Trouble and Her Friends

Chapter Six

TODAY SEAHAVEN is a city in flight, and Cerise walks through uncrowded streets while the stars whirl overhead and under her feet, easily seen through the transparent sidewalks. The Mayor’s palace looms ahead, always Aztec no matter when the setting, but she ignores it, wanders instead onto the mall where the merchants, legal and not, collect in rows, and a wall displays a thousand messages. Her current icon is known—a comic-book woman, all tits and hips and Barbie-doll waist, but done in one dimension only, exactly like a comic book, so that the shape is paper thin, absolutely flat from certain angles—and so is her current affiliation: the crackers give her a wide berth, and she pretends not to see or recognize the familiar icons. She is interested in Trouble, not trouble, and there’s no point in antagonizing the people who might most be able to help her.

She is early at her rendezvous; she walks the length of the wall, scanning the displays. Art swirls through and over the messages, screening content in glorious colors—the Mayor pays in time for artists without other access to decorate his wall—and she enjoys that more than the words, until she reaches the midpoint. And there, in neon-red, hot Chinese red, the artists giving it a wide berth, is a familiar symbol: Trouble’s harlequin, brilliant against the dark seeming-stone of the wall itself. Cerise reaches for it, feeling the familiar flicker of codes against her fingers—Trouble’s work, no mistake, no forgery, the real thing, not the pale imitation of the new Trouble’s work—and the message spills into the air around her.

I’M THE ONLY TROUBLE THERE IS. I DON’T TAKE KINDLY TO IMPOSTERS—FAIR WARNING, LAST AND ONLY WARNING.

Cerise puts the message back where she found it, watches the red symbol reappear around it and flatten itself back against the wall, glowing like fire against the darkness. So my Trouble’s back now, she thinks. I knew it wasn’t her who did the boasting. For an instant she considers copying the message for Coigne, using it to force him to admit that her Trouble wasn’t the intruder, but common sense intervenes. He will say that this is more clever planning, more evasive advertising, and, from anyone else but Trouble, he could be right.

She turns away, the stars wheeling overhead, streaks of light in a cloudless dark, wheeling underfoot as well, as though she and the city lay on a plain that bisected a sphere spinning through space. The buildings look sharper-edged, as though seen against fireworks, but she ignores the effect, scans the plaza for Helling’s icon. She sees it at last, almost doesn’t recognize it—he’s changed the symbol, gone from the old blue biplane to a blue thunderstorm, almost invisible, an inky shadow against the greater darkness.

*So you’ve seen it,* Helling says without preamble, drifting closer, and a tiny fork of lightning briefly touches the dancing figure.

How could I miss it? Cerise asks, and hears herself hard and bitter.

No one else has, either, Helling agreed. *It’s been up for a hundred-twelve hours.*

Cerise whistles softly, amazed that the Mayor would allow anything to occupy space for so long, and Helling goes on, “Treasury’s seen a copy, too—and it’s been downloaded out of town, of course.*

Of course. Cerise looks up at the spinning sky, dizzying herself. This is Trouble’s style, this warning one warning, and God help you if you don’t listen, because she won’t give another one, or any quarter afterwards. She remembers Trouble, long ago, earning the name she’d taken, tracking a man who hadn’t paid her through the nets, and, once she’d found out exactly what he was doing and where in the realworld he was doing it, passing details and location to the police, once a day every day for three weeks—always through complex cutouts, she’d been just as deep in the shadows as her victim—until they’d caught up with the dealer. Trouble had sat smiling at the evening news, and never had to do it again. Cerise shakes her head, shakes the memory away, and looks back at Helling. *I hear you’re consulting these days. *

*That’s right,* Helling says, and she hears him suddenly wary.

*I also hear you’ve got a friend at Interpol. *

*Yeah. *

Anywhere accessible? In reality, I mean. It occurs to her that she no longer knows where Helling is based—she had heard he was in London, but that was a year ago.

To you, yeah, Helling says, sourly. *I’ll tell him to have his people call your people. *

Thanks, Cerise says.

One thing, though, Helling says, and Cerise looks back at him. Vess wants Trouble, too.

I thought Interpol only dealt with multimillions or germ warfare, Cerise says, already dreading the answer.

*The new name’s been linked to a couple of nasty viruses.*

Bullshit. The word triggers a lurking watchdog, which materializes as a small and yapping terrier, sparks flying where its claws strike the transparent paving. Cerise glares as it circles her ankles—the Mayor’s delicacy never fails to irritate her—waits until it dissolves before she goes on. *Also not Trouble’s style. Even less so than boasting.*

Vess never knew Trouble, Helling says. *He’s a Eurocop, they move in different circles. You sure you want to talk to him, Cerise?* His face shows briefly in the thunderstorm, smiling.

No, Cerise thinks, but says, *I’m sure. Tell him, will you?*

*I’ll tell him,* Helling says again. The icon brightens slightly, lifts away from her, lightning flickering through it to outline the clouds.

She watches it go, fading to nothing against the moving sky, makes no move to call him back. There’s nothing more to say, not to him, and she walks back down through the plaza under the spinning stars.

Helling was as good as his word, as Cerise had expected. Interpol’s local office contacted her secretary, and they juggled schedules until they found a mutually acceptable time for lunch. She took a car and driver—not her usual habit, but she wanted time to think—and as the car slowed in the clotted traffic on the main approach to the downtown business district, she began to wonder if she was doing the right thing. That uncertainty was unlike her, and she frowned, annoyed with herself, and pushed the thought away. What she needed from Interpol was simple, an accounting of the false Trouble’s activities—it would be useful to have something to show the board, to prove that Multiplane was not the only corporation targeted by this particular cracker, plus it would be nice to have more evidence to analyze, to prove to Coigne that it wasn’t her Trouble—and maybe, just maybe, she could trade her own information, her knowledge of the old Trouble and her certainty that this was someone else, for Interpol’s files. After all, she thought, I was Trouble’s partner, and anyone who’s been anything in security, even a Eurocop, has to know that. It’s the least I can do, for old times’ sake. And if I have to, I have other coin to trade. The pun pleased her; she smiled, and saw the driver cast a fleeting glance into his mirror.

The car turned off the flyway, rode the ramp down into the crowded streets. Cerise leaned back in her seat as the hordes of pedestrians flowed around the car like water around the rocks in a streambed, not wanting to pay attention to them, men and women in cheap-corporate suits, the middling sort who kept the companies running and the money flowing. Trouble would have teased her for her contempt, called it arrogance—and she would’ve been right, had been right about it, but I was right, too, when I said I’d earned it. Cerise frowned slightly, the old apartment coming back to her in a rush of memory, the plain two-rooms-and-a-bath, with a kitchen unit mounted into the wall above the freezer, and Trouble lounging on the foam-core folding couch that was their only piece of furniture. It had been two months before they’d gotten a job that let them pay for anything else, and right after it they’d seen a play on the culture channel that took place entirely in a bed. For weeks, just the thought of it had been enough to send both of them into giggles. Bad enough to be crackers, Trouble had said, that was enough of a stereotype, but artsy crackers…

And this was not the attitude she needed to take to this meeting. Her frown deepened to a scowl, and she took her thoughts firmly in hand. Helling’s friend from Interpol was going to want value for any information he let slip; she would have to be at her best, if she was going to win this game. The car slowed again, eased to a stop directly in front of the black glass-fronted building that housed the restaurant they had chosen. The driver locked the engine, and came around to open the door; Cerise climbed out easily, just touching the automatically extended hand.

“I’ll be back for you at three, Ms. Cerise?” the driver asked, and she nodded.

“That’ll be fine,” she said, and went up the shallow marble stairs into the lobby.

The light was darker here, dimmed by the smoky glass, but she knew her way without having to consult the direction boards placed discreetly inside the entrance. She climbed the double staircase and nodded to the man in evening clothes who waited just outside the door.

“Cerise,” she said. “I’m meeting a man named Mabry.”

The security man nodded back, fingering the silver square of the annunciator clipped to his lapel, and Cerise stepped past him into the suddenly warm light of the restaurant. It wasn’t crowded, and a pair of waiters came hurrying to meet her.

“May I help you?” the first—a dark, curvy little woman in a black skirt a little too short to flatter her short legs—asked, in a voice that held the hint of a musical accent. Cerise smiled in spite of herself, in spite of business.

“My name’s Cerise,” she said again. “I’m here to meet Mr. Mabry.”

“Of course. If you’ll come this way,” the woman answered, and hurried off, glancing back only once to be sure Cerise was still behind her. Cerise followed more slowly, enjoying both the woman’s bustling handsomeness and the quiet elegance of the dining room, found herself, as she had expected, at the door of one of the semiprivate rooms. A table for two had been set up there, hidden from any other diners by a standing screen and some towering, broad-leafed plants, and the dark woman gestured toward the table.

“Your party, ma’am.”

“Thanks,” Cerise said, hoping vaguely that she would be the one to wait on them, and turned her attention to the man at the table. He rose to his feet at her approach, holding out his hand in greeting.

“Ms. Cerise?” It was only half a question, but Cerise nodded anyway, and the man went on, his vowels touched with a flat, European accent. “I’m Vesselin Mabry.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Cerise said, and allowed herself to be handed to her seat. It was a tactic Eurocops often employed against Yanks, that overdone, unfamiliar politesse, but she had faced it before, rather enjoyed the brittle game of it. He was not quite what she had expected, looked more like an overage rocker than a netwalker: a big man, broad through the shoulders and thick-bodied, with a mane of untidy, greying curls and a fleshy, broad-boned face. Only the jacket betrayed him for a cop, even though he wore it over jeans and a charcoal-grey T-shirt: it was not top-of-the-line, a less expensive copy of a good designer. She smiled to herself, reassured, and leaned forward in her chair.

“Max said you might have some information for me about a cracker I’ve been hunting.”

Mabry didn’t even blink, just smiled slowly, the lines at the corners of his eyes tightening with what looked like good humor. “Funny, that’s what Max said to me.”

Their waiter—not the dark woman, Cerise saw with some disappointment—arrived then, stopping the conversation. He offered menu boards, pointed out the order mechanism, and vanished again, but the interruption had been enough to defuse any advantage she might have achieved.

“I heard on the net that Multiplane had had an encounter with Trouble,” Mabry said. “Frankly, I was disappointed that you didn’t notify us at once.”

“Question of jurisdiction,” Cerise said, promptly and plausibly, using the easy lie. “Interpol’s network authority comes from the Amsterdam Conventions, and you know we never signed.”

Mabry sighed heavily, put his menu aside. “You and I both know that’s bullshit. Any law enforcement agency can be notified now, and the word passed to a more appropriate entity if necessary.”

“Also bullshit,” Cerise said. “We have a responsibility to be certain that our response to an intrusion is overseen by the agency most directly concerned. Which may or may not be your agency—all of which is made moot, of course, by the fact that the company is U.S.-based.”

“Multiplane is multinational,” Mabry murmured. “You have subsidiaries in Switzerland, Eire, and Germany, just to name Europe. That certainly falls within my brief. And multinationals have traditionally obeyed the Conventions.”

Cerise nodded, willing to surrender her position—she had better and stronger ones in reserve—and said, “Which is part of why I’m here, Mr. Mabry.”

“Vess. Please.”

Like calling a cobra “Cuddles,” Cerise thought. It’s cute, but it doesn’t make me any less careful. “And I’m Cerise.”

“No other name?”

“I never needed one.” Cerise smiled at him, looked down at her menu, then touched the order strip to select her lunch.

“Except Alice,” Mabry said, and matched her smile.

“That was a long time ago,” Cerise answered. She had expected him to know that—anyone who was halfway competent on the nets would have found out her old workname, never mind that Helling could have told him—and she refused to be disconcerted by it.

“Yes, it quite dates me,” Mabry answered, and Cerise caught herself warming to him. That was dangerous; still, Helling liked him, and Max had never been a fool.

“But we are interested in the same person,” Mabry went on. “I would be very glad indeed to see any data you can give me regarding your intrusion.”

“You didn’t say, we’re both interested in Trouble,” Cerise said.

“That’s the second thing I’d be interested in hearing from you,” Mabry said. “The word on the nets is that Trouble is back—the old Trouble, your former partner, I believe—and that this intruder, this cracker who writes viruses, is someone else entirely. Of course, a week ago, everyone was saying the opposite.”

“I think it’s two different people,” Cerise said.

“Why?”

Cerise leaned back in her chair as the waiter appeared with their salads, grateful for the interruption. When the man had left, she went on, “Because none of this is Trouble’s style. Not the cracking—our work was surgical, we did exactly what was needed, nothing more, nothing less—and not the boasting afterward. I hadn’t heard about viruses until I talked to Max—you must be keeping that very much under wraps, Mr. Mabry—but that’s even more not our style, not Trouble’s style. Germ warfare is too double-edged. We never messed with it.”

“What, never?” Mabry murmured, with a lift of his bushy eyebrows. “I thought it was a rite of passage.”

“Don’t play devil’s advocate with me,” Cerise said. “You’re old enough to remember the old days. There were standards, even before the law moved in. Responsible people didn’t do viruses.” She shook her head, the anger cooling rapidly, continued more quietly. “I know, we were breaking the law, offline law, but we did keep to our own rules.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you a romantic,” Mabry said.

“You were there, too,” Cerise answered. “You tell me.”

There was a little silence, and then Mabry looked away. “Yes, I know,” he said, softly. “I get tired of hearing about it sometimes, that’s all.”

He was never one of us, Cerise realized suddenly, had never worked the shadows. She eyed him with new wariness and a new respect, not quite sure which she felt—more like what she would feel for some new and exotic species—and Mabry smiled with what looked like self-mockery.

“Still,” he said. “Cops should stick together—shouldn’t we?”

Cerise smiled, acknowledging the point: whatever he hadn’t been, whatever she had been before, right now they were on the same side.

“Max said this wasn’t like Trouble,” Mabry went on, “or not like the Trouble he knew, and now you’re saying the same thing. I find that very interesting.”

Cerise hesitated, then, deliberately, touched one finger to her dollie-slot. “This new Trouble doesn’t feel the same.”

“A brainworm?” Mabry’s thick eyebrows rose, and then he grinned. “A European job, I presume.”

“Of course,” Cerise said, blandly.

“Yet the Treasury savants make a match of it.”

“Sixty percent accuracy,” Cerise said. “All that means is that they’ve never seen the newbie before, and that it’s using some of Trouble’s old programs—which would make sense, if it’s stealing Trouble’s name. All of which you know.”

Mabry grinned again. “Tell me about Trouble.”

Cerise looked at him in genuine surprise. “What’s Max told you?”

“Very little,” Mabry said, and there was a touch of bitterness in his voice. Cerise lifted an eyebrow, and Mabry took a deep breath. “Max and I have been—together—for about a year now, but we don’t, he doesn’t talk much about his old friends.”

“I didn’t know you were family,” Cerise said.

Mabry touched his own dollie-slot. “Depends on the family,” he said, and this time the bitterness was clear.

Cerise nodded once, careful not to show too much comprehension. Helling was on the wire, of course—they had all been, van Liesvelt, herself and Trouble, Max and his then-partner Jannick Aledort, Carlie Held, Arabesque, Dewildah Mason, and David Terrel. They had lived within a subway ride of each other for three years, and had seen each other off the nets perhaps even more than on—and that was part of what the wire had brought them, the desire to know each other in reality as well. And it would be hard for Mabry, a man who stayed within the law, who adapted to the rules of the net—one of the most ironclad of which was, never try to contact the human being behind the net persona—to know that his lover had not only managed an illegal career with an illegal implant, but had broken that rule as well. “Whatever happened to Aledort?” she asked, with apparent inconsequence, and Mabry grimaced.

“He was shot to death,” he said, after a heartbeat’s pause.

“Two years ago. No one was ever charged, but it was probably Planetaries.”

Cerise nodded, feeling suddenly cold despite the restaurant’s expensive environmental system. That was two down, out of the old gang, Terrel in jail—still—and Aledort dead, and maybe more gone, if she’d been able to keep in touch. It was no surprise that Aledort had gotten himself killed— ecotage was a dangerous profession, and the Planetary League was a particularly bad group to cross; and besides, Aledort had a nasty streak that almost invited murder—but it was still a little unnerving to contemplate.

“And yes,” Mabry went on, with another little smile, “I’m a bad winner.”

So we know where we stand, Cerise thought. She said, “We all thought Max could do better than Aledort.” She carefully did not say that she thought he had done so, and Mabry’s smile broadened for an instant.

“To return to business,” he said. “Tell me about Trouble.”

Cerise paused, took a deep breath, and was pleased that when she spoke, her voice stayed steady, remote. “We lived together, worked together, for just about four years. She’s a brilliant cracker—also on the wire, we all were—with a good sense of place and timing, a nice hand with tools. She used to write most of her own, or modify them. I’m probably a little quicker—she’s bigger than I am, and that shows even on the net—but she’s probably a little more accurate in the long run. She liked to run really clean programs, the architecture mattered to her, she’d polish things just for the satisfaction of it. That’s what’s missing with this newTrouble, that sense of precision. Trouble liked to keep things clean.” Including leaving me—at least it was clean for her. Cerise put the thought aside along with the flash of memory, Trouble’s body pressed against her own, the feel of Trouble’s muscled back beneath her fingers as she pulled the other woman closer into a twining embrace, and said, “What’s Interpol’s interest in all of this?”

There was a little pause, but then Mabry said, “As you know, this new Trouble has been causing a lot of commotion. Treasury is looking for her—or him—here, ECCI and Interpol are mounting their own investigations as well. Since Trouble, either one, has always worked out of the U.S. nets, I’ve been sent over to keep an eye on the Treasury investigation, just in case they turn up something we can use. There have been a series of intrusions, scattershot attacks, into the industrial nets in Europe, but we—Interpol is most worried about the viruses.”

