've just got such a hard-on for getting back at him that you're making stupid decisions."

"You're entitled to your opinion. If I had to assess my own performance lately, I'd say a worse decision was not leaving you back on the Ridge."

"Right, Ken. Achilles had me on a leash for the past two weeks. I was the one who read Seppuku ass-backwards. Jesus, man, you've been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for five years just like the rest of us. You're not exactly at the top of your game."

Silence.

"Ken, what are we going to do? You're blind!"

"There are ways around that."

Eventually, he said they'd docked. She didn't know how he could tell—the sloshing of liquid that contained them, perhaps, some subtle inertia below Clarke's own perceptual threshold. Certainly no sound had tipped him off. Buried deep in the lifter's vacuum, the bladder was as quiet as outer space.

They crept out onto the back of the beast. It had come to rest in an enormous hanger with a clamshell roof whose halves were sliding shut above them. It was deep dusk, judging from the opacity of the sky beyond. The lifter sloped away in all directions, a tiny faceted planet birthing them from its north pole. Light and machine sounds came from below—and an occasional human voice—but these upper reaches were all grayscale.

"What do you see?" Lubin said in a low voice.

She turned and caught her breath. He'd peeled back his hood and removed his eyecaps; the gray of his skin was far too dark, and pebbled with blisters. His exposed eyes were clusters of insectile compound bumps. Iris and pupil were barely visible behind, as if seen through chipped, milky glass.

"Well?"

"We—we're indoors," she told him. "Nobody in sight, and it's probably too dark for drybacks to see us up here anyway. I can't see the factory floor, but it sounds like there are people down there. Are you—fuck, Ken, did it—"

"Just the face. The 'skin sealed off everything else."

"Does it—I mean, how do you—"

"There's a gantry on an overhead rail to the left. See it?"

She forced herself to look away. "Yeah." And then, surprised: "Can you?"

"The guts show up on my inlays. This whole hangar is a wireframe schematic." He looked around as if sighted. "That assembly's on autopilot. I think it handles refueling."

The clamshell doors met overhead with a dull, echoing boom. In the next instant the gantry jerked to life and began sliding towards them along its rail. A pair of waldos unfolded like the forelimbs of a mantis. They ended in clawed nozzles.

"I think you're right." Clarke said. "It's—"

"I see it."

"How do we get out of here?"

He turned his blind, pitted eyes on her. He pointed at the approaching arthropod.

"Climb," he said.

He guided her through rafters and crawlways as though born to them. He quizzed her on the color-coding of overhead pipes, or which side of a given service tunnel was more streaked with the stains of old condensation. They found their way into an uninhabited locker room, traversed a gauntlet of lockers and toilet stalls to an open shower.

They washed down. No longer flammable, they turned their attention to blending in. Lubin had brought dryback clothing wadded up in his backpack. Clarke had to make do with a pair of gray coveralls lifted from a row of a half-dozen hanging along one wall. A bank of lockers lined the wall opposite, locked with snapshots and thumb pads; Lubin made a mockery of their security while Clarke dressed. The weave tightened around her into a reasonable approximation of a good fit.

"What are you looking for?" she asked.

"Sunglasses. Visor, maybe."

Four jimmied lockers later, Lubin gave up. They returned to the echoing arena of the main hanger. They walked brazenly across open space in plain view of eight service techs. They passed beneath the swollen bellies of four lifters, and gaping bays that would have held another three. They wound along rows of clicking, articulated machinery, waving casually across the floor at people in blue coveralls, and—at Lubin's insistence—keeping a discrete distance from others wearing gray.

They found an exit.

Outside, the buildings were packed so closely that their upper floors seemed to lean together. Arches and skywalks spanned the narrow airspace above the street, connecting opposing facades like stretched arteries. In other places the buildings themselves had melded at the fifth floor or the fortieth, overhanging boles of plastic and biosteel fusing one structure to another. The sky was visible only in dark fragments, intermittently sparking with static electricity. The street was a spaghetti of rapitrans rails and narrow sidewalks doubling as loading platforms. Neither rails nor walkways carried much traffic. Colors were a muted wash to Clarke's eyes; drybacks would see intermittent pools of dim copper light, and many deep shadows between. Even in these relict nodes of civilization, energy seemed in short supply.

Ken Lubin would be seeing none of the surfaces. Perhaps he saw the wiring underneath.

She found them a market in the shadow of a third-story overhang. Half the machines were offline, but the menu on the Levi's dispenser twinkled invitingly. Lubin suggested that she trade up from the coveralls; he offered his wristwatch to enable the transaction but the machine sensed the long-forgotten currency chip embedded in Clarke's thigh, still packed with unspent pay from her gig at the Grid Authority. It lasered her for fit while Lubin got a pair of nightshades and a tube of skin cream from a Johnson & Johnson a few stalls down.

She pulled on her new clothing while Lubin whispered into his wristwatch; Clarke couldn't tell whether he was talking to software or flesh-and-blood. She gathered from his end of the conversation that that they were in the northern core of Toromilton.

Afterwards they had places to go. They climbed from the floor of the city into a mountainous range of skyscrapers: office buildings mostly, long-since converted to dormitories for those who'd been able to buy their way out of the 'burbs when the field generators went up. There weren't many people abroad up there, either. Perhaps the citizenry didn't come out at night.

She was a seeing-eye dog, helping her master hunt for Easter eggs. He directed her; she led him. Lubin muttered incessantly into his watch as they moved. His incantations catalyzed the appearance of strange objects in unlikely places: a seamless box barely bigger than a handpad, nestled in the plumbing of a public toilet; a brand-new wristwatch, still in the original packaging, on the floor of an elevator that rose past the mezzanine with no one on board. Lubin left his old watch in its place, along with a tiny ziplock of derms and plug-ins from his own inventory.

At a vending wall on the same level he ordered a roll of semipermeable adhesive tape and a cloned ham-and-cheese. The tape was served up without incident, but no sandwich appeared on its heels; instead a pair of hand-sized containers slid down the chute, flattened opalescent cylinders with rounded edges. He popped one of them open to reveal pince-nez with opaque jade lenses. He set them on his nose. His jaw twitched slightly as he reset some dental switch. A tiny green star winked on at the edge of the left lens.

"Better." He looked around. "Depth perception's not all it could be."

"Nice trick," Clarke said. "It talks to your inlays?"

"More or less. The image is a bit grainy."

Now Lubin took the lead.

"There's no easier way to do this?" she asked him, following. "You couldn't just call up the GA head office?"

"I doubt I'm still on their payroll." He turned left at a t-junction.

"Yeah, but don't you have—"

"They stopped replenishing the field caches some time ago," Lubin said. "I'm told any leftovers have long since been acquired by unilaterals. Everything has to be negotiated through contacts."

"You're buying them off?"

"It's not a question of money."

"What, then?"

"Barter," he said. "An old debt or two. In-kind services."

At 2200 they met a man who pulled a gossamer-fine thread of fiberop from his pocket and plugged it into Lubin's new wristwatch. Lubin stood there for over half an hour, motionless except for the occasional twitching of fingers: a statue leaning slightly into some virtual wind, as if poised to pounce on empty air. Afterwards the stranger reached up and touched the blisters on Lubin's face. Lubin laid one brief hand on the other man's shoulder. The interaction was subtly disquieting, for reasons Clarke couldn't quite put her finger on. She tried to remember the last time she'd seen Ken Lubin touch another person short of violence or duty, and failed.

"Who was that?" she asked afterwards.

"No one." And contradicting himself in the next second: "Someone to spread the word. Although there's no guarantee even he can raise the alarm in time."

At 2307 Lubin knocked at a door in a residential retrofit in the middle reaches of what had once been the Toronto Dominion Center. A brown-skinned, grim-faced ectomorph of a woman answered. Her eyes blazed a startling, almost luminous golden-orange—some kind of cultured xanthophyll in the irises—and she loomed over Lubin by a head or more. She spoke quietly in a strange language full of consonants, every syllable thick with anger. Lubin answered in the same tongue and held out a sealed ziplock. The woman snatched it, reached behind the half-open door, threw a bag at his feet —it landed with the muffled clank of gloved metal—and closed the door in his face.

He stowed the bag in his backpack. "What did she give you?" Clarke asked.

"Ordnance." He started back down the hall.

"What did you give her?"

He shrugged. "An antidote."

Just before midnight they entered a great vaulted space that might once have been the centerpiece of a mall. Now its distant ceiling was eclipsed by a warren on stilts, a great mass of prefab squats and storage cubes held together by a maze of improvised scaffolding. It was a more efficient use of space than the extravagant emptiness of the old days, if a whole lot uglier. The bottom of the retrofit stood maybe four meters off the original marbled floor; occasional ladders reached down through its underside to ground level. Dark seams cracked the structure here and there, narrow gaps in a patchwork quilt of plastic and fiber paneling: a bounty of peepholes for hidden eyes. Clarke thought she heard the rustling of large animals in hiding, the occasional quiet murmur of muffled voices, but she and Lubin seemed to be the only ones here on the floor beneath.

Sudden motion to the left. A great fountain had once decorated the center of this place; these days its broad soapstone basin, spread out in the perpetual shadow of the squat, seemed to serve primarily as a community dumpster. Pieces of a woman were detaching themselves from that backdrop. The illusion was far from perfect, now that Clarke focused on it. The chromatophores on the woman's unitard mimicked her background in broad strokes at best, producing more of a blurry translucence than outright invisibility. Not that this particular K seemed to care about camouflage; the ambulatory hair wasn't exactly designed to blend with the background.

She approached them like a fuzzy cloud with body parts attached. "You must be Kenny," she said to Lubin. "I'm Laurel. Yuri said you had skin problems." She gave Clarke an appraising glance, blinking over pupils slit subtly vertical. "I like the eyes. Takes balls to go for rifter chic in these parts."

Clarke looked back expressionlessly. After a moment, Laurel turned back to Lubin. "Yuri's wait—"

Lubin snapped her neck Laurel sagged bonelessly into his arms, her head lolling.

"Fuck, Ken!" Clarke staggered back as if she'd been kicked in the stomach. "What are you..."

From the rustling cliff dwellings above them, sudden silence.

Lubin had Laurel laid out on her back, his pack at her side. Her cat eyes stared up at the belly of the squat, wide and astonished.

"Ken!"

"I told you in-kind services might be necessary." He fished a handgrip of some kind from his pack, pressed a stud on its hilt. A thin blade snicked into view. It hummed. One stroke and Laurel's unitard was split from crotch to throat. The elastic fabric pulled apart like slashed mesentery.

Chat. Snap. Sag. Just like that. It was impossible to banish the image.

Deep abdominal cut, right side. No blood. A wisp of blue smoke curled up from the incision. It carried the scent of cauterizing flesh.

Clarke looked around frantically. There was still no one else in sight, but it felt as though a thousand eyes were on them. It felt as though the whole teetering structure over their heads was holding its breath, as though it might collapse on them at any second.

Lubin plunged his hand into Laurel's side. There was no hesitation, no exploratory poke-and-prod. He knew exactly where he was going. Whatever he was after must be showing up on his inlays.

Laurel's eyes turned in her head. They stared at Lenie Clarke.

