Spin State

Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.

The rats were leaving, boiling up out of the pit like survivors of a firebombing.

“They know the roof’s hung up,” Daahl told Li when one skittered into the room, panicked, and ran over her foot before it found its way back out. “There’s a big fall coming. I wouldn’t stay down there any longer than you have to.” He glanced at her, his pale eyes flashing blue as a Davy lamp’s flame in whitedamp. “I wouldn’t go down at all, frankly.”

They were at the strikers’ de facto command center in the Pit 2 headframe. It had taken Li and Bella a long, hard day and much of a night to get there, traveling through the tunnels beneath the birthlabs.

Cohen had ridden Li all through that long night journey—if ridden was the right word for it. He heard every thought, felt every twinge and misstep. And she felt him, knew him, all but was him. Finally she understood Cohen’s habitual confusion of pronouns. I, you, we. Yours. Mine. None of those words meant what she was used to them meaning. And none of them meant the same thing for more than a breath or two.

There were still borders between them, even now that the intraface was fully up. There were doors and walls, some of them solid enough to keep him out—or, more often, to keep her out of him. But no line of separation stayed put long enough for her to set a mark on it and say, Here I end, here he begins. In the end the walls only reminded her of how tangled up in him she was, how impossible it was to think or feel or even breathe without brushing up against him.

The headframe had changed since Li’s last visit. Strikers crowded the creaking corridors. Someone had brought in a truckload of mattresses and microlaminate blankets, and people were bedding down in the halls and changing rooms, even cooking on home-built methane stoves. Everyone was moving too fast, talking too loud, their voices pitched a little high for comfort. Li knew the mood. She’d seen it in students, navvies, line workers. It was the feel of any ragtag amateur army waiting for the riot troops to move in. But of course, she’d always seen it from the other side of the lines.

She pushed that thought away and stepped to the window. Someone had parked a mine truck outside so that its undercarriage partially shielded the window. She scanned the horizon between the truck’s wheels. The night was dark except for a scattering of cloud-strafed stars. The flat plain of the coalfield stretched away for miles, broken only by mountainous tailings piles and the rust-gnawed bones of mining machines. The place was chaos on infrared. The tailings piles were smoldering, as always. The junked vehicles and empty oil barrels still threw the sun’s heat back into the air hours after nightfall. But Li didn’t need infrared to see where the troops were; her eyes instinctively sought out each rim and hollow that could hide a soldier, snapped into focus every time firelight reflected off a sniper’s optical sight. Please God, she thought, just get me underground before I have to decide whether or not I’m willing to shoot at those kids.

“When will they move in?” she asked Daahl as Ramirez and Mirce Perkins walked in.

Daahl turned to them. “Any word?”

“Nothing new,” Ramirez said. Mirce didn’t answer at all, except for a curt shake of her head.

“We think we’ve got another day or two,” Daahl said.

“What happens if they move in while we’re underground?”

Mirce shrugged. “If they come, they come. And our biggest problems underground are going to be air and time, not ground troops.”

She rolled out a map and traced their path on it. Daahl’s guide would get them into the Trinidad, then split off into the back tunnels toward a vertical borehole that didn’t show up on the AMC maps. With a little scaling, the hole should be clean enough for someone at the top to lower fresh oxy canisters as long as there was a man at the bottom with a guide rope. When the live field run was complete, Li and Bella would make their way back to the oxygen dump, and Daahl’s men would haul them to the surface.

Li listened to Mirce with half her mind and traced the route on the maps with the other. It was doable. Eminently doable. She’d taken dicier gambles more than once. The only question this time was whether the mine was going to let them get away with it.

“You just get yourselves back to the drop,” Mirce concluded. “Once we rendezvous there we’ll evaluate the situation, and I’ll either get you out through the main gangway or up into the hills through the bootlegger tunnels.”

“You?” Li stared at her. “You’re not going. You can’t go.”

“Of course I am,” Mirce said. “I’m the best.”

Li looked toward Daahl, but before she could speak she heard a sound that raised her hackles and sent Daahl and Mirce diving toward the window. Rifle shots. And the shots came from this side of the line.

Li stepped up behind Daahl and Mirce and tried to see out the window herself. Hopeless. All she could see was movement, out across the flat plain in the twisting fire-shot shadows. Then the movement turned into a shape, the shape into a man. A man walking, holding a white flag.

“Tell them not to shoot!” Daahl snapped, and Ramirez took off out the door, running.

“Christ,” Li muttered. “That guy’s taking his life in his hands.”

“More than just his life,” Daahl said.

They waited. Ramirez reappeared in the doorway.

“We know who it is,” he said. “A militia officer seconded to Station Security. Shantytown kid too, I guess. Brian McCuen.”

Li caught her breath.

“Now why the hell would they send Brian?” Daahl asked slowly, quietly.

“Because,” Mirce said, her eyes as cold as the night side of a dead space station, “they think we won’t kill him.”

The miners outside, and maybe a few of the ones inside, got to McCuen before Li could. By the time she finally saw him, one eye was threatening to puff shut and he looked more than a little tattered around the edges.

“Are you crazy?” she said.

He just gave her a lost-puppy-dog look. “I need to talk to you alone.”

Li glanced at Daahl standing just behind her, at Mirce slouching in the open door.

“We’ll give you ten minutes,” Daahl said.

Mirce said nothing, just detached herself from the doorframe as Daahl went by and pulled the door shut behind her. Li sure as hell hoped she’d never stared at any Syndicate prisoners the way Mirce stared at McCuen.

“I haven’t told them anything,” McCuen said when they were alone, “except that I had to talk to you.”

“Well, you’re talking to me. What have you got to say for yourself?”

He just kept staring at her, trust, fear, suspicion chasing across his boyish face.

“Who sent you, Brian?”

His eyes evaded hers for a moment. “Don’t you know?”

“Haas?”

He glanced around the room hesitantly, searching the ramshackle walls for surveillance plants. Then he mouthed a single, silent syllable: Nguyen.

Don’t trust him, Cohen breathed into her backbrain. Not if he comes from Helen.

Li brushed the thought aside. She couldn’t afford not to trust Brian. Not if it might mean Nguyen had decided to slip her a much-needed ace under the table.

She pulled up a chair, sat down, and bent her head toward him so he could keep whispering at her. The room wasn’t bugged as far as she knew. And if it was bugged, then Mirce, for one, wasn’t going to waste much time beating whatever McCuen had whispered to her out of him. But if he wanted to play secret agent, let him. What harm could it do?

“She knows everything,” he told her, so close she could feel his breath in her ear. “I sent her the tape from airport security and she worked out the whole thing. Who’s holding you. Why. What Korchow wants from you.”

Li could just imagine. Nguyen would have pumped McCuen for every spin of data he had without his even realizing he’d been squeezed dry. She would have had him hypnotized, wrapped around her finger from that first riveting streamspace glance. But that was Nguyen’s job, of course. You could bet your life on her doing it right—and on her being there to bail you out when it really counted. As long as you delivered. As long as you were loyal. As long as it was in the Secretariat’s best interests to bail you out.

“What about Gould?” she asked, brushing Cohen’s nagging questions aside. “Any progress there?”

“That’s why Nguyen moved up the troop landings. To keep Korchow on schedule. To make sure we get this wrapped up before Gould gets to Freetown. She says to keep cooperating for now and just bide your time. I’m supposed to go down with you. Stay with you through the whole thing. I’m supposed to tell you that Korchow’s planning to turn on you. They think he’ll try to kill you when he has his data.”

That wasn’t exactly news, though Korchow seemed too pragmatic to kill anyone as long as he thought he could still wring a little more information out of them under threat of blackmail.

“And she says not to worry about Alba either,” McCuen added. “It’s taken care of.”

Li stared at McCuen, shocked, but he didn’t seem to have any idea of the enormity of what he’d just said. “So when do we make our move?” she asked when she had gotten her composure back.

“As soon as live field run’s over. You and me.”

“And Cohen.”

McCuen blinked. “What?”

“You and me and Cohen. The AI.”

“Oh. The AI. Of course.” Had she imagined it, or was there the slightest hint of hesitation there?

“And what are we supposed to do with Korchow?”

“Improvise.”

Li felt the slim hardness of her Beretta at her waist. She looked at McCuen. He looked away.

What had Nguyen really told him? Was he holding out on her, or was it just the nerves any new operative went through on a first covert mission? Could she afford to turn down an ally with a strong back and a steady trigger hand? She sure as hell didn’t want to be down in the pit with no one but Bella to back her up. Assuming Bella would back her up.

“Right,” she said after a pause she knew had lasted a few beats too long. “We’ll play it Nguyen’s way. You up to it?”

McCuen nodded.

“Then put on your game face and let’s get out there.”

Mirce moved through the mine with the surefootedness of a pit dog. Her deceptively slow stride ate up ground at a pace that seemed totally unaffected by the steep grades and rough shale layers. She wasted nothing. Every step was thought out, every flick of her pale eyes was calculated. Her gestures, her breath, her steadily pumping muscles all embodied a chillingly elegant syllogism: wasted motion was wasted air; wasted air was wasted time; and miners who ran out of time in a gas-logged mine died.

She made them take regular breaks “for safety reasons.” During the breaks, when everyone but McCuen took their masks off for a few brief minutes of unobstructed breathing, Mirce began to talk to Li.

She talked about her work, her new husband, her new children. Quietly. Not naming names. Not touching on the past. Just talking. She talked only during the breaks at first; then Li fell in next to her and she spoke while they walked, the blurred and impersonal voice that filtered through her rebreather oddly mismatched with the intimate daily details she was telling Li. She asked nothing about Li’s life. From little ends and pieces she let drop, Li realized that she knew a lot. But it was all just the same stuff anyone who’d been watching the spins would know. Nothing personal. Nothing dangerous.

As Mirce talked, Li realized that it wasn’t a bridge she was building between them with her words, but a wall. Whatever common ground the two of them might once have traveled, Mirce seemed to be saying, Li’s life was now a foreign country from which no road led back to Compson’s World. They’d chosen, back in that past Li no longer remembered. A father’s life for a few doctor’s visits. Li’s old future for a new, better future. And Mirce lived in a world where there was no room for regrets or refunds.

By the time Mirce left them at the stairs down to the Trinidad, Li knew she was right. There was no going home. From the moment she’d stepped into that chop shop, there’d been no home to go back to.

She felt the glory hole long before they reached it. The condensates had been sleeping the last time she’d been there, she realized, dreaming fitfully. Now they were wide-awake.

Quantum currents licked through the dark mine, searching, scanning, questioning. You feel them too? Cohen asked.

She didn’t have to wonder why he asked; she could feel him, feel the havoc the crystals were wreaking on his all-too-fragile networks. As if whoever controlled them were looking for something. Or someone.

We won’t have to worry about setting up Korchow’s link, Cohen said before she could finish fitting words to the thought. They’ve already done it for us.

He had locked down all his systems in a last-ditch effort to hold off the condensates’ assault, and she was amazed for a moment that he could even speak over the intraface. But then he wasn’t speaking, was he? The link between them had gone beyond speaking. And when she answered him, she was just thinking to herself, thinking to the part of Cohen that was her.

What do we do?she thought, and the answer was there before she knew she had asked the question.

We let them in.

Then there was just light facing off against darkness and a confused sensation of Cohen pushing her behind him with the hopeless bravado of a child trying to protect another smaller child.

It was like waiting for a tsunami to hit. The wave loomed, crested, crashed down on them. Then they were inside it, and its boiling undertow was sucking at their knees and ankles, threatening to topple them, leaving them soaked to the skin and in danger of losing their footing on the shifting sands beneath them.

The crystals probed more gently after the first assault. They moved in probability sets, long spiraling quantum operations as incomprehensibly elegant as the sinuous columns that filled Sharifi’s notebooks. But there was something behind the equations. A single presence. A presence as much bigger than Cohen as Cohen had been bigger than the semisentient on Alba. Li felt it thinking, seeking, considering. And most of all she felt its ominous fascination with Cohen. With the intricate manyness of this strange new not-animal. With what he was. With what he could be used for.

It’s the mine, Cohen thought. It wants to know us. Taste us.

But it was more than knowing that it wanted. More than tasting.

“Do you hear it?” Bella cried, oblivious to the life-and-death battle being waged along the intraface. “Don’t you hear it? They’re singing!”

Heat. Darkness. A dizzying flash of leaving, of arriving. Then Li was standing just where she’d been standing before, looking around the glory hole.

But not the same glory hole she’d stood in with Bella and McCuen a moment ago. This one rose higher above her head. Its fan vaults were clean, unstained by smoke. Her feet stood on hard living rock, not the fire and flood’s detritus. And this glory hole was cluttered with equipment—equipment Li herself had only seen in twisted ruins.

