Beggars Ride

Nineteen

Lizzie shrank back farther into the shadows of the building. The tribe was just around the corner. No, it wasn’t a “tribe”—a tribe had rules and order and kindness. This was just a… a… she didn’t know what.

The scum of the Earth, them, she heard inside her head, and it was her mother’s voice. Who had Annie been talking about? Nobody like these people—there’d been nobody like this in East Oleanta or Willoughby County. Lizzie couldn’t remember who Annie had called scum. She couldn’t remember anything. She was too scared.

“My turn, me,” a man’s voice said. “Get off her, you!”

“Hold your horses, I’m getting… All yours.”

A third voice laughed. “Didn’t leave much, did you, Ed? Hope Cal don’t like them feisty, him.”

“Fuck, she ain’t even breathing!”

“Sure she is, her. Climb on, Cal.”

“Christ!”

“You go last, you, you take wet decks.”

Lizzie fingered her belt, with its reassuring slight bulge of the personal-shield casing. The shield was on. She could see its faint shimmer around her hands. The men out there couldn’t hurt her, even if they caught her. The most they could do would be knock the shield around awhile, with her in it like sausage in a casing. Lizzie remembered sausage. Annie used to make it. Sausage… what was she doing thinking of sausage? The girl out there was being… and there was nothing Lizzie could do to help her. She couldn’t even help herself by hiding inside this building she cowered behind. The building, like all the others in the abandoned gravrail yard, was Y-shielded. She pressed her own shield tight against the building’s shield.

The other girl screamed.

Lizzie closed her eyes. But she could still see the girl inside her eyelids. She could see all of it: the girl tied naked on the ground, the four men, the rest of the tribe a little way off. Other women, ignoring what was happening because the girl had been stolen from another tribe, wasn’t one of their own. And children, glancing at the four men, curious…

How could they? How could they?

“You got enough,” one of the men said. “Come on, we gotta move out, us.”

“Give him a minute, Ed. Old guys need time, them.”

A bark of laughter.

What if one of those curious children came around the edge of the building and saw Lizzie? She could grab him and knock him out before he called to the others.

No, she couldn’t. A little boy, like Dirk would be in a few years… she couldn’t. How impenetrable was a personal shield, anyway? She’d been wearing Vicki’s for two weeks now, and she didn’t really know. It kept out insects and raccoons and rain and brambles. Those were the only tests she’d given it.

“Come on, Cal!” one of the men shouted. “We’re moving out, us!”

Slowly the tribe straggled past Lizzie’s building. Seventeen, twenty, twenty-five. They wore ragged jacks and carried tarps and water jugs. No Y-cones, no terminals that she could see. Four filthy, Changed small children, but no babies. When they were all out of sight and sound, Lizzie ventured around the corner of the building.

The girl was dead. Blood from her cut throat drained into the ground. Her eyes were wide open, her face contorted into terror and pleading. She looked about Lizzie’s age, but smaller, with lighter hair. In one ear was a small tin earring in the shape of a heart.

I can’t bury her, Lizzie thought. The ground was hard; it hadn’t rained in a week. Lizzie had nothing to dig with. And if she stayed here much longer, she’d lose her nerve for the bridge. Oh, God, what if those people were going over the bridge? If they caught her on it?

No. She wouldn’t let that happen. She wasn’t as helpless as this poor girl had been. And it wouldn’t be a good idea to bury her even if Lizzie could. The girl’s own tribe might come looking for her, and it would be better if they knew what happened to her than if they had to wonder forever if she was still alive. That would be intolerable. If it were Dirk…

She thrust the obscene thought away, knelt on the bloody ground, and untied the girl’s hands and feet from the crude wooden stakes. She pulled the stakes from the ground; she could spare the girl’s people that much. Grateful for the shield protecting her from contact with the streaming blood, Lizzie lifted the girl’s body and staggered with it to the shadow of the building. She rolled the body against the Y-dome and covered the torso with a shirt from her backpack, knotted loosely around the girl’s waist to keep it from blowing away.

Then she set out for the bridge, before it got too dark, or she got too scared.

She knew exactly where she was. Although she didn’t dare use her terminal to open a link of any kind that could be traced, she could use it to access information in the crystal library, including detailed atlases. This was the New Jersey tech yard of the Senator Thomas James Corbett Gravrail. Of course, the gravrail had stopped running during the Change Wars. But the shielded buildings were still here, probably with the trains inside, and nothing could destroy the maglev lines themselves. Shining twin lines of some material Lizzie couldn’t identify, they’d run all the way here from Willoughby County. They ran across the bridge spanning the Hudson River into Manhattan; they would run, according to her atlas, north to Central Park and straight to a ground gate of Manhattan East Enclave.

And then what?

First, just get there.

Lizzie stared at the bridge, and then at the sky. About three hours until sunset. She could cross under cover of dusk, hide on the other side. The trestle bridge itself provided little cover. It was narrow, no more than ten feet across, with no visible protrusions or supports. How did it stay up? Probably the same way the gravrails had stayed up. Neither physics nor engineering much interested Lizzie—only computers. Still, she should gather all the information she could before the crossing.

The Hudson shimmered bright in the sunshine. By the river, half-hidden by an embankment, Lizzie found a patch of weedy ground. She drank from the Hudson, turned off her shield, and stripped. As she lay on the ground to feed, she raised her head every few seconds to be sure no one approached. The sun felt good on her bare skin, but she couldn’t let herself enjoy it. As soon as her Changed biochemistry signaled satiety, she jumped up, dressed, and turned on the personal shield. Then she settled into work with her computer. By sunset, she knew as much as was in her crystal library about the Governor Samantha Deborah Velez Memorial Gravrail Trestle.

At the eastern end of the trestle, in the deep shadow of a building, Lizzie listened as hard as she could. An hour ago she’d heard people start across the bridge. But now there was no one in sight, and all she heard was the cry of wheeling gulls and the lapping of the river against the shore. She dropped to her hands and knees and started to crawl across the bridge, presenting as inconspicuous a silhouette as possible.

The bridge was 2.369 kilometers long.

Darkness set in more quickly than Lizzie had counted on. Darkness was a cover, of course, but she was afraid of crawling across the unlighted bridge. Not of falling off, but of… what? She was just afraid. Of everything.

No, she wasn’t. She was Lizzie Francy, the best datadipper in the country, the only Liver to even try to reclaim political power from the donkeys. She would not be afraid. Only people like her mother were afraid of everything—even before the neuropharm.

Stay home, child, where you belong, you. Annie’s voice again. God, she’d be glad when she was too old to hear her mother’s voice in her head. How old was that? Maybe as much as thirty?

Then she heard something else. People, crossing the bridge from the Manhattan side.

Lizzie crawled forward even faster. Now she could see their light, a bright Y-energy torch, bobbing in the distance. How far? The wind must be blowing toward her; it carried their laughter. Men’s laughter.

It should be here soon, soon, it had been a while since the last one…

She felt it in the darkness, the small dark bump at the edge of the bridge, meant to be used in making repairs. The techs attached their floaters here, then activated the energy shield that temporarily augmented the width of the bridge for easy maneuverability. The shields could hold several tons of equipment, if they had to. They could also bend at any needed angle. Lizzie had read everything about them in the crystal library—which did not include the activation codes. And she hadn’t dared open a satlink to try to dip the information from the gravrail corporation’s deebees.

Now, she didn’t have any choice.

“System on,” she whispered. “Oh, God—system on. Minimal volume.”

“Terminal on,” the computer whispered.

She worked as quickly as she could, muttering feverishly to the terminal, eyeing the torchlight ahead. It seemed to have stopped. Occasional wordless voices blew toward her on the wind. Raised voices—an argument. Good. Let them argue, let them fight, let them all throw each other off the bridge… What if they threw her off the bridge? She didn’t know how to swim.

Stay home, child, where you belong, you.

“Path 74, code J,” Lizzie tried. Come on, come on… It had to be a simple code, maybe even a standard industrial one, easy for all techs on rotating crews to remember. Not too many contingencies or automatic changes; they’d hamper an emergency. It had to be fairly simple, not all that deeply secured…

She had it.

The torch was moving forward again. Lizzie seized her terminal and backpack in her arms. She laid a hand on the dark bump and spoke the code. Soundlessly—thank God it was soundless!—the bridge extended itself over the water, a clear platform of energy disappearing into the darkness.

Lizzie hesitated. It looked so insubstantial. If she crawled out on it and it just let her drop through into the river far below… but that wouldn’t happen. Y-energy wasn’t insubstantial. Y-energy was the surest and most solid thing left from the old days, before the Change Wars, when life had been safe.

The voices crystallized into words. Hurry up… Where’s… can’t never… Janey girl…

They might be all right. They might be just normal people, crossing a bridge. Or they might be like those animals at the tech yard. Lizzie looked again at the almost-invisible shield, closed her eyes, and rolled onto it. She whispered code, and felt the shield curve, move, and swing her under the bridge for inspection and repair.

Cautiously Lizzie opened her eyes. She lay inches under the trestle, the underside of which was pocked with bumps and panels. Probably some of those were terminals. For once, she felt no desire to datadip. She groped with one hand along the edge of the energy shield supporting her, trying to feel the place it met the bridge. As far as she could feel, the whole shield had swung neatly underneath, detectable from the top only if you happened to be looking in the dark for a bridge extension made of energy field.

Above her, people straggled past.

She waited several minutes after the last vibration in the bridge. Then she spoke the code to swing the extension back, followed by the one to close it up.

On the east side of the bridge the gravrail divided. One line ran south, along the western shore of Manhattan, on a narrow strip of land between the river and the dome of Manhattan West Enclave. The other veered north, to skirt the enclave and, eventually, Central Park. That way, Lizzie knew, were the ruins of Livers’ New York. Not too many people lived there now; broken foamcast and fallen stone didn’t provide much to feed on. Those that did remain tended to be dangerous.

She had no choice. This was the way to Dr. Aranow.

Wrapped in her personal shield, Lizzie hid under a thick bush until morning. She felt fairly sure she wouldn’t be seen. But she couldn’t go to sleep for a long time.

In the light, New York was even worse than she’d imagined.

She’d never seen anything like it. Yes, she had—those history holos that Vicki had insisted she study in the educational software, before Lizzie grew old enough to put her foot down and study only the software she wanted. The holos had shown places like this one: burned, fallen piles of rubble with weeds straggling through them. Streets so blocked you couldn’t be sure which direction they’d once run. Scattered twisted metal separated by black glassy areas where some weapon had fused everything into smoothness. Lizzie had always assumed the holos were made-up, like the literature software Vicki had made her watch. Or if not made-up completely, then data-enhanced.

But this broke-down city was real.

She moved cautiously through the ugly ruins, listening. A few times she heard voices. Immediately she hid, shaking, until the men had passed. She didn’t see them, and was just as glad.

People lived in some of the ruined buildings. She saw a woman carrying water from the river, a man braiding rope, a Changed child chasing a ball. And then an unChanged baby, carried by a little girl of about ten.

The Changed girl was dirty, half-naked, hair matted with debris. But her skin shone with health, and she clambered strongly over a pile of rubble, the baby clinging to her chest. He—she?—looked over a year old, the age of Sharon’s baby, Callie. But this child’s legs were shriveled and weak-looking, his belly swollen, his arms like sticks. An open sore on his leg oozed pus. When the little girl set him down, he mewed and held up arms that almost immediately dropped helplessly to his side.

That’s how all babies would look soon, if Miranda Sharifi didn’t make more Change syringes, and if Sanctuary spread the fear neuropharm. Just like that.

The older girl set the child down, and he immediately fell over. His bones had no strength.

Lizzie moved away from the children. It would have been better to wait until they left the area, but she couldn’t stand to wait. Carefully she made her way across Manhattan, keeping direction by the gravrail even when she had to skirt north of it to avoid people. To the south, both ahead and behind her, she could see the towers of Manhattan West and Manhattan East, separated by the broad expanse of the park. The towers shone in the sunlight, and bright splashes of genemod color bloomed on their terraces under the enclave Y-shields. Aircars flew in and out of invisible gates in the invisible dome.

By mid-afternoon, she’d reached the northern ground gate for Manhattan East Enclave.

It was surrounded by a sort of ruined-village-within-the-ruined-city. Of what Lizzie guessed were the original foamcast buildings, half were intact and empty, still surrounded by impenetrable shields. The other half were rubble, burned or bombed or hacked into ragged chunks by sheer brute force. Around and between, people had constructed shacks of board, foamcast debris, sheet plastic, even broken ’bots. Well, tribes everywhere made do with what they found. But these shacks were also broken and ruined—some patched, some not—as if there had been a second Change War here. And a third, and a fourth.

Lizzie saw no people, but she knew they were there. A dead campfire, the ashes still undisturbed. A worn path, free of weeds. A bouquet of unwilted wildflowers from some child’s game. And, most puzzling, a framed picture of a man in very old-fashioned clothes, stiff ruffles at neck and wrists, holding some sort of jeweled book. How had that gotten there? She stayed hidden, within sight of the enclave gate, and waited.

Suddenly a chime sounded.

Immediately people rushed out of hiding from behind rubble, out of shacks, even from an underground tunnel. Livers, but not dressed like any Livers that Lizzie had ever seen. They wore donkey clothes: boots, tight little shirts, full trousers, rich coats. But only in bits and pieces—nobody had a complete outfit. The people—women, children, a few men—didn’t look dangerous. They gathered around the enclave gate. The chime sounded again.

If Lizzie wanted to see what was happening, she was going to have to gather with them. Cautiously she edged into the small crowd. They stank. But no one paid her any particular attention. So they weren’t really a tribe, who knew each other and stuck together. They were just a bunch of pathetic people. She jostled to the front of the group.

The enclave dome was opaqued gray for fifteen feet up, clear after that. Probably the residents didn’t want Livers peering in at them, spoiling the view of their pretty gardens. The gate, a black outline on the gray energy field, suddenly disappeared. Everyone rushed inside the enclave.

It couldn’t be this easy!

It wasn’t. Inside was another sealed dome, full of… what? Piles of clothing, boxes of stuff. Lizzie saw a doll with a broken head, some mismatched dishes, a scratched wooden box, some blankets. Then she understood. The donkeys in Manhattan East Enclave were giving away the used things they no longer wanted.

People snatched objects from the piles, the boxes, each other. There was a little pushing and shoving, but no real fighting. Lizzie watched carefully, trying to see everything, both dome structure and discards. Clothing, pictures, toys, bedding, flowerpots, furniture, plastics—nothing electronic or Y-energy, nothing that could become a weapon. In three minutes the dome was picked clean, and all the Livers ran away with their new discards.

Lizzie waited, her heart starting a slow hammering in her chest.

“Please leave the dome now,” a stern ’bot voice said. “Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.”

Lizzie stayed where she was, fingering her personal shield.

“Please leave the dome now. Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.”

Outside, someone screamed something unintelligible. The Livers froze for a horrified moment, then started running.

“Please leave the dome now. Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.” And then, just like that, she was outside. The rear energy wall had unceremoniously pushed her forward, closing itself, so quickly that Lizzie tumbled on her face in the dirt.

The Livers still screamed and ran, disappearing into their dens and holes. Some weren’t quick enough. The band of raiders, mostly men but a few women too, burst on them and started grabbing the donkey discards, knocking people down, shouting and hollering as they stomped with heavy, stolen boots on bodies and faces.

