Walkaway

[I]

DEFAULT SMELLED. IT wasn’t a technological smell. If there was one thing walkaway had, it was technological smells. It was an inhuman smell. There were background processes looking for BO and bad breath, zapping them with free ions and tasteful anti-perfume. It smelled like something just unwrapped.

When she woke, the smell was her first clue, before opening her eyes. She noticed it before she was fully awake, experiencing a gorgeous state of being aware of not being awake, a drug-feeling. She got that feeling once from something very good Billiam had. Not Billiam. Limpopo. No, Limpopo didn’t try new pharma, just stuff she knew. Seth had the pharma thing, downloading new stuff and piloting it in full sensor gear for the analytics groups to pore over, then showing up with a basket of fresh apples and a vaper set to dose them with weight-adjusted amounts.

What had Seth given her? What was that smell? Oh, default. Did Seth download a default drug? What a fucking terrible idea. Why would he do that?

Rising awareness, conscious consciousness. Despair. Either her father had her, or someone who planned on ransoming her. If it was the former, she would likely never get away. If it was the latter she’d end up in with her father, and (see above). Because if there was one thing Iceweasel – fuck it, Natalie – had known for as long as she’d known anything, it was that the daughter of Jacob Redwater was worth more alive and intact than dead or damaged. If her father had finally come to get her – or if he was about to have to do so – he would not let her go again.

All through her walkaway time, she’d known this day would come when Jacob Redwater twitched his little finger and brought her back before she could be leverage against him – or worse, an embarrassment. She’d never opened his messages, had boycotted her sister and cousins’ messages, because good as her opsec was, good as the best brains of walkaway could make it, she was sure that if there was a zeroday that would let him bug her that he would be able to afford it before it was found and patched, and wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Wouldn’t even understand why anyone would hesitate to use it.

Eyes open now. Hospital bed. Four point zip-restraint and when she saw them, she realized her sleeping brain had already noticed, tugged against them in her sleep and expected them.

Hospital bed, but not a hospital room. Private house. The smell. Her father’s house. She was home. She started, softly, to cry.

Her sister came to her bedside. Cordelia, two years younger than her, hair different from last time they’d seen each other, during a university break, more sophisticated with a precise degree of insouciant messiness, but otherwise she hadn’t changed. She looked down at her big sister with an unreadable expression, set down a large purse on the floor and settled into an angular wooden chair Natalie vaguely recognized as having once lived in the girls’ side of the house. She could see a burn on one arm that she remembered more clearly than the chair itself.

The two sisters contemplated each other. Natalie took after their father, had his weird, blade-like nose and the double-dimple in her cheek, both of which she’d hated as a teenager and come to treasure later as setting her apart. Cordelia looked like Mom, faint memory from girlhood, a round china-doll face and wide green eyes and a sprinkle of toasty Kewpie doll freckles, but with a satanic glint in her eye for the look-and-feel of a knife-wielding horror-doll.

Natalie gave up. She smiled. There was no honor in pretending to be made of ice. “Nice to see you, Cordelia.”

Cordelia smiled back, and she saw the ghost of her own smile. Everyone always said they looked alike when they smiled.

“You’re looking good, sis.”

“You too. Got some scissors in that giant purse?” She rattled her restraints.

“I do, and I’m delighted to inform you that I have been authorized to use them.” Her sister always put on a sarcastic, officious voice when she was nervous.

“Best news I’ve heard all morning. I have to piss like a racehorse.”

“Let’s get on it.” They weren’t normal scissors; they came in a special sheath that crinkled, and their black blades ate light. Cordelia handled them like they were red hot, snipping at the zip-ties with pantomime caution to keep the tips away from Natalie’s skin, though they parted the plastic ties with normal cut-plastic noises.

There was a partly open door to Natalie’s left, opposite the blind-darkened window, and she tottered to it, feeling floorboards beneath her feet with alarming, hallucinatory clarity. The bathroom behind it was small, fitted with the same brand of mirror and toilet and shower-heads as the rest of the house. The towels were familiar, off-white with a scalloped edge. She peed, washed, didn’t look in the mirror, then did.

She was clean. Her hair was combed out and trimmed to uniform length, five centimeters all over, the length of the shortest sections of her last haircut, administered by Sita, who could do unexpectedly great things with a pair of scissors.

Her eyes sunk in dark bags. Her skin was dull, her expression thickened with grogginess. She made a face, checked the back of her head, saw a bruise poking out of her hospital robe. It extended down her shoulder and now she saw it, her ribs and shoulder throbbed, or perhaps she noticed the throbbing that had been there all along.

Seeing the injury made her remember the snatch, the little woman with the grip of steel, the unseen man who’d loomed out the shadows. Then she remembered the bodies, Etcetera’s weeping on Limpopo’s shoulder, Gretyl’s head wound, the smoldering ruin of the Better Nation and the fate of its crew.

She searched the bathroom for a weapon. She couldn’t imagine hitting Cordelia, but she couldn’t imagine not hitting anyone who got in her way.

Nothing more dangerous than a squeeze bottle of eye-watering peppermint shampoo. Even the toilet-seat lid was bolted. Fine.

She stepped into the bedroom. Cordelia turned to her, smiling, then the smile faded as she saw Natalie’s expression, and Natalie reached for the room’s door. She wasn’t sure which corridor it opened on, but from there, it’d be easy to find the door and the street and –

She turned the knob and stepped into the hallway.

The small woman with her weight forward on the balls of her feet was unquestionably the woman from the woods. The smile, the small teeth. Natalie would have recognized them anywhere, even though without the dazzle paint, the woman’s face was transformed into a forgettable, statistically average mask of mid-Slavic nondescriptness. The teeth, though.

Natalie looked her in the eye. There was no tough-guy stare-down, just a mild interest. Natalie stepped forward to the side, to go around the woman, but she was right there, moving faster than Natalie had ever seen anyone move. That might be the drug hangover. She stepped to the other side, the woman was already there.

Staring, she said “Excuse me,” and tried to step past. The woman blinked.

“I said excuse me.” She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, gently pushing her to one side. She didn’t push.

“Get out of my fucking way.” Natalie regretted the fuck as she said it, nothing to be done about it.

From behind her, Cordelia: “Natalie, come back in here, okay?”

“Get out of my way, please.” Her eyes locked on the mild, disinterested gaze of the small woman. “Please.” She sounded so weak. She remembered how she’d faked out the woman, broken her grasp before. Strong and fast, but not invincible. Let her think Natalie was weak.

Cordelia’s hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Natalie. She’s not going to let you past, and if she did, you wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”

Still looking into the woman’s mild eyes. “What if I had you as a hostage?”

“I’d incapacitate both of you.” The woman spoke for the first time. She had a sweet voice, girlish, the voice that went with Cordelia’s face (Cordelia had spent a lifetime cultivating a husky voice because it was too much otherwise), and a bit of an accent that Natalie thought might be Quebecois or possibly, weirdly, Texan.

“Natalie, please?” Cordelia said.

“They murdered people,” Natalie said. “In front of me. I helped the wounded. I carried the dead.” Tears on her cheeks, but her voice was steady. “Keep your fucking ‘please.’” There was that fuck again. Fuck it. “Get out of my way, killer, or get ready to incapacitate me, whatever that little asshole euphemism means.”

The woman didn’t speak. Cordelia’s grip tightened on her shoulder, would not be shrugged away. The woman wore stuff that was almost walkaway: seamless, printed as a single piece, a bitmap woven into it: conservative dark stripes on a darker background. The stripes did something to her perception of the woman’s stance and movement, made it harder to predict where she’d go and when she’d get there. More dazzle.

Without windup, without letting the thought percolate to her fore-brain, she took a rough step, bulling into the woman, bodies colliding and she was already ready to take another step.

Then she was lying on her back, winded, the woman standing back a step. Her expression was unchanged. Small teeth.

“Natalie,” Cordelia said. “This isn’t going to get anywhere. You can’t solve this with force. You’re out-gunned.”

Walkaways walk away. But what if you’re confined? Natalie considered another staring contest with the woman, spitting in her face. Doing it over and over. She had a deep intuition the woman would take it. The vivid image of the woman with Natalie’s spit spattered across her face was entertaining in a way she identified as a Jacob Redwaterish feeling.

She got to her feet, back to the woman, like she was furniture, and refused Cordelia’s help. She went back into the room. The cell. Her shoulder hurt.

They fed her by dumbwaiter, her favorite girlhood foods. It was worse than slop or moldy bread. The dumbwaiters ran through the house, a way to fulfill desire without the bothersome politesse of dealing with human servants. She and Cordelia called it Redwater Prime, after the Amazon service, because they knew somewhere in the chain were people earning nowhere near enough to buy the things they dispatched.

Cordelia visited the next two days. The house – her father – listened to them. Natalie knew this because when she asked for things they’d sometimes arrive in the dumbwaiter. But she couldn’t directly access interfaces.

Her father didn’t visit.

The meals and the fulfilled wishes came at irregular intervals. She knew it was intermittent reinforcement. Give a rat a pellet every time it presses a lever, it will press the lever whenever it’s hungry. Give the rat a pellet on random lever-presses, it will press and press, past satiety, as the pattern matching part of its brain tried to find the pattern in the randomness. You could produce superstitious rats, it was one of Limpopo’s favorite epithets for people who were specifically stupid in the superstitious rattish way. Superstitious rats noticed a certain combination of actions prior to a lever-press produced a pellet a few times, decided this needed to be done every time, and though it didn’t change the pellet distribution frequency, every pellet was accompanied by the superstitious dance, reinforcing the ritual.

The woman outside her door never seemed to sleep. Maybe she was twins, or a robot. She was always there, neutral, small teeth bared, blocking the hall. Natalie had explicit, violent torture-fantasies about the woman, what she’d do if she had a gun or a taser or the power to move things with her mind.

Her mind. The room had: a chair, a bed, remains of her meals – whatever she hadn’t put into the dumbwaiter – dirty laundry, and four walls, two doors, one window. The bathroom: toilet roll, toothbrush – self-pasting – the earthy-smelling probiotic cleanser that put her in mind of her mom, though she didn’t really know if her mom ever used it, and lethally strong peppermint soap she thought of as her father’s, in silicone squeeze-bottles that felt like the skin of a sex-toy.

The door wasn’t locked. But the woman wouldn’t let her out, and, as Cordelia reminded her during their increasingly infrequent visits, even if she got down the stairs, the door wouldn’t let her out into the wider world.

“Have you spent a lot of time in zottaland?” she asked the woman. She’d taken to sitting in the corridor, studying her. Before that, she’d been talking to herself in the room/cell as a performance for the hidden watchers or algorithms. That made her so self-conscious that she’d come to conduct her monologue with the woman, who might have been a statue.

“I expect you have. Someone like you, good at what you do, you probably hire out for all the most elite barons and plutocrats.

“Most of my friends were zottas. It wasn’t until I slipped the leash and brought home some civilians that I really got how fucked up this was. My friends had a hard time making sense of it, some of them never got used to it, just kept on remarking on how weird it was. What got me was how they talked about the surveillance, as though they weren’t being watched in every imaginable way back in their apartments or subways or schools. As though the sidewalk wasn’t measuring their gait and sniffing their CO2 plume for forbidden metabolites.

“I get it now. Zottas do surveillance to themselves. It’s not done to them. You could build a house like this with no sensors, retro, with strings running along the walls to tinkle bells in the servants’ quarters. You could line the walls with copper mesh and make it a radio-free fortress.

“The eyes and ears are recording angels that remember everything forever. They’re choices. I’d never thought of it, same way a fish doesn’t think about water. I get it now.

“The definition of zotta is ‘someone who doesn’t live the way everyone else does.’ You know Gatsby? ‘The rich are different.’ No one reads Gatsby as criticism anymore. Now it seems nostalgic. Or Orwell, the inner party with their telescreen off-switches. Why would a zotta choose to install telescreens in his fucking bathroom?”

She considered the irony of the sensors recording and analyzing her talk about them. She thought about Dis, a computer who was a person. She entertained a fantasy about the house’s network being self-aware, knowing she was talking about it and she was angry at it, she wanted to switch it off. No wonder there’d been so many netsoaps about people killed by rogue computers, the I-can’t-let-you-do-that-Dave cliché that was the go-to dramasauce for hack writers.

The woman stared, eyes focused, betraying nothing.

“You must be a hell of a poker player. I once saw the Beefeaters, you know, in London? England, I mean, not Ontario. They were bullshit, trying to pretend they were wooden soldiers, never acknowledging you. I don’t think it’s possible to be vigilant while pretending everyone else is invisible. Tell yourself that long enough, you’ll believe it. You, on the other hand, can hear and see me, but it’s like I’m beneath your notice unless I’m trying to get past. You can hear me. Shit, you probably agree with every word, but what I say isn’t anything compared to the immovable truth of a fuck-ton of money for you if you do the default thing; nothing at all if you follow your conscience.

“On the other hand, I might be projecting. Maybe you love default, think weird-ass zotta shit is proof of their divine right to rule. Maybe you’re animal cunning and wiry strength, without much going on behind those cool eyes of yours?”

She stopped, aware that she was a zotta, taunting a person who couldn’t respond because she wasn’t. She felt ashamed.

“Sorry,” she said, and went into her room.

[II]

HER FATHER VISITED her on day four. She’d gone twenty-four hours without taunting the guard, and was bored out of her mind. She’d fantasized about a notebook and a pen, anything she could use to pour out her feelings to something other than the unseeable watchers.

He looked in control. That was the first thing she noticed, the contrast between her shaky nerves and his calm exterior. She thought he’d done something with his face, injections. He looked younger than she remembered, a youthful 35. He turned the chair around, sat straddling it with his arms folded on the back, cocked his head and smiled as though they shared a joke. There was definitely something different in the smile.

“Welcome home, Natty.”

She thought about freezing him out, like the guard-woman with her gaze that saw, did not acknowledge. She was so lonely, so bored. Her brain was a hamster wheel, spinning out of control. She needed to slow it with words, even if it was argument.

“I would like to go now, please.”

He smiled wider. “How was it?”

She made herself breathe into her diaphragm, once, twice. “I’m sure you got a blow-by-blow.”

“Your mother is coming tomorrow. She can’t wait to see you.”

“They killed people, you know. I saw them, saw the bodies. I held the bodies. My friends – they were my friends.” She struggled to keep her voice calm, was successful except for a wobble on the second “bodies.” She was sure her father picked up on it. He was a man who was keenly attuned to others’ useful frailties.

“I can see it’s been hard on you.”

“You mean, the mercenary terrorists you sent were hard on me.”

“You’ve lost contact with reality, darling. You can’t believe that. I can’t order air-strikes. I don’t know mercenaries. I’m a scary rich guy, but if my enemies fear me, it’s because they’re worried I’ll sue them, not assassinate them.”

Natalie closed her eyes and tried to find her breath’s rhythm. For her father – her father – to say he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with what had happened, when there was a ninja mercenary in the hallway – it was too much. It epitomized every conversation they’d ever had where he’d told her everything she felt and hoped for was a girlish dream, every observation of the world around her a girlish fancy.

Her breath wouldn’t come. Maybe her father hoped the long isolation would make her pliable. But it had broken something inside that jangled. She realized with a rush that felt like a convulsion of vomit she had hardly thought of Gretyl since arriving. It made her wonder if they’d done something to her mind, if she was herself. If there even was a mercenary in the hall who could lay her out with moves so fast she couldn’t follow them. Perhaps it was a dream. Perhaps she was dead, uploaded, simulated.

She was hyperventilating, and took satisfaction in her father’s discomfort. He could deal with I-hate-you-Daddy tantrums, but she was losing it now, was glad to be lost. She was tired of being found, pretending the situation was normal.

She stood calmly and smoothed down her long t-shirt, adjusting her track-pants’ drawstring – red, with a crisp-edged ROOTS logo over one thigh, the kind of thing she’d slopped in at summer camp, as though the dumbwaiter was loaded by someone trying to make her feel like a grounded teenager and not a kidnap victim – and walked out of the room.

The guard was not in the hall.

She broke into a run, hearing her father – a step behind her – shout something she couldn’t make out. She got five long steps down the hall and the merc came around the corner, effortlessly grabbing her arm as she tried to run past, interposing her calf between Natalie’s running legs, pulling smoothly at the arm, throwing her down with a tooth-rattling thud. The floorboards were pale wood with dark grain, and underfloor heating made them feel alive. All she could see was that grain, stretching to the baseboards. She waited for her wind to come back.

She got to her knees, her feet – the merc didn’t interfere or offer help, stood with that same disinterested attention that let Natalie know she was watching but wasn’t feeling. Natalie steadied herself on the wall, looked at her father, on the far side of the merc. He looked furious, and she realized he was furious with the merc, not her, because the merc had deserted her post, maybe slipping out for a piss, thinking Natalie would be complacent while having a come-to-Jesus negotiation with her old man. The merc had fucked up in front of the big boss. Natalie tried to read her face for the oh-shit expression of waiters and hotel managers when her dad wasn’t happy with them. She was cool. Natalie couldn’t help but admire her. It was twisted, but she felt solidarity with anyone her father planned on destroying.

“No tough-guys on the payroll, huh?” She spun on her heel to walk out of the house. It was stupid, but why not? The woman grabbed her shoulder in a way that gave her surprising leverage, spun her around with almost no force, though there was no way Natalie could stop it. Natalie shrugged at her hand, but the hand rode her shoulder with ease, rising and falling like a flag in a breeze.

“What are your orders, anyway? You said you could ‘incapacitate’ me. Would you beat me unconscious? Give me a secret nerve pinch? Got a taser hidden in your ninja-suit?” She took a long look at her father. He had mastered his expression and projected impatient boredom with his whole body.

“Let’s find out.” Natalie took three running steps toward her dad, who flinched minutely at the last moment. She stopped and spun, stared at the woman, then charged. One step, two steps – wham, on the floorboards, staring at the ceiling, noticing the LED recesses you could only see if you were prone. Her back hurt. She had the ghost sensation of a hand at her wrist, a foot at her ankle, the sense the woman had barely moved to throw her. It was the spirit of all those Sun Tzu-y martial arts: use the enemy’s strength against him. She giggled at the thought that she should take notes, figure out how to dismantle default by using its strength against it.

She stood. The woman stepped back a half-step, weight forward, while her dad stayed at the corridor’s far end with his stern, disappointed mask on. It wasn’t entirely intact. There was a bit of worry Mr Poker Face couldn’t hide. She leaned on the wall and took a couple breaths.

“Let’s make it best two out of three.” Her father’s face flickered, and there it was: fear.

She charged him. He didn’t flinch, but she saw he wanted to, and she turned around and before she could think, she ran straight at the guard, coming in low, like she was playing a platformer and was trying one approach after another to defeat the level’s mini-boss, hoping she didn’t run out of lives before she found the trick. Maybe if she came in low, she’d be harder to throw.

She wasn’t.

This time she jammed her elbow and her body was lanced by a white-lightning sear, making her suck air through her teeth. What was pain, anyway? Dis could feel pain or not, but it was an infographic, a slider you moved up or down. Her arm was hurt – something had been damaged – but the feeling of hurt wasn’t intrinsic. You could be hurt and feel nothing, you could be in immense pain without injury. Injury was in the elbow, pain was in the brain.

But it hurt.

She got to her feet more slowly, rubbed her elbow. She had paid more attention this time, had the impression that the woman had lightly touched her shoulders as she passed, did something to her that caused her weight to overbalance to the front, sending her face first into the floor.

She breathed. Jacob scowled. She watched him painstakingly convert his fear to anger. Anger was fine. She was fucking pissed.

“Third time’s the charm.”

This time he grabbed her, but she’d been a walkaway, carrying heavy loads for the sheer pleasure of doing things with her hands, walking miles at a time, having long, unhurried, sensuous yoga sessions on the B&B’s lawn that made her strong and supple. He was a gym rat, attended by skilled trainers and a pharmacopoeia that gave him cut transverse abdominals like an underwear model and arms with lean triceps and strong wrists, and he could do an hour on the elliptical, but it was all for show, never used.

She shook him off easily. She thrilled to realize she could have flattened him as easily as the merc was knocking her out, run up one side of him and down the other. It had been years since her father had been physical with her, but she recollected his iron grip, how he could carry her out of the room when she was misbehaving, ignoring her squirming. Let him try now.

She tried for a low sprint pumping her arms for speed, though she knew she’d need to be fired out of a longbow before her speed was high enough to make a difference to the woman. She almost faltered as she drew near, some cowardly part of her not wanting to get the coming beat-down, and she killed that part of her with a blast of will, put on more speed.

Her head bounced off the wall on the way down, filling her vision with stars. She took longer to get up. She was dizzy. It had been a solid hit. Had the woman hurt her on purpose, to punish her for refusing to back down? Had her run-up just been better?

Her father went into the bedroom, she supposed to phone for backup, so she walked this time, turned around, stared at the woman, the two of them alone now save for the watching eyes.

She ran. Something was wrong with her balance, and she couldn’t get her wind. This time the woman caught her and turned her around, neatly canceling all her momentum as she did so. Natalie and she were face to face. The woman’s nothing-special face and small teeth were right there, her breath smelled of toothpaste. She had a booger up one nostril. Her eyebrows weren’t plucked, which Natalie hadn’t noticed, and had a bushiness that reminded her of Gretyl. She wanted to cry.

She tried to walk past, walked into the woman, was pushed gently away. She tried again. She was really dizzy. It had been a bad hit.

This woman wasn’t her enemy, she just had a job. Natalie didn’t care. She swung a wild roundhouse the woman easily sidestepped. Had she smiled a little? It was weird to be here, silent except for breathing, her father’s muttering from the bedroom. Wordless intimacy. She swung again. Again. If she’d had a gun, she’d have shot the woman, her father, herself. What does a walkaway do when she can’t walk away?

She gave up, arms dropping to her sides. Stalked into the bedroom. Her father was in the chair, looking disgusted, like she was pathetic. She supposed she was. What’s more pathetic than a walkaway who stops walking?

She swallowed and tried to work up the courage to fall on him, to stick her thumbs in his eye sockets, rake her nails down his throat, knee him in the balls. The thought of the violence was so seductive that she was actually stayed from moving, surprised at her id’s ardor.

But then she embraced it, with a predator’s grin. She heard herself panting. Now she would do it. Her father understood, she saw it in his eyes. He was scared. The predator rose. She would enjoy this.

One step. Two steps.

A hand on her arm. Strong. A man’s hand, squeezing so hard she gasped, then the needle in her elbow. She turned and saw the man, not big, shorter than her, but with a face like a stone and a bull’s neck. Then she didn’t see anything else.

[III]

SHE WAS CERTAIN she was still in the house. You couldn’t fake the smell. But it looked like a hospital room. The door had no handle or inset panel, just some kind of invisible sensor that chose who passed. This hospital bed was bigger, cruder, and she was – she squirmed her hips – she was plumbed into it. There was an IV in her wrist, and a sense of fuzzy-wellbeing she knew couldn’t be endogenous. She wondered what was in the IV bag. She’d have loved some Meta right now.

She was in four-point restraint, with an extra band around her forearm to keep the IV firmly seated.

She supposed it was a suicide attempt. The idea wasn’t very disturbing. Her sorrow was a distant moon orbiting her psyche far away, visible but ultimately exerting only the mildest of tides.

“Now what?” Her voice was thick, her mouth pasty. If there was saline in the bag, it wasn’t keeping her hydrated. It was like someone had dumped a tablespoon of hydrophilic shipping gel-pellets in her mouth, drying it to the texture of old roadkill.