Sharifi’s equipment. Li raised her hand and saw the crescent of scar tissue between thumb and forefinger. Sharifi.

But she wasn’t just in Sharifi this time. She was her. She knew her thoughts, her memories, her emotions. And she knew that it was some unfathomable combination of Cohen and the mine itself who had made this possible. Even as she walked through Sharifi’s dreaming memory, the intelligence behind the crystals was using Cohen, reading him, threading itself through him as subtly and inextricably as ceramsteel twining through nerve and muscle. She felt the crystals’ exultation thrumming along the intraface just as clearly as she felt Cohen’s terror.

Sharifi knelt, reached for a gauge, tied off a loose wire. And with each little physical act she thought, considered, remembered. Li shuddered as she realized that Sharifi’s understanding didn’t end with her death, that it was tinged with the piercing regret of hindsight. Because what Sharifi had found in the glory hole was death. Her own death, in the place she least looked for it.

“Do you have to hang over me like that?” she asked Voyt.

He backed off. “So where’s Korchow? Off stealing the silverware?”

“I’m here.” A shape stepped out of the shadows. Bella. Of course. But Bella had never smiled that smile, never walked with that deliberate catlike stride. Where Bella crept—and Li realized only now that it was creeping—Korchow danced. “Ready?” he asked.

Sharifi frowned. “Just keep your end of the bargain.”

“How could I forget it?”

Sharifi linked with the field AI, and Li felt the blossoming thoughtline run bright as new wire between Sharifi’s wetware and the orbital field array high above them. Sharifi’s link was nothing, she realized. A mere echo of the bond between her and Cohen. What Sharifi had done they could do. And more, much more. She felt a wild elation rising inside her, her excitement and Cohen’s feeding off each other in this still-strange alchemical union of her one and his many.

We need more, Cohen thought. We need to know what she’s doing.

Li snapped back into focus. Sharifi was still fiddling with wires and monitors, testing the link, readying herself. Meanwhile the mind behind the crystals was probing, exploring. Li felt it run through her, coursing up the line to the field AI high above them, enveloping woman and AI alike.

But Sharifi just kept fussing. Stalling. Couldn’t she feel that the link was up? Her precious dataset was there for the taking. What the hell was she waiting for?

Li knew the answer as soon as she asked the question. She could hear Sharifi think, feel her pulse, her breath, the stray ache of a pulled muscle. She wasn’t waiting for anything. She’d already gotten everything she’d come for. The experiment was over, run off the rails by the crystals themselves. She had her answers—the same answers she’d hidden from Li, from Nguyen, from everyone. Now she was playing out a script, playing Nguyen and Haas and Korchow off against each other, hoping she could do what she had to do before the bill came due.

Nguyen had been right all along; Sharifi had betrayed them.

But not to Korchow. Not for the Syndicates, not for money, not even for Bella. She’d done it for this—this first tentative contact with the life swirling through the fan vaults and pillars of the glory hole.

This was the thing that had brought her to Compson’s World. The money, the fame, the dream of cheap cultured crystal had been not lies, exactly, but merely surface reasons. The real reason had been the same one that brought Compson here, and so many explorers and scholars after him: life, the only other life in the universe besides humans and the creatures humans made.

It had been in front of Li’s eyes all the time, clear as clear water, scribbled in Sharifi’s dog-eared copy of Xenograph.

We came into the country like saints going to the desert, Compson had written. We came to be changed. But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.

And Sharifi had answered, But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?

This mine was Sharifi’s desert. She had come here to see, to understand, to be changed. And she wasn’t going to make the same mistake Compson had made. She wasn’t going to pass the maps up the food chain and trust TechComm to protect the crystals. She thought she had a better plan.

Li glanced at Voyt and Korchow. They had backed off a little, following Sharifi’s preparations. Haas’s man and the Syndicates’ man. One of them after the synthetic crystal the Syndicates needed so desperately. The other after… what? Who did Voyt answer to, Haas or the UN? And which one of them was going to kill Sharifi?

Suddenly Li knew that she didn’t want to be watching—let alone watching from inside Sharifi’s skin—when it happened. She didn’t need to see who had battered Sharifi’s head, mangled her hand. She didn’t need to watch them break her. She owed Sharifi at least that privacy.

Something shifted in the shadowed air. Something vast, slow, ancient. There was no breeze, no sound, no outer evidence of the change, but it was as clear as a door opening. The data shooting between Li and Cohen over the intraface spiked. Li felt the same waiting-for-the-flood feeling that had overpowered them when they first stepped into the glory hole. Then it was on top of them.

It flowed through her like blood coursing through arteries. It filled her lungs, filled her mind, filled every hollow space of her. And when it had taken all of her there was to take, it made new spaces to fill, new universes inside her. Her skin stretched across oceans and continents. Her nerves were the petrified, planet-spanning rivers of carbon beds, her veins fault lines and ore seams, her eyes dusky stars burning in the dark heart of the earth.

She saw the change of seasons, and the slow seasonless passage of time in the Earth’s deep places. She watched the welling up of mountains, the shift of continents. She saw life rise and struggle and fall and pass into darkness without looking back. She looked out through the eyes of every creature that had lived in the depths, that had crawled on the planet’s skin or swum in its long dry oceans. And then, in what seemed but a moment, the water was gone and the wind swept across the steppes with nothing but the soft fur of algae and lichen to feel it.

She watched humans come. Saw the explorers and surveyors, the brief flickering lights of miners. She felt the stirring and pricking of a world waking to the thought that it had children again—even if they were strange, murdering, voracious children.

Sharifi had seen only a pale echo of this, filtered through the uncomprehending field AI. But it had been enough. She had known. And once she knew, there would be no room for deals or compromises or secrecy.

It was that simple. It was that impossible. Of course they had to kill her.

Something snapped, and Li was blind, cut loose in the void.

But not alone. This was a shared darkness. Someone waited in the many-trunked forest of crystals. A man, thin, dark-haired, his face lost in shadow. A man who slipped in and out of sight as she walked toward him, like stars flickering behind blowing cloud cover.

“Not him,” she whispered to whoever or whatever was listening. “Please, not him.”

But it was him. It was the father Li remembered from his worst sickness. So thin, so pale, so collapsed in on himself that he was barely bigger than she was. He raised a wasted hand to wipe away tears she hadn’t known she was crying. She collapsed into his arms and buried her face in the cloth of his shirt that smelled of rain and of coal dust and of him.

We are so glad. The thought swept through her more fiercely and intimately than even Cohen’s thoughts. So glad it was you.

We, Li said.

Shall I show you?

He pulled away from her, his hands lingering on hers. He took a step backward. He reached up to unbutton his shirt.

Li flinched, hands jerking up to cover her eyes. It was the gesture of a terrified child, the child whose growing up had been wiped out of her jump by jump, leaving no bridge from past to present, no path from her old fears to the understanding she should have grown into in the years since her leaving.

There are no monsters, the thing that wore her father’s flesh said. Not down here. Not even you.

He unbuttoned his shirt with agonizing slowness. She watched, button by button, breath by breath, knowing that her heart would stop if she had to look at that black horror that haunted all her dreams.

But the dream had changed. Or she had.

His body was a map now. The life of the planet coursed through him—this planet that had given birth to both of them. His wasted muscles were mountain ranges. Oceans waxed and waned in the bone house of his ribs. The secrets of the Earth lived in him.

She dropped to her knees, dazed, ears ringing with the song of the rock around her. She laid her hands on him, learned him, studied him. She passed from not knowing to knowing in the space of a touch. The world reached out through him and changed her, and she let it. Just as Sharifi had.

Do you understand?he asked. Do you see what this world could be? What it wants to be?

Yes.

Do you believe in it?

Yes.

Do you?

She trembled. Because he wasn’t asking what she believed in. He was asking what she was willing to do about it.

“I can’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. I can’t do what Sharifi did.”

Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.

White light. Open spaces. The sweep of a hawk’s wing above her.

She stood on a dry plain. Silver-green sage covered the hills. Sunflowers marched across the valley like the squads and battalions of an army in parade-ground finery. The wall behind her was overrun with blooming jasmine, and the musky smell of the blossoms was as hot and exotic as the brilliant plain before her.

She jumped at the sound of a footfall behind her. A tall, long-limbed girl strode across a courtyard under the blazing sun, white skirts kicking up in front of her. Red dirt coated her bare feet, faded into the tawny gold of her ankles. Brown curls blew around her face and veiled the smiling mouth, the hazel eyes.

Cohen?

She felt him in her mind, restful and reassuring after the terrifying presence in the glory hole.

“The whole planet is alive,” she said, “isn’t it?”

“Alive,” he repeated. She felt him turning the idea over, pondering it, poking at it. “I guess that’s as good a word as any other.”

“What does it want?”

“To talk to us. Or to talk to our planets, I imagine. I doubt it understands that we’re not mere parts of a larger being.”

“So what do we do now?”

He gazed down at her, squinting a little in the bright sunlight. “That’s not quite the same question for me as it is for you.”

Her stomach wrenched as she remembered what she was here for. To hand the condensates over to Nguyen and TechComm. To do what Sharifi, in the end, had not been willing to do. Was she even now walking in Sharifi’s footsteps, stumbling through the same impossible choices that had led Sharifi to her death?

“What would you do?” she asked Cohen.

“What would I do? Or what would I do if I were you?”

She looked into Chiara’s eyes. She could see Cohen lurking behind them now, so close she could almost catch him, almost know what it was to be that shifting, kaleidoscopic many-in-one.

“Both,” she said.

“For me it’s simple. Or rather it’s a matter of choices I made so long ago that they don’t seem like choices anymore. I’d like to be able to say that it’s a matter of principle, that I don’t think TechComm or Korchow or anyone else has the right to control Compson’s World. But it’s not that. It’s just… curiosity, I suppose.” He paused, looking down at the rich dirt blowing past their feet. “You have more to lose than I do, of course.”

She took her hands from his, unable to bear the mingling of physical intimacy and this newer and more threatening intimacy. “Are we safe here?”

“It makes no difference; we couldn’t leave if we wanted to. The worldmind wants us here.”

“The worldmind? Where’d you get that from?”

“That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

They walked under the hot sun of a world that had been dead for two centuries. The far fields had been cut already. Trout-colored horses grazed among the knee-high sunflower stalks, their silver tails swishing back and forth like pendulums. Birds stabbed for worms in the furrows, and the tall stalks harbored invisible singers that Li’s oracle told her were called crickets.

She’d never seen a cricket, and she kept stopping, searching through the tall green stalks for them until Cohen laughed and asked if she wanted him to catch her one.

“No!” she said, speaking too quickly, too sharply. A memory welled up in her, clear as running water across the stretch of more than twenty years.

Her twelfth birthday. Her father had bought her a small-gauge over-under Gunther. It was fake, a rim-manufactured knockoff, but it was still an outrageously extravagant present. They climbed into the hills at dawn, crossing creeks heavy with red spring runoff, too excited to stop and look for the stocked fish that lurked in the riffles. They penetrated far enough into the canyons to smell native air and feel their breath start to shorten. When her father started coughing, they dropped altitude and hiked sideways along the cut line of an old lake bed.

They found the magpies just as the sun began to silver their backs and flash blue fire off their long tail feathers.

The magpies made a game of it, just as they made a game of everything. They hopped from tree to tree flaunting themselves, cackling at the slow, stupid, earthbound humans. She loved them. She loved their defiant beauty, the strong curve of chest to wing to pinion, their gleefully unashamed thievery. She wanted one of them more than she could ever remember wanting anything.

She snugged the shotgun into her shoulder the way her father had shown her. She led the target, reveling in the dog-sharp reflexes that had been her construct’s birthright long before the first piece of Corps wetware burrowed into her spine. She squeezed the trigger softly, felt the give of it, the final burr of resistance as the slack of the uncocked mechanism gave way to the sharp, clean union of brain, trigger, firing pin. She fired, and the blue-black-and-white glory that had been a magpie burst into a tumbling whirl of blood and feathers.

It fell into a puddle. She remembered that very clearly. She remembered running, impatient to see the bird, to get it in her hands, to possess it. She remembered kneeling in the dirt, picking up a broken, bedraggled, limp thing with a shattered chest. She remembered crying. It was the last time she could remember that Caitlyn Perkins had cried. She certainly hadn’t cried when her father died.

She surfaced from the memory to feel Cohen beside her, inside her. Are you the hunter or the bird? he asked. A question only Cohen could ask.

She looked into Chiara’s gold-flecked eyes and thought that the world was the bird, and the miners were, and the crystals. Everything people used and used up. “I guess I’m both,” she said. And she felt Cohen accept both the spoken answer and the unspoken one.