"Oh God, she's alive..."

"She can't feel it," Lubin said.

How could he do this? Clarke wondered, and an instant later: After all these years, how could I still be surprised?

Lubin's blood-soaked hand came back into sight. Something pea-sized glistened like a pearl in the clotting gore between thumb and forefinger. A child began crying somewhere in the warren overhead. Lubin lifted his face to the sound.

"Witnesses, Ken..."

He stood. Laurel lay bleeding out at his feet, her eyes still fixed on Lenie Clarke.

"They're used to it." He started walking. "Come on."

She backed away a few steps. Laurel stared steadily at the place where Lenie Clarke had been.

"No time," Lubin called over his shoulder.

Clarke turned and fled after him.

Island Airport pushed up against the southern reaches of the static dome. There was no island that Clarke could see, only a low broad building with helicopters and ultralights scattered across its roof. Either there was no security or Lubin's negotiations had seduced it; they walked unaccosted to a four-seater Sikorsky-Bell outfitted with passive cloaking. The pearl shucked from Laurel's guts proved to be the keys to its heart.

Toromilton dimmed in the distance behind them. They flew north beneath the sight of some hypothetical radar, threading between silver-gray treetops. Darkness and photocollagen hid a multitude of sins; for all Clarke knew every plant, every rock, every square meter of the landscape below was coated in ßehemoth. You couldn't tell through the photoamps, though. The terrain scrolling past was frosted and beautiful. Occasional lakes slid beneath them like great puddles of mercury, dimly radiant.

She didn't mention the view to Lubin. She didn't know if his prosthetic eyes came equipped with night vision, but he'd switched them off anyway—at least, the little green LED was dark. Nav must be talking directly to his inlays.

"She didn't know she was carrying it," Clarke said. They were the first words she'd spoken since Laurel's eyes had fixed and dilated.

"No. Yuri made her a home-cooked meal."

"He wanted her dead."

"Evidently."

Clarke shook her head. Laurel's eyes wouldn't leave her alone. "But why that way? Why put it inside her?"

"I suspect he didn't trust me to keep up my end of the deal." The corner of Lubin's mouth twitched slightly. "Rather elegant solution, actually."

So someone thought that Ken Lubin might be reluctant to commit murder. It should have been cause for hope.

"For the keys to a helicopter," Clarke said. "I mean, couldn't we just—"

"Just what, Lenie?" he snapped. "Fall back on all those high-level contacts that I used to have? Call the rental agency? Has it still not dawned on you that a continental hot zone and five years of martial law might have had some impact on intercity travel?" Lubin shook his head "Or perhaps you don't think we're giving Desjardins enough time to set up his defenses. Perhaps we should just walk the distance to give him a sporting chance."

She'd never heard him talk like this before. It was as if some chess grand-master, renowned for icy calm, had suddenly cursed and kicked over the board in the middle of a game.

They flew in silence for a while.

"I can't believe it's really him," she said at last.

"I don't see why not." Lubin was back in battle-computer mode. "We know he lied about Seppuku."

"Maybe he made an honest mistake. Taka's an actual MD and she even—"

"It's him," Lubin said.

She didn't push it.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Sudbury. Evidently he didn't want to give up home-field advantage."

"It wasn't destroyed during Rio?"

"Desjardins caused Rio."

"What? Who told you that?"

"I know the man. It makes sense."

"Not to me."

"Desjardins was the first to slip the leash. He had a brief window in which he was the only man on the planet with all the power of a 'lawbreaker and none of the constraints. He used it to eliminate the competition before Spartacus freed them."

"But it wasn't just Sudbury. Rio took out cities all over." She remembered words and images streaming across the Atlantic. An industrial lifter inexplicably crashing into the CSIRA tower in Salt Lake. A fast-neutron bomb in the unlikely hands of the Daughters of Lenie. Quantum shriekers falling from orbit onto Sacramento and Boise.

"Sudbury wouldn't have been the only franchise seeded," Lubin pointed out. "Desjardins must have obtained the list and gone to town."

"And blamed it on Rio," Clarke murmured.

"All the post-hoc evidence pointed there. Of course, the city was vaporized before anyone had a chance to ask questions. Very little forensic evidence survives ground zero." Lubin tapped a control icon. "As far as anyone knew at the time, Desjardins saved the day. He was the toast of the town. At least he was the toast of anyone with enough clearance to know who he was."

There was a subtext to the aridity in Lubin's voice. His clearance had been revoked by then.

"But he couldn't have got everyone," Clarke said.

"He didn't have to. Only those infected with Spartacus. That would have been a minority even in seeded franchises, assuming he hit them early enough."

"There'd still be people off shift, people off sick—"

"Wipe out half a city, you get them too."

"Still—"

"You're right, to a point," Lubin allowed. "It's likely some escaped. But even that worked in Desjardins's favor. He can't very well blame Rio for his actions now. He can't blame everything on Madonnas, but as long as convenient scapegoats from Rio or Topeka are at large, nobody's likely to suspect him when some piece of high-level sabotage comes to light. He saved the world, after all."

She sighed. "So what now?"

"We go get him."

"Just like that, huh? Blind spy and his rookie sidekick are going to battle their way through sixty-five floors of CSIRA security?"

"Assuming we can get there. He's likely to have all approaches under continuous satellite surveillance. He must have planned for the word getting out eventually, which means he'll be equipped to handle large-scale retaliation up to and including missile attacks from overseas. Far more than we can muster."

"He thinks he can take on the rest of the world?"

"More likely he only expects to see the rest of the world coming in time to get away."

"So is that your plan? He's expecting an all-out assault so he won't notice one measly helicopter?"

"That would be nice," Lubin admitted with a grim smile. "I'm not counting on it. And even if he doesn't notice us on approach, he's had nearly four years to fill the building itself up with countermeasures. It would probably be impossible for us to guard against them all even if I knew what they were."

"So what do we do?"

"I'm still working on the details. I expect we'll end up walking through the front door."

Clarke looked at his fingernails. The dried blood beneath turned their edges brown.

"You've put all these pieces together," she said. "They make him a monster."

"Aren't we all."

"He wasn't. Do you even remember?"

Lubin didn't answer.

"You were going to kill me, remember? And I'd just killed everyone else. We were the monsters, Ken, and you remember what he did?"

"Yes."

"He tried to save me. From you. He'd never even met me face to face, and he knew exactly who I was and what I'd done, and he knew first-hand what you were capable of. And it didn't matter. He risked his life to save mine."

"I remember." Lubin tweaked controls. "You broke his nose."

"That's not the point."

"That person doesn't exist any more," he said. "Spartacus turned him into something else."

"Yeah? And what did it do to you, Ken?"

His blind, pitted face turned.

"I know one thing it didn't do," she went on. "It didn't give you your murder habit. You had that all along, didn't you?"

The pince-nez stared back at her like mantis eyes. A green LED ignited on its left lens.

"What's it like, Ken? Is it cathartic? Is it sexual? Does it get you off?" A part of her looked on, alarmed. The rest couldn't stop goading him. "Do you have to be right there, watching us die, or is it enough to just plant the bomb and know we'll be dropping like flies offstage?"

"Lenie." His voice was very calm. "What exactly are you trying to accomplish?"

"I just want to know what you're after, that's all. I don't see anyone waving pitchforks and torches at you just because Spartacus rewired your brain. If you're sure about this, if he really did all these things and he's really some kind of monster, then fine. But if this is just some fucked-up excuse for you to indulge your perverse little fetish, then..."

She shook her head in disgust and glared into the darkness.

"You'd like his perversions somewhat less than mine," Lubin said quietly.

"Right," she snorted. "Thanks for the input."

"Lenie..."

"What?"

"I'm never gratuitous," he told her.

"Really?" She looked a challenge at him. "Never?"

He looked back. "Well. Hardly ever."

Expiration Date

Equal parts dead and alive— and hardly caring which way the balance went—Taka Ouellette had figured it out.

She'd never done well under pressure. That had always been her problem. And Achilles the monster hadn't understood that. Or maybe he'd understood it too well. Whatever. He had put her under the mother of all high-pressure scenarios, and of course she'd fallen apart. She'd proven once again to be the eternal fuck-up. And it was so unfair, because she knew she had a good head on her shoulders, she knew she could figure things out if only people would stop leaning on her. If only Ken hadn't been there with his biowar canister, expecting answers right now. If only Achilles hadn't come within a hair of incinerating her alive, and then rushing her through Seppuku's gene sequence without so much as letting her catch her breath.

If only Dave hadn't been so impatient. If only she hadn't hurried on that last crucial diagnostic...

She was a smart lady. She knew it. But she was terrible under pressure. Bad, bad Alice, she chided herself.

But now that the pressure was off, see how well she put everything together?

It had only taken two things to get her over the hump. Achilles had to leave her alone for a bit, give her a chance to think. And she had to die. Well, start dying anyway. Once she knew she was dead, once she felt it in her bones, no reprieves, no last-minute rescue—all the pressure disappeared. For the first time in her life, it seemed, she could think clearly.

She didn't know how long it had been since Achilles had been by to torture her. She figured at least a day or two. Maybe a week—but no, surely she'd be dead already if he'd left her here for a whole week? Her joints had frozen up in the meantime. Even if she were to be released from the exoskeleton, her body was as rigid as rigor...

Maybe it was rigor. Maybe she'd already finished dying and hadn't noticed. Certainly things didn't seem to hurt as much as they had—although maybe she just didn't notice the pain so much now, on account of the raging thirst. One thing you could say about Achilles, he'd always kept her fed and watered. Didn't want her too weak to perform, he'd said.

But it had been so very long since he'd come by. Taka would have killed for a glass of water, if she hadn't already died for want of one.

But wasn't it nice that nothing mattered any more? And wasn't it nice that she'd actually figured it out?

She wished that Achilles would come back. Not just for the water, although that would be nice. She wanted to show him. She wanted to prove he was wrong. She wanted him to be proud of her.

It all had to do with that silly little song about the fleas. He must have known that, that's why he'd serenaded her in the first place. Has smaller fleas that on him prey, and these have smaller still to bite 'em...

Life within life. She could see it now. She was amazed that she'd never seen it before. It wasn't even a new concept. It was downright old. Mitochondria were littler fleas that lived in every eukaryotic cell. Today they were vital organelles, the biochemical batteries of life itself—but a billion years ago they'd been independent organisms in their own right, little free-living bacteria. A larger cell had engulfed them, had forgotten to chew before it swallowed—and so they'd struck up a deal, the big cell and the little one. The big cell would provide a safe, stable environment; the little one, in turn, would pump out energy for its host. That ancient act of failed predation had turned into the primordial symbiosis...and even today, mitochondria kept their own genes, reproduced on their own schedule, within the flesh of the host.

It was still going on. ßehemoth itself had stuck up a similar relationship within the cells of some of the creatures that shared its deep-sea environment, providing an energy surplus which the host fish used to grow faster. It grew within the cells of things here on land, too—with somewhat less beneficial consequences, true, but then virulence is always high when two radically disparate organisms encounter each other for the first time...

Achilles hadn't been singing about fleas at all. He'd been singing about endosymbiosis.