“Reasonable enough,” Cerise said. In spite of herself, she felt another touch of fear worm its way along her spine. You couldn’t steal much in a five-second intrusion, but there was plenty of time to leave an infectious program. In fact, she thought, if I were trying to virus a system, that’s probably how I’d do it. Break in, leave my virus, and then deliberately trigger the alarms in the hope that the syscops would be too busy trying to trace the intruder to spot any stray bits of code. She bit back the desire to call her people immediately with the warning—they had run scans as soon as the intruder had been spotted; she had returned from her futile chase to find the printouts waiting—and said instead, “The same style?”

“All the ones that have been reported,” Mabry said, “follow a similar pattern. A quick intrusion, sometimes a virus inserted, more often not, once a definite theft and subsequent sale, but always boasting afterwards.”

“That sounds like what we had,” Cerise agreed. “I have a transcript of the event with me, if you’d like to take a look at it.”

“I’d like to keep it.” Mabry held out his hand, and Cerise slid the disk across the table.

“Please do,” she said. “We haven’t had any signs of infection, but I’ll double-check when I get back to the office.”

“I can give you a sample of the payload,” Mabry said. “Which hasn’t been particularly destructive. And also what we’ve salvaged of the main code.” He produced another disk from his pocket, and held it out. Cerise took it, nodding her thanks.

“If you find anything,” Mabry went on, “would you save it for us? Most of it’s been set to self-destruct, but still, any fragments are potential evidence.”

“Of course,” Cerise said, and slipped the disk into her carrier.

“There’s one more thing,” Mabry said, “and I’d rather you didn’t answer than lie to me. Do you keep in touch with Trouble?”

It was not the question Cerise had been expecting. She hesitated, choosing her words carefully, thought vaguely that he’d paid her back for asking about Aledort. “No. We didn’t exactly—part friends. Right before Evans-Tindale passed, we had, well, a disagreement about it, about what we should do. Trouble wanted to bail out then and there, go legit, and I wanted to go on. I had a job in train that I wanted to do, you see.” She could almost see the remembered IC(E), almost taste the sharp codes, a new system then, one she’d never broken before, a gaudy, glittering challenge, utterly irresistible to any netwalker of spirit. “We were still arguing about it, about the job, when Evans-Tindale passed. She left. I haven’t seen her since, bar her name on the nets.” The worst of it was, Trouble had been right.

Mabry nodded slowly, as though he’d guessed her thought. “Treasury will be wanting to talk to you nonetheless.”

“I might’ve known.” The words came out more bitter than she’d intended, and Mabry smiled slightly.

“They want Trouble—either one—very badly. If you know of a way to get in touch with her—” He broke off, shaking his head.

I certainly wouldn’t tell you, Cerise thought, and said, “I’ll bear that in mind.” Or was he hinting I should warn her? she wondered a split second later. It was possible; he was Helling’s lover. Max had obviously spoken well of them, from the old days, or at least the little he’d said had been good. And there was an old rivalry between Treasury and the Eurocops.

“They’ll probably be getting in touch with you soon,” Mabry went on. The waiter appeared with their food, a plate balanced in each hand, served them with economically graceful gestures. Mabry waited until he had gone to continue. “John Starling is handling the on-line investigation.”

Cerise froze for a fleeting instant, the delicate flavor of the chicken gone to ashes in her mouth. She knew Starling, all right, at least by reputation, and didn’t much like him— another netwalker who’d never known the shadows and had a chip on his shoulder because of it. He used a soaring bird as an icon, a deceptively simple sweeping line, bright as light on metal. “I’m sure I’ll be hearing from him, then.”

Mabry nodded, she thought in sympathy. “I’m inclined to agree with you and Max, this isn’t the Trouble you knew. But now that Trouble’s back on-line—well, I suppose they have to take action.”

“If I were looking for Trouble,” Cerise said, “I’d look in Seahaven.”

Mabry smiled then, with genuine amusement, the lines tightening around his eyes. “So easy for some of us to get there.”

“Ah, well,” Cerise answered, and matched his smile. Mabry would not be welcome in Seahaven, any more than she would be welcomed in the near-mythical bat caves reserved for the real cops. “Are you based in the States these days?”

“London, actually.” Mabry accepted the change of subject with equanimity. “This is a temporary assignment.” They talked through the rest of the meal about minor things— Mabry’s time in London, her own life at Multiplane, never how he and Helling had met—and came back to the new Trouble’s techniques over dessert.

“Frankly,” Mabry said, “I think this Trouble, the new one, is very young. The technical aspects—the routines I’ve dissected have managed to be brilliant and sloppy all at the same time. Not mature work.”

“And very much not Trouble’s style,” Cerise said.

“Not if she liked—likes—precision work,” Mabry agreed.

“And it’s asking for trouble, being that sloppy,” Cerise said, and grimaced at the inadvertent pun. A drop of raspberry sauce escaped from the wedge of chocolate terrine, landed on the pristine edge of her plate. She dabbed it up abstractedly, the fuchsia of her nails clashing with the deeper red, licked her finger without really thinking about it.

Mabry smiled wryly—he was having coffee, black, decaf— and said, “Yeah. I think this newTrouble is going to trip itself up one of these days.”

“What about tracers? Any luck?”

“Now there this Trouble seems to have learned quite a lot from someone.” Mabry leaned forward, planted both elbows on the cloth. The table tilted slightly under his weight. “I’m good at tracking, and we’ve had some other experts in—Max among them.”

“I remember Toby,” Cerise said. It had been the best tracer she’d ever used, was still a part of her frontline toolkit.

“Yes. But we still haven’t been able to get any kind of a fix.”

Cerise finished the last bite of the terrine, and leaned forward herself. “It may be because this guy’s using some of Trouble’s old routines, modified. Trouble knew Max’s work, used to enjoy playing hide-and-seek with him, and most of the current tracers use some of the Toby routines. That’s part of the problem with all of this. This guy’s using Trouble’s tools, so it is her work, her hand, that shows up on autopsy. But it isn’t her.”

“I wondered why so many of the shadow-folk were staying so quiet,” Mabry said. “Usually, when someone boasts like this, stirs up this much heat, you get a lot of talk. The shadows either close ranks, wall us out, or there are half a hundred people wanting to shop him.”

“Trouble was well respected,” Cerise said. It wasn’t precisely true, but it was as close as she felt like coming to the full explanation. Trouble’s skills had been universally respected, but the wire had made the old netwalkers keep their distance, and there had always been the whisper that Trouble was only as good as her chips. It was more that Trouble had been the most visible of the group on the wire, and one of the best crackers around; like it or not, she’d been a symbol to both sides. “Now that she’s back, you may hear more.”

“So you believe in this message I’ve been seeing everywhere.”

It wasn’t really a question, but Cerise answered anyway. “That’s Trouble’s style.”

There wasn’t much to say after that, and Mabry signaled for the check. They argued politely over it, and, after some insistence Mabry let her pay. Cerise was still smiling when she emerged into the cloudy afternoon to find her car waiting as she’d asked. She told the driver to take the long way back to Multiplane’s compound, along the ring road that surrounded the city, and leaned back against the seat, trying to sort out her thoughts. She would almost certainly have to talk to Starling—or maybe I could send Sirico, or maybe Jensey? she wondered. The real question is, am I going to try to warn Trouble first? Can I afford to take that chance? She sighed, turned her head sideways, not really seeing the other vehicles—dozens of dark, heavy-bodied cars that matched the one in which she rode—crowding the travel lanes. Trouble more than half deserves this, the way she ran out on me— but she gave me fair warning, the one warning she always gives, she told me she wasn’t going to crack that system… And I don’t like John Starling’s reputation.

That wasn’t entirely fair, and she knew it—he was a dedicated cop and a skilled netwalker—but she refused to look further. I don’t like him, and I don’t think Mabry likes him either. And besides, I owe Trouble at least this much. The trick now is to find her—or, of course, someone who knows how to find her. I wonder if Butch kept in touch? It was quite possible, and she felt a faint pang at the thought. But then, she told herself, I didn’t exactly make an effort to keep in touch with him, or with any of them, after I went legit. She had not been proud of herself for taking the job with Multiplane—it had not been entirely her choice, and it was not something she had been going to boast about to her old friends, not something that she had wanted to discuss at all, if she could help it. And the easiest way to avoid questions had been to avoid the people altogether, at least until she was well-known as Multiplane’s chief syscop, and by then so many of the shadow-folk and the worm-carriers had fled into security that she was relatively invisible. She could put the word out discreetly—one of the others, Helling, maybe, or Dewildah, or even van Liesvelt, if she could find him, might be willing to help—or she could take her own advice to Mabry and look in Seahaven. That was probably her best bet, and she shifted against the cushions, wishing now that she’d told the driver to take the flyway. She curbed her impatience sharply, made herself sit quiet as the car churned its way through the heavy traffic. Seahaven was always a temptation and a challenge: she could only welcome the excuse.

The car let her off at Multiplane’s main entrance, where the same deferential security was waiting. The first pair murmured greetings as one held first the car door and then the door into the lower lobby, but the second pair, one seated behind the high desk that half blocked the entranceway, the other standing hidden behind a pillar and a potted palm, looked up at her approach, and the taller man stepped out from behind his pillar.

“Excuse me, Ms. Cerise, but I’ve got a message for you.”

Cerise stopped, frowning in spite of herself—she hadn’t expected Treasury to catch up with her so quickly—and security went on, “Mr. Coigne would like to talk to you as soon as you get in. He said, if you’d drop by his office on your way up.”

That was not a request. Cerise frowned more deeply, wondering exactly what Coigne wanted, and shook speculation away as pointless. “All right, thank you. You can let him know I’m on my way.”

“Thanks, Ms. Cerise,” the woman behind the desk said.

Cerise nodded and went on past, to ride the moving stairs up to the main lobby. She had to wait for an elevator—not unusual, so late in the day—and stood for a long moment staring at the elevated track that carried the compound-to-compound shuttle. The frame embedded in the massive grey-glass wall was designed around the track and its enclosure, the brass struts radiating like a sunburst from around the triangular entrance. Even on a cloudy day, the metal seemed to gleam with a light of its own; in better weather it was spectacular, and Cerise allowed herself a quick moment of regret, wishing it were sunny. It was easier, at the moment, to think about architecture. The elevator came then, and she stepped inside past the hurrying squad of brightly dressed secretaries, keeping her mind blank as she rode up to the twentieth floor.

Coigne was expecting her, of course—security had, inevitably, notified him of her arrival—and the secretary, a quick-moving, painfully serious woman, waved her on into the inner suite. The door to Coigne’s office stood open, and she paused there, tapped once on the black-enameled metal of the frame. Coigne looked up with well-simulated surprise, beckoned for her to come in.

“I heard from the Treasury today,” he said, without preamble.

Cerise seated herself in the guest’s chair, arranging her skirt to show a comfortable amount of thigh. She had dressed carefully for the meeting with Mabry, in the black and hard fuchsia that was her trademark, and knew she looked good. She had realized long ago that it annoyed Coigne to find her attractive, and she enjoyed the delicate game of provocation. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “I assume they’re interested in Trouble?”

Coigne frowned. “If you were expecting them, Cerise, you might have warned your staff.”

“I thought,” Cerise said, “that they were capable of handling routine matters.”

“The Treasury doesn’t seem to think it’s routine,” Coigne said. “Neither does your staff, for that matter.”

Cerise hid her irritation, an annoyance mixed almost equally with apprehension, and said, “I don’t see the problem.”

“No problem,” Coigne answered, and laid gentle stress on the word “problem.”

“However, they do want to talk to you.”

“So I’d heard.” Cerise leaned back in the padded chair, crossed her legs and let one foot swing, the shoe hanging momentarily from her toe before she pulled it back. “I gave a precis of our information on the intrusion to the Interpol agent handling the case—given that we’re multinational, I thought it’d be good to have someone from there looking into the matter—but I’d be happy to provide the same information to Treasury.”

“They know that you used to work with Trouble.”

“It’s no secret.”

Coigne eyed her thoughtfully, thin face expressionless, the grey eyes paler than the clouds seen through the windows behind him. He was framed against the ocean and the sky, the water gone cold and grey-green in the dulled light; his fair hair looked washed out, ugly against the strong greys On the horizon, a rustred shape was briefly visible: a ship, a tanker maybe, standing out to sea.

“Listen to me, Cerise,” Coigne said at last. Cerise did not move, did not change her politely attentive smile, but every muscle in her body tightened. She recognized that tone all too well: Coigne meant every word, and would back them up, precisely and exactly, with all his considerable skill and resources. “I want this Trouble—I’ve told you that before, and I mean it. I don’t intend for us to put up with this kind of shit from two-bit crackers. I don’t really care if this is the woman you used to live with, but if it is, I expect you to put her away. You work for me now—for Multiplane—and don’t forget it.”

“All right,” Cerise said. She sat up abruptly, enjoying her anger. “You’ve said your piece, now listen to me. I will put a stop to this new Trouble—who is not my ex-lover; my ex-lover is back and thoroughly pissed off on her own account—and I don’t need your threats to make me do my job. I have a system to protect: that matters to me. But I am not going to be able to do it while you or Treasury are breathing down my neck, and I’m not going to find him or her or it on the nets. You want me to catch this new Trouble, fine. But I’m going to need more freedom of action than you’re used to putting up with. And if you won’t give it to me, I don’t want to hear any complaints about me not doing my job.”

Coigne blinked twice, looked down at his desktop, looked back at her, his face still without readable emotion. “What do you need?”

Cerise paused, startled by his capitulation—which means that he wants this new Trouble, much more than I realized— said, slowly, trying to hide the fact that her own plans were still unformed, “First, I’ll need to make Jensey—Baeyen— acting chief for the duration.”

Coigne nodded.

“Then—” Cerise took a breath, pulling her thoughts together. “I’ll need to devote myself to this job exclusively. I have net access, I’ll want extra time without questions, and I’ll want a company car—no driver, just the car. Also leave, with pay, no questions where or why, and a company draft, at least ten thousand.”

“You should have that in your budget,” Coigne said.

“I’ll need your signature on the forms.”

Coigne nodded. “You’ll be going after her—or him—yourself, then?”

“Yes,” Cerise said, and realized that she was shaking. She folded her hands, laced her fingers together—she had not expected Coigne to agree, still had not realized how important this was to him—and smiled deliberately. “It’s my job, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Coigne said, “it is.”

Cerise pushed herself up out of the chair before the silence could grow into a threat. “Then I’ll pass this information to Treasury, and put things in train.”

Coigne nodded again. “Send me the papers. I’ll approve your requests.”

“Thanks,” Cerise said, and turned toward the door. Coigne’s voice stopped her in the doorway.

“Don’t fuck this up.”

“I don’t intend to,” Cerise said, and let the door close gently behind her.

She made her way back to network security like a woman in a dream, barely aware of the delicate pastel murals that decorated the public spaces or the carpets chosen to be soothing. She showed her ID to security, a stocky woman sitting hunched behind the bulletproof glass of her cubicle, and went on into the main room. It was very quiet, the only sound the gentle hum of half a dozen individual stations mingled with the softer hiss of the environmental system. Her staff, Sirico, Macea, Czaja, and the rest, sat or sprawled bonelessly in their cubicles, supported by the heavy chairs, out on the nets. She ignored them, stepped into her own office to find Baeyen sprawled vacant-eyed at her station in the outer office. Her mouth hung slightly open, and a thin line of spittle trailed down her chin. Cerise walked past her, knowing better than to try to reach her from the realworld, went into her own office, and keyed commands into the waiting machine. A few seconds later, Baeyen’s icon flashed onto the screen.

“Boss?”

“Sorry to interrupt you,” Cerise said, “but we’ve got a project to set up.”

“Let me close this down,” Baeyen answered promptly, “and I’ll be on my way.”

“Thanks,” Cerise said. The icon vanished, and she turned her attention to the schematic of the corporate net that bloomed automatically in her screen. Everything seemed to be in order, and live security was tight; she touched another key sequence, and confirmed that her extra watchdogs were in place. So far, so good: all that remained was to warn her people to check again for viruses. She flipped away the schematic, typed a code command, and added identifying icons from machine memory; an instant later, the screen split, showed Czaja’s flying-crane icon in one half, Alec Zemtzov’s dumptruck, bright as a child’s toy, in the other.

“Boss?” Czaja said.

“Sorry to drag you away,” Cerise said again, “but I picked up some—worrisome—news at lunch today, from Interpol. Seems that the Eurocops have been finding viruses in a few of the intrusions, and they gave me a sample disk. We need to scan for it right away.”

“We ran a solid scan as soon as it happened,” Czaja said.

He was in charge of the section of the net that included Corvo’s research volume. “We didn’t turn up anything—”

Zemtzov’s icon flickered, signaling an interrupt. “Nothing that matched existing patterns, anyway.” His on-line voice was far crisper than his real voice, and Cerise was, as always, briefly amused by the contrast. She smothered her smile as he continued, oblivious to the differences. “What does Interpol say about payloads?”

That was always the real question, the virus’s intent, and Cerise nodded her approval. She had picked Zemtzov to be the system’s virus researcher, and was pleased to see her decision borne out. “Nothing too bad, or so Mabry said, but there’s still been some damage.”

“Collateral or primary?”

“I don’t know for sure—don’t know if they know.” Cerise slid Mabry’s disk into one of the transfer drives. “I have the dissections Interpol did.”

“Ah.” Zemtzov’s icon shifted color again—he was an expressive communicator—and she could hear the satisfaction in his voice. “Then if there was anything—and I think Shaja’s right, the intruder didn’t leave us any presents—we should be able to track it.”