In place of a reply, he reached over her shoulder and plucked a cricket out of the greenery to sit chirping on his outstretched palm. “Disappointed?”

“No,” Li said.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?”

“It’s a she?”

“We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”

He put his hand against a sunflower stalk. The cricket marched onto the stalk with slow dignity, sat down, and went on singing as if its visit to Cohen had been just another walk under the warm sun.

“How did you do that?” Li asked.

“Oh, this is all me. It’s a place I used to have in Spain. Gone now, of course. We’re in one of my memory palaces. Whatever the crystals are doing to us, they’re using my networks to do it. They’ve just… locked us in a back room while they search the house, I guess you could say.”

“Christ!”

“Yes. Well. There’s not much we can do about it. And you don’t want to see what’s happening out there. It has a lot more to do with shooting magpies than catching crickets.”

She stared at him, stricken, but he was already bending over the cricket, talking about what crickets did and ate, how they used their legs to make that fantastic, improbable noise. “They always liked hot, dry places,” he said. “Spain. Texas. You couldn’t wake up in one of those places and not know just where you were in the world.”

“They’re extinct?”

“Long, long before you were born, my dear.”

“They’re going to turn Compson’s World into another Earth. Another Gilead. And we can’t stop it, can we?”

“We can change the battle lines.”

“Just buying a little time, Cohen. Is it worth it?”

“For me it is. If ALEF gets the intraface.”

“And what if the price of getting the intraface is losing the planet to the Syndicates?”

“I don’t have any grudge against the Syndicates. Maybe you do. Maybe you’re right to.” He sounded impatient. “I can’t choose for you.”

Li scuffed her feet in the dirt, kicking up red dust puffs from the furrow bottoms. She reached out to Cohen, felt the shape and breadth and complexity of him. He reached out just as she did, and they got tangled in each other and backed away again. They were dancing around each other, she realized, putting up a new wall for each one they dismantled, closing another door for each door they opened. Acting as if they had all the time in the world, instead of none at all.

“Cohen?” she asked.

“What?” He had gone on a little ahead, and now he drifted back and stood facing her.

“What you said back on Alba about… AIs. About the way they’re put together. Do you think a person can change something like that? Change their code? Change what they were made to be?”

“Are we still talking politics?” She felt the flurry of unspoken questions behind his words.

“No. Or… not only politics.”

He gave her one of those looks he’d gotten into the habit of throwing at her lately. A look that put everything in her hands, that laid everything he wanted right out in front of her and left her with no excuses, no evasions.

She met his eyes. The moment when she could have laughed, or glanced away, or turned aside passed.

“I think a person can try to change,” Cohen said. “I think trying means something, even if you fail. I think even wanting to try means something.”

Li screwed up her nerve as if she were forcing herself out of a high window. “I hope we get out of here in one piece,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him while she said it, but she had said it.

And she had said it knowing that he knew what she meant by it. It wasn’t much, maybe, but it was something.

“I hope so too,” Cohen said. A sly smile played around his lips. “Now what’s this nonsense with Bella?”

Li flushed. “Nothing. What you said. Nonsense.” She looked up to find the hazel eyes measuring her. “What?”

“Prove it.”

His voice was light, making a joke of it, but just for a moment Li caught a flash of the want behind the words. Her stretched out on top of him. Her mouth on his. Her knee pushing Chiara’s thighs apart.

“And just what the hell would that prove?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“Sex isn’t a promise, Cohen.”

“Not even a promise to try to want to try?”

“Well. Maybe it’s that.” She stepped toward him. “Prove it, huh? Do you have any idea how childish that sounds? Who knew you were such a baby?”

Chiara was enough taller than Li that she had to stand a little on her toes to reach her lips. She thrust her hands into the honey-colored curls, smelling the clean, warm, safe smell that followed Cohen everywhere. Feeling the flush of desire that coursed through him at her touch.

That first kiss was slow, tentative. As if they had suddenly, after all the time and all the battles and secrets they shared, become shy with each other. Even on the link, Cohen was silent. He gave her Chiara’s lips, soft, open, yielding. But the rest of him—the things she had glimpsed among the wild roses, the feelings he had always spoken of even when she least wanted to hear him—all that was as ghostly and insubstantial as second-hand memories.

Li pulled back and looked up into the hazel eyes. “Are you going to help, or were you just planning to stand there?”

She felt Cohen’s brushfire laughter licking along the link between them. And something below the laughter. A doubting, trembling, questioning something. “I’ve been chasing you for a long time,” he said. “Maybe I need to be chased a little.”

She smiled—and she didn’t know whether she was smiling at him or at herself or at the whole hopeful ridiculous mess they’d made of things.

“I think I can manage that,” she said.

She was cold when she woke, cold to the point of pain. Her head ached. Her mouth felt as dry as if she were coming out of cryo. Someone was shaking her.

She opened her eyes and saw Bella.

No. Korchow. It had to be Korchow.

“I’m paying you to do a job,” he said, “not fuck in the fields. What exactly do you two think you’re doing?”

She opened her mouth to answer him, but all that came out was a weak croak.

McCuen’s face appeared above and behind Bella’s. “She’s going into shock,” he said.

Korchow brushed the words aside impatiently. “Where’s Cohen?” he asked.

She panicked. Where was he? What had he said when they first felt the worldmind? That it was tasting them? Using them? How much of Cohen could it use before what made him Cohen was gone? How much time did they have?

Korchow pulled her into a more or less sitting position and trickled some water into her mouth. Her thirst shocked her, and when she checked her internals she saw it had been almost two hours since they’d reached the glory hole. How much time was unfolding for every minute she spent in those visions? Were these the dreams Dawes had spoken of? The dreams the first settlers had warned Compson about?

Those who hear it stay and listen and sleep and die there.

She shuddered hard enough to knock her teeth against the rim of the bottle Korchow was holding to her lips.

“You need to make contact again,” Korchow said.

She laughed bitterly. “They contacted us,” she said. But that was Cohen speaking—speaking through her mouth in a way that had somehow come to seem normal, reasonable. “They’ve been doing it for days, weeks. From the first time Catherine came down here.”

The blood drained from Korchow’s face. “Sharifi said that.”

“So Sharifi woke them up,” Cohen said. “Or blasting that galley through the Trinidad did. And now that they’re awake they expect to be listened to.”

“Then God help us,” Korchow whispered.

Li’s heart skittered and locked in to a fast uneven rhythm. “What really happened down here?”

“One minute everything was fine,” he answered. “The next I was off the shunt. As if an immense arm had reached out and… pushed me. I never got back on.”

He’s telling the truth, Cohen whispered in her head. Don’t you see what happened? What must have happened?

Li caught the edge of the thought as it swirled through his mind. But all she saw was a confused image of Sharifi, betrayed and frightened. And whether the image sprang from Cohen’s mind or hers she couldn’t tell.

Then she was back in the glory hole.

“I’m on,” Sharifi said.

Bella started. Voyt turned away from the monitor he’d been watching, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two women. As if, Li realized, he too were waiting for something.

She heard Cohen echo the thought and knew that he was there with her. She reached out cautiously, touched him, was comforted.

Bella stepped forward. “You have the dataset?”

“Can you see what Bella sees, Korchow? Can you hear them?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know yet.” Sharifi smiled. “But you will.”

Voyt made a spitting noise.

“Remember,” Sharifi said. “You have two weeks to get it there. Miss that deadline and all deals are off.”

Korchow dipped his head in an almost courtly gesture. Then he was gone, and Bella was standing there, blinking, swaying a little as she took back her own posture and balance.

Sharifi reached out and smoothed Bella’s hair back from her face. It was a protective gesture, a gesture that could have been a mother’s as easily as a lover’s, and Bella moved her head like a cat to meet the caress. She stared into Sharifi’s eyes, devouring her, surrendering to her. She drank up Sharifi as if she were the only real thing in the universe.

Sharifi touched her temple and flipped a contact switch. She held out her left hand, palm open. Bella set her own palm against it, and Li saw subliminals flicker into life in Sharifi’s peripheral vision.

‹Data transfer initiated,› Sharifi’s internals announced. Numbers spun down, counting out the units of a massive data transfer.

Her eyes on the numbers, Sharifi didn’t see Voyt step toward her. But Li saw him. And she saw the charged and primed Viper in his hand.

The next thing she knew, Sharifi was picking herself up off the ground and pulling a gun out of her coverall pocket. “You’re too late, Voyt. It’s already done.”

“Not until Bella walks out of here,” Voyt said. “Not until you walk out of here.”

He stepped toward her.

Sharifi flipped the safety off her gun. Her aim wavered and she was trembling with adrenaline, but she was still acting like a woman who meant business.

“I’ll shoot you if I have to, Voyt, but I’d rather deal. What’s your price?”

“My price?” Voyt laughed. “I’m a soldier, not a whore.”

“There’s a difference?”

He took another step toward her.

She pulled the trigger. Sparks arced from the rock floor a few centimeters from his right foot.

He stopped. Not scared exactly; he was Li’s kind, and it would have taken more than a stray bullet from a civilian’s hand to really frighten him. But he was at least wary.

“Take his gun,” Sharifi told Bella.

Bella stepped up to Voyt and wrapped her hand over the Viper’s blocky barrel. He let her take it from him. He even smiled when she took it—a smile that raised Li’s hackles.

“Good girl,” Sharifi said. “Now give it to me.”

We have a problem, Cohen said.

Christ, not now!

A realtime problem. Someone just fired a surface-to-air missile from the planet. Li felt the shock of the news pulling her out of Sharifi, jerking her out of step with Sharifi’s dream memory. They’re aiming at the orbital relay.

Cohen didn’t voice the next thought, but she caught it anyway: Maybe Korchow had made his move early.

What do we do?she asked.

But she knew the answer before she asked the question. The missile would hit the relay in a matter of minutes whether they did anything or not, and if the relay went down when it hit, then so would Cohen’s link with the outside world. And any hope of getting Sharifi’s information—or Cohen himself—out of the mine would go with it.

They had to get out before that happened.

“What’s Haas paying you?” Sharifi asked. “I can top it.”

Voyt laughed again. “No one’s paying me shit. You may have caught me dipping into the till, but that’s not treason, and I’m not a traitor. And speaking of payments, what’s Korchow offering besides Haas’s little piece of bought-and-paid-for hospitality?”

“Shut your mouth, Voyt!”

“That got to you, huh? Don’t like the idea that you’re selling state secrets in exchange for used merchandise?”

Sharifi glanced at Bella. She stood frozen between them, her face a pale blur in the lamplight.

“I’m not selling them,” Sharifi said. “Knowledge doesn’t belong to anyone. Life doesn’t belong to anyone.”

“Save your justifications for someone who gives a shit.”

Bella made her move so fast that it caught even Li by surprise. In one smooth gesture, she had her arm around Sharifi’s neck and the Viper against her temple. “Drop the gun,” she said.

Sharifi tried to turn and stare at her, but Bella just tightened her hold on her neck and jabbed her with the Viper’s sharp prongs. Sharifi dropped the gun. It skittered across the slate floor of the cavern and fetched up under a correction channel monitor.

“Get the gun, Jan,” Bella said. It took Li a heartbeat to remember that Jan was Voyt’s name. “We’ll need it if she gives us trouble.”

“Korchow?” Sharifi asked. Her voice was trembling. Her whole body was trembling.

Bella laughed.

I know that laugh, Li thought. And even as she thought it, she knew Sharifi had recognized him too.

“Haas.” Sharifi said. “I need to see Nguyen.”

“Bullshit,” Haas said.

“Can you really afford to gamble? It’s not your choice to make. Nguyen needs to know about this.”

“Oh, she’ll know about it.” Haas jerked Sharifi around and pushed her up the ladder. “Don’t you worry about that.”

Sharifi turned at the top of the ladder. “Listen, Haas—”

“No, you listen.” He spun her around, laid the Viper against her temple. “You open your mouth again,” he said, very quietly, “and it’ll be the last time you open it.”

Sharifi looked into Bella’s violet eyes and saw Haas looking back at her. Something passed along the line of that gaze, some backbrain survival instinct that Sharifi had no words for, but that Li knew from a hundred killing fields.

Sharifi ran.

Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.

She might have made it if she hadn’t slipped on a slick bit of slate and fallen.

Voyt caught Sharifi as she set her foot on the bottom step of the stairs up out of the Trinidad. The edge of his hand slammed into her head, and she crumpled.

She heaved herself up and tried to run, but it was hopeless. Li knew, even if Sharifi didn’t, that Voyt had pulled that first blow, afraid of killing her outright. He hadn’t pushed through the hit, hadn’t put anything but unenhanced muscle into it. He hadn’t needed to.