She willed the door to open, thinking of the days she’d spent in isolation in the other room, wondering if they’d leave her, a tube going in and tubes going out, a brain inextricably tethered to inconvenient meat, easily coerced, thanks to its ridiculous frailties.

Had they had this room ready all along, as plan B? Or had she been kept unconscious while they refitted a room to make it secure?

A nurse came through the door, wearing hospital whites and wheeling a cart. He stood beside the bed.

“Hello,” she said.

He stared at her consideringly, then pulled out the cart’s trays, pointed a thermometer in her ear, fit a pressure cuff to her arm. He flipped back the blanket and impersonally hiked up her gown, accessing a small box taped over her hip that she hadn’t known was there.

“Why doesn’t all that stuff come with remote telemetry? If you’re going to pretend I don’t exist, why not get transmissions in another room, spare yourself the social awkwardness?”

He was good at ignoring her. He checked her catheter, so mechanically that she felt anger instead of humiliation, which was, in its way, a mercy. What an asshole.

“I know there are cameras recording, but at least tip me a wink. Don’t nurses have to take a vow? An oath? Are you a nurse? Maybe you’re a ‘med-tech.’ Did you flunk out of nursing school and get the version that doesn’t come with the Florence Nightingale training?”

Taunting him wasn’t satisfying, and her mouth was so, so dry.

“How about a drink? Water? Juice?”

He had a hose with a sponge tip. He pulled off the sheets and threw them into a basket in the cart’s base, revealing a rubbery under-sheet. Working with that same impersonal efficiency, he gave her a quick sponge bath, hose in one hand and a small hydrophilic towel in the other, stopping after each limb to wring the cloth into his cart. From her distant mental vantage point, Natalie admired the cart and wondered who its primary market was – people with loony old relatives locked up in attics?

He did her face and ears with wipes in sterile packaging, like the guys at the detailing place working squeegees over the windscreen of her dad’s cars. The fact that it was done by humans was a selling point. All the places her dad used had “bespoke” or “hand-wash” or “artisanal” in their names, sometimes all three. She smelled the nurse, soap with a bit of sweat, saw some stubble under his left ear. There was one point where she could have kissed him. Or bit him.

When he was done, he packed up his tray, tugged her clothes into place and replaced the sheets. He fished under the bed for a flexi-hose with a bite-down nipple on the end. He pulled off lengths of surgical tape and taped it to her collarbone and cheek, so she could turn her head and drink. She could have bitten off a fingertip, but didn’t. He packed his things and left. The door sighed shut and clicked, then clunked, a reminder that it had serious locking stuff. It sounded like the second clunk came through the floor, like the door had a set of pins that penetrated it.

She realized where she was: her dad’s panic room. It had independent, redundant network connections, power backups, food and water stashes, a whole armory. It wasn’t like her dad to tell other people about the panic room – she’d never seen it and knew that opening it would set off alarms all over town. Her dad made sure she knew, just in case she got the idea of throwing a party there.

Dad must’ve built himself a better bolt hole – he’d mused about one in a second sub-basement, bored out beneath the house using a super-covert drill that his zotta buddy had used to turn the plot under his estate into a bat-cave. It sent Dad into ecstasies of jealousy. There’s no way he’d let Mr Not-a-Nurse into this place if it was still the secret he’d bet his life on. Unless he planned to off all the staff once he’d brainwashed her and entomb them within the reinforced walls, like a pharaoh’s tomb-builders.

These thoughts produced seven minutes’ worth of distraction. When they were exhausted, she was alone with her situation. Thinking of Gretyl made her cry with desire and loneliness. There were thoughts about her father and sister. Hadn’t her father said her mother was on her way? Was she here? She had her own floor on the adults’ side of the house. It hadn’t been occupied often, but when it was, the house’s affect changed. The whole household was alive to the possibility of their mercurial mistress doing one of her patented Valkyrie numbers.

She chased the tail of her thoughts in ever-tighter spirals. It was a desperate place. Visit it enough and it might drive you to suicide.

“Fuck it,” she said aloud. “Brainwashing, rubber hoses, deprogramming, all that Patty Hearst stuff.” She’d learned about Hearst, the poor little rich girl who’d carried a gun with her kidnappers, after Gretyl joked about it. She’d been offended, but then adopted the girl as a totem. Hearst was an idiot, but at least she wasn’t just another rich asshole.

She sang “Consensus,” an incredibly dirty walkaway marching song, thirty verses. The chorus: “Consensus, consensus, it beat us and bent us, but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin.” Making up new verses was walkaway sport, there were wikis of them. She couldn’t remember them all, but she could make them up on the fly, especially if she sang humm-humm-humm where she couldn’t think of a line, which was automatic disqualification when it was sung in earnest.

The verses got more hum-hum-hummy. She was ready to peter out and start another song, when a voice joined in: “...but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin!” It was achingly familiar. She shivered from scalp to ankles, hairs on her neck standing.

“Dis?”

“That’s Dis Ex Machina to you, kid,” the voice said.

She cried.

“This is a dirty trick.” She mastered her tears. “Absolutely disgusting.”

“It would be,” Dis said, “if it was a trick.”

“How would you know if it was or not? You’re on all the version control servers. Anyone who can build a cluster can bring you up. There’ll be hundreds of you, in all kinds of configs. My dad could easily afford a version of you that was constrained so it believed it had infiltrated his network to work against him, while spying on me and everything I did. You would never know. I’d tell you things he’d have to slice my nipples off to get otherwise. He’d call this humane, a ‘low-impact’ way of ‘bringing me around’ to sanity, which, in his world, is the ability to bullshit yourself into believing you deserve to have more of everything that everyone else has less of, because of your special snowflakeness.”

“You’re preaching to the converted, girl. Remember, I was walkaway before you.”

“Dis was walkaway before me. You, whatever you are, are an emissary, knowing or not, from default.”

“We’re going in circles. No skin off my back, because I’m a construct. I can park my frustration to one side, move the slider, have this argument with you for as long as you’d like. It’s cool. Comes from a lab in Punjab, ex-IIT math-geeks who want to turn the Āgama into subroutines, Yogic Mastery Apps. They’re turning Meta into math. You’d love it – they worship Gretyl, her optimizations for lookahead modeling are the basis of their discipline. I think if she wasn’t so worried about you, she’d be all over it.”

“That was really low.” She was surprised by the venom in her voice. When her thoughts strayed to Gretyl, she was seized by unbearable helplessness and longing. That Gretyl felt the same about her was a weight crushing her chest.

“Oh, honey,” Dis said. Her computer voice was better. The emotions in those two words were awful. “She misses you so much. I can get you a message from her. Or...”

Natalie knew it was a baited hook. She didn’t want to rise to it. Fish must know the worm has a barb in it, but some bite anyway. Was it hunger? A death wish? “What?”

“They’ve been scanned now,” Dis said. “After they reached the Thetford abandoned zone, everyone made a scan, first thing. They’re in the walkaway clouds now, more every day. We’re learning so much from the multiplicity of scans, too – I think the problem with bringing back CC was that we just didn’t have a deep enough data-set to make inferences about tailored simulation strategies for brain variations. CC is pretty stable. We can characterize scans based on the likelihood of bringing up a successful sim. Gretyl’s scan is in the top decile. She was made to run on silicon. Sita, too. Hell, Sita was so up for it that she’s running a twin 24/7, in realtime, with sensors all over herself. Gretyl hasn’t done that, though. We’ve only done the preflighting for her. We haven’t run her...”

Yet, Natalie finished. Gretyl could be here, running on whatever substrate Dis was on. Her Gretyl, not her Gretyl, that was a distinction without a difference.

“So fucking evil.” She didn’t have the energy for bile. It came out like surrender.

“It’s not complicated. Your dad’s got amazing opsec on the main house network. But the patchlevel on his safe-room is lagged, because there were conflicts the auto-updaters couldn’t handle, and the ops guy who set it up retired and your dad doesn’t have anyone in his ops department who even knows about this. The alert messages have piled up in an admin dashboard for years, all neglected. I wonder if your dad even has a login for that dash?

“We pwned this place as soon as you went. It was Gretyl’s project, but I did the heavy lifting. We used like seventy percent of walkaway’s compute-time running parallel instances of me, at twenty ex realtime. We clobbered the fucking IDS, smoked the firewall, and now I’m so deep I can do anything.” The door-locks clunked out “shave and a haircut.” It was terrifying and hilarious. Natalie’s anguished smile hurt to hold.

“But I can’t work your shackles. They’re not networked. I can’t do anything with the housenet, that’s totally airgapped. For the best, otherwise all that pwnage would have set off all kinds of alarms.”

Despite herself, Natalie was drawn into the explanation. “Come on.” Her stimulus-starved brain worked hard. “Occam’s razor. Either there’s this crazy bug because Dad fired his bull-goose sysadmin, and a convenient airgap in the bed’s systems – or you’re my dad’s puppet, and he’s locked you down so you can do magic tricks with the door-locks, but not set me free. You happen to have the ability to bring me a sim of my girlfriend, who would no doubt get me to say things that my dad could use to brainwash me, like Cordelia.”

“That does sound plausible. I can’t prove that I’m working with you, not your dad. Sims can’t be sure that they aren’t being torqued by the simulator, and that makes them incapable of knowing we’re being manipulated. We’re heads in jars. But how do you know you’re not a sim? We scanned those mercs in the tunnels without their knowledge.”

“My dad isn’t that—” she almost said powerful, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go there. “Sentimental.”

“He’s a dick. I’m really glad we found you. Half the camp thought you were dead. Gretyl insisted you’d been snatched. Someone thought they saw you going into the woods, and they found evidence of a scuffle there. No one could say whether it was you, but everyone else was accounted for or dead. When the only person missing is the kid of an asshole zotta, it’s not a stretch to imagine a snatch.”

Natalie wanted so, so much to believe this was Dis, a lifeline to outside, life beyond the confines of her lashed-down body. Of course she wanted to. If Dis was her father’s trick, he’d depend on it.

She had to piss. It had been building, now it was unbearable. She knew she was plumbed into the bed, must have pissed many times before regaining consciousness, but the thought of voluntarily releasing her bladder while tied to a bed was too much.

“Dis.” She was ashamed of the weakness in her voice. Why couldn’t she be strong, like Limpopo? Like Gretyl?

“What is it, Iceweasel?”

No one had called her that since she’d been snatched.

She lost control over her bladder. The piss coursed out, disappeared silently down the hose, a feeling of heat where the hose was taped to her inner thigh before diving down to the bed’s cistern. Even though she wasn’t soaked with urine, the sense of pissing herself was inescapable, and she lost control of her tears.

“Oh, Iceweasel. It’s okay to cry, darling. This is totally fucked up and shit. You have people who love you, who sent me to get you loose. I can’t cut your bonds, but I can do plenty else. I can see in every room of the prison wing. There’s three others in a break room. They’re monitoring the room, but I control those monitors. They’re not seeing or hearing a realtime feed, they’re getting a loop of sleeping. Your bed’s streaming real telemetry, but I’m swapping for stored data from your unconscious period. I’ve got their private messages, I can do adversarial stylometry to impersonate them in text and voice – we’ve done work on voices.”

“I can tell.” Natalie snuffled snot. It was all down her face. Tears ran into her ears and made them itch. The feeling was so ridiculous it made her smile a little.

“Great, isn’t it? It keeps on getting better to be a pure energy being.”

“You make it sound like you’re a ghost.”

“I like ‘pure energy being’ but I’m the only one. It’s better than ghost. Don’t get me started on ‘angel.’ Jesus fucking Christ.”

Natalie cried again. The hopeless world kept crashing in. She wanted to have hope, to believe in Dis. But she was a walkaway. Walkaways were supposed to confront brutal truths. The brutal truth of Dis was that it was more likely that her dad had a hot-shit hacker who’d run an instance to betray Natalie than it was that he’d forgotten to hire a new sysadmin to take over ops for his safe-room.

“Iceweasel, how about this? You don’t have to believe me. I won’t believe me, either. There’s no way for me to know if I’m who I think I am. The logical thing for us to do is to act like I can’t be trusted.”

“That’s weird.” Natalie snuffled snot and bore down on the problem.

“Weird isn’t the opposite of sensible. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. Uh, hold on. They’re coming in, time for a scheduled call. Close your eyes and pretend to be groggy, which won’t be a stretch. I’ll lurk. It’s best if we don’t let ’em know I’m here, but I will be, listening and recording. When they go, I’ll be here still, whatever you need to stay sane until we can bust you out.”

She couldn’t help but feel this was exactly what a traitorous Dis would say if she was trying to trick Natalie. But it felt good.

The door clunked twice, clicked, and swung open.

[IV]

AS SETH AND Tam paced the cargo train, he contemplated his weird relationship with Gretyl. Back in his beautiful youthful days, a girlfriend once left him for another woman, after he’d hooked up with a guy at a party, someone’s horny, hot cousin. They’d had a crazy night locked in a spare bedroom at someone’s mom’s apartment in Bathurst Heights, leaving linens so be-funked that he heard they’d been burned. In the ensuing drama, he’d challenged his girlfriend on her freak, pointing out boys were boys and girls were girls, and he was exclusive to her in the “girl” part of his life, but that it was unreasonable for her to expect him to swear off dick when she didn’t have one.

Even as he’d uttered the words, part of him understood them to be self-serving bullshit. He still cringed with embarrassment at the thought of them, a decade later.

The girl found another girl, because he’d told her to, and quickly decided the other girl was the person she wanted to be exclusive with, without the weaselly “exclusive for people with vaginas” distinction Seth insisted on.

Seth, single and stinging, told himself it was because there were things you could get from a girl–girl relationship you couldn’t get from girl-boy, and he’d never understand those things, but they must be awesome because his girlfriend dumped his ass. Later he realized the difference between the girl and him wasn’t the penis so much as the cheating-asshole-ness.

When Iceweasel came home with Gretyl, Seth had been mature about it by Seth standards. When his jealousy rose in his gorge, he fought it down, bitterly recalling the self-recrimination that surfaced whenever he thought of the penis/no-penis distinction incident.

He and Iceweasel didn’t have a serious boy–girl thing, so he had no business feeling jealousy, even by default-ish rules that said there were times when you had business feeling jealous. Then there was Tam, who knew Gretyl well, looked up to her, admired her toughness and bad-ass math chops. Tam and him were an item, a boy–girl thing. It would be monumentally fucked for Seth to pursue Iceweasel.

Technically, they were all friends, some of whom had hooked up, some engaged in long-term exclusive-ish nookie. When Iceweasel disappeared, they’d been agonized by the not-knowing about their friend/lover/whatever. They’d welded into a guerrilla unit, scouring the net, working connections to find her.

As the search petered out, it was increasingly Seth and Tam, a couple, and Gretyl, basically a widow, trundling on the back of a cargo freighter together, staring awkwardly, pretending they all had the same relationship to Iceweasel and the same kind of grief. So much bullshit. Eventually there was no way to pretend.

Seth and Tam walked alongside the cargo train, headed for Thetford, passing blighted zones and small default towns with stores and people living like civilization would endure forever. Seth had high-school French, but the people who called out in slangy joual might have been speaking Klingon. Despite the language barrier, every time they passed through a town, people joined their column. They’d come at night, wherever they were camped. Inevitably, they were shleppers with mountains of junk that Seth didn’t let himself get irritated by. He’d been the King of the Shleppers.

Gretyl rode on the train, face furrowed with sorrow, eyes distant, fingers moving over interface surfaces. At night, Seth brought steaming trays from the mess wagon, collected them when she’d finished, but she hardly noticed.

Finally, Tam rolled over one night and put her arm across his chest and her face in the hollow of his neck and said, “What the fuck is she doing?” He didn’t know, and Tam mentioned the obvious fact (which he’d been oblivious to), that she was worried sick about Gretyl.

“Intervention. First thing in the morning.”

“Now,” Tam said. “I’ll bet you a two-hour foot-rub she’s wide awake.”

“I’m not wide awake. OW! Now I’m awake.” He rubbed his nipple and glared at Tam in the dark. She had sharp fingernails.

They pulled on clothes and lit themselves. Fall had slipped toward winter and there was frost on the road where camp had been struck for the night.

Gretyl was awake and hammering away, a hunkered, moonlit silhouette propped against the side of the train. Her hands danced and her whispers and grunts floated on the breeze. She wore a mask, which Seth hadn’t seen her do before. More than anyone, she seemed able to visualize virtual spaces and prod them without visual feedback. So she was doing something intense.

The acceptable protocol for masks was to call first, so they knew you were there, rather than tapping them on the shoulder and destroying their creative fog. But Gretyl had her do-not-disturb flags set, even the no-exceptions-this-means-you flags. They stood for a moment, a few steps away from her, wondering what to do.

“I feel like such an idiot,” Seth said. “I mean, fuck.”

“Don’t stand there with your dick in your hand. Tap her on the shoulder.”

A variety of responses about dicks, and hands, occurred to the part of Seth who was still seventeen years old and horny about having a girlfriend with a dick, which was the whole package as far as Seth-Seventeen was concerned. Seth told Seth-Seventeen to shut the fuck up.

“Why don’t you?”

“She likes you.” Tam shoved him. Gretyl showed exasperated maternal affection and bemused humor at Seth’s various schticks, but with an edge that left him wondering if she thought he was a colossal asshole.

“She likes you, too.”

“You’re closer.” Tam took a quick step backwards.

He sighed and Tam blew a kiss that turned into a shooing motion. He edged to Gretyl, whose head bobbed, presumably in tune with her earplugs, implants that filled her ear-holes with soft blue light to let others know she was not sharing their acoustic consensus reality.

Nevertheless, he cleared his throat and even said, “Gretyl” into her ear twice – hoping she’d done the sensible thing and programmed her plugs to pass through – before he tentatively touched her shoulder. As he’d feared, she jerked like he’d stabbed her and whipped off the face mask and glared.

“Are we being attacked?” she said.

“No, but—”

“Fuck off.” She pulled her mask down. Tam shook her head and shooed him again. Before he could tap, she whipped the mask down. “Seth, I have not been subtle. I’m doing something that needs concentration. Why have you not fucked off, per my instruction?”

He looked to Tam. Gretyl looked at her, too, and softened one billionth of a percentage.

“What do you two want?”

Tam took Gretyl’s hands, heavy with interface rings. “Gretyl, we want to talk about Iceweasel.”

Gretyl cocked her head. “Yeah?”

“She’s been gone for more than a week. We’re all hoping she turns up. We’ve put out the word in walkaway and default, but fretting’s useless. She’s smart and resourceful and so long as we’re reachable, she’ll get in touch once she can.”

Gretyl smiled, which alarmed Seth. He took a half-step backwards in the guise of settling down on his butt in the dirt opposite Gretyl. It was a weird smile.

“Was that all?”

“No.” Tam sat next to Seth. “No, it’s not, Gretyl. You need to understand we’re your friends, we love you, we’re on your side, we’re in this together. We all miss her. We need to support each other, not withdraw into our own corners and—”

She stopped, because Gretyl’s smile was broader now. Tam said, “Gretyl?”

Gretyl heaved a sigh and stood so she towered over them. She reached onto the cargo train’s running-board and found a flexible flask with a nipple from which she took a long pull, then passed it to Tam, who sniffed, then drank and passed it to Seth, who found it to be full of something like Scotch, so peaty it was like drinking a cigar. He liked drinking cigars. He took in a larger-than-intended mouthful, then made the best of a not unpleasant situation.

Gretyl held her hand out and he reluctantly passed the booze back. “To Iceweasel.” She took another drink.

They both nodded. Looking up at Gretyl was giving Seth a crick in his neck. He got up, just as Gretyl sat and gave him a yes-I’m-fucking-with-you look he knew he gave other people.

“It’s very nice of you two. You mean well. But I haven’t been heaving dramatic sighs. I’ve been doing something.”

“What?” Tam’s eyes shone in the soft light of her glowing clothing, underlighting her strong jaw and making her skin a pool of buttery tones in a gray-and-black night. Seth felt a tremor of excitement, partly sexual and partly just excitement. Something was happening.

“I brought up Dis. There’s so many clusters in Akron. Tons of compute-time, people are happy to share. I ran her and told her Iceweasel had been snatched by her family, and she talked to ninja-types who are good at that kind of thing.”

“Yeah?” Tam said, calmer than Seth, who got the willies talking to Dis – it wasn’t that she didn’t seem human. It’s that she did. Freaked him to his balls.

“Yeah.”

Gretyl looked expectant.

“I’ll bite,” Seth said. “What happened?”

“We found her. We pwned the house she’s in. Dis is running on their hardware. She’s in communication with Iceweasel.”

Seth and Tam looked at each other.

“I’m not crazy,” Gretyl said. “It’s real, and it’s happening.”

“When?”

“Last week. Nothing’s happening now, not until she regains consciousness.”

“Regains consciousness?” Seth said.

Tam said, “Really?”

“Regains consciousness.” Gretyl’s expression made him flinch. “Really.” Her smile was so big her eyes all but disappeared between her cheeks and forehead. “Really!” Tam, who knew what to do in a way Seth never had, gave Gretyl a hug that he joined.

“Now what?” Seth said.

“Now we break her out,” Gretyl said.

[V]

ETCETERA DIDN’T KNOW what to expect from Thetford, but this wasn’t it. The zone was abandoned a decade before, when asbestos contamination went critical and even the federal government couldn’t ignore it. The evacuation happened with the usual haste and coercion. The houses still had china in the cupboards, toys in the toy chests, rusting swing sets in the yards.

Warm winters and wet summers triggered landslides that left the town and the valley silted up, the buildings spongy with black mold. A very dry year capped by a midsummer lightning-storm triggered fires across the valley, then more floods. What remained looked like a thousand-year ruin, albeit with odd pockets of perfectly preserved rural life – a farmhouse that escaped the worst and still had a bookcase bulging with old French romance novels, a set of basements and sub-basements underneath the hospital that were dry with working emergency lights.

The walkaways who’d taken over Thetford treated it as a hostile alien planet, where the air could kill you, where the terrain was treacherous and the extreme climate showed no mercy. This was precisely the environment they’d sought, because it was a dress-rehearsal for going to other planets.

“It’s the ultimate walkaway,” Kersplebedeb said. He was gangly, with a prominent adam’s apple, and spoke English with a funny accent that came from having a French mother and a Kiwi father in bilingual Montreal. “All that first days of a better nation stuff, it’s just bourgie bullshit. Nations are bullshit. You know what’s not bullshit? Space. No room for power-games in space. No room for coercion, or war.”

“Run that past me again?” They were in one of the air-tight capsules that had been deposited, like the egg sacs of sky-squids, all over Thetford. “Why no war?”

“Why war?” Kersplebedeb said. He spread his long fingers over the table. He had chipped silver nail polish and a yellow housedress and short hair, which assuaged any fear Etcetera had that the Thetfords would be boringly socially conservative. That was the reputation of space-exploration types.

“Jealousy. Greed. Irrational hatred.”

“Once you’re in space, you’re mobile. Unlimited power, anywhere the sun shines. Oxygen anywhere you can find ice to fractionate with solar-powered electrolysis. Food anywhere you can find feedstock, including your poop. Someone wants your lump of ice? Walk away. Someone wants your space habitat? Walk away. Walk away, walk away.