“Good,” Cerise said. “I’m copying you Interpol’s files. I want you to take another run through the system, especially Corvo’s volume, Shaja, and sweep specifically for anything that’s in the file.”

“You got it, boss,” Zemtzov said.

Czaja said, more slowly, “I’m going to get complaints. The system’s already running slow.”

“They’ll have to live with it,” Cerise said. She looked up to see Baeyen standing in the doorway, still rubbing at the damp line on her chin. “Blame it on me if you have to. I’ll handle any complaints.”

“I’ll try to keep them calm,” Czaja said. “But they won’t be happy.”

“They’ll survive,” Cerise said. “We need to do that sweep.”

“All right,” Czaja said.

Cerise sighed—he was good at his job, but painfully negative, always ready to find the bad things about any suggestion—and said, “Let me know when you’re finished.” She cut the connection as soon as they’d begun their acknowledgments, looked up at Baeyen. “Sorry, Jensey. Have a seat.”

“No problem,” the dark woman said equably, and settled herself in the chair opposite Cerise. “What’s up?”

Cerise smiled. “Enough. I’ve got Shaja and Alec running another sweep of the Corvo volume. Interpol says that the intrusions they’ve been dealing with have involved viruses.”

Baeyen made a face, spread her hands wide. “That’s going to slow down everything.”

“So I’ve been told,” Cerise said. “I also hear Treasury was wanting to talk to me.”

Baeyen’s eyes slid sideways. Embarrassment? Cerise wondered. Or guilt? “That’s right,” the dark woman said. “I didn’t know what you wanted to tell them, so I told them they should come back.” She hesitated. “I didn’t mean to make trouble with Coigne.”

“You didn’t,” Cerise said. It wasn’t true, but the other woman’s concern had made her feel vaguely protective. “When they come back, give them—no, we’ll make a couple of disks for them, analysis and a transcript of the event. Get Sirico to pull that together for me, will you, and copy it to me when he’s done.”

Baeyen nodded, and slipped a notepad machine out of her pocket, began chording notes into its memory.

“If I’m here,” Cerise went on, “I’ll talk to them, and if I’m not, see if you can get them to set up an appointment, all the usual stuff.”

“Right,” Baeyen said. “Like I can tell Treasury what to do.”

“I know,” Cerise said. “Do your best. This isn’t the main thing, though.”

Baeyen looked up warily at that, and Cerise leaned forward, steepling her hands on the desktop. “I’m going after Trouble—the new Trouble—myself,” she said. “Which means I’ll be leaving you in charge of the systems, Jensey.”

Baeyen’s eyes widened, a look of shock replaced almost at once by one of calculation. Then that, too, was gone, and she looked back down at the notepad’s tiny screen. “What do you need me to do?”

“As I said, you’ll be handling the systems once I leave,” Cerise said. “I don’t know exactly when it’ll happen—it all depends on how long it takes me to track down newTrouble—but I want to get everything in place now.” She watched Baeyen as she spoke, saw the other woman’s struggle to keep the excitement from her face as she chorded information into the notepad: Baeyen was no less ambitious than anyone at Multiplane, and she could see the possibilities. Not that it mattered, Cerise thought. She was still better than Baeyen. “Aside from getting you briefed, I need to arrange for a car, not with a driver, to be available for me on an hour’s notice—less if transport can manage it—and to get the paperwork written up so I can draw on the emergency funds.”

Baeyen nodded, head still down, watching words scroll past on her screen. “All right. I’ll put the paperwork in train—I can do it myself, or I can give it over to one of the secretaries, if you don’t mind word getting out.”

“That’s why I asked you to do it,” Cerise said.

“I’ll take care of it, then,” Baeyen said, without annoyance. “Ditto for the car. I’ll also get on that disk for Treasury.”

“Sirico can do that,” Cerise said, and Baeyen nodded.

“After that—whenever you want to start showing me things, I’m ready.”

“Get the paperwork going,” Cerise answered, “then come talk to me.” She was startled by her own reluctance, took herself firmly in hand. “I’ll start putting together notes for you tonight.”

Baeyen nodded, chorded a final bit of data to her notepad, and rose gracefully to her feet. “I’ll talk to you before you go home, anyway,” she said, and let herself out, closing the office door behind her.

Cerise sighed, and looked down at the desktop with its scattered icons. She should really start on the package for Baeyen, and she knew it, but she reached instead for the input cord. It wouldn’t hurt anything to go out on the nets for an hour or two, might even help her give Baeyen an up-to-the-second picture. She grinned at the thought, well aware of what she was doing, but plugged herself in, pushing a stray piece of hair back out of the way. She did need to see how people were responding to Trouble’s challenge— and besides, she thought, I just might be able to pass Mabry’s warning to Trouble. That was an odd thought, that she might encounter the other woman on the nets after all these years, an uncomfortable thought—she had always somehow assumed that Trouble had quit for good, left the nets entirely— but she put the idea aside. She owed Trouble this much, that was all that mattered.

She wanders through the fields of light, past familiar signs, moving toward Seahaven, but not in pursuit of it. Her work is, mostly, done two hours on the nets already, longer in virtual time, long enough for anyone, and ample for her. There is only Trouble to consider, but she floats, drifting from node to node, not quite willing to take the next step, to turn down toward the BBS and the hidden roads that lead to Seahaven. IC(E) arches to either side, coils and spills of it concealing a link of nodes that leads to unidentified corporate space, glittering like razor wire in sunlight. She studies it idly, mapping its weak points and its strengths, and wonders if she should find the maker of one particularly clever piece of code, beg, borrow, or steal it for her own nets. She files the thought, and the location, for later, and turns away, letting a rush of traffic carry her down into the BBS.

She touches down on the virtual plane that carries the Bazaar traffic, lets her icon interface completely with the system around her. Balls of advertising burst overhead and at her feet, spraying bright images, gilded promises, so that she walks at the center of her own hailstorm of light. Very little is of interest, but she smiles anyway, enjoying the brilliance, the sensation like soap bubbles against her skin, and does not dismiss them out of hand. Other icons glide past her, some like her haloed with the confetti of the advertising, many not—real crackers, they say, don’t tolerate this misuse of the net’s potentials, and many others copy the affectation, true or not. She ignores them all, follows the currents that spiral in toward the center of the bazaar. At Eleven’s Moon, further in today than the last time she found it, closer to the hubbub of the central board where real business is transacted and transformed, she lifts a hand to the demon, who scowls but says nothing. The door opens for her, and she steps out into Seahaven.

It is quiet today, a muted space, trees with jewels for leaves lining black-glass avenues, while the illusion of water rushes through an arrow-straight canal, reflecting equally illusory stars as strands of golden light. She looks down, and finds her icon remade, the cartoon woman rounded out to become something close to human. She frowns—Seahaven is in a realistic mode today—and gestures, dismissing the icon. A warning sounds, a shape like a gryphon forming in the dark air to inform her that she can’t go naked/invisible here, but she ignores it, chooses another shape from her bag of tricks. This one is closer to her true image, in a style that will match the Mayor’s whim, an alabaster woman, austerely thin, draped in black and touched with the color that is her name. The gryphon vanishes, accepting the change.

She continues along Seahaven’s streets, following the pattern that remains constant no matter how the trappings change, finds herself at last in the market square. She moves through a gathering made unfamiliar by the Mayor’s choice of convention, human shapes rather than icons, male mostly, out of anime, a few caricatured women and robots, once a Masai prince striding with a spear, and makes her way to the heart of the space. There the wall glows neon-bright, prodigal images splashed along its surface, overlapping, overwriting each other. Here and there a message glows among the designs, and she walks along its length, following the threads. Trouble’s message is gone at last, but Cerise keeps walking, looking for some other trace of her old partner. There is nothing, not even among the tangles of artists’ imagery, and she stands for a long moment, considenng the wall. There is someone watching her among the moving people, a shape she almost certainly will not find familiar even if she looks. The brainworm translates the code to a prickling between her shoulder blades, itchy, uncomfortable, but she takes her time anyway, framing her own message, before she turns around. It is a woman, a girl-shape, really, thin and angular, big eyes in a sharp and pointy face above black leather.

The girl-shape smiles, pure mischief, impure invitation, Cerise blinks, intrigued in spite of herself, but returns to business.

She knows what she needs to say, and phrases it without apology—TREASURY/STARLING (the joined icon, not the words) ARE LOOKING FOR YOU, TAKE PRECAUTIONS—but hesitatesfor an instant over the identifier, and settles at last for the smiling cat that will for better or worse, evoke the old days. She wraps the words in a gaudy package that is much stronger than it looks, and seals it again, this time with Trouble’s harlequin, using the codes that they once shared, and hangs it on the wall before she can change her mind. She hears a murmur of surprise and curiosity behind her, but she does not look back.

And then the girl-shape is there in front of her, still smiling on the wire. Cerise blinks again, assessing the image, bad-girl chic black leather and silver chains and the unmistakable curves, and dispatches a quick query-program of her own. It is rebuffed, as she’d expected, but the flavor of the other woman’s work comes with it, smoke and mirrors and the hint of steel beneath it

Hey.

The voice is as much a pose as the rest of the icon, deep and smoky, but it’s well chosen. Cerise admits a silent interest, but suppresses all hint of it, because, after all, this may be a different kind of challenge.

Hey yourself.

The girl-shape shifts, takes up a stronger stance, hands on hips and Cerise grimaces inwardly, bracing herself for the inevitable. She is known, and a syscop, there are plenty of crackers who have dared her before now.

*You’re playing with fire,* the girl-shape says, gestures to the harlequin dancing against the wall. *Sure you’re up to it?*

Cerise laughs, lets the amusement ripple out onto the net. Are you?

Try me, the girl-shape answers, but she, too, is smiling, the mask of the icon-face creasing in a simulation of delight. Definitely on the wire, and Cerise nods, recognizing the skill.

Sorry, sunshine, she says aloud. *I don’t have the time.*

You could make time, the girl-shape answers, and flings up a hand, throwing out a shape like a mirrored sphere to surround them, blocking the sights and sounds of the plaza. Cerise reacts instantly, freezing the sphere literally half-formed—just to prove she can do it, she’s curious now herself about this stranger—then relaxes and lets the image flow like mercury around them.

And why should I? she asks, but makes no move to open the sphere, letting the lazy voice and the hint of contempt hold the other at a distance.

*I’m cute,* the girl-shape answers, and the words are meant to sting. *That’s supposed to be enough for you.*

I’ve seen better, Cerise thinks, and says nothing, lets the silence carry the message for her.

You a friend of that Trouble? the girl-shape asks, voice gone sharp with anger, and shapes the piping harlequin in the palm of one hand to make herself absolutely clear.

Cerise nods.

*NewTrouble’s not going to be happy,* the girl-shape says, and Cerise’s attention sharpens.

And whose friend are you, little girl?

Ah. The girl-shape’s tone changes again, goes faintly smug, the icon preening itself against the silver mirror. *Myself and mine. Maybe yours—if you’re interested.*

It’s not the challenge Cerise expected, and her eyebrows rise. It’s been a while since anyone approached her—being a syscop plays hell with one’s wetware. So just who are you?

Something scratches at the outside of the sphere, a tarnished shadow against the silver. One of the Mayor’s watchdogs, Cerise guesses, groaning silently, come to stop just this kind of conversation. The girl-shape glances up at it, gestures rudely, looks back at Cerise.

Silk, she says, they call me Silk. She reaches into her toolkit, icon-hand vanishing for an instant, to reappear clutching something that looks like an anarchist’s bomb wrapped in green-red-and-gold Christmas plaid. She tosses it gently toward Cerise, and it tumbles heavy to the illusory ground, rolls almost under her feet before it explodes in a cascade of blinding light. The silver sphere vanishes with it, exploding into a shower of gleaming shards. Cerise flinches back as they sting against her, blind for an instant before her filters override the image, and then the girl-shape is gone.

A watchdog—this one a shape like a hound, black and tan—whines around her feet, seeking a scent. Fragments of red and green litter the ground, bits of codes no longer holding meaning, and out of the corner of her eye she sees a scavenger trundling toward them. She frowns slightly, scans the broken bits again—whatever Silk is, whatever else Silk is, she seems to act with reason, and there must have been some purpose behind the Christmas-colored bomb—and this time sees the mailcode, lying harmless among the clutter. She collects it hastily, stashes it in a holding box, is standing innocent and aloof, the box well sealed, when the scavengers arrive. She steps over them, walks away, out of the plaza, thinking of Silk.

Chapter Seven

TROUBLE DROVE TOO fast, as usual, the speed warning flickering yellow at the base of the helmet display. Ahead, the flyway gleamed like a dirty mirror in the cloudy light, reflecting the grey of the sky. At this hour, dozens of tow-carriers rumbled in the central lanes, mostly heading south toward the markets; the private traffic was sparse, a couple of corporate limos and a handful of light trucks and runabouts, spread out for kilometers along the ribbon of the road. More letters flashed in the helmet display, warning that this was the last exit before the border tolls, and she eased the trike sideways into the slower lane. The exit ramp curved down into the scrubland behind the salt marshes, and the grid lights flashed at her, warning her that local roads were not under computer control. She matched the speed limit here—local cops were less forgiving than the grid—and turned onto the narrow road that led east, toward True’s Island and the sea.

The land was relatively crowded here, cluttered with low-built, sagging houses and cinder-block garages. This was car-farm country, a place to buy and sell spare parts and junkers. The road was busier, too, battered runabouts with unmatched panels and the ubiquitous pickups, each with its bed full of miscellaneous machinery. Trouble drove decorously, not wanting to attract undue attention: the border people were an insular group, didn’t welcome outsiders and particularly not the ones who took the back roads to Seahaven.

She crossed the border just south of Southbrook, skirting the town itself and its asphalt plains of discount shopping. On the horizon, she could see the neon sign, bright even in daylight, blinking the message that had been the town’s salvation, NO SALES TAXES!!! East of town, all the little roads wove together into a rotary, complete with a cop-shop in the center, mixed public and private station, the state insignia side-by-side with the logo of the hotel, The Willows at Seahaven. Only a single road led east, out into the marshes, and Trouble took it, careful to keep the trike just under the speed limit posted on the board at the entrance to the road. A forest-green fast-tank was waiting in the lay-by beside the station, warning lights muted, and she watched it warily in her mirrors until it had faded from sight.

No one else had taken the Seahaven road. The asphalt ran straight and true toward the sea, the marsh spreading golden to either side. It was low tide, and the air smelled of salt and mud even under the helmet. She glanced sideways, and saw a few seabirds wading in the shallow channels, heedless of chemical sands, long legs bleached white by the tainted waters; another bird circled idly overhead, whiter than the clouds. As she drew closer to the coast, the ground seemed to drop away to either side, the road carried on heavy concrete pilings over bare mud and the filled channels that were the creeks. At high tide, it was all water, and only the brookers knew the safe passages, where the creeks and brooks were deep enough to take a boat and cargo without touching the poisoned land. They would fish here, too, in defiance of the law and common sense, scratching a living from the polluted waters that might well be worse than the town jobs they feared so badly.

Ahead, the land lifted slightly, sand and seawall rising to block her view of the ocean. She slowed in spite of herself, in spite of the brookers who could be lurking, as the road went from pilings to the solid sand and stone of Shepherd Hill. It wasn’t much of a hill, or even much of an island, just scrub grass and a few straggling pines, bent nearly double by the winter winds, but it was enough to carry the Coast Road. Ahead, the seawall loomed, a massive heap of stone and gravel, with the faded warning sign below it: ROAD ENDS HERE, and then a double-headed arrow. To the right, the road was drifted with sand and rock, barely traveled: only the Plantation lay to the south, deserted since the Hundred-Year Winter, except for public sex and suicides. It had once been a tourist mecca, a stretch of semiwild beachfront, protected from overdevelopment by state and federal governments. There had been a web of narrow roads on the landward side, leading to a pavilion and ranger station just below the main beach, but south of that the beach and scrubland had been left for hikers. In the old days, Trouble had been told, it had been a picnic spot, a twenty-minute walk from the last parking circle to a sweep of beach that looked across the inlet to the Joppa Flats. Now, though… Now it was dead land, or dying—the ecologists weren’t completely sure of that, but they had diagnosed the chemical-sands syndrome, and that was an eventual death sentence, both for the beaches and, very nearly, for towns like Seahaven that clung to the water. The sands had absorbed the chemicals that had spilled offshore during the unbelievable series of winter storms that had struck the coast twenty years ago; there had been other spills since, in storms and in fair weather, none quite as bad as in the Hundred-Year Winter, and the sands had bonded to the chemicals, changing the nature of the beaches and of the sea floor. The vegetation, or some of it, had adapted, the algae first, great mats of it washing up on the beaches to carry still more chemicals ashore. Some of the hardier species had developed ways of eating the more noxious chemicals, and a few seaweeds had developed a symbiotic relationship with them, carrying the algae in their nodelike floats or under the broad leaves, until the entire coast was poisoned. Only a few species seemed to hold their own; the rest, fish and birds and the occasional shoreline mammal, were dwindling toward extinction. Trouble turned north, toward Seahaven.

It wasn’t a long drive, not half an hour even at the low speed the badly mended potholes and the drifting sand forced upon her, and she could see the arc of the Ferris wheel on the horizon, bright even in the daylight. The road lifted as she reached the higher ground of the Sands, the ground falling away steeply into the mud and grass of the Blood Creek Slough. A boat, high-bowed, with a squarely upright pilothouse in its center, moved slowly along the creek itself, a single figure just visible in the stern. In the far distance, at the inland edge of the Slough, the autumn trees were red and gold against the dull sky.