Seppuku must carry its own little fleas. There was more than enough room—all those redundant genes could code for any number of viral organisms, as well as merely masking the suicidal recessives. Seppuku not only killed itself off when its job was done—it gave birth to a new symbiont, a viral one probably, that would take up residence inside the host cell. It would fill the niche so effectively that ßehemoth would find nothing but no-vacancy signs if it came sniffing around afterwards, looking to move back in.

There were even precedents, of a sort. Taka remembered some of them from med school. Malaria had been beaten when baseline mosquitoes lost out to a faster-breeding variant that didn't transmit Plasmodium. AIDS stopped being a threat when benign strains outnumbered lethal ones. Those were nothing, though, diseases that attacked a handful of species at most. ßehemoth threatened everything with a nucleus; you'd never beat the witch by infecting the Human race, or replacing one species of insect with another. The only way to win against ßehemoth would be to counterinfect everything.

Seppuku would have to redesign life itself, from the inside out. And it could do it, too: it had an edge that poor old ßehemoth had never even dreamed of. Achilles had forced her to remember that too, half an eternity ago: TNA could duplex with modern nucleic acids. It could talk to the genes of its host cell, it could join the genes of its host cell. It could change anything and everything.

If she was right—and hovering at the edge of her life, she'd never been more certain of anything—Seppuku was more than a cure for ßehemoth. It was the most profound evolutionary leap since the rise of the eukaryotic cell. It was a solution far too radical for the fiddlers and tweakers who hadn't been able to see beyond the old paradigm of Life As We Know It. The deep-sea enzymes, the arduous painstaking retrofits that had allowed Taka and others like her to claim immunity—improvised scaffolding, no more. Struts and crutches to keep some teetering body plan alive long after its expiration date. People had grown too attached to the chemical tinkertoys that had defined them for three billion years. The most nostalgia could ever do was postpone the inevitable.

Seppuku's architects were more radical. They'd thrown away the old cellular specs entirely and started from scratch, they were rewriting the very chemistry of life. Every eukaryotic species would be changed at the molecular scale. No wonder Seppuku's creators had kept it under wraps; you didn't have to be an M&M to be terrified by such an extreme solution. People always chose the devils they knew, even if that devil was ßehemoth. People just wouldn't accept that success couldn't be achieved through just a little more tinkering...

Taka could barely imagine the shape of the success that was unfolding now. Perhaps the strange new insects she'd been seeing were the start of it, fast short lives that evolved through dozens of generations in a season. Achilles hadn't been able to keep it out after all: those joyful, monstrous bugs proved it. He had only been able to keep it from infecting Humanity.

And even there, he was doomed to fail. Salvation would take root in everything eventually, as it had taken root in the arthropods. It would just take more time for creatures who lived at a slower pace. Our turn will come, Taka thought.

How would it work? she wondered. How to outcompete the hypercompetitor? Brute force, perhaps? Sheer cellular voracity, the same scramble-competition strategy that ßehemoth had used to beat Life 1.0, turned back upon itself? Would life burn twice as bright and half as long, would the whole biosphere move faster, think faster, live furiously and briefly as mayflies?

But that was the old paradigm, to transform yourself into your enemy and then claim victory. There were other options, once you gave up on reinforcing and turned to redesign instead. Taka Ouellette, mediocre progeny of the Old Guard, couldn't begin to guess at what they were. She doubted anyone could. What simulation could predict the behavior of a multimillion-species system when every living variable was perturbed at once? How many carefully-selected experimental treatments would it take to model a billion simultaneous mutations? Seppuku—whatever Seppuku was poised to become—threw the very concept of a controlled experiment out the window.

North America was the experiment—unannounced, uncontrolled, an inconceivably tangled matrix of multiway ANOVAs and Hyperniche tables. Even if it failed, the world would hardly be worse off. ßehemoth would have suffered a major setback, Seppuku would have fallen on its sword, and whatever came after would at least—unlike ßehemoth— be limited to the inside of a host cell.

And maybe it wouldn't fail. Maybe everything would change for the better. There would be monsters, some hopeful. Mitochondria themselves might finally be driven to extinction, their ancient lease expired at last. Maybe people would change from the inside out, the old breed gone, replaced by something that looked the same but acted better.

Maybe it was about fucking time.

A little man nattered at her from a great distance. He stood in front of her, an irritating homunculus in ultrasharp focus, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He paced back and forth, gesticulating madly. Taka gathered that he was afraid of something, or someone. Yes, that was it: someone was coming for him. He spoke as if his head was full of voices, as if he had lost control of a great many things at once. He threatened her—she thought he was threatening her, although his efforts seemed almost comical. He sounded like a lost little boy trying to act brave while looking for a place to hide.

"I figured it out," Taka told him. Her voice cracked like cheap brittle plastic. She wondered why that was. "It wasn't so hard."

But he was too caught up in his own little world. It didn't matter. He didn't seem like the kind of person who'd really appreciate the dawn of a new age anyway.

So many things were about to happen. The end of Life As We Knew It. The beginning of Life As We Don't. It had already started. Her biggest regret was that she wouldn't be around to see how it all turned out.

Dave, honey, she thought. I did it. I got it right at last.

You'd be proud of me.

Bastille

Sudbury rose in the night like a luminous tumor.

Its core glowed from within, faintly by dryback standards but bright as day to Lenie Clarke: a walled, claustrophobic cluster of refitted skyscrapers in an abandoned wasteland of suburbs and commercial zones. The static field was obvious by inference. The new buildings and the grafted retrofits, the galls of living space wedged into the gaps between buildings—all extended to the inner edge of the field and no further. Like metastasis constrained under glass, Sudbury had grown into a hemisphere.

They cut through from the east. Clarke's diveskin squirmed in the field like a slug in a flame. Charged air transformed the rotors into whirling vortices of brilliant blue sparks. She found the effect oddly nostalgic; it seemed almost bioluminescent, like microbes fluorescing in the heat of a deep-sea vent. For a moment she could pretend that some airborne variant of Saint Elmo's Fire trailed from those spinning blades.

But only for a moment. There was only one microorganism up here worth mentioning, and it was anything but luminous.

Then they were through, sniffing westward through the upper reaches of the Sudbury core. City canyon walls loomed close on either side. Sheet lightning sparked and flickered along the strip of sky overhead. Far below, intermittently eclipsed by new construction, some vestigial rapitrans line ran along the canyon floor like a taut copper thread.

She resumed loading clips from the open backpack at her feet. Lubin had toured her through the procedure somewhere over Georgian Bay. Each clip contained a dozen slug grenades, color-coded by function: flash, gas, shipworm, clusterfuck. They went into the belt-and-holster arrangement draped over her thigh.

Lubin spared a prosthetic glance. "Don't forget to seal that pack when you're done. How's your tape?"

She undid her top and checked the diveskin beneath. A broad X of semipermeable tape blocked off the electrolysis intake. "Still sticking." She zipped the dryback disguise back into place. "Doesn't this low-altitude stuff bother the local authorities?"

"Not those authorities." His tone evoked the image of blind eyes, turning. Evidently derms and antidotes and gutted bodies bought more than mere transportation. Clarke didn't push the issue. She slid one last cartridge home and turned her attention forward.

A couple of blocks ahead, the canyon ended in open space.

"So that's where he is," she murmured. Lubin throttled back so that they were barely drifting forward.

It spread out before their approach like a great dark coliseum, a clear zone carved from the claustrophobic architecture. Lubin brought the Sikorsky-Bell to a dead stop three hundred meters up, just short of that perimeter.

It was a walled moat, two blocks on a side. A lone skyscraper—a fluted, multifaceted tower—rose from its center. A ghostly crown of blue lights glowed dimly from the roof; everything else was dead and dark, sixty-five floors with not so much as a pane alight. Patchwork foundations scarred the empty ground on all sides, the footprints of demolished buildings that had crowded the neighborhood back in happier times.

She wondered what dryback eyes would see, if drybacks ever ventured here after dark. Maybe, when Sudbury's citizens looked to this place, they didn't see the Entropy Patrol at all. Maybe they saw a haunted tower, dark and ominous, full of skeletons and sick crawling things. Buried in the guts of the twenty-first century, besieged by alien microbes and ghosts in the machinery, could people be blamed for rediscovering a belief in evil spirits?

Maybe they're not even wrong, Clarke reflected.

Lubin pointed to the spectral lights on the parapet. A landing pad rose from that nimbus, a dozen smaller structures holding court around it—freight elevators, ventilation shacks, the housings of retracted lifter umbilicals.

Clarke looked back skeptically. "No." Surely they couldn't just land there. Surely there'd be defenses.

Lubin was almost grinning. "Let's find out."

"I'm not sure that's—"

He hit the throttle. They leapt into empty, unprotected space.

Out of the canyon, they banked right. Clarke braced her hands against the dash. Earth and sky rotated around them; suddenly the ground was three hundred meters off her shoulder, an archeological ruin of razed foundations—and two black circles, meters across, staring up at her like the eye sockets of some giant cartoon skull. Not empty, though. Not even flat: they bulged subtly from the ground, like the exposed polar regions of great buried spheres.

"What're those?" she asked.

No answer. Clarke glanced across the cockpit. Lubin was holding his binoculars one-handed between his knees, holding his pince-nez against their eyepieces. The apparatus stared down through the ventral canopy. Clarke shuddered inwardly: how to deal with the sense of one's eyes floating half a meter outside the skull?

"I said—" she began again.

"Superheating artefact. Soil grains explode like popcorn."

"What would do that? Land mine?"

He shook his head absently, his attention caught by something near the base of the building. "Particle beam. Orbital cannon."

Her gut clenched. "If he's got—Ken, what if he sees—"

Something flashed, sodium-bright, through the back of her skull. Clockwork stuttered briefly in her chest. The Sikorsky-Bell's controls hiccoughed once, in impossible unison, and went dark.

"I think he has," Lubin remarked as the engine died.

Wind whistled faintly through the fuselage. The rotor continued to whup-whup-whup overhead, its unpowered blades slapping the air through sheer inertia. There was no other sound but Lubin, cursing under his breath as they hung for an instant between earth and sky.

In the next they were falling.

Clarke's stomach rose into her throat. Lubin's feet slammed pedals. "Tell me when we pass sixty meters."

They arced past dark facades. "Wha—"

"I'm blind." Lubin's teeth were bared in some twisted mix of fear and exultation; his hands gripped the joystick with relentless futility. "Tell me when—the tenth floor! Tell me when we pass the tenth floor!"

Part of her gibbered, senseless and panic-stricken. The rest struggled to obey, tried desperately to count the floors as they streaked past but they were too close, everything was a blur and they were going to crash they were going to crash right into the side of the tower but suddenly it was gone, swept past stage left, its edge passing almost close enough to touch. Now the structure's north face coasted into view, the focus sharper with distance and—

Oh God what is that—

Some unaffordable, awestruck piece of her brain murmered it can't be but it was, black and toothless and wide enough to swallow legions: a gaping mouth in the building's side. She tried to ignore it as they fell past, forced herself to focus on the floors beneath, count from the ground up. They were diving straight past that impossible maw—they were diving into it—

"Le—"

"Now!" she yelled.