“People who think about space end up thinking about bullshit like Star Wars and Star Trek. They have faster-than-light travel, but they still fight? Over what? They’ve got transporters. What are they fighting over? What does anyone have that anyone else can’t get, instantly, for free? They have to invent unobtaniums, magic crystals that, for some reason, can’t just be printed out by their transporter beams, or there’s no story.

“Why do they even die? We’re already making scans of ourselves – if they’ve got transporters, they should do hourly scans!”

“I get your point.” He wished Limpopo was there, but she’d gone off to get trained at the space-suit factory, along with a contingent of Walkaway U scientists and some B&B people. There was talk of building another factory, because they were all tunnel-bound until they were outfitted. The academics who’d lived in the tunnels accepted this with resignation and mostly just wanted space, time, and freedom from distraction so they could scan everyone. That was okay with everyone. The long march to Quebec was fraught with danger. Sound from the sky made them flinch in anticipation of death-by-drone. Every crackle in the night had been a merc. The case for getting every walkaway into the cloud could not be stronger.

The B&B crew and the surviving aeronauts wanted the scientists to bear down on the scanning project, indoors and safe from the blowing asbestos and leaching heavy metals of Thetford; they themselves wanted to get the fuck out of the tunnels. Walkaways who couldn’t walk away were like foxes whose den lacked an emergency back door. The space-suit project was a priority. The Thetford crew had improvements on the space-suit fab they couldn’t wait to go 2.0 with, so that was likely to achieve liftoff.

Kersplebedeb laughed, showing horsey teeth and the insides of his nostrils. “You people kill me. You’ve done so much for the project, but you don’t appear to have given any thought to how it changes everything. The rate we’re going, we’ll be launching a thousand walkaways into space by New Year’s.”

“Where do you plan on getting the launch capacity to put a colony into orbit? Last time I checked your wiki, you had a deal to lift a couple cubesats a year.”

“All we need is one cubesat, up high with decent comms to Earth-station, and we’re set.”

The penny dropped. “You want to run a cluster in orbit and put sims on it?”

Kersplebedeb gave him a “duh” look and pawed through a cooler for a jar of astronauts’ moonshine, made from distilled lichen. It tasted amazing, like a slightly sweet tequila, deceptively smooth and very strong. He spun the lid off the jar and poured two small glasses of greenish liquid. These sit-downs with Kersplebedeb involved a lot of lichen booze. It was a theory-object from walkaway space programs. It was cheap and easy to make even if you didn’t have hard vacuum right outside your airlock.

“What else would we do?”

“What would they do up there?”

“Same thing we’re doing here, but far from people with bombs and weird ideas about doing what you’re told and accepting your station.”

“You’re going to run copies of yourself in space, on a cubesat, and what, exchange email with them? Let them have high-latency flamewars about engineering problems?”

“I’ll grant it’s weird.” He sipped the drink and his affect got less wild, more – Etcetera struggled for the word. Default. More sane, more respectable. At some time in Kersplebedeb’s life, he’d been the kind of person who could explain to a board-room of normal people and make it sound normal. Now he was busting out his normal register for Etcetera. “Things” – he waved his hands “– are coming to a head. Zottas are freaking.”

“Zottas are always freaking. That’s what they do. Worry whether they have more than everyone.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, Ets.” This was Kersplebedeb’s name for Etcetera. For a guy called Kersplebedeb, Kersplebedeb was impatient with other people’s multisyllabic names. Everyone else got one syllable. “That’s the baseline social anxiety that keeps default’s boilers running. But for the past three generations, zottas have expanded their families. It used to be only one kid got to be stratospherically wealthy. The others would be shirt-tail squillionaires. They’ll never be poor, but they’re not going to change the course of nations. They’re two orders of magnitude poorer than the eldest.

“Money’s relative. When your big brother gets to be a hundred times richer than you, it means his kids get to go into orbit for Christmas break, have dinner with presidents, while your kids merely go to Eton or UCC and do deep-sea sub-dives instead of space-shots. They have dinner with pro athletes and the pop-star who plays their fifteenth birthday party. Big brother’s number-two kid ends up like yours, and he’s not happy about that, because number two knows it early. It warps him like it warped you. It rots a family from inside.

“The 0.001 percent can bud off three fortunes, branching dynasties for the whole brood. This makes things worse because when you’re jealous of your brother, that’s Old Testament badness. Ends with ‘a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.’”

Etcetera looked puzzled. Kersplebedeb said, “Cain and Abel.” Etcetera mouthed, “Oh” and made a go-on gesture. He’d had decent-sized gulps of lichen-juice and was filled with expansive goodwill.

“The endgame: even those zottas run out of new territory to conquer to carry on geometrically expanding their fortunes. There’s nothing left to squeeze out of the rest of us. The capital owned by non-zottas has dropped to negligible. If some desperate zotta figured out how to confiscate all of it, he wouldn’t get one dowry’s worth for his number-two kid.”

“So they turn on each other?”

“We’ve sat through this movie before.” Kersplebedeb touched his nose in a gesture Etcetera eventually recognized as meaning “on the nose.” “In the nineteenth century, the rich had the same pattern – one kid from each family got the name and the estate, everyone else became a comfortable nonentity, or, if they were very lucky, got married off to someone else’s number one. Then came the colonial era, new worlds to plunder, and whoosh, geometric expansion for two generations, long enough that there was no one alive who could remember a time when the dynasty was a straight line instead of an expanding tree of fortunes.”

“What happened?”

“They ran out of colonies,” Kersplebedeb said.

“What happened when they ran out?”

“Oh!” Kersplebedeb took a long drink. Sighed as his adam’s apple worked. “World War One broke out. They turned on each other.”

[VI]

LIMPOPO FLEXED HER arms in the confines of her environmental suit. It was a fourth-generation model, fresh off the printer and snapped together around her body by a Thetford spacie who made anachronistic squire-and-knight references. When she asked him, he shrugged and said, “Sci-fi and fantasy are two sides of the same coin.” He had a twang that might be Texan, and looked like he might be Vietnamese. Spacies came from all over. They had a wild-eyed visionary aspect that set them apart, even by walkaway standards, where wild-eyed-ness came with the job.

The suit was stiff but not terrible. There was a hydraulic boost in the joints that helped it support itself, gave it strength of its own, like a junior mecha-loader. She’d ordered hers skinned with a mosaic of van-art Hobbits and elves she’d picked from a catalog, and watched in fascination as an algorithm figured out how to resize and tessellate them so that they covered the whole suit without any mismatched edges.

She’d been outside once since they’d arrived, ferried by bubble-car into a bouncy-castle room they used for common-space. That time, she’d gone in a loaner suit, a gen-2, and it had been so hot and ungainly that she’d done a circuit around one of the ruined houses and gone back in, face mask clouded with condensation and scratches.

Now she had the custom fitted gen-4, she was ready to try again. They had a house rule of going in pairs, and she knew Sita had been champing to get outside. They got acquainted on the long march and working in the makeshift infirmary after the Better Nation had been shot down. They were both scared and excited by the rage that burned in Sita. It was a casual ruthlessness in her desire to defend walkaways. She took over defense of the column, putting up drones in a rotating pattern, working evenings to charge and inspect their weapons – mostly pulsed sound and energy weapons, though there was a big, weird projectile thing, a rail-gun they’d brought from Walkaway U and then towed from the B&B.

Now they were settled in at Thetford Space City, Sita led the project to get neural scanners running, providing administrative and work-flow support. Her own background – computational linguistics – didn’t have practical application to that part of the project, so once things were humming, she didn’t have anything to do besides bringing hot drinks to real experts, and she got squirrelly.

Sita’s suit was tiled with a forest camouflage pattern that was composed of thousands of distorted faces sporting bizarre expressions. Looking at it made Limpopo’s eyes go swimmy.

“Ready?” Sita said, through the point-to-point network. It was encrypted, used multiple bands for redundancy, and had clever telemetry in its radios that also detected interference and used it to infer the state of the electromagnetic environment, allowing it to overcome electrical storms. Sita’s voice was so crisp, so beautifully EQ’ed with the ambient wind sounds and the windmill thrums, so well-corrected in binaural space that she sounded like a game character.

Limpopo gave her a thumbs up and punched the airlock button. They crowded together, and she got Sita’s elbow in the side, making the suit rub along her scar in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. At a time when so many of the people around her treated their bodies as inconvenient meatsuits they were obliged to use as mechas for toting around their precious brains, it was nice to have a piece of her identity that was inextricably bound to her flesh.

Her last trip out an airlock had been a confusion of impeded movement, chafed skin, and poor visibility. Now, stepping into the tall, brittle wild grass poking out the snow, sapphire visor so clear it felt like UI, complete with lens-flare, she was struck by the place’s beauty.

Sita gave her a shove from behind. “Dude, don’t block the door.”

“Sorry.” She sidestepped. The trees were tall and lavish with needles, the snow so fluffy, the sky an expanse of dramatic clouds. “Just a bit—”

“Hard to remember it’s a blasted wasteland when it’s this beautiful. You should see the wildlife. Moose, deer, even wildcats, judging from scat and paw prints. And birds! Owls, of course, but so many winter birds, you’d swear migration was an urban legend.”

“How?”

Sita struck off through the snow, sinking to her knees with each step. Limpopo walked in her footprints, marveling at her suit’s wicking sweat from her back.

“No people. It’s like this around Chernobyl. Turns out that, relative to sharing a biome with humans, living in the shadow of a radioactive plume or a place where the dirt and air are forty percent asbestos is a good deal.”

“You put it that way and we sound like a blight.”

“Whaddya mean ‘we,’ White Man?”

She knew the joke – “Tonto, the Indians have us surrounded!” “What do you mean ‘we’ White Man?” – even though she’d never read a Lone Ranger book or played the game or seen the cartoons or whatever, but it took a moment to get Sita’s meaning.

“Really? Anyone who wants a body is worse than asbestos?”

Sita stopped. The snow was above her knees. She was really having to work to keep up the pace. Limpopo heard her hard breathing in the earbuds. “Let me catch my breath.” Then: “It’s kind of obvious. The amount of stuff we consume to survive, it’s crazy. End-timers used to project our consumption levels forward, multiplying our population by our needed resources, and get to this point where we’d run out of planet in a generation and there’d be famine and war.

“That kind of linear projection is the kind of thinking that gets people into trouble when they think about the future. It’s like thinking, ‘Well, my kid is learning ten exciting new things every week, so by the time she’s sixty, she’ll be smarter than any human in history.’ There are lots of curves that start looking like they go up and to the right forever, but turn into bell-curves, or inverted Us, or S-curves, or the fabled hockey-stick that gets steeper and steeper until it goes straight vertical. Any assumption that we’re going to end up like now, but moreso, is so insufficiently weird it’s the only thing you can be sure won’t happen in the future.”

Limpopo looked at the sky with its scudding clouds, listened to the trees rattling. Her suit’s temperature was perfect ambient, a not-warm/not-cool you wouldn’t notice if it wasn’t minus twenty around you. “I thought the B&B crew liked heavy discussions at the drop of a hat, but then I met you academics. Shit, you like to broaden the frame.”

Limpopo saw her shoulders shake a little, and she had a moment’s panic that she’d inadvertently reduced Sita to tears, not unheard of in walkaways, everyone carrying around hidden trauma-triggers you could trip by accident.

When she slogged through the snow and looked at her faceplate, she saw Sita was laughing silently, staring fixedly ahead. When she followed Sita’s gaze, she saw they were being stared down by a moose with an antler-rack at least as wide as she was tall.

“Big moose,” she whispered.

“Shh,” said Sita, through a hiccuping laugh.

Limpopo made the hand-gesture that bookmarked her suit’s video-recording for interestingness and a soft red light pulsed in the top right of her visor. The moose regarded them for a moment. It had threadbare upholstery spots over its knees. Its shaggy fur glittered with ice-crystals. Steam poured out of its nostrils in plumes that swirled in the breeze. Its jaw was ajar, making it look comically stunned, but when she looked into its huge eyes, she saw an unmistakable keenness. This moose wasn’t anyone’s fool.

The moose shifted and a large turd plopped into the snow, melting and disappearing, leaving behind a steaming hole. They snickered at the unexpected earthiness. It gave them a look Limpopo read as “Oh do grow up,” though that was anthropomorphizing. It shuffled around in a broad circle, ungainly legs swinging in all directions but somehow not stepping in its own turd crater, turned its broad backside to them and walked – no, sauntered – away with a sway-hipped gait that was pure fucks-given-none.

Both of them burst into laughter. It rolled on, turning into giggle fits that ricocheted between them. Whenever one of them started to taper, the other got things rolling again.

“Say what you will about bodies,” Limpopo said, at last, “they sure are funny.”

“No argument.”

“Come on.” Limpopo took the lead. There was a birch stand ahead, huge trees with curls of white bark peeling away like cuticles begging to be picked at. Limpopo remembered her days after the fire, living on the land. She’d lost her gas-phase stove/generator and been reduced to building campfires, stoking them with shreds of birch bark. She had been traumatized and hurt, but her literal time in the wilderness had a reflective peace, slow-paced satisfaction for each day survived that she’d missed ever since.

“I can practically hear what you’re thinking.”

“What’s that?” Limpopo led them past the birch to a fast-moving icy brook with the footprints of many species around it. She tentatively stepped into the rushing water, feeling it as soft massage through the suit’s insulation. The grip-surfaces on her boot soles bound her fast to the streambed. From the brook’s middle, she could see uphill and downhill for some distance. She admired the hills above her, the valley below.

“You’re thinking how all this beautiful stuff proves that living in a virtual environment would never be truly satisfyingly human.”

“I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s certainly something I have thought.”

“Smartass.” Sita maneuvered into the streambed, finding a deeper spot, sinking to her knees. “This is beautiful, no question. Being stimulated with this view and this environment is profoundly satisfying.”

Limpopo stopped herself from saying We agree then, let’s get walking because that kind of flippancy was more Seth’s department and because this was eating Sita.

“Go on.”

“First, I’d like you to consider that the reaction we have is a marker for something we could call ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness.’”

“Or ‘beauty’?”

“Sure. There’s a body of computational linguistics on the difference between ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness.’ I don’t propose we go down that rat-hole, but this demands further discussion.”

“Noted.”

“Good.” She sloshed to the other side and went into a pine-stand where the trees leaned toward the open sky over the crick. “Come on.” Now she was in the lead, heading uphill, and Limpopo understood that there was an abandoned road ahead, switchbacking up the hill. It was blanketed with snow and she wondered if there was any way to attach cross-country skis to the environment suit, because that looked damned challenging.

“This is beautiful, good and virtuous. It is most prolific and healthy without us. So the best human course is to absent ourselves from it, to do what the original Thetfordians did, but on a grand scale. Evacuate the planet.”

“Uh.”

“Think of it for a minute. I’m not talking mass suicide. I’m talking about balancing our material needs with our aesthetic or, if you want to call it that, our spiritual needs. We’d be seriously bummed if all the wilderness disappeared. We care about Earth and the things that live here because we coevolved with them, so our brains are the products of millions of years’ worth of selection for being awed and satisfied by this kind of place.

“At the same time, we’re consumptive top predators with the propensity to engage in self-evolution. We’ve hacked Lysenkoism into Darwin.”

“You lost me.”

“Lysenko. Soviet scientist. Thought you could change an organism’s germ plasm by physically altering the organism. If you cut off a frog’s leg, then cut off its offspring’s leg, then its offspring’s leg, eventually you’d get a line of naturally three-legged frogs.”

“That’s dumb.”

“It was attractive to Stalin, who loved the idea of shaping a generation and imprinting the changes on their kids – which happens, just not genetically. If you teach a generation of people they have to step on their neighbors to survive, setting up a society where everyone who doesn’t gets stepped on, the kids of those people will learn to betray their neighbors from the cradle.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“That was just for starters. Stalin insisted they could weatherproof wheat by growing it in shitty conditions. That ended badly. Famine. Millions dead.”

“But now we can, uh, ‘hack Lysenkoism’?”

“We have cultural as well as genetic traits. We pass them on. When we come up with a society like default, it selects for people who are wasteful jerks that succeed by stabbing their neighbors in the back, even though we’ve got a species-wide priority of not going extinct through environmental catastrophe, pandemic, and war.”

They wound up and up the hill. The snow was just as deep, but there weren’t trees to avoid, so the going was easier. Still, Limpopo was getting puffed out, to her embarrassment. Sita, fifteen years older, showed no sign of slowing, so Limpopo swallowed her pride and called for a rest. They were over the tree line and could see over it deep into the basin, the weird tunnel-scape of the spacies, the rotting houses and farms colonized by small trees that just pierced the snow.

“Wow,” Limpopo said, not subjecting her laboring lungs to anything longer.

“Indeed. So, Lysenkoism. With the sims, we can make Lysenkoism work. Think of Dis inside her constraint envelope. We’ve brainwashed her – or helped her brainwash herself – to be fine with being a simulation.”

A cold feeling spread in Limpopo’s gut. She looked at Sita with horror. “You’re not talking about turning people into sims who aren’t moved by natural beauty?”

Sita stared through her face mask. “Oh girl, no. Jesus, you think I’m a monster? We could constrain our sims to spaces where we value nature so much that we prefer to be disembodied and not a force for its destruction, to experiencing it directly.”

“That’s just weird.”

They moved again. Two switchbacks later, Limpopo said, “I think I’ve got that. That is some fucked-up shit.”

“For hundreds of years, people have been trying to get everyone to live gently on the land, but their whole pitch was, ‘hold still and try not to breathe.’ It was all hair-shirt, no glory in nature’s beauty. The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don’t reproduce. Don’t consume. Don’t trample the earth or you’ll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven’t gotten there?

“We know there’s truth in it. It’s all around us. You can only act like the planet is infinite – like wishful thinking trumped physics – for so long before it goes to shit. That’s why Cape Canaveral is a SCUBA site. Think about it too long and you’ll come to the conclusion that nothing you do matters. It’s either kill yourself now or kill your descendants just by drawing breath.

“Now we’ve got a deal for humanity that’s better than anything before: lose the body. Walk away from it. Become an immortal being of pure thought and feeling, able to travel the universe at light speed, unkillable, consciously deciding how you want to live your life and making it stick, by fine-tuning your parameters so you’re the version of yourself that does the right thing, that knows and honors itself.”

They came to a ruined building, a vast refinery or processing plant, big as an aerodrome, two great cave-ins marring the roof line.

Sita gestured at it. “A couple years without maintenance and it just imploded. It’s the climate control. Place like that, unless you build it air- and vapor-tight, give it a Q factor like a space-suit, it’ll cost you more to heat than you could make by running it. That stuff needs climate control or it starts to trap moisture, and come summer it rots. The next winter it’s worse. A couple years later, boom, it’s rubble. That thing was a giant computer that housed people and machines and when they turned the computer off, it was an instant tear-down.

“The universe hates us. We are temporary violations of the second law of thermodynamics. We push entropy off to the edges, but it’s patient, and it builds, and when we take our eyes off of it, kerblam, it’s back with a vengeance.

“You want to change the history of the future, give us a chance for a life worth living, without oppression? There’s only one way. You know it, but you can’t make yourself face it.”

“But I could if I was a sim? Nudge the sliders until I was in the envelope that loved being simulated?”

“Bingo. We’d have a world that belonged to animals, and we’d experience it through sensors that perfectly simulated our wet stuff, but without crushing all those precious roots.”

“Can I make a suggestion?”

“Go ahead.”

“When you make this pitch, don’t mention Lysenko. Making the world a better place by realizing the failed dreams of the pet mad scientist of one of history’s greatest monsters—”

“Duh.”

“Just saying.”

“The point isn’t Lysenko or Stalin. It’s the angels of our better natures. Everything we know we should do but can’t bring ourselves to do because the part of us that sees the whole map and knows it’s the way to go can’t convince the part that’s in the driver’s seat. It’s about being able to choose, make the choice stick.”

“What if someone else chooses for you?”

“If someone else gets control over your sliders? Disaster. Teetotal capsizement. Terror without historical parallel. Better make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“I get the feeling that you’ve already planned this argument, Sita. An ambush.”

“Not an ambush,” she said. “Just the marketplace of ideas. We’re getting somewhere, something is brewing that’s going to bubble over. We’re part of it. I want to get everyone ready for it, so there’s a minimum of headless chickening.”

Limpopo remembered arguments with Jimmy about the way the world was about to change and how she had to face it, how he’d offered to put her in charge if she backed him. It was so nakedly manipulative that she’d never been tempted. Is that what Sita was doing? If so, why wasn’t her back up?

“One more question.”

“As many as you’d like, Limpopo.”

“Just one. Then I want to go back to enjoying nature.”

“Shoot.”

“Why do we have differing levels of executive control over our minds? Why would we evolve to foil our own better natures?”

“Because evolution isn’t directed. It’s not streamlined. We’re an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you’ll make.”

Limpopo laughed in spite of herself, despite Sita having obviously used that line before. “All that stuff in the attic, it’s useful, right? That’s why the attics themselves haven’t been squeezed out by evolution. Having a statistically normal distribution across every trait – including the ability to make up your mind and stick to it – means that as a species we’re able to face a variety of challenges. We’ve got a tool for every occasion, genomically speaking.”

“Can I interrupt you?”

“Of course.”

“This isn’t a new argument. There’s a whole neurodiversity contingent who hate my ideas of sliders, and want to preserve our incapacity to ‘make up your mind and stick to it’ in case there’s some hypothetical species-destroying crossroads in the future where we need to rescue it. I say, you keep your irrationality intact. I’ll switch mine off. Other people can make up their own minds. Because the inability to see reason is a species-destroying crossroads and we’re at it now. If we don’t figure out how to put off gratification today for survival tomorrow, to beat the solipsist’s delusion that you’re a special snowflake—”

“Okay, I know how this goes.”

“I know you do.”

They picked through the ruins, over huge machines under their blankets of snow and treacherous piles of rubble that could be used as wobbly staircases to reach the remains of the roof and odd preserved relics, including a manager’s station with a faded set of laminated safety memos tacked around its missing observation window.

“If it turns out the level of executive control we get from sims backfires, we’ll just turn it off. That’s the point of executive control: deciding what you’re going to do.”

“What about the existential crises?”

“What?”

“Iceweasel told me that Dis kept suiciding—”

“Crashing.”

“Terminally freaking. Until you figured out how to constrain her to versions of herself that wouldn’t have existential crises.”

“Yeah...” She sounded cautious. Limpopo sensed weakness.

“You can’t simulate someone unless you turn down the slider that freaks out at the thought of being simulated.”

“Yes...” Deeper caution.

“What happens if you ditch your bodies, upload, and it turns out the human race can’t survive without whatever makes us terrified of losing our bodies?”

“That is perverse.”

“It’s not. It’s not hard to think of an aversion to having a body-ectomy as pro-survival. What if you’re engineering the mass suicide of the human race?”

“All you’ve got is a hypothetical. I’ve got a concrete risk: we are in the midst of mass suicide. If it turns out turning off our existential terror makes us give up hope and switch ourselves off, we’ll deal with that when it arrives. Come on, Limpopo, be serious.”

The rebuttal was so hot, so different from the argument thus far, Limpopo knew she’d touched something tender. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. When people got like this, you couldn’t convince them of anything. She wished for a way to turn off Sita’s anxiety, a slider she could dial to a middle ground where Sita could confront her anxieties without freaking. Sita wished she had one, too.