The land widened, a few houses, low-built, sturdy looking, cinder block and grey shingle, appearing now, and the piled-rock seawall gave way to concrete and sloped sand. This was brooker country, not quite Seahaven, and Trouble touched the throttle, increasing her speed as she passed a fenced-in schoolyard. And then she was past the Sands, the land narrowing briefly to a causeway, the first houses of Seahaven appearing ahead. In contrast to the Sands, they were brightly painted, and crammed in higgledy-piggledy on the rising ground. To her left the Ferris wheel loomed, centerpiece of the Parcade, and a paved road, much mended but clear of sand, turned off toward it. She allowed herself a long look at the low-slung arcades lining the road, and the mock-castle, pink and green and bright as an Easter egg, at the end of it, but kept to the main road. If newTrouble was in Seahaven, he would almost certainly be found in the Parcade, but there would be time to search for him later, when she had reestablished herself in town.

There were more people here, more than she’d seen in any one place since she’d crossed the border, kids in ragged denim and army surplus or cheap-dyed tunics, a few older adults in uniforms from The Willows, heading home to sleep or out to the Parcade to play or deal, other adults in an attempt at cracker’s leather and chains clustered in the shop doorways or along the streetside. Most of them would be faking it—real crackers would probably be asleep by now, after a hard night’s work, or just waking up—and Trouble’s lip curled behind the concealing helmet.

She turned onto the beachfront road, skirting the crowds at the town center, drove between the seawall and the tattered boardwalk, where the shops clustered together, selling souvenirs of a beach no one wanted anymore to see, and cheap, oily food. Beyond the seawall, the ruin of the Pavilion Bandstand loomed, jutting on a broken pier a hundred meters out into the water. Only the junkies and a few whores went there now, sheltered in its leaning shell, and even the craziest netwalkers gave it a wide berth: the net held no weapons that could frighten a people without credit or history.

There was a public lot at the end of the boardwalk, half-filled with runabouts and the occasional home-built truck. Trouble found a space without difficulty, and climbed off the trike, stretching in the suddenly humid air. She needed a place to stay, someplace cheap and, more important, discreet, and she would find that only on this side of the Harbormouth Bridge. Once she crossed the drawbridge into Seahaven proper, people would begin asking awkward questions; better to stay this side of the bridge, safely anonymous and clear of the hotel’s direct influence. She knew half a dozen places that met that description, or she had known them; whether they still existed, in the continual flux that was this unnamed section of town, was another matter. Still, there was only one way to find out, and she hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and started walking, the humid warmth closing in around her.

The first hostel was long gone, displaced by an Asian restaurant with purple walls and plastic plates of food in the windows, but the second was still in business. It was tall for Seahaven, almost four stories, sides shingled and painted a faded blue. Trouble stepped cautiously onto the sagging porch, trimmed with pink-and-yellow-painted carving, and pushed open the screen door that led to the little lobby. As usual, no one was in sight, but a camera watched from the corner above the manager’s counter. She stared up at it, deliberately acknowledging its presence, and settled herself to wait.

It was only a few minutes before the door that closed the stairwell off from the rest of the lobby swung open, but it felt much longer. Trouble made herself turn slowly, found herself facing a woman she didn’t recognize, a woman nearly as tall as herself, with grey eyes and grey-streaked dark hair. Her skin was faintly mottled, sun-scarred, and she’d made no attempt to hide it with makeup or creams.

“Help you?” she asked, in a tone that suggested she didn’t care if she could.

“Yeah,” Trouble answered. “I’m looking for a room.”

The woman just stared at her, lined face without expression, and Trouble went on, keeping her impatience under control with an effort, “Does Mollie Blake still live here? She’ll vouch for me.”

Something in the woman’s expression changed, a shadow of recognition flickering across her face. “I know Mollie. What’s your name?”

“India Carless. But everyone calls me Trouble.”

“I remember you.” The woman stood still for an instant longer, then turned away from the counter. “Wait. I’ll see if we have anything.”

It was a risk, giving her proper name, Trouble knew, but it was the only name Mollie Blake knew her by. She waited again, leaning now against the counter where the camera was focused, and listened for the sound of footsteps on the steps up to the porch. If the stranger called the cops—though which cops would be interested, here in Seahaven, was always an open question—there was another way out, through the flimsy door and down the long hall to the barren backyard… And then she did hear footsteps, not on the porch behind her but on the inside stairs, and the stranger reappeared in the doorway. A second woman stood behind her, and, seeing her, Trouble gave a sigh of relief.

“Hello, Mollie.”

“Hello, Trouble.” Blake stepped out from behind the other woman, but did not come closer or offer an embrace. “I thought you were out in the bright lights these days.”

“I was.” Trouble eyed Blake warily, uncertain how to read the reception. Blake was no cracker, had never been on the nets—didn’t even have a dollie-slot, the essential tool for anyone who worked with any network. She was, however, one of the best sources of hardware throughout the Parcade, possibly along the coast. “You might say my past caught up with me. I’m looking for a place to stay, until I find someone.”

Blake nodded, slowly. She was a stocky, straight-bodied woman, a little taller than average, her skin tanned almost to the color of her rust-brown hair. At the moment she was absolutely ordinary in jeans and a crumpled, man-style shirt, but Trouble, who had seen her dressed to kill, ready to mingle with the crowds at The Willows, was not deceived. “I’ve heard something about that,” Blake said.

“You’re still with Nova, then?” Trouble asked, and Blake shrugged.

“Off and on.” She looked at the other woman, still standing silent at her shoulder. “Trouble’s OK. She doesn’t cause problems—or if she does, she cleans it up herself.”

That was letting her know where she stood with a vengeance. Trouble suppressed a moment’s annoyance—Blake should talk—and said, “Thanks.”

The grey-haired woman stepped around Blake, ducked under the barrier so that she stood behind the counter, and reached for the keyboard of the registration system, pulling it out from under a pile of news sheets. “Carless, you said the name was?”

Blake said, “That’s Joan Valentine, by the way.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Trouble murmured.

Valentine nodded, her expression noncommittal, and poised her hands over the keyboard. “Name?”

“India Carless,” Trouble said, and wondered an instant later if she should have chosen another. Treasury knew that name—worse still, it was her real one—but then, she told herself, she didn’t have good ID for anything else. That was the one thing she hadn’t gotten for herself in the city, new ID to replace the jane-doe registration or her own legitimate papers. She shook the worry away, leaned forward to watch Valentine key the information into the machine.

“They send a disk up to the cop-shop twice a week,” Blake said suddenly, and Trouble glanced over her shoulder to see the other woman smiling slightly.

Valentine said, “Local regulations.” She looked at her screen, head cocked to one side as she studied the menu. “The only thing they pay attention to is the ID numbers, though.”

“Right,” Trouble said, and reached into her pocket for the jane-doe disk. She handed it to Valentine, who ran it through the scanner and handed it back across the counter.

“Somebody’s going to come asking questions about that,” Valentine said.

“When?”

Valentine shrugged.

Blake said, “Come on, Val. You sent the last update, when, yesterday?”

Valentine darted her an uncertain look, but said, “Yeah.”

“So you’ve got, what, it’s Thursday—so, you’ve got until Monday at the earliest,” Blake said. “Or Tuesday, if Val forgets to send the disk on time.”

“And how likely is that?” Trouble asked, and Blake laughed.

Valentine made a face. “It—can be arranged. Talk to me.”

“Let me know the going rate,” Trouble said. “In the meantime, though, I’d like to get a room.”

“I’ve got a two-room suite, your own bath and input nodes, on the third floor,” Valentine said. “If that’s all right with you.”

“That’s fine,” Trouble said, and meant it. She pulled the last cash-card from her belt, set it on the counter. It would certainly be enough to cover a few days in Seahaven—at least until Tuesday, and after that, she could use credit. Valentine accepted it, fed it into the machine, and nodded as the verification codes appeared.

“I’ll take you up, then,” she said.

“Key?” Trouble asked, in some surprise, and Blake shook her head.

“We got palm-locks last year, Trouble. Even Seahaven changes.”

“Right,” Trouble said, and followed Valentine through the battered door and up the narrow stairs.

It was warm in the upstairs hall, and the air smelled indefinably of Seahaven, salt and constant damp blending with the scent of oil or burned rubber from the beaches. Valentine led her down the long, dimly lit hallway, and stopped at the last door, fingering the heavy box of the palm-lock mounted above the latch. The door swung open, and Valentine held it, nodding for the other woman to go in.

Trouble stepped into sudden cool and the hum of an environmental unit set on high, reached automatically for the room controls to switch on the lights. The room was bigger than she’d expected, with a desk and table and a couple of comfortable chairs next to a floor-mounted junction box in one room, and a big bed and a video cabinet in the other. She’d gotten turned around somehow, coming up the stairs, so she was surprised when she opened the heavy curtains to see that she overlooked the front of the building and the street outside. She could just see the edge of the neon sign running below the window, and understood why the curtains were made of such heavy fabric. The bathroom was small, but most of the fixtures looked relatively new. She set her bag down, and Valentine said from the doorway, “All right?”

“It’ll do, thanks,” Trouble said.

“Then we’ll set the lock.”

It was an exercise in futility—the first thing she would do, after she checked the net, would be to buy an override lock of her own, probably from Blake’s shop—but Trouble nodded, and came forward to lay her palm against the sensor plate. Valentine fiddled with the lock controls, and then with her master control, and pronounced the lock ready. Trouble tested it obediently, and the door snapped open to her touch.

“All set, then,” Valentine said, and turned away without waiting for an answer.

Trouble shut the door behind her, turned to survey the suite more closely. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, scarred wood floor, a single throw rug, cheap white-wood furniture, a few posters tacked onto the walls in lieu of prints, but she went methodically through it anyway, searching for bugs and taps and peepholes. She found nothing, either in the walls or under the casing of the junction box, and dragged the less battered of the two chairs close to it, within reach of her machine cords. She pulled the other chair in front of the door, wedged it with the desk, and went back to the junction box to begin setting up her system. The node was standard; she plugged in cables and power cords, and leaned back in her chair to begin a last quick check for lurkers.

She let the diagnostics run, paying less attention to the play of lights and numbers on the little screen than to the flicker of feeling across her skin, hot as a summer wind, and the fleeting taste of the system on her tongue. Everything felt clean, no alien programs hidden in the architecture, no odd loops of code that led nowhere, and she adjusted the brainworm to its highest setting. It was the first time she had run it at full capacity since she’d had the new chip installed, and she sat for a moment, letting herself get used to the sensations. The net felt brighter, as though she were looking at it through freshly washed windows, all her senses sharpened as though she’d shed a skin. She grinned to herself, enjoying the heady feeling, and touched the button that released her onto the net.

She rides the nets like a rollercoaster, swept along the datastream, hitching a ride on the lightning transfer just because she can. She laughs aloud, not caring for an instant that the brainworm transmits the ghost of that emotion back onto the net, but then she sobers, remembering what she’s come for, and drops back down to the plane of the datastream. Roads of light, highways of data, stretch in every direction, dazzling red and gold and the pure white light of diamonds. She pauses a moment, enjoying the display, the sheer pleasure she had missed for three interminable days—better, actually, than what she had had, a sharper image, faster response—and then she shapes her course, chooses a road that glows like lava, red as molten steel, sinks into it, and lets it carry her away.

She rides it toward the BBS, buffeted by the taste and smell of the data that enfolds her, her skin prickling with its touch, tingling with security and encryption The noise of it is jarring, like high-pitched thunder, but she rides with it until it carries her through the final node, the last one before the bazaar. She drops from it then, finds herself abruptly in a space that has been reformed since the last time she took this route. A wall of light flows like water ahead of her, curving in a graceful semicircle, she hears a sound like a thousand voices mimicking water, the flow of conversation in a million languages, and the air is suddenly cool, faintly damp against her skin. She takes a step forward, curious but not alarmed—there is no IC(E) visible, and no warning, the space’s creator doesn’t seem to mind trespassers, indeed, seems actively to invite them—and an icon/face blooms in the lightfall, the colors running down now over the planes and angles of the face, bright along the scar that bisects one cheek

Fate? she says aloud—it has to be him, even though the icon is new, a startling, unexpected effort for a man not on the wire, an illusion built to lure in the worm-carriers, or one particular worm—and she tastes agreement before she hears the answer.

Hello, Trouble. I want to talk to you.

Trouble nods, wary, goes no closer while she feels no IC(E), Fate has no reason, just now, to be fond of her, and there are other programs besides IC(E) in every cracker’s toolkit. *I’m listening,* she says, when the other says nothing.

Where are you going?

Trouble hesitates, a heartbeat of time that will seem longer. Fate is certainly no friend, never was—but then, how hard will it be to guess where she is ultimately headed? Seahaven.

I thought so, Fate says, and the colors shift briefly, flush with satisfaction, and fade again to the rainbow of the lightfall. There are people there who want to talk to you.

Oh? In spite of herself, Trouble feels a touch of fear—Treasury/ Starling, maybe, though how he would get into Seahaven without the Mayor’s connivance, or any of her old enemies, or even newTrouble itself. She curbs the feeling sharply, makes herself wait.

Oh, yes, Fate says, and this time she hears the malice in his voice. *You’ve stirred up a lot of trouble. People want to know your intentions.*

That’s different—that she can handle, and she sighs softly. Thanks for the warning, Fate. she says, and the icon retreats, fading into the lightfall.

*I’ll be watching. *

Fate’s voice drifts back to her as if from a great distance, and then the lightfall and the cool air and the rest of the space dissolve around her, fading to grey like a scene from an old movie. Trouble lifts an eyebrow—an enormous effort, just to pass that message—but turns her attention to the business at hand. Overhead, the web of data conduits glitters black-on-silver, she reaches up, touches one, and lets it carry her down into the BBS.

She finds the door to Seahaven without difficulty—she is expected, she thinks, and takes a moment to reorder her toolkit, so that her best defenses, a shield and a dispersion program, are ready to hand. Then she steps through the gateway, and out into Seahaven.

Today it’s all black glass, a predatory nightmare of a city, looming buildings that turn the streets into canyons lit only by the graffiti that glows neon-orange against the slick black walls. This is not her favorite incarnation, it means the Mayor is in a bad mood, unwilling to police the virtual violence, or, perhaps and worse, ready to indulge in it himself. She tunes the toolkit higher, evokes the standby call and feels the ghost of a shield bind itself like a weight to her left arm. The linked dispersion program trembles against her right palm, ready for use—it will handle most active attacks, destroy the program that the shield deflects—and she walks carefully out into the glass-walled city.

The streets are empty, or nearly so, she catches the glimpse of an icon whisking out of sight around a corner once, but that is all. Her footsteps echo, ringing on the apparent stone beneath her feet, but no one challenges her, and she reaches the market square without seeing anyone more at all. The market is all but empty, too, most of the shopfront/icons shuttered, splashed at the Mayor’s whim with heavy grills and bright graffiti. Only the wall remains unchanged, and there are icons clustered at its far end, waiting. Two turn at her approach, and she hears her footsteps suddenly ring louder, sparks flying where her heels touch the black ground, the Mayor, making sure no one misses her entrance. Bastard, she thinks, and grins, and keeps on walking, watching the icons shift themselves, spreading out to meet her.

She imagines music, West Side Story, Sharks against Jets, and shifts her stride to match the nervous beat, the finger snap of sparks against her skin. Behind the icons, on the wall, she sees her icon dancing against a gaudy familiar packaging, its gloss a little dulled from handling. Someone has been trying to read her mail, but she knows from the pattern of the wrapping and the way the scuff marks lie that the seals—Cerise’s seals—have held.

The icons are clearer now, some with the tang of the wire about them, their feedback tinting the net around them, others—the majority, but not by much—plaintext. She knows them all, and that is briefly disappointing. It would have been good to meet newTrouble at last, the stranger who’s taken her name. She stops when she is about five virtual meters from the nearest of them, waits, hands loose at her sides, the programs trembling against her fingers. One icon takes a single step forward, declaring itself the spokesman, an angular, armored shape like a Japanese toybot.

Trouble, it says, and Trouble smiles, lets her amusement leak out onto the net.

Dargon. She knows what lies behind the massive image, a pudgy, bearded man who lives in his parents’ basement, she tracked him once, after he’d crossed her, and found his secret. She lets that knowledge strengthen her, then pushes it aside. Whatever he is in the realworld, they are on the nets now, and she cannot afford contempt—whatever he is in the realworld, on the nets he is a king. She turns her head, surveys the line, names them one by one.

*Nova—* Blake’s partner, a shape perversely made of shadow rather than light, sexless against the dark city walls. *—Starfire—* Another shadow-shape, this one filled with stars, as though the icon were a window into the heart of a galaxy. *—Arabesque, or should I say, hello, Rachelle—* And here her voice sharpens in spite of herself, because Rachelle Sirvain is an old friend, a good friend, from the years before. The robed icon shifts, and Trouble tastes uncertainty, a hint of guilt spiking the air, before Arabesque has herself under control again. *Postmaster, Katana, Jimmy-D, Rogue Alexi—* The last all plaintext, two-dimensional shapes against the black-and-neon city, without depth and expression, but not, she reminds herself, without tools or the skill to use them.

Someone, she says, *someone’s been messing with my mail.*

There is a little pause, and in the silence someone, Arabesque, she thinks, laughs soft and low. The Postmaster icon shifts slightly, and she knows he was brought in to do the work, and failed.

Dargon says, We have reason to be concerned.

Trouble laughs, lets the sharp sound carry the scent of her anger onto the net. The ones on the wire will feel it clearly, the others will receive a footnote and, perhaps, the faint uncomfortable echo of her feelings. *So do I have a reason to be concerned—and the right. Where were you when this punk cracker took my name?*

That is her best point, the most legitimate argument, and she feels it strike home. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees other icons gathering by ones and twos, staying well back, out of range, but watching. This is a major event, even for Seahaven, and she wonders, briefly, where the Mayor is.