Voyt did everything Li would have done, and he did it with the precise savagery of hardwired reflexes and ceramsteel-reinforced muscles. He tackled her, driving with his legs so that the force of his impact knocked her up and backward, and when she hit the ground he delivered four swift, carefully calibrated kicks to her ribs. Li felt the jerk and snap of breaking ribs. She didn’t need internal monitors to know that one of those ribs had punctured Sharifi’s lung. Nor did she doubt what was going to happen if Voyt kept delivering this kind of punishment.

But he didn’t. He backed off as soon as he was sure she couldn’t get up, and waited. He did nothing when Sharifi got to her hands and knees. Even when she tried to drag herself up the steps, he waited. Haas caught up to them just as Sharifi collapsed in pain. He looked over Voyt’s shoulder.

“What she said just now,” he told Voyt. “About Nguyen. Ask her what Nguyen needs to know.”

Voyt rolled Sharifi onto her back and took her hand in his. He did it slowly, almost gently, and suddenly Li understood the way Bella had always talked about him. She knew it in her gut, with a guilty certainty that made her want nothing for Sharifi but a quick painless death. Because no matter what else Voyt had done, no matter what uniform he’d worn or what excuses he’d made for himself, he had the heart of a torturer.

He smiled. He had a nice smile; he’d been a good-looking man, she realized. He explained, calmly, the risk of biting through one’s tongue during questioning. He pulled a rag out of his pocket, handed it to Sharifi, showed her how to put it in her mouth. Gave her time to do it. Time to think about it.

Li watched the sickening dance unfold. She felt Sharifi’s pulse slow. She felt her skin go clammy and then dry. She felt her eyes lock on to Voyt’s and begin to follow his every glance as if he were a lover she couldn’t bear to disappoint, as if her very life depended on his happiness.

There’d been a Voyt on Gilead. Lots of Voyts. Li had tried not to be around when they’d done their work. But she’d used the information, God help her. She’d hung on every bloody word of it.

Catherine?

Shame clutched at Li’s heart. Later, Cohen. You don’t need to see this.

This can’t wait, he said.

She was so wrapped up in Sharifi’s fear and pain that she didn’t immediately understand him.

The missile’s almost at the field array.

Then they had to get out. Before the field AI died—before they were trapped in the mine, cut off from Cohen’s backups, dependent on a home-brewed Freetown network that couldn’t support his systems without the field AI’s processing capacity.

I can get you out, he said, plucking the thought from her backbrain as effortlessly as if she’d spoken it aloud. And she read his unspoken thoughts just as easily. He could get her out. But only her.

Then we stay and take our chances, she told him.

And back in the glory hole, the dance went on.

Voyt tied Sharifi’s hands. He spoke to her quietly, reasonably. He pulled out a small knife and set it on her chest, just where she had to crane her neck a little to see it.

Behind Voyt, Bella was a slim, watching shadow. She stepped forward a little as Voyt went to work, and Li saw in her face—in Haas’s face—the guilty fascination that the first sight of hard interrogation always brings, even to people who are used to ordinary violence.

Voyt made Sharifi wait to tell him. His timing was so perfect, so by the book, that Li could predict each groan he would ignore, each desperate plea he would pretend to misunderstand. Just enough of them that when he finally pulled the gag from her mouth and let her speak, she would tell him everything she could possibly think of that might make it be over.

But she didn’t tell. And when Li probed her mind looking for the source of her strength, she found something that made her stomach curl: the hope—no, the sure and certain belief in a rescue. Sharifi was gambling like she’d always gambled. Gambling that she was more valuable to Nguyen alive than dead. Gambling that she was too famous to die like this. Gambling that she was too important a pawn for Nguyen to lay down willingly, no matter what betrayals she had committed.

She’d always been right before. Her luck, like Li’s own luck, had always held. She had a whole lifetime of being right to back up her faith in her gambler’s instincts. And this shuffle might have broken her way too if not for Bella.

When the missile hit, Li thought it was just the Viper again.

Then she was out of the glory hole, struggling to find her bearings, reorienting herself, unbelievably, in the shadowy clutter of Korchow’s antique shop.

Korchow sat at his desk, head bowed, face in shadow, the orange circles of contact derms pulsing at his temples. Outside, lithe and furtive shadows flitted past the shop front. From the back room, Li heard the muted clink of a metal buckle knocking against a carbon compound rifle stock.

Half a heartbeat later, the shop exploded into motion. The flare of a pulse rifle arced out from behind the back curtain toward Korchow. Camouflage-clad figures burst through the front door—masked paras with UN-issue weapons and blackout tape patched over their unit insignia.

She lost the image. She dialed around frantically, desperate to know what was happening, who had rolled up Korchow’s network. She found the gunman’s feed, on a narrow band UNSC channel, and tapped in to it just as he put out a booted foot and rolled Korchow’s body over.

But the face that turned into the light wasn’t Korchow’s at all.

It was Arkady’s.

She started to ask Cohen if he’d seen it, if he knew who’d sent the gunmen, but before she could get the thought out, they were in real-time trouble.

Korchow’s shop was gone. Cohen was gone. She was alone, truly alone, for the first time in days. And she was buried alive in some past, present, or future of the glory hole that had nothing to do with anything else the worldmind had shown her.

She stepped forward and stopped, unable to see the ground before her.

“Careful.”

Hyacinthe stood behind her. He looked tired and drawn. His face was smudged with coal dust, and the shoelaces looped over his shoulder were broken and knotted.

Li watched him the way she would have watched a tiger.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She stepped forward to stare into the dark eyes.

It was Cohen, after all. She was sure of it. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“For now.”

“What does that mean?”

“The worldmind is running on my network. Using me like it’s used the field AI since the first fire. I don’t think it has any other way to organize its thoughts… not in any way that we would understand.”

“But you don’t have to hold out for long,” Li said. “Nguyen—”

“Nguyen didn’t even try to intercept the missile that blew the field AI,” Cohen said. “She seemed more interested in wrapping up Korchow.”

He caught his breath and shuddered. The image of Hyacinthe flickered ominously.

“What’s wrong?” Li asked.

“Nothing,” he said quickly. But there was a telltale hesitation in his voice. “I’m afraid,” he said at last. “It wants me to hold it up. Hold it together. And… I can’t.”

“Cohen—”

“It’s taking me apart in order to put itself together. It’s doing what it did to Sharifi, to your father, to all the people who died down here. Except that it figured out with the field AI that an AI is much, much better for what it needs. That if it goes through an AI, it can get into streamspace, understand it, use it.” He was talking fast now, the words rushing and tumbling. “You need to go to ALEF, Catherine. You’re taken care of. I’ve made sure of that. It’s all yours. Everything. You’ll lose some networks. Some won’t accept you, won’t accept any human. Don’t worry about it. You’ll hold on to enough to make it all work. The ALEF contact is—”

“Stop it! You’ll go yourself.”

“But if something happens—”

“Nothing will happen!”

He put a hand up to touch her face, but she jerked away, her throat tight with panic. “Don’t you sacrifice yourself for me and leave me to live with it. I won’t let you. And I’ll hate you for it.”

“Don’t say that, Catherine.”

“Well, what the hell do you want me to say?” she shouted.

I want you to say you love me.

He took a step toward her, and this time she didn’t back away.

“Fine. I’ll buy you a drink somewhere when this is all over and say it.”

“Say it now,” he whispered. “Just in case.”

She said it. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t even get the words out without stuttering. But she said it.

Then he set a hand on her hip, and she stepped into his arms, and it was all so, so simple. Something shivered and let go at his touch, something she’d never even known she was holding on to. And with a jerk of recognition, she found that dark unmapped territory in her own heart that was his already—shaped to him, made for him, the exact width and breadth and depth of him.

This time there was no chasing, no hiding. Just everything they wanted spilling through their hands and running away like water.

“We’re getting the truth now, I think,” Voyt said. His voice was level, but there was a brightness, a loose-limbed alertness to him that turned Li’s stomach to acid.

Sharifi was still sprawled across the steps. Li could feel the cold stone biting into her back, setting shattered ribs grinding. She blinked, and a razor’s edge of agony shot through her now-blind right eye. God, what had they done to her?

“Is she dying?” Haas asked. Li recognized the doubting hitch in his voice: a civilian’s cautious uncertainty about just what kind and what degree of violence a human body can tolerate.

“I know my business,” Voyt said. “She’s not going anywhere.”

“Your recorder off?”

Voyt twitched irritably. “I’m not a complete fool.”

“Good.” Haas had been drawing closer as they spoke. Now he stretched Bella’s slender hand toward the Viper, “Give me that.”

Voyt hesitated, then handed it to him.

Haas stepped around Voyt and pressed the tongue of the weapon against Sharifi’s head.

“Careful,” Voyt said. He spoke in the even, artificially calm voice of a soldier watching a civilian do something stupid with a gun and not wanting to scare him into making a big mistake out of a little one.

“Oh, I will be,” Haas said.

Voyt relaxed slightly. But Li could see, through Sharifi’s single good eye, what Voyt couldn’t. She could see the look on Haas’s face.

“Did you think I didn’t know?” he asked Sharifi. “Did you think I’d just stand back and let you fuck her?”

But Sharifi didn’t hear him.

All she heard was Bella’s voice. All she saw was a beloved face bending over her. All she felt was Bella’s hand touching her, taking the pain away.

She reached out with one hand, a gesture that was no more than a breath, a tremor. Li was the only one who heard the soft snick of the trigger.

As Sharifi died something gave in the rock above them, booming and cracking. A hot blast of air pulsed down the gangway, hitting hard enough to knock Bella to her knees.

“Run!” Voyt yelled, but his voice was lost in the roar of falling rock.

It’s going to kill them, Cohen said.

She heard Voyt scream and fall, but the sound seemed to come from far, far away. She saw Haas pass a hand over Bella’s brow. She felt him slip off the shunt just in time, just the way he must have planned it. Then the last barrier broke, and the worldmind was running free, unfettered, ripping through Voyt, through Bella, through Li and Cohen like wildfire sweeping through dry grass.

For one wild, surreal moment she saw it all. The dark cavern around her. The flesh and ceramsteel mélange inside her own ringing skull. The blazing silicon vistas of Cohen’s networks. The antique shop, smelling of tea and sandalwood. Arkady’s unconscious figure sprawled among the sleek curves of the generation-ship artifacts. And above, around, and through all of it, the endless weight and darkness, the million voices of the worldmind.

The stones were singing.

In the end Cohen, or whatever was left of him, cut her out of the link. She begged, in that last moment, not even sure he could hear her. She cursed him, cursed herself, Korchow, Nguyen, the whole killing planet.

Then she was alone in the darkness, and there was nothing left of Cohen but the hole inside her where he should have been.

The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.

Adry breeze blew across her face, winding from nowhere to nowhere like a desert river.

Her internals were shattered. Ghosts, fragments. She felt the abuse her body had taken through the long hours in the pit. And behind it, worse than the physical pain, the memory of what Voyt had done to Sharifi, and of the whirling, chaotic, living darkness Cohen had cast himself into to save her.

Bella and McCuen were staring down at her, their faces white, drawn, terrified.

“Did you see that?” Li asked, sitting up.

Bella nodded. “Cohen?”

Li looked away.

“I’m sorry,” Bella said, and when Li searched her face she saw that she really was sorry. “He was… kind.”

Li checked her rebreather gauge instead of answering. She checked her internals, found with relief that at least the basic programs were working, and ran a quick air-use calculation.

“We’ve got to go,” she said. “We have twenty-eight minutes to get to Mirce and the fresh canisters. Maybe less.”

She glanced at McCuen. His face looked shockingly pale, but maybe it was just the lamplight. “I… didn’t see much of anything,” he said. “Just stuck around to pick up the pieces.”

“You didn’t miss much,” she said, hefting her rebreather.

“Catherine?” Bella asked. Where had she picked that habit up? “Can we make it to Mirce? How long will it take us?”

“Less than twenty-eight minutes,” Li said. “Or forever. Let’s go.”

The mine had come alive. It rumbled, rang, sang. The sound resonated in Li’s chest, set her fingers twitching and her teeth buzzing. And along the intraface, beyond her control but still flickering in and out of life according to some obscure rhythm, coursed a bustle and roar of high-speed traffic that shorted out her internals and flashed cryptic status messages across her retinas like tracer bullets.

She probed the intraface as they walked. It seemed to work regardless of whether Cohen was on the other end of it. At one point she almost managed to access the memory palace and its operating systems. But the framework wouldn’t evolve, and she ended up cut off, stranded in a blind alley of the loading program. Cohen himself was a ghost presence: an absence given flesh and substance by her own body’s refusal to admit that he was no longer part of her. That feeling, the sense that he was both there and not there, reminded her of stories about amputees who still kept waking up years later feeling the pain of lost limbs.