[VII]

“HELLO, JACOB,” NATALIE said. She hadn’t called him that before, but Dad wouldn’t cut it. Her father gripped the foot of her bed while the door’s locks cycled, clunk-clunk.

“I don’t like this, you know.”

“Then let’s stop it. You untie me and let me go, and we’ll part ways. Not every family stays a family forever. I’ll send you a Christmas card every year and I’ll come to the funeral. No hard feelings.”

He looked wounded. That might have been partly genuine, which was amazing, considering that she was in four-point restraint. The moment passed.

“Your mother and sister want to visit.”

She rolled her eyes. Dis had been her constant companion since she’d awoken in the bolt hole. Without her, Natalie imagined she would have been in quite a weakened state, desperate for company. Solitary confinement was officially torture. She ping-ponged between a conviction Dis was a traitor and the possibility that Dis was genuinely on her side, but even that state of indeterminacy was a chewy mental problem that kept her sane.

“It’s not like I could stop them.”

He pursed his lips. “Don’t be difficult” – she suppressed a snort – “I can’t bring them in while you’re like this.”

She couldn’t suppress the second snort. “You make it sound like I tied myself up.”

“What the fuck else was I supposed to do? Natalie, I’m being gentle with you. Do you know what other parents do with kids who run away with your friends? Do you have any idea what that kind of de-programming looks like?”

“I have a pretty good idea. I remember Lanie.”

Lanie Lieberman was her best friend until the year they turned thirteen, when Lanie went off-piste, sneaking away for daring encounters with boys, booze, and the kind of club where the bouncers let a thirteen-year-old in if she dressed right and came with the right louche rich boy. They’d grounded her, put trackers on her, droned her, put a bodyguard on her, then two, but Lanie was a Houdini – especially with help from scumbag kid-fiddling older boys from families even richer than hers, who had their own money for the countermeasures Lanie needed to get away.

After that, it had been private school, then military school, then a place for troubled kids, and finally a place whose name Lanie never spoke. It was the only one she couldn’t escape from. Judging from her pallor when she returned, it had been underground or somewhere far north. In Natalie’s imagination it was an abandoned mine or a stretch of tundra. The Lanie who came back from it was... hinky. Not just wounded, but cross-wired in a terrifying, mystifying way. Sad things sometimes made her laugh. When other people laughed, she’d get a look of concentration and anger, she had to keep her rage in check.

They stopped pretending they were friends by fifteen. At sixteen, Lanie got early admission to a university no one had heard of in Zurich, supposed to be an amazing boot up in the finance industry, where even math dumbos could learn to be high-flying quants. The last Natalie heard of her was a hand-delivered invitation to her father’s funeral, a neat ink signature below the engraving. Natalie didn’t go to the funeral and couldn’t imagine the database cross-section that spit out her name as a potential attendee.

Her dad smiled wanly. “Things have come a long way since the days of Lanie Lieberman. There’s trade shows for what we could be doing right now. I made two discreet queries and now I get brochures on rag paper so thick it could shingle the roof. Natalie, you’re a growth industry, and the methodology is faster, more ruthless and more effective than anything from back then. Thumbscrews versus psychoanalysis.”

Curious in spite of herself: “But you didn’t ship me off.”

“Not yet. Natalie, hard as you might find this to believe, I respect you in addition to loving you as your father. I would like the part of you that makes you you to survive this adventure. I don’t want an automaton with a superficial resemblance to my daughter. I want you to realize all this pissing around with radical politics and camp-outs with dropouts is not a long-term strategy. I understand you feel guilty about having so much when everyone else has so little, but what good do you think it does to turn your back on reality? You can’t wish inequality away. In my ideal world, you’d run the family foundation, oversee our good works. There’s a lot of poor people out there who owe their vaccinations, water and education to the Redwater Foundation. Take some of that energy you put into anarchy and channel it into something productive. You could even set aside a little brownfield for experimental communities based on walkaway principles.”

She just stared at him. She knew if she’d really been in solitary all that time, this would have sounded like a hell of an offer. If not for Dis, she’d beg for this. She knew how susceptible she was to isolation. It wasn’t just being alone. It was being alone with herself. Did this mean Dis wasn’t working for her father? Or was this a subtle, super-Machiavellian Jacob Redwater deal that made him the stuff of legend, even in zotta circles?

“When are Mom and Cordelia going to visit?”

He shook his head. It was so patronizing. “Your mother isn’t going to bail you out. She’s more upset than I am. Cordelia, well, she’s afraid of you. Wants to put you on anti-psychotics. Thinks you’re going to attack her.”

“When are they coming for a visit?”

“Do you want to see them?”

She stared him down. He’d tilted her bed up to a forty-five-degree angle, so she could look at him over the rumpled white hill-scape of her sheet-draped body.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

When he was gone, Dis whooped loudly enough that she winced.

“Jesus, keep it down!”

“This place is so shockproof you could use it to print holograms,” Dis said.

“My head isn’t shockproof.”

“Sorry. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but your dad is a colossal asshole.”

“I’d apologize for him, but fuck that.”

“Yeah.”

“If it matters, I’m more convinced you’re not working for him.”

“What a relief.”

“That voice sim is getting better at sarcasm.”

“I’ve been sneaking updates to my local copy. The voice synth people are good – merging normalized speech recordings from MMOs and voice-response systems, getting incredible stuff out of it. I’ve been playing around with some of the possibilities.” The last sentence came out in a growl of predatory menace, so scary Natalie jerked in her bonds.

“Jesus.”

“I know, right? I cheated, though. Used sub-sonics. It’s pretty amazing what I can do. You should hear my sexy ingénue.”

“No thanks. I can’t remember ever feeling less interested in sex—”

“They’re coming.”

The door clunked and clunked again and gasped open, and in came Natalie’s mother, in her pearl gray, like a monochrome Jackie O, smaller than Natalie remembered, but no older. She took a small step inside, her nose wrinkled at a smell Natalie had lost all awareness of. She stared at Natalie. Cordelia slipped in behind her, round face a china-doll mask. Natalie felt a pang of weird sympathy for her, being with their mother on her own, the sole focus of Mother’s attention.

“Hi, Mom.”

Her mom circled the bed, walking around three sides before coming to the wall, retracing her steps, coming to rest beside Natalie.

“Jacob,” she called. Jacob stepped into the room, looking pained.

“Yes, Frances?”

“Remove these restraints.”

“Mom—” Cordelia began, but her mother held up a shaking hand.

“Jacob. Now.”

They locked eyes. She remembered this from childhood, their wars of silent gazes. As she’d grown, she’d realized these were a game of chicken where each gave the other longer to contemplate the ways retribution could come, until one looked away. As usual, Jacob broke contact first.

“I’ll be back.”

Natalie assumed he’d gone to get the med-tech or whatever he was, but a moment later, he was back with the merc. She nodded a little at Natalie, a degree of acknowledgment that was practically a full-body hug given their previous interactions. Maybe Natalie had impressed her with her “spunk.” Or maybe she’d been given permission – or orders – to lighten up.

“Frances, Cordelia, please stand back.”

Mom looked like she was going to argue, but Cordelia dragged her arm. “Come on, Mom.”

Once they had a few meters’ distance between them and the bed, the merc stepped forward and locked eyes with Natalie.

“No trouble,” she said, and clipped a bracelet around Natalie’s wrist. Natalie lifted her head and strained to see it. It was evil blue metal. She didn’t want to even guess what it did, though she couldn’t stop her subconscious from gaming it out: not shock, because she could grab hold of Mom or Dad or Cordelia and the shock would go through them, too. Maybe something in her nerves, like pain, or seizures, or –

“No trouble,” she agreed. The merc impersonally lifted the sheet, removed her catheter, let it retract into the bed. The sensation made her gasp with humiliation. The merc wiped her hands with a disposable and dropped it into the bed’s hopper before offering her hand. Natalie took it, because after days – weeks? – supine, she was weak and dizzy and her stomach muscles refused to help swing her huge, numb legs over the bed’s edge. Tears sprang into her eyes, because when she’d been a walkaway, she’d been so strong – they all had been. All the walking. Now she couldn’t walk away even if they cleared a path. Tears rolled down her cheek and slipped into her mouth.

She snotted up the rest of the tears and blinked hard, let herself be guided to her feet. She swayed, not looking at Mom or Cordelia, locking eyes with Jacob, letting him see what he’d done to her. He’d destroyed her body, but she made her eyes shine to let him know he hadn’t touched her mind.

Her mom was at her side, getting a shoulder beneath the arm whose hand didn’t have an IV. The merc disconnected the other end of the hose from its bed-feed, capped it with a sterile, elasticated wrap, draped the hose around Natalie’s neck. Her mom smelled of her own perfume, made specially by a man in Istanbul who used to come to the house once a year, during Sacrifice Feast, when he’d tour the world and drop in on his best clients while all of Turkey ground to a halt. Natalie hadn’t smelled that scent – not quite sweet, not quite musky, and with a whiff of something a bit like cardamom – for years, but she remembered it more clearly than her mother’s face.

Her mother gasped when she settled her weight over her shoulders. Natalie thought she was too heavy, then: “Jacob, she’s like a bird!” in tones more horrified than Natalie had ever heard from her. She saw her mother’s perfect skin crumpled in a grimace, eyes narrowed into slits that made the hairline wrinkles at their corners deepen in a way she hated.

“Hi, Mom.”

They stood, swaying. She felt her legs giving out.

“I should sit.”

They both sat. The opening in the mattress where the hoses retracted, smelly and dark, was right behind them. Her mother twisted to look at it, twisted back, and captured Jacob on an even fiercer look.

“Jacob,” she began.

“Later,” he said.

Natalie enjoyed his discomfiture. Cordelia stood halfway between the parents, fretting with her hands, picking her cuticles. She’d been a nail-biter, broken the habit only after several tries, and Natalie could tell that she wanted nothing more than to chow down on her own fingers.

It struck Natalie that she was the least upset among them, except for the merc. She was on a team with the merc, them versus these fucked-up zottas. That was stupid. The merc was not on her side. Come on, Natalie, focus.

“I won’t be tied down again.”

“No, you certainly won’t,” her mother agreed.

“Frances—” her father began.

“No, she won’t.” The staring contest smoldered again. The balance had changed. There was a new implicit threat – what would a divorce court judge say about a daughter tied to a bed, starved and intubated, locked away in a safe-room? Her mother had been furious about her going walkaway, but that wouldn’t stop her from deploying any leverage Jacob Redwater had handed her.

“No she won’t,” he said. “Excuse me.” He stepped out of the room. He shut the door. Clunk-clunk.

Cordelia took a tentative step. Her mother extended an arm and she stepped the rest of the way, let Frances give her one of her hugs, always warm enough, always ending a moment before you expected.

Cordelia subtly leaned to Natalie, testing for the presence of a potential hug, but Natalie didn’t signal back. Fuck her. For that matter, fuck Frances. They had known she was a prisoner and neither had sprung her. Getting her loosed from four-point restraint hardly qualified as liberation.

“Natalie, this is just terrible,” her mother said.

No shit. “Uh huh.”

“Why, Natalie? There are more constructive ways to engage with the world. Why become an animal? A terrorist?”

It was so fucking stupid she couldn’t manage a derisive snort. “What would you prefer?”

“Move out, if it’s so bad. Your trust is mature, you could buy a place anywhere in the world. Get a job, or not. Take up a cause. Something constructive, Natalie. Something that won’t get you killed or raped or—”

“Kidnapped by mercenaries and tied to a bed in some rich asshole’s basement?”

Her mother set her jaw.

“Natalie,” Cordelia said. “Can I get you anything?”

“A lawyer. Cops.”

“Natalie—” Cordelia looked hurt. Natalie didn’t let herself give a shit.

“You knew I was down here. You knew he had me snatched. You don’t like the walkaways and you don’t like that I’m one, fine. But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m an adult and whether I become a walkaway is none of your business. Neither of you get a say in what I do.”

“Of course we do. I’m your mother!”

Even Cordelia smirked.

She saw rage boil in their mother, different than their father’s, but no less deadly. “Natalie, if you think being an adult means you don’t have any duty to anyone else in the world—”

She and Cordelia both snorted. It further enraged their mother, but it was the most sisterly moment they’d shared since Natalie first went away to school.

Frances went rigid and stared straight ahead, not acknowledging them, wishing she hadn’t gone straight to the maternal moment, which left her with no gracious out, and if there’s one thing Frances Mannix Redwater was, it was gracious.

The door clunked, opened. Jacob came in trailed by the med-tech/paid goon, who carried a precarious armload of clothing. Natalie recognized the clothes from the dumbwaiter in her previous incarceration.

“We’ll bring in a proper bed later today,” Jacob said, while the man put the clothes on the floor.

“Books, too,” Natalie said. “Interface stuff. Paper and something to write with.”

He looked at her, then at Frances.

“No interface stuff,” Frances said. “But everything else. Some furniture, too. A fridge and food.”

“Hop to it,” Natalie said, with a giddy laugh. Jacob ignored her. He had a goat, but you couldn’t get it with a jibe as crude as that.

“Now everyone else out,” Frances said. “I need to talk to Natalie alone.”

Natalie closed her eyes. Not one of those talks.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“You’ve had plenty of time to rest.” Frances managed to make it into an accusation, as though Natalie had lazed around eating bonbons. It wasn’t sarcasm – Frances was capable of being simultaneously outraged because she’d been tied to a bed, and because she’d been too lazy to get out of bed.

“Everyone, out.” She glared at the merc, who had the sense not to look at Jacob. That would have been the end of her employment in the Redwater household. Natalie guessed being a merc in the employ of zottas required political sense.

They left and before the door clunked closed, Frances called out to Jacob. “Private. No recording.”

“Frances—”

“She’s not going to jump me and hold me hostage, Jacob.”

“You’ve seen the video—”

“I saw it. That was before you tied her to a bed for a week and fed her through a tube.”

“Frances—”

“Jacob.”

Jacob turned to the merc, who was already holding something out, palm down. He passed it to Frances. “Panic button,” he said.

She pointedly put it in her purse, then set the purse far from the bed, leaning against the wall, buttery yellow leather slumped against stark white. “Good-bye, Jacob.”

They left the door open.

[VIII]

LIMPOPO WAS VOLUNTEERING with the scanner crew when Jimmy showed up.

He didn’t look as cocky as the last time they’d met, with his stupid weapons and such. He’d had a hard walk, fetched up in Thetford with a limp and a head wound, in filthy overlapping thermal layers. He was gaunt, frostbite in three fingers and all his toes.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, when Limpopo came upon him in the great hall of the Thetford spacies, tended by a medic who listened to advice from someone far away who diagnosed Jimmy.

“You look bad,” she said.

“Could have been worse. We lost fifteen on the road from Ontario. It’s getting mean.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. Actually, possibly it is your fault, you being a big beast in the world of scanning and sims.”

“I’m a walkaway. We don’t have big beasts.”

The medic smiled, then did something to Jimmy’s toes that made him suck air through his teeth – one missing – and squeeze his eyes.

“I think you’ll keep them,” she said. “Except maybe the left little toe.”

“Huzzah.” He rocked his jaw from side to side.

“Why are you here, Jimmy? Come to kick more people out of their homes?”

He shook his head. “It’s not like that. Whatever minor philosophical differences you and I had—”

It was textbook self-delusion, but Limpopo couldn’t see any reason to point it out.

“– I have more in common with you than with the assholes who came at us on the road. There’s only one thing they want: a world where they’re on top and everyone else isn’t.”

I’d love to know how you differentiate that from your philosophy. But I don’t guess you’d be able to explain it.

“This is clearly where the action is. This has them shit-scared, and scheming.”

“So you’ve come to help?”

“Look, there’s an angle, something I haven’t seen on the forums, an outcome that’s worse than anyone’s preparing for. I think it’s because people like you just don’t understand what backup really means.”

Backup. A perfect, perfectly seductive name for scan and sim. She was amazed she hadn’t heard it. As soon as she did, Limpopo just knew there must be thousands – millions – of people using the term. Once you conceived of the thing that made you you as data, aeons of data-handling anxiety kicked in. If you had data, it had to be backed up. Anything important that wasn’t backed up was good as lost. Data is haunted by Murphy. Do something irreplaceable and magnificent while out of network and backup range and you were begging for critical failure that nuked it all.

“Backup,” she said.

“Yes.” Jimmy grinned. He’d followed her thinking. “Of course. No one has thought it through to the logical end.”

“Which is?”

Despite his injuries and grubbiness, he enjoyed testing her, waiting to see if she’d spar. She knew there was no way to win a mental sparring match with Jimmy: victory would piss him off, loss would convince him he could walk all over her.

“Nice seeing you.” She turned to go, because walking away solved the Jimmy problem every time. If he ever figured that out, he might be dangerous.

“It means,” he said to her back, and she slowed a little, “anyone who can get your backup can find out everything there is to know about you, trick you into the worst betrayals, torture you for all eternity, and you can never walk away from it.”

“Shit.” She turned around.

“Anyone who talks about this gets treated as a paranoid nut. Sim people wave their hands and talk about crypto—”

“What’s wrong with crypto? If no one can decrypt your sim, then—”

“If no one can decrypt your sim, no one can run your sim. If the only repository for your pass-phrase is your own brain, then when you die—”

“I get it. You’d have to trust someone with your pass-phrase so they could retrieve your key and use it to decrypt your sim.”

“Your trusted third party would have to trust her trusted third party with her pass-phrase, and that person would need someone to trust, and there’d need to be some way to find out who had which pass-phrase because once you’re croaked the last thing we’d want was to realize we’d lost your keys. Can you fucking imagine – sorry about your immortal birthright, we forgot the password, derp derp derp.”

“Ouch.”

“There’s plenty of crypto weenies trying to figure this out, using shared secrets so to split the key into say, ten pieces such that any five can be used to unlock the file.”

“Sounds like a good idea.” She’d worked with shared secrets for the B&B’s various incarnations, establishing committees of trusted parties who could collectively institute sweeping changes in the codebase, but only once a quorum agreed.

“Yes but no. Good in the sense that you need to kidnap and torture a lot more people to unlock someone’s sim without permission, but from a complexity perspective it’s worse – you’re multiplying the number of interlocking relationships necessary to retrieve a sim by ten. As in: now you’ve got ten problems.”

“What’s the answer?”

“That’s what I’m worried about – the answer is going to be no answer. There’s urgency, it’s all going to blow up soon. Back in default, they’re treating Akron like an ISIS stronghold, like the fucking end-times. I’d be surprised if they didn’t nuke it.”

“Fallout.”

“They’ll blame us for it and set up a contract to treat radiation sickness with some zotta’s emergency services company. You don’t know what it’s like out there.”

“I know some things.”

“I guess you do. Sorry, I didn’t mean to, you know—”

“Mansplain.”

He looked awkward. She could tell he wished they’d had an argument. He was so easy to outmaneuver, because he couldn’t imagine the people around him weren’t trying to outmaneuver him.

“Limpopo, it’s been rough for me, the last couple years. After the B&B, uh—”

“Imploded.”

“I was angry for a long time. I was angry at you, though I knew it was my fault. Who else’s fault could it be? I chased you out.”

“You did worse than that.”

“I did worse than that. I threw you out.”

“No. You never did that.” You couldn’t do that.

“I couldn’t do that.” He wasn’t as dumb as he looked. “I took things from you because I thought it would make me strong, because I thought what you were doing was making people weak. But all that stuff, strong and weak—”

“Bullshit.”

“Entirely. Strong and weak isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it.” He paused. She was about to say something. “Also what you do. It’s not charity or noblesse oblige to treat people like they’re all equally worthy, even if they aren’t all equally ‘useful’ – whatever useful means.” He looked ready to cry. The medic stopped working on his toes and watched him intently. He looked at her, at Limpopo, sighed. Then he went on, which impressed Limpopo, because this confession would be all over Thetford by the time he’d found a place to sleep.

“I told myself I was making the world better. I thought there were ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ people and if you didn’t keep the useful people happy, the useless ones would starve. Of course I put myself in the useful group. I knew this important secret thing about useless and useful people, and if that’s not useful, what is? I told myself I was making more of everything for everyone. We just needed to let people who were worth the most do whatever they wanted. It was fucked up. I fucked up. That’s what I’m trying to say sorry for.”

“Your problem is you think ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ are properties of people instead of things people do. A person can perform usefulness, or anti-usefulness, depending on circumstances. Evolutionary winnowing didn’t somehow pass over the people who don’t contribute the way you want them to, leaving a backlog of natural selection for you to take care of. The reason everything about us is distributed on a normal curve, with a few weirdos way off in the long tails at the right and left and everyone else lumped together under the bulge is that we need people who get on with stuff, and a few fire-fighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges. We assume someone who puts out a fire is a one-hundred-meter-tall superhero fated to save the universe, as opposed to someone who got lucky, once, and has been given lots more opportunities to get lucky since.”

“That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. It’s hard to figure this shit. It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on – the scale I was failing on – was irrelevant. That’s one of those convenient things that reeks of bullshitting yourself.”

“I happen to agree the old scale was bullshit, so I’m giving you a pass.”

He winced as the medic did something to his toes. Two of them looked bad, black at the tips. Limpopo looked away, grimacing.

“Thanks,” he grunted, though whether he was talking to her or the medic, she couldn’t say.

[IX]

THE PARTY WASN’T Pocahontas’s idea, but she took off with it. At first, Etcetera was horrified at the thought. He couldn’t imagine anything worth celebrating amid the death and anxiety. Iceweasel was disappeared and Gretyl was buried in secret projects. He was convinced everyone would be offended, from spacies to late arrivals to aviators to the B&B crew who mourned their dead, but as Pocahontas posted notices of the party’s progress to the spacies’ social hub, it was clear the only anxiety anyone felt about a party was that someone else might hate it.

Pocahontas was a force of nature. She’d been the first of their crew to figure out how to run the space-suit fabbers, made herself a gorgeous suit she wore on a series of epic, multi-day treks, establishing contact with nearby First Nations bands. Though they weren’t as political as she, none had any use for default and all were curious about the weird spacies who’d taken over Thetford, so many years after it was abandoned. Pocahontas had used the Thetford fab to print parts for a new space-suit fabber, stacking them outside a utility corridor, ready to be hauled to her new friends by anyone who could make a vehicle capable of the run. Gretyl was working on refurbing the engine of their cargo train, which limped into Thetford. They’d have scrapped it if there hadn’t been so many wounded who couldn’t finish the voyage on their own legs.

Gretyl was better than Etcetera had any right to expect. Seth told him what she’d done, and though she rarely heard from Dis – the sim was running on the safe-room’s own servers, to avoid the risk of discovery through mountains of traffic where none was expected – the terse messages made her stoic, if not cheerful. According to Dis, Iceweasel was sane and intact despite torture. She was made of indomitable steel. “If she’s not losing her shit, how could I?” Gretyl said, one morning, as Limpopo brought them coffium and fresh rolls.

“You going to sing?” Limpopo said. Etcetera looked sharply at her. Gretyl had a beautiful voice, torchy. Back in the ancient days of the B&B common-room, she’d passed evenings singing songs from her deep repertoire, accompanied by zero or more B&B musicians. A capella, she was astounding; with a band, she was transcendent. But she hadn’t sung since Iceweasel was taken from her.

“At the party?” Gretyl said.

“At the party.”

“Is there a band?” Etcetera thought she was looking for an out – I don’t think I could do it unaccompanied or we don’t have time to practice – but her eyes glinted –.

“The spacies have a couple of bands, but I don’t know if they’re any good.”