For a second that went on forever, Lubin did nothing at all.

The strangest sensations, in that elastic moment. The sound of the rotor, still impossibly awhirl through luck or magic or sheer stubborn denial, its machine-gun rhythm dopplered down like the slow, distant heartbeat of a receding astronaut. The sight of the ground racing up to spike them into oblivion. Sudden calm resignation, a recognition of the inevitable: we're going to die. And a nod, sadly amused, to the irony that the mighty Ken Lubin, who always thought ten steps ahead, could have made such a stupid fucking mistake.

But then he yanked on the stick and the chopper reared back, losing its nerve at the last moment. Suddenly she weighed a hundred tonnes. They faced the sky; the world skidded around them, earth and glass and far-off cloud rolling past the windshield in a blurry jumble. For one astonishing moment they hovered. Then something kicked them hard from behind: from behind, the sound of cracking polymers and tearing metal. They lurched sideways and that magical rotor slashed the earth and stopped dead, defeated at last. Lenie Clarke stared up mad-eyed at a great monolith leaning crazily against the night sky, descending along with the darkness to devour her.

"Lenie."

She opened her eyes. That impossible mouth still yawned overhead. She squeezed her eyes shut, held them closed for a second. Tried again.

Oh.

Not a mouth after all. A great charred hole, partway up the north façade, stretching across ten gutted floors or more.

Rio, she realized. They never repaired the damage.

The roof of the building was clearly visible, straight ahead through the forward windshield. The lights up there had gone out. The whole building seemed to lean to the left; the chopper's nose was twisted up at a thirty-degree angle, like some mechanical mole that had breached from the earth and torqued on its axis.

Their ride was sockeye. The tail boom must have either crumpled at their backs or snapped off entirely.

Pain in her chest and arms. There was something wrong with the sky. It was—that was it, it was dark. They were in a clave, where static-field generators hummed endless electricity into the air. Sudbury's sky should have been flickering. Before they'd fallen, it had been.

"Lenie."

"Was that—was that a pulse?" she wondered.

"Can you move?"

She focused, and located the source of the pain: Lubin's backpack, hard and lumpy, clutched tightly as life itself against her chest. It must have risen from the floor during the dive, she must have grabbed it in midair. She remembered none of it. The slit along its top puckered like a mouth in her embrace, affording glimpses of the stuff inside—an angular jumble of tools and ordnance pressing painfully into her flesh.

She willed her grip to relax. The pain subsided.

"I think I'm okay. Are you—"

He looked blindly back at her through sandblasted eyes.

An image from the fall came to her, unregistered until now: Lubin's pince-nez, sailing gracefully towards the back of the cabin. Clarke unbuckled and twisted to look behind her. Sudden sharp pain splintered down her spine like cracking ice. She cried out.

Lubin's hand was on her shoulder. "What?"

"Wh—whiplash, I think. I've had worse." She settled back in her seat. No point in looking for the pince-nez anyway; the pulse would have fried them as thoroughly as it had the chopper.

"You're blind again," she said softly.

"I packed another pair. The knapsack's shielded."

Its open mouth grinned at her, zipper-toothed. Realization crashed over her in a sickening wave. "Oh, fuck, Ken, I—I forgot to zip it up. I'm—"

He waved away her apology. "You'll be my eyes. Is the cabin breached?"

"What?"

"Any breaks in the fuselage? Anything big enough for you to crawl through, say?"

"Uh—" Clarke turned again, carefully. Pain feinted to the base of her skull, but stopped short of outright attack. "No. The rear bulkhead's crumpled to shit, but..."

"Good. Do you still have the pack?"

She opened her mouth to answer—and remembered two carbonised mounds staring into the sky.

"Focus, Len. Do you—"

"It doesn't matter, Ken."

"It matters a great—"

"We're dead, Ken." She took a deep, despairing breath. "He's got an orbital cannon, remember? Any second now he'll just—and there's not a fucking thing we can—"

"Listen to me." Suddenly, Lubin was close enough to kiss. "If he was trying to kill us we'd be dead already, do you understand? I'd doubt he's even willing to bring his satellites online at this point; he doesn't want to risk losing them to the shredders."

"But he already—the pulse—"

"Didn't come from orbit. He must have packed half the floors in that building with capacitors. He's not trying to kill us. He's only trying to soften us up." He thrust out his hand. "Now where's the pack?"

She handed it over, numbly. Lubin set it on his knee and rummaged inside.

He's not trying to kill us. Lubin had made that claim before, laid it out as part of his working hypothesis en route from Toromilton. Clarke wasn't entirely sure that recent events bore him out, especially since—

A flicker of motion, just to the right. Clarke turned and gasped, the pain of that motion forgotten in an instant. A monstrous face stared back through the bubble of the canopy, centimeters away, a massive black wedge of muscle and bone. Small dark eyes glinted from deep sockets. The apparition grinned, showing sawtooth serrations embedded in jaws like a leghold trap.

In the next moment it had dropped out of sight.

"What?" Lubin's face panned back and forth. "What do you see?"

"I—I think it used to be a dog," Clarke said, her voice quavering.

"I think they all did," Lubin told her.

Tilted at the sky, she hadn't seen them arrive; she had to look down to see forward, and now—through the ventral bubble between her knees, over the edge of the door if she strained from her seat—the darkness seethed on all sides. The apparitions did not bark or growl. They made no sound at all. They didn't waste energy on brute animal rage, didn't throw themselves slavering against the hull to get at the soft meat inside. They circled like silent sharks.

Boosted light stripped nothing from these creatures. They were utterly black.

"How many?" Lubin ran one hand across his grenade pistol; the ammo belt lay across his knees, one end still trailing down into the knapsack between his feet.

"Twenty. Thirty. At least. Oh Jesus, Ken, they're huge, they're twice as big as you are..." Clarke fought rising panic.

Lubin's pistol came with three cartridge slots and a little thumbwheel to choose between them. He felt out flash, shipworm, and clusterfuck from the belt and slotted them in. "Can you see the main entrance?"

"Yes."

"What direction? How far?"

"About eleven o'clock. Maybe—maybe eighty meters." Might as well be eighty lightyears.

"What's between there and here?"

She swallowed. "A pack of rabid monster dogs waiting to kill us."

"Besides that."

"We're—we're on the edge of the main drag. Paved. Old foundations either side, pretty much razed and filled." And then, hoping he wasn't heading where she feared—hoping she could deflect him if he was—she added, "No cover."

"Can you see my binocs?"

She turned carefully, torsion and injury in uneasy balance. "Right behind you. The strap's caught up in the cleat over the door."

He abandoned his weapon long enough to disentangle the binoculars and hand them over. "Describe the entrance."

Range-finding and thermal were dead, of course. Only the raw optics still worked. Clarke tried to ignore the dark shapes in the blurry foreground. "Bank of glass doors, eight of them. They're set into this shallow indentation in the façade, CSIRA logo on top. Ken—"

"What's behind the doors?"

"Uh, a vestibule, a few meters deep. And then—oh, last time there was another set of doors further in, but those're gone now. There's some kind of heavy slab instead, like a big dropgate or something. Looks pretty featureless."

"What about the side walls of the vestibule?"

"Concrete or biolite or something. Just walls. Nothing special. Why?"

He tightened the ammo belt around his waist. "That's where we go in."

She shook her head. "No, Ken. No fucking way."

"Dropgate's the obvious defense. More sensible to go around than hit it head-on."

"We can't go out there. They'll tear us apart."

"I didn't come all this way to let a pack of dogs pin me down eighty meters from the finish line."

"Ken, you're blind!"

"They won't know that." He held up his pistol. "And they'll know what this is. Appearances matter."

She stared at his corroded eyes, the oozing flesh of his face. "How're you going to aim?"

"The same way we landed. You'll give me bearings." Lubin felt around in the pack and pulled out the Heckler & Koch. "Take this."

She did, unbelieving.

"We keep the dogs back long enough to get in through the wall. The rest of the plan doesn't change."

Dry-mouthed, Clarke watched them circling. "What if they're armored? What if they're wired?"

"They'll be pulse-proof. No electronics. The usual tweaks and nothing more." He zipped up the knapsack and slung it across his back, tightening the straps around shoulders and waist.

"Are these guns pulse-proof? Are—" A sudden, disquieting memory rose to the surface of her thoughts: machinery in her chest, hiccoughing. "What about our implants?"

"Myoelectric. EMP doesn't bother them, much. What's the H&K set on?"

She checked. "Conotoxins. Ken, I've never even fired a gun before. My aim—"

"Will be better than mine." Lubin clambered back down into the tilted cabin behind their seats. "You may get off easily. I rather suspect they'll be focusing on me."

"But—"

"Gloves," he said, sealing his to the gauntlets beneath his clothing.

Clarke pulled her gloves over shaking hands. "Ken, we can't just—"

He paused, fixed her with his sightless eyes. "You know, I liked you better when you were suicidal. You weren't nearly so chickenshit."

She blinked. "What?"

"I'm losing patience, Len. Five years of guilt-ridden self-pity should be enough for anyone. Was I wrong about you? Were you just wallowing, all this time? Do you want to save the world or not?"

"I—"

"This is the only way."

Is there anything you wouldn't do, then? For the chance to take it all back? Back then the answer had been obvious. It was obvious now. Freezing, familiar determination reignited inside her. Her face burned.

Lubin nodded, only his eyes blinded. He sat on the floor, braced his back against the bulkhead behind Clarke's seat. "Noseplugs."

They'd improvised them en route, little wads of the same semipermeable tape that blocked her intake. Clarke stuffed one up each nostril.

"I blow a hole in the hull," Lubin said, inserting his own. "That drives the dogs back long enough for us to exit the chopper. Once we're outside, point me at the main entrance. That's twelve o'clock. All target bearings will be relative to that, not to where I happen to be facing at any given time. Do you understand?"

She nodded, forgetting for an instant, then: "Yes."

"They'll charge as soon as we're in the open. Call it. Close your eyes when I give the word. I'll be using the flash grenades; they'll be incapacitated for at least ten seconds. Shoot as many as you can. Keep moving."

"Got it. Anything else?"

"Lose the gloves once we're free of the heat. The sight of a diveskin might start him thinking."

Patient killers paced just past the canopy. They seemed to look her in the eye. They smiled, showing teeth the size of thumbs.

Just the usual tweaks, she thought, giddy and terrified. She braced her back against the canopy, raising her gloved hands to protect her face.

"We can do this," Lubin said softly. "Just remember what I told you."

He's not trying to kill us. She wondered just who that applied to.

"You really think he expects us to survive."

Lubin nodded.

"But does he know you're blind?"

"I doubt it." He pointed his gun across the cabin. The thumbwheel locked onto clusterfuck. "Ready?"

This is it, Lenie girl. Your one shot at redemption.

Don't fuck it up.

"Go," she said, and shut her eyes.

Lubin fired. Clarke's lids glowed sudden, bloody orange.

Her diveskin took most of the heat from the neck down, but in that moment it was as if someone had thrust her head into a kiln. She swore the heat blasted the very skin from her face. She clenched her teeth and held her breath and cursed the chances Lubin wouldn't take: it might tip him off if he sees our hoods.