They reached the rendezvous at twenty-nine minutes and twenty seconds. Bella’s rebreather, which she had used sparingly, had four minutes to run. Li had already given her own rebreather to McCuen. Mirce wasn’t there to meet them, but as they turned the corner they saw the fresh tanks glimmering in the darkness.

“We’re still one tank short,” Li said, counting the tanks. She strained her ears for the sound of ropes and canisters being lowered, but heard only creaking lagging and the ominous silence of the hung-up roof.

She dropped to the ground beside the nearest tank and began hurriedly booting up the onboard comp and connecting the feedlines.

She couldn’t get the air gauge on the tank to light up, no matter what she did. And she didn’t have time to fiddle. She put the mask to her mouth, sucked at it experimentally. No. It wasn’t just the gauge. She wasn’t getting anything.

“What’s wrong?” McCuen asked. There was a nervous edge to his voice that hadn’t been there even when he’d watched his last tank running down before they reached the drop-off point.

“I don’t know,” Li said.

Then the gauge finally flickered into life. The arrow dropped into the red, quivered and stayed there. She fumbled for the fill valve, and when she touched it, it spun loosely at the touch of her fingers. No pressure.

And suddenly she did know what was wrong. Someone had opened the valve and emptied the tank. All the tanks.

They had no air.

“Mirce!” she shouted, already up and running down the twisting drift.

She found her twelve meters past the next bend, her hand still on the rope, the final canister of compressed air lying on the ground beside her. Li looked into the still-clear, still-blue eyes, looked at the head turned a little sideways, baring the strong, clean line of her jaw under the stretched skin. She thought, for no reason she wanted to remember, of magpies’ wings.

The cut ran diagonally across Mirce’s throat, from the collar of her coverall to the soft flesh below her ear. She had bled out fast. In seconds, probably. No sign of a fight; the spreading pool around her could have been water or rehab fluid, except for the rich copper-and-rust smell of it.

“Why?” Bella whispered. “Why?”

“To stop us,” Li said, wondering how that calm professional’s voice could be speaking out of the whirlwind inside her.

“What do we do?” McCuen asked.

“We find whoever killed her and take their air.”

When it finally happened, she was so ready for it that she knew some deep part of herself must have been expecting it. Reading the accumulation of clues, each one insignificant in itself, that told her they were being followed. Listening for the echo that wasn’t an echo. Waiting for the muffled step behind them.

What she wasn’t prepared for—hadn’t even suspected—was the flash of quickly suppressed recognition in McCuen’s eyes.

She’d made a fool’s mistake, she told herself as the hot flush of adrenaline flooded through her. McCuen had betrayed her. Somehow, by some hook she’d probably never know about, Haas had turned him. The proof was right there in front of her, in those wide-open little-boy-blue eyes.

She called a break, drifted to a stop against an outcropping in the passage wall, stretched, and sat down a few feet from him with her back safely against solid stone.

“How could they have known where to find her?” McCuen asked. He talked fast, seizing on the first thought that came to mind, trying to gloss over the footsteps that he too had heard, that he too had been waiting for. “I mean, we were fine before that. She makes the meet, and we all get out.”

“Except Cohen.”

She could see in McCuen’s face that he still didn’t know who she was talking about. He had never met Cohen, she realized, probably never thought of him as more than a piece of equipment. “Well, yeah,” McCuen said. “But… you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” she said. “I know.”

She strained her ears, listening to the darkness beyond the lamplight. Everyone has a weakness, she told herself. And their weakness would be their wire.

A flickering double vision swept over her as she tried to hold streamspace and realspace in her mind simultaneously. It was stomach-wrenching, but she couldn’t afford to drop all the way out of realtime. Not with McCuen three feet away from her and an unknown pursuer waiting at the edge of the lamplight.

She stepped into the memory palace.

The door was broken. The fountain had run dry. A storm howled over the turrets, setting roof tiles rattling and shutters flapping. Whole wings of the palace were open to wind and sky. Locked doors confronted her at every turn, and even when she got past them, she found only rain-strafed ruins behind them.

She couldn’t find the communications programs, couldn’t even figure out which networks they were on. She thought about dropping into the numbers to look, but the memory of the disaster Cohen had averted last time stopped her.

Then she heard something.

Footsteps. Echoing around the next turn in the hall, up the next flight of stairs, across the floor over her head. Footsteps and a mocking quicksilver laugh flickering across the dead link like heat lightning.

She tracked the sound through cold dark halls, across vast, rubble-choked courtyards. She’d almost given up when she stumbled through a half-open door and saw the arches of the cloister, the wind-whipped, moonlit tangle of wild roses.

She stepped out from under the arcade, one hand up to shield her face from the wind. Someone was sitting on the bench under the roses. She saw the tarnished copper of rain-soaked curls. She saw Roland’s golden eyes glinting out of the shadows.

She ran.

Both of them were cold and slick with rain, and a dead leaf had blown against his face like a little black moth so that she had to brush it off before she could kiss him. “You came,” she whispered.

And then she was kissing him, searching for him with lips, hands, heart, her mind stripped of everything but her need for him.

He took hold of her shoulders and pushed her away from him. She looked into the golden eyes and saw… nothing.

“No,” she whispered. “ No.”

“He couldn’t come. I’m supposed to tell you he’s sorry.”

The rain stopped. The darkness around them deepened. She glimpsed tall windows flung open to the lowering clouds, and realized that they stood on the threshold of the hall of doors.

Roland pointed to a door like all the others. “There,” he said.

Then he was gone.

She pushed it open and stepped into a darkness blacker and more storm-charged than the sky outside.

“Who is it?” a voice said.

It was not a friendly voice. Not a friendly question.

“Me,” she said. “Catherine. Don’t you know me?”

“Oh, yes. We know you.”

The lights came on. She was alone in an empty room.

“Why did you come here?” the voice asked. It was the walls, or whatever was behind the walls, speaking to her.

“I need to access the AMC station net.”

Silence.

“I need to.”

“And why should we help you?”

We?

“Because—”

Another voice spoke. Words she couldn’t make out. Whispers. Suddenly the room was boiling with whispers. She stepped back, feeling for the door behind her. “But Cohen said—”

“Yes.” A new voice now, even colder than the first. “Tell us about Cohen. Tell us what Cohen said to you.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she breathed.

“Wasn’t it?”

She felt for the doorknob again, her hand trembling. She touched something, gripped it. But instead of metal, she felt skin.

Someone shoved her forward into the center of the room, and she fell on her knees, hands pressed over her ears to shut out the hateful, hissing accusations.

“It’s not my fault!” she screamed, over and over again. But she couldn’t block the voices out. It was her fault, they kept saying. It was all her fault. All of it.

“Are you all right?” McCuen asked.

She looked at him, chest heaving. She glanced at Bella, who was staring at her, wide-eyed. “I’m fine,” she lied. “Glitch on my commsystem.”

Then she heard Cohen talking to her.

She opened her eyes in VR to find Hyacinthe taking her hand, drawing her to her feet, tugging her back toward the terrible room.

But this was no Hyacinthe she had ever known. This was a mere memory dump, an interactive tutorial triggered by her entry into the memory palace. It explained how to access networks, bank accounts, corporate records, how to run an empire it kept insisting was hers now. It explained everything except the only thing that mattered: that if she was here, if this program was running, Cohen must be gone.

“I still need to get into the AMC net,” she said when he was done. She felt numb, as if her voice were coming from someone else’s throat.

But the others wouldn’t let her in, wouldn’t do it for her. And even with Hyacinthe’s help she couldn’t make them do it. “Cohen wanted this!” she said finally, frightened and furious.

That got a bitter laugh from a voice she hadn’t even heard before: a powerful, saturnine presence who made it clear that he despised her so much he hadn’t bothered to participate before. “Cohen wanted you too,” the voice told her. “And look what that got him.”

As it spoke, she felt a burning jealousy behind the words. A child’s jealousy? A lover’s? Or was this some other thing entirely, some splinter of Cohen’s inhuman soul? But this was no child, she realized. It was Cohen’s old communications AI—the only entity in the shifting ruin of his networks that was capable of controlling its fellows.

She started to answer, to argue. But before she could form a thought, a wave of anger battered her, cold as ice water, and she was cut off, out of the link, kicked off the intraface.

“Where are you going?” McCuen asked.

“To take a piss.” She forced a grin. “You want to come?”

He flushed. Like a little boy, for Christ’s sake. But he stayed put. And that was all she had really wanted from him.

She stepped into the shadows and slipped her butterfly knife from her belt, relearning its balance, feeling the blade blossom, lilylike, from the cross-gripped handle.

She could smell their pursuer. She could feel him with the hairs of her arms, with her raised hackles, with the skin of her face. She could have found him by touch if she’d had to. She was deep into her own territory now. She didn’t need maps, not even Cohen’s maps. She was about to murder someone. And she’d known how to do that for as long as she could remember.

She eased around the corner, stopped, listened, stopped again. She weighed the dark and the silence, took their measure.

She took her own measure too. Heavy-soled boots that could crunch against grit or scrape on rock. Cloth that could rustle and whisper treacherously. Loose buckles, loose straps, loose bootlaces. And her own breathing, sweating, shedding body, casting off trace faster than her skinbugs could scramble to camouflage it. She’d heard it said that Earth’s extinct carnivores had no scent, but that was a lie, like so many other things people said about the planet. The truth was they’d just known how to hide their scent from those they preyed on—a last, deadly secret.

She found her prey two meters past the bend in the drift. He sat in the dark, back to the wall, rebreather hanging lose around his jaw, infrared goggles laid on the ground beside him. He was eating.

She inched along the wall, arms out, knife ready. Waiting for him to turn. Waiting for the telltale catch of breath that would tell her he’d heard her.

It never came.

He struggled at the last, standing up, trying to throw her off as her left hand grasped his head and stretched his throat taut. But by then it was over.

“Christ!”

McCuen. With the gun in his hand that she should have, damn her, taken from him.

She let the dead man slide down the length of her body to the ground.

“You killed him,” McCuen said, his voice a ragged whisper. “I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe you’d do it.”

Li shook her head. Her ? What was he talking about?

Bella came around the corner before she could ask him. She saw the fallen guard, gave a strangled cry, stopped and drew back, her hand over her mouth.

“Go up the drift and wait for me,” Li told her. “You’re just in the way here.” And I don’t want you to see this. I don’t want anyone to see it.

Bella started to speak. Then her eyes slid away from Li’s. She turned and walked back up the drift, leaving Li and McCuen alone.

They stared at each other. His betrayal and her knowledge of it hung in the air between them. He made a move, just the slightest flexing of his ankles.

She lunged, still hoping to keep the fight quiet and not alert the other three pursuers. She feinted toward McCuen’s face with the knife, and he threw up his left arm to cover himself, just as she’d known he would. He kept the gun more or less pointed at her while he did it, but he lost time. And in that instant, she reached up, wrapped her left hand around his wrist and broke it.

He screamed. The gun fired high and wild, then dropped from his hand and rattled along the slate floor into the darkness. She heard it come to rest behind her, fixed the point in her hard files, and set a subroutine to track it so she could retrieve it when she needed to.

She cursed her own slowness. That one shot could set Kintz on her before she had time to take care of McCuen. And even if it didn’t, she no longer had surprise on her side. Now they would know she was coming for them.

She brushed her regrets aside to focus on the job in front of her. McCuen was crippled. Not just by his lack of internal wetware or his broken wrist, but because Li could push back her mask and breathe freely, for a few moments at least, while he had to keep struggling to suck air through the cumbersome mouthpiece. He’d never fought her either. Not for real. He had no idea what he was up against.

Forty seconds into the fight she landed a clean kick, and McCuen’s leg collapsed under him with a grinding snap that told her she’d found her target. She was on top of him before he hit the ground, thumb and forefinger locked on his windpipe.

She lifted her knife hand to his face and ripped off his infrared goggles, leaving him blind. Then she straddled him, got a good purchase with her boot soles, sat on his stomach. As she did it, she had a flash of Voyt doing the same thing to Sharifi, and it turned her stomach.

“Who did Haas send?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play with me, Brian.” She dug her fingers under his windpipe and squeezed. “Who’d he send? Kintz? He the one who cut Mirce’s throat for no fucking good reason? Nice friends you’ve got.”

He was choking. She let up a little—just enough so he could talk.

“I didn’t know they were going to kill her,” he said when he could breathe again. “I would never have…” He swallowed, Adam’s apple jerking. “It’s not like you think it is.”

“Oh? How is it then? What’s Haas paying you?”