Pocahontas – who’d flitted through the common-space, directing people as they set up for the party – homed in on them, having followed this conversation on the hoof.

“There’s a good band and a so-so band,” she said.

“What kind of music?”

“The good band is loud and fast. The so-so band does folk stuff.”

“I’ll sing with both of them,” she said.

Pocahontas gave her hand a squeeze. “Done. Thanks.”

“You want some coffium?” Etcetera said. Watching Pocahontas dash around made him exhausted.

“I don’t drug.”

They all looked uncomfortable. Etcetera hadn’t known any First Nations people personally, but he knew there was stuff about booze and other substances. He shrugged. They were all walkaways, right? Man, woman, white, brown, First Nations or otherwise.

“Sorry,” Limpopo said. He wondered if he should have apologized, too. He felt stupid and anxious, and that meant it was something he should be paying attention to.

“No biggie. Your neurotransmitters are your own business.”

“What can we do to help?” Etcetera looked for a better subject.

Instantly: “Get the fab to Dead Lake,” she said. “They can’t come to the party without protective suits.”

“Ah,” Etcetera said. He should have known she’d say that.

“We’ll all get on it,” Limpopo said, and squeezed his hand, though whether it was sympathy or a reminder to live up to his promises, he couldn’t say. “Count on us.”

“I am,” she said, with the solemn simplicity that she had in endless supply. It killed the mood’s lightness, made them gravely committed to throwing a party of unparalleled fun. Pocahontas looked from face to face, smiled, and launched herself in the direction of another group.

Gretyl watched her go. “She’s amazing. A party.” She shook her head. “And now we’ve got to get those fab parts, what, seventy klicks?”

“Sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for. It’s high time we got the cargo train running.” She drank her coffium. “Some of that stuff is wedged tight and won’t come out without a fight. We’ll hack it out. It’ll be tough in the suits.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t be glum,” Limpopo said. “It’ll be fun to do hard work for a change.”

She was right. Back when they’d built the second B&B, this was a common fixture of their days – some big, hard technological challenge they’d have to solve together, downloading tutorials and tapping the global walkaway frequency to find someone who could get through the problem. Sometimes, they’d labor over a trivial technical problem for weeks, stumped, until, one day, something worked, and the experience would be sweeter for the bitterness of the struggle.

He drained his coffium and looked at the party preparations all around him, and remembered he was a walkaway. He was living the first days of a better nation, doing something that meant something. His existence was a feature and not a bug.

Limpopo smiled. She’d read his thoughts.

“Drink up,” she said to Gretyl. “Let’s get down to it.”

Etcetera felt the tension melt out of his back, replaced with warm purpose. Work needed doing, and he could help. What more could anyone ask for?

When Gretyl shucked her suit, she was a mass of aches that had not manifested when she was deep in work, hacking at the damaged carrier train with saws, blasting it with cutting torches, hammering at unyielding metal and polymers.

She stood by the airlock, smelling her stink. She groaned and put her forehead to the wall.

“You okay?” Tam looked genuinely, embarrassingly concerned. When Tam joined the Walkaway U crowd, Gretyl mothered her, helping her navigate the opaque waters of the academic enclave. After the attack, Gretyl watched with pride as Tam transformed into a dervish, ferrying people and supplies into the tunnels, risking her life, strong and inspiring.

Since she’d lost Iceweasel, Gretyl’s world had smashed to fragments. Even at the best of times she felt like a fractured vase that had been glued together by a cack-handed repairer, cracks on display for all to see. Damaged goods. Tam had flipped their script, trying to mother Gretyl in a way Gretyl hated, not least because she needed it.

“I’m okay.” Gretyl tried to starch her posture, paint on a smile. Working on the engine was hard, but it gave her a break from all-consuming fear for Iceweasel. The worst part about being mothered was her own pathetic need to be mothered.

“That’s good. Because honestly, you look like chiseled shit.”

“Thanks.”

“Someone had to tell you the truth, dude.” Tam slipped behind her. Her hands gripped Gretyl’s shoulders. “You’re tight as a tennis racket.” She squeezed experimentally, strong thumbs digging into Gretyl’s shoulders. Gretyl groaned. Now Tam’s hands were on her, she felt the tension, like a rubber-band pulled to the breaking point. Despite herself, she leaned into Tam, and Tam squeezed back. Gretyl groaned again.

“Come on, then.” Tam continued to knead. “Tell me where it hurts.” Gretyl heard the grin. Tam was enjoying this. Gretyl gave up. “What are you doing now?”

“Gonna find somewhere to sleep.” The spacies’ complex, crowded before they arrived, was now thronged, and it was a juggling act to find a free bed – or even a corner where bedding could be placed temporarily – in the evening. “We stopped for a late lunch and I was gonna sleep dinner. I mean skip dinner.”

“You’re in luck.” Tam worked the knots. “Seth and I found a place. It’s big.” She squeezed. “And comfy.”

Gretyl groaned. “Come on then.” Surrender felt good.

The room was big enough that Gretyl felt guilty. But it was a weird shape, with low ceilings in places, uneven flooring in others, the result of a weather event that buckled the bulkheads, introducing cracks whose temporary seals no one had made permanent.

It was lit with constellations of throwie lights, scattered in smears across the ceiling and walls, and there was a spacie-style adaptive sleep-surface, millions of sensor-embedded foam cells, like a living thing that cuddled and supported you according to an algorithm that second-guessed your circulation, writhing in a way that was disturbing and wonderful.

Seth was already lounging in his underpants, sipping lichen tequila from one of the glass bulbs that were everywhere in Thetford, though she hadn’t met the prolific glassblower.

He waved the bulb blearily and called out a greeting. Tam barked at him in mock drill sergeant to pull himself together and offer their guest hospitality. He climbed to his feet, found booze and another bulb – elongated like a teardrop, shot with swirls of cyanotic blue and rusty orange/red – and poured. She started to wave it off, then caught the smell and relented.

Fuck it. She took a burning sip, swirling it through her foul-tasting mouth, and letting it trickle down her dry throat.

“Hot towels.” Tam snapped her fingers. Seth groaned theatrically but pulled on drawstring pants and stepped out.

“You don’t need to—” Gretyl said.

“Oh yes we do.” Tam pinched her nose dramatically. Gretyl shrugged. She probably did stink – the B&B’s onsen was far behind, and the weeks underground after the bombing of Walkaway U had accustomed her to a baseline of BO that fulfilled every default stereotype of stinky walkaways.

Tam rifled through chests crammed into a crawlspace, consulting her interface, coming up with a pair of silk-like robes, chucking one to Gretyl. They kicked their dirty clothes into the sizable pile left by Seth, shrugged into the robes and collapsed into bed.

Seth wheeled in an insulated chest. He popped the lid, releasing fragrant steam. There were showers at the spacies’ compound, but swollen numbers had driven everyone to the wikis for alternatives from other walkaways and the towels were a winner. It wasn’t easy to bathe yourself with them, but that was a feature, not a bug, far as most people were concerned.

Seth flopped down between them. “Okay, I’m ready.”

Tam slugged him in the arm – Gretyl saw that she kept her middle knuckle raised, driving it straight into the meat of his bicep. “No. Way.”

He rubbed his arm. “Ow.”

“Yes,” she explained. “Ow. Want another?” She made a fist. Gretyl saw they were both trying to suppress grins. Young love.

“Okay, who’s first?”

“Guests first,” Tam said.

Gretyl wanted to object, but lying on the bed, swaddled in the soft robe, sapped her of her residual strength. Groaning – theatrically, this time – she shrugged out of the robe, feeling her skin goose-pimple as the recirculated air kissed it.

The first heavy, wet, fragrant towel made contact, draped across her back with a wet slap followed by a spreading heat that was like a languorous tongue, and then it was joined by another, wielded by Tam, across the backs of her legs. Tam rubbed along her sore, tight hamstrings. The four hands scrubbed at her through the heat, strumming her aching muscles, clever thumbs and grinding knuckles, elbows in the unyielding knots. Where the towels slipped, her wet skin shrank from the air currents.

All too soon, they told her to roll over, and they did her front, working her abdominal muscles, her thighs, her clenched jaw, her scalp. The towels were soaked with sage and pine. The smell suffused the room. She kept nodding off, luxuriating in attention, then waking as a knuckle caught a sore spot.

Then it was Tam’s turn. There were more hot towels in the crate. Seth found a thermostat interface and cranked up the heat. Gretyl dispensed with the robe, which made things easier as she worked the hot towels into Tam’s skinny legs and bony back. Seth brought more lichen-juice, and she spilled some on her fingers, and when she licked it off, she tasted the sage and pine. The flavor was incredible and she told them so. They dribbled booze over their fingers and licked away and everyone agreed and they also got looser and mellower. And sloppier.

By the time they moved onto Seth, the heat, moisture and booze made the room as swimmy as a Turkish bath. There were dry towels in a compartment with its own element. They came out warm and fluffy as kittens. Bundled up, they burrowed beneath the covers.

Gretyl marveled at the feeling of peace, the intimacy that was asexual and sensuous at the same time. It was child-like, a feeling from before sex, or maybe the feeling of someone very old, beyond sex. Everything was at peace.

So why was she crying?

The tears had slipped silently down her cheeks for some time. She noticed them because they were pooling in her ears and slipping down her neck. She’d once sliced her hand with a kitchen knife, and there’d been a moment when she’d stared at the pulsing blood, understood it, but not felt it, before the pain crashed on her, radioactively intense and thunderclap-sudden. She’d shouted in surprise – not at the wound, but at the sudden onset of pain.

It was the same now: the wound visible, the ache lagging it. She gulped, sobbed, then brayed, doubling over like she’d been punched in the stomach. The pain there was sickening. All her buried fear and sadness for her lover crashed down.

Seth figured it out first, wrapping her in his arms, murmuring shh-shh, rocking her. Tam was slower on the uptake, but she took Gretyl’s hands and squeezed them, saying that’s right, let it out. Gretyl was so far down her pain that she didn’t worry about being mothered by Tam.

The sorrow was obliterating. The siren-wail blotted out coherent thought. It abated to the point where she could hear her thoughts and first among them was terror that Iceweasel would never come back. Her father and family would turn her into a zotta.

The storm passed, floods of tears slowing to trickles. Her eyes stung and her guts ached. She disentangled herself and swung her legs over the bed and put her face in her hands.

“What are we doing?”

“You mean in general, or specifically, right here and now?” Seth said, and Gretyl felt Tam reach out and pinch him.

“I’m not being funny,” he said.

“You’re never funny,” Tam said. “That’s the point.”

“Ouch.”

Gretyl looked up, tugged her robe around her and stood to pace, promptly stubbing a toe on the cold, uneven floor. She yelped and sat back down, rubbing her toe.

“I have an answer, you know,” Seth said.

“To what?”

“What we’re doing,” he said.

Tam sighed. “Go ahead. If Gretyl doesn’t mind.”

She shook her head. She felt affection for these broken, sweet, loving people.

“When I was a kid and I’d hear about walkaways, they always seemed insanely optimistic to me. If they ever seriously threatened default, it would crush them. It was naïve – thinking default could peacefully co-exist with anything else. How could it? If the excuse for putting a clutch of rich assholes in charge of the world was that without them we’d starve, how could they allow people to live without their stern but loving leadership?

“I thought of myself as a realist. Reality had a well-known pessimistic bias, so that made me a pessimist. I liked the idea of walking away, but I was on the other side.”

Tam squeezed his hand. “Then you followed a hot rich girl into the woods and everything changed. I’ve heard this.”

“Not the important part, because I only figured it out when we got to Thetford.” He paused. Gretyl thought he was being dramatic, but he was gathering his thoughts, uncharacteristic vulnerability on his face in the dim light. She wanted to hear what he’d say next. Maybe he’d discovered something important.

“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don’t give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do something.”

He stopped, wrung his hands.

“Realistically speaking, if you’re in the middle of the sea, you’re a goner. But you tread water until you can’t kick another stroke. Not because you’re optimistic. If you polled ten random shipwreck victims treading water in open sea, every one would tell you they’re not optimistic.

“What they are is hopeful. Or at least not hope-empty. They don’t give up because that means death and living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can’t change a fucking thing.

“I’ve never been lost at sea, but I think if your buddy was weaker than you, and you were holding him up, you’d kick just as hard, because you’d be hoping for both of you. Because giving up for someone else is even harder than giving up for you.

“Now I’m walkaway, I’ve been shot at and chased from my home, but I can’t feature going back to default, because default is the bottom of the sea and walkaway is a floating stick we can clutch. Default has no use for us except as a competition for other nonzottas, someone who’ll do someone else’s job if they get too uppity and demand to be treated as human beings instead of marginal costs. We are surplus to default’s requirements. If they could, they’d sink us.

“So what we’re doing, Gretyl, is exercising hope. It’s all you can do when the situation calls for pessimism. Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That’s realism, but everyone whose hopes weren’t dashed started off by having hope. Hope’s the price of admission. It’s still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it’s our lotto. Treading water in default thinking you might become a zotta is playing a lotto you can’t win, and whose winners – the zottas – get to keep winning at your expense because you keep playing. Hope’s what we’re doing. Performing hope, treading water in open ocean with no rescue in sight.”

“So, basically, ‘live as though it were the first days of the better nation?’” But Gretyl smiled when she said it.

“That kind of wry cynicism is my department, you know.”

“It’s fun being a dick.”

He grinned back. “It is, isn’t it?”

“So it’s hope. But—” She heaved a sigh.

Tam brought lichen tequila. She had a fleeting thought about how it was a bad habit to use alcohol to cope with distress, then drank from the bulb. It burned pleasurably.

“Iceweasel,” she said.

“Poor Iceweasel,” Tam said. “Have you heard from Dis?”

“No. I don’t want to break security protocol. Every time I call her, it raises the chances of her being discovered. She said she’d get in touch when things changed, when there was something I could do. But she hasn’t called.”

“Let’s call her. Fuck protocol. They didn’t discover her when she rooted their network, what more could one more network session do?”

“I don’t think—”

“Let’s do it,” Seth said. “If they’ve got her prisoner, that’s fucked up. She’s our friend, she’s sinking beneath the waves, we need to rescue her.”

“Rescue her? That’s insane, Seth. She’s in a fucking armed compound.”

“I’d jump into shark-infested waters to save Tam.” She looked to see if he was smartassing, but he was grave.

“Don’t be an asshole, Seth. Don’t you think that Gretyl’s beaten herself up for not going rambo on Daddy Iceweasel’s dungeon? It’s a suicide mission.”

“It was a suicide mission, without Dis’s help. Now it’s merely insane. Come on, you want to live forever or something?”

“Let’s call her first,” Tam said. “For all we know, Dis is ready to break her out without anyone getting shot.”

Getting Dis on the phone wasn’t easy. There was a Dis instance running on the spacies’ cluster – running a Dis instance was a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a walkaway clade these days – but it was slow and stock. The spacies used her to help their research on the microsat upload project, and the scanning crew consulted her to keep the array of cheap scanners synched to do the powerful computation necessary to interpolate low-precision measurements into very hi-rez, high-accuracy databases that turned all the parts of a person that mattered into a digital file.

The local Dis didn’t know about her instance-sister in Jacob Redwater’s bolt hole, but that Dis left Gretyl with a letter to other Dis instances, encrypted with a key protected by the private pass-phrase Dis had used in life. The local Dis accepted the file, decrypted it, thought about it for a computerish eyeblink. “This is crazy.”

“Yeah,” Gretyl said.

“Which part?” Seth said.

“The whole thing. Kidnapping, infiltration, pwnage. It’s terrible. It’s terrifying. It’s also bad-ass, all that pwnage.”

“Conceited much?” Seth kept it light, but Gretyl could tell he chafed. He’d never known Dis alive, so for him, she was this omnipresent transhuman oracle. When Gretyl heard Dis’s voice, she pictured the colleague she’d worked alongside, the way she’d waved her hands and paced when she talked, felt the physical presence of her through a mental illusion so complete it seemed she could reach out and grab Dis and hug her.

“Nope,” Dis said. “That wasn’t me-me. That was other-Dis-me. English needs new pronouns. Other-Dis-me and I are and are not the same person, and the accomplishments I happen to be praising are not accomplishments that me-me had anything to do with, so I am not tooting my own horn, just admiring the work of a very close colleague. But I could have done the same thing, of course.”

“Of course,” Seth said. Gretyl could see the through-the-looking-glass logic of talking to Dis had charmed him.

Tam said, “Plus, don’t be a dick to the immortal simulated dead lady. It’s bad manners.”

Gretyl didn’t know if Tam and Dis got on but she felt there must have been history there.

“You say the sweetest things,” Dis said. “Now, how about we place a call?”

“Please,” Gretyl said. The word was louder and more forceful than intended. Her palms were sweaty and her pulse throbbed in her ears. Perhaps she could even talk to Iceweasel?

A moment, then a strange sound from the speaker, another moment. Then, “Hi there.”

“Couldn’t reach her?” Gretyl felt like she was drowning in disappointment.

“What? Oh. No, this is me – Dis. I mean the one at Natalie’s father’s house.”

“I’m here too.”

“This is too weird,” Tam said.

“I’ll drop an octave,” said one of the Dises, in a deeper voice, and the other said, “Man, that’s weird.”

“Which is which?” Gretyl’s head swam.

“I’m local,” said deep-Dis.

“I’m on-site,” the other said.

Tam took charge. “Okay,” she said, “I’m going to call you ‘Local’ and ‘Remote’ for this call. Deal?”

“Deal,” both voices said at the same instant. Gretyl thought about her own backup, sitting in storage, wondered what it’d be like to converse with it, or multiple copies of it. The thought was nauseous; though the possibility had come up many times over the years, it had never been this immediate.

“Remote, what’s going on with Iceweasel?”

“They untied her three days ago. She’s been doing isometric exercises whenever they’re not around, but she’s still weak. She was out for ten days. They’re giving her sedatives in her food. They’ve stockpiled hypnotics, but I can’t tell if they’re going to use them – it’s a multi-factional thing, the mother and father not in agreement about how to proceed. The disagreement has as much to do with their fucked-up husband/wife dynamic as it does with their feelings for their kid.

“Emotionally, she’s not in great shape, even with sedatives. She’s pissed, having jangly feelings about her parents. When Mom visits, she veers from affection, or maybe pity, to a mother–daughter ‘I hate you!’ dynamic that’s got a sharp edge.”

“Because her mother is complicit in her kidnapping,” Tam said.

“Yeah, because of the kidnapping. Thought that went without saying.”

“Trying for maximum clarity.”

“Max-clarity it is. I’m totally inside their network now. Updated firmware on every device connected to the safe-room net, left a back door. The only way to get me out would be to burn everything and start over. It’s airgapped from the house network. There are a half-dozen sensors outside the safe-room, optical/sound/radiation/air quality. I’m not sure, but I think they’re physically co-located with house network devices – they may even be house network sensors, hacked to send a second data-stream into the safe-room. There might be a way to pwn those sensors and use them to get inside the housenet, but I’m worried that’ll trip the intrusion detection system and give it all away, so I’ve stayed away.

“From watching the sensors, I believe there’s only one full-time security thug, a woman who might have been on the snatch-team that got Natalie – that’s what they call her. I’m basing that on conversations I’ve eavesdropped on between Natalie and her family. There’s also a medic and an admin assistant who gofers food and meds. They’re keeping it small, which makes sense from a secrecy/opsec perspective. Apart from them, the only people who go in or out of the safe-room are the mother, the father, and the sister.”

“They’re all in one room?” Gretyl said.

“No, the safe-room is a complex: two entrances, one through the house and the other via a tunnel that leads to the exterior. There are three rooms, besides the tunnel: a vestibule, the room they’re using as a control-center, and Natalie’s room. Natalie’s room has its own sealing doors and independent air and power – it’s meant to be the impregnable safe, defense-in-depth. There’s a toilet in Natalie’s room, and a chem toilet in the control room with a jury-rigged screen around it. The gofer empties it – it’s got a cartridge that slides out. I see her swapping it a couple times a day, and she pulls epic faces, though the others give her gears about it and insist it’s odor free. Everyone thinks their shit doesn’t stink.”

“What are they doing with Iceweasel?” Tam asked, because Gretyl was still taking this in, trying to picture it in her mind’s eye. She thought she should ask Remote for a set of photos and plans, then imagined seeing a picture of Iceweasel – Natalie! – thin and drugged and her stomach did another slow roll.

“I think that Dad’s plan was to bring someone in to brainwash her – there’s supplies and dope stockpiled that fits that hypothesis. Based on conversations he’s had with wifey in the control room, she vetoed it, though Dad’s not happy and has set some ultimatum. I don’t have details, because they don’t talk about it in front of the help, and there’s nowhere for the help to go except Natalie’s room. This is the stuff they hiss at each other in spare moments.

“Mommy Dearest visits every day, so does sis, but they go on their own. Mommy has breakfast with Natalie, talks with her about the old days, telling stories that Natalie is either indifferent or hostile to. The old lady keeps up a brave face but I can get her respiration and pulse and Natalie’s getting her goat. She’s good at it. Lots of practice.

“Sis does better, getting Natalie to tell walkaway stories, being nonjudgmental-ish” – Seth snorted – “commiserating about how terrible Mommy and Daddy are.”

“What about escape?” Gretyl said – the question she’d been bursting to ask.

“What about it?”

Gretyl made a choked sound. It felt like Dis was jerking her around, but was she, really? She wasn’t the person Gretyl had known – maybe she wasn’t a person at all. She had been through a dramatic experience – killed, brought back, forked and ramified and simulated – and existed in a programatically constrained state to prevent her from thinking certain thoughts. Who knew what other emotions were choked off because they co-occurred with existential crises? Maybe angst and empathy were entangled particles, and extinguishing one extinguished both.

“What about helping her to escape from her family and come back here?”

“Oh.”

“Well?”

“I’ve talked with her about it. She’d like to, but views it as a remote possibility. I can unlock the safe-room, even lock the rest of them out of it while she uses the tunnel. But getting from Toronto back to somewhere outside of her parents’ reach? That’s black ops exfiltration, not running away from home.”

Gretyl forced deep breaths and pushed down despair. This was why she hadn’t asked, because she’d already figured this out.

“But you can get her out – I mean, out of the house?”

“Yes. She’s got clothes, and her sister has the same size feet. Assuming she could get her sister’s shoes, she could get free, though she’d be pretty goddamned cold. No way to get her a winter coat.”

Local chimed in, deep voiced, “Too bad we can’t get her a space-suit.”

Remote paused and Gretyl had the sense that she and Local were exchanging data. “That’d be perfect. Wishful thinking.”

Tam cut in: “Never mind. Knowing what’s possible is important, knowing what’s impossible tells us what we have to work on next.”

“Hope,” said Seth.

“Treading water.” Tam squeezed Gretyl’s hand.

“Oh!” Remote said, then, “Shit.”

“What?”

“Another fight with her father. One of his visits. He was trying to convince her walkaways were like him, greedy and shitty. Naturally, she told him to fuck off, and he started in about Limpopo. He knows a lot about her, stuff in her background I’d never heard, some of it ugly. Natalie bore it well, but she’s brittle, and he kept pushing until she snapped and came at him, physically, and he used his compliance button—”

“What?”

“They’ve got her in a pain cuff; less-lethal stuff they use in prison psych wards and asylum-seeker detentions. Melt-your-face stuff. It’s got good anti-tamper. There’s a whole box of them in the safe-room’s stores, which is creepy as fuck.”