Lizzie rolled back toward the dome that had just ejected her. She understood now why the shacks had been repeatedly destroyed, repeatedly rebuilt. The price for living near the enclave’s used bounty was that others would take it away from you, with varying degrees of viciousness.

She scrambled to her feet and started sidling along the dome. Useless—she was the most visible, best-equipped target in sight. Two men converged on her.

“Backpack! Grab it, Tish!”

It wasn’t two men but a man and a woman, a woman as tall and broad-shouldered as a man. With deep purple eyes under thick, thick lashes. Genemod.

The beautiful donkey eyes leered at Lizzie, grabbed for her, encountered the personal shield. “Fuck! She’s shielded, her!” The voice was pure Liver.

Tish outweighed Lizzie by at least thirty pounds. She knocked Lizzie sideways, and Lizzie felt herself fall against the energy dome and slide down it. She cowered and whimpered, groping inside her boot. Tish dropped to her knees beside her, the purple eyes bright with the joy of torture, and began to shake Lizzie by the neck like a dog with a bone.

“So I can’t get inside there, me… I can still shake you till your neck breaks, it, right inside your safe little shield…”

Lizzie pulled Billy’s rabbit-skinning knife from her boot and shoved it up and under the woman’s breastbone.

She’d sharpened the knife every day, during the long daylight hours of hiding. Even so, she was surprised how hard it was to drive the blade through muscle and flesh. She pushed until the long blade was buried to its handle.

Tish’s beautiful eyes widened. She slumped forward on top of Lizzie, her arms settling around Lizzie like an embrace.

Lizzie shoved her off and looked wildly around. The man who’d told Tish to grab Lizzie’s backpack was across the clearing, fighting with one of the few men left alive near the enclave. Tish’s partner seemed to be winning. And there were other raiders around, in a minute another one would attack… Lizzie had only a few moments.

She didn’t hesitate. If she thought, she’d never be able to do it. But Tish was too heavy for Lizzie to lift, she couldn’t carry that muscular body… but she didn’t need the whole body.

Shaking, Lizzie knelt beside Tish and pulled out the silver teaspoon she’d stolen from Dr. Aranow’s dining room. She’d had some weird idea that once inside Manhattan East, she could show it to the house system, convince “Jones” that she belonged there… not likely. But now she grasped Tish’s right eyelid with her right thumb and index finger, pried the eyelid wide open, and slid the spoon under the eyeball. Gasping, she scooped the eyeball out of its socket. She pulled her knife from Tish’s body; immediately blood spurted over her in jets, running down the outside of the energy shield. Lizzie sliced through the nerves and muscles tethering the eyeball to its empty socket.

She turned, groping for the black outline of the enclave gate. Blood smeared between the outside surfaces of the dome’s Y-shield and hers. Embedded in the gate outline was a standard retina scanner, set to admit any genemod configuration. An emergency measure: a tech could get caught outside, an adventurous adolescent could be stranded. Lizzie knew about it from datadipping.

She pushed Tish’s eyeball against the scanner, and the outer dome gate opened. It closed behind her, just ahead of the raiders screaming for her death.

Lizzie collapsed to the floor and heaved. She couldn’t vomit; she’d had no mouth food in weeks. But there was no time. How long did a dead eyeball stay fresh enough to fool a scanner? Such information wasn’t in the deebees.

Staggering to her feet, she held Tish’s purple genemod eye to the second scanner. The inner gate opened, and Lizzie lurched through.

She was inside Manhattan East.

Specifically, she was inside a warehouse of some kind, with heavy-machinery ’bots standing motionless around the walls. Good. No cop ’bots until she left the building, which would be heavily shielded and locked. That could wait. Lizzie lay on the floor until she could breathe normally.

When she could stand, she turned off her personal shield. Tish’s blood slid off onto the floor. Lizzie turned the shield back on, then realized she was still holding the eyeball. It wasn’t bloody; all the blood had come from withdrawing the knife from Tish’s body.

Tish had never used her genemod eyes to enter the enclave. Why not? She must have known what she was. But when she tried to shake the life out of Lizzie, Lizzie had felt the reason for Tish’s exile. Tish’s hands had circled Lizzie’s neck; Tish’s body had pressed hard against Lizzie’s. And through Tish’s clothing, Lizzie had felt the hard lumps in the wrong places, the misshapen breastbone, the asymmetrical ribs. Tish’s skeleton must have gone wrong in the womb. Naked, she would look grotesque. Lizzie thought of how donkeys insisted on physical perfection, and how long Tish must have dwelled with Livers to have that accent. Vicki always said that hating yourself was the worst kind of hatred. Lizzie had never understood what Vicki meant.

She shuddered and dropped the purple eyeball. Her gorge rose. But still, she couldn’t leave the thing here, for a maintenance ’bot to find. She forced herself to pick the eyeball back up and put it in her pocket.

Then Lizzie started patiently to dip the inside security locks on the warehouse.

It took her almost half an hour. When she was finished, she stepped out into Manhattan East Enclave. She stood on an immaculate street bordered with genemod flowers, long slinky blue shapes that yearned toward her. Lizzie jumped back, but the flowers were soft, flaccid, harmless. The air smelled of wonderful things: woodsmoke and newly mown grass and spices she couldn’t identify. The towers of Manhattan gleamed in sunset, the programming on their outer walls subtly keyed to the colors in the sky. From somewhere came the low (artificial?) hooting of mourning doves.

People actually lived in this beauty and order. All the time. They really did. Lizzie, terrified and exhausted and enchanted, suddenly felt that she might cry.

There was no time. A cop ’bot zoomed toward her.

Frantically she dug in her pocket for Tish’s eyeball. It had grown softer, slightly squishy. Lizzie’s gorge rose. She held the disgusting thing in front of her right eye, squeezing shut the left, but the ’bot didn’t even try for a retina scan on the decaying purple eye. Somehow, it already knew she didn’t belong in Manhattan East. Lizzie saw the mist squirt into her face, screamed, and slumped backward onto the genemod flowers, which wrapped their soft petals lovingly around her paralyzed limbs.

Twenty

Jennifer Sharifi, dressed in a flowing white abbaya, stood in the conference room of Sharifi Labs. The other members of the project team called this “the command center,” but Jennifer disliked that name. The team was a community, not an army. Through the clear bordered floor panel, stars shown beneath her feet.

However, Jennifer gazed not down but at a row of five holoscreens. The conference room had been transformed. Gone were the long curved table and eighteen chairs. Banks of computers and consoles filled the large space, with team members moving quietly among the machines. Jennifer herself remained motionless. Only her eyes moved, flickering from screen to screen, taking them all in, missing nothing.

Screen one: the “tribal” camp in Oregon, on hidden-frequency monitor. Livers walked on the rocky Pacific beach in mid-afternoon fog, because these particular Livers always walked on this particular beach in mid-afternoon. Today, however, the heavy ugly Liver faces were clearly upset and frightened. The Livers huddled together ten feet from the surging ocean. Surrounding them, donkey reporters shouted questions. Robocams recorded.

“The newsgrids have finally discovered one of the test sites?” Eric Hulden said, walking up beside her. “Slow enough, aren’t they?” Eric was one of the new ones, the few Sanctuary youngsters Jennifer and Will had added to the project in its later stages. Without stopping the back-and-forth flickering of her eyes, Jennifer smiled. Eric was tall, strong, perfect as all the Sleepless were perfect. More important, he was cold, with the coldness necessary to understand and control the world. Much colder than Will. Still, if Jennifer smiled directly at Eric, his eyes would deepen their genemod blue. He was ninety-six years her junior.

But all that could wait, until the project was over.

Screen two: newsgrids from Earth. The left side of the split screen ran the United Broadcast Network, the most reliable of the donkey channels. An announcer with the flashy genemod handsomeness of a Spanish grandee said, “In a major data-atoll coup on the Singapore Exchange, the stock of Brasilia-based Stanton Orbital Corporation rose to…” Nothing in the newscast mentioned a strange neuropharm altering Liver behavior. Nor did the flagging program on the right side of the screen, which constantly scanned the world’s major newsgrids in several languages. So far, the project’s luck was holding; Strukov’s virus had not mutated on its own.

“The neuropharm is still just a local story in Oregon, then,” Eric said. “Donkey fools.”

“Not completely local,” Jennifer said calmly. “Just underground.” She gestured toward the next two screens.

Screen three: Jennifer’s chief scientist, Chad Manning, gave his six-times daily summary of the progress at Kelvin-Castner on replicating Strukov’s neuropharm. Kelvin-Castner was thoroughly monitored, in ways the stupid Sleepers would never detect. Chad received streams of data, which he analyzed and reduced to terms intelligible to Sleepless who weren’t microbiologists. Kelvin-Castner was proceeding slowly—far too slowly to do them any good.

Screen four: the pirated monitoring of government progress. This was more problematic. The federal agencies were much better at security than corporations like Kelvin-Castner. Neither Jennifer nor her communications chief, Caroline Renleigh, was sure how complete their pirated information really was. But as far as Sanctuary could discover, the government labs at Bethesda, although they had “in protective custody” Livers infected by Strukov’s virus, hadn’t yet succeeded in replicating or countering it. And the FBI hadn’t succeeded in establishing any solid evidence about the La Solana bombing. As far as Sanctuary could discover.

Miranda would have found out for sure.

Immediately Jennifer destroyed the thought. The thought did not exist, and never had. Her eyes flickered among the five screens.

Eric Hulden put a hand on her shoulder. “I came to tell you that Strukov linked. He wants to strike Brookhaven in an hour. Is that all right with you?”

“Fine. Call in the entire team for the viewing.”

“All right, Jennifer.” A part of her mind noticed how he said her name. Firmly, coldly. She liked it. But all that could wait.

Screen five: empty. It was used for communications from Jennifer’s agents on Earth. They were Sleepers, informants against their own kind, highly paid and little trusted. Anything that Jennifer needed to know about came through here, instantly.

As Eric walked away, the fifth screen brightened into a formless glow. Audio only. The encryption integrity code appeared along the bottom of the screen. The transmission came from one of her agents in the United States. “Ms. Sharifi, this is Sondra Schneider. We’ve located Elizabeth Francy.”

“Go ahead,” Jennifer said composedly, but she felt her chest lift. That little Liver had been surprisingly hard to find. After Sanctuary had caught her electronic stumbling across Sanctuary’s data beam from the Liver camp in Pennsylvania, the Francy girl had disappeared. Hard as it was to believe, one of the most debased class of Sleepers had apparently realized what she’d found. She knew that Sanctuary was connected somehow to the neuropharm that had infected her pathetic “tribe.” Elizabeth Francy had apparently also realized that if she opened a comlink through any satellite relay or ground station, Sanctuary would locate her. She’d been off the Net, out of visible surveillance, hidden somewhere in the barbarous countryside. Jennifer had hoped she were dead.

“Elizabeth Francy is in custody of Manhattan East Enclave security,” Sondra Schneider said. “She apparently made her way to New York and through an enclave ground gate. A half hour before her arrest, the gate was opened by a donkey retina scan nowhere in our data banks. I can’t explain that. A ’bot from the enclave’s security franchise, Patterson Protect, classed her as suspicious, and moved to sedate and capture. Our Net-wide flagging program picked up the girl’s name from the routine police-net queries to other franchises.”

Jennifer said swiftly, “How long ago?”

“About ten minutes. They’ll give her a truth drug soon, if they haven’t already. But that’s off-Net, of course. We can’t access.”

“Do we have an agent inside Patterson Protect?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

Jennifer considered. Lizzie Francy must have gone to Manhattan East in search of either Victoria Turner, her quasi-adopted mentor, or of Jackson Aranow. But why? To tell them what she’d discovered about Sanctuary’s monitoring her infected tribe, of course. If the local police franchise thought her worth truthing—and they would, of course, they’d want to know how a Liver had penetrated Manhattan East—Lizzie would tell them. She’d tell them, too, about Sanctuary. But would they believe her? The drawback to truth drugs was that if the subject believed that lies were truth, lies were what the drug elicited. Would the Sleepers believe that Elizabeth Francy was deluded?

Perhaps not. Especially if Jackson Aranow supported the Liver girl’s assertions.

Damn it, it was less than an hour until Strukov’s most important test!

Jennifer stood very still, appalled at herself. She didn’t have such flashes of anger. They were unproductive, weakening. Jennifer Sharifi didn’t become angry. She became cold, and hence effective.

The moment of anger had never happened.

“Ms. Schneider,” she said calmly, “I’ll take care of this. Pull all of our agents out of Manhattan East, unobtrusively, during the next forty-five minutes. Make sure they understand that they must leave immediately. I’ll take care of the rest.” Strukov could go ahead with the Brookhaven test, but Jennifer would instruct him to change, the second target to Manhattan East. That would take care of the problem of Elizabeth Francy.

“Understood,” Sondra Schneider said. The fifth screen blanked. Jennifer’s eyes flickered regularly among the other four.

Livers on the Pacific beach, huddled in fear against donkey reporters…

The UBN newsgrid and Net-grid flagging programs, both ignorant of the inhibiting neuropharm…

Streams of data from Kelvin-Castner—data accumulating too slowly to unravel the tangled skeins of Strukov’s molecules…

Frustrated investigative reports from the FBI on the nuclear explosion at La Solana…

Miranda’s cold face on screen five…

Jennifer’s body jerked in shock. There was nothing on screen five. There had been nothing since Sondra Schneider blanked. Miranda was dead. Her image had never existed.

“There you are,” Will Sandaleros said. “Jenny, look at this.”

She looked at Will instead. His face was flushed with excitement. He held out to her a portable terminal, with a CAD model of a ’bot on it.

“The Peruvian delivery drone. The bastards finally released the detailed design to us, which contractually they were supposed to do weeks ago. It’s somewhat interesting. It—”

“I’ve already seen it,” Jennifer said. “Weeks ago.”

“They showed it to you? The detailed version? And you didn’t tell me?”

Jennifer merely stared at him. Now his face, moments ago flushed from what he considered his triumph over the Peruvian contractors, paled at what he considered his betrayal by her. More and more, Will was absorbed by these petty power struggles. He got upset over them, he compromised his objectivity and his effectiveness. He lost sight of the project’s overwhelming, sacred mission.

“Excuse me, Will, I have things to attend to. Strukov launches in less than an hour.”

“You knew I wanted the drone design, that I’ve been badgering those sons of bitches—”

“A Sleepless does not ‘badger,’ Will.” Jennifer saw Eric Hulden, across the room, watching them.

“But you knew—”

“Please excuse me.”

Will’s hand tightened on his terminal. “All right, Jenny. But after today’s tests, you and I are going to have some personal discussion.”

“Yes, Will. We are. But after the tests.” She walked gracefully away from him.

The rest of the team arrived in the conference room in ones or twos. The mood was quiet, subdued. This was too important for hilarity, or for the kind of irresponsible heat that Will showed. This was the culmination of Jennifer’s life.

She was finally going to make Sanctuary truly safe for Sleepless.

They had been despised, persecuted, resented, harassed, and even killed (always, always, she remembered Tony Indivino) for over a hundred years. The Sleepers hated her people because Sleepless were smarter, calmer, more successful. Better. The next step in human evolution. So the losing species had tried to render the Sleepless impotent in the world. Only Jennifer Sharifi and Tony Indivino had seen coming that inevitable long-term warfare. Now only Jennifer was left to make her people safe against the enemy’s so much greater numbers.