McCuen’s face twisted in anger. “No one’s paying me.”

“Then talk to me.”

McCuen put on a resisting-interrogation face. A little boy playing at cowboys and cybercops. Li could have screamed with frustration.

“I don’t have time for this,” she said. She flicked her knife under McCuen’s rebreather feed, pulling the thin tube taut.

“God, no!” he pleaded. He was panicking, a trapped animal thrown back on instinct and adrenaline. She felt his legs twitching under her as if his backbrain believed he could overpower ceramsteel-enhanced muscles, outtwitch hardwired reflex. “Don’t make me die like that. Please, Li!”

She remembered her father, blue-gummed, drowning in his own bile. The growth had filled 20 percent of his remaining lung when they took the last X ray. The doctor had said it was bigger than most of the babies born in Shantytown that year.

Her knife hand was shaking. She took the information in coldly, as if it were someone else’s hand. Dealt with it. Rerouted. Adjusted. “Then talk,” she said, and let the blade scrape along the thin sheathing of the feedline.

“Okay! Okay. Shit. It’s Kintz. And two more.” He said two names she didn’t recognize. “They weren’t supposed to kill anyone. They were supposed to wait until Korchow and the AI were taken care of, and then take you and Bella in. Alive, if they could.”

Li’s breath caught in her throat. “What do you mean until the AI was taken care of?”

“I don’t know.”

She twisted the knife.

“I swear I don’t! All she said was that she’d get rid of it. That we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

All she said?

Of course, she realized. It had been right there in front of her all the time. The answer that she had blinded herself to because she didn’t want to see it, couldn’t afford to see it.

This was a chess match, and one that had gone on far too long to be anything but a deadly fight between two equally devious and experienced opponents. Haas wasn’t the player on the other side of the chess board from Korchow. He never had been.

All along, every time Haas railroaded her or sabotaged her investigation, she had gone running to Nguyen like a little idiot. Never quite listening to Cohen’s warnings. Never looking up long enough to see the shadowy hand that hovered behind Haas, behind Voyt, behind McCuen. And now, when it was too late, she saw with painful clarity.

Who was the one person in a position to control both her and Sharifi? To orchestrate Metz and the mine investigation and the secret work at Alba? Who was the one person who knew just what Cohen would risk to save her? Who knew so well how to sow the seeds of mistrust that would keep her from confiding in Cohen even as she used him to save herself? And who, ever since Tel Aviv, had more or better reasons to want Cohen dead?

“What else did Nguyen say?” she asked casually, her eyes fixed on McCuen’s, praying that he was too scared and too confused to hear the question that hid behind her words.

“I don’t know. Oh, God, Li! Don’t! I swear I don’t know. I only talked to her that once.”

“Tell me exactly what she said, Brian. That’s all I’m asking. Do that and I won’t have any reason to hurt you.”

“She said to go with you. Keep an eye on you. That Kintz would bag you afterward.”

“And the AI?” Li couldn’t stop herself from asking.

“She just said she’d take care of it. It’d be gone when you came off the link.”

Holy Mother of Christ, she thought—and then thrust aside the knowledge of what she had helped Nguyen do to Cohen. “What is Kintz supposed to do with us?”

McCuen hesitated.

“What, Brian?”

“He’s supposed to try to take you alive.”

“Try?”

“If he can’t, he’s supposed to kill you. You and Bella both.”

A cold knot ground itself into the pit of Li’s stomach. “What about Gould and the Medusa ? What about Sharifi’s package?”

“Nguyen’s going to catch both ships in open space when they drop out of slow time. Intercept Gould before she can get the package.”

“What did she give you, Brian? Money? A promotion? What did she come up with that was worth killing Mirce and Cohen for?”

McCuen looked at her, his eyes round and childish above the rebreather’s insectlike mouthpiece. “She told me you were a traitor.”

Li went slack, let the blade drop away from the feedline.

“What if I told you I wasn’t?” she asked finally.

“I would have believed you. Until today.”

She looked into his eyes, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. “And you would have been right,” she said, “until today.”

“What are you going to do with me?” McCuen asked. His voice sounded very small—a child asking his mother to tell him that nightmares weren’t real, that monsters didn’t really exist.

“I don’t know,” Li said truthfully. Kintz must have heard her shot, must already be on the move. “Brian, I need to know where Kintz is going to ambush me.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Let’s not do this again, Brian.”

“No! I really don’t know. They were supposed to pick up Mirce and bag us when we got to the rendezvous with her. So… well, you saw. They’re not doing what they said they would.”

Li laughed bitterly. “It looks like Kintz has already decided he’s just not going to be able to bring us in alive.”

“Yeah,” McCuen said. If he wondered what Kintz’s decision meant for him personally, he didn’t say so. “Listen,” he said after a moment. “You can contact the station, can’t you? You could call Nguyen. It’s not too late. Maybe you can’t fix everything. But enough. Enough not to get killed down here. Enough to keep the Syndicates from getting what they want.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know what. But it has to be better than getting killed!” He shivered. “Or going over to the Syndicates. Come on, Li. I can’t believe you want that.”

She looked down at his pleading face. She thought about dying in the mine. She thought about the long list of ugly, violent things she would have to do to get back to the surface alive. She thought about Nguyen, about what she might be willing to trade Li’s life for.

What difference would it make to anyone? Mirce was already dead. Cohen was gone. What did she care about what happened to a planet she’d never thought of as anything but a trap to escape from?

“But Nguyen’s going to kill the crystals,” she said. “She’s going to kill the whole planet.”

She knew it was the truth as soon as she spoke the words. It wasn’t a plan or a conspiracy; even now she didn’t believe that Daahl’s stolen memo had been more than an unfortunate turn of phrase. But it would happen. It was already happening.

The UN couldn’t survive without live condensate. Left to its own devices it would swallow Compson’s World whole, just as the worldmind had swallowed Cohen, just as the Security Council had swallowed Kolodny and Sharifi and all the other quiet casualties of their covert tech wars. Not out of malice, but with the best intentions. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Because that was how their code was written.

And Sharifi—Sharifi had known that the only way to stop them was to take the choice out of their hands.

“It’s not our job to decide those things,” McCuen said, as if he had tracked every turn and twist of her thoughts.

Li knew he was saying no more than she’d have said a few short weeks ago. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen. He hadn’t lived it. He could only see the choice she faced as black or white, loyalty or treason, UN or Syndicate.

And if she chose the side he wanted her to choose? The side that loyalty to comrades dead and alive made her want to choose, that everything in her long years of training and service had taught her to choose? Then the UN would be saved from the Syndicates, for a while anyway. It would survive, feeding off the condensates in a kind of cannibal existence that was no worse, when all was said and done, than any other creature’s struggle to survive at the expense of all the other life in the universe.

But the condensates—Cartwright’s sainted dead, Li’s father, Sharifi, Cohen—would die. And this time there would be no second birth, no dreaming afterlife, however alien. This time they wouldn’t be coming back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She sat back on her haunches and took the knife off the rebreather line.

McCuen’s body turned to water under her as terror collapsed into shivering relief. “Jesus, Li, you scared the hell out of me. I really thought—”

She slit his throat cleanly, making sure the first cut finished it. It was messy, but it was kinder than anything else she could do for him. He died with a confused expression on his face, an idealistic little boy who still couldn’t believe this game of cops and robbers had turned real.

“It’s not personal,” she whispered into the void of his dilating pupils. But that was a lie too, the biggest lie of all. And she knew it even if McCuen didn’t.

Bella was waiting by their packs. She started to say something, then saw the blood covering Li’s hands and clothes and stopped, backing up a step.

Li hated her for that step, for the disgusted, fearful look on her face. She hated her so much she could feel her hands shaking with it. She emptied McCuen’s pack, took what she could carry, and left the rest for the rats. She didn’t trust herself to look at Bella.

“Did he… did you find out how many of them there are?”

Li held up three fingers.

“Kintz?”

“Yes.”

Li was drowning. Suffocating. She shouldered her pack and started down the drift, leaving Bella to follow any way she could.

Neither of them said McCuen’s name, then or later.

The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.

Kintz must not have been expecting them to come after him. He’d let his men straggle. He was acting like he expected Li to run, like he thought he’d have to corner her before she’d fight. What did he know that she didn’t?

She took down the first man with a single shot; no hope of surprise anyway, and the best tactic now was speed. Unfortunately, her shot took him in the neck, shattering the feedlines of his oxygen tank. She listened to the air whistling out of the tubes and cursed herself for being impatient. For not having thought things through more carefully. For having hands that shook too much. For not being as sharp as she’d been five years ago. Five months ago, even.

Behind him was another man she’d never seen before. Probably planet-side mine security. He had the instincts and training to duck for cover before she could shoot him, but she’d chosen her point of attack well; there was no cover.

She would have shot him down where he stood if he hadn’t been wearing a rebreather. But he was wearing one. And since Kintz was wired, it might be the only rebreather left down there.

She leveled the Beretta at the guard’s chest, and he froze, staring at her. She listened for Kintz, but all she could hear was Bella’s dress rustling as she shifted nervously from foot to foot.

“You might as well come on out,” Li called up the drift. “I can smell your cheap aftershave from here.”

“I wouldn’t shoot him,” Kintz said from behind a protruding piece of lagging about three meters away. “He’s got the last full tank. And I believe you need one of those.”

“Take off the rebreather,” Li told the guard, “and push it toward me.”

He didn’t move.

“I will shoot you if you don’t do it.” She spoke calmly. She didn’t have to put on a play to convince him; the body of his friend was still steaming on the ground in front of him.

She saw the man’s gaze flick back toward Kintz, behind the lagging. That glance might as well have been a map. She could see where Kintz must be braced between lagging and rock face. She could see the gun that must be in his hand. And she could see what the guard had clearly seen: that Kintz would shoot him down himself if that was what it took to keep Li from getting the oxygen tank.

“Come here,” she told Bella. “And stay back against the wall.”

Bella crept forward, slowly, reluctantly. The look on her face said that Li had let her down somehow by even making her witness this scene. Li pulled McCuen’s gun out of the back of her pants where she’d stowed it.

She looked at it. She looked at the expression of fascinated revulsion on Bella’s face. She thought about the recoil on a big revolver like that, the way joints loosen on an old gun and the long uneven pull it would probably take to fire it.

She gave Bella the Beretta.

“Look,” she whispered, keeping her hand over Bella’s and the gun trained on the guard while she spoke. “Elbows locked. Bead lined up on his chest. And if he moves—if he even breathes too fast—shoot him.”

Bella nodded, tight-lipped. You lose your nerve and we’re both dead, Li wanted to say. But she didn’t. There was such a thing as too scared. And Bella looked like she was halfway there already.

Li flexed her hand around the Colt, felt its weight and balance. She wished to God she’d had a chance to fire it before, but wishing was beside the point. She gave the guard a warning look and started working her way down the drift toward Kintz.

The guard’s eyes followed her, telegraphing her movements, but there wasn’t much she could do about it short of shooting him outright. And Kintz would figure out what she was doing anyway. The thing was to get there fast. And to get there quietly enough that he couldn’t be quite sure where she was and when she was going to round the corner on him. She didn’t need absolute surprise. Just relative surprise. That, and a little help from Bella.

She got one of those things.

She turned the corner around the lagging, leading with her elbows, dropping the gun toward Kintz as soon as she was sure he wasn’t going to kick it out of her hands. And there they were, facing off against each other, each one with a gun to the other’s head. The next stage in the deadlock.

“Drop it,” Kintz said.

She hit him instead of answering. She’d thought it out, run the possibilities and options down in her mind, troubleshot her plan, and now she moved so fast that even Kintz’s enhanced reflexes couldn’t counter her. She turned into him, shoving him into the angle between lagging and rock face, where he couldn’t put his superior reach and height to use. She slammed her foot into his groin, and as he staggered under the kick she spun her gun butt-first and hammered it down on the side of his head.

He was a tough son of a bitch. He didn’t pass out. He didn’t fall. He didn’t even lose his grip on his gun. But he dropped its muzzle a few inches—all the opening Li needed. Before he regained his balance, she shoved McCuen’s gun under his jaw.

“Empty it,” she said.

He hesitated.

She cocked the hammer. He emptied his pistol, bullets ringing and skittering across the rough floor. “Now drop it.”

He dropped the gun at her feet, not taking his eyes off her, and she kicked it away down the drift. They looked at each other.

“I don’t want to kill you this fast,” she said. “I’d like to see you suffer, you son of a bitch.” She said the words without thinking, and the sound of them shocked her. But they were true, God help her. She’d killed more people than she could count or even remember, but this was the first time she’d actually wanted to murder someone.