Dargon says, Rumor had it you were dead.

Rumor, Trouble says, and lets them sweat, lets them wonder which rumor she will mention, which of the nasty stories that circulate about them all. Rumor had it wrong, she says at last, and smiles inside, tasting their relief. *I’m still here, and it’s my name.*

*You’re stirring up a lot of trouble,* Dargon says. *Causing problems for everyone who works the shadows. It can’t go on, Trouble.*

*I didn’t start it,* Trouble says. *It was forced on me—but I intend to finish it.* She lifts her voice a little, talking now not only to the line of icons but to the lurkers to either side and any others watching invisible—to the Mayor himself, if need be. *This newTrouble, this person who stole my name, it’s compromised me. Not to mention it’s gotten everyone else into difficulties, but that’s your business, yours to deal with unless you want to make it mine. I want my name back, and I want this punk off the net. Is that clear enough for you, Dargon?*

*It’s clear,* Dargon says, and the color of his armor shifts slightly, takes on the red tinge of anger mixed with the blue of amusement. A grim smile? Trouble translates, and waits.

*Treasury doesn’t care which one of you it gets,* he says at last.

Trouble smiles. *But you care, or you should. You don’t stop this one now, you don’t know what it’ll do next—could steal your names, your work and style, could just keep cracking the way it’s been doing, and upsetting the cops. But sooner or later you’ll have to do something. I intend to do it now.*

There is another silence, this one longer, and she takes the chance to look sideways at the lurkers. Fate is there, plaintext cartoon-icon of his scarred face, and next to him a shape that can only be Max Helling, bright among the rest. The old gang returning, she thinks, and can’t decide if she feels better for it. She thinks she sees van Liesvelt too, among the cluttering crowd.

Dargon says at last, If this newTrouble agreed to stop using your name, would you call a truce?

Yes, Trouble thinks, if it also agreed to stop using my programs, copying my style, made it clear it was someone else. But this is the net, and the rules are different; she can’t concede a position yet, not without losing status. She says, Has this person agreed to it?

Dargon hesitates, and the colors fade a little from his icon. No.

And that, Trouble thinks, will never do. She can’t afford to concede first, not when she’s always been on the outside, not quite of the community that polices the net, set apart by the brainworm, gender, and her choice of lovers. She shakes her head, enjoying the sense of the movement—a false sense, really, existing only in her brain, along the brainworm’s wires—says, If it agrees, talk to me then.

Dargon gives a little sigh—he had obviously expected no other response, would probably never even have asked if she hadn’t been a woman, a dyke, and on the wire.

Trouble goes on, not waiting for his answer, *Like I said, sooner or later this person’s going to have to be stopped.*

Stopped or shopped? a voice—Nova’s, she thinks—queries, sharp and amused, and Trouble nods her appreciation of the quibble.

Treasury will certainly buy, she says. *And I’m prepared to sell, if I have to. But I want my name back, and an end to this stupidity.*

She has declared herself, fully and completely, and she stops, waiting for their answers. The Postmaster is first to move, drifting back out of the line of icons, away from the wall, away from her, his message clear. He will not help, but he won’t stand against her, either. Arabesque steps forward, colors rippling along the sweep of her silken robe, the cloth flying as though she stood perpetually in a strong wind, steps past Dargon and comes to join her. Trouble smiles, and feels an unfamiliar sensation shiver through her—gratitude, certainly, and something more. Starfire backs away, joining Postmaster, and Rogue joins them; a heartbeat later, Alexi goes with them. From the lurkers, van Liesvelt steps forward, a big shambling bear-shape that carries his familiar grin. Blue Max, Max Helling, unmistakable even in the blue thunderstorm that has replaced his biplane, follows more slowly, and van Liesvelt turns to him in surprise. Katana and Jimmy-D turn away, brush past Postmaster, and are gone, lost among the lurkers. Fate steps forward without comment or change of affect, takes his place with Trouble’s friends. That she had not expected, a public affirmation of his private choice, and she is careful not to shame him with surprise. Dargon and Nova stand alone between her and the wall, and Nova laughs.

*Later, maybe, Trouble. But I won’t stand in your way.* The icon flips away, vanishes in a shower of smoke, and Dargon turns slowly, faintly green, the color of a nodded head.

All right. For now, he says, and steps aside.

Trouble hides her smile, mutes the triumph that sings through her, looks at the icons gathered around her. It is so like the old days that she could cry or dance, and she doesn’t know what to say, says instead of greeting, I have to get my mail.

Arabesque laughs, a muted sound, and van Liesvelt says, *So do it. We’ll wait.*

Trouble nods, strides away across the charcoal paving, takes the message down from the wall. Cerise’s once-familiar codes seethe against her hands, she matches them from memory, the responses buried in her toolkit, and the message falls open in her hands, a fleeting burst of words that burns itself into memory, TREASURY/ STARLING ARE LOOKING FOR YOU, TAKE PRECAUTIONS. That is unexpected, a warning from Cerise, after everything that’s been between them, and she walks back to the others as slowly as she dares, wondering what to do.

So, van Liesvelt says You got your mail.

Was it worth it? Fate says, and despite the inflexible icon, Trouble hears the irony in his tone.

It triggers her decision, and she nods, speaks before she can change her mind. Yeah, she says, *it was worth it—and does anyone know where Cerise is these days, or what she’s doing?*

Arabesque draws in a breath, says, in the sharp London voice that goes so strangely in Trouble’s mind with the black skin, What a welcome. Thank you, sunshine.

Sorry, Trouble says, and after a moment the other woman laughs, this time at herself.

*I’ve missed you, Trouble. *

*And I’ve missed you,* Trouble waits a moment, gauging her chance to ask again, and Helling clears his throat.

*Cerise is with a company called Multiplane. Chief of on-line security, I think. And she’s looking for Trouble—the new one, I mean.*

I see. Trouble didn’t mean to speak aloud, is vaguely startled when the words drop onto the net, shakes herself with a frown. I need to get a message to her, privately. Any ideas?

Arabesque’s mouth twists, but she says nothing. Helling says, slowly, *I have a—friend who’s in touch with her, but it wouldn’t necessarily be private.*

I know a route, Fate says Do you want the numbers or do you want me to do it for you?

There is a challenge, intended or not, in his words, and Trouble stiffens. Give me the numbers.

The icon does not change, but a moment later a silver wafer appears in the air between them. Trouble takes it, tucks it into memory without looking at it, feels the numbers vibrate in her mind. Arabesque says, *I thought you left her. That’s what she said.*

*I did.* Trouble doesn’t look at her, doesn’t want to explain, and Arabesque laughs again, this time with genuine amusement.

*Trouble, you’re too much.* She steps back, her draperies gathering around her as though her private windstorm had changed direction, lifts her hand to find a gateway out of Seahaven. *I’ll keep in touch,* she says, and is gone.

Trouble stares after her, regretting the unasked questions—what are you doing these days, are you well, are you happy—then shakes herself, and turns back to business. She has to find Cerise—she owes Cerise the word she herself had gotten, that newTrouble’s in real-Seahaven.

Helling says, *It’s slick IC(E) at Multiplane, slick and very hard. And not all of it’s Cerise’s.*

The route I gave you takes you in obliquely. Fate says.

Trouble nods her thanks, feeling the numbers, address and direcionals, trembling in memory.

Good luck, Helling says, and starts to drift away.

Thanks,* Trouble says, softly, for more than just good luck, and she sees Helling’s face appear momentarily in the shadow of the thunderstorm, to show his smile.

*It’s good to have you back.*

Trouble grins in spite of herself. *—it’s good to be back—and looks at the others. *And thank you, too.*

*I don’t much like viruses,* Fate says. The icon does not change it never changes, he’s not one to indicate feelings, says it all in the choice of his words. Trouble looks wanly at him, wondering what lies behind it, morals, the cracker prejudice she shares, some deeper hatred, and the icon fades before her eyes. That leaves van Liesvelt, and she looks back at him, the heavy bear-shape bulky against the neon scrawl behind him.

I had some news, he says. *From the doc. She says Treasury’s been asking questions. *

What kind of questions? Trouble asks, and feels the fear stab through her. How could Treasury have known to go to Huu—how could they have known she needed a new chip? Jesse? It wasn’t like him to sell that kind of information.

Van Liesvelt shrugs. *She said it was a general have-you-seen-her notice, just asking if anyone’s done any work on a woman matching your description. It was going under your real name, though.*

Fuck, Trouble says, and only with difficulty refrains from kicking the watchdog that appears instantly to snap at her ankles. The co-op, then, and possibly Jesse—he would sell her, if it meant staying clear himself.

*The doc didn’t say anything, of course,* van Liesvelt went on, and she thinks it should dead-end there.

Trouble nods, her mind racing. When she gets off the net, she’ll have to bribe Valentine, see if she’ll substitute another name for the one she gave at registration, or maybe hack the hotel system and make the fix herself. That, in Seahaven, won’t be easy, and she puts the thought sternly aside for later. She will have enough to do, to leave Cerise the message she needs. Thanks for the warning, she says aloud, and van Liesvelt grins.

Just be careful, he says, and turns away.

Trouble takes the long way out of Seahaven, through the most complex of the gateways, checks the address Fate has given her, and lets the first node she comes to carry her away from the BBS. She follows the coded numbers through the tangle of the midlevel roads, letting herself fade to obscurity against the brilliant packets of data, until she is all but invisible, little more than a shadow of a ghost. She pauses at the center of a great hub, waits, a dozen breaths, a hundred heartbeats, while the datastreams flow over and past her, until she is sure she is not followed. Only then does she take the final step, the last turn that will lead her to her ultimate destination.

IC(E) arcs to either side, walling off the corporate precincts, sparks dripping like water from the overarching spines. Trouble recognizes the space, a shared system where suppliers and parent corporations meet and exchange data, knows how the protocol works and how to get inside. Fate has done well by her, bringing her here, the only difficulty now is to trace Multiplane’s lines. She checks herself, confirming that her presence has been muted, outbound data squelched, turns slowly, watching the datastream slide past her, merging with the IC(E), until she understands the pattern of it, and feels it in her bones. She chooses a packet then, invokes a mirror program from her toolkit, watches it spin an identical image around herself, so that she sinks into the datastream, indistinguishable from the data around her. She lets herself drift toward the IC(E), lets the steady flow draw her into the coils of unreal wire, sharp and cold as steel and hard as bone. She can feel the chill from them as she slides through the spiraling wire, sees it through a pale gold haze of the stolen pattern, her own hands are all but invisible, the gleam of IC(E) bright beneath her skin.

And then she’s through the first barrier, emerges into a space like a pool, where a structure like a stack of gears stirs the datastream, curving it first into a gentle whirlpool and then sorts it on its way. She slows herself subtly, not daring to fall too far out of the parameters, just a backward eddy in the general current, and searches the packets for an address label. They are coded, an unfamiliar system, and she calls Fate’s codes from memory. She had hoped not to have to rely on them—she trusts him, but only so far, only so far as she would trust any fellow cracker, except perhaps van Liesvelt and Arabesque and Cerise. But the numbers are there, and she evokes them, creates a label for herself that matches the patterns that she sees, and lets herself slide back into the line of data.

The current sweeps her closer, stirred by the first level of gears into the general pool, and then, quite suddenly, she’s swept up and away, snapped from the stream and flung off into a new and alien conduit. Her stomach lurches as the brainworm relays the motion faithfully—one of the few disadvantages of the wire—and then she steadies, orienting herself against the new perspective. The space is marked off in grids, black on silver, a dozen or more imposed one on top of the other, a mailroom configuration, a limited interface with Multiplane’s primary systems. She studies the pattern for a moment, letting the data fall past her to be captured by the various grids, then lets herself fall with them, shrinking as the data shrinks until she matches its shape precisely. The address Fate supplied floats before her, she feels the system probe it, a pulse like a pressure, a finger poked hard into her ribs, and then she’s shunted into the maze of the grids. She rides the current, tossed abruptly from side to side as the system shunts her from one plane to another, and then, quite suddenly, she’s where she wants to be.

She hangs suspended, abruptly still, in a space that seems infinite, but feels constrained, hemmed in by the walls of the pigeonhole into which she has been dropped. This is the virtual address, the place where the mail waits, and she studies it, reaching with infinite care to feel the other message packages waiting with her. They are all for Cerise, she feels further, finds the password lock that seals the system and recognizes Cerise’s hand in the intricate check mechanism. Definitely the right place, she thinks, and sinks back into the still center of the address to compose her message. It is simple, a single word—from her, to Cerise, there’s no need for more. Even after everything, it’s still that simple, and she shapes the word in its delicate casing: SEAHAVEN.

She sets it free, easing it out of the shell that conceals her presence, budding it like an amoeba. At last it pops free, shining like a soap bubble for an instant as the system registers a new arrival and Trouble smiles to herself. She has done what she can, it should be enough to bring Cerise to Seahaven, the real one—Cerise has already been to the virtual town, she knows what is and isn’t, there. All that remains is to leave as undetected as she’s entered. She pauses for an instant longer, considering her options then grins and shapes another address. The mail routine sweeps by again, and she watches it pass, gauging speed and direction, another dozen heartbeats, and it sweeps past again like a lighthouse beam. This time she reaches for it, places the false address in its path and lets it scoop up the packet, dragging her in its wake. When she’s sure it has her bait securely, she reels herself in, recomposes herself behind the mask of the false package. The program flings her back into the grids, and the grid flips her out into the sorting area. She would laugh if she dared, breathless, enjoying the rollercoaster ride. And then she’s back out in the IC(E) and she abandons the mail packet, lets the system carry its empty shell on through the walls of IC(E) Someone will be annoyed, receiving a transmission so badly garbled, but she spares less than a thought for them, turns her attention to the IC(E) instead. It is less formidable from this direction, was designed to keep people out, not to hold them in, but she knows better than to be too confident. She eases her way through the coils like diamond and wire, moving crabwise, oblique, across the grain of the net, until at last she emerges from the thicket, hangs once again in the open net.

She smiles, allowing herself at least that much of triumph, but does not let her cloaking programs fade. Instead, she takes the nearest datastream, and, still smiling, lets it carry her toward home.

Chapter Eight

IT WAS A five-hour drive to Seahaven, under grid control, four hours on manual. Cerise, driving alone, kept the runabout off the grid. She flashed past the corporate vehicles in the grid lanes to her right, barely aware of the figures outlined against the bright-gold windows. Crossing the Merrimack, it was foggy—it was never not foggy at night up here, drifts rippling past in the cones of light from the headlamps—and Cerise cut her speed, the engine easing down from the shrill whine that had annoyed her for the past four hours. Multiplane’s loaner fleet was generally underpowered, whether for economic reasons or security she didn’t know, but a few days driving at what she considered to be a reasonable speed would generally send the borrowed machines back for a tune-up She smiled to herself, thinking of the mechanics’ faces when she returned this one, and settled herself more comfortably against the padded seat.

A light clicked in the heads-up display at the base of the windscreen, and in the same moment a sign flashed past on the side of the road: one mile to the border toll station. She read the information almost without thinking, feet automatically shifting on the pedals, her hands easing the wheel. Another limo slid past, this time on her left, overtaking her on manual. She caught a brief glimpse of the bright interior, two men in suits seated facing each other across a display console, and then it passed completely, and she saw only the flickering taillights. The driver’s compartment had been blacked out, without even the glimmer of red that usually outlined the section. Going to Seahaven? she wondered, and the toll station loomed ahead.

At this hour, almost midnight, most of the gates were on automatic. The grid was signaling to her, more letters and arrows streaking past in the windscreen, and she hit the thumb button to signal that she would obey. The grid computers shunted her toward a middle lane, as she had expected— they would be considering that she was on manual and, driving fast in a small car, would respond more quickly than the heavier limos—and she smiled once to herself at the accuracy of her prediction. A single light flickered in the tollkeeper’s booth; the row of gates stretched empty across the road, display lights proclaiming that they were on automatic. Cerise worked the window controls, reached for the passcard as she slid into the gate. The reader was set high, positioned for a limo running on the grid, and she had to stretch to slide the card through the manual sensor. There was a brief pause while the computers considered the verifications and the money was deducted from Multiplane’s traffic account, and then the orange-and-white barrier folded back. She touched the accelerator gently, and the runabout slid out into the warm orange light of the toll station. There was a beeping sound behind her, and she glanced up at the mirror screen. The grid had brought one of the limos into the gate badly, and the gate sensors couldn’t read the low-powered pass button. She could see the tollkeeper, a stocky man in jeans and a T-shirt, dashing across the pavement toward the beeping car.

Another good reason to stay off the grid, she thought, and returned her attention to the road. The lights from the toll station formed a band of orange across the roadway, the fog drifting through it in seemingly solid clouds. Beyond the lights, the night seemed very black. She timed her acceleration so that she slid into the darkness at the point where the road narrowed again to five lanes, touched the controls to close the window. The fog smelled of peppermint and tobacco, and she wondered what had drifted in from the open sea this time. She was three minutes away from Seahaven.