When all members of the project team had gathered, Jennifer moved among them, murmuring words of thanks, praise, encouragement. Strong, competent, cold people. The most effective and loyal in the solar system.

Jennifer had chosen not to make any sort of speech. Let the event speak, eloquently, for itself. Evidently Strukov had made the same choice. Without preamble, the main wall screen brightened as the cam mounted on the Peruvians’ drone activated itself.

Below their feet, through Sanctuary’s clear floor panel, Earth drifted into view.

The drone flew low and leisurely over Long Island, New York. Slowly the dome of Brookhaven Enclave grew in the distance, dominating the new spring grass, abandoned roads, and wrecked Liver towns of Long Island. The drone angled upward and now Jennifer could see inside the enclave dome. Simple, gracefully proportioned buildings. Houses. Shopping complexes. Entertainment areas. Government buildings. And Brookhaven National Laboratories.

Brookhaven was the ideal site for the first high-security test of Strukov’s virus. Small enough (as Taylor Air Force Base would not have been), isolated enough (as the Pentagon would not have been), secretive enough (as the Washington Mall Enclave would not have been). And because of the Brookhaven National Laboratories, shielded as completely as any government installation anywhere. If Strukov’s drone could penetrate Brookhaven’s Y-shields, it could penetrate anyone’s.

Except the one that had shielded La Solana… Jennifer destroyed the thought.

The drone flew through Brookhaven’s triple Y-shield as if it weren’t there. The drone burst into speed and zoomed to just under the top of the inner dome, and the picture disappeared.

“It’s in,” Chad Manning breathed. “We’re in.”

“Drone disintegrated,” Caroline Renleigh said. “Brookhaven is of course equipped for biological warfare. There have to be security systems signaling, tracking, aiming… How did the Peruvians even—”

“Response signals might have been electronically delayed at their sources,” David O’Donnell reported from his security console.

The screen brightened again. This time the picture was jumpy, distorted; Jennifer realized it represented microsecond intrusions into the Brookhaven security computers themselves, time-sharing the Brookhaven monitors in non-continuous bursts to better evade detection. There was no sound. The screen split. The top showed grim security specialists at banks of machinery. The bottom displayed data taken from the enclave computer.

“They know they’ve been penetrated,” Will said, standing behind her. “They know there might be a biological agent… they’re sealing the labs…”

“Too late,” Jennifer said, studying the data on the bottom half of the screen. “At least, for everybody not sealed in when it struck.”

Will exulted, “We can afford to have a few escape infection. It isn’t like they’re going to be able to detect what hit them.” His mood had changed. If she turned around, she’d see Will excited, arms twitching and eyes shining. She didn’t turn around.

The printed data on the bottom half of the screen said:

“Won’t do them any good,” Will said, chuckling.

Jennifer kept her face immobile. Will tended to underestimate the enemy. There were some quite good people at Brookhaven, for Sleepers. Not as good as the Peruvians, but still competent. Sydney Goldsmith, Marianne Hansten, Ching Chung Wang, John Becker. Unlike the pathetic Liver test sites, the Brookhaven team would easily locate the unbreathed virus in their automatic air samples, even with its low concentration and short half-life. They would bond it with a radioactive marker and have lab animals breathe it in. The gas would enter the bloodstream and circulate for a few minutes before being both lost in the breath and destroyed by the Cell Cleaner.

Before that happened, the parts of the brain most active at that particular time would receive the greatest blood supply. The marker would clearly pinpoint the amygdalae. Then the researchers would switch to both brain scans and cellular tests. They would launch a dogged examination of Strukov’s long and twisted skein of cerebral events.

But long before the Brookhaven researchers could unravel that skein, they would no longer want to. The newness of the research would make them vaguely uneasy. It wasn’t familiar enough. Anxiety would fill them whenever they thought about the novelty of the situation. For a while they might fight the anxiety, but then it would grow. The Brookhaven researchers—and, eventually, all of the domed enclaves in the United States—would choose the known over the unknown. It would just feel too unsettling to mobilize for any new research effort.

And then Jennifer Sharifi and the rest of the Sleepless really would be safe.

Will was pouring champagne. Jennifer never drank—it made her feel in less than perfectly cold control—but this time she couldn’t stay outside the circle of her people. They’d done it. They were safe.

She raised her glass. The room quieted. In her calm, low-pitched voice Jennifer said, “Thanks to the efforts of everyone in this room, we have finally won. The Sleepers have had their own biochemistry turned against them. In the next hour, drones will penetrate the Pentagon, Washington Mall, Kennedy Spaceport, and Manhattan East enclaves. No Sleeper will die. But no one will ever be able to threaten us again, except in those ways we already understand and can counter. We will be in control, if only because there will never again be any unknown devils unleashed against us. Let us therefore drink to the devil we know.”

Laughter. Drained glasses. And then Strukov’s face appeared on the main screen.

“Ms. Sharifi. You and your people, without doubt, now celebrate the successful penetration of the Brookhaven. I, too, am pleased; I was very eager to see if we could accomplish this. But I cannot permit—”

“Oh, my God!” David O’Donnell said from the security console. “Launch. Code sixteen A. Repeat, launch.”

“—you to continue with this project. I, too, am a Sleeper, of course. And although I feel no loyalty to my own kind, I am, naturally, as self-protective as they. Or as you. So—”

Brilliant light exploded under their feet, somewhere between the floor panel and the rotating planet thousands of miles below.

“Sanctuary’s countermissile array destroyed,” said David O’Donnell. “Launching backup.”

“—so no more of the Peruvian drones will fire themselves. And since we both know from the experience of La Solana that only the nuclear can destroy completely, I fear it is the nuclear I myself am forced to use. Do you know La Rochefoucauld on superiority? ‘Le vrai moyen d’être trompé… ’ ”

Safe, Jennifer thought numbly. I thought we were finally safe.

“ ‘… c’est de se croire plus fin que les autres.’ ”

“Countermissile array number two destroyed,” David O’Donnell choked out.

Jennifer took a step forward. She thought for an uncontrolled moment that Strukov’s face on the wall screen had been replaced by Miranda’s.

Sanctuary orbital exploded in a burst of brilliant lethal light.

Twenty-one

Lizzie woke in a small bare room, no more than eight feet by four feet, with windowless foamcast walls. Three walls. She sat up on the bed, which was only a platform jutting from the wall, and looked for the missing wall. A woman sat on a chair, facing her. Behind the woman, who wore a blue uniform, stretched a featureless corridor.

“Hello,” the woman said. She was beautiful like Vicki was beautiful: genemod. Black, black hair, brown eyes, skin like clean snow. The fourth wall, Lizzie realized, was a Y-shield.

“You’re in Manhattan East Security Headquarters, Patterson Protect Corporation, legal franchisee. I’m Officer Foster. You’re Elizabeth Francy, and you were picked up for breaking and entering, criminal trespass. Would you like to tell me how you penetrated the enclave?”

Lizzie patted the outside of her pocket. The purple eyeball was gone, which meant Officer Foster already knew how she’d gotten in. Lizzie stared silently.

“Ms. Francy, you don’t seem to understand. Manhattan East is private property. Patterson Protect is fully authorized to deal with intra-enclave police matters. We also can involve the New York Police Department—if we choose to do so. Criminal trespass is a felony charge. And murder is a capital crime.” She held up Tish’s eyeball. “Patterson Protect can—and will—use truth drugs, as authorized under the law.”

“I didn’t murder anyone! And I need, me, to see someone in here. Dr. Jackson Aranow. To tell him something important!”

“Dr. Jackson Aranow,” the cop said, and sat silent. Lizzie guessed a system was speaking information into her ear mike. After a moment, she said, “Why do you—”

The door somewhere in the corridor behind her flung open. Running feet. A boy appeared, no more than fourteen, dressed in the same uniform, “INTERN” blazoned across the collar. His face showed excited shock. “Officer Foster! Come quick, the newsgrid—”

“Daniel,” the cop said tonelessly.

“—says that—”

“Daniel.”

“—somebody blew up Sanctuary with a nuclear bomb!”

Slowly Officer Foster rose. She followed the boy down the corridor, but not before Lizzie had seen her parade of successive expressions: shock, calculation, pleasure.

Blew up Sanctuary.

Lizzie leaped off the sleeping platform. Her legs didn’t falter; whatever neuropharm the security ’bot had used didn’t leave lingering effects. She ran her hands over the Y-shield that formed the fourth wall of the cell. No openings. No machinery on this side of the shield. No way out.

Blew up Sanctuary. Who? Why? With all the Sleepless inside? It might have been Miranda Sharifi, at war with her grandmother… but why now? Could it somehow be connected with the fear neuropharm?

None of it made any sense.

And Lizzie was tired of trying to figure it out. Tired, angry, scared. Of walking to New York to find Vicki and Dr. Aranow. Of being attacked by Livers and donkeys and ’bots. Of being threatened with arrest for murder. Even of datadipping. She was a mother. She belonged home with her baby. And as soon as she found Vicki, or Dr. Aranow, or anybody to turn this mess over to, that’s exactly where she was going.

“Hey!” Lizzie yelled, experimentally. No one answered. Officer Foster didn’t return.

Lizzie started in on the standard spoken codes, to see if she could get any sort of building system to respond to her. Nothing happened.

She settled in to wait.

An hour passed. Wasn’t anybody going to come back to question her? Wasn’t anybody left in New York? What if whoever blew up Sanctuary sent a bomb to Manhattan East… well, then she’d never know about it before she was dead. But what if somebody had set off the fear neuropharm here? Would the cops just go home and stay there, afraid of anything new, leaving Lizzie in her cell just to rot?

Everything in here was synthetic. Nothing was consumable.

But there had to be a ’bot to bring something to feed on. And water. And a place to piss… She spied the hole in the floor.

Another hour dragged by. Lizzie tried to think carefully, to plan. All right, if no one came and nothing happened by the time she counted to a hundred… all right, two hundred.

Time up.

“Uhhhuhhhhuhhh!” Lizzie shrieked. She grabbed a few nose hairs in her right nostril and yanked. It hurt tremendously. Immediately mucus flowed from her nose, her heart began to pound, and she could feel the color rise in her face. She yanked more nose hairs, tears streaming from her eyes and snot from her nose. Then she began to breathe in quick shallow pants, until she started to hyperventilate. She threw herself on the narrow foamcast floor.

“Medical assistance required,” the cell said. “Abnormal respiratory pattern. Blood pressure abruptly elevated by forty points over thirty, heart rate one-thirty, brain scan shows—”

A medunit floated through the Y-shield. It was a kind she’d never seen before, even back when Liver towns had medunits. A small arm with a patch shot out toward her: another tranq. Lizzie leaped onto the sleeping platform, grabbed the medunit, and yanked it up with her, upending it and hoping to hell that she was holding it so that no ’bot arms could reach her. And that the alarm it was undoubtedly sending to the building system had no people around to answer it.

“Open medical comlink!” she yelled at it, and recited Dr. Aranow’s AMA code, just as she’d dipped it from his personal system. God, it had to open! The thing was a medunit, wasn’t it? It had to be linked to official records.

“Official medical link open,” a female voice said calmly. “Recording. Go ahead. Dr. Aranow.”

“Link me with my home system!”

“This unit is not equipped to do that. You have opened an official medical link recording channel. Please proceed.”

“Fucking damn!” Lizzie yelled. What if the unit activated physical defenses? She started to reel off the security overrides she’d dipped on various government systems, all of them, hoping one would open the channel that she knew was possible, must be possible, even official donkey links always had back doors to allow the system to be used for something besides what it was designed for…

“Link opened,” the female voice said, and a moment later a male voice: “Yes, Dr. Aranow?”

Jones. Dr. Aranow’s house system. Lizzie took a deep breath to calm herself.

“Jones, please tell Dr. Aranow he has an emergency call from Lizzie Francy.” She continued to hold the medunit as far away from her body as she could, even though it had stopped trying to slap her with a tranq patch. “Ms. Lizzie Francy.”

“Dr. Aranow is not currently available. Would you like to record a message?”

“No! Don’t… I mean, I need him, me! Link with his personal system!”

“I’m sorry, this system cannot do that on outside orders. Would you like to record a message?”

She didn’t have a high-priority link, and this patch-pushing ’bot wouldn’t have the ability to create one. Now what?

“Please respond in the next fifteen seconds. Would you like to record a message?”

“No!” Lizzie said desperately. “Let me talk to the doctor’s sister!”

“Just a moment, please.”

And then a weak, frightened voice, “Hello?”

“Ms. Aranow!” Suddenly Lizzie couldn’t remember Jackson’s sister’s name. She could see her, slim and elegant in her flowered dress, holding Dirk in her arms, tears running down her pale terrified face. Lizzie could even remember the sister’s personal system’s name—“Thomas”—and, of course, all the access codes. But she couldn’t think of the donkey girl’s first name. “Ms. Aranow, this is Lizzie Francy, Dr. Aranow’s… friend. With the baby. I’m in jail in Manhattan East Enclave! Please tell Dr. Aranow and Vicki Turner right away to come get me, it’s an emergency!”

“In… jail? With… with the baby?” Ms. Aranow started to say.

The medunit suddenly started to push toward her, some sort of time-delayed follow-through, the ’bot arm again snaked out with a tranq patch… “Tell the doctor! Tell Vicki! Come get—”

The medunit bucked with a sudden urge of energy. The patch connected with Lizzie’s wrist. Immediately blackness took her; she didn’t even see the medunit float out of her grasp to hover beside her body, slumped half on the platform and half off.

Theresa lay trembling in her bed. That Liver girl was in jail. With her baby.

She saw, as clearly as if she gazed at the walls of her study and not of her rose-pink bedroom, the newsgrid holos of Liver babies, crippled and crumpled and starving and dying…

No. She was being ridiculous. Lizzie’s baby wasn’t dying. That baby was Changed. But the little thing was in jail, in a cell someplace, and something had happened to its mother to cut off the comlink like that. Had somebody hurt Lizzie Francy? And the baby?

Theresa had never seen a jail. But she’d watched history holos, and movies. Jails in those were filthy, horrible cells that smelled bad and held dangerous people who hurt other people. But surely jails weren’t like that anymore? The cleaning ’bots wouldn’t let them stay filthy. But the rest…

She sat up against her pillows. The sores on her hands and body had closed up. She could eat, and talk, and even walk a little, with crutches. She’d had a floater, but Jackson had sent it back because, he said, using the floater didn’t help rebuild her muscles. Twice a day the nursing ’bot coached Theresa through the physical rehabilitation software. But getting up was an effort, and feeling her hairless head made her cry. Jackson had removed all mirrors from her rooms. Much of the time, Theresa lay in bed and spoke notes, hours of obsessive notes, to Thomas. About Leisha Camden. About the Sleepless. About Miranda Sharifi.

She spoke to her system now. “Thomas, have Jones place an emergency call to my brother at Kelvin-Castner!”

“Of course I will, Theresa.”

But it was Cazie, scowling and rumpled, who answered her call. “Tess? What’s wrong? Why the emergency call?”

“I need to speak to Jackson.”

“So you said. But why?” Cazie drummed her fingers on an unseen table. Her black hair needed combing, and there were smudges under her eyes. She looked distracted and upset. Theresa shrank back against her pillows.

“It’s… private.”

“Private? Are you all right?”

“Yes… I’m… yes. It’s about somebody else.”

Cazie’s gaze suddenly focused sharply. “Who else? Did a message come for Jackson? This isn’t about Sanctuary, is it?”