“No kidding,” Tam said. “Why would you need compliance weapons in a safe-room that only your family was supposed to know about?”

Seth shook his head. “I’ve met the guy. I bet he’s got lifeboat captain fantasies about having to keep everyone else in line for their own good, you know, like on ‘Farnham.’”

“Ugh, I hated that show.”

“Everyone hates that show.”

“Not zottas.” Seth snapped off a sharp salute. “Yes sir, Farnham, sir, and may I thank you, sir, for helping us survive this terrible disaster through your superhuman judgment and special snowflakiness!”

Gretyl lost her breathing. She hadn’t seen a compliance bracelet, but she’d been hit by a compliance weapon, during a wildcat adjuncts’ strike at Cornell, when campus cops rolled into the quad with M.R.A.P.s, kettled everyone, and started sniping anyone they took for a leader. Gretyl hadn’t been on the picket, but she’d stopped to discuss it with a boi who’d been one of her grad students, because they had always had good instincts for picking their battles, and she wanted to hear them out.

She supposed for campus cops, anyone with graying hair was a ringleader – she was the oldest person in the quad by at least ten years – and she’d been hit. The pain came in two waves, first a sharp, stinging sensation all over her body like being shocked by a loose wire. It hurt, but it wasn’t debilitating. Later, she found out this was the “honeymoon stage” of the weapon, and it was supposed to stop perps in their tracks, but leave them coherent enough to understand the orders being shouted at them.

She stopped talking, looked wildly for her pain’s source, saw a visored cop in an M.R.A.P. turret, one eye covered with a bulging magnifier/scope, lower half of her face impassive as she played her wand over Gretyl’s body. It auto-tracked targets, shaping the pulse to keep it center-mass as the perp jerked and writhed.

No one shouted orders at her. Seconds later, pain blossomed like a thousand razors bursting out of her skin all over, all at once. There were no words for it. It didn’t let up at all. Pain got as bad as it could get, got worse. It was unimaginable. The boi immediately understood what was happening and dumped their backpack, seizing a sheet and snapping it over her. The pain had sizzled off/on-off/on, then stopped, leaving her twitching.

(The chivalry cost the poor boi their own safety – they were the sniper’s next target and it took Gretyl an eternity before she was recovered enough to get the blanket over them.)

The thought of Iceweasel with one of those cuffs – her father’s finger on the button – made her want to cry as memories of that day flooded back.

Gradually, Seth and Tam became aware of her upset and stopped bantering. “Hey,” Tam said. “Be strong. We’ll sort this out.”

“Yeah.” Seth sounded less convinced, despite his hope-talk. “This is a temporary situation.”

“How is she?” Gretyl said, and was alarmed by how small her voice sounded.

Remote noticed, too. Her voice lost its flippancy: “She’s resting. Withdrawn.” Then: “Would you like to talk to her?”

“Can I?” The thought made her heart thunder.

“One sec.” Gretyl noticed a tic of Remote’s voice. When she finished speaking, the sound cut off too perfectly on the last syllable, cleanly clipping at the end of the sound-wave, without open-mic hiss while the sound duplexing algorithm made extra certain the squishy human was finished, not wool-gathering. When you conversed with someone hosted on a machine, metadata became data. She wondered what a conversation between Remote and Local would sound like, then realized they wouldn’t use sound at all, then realized that she was trying to distract herself from the fact that she was about to speak to –

“Okay, put them on.” The voice was thready.

“Dude!” Seth said. “How’s prison?”

Tam slugged him. He grunted and Iceweasel said, “You’re such an asshole, Seth.”

“But I’m a lovable scamp, you have to admit.”

“I admit it.” Her voice quavered.

“How are you hanging in, darling?” Tam said.

“I, uh—” A pause, shuddering breath. “I’m scared. I don’t see how they can ever let me go now.”

“We’ll get you.” Gretyl surprised herself.

“Gretyl?” Iceweasel’s voice quavered more, cracking on the second syllable.

“I love you,” she blurted. Tears coursed down her cheeks. “I love you, Iceweasel. We’re coming for you. Be strong.”

“Oh, Gretyl.” Full-blown sobs now.

Gretyl sobbed too. The rest waited in respectful silence.

“The worst part—” Iceweasel began, then was lost to tears. “The worst thing is that it gets so normal. Like I’ve been sick for a long time, and I’m in a hospital, getting better. There are times when I can’t remember—”

“I won’t forget you.” Gretyl’s chest convulsed at the thought of the hours that passed without a thought of Iceweasel; working on the engine, just brutish stubbornness of the material world, inconvenience of weather and the suit, the brain-teaser of solving the mechanical puzzle of the stricken machine. The focus felt good. It was freedom from the grief she’d carried so long.

“But.” Gretyl couldn’t speak for sobs. “But.” She mastered her breathing. “If it makes it easier – if it hurts less, it’s okay to forget about us. About me. If you can find a way to be happy, I won’t be hurt—” Oh, no? “I’ll understand.” Because you do it, too. “It’s okay.”

No reply, then sobs, then nothing. Then: “I won’t ever forget. It’ll never be okay. If I die here, I’ll die with you in my mind.”

“Don’t die,” Gretyl blurted. “Just hang on.”

“I’ll hang on.”

Gretyl’s world telescoped to the two of them, minds reaching across space, piercing walls, transcending the channel set up by the simulated Dises. It was like they were touching again. “I—”

“Yeah,” Iceweasel said. “Yes. Me too. You too.”

“Yes.” A terrible weight lifted from Gretyl.

“Uh,” Remote broke in.

“Yes?” they said together, still in synchrony.

“I can get you through the tunnel – I can even get you shoes. But I can’t help once you’re outside.”

“I know,” Iceweasel said.

“Let us try and find something,” Gretyl said. “We’re going to default tomorrow, a First Nations reservation, we’re delivering – never mind what we’re delivering. We’re going to be there for a day or two. Then everyone’s coming here, from all over for...” She swallowed. “A party.” She felt like she was betraying Iceweasel.

“Will you bridge me in?”

“What?”

“The party. Can you bridge me in?”

“It’s bad opsec,” Remote said. “Every time we open a channel to the world, there’s a chance that someone’s going to notice the traffic.”

“I thought you pwned the whole network?”

“Yeah, but there’s the upstream. I’ve got the connectivity contracts here, read ’em all. They’re with a Redwater subsidiary, one of your cousins, the big timers. It’s for another Redwater property, a place across the ravine they use for secure storage, and there’s a point-to-point microwave link with line-of-sight laser backup, so anyone who used the contract to figure out what building to storm to kidnap Jacob and his family would find themselves three hundred meters away, in a building with remote monitoring and nasty surprises.

“The upstream provider’s got to run intrusion detection. That’s basic opsec. It’s tolerant – didn’t go nuts when your dad brought in his team, but the more anomalous traffic we generate, the higher the likelihood it’ll fire an alarm at some ops center and generate a warning to Daddy’s security people and then—”

“I get it,” Iceweasel said. She drew a shuddering breath. Gretyl could hear how close to tears she was. Tears sprang in her eyes. “I’d be alone again, and the party would start for real. I don’t think Dad’s security knows what’s going on here. I know that dude. He runs a tighter ship than this. My dad brought in specialists, deprogrammers for rich girls who join the walkaway cult. Someone who’d insist on running his own show.”

“Pretty sure you’re right,” Remote said. “Fits available evidence. We can’t assume your dad would tell his security not to worry about alerts. Even if Boss Cop doesn’t know what your dad’s doing in his dungeon, he’s got to know that something’s going on.” She paused. “I wonder...”

“What?” Local said. Gretyl had a moment’s disorientation. She’d started to think of them as aspects of one person, which they were, but not in the sense that they both had the same knowledge. Remote could wonder something and Local couldn’t know what it was until Remote told her.

“Jacob Redwater’s not the baddest zotta, not even in the top tier, but he’s still rich and ruthless. I can’t imagine him giving up his little bolt hole without having another one. I just bet there’s another place like this, only 2.0—”

“Heard anyone discuss it? Seen any traffic?”

“Nope, but if it’s there, maybe that’s something we could use.”

“Push it onto the stack,” Local said, sounding irritated, which also made Gretyl’s head ache. She could get upset with herself. Why should that stop once there were multiple instances of herself? “Come back to it later.”

“They’re coming. Jacob and his security, that woman merc—”

Silence.

Tam took Gretyl’s hand. Gretyl hadn’t had a chance to say good-bye, to again tell Iceweasel that she loved her.

[X]

THE LAST TIME she’d seen her father, he’d been stalking out of the room, with rare, visible fury. Usually he kept it icy and only let it emerge as a dangerous calm tone. When Jacob Redwater’s face twisted into a rage-mask and he raised his voice and clenched his fists, he was at the point of snapping.

Once, she’d have quailed at the thought. Her mother always assured her Jacob Redwater was a good and patient man, though not a man she had any particular affection for. Natalie and Cordelia were in good hands with him. Anything they did that made him snap was their own fault.

She could not have given fewer fucks about his rage. She’d flopped on the ground, trying to scream as her skin burned and her muscles contracted, a pain-seizure eclipsing every emotion except for self-pity and towering fury.

He had changed clothes. He wore tailored weekend stuff, a soft flannel shirt and jeans hid his incipient paunch unless you knew to look for it. He smelled of his sandalwood soap. He’d had a shower and calmed down and fetched the merc, who stood within arm’s reach and slightly ahead, body slightly rotated toward Iceweasel, impassive but alert.

“There are things you need to know about your friends, things that might help you see what’s going on there.”

“Is this part of the program? Did your snatch-consultant give you a ten-point process for deprogramming me and this is stage six?”

He shook his head. “Can you stop? I want to have an adult conversation and present the evidence. I think once you see it, you’ll understand—”

“Adults don’t have rational discussions that involve kidnapping and violent coercion. You set the terms when you sent her to drag me here. When you tied me up. When you used that on me.”

Her dad looked at the merc, a flush creeping up his cheeks. Natalie knew from Dis that the cameras in her room fed the control room, even when he was with her, so the merc and the med-tech and anyone else there heard and saw it all. Being called out as a father who’d use the pain-machine on his daughter was not Jacob Redwater’s style. He liked to be liked. He was likable – handsome, with an easy smile and enormous confidence. Natalie had seen friends fall under his spell, mistaking his friendliness for friendworthiness. It was flattering to be friended by a powerful zotta who could really listen to you with an intensity that made it clear he was interested in you, only you.

That hadn’t worked on Natalie since she was ten.

He made his eyes sad. “I wish I could tell you how much this has hurt me. I know you don’t think I love you, but I do. I’ve tried to be a good father. I know work kept me away too often. There were times when I should have been there for you—”

She swallowed her reaction: to tell him she’d always wished he was away more.

“But I have responsibilities, ones that you haven’t ever understood. I’m willing to take the blame. I’ve tried to shield you and your sister and your mother from what I do to keep us safe. It’s a rough world. I didn’t want to scare you.” His eyes grew moist. That was new. She’d never seen him mist up. He was pulling out the stops. “Natty, don’t tell your sister, but I assumed you’d take over some day. Cordelia is a lovely girl, but she doesn’t have any edge. You’ve got edge. Too much edge. But that’s good, because this world demands edge from the people who run it.”

He tentatively maneuvered a chair to her bedside. She steeled herself. She didn’t shrink when he sat. The merc positioned herself a little ahead of him. Natalie couldn’t say why, but this made her feel safer. She and the merc were on the same side, ultimately. Both were beholden to Jacob Redwater, though of course the merc had a lot more leeway about the terms of engagement.

“Your mother and sister never got that, but you did. This family, families like ours, we steer this world. It’s in trouble, Natalie. There’s too many people. Lots of them are bad people who’d destroy everything. Nihilists. They don’t care about human rights or property rights. They’d take everything we have. Jealous people who think they have nothing because we have something.

“You’ve seen the real world. There are people plenty richer than us. We’re comfortable, I’ll grant you, but we’re not ‘zottas’ – not real ones. A couple mistakes, a few changes in the world, we lose everything. Bums on the street.

“I’ll tell you what would happen next: we’d rebuild. Without handouts. We’d get to work, figure things out, and before long, we’d be on top.

“The world is lean and mean, and shakes. When you shake the cornflakes box, little flakes sink to the bottom and big flakes end up on top. I’m a hell of a big flake.” He smiled. His charming schtick.

“I know what you think of that: that I’m deluding myself. I’ve heard your talk about special snowflakes. I know your arguments. I disagree with them. You don’t know my arguments. You think you’ve found a better way. You think your walkabouts can make their way in the world without having someone in charge, without big and small cornflakes.

“That’s what I want to talk about. You need to know some things about your friends that might be hard to hear. Walkaways say the worst thing you can do is bullshit yourself. I want to demonstrate how you’ve bullshitted yourself – about them. They’re not hard to figure. Where there are walkaways, there are sellouts, happy to take free food and easy sex, but who also want money, and have a way to get both. Since you left, I’ve known everything that happened in your little world. I get videos. I’ve been inside your networks. I’ve seen traffic analysis.”

Of course it was true. Why would Jacob Redwater spy on her less in walkaway than he had in default? She’d always had the eyes-on-the-back-of-her-neck feeling, ever since she’d been old enough to leave the house, and it hadn’t let up once she got to the B&B. It took an act of will not to guess which of her “friends” fed reports back to Jacob; which ones were in government employ, or working for zottas or big companies. She’d talked it over with Limpopo and Limpopo confessed she had to resist the same impulse.

“It’s not that there aren’t plants here. Of course there are plants. The way plants hurt us isn’t by telling rich people what we’re doing. Fuck rich people – all our shit’s on public networks. The worst thing plants do is make us mistrust each other, think our friends might be our enemies. Once that happens, you’re well fucked. It’s impossible to have a discussion if you think the other person is trying to fuck with you. Everything gets distorted by that lens. Did she leave out the trash because she was distracted, or because she wanted to bicker about chores?

“That mistrust is the most corrosive thing. Back when I was in default, I was in this protest group, an affinity group loosely connected to the Anonymous Party, doing data-analysis of regulators’ social graphs to show their decisions favored the industries they regulated, such a fucking no-brainer, but it was good to have facts when you met someone who hadn’t figured out the game was rigged.

“There was a guy in our group, Bill. Bill was weird. Standoffish. Always looking at you from the corner of his eye. Always listening, not talking, like he was taking notes. We worried. We knew there were plants in our group. Whenever we found something juicy – some minister’s wife’s brother running the oil company the minister handed a fat exemption to – the government was always out in front, managing the news cycle before we published, which was overkill, given how little attention the news paid to us. The powers that be are thorough. Anything that might rise to a threat gets neutralized because it costs peanuts to clobber us, and there’s zottabucks moving around they do not want disrupted.

“We isolated Bill. Created distribution lists and passworded forums he wasn’t invited to. Stopped inviting him to pizza nights. Forgot to tell him when we went out for beers.

“Bill wasn’t a plant. Bill was clinically depressed. Bill hanged himself with his belt. His roommates didn’t find him for two days. When they put Bill into the fire, no one was there to take his ashes, so I took them. I kept them by my bedside until I walked away. They reminded me that I’d helped isolate Bill. I’d helped make him so alone that when darkness ran up on him, he didn’t have anywhere safe to run. I helped kill Bill. So did my pals. What killed Bill was our suspicion about plants. The worst thing a plant could do wasn’t leak our shit or stir up shit. We leaked our own shit. We were argumentative enough that we didn’t need plants to make us fight with each other. Worrying about plants was a million times worse than the worst thing a plant could do.”

There had been tears in her eyes.

Her father said, “Things aren’t what you think. You think you’ve found a way everyone can get along without bosses. There are always bosses – if you don’t know who the boss is, you can’t question her leadership. A system of secret bosses is a system without accountability or consent. It’s a manipulocracy.”

She looked at the merc, wondering if she was following this, whether she appreciated the irony of her father – her father – criticizing society on the grounds that it was run from behind the scenes by shadowy fixers and string-pullers.

He caught her look. He nodded and made a charming face. “Takes one to know one, daughter-mine. If I can’t recognize a conspiracy, who could?”

“When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” She regretted saying it. Why argue with her fucking father? He won as soon as you acknowledged there was a debate.

He knew it. He smiled wider, put on a frowny, thinky face. “I understand what you’re saying. We all see ourselves reflected in data. Analysis is subjective. But Natalie, I’m not asking you to take what I’m saying at face value. I want you to look at the data yourself, see if what I’m saying is true. That’s not monstrous, is it?”

“No. Kidnapping and administration of pain-weapons is monstrous. This is just bullshit.”

“I get you’re angry. I’d be angry. But if I was brainwashed by a cult – if I couldn’t understand what was going on – I would want you to do everything you could to get me to understand what was happening. You have my permission to do everything I’ve done here, to me, if I am ever in the grips of some irrational impulse that puts me in imminent and grave danger.”

Natalie restrained herself from snorting. Not to spare his feelings, but because derision was acknowledgment, another chance for him to argue. Give him a millimeter, he’d take a parsec. That’s how you became a zotta. It’s how he’d been raised. It was how she’d been raised, which scared the shit out of her, especially these days. She was back in her father’s demesne. In this house, there was so much pressure to accept the easy justifications. Some people had to be on top, some on the bottom, big and little cornflakes. Besides, the Redwaters weren’t really rich; not rich rich, not like Jacob’s cousin Tony Redwater.

“Believe me, if there was any other way, I would take it. I don’t want this. I want my daughter back. I know what you’re capable of. It’s why I kept you close to home, made sure you knew what went on behind the scenes. You could put it all together.”

Even though she knew he was flattering her, it worked. Goddamn him, and goddamn her, too. She knew her dad’s bullshit. Even so, something inside her rolled over and preened when Daddy said nice things.

“That’s what I want you to do. Pull it together.” He twiddled his interface surfaces and a piece of wall slid away, revealing a huge touchscreen, stretching across the room’s width. It was showing a screensaver, the manufacturer’s loop of kids playing lacrosse, blond and lanky, with muscular legs and horsey white teeth. Not zottas, because zottas didn’t need to pose for screensaver photos. But they looked like zottas. Maybe they were actors. Or CGI.

Her dad made the image go away and replaced it with a social graph. In the graph’s middle, like a gas giant surrounded by a thousand moons, was a circle labeled LIMPOPO [Luiza Gil], a circular cameo of Limpopo, looking younger and scowling ferociously, like she wanted to kick the photographer’s ass. Around her, the moons of various sizes were labeled with the names of her friends, all the walkaways. Just seeing those names made her mist with unbearable nostalgia. The feeling of being away from her true family was a clawed thing gnawing at her guts.

“Look at it, okay?” He turned to go. The merc followed, contriving to keep an eye on Natalie without walking out backwards. Natalie hardly noticed, because she was trying not to smile, because she’d just noticed Etcetera’s disc, and the minuscule type the system used to render his name in full.

She drifted over to the wall and caressed Etcetera’s circle, as though she were caressing him, and the graph jumped into life, helpfully arranging itself to better convey its meaning.

[XI]

“WE ARE WELL and truly at vuko jebina now,” Tam declared. She’d learned the phrase from Kersplebedeb, who said it was Serbian for deepest boonies, literally, “where wolves fuck.” Tam loved this phrase, to no one’s surprise.

Seth looked from side to side. The snow started an hour after they set out. It hadn’t been in the meteorological projections, normal for decades of weird weather. The first flakes were pretty, turning poisoned countryside into a Christmas card of birches and pines iced with fluffy snow like iced gingerbread. Toxic icing, but they weren’t going to eat it and, as Seth had inevitably pointed out, sugar was only slightly better for you than asbestos.

Pocahontas’s friends were welcoming, though they had little to call their own. They weren’t from one band, but were a commune living on territory the Quebec government had turned over in reparations for jail time, each of them exonerated by physical evidence, sometimes after decades of lock up. It had been the work of a Mohawk legal collective in Quebec City, and after a string of these, they’d been audited, audited again, investigated by the Law Society, and half their lawyers were disbarred and found themselves with full-time jobs saving themselves.

The community was called Dead Lake. It sported a few windmills and some second-rate fuel cells the residents had carefully coaxed into performing better than anyone could believe. Even Gretyl was impressed. Tam marveled at their improvements. Their technical crew relieved the wagon of the suit-fabbers and started assembling them. It took less than a day. That evening, all thirty residents came to the utility shed to watch them run.

Gretyl, Tam, and Seth were invited to a modest dinner, printed stuff with feedstock from down south because game around Thetford was poison and the Dead Lakers knew better than to eat it. Conversation was merry, if stilted. The Dead Lakers thought walkaways were crazy, or maybe silly, and didn’t hide it. They liked walkaways, and provided wonderful hospitality, but it was clear these folks didn’t rate the walkaways’ chances of getting anything done. For them, walkaway was a lifestyle and a hobby. Seth bristled because it was his deepest fear and also his turf – he could make fun of walkaways, but who were these people to tell him what to do? He’d buried his sarcasm, because the Dead Lakers knew the difference between a joke-joke and a ha-ha-only-serious joke, and Seth liked to live on that edge.

He was relieved to go the next morning. They hit the trail to Thetford in suits, riding the empty cargo wagon as it rumbled across the deep snow at a slow walking pace, sometimes nosing down precipitously as it discovered drop-offs, sometimes listing so far to one side they were nearly thrown.

The snow had started, about an hour out. Flakes, swirling clouds, then, whiteout.

“Vuko jebina, huh?” he said. There were trees somewhere – the wagon’s radar automatically avoided them, but it was turning again and again. Its collision-avoidance systems were fubared. This was definitely the place where wolves fucked.

He looked at Tam, trying to make out her face through the snow and her clear plastic visor. The suits were in whiteout mode, strobing a slow flicker that made it easy to pick a person out against the snow; defoggers blew over the visors, the mask’s ear pieces played pin-sharp reproductions of the defoggers from the other two masks, a white-noise symphony overlaid with the gusting wind.

“Even wolves don’t fuck in this,” Gretyl said. She was in the back, thumping at a mechanical keyboard she’d magneted to its skin, watching a screen projected against her mask. “Shit.” The wagon stopped. “Might as well stop, this thing’s gonna chase its tail until it runs out of juice.”

Seth’s butt vibrated with ghost sensation of wagon motors, That stopped, and there was just the sound of the wind, the blowers and the thrum of his pulse. He felt transient fear: where wolves fuck, snow blowing, ground saturated with carcinogens, sky a source of potential death. If he died here, no one would know. If they did know, almost no one would care. His father died when he was ten, his mother had been in jail since he was seventeen and they hadn’t spoken since he was fifteen. Natalie was... Natalie was gone. He had to admit she probably wouldn’t be back.

He was so small. They were pimples on the world’s face. Unwanted. Uninvited. Alone in snow, on their silly homemade wagon, in high-tech pajamas, where wolves fuck.

The feeling passed. It had contracted his sense of self to a pinprick and then expanded the world around him to a yawning gulf.

The world kept on expanding. It wasn’t just him that was tiny and insignificant. It was everything. Zottas, all they’d built. The world’s great cities. Humming networks of meaningless, totalizing money, endlessly and algorithmically shuffled. Deeds and contracts, factories and satellites, endless oil and stone, poison in the sky and carbon in the air. In a thousand years no one would give a shit. The universe didn’t care about humans. The wind didn’t care. The snow didn’t care. The fucking wolves didn’t care. If he froze and moldered to dirt, like Thetford’s rotting homes, it would be no better and no worse than living to 90 and going into the ground in a box with a stone over his head. It would be no better and no worse than what was coming for all those asshole zottas who thought they could speciate and overcome death.