She reached the Seahaven cutoff in five minutes, slowed by the appearance of a phalanx of state militia in their dull green fast-tanks, coursing along the outer lanes. She pulled over, into the slowest of the manual lanes, watching the warning lights stream along her display band: rear-and side-scan radar, automatic identity query and response, machine check. She kept her speed cautious even after they had passed. At the Seahaven exit, more lights flashed, demanding that she link with the local grid. This was Seahaven: she obeyed, lifting one hand from the wheel to punch in the link codes. An instant later she felt the controls shifting against her touch, and she made herself relax. The runabout swung south, turning along the access road that ran almost parallel to the main north-south flyway. Seahaven—or, more precisely, The Willows at Seahaven, the secure hotel that was the town’s economy—preferred to control all vehicular traffic within its borders, and made access to the town as complicated as possible. The commuter trains did not stop there, nor did the buses. They were particularly careful about anything coming in over the causeway; the town grid was both competent and aggressive in its attempts to gain control. She touched a final code, temporarily disabling her controls, and leaned back against the padding, suddenly aware of her own tiredness. It had been a long day, longer than she’d realized: meetings all morning trying to get her department into order and to make sure Baeyen would be able to handle the transferred authority, and then going onto the net to find the message waiting, the unfamiliar packet that she had known, even before she touched it, felt the codes, had to be from her Trouble. It had just been one word, just “Seahaven,” but that had been enough: Trouble was back in the game, and willing to share what she’d found. It had taken her three hours to convince Coigne of that, though, and she grinned, savoring the victory. Best of all, though, Trouble was back.

At least for now. Cerise felt her smile turn wry, the old pain stabbing her again. Trouble had left once before, left her in the lurch; there was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. And even that was getting ahead of things: there was no reason to think that she would see Trouble again even on the nets, no reason to think that Trouble would want to do more than this, this one message. Cerise stared at the lights of the heads-up display without really seeing them, thinking about Trouble. She could almost see her, was tired enough that it took very little to conjure her, tall and broad-shouldered and smiling, tiger stripes vivid in her thick hair. And that was not what she wanted to think about. She shook the image away, frowning now, shook away too the recognition that she still wanted Trouble, after everything, and fixed her eyes on the darkened screen.

The roadway lifted, rising up on pilings to cross the bands of salt marsh that lay between the main highway and Seahaven itself. The dome of the local nuke glowed on the horizon to the south, whitening the fog. Security had to be tight there, with Seahaven on its doorstep, though whether it was to protect The Willows’ exclusive clientele or to keep out the lowlifes who lived in the town and along the Parcade, she had never been entirely sure. Closer in, she could see the Ferris wheel at the end of the Parcade glowing through the fog like a monster icon. She would check there tomorrow, she decided, see if she could get word of either Trouble in the shops and cubicles that lined the street.

The roadway curved, swinging to cross the Mill Race at its narrowest point, and she looked sideways and back, looking for The Willows. She could barely find it—the road had been laid to make it hard to see, from any approach angle—just the white roofs floating, floodlit, above a screen of trees that was all but invisible in the dark. She had even been there once, when Multiplane had been negotiating to buy out a competitor, had stayed in the cool and perfect rooms, screened from electronic snooping, live spies, and the threat of raiders real or virtual, and had hated every minute of it. The staff had been perfect, discreet, all but invisible in the conference center at the heart of the compound, attentive and cheerful in the perimeter buildings; the food had been exquisite, the evening entertainment, tapes and sports, of course, nothing live, well chosen. But she had remembered the people she had known, the summer she had lived in Seahaven, the ones who worked at The Willows and the ones who wanted to, the ones who would indenture themselves to the hotel and the ones who didn’t dare, and had found it hard to meet the service people’s eyes. The Willows had saved Seahaven, there was no question about it: when the beaches died, there had been no other jobs, no other employers, and the hotel had taken up the slack, employed the fishermen and their children, the small businessmen who suddenly had no clientele. The town had always lived partly off the tourists; it had not been difficult to find people who knew the service trades. But The Willows had also made sure it would have no competition—security reasons, they said, but it allowed no other corporations to settle in the town limits. The Parcade they tolerated only because it brought extra and expensive business, both the bright-light corporations whose people liked the game of a walk on the wild side and the greyer ones who had some dealings with the shadows.

Cerise shook the thought away. She shouldn’t have to deal with The Willows, or its security, not this trip, and if she did, Multiplane had clout enough to handle it. Ahead now she could see the lights of Harborside, on the higher ground across the Eel Ditch. Her own hotel was there, a subsidiary of The Willows, of course, built to accommodate spouses and families who couldn’t be allowed in the more secure buildings of The Willows itself. Harborside was the nicer part of town, where the better-paid service trades had their houses, and the better shops and entertainment centers were; beyond the Blind Creek it became plain Seahaven again, the acceptable face of poverty, hardworking, stubborn, some of it subsidized to astonish the visitor. But the harbor still held its share of fishing boats, though you had to sail a long way, the fishermen said, push the boats’ limits, before you dared eat what you caught, and there were only a few jobs there that had no connection to The Willows.

Lights flashed across her display, and Cerise glanced at the string of query codes. The inboard systems responded automatically—destination, reservation codes, a request that the hotel be informed of her arrival—and the message bar flashed green in acknowledgment. The runabout slowed, the sound of its tires changing as it hit the older pavement of the town roads, and the grid shunted it neatly into the middle lane of Willows Road. Cerise smiled to herself—the locals still called it Ashworth Avenue, a last stubborn gesture of the independence they had already sold—and saw the lights flashing from the drawbridge that spanned the Harbormouth. Beyond it lay the unnamed neighborhoods that lay between the main town and the Parcade, still Seahaven but cut off from the town and The Willows and the jobs by the one-lane bridge: her eventual destination was the Parcade, which she had once known better than she had known the town where she was born. She closed her eyes, shutting out the fog-damp street and the forlorn neon, remembering her Seahaven. There were tiny gardens there, wedged in between the candy-colored houses, with raised boxes of store-bought dirt to fight the sand and the encroaching chemicals from the beach. There were triple and quadruple-deckers, porches jutting off at odd angles, and families crowded into low bungalows never meant to stand the winter, and tidy capes where someone still cared enough to paint and clean and sweep the sand from the concrete before the doorways. She had had a flat on the top floor of what had been a tall vacation house, two rooms and a bath, but with a balcony from which she could see the ocean. It had been hot, even with fans running and all the windows open, and she had slept on the roof with the rest of the housemates more than once, but at least it had been warm through the interminable grey winter.

The runabout slowed and tilted, turning, and Cerise opened her eyes to see the low buildings of Eastman House looming out of the fog. She glanced once to her right, to see the guardhouse at the end of the smaller causeway that led to The Willows, and then looked back toward the doorway, mustering a smile for the uniformed man who appeared to greet her. She touched the interior lock, and he opened the runabout’s door for her, smiling with apparently genuine welcome.

“Ms. Cerise. Can I take your luggage?”

Cerise nodded, touched the controls a final time to open the storage compartment, and levered herself out of the driver’s seat while the doorman collected her single bag. She pulled the hardware case from its place behind the seat, waving the doorman away when he offered to take it from her, and followed him into the lobby. It was dimly lit, warm amber light, and music drifted gently from the bar beyond a screen of broad-leafed plants—someone singing the blues, Cerise recognized, the sort of music Trouble had liked, in her more mellow moods. She turned to the woman who waited behind the all-but-hidden counter.

“Ms. Cerise?” the woman said, making it a question even though the town grid had signaled Cerise’s arrival, and Cerise nodded. “If you’ll just look over our form, make sure everything is as requested…”

Cerise took the flashprinted form, scanned it quickly—single room, full media suite and net ties, unlimited signing privileges, courtesy of Multiplane’s account—and scrawled her name where indicated. The woman took it back, smiling her thanks. She had perfect teeth, like all The Willows’ employees, very white against the deep red lipstick.

“Thank you, ma’am.” She reached beneath the counter to retrieve a glittering disk of iridescent plastic and a sensor board. Recognizing the system, Cerise laid her hand against the board, and waited while the woman recorded palm and fingerprint and the heat pattern and recorded them on the disk itself. It was a double-check system, the prints recorded both in the disk that served as a key, so that only the registered guest could use it, and in the lock itself. It wasn’t impossible to defeat, Cerise knew—she’d done it herself—but it did take more time and equipment and a knack for social engineering that not every cracker possessed.

“You’re all set,” the woman said, and Cerise slipped the proffered disk into her pocket. “George will take you up, bring anything you need to get settled.”

“Thanks,” Cerise said, and let the doorman lead her through the lobby to the double elevator. They rode up in silence, and Cerise followed him down the short hall to her room. It was on the end of one of the three wings, she realized as the doorman unlocked the door and held it for her, then followed her inside. In daylight, she would have a clear view of the slough and The Willows itself. She tipped the doorman automatically, declined his offer of a drink from the bar or a late dinner, and let the door close behind him.

There was a kitchen console, coffee machine and hot-water dispenser above a little cabinet of supplies, set into the wall of the main room, and she started a pot of coffee before she turned her attention to the net console. It was pretty much the same setup that she had remembered from her first visit to The Willows, and, at least at first glance, she was certain she carried the right programs to deflect any lurkers in the system. She hesitated a moment, wondering if she should wait until she’d had some sleep, wait until morning before venturing onto the net, then reached for her hardware carrier. She would stick to the local net, take a quick look around tonight, when the local crackers would be out in force, and tomorrow she would look in earnest for Trouble. She put together her system, then poured herself a cup of coffee before coming back to settle herself in front of the console. As she had expected, the management did not provide chairs that would be comfortable for netwalking. She wriggled against the too-tilted chair back, then brought the pillows from the bed to prop herself more comfortably into position. She slipped the jack into the dollie-slot, and dropped easily onto the local net.

She tunes the brainworm low, enough to feel but inconspicuous to others, and begins to wander, following the spiral curves of the local net. It’s a plain system, heavily controlled—she sees watchdogs everywhere, some sleeping and benign, others ranging purposefully, one or two guarding specific gateways, and she marks those last for later investigation. Not that there’s anything she wants from behind those IC(E)-walled doors, but the challenge intrigues her.

The local trade-net lies ahead, a chain of BBS, a spiral within the spiral, an eddy curling in opposition to the main system that becomes a series of spherical spaces like beads on a string or the chambers of a nautilus. She considers it for an instant, then lets herself drift down to that plane: it is here, if anywhere, that she will find either Trouble. Her feet touch solid ground, or its illusion, and she walks along a road whimsically marked with yellow bricks.

The BBS surround her, the first sphere filled with gaudy advertising, the icons fizzing against her skin, dancing around her like a cloud of insects. She ignores it—this is a trade space; she recognizes most of the product, and knows this is not worth her while—and the images fade as she leaves that chamber. The next space is brighter still, badged with neon shapes stolen from the Parcade, and she doesn’t bother to hide her sneer. This is for the tourists, the ones who want the illusion of the shadows without the danger, a place that plays at being the grey market. She looks close, and sees the watchdogs and the trackers, the silent IC(E) woven into the very fabric of the images, all to protect the people the market is designed to cheat. They have the feel of The Willows, of the security she has already tasted from a distance, and she quickens her pace, knowing this is not a place to linger.

Beyond it lie cocktail spaces, crowded with icons not all of whom represent netwalkers—the local system believes in the illusion above all—and she slows, scanning the space for likely trapdoors. There are fewer watchdogs here, and most of those are focused on the obvious flashpoints, where the BBS intersects most directly with the abstract plane. She walks past, searching for familiar symbols, and finds an icon that she recognizes, painted by a well-known hand, a touch like a whisper of perfume against the air. She smiles, approaches, and the icon rotates toward her as though there were a live hand behind it. She can feel that fake, however, the chill unreality radiating from it, and doesn’t bother to answer the preprogrammed greeting.

Libera, she says, the old password, and the icon fades slightly, disclosing the trapdoor. She glances behind her once, unfolding her scan, and sees/feels nothing untoward, no particular attention from the watchdogs. She gestures then, furling her programs, and steps through the nebulous doorway.

She emerges into a new space, green-walled, floor of jagged emerald grass imprisoned beneath an invisible surface, so that she walks above the apparent surface of the ground. It is a lot of effort for a shadow board, and she looks sharply sideways, letting the scans unfurl around her, but there is nothing untoward, no tang of unexpected security. The watchdogs are bred from the shadows, and she recognizes at least the pedigree if not the hand that made them—and in any case, they are turned toward the walls, watching for intruders, not for the people who use the space. It is less crowded here—no need for the illusion of a crowd, to bolster the ego—and she can feel the faint current, gentle feedback, a hint of emotion, that signifies another brainworm, or maybe more than one. Definitely the right place, she thinks, and lets herself stroll toward the source of that sensation, walking, almost floating, over the top of the gleaming grass.

At the center of the space, by the message pole that runs from floor to arched ceiling, she sees a familiar icon—Mario, his name is, and he once tried to crack her IC(E), though he was good enough to get away once she’d jumped him. This is neutral ground, however, and she gives him a careful distance, feeling his surprise and quickly controlled anger feed back into the net. He’s on the wire, too, unusually, and she doesn’t want trouble from him.

And then she feels it, the familiar warmth, a whisper of sensation that’s like a well-known voice. She quickens her step in spite of herself, in spite of knowing better, and sees, around the pole, the shape of a harlequin, dancing, pipes in hand.

Trouble, she says aloud, and the word comes out exultant, and she doesn’t quite know why.

The harlequin turns, lifts hand to half-mask, and she sees the mouth below it smile. Cerise.

Cerise stops three virtual meters from her former partner, suddenly not sure what to say or do, and Trouble lifts her hand. Evoking a program, Cerise thinks, tensing—she can feel the routine as yet undefined, its potential trembling in the virtual air around the other woman’s fingers—and Trouble says, Shall we talk?

It is the tone, the same tease, half-amused, half-seductive, in which she would have said, Shall we dance?, and Cerise smiles in return, deliberately slow and mocking. Why not? she says, and calls her own program, throwing a silver sphere around them, to keep out the lurkers. Trouble has seen the gesture and in the same moment launches her own program, so that the two spheres, silver, silver gilt, meet and mesh so that they stand under a mottled sky that streams with color. Trouble lifts her hand to her face, and her own face appears through the mask—a gesture of respect, Cerise acknowledges, but a cheap one. She can feel the other’s presence, the feedback from the brainworm, knows Trouble feels the same, and that if either one of them relaxes that same feedback can spiral, each feeding on the other, until it carries them both away.

*I thought you’d come,* Trouble says, *but I didn’t expect you so soon.*

*I’m not particularly happy with the current situation,* Cerise says, and hears herself less sharp than she’d intended.

No more am I, Trouble said, and laughs aloud. *For what it’s worth, it wasn’t me.*

*I didn’t think it was,* Cerise answers. *Not your—style.*

Thanks for that.

There is a little silence between them, and in that silence Cerise hears the thread of a sound, the ghost of a siren: her passive watchers, warning her that security is interested in the private sphere. Trouble hears it, too, or some warning of her own, looks over her shoulder.

*We can’t talk here,* she says, and Cerise nods.

*I’m at Eastman House,* she says. Join me for breakfast. She lifts her hand to break the sphere, feels Trouble’s agreement even as she dissolves the program’s construct in a cloud of buzzing smoke and fragments, and takes a quick five steps sideways so that by the time the smoke clears and the watchdogs arrive, sniffing avidly, she is well away and Trouble is nowhere to be seen. There is nothing else she can do—she has already done more, much more, than she’d expected—and she walks back along the spiral, lost in thought, retracing her steps out of the spiral path until she can ride the data home again.

Trouble sat unmoving in the darkened room, the sea-damp air chill on her bare arms. Beyond the half-opened window, the fog rolled past in slow billows, bringing a smell like peppermint and gasoline with it from the beach. She sniffed it automatically—the peppermint smell was like the one her bioware used to label a particular class of data—but did not move to close the window. The lights, linked for economic reasons to a motion-sensor, had turned themselves out while she was out on the net; they would not go on again until she touched the switch. There was enough light from the window, from the neon on the street below, to show the shapes of the furniture, and the flickering telltales on her hardware cast faint orange light across the table where she’d set up her system. She stared at it, noting successful shutdown with one corner of her brain, thinking about Cerise. She had expected Cerise to come to Seahaven herself—that was Cerise’s style, to step briskly in when angels would think twice before acting—but she had not expected quite so rapid a response, if only because she had not expected Multiplane to be able to act so fast. The fact that they had meant that Cerise had been expecting—something, and had set up her departure in advance. And will I go to breakfast? Trouble thought, and smiled, seeing the icon again in imagination, Cerise’s cartoon-woman walking toward her under the green-glass dome of the BBS. It had been a strange thing to see her again, to feel her presence, silk and steel and taut-strung wire; stranger still to feel her own response, heart turning like a wheel, rolling over into the familiar habit of trust, despite everything—and that was foolish, stupid beyond permission, as Cerise herself would say. Old habits die hard, but die they must: I’ll go to breakfast, she decided, but not without setting up some fallbacks of my own first.

She turned back to the system, wincing a little at unanticipated stiffness in her shoulders and back. She had slipped sideways at some point, come back from the net to find herself slumped painfully against the side of the chair. The dol-lie-cord slithered across her shoulder, and the healing flesh around the new socket was starting to hurt again, a dull throb of pain at the back of her head. She would make the fallbacks in the morning, she decided, when she was fresh and rested, and freed herself from the system. She undressed in the dark, not bothering with the room lights—her eyes had adjusted now to the dimness, and it seemed pointless to put on a light for the few minutes she would be awake and active—used the toilet, and crawled between the clammy sheets. She fell asleep watching the blink of the system telltales mirroring the neon.

She woke to brilliant sunlight, slanting in under the imperfectly lowered shades, lay blinking for a moment before she pushed herself upright. She was still stiff from the previous night’s work, and the back of her head felt bruised, puffy and sore to an exploring touch. She grimaced, and swung herself out of bed, hoping that a shower would help. Washed and brushed and dressed, she felt a little better, but the muscles of her neck still twinged with each unwary move. She rolled her head from side to side as she moved toward the media center, touched keys to call up time-and-temperature. It was later than she had realized, well past nine, and she swore under her breath. Cerise wasn’t a morning person, and when she said breakfast, she meant ten o’clock and no earlier, but that barely left Trouble enough time to reach Eastman House. I knew I should’ve taken care of fallbacks last night, she thought, and shook the anger away. It was too late, that was all; she’d have to chance it. But I must stop being stupid about Cerise. She shut down the sleeping system, unplugged the central brain, and shoved it into her bag along with what was left of her money and the disks she had collected—her emergency kit, the absolute minimum that would let her walk the nets—then let herself out of the room, sealing the room lock and the extra override behind her.