“Sanctuary? Why would Jackson get a message about Sanctuary?”

Cazie’s gaze veiled again. “Nothing. So who’s the message from?”

“What about Sanctuary?”

“Nothing, Tessie. Listen, I didn’t mean to snap at you, when you’re so sick. Go back to sleep, pet. Jackson’s in the middle of an important meeting here and I don’t want to interrupt him, but I’ll tell him you called. Unless there’s something important you want to tell me, so I can pass it on to him?”

Theresa looked into Cazie’s eyes. Cazie was lying to her. Theresa knew it—how? She didn’t know. Yes, she did. Theresa had pretended to be Cazie, and now she could tell when Cazie was pretending. A shift in her voice, a look in her golden eyes… Jackson was not in a meeting. Which meant Cazie was keeping Theresa away from Jackson. As well as away from something about Sanctuary. And Cazie had never liked Jackson’s helping that girl Lizzie and her baby…

“N-no,” she faltered. “Nothing… important. Just a message from… from Brett Carpenter. That man that Jackson plays tennis with. About a match.”

“But you said it was an ‘emergency.’ ”

“I… I guess I just wanted to talk to Jackson. I’m kind of lonely.”

Cazie’s face softened. “Of course you are, Tessie. I’ll have Jackson call you the minute this meeting is over. And I’ll come by tonight to see you. I promise.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“Now you rest like a good girl and get all better.” The link blanked.

“Thomas,” Theresa said. “Newsgrid flag, last twenty-four hours. Anything on Sanctuary.”

She didn’t need the flag. The screen lit up with current news, and Theresa watched the holo of Sanctuary blowing up, listened to the shocked newscaster, saw the simulation of the missile’s path, heard President Garrison’s angry denunciation of the nuclear terrorists who had not yet named themselves.

“Repeat,” Theresa said to Thomas, even though the word came out a choked whisper and the salt tears hurt her radiation-burned skin. The newsholo repeated.

So they were all dead. Miranda Sharifi—dead at La Solana, along with all the strange and inhuman Supers who had changed humanity into something different. Jennifer Sharifi—dead on Sanctuary, along with her brilliant, powerful people who controlled so much of the world’s money in ways Theresa had never understood. Leisha Camden—dead seven years ago in a Georgia swamp. All dead. All the people genemod for never having to sleep, all the people who, Jackson said, were once supposed to be the next step in evolution. All dead.

But Lizzie Francy and her baby were alive. In jail in Manhattan East Enclave. Tell the doctor! Tell Vicki! Come get—

Theresa couldn’t do it. She was too weak, too frightened.

Please tell Dr. Aranow and Vicki Turner right away to come get me, it’s an emergency!

She could do it if she became Cazie.

Theresa closed her eyes. The tears stopped. Jackson had no idea—nobody did—how often in the last month Theresa had become Cazie. Lying in bed, hurting even through the painkillers, struggling to push herself through the physical rehabilitation program, making herself think about the explosion at La Solana without panic and seizure—Theresa had practiced being Cazie. Being someone who was not afraid, who was able to decide what she had to do and then do it.

She became Cazie now.

Gradually Theresa’s breathing slowed. Her hands stopped trembling. More important, she could feel the difference in her head. Like a newsgrid changing channels, almost. Her brain felt different. Could that be? But it was how she felt.

Theresa swung her legs to the floor and reached for her crutches. The nursing ’bot floated to her bedside. “Do you need help, Ms. Aranow? Would you prefer a bedpan?”

“No. Deactivate,” Theresa said, and the part of her that was still Theresa—there was such a part, only if she thought too much about that she’d lose the part that wasn’t—heard the decisiveness in her tone. Cazie’s tone. In Theresa’s still-hoarse voice.

Don’t think about it.

She struggled out of her nightgown and into a dress. It hung on her thin body. Shoes, jacket. In the foyer she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror.

No. Oh, God, no… that bald head, her? Sunken eyes, burned scabbed skin stretched over the skull… her? The tears started again.

No. Cazie wouldn’t cry. Cazie would know it was only temporary, she was getting better, Jackson said so… Cazie would wear a hat. Theresa took one of Jackson’s and jammed it down over her ears.

“Manhattan East jail, look up the coordinates,” she told the go-’bot that the building had called for her; she tried to scowl like Cazie. She’d had to wait for the go-’bot for nearly fifteen minutes. But she’d stayed Cazie the whole time.

“Yes, Ms. Aranow,” the go-’bot said. Theresa opaqued the windows and closed her eyes, to avoid glimpsing herself in window reflections.

The go-’bot left her in front of a building near the enclave shield’s east wall. A few people hurrying by stopped on the sidewalk and stared at her. Theresa ignored them. Chin high, hands clasped tightly together, she told the retina scanner in the deserted atrium, “I’m Theresa Aranow. I’m here to see a… a prisoner. Lizzie Francy. Or whoever is in charge here.”

“You’re not registered as an attorney, Ms. Aranow,” the building said. “Or as a close relative of the prisoner.”

“No, I’m… can I talk to a human, please?”

“I’m sorry, we’re in an emergency state just now. All Patterson Protect personnel have been deployed elsewhere. Would you care to wait?”

An emergency state. Of course. The attack on Sanctuary… people must be afraid the next bomb could fall on New York. If she hadn’t opaqued the go-’bot window, she would probably have seen people streaming out of the enclave by air. No wonder her building had taken so long to get her a go-’bot. And maybe the startled-looking people outside hadn’t been startled by her weird looks after all, but by their own fear. This bolstered her.

“I don’t want to wait,” she said. “I want to take Lizzie Francy out of here. What do I have to do for that?”

“Are you requesting Public Records?”

“Yes.” Was she? Why not?

“This is Public Records,” a different system said. “How may I help you?”

“I want… I want to take Lizzie Francy home. With me.”

“Francy, Elizabeth, citizen ID CLM-03-9645-957,” the system recited. “Apprehended 4:45 P.M. May 18, 2121, at 349 East 96th Street by Patterson Protect security ’bot serial number 45296, licensed to Manhattan East Enclave for official operation within the enclave dome. Placed under enclave detention. Patterson Protect franchise headquarters, 5:01 P.M., detaining personnel, Officer Karen Ellen Foster. Grounds filed for detention: breaking and entering, criminal trespass. Current legal status: enclave action only, NYPD not notified. Current detainee status: in custody, alert, no registered attorney.”

Theresa repeated stubbornly, because she didn’t know what else to do, “I want to take her home.”

“Detainee has not been placed under NYPD arrest. Patterson Protect does not have extended detention rights without NYPD notification. No notification has been filed for Francy, Elizabeth, citizen ID CLM-03-9645-957. However, arrested person does not have authorization to remain within Manhattan East Enclave unless she is under the recognizance of a registered resident.”

“She’s my… guest.” Was that good enough? Cazie would think it was good enough. Theresa said, more firmly, “My guest. Mine. Theresa Aranow.”

“Let the record read that in the absence of Patterson Protect notification of charges to NYPD, detainee Elizabeth Francy, citizen ID CLM-03-9645-957, has been released under the recognizance of Theresa Katherine Aranow, citizen ID CGC-02-8736-341. Thank you for your patronage of Patterson Protect.”

Theresa suddenly panicked. “And the baby! Let me take the baby home, too, Lizzie’s baby, I forget his name… the baby!”

The system did not respond.

Theresa closed her eyes, fighting for control. Cazie would not panic. Cazie would wait and see if Lizzie came out of one of these doors carrying the baby. Cazie would wait, and then decide what to do next… She was Cazie.

“Ms. Aranow?” Lizzie said. “Theresa?”

Theresa opened her eyes. Lizzie stood there, without the baby. She stared at Theresa from wide shocked eyes, and Theresa remembered how she must look. She said, “Where’s… where’s the baby?”

“Baby? My baby, you mean? Home with my mother, him. Why?”

“I thought—”

“What happened to you?”

And at that, Theresa crumpled. She wasn’t Cazie. Now that someone else was here, someone stronger… now that Lizzie had reminded Theresa of how she looked… now that she’d succeeded in getting Lizzie out… she wasn’t Cazie anymore. She was Theresa Aranow, and she could feel her breathing start to go ragged and could watch her scrawny arm clutch at the disheveled Liver girl who for all Theresa knew might be the only other human left in an enclave about to be hit by a nuclear bomb. Theresa moaned.

“No, don’t do that here,” Lizzie said from far away. “God, it’s just like Shockey, isn’t it? And you never even breathed a neuropharm… come on, don’t fall, lean on me… no, wait, I need my terminal back—building system! I want the backpack, me, that I come in here with!”

Theresa’s weakened legs gave way. Her crutches clattered to the floor, and she with them. Later—how much?—she felt herself half dragged, half carried, outside. Dumped into a go-’bot. Held firmly around the shoulders.

“Come on, girl, it’s all right. Come on, girl,” Lizzie was saying, over and over. “Don’t be like this, you. You can’t be like this, I need you!”

I need you. It got through to her. I need you. Like people needed Cazie, like people needed Jackson… but not Theresa. People never needed Theresa because she was always the one doing the needing.

Not this time.

She concentrated on once more being Cazie. Her breathing slowed, the streets came back into focus, her fingers unclutched Lizzie. The click went on in her brain.

Lizzie was staring at her. “How did you do that?”

“I can’t… explain.”

“Well, don’t then, you. We have more important things. Where can you make this thing go so we can talk?”

“Home!”

“No. Probably monitored. What’s all that woods?”

“Central Park. But we can’t—”

“’Bot,” Lizzie said, “go into Central Park and stop someplace private. With a lot of trees, and no people within a hundred yards.”

The go-’bot whizzed through the streets of the enclave, entered the park, and stopped under a huge maple near the East Green. With one hand Lizzie dragged Theresa away from the go-’bot. With the other she carried a purple backpack, which she opened on the grass to pull out a terminal. The go-’bot whizzed off.

“I wanted it to wait!” Lizzie said. “Oh, never mind, we’ll call another one. I have to find Dr. Aranow right away, I’ll have to take the risk of a call—”

“Jackson’s at Kelvin-Castner,” Theresa said. She wrapped her arms around herself; her wasted body felt cold and exhausted. “But you can’t reach him. Cazie’s intercepting his calls, even emergency ones. She didn’t want me to know, but… but Sanctuary was bombed and destroyed.”

Lizzie didn’t answer. She didn’t look surprised. But then she said slowly, “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Theresa felt the tears start again. “I saw… the newsgrids.”

“Who did it?”

Theresa could only shake her head.

Lizzie demanded, “Why are you crying? There were only Sleepless on Sanctuary, right?”

“Leisha… Miranda…”

“Miranda Sharifi’s on the moon. At Selene. And who’s Leisha? Never mind, let me think, you.”

Lizzie sat over her unactivated terminal, silent. Theresa fought for control of herself. She was Cazie… she was Cazie… no, she wasn’t. She was Theresa Aranow, sick and weak and exposed in Central Park, and she wanted passionately to go home and go to sleep.

Lizzie said slowly, “Sanctuary made the fear neuropharm that infected my baby. And my mother, and Billy, and… all of them. At least, I think it was Sanctuary. They were monitoring my tribe afterward, with heavily encrypted and shielded data streams, and I don’t know how they’d even know we were infected if they hadn’t done it. Only… only if they’re all dead, all the Sleepless… God, Theresa, don’t cave in now, you!”

“I want… to go home.”

“No, we can’t. I have to find Dr. Aranow. If we can’t call him, we’ll have to go there, us… Look, I’ll call a go-’bot on my terminal. Just hang on.”

Theresa didn’t. But she didn’t panic, either; she was too exhausted, clear down to her weakened bones. She tried to tell Lizzie that a go-’bot wouldn’t take them to Kelvin-Castner in Boston because the go-’bots couldn’t leave the enclave, but she was too exhausted to form the words. The last thing she remembered was falling asleep on the grass in Central Park, genemod and fragrant, while she wept wearily for the Sleepless, who were all gone and would never come again.

Twenty-two

Jackson sat in the atrium of Kelvin-Castner on a white marble bench, surrounded by white marble columns, a decorative pool filled with milky white water, and his lawyer. The surface of the white water was occasionally broken by darting silver fish, genemod and shining. The white columns were subtly laced with silver threads. The last time Jackson had sat here, the lobby had been all paisley double helixes. Somebody had reprogrammed.

Jackson’s lawyer, in severe black business coat buttoned to his chin, was costing TenTech triple legal fees for “immediate, exclusive, and overriding service.” Jackson had summoned him from Manhattan’s best law firm an hour before, causing several other cases to be postponed. For this situation, Jackson didn’t want a TenTech lawyer. Who might have slept with Cazie.

“They can’t keep us waiting out here indefinitely, can they?” he demanded.

“No,” said Evan Matthew Winterton, of Cisneros, Linville, Winterton and Adkins. He was genemod for a certain kind of eighteenth-century handsomeness: long bony aristocratic face, sharp deepset eyes, delicate long fingers with tensile strength. Winterton flicked through a handheld terminal in write mode. “Contractually, you have guaranteed physical access to the premises as well as the data. Not, however, to the person of Alex Castner. He doesn’t have to see you.”

“But Thurmond Rogers does.”

“Yes. Although the wording here in section five paragraph four is ambiguous on a few points… Why didn’t you come to me in the first place, to have this drawn up?”

“I didn’t know I’d need you. Or anyone like you. I trusted Kelvin-Castner to do what they said they’d do.”

The lawyer just looked at him.

“All right, I was a fool,” Jackson said, and hoped the building was recording. Let Cazie and Rogers know that he knew it. “I won’t be a fool again. Which is why I’ve hired a systems expert on the same basis as you.”

“You can have a systems expert,” Winterton said, with the patience of someone who’s already said it several times. “A systems expert to write flagging, data-organization, and data-summary algorithms. What you can’t have is a systems expert to dip private corporate records, unless you have sufficient evidence for a court order that Kelvin-Castner is in violation of contract. I’ve already explained, Jackson, that you don’t have such evidence.”

No. All he had was the look in Cazie’s eyes, to which years of watching had attuned him as sensitively as a brain scan. Not the sort of thing that led to a court order. It led only to truth.

“However,” Winterton continued, in his pedantic style that Jackson suspected covered the instincts of a killer shark, “if your professional examination of the data offered, plus that of the systems expert, shows sufficient cause to suspect that Kelvin-Castner is not complying with contractual promises of disclosure, then a subpoena duces tecum is certainly possible.”

So Winterton, too, expected the building to be recording. He was warning Castner.

The wall brightened and a holo of Thurmond Rogers appeared, smiling warmly. “Jackson! I’m so glad you finally dropped by to see our progress personally!”

“No, I don’t think you will be,” Jackson said. “This is my lawyer, Evan Winterton. A systems expert is en route from New York, along with two medical consultants. We’re going to be going very carefully over your data, Thurmond, to be sure you’re in contractual compliance.”

Rogers’s smile didn’t waver. “Certainly. Jackson. Standard procedure when there’s this much at stake, isn’t it? You’re more than welcome.”

“Then let us in.”

“Now, Jackson, this is a level-four biohazard facility. The air is sealed, you know that, and we have U.S. Installation A decontamination procedures. No researcher has left the building since the start of the project. Once in, you’re in. But Alex Castner has authorized complete terminal facilities for you in the unsealed portion of Kelvin-Castner. The rooms are quite comfortable. So if you’ll just follow my holo—”

“No,” Jackson said. “My team will use the comfortable facilities, but I’m coming inside. To the labs.”