The air roared and crackled, sizzled with spatterings of liquid metal. She could hear the crack of Lubin's pistol firing again at her side. She realised, distantly amazed, that the pain was gone. Fear and adrenaline had swept it away in an instant.

The world dimmed beyond her eyelids. She opened them. A hole gaped in the side of the chopper. Soft alloy glowed intermittently at its edges; acrylic peeled and blackened. Chunks of shredded canopy guttered on the floor, one scant centimeters from her left foot.

Lubin fired a third time. A spread of incendiary needles shot through the breach and into the darkness beyond, a tiny, devastating meteor shower. Clusterfucks were designed to sow a thousand lethal pinholes across a wide area, but there'd been little chance to disperse across the meager width of the cabin. Almost two meters of solid fuselage had been reduced to silvery chaff and blown outward; a fan of dispersed wreckage steamed and congealed on the ground outside.

"How big is the hole?" Lubin snapped over ambience.

"Meter and a half." She choked and coughed on the stink of scorched plastic. "Lots of little bits past—"

Too late. Lubin, blindly brazen, had already launched himself through the hole. He sailed over the scree nearest the threshold and hit the ground shoulder-first, rolling to his feet in an instant. A lozenge of hot metal smoldered like a branding iron against his left shoulder blade. Lubin writhed, reached around and pushed it loose with the muzzle of his gun. It dropped to the ground, tarry with half-melted copolymer. A ragged hole smoked on Lubin's shirt. The injured diveskin beneath squirmed as if alive.

Clarke gritted her teeth and dove after him.

A bright spark of pain, needle-sharp and needle-fine, ignited briefly on her forearm as she sailed through the breach. In the next instant blesséd cool air washed over her. She landed hard and skidded. Two great carcasses twitched and burned before her, grinning behind charred lips.

She scrambled to her feet, peeling off her gloves. Sure enough, the rest of the pack had retreated for the moment, holding the perimeter at a more discreet distance.

Lubin swept his weapon back and forth, pure threat display. "Lenie!"

"Here! Two down!" She reached his side, pointing her H&K at the circling horde. "The others backed off." She turned him clockwise. "Entrance that way. Twelve o'clock." Remember, she told herself. Bearings from the entrance, bearings from the—

He nodded. "How far are the dogs?" He held his pistol two-handed, arms extended, elbows slightly bent. He looked almost relaxed.

"Uh—twenty-five meters, maybe." Bearings from the entrance...

"Smart. Just past effective range."

Bearings from—"Your range is twenty-five lousy meters?"

"Wide spread." It made sense, of course—a useful cheat for a poor marksman, and blind was as poor as it got. The catch was a needle-cloud so widely dispersed that distant targets passed through it untouched. "Try yours."

Clarke aimed. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. She fired once, twice. The H&K bucked in her grip. Its bark was surprisingly soft.

The enemy stared back, undiminished.

"Missed. Unless they're immune, Ken, you said they were tweaked—"

Sudden motion to the right, a rush along the flank. "Two o'clock," Clarke hissed, firing. Lubin turned and shot a firestorm of needles. "Eight!" He swung and fired again, barely missing Clarke as she ducked beneath his outstretched arms.

Splinters of fire laced the ground to both sides. Three more dogs were down, lacerated by flaming shrapnel. Two more, fitfully ignited, fled back out of range. Still the pack was mute. The perimeter boiled with silent anger.

She kept her own weapon up, for all the good it would do. "Three down, two injured. The rest of them are holding back."

Lubin panned left, right. "This is wrong. They should be charging."

"They don't want to get shot. You said they were smart."

"Attack dogs too smart to attack." Lubin shook his head. "No. This is wrong."

"Maybe they just want to keep us pinned here," Clarke said hopefully. "Maybe—"

Something rang faintly in her skull, not so much heard as felt: an itch, shrill and irritating.

"Ah," Lubin said softly. "That's more like it."

The change was too subtle for sight and too fundamental. No motion sensor, no image-analysis subroutine would have been able to read the signs. But Lenie Clarke knew it instantly, on some primal level that predated Humanity itself. Something in the gut had never forgotten, in all these million years. On all sides, many creatures merged suddenly together into one, into a vast seething entity with myriad bodies and a single merciless focus. Lenie Clarke watched it leap towards her and remembered exactly what she was, what she always had been.

Prey.

"Flash!" Lubin barked. Almost too late, she remembered to shut her eyes. Four pops sounded in rapid succession. A constellation of dim red suns ignited briefly through her eyelids.

"Go!"

She looked. The composite organism had shattered, just like that. Solitary predators wheeled on all sides, blinded and confused. Briefly blind, she remembered. Briefly confused.

She had seconds to act and nothing to lose. She charged.

Three meters from the nearest beast she started shooting. She squeezed off five rounds; two hits in the creature's flank. It snapped and dropped. Two others stumbled into each other, a mere arm's length away: one shot each and she was spinning in search of new targets. Somewhere offside, needlefire slammed obliquely across the ground. She ignored it and kept shooting. Something dark and massive hurtled past, bleeding flame. She nailed it in the flank for good measure and suddenly she was transformed yet again, all that adrenalized midbrain circuitry flipping from flight to fight, whimpering paralysis burned away in a fury of bloodlust and adrenaline. She shot a leg. She shot a great heaving ribcage, black and sleek as a diveskin. She shot a monstrous, silently-snarling face, and realized it had been looking back.

A part of her she hadn't even known was keeping score served up a number: seven. That's the number you can take, before they come for you...

She broke and ran. Lubin was running too, poor blind Lubin, Lubin the human tank. He'd switched back to clusterfuck and cleared a fiery path down twelve o'clock. He charged down the driveway—

—I told him no obstructions oh boy will he be pissed if he trips on a sewer grating—

—like a sighted man. Dogs shook their heads in his wake and wheeled, intent on reacquisition.

They were closing on Clarke, too. Their paws drummed at her heels like heavy rain on a cloth roof.

She was back on the asphalt, a few meters off Lubin's stern. "Seven o'clock!" she cried, diving.

Incandescent sleet streaked centimeters overhead. Gravel and coarse pavement flayed the skin of her palms, bruised her arm and shoulder through nested layers of denim and copolymer. Flesh and fur burst into flame close enough to warm her face.

She twisted onto her back. "Three o'clock! Flash wore off!" Lubin turned and sprayed fire across the bearing. Three other dogs were closing from eleven; still on her back, Clarke held the gun two-handed over her head and took them out with three meters to spare.

"Flash!" Lubin shouted again. Clarke rolled and ducked, closing her eyes. Three more pops, three more orange fleshy sunrises. They backlit the memory of that last sighted instant—the instant when Lubin called out and every dog had flinched and turned their heads away...

Smart, smart doggies, giggled some hysterical little girl in her head. They heard FLASH, and they remembered it from the first time, and they closed their eyes...

She opened hers, terrified of what she was about to see.

The trick hadn't worked twice. Lubin was bringing up his weapon, desperately switching modes as some black slavering nemesis launched itself at his throat. There were no stars in its eyes. Lubin fired, blind and point-blank; blood and bone exploded from the back of the creature's skull but the carcass just kept going, a hundred kilograms of gory unstoppable momentum hitting him full in the chest. Lubin went over like a paper doll, gripping his dead attacker as though he could prevail over mass-times-accelleration through sheer bloody-minded determination.

He couldn't, of course. He couldn't prevail over anything. He had only killed one of them. He disappeared beneath a dozen others.

Suddenly Clarke was charging forward, firing and firing and firing. There were screams, but none of them came from anything she might have hit. Something hot and hard slammed into her from the side; something cold and harder slammed against her back. A monster grinned down at her, open-mouthed, drooling. Its forepaws pinned her to the ground like piled cinderblocks. Its breath reeked of meat and petroleum.

She remembered something Ken had said: You may get off easily. I rather suspect they'll be focusing on me. She really should have asked him about that, back when she'd had the chance. Only now it was too late.

They're saving me, she thought distantly. For dessert...

From somewhere nearby, the sound of crunching bones.

#

Jesus God, Ken. What did you think would happen?

The weight on her chest was gone. On all sides she could hear the sound of monsters, breathing.

You thought we had a hope in hell? You were blind, and I—I might as well have been. Were you trying to die, Ken? Did you just think you were indestructible?

I could understand that, maybe. I almost believed it myself, for a while.

Strangely, nothing had torn out her throat. I wonder what's keeping them, she thought.

She opened her eyes. CSIRA loomed into the sky over her head, as though she were staring up from the grave at some colossal tombstone.

She sat up in a circle maybe four meters across. Massed black bodies circumscribed its edge. They watched her, panting with past exertion, sitting calmly on their haunches.

Clarke struggled to her feet. Her head itched with the memory of that irritating inaudible tickle, freshly resurgent against her inner ear. She'd felt it when the monsters had first charged. She'd felt it again, just now. Ultrasonics, she realised.

The Hechler & Koch lay at her feet. She bent to scoop it up. Dark shapes tensed on all sides; jaws snapped, restive. But they didn't stop her.

The Sikorsky-Bell lay broken-backed fifty meters to her left, fat thorax and slender abdomen rising in a lopsided V from their common juncture. A ragged, charred hole gaped darkly in the cabin wall, as though some white-hot parasite had burst forth from inside. She took one shaky step in that direction.

The dogs bristled and held their ground.

She stopped. Turned to face the black tower.

The pack parted before her.

They moved as she did, yielding in some approved direction, closing behind in her wake. After a few steps her own shifting bubble of space fused with another; two pockets merged into a single oblong vacuole ten meters down the major axis.

Two great torn carcasses lay piled before her in a pool of blood and spilled intestine. A foot protruded unmoving from beneath the nearest. Something else--dark, slick, strangely lobate—twitched further along one bloody flank as Clarke approached. It looked like some grotesque swollen parasite, pulsing weakly, spilled from the guts of its disembowelled host.

It clenched. Suddenly the image clicked: a blood-soaked fist, knotted in gory, matted fur.

"Ken!" She reached down, touched the bloody hand. It jerked back as if stabbed, disappeared beneath the carcass leaving only the vague sense of some half-glimpsed deformity. The mass of carrion shifted slightly.

Lubin hadn't torn these two animals apart. He'd merely blown lethal holes in them. Their evisceration had happened after the fact, a demon horde ripping through their fallen comrades in pragmatic, remorseless pursuit of their target.

Lubin had used these two as a shield.

"Ken, it's me." She grabbed handfuls of fur and pulled. The blood-slicked pelage resisted her grip. Splinters of bone stabbed her hands through clots of muscle and fur. On the third try, the center of mass tipped past some crucial threshold. The carcass rolled off Lubin like a great log.

He fired, blind. Lethal shards sprayed into the sky. Clarke dropped to the ground—"It's me, you idiot!"—and stared panic-stricken around the perimeter, terrified that Lubin had jump-started a whole new assault. But the pack only flinched and fell back a few steps, silent as ever.

"Cl—Clarke....?"

He didn't even look human. Every square centimeter glistened with black gore. The pistol shook in his hand.