“Got you where it hurt, huh? Who was that bitch whose throat I cut, anyway? Another girlfriend? Too bad I didn’t have more time to spend on her.”

Li forced the gun’s muzzle farther up under his jaw, as if she thought she could shut his mouth with the sheer pressure of it.

“They’re waiting for you,” he said, eyes on her trigger finger. “You’ll never get out of here alive, even if you kill me.” He licked his lips. “Especially if you kill me.”

Li backed off a step or two, keeping the gun leveled on him. That was when the other guard made his move.

She didn’t see it herself, but she saw the quickly suppressed flash in Kintz’s eyes that told her something was happening behind her back. She glanced around, Kintz still in her sights. The guard was inching toward her, slowly, deliberately, his eyes locked on Bella’s. And Bella was letting him.

“Shoot him!” Li screamed. But Bella was frozen, shut down with terror, standing on the edge of a cliff she couldn’t force herself over. Li spun around, snapped her elbows straight, and fired a single shot over Bella’s head and through the guard’s eye socket.

Kintz was on top of her before she could swing back around. He went for the hurt arm, of course. She had known he would. What she hadn’t known was how fast the arm would fail her.

Bella tried to help. Li saw her out of her peripheral vision, circling around them, holding the Beretta stiffly out in front of her, trying to decide where to aim the gun. As if she even knew how to aim it.

“No, Bella!” she barked. “No shooting. Just take the air tank and leave. I’ll catch up if I can.”

Kintz didn’t even give her time to notice if Bella had obeyed her. He wasn’t her match in skill, but she was handicapped by her stripped-out arm, and the punishment she’d gone through in the past few hours. And by the five years and eight inches and thirty kilos Kintz had on her.

He slammed her against the drift wall, threw her hard, and was on top of her before she could get her arms or legs under her. He jerked her onto her stomach, jammed his knee into the small of her back, and bent her bad arm back so savagely that she couldn’t breathe without feeling the twinge of stretched-to-snapping tendons.

She heard him reach for his belt, heard the click of handcuffs releasing. “I’d kill you right here,” he said, “but Nguyen almost had our heads over Sharifi. Your lucky day.”

“Not behind my back,” she said as he slapped the first cuff on. “Not unless you want to carry me up.”

He stopped, rolled her over, let her hold her hands out in front of her while he locked the second virusteel ring around her wrist and single-keyed in a preset compressed code.

He was in no hurry now that he had subdued her. He almost seemed to be waiting for something. He frisked her, ran his hands up and down her legs, into her crotch. She watched him think about the fact that they were alone.

“You must really have fucked up on Gilead,” she said, needling him. “Or were you just too pissant incompetent for them to trust you with a real Corps job after that?”

“You need to learn to shut up,” he said, and put a hand down her shirt.

She let him get a good feel. She saw his mouth open a little, his breath come faster. “You’re pathetic,” she said.

He took hold of her legs and jerked her flat on the floor. “Roll over.”

“Don’t have the balls to look me in the face?”

He hit her so hard she didn’t even feel the blow. When she came to, he was on top of her and already fumbling at her belt. He got that unfastened all right, but the pants and the tie-down of the Beretta’s empty holster took two hands. She waited, eyes closed, until he had both hands engaged. Then she balled her hands into a double fist and swung them, letting the weight of the cuffs add to the momentum of her internals.

She caught him on the right temple. Not ideal, but she stunned him—and opened up a long gash in his skull that would bleed into his eyes with a little luck.

He staggered to his feet and aimed a crushing kick at her ribs, but she was already rolling away from him.

She glanced around as they squared off against each other. The gun was too far away. She’d never get there in time. But Kintz couldn’t get to it either—not without risking a kick from Li’s still lethal legs.

This would be a good time, Bella, she thought. But of course, Bella was nowhere.

“You fucking digger bitch,” Kintz said. “Fucking stinking dirty half-bred cunt!”

Li laughed. She didn’t know where the laugh came from, but suddenly it all seemed pathetically ridiculous, from Kintz’s tired insults to the fact that they were fighting for the same planet both their ancestors had wasted lifetimes trying to escape from. “Guess you should have stuck to the half-breeds you could buy in Helena,” she gasped.

After that, they didn’t talk anymore; they were both short of breath, and they knew that the next time they went down one of them wasn’t getting up again.

Li would have liked to be able to wait Kintz out, let him get impatient. But she couldn’t afford to. She was too tired, too battered. She would flag before he did. She had to draw him into doing something stupid, and she had to do it while she still had the strength to take advantage of his mistake.

She danced in, let him get a glancing hit on her, jumped away, deliberately stumbling a little. He took the bait; he reached for her, missed his hold, reached again.

This time she let him catch up to her. She forced herself not to think what would happen if this ploy didn’t work, if he really did get her down. She kept her hands up, locked together. As he gripped her, she braced her feet and drove her hands toward his face with all the strength she had, fingers rigid.

He screamed and staggered back, clutching his eyes. She threw herself down the drift without even looking to see if he was following and reached the Colt in a cloth-ripping, face-forward slide.

His first kick connected just as her fingers touched the gun. He slammed into her ribs, her kidneys, her stomach in a flurry of blows so violent that only the certainty of death if she failed kept her hands locked around the revolver.

She rolled over, baring her stomach, and looked up at him. One eye was still open, though the skin around the socket was torn and bleeding. The other was a gushing mess.

She raised the gun only to have him kick it aside. He fell on her, trapping the gun between them, scratching and grabbing for it, his breath roaring in her ears with the tight scream of adrenaline and agony. They wrestled, grunting like dogs fighting for a bone, locked in a deadly tug-of-war. She felt Kintz prying her fingers from the sweat-and-blood-slicked grip. Her pulse drummed in her skull. Her lungs and fingers burned. Her grip slipping, belly to belly with Kintz, hardly knowing where the gun was aimed, she fired.

She heard the wet thump of bullet hitting flesh, felt hot blood rush over her legs and stomach.

It took a long time for him to die, and she didn’t dare move the gun, even to flick the safety back on, until she was sure his fingers had slacked. When she finally pushed him off her his one remaining eye was open and his limbs loose and heavy. She wiped the blood off her face and stood up—only to find herself staring down the barrel of her own gun.

“Bella,” she said.

“Not quite.” Haas’s smile looked all wrong on Bella’s pale face, and in the construct’s dark eyes Li saw the same frozen, uncomprehending panic she’d seen when she’d gone under the loop shunt.

“You took your time,” she told Haas.

“I had other fires to put out,” he said. “And I didn’t want to get on the shunt and show my hand too soon. Bella’s been getting… difficult.”

“Christ,” Li whispered, sick at the thought of what Haas had done, at the sure knowledge that this had been the nightmare behind Bella’s eyes every time she’d spoken of Sharifi’s death. She might not have remembered, but she had suspected. And she had used Li to chase down that suspicion—hoping all the while that it would turn out to be wrong, that Li would find some other explanation.

Haas bent over Kintz, pulled a second pair of cuffs out of his belt and tossed them to Li. “Cuff your ankles,” he said, and watched while she did it. “Now give me your hand,” he said.

Fear prickled down Li’s spine. Haas wanted her dataset, the record of her interface with the condensates. And once he got it, there would be no reason at all to take Li above ground.

Haas saw her hesitation. “Nguyen may want the data enough to play games with you,” he said, his voice level, “but I personally don’t give a shit. Bear that in mind.” He nodded toward the cuffs already encircling her wrists. “You might crack those given a few hours, of course. But you don’t have a few hours. I leave you here without air and you’ll be dead inside of one hour. I’m your ticket out of here, my friend. You better fucking keep me happy.”

Li stretched out her hands, fingers spread wide, palms toward him. He put Bella’s left hand against hers, clasped Bella’s fingers around hers, and started the data transfer.

It was a strange thing to feel information being pulled out of her internals without her consent, to feel Haas taking the last chip she had to bargain with.

Or was the data all she had now? There was something else. Something Cohen had been ready to use. Something she could use too—if she was willing to put it all on the table and gamble everything, the way Sharifi had. She hesitated, knowing that the hard knot in her stomach was simple fear. Then she looked into the cold black pit of Bella’s dilated pupils and knew she was already risking everything. She closed her eyes, took a last, trembling breath, and stepped into the memory palace.

The numbers hit her like a riptide. Code coursed through her, rolled her over, dragged her under. She reached out—tentatively at first, then more confidently—to the myriad sentient systems that made up Cohen. She felt their squabbling, bickering personalities—and the glue of shared goals, shared memories, shared passions that bound them together. None of these splintered shards was Cohen. But they remembered him. They remembered everything he had felt and believed and wanted. They shared that with her, even if they shared nothing else.

She just hoped it would be enough.

She found the communications AI almost before she began looking. His fury spun at the core of the memory palace like a dead star, sucking her in, absorbing the dead AI’s last functioning subsystems, devouring every remaining bit of heat and warmth and light in the place.

“I need you,” she said. “I need to get a line out to Freetown.”

“We can’t get a line to Freetown without the field AI. We have no network.”

“Yes we do,” she said. “We have the worldmine. The worldmine can give us streamspace access completely outside UN control or oversight. All we have to do is get Daahl’s network up. All we have to do is finish the job Cohen started.”

A cold shiver ran through the numbers. “Why should we?”

“It’s what Cohen would have done if he were still here.”

“He was different. We believed in him. Trusted him. He earned that. You, on the other hand, had better have something to bargain with.”

So she bargained.

She gave them the intraface. She promised to do what she had already promised Cohen she would do. What they would have known she would still do if they’d trusted her as he had.

She promised to set them free.

The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.

She rode Cohen’s networks like a hawk riding an updraft.

She wheeled and soared, sideslipping into subnetworks, enslaved systems, communications programs. She felt out beyond them to the static-charged web of local communications that hung like an electronic smog over Compson’s World, to the miners’ primitive radio communications, to Helena, to the orbital stations. And then she dove, surrendering herself to the black depths of the worldmind.

It was waiting for her, just as she’d known it would be; but it was no longer the alien, incomprehensible presence of the glory hole that she felt. Instead she heard the echoes of half-remembered voices in it. Mirce. McCuen. Her father. And, worst of all, Cohen.

He had been right, of course. The worldmind needed him. It had cannibalized him, anchoring a new structure in the ruins of his systems, and in the flimsy beginnings of the planetary net that he had helped Ramirez create for it. Because it was the worldmind that Ramirez’s net had been meant to serve all along. That was the secret that had taunted Li from behind Cartwright’s blind eyes. That was the secret her father had known, the secret Cohen himself had known, even if he had figured it out too late to save himself. And now Li watched the worldmind explode into orbit, crackle through the Bose-Einstein relays of every planet along the Periphery, across the unmonitored, uncontrolled tributaries of FreeNet and out into the deep, swift, living tide of the spinstream.

She followed, running on more tracks than she could consciously manage. She combed her subsystems, found two UN pension administration number crunchers and set them to work on the cuff locks. The communications AI wondered fleetingly if they had time to wait for them. She wondered along with him —and an instant later, so quick on the heels of the thought that she had no sense of having acted, she was on the FreeNet airspace control system searching the skies for a signal from a ship that had not yet reported in to the navigational authority.

She found Gould’s ship already in orbit, maintaining forced radio silence while the sleek, vicious shape of a UNSC frigate drifted above it, going through a search-and-seizure routine. She stayed just long enough to be sure that Nguyen’s net had closed around Gould. Then she was off and running, looking for the Medusa.

It wasn’t there. Not when she started looking, anyway. Then it exploded in-system at relativistic velocity, right on schedule, its navigational beacons howling in Dopplered harmonics, its retrorockets blazing like a man-made supernova.

Nguyen’s people lay in wait at the first system buoy. As the Medusa dropped into normal time, a second frigate detached itself from the buoy’s signal shadow and began pacing the civilian ship, hailing it.

As fast as the Medusa was moving, the hail couldn’t have come through as anything but twisted static. Still, it was on a closed military link. The ship slowed for it.

Li prowled through eight different Bose-Einstein-enabled networks before she could find a back door into the closed communications shooting between the two ships.

“—for boarding and security inspection,” the frigate’s captain was saying when she finally broke through the ship-to-ship encryption.

She didn’t wait to hear the freighter give the permission. She was accessing the Medusa’s data banks before the frigate completed its request, looking for anything Sharifi could have deposited there, hoping desperately that the precious dataset wasn’t deadwalled into an unwired storage locker.

Then someone logged on and began executing a massive data dump into the ship’s computer core. Sharifi’s unencrypted datasets. And more. As Li raced through the files she realized there was spinfeed with the datasets—feed that Sharifi must have thought was important enough to record live and send with the original data. Li looked to see who was doing the uploading and laughed at the obviousness of it when she finally saw it.