Thurmond’s face turned grave. “Jackson, that’s not advisable. Particularly with your sister so sick and susceptible to infection. She’s not Changed, is she? Cazie told me. Although the neuropharm isn’t transmissible in its current form, there’s no guarantee that a version might not mutate, or even be deliberately created, that is transmissible by direct contact.”

“I’m coming in,” Jackson said. “It’s in my contract.”

“Then I can’t stop you,” Rogers said, and from the lack of hesitation Jackson knew that this had been discussed before he even arrived. If he insists, legally we have to admit him, someone had decided: Castner or K-C counsel or even judicial-probability software. “But of course you’ll have to go through decontamination procedures, and quarantine before you can leave again. If you’ll both follow the holo, I’ll conduct you each to the appropriate corridor for—”

The holo froze.

At the same moment, Winterton’s comlink shrilled. “Code One call, Mr. Winterton. Repeat, Code One call…”

Winterton said, “Go ahead. By cable, please.” Only then did Jackson notice the thin, insulated wire running discreetly from the collar of Winterton’s coat to his left ear. His law firm’s Code One calls must come in heavily encrypted. But once the remote in his pocket had unscrambled them, the data was vulnerable to field interception. Unless it traveled to his brain not in any radiated form but by old-fashioned insulated cable. Sometimes, Jackson reflected coldly, the old-fashioned method was the best. Such as visually inspecting K-C’s experiments for himself.

Evan Winterton’s long aristocratic face suddenly trembled. The deepset eyes widened, then closed. Jackson understood that he was looking at an extreme emotional reaction. Thurmond Rogers’s frozen holo abruptly vanished.

“What is it?” Jackson said. “What’s happened?”

Winterton took a moment to answer. His voice sounded scraped. “Someone has blown up Sanctuary.”

“Sanctuary?”

“Nuclear. From the outside, missile trajectory originating in Africa. The President has declared a national alert.” Winterton stood up, took a pointless step forward, and began flicking rapidly through his remote, still listening to the ear implant. Jackson tried to take it in. Sanctuary gone. And La Solana as well. All the Sleepless, or pretty close to it… but only Theresa and Vicki and he knew that. The rest of the world thought Miranda Sharifi was safe at Selene Base.

“Who…?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Winterton said, and Jackson saw that to him, it didn’t. Cisneros, Linville, Winterton and Adkins must have many clients who dealt, directly or indirectly, with Sanctuary. Jennifer Sharifi’s tangle of corporations, lobbyists, investors, holding companies, and data-atoll activities would of course need a legion of lawyers, both Sleepless and, as blinds, Sleepers. Every financial institution in the world would react to the massacre at Sanctuary. The legal implications would take decades to unravel.

The Livers didn’t have decades. Not if the neuropharm spread.

“I’m sorry, Jackson, I have to leave,” Winterton said. “Urgent business at my firm.”

“I’ve retained you!” Jackson said. “You’re obligated to stay until we—”

“I’m sorry, but I am not,” Winterton said. “As yet we have nothing in writing. If it weren’t for the overriding need at my firm… but surely you see that this changes everything. Sanctuary is destroyed.”

Not even Evan Matthew Winterton, Jackson noted as the lawyer left, could keep the note of awe from his voice.

Jackson stared into the atrium pool, with its clouded white water. The silver fish darted and leaped ceaselessly. Their metabolism must be genetically accelerated, to keep up that activity level. He wondered what they ate.

Sanctuary is destroyed. This changes everything. And, in Vicki’s voice, It’s up to you, Jackson.

He didn’t want it to be up to him. He was one individual, not particularly effective in the world, and his professional training had only underscored his belief that no one individual made much difference. Science argued against it. Evolution was never interested in the individual, only in the survival of the species. Brain chemistry shaped the individual’s choice of actions, no matter how much that person might believe in free will. Even the great scientific discoveries, if they had not been made by the men and women who made them, would eventually have been discovered by somebody else. When the slow accretion of tiny bits of knowledge reached critical mass, then you got steamships, or relativity, or Y-energy. The individual wasn’t really important for radical change. Perhaps a Miranda Sharifi was the exception—but Miranda Sharifi had not been human. And there were no more like Miranda Sharifi left.

And Jackson didn’t want this. He wanted to live quietly with Theresa, and to be able to love Cazie again, and to practice medicine, conventional medicine, the kind he’d been trained for before these Sleepless started remaking the world. As it happened, he couldn’t have any of those things, but they were nonetheless what he wanted.

Or did he?

If he had wanted to practice conventional medicine, he could have joined Doctors for Human Aid, left his comfortable enclave, and practiced among the Liver children dying for want of medical care. If he had really wanted Cazie back, he wouldn’t have opposed her on TenTech’s role in adapting the neuropharm delivery targets. If he had wanted to live quietly with Theresa, why wasn’t he there now, doing that, in their apartment overlooking the carefully guarded Eden of Central Park?

Welcome to personal evolution.

He stood. The silver fish continued to cavort frantically in their white pool. Probably their genemod metabolism didn’t permit them to stop.

“Building,” Jackson said, “tell security I’m ready to begin decontamination for the sealed biohazard labs.”

A remote holo of Cazie appeared at his elbow. Jackson had just emerged from Decon, dressed in a disposable suit of Kelvin-Castner green. The suit wasn’t in any way protective. Maybe K-C wasn’t concerned about what might infect him as much as they were about what he might have carried in with him. Or maybe he would have to go through yet more Decon before he inspected the biohazard labs supposedly re-creating the inhibition neuropharm. If there were any such labs.

Cazie’s holo—projected from inside Kelvin-Castner, or outside?—said, “Hello, Jackson. Despite everything, it’s good to see you again in actual flesh.”

Her manner was perfect. Not seductive—she must sense he’d moved beyond that susceptibility. Not cold, not accusing, not ingratiating, not falsely friendly. Cazie spoke gravely, quietly, with just a shade of regret that things could not be different, a shade of respect for Jackson’s right to do what he was doing. Perfect.

“Hello, Cazie.” Astonishingly, he felt for her a sudden stab of pity. Because he felt nothing else. “Shall we get started?”

“Yes. There’s a lot to show you, and someone will be here soon to do that. But while you were in Decon, a complication arrived.”

“ ‘Arrived’?”

“Your friend Victoria Turner. With that Liver girl, the mother of the juvenile tissue samples. Ms. Turner is demanding to be admitted wherever you are. Demanding it somewhat vociferously, I might add.”

The Cazie projection looked at Jackson meaningfully, sudden vulnerability in her holographic eyes. Deliberate, or genuine? He’d never been able to tell, with Cazie. And now it no longer mattered.

He considered rapidly. “Admit Vicki through Decon. She can assist me in my inspection. Put Lizzie in the outside room with the systems experts from New York—are they here yet?”

“No. But I’m afraid Ms. Turner can’t blithely walk through Kelvin-Castner proprietary labs just because you have a—”

“An assistant inspector is in my contract. Read it again.”

“A trained assistant, not some amateur—”

“Vicki once worked for the Genetics Standards Enforcement Agency. She’s trained in espionage. Now show me where I can link with Lizzie immediately. While Vicki’s in Decon.”

Cazie bit her bottom lip, hard enough to draw a single bright drop of red blood. Then she said coldly, “Go down this corridor and through the last door on your left.” Jackson understood that Cazie had absorbed the changes between them, and moved on. That single drop of holographic blood was the only acknowledgment that he would ever see. Or possibly that Cazie would let herself feel.

The door led to an alcove-sized room with a standard, self-contained, building-system terminal. Jackson said, “Call to Lizzie Francy, on premises.”

“Dr. Aranow! Don’t worry about Theresa, she’s back home and asleep.”

“Theresa? Back home? What are you talking about?”

Lizzie grinned. Jackson saw that she was bursting with excitement and self-congratulations. She looked a mess: bits of grass—very green, very genemod grass—in her hair, her face dirty, her screaming yellow jacks more rumpled than he thought plastic jacks could look. She was a vivid, youthful, disorderly smear in the pristine Kelvin-Castner work cubicle, and Jackson felt his spirits lift just looking at her.

“I walked to Manhattan East Enclave to see you, because I have something important to tell you that I couldn’t open a link for—”

“Then don’t say it here.”

“Of course not,” Lizzie said scornfully. “Anyway, I got into Manhattan East all by myself, I’ll tell you how later, and then a security ’bot picked me up and took me to jail. I faked a medical emergency and forced the medunit to open up a link to your house, only you weren’t there, so I talked to Theresa, and she came down to jail and got me out—”

“Theresa? How could she—”

“I don’t know. She does something weird with her brain. Anyway, when Theresa got too scared I took her home and used your system to call Vicki, who it turned out was out looking for me. She brought me here, because she said you needed me. But I wanted to tell you first that the nursing ’bot says Theresa’s fine, and she’s asleep. And Dirk is fine, too—I called my mother.”

Jackson felt dizzy. Lizzie—a Liver, scarcely more than a child—had walked two hundred miles to New York, dipped what was supposed to be an impenetrable energy shield, subverted the Patterson Protect security equipment, and sat there eager to pit herself against one of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies… The individual wasn’t really important for radical change?

“Listen, Lizzie. I need you to write flagging programs for a list of key word combinations I’m going to give you, to search all Kelvin-Castner records. Copy everything flagged for me to look at later, with double-flagging clearly indicated.”

Lizzie stared at him, looking puzzled. What he was asking her to do was something anyone basically familiar with systems could do. He spoke the next words very slowly and carefully, looking directly into her eyes, willing her to understand.

“This is very important. I need you to do what you do best.”

She got it. Jackson could tell from her smile. What she did best was datadip fast, confusing her tracks as she went, so that even the K-C systems experts who would be following everything she did would be constantly one move behind her. She’d find hidden data that matched his flagging combinations faster than they expected, and she’d copy it to her own crystal library faster than they’d believe possible. Especially than they’d believe possible by a dirty teenage Liver.

And after she’d done it, Jackson would have sufficient cause for a subpoena duces tecum of private K-C documents.

“Okay, Dr. Aranow,” Lizzie said cheerfully, and he would swear she looked so wide-eyed and dumb just to throw off the K-C observers. She was enjoying this, the little witch.

Jackson wasn’t. He let Cazie lead him to the first of the K-C labs and introduce him to the junior lab tech (a status insult, of course) appointed to explain the research to the intrusive outsider. Jackson prepared to hear streams of irrelevant summaries, to examine ongoing irrelevant experiments, and to wonder behind what sealed doors the real work was going forward, in directions that would not do anything to make little Dirk less afraid of the trees outside his front door.

Dip hard, Lizzie. Dip fast.

By midnight, Jackson’s head ached. For hours he’d concentrated on the research he’d been shown, trying to discern behind it the shadowy outlines of what he wasn’t being shown. He hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t taken in sunlight. Brain and body couldn’t take any more.

For the first time, he realized that Vicki hadn’t joined him.

“This particular series of protein foldings looked promising at first,” said the senior researcher that Jackson had insisted replace the junior lab tech as his guide, “but as you can see from the model, the gangloid ionization—”

“Where’s Victoria Turner? My assistant, who was supposed to show up here hours ago?”

Dr. Keith Whitfield Closson, one of the leading microbiologists in the United States, looked at Jackson coldly. “I have no idea where your people are, Doctor.”

“No. Sorry. Thank you for your time, Doctor, but I think we’d better resume in the morning. If you’d just point me in the direction of my quarters…”

“You’ll need to call the building system for a holo guide,” Closson said, even more coldly. “Good night, Doctor.”

The building led him to his room, a nondescript rectangle designed for comfort but not aesthetics. Bed, closet, bureau, chair, terminal. Jackson used the room terminal to call Lizzie.

She sat alone in the same room as hours ago, a table by her elbow strewn with the remains of mouth food. Her hair stuck out all over her head, evidently pulled at in the throes of battle, and her black eyes gleamed. She didn’t look even remotely tired. Jackson suddenly felt old.

“Lizzie, how are the flagging programs coming along?”

“Fine.” She grinned. “I’m getting closer and closer to a really good flag. Oh, and Vicki said to tell you she’s on her way through Decon and will be there to talk to you soon.”

“What took her so long?”

“She’ll tell you herself. Sorry, Jackson, I have to get back to work.”

It was the first time Lizzie had ever called him by his first name. Despite himself, Jackson smiled ruefully. Lizzie now considered them equals. How did he feel about that?

He was too tired to feel anything about anything.

But when he came out of the shower, dressed in complimentary pajamas of Kelvin-Castner green, Vicki sat on his lone complimentary K-C-green chair.

“Hello, Jackson. I invited myself in.”

“So I see.” Was his room monitored? Of course it was.

Vicki looked even more exhausted than Jackson felt. Instead of the Liver jacks he’d always seen her in, she wore a pants and tunic of K-C post-Decon green. She said, “I’ve been to your house, that’s why I wasn’t here earlier. Don’t look so alarmed, Theresa’s fine. But I have a lot to tell you.”

“Maybe not—”

“—from across the room. Yes, you’re right, darling.”

She got up from the chair, walked toward him, didn’t stop. Not until she’d pushed him back onto the bed and stretched full-length beside him did she stop. She put her mouth directly over his ear and whispered, “You could act as if you meant it, you know. Monitors.”

Jackson put his arms around her. She was presumably trained for this kind of thing; he was not. He felt embarrassed, ridiculous, exhausted, and horny. Her body felt light and long in his arms, different from Cazie’s tiny voluptuousness. She smelled of Decon fluids and very clean female hair.

She covered his ear with her mouth. “Lizzie left the tribe two weeks ago because she discovered high-intensity monitors there. She traced the data stream back to Sanctuary. They were responsible for the neuropharm. No, don’t react, Jackson. Stay amorous.”

Sanctuary. Responsible for the neuropharm. Why? To keep power from shifting unpredictably to unpredictable Livers.

“More,” Vicki breathed. “Something strange is going on at Brookhaven National Laboratories. An information shutdown. After Sanctuary blew, and Lizzie felt safe dipping again, she went into the government deebees. I’m guessing, but I think Sanctuary tried to extend the neuropharm to the enclaves before somebody blew them up. The newsgrids are assuming it was Selene, but if what Theresa said was true, Selene is empty and Jennifer Sharifi killed Miranda before Sanctuary was hit. So somebody else destroyed Sanctuary. No, don’t show any reaction, Jackson. Act natural.”

Act natural. What the hell was that? Jackson didn’t know anymore. Selene is empty and Jennifer Sharifi killed Miranda and somebody else destroyed Sanctuary. His arms trembled. To still them, he pulled Vicki closer and pressed his mouth against her neck. “And… and Theresa?”

“Get comfortable, Jackson. It’s a complicated narrative. Something has happened to Theresa, and I don’t really understand what. Or how.”

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: May 20, 2121

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: Denver Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1663 (U.S.)

MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: Class D, Public Service Access, in accordance with Congressional Bill 4892-18, May 2118

ORIGINATING GROUP: “the town of Crawford-Perez”

MESSAGE:

We counted, us, on you, Miranda Sharifi. You was supposed to save us, you. Now if s too late. Three babies are sick, them, already. And it’s your fault.

Who are we supposed to look to now, us? Who?

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Twenty-three

Theresa awoke from a deep sleep to find herself back in her own bed, with no clear memory of getting there. Had Lizzie Francy brought her home, in a go-’bot? That must have been what happened.