"It's me," she repeated. She had no idea how much of the blood was his. "Are you—"

"—dogs?" His breath hissed fast and panicky through clenched teeth, the breath of a terrified little boy.

She looked at her escort. They looked back.

"Holding back, for now. Someone called them off."

His hand steadied. His breathing slowed. Discipline reimposed itself from the top down, the old familiar Lubin rebooting himself through sheer force of will.

"Told you," he coughed.

"Are you—"

"Functional..." He got slowly to his feet, tensing and grimacing a half-dozen times. "—barely." His right thigh had been gored. A gash split the side of his face, running from jaw to hairline. It tore straight through the shattered socket of his right eye.

Clarke gasped. "Jesus, your eye…"

He reached up to touch his face. "Wasn't doing me much good anyway." The deformity of his hand, barely glimpsed before, was obvious now: two of the fingers were gone.

"And your hand—Ken, it—"

He flexed the remaining digits. Fresh membranous scabs tore open at the stumps; dark fluids seeped forth. "Not as bad as it looks," he said hoarsely.

"You'll bleed out, you'll—"

He shook his head, staggered slightly. "Enhanced clotting factors. Standard issue. I'm good to go."

The hell you are. But dogs crowded close on one side, fell back on the other. Staying put obviously wasn't an option either.

"Okay then." She took him by the elbow. "This way."

"We're not deviating." It wasn't a question.

"No. We don't have much choice."

He coughed again. Clotting fluid bubbled at the corner of his mouth. "They're herding us."

A great dark muzzle pushed her gently from behind.

"Think of it as an honor guard," she said.

A row of glass doors beneath a concrete awning, the official logo of the Entropy Patrol set into stone overhead. The dogs formed a semicircle around the entrance, pushing them forward.

"What do you see?" Lubin asked.

"Same outer doors. Vestibule behind, three meters deep. There's—there's a door in the center of the barrier. Just an outline, no knob or keypad or anything."

She could have sworn that hadn't been there before.

Lubin spat blood. "Let's go."

She tried one of the doors. It swung open. They stepped across the threshold.

"We're in the vestibule."

"Dogs?"

"Still outside." The pack was lined up against the glass now, staring in. "I guess they're not—oh. The inner door just opened."

"In or out?"

"Inwards. Dark inside. Can't see anything." She stepped forward; her eyecaps would adjust to that deeper darkness once they were in it.

If they got in it. Lubin had frozen at her side, the remaining fingers on his mauled hand clenched into an impoverished fist. The grenade pistol extended from his other hand, unwavering, pointing straight ahead. His ravaged face held an expression Clarke had never seen before, some smoldering picture of rage and humiliation that bordered on outright humanity.

"Ken. Door's open."

The thumbwheel clicked onto shipworm.

"It's open, Ken. We can walk right in." She touched his forearm, tried to bring it down but his whole body was gripped in a sudden furious tetanus. "We don't have to—"

"I told you before," he growled. "More sensible to go around." His gun arm swung to three o'clock, pointing straight at the vestibule wall. His useless eye stared straight ahead.

"Ken—" She turned, half-expecting the monsters at their backs to crash through the panes and rip his arm off. But the dogs stayed where they were, seemingly content to let the drama play out without further intervention.

"He wants us to go forward," Lubin said. "Always sets it up, always takes the initiative. All we ever do is fucking— react..."

"And blowing out a wall when the door's standing open? That's not a reaction?"

Lubin shook his head. "It's an escape route."

He fired. The shipworm plunged into the side wall, spinning fast enough to shatter an event horizon. The wall erupted like a tabletop Vesuvius; filthy grey cumulus billowed out and engulfed them in an instant. Stinging particles sandblasted Clarke's face. She closed her eyes, choked on the sudden sandstorm. From somewhere deep in the maelstrom, she heard the tinkle of shattering glass.

Something grabbed her wrist and yanked sideways. She opened her eyes onto the swirling, soupy aftermath of the blast. Lubin drew her towards the ruptured wall; his ravaged face loomed close. "This way. Get us in."

She steered. He lurched at her side. The air was filled with the hiss of fine sifting debris, the building sighed at its own desecration. An empty, twisted door frame leaned crazily out of the murk. Pebbles of crumbled safety glass crunched beneath their feet like a diamond snowfall.

There was no sign of the dogs, not that she'd be able to see them anyway unless they were on her. Maybe the explosion had scared them back. Maybe they'd been trained to stay outside no matter what. Or maybe, any second now, they'd find this broken doorway and pour through to finish the job...

A ragged hole resolved in the wall before them. Water ran from somewhere beyond. A ridge of torn concrete and rebar rose maybe five centimeters from the floor, the lip of a precipice; on the other side there was no floor, just a ruptured shaft a meter across, extending into darkness both above and below. Twisted veins of metal and plastic hung from precarious holdfasts, or lay wedged across the shaft at unforeseen angles. A stream of water plummeted through empty space, spilling from some ruptured pipe above, splattering against some unseen grate below.

The wall across the gap had been breached. There was darkness beyond.

"Watch this step," she said.

They emerged into a dark, high-ceilinged space that Clarke half-remembered as the main reception area. Lubin turned and aimed back at the hole through which they'd come. Nothing jumped out at them. Nothing followed.

"Lobby," Clarke reported. "Dark. Reception pedestals and kiosks over to the left. Nobody here."

"Dogs?"

"Not yet."

Lubin's working fingers played along the edges of the breach. "What's this?"

She leaned closer. In the boosted half-light, something glimmered from the torn cross-section like a thin vein of precious ore. Frayed bits protruded here and there from the shattered substrate.

"Mesh of some kind," she told him. "Embedded in the wall. Metallic, very fine weave. Like thick cloth."

He nodded grimly. "Faraday cage."

"What?"

"Shielding. From the effects of the pulse."

Like a handclap from God, the lights came on.

Empath

Instantly Clarke was snow-blind. She brought up the H&K, waved it wildly in no particular direction. "The lights—"

"I know."

From somewhere deep in the building, the sudden hum of reawakened machinery.

"Jesus Priestpoking Christ," said an omnipresent voice. "You always have to make things so damned difficult. The door was open, you know."

"Achilles?" Her eyecaps were adjusting; objects and architecture resolved from the whitewash. But the fog wasn't entirely in her caps. Dust from the explosion hung in the air, bleeding contrast from their surroundings. Scree fanned out across the floor from their makeshift entrance. Polished stone paneling on the opposite wall, a good ten meters from the breach, had cracked and fallen in a jagged heap.

"Or you could've just landed on the roof," the voice continued. "But no. You had to storm the battlements, and look at you now. Look at you now.

"You can barely stand."

Ventilators whirred in the distance, tugged wisps and streamers of suspended dust into grilles in the ceiling. The air began to clear. Lubin swayed by the wall, favoring his injured leg. The lights had returned color to Clarke's sight; the gore on Lubin's body glistened shocking rust and crimson. He looked flayed alive.

"We could really use some help here," Clarke said.

A sigh from somewhere, from everywhere. "Like the last time you came to town. Some things never change, eh?"

"This is your fault, you fucker. Your dogs—"

"Standard-issue post-pulse security, and did I tell you to go up against them blind? Ken, what got into you? You're damn lucky I noticed in time."

"Look at him! Help him!"

"Leave it," Lubin insisted, barely above a whisper. "I'm all right."

The building heard him anyway. "You're far from all right, Ken. But you're not exactly incapacitated either, and I'm not stupid enough to let down my guard to someone who's just broken into my home by force. So let's work this out, and then maybe we can get you fixed up before you bleed to death. What are you doing here?"

Lubin started to speak, coughed, started again: "I think you know already."

"Assume I don't."

"We had a deal. You were supposed to find out who was hunting us on the ridge."

Clarke closed her eyes, remembering: The rest of the plan doesn't change.

"In case it hasn't sunk in yet, I'm dealing with quite a few demands on my time these days," the room pointed out. "But I assure you, I have been working on it."

"I think you've done more than that. I think you solved it, even before you lost so much of your resource base. We can tell you how to get that back, by the way. If that factors into your analysis."

"Uh huh. And you couldn't have just phoned me up from Podunk, Maine or wherever you were?"

"We tried. Either you were busy dealing with all those other demands on your time, or the channels are down."

The building hummed quietly for a moment, as if in thought. Deeper into the lobby, past dormant information pedestals and brochure dispensers and an abandoned reception counter, ruby LEDs twinkled from a row of security gates. The leftmost set turned green as Clarke watched.

"Through there," Desjardins said.

She took Lubin's elbow. He limped at her side, maintaining a subtle distance; close enough to use her as a guide, far enough to spurn her as a crutch. An asymmetrical trail of dark sticky footprints marked his passage.

Each gatepost was a brushed-aluminum cylinder half a meter across, extending from floor to ceiling like the bars of a cage. The only way in was between them. A black band the height of Clarke's forearm girdled each post at eye level, twinkling with color-coded constellations—but the whole band flushed red before they were halfway across the room.

"Oh, right," Desjardins remarked. "Security will cut you into little cubes if you try to sneak anything past." A curved panel beneath the display slid back at their approach. "Just throw everything in there."

Lubin felt out the chamber, set his pistol and belt down inside it. Clarke followed suit with her own weapon while Lubin struggled to remove his pack. He shrugged off Clarke's attempted assistance; the pack clanked on top of the pile. The panel slid shut.

The wraparound display bloomed into a riot of images and acronyms. Clarke recognized some of them from Lubin's tutorial on the way up: taser and microwave gun; mechanical springlift; aerosol flypaper. Other things she'd never seen before. For all she knew Lubin had brought them from his stash at the bottom of the Atlantic.

"Is that an electron stripper?" Desjardins asked. "And a pulse bomb! You brought your own tiny pulse bomb! Isn't that cute!"

Lubin, his jaw set, said nothing.

"That's everything, then? No nasty biosols or hidden freakwire? Because I'm telling you, those gates are very unforgiving. You walk through with any—"

"Our implants," Clarke said.

"Those will pass."

Lubin felt his way between the gateposts. No klaxons sounded, no lasers lanced down from overhead. Clarke stepped after him.

"The elevators are just around the corner," Desjardins said.

Completely disarmed, they stepped into Desjardins's parlor. Clarke led Lubin with soft words and an occasional touch. She didn't dare speak her mind, even in a whisper. But she gave his arm the slightest squeeze, and knew after all their long years together that he'd know what she meant: He didn't buy it for a second.

Lubin replied with a blind glance and the twitch of a bloody lip: Of course he didn't.

All according to plan. Such as it was.

She had to take the physics on faith.

She could buy everything else that Lubin had laid out on the way up. It didn't matter whether Desjardins believed their story, so long as he thought they might be useful. He wouldn't try to kill them outright until convinced otherwise.

Which didn't mean that he wouldn't still try to disable them. He wasn't about to let anyone into his secret lair without taking precautions—disarming them, confining them, cutting their strings.

Nothing lethal, Lubin had predicted, and nothing that will damage the structure. That limits his options. We can handle it.

Fine, as far as it went. It was how they were going to handle it that she couldn't quite get behind.