Everything they did was human. Everything he did was human. Here, where wolves fucked, it didn’t mean anything; it meant everything.

“Awooo!” It was louder than he’d intended, but who cared? Tam and Gretyl’s gloves clonked their helmets, then the gain-control cut in. They stared, faces barely visible behind visors, suits strobing silently in swirling flakes. They were annoyed, hungry, needed to pee, and so did he but: “Awooo!” It came out louder this time.

“Come on, you wolves!” A wild laugh chased the words.

“Enough.” Tam’s voice had a warning note.

“It’s not enough. Come on, just try it. Seriously serious.”

“Seth, come on—”

Gretyl cut loose with a howl that made their visors rattle and left their ears ringing. “Fuck yeah!” She punched the air.

Tam heaved a sigh, looked from one to the other, wiped snow off Seth’s shoulders. She filled her lungs and howled. Seth joined. Gretyl joined. They howled and howled, in the place where wolves fuck, and Seth found himself with tears in his eyes, which he couldn’t wipe, but it didn’t matter. He was shedding his skin, leaving behind the last vestiges of default, the last shreds of belief that someday he’d forget this craziness and try to find a job and a place to live and hope no one took them away.

“I love you people.” He squeezed them so their visors clonked.

“Ow,” Tam said, but didn’t pull away. “You’re a jerk, but we love you, too.”

“Yeah,” Gretyl said. “Most of the time.”

“What do we do? Walk?”

“And end up frozen to death,” Gretyl said. “Snow can’t keep falling. Once it stops, we’ll ride home. Meantime, we shelter in cargo pods. If we each take one, we’ll be able to shin out of the suits to take a dump or eat, then get back inside to keep from freezing to death.”

“How would that work?” Seth said. “I mean, where do we poop?”

She rapped the engine’s cowl. “Not much room in these. But with care you could crap outside the suit, then get back inside, without getting crap on you. It’ll get on the outside of the suit, but that’s life in the big city. No worse than the stuff that gets stuck to it while we’re walking. We’ll wash them off when we get back.”

“I’ll strip off outside and hang my butt over the snow. The amount of snow on the ground now, there’s not going to be any airborne contaminants.”

“Suit yourself, but remember, there’s only so much power in these things and getting naked at minus twenty is going to suck heat out of your body that the suit’s going to have to put back or you’ll die of hypothermia. There might come a moment when you’re wishing you still had those amps in your battery – when your toes are turning black.”

“This conversation’s taken a delightful turn.” Tam jumped off the engine and sank to her knees. She swept her arms, mounding snow up. “We’re not going to walk very far through this. How about we try to tell someone where we are, and could use help?”

“I’ve got zero bars,” Gretyl said. “Been that way almost since we left Dead Lake. The aerostats probably landed themselves when the wind kicked up.”

“I packed a couple drones in the survival kit. Hexcopters, they can fight heavy wind, but they’re not going to get a geographic fix until the sky clears. Still—”

“Get one high enough and it might bounce a connection between us and Thetford,” Tam said. “There’s a good chance we’ll lose it – another decision we might regret later.”

“In summary: we should hide in these boxes, shit ourselves and wait out the weather.” Seth discovered the idea didn’t sound as horrible as it should. The revulsion he wasn’t feeling was part of the package of default-ness that he’d sloughed off.

“About right,” Tam said. “The weather isn’t ours to command. Physics is physics. Snow is snow. Batteries are batteries. Sometimes the best action is no action.”

[XII]

DIS FELT SWADDLED in cotton batting. Her thoughts veered toward panic or sorrow and she’d brace for the torrent of feeling, and it would fizzle. She’d tried anti-depressants as a kid, when her parents worried about her “moods.” She knew how it felt when her brain couldn’t make the chemicals that got her into that race-condition of things-are-bad-I-can’t-fix-them-that-makes-it-worse. That was a feeling like reality in retreat, colors bled out and fight gone from her limbs. They said it was a matter of “dialing in the dosage.” They said it was worse before advanced neurosensing that could continuously monitor her reactions. In practice, this meant spending the eighth grade reporting to the nurse’s office every hour to have a disposable electrode band wrapped around her forehead while she lay on a couch and let a machine draw blood. Her parents had to do it at home, including a session at 11:15 every night. They got so good at it that most nights they could take all their measurements without waking her. It helped that the drugs made her sleep like the dead.

A year ticked by. She got her first period, her first F (in math, always her best subject) and took her first beating, from a group of kids that included three girls who’d come to her birthday party the year before. They sensed her intolerable weakness. None of it left a mark. They told her the meds were working. She experienced vacant anxiety, a purely intellectual sense that things were terrible, but the terribleness didn’t matter. It was remote urgency. It made her feel sinister and unimportant.

The feeling was terrible but she didn’t feel terrible once she stopped the meds. Everyone had told her she musn’t do that, because cold turkey would cause problems. The lack of urgency she felt for everything extended to the prospect of going crazy from freelancing her own psychopharmacology.

She did go crazy. It was like the time she’d gone jumping in the surf and waded out too far, buffeted by waves that spun her around, knocked her over, without any way to predict when the next one would come, coming up sputtering and disoriented.

Without meds, she’d be overtaken by passions. Innocuous remarks made her furious, or set off tears. Jokes were convulsively funny or unforgivably offensive, sometimes both. She strove to hide it from her parents and teachers, but they noticed. She had to connive to stay off meds, hide them under her tongue and spit them out.

Bit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They weren’t triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose. She treasured her weather and harnessed her storms, turning into a dervish of productivity when the waves crested; using the troughs to retreat and work through troubling concepts.

She read the transcripts of those sessions when they’d woken her up inside a computer and she’d lost her mind. Reading through them, she sensed the crash of those storms. They’d blown terribly when her mind was untethered flesh.

She’d thought of storms as wet things, hormonal in origin. She’d mapped the storms to ebbs of mysterious fluids from her glands. But shorn of flesh hormones, the problems were worse. Ungovernable. She pondered this mystery, wondering if the discipline and nimbleness had been the wet part, the trained ability to conjure fluids that lubricated the dry, computational misfirings of her mind.

They’d stabilized her with her help, translating between her secret language of moods and the technical vocabulary of computation. She had no memory of those moments, only logs, but it was easy to imagine the desperate race to grind out coherent thoughts while waves of panic – she was dead, she was a parlor trick of code and wishful thinking – built to greater heights.

Afloat in seas of her own calming, she experienced unhurried urgency, the same contradictory feeling that things were alarming but she was not alarmed. It wasn’t a good feeling, but it didn’t make her feel bad, which was the problem.

Talking with Remote helped. Knowing there was someone else going through the same things helped, even though they never explicitly discussed it. Remote seemed so normal and together. That salved her. If that’s how normal and together Dis looked from the outside then she was probably holding it together too. Remote was a sort of mirror. What she saw in it was reassuring.

She helped with party preparations, kept track of the goings on in Thetford’s great hall, watched the weather, conversed with spacies and worked on cluster optimization and predictive modeling for the constraints they’d apply to each model in storage when they brought them up in their own sims. Working with CC’s sim was educational and scary. She’d envied CC his even keel, but in his digital afterlife, he was a mess. He was worse than she’d ever been. Walkaways all over the world collaborated with her.

She worried – without feeling worried – about her friends in the snow. There’d been no stable network connectivity for five hours. Last she’d heard, they’d departed from Dead Lake. They were now two hours overdue. The microwave masts outside the space-station sporadically caught distant threads of network signal, enough for the routers to start trading zone files and synchronizing clocks and getting the latest meteorology and frequency-hopping norms, only to fade off in an unrecoverable cascade of packet-loss and blown checksums.

Walkaway net was different from default’s. Its applications were designed for fault tolerance – built with the assumption the machine you connected to could disappear and reappear without warning, as drones, towers, wires and fibers failed, faded or fubared. It assumed it was being wiretapped, under permanent infowar conditions. It insisted on handshakes, signatures and signed nonces to root out man-in-the-middlers. When Dis went from Stanford to Walkaway U, the network had been the biggest culture shock. Slower in some ways, but without the ubiquitous warnings about copyright infringement, interminable clickthrough agreements, suspicious blackouts of “sensitive” resources when global protests spiked.

She lived on walkaway networks. She appreciated the subtle genius in its architectures. Sites that had became unreachable sprang back to life thanks to the questing tendrils of the network’s self-healing, restlessly seeking out new ways to bridge the parts that were atomized by entropy or connivance. The downside was that nothing was ever truly down, and anything unreachable warranted a reload. It didn’t work, but sometimes it did, often enough to keep trying. Dis hadn’t thought about B.F. Skinner since her undergrad days, but after the millionth retry to reach Seth, Tam and Gretyl, she looked up “intermittent reinforcement” in their locally cached wikip. That’s what it was: intermittent reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.

She was disconcerted to learn that being a disembodied consciousness didn’t immunize her from such a cheap cognitive trick. Not for the first time, she thought about tinkering with her parameters. Other Dises in other places had done that, under better controlled conditions, with some success. It was so unfair to be subject to this kind of cognitive frailty. Reload reload reload. In fact, reload, she was especially susceptible to it, reload, which was so unfair –

She drew up short. The big tower had contact with another tower, in the mountains, with line of sight to a fiber downlink, and data flowed. Nothing that reached her friends, but huge swaths of walkaway space came online. Cachers negotiated to opportunistically copy off great slices of it for local access, salting it away against the next electronic famine. All over the world, waystation machines with packets destined for Thetford knocked on its doors, seeking permission to hand off their payloads.

Amidst it was the news. It brought Dis up short. Every filter she had on the raw feeds was going fucking crazy.

It was Akron. They’d cheered Akron on as walkaways consolidated their position, using printed health care and food as a calling-card for their neighbors: die hard Akronites who couldn’t or wouldn’t vacate the dead city. They’d reveled in videos and casts of Akronites doing the unthinkable, establishing a permanent walkaway city, something you couldn’t walk away from, with permaculture farms and free-for-all white bikes and free schools where kids learned to teach each other and to be taught by other walkaway kids all over the world.

There’d been bad stuff. It was impossible to tell how much of that was propaganda. Akron had already been full of walkaways and semi-walkaways, throwing Communist parties and opening squats. It had been full of gangs and bad dope, pimps and scared people. Since Akron went walkaway, every murder and beat-down in Akron was top-of-feed news for every service in default, though violence and diseases hadn’t attracted attention in the ten years when Akron had been turning into Akron – even its bankruptcy and the appointment of a zotta “administrator” to replace the lame-duck mayor hadn’t rated particular mention. Akron was the fortieth American city to end up in that situation, and it wasn’t the biggest, or most violent, or most fucked up, so how was that news?

Default’s few voices of critical thinking pointed this out, pointed out Ohio had stopped keeping stats on the murder rate and overall mortality in Akron four years before, and back then, it had been five times higher than now, best anyone could figure.

When she saw a shit-ton of bad Akron news, she spacebarred it into ignoreland, but it kept popping up, and the headlines got snaggier and gnarlier and she couldn’t help herself, she read one. Then another. Then she watched videos the cachers had already pulled down and made local copies of, because every feed in Thetford was losing its mind over Akron.

Default had marched on Akron: the US Army and a ton of private “contractors” in the vanguard, riding mechas or ground-effect vehicles with drone outriders that continuously scanned for IEDs with lidar and millimeter-wave and backscatter, emblazoned with radiation trefoils in safety orange on their bellies, more to scare than to fulfill any safety remit.

They rode in to fight the Four Horsemen: pornographers, mafiosi, drug dealers and terrorists. Depending on the feed, their mission was to arrest high-profile Zetas who’d gone to ground in Akron; to rescue trafficked children from a pimp ring; to neutralize a Z-Word factory that was pumping out unprecedented quantities of the latest zombinol analog; or, of course, to capture domestic extremists who were working to establish an American Caliphate along with known terrorist cells in Michigan, Oregon, and Louisiana.

Whichever one they were fighting, they prepared for the worst. “Targeted” strikes took out twenty-two buildings in ten minutes, reducing them to rubble and showering the streets with lethal rains of falling stones. One of the buildings was a hospital, formerly derelict and since reopened by walkaways and allies, with a maternity ward and a palliative care ward where patients chose the manner of their deaths. The war of words about this building was especially heated – it was alleged to be a breeding ground for bio-agents (which walkaway nets insisted were vaxx printers that made ebola and H1N1 vaccine without licenses), a “murder clinic” and a “rogue surgery operation.” The default nets didn’t mention the maternity ward.

The boots-on-the-ground phase started before the dust settled, literally: pacifier bots that tazed anyone believed to be carrying a weapon or whose facial biometrics were a “sufficient” match for a “high-value target.” Once a bot zapped someone, it broadcast loud messages warning everyone to keep clear, then stood guard over the unconscious victim until a snatch-squad arrived by ground-effect or sky-hook.

The walkaway net in Akron suffered a cyberwar attack, first missiles that took out the fiber head-ends, then RF-tropic aerostats that homed in on wireless masts and blasted them with pulses of noisy RF. The RF noise-floor in the city limits rose to the point where all devices began to fail.

That was the push; then came the push-back. The walkaways and Akronites who’d assumed control of the city planned for this kind of shock/awe. They had bunkers, aerostat-seeking autonomous lasers, dark fiber backups that linked up to microwave relays far out of town, offline atrocity-seeking cameras that recorded footage automatically when the network went dark, crude HERF weapons that stored huge amounts of solar energy whenever the sun shone, ready to discharge it in a powerful whoomf the moment they sensed military spread-spectrum comms.

Once the word got out about Akron, there was online pushback, too. Walkaways all over the world battered at the comms and infrastructure of the contractors in the vanguard, the DHS, the DoD, the White House internal nets, the DNC’s backchannels, Seven Eyes chatter nets – the whole world of default super-rosa and sub-rosa connectivity. Walkaway backbones prioritized traffic out of Akron, auto-mirrored it across multiple channels.

This was all to script. For a decade, walkaway had been allied with monthly gezis that popped up in one country or another. They’d made a science of responding to authoritarian enclobberments, regrouping after every uprising to evolve new countermeasures and countercountermeasures against default’s endlessly perfected civil order maintenance routines.

The difference was these walkaways were getting the full treatment. Not that default hadn’t gone total war on walkaway before, but walkaway had always solved the problem by walking away. Default had produced an endless surplus of sacrifice zones, superfund sites, no-man’s-lands and dead cities for walkaways. To a first approximation, all blasted wastelands were fungible.

Staying put was not walkaway doctrine, but there were plenty of other people in the planet’s recent history who’d evinced an irrational, deep attachment to the real-estate where they’d most recently ground to a halt. The tactics were understood.

Every gezi ended the same. Clouds of tear gas, lack of food and medicine; mounting injured and mealymouthed promises of zottas lured everyone off the streets and into what was left of their homes. Insignificant concessions were made and everyone agreed something had been done and it was time to move on.

Everyone knew that wasn’t where these walkaways were headed. Even zottas. Especially zottas. The shock/awe phase was the most brutal ever, lethals and less-lethals mixed indiscriminately. Even the tamest default press was kept away due to fears of cooties and other bio-agents. Ohio’s governor suspended the state legislature until the “emergency” concluded.

It was nerve-wracking. Walkaway footage from Akron had a desperate vibe. Every face, even the brave ones, looked doomed. The brave ones were the worst.

Dis knew some people in Akron. There was a Dis in Akron, or had been. She’d recently synched with her twin and feared for her, which was irrational. The meat-people she knew had been backing up since the Akron project was declared. This was the most worrying thing. Walkaways stood their ground because they did not fear death. Though she’d never say it to anyone – not even another Dis instance – she thought of the Akronites as a death-cult. They were fearless suicides who’d been guaranteed an afterlife. Default feeds hinted this, without saying it, because official default position was that uploading – walkaway uploading, anyway – was smoke and mirrors. They were chatbots with idiosyncratic vocabularies, just convincing enough to trick gullible and desperate extremists who’d turned their back on everything.

Dis was grand-matron to these walkaways and everyone who thought death was another way of walking away from zottas and their demented ideas about wealth only ever mattering if you had more than everyone else. They were her spiritual children. She represented proof that death was the beginning, not the end. She’d never told anyone to take a backup and throw themselves into enemy cross-hairs. She hadn’t had to. Her existence was enough.

There must be so many Dises running in default’s cyberwar labs. That was how they thought. She’d be the ultimate captive. All it would take to torture her into compliance was a tweak to the parameters of her even-keeled lookaheads, so existential terror smashed her again and again, beneath its high waves, without drowning her. The knowledge of her legion of sisters being grotesquely tortured made her furious – without making her rage, thanks to the lookahead safeguards. She wondered if her tortured sisters experienced the intensity that she was missing, whether they secretly enjoyed it a tiny bit.

It was impossible to know who was “winning” in Akron. Like all gezis, it was a war of perception and a military conflict. Would default’s rank-and-file see just-desserts when Akron was smashed flat? Or would they see a default victory as a tormenting Goliath grinding Davids like them underfoot? Would guerrillas be seen as plucky Ewoks taking down Imperial Walkers, or as terrorists using IEDs to kill whey-faced American patriots? Default was media savvy. The only press with money to cover anything was underwritten by the same conglomerates that owned the contractors on the invaders’ vanguard.

Every gezi ended with mixed defeat. Every gezi sent more people to walkaway, convinced no reform would rescue default. Convinced people on top couldn’t contemplate a world where no one had to be poor to make them rich. Every gezi ended with great numbers of people scared into another season of submission, a thumb on their scales that overbalanced the risk of speaking out and made going along to get along tolerable.

What effect would Akron’s martyrs have? Would fence-sitters become furious with the slaughter and rush to the streets because they wanted no part of the system that did this? Would it terrorize them into sitting still, lest they join the dead? Would they be convinced that it was suicidal to oppose default, regardless of mystical beliefs in “the first days of a better nation” and electronic afterlife?

“Did you see this?” Limpopo paged her from the party room where preparations were nearly complete. It was hung with improvised bunting, retrofitted for thundering dance music and feasting from extruders that cycled through the delicacies of walkaway’s vast store of recipes.

“Akron? It’s terrible.”

She watched Limpopo through sensors – visible light, lidar, electromagnetic. Etcetera was with her, eyes glued to a screen he’d uncrumpled from his shirt-cuff and stuck onto the side of a beer keg. Etcetera held Limpopo’s hand. A pang/not-pang of loneliness visited Dis, a ghost-ache for physical sensation and the hand of a lover.

“Akron is worse than terrible.” During the storm, the party room filled up with people who’d worked on the machines, music, and food while the nets were down. Now the connectivity was flooding back, they’d returned to their screens. It was a weird hybrid of ancient and modern rhythms. Ancient people worked when the sun shone, slept when it sank, stayed inside when storms blew, and plowed when they cleared. Walkaway nets were environmentally disruptable, and nondeterministic networks, so they did the same: endlessly communicated and computed when networks were running, did chores when weather or the world blew the networks down.

Everyone in the party room was glued to a screen or an interface, some in small groups, some on their own. They flung feeds at each other, whispered excitedly, spooling messages for walkaways in Akron, Stay safe Stay brave You are in our hearts What they do to you they do to us We will never forget you.

“Wish I had your software controls.” Limpopo’s breath was ragged. There were more deaths in Akron, fresh revelations as a drone flew over a bomb site where mechas were shifting rubble, recovering bodies and parts of bodies. The first feed died when the drone was shot down. This attracted a flock of suicide drones that sacrificed themselves to capture and transmit whatever the powers of default did not want to be seen. More shots brought them down. High-altitude drones winged in, the feeds jerkier because they recorded from a greater distance, with not-quite-stabilized magnification. There were children in the rubble. Limpopo cried. Etcetera cried. Dis wanted to change their feed, show them the doxxings popping up in darknet pastebins, personal facts of the lives of the contractors and soldiers whose faces were tagged from the footage, open letters written to their mothers and fathers, spouses and children, asking how they could do this to their fellow human beings.

These doxxings were also from the gezi playbook. Sometimes they worked. Even when they didn’t, unexpected things happened. Kids left home, leaked their parents’ private documents implicating their superiors, publishing secret-above-secret rules of engagement with instructions to use lethals when cameras were off, to bury evidence, or implicate insurgents in atrocities. Sometimes parents disowned children who’d done zottas’ dirty work, publicly disavowing slaughter. It split families and communities, but it also brought new ones together. It was controversial because it implicated so many innocents and was a dirty trick, but it was okay with Dis. Even when she’d been alive, she’d been willing to break those eggs to make her omelet. As a dead person running on servers around the world, including several hostile to her and everything she believed in, she couldn’t work up a mouthful of virtual spit in sympathy for people who felt sad that Daddy was exposed as a war criminal.

Kersplebedeb quietly typed on a keyboard and muttered into a mic.

“We should be ready to go.” He put his arms around Etcetera’s and Limpopo’s shoulders. “There’ve been more attacks. Two in Ontario, three in PEI, a couple in northern BC, and Nunavut. Some were big and some small, but none of them expected it. A couple were stable, one in PEI was twenty years old, had a good relationship with the normals around them. It’s gone now, not even a crater. Scraped clean.”

Dis said, “Have you heard anything specific about Thetford? Is anything incoming?” She spoke out of Limpopo’s bracelet, turning herself up loud enough for Kersplebedeb. He blinked and absorbed the fact that she was there.

“Nothing,” he said. “There’s almost nothing in the air right now, so if something was coming, we wouldn’t see it. If something’s coming, the snow might have stalled it. I think we should be ready to go if and when. I never believed in the Big One, but this feels like a Medium One.”

“What’s the Big One?” Dis nearly leaped in to answer Etcetera, but she let Limpopo in.

“It’s first-generation walkaway stuff. The theory was default would decide we were too dangerous to exist and they’d stage a coordinated attack on all of us, all at once. Kill or arrest everyone, end the movement in one go. They’ve got the spook power to know who and where we all are, so the only thing that stops them is whim or lack of gonadal fortitude.”

Etcetera said, “I thought it was just me who worried about that.”

“It used to be hotly debated. We thought they’d wipe us out. Then they didn’t, and didn’t, and didn’t. We speculated, were they not willing to risk the good boys and girls of default deciding this ruthlessness couldn’t be abided, taking to the streets with pitchforks? Was it that they liked to have the goats and sheep self-sorted? Did they secretly slum and ogle flesh in the onsen and eat extruder-chow and drink coffium and play bohemian dropout? Were there too many zottas’ kids in walkaway, too much blue blood to be spilled in the Final Solution?”

“I hate Kremlinology,” Etcetera said. “It obsessed my parents. Second- and third-guessing what the real powers behind Anon Ops were and who pulled their strings and why.”

Kersplebedeb: “It’s not my favorite, either, but there’s a difference between obsessing over tea-leaves and trying to figure out if the next missile is headed your way. Let’s get supplies packed and stashed by the doors, vehicles checked and charged, make sure everyone’s got a suit.”

“We can’t object to that.” Limpopo got Etcetera’s screen down and stuffed it into a pocket. “Dis, can you help? Get the word out, throw up a git to track what’s done and what needs doing?”

“Already doing it.” Dis never stopped believing in the Big One. No one who’d worked on uploading and simulation had – it was the unspoken motivation behind the project, only way you could be sure zottas wouldn’t genocide is if they knew that you’d come back as immortal ghosts in the machine to haunt them to the ends of the earth.