And she, Theresa Aranow, had gotten Lizzie out of jail.

Theresa lay quietly, marveling. Her back ached, her skin itched, her bald head burned. All her muscles felt watery. Yet she had forced herself to leave the apartment, go to a jail, and free a strange girl she’d only seen once in her life. Despite her dread and doubts and anguish, which were no different than they’d ever been. Her brain was no different. Only, somehow, when she pretended to be Cazie Sanders, it was.

Not pretended to be Cazie. Became Cazie. For a little while anyway, and in her own mind.

Did that mean that if she could somehow change her brain, anybody could? Without more syringes from the Sleepless? Who no longer existed.

The nursing ’bot floated to her bed. “Time for physical rehabilitation, Ms. Aranow. Would you like to eat first?”

“Yes. No. Let me think, please.”

Theresa stared at the ’bot. For six weeks she’d heard Jackson or Vicki give it instructions. She knew the words.

“Do a brain scan, please. Print results.”

The ’bot moved into position, extended four screens around her head, and whirred gently. Theresa lay still and thought about the night last autumn when Cazie had brought her friends around, those frightening, cold men wearing rags and bees and breathing from inhalers. When the printout issued from the ’bot, she laid it on her pink-flowered bedspread.

“Now do another brain scan in exactly five minutes.”

“It is not usual to do two scans so close together. Results don’t—”

“Do it anyway. Please. Just this once, all right?”

She was pleading with a ’bot. Cazie would never plead with a ’bot. Theresa closed her eyes and became Cazie. She was striding into the jail, insisting on taking Lizzie home… she was at the Manhattan East Airfield, arranging for a charter plane… she was facing Cazie—Cazie facing Cazie!—telling her to treat Jackson better, telling Cazie what a good person Jackson actually was, telling Cazie off—

The nursing ’bot whirred.

Theresa closed her eyes. When she was just Theresa again, she studied the two printouts, trying to compare them. She didn’t know what the diagrams meant, or the numbers, or the symbols along one side. Most of the words were too hard for her to read. But she could tell that all of those things differed from one paper to the other.

So it was real.

Her brain worked differently when she was being Cazie. When she was choosing for it to work differently. She could choose to change its chemistry, or electricity, or whatever things these scans measured. It was real.

The nursing ’bot said pleasantly, “Time for physical rehabilitation, Ms. Aranow. Would you like to eat first?”

“No. Deactivate. Please.”

Theresa got out of bed. Her legs felt shaky, but she could stand. No time for a shower, though—she didn’t want to waste her strength. Even though she’d look like a scruffy beggar…

She paused. A beggar. Someone with no power to command, no power to hide, no power to trade. No power to look scary with.

She pulled off her nightdress and walked unsteadily to Jackson’s room. From his closet she took pants and a shirt, and used scissors to rip and cut them. From a pot of genemod flowers, big showy purple blooms that Cazie must have given him, Theresa took soil and rubbed it into Jackson’s clothes. The soil was probably genemod for all kinds of things, but it still dirtied the pants and shirt. They were too big for Theresa; she tied them on with string.

When she looked at herself in the mirror, she wanted to cry. Bald burned head, sunken face, dirty ragged clothes, trembling and weak… No, not cry. Exult. This was her gift, and she was finally going to use it.

“Follow me, please?” she told the nursing ’bot, relieved when it did.

She managed to get to the roof, into the aircar, and all the way to the Hudson River camp without being Cazie. She was saving it. When the car had landed out of view of the Liver camp, she took a deep breath and began.

“Ms. Aranow,” said the nursing ’bot on the seat beside her, “it really is time for physical rehabilitation. Would you like to eat first?” Theresa ignored it.

She was a beggar, a beggar with the gift. The gift of needing these frightened people. The gift of needing to be fed, to be welcomed, to be taken in. She was hungry, and weak, and she needed them. She brought the gift of need, to save them.

“Ms. Aranow, it really is—”

She was a beggar, a beggar with the gift. The gift of needing these frightened people. The gift of needing to be fed, to be welcomed—

“Ms. Aranow!”

“Stay here for half an hour, and then follow-me.”

She wasn’t Theresa, she was a beggar. A beggar with a gift. The gift of needing—

The walk to the camp nearly finished her. The camp looked deserted, but the beggar knew better. She squatted outside, in full view of a window, and began to cry. “I’m so hungry, I’m so hungry…” And she was. Theresa was hungry, the beggar was hungry, Theresa was the beggar, with her gift.

Eventually the door opened, and an old woman peered fearfully around its corner, hugging the door.

“Please, ma’am, I’m not Changed, I haven’t eaten, I’m sick, I’m so hungry, don’t leave me here…”

The woman’s fear was heavy on the air; the beggar could smell it. But her old face creased with compassion. The beggar saw that the old woman, in her long life, knew well what it meant to be hungry, and sick, and alone.

Slowly the old woman crept around the door. And with her, the two people to whom she must be bonded, another elderly woman and a young girl whose heavy features resembled the second woman. One carried a bowl, another a blanket, a third a plastic cup. Ten feet from the beggar they stopped, breathing hard, taut with fear.

“Please, please, I can’t move anymore…”

Fear warred with memory. The old women, who remembered the unChanged days of hunger and sickness, briefly became the people they’d been then. And moved toward Theresa, the stranger in need.

“Here, now, how come you’re not Changed, you? Eat this, go on… Look at her arms, Paula, they’re like sticks, them…”

Plastic bowl and spoon. A mess of gluey food, looking like oatmeal but tasting of wild nuts, slightly bitter, incompletely masked by too sweet maple sugar. The beggar wolfed it all.

“She’s starving, her… Paula, she can’t hardly move, we can’t leave her here, us…”

From around the edge of the heavy door crept Josh and Mike and Patty, clinging to each other’s hands. Jomp. Feebly, the beggar raised her bald, scarred head. They didn’t recognize her. “Not Changed’ her? Jesus Christ—”

“It’s starting to rain, she can’t stay, her, out here like that…”

Mike picked her up. The beggar winced as her tender skin was hoisted into his arms. He carried her inside, the others trailing behind.

A dim, strange room, unfamiliar faces peering at her in fear… Her throat started to close and her heart to race. But she wasn’t Theresa. She was the beggar. The beggar with a gift. They needed her to need them.

The unChanged child, the same child she’d seen before, in another life, watched her from behind her mother’s legs. So it was still alive. And older; the beggar could see now that it was a little boy. His nose streamed snot. His crippled left arm, shorter than the right, dangled from his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said to the circle of faces. A few shrank back, but the rest nodded and smiled. “Now will you let me give you something, because you helped me?”

Immediate alarm. Something different, something new. The beggar wondered, deep in a part of the brain that was someone else, how all their brain scans changed with her words.

“You can do this, accept this,” she said. “It’s just a ’bot. You’ve all seen ’bots, lots of times.”

The door to the building had been left open. The nursing ’bot, following its instructions, followed the beggar. The unChanged child, who had not seen ’bots lots of times, began to cry.

“It’s a medunit,” the beggar said desperately. Maybe if she spoke like them… “A medunit, it. Like we used to have, us. It can’t Change that baby, but it can give him medicine for his nose. It can fix his arm, it.” And, again, “You can do this.”

“Do what, us?” Josh said. He was still the most intelligent, and the least afraid. The beggar spoke directly to him.

“Do something new, Josh. You can do it, you, if it’s a good thing, and you really want to. I can teach you how, me.”

She was going too fast. Josh paled and took a step backward. But she also saw the quick gleam of interest in his eyes, before it was lost in fear. He could do it. He could learn to make different brain chemistry by pretending to be a person who was different. Maybe not all of them could, but some could. Like Josh. And maybe that would be enough.

A man was backing away from the nursing ’bot, dragging his two partners with him. “No, no, we’re fine, us. Take it away, you!”

But the mother of the crippled child stood her shaky ground. Theresa reached out and, with a corner of her torn and muddied shirt, wiped the baby’s nose. The mother let her, although her hand tightened on the little boy’s good shoulder. Still, she let the beggar, who ended up with snot all over her hand, touch her child. She had a reason to fight the fear.

Take a neuropharm, Tessie. It’s a medical problem.

With that thought, she was Theresa again. Theresa weak, Theresa frightened, Theresa in a strange place with strange people. She felt her breathing grow uneven. But she had been the beggar, she had come here, she had made a difference… and next time she would be the beggar longer. Would teach others to do it, only not now, she was so weak, she was afraid but these others understood fear, they would take care of her…

She had time for just one more thought before blackness took her. Theresa’s thought, not the beggar’s: Only partway a medical problem, Jackson. Only partway.

When she came to herself again, Theresa lay on a strange bed in the dark. No, not a bed: a pile of blankets on the floor, spread over pine branches. She could smell them, and they rustled underneath her. Irregular walls loomed on either side of her.

The Liver camp. They had put her to bed in one of their own sleeping places. Theresa remembered everything. Immediately she closed her eyes and tried to become Cazie. Only Cazie could get her out of here without panicking. She was Cazie, she was fierce and small and fearless, she was Cazie… the now-familiar click happened in her brain.

She rose quietly in the dark and groped along the closest wall. It ended in a heavy blanket hung as a curtain. After she pushed it aside, there was more light, glowing from a Y-cone in the center of the cavernous floor. The room smelled of unwashed, sleeping people. Cazie crossed it as swiftly as her battered body permitted. Halfway to the door, the nursing ’bot floated up to her. “Ms. Aranow, you’ve missed two sessions of physical re—”

“Quiet!” Cazie whispered. “Don’t talk! You stay right here.”

The ’bot whispered, “I am not programmed for override reassignment, Ms. Aranow. I must stay with you.”

The stupid thing was bonded to her. Like Jomp. Cazie scowled. “Then follow me in half an hour. Like before.”

She hobbled to the door and opened it quietly. The moon was full and high. Cazie started along the path beside the river, to the aircar. It took every bit of Theresa’s strength, borrowed and made and natural and a final strength that could only have been a gift, to make it.

“Oh, God,” a voice said. “Oh, Theresa!”

Vicki Turner. Vicki’s voice. But what was Vicki doing on the roof of her apartment building, in the cold night? Theresa, heavily asleep before the aircar landed, blinked and shrank back against the seat.

“Look at you, Theresa. Where did you go? Those rags… don’t you have a hat? Come on, let me help you…”

“I was Cazie,” Theresa said. “And the beggar.”

“What? Come on inside, you’re shivering. I’ve been waiting here for you to come home because I had no idea where to look, I didn’t even dare tell Jackson you were missing. No, Tessie, let me hold you up, here’s the elevator…”

She was asleep again. She was dreaming, she must be, strange shapes with huge teeth were chasing her across a genemod garden where all the trees hated her, she could feel their hatred coming to her in waves and she couldn’t understand what she’d done to make them want to destroy her—

“Theresa, wake up, it’s just a dream. You screamed, you’ve been asleep for hours…”

Her body was burning up. The shapes had set her on fire. Her head ached. “I don’t… don’t feel so good.”

Vicki, standing beside her bed with one hand on Theresa’s shoulder, went suddenly still. Theresa turned her head and vomited onto the pillow.

Vicki waited until she was finished. “Come on, Tessie, slide out the other way… no, you won’t fall, I’ve got you, we’re going into the bathroom… There. Theresa, listen, this is very important. Where’s the nursing ’bot?”

“I… left it.” She let Vicki wipe her face with a cool cloth. So cool. She was burning up, the sharp-toothed shapes had set her arms and legs on fire and now flames danced along them, dry and hot.

“Left it where? Where, Tess?”

“The… camp.”

“A camp? A Liver camp? You gave the nursing ’bot to a Liver camp?”

“I was… the beggar.” Her stomach heaved and she vomited again.

“At the camp. Theresa, was there any Liver there who was unChanged? Did you touch anyone who was sick?”

“The baby. His nose…”

“What about his nose? How sick was he?”

But she couldn’t answer. The bathroom jumped and swirled, and she vomited again, thin black bile in ropy gobs.

Then she was back in bed, but the bed was clean. Vicki held a pan under her mouth whenever the dry heaves came. Theresa’s head pounded from the inside, so hard she could only see in flashes, and the flashes sent hot lances through her eyes. She saw that the room was a mess. Holes in the walls, furniture knocked over… Had Vicki done that? Why had Vicki done that?

“Where is it, Tess? Think, darling. It’s important Where is it?”

“What?” Theresa said, because Vicki’s face looked so urgent and intense. Like Cazie’s face. No one could stand against Cazie. Not even Jackson. Only Theresa couldn’t be Cazie because she was too weak, too hot, she hurt too much—

“Where’s the safe, Tess? Your father’s private safe. I know he had one because I once heard Jackson say so—come on, Tessie, stay with me. Where’s the safe?”

Safe. She wanted to be safe. All her life she’d wanted to be safe, and she never had been… Take a neuropharm, Tess. But that wouldn’t make her safe, she’d always known that, she’d needed something more, something bigger—

“Where is your father’s private safe?”

“I think… master bathroom?… the wall behind the toilet…” Vicki ran off. Only then did Tess realize that the torn-apart room wasn’t hers but Jackson’s, she lay in Jackson’s bed and not her own. Jackson’s room that had once been her parents’.

From the bathroom came a tremendous crash. Jones immediately said, “Ms. Aranow, there’s a plumbing problem in the master bath. Would you like me to summon a building maintenance ’bot?”

“Yes… No…”

More crashes. Something heavy hit something else, hard. Theresa cowered in Jackson’s bed. Vicki came back in, covered with water.

“All right, it’s an old-fashioned mechanical lock. Completely undetectable by any electronics. You open it with numbers. What’s the code, Theresa?… Three numbers… Theresa! Stay with me!”

“Don’t know… call Jackson…”

“I can’t get through. Kelvin-Castner has cut him off electronically, and he probably doesn’t even know it. I can’t get through to Lizzie, I don’t know enough about systems… wait a minute. Systems.”

“I’m… am I… dying?”

“Not if I can help it,” Vicki said grimly. “And not if your brother is as sentimental and naive as I think. Jones, calendar information!”

Theresa winced. Vicki sounded exactly like Cazie. But how could that be, Theresa was Cazie…

Jones said, “What dates would you like, Ms. Turner?”

Vicki ran into the bathroom, yelling to Jones, “Jackson’s birthday. Theresa’s birthday…”

Theresa was dying. But she couldn’t die, she had to sing vespers with Sister Anne. Vespers and matins and… what came next? Something else. The unChanged Liver baby with the snotty nose was going to sing with her. She’d promised him…

“The date Jackson graduated from medical school,” Vicki yelled.

If Theresa died, the little boy with the runny nose would die, too. You can’t, Jackson, she argued with him, ghostly by her bedside. You can’t stop me. I can show them how… Don’t you see, it’s a gift? It’s always been my only gift. Need. You needed me, to take care of.

Vicki stood beside her, with something in her hand. She’d stopped yelling. In fact, Theresa could barely hear her. Vicki’s voice came from someplace very far away, still sounding like Cazie. “The code was his wedding date, damn him for futile tenacity. His wedding date to that narcissistic succubus. Theresa, listen—”

The thing in Vicki’s hand was a Change syringe.