A good half-liter of water sloshed through the plumbing in Clarke's chest, unable to drain because of the tape on her electrolysis intake. Five hundred milliliters didn't sound like much. When she swam through the deeps a steady current of seawater flowed through her implants, endlessly replenished. It hardly seemed possible that the stagnant dregs trapped there now would last more than a moment.

Four hundred fifty grams of molecular oxygen, Lubin had said. That's almost what you'd get in two thousand liters of air.

Her head couldn't argue with the numbers. But her gut was no mathematician.

A rank of elevators stood before them. One set of doors was open; soft light spilled from the compartment behind.

He'll confine us first.

They entered. The doors slid shut. The cage began to move.

Down.

This is insane, she thought. This can't work. But already, she imagined she could hear the soft hiss of gas from hidden nozzles...

She coughed and tripped her implants, praying to some indeterminate deity that Lubin hadn't fucked up his calculations.

He hadn't. A familiar, subtle vibration started somewhere in her chest. Her guts writhed and flooded with their own private stock of isotonic saline. The liquid rose in her throat and filled her mouth. Brief nausea accompanied the flooding of her middle ears. A salty trickle ran down her chin before she remembered to clamp her lips together. The world muted, all sounds suddenly faint and distant except for the beating of her own heart.

Just like that, she lost the urge to breathe.

The descent continued. Lubin leaned against the wall of the elevator, his face a bloody cyclops mask. Clarke felt warm wetness on her upper lip: her nose was running. She reached up and gave it a scratch, inconspicuously jamming the plug in her left nostril tight against the leak.

Suddenly her body thrummed, deep inside, an almost subsonic quaking that vibrated her bones as though they were the parts of some great bass instrument. Faint nausea struck her in the throat. Her bowels quavered.

The two most likely options, Lubin had mused, are gas and infrasound.

She didn't know if gas was in Desjardins's arsenal—for all she knew the air around them was already saturated. But this was obviously some kind of squawkbox. The sound dish must stretch across the whole ceiling of the elevator, or maybe beneath the floor. The walls focused its vibrations, built resonances within the cage. The sound would be tuned to build intolerable harmonics in the lungs and middle ears, in the sinuses and trachea.

It made her sick even with her airways and hard cavities flooded; she could scarcely imagine the impact on unbuttressed flesh. The implants didn't deal with gastrointestinal gases—deep-sea pressure collapsed those soft pockets down with no ill effect—and acoustic attacks were generally tuned to harder, more predictable air spaces anyway. Desjardins's squawkbox was doing something down there, though. It was all she could do to keep from vomiting saline all over the compartment, from shitting in her diveskin. Any dryback would be on the floor by now, soiled and retching or unconscious. Clarke clenched at both ends and hung on.

The elevator stopped. The lights went out.

He knows, she thought. He figured it out, of course he figured it out. How could we think he wouldn't? How could he not notice?

Any second the elevator would lurched back into motion, drag them up through this ruined, booby-trapped derelict where sixty-five floors of countermeasures would turn them into—

Her head cleared. Her bones stopped tingling. Her bowels returned to the fold.

"Okay, guys." Desjardins's voice was tinny and distant in Clarke's flooded ears. "End of the line."

The doors slid open.

An oasis of bright machinery on a vast dark plain. That's what naked eyes would have seen: the Second Coming perhaps, a Christ-figure bathed in light and technology while all around was an infinite void.

To Lenie Clarke there was no darkness. The void was a converted parking garage, an empty gray cavern stretching half a city block on a side. Evenly-spaced rows of support pylons held the ceiling from the floor. Plumbing and fiberop emerged from the walls, crawled along their surfaces like a webbing of sparse vines. Cables converged into a loosely-bound trunk, winding along the floor to a horseshoe of workstations lit by chemical lightstrips.

Christ was someone Lenie Clarke had met before. She'd first encountered him in darkness much deeper than this, a prisoner of Ken Lubin. Back then, Achilles Desjardins had been a man convinced he was about to die.

It had been so much easier to read him, then.

Clotting blood cracked around Lubin's lips. His chest rose. Clarke shut down her own implants, yanking the plugs from her nose before the tide had fully receded within her. In the center of the room, in the heart of a high-tech horseshoe, Desjardins watched them approach.

"I thought I could make up for it," he said.

In some strange, twisted way it was actually good to see him again.

"For being a monster," he explained, as if someone had asked. "Why I joined the Patrol, you know? I couldn't change what I was, but I thought—you know, if I helped save the world, maybe that could make up for it somehow." His mouth spread in a rueful smile. "Pretty stupid, right? Look where it got me."

"Look where it got everyone," Lubin said.

Desjardins's smile vanished. There was no shielding on his eyes, and yet somehow he was suddenly as opaque as any rifter.

Please, Clarke thought. Let this all be some monstrous, stupid mistake. Tell us we've misread everything. Please. Prove us wrong.

"I know why you're here," he said, looking at Lubin.

"You let us in anyway," Lubin observed.

"Well, I'd hoped to be at a bit more of an advantage by now, but whatever. Nice trick with the implants, by the way. I didn't even realise they'd work without your diveskins sealed up. Pretty stupid mistake for Achilles the Master Pattern-Matcher, eh?" He shrugged. "I've had a lot on my mind lately."

"You let us in," Lubin repeated.

Desjardins nodded. "Yeah. That's far enough, by the way."

They were four meters from his fort. Lubin stopped. Clarke followed suit.

"You want us to kill you?" she asked. "Is that it?"

"Suicide By Rifter, huh?" He snorted a soft laugh. "There'd be a certain poetry to that, I guess. But no."

"What, then?"

He cocked his head; the gesture made him look about eight years old. "You were the ones who pulled that kin-selection trick with my Lenies, weren't you?"

Clarke nodded, swallowing on the realization: So he's behind those too.

He's guilty after all....

"I figured," Desjardins admitted. "It's the kind of thing that would only occur to someone who knew where they came from. Not many of those left up here. And the thing of it is, it's easy enough to do but it's not so simple to undo." He looked hopefully at Lubin. "But you said you knew how to—?"

Lubin bared his teeth in a bloody rictus. "I lied."

"Yeah. I kind of figured that too." Desjardins shrugged. "So I guess there's only one thing left to talk about, isn't there?"

Clarke shook her head. "What are you—"

Lubin tensed beside her. Desjardins's eyes flickered to the side for the merest instant; cued, the surface of a nearby wall sparkled and brightened before them. The image that resolved on the smart paint was hazy but instantly recognizable: a sonar composite.

"It's Atlantis," Clarke said, suddenly uncertain.

"I see it," Lubin said.

"Not real-time, of course," the 'lawbreaker explained. "The baud rate's a fucking trickle, and with all the range and cover issues I can only sneak in and grab a shot like this once in a while. But you get the idea."

Lubin stood motionless. "You're lying."

"Word of advice, Ken. You know how some of your people kind of just go off the deep end and wander into the black? You really shouldn't let them take squids when they go. You never know where their security transponders might end up."

"No." Clarke shook her head. "You? It was you down there?" Not Grace. Not Seger. Not the corpses or the rifters or the M&Ms or even two lousy guys on a boat.

You. All along.

"I can't take all the credit," Desjardins admitted. "Alice helped me tweak ßehemoth."

"Reluctantly, I'd guess," Lubin said.

Oh, Achilles. One chance to fix the mess I made and you fucked it up. One chance to make peace and you threaten everyone I ever knew. One lousy, faint hope, and you—

How dare you. How dare you.

A thin, final straw vanished in her hand.

She stepped forward. Lubin reached out with one mutilated hand, and held her back.

Desjardins ignored her. "I'm not an idiot, Ken. You're not the main attack force, you're just all you could scrape together on short notice. But you're not an idiot either, so there are reinforcements on the way." He held up his hand to preempt any protest. "That's okay, Ken, really. I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, and I took all the necessary precautions. Although thanks to you, I do seem to have lost a certain finesse when it comes to my big guns..."

His eyes jiggled slightly in their sockets. His fingers twitched. Clarke remembered Ricketts, sweet-talking his way into Phocoena with a wink and a glance.

The image on the wall dissolved. Numbers appeared in its place.

"Now I am in real-time contact with these guys. Can you see them, Ken? Channel 6?"

Lubin nodded.

"Then you know what they are."

Clarke knew too. Four sets of lats and longs. Depth readings, zeroed. Targeting ranges. A row of little flashing icons that said holding.

"I don't want to do this," Desjardins said. "It was going to be my retirement home, after all. I never wanted to blow it up, just—hobble parts of it. Smooth the transition, so to speak. But if I'm gonna be dead anyway—"

She twisted in Lubin's grip. But even mutilated, Lubin was immovable. His hand shackled her arm like a granite claw, oily with coagulating fluids. She could only slip in his grasp; she could not break free.

"I do have other options," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Contingency villas, you might say. I can go to one of those instead." He lifted a hand to the telemetry. "You've got a lot more riding on this than me."

He planned it for years, she realized. Even when we thought he was helping us. And ever since we've been cowering in the dark like good little rabbits while our lines went dark and our contacts dried up and it was him all along, cutting us off, fumigating the place so there wouldn't be any uncooperative tenants around when his luck ran out and he needed a place to hide...

"You asshole," she whispered, straining.

He didn't look at her. "So when are the cavalry coming, Ken? How did you call them in? How much do they know?"

"I tell you," Lubin said, "and you call off the attack."

"No, Ken, you call off your attack. Use whatever clever code words you set in place to shut down your sub's autopilot, or to convince Helsinki that you were mistaken, or whatever it takes."

"And you blow up Atlantis anyway."

"What for? I have other options, as I said. Why waste all those perfectly good hostages for no payoff? They're worth way more to me alive."

"For now."

"Now is all we've got, buddy."

Clarke glared: from the man who had tried to kill her, to the man who'd risked his life to stop him. Every hour you're in this place, you kill more people than ever lived in Atlantis, she thought.

Every hour I kill more people, by leaving you here.

And Ken Lubin was about to cut a deal.

She could see it in his stance, in that ruined blind face that had been at her side and behind her back all these years. He wasn't entirely inscrutable. Not to her. Not even now.

"I know you, Ken," Desjardins was saying. "We go way back, you and I. We're soul mates. We make our own rules, and by God we live by them. People don't matter. Populations don't matter. What matters is the rules, am I right, Ken? What matters is the mission.

"If you don't deal, the mission fails."

"Ken," she whispered.

"But you can save them," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Isn't that why you came back in the first place? Just give me your stats and the mission succeeds. You walk away, I abort the strike, and before I disappear I'll even send you a fix for that nasty new strain of ßehemoth your buddies have been wrestling with. I gather by now a fair number of them are seriously under the weather back there."

She remembered a floating machine that had used his voice: If killing ten saves a thousand, it's a deal. She remembered Patricia Rowan, torn apart on the inside, the face she presented to the world cold and unflinching: I tried to serve the greater good.

"Or," Desjardins said, "you can try and take me out, and kill everyone you came up here to save." His eyes were locked on Lubin's. It was as though the two of them shared their own pocket universe, as though Clarke didn't even exist. "Your choice. But you really shouldn't take too long making up your mind—your tweaks are fucking things up all over the place. I don't know even how long I can keep control of these circuits."