It was about a half-hour’s walk into Seahaven proper, across the drawbridge that spanned the Harbormouth. Trouble walked easily through the nearly-empty streets, seeing only a few people gathered outside the waffle shop behind the beach arcade. It was low tide, and the air smelled of salt mud, and oil, and, faintly, still, of peppermint. It was cool, the breeze off the water cutting through her vest and jersey, but the sunlight was warm. Crossing the drawbridge, it struck diamond highlights from the water left in the central channel, and lay in sheets across the exposed flats, where the mud was still wet from the receding water. A boat was moving along the dredged channel, heading for the fish docks, and a trio of gulls wheeled behind it, following the scent of food. They were very bright against the autumn trees that lined the horizon. At the top of the bridge, the concrete changed to metal mesh, and Trouble walked warily, careful of the slick surface. From that point, she could see down into Seahaven and beyond, past the seawall that enclosed the town and even out onto the beach itself. The sand lay in ugly patches, green and grey and oily brown, sand changing to sludge at the tideline. Even at this distance, she could see the heaped seaweed smoldering as the air hit it, releasing the chemicals it had collected from the sea. The remains of the Pavilion Bandstand were very bright against the blues of sea and sky, and someone had scrawled the beginning of a word, K and O, in scarlet across the broken shell. She wondered vaguely what it had been going to say, and started down the bridge into town.

It was more crowded here, runabouts moving along the narrow streets, and a bus passed her halfway up the avenue, carrying the night shift home from The Willows. She kept walking, moderating her pace so that she didn’t seem too conspicuous, turned at last onto the little road that led toward Eastman House and to The Willows beyond. The sidewalk here was well repaired, like the roadway itself, and the grass to either side was expensively maintained, the irrigation and fertilizer heads showing like brass nails at regular intervals. There would be one-way filters buried beneath it to keep the beach chemicals from leaching into the new-laid soil, Trouble knew, and security devices laced into the neat hedges that bordered the property. For an instant she wished that she could have approached it on the wire, so that she could see the networked security blazing out of ground and trees, but that was beyond even experimental capacity now.

She did not hesitate at the entrance to Eastman House, but marched between the carved pillars as though she owned the place—as though she’d been invited, which she had. The doorman eyed her warily, taking in the casual, uncorporate clothes, but held the door open, and even offered a smile. Trouble grinned back, unable to keep from enjoying his uncertainty, and crossed the lobby, her bootheels echoing when they hit the strips of marble between the islands of carpet, to fetch up at the reception desk.

The young woman behind the desk frowned slightly, then muted that expression almost instantly, but her hand still hovered over a security button. “May I—?”

“I’m here to see Cerise,” Trouble said, and smiled again. “I’m expected.”

“Of course,” the young woman said. She took her hand away from the button to punch codes into a keyboard, managed an uncertain smile of her own in return. “Who may I say is here?”

“I’m expected,” Trouble said again. That was a risk, but less of one, she suspected, than giving her real name. Besides, when the corporations dealt with the shadows, they dealt on the corporation’s turf. Let them think that, let them think that Cerise is buying grey-market goods, Trouble thought, and we’re home free.

“Of course,” the young woman said. She was too well trained to show any hint of annoyance in tone or expression, but Trouble could hear it in the click of fingernails on keys. “Ah, yes,” the clerk went on, after a moment. “Don’ll show you up.”

“Thanks,” Trouble said, and turned to face the doorman as he approached. The clerk handed a slip of paper across the counter, and the doorman took it, glanced quickly at it, and turned to Trouble.

“If you’ll follow me, ma’am?” He started toward the elevators without waiting for an answer.

Trouble followed, felt the hairs at the back of her neck prickling. This was the tricky part, the dangerous part: if anyone was looking for her, if The Willows had somehow spotted her, recognized her from Treasury have-you-seens, this was the time when they could take her. She kept her shoulders loose with an effort as the elevator doors closed behind them, wishing, not for the first time, that she still had a gun. Or a knife, she thought, or anything.

The elevator doors opened at last, and she kept close behind the doorman, keeping him between her and any lurking security. They stepped out together into a beige-walled hallway, gently sky-lit, beige shadows on beige carpeting; the only color was the scarlet of the flowers in a niche at the very end of the hall. It was very quiet, too, only the faint hiss of the environmental system, and Trouble felt herself relax slightly. No one was waiting here; that left only Cerise to worry about, and despite everything, she couldn’t quite be wary of her. She shrugged that recognition away, annoyed with herself, and the doorman stopped in front of one of the beige doors. He touched the intercom button, said, in the deferential voice The Willows taught its employees, “Ms. Cerise, your guest is here.”

“Thanks.” The voice even through the distorting intercom was unchanged, the same clear soprano. “It’s open.”

The doorman pressed the handle, and held the door, and Trouble walked past him into the suite. The light was stronger here, and she blinked once, startled, as the door closed again behind her. Cerise was waiting more or less as she’d expected, sitting with her back to the west-facing window in one of the hotel’s big armchairs, legs crossed, fingers steepled to proclaim she didn’t have a weapon, and didn’t need one. Trouble had never been fully sure whether the pose was bravado or misdirection, if there really was a palm-gun somewhere close to hand: Cerise had never owned a gun when they were together—there had been no real need, all the aggression had taken place on the nets, virtual violence, where a woman could easily be as hard and tough as any man—but she had demonstrably known how to use one. Cerise did not move, and Trouble took a step sideways, out of line with the window, so that she could see Cerise’s face against the sky and the slough beyond the glass. Cerise smiled then, full lips quirking up into something like genuine amusement. She had gone back to dark hair, Trouble saw, jet-black hair that emphasized the alabaster pallor of her skin, and was stark contrast with the deep pink of her lips and nails. The black suit was expensive, top of the line, like the pink-heeled shoes. It jarred with the makeup, the hard cheap color flat as the icing on a cookie, but, as always, Cerise carried it off.

“It’s good to see you again,” Trouble said, and Cerise laughed.

“You’re late.”

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Trouble said, and then the amusement vanished from her voice. “And I didn’t want to draw too much attention. Someone’s been taking my name in vain.”

Cerise nodded. “So I’d noticed. So lots of people have noticed.” There was a little silence between them then, and Cerise looked up at the other woman. Trouble had changed more than she’d expected, more than she herself had—she was heavier now, though not fat, the sexy child’s curves maturing into something fuller, rounder, a shape that promised adult pleasures. She’d let her hair go back to its natural brown, cut short to keep the heavy curls subdued, but she still wore her clothes, jeans, man-style shirt, boots, a Japanese-patchwork vest, all mock-simplicity, with the old understated edge of menace.

“I’m not best pleased,” Trouble said, quite mildly.

“Coigne—my immediate superior—wants to shut you down.”

“Was it him who set Treasury on me?”

“I don’t know,” Cerise said. “That may have just been natural causes—this new Trouble’s pushing the envelope pretty hard. It was bound to attract attention.”

“What concerns me,” Trouble said, “is how that attention got turned on me.”

“You—we—were pretty well known,” Cerise answered. “No one’s forgotten Trouble.” They had forgotten Alice, though, she thought, with a too-familiar touch of bitterness—or, no, not forgotten, but Alice-B-Good had gone to the corporations, joined the enemy, and her name had disappeared from conversation. She uncoiled herself from the chair, and crossed to the breakfast table set up beside the media center. “Coffee?”

“Thanks,” Trouble said, and took the cup held out to her.

“What I’d really like to know is where this punk got the idea my name was up for grabs.”

Cerise nodded slowly, poured herself a cup and set the pot aside, all without taking her eyes off the other woman “You’ve been less than visible for quite a while. I don’t know where you were, and I looked.” In spite of herself, the old anger sounded in her voice; she controlled it instantly, and went on with only the slightest of hesitations, “There was a rumor that you were dead. He—she—may have thought the name was free.”

“I’d love to know how that story got started,” Trouble said, and settled herself on the nearest chair.

Cerise went back to her armchair, set her cup down and tucked her legs back under her. She could feel the narrow skirt straining, riding up on her thighs, and didn’t care, was even mildly pleased with the effect. “I wasn’t very happy with you,” she said, and Trouble gave a wry smile.

“I guess not.”

“Did I have cause?”

Trouble looked down into her cup, wrapped both hands around the fragile china as though she needed the warmth, staring into the black liquid. She said, without looking up, “I fucked up, leaving like that. But I was right—I had to go.”

Cerise felt her own mouth twist, stared at the top of Trouble’s head as though she was trying to memorize the way the hair grew from the other woman’s scalp, the short almost-curls springing from a straggling part, tumbling heavily across her skull and over the tips of her ears. “We might’ve cracked that IC(E) together,” she said, in spite of herself, and Trouble looked up sharply.

“Or we might’ve both gotten caught.” It was the old argument, the one that had driven them apart, or as near as made no difference, and she took hold of herself, said, carefully, “I screwed up, I admit it, but that was three years ago. We can’t change it.”

“No,” Cerise said, still with the twisted almost-smile, and then she made herself relax. “I suppose we can fight that out later. What matters now is to find this imposter of yours.”

“Not mine,” Trouble said instinctively, and was glad to see Cerise smile. “So what have you got on it?”

“Let’s trade,” Cerise said, and this time it was Trouble who grinned. “You first.”

Trouble’s grin widened, as though she might refuse, but she said, “I don’t know a whole lot, actually. The first thing I heard of it was Treasury showing up on my doorstep—literally, I was working as a syscop for an artists’ co-op—”

“You’re kidding,” Cerise said, and Trouble shrugged.

“It seemed the thing to do at the time. I stayed off the net for eight months after I—left—and then I stayed in the bright lights, got myself syscop’s papers and got a real job.”

“A syscop,” Cerise said, and shook her head. “Well, set a thief to catch a thief.”

Trouble said, “But, like I said, I’ve been keeping a low profile. The first thing I knew about it was John Starling and his partner, what’s his name, Levy, I think, showing up to interview me about somebody using my local net as a springboard into the big BBS. I’m pretty sure that was just an excuse to check me out—my records were clean, and I’d‘ve known if someone was screwing around on my boards.”

“What happened to the co-op?” Cerise asked.

Trouble poured herself another cup of coffee, buying time. “I left—at their request. They said they couldn’t afford my problems.” She held up the pot, eyebrows rising in question, and Cerise shook her head. “So Butch van Liesvelt had showed up on my back porch the night before Treasury came down, to warn me they were interested, and when I had to run, I looked him up. I got an updated implant, and then we did some snooping around. Fate—remember Fate?—has had some dealings with newTrouble, and he told me he was based in Seahaven. This one, that is. He was not real happy with newTrouble. I guess he’d spent a couple of days mopping up Treasury watchdogs and snoops after the last time newTrouble was in his system.” Trouble took a deep breath. “He did tell me one other thing, though. NewTrouble’s on the wire.”

“Is he, now,” Cerise said softly. “That’s very interesting.”

“So what do you have?”

“Interpol doesn’t know he’s on the wire,” Cerise said, as if the other hadn’t spoken. “They’re worrying about viruses at this point.” She shook herself, frowning as she tried to organize her thoughts, said, “Hand me an English muffin, will you?”

“You’re eating before noon?” Trouble asked, but found one of the still-warm muffins in the bread basket. It oozed butter—Eastman House didn’t skimp on cholesterol, it seemed—and she found a plate to set it on before handing it across. Cerise took it with a nod of thanks.

“Help yourself, there’s plenty.”

“No, thanks,” Trouble said, but picked a strawberry from among the garnishes. It was out of season, but tasted better than she’d expected, and she ate another. “So what’s this about viruses, and Interpol?”

“I gather that newTrouble’s been playing games in Europe,” Cerise said, indistinctly, through a mouthful of bread. “But let me start at the beginning. We—Multiplane, that is—had an intrusion. I was on line and tracked it, but lost the intruder in the BBS.”

“Naturally,” Trouble muttered, and Cerise nodded.

“My programs, and the later autopsy of the icepick that was used, suggested it was your work—I think it was a sixty-five or seventy percent probability, something like that—but it didn’t really feel like your hand.” She smiled thinly, remembering Coigne’s response. “My boss, Coigne, disagreed, said it was you, so I started looking for myself. I didn’t talk to Treasury personally, my people did that, but I ran into Max Helling on the net and he put me in contact with someone from Interpol. And he—Mabry, his name is—gave me what they’d picked up, mostly code fragments and the occasional virus. Apparently newTrouble’s been doing some cracking in the European nets, and was leaving a few viruses behind him. None of them were really damaging payloads, but the corporations have been—concerned.”

“Not unreasonably,” Trouble said.

“And Max and Mabry seem to be a couple,” Cerise said. “For what it’s worth.” She leaned forward, holding out her plate. “Would you hand me another muffin? I have a disk for you, if you want to look at it.”

Trouble did as she’d asked. “Yeah, I’d like to get a look at this person’s work.”

“My setup’s there,” Cerise said, and pointed to the modules laid out on the shelf at the front of the media center. “The disk is loaded and cued, hit any key to run it.”

Trouble picked up a slice of melon, crossed to the media center. “Can I keep this?” she asked, and touched a key to start the display.

“It’s yours if you want it,” Cerise answered, with another of her thin smiles. She watched as Trouble stared down into the screen, still gnawing delicately on the slice of melon, brows drawing down into the faint, familiar thoughtful frown. And it was strange to think of that expression as familiar even now, and not entirely pleasant, like another, unexpected, betrayal, and Cerise looked away, poured herself another cup of coffee that she didn’t want.

“That’s interesting,” Trouble said, in the controlled voice that had always boded ill for someone. “This person’s using most of my old routines.”

“Yes,” Cerise agreed, with enough mild amusement that Trouble turned to look at her. “Well, what’d you expect, Treasury pulled the match out of thin air? Of course it’s using your routines.”

Trouble grunted an acknowledgment, her eyes already back on the screen and the scrolling text. “A fair number of modifications, though—and he wasn’t working from first-generation copies. Looks like he got them second-or third-hand, with modifications already in place—I think there’re two hands in this, at least, or else he’s really careless.”

“Mabry said, and I agree, from what I saw in the autopsy, that it’s immature work. This person—you said he?—doesn’t like to do tidy work, only does it when he has to.”

Trouble nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, it’s a he, or so Fate said.” She ran her hand across the control ball, recalling a section of text, stared at it for a moment longer before going on. “You know, I could be offended that anyone thought this was me.”

“And you used to complain I was arrogant,” Cerise said.

“Well, you are.” Trouble grinned, and Cerise smiled back in spite of herself.

“But I’ve earned it.” She uncurled herself from the chair, stretched legs and arms, and realized with a certain pleasure that Trouble was watching her, enjoying the play of muscles under the thin black tights. And that was playing with fire, she knew, but she had never been able to keep away from matches… “So, what are your intentions?”

Trouble’s eyebrows rose in mute question, pointing the double meaning, and Cerise waved it away.

“Regarding newTrouble.”

Trouble looked at her for an instant too long, an imperceptible hesitation before she answered, “The word I have is, he lives here, somewhere in town. I’ve already stopped by Mollie Blake’s—you remember Mollie—but I thought I might take a walk along the Parcade, see if anyone wants to tell me where he’s at.”

Cerise smiled again, picturing Trouble’s styles of questioning. “Mind if I tag along? I want this guy, too, you know.”

“Dressed like that?”

“I can change.”

“Don’t tell me you got suited up just for me.”

Cerise pushed herself up out of the chair, heard the note of challenge in her voice as she answered, “I thought you should know where I stand these days.” She went into the bedroom without looking back, shedding her jacket as she went.

Trouble said behind her, “Head of on-line security for Multiplane. I’d heard. Sort of a glorified syscop—set a thief to catch a thief?”

It was only what she herself had said, her own jibe thrown back at her, but Cerise flinched anyway, and didn’t answer. She left the door open, worked the tight skirt down her hips, exaggerating the movements with deliberate anger, walked in tights and heels and thin chemise to the suitcase that stood open on the dresser top. She found jeans and a T-shirt, and looked up again, to see that Trouble had disappeared from the doorway. She could see the other woman’s reflection in the grey surface of the media center’s monitor, however, and knew Trouble could see her, too. She stood still for a moment, then made herself move away, out of the line of sight.

Trouble looked away from the big monitor, not sure whether she was glad or sorry, not sure exactly what had happened, either, except that she was glad the challenge had been withdrawn. She glanced again at Cerise’s machines, touched a key to recall the file, made herself concentrate on the Interpol report. Whoever had written it, this Mabry, presumably, Helling’s new lover, had known his business: the analysis was cogent, each step laid out so that anyone reading the file could follow the reasoning behind its conclusions. What was missing, and Mabry had known it, was a sense of why newTrouble had picked these particular targets, chosen to steal these particular bits of data and release his viruses in these particular volumes of the net. Trouble frowned, trying to remember everything Fate had told her. It wasn’t much, and most of it was unspoken, but she could assume that it was his dealings with newTrouble that had caused him enough problems to put him firmly on her side. And that was odd, too: any serious cracker would know better than to antagonize a data fence, especially someone like Fate, who worked for the mob. Of course, if newTrouble did all his business on the net, he might not know about that connection. But even so, she thought, you don’t mess with a good fence. And Fate is a good one, no question about it.