Sharifi had rented a locker with an automated data release. When the Medusa dropped into orbit over Freetown, the release program had looked for a streamspace signal—one Gould would presumably have sent had her own delivery been successful—and, not receiving it, had begun dumping its data into the ship’s comp. The ship in turn was programmed to broadcast the data on FreeNet when the upload was complete.

This was Sharifi’s insurance policy: dumping her raw data onto the most unregulated and chaotic sea in streamspace’s ocean. It amounted to little more than shouting out her discoveries in an electronic town square. Bella and Cohen and everyone else who knew Sharifi had been right about her all along. Sharifi hadn’t been trying to sell her information. She’d been trying to give it away, to anyone and everyone who could use it. And she had trusted that someone—enough someones to make a difference—would take care of Compson’s World.

The Medusa was too slow, though. Its onboard systems were hopelessly obsolete and in uncertain repair. Li spun through the ship comp, tweaking, adjusting, speeding things up wherever she could; but even so the first files had barely loaded before she felt the clank and pressure shift of the frigate’s boarding tube locking onto the Medusa’s fragile skin.

Christ! All this, only to lose everything because of a slow ship’s comp? She pushed and prodded furiously, but still the numbers seeped through the shipboard systems as reluctantly as cold diesel fuel. And meanwhile it was just a matter of time until the frigate’s techs accessed the Medusa’s systems and shut down the file transfer.

But they never did. They ran a cursory search that didn’t turn up anything—didn’t even seem intended to turn up anything. Then they closed the airlock and pulled away, leaving a welter of relieved, if confused, internal mail between the freighter’s crew and passengers.

Li breathed a sigh of relief and let her guard down. The frigate kicked in its attitudinals and pulled away. The Medusa continued its radically slowed drift toward Freetown.

Then she saw it. It was as chillingly, breathtakingly clear as sunlight in hard vacuum. The frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the freighter to take Sharifi’s data off it, but to leave something else on it. Something that would be sitting in one of the dark cargo bays waiting for a signal from the frigate’s bridge.

Nguyen didn’t need the files on the Medusa anymore. She hadn’t fired on the field AI until she knew Li and Cohen had retrieved everything she needed. And the frigate’s crew hadn’t boarded the Medusa until Haas had Li’s hand locked in his and was already stripping the precious data out of her hard files. Nguyen had the data now. So why would she run the risk that someone else might access the Medusa’s files, that Sharifi’s message might get through? Why would she let the rest of the world in on TechComm’s most jealously guarded secret?

The others were with her before the thought was even a word. They hijacked every navigational buoy within broadcast distance of the Medusa. They hijacked the NowNet lines that ran through the Ring-Freetown axis and out to the Periphery. Then they started shooting Sharifi’s files over every open link they could find.

Your files too, the communications AI said—and before Li could argue he was shooting out the unedited spinfeed of all those long hours in the mine, broadcasting everything she and Cohen had seen and felt since the worldmind first engulfed them.

Watching through the Medusa’s nav systems, Li saw the frigate slow and turn. Was she too late? Had it all been for nothing?

But no. They had caught the outbound transmissions. Li saw a quick FTL exchange of encrypted data between the frigate and Corps headquarters on Alba. Then the frigate turned tail, fired up its Bussard drives, and vanished into slow time.

The Medusa kept inching toward Freetown, its crew blissfully unaware of their deadly cargo. Meanwhile, Sharifi’s message flashed onto FreeNet and across a dozen Bose-Einstein relays onto a dozen planetary nets throughout the length and breadth of streamspace.

Li opened her eyes, amazed at her ability to act simultaneously in realspace and the whirling chaos of Cohen’s systems. The cuffs fell away from her wrists and ankles with a clatter. Haas looked at them unbelievingly for a split second, then jumped away from her.

Li jumped faster. She was on him before Bella’s body had taken a step, surrounding him, suffocating him, penetrating him. The station AI fought her, but she ground it to dust, barely stopping to think what she was doing, and slid toward Haas through the numbers, bright and pitiless as a shark. He cried out once. Then there was only Li. Her incandescent purpose. Her glacial, inhuman clarity. Her all-too-human fury.

She’d forgotten about the derms, though. At the last instant Haas quivered, mustered his strength, and ripped them off, leaving her with nothing but the empty vessel of Bella’s shunt-suppressed mind.

The last thing she heard as she collapsed was the cool, disembodied echo of Haas’s laughter.

She woke to pain and darkness. Her lungs burned. She put a hand to her face, and it came away wet with blood. Hers or Kintz’s, she couldn’t tell.

She sat up and saw Bella stretched out on the floor in front of her, unmoving but still breathing, thank God. There were voices in her ear. Not the whispers and echoes of the memory palace, but real human voices.

“Daahl?” she called. “Ramirez?”

No answer but crackling, hissing static.

After an eternity something came over the line. It was indistinct at first, lost in interference. But when it cleared, she heard Ramirez calling her name.

“We’re ready to come up,” she told him.

“Good. Hurry. We’d just about decided to let them go down and look for you.”

“Let who down?”

Another garbled, crackling stretch of static.

“What?”

“I said the strike’s over. The troops are pulling out. And there’s a General Nguyen looking for you.”

Nguyen. Christ.

“I need to send a message first. To ALEF.”

“Forget ALEF. It’s over. Just get up here. It’ll make sense as soon as you see the spinfeed.”

AMC Station: 9.11.48.

The news was all over the station. The streets were still, hushed, dark but for the flickering light of the livewalls and the low murmur of the crowds gathered around them.

Sharifi was on every channel. Interrupting news hour, NowNet programming, the last game of the Series. As they passed the All Nite Noodle, Li glanced at the livewall and saw the Mets and Yankees huddled on the infield, staring up at a two-story-high holomonitor Sharifi who smiled as she explained the unprecedented, unlooked-for, inconvenient miracle that was Compson’s World.

FreeNet’s AIs had been the first to catch the transmission, just as Sharifi must have planned it. Once they realized what they had, they spun it to every channel, every terminal, every press pool in UN space. In a matter of minutes, reporters were calling the General Assembly and the mining companies for position statements.

It wasn’t over yet, of course. There would be debates, compromises, and unholy alliances in the days to come. But they would happen onstream, in public. Compson’s fate wouldn’t be sealed in Nguyen’s office or other equally discreet offices. All of humanity, UN and Syndicate alike, would have a say in it. Sharifi had done that, at least. Her death, Mirce’s death, Cohen’s death had done that.

Security was deserted; everyone was on the street, dealing with the changes, trying to figure out who was in charge now. Li collapsed in a chair, rubbing her eyes. She wanted a shower. And then she needed to see Sharpe, probably.

She looked up. Bella stood over her.

“What are you still doing here?” she asked.

“Who killed her?” It was the first thing Bella had said to Li since they’d hit station.

“What does it matter, Bella? It’s over.”

“It’s not over for me.”

Li stared. The room was so silent she could hear her own pulse drumming in her ears. Bella’s body was taut, every muscle rigidly contracted. Her hands were trembling, the nails dirty and broken. There was blood on her. Her own blood. Li’s blood. Kintz’s blood.

“I have to know,” she said.

Li thought back to the vision of Sharifi in the glory hole. To the lost, desperate, adoring way Bella had looked at Sharifi. Whatever else Bella had done, she’d loved her. And been loved in return. Li was sure of that much.

“Voyt killed her,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

She looked Bella square in the face, unblinking. “It’s true.”

“I have a right to know. I need to know.”

Li sighed. “You know already, Bella. Think about it.”

Li saw the knowledge unfold in her, blossoming like a night flower. She put a hand over her mouth, turned on her heel, and walked across the holding pen into the bathroom. Li heard her retch again and again until there couldn’t have been anything left to bring up.

When she came back her face and arms were wet, and there was water on her clothes. But she looked clear-eyed, calm, reasonable. “Who was on-shunt?”

Li started to answer, but Bella spoke before she could. “It was Haas, wasn’t it? You don’t have to say it, just nod.”

Li nodded.

“What are you going to do about it?”

Li shifted in her chair. “What do you mean?”

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“You didn’t kill her, Bella. No one’s crazy enough to hold someone responsible for crimes committed when they’re under a shunt.”

“A crime was committed.” Bella still sounded rational, but Li was beginning to hear an ominous edge in her voice. “I thought that was what you were doing here. Finding her murderer. Punishing him. Do I have to show you the way to his office? Or was all that talk about right and wrong and punishment just something you made up to get me to believe in you?”

Li pushed her chair back and stood, swaying with exhaustion.

“Sit down, Bella.” She put a hand on Bella’s shoulder, steered her to a chair and pushed her into it. “Listen to yourself. You want me to march over and arrest Haas? On whose authority? He killed Sharifi on what amounts to Security Council orders. No one’s going to punish him. He won’t spend a day in jail, no matter what you or I do.”

“He killed her.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! She was as good as selling information to the Syndicates.”

Neither of them breathed for a moment. Then Bella walked across the room, opened the door, stepped into the street. She turned and looked at Li, her eyes glistening. “So you won’t do it?”

“What’s the point?”

“What’s in it for you, you mean.”

Li grabbed the chair Bella had been sitting in and slammed it down hard enough to set the pens and coffee cups rattling on the nearby desks.

“Just leave, Bella. Leave and don’t come back and don’t ever talk to me again. Because if I have to look at your face for one more second, I swear I won’t be responsible for myself. I lost friends down there. And I killed four people to save your worthless carcass. What I do and why and what I get out of it is none of your fucking business!”

Bella stared for a moment, then turned on her heel and left.

Li stood gripping the chair, white-knuckled, while the big doors swung to and fro, regained their equilibrium, and came to a standstill. Then she borrowed someone’s forgotten uniform coat, curled up on the duty-room couch, and cried herself into a numb, dead, dreamless sleep.

She woke up falling.

She’d had enough stations shot out from under her in the war to know the feeling. AMC station had just lost rotational stability. And they were about to lose gravity.

Even as she sat up, the emergency systems kicked in and she felt the lurching, shuddering deceleration of four thousand permanent residents and all the clutter that went with them. Her arms and legs lightened, her stomach lurched as the grav lines wavered. The lights dimmed and the ventilation ducts overhead fell silent. The systems picked up again, but the rush of air was fainter now, the overhead panels dimmer. Someone had just shut down the massive Stirling cycle engines buried in the station’s core; they were running on emergency power.

There was still partial gravity, enough to make things easier than they would be in a very few minutes. She tapped in to the station net, trying to figure out what was going on; but the net was down, or she was locked out of it. She got carefully to her feet and began moving out into the main room of the HQ, where the duty officer hovered behind the counter looking bewildered by this sudden reversal of the laws of gravity as stationers knew them.

“What’s going on?” Li asked.

He started so violently at the sight of her that he bounced off the counter and had to scrabble for traction to keep from drifting sideways. Only then did she look down at herself and realize she hadn’t washed or changed since reaching the station.

“Christ. Sorry.” She rummaged through the lockers at the back of the room until she’d found something almost small enough. Meanwhile, others were starting to filter into HQ, all trying to figure out what had shut down the gravity and what they were supposed to do about it.

It wasn’t until the chief engineer called saying he couldn’t find Haas that she finally put the pieces together.

She burst into Haas’s office just as the precession ring ground to a stop and gravity gave out completely. It caught her off guard, and she careened across the room, her feet stranded in midair above the star-filled floorport.

She saw Haas out of the corner of her eye. He sat in the chair behind the big desk. His face looked peaceful, except for the mottled bruises spreading beneath his eyes.

Bella stood, or rather floated, above him.

She hung weightless over the tide-swept slab of the crystal desk. Her hair writhed like a vipers’ nest. Her eyes were closed, her face pale, her chest rising and falling in a sinister parody of a sleeper’s breathing. Her smile sent cold fingers brushing down Li’s spine.

Something—her own subconscious or one of Cohen’s remnant systems—nudged at her, prompting her to run a network scan.

Spitting, flaring lines of current shot out from Bella, splicing into each of the station’s embedded systems, running back and forth between station and planet, between surface and mine shaft. And all that immense power was being channeled into the single frail wire that connected Bella’s jack to the derms at Haas’s temples.

She was breaking him. Slowly, pitilessly, irresistibly. She had locked him into the loop shunt somehow and was running the whole vast power of the worldmind through him, killing him.

Li looked at Haas, slumped over the glowing desk. She looked at Bella’s peaceful face, at the hair circling her head like the flaming corona of an eclipsed star.

She is coming down from the mountains, she thought. Singing. With stones in her hands.

She called Security.

“I’m in Haas’s office,” she said. “Don’t send anyone. Everything’s fine here.”