“Listen, Tess. Jackson told me he had this put away in his safe for you. For when you someday reversed your decision about Changing. You’ve picked up some disease from that unChanged kid in the Liver camp; it must be a fast-mutating virus—there’s all sorts of microbes coming out of the woods now that the host population is without vaccines. Tess, I gave you antivirals from Jackson’s supply but it doesn’t look like any of them are working. I don’t know what I’m doing with medicine, the nursing ’bot is gone, I can’t reach Jackson. It has to be the Change syringe—”

Theresa shook her head. Tears burned her eyes.

“Tessie, you’d have had to have it sooner or later anyway, because of the radiation you took in New Mexico. The cancer curves… I’m going to inject you, Theresa. I have to.”

“G-g-g…” She couldn’t get the word out. Gift. Her gift. It would be gone if she Changed, you had to struggle to gain your soul… they said so… all the great historical people that Thomas had quoted for her…

“I’m sorry, Tess.” Vicki gripped Theresa’s arm and raised the syringe.

“Beggar,” Theresa gasped. “Gift…” She closed her eyes, and fever danced along her body and burned her soul. Gone.

She felt nothing. When she opened her eyes again, Vicki still held the syringe above Theresa’s arm.

“Tessie—” Vicki whispered. “Do you really want to die instead? I can’t make you do this… yes, I can make you. But I shouldn’t, it should be your choice… damn you to hell, Jackson! This should be your problem!”

Tess said, “My… problem.”

Vicki stared at her. “Yes. Your problem. Your choice, your life… God, Tess, how can I not… all right. Your choice. Should I inject you? If I don’t, you might die—but I don’t know that you’ll die. If I do inject you, you might or might not have your brain chemistry altered in some ways… I don’t know, I’m not a doctor!”

Her brain chemistry altered. But Theresa could already do that! She could be Cazie, could be the beggar, could make herself control her own brain… at least a little.

Enough to be Theresa.

Even if her body was Changed. She was more than her body. But hadn’t she always known that? Wasn’t that what she’d argued about so hard with Jackson?

“Tess? You’re smiling like… God, honey, your forehead is burning up… I don’t know what to do!”

“Inject me,” Theresa said, and thought, at the moment that the needle plunged in, and through the bright hot whirl of fever, that Vicki was different from Cazie after all: Cazie would never have said she didn’t know what to do.

The slim black syringe emptied into her wasted arm.

Twenty-four

When Vicki finally stopped speaking, Jackson lay silent a long time. Her body beside his on the narrow Kelvin-Castner guest bed no longer distracted him, and he certainly no longer felt sleepy.

He believed her. Even though some of the events she’d just whispered into his ear seemed incredible. Theresa—his Theresa—bailing Lizzie Francy out of jail? Going alone to a Liver camp to give them the nursing ’bot? Choosing to be Changed?

And yet he believed Vicki. But, then, he’d always believed Cazie, too, right up until he came to Kelvin-Castner…

“I have something to show you,” Vicki said, and now it was her voice that drowsed. “Proof, of a sort. But it can wait until morning. I am spectacularly sleepy. Worn out with Lizzie and Theresa, the children of the next age…”

“The what?” Jackson said, more harshly than he’d intended, because he felt so disoriented. Theresa, choosing to be Changed… Theresa, Changed. Would she still need him?

“Children of the new age,” Vicki repeated, almost mumbling. “Self-appointed…” She was asleep.

Jackson eased himself away from her limp body and off the bed. Sleep was impossible. The room, ten by ten at the most, had no room to pace. And if he used its terminal, he might wake Vicki. He didn’t want Vicki awake. She’d only hit him with additional emotional right hooks—that’s what she did—and he’d already been hit too many times today.

How many brain-rattling punches were too many? And why the hell was he the one receiving them?

Soundlessly Jackson opened the bedroom door, closed it behind him, and padded barefoot in his borrowed pajamas down the unfamiliar and institutional-looking hallway. At the end he found a small, empty lounge. Of course it was empty—this was the middle of the night. The lounge held a sofa, chairs, table, servebot—all as institutional as the hallway—and a flat-screen terminal.

“System on,” Jackson said.

“Yes, how can I help you?” An anonymous program, for waiting technicians or bored insomniac guests. Undoubtedly limited access. It was enough.

“Newsgrids, please. Channel 35.”

“Certainly. And if there’s anything else Kelvin-Castner can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“—in eastern Kansas. The tornado brushed the Wichita Enclave, which immediately activated high-security shields. In Washington, Congress continued debating on the controversial airport-regulation package; the Senate vote is scheduled for tomorrow morning. In Paris, the Sorbonne Enclave saw the first performance of Claude Guillaume Arnault’s new concerto, Le Moindre. The venerable but irascible, much-feted composer did not—”

“Internal communications,” Jackson said. The newsgrids didn’t have anything fresh on the destruction of Sanctuary. And the inhibition-neuropharm wasn’t yet major news, merely an isolated phenomenon, a local curiosity among backward Livers.

Fools. The enclaves were all fools.

“Yes, how can I help you?” the program said. “With which internal department would you like to link?”

“Not a department, an individual. Lizzie Francy. She’s a guest user somewhere in this building. In the bio-unshielded portion.”

“Certainly. And if there’s anything else Kelvin-Castner can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

Lizzie’s face came on the screen. Her wiry black hair stuck out in twenty different directions, hirsute vectors. Her black eyes gleamed with excitement, despite the deep shadows underneath. “I just tried to link with your room.”

“I’m not there,” Jackson said inanely. “Only Vicki is. She came from my and Theresa’s—”

“I know,” Lizzie said hurriedly. She raised both hands to her hair and pulled, creating even more hair vectors. “I woke her up. Jackson, I need, me, to come in to you. To see you, me, in person. Now.”

“Lizzie, it’s bioshielded here. If you come in, you can’t leave for—”

“I know, I know! But I have to come in, me. Now.”

Jackson looked more closely. It wasn’t excitement shining in Lizzie’s eyes. It was fear. And her speech had reverted to Liver.

“Lizzie, what—”

“Nothing yet. I can’t dip this system, me. It’s too hard. But I don’t like it here, me, by myself. I want Vicki. I want to come in, me!”

Lizzie, Jackson saw, was trying hard to look pathetic. A teenage girl alone in the middle of the night in a strange place, who wanted her surrogate mother. Except that this was Lizzie Francy, who had walked to New York alone, had broken into a supposedly impenetrable enclave, had dipped more donkey corporations than Jackson could probably name. The pathos was faked.

The underlying fear was not.

He said, “Dirk—”

“I know that if I come in, me, I’ll be in quarantine a few weeks. But I want Vicki, me! And I can’t dip this fucking system!” Tears filled her black eyes.

Bewildered, Jackson said, “All right. I’ll tell a holo to lead you to Decon. Thurmond Rogers gave me the code. The whole process takes about an hour. But you can’t take your terminal through, Lizzie.”

“My diary is on here! And Dirk’s baby pictures!” And she started to cry.

“Lizzie, sweetheart—”

“I want Vicki!”

So, all at once, did Jackson. Vicki might know how to deal with unexpected hysteria. Lizzie, of all people, wailing and throwing a tantrum for her mother… But Vicki wasn’t even her mother. And Jackson didn’t believe that Lizzie hadn’t dipped the Kelvin-Castner system.

“Come on in, Lizzie,” Vicki said beside him. “Leave your terminal. Isn’t the information you’re concerned about backed up at Jackson’s?”

“No! If I try, it might be zapped!”

“Then carry your personal system—you’ve unlinked it from K-C already, haven’t you? Of course you have—carry it outside the building. Through the door behind you, turn left at the end of the corridor, continue to the fire exit. Right outside are seven people in a van. Give them your system, and they’ll safeguard it while you come in to me.”

Jackson blinked. A van?

Immediately the screen split, and Thurmond Rogers said from the other half, “No proprietary data can be physically removed from Kelvin-Castner. Ms. Francy has been analyzing K-C systems, and—”

Vicki interrupted him. “Two of the six people in the van are bonded shield-security agents. They have appropriate equipment for encasing Lizzie’s system in such a way that it cannot be opened without retina scans from her, Jackson, and two Kelvin-Castner officials present at the sealing. One official could easily be you, Thurmond.”

“Even so, you can’t—”

“One of the people in the van is a lawyer. He has a court order to safely remove any Kelvin-Castner records that may be pertinent to Dr. Aranow’s legal contract with Kelvin-Castner.”

“That’s only contractual if—”

“Another person in the van is a microbiologist. She is prepared to examine Lizzie’s data before sealing and declare, as legally valid expert opinion, that it is indeed relevant to Dr. Aranow’s contract. Unless, of course, you don’t wish her to examine the data.”

Thurmond Rogers stared at Vicki with hatred.

“Go now, Lizzie,” Vicki said. “It’s a short walk, and no one will stop you. There’s, a homer stuck inside the collar of your jacks; the people in the van will track you when you move out of sight of K-C monitors. Dr. Rogers will tell the building to open the door for you, and to let you back in. With a witness from the van accompanying you. Go now, honey.”

Lizzie, her eyes still gleaming, picked up her terminal and her ugly purple backpack. She hugged the terminal tightly to her chest and walked out of link range. Vicki drew a deep breath and held it until a strange male face flashed onto the screen. In the middle of the night, the stranger looked crisp, combed, and calm. “Elizabeth Francy is with us outside, Ms. Covington. With the system. Sealing of her system to begin as soon as the Kelvin-Castner team appears, unless Kelvin-Castner prefers Dr. Seddley to examine the data.”

“Rogers?” Vicki said.

Thurmond Rogers’s hatred had not cooled. But he had himself under control. “No examination at this time. I’ll be at the east fire door immediately, accompanied by Kelvin-Castner security.”

“Certainly,” the well-groomed male face said, and Jackson thought inanely of the anonymous guest system that had turned on the newsgrids for him. “Ms. Francy, accompanied by Agent Addison, is returning into the building.” Both halves of the split screen blanked.

Jackson looked at Vicki. She was barefoot, and her hair was rumpled from sleep. Fine strands strayed across her left cheek. She looked young and defenseless. He said, “Who’s Agent Addison? And the other three people in the van?”

“Bodyguards.”

“How did you know to—”

“That’s what I do,” Vicki said. “Or what I once did. Although of course I didn’t pay for all this. You did.”

“How—”

“Lizzie dipped all your personal account numbers long ago. But she’s an ethical little creature, in her own way. I’d swear she’s never used them.” Vicki smiled. “Can’t say the same for me, clearly.”

Jackson put his hand on Vicki’s arm. Not a grip, but not a caress either. “What has Lizzie dipped?”

“I won’t know until she tells us. Or until her terminal is unsealed. But I’m more interested in why she wanted to come into the bioshielded area to speak to us in person.”

“Will the agent—bodyguard—whatever he is—stay with her through Decon?”

“Like fused atoms.” Vicki spoke to the air. “And the agent carries subcutaneous continuous transmitters. Among other augments.”

“So we wait,” Jackson said. “Until Lizzie’s through Decon.”

“We wait,” Vicki said. “System, instruct a servebot to bring coffee.”

“Certainly. And if there’s anything else Kelvin-Castner can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

Vicki just smiled.

It took an hour for Lizzie and Agent Addison to go through Decontamination. Jackson drank two cups of coffee and watched Vicki get ready to lob another grenade. By now he knew the signs. She drank her own coffee slowly, deliberately, and watched the newsgrids. Finally he said, “What specifically are you waiting to hear?”

“Anything about Brookhaven.” Vicki spoke naturally, which meant she didn’t care if they were overheard. She shifted position on the waiting-room sofa, curling her legs under her.

“Brookhaven National Laboratories? What about them?”

“I don’t know. But Lizzie’s monitor program picked up an anomaly. The program scans transmissions from selected governmental agencies to flag marked differences in volume, frequency, priority, or encoding. Information from Brookhaven to nearly everyone else showed an anomaly.” Vicki uncurled her legs and crossed her knees.

“An anomaly? Some significant changes?” Jackson said.

“A significant lack of change. The same volume, frequency, priority, and encoding every day.”

“You mean—”

“The inhibition neuropharm has penetrated an enclave shield. And not just any enclave—a government laboratory that’s supposedly biosafe.” Vicki shifted her weight again. “Of course, Kelvin-Castner already knows this, I’m sure. Damn, I just can’t get comfortable.”

She stood up from the sofa, stretched, yawned, and smiled at Jackson. For once, he saw what he was supposed to do. He said, “Come get comfortable with me.”

She crossed the room to his chair and settled onto his lap. The screen droned out routine news at a volume, Jackson suddenly realized, slightly higher than normal. Vicki’s lips nuzzled his ear. She said softly, “I want to show you something,” and unbuttoned her shirt.

Hormones surged in Jackson’s chest. But then he saw drawings on her chest.

Vicki murmured, “Fewer monitors here, probably, than in your room. Even so, turn to the left. More. There.”

Their bodies formed a closed triangle with the padded back of the chair. Vicki bent her head, and her hair screened the enclosed space from the ceiling. She unfastened more buttons.

Her breasts were smooth and pale. Smaller breasts than Cazie’s, but firmer, with a sweet high lift. On the upper curve of each was a sketch in non-smearable ink, the kind used for indelible signing and dating of off-line lab records. Such pens lay all over Kelvin-Castner. Vicki must have drawn on herself after she came through Decon. Jackson peered at the sketches; there was barely enough light to decipher the inked lines. And Vicki’s scent, the fragrance of her skin and breath, clouded Jackson’s brain.

Until he realized what he was looking at.

Two crude sketches of brain-scan printouts. The one on the left breast was Theresa’s. Even drawn upside-down and rough, Jackson recognized it. He had looked at those particular graphs daily during Theresa’s illness, and frequently throughout the years before. They were the graphs of chronic cerebral overarousal, especially in the more primitive parts of the brain that controlled emotion. The limbic, hypothalamus, amygdalae, brain stem reticular formation, rostral ventral medulla—all overaroused.

The ascending reticular-activating system—ARAS—which reacted to neural input from many other parts of the brain, showed especially frantic wave activity: low-amplitude, high-frequency, intense desynchronization. Alarm signals constantly traveled to Theresa’s cortex, which thus constantly thought of the world as an alarming place. This information in turn traveled back to the ARAS, which reacted with even more frantic electrochemical activity. Electrochemical danger signals alerting thoughts of danger that in turn alerted more electrochemical stress responses. The vicious circle, which Theresa had never let Jackson interrupt with neuropharms.

The second set of rough graphs was entirely different. In fact, it was unlike any brain scan Jackson had ever seen. The ARAS and primitive graphs showed only normal arousal, the kind associated with steady, purposeful, realistic action. But the input from the cortex to the ARAS was intense. And parts of the brain showed a veritable electrical storm. These were in the brain sections associated with intense non-somatic activity: epileptic seizures, religious visions, imaginative delusions, certain kinds of creativity. Such graphs were most often seen in visionaries in locked wards: people who believed they were Jesus Christ or Napoleon or General Manheim. But to combine that pattern with the control and clarity of high-amplitude, low-frequency alpha waves, usually a product of intense concentration or biofeedback…

“Whose is the second scan?”

Vicki said, “Theresa’s.”

“Impossible!”

“No, it’s not. They’re both Theresa. One scanned before she put herself in a mental state to do something difficult for her, and one after. I don’t know exactly how she accomplishes it.”

“I wish I could see the spinal segment readings!”

“Well,” Vicki said acidly, “there’s only so much room on my breasts. Unlike some other people’s. So I memorized only the parts of the two printouts that looked most different from each other.”