“You done with that?” Cerise asked, and Trouble turned, to see the other woman standing in the bedroom doorway. She had changed into something like her old style, black jeans, nearly black T-shirt, black jacket, and walking boots, and the vivid makeup was a shocking contrast.

“Yeah,” Trouble answered, and stood aside to let Cerise close down the system. “It’s got to be a kid, newTrouble does. It doesn’t make sense any other way.”

Cerise looked up curiously, her hands slowing on the keys. “Why? I think I agree, but why?”

“You first,” Trouble said, automatically, and Cerise laughed.

“Give it up.”

Trouble grinned. “Because this isn’t profitable—none of this that your Interpol buddy found, and none of what I’ve heard about here, and most certainly not hassling Fate.”

Cerise nodded, folding the screen back over the keyboard. “That’s more or less what Mabry said, and certainly the intrusion we had was pretty pointless—more to prove he could do it, as far as I can tell, than to get anything to sell. He was in the wrong place—that particular volume belonged to a subgroup that didn’t have anything at a crucial stage.”

“Besides,” Trouble said, “it feels like a kid’s work.”

Cerise nodded again, slipped a folder into her jacket pocket. “And where best to find a kid but on the Parcade?”

They walked back across the Harbormouth bridge. The tide was coming in now, rising over the flats, and a few gulls were waiting at the edge of the mud, heads cocked to watch something under the shimmering surface. Cerise shook her head, seeing them, said, “I don’t know how they survive, given what the fish have been eating. And swimming in.”

Trouble shrugged. “Scavengers evolve, too, I guess.” But there had been more gulls around when she was younger, she thought, or maybe that was just a trick of memory. She frowned slightly, annoyed at the irrelevance of her thought, and fixed her eyes on the continuation of the avenue ahead. The streets were more crowded now, night workers just starting their day, and the arc of the Ferris wheel showed neon above the rooftops.

The Parcade lay perpendicular to the beach, had once connected almost directly with the beach itself, but the stairs that breached the seawall had been barricaded, riprap piled behind the new concrete walls, and only the occasional plume of sand now passed that barrier. Cerise looked away from the barricades, brighter concrete against the weathered grey, said, “Where to first, do you think?”

Trouble shrugged again, surveying the low-slung buildings. They lay in two long rows, facing each other across the much-mended street; the ones closest to the beach were sand-scarred, the pastel paint scratched and blistered, but the more distant ones were in fairly good repair, only the sun to fade the gaudy colors. The Ferris wheel and its battered control shack lay at the end of the northern arcade, but even its brilliance was dwarfed by the pink-and-green palace that stood across the end of the road. The mostly green trim was picked out in yellow and white, and purple banners streamed from all six turrets. They would have to end up there, whether they wanted to or not, and Trouble grimaced, thinking of the warren of dealers behind those walls. Not just grey-market there, but black, software, and even hardware, dragged out of the deepest shadows, plus drugs and arms and just about anything else that one could want, and the man who presided over it all with genial contempt was a deeply connected player. Or at least he had been: he might be dead by now, she thought, and said, “Mollie’s first, and then work our way down the arcades.”

“Leave the palace for last?” Cerise asked, but there was no malice in her smile.

“It’ll give them a chance to take a good look at us,” Trouble said, and Cerise nodded.

“Yeah. Tinati was always a little trigger-happy for my taste.”

“So he’s still running things?” Trouble asked, and stepped up onto the boardwalk that ran the length of the arcade. It was cooler under the sheltering roof, and she drew her vest closed again. Across the street, in the other arcade, a skinny kid in jeans and a sweatshirt came out of one of the storefronts, began sweeping sand off the boardwalk into the street.

Cerise nodded. “I had some—dealings—with him about a year ago.”

Trouble glanced at her. “I thought reputable corporations didn’t make deals with the shadows.”

“It was a buy-back,” Cerise said, indifferently. “Anyway, who told you Multiplane was respectable?”

Trouble laughed. “There’s Mollie’s.”

Mollie Blake had a single storefront toward the beach end of the north arcade, a narrow, dimly lit public room presided over by a thin girl with teased hair piled high over a frame. The shelves to either side of the central desk were piled with a random array of hardware, toys, and useless gadgets mixed with genuinely practical items. Trouble found her eyes drawn to a simple-looking data-dome, wondering if its interior works really matched the manufacturer’s name on the touchplate. The override lock she had bought had been top-of-the-line, and Blake’s price had been better than fair.

“Can I help you?” the girl said, not moving from behind her desk, and Trouble brought herself back to the business at hand.

“I want to talk to Mollie,” she said. “Would you tell her Trouble’s here?”

The girl’s eyes moved to Cerise, and Cerise said, “We’re together. My name’s Cerise.”

This time the girl’s eyebrows rose in open amazement, and she touched something under the edge of the desk. “Ms. Blake? You have visitors.” There was a little silence, and Trouble looked again, found the thin wire of an earpiece running down the girl’s neck. “Trouble and Cerise.”

There was another silence, this one longer, and Cerise glanced sideways, unable to repress a quick grin. It was all too like the old days, and she had forgotten, almost, how much fun those days had been…

“Ms. Blake says go on back,” the girl said, and her surprise was audible in her voice. She reached under the edge of the desk again, and an unobtrusive door popped open on the back wall.

“Thanks,” Trouble said, and stepped around the desk. She pulled the door open—it was heavier than she had expected, backed with armor sheathing, and the locks were extra-heavy-duty—and stepped through into a narrow stairwell.

Cerise followed cautiously, wrinkling her nose a little at the dust that had drifted behind the threshold.

“Come on up,” Blake said from the top of the stairs, and Trouble did as she was told.

They emerged into a bright and pleasant room tucked under the eaves. Twin skylights were open, the armored shutters propped up to let in light and air, and there was furniture, foam-core chairs and a pair of low tables, drawn up around a central test table. Another woman, heavyset, big-breasted and wide-hipped, sat in one of the chairs, one ankle resting on her thigh.

“You know Nova,” Blake said, and the heavy woman nodded in greeting.

Trouble nodded back, did her best to hide her surprise, and could see the same startled realization flicker across Cerise’s face. She had never met Nova off the nets, neither of them had; she had thought Nova was a man, like most of the crackers who affected that style. Nova smiled crookedly, as though she recognized and did not entirely enjoy that response.

“So,” Blake went on, and waved them to the nearest chairs. “What do you want from me now, Trouble?” She looked at Cerise. “Or is this Multiplane’s business?”

“Both,” Cerise said, gently, and sat down in a patch of sunlight.

Trouble said, “I’m looking for information, Mollie.”

Blake made a face, and Nova said, “And Treasury’s looking for Trouble.” Her tone was absolutely familiar, sharp and ironic, and Trouble knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was the person she had sparred with on the net.

“I’ll tell you what we’re after,” she went on, as though Nova hadn’t spoken, and fixed her eyes on Blake, who stood with one hip leaning against the edge of the test table. “Then you can think about it and give me an answer. I’d rather you said you didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me than lie to me—and I’ll find out any lies.”

“Oh, I know exactly what this is about,” Nova said, and Blake said, “Wait.” She looked at Trouble. “Go on.”

Trouble said, “Word is that this newTrouble, the person who’s stolen my name on the net and who’s causing a lot of trouble for all the shadows, lives in Seahaven. If he buys hardware, and he must, no one goes without hardware, he’ll have come to you. I want his name, and an address.”

“He might not have come to me,” Blake said, tonelessly. “Not everyone has your high opinion of my sources.”

“Bullshit,” Cerise said sweetly.

Trouble elaborated, “He’s not stupid, newTrouble. He will have come here—the work he’s doing, he’d have to have done.”

“Assuming he’s in this Seahaven,” Blake said. “What’s this to you, Cerise? Where does Multiplane fit in?”

“My bosses want Trouble almost as much as Treasury does, and they aren’t much more particular about which one they get,” Cerise answered, with a thin smile. “I, however, want to see the right Trouble blamed for this shit.”

“Personal interest?” Nova murmured, with a lifted eyebrow.

“Get the wrong Trouble, and it’s not going to stop,” Cerise said. “And surely both sides of the law agree it has to stop.”

“Touché,” Nova said.

“Well?” Trouble asked, still looking at Blake.

Blake looked down at the test table, running her fingers over the concealed controls. “Give me a few days,” she said.

Nova said, “I hate to say it, Moll, but she’s right. Trouble, I mean. This punk’s got to go.”

Blake glared at her partner, got herself under control instantly. “I need to check things out,” she said to Trouble. “You understand.”

“Fair enough,” Trouble answered, and pushed herself back up out of the heavy chair. “Let me know.”

“What are you going to do when you find him?” Nova asked.

Trouble looked back over her shoulder, met Cerise’s eyes for an instant, saw her eyebrows lift slightly, and then her gaze slid past to Nova, still sitting with her leg cocked up, ankle on her knee. A carved bead hung from a braided leather anklet, catching the light from the window. “Shop him,” Trouble said, simply, and Nova nodded.

She went on down the stairs, Cerise following silently, and the door opened again into the shop. The young woman was still sitting behind the counter, but this time a pair of young men in patched denim jackets stood together over a recording deck, muttering to each other about its merits. They looked up as the door opened, startled and unwillingly impressed, and Trouble walked out past them, Cerise falling into step at her side.

“Where to now?” she asked, when they had stepped out onto the boardwalk.

Trouble shrugged, looked down the arcade toward the palace. “We’ll stop in a couple more places,” she said, “and then we’ll hit the palace.”

Cerise nodded, a faint, not entirely happy smile playing on her lips, and turned toward the next storefront.

Most of the storeowners remembered them, though not all fondly. Trouble repeated her message four times more, twice to men she had once known well, once to a thin woman who’d done them a favor, back in the old days, and was visibly unsure if she regretted it, once more to a man who had known Cerise, and sweated for it. She looked at Cerise as they left the store, and Cerise smiled.

“So what was that all about?” Trouble asked.

Cerise’s smile widened, became almost impish. “He owed me money, and he doesn’t know if I remember.”

Trouble grinned. “You going to call it in?”

“I haven’t decided.” Cerise stiffened abruptly, not a movement but a sudden focusing of attention. Trouble shifted, looking with her toward the palace, and saw a man in black leather walking toward them, a red skull vivid on his shoulder.

“I see Tinati’s deigned to notice us,” she said aloud.

Cerise jammed her hands into the pockets of her jacket, one fist distending the pocket as though she held something there. “That’s Aimoto. He’s sort of chief thug.”

“Great.” Trouble kept walking, controlling her steps with an effort, turning her approach into a saunter that was as provocative as open aggression. As the stranger approached, she could see that he was Asian, or at least part Asian: a big man, broad-shouldered, big-bellied under the heavy jacket, with golden skin and a flat nose and eyes that looked very small.

“He is not,” Cerise said mildly, “even half as stupid as he looks.”

The big man was within earshot now, and Trouble wondered if he’d heard. If he had, he gave no immediate sign of it, nodding placidly to Cerise. “It’s good to see you again, Ms. Cerise. Mr. Tinati was wondering, are you here on Multiplane’s business, or is it—personal?”

“A little of both,” Cerise answered, still with her hands in her jacket pockets.

Aimoto nodded again, looked at Trouble. “Trouble, I believe?”

Trouble nodded.

“Mr. Tinati would like to talk to you—to both of you.”

“Fine,” Cerise said, and Trouble nodded again.

“We were wanting to talk to him.”

She wasn’t sure, but thought a smile flickered across Aimoto’s broad face. He said nothing, however, but turned back toward the palace, gesturing for them to go with him. Trouble kept step at his shoulder, not wanting to fall ahead or behind, and wished again that she had some weapon, any weapon. Tinati, and his bosses, were people that even the net did not cross; she preferred to deal with them only at a distance.

They passed through the shadow of the Ferris wheel and climbed the four steps that led up to the palace’s main door, plywood painted to mimic pink marble ringing hollow under their boots. Inside, the palace was relatively dark, despite the strip-lights along the halls, the walls painted pink or green or covered with bright, surreal murals. Most of the little doors that led off the hall were closed, each one badged with cryptic symbols or a name printed in letters so small that one would have to be practically touching the door to read them. Cerise glanced curiously from side to side, obviously recognizing at least some of the symbols. Trouble, who had been out of the shadows long enough to lose track of who was who, ignored them, and tried to pretend she didn’t care.

Aimoto took them up the back stairs, the ones that led directly to Tinati’s main office. Trouble spotted at least two gun alcoves on the way up, and knew there was more security she couldn’t see, hidden in the walls and ceiling and wired into the building’s electrical system. At the top of the stair, Aimoto paused and said, apparently to thin air, “I’ve brought them, boss.”

A voice answered almost instantly, “Come on in.”

Aimoto pushed open the heavy door, gesturing for them to enter. Trouble stepped past him, Cerise still at her side, and caught a quick glimpse of the armor sandwiched in the door itself as she came into the room. Aimoto followed them in, set his back against the door, and waited. Trouble did not look back, knew better than to look back, but the skin between her shoulder blades tingled painfully, and she knew from the deliberately bored expression on Cerise’s face that the other woman was just as aware of the big man’s presence between them and the only visible exit.

Tinati was sitting at a standard executive desk, beautifully polished red-toned wood supporting a black-glass display top. A few papers were scattered across the surface, but the viewspace and the work areas were conspicuously clear. Tinati was a slim man, not very tall, not quite dwarfed by his high-backed chair, and well dressed, looked like an Ivy League lawyer on the make.

“It’s good to see you again, Tinati,” Cerise said, breaking the silence.

Tinati looked at her without expression, steepling long and rather beautiful hands above the desk’s viewspace. “And you, Cerise. Tell me, is this official, Multiplane’s business, or is it personal?”

“A little of both,” Cerise said again.

“I’d like to be a little clearer on that one,” Tinati said.

Trouble said, “Why? It’s not the clearest situation.”

Tinati’s eyes flickered toward her, but he looked back at Cerise. “Multiplane’s involvement—complicates—my position.”

Cerise took a deep breath. “Multiplane wants Trouble— there have been intrusions, as I’m sure you’ve heard. I want to make sure we get the right one.”

“Ah.” Tinati leaned back again, unfolding his hands. “Then I take it that resuming your old association is purely unofficial.”

“So far,” Cerise answered, with more certainty than she felt. Multiplane—or, more precisely, Coigne—would be extremely unhappy when they found out she’d been working with Trouble; only delivering the newTrouble’s head on a virtual platter would have any chance of appeasing them.

“So I think I’m safe in saying this is the net’s business,” Tinati said. He looked at Trouble. “I don’t mess with the net. It’s not my bosses’ policy, and it doesn’t pay. I want that clearly understood. But if the net is cracking down on this new Trouble—well, I won’t stand in your way. And I won’t help, either. This is strictly the net’s affair.”

“What about your people?” Trouble asked. “I’m going to be asking questions. Your sanction, your forbearance, at the least, that would make a big difference.” She was taking a chance, and she knew it, was not surprised when Tinati shook his head.

“What my people do is their business, up to the individual. I’m not for you, I’m not against you, I’m not involved. Don’t make me get involved.”

“As you say,” Trouble answered, “it’s the net’s business.”

“It’s getting very close to real,” Tinati said.

Cerise laughed, the sound loud in the quiet room. Even Tinati looked startled for an instant, and hid it quickly behind his lawyer’s mask. “All we want is to resolve a problem, Tinati—one that’s already a thorn in your side as well as ours.”

“It’s a straightforward deal,” Trouble said. “We find him, I shop him to Treasury, and that’s the end of it.”

“I hope so,” Tinati said. “I hope it’s that simple, Trouble. I don’t appreciate complications.”

“If there are any complications,” Trouble said, “they’ll come from you.”

Tinati studied her for a long moment, nodded at last. “As I said, this is the net’s business. I don’t interfere with the net.”

“Until it interferes with you,” Cerise said, and sounded almost happy.

“I’m glad we understand each other,” Tinati said, and there was more than a hint of irony in his tone. “Kenny, will you show the ladies out?”

Aimoto led them back down the stairs and out into the bright sunlight of the Parcade. “Good to see you again, Ms. Cerise,” he said, and disappeared back into the palace before the black-clad woman could answer.

“I bet,” Trouble said, and started walking back down the Parcade. Cerise fell into step beside her.

“So now what?” she asked. “Bother some more dealers?”

Trouble considered the question, shook her head slowly. “No. No, I don’t think it’d do much good. If anybody’s going to tell us, it’s going to be Mollie, and that’s going to take time.”

Cerise nodded. “I agree. So what, see what the nets are saying—see what’s going on in the other Seahaven, maybe?”

Trouble smiled wryly, remembering her last visit to virtual Seahaven. “Maybe you better do that,” she said. “I’m not exactly persona grata there just at the moment.”

“Can’t imagine why.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Trouble said, and saw Cerise’s expression go suddenly wooden. There had been too much of an echo of the old days, too much a reminder of the old give-and-take and where it had led them both, and she added, much too late, “If you wouldn’t mind. Please.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Cerise said, still stiff-faced, and lengthened her step with sudden angry energy, striding off down the Parcade toward the main road that led back to Seahaven. Trouble watched her go, knowing better than to call her back, and could have kicked herself for her own clumsiness. She had always given the orders on jobs like this—she was good at the jobs where the real world intersected the virtual, better than Cerise, and better than Cerise, too, when it came to vengeance. Cerise enjoyed the chase, but lost interest once the catch was made. It had always been Trouble, in the end, who’d made the kills. It was old knowledge, not even regret anymore, and Trouble put it briskly aside, and with it the possibility that Cerise, too, might have changed. She started down the Parcade in Cerise’s wake, not hurrying. She would let Cerise visit virtual Seahaven, all right, but she’d also run her own discreet checks, just in case. She could not forget, couldn’t afford to forget, that they weren’t a partnership anymore.