She thought of what Patricia Rowan would have done, faced with this choice. She thought of the millions dead who would not have died, if only she had.

She remembered Ken Lubin himself, a million years ago: Is there anything you wouldn't do, for the chance to take it back?

"No," she said softly.

Desjardins raised an eyebrow and—finally— deigned to look at her. "I wasn't talking to you. But if I were Lenie Clarke—" He smiled. "—I wouldn't be shameless enough to pretend I gave a flying fuck about the rest of the world."

She twisted in Lubin's grasp and kicked, as hard as she could. Her boot plunged deep into the gash in his thigh. Lubin staggered and cried out.

And Clarke was free, and springing forward.

She launched herself directly at Desjardins. He won't risk it, she told herself. It's his only leverage, he's dead if he hits the button, he must know he's—

Desjardins's eyes flickered left. His fingers twitched. And a tiny thread of doubt blossomed into full-blown horror as the numbers on the wall began to move...

Holding transmuted into a whole new word, again and again and again along the bottom of the board. Clarke tried desperately not to read it, drove forward on the wings of some frantic infantile hope maybe if I don't see it it won't happen, maybe there's still time, but she did see it, she couldn't help seeing it, spelled out in quadruplicate full-stop before the whole board went dark:

Commit.

With the next step she toppled.

Something hummed deep in her head. Her bones sang with subtle electricity. Her legs collapsed beneath her, her arms were dead weights at her sides. Her skull cracked painfully against the back of a workstation, cracked again against the floor. Her lung deflated with a tired sigh—she tried to hold her breath but suddenly she was slack-jawed and drooling. Her bladder voided. Implants clicked and stuttered in her chest.

"You gotta love the symmetry," a voice remarked from somewhere on the other side of the universe. "The ultimate victim, you know? The ultimate victim, and the most powerful woman in the world all rolled into one tight little bod. And I, well, I'm the last word in one or two things myself..."

She couldn't feel a heartbeat. Darkness roared up from somewhere deep in her skull, swept swirling across her eyes.

"It's fucking mythic is what it is," the voice continued, distant and barely audible. "We just had to get together..."

She didn't know what he was talking about. She didn't care. There was nothing in her world but noise and chaos, nothing in her head but commit commit commit commit.

They don't even know they're dead, she thought. The torpedoes haven't reached Atlantis yet. They're living the last few minutes of their lives and they don't even know it.

They'll live longer than me...

A hand around her ankle; friction against the floor.

Bye, Jelaine. Bye Avril. Bye Dale and Abra and Hannuk...

A great gulping wheeze, very close. The sensation of distant flesh expanding.

Bye Kevin. Bye Grace. Sorry we could never work it out...

A pulse. She had a pulse.

Bye Jerry. Bye Pat. Bye again...

There were voices. There was light, somewhere. Everywhere.

Bye, Alyx. Oh God, I'm so sorry. Alyx.

"...bye, world."

But that voice had come from outside her head.

She opened her eyes.

"You know I'm serious," Desjardins was saying.

Somehow Ken Lubin was still on his feet, listing to port. He stood just beyond the pool of light. Achilles Desjardins stood within it. They confronted each other from opposite sides of a waist-high workstation.

Lubin must have pulled her out of the neuroinduction field. He'd saved her life again. Not bad for a blind psychopath. Now he stood staring sightlessly into the face of his enemy, his hand extended. Probably feeling out the edge of the field.

"Dedicated little bitch, I have to admit," Desjardins said. "Willing to sacrifice a handful of people she actually knows for a planetful of people she doesn't. I thought she was way too human to be so rational." He shook his head. "But the whole point is kind of lost if the world blows up anyway, no? I mean, all those runaways on the Ridge are about to die in—oh, sorry, who've just died—and for what? The only thing that'll give their deaths any meaning at all is if you turn around and walk away."

They're gone, Clarke thought. I killed them all...

"You know how many battellites are still wobbling around up there, Ken. And you know I'm good enough to have got into at least a few of 'em. Not to mention all the repositories of chemical and biological weapons kicking around groundside after a hundred years of R&D. All those tripwires run right through my left ventricle, buddy. Lenie should thank the spirit of motherfucking entropy that she didn't kill me, or the heavens would be raining fire and brimstone by now."

Clarke tried to move. Her muscles buzzed, hung over. She could barely lift her arm. Not the usual med-cubby field by a long shot. This one had been cranked to quell riots. This one was industrial.

Still Lubin didn't speak. He managed a controlled stagger to the left, his arm still extended.

"Channels seven through nineteen," Desjardins told him. "Look for yourself. See the kill switches? See where they lead? I've had five years to set this up, Ken. You kill me, you kill billions."

"I— expect you'll find a number of those tripwires are no longer connected." Lubin's voice was thin and strained.

"What, your pack-hunting Lenies? They can't get into the lines until the lines open. And even then, so what? They're her, Ken. They're concentrated essence of Lenie Clarke at the absolute peak of her game. They get their teeth into a tripwire, you think for a second they won't pull it themselves?"

Lubin cocked his head slightly, as if taking note of some interesting sound.

"It's still a good deal, Ken. Take it. You'd have a hard time killing me anyway. I mean, I know what a tough hombre you are, but your motor nerves short out just the same as anyone else's. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you're blind."

Realization stabbed Clarke like an icicle: Achilles, you idiot, don't you know what you're doing? Haven't you read his file?

Lubin was speaking: "So why deal in the first place?"

"Because you are a tough hombre. You could probably hunt me down by smell if it came to that, and even though you're having a really off day I'd just as soon not take the chance."

You're talking to Ken Lubin, she raged silently, trapped in her own dead flesh. Do you actually think you're threatening him?

"So we disappear, you disappear, the world relaxes." Lubin wavered in and out of focus. "Until someone else kills you."

Clarke tried to speak. All she could force out was a moan, barely audible even to herself.

It's not a threat at all—

"You disappear," Desjardins said. "Lenie's mine. Saved her special."

It's an inducement...

"You're proceeding from a false premise," Lubin pointed out.

"Yeah? What premise is that?"

"That I give a shit."

Clarke caught a glimpse of muscles bunching in Lubin's left leg, of a sudden sodden pulse of fresh blood coursing down his right. Suddenly he was airborne, hurtling through the field and overtop the barrier from an impossible standing start. He rammed into Desjardins like an avalanche, pure inertia; they toppled out of sight behind the console, to the sound of bodies and plastic in collision.

A moment's silence.

She lay there, tingling and paralyzed, and wondered who to root for. If Lubin's momentum hadn't carried him completely through the field he'd be dying now, with no one to pull him to safety. Even if he'd made it across, he'd still be helpless for a while. Desjardins might have a chance, if the collision hadn't stunned him.

Achilles, you murderer. You psychopath, you genocidal maniac. You foul vicious monster. You're worse than I am. There's no hell deep enough for you.

Get out of there. Please. Before he kills you.

Something gurgled. Clarke heard the faint scratching of fingernails on plastic or metal. A meaty thud, like someone slinging a dead fish against the deck—or the flopping of a limb, stunned in transit, struggling back to life. A brief scuffling sound.

Ken. Don't do it.

She gathered all her strength into a single, desperate cry: "No." It came out barely whispered.

On the far side of the barricade, a wet snapping pop. Then nothing at all.

Oh God, Ken. Don't you know what you've done?

Of course you know. You've always known. We could've saved it, we could have made things right, but they were right about you. Pat was right. Alyx was right. You monster. You monster. You wasted it all.

God damn you.

She stared up at the ceiling, tears leaking around her eyecaps, and waited for the world to end.

She could almost move again, if only she could think of a reason to. She rolled onto her side. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, his bloody face impenetrable. He looked like some carved and primitive idol, awash in human sacrifice.

"How long?" she rasped.

"Long?"

"Or has it started already? Are the claves on fire? Are the bombs falling? Is it enough for you, are you fucking hard yet?"

"Oh. That." Lubin shrugged. "He was bluffing."

"What?" She struggled up on her elbows. "But—the tripwires, the kill-switches—he showed you..."

"Props."

"You saw through them?"

"No. They were quite convincing."

"Then how—"

"It didn't make sense that he'd do it."

"Ken, he destroyed Atlant—" A sudden, impossible ray of hope: "Unless that was a bluff too?..."

"No," Lubin said quietly.

She sank back. Let me wake up from this, she prayed.

"He destroyed Atlantis because he had another deterrent to fall back on. Making good on the smaller threat increased the credibility of the larger one." The man without a conscience shrugged. "But once you're dead, deterrence has already failed. There's no point in acting on a threat when it can't possibly achieve your goal."

"He could have, easily. I would have."

"You're vindictive. Desjardins wasn't. He was mainly interested in self-gratification." Lubin smiled faintly. "That was unusually enlightened of him, actually. Most people are hardwired for revenge. Perhaps Spartacus freed him of that too."

"But he could have done it."

"It wouldn't have been a credible threat otherwise."

"So how did you know?"

"Doomsday machines are not easy things to assemble. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort for no actual payoff. Faking it was the logical alternative."

"That's not good enough, Ken. Try again."

"I also subjected him to Ganzfeld interrogation once. It gave me certain insights into—"

She shook her head.

He didn't speak for a while. Finally: "We were both off the leash."

"I thought you gave yourself a new leash. I thought your rules..."

"Still. I know how he felt." Lubin unfolded—carefully, carefully—and climbed slowly to his feet.

"Did you know what he'd do?" She couldn't hide the pleading in her voice.

He seemed to look down at her. "Lenie, I've never known anything my entire life. All I can ever do is go with the odds."

It wasn't what she wanted to hear. She wanted him to describe some telltale glitch in Desjardins's shadow-show, some compelling bit of evidence that said the worst will not happen. She wanted some channel of ostensible input traced back to an empty socket, impossibly disconnected from its fiberop. Anything but a gamble based on empathy between two men without conscience.

She wondered if he was disappointed, even a little bit, that Desjardins had been faking it after all. She wondered if he'd really been expecting it.

"What are you so down about?" Lubin asked, sensing what he couldn't see. "We just saved the world."

She shook her head. "He was going to lose anyway. He knew that better than we did."

"Then we advanced the schedule significantly, at least. Saved millions of lives."

How many millions, she wondered, and then: what difference does it make? Could saving twelve million today make up for killing ten million in the past? Could the blood-soaked Meltdown Madonna somehow transmute into Saint Lenie In the Black, savior of two million net? Was the algebra of guilt really so elementary?

For Lenie Clarke, the question didn't even apply. Because any millions saved today had only been spared from a fate she'd condemned them to in the first place. There was no way, no way at all, that she would ever be able to balance those books.

"At least," she said, "the debt won't get any bigger."

"That's a needlessly pessimistic outlook," Lubin observed.

She looked up at him. "How can you say that?" Her voice was so soft she could barely hear herself. "Everyone's dead..."

He shook his head. "Almost everyone. The rest of us get another chance."

Ken Lubin reached out his hand. The gesture was absurd to the point of farce; that this torn and broken monster, gored, bleeding, could pretend to be in any position to offer assistance to others. Lenie Clarke stared for a long moment before she found the strength to take it.

Another chance, she reflected, pulling herself to her feet.

Even though we don't deserve one.