“But how could Tess—”

“Lower your voice, Jackson. And look like you’re actually nuzzling me; we’re still on monitor. I said I don’t know how Theresa does it, but I do know what she told me she thinks she does. Theresa changes her brain scan by pretending to be Cazie.”

Jackson was silent. Theresa. Pretending to be Cazie. And capable of inducing, at least temporarily, the kind of brain-activity pattern that belonged to another, entirely different temperament. Plus the activity of intense imaginative creativity bordering on the delusional. She must start with controlling her thoughts in the cortex, which changed the information feeding back into her autonomic nervous system… All experience of emotion, after all, was essentially a story that the brain created to make sense of the body’s physical reactions. Tess had found a way to reverse the process. She was telling herself some sort of story, telling it in her conscious brain, that was altering her more primitive physical reactions. Right down to the neurochemical level. She was controlling her physical world by sheer imagination and will.

Jackson hadn’t known his sister at all.

He said haltingly, “I’ll want to replicate this…”

“Of course. But not now.” Vicki rebuttoned her shirt, but she didn’t move away from him. Nestled on his lap, her breath warm against his neck, she said in a different voice, “I’m a little afraid of you, you know.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You don’t believe me. You think you’re the only one afraid of feeling very much. Well, fuck you.”

Abruptly she stood. From her words, Jackson had expected her to look angry, but instead her face showed hurt and uncertainty. And at that moment, Jackson realized that this was the woman who could replace Cazie in his life.

Immediately the realization filled him with terror. Another bitchy, bossy woman? Mocking him at every turn, struggling to control him, knowing what he was going to say before he said it… Vicki’s scent, somehow stronger now that she no longer sat so close to him, filled his nose and throat. She had left the bottom three buttons of her shirt unfastened. Deliberately? Of course. Resentment filled him at the manipulation.

Vicki’s vulnerability lasted only a moment. Then she looked again like Victoria Turner, controlled and competent.

Victoria Turner. Not Cazie. That was his confusion, not hers.

It was Theresa who was Cazie.

Jackson laughed aloud. He couldn’t help it; the whole critical, ludicrous situation suddenly struck him as unbearably funny. Or maybe just unbearable. Theresa. Brookhaven. The renegade neuropharm. Kelvin-Castner. Sanctuary. The world was blowing up, on both micro and macro levels, and he, Jackson, had chosen as his object of fear a woman who said she was just as afraid of him, except that he was too afraid to believe her, and she was too afraid to believe that he was too afraid… “Vicki—” he said tenderly.

Their eyes met across the drab room, the newsgrids blaring. The moment pulled itself out like taffy, stretched and sweet.

“Vicki…”

“You have guests on their way in,” the system announced brightly. “Ms. Francy and Mr. Addison will arrive in ninety seconds. Shall I show them in?”

“Yes,” Jackson said. He welcomed the reprieve, at the same time that he was disappointed by it.

“Certainly. And if there’s anything else Kelvin-Castner can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

Addison was a tech, clearly chosen not only to be threatening but to look it. His head brushed the ceiling; his arms bulked twice Jackson’s in diameter. And probably augmented as well: muscles, vision, reaction time. He surveyed the room professionally. Beside him Lizzie looked like a very small, very scrubbed, very fearful doll dressed in Kelvin-Castner green disposables. She threw herself at Vicki and clung. Jackson expected to hear Vicki making maternal cluckings, but this was not happening.

“Come on, Lizzie,” Vicki said, “reassemble yourself. You can’t tell me that the all-conquering datadipper gets tearful over a little deep lavage. You’ve gone deeper into government holes than Decon scrubbers just went into yours.”

Lizzie laughed. Shaky, but still a laugh. Vicki’s bawdy tartness had braced Lizzie. Jackson would never understand women.

“Now,” Vicki said, “sit down right there and tell us what you found. No, ignore the monitors. It’s fine if K-C knows that we know what we know. Do you want some coffee?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said. She looked calmer. Her hair, with no time to pull at it since Decon, lay flat and clean against her scalp. Addison finished his survey of the room and took up a position between Lizzie and the open door of the alcove.

Vicki said, “So what do we know?”

Lizzie sipped her coffee and made a face. Jackson realized she wasn’t used to the real thing. He sat down across from her, watching quietly.

“We know that Kelvin-Castner made a probability model for research on the fear neuropharm that… that Dirk has.” Lizzie’s voice faltered for only a moment. “I can’t understand most of it. But it looks like a program would furnish data to Dr. Aranow along a pre-set path. Some points on the flag had bolstered Lehman-Wagner equations for reliability… depending on what Dr. Aranow asked, the decision tree furnished consistent data. I think. What I could tell was that every branch of the tree ended in inconclusive equations.”

Jackson said calmly, “How do you know the data wasn’t actual?”

“The dates on most of the stuff was in the future.”

“Projected experiments…”

“I don’t know,” Lizzie said flatly. “How would I know?” Jackson saw that he mustn’t argue with her; her confidence might deflate again as suddenly as it had ballooned.

Vicki said smoothly, “None of us will know until the terminal is unsealed and you can examine the data directly, Jackson. But it certainly sounds like a tool for contract smashing, doesn’t it?”

Jackson said, “It does.” A large cold rage was rising in him, quietly, like black, still water. Had Cazie known?

Lizzie said, “The probability model was cross-referenced with a bunch of stuff about you, Dr. Aranow. A customized psych program.” Lizzie blushed.

So Cazie had known.

Jackson rose, but after he was on his feet, there was no place to go. Lizzie clearly wasn’t done. His cold black anger seeped higher.

Vicki said, “Good work, Lizzie. But that’s not all, is it? Why did you want so badly to join us in the biosafe area?”

Lizzie’s hand shook. The rest of her coffee spilled. “Vicki—”

“No, say it. Here. Now. So everybody knows what K-C knows.”

Lizzie’s head still shook, but her voice was steady. “There were other probability models in the deep data. Simpler ones, so I could understand them, me. They showed various probabilities of mutation of the original neuropharm. Or maybe not the original, it, maybe something it makes. That part was hard. But the models for different paths… the models…”

“Give me the Tollers average,” Jackson said coldly. “The average probability was for direct transmission of the infection, wasn’t it? From person to person, through Nielson cells in bodily fluids. What was the Tollers probability?”

Vicki said, her voice scaling upward in surprise, “You knew?”

“I guessed. I hoped I guessed wrong. But this kind of delivery vector is notoriously unstable, mutates all the time… Lizzie. What’s the Tollers probability for mutation to an airborne form that could survive independently, outside either laboratory cultures or the human body?”

“Point oh three percent.”

Low. The designer—whichever the hell Sleepless it was—of the original vector—whatever the hell it was—had at least done everything he could to prevent uncontrollable, worldwide airborne infection. At least he had done that. “And for mutation to an independent form capable of direct human-to-human transmission?”

Lizzie whispered, “Thirty-eight point seven percent.”

Better than a one in three odds. So now, Jackson thought, they knew. The inhibition infection might end up passed from person to person, through blood. Saliva. Semen. Urine? Maybe. Probably. A thirty-nine percent chance. To get that high a possibility, the lab samples must be mutating like crazy.

Vicki said to Lizzie, “You were afraid you might get infected yourself, out there. Then you’d never be able to help Dirk. So you came into the bioshielded area with us.”

Jackson said, “Even if the mutation has already happened—which isn’t likely—she wouldn’t have contracted it if she’d just stayed away from people. She’d have needed to come in direct contact with blood or have sex or—Lizzie, what is it?”

Lizzie whispered, “Or touch eyeballs?”

“Eyeballs?”

“Dead ones, I mean, me. Oh, Dr. Aranow, I done touched… oh, God, what if I got it? Dirk! Dirk! Is there a test, what if I got it, me, what if I got it!”

The girl was hysterical. Jackson remembered that Lizzie was eighteen years old, and had just come through horrors Jackson couldn’t imagine. Lizzie sobbed, and when Vicki led her down the hall and a door somewhere closed behind them, Jackson was glad for the sudden silence.

It seemed a long time before Vicki returned, although it probably wasn’t. Her genemod violet eyes looked tired. It must be some god-awful early hour of the morning.

“Lizzie’s asleep.”

“Good,” Jackson said.

Vicki stood three feet from him, not trying to touch. “So what happens now?”

“Kelvin-Castner scraps the fake data tree and does the research for real.” Jackson looked at the silent screen. “You hear that, you bastards? Now you have a motive. It’s not just Livers who inhale some weird compound. They’ve got it at Brookhaven, don’t they? Shielded enclaves can get the infection. You can get it. Better find a reverser.”

He waited, half expecting to see Thurmond Rogers or Alex Castner or even Cazie. The screen stayed blank.

Vicki said, “So now we’re all on the same side, looking out for the same interests. How cozy.”

“Right,” Jackson said bitterly.

“Except,” Vicki continued, “you and I and Theresa know something the rest of the world doesn’t. Miranda Sharifi and the Sleepless can’t get us out of this one. This time, no miraculous syringes from Sanctuary or Eden or Selene. The Supers are all dead.”

Jackson stared at her.

“No, we shouldn’t keep it secret, Jackson. We need to tell K-C. We need to call the newsgrids and the government and all the people counting desperately on Miranda Sharifi to rescue us one more time. Because K-C isn’t going to get any help from the sky. And the government has to break into Selene to verify missing persons. And people might as well stop beaming messages to Miranda, because there won’t be any dea ex machina this time. The machina broke down, and the dea is dead. Jackson… please hold me. I don’t care who’s watching.”

He did. And although Vicki felt warm in his arms, it didn’t really help. Not really.

“Jack,” Cazie said from the terminal screen, her face grim, “tell me what you think you know about Miranda Sharifi and Selene.”

He went over it for Cazie, in the middle of the night. He went over it for Alex Castner, also in the middle of the night. He went over it for the FBI and the CIA late the next morning—late because, it turned out, Kelvin-Castner did not call the feds until K-C had had a board meeting. Jackson was grateful for the prolonged sleep. For the FBI and CIA, he had to go over it a lot.

After that, he tried to push the investigation out of his mind. He spent his days with the data Kelvin-Castner now freely gave him. No reason not to. As Vicki had said, now they were all on the same side.

The twenty-first day of his quarantine, the last day, and he had worked his way through all the data K-C had. He didn’t go into the labs themselves; he was not a trained researcher. He confined himself to the medical models, which were inconclusive. Maybe a reverser to the neuropharm could be found. But they didn’t yet know where, or how.

Or when.

The cold black anger stayed with him. The anger wasn’t because devising a cure was hopeless. It wasn’t hopeless. Nor was the anger because someone had created this dangerous and cruel neuropharm, unknown in nature. For four thousand years men had created poisons unknown in nature to incapacitate each other. Nor was the anger because Kelvin-Castner had put its own profits ahead of public good, until the public good suddenly became identical with its own good. That was how corporations worked.

On the twenty-first day, as Jackson was leaving K-C for a brief trip to see Theresa, Thurmond Rogers stopped him just short of the security lock into the bio-unshielded part of the building. Thurmond Rogers in person, not holo or comlink. “Jackson.”

“I don’t think we have anything to say to each other, Rogers. Or are you a messenger boy for Cazie?”

“No,” Rogers said, and at his tone Jackson looked closer. Rogers’s skin, genemod for a light tan meant to contrast with the golden curls, looked blotched and pasty. The pupils of his turquoise eyes were dilated, even in the simulated sunlight of the corridor.

“What is it?” Jackson said, but he already knew.

“It’s gone to direct transmission.”

“Where?”

“The Chicago North Shore Enclave.”

Not even among the Livers. Someone had gone outside North Shore—or someone else had come in—and contracted the neuropharm from blood, semen, urine, saliva, breast milk. It was in non-inhalant form.

He said crisply to Rogers, “Behavior of the victim?”

“Same severe inhibition. Panic anxiety at new actions.”

“Medical models?”

“All match known effects. Cerebrospinal fluid, brain scans, heart rate, amygdalae activity, blood hormone levels—”

“All right,” Jackson said, meaninglessly, since it was not all right. But all at once he knew why he was so angry.

“It’s the same thing, over and over,” Jackson said to Vicki. They sat side by side in his aircar, lifting off from Boston. This month the Public Gardens below them bloomed yellow: daffodils and jonquils and roses and pansies in artful genemod confusion. The dome of the State House gleamed gold in the late afternoon sun, and beyond the dome the ocean brooded gray-green. After a month in front of terminals, Jackson’s fingers felt awkward on the car console. He set it for automatic and flexed his shoulders against the back of the seat. He was very tired.

Vicki said, “What’s the same thing over and over?”

“People. They just go on doing the same thing over and over, even if it doesn’t work.”

“What specific people are we talking about here?” Vicki laid her hand on Jackson’s thigh. He covered with his own, and immediately thought, Where are the monitors? Twenty-one days of holding back, self-conscious about being observed… Only there were no monitors in his aircar. Or were there? The car had been sitting for three weeks under the Kelvin-Castner dome. Of course there were monitors. And anyway, he was too tired for sex.

“All people,” he said. “Everyone. We just go on doing whatever we’ve always done, even if it doesn’t work. Jennifer Sharifi just went on trying to control everything that might threaten Sanctuary. Miranda Sharifi just went on relying on better technology to lift up us poor benighted beggars who have to sleep. Kelvin-Castner just goes on following profits, no matter where they lead. Lizzie goes on datadipping whatever system’s in front of her. Cazie—” He stopped.

“—goes on performing for whatever audience feeds her hunger for applause,” Vicki said, more tartly. “And what about you? What do you go on doing, Jackson?”

He was silent.

“Didn’t think of applying your own theory to yourself? Well, then, I will. Jackson goes on assuming that the medical model can explain everything about people. Profile the biochemistry and you understand the person.”

He glanced sideways at Vicki. Her eyes were closed; Jackson was suddenly sorry not to see their pure violet. She had removed her warm fingers from his. He said, “You sound like Theresa.”

“Theresa,” Vicki said, not opening her eyes, “is learning to do something different. Very different.”

“It’s still just a biofeedback control of the brain chemistry that—”

“You’re a fool, Jackson,” Vicki said. “I don’t know how I can be so much in love with a man who’s such a fool. Watch Theresa when she learns that the inhibition neuropharm is transmissible. Just watch her. And meanwhile—car; land there, in that soonest clearing at two o’clock.”

The flowers in the clearing weren’t genemod. The grass was rough, smelling of wild mint. The air was a little too cold, at least for naked bodies. But Jackson discovered that he wasn’t nearly as tired as he thought.

Afterward, Vicki clung to him, her long body imprinted with marks from grass and weeds, smelling of crushed mint. He stroked her goose-pimpled skin. Against his shoulder, he felt her lips curve into a smile.

“Solely biochemistry, Jackson?”

He laughed, feeling too good for annoyance. “You never give up, do you?”

“I wouldn’t appeal to you if I did. Solely biochemistry?”

He wrapped his arms around her. They had to return to the aircar; this scraggly field was hard ground. Also exposed. Also blanketed with biting insects. In addition, he had to see Theresa, get back to Kelvin-Castner, launch the legal fight to get K-C to share data with the CDC now that the neuropharm had moved from random terrorism to public health crisis…

Vicki’s voice held sudden uncertainty, that unexpected quality that emerged in her at unexpected times. “Jackson? Biochemistry?”

He held her tighter. “Not biochemistry. Love.”

And that both was, and was not, the truth. Like everything else.