Even as she did it, she worried about Akron, and wondered what was happening with Tam and Gretyl and Seth.

[XIII]

SETH’S ALARM ROUSED him to check on the snow every hour, first to see if it was safe to get moving; second to ensure he wasn’t entombed under an immovable drift. The other two set theirs at twenty-minute offsets. He managed to doze off the first hour in the uncomfortable cocoon. The chime woke him with a violent start. He experienced near-panic while he tried to figure where the exact fuck he was. Terror so adrenalized him that he wasn’t drowsy when he went back in, so he played an old acoustic minigame he’d been addicted to as a kid, matching the rhythm and pitch of the tones in his earbud with finger-taps and whistles.

The suit’s interface surfaces were three generations removed from the ones the game was designed for, and were specialized for wildly different purposes to the surfaces he’d grown up with. The game was a lot harder until he tweaked the way the interfaces registered.

Playing made him nostalgic for the hundreds of hours he’d logged on the game, until he remembered why he’d stopped playing – he’d beaten another kid, Larry Pendleton, to whom he was peripherally connected, part of the same massive grade-nine class at Jarvis Collegiate. He didn’t know Larry well, but they sometimes were in the same groups, and he’d figured Larry was, if not cool, at least not a turd.

But then Larry said, “Hey, good game, Seth. Guess you’ve got a natural advantage, though.”

Everyone either didn’t understand what Larry meant, or pretended they didn’t. Seth understood, immediately: “Because you’re black, you’re better at rhythm games. Because you know, black people got rhythm, everyone knows—” Seth saw Larry dropped the remark in a way calculated for plausible deniability, wiggle room to claim it wasn’t racial, that Seth was being over-sensitive and social-justicey.

The unspoken deal with his white friends was he wasn’t allowed to talk about being black, except for the lightest of jokes. To acknowledge he was the black guy in their white crowd was tantamount to accusing them of racism: Why am I the only black face here? It was a deal everyone understood and no one spoke of, especially the Asian and Desi kids in their cadre, because everyone was supposed to be race-blind and being the Angry Minority was a buzzkill for everyone.

He boiled with shame and anger at fucking Larry Pendleton, who was decades away in default and maybe dead of something antibiotic resistant or in jail or working a precarious job and hoping he didn’t get fired, which was all any of them were doing. But he jammed down the shame and anger of pretending he hadn’t noticed the racism, pretending he wouldn’t always be probationary.

He spent the hour thoroughly asking himself whether he was a black guy or a walkaway, or a black walkaway, or something else, or all of the above. It was not a question he often asked. Thinking about it made him angry. He didn’t like being angry. He liked being funny and horny, carefree, perennially underestimated, which had many advantages. Being thought of as harmless – “he’s a black guy, but he’s cool, doesn’t make a big deal of it” – was something he’d cultivated early on. It meant he heard and saw things his black friends didn’t see. A lot of it was casual racism. Some of it was good. He got to be more than his skin.

Being stuck in a box was driving him fucking crazy. All he could think about was skin-color. He couldn’t even see his skin in the dark. Then there was the rhythm game, Thumperoo, which he’d played the whole time, until his wrists felt RSI-ish.

He checked the time. Forty-one minutes until he was scheduled to stick his head out. He sighed. His wrists hurt too much to keep playing and –

The hatch opened and above him grinned the face of Tam, sun glinting off her visor, obscuring one of her eyes and one of her cheekbones. But he’d know those lips anywhere.

“Come on, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s here to wake your ass up.”

She helped him out. The storm-clouds had blown away, leaving blue skies, darkening with impending dusk. Slanting late sun made the fresh powder glitter like it had been dusted with diamond chips. Gretyl stood in powder up to her thighs. She flopped on her back and made an angel. “Thank god that’s over. Vuku jebina!”

He cupped his hands over his visor – for effect – and howled.

“The wagon won’t make it back until this freezes or melts. It’s snowshoes from here.” Gretyl brushed snow off the tarp they’d put over the survival gear when they’d dumped it out to make room for their bodies.

She tugged at the tarp. Seth and Tam slogged over to help. They sorted through the neat bundles until they found snowshoes. None of them had ever assembled the shoes, and they couldn’t figure it out. Seth rooted further until he found an aerostat and sent it up, looking for walkaway signals to bridge to the suits. They watched it putter, spinning and tacking, receding to a dot on the darkening sky. Their suits started to make welcoming, subliminal interface buzzes as they in-spooled and out-spooled messages. They brushed away the incoming alerts for a minute, clearing stuff until they could get the snowshoe FAQs.

Gretyl got there first. She threw a shoe frame atop the snow in a particular way, so it landed partially embedded, then she clicked a mechanism none of them had figured out was clickable until they saw the video. The shoe sprang open and sent powder up in a pretty flurry, lying flat on the surface. She spread the bindings, then did the same with her other shoe.

Seth and Tam got their shoes spread out, too. They all engaged in involuntary slapstick as they struggled to put them on. Eventually, Tam came to Seth, who had fallen into the snow and was half-submerged with legs in the air. She seized one of his feet and shoved it into the bindings, then did the other, then hauled him upright. He lifted the shoes clear of the snow and set them atop it, and found to his delight that he stayed on the powder, which creaked beneath the shoes’ webbing. He gave Tam a double thumbs up and she handed him her shoes and flopped onto her back and stuck her feet in the air.

He wasn’t as good at putting them on as Tam but that was okay. The clear skies, the entombment in the cargo pods, and the thought of a walk through the woods on these cool-ass outdoor prostheses made them giddy. He wished he could take her into a pod, get naked, and fuck her brains out. It was a comforting randiness. The suit was surprisingly accommodating of his erection. He contrived to brush his hand over Tam’s crotch as he helped her up – this was something they did often, with the ardor of school kids who’ve just found their first fuck-buddies and can’t believe that they’ve got all the ass they want on tap, 24/7 – but the suits were too padded for him to tell if she had a boner, too. He decided she did – she’d changed her hormones recently and hard-ons were a welcome side-effect of the new regime they both enjoyed.

They held hands – she squeezed, which made him even hornier – and approached Gretyl, who scowled at her shoes, having tramped a wide circle as she tried to put them on. They flanked her and she looked from one to the other.

“Oh no,” she began, then Tam put one snowshod foot behind her and Seth pushed and over she went, legs in the air, howling in mock-outrage. They clipped the shoes to her feet as she giggled, pulled her upright.

Seth looked at his heads-up, pulled up the way-finder, and pointed. “Thataway,” he said.

They tramped on. As the sun set, they activated nightscopes, and watched the starlight and enhancement algorithms turn everything milky, glowing – a fairyland.

[XIV]

NATALIE NAPPED A lot. Maybe she was depressed, or maybe it was dope in her food, though Dis didn’t find any record of that anymore in the patient management stuff in control-central.

Maybe it was her mind’s defense mechanism, shutting down in the face of boredom and frustration. Her friends said they’d come get her. Gretyl promised, but days had passed since she’d heard from them. Her father stopped visiting. She didn’t know if that was because she’d gotten under his skin, or because he’d blown town for some business, which was the sort of thing he’d always done. Mom and Cordelia visited for regular, sterile half-hours. Every time they left, she swore next time, she’d freeze them, sit in stony silence.

But then they arrived and opened with rehearsed pleasantry – “Oh, Natty, it’s been such a day—” and smile, and she was a Redwater girl among Redwater girls, the sisterhood of ladies who lunch and who would never be allowed to be more than that. Her mother missed Greece, and often passed the whole half-hour in a monologue about a particular boat captain, or wonderful honey, or a shrine a Greek family brought her to, approached by knee-walking pilgrims who wore painter’s knee-pads to protect themselves as they humped up the hill to the icon of Madonna in the humble building.

Cordelia talked about school, professors, and a boy – a man, she said – whom Jacob would never approve of. It was easy to hold up her end of these conversations. All she had to do was nod and make noises and not stand and scream it was bullshit, everything Cordelia dedicated her life to was worse than a sham, fueled by delusional conviction that the money, power, and privilege of the Redwaters was something they’d earned – and therefore, everyone without lovely money and power and privilege hadn’t earned it.

Sometimes, the merc came in. Natalie had listened carefully for someone to mention her name. She desperately wanted to know. The merc was a bridge between worlds. She had to live in the real world where privilege was obviously undeserved. How could she meet clients and not know? She had to be able to make it not matter, because her paycheck depended on her not letting herself care, on understanding walkaway well enough to snatch them. The merc wasn’t her friend, but she was important.

No one called her by name. When Jacob wanted her, he changed the pitch of his voice, switching to a command tone he always used on bodyguards. It was different from the command tone he used on domestic servants, more militarized, like he was LARPing a blue-jawed sergeant in a war-movie. When Mom wanted the merc, she switched to her wheedling tone, the “do me a favor” voice, less gracious for the iron-clad conviction the favor would be done.

Cordelia never spoke to the merc. She treated her as if she were invisible, a walking C.C.T.V. If she ever looked at the merc, it was with fear.

The merc was key.

The next time the merc came in – bringing in a basket with snack-food, fresh underwear and shirts, and a pointless shatterproof vase of unseasonal hothouse flowers that had undoubtedly originated with her mother – Natalie locked eyes with her.

“We could do a side-deal. No one would have to know, not at first. They can’t keep me here forever. Eventually they’ll get bored of the crazy sister in the attic and ship me to a nut-hatch and kick you out on your butt. If I can get out, I can get a contingency lawyer to harass them into unlocking my trust fund. You know how I feel about money, you’ve seen how I want to live. I’d sign it over to you. Air-tight and irrevocable. It’s more than they’re going to pay you, more than they could ever pay you. A fortune. A dynastic fortune, the kind that will still be intact when you’re an old lady and your kids are fighting over your deathbed for the dough.

“I’m sure you’re thinking if you did this you’d be radioactively fucked. That’s why I’m offering you the whole package: life without having to work another day, ever. Automatic deposits, every month, for you, your kids, their kids. The way the trust is written, there’s a good chance that when Mummy and Daddy kick the bucket, there’ll be fresh dough in the trust, even more for you and yours. All they can offer you is a bed under the stairs – I’m offering to turn you into a zotta.”

The merc looked at her.

Natalie smiled. “You know I mean it.” She hesitated, because this part was dangerous, if she’d misjudged the woman. “There’s no video of this conversation. Check for yourself, then let’s deal.”

A maybe-smile crossed the merc’s face, so subtle Natalie might have been kidding herself. She set the basket down and backed out, like she always did, with that confident stride that said, I’m not afraid of you, this is just best-practices.

As soon as the door clunk-clunked, Dis said, “That was...”

“I know. I’m sick of being a fucking damsel. Princess Peach sucks. I wanna be Mario. It’s been weeks. This isn’t going to get better. Dad isn’t going to wake up and say, ‘What the fuck was I thinking? Nice people don’t kidnap their daughters!’ If I can’t fake capitulation, he’s going to bury me in some deep hole, a boot camp for rich bitches where they shave your head and make you crawl in mud until you mewl for mercy and then they send you home with a zombinol pump in your appendix and your smile stapled on with sutures.”

“But if she rats you out, they’ll catch me.”

“So what? If you’ve pwned them as thoroughly as you say, they’ll have a hell of a time rooting you out – in the meantime, they’ll have to move me, which might be a chance to get away. You’re backed up. Getting caught isn’t the death penalty – just email your diff file to another instance. You can walkaway. That’s the whole point of the Dis Experience.”

Dis was silent. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“You think I can’t handle it.”

“I don’t think anyone could handle it, or should have to handle it alone.”

Natalie remembered how glad she’d been when Dis first spoke, the relief of having an ally. Even not knowing whether Dis was compromised, whether Dis herself could tell if she had been compromised, it had been such a relief. Before Dis, she’d been so isolated that she’d cracked up.

“Having you here kept me from doing more to help myself. You’re my Deus Ex, promising salvation from afar. I was going insane before you got here, because I was in an insane situation. I’ve been sane since – even though my situation’s more fucked up. That’s not a good thing.”

Another machine silence. Natalie remembered when Dis was a fragile, cracked-up simulation, how she’d gentled her while she worked on the problem of her own sanity. There was a symmetry in Dis returning the favor.

“I’m not a sim, Dis. I’m a human being. I’m cracking up because my situation is terminally fubared.”

Could a sim cry? There was a thickness to Dis’s voice: “I understand.”

“Are you okay? You shouldn’t be able to feel sad, right?” She was alarmed, thinking of how spectacularly off the rails Dis could go, remembering the terrifying personality disintegrations at the end.

“I think so. I – There’s a bunch of us, a bunch of Dises, who’ve been trying to loosen the strings on our personalities. Gretyl’s work on lookaheads lets us do it. When we started, we were sparing with lookahead, steering clear of the banks, trying to go down the middle. We’re so much better at lookaheads – the code’s getting tighter – we’re working with wider ranges, closer to the edges.”

In spite of herself, Natalie was fascinated. “But why?”

Even as she asked it, she understood. Isn’t that just what she was doing? Finding madness to let her meet terror with terror, meet the impossible with the uncompromising?

“Because I’m not me. That was the one thing we promised ourselves we wouldn’t say. Everyone is counting so hard on simulation. It’s everyone’s plan B, their escape hatch. The more time I spend in this – situation – the less certain I am that I’m still me.”

“Of course. Not having a body, being transubstantiated to software, that has to change you. Like being stuck here changed me.”

“I don’t mean I haven’t been changed. I expected I’d be changed. I’ve been around. We outgrew the ‘if I cut off your finger, wouldn’t you still be you?’ word game years ago. I’d still be me, but a different me. If you kept chopping away by centimeters until there’s nothing left but machine, I’d still be me, but I’d be a me that was traumatized and changed.

“The ‘me’ that counts isn’t just a me I can recognize. It’s a me I want to be. If the only way to be me in silicon is to be a me that only manages not to hate myself by literally refusing to allow myself to think the thought that I should be thinking, then fuck that.”

“I almost understood that,” Natalie said, smiling despite herself. “Sorry, I don’t mean to joke—”

“It is funny, in a what-the-actual-fuck way. But it’s terrifying. There’s so much riding on my stupid existential crises—”

“That must be terrible.”

“I mean, fuck, I’m an immortal machine-person who can be in hundreds of places at once. I haven’t been imprisoned by my father. I haven’t been kidnapped from my lover. I have no business whining, just because I’ll be lonely if I can’t be with you—”

“I’ll miss you, too, if they nuke you.” A thought occurred. “Do you think they could capture you and fuck with your parameters to torture you?”

“No, that’s the one thing I’m dead certain of. I’m all dead-man’s-switches. If they fuck with me, I’ll be securely erased before they know it.”

“That’s a relief. I’ll miss you, but we’ll talk again. I’m getting out, no matter what. When I do, you’ll be there.”

“I’m sorry for being needy. I’m a shitty robot. It’s just—” Another pause. Did Dis throw these in for dramatic effect? Was she doing a gnarly lookahead? The voice that came next was so soft that Natalie barely heard it. “No one knows me like you. No one’s seen me in the raw, without rails on my sim. No one can understand the full possibility-envelope of all the ways of being me, and how constrained those possibilities are in the me I am today.”

Her palpable sorrow – her voice synth had gotten so good – ripped Natalie. Her eyes flooded. She wiped furiously. She didn’t want to be hobbled with concern for someone else’s welfare. She wanted to look after herself.

The thought snagged like a fishhook. It was a Jacob Redwater thought. A default thought. A zotta thought. It was not a walkaway thought. It was the kind of thought she’d spent years learning to unthink. It was so easy to be a special snowflake and know her misery mattered more than everyone else’s. That could be true. Jacob lived a life where his happiness trumped all others’. But it only worked if you armored yourself against the rest of the world. To build a safe-room in your heart.

“I love you, Dis.” She didn’t know if it was true, but she wanted it to be true. She wanted to love everyone. Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals. “I love you for who you are now, and for who you are when you’re losing your shit. They’re both you.”

Machine silence. It stretched. She was about to speak, but clunk-clunk the door unlocked. The merc came in, carrying a tray with a carafe of – long experience told her – lukewarm, shitty coffium that had been denatured of the good stuff.

The merc closed the door, clunk-clunk, and spun the carafe’s top. The liquid inside steamed in a way that the drinks she was allowed as a prisoner never steamed. She remembered the smell from childhood, cottage trips with Redwater cousins from the dynastic branch, with implanted tracking chips and bodyguards. It wasn’t coffium, it was coffee – prize beyond measure, beans grown in specially isolated fields tended by workers who were microbially screened twice a day for the first signs of blight.

The merc set the tray down on Natalie’s breakfast table, arranged two china cups, poured – volatile aromatics filled the room with impossible, vivid smells.

“Cream?” She’d spoken so few words that the voice surprised her. Warm, deeper than Natalie remembered. Was there an accent, a hint of a roll on the r?

“Not if that’s what I think it is.” She sniffed more deeply. “Yergacheffe?” A cousin – older, well-traveled – taught her to pronounce it with a soft y, a rolled r, a hard ch and a breathy h at the end. It sprang from her lips with ease, a status marker in four syllables. The smell was unmistakable, a fruitiness and acidity that was nothing like other storied beans, the fullness of Blue Mountain, the acid fruitiness of bourbon. Her mouth watered.

“That’s what it said on the bag.” There was an accent, maybe Eastern European. Growing up, she’d heard a lot of those accents – kids whose parents made fortunes doing nonspecific “entrepreneurial” things. Like the true Redwater cousins, these kids had bodyguards, who also spoke with the accent, only thicker. “The cook sent down a grinder and a press.”

She sipped, eyes closed, lost in reverie. Natalie saw she was lovely in a predatory way. Not hot – not her type – but maybe someone you’d model a video game character on in a specific type of video game aimed at a certain kind of boy. “It’s the first coffee I’ve drunk in Canada. Only get it in Africa, usually. Chinese bosses always insist on it.”

There’d been a Chinese–Nigerian girl in high school, guarded more heavily than the Russian kids. She had a short temper, and woe betide anyone foolish enough to ask to touch her hair, which Natalie understood. Her name was Sophie. Natalie hadn’t seen her since graduation, but she sometimes thought about the stories Sophie told about the floating super-cities off Lagos where she’d been raised, hopping from one aircraft-carrier-sized walled garden to another.

Natalie reached for her coffee. Her hands shook. She wished they didn’t. She raised the cup and didn’t spill. She was out of practice with real hot beverages, but managed to sip. It was very hot, and flavorsome in a way that “bitter” didn’t capture. It tasted nothing like coffium, except you could see where one was related to the other in an indefinable way. There was an oiliness to it she hadn’t anticipated. Mouth feel. Another class marker, knowing those two words and having the confidence to use them without feeling bourgie. The dynastic Redwaters could say “mouth feel” without batting an eye, and memorably, cousin Sarah used it to describe a boy she’d met at boarding school in Donetsk.

She swallowed. Caffeine was so primitive, she expected it to cudgel her like a caveman, but the high, which came on fast, was surprisingly good, a tingling with a smooth peak and a mellow comedown. No one did caffeine anymore. There were options for getting up. It was such a genteel zotta thing, like sherry and cream tea. The zottas had been hoarding the best stuff.

She drank more. The up was so clean. It steadied her nerves, made her want to move.

“My name is Nadie.” The merc held out a strong, small hand that gripped hers with calibrated firmness.

“I’m – Iceweasel.”

Nadie smiled, small square teeth. “I know. We were inside your nets for two days before I took you. Wasn’t hard.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” Iceweasel said. “We want people to read the public stuff. Almost everyone isn’t a zotta, which means that almost everyone should join the walkaways.”

“Some zottas join, too.” Nadie had this Russian – Bulgarian? Belarusian? – deadpan thing, the corner of her mouth a precursor to a smirk, a deniable microexpression that registered nevertheless.

“Some do.”

“I’m interested in the information security aspect of our earlier conversation.”

“Does that mean we have a deal?”

“No.” Nadie’s microexpression flickered. “We don’t have a deal. Calm yourself.” She pointed to a readout on the bed that alerted as Iceweasel’s heart-rate and endocrine signifiers thwacked the red zone.

Iceweasel made herself breathe. Nadie was playing head games. That’s what she’d done from the start. It would be delusional to hope for anything else.

“I’m calming.”

“I want to know about infowar. I know you had no jailbroken devices you could use to probe and pwn the safe-room. I searched you. No one who comes in is allowed to bring anything that could be used to launch an attack, except your father, and even he submits to an inventory whenever he leaves. The attack came from outside, which should be setting off IDS alarms. That’s not happening. There’s something very bad that I never noticed. This makes me feel foolish.”

“I don’t think less of you.”

A microexpression telegraphing dark amusement. The woman was a savant of emotion-hockey.

“I hope not. I hope you understand I’m a serious person, and I’m not your friend. I’m not your enemy, either, though I have been your opponent. I’m very good at what I do. Good enough that you want to be straight with me. Good enough that if we end up enemies, it should worry you.”

Her microexpression changed, a glint that made her feel frightened a centimeter below her navel. Like the fear she’d felt once, trekking near the B&B. There’d been a wolf. It looked at her in a way that made her certain it had mapped every possible thing she might do, anticipated countermoves. It effectively owned her. She was only breathing because it suffered her to. She tried to stay calm. The stupid bed-monitor ratted her out, its infographics redlining in her peripheral vision. She expected Nadie to smirk, or micro-smirk, but she held that bad-ass look for another moment.

“I see you understand. Let us talk about the network.”

Iceweasel felt for her bravery. “I don’t think so. I’ve given you knowledge of the network situation. Why should I give you something more?”

She nodded, acknowledging the point. “More coffee?” Subtext How about this black magic; a fair trade, wasn’t it?

“Absolutely.” Black liquid poured in a silky river from carafe to pot. “I’m still not going to tell you more about the network. Not until we have a deal.”

“It’s not a stupid position, though you know that now I can get to the bottom of it myself. My employers have procedures. They’ll pull everything in the building in twelve hours, take it away for forensics while new patched and locked stuff is installed here.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You’re counting on the fact I’ll get more money from freeing you than I would from helping your father.”

“I’m hoping for that. It helps that my father is an asshole. I’m hoping you find working for him so offensive that the chance to get away and fuck him over and help me and get rich is tempting.”

The micro-smirk returned: touché. “Your father is in a difficult position.”

“My father deserves to swing from a lamp post.”

“A difficult position, I think you’ll agree.”

“You didn’t disagree with my assessment.”

“I’ve seen people swing from lamp posts. It’s not nice.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

More coffee. The second caffeine rush wasn’t as good as the first, which she remembered hearing, caffeine adaptation was faster than with coffium’s cocktail of neuroticklers. You had to keep upping the dose to get to the same place, or wait out tedious refractory periods before you could recapture the rush.

“People swinging from lamp posts, huh?”

“Twice. I didn’t put them there.”

“Who did?”

“People like me, to tell the truth. People working for rich people, taking money under orders, to send a message.”

“What kind of message?”

“Don’t fuck with my boss or you’ll hang from a lamp post.”

“But you never hung anyone from a lamp post.”

“Never hung anyone from anything. That’s not my kind of work. I’ve been asked to do it.”

“You get to say no to that kind of boss?”

“I’m good at my job. I get to say, ‘Let me explain to you why this will make things worse. Let me explain how this will make people who don’t think you’re the enemy decide they have to kill you before you kill them. Let me explain what I can do to neutralize people who want to harm you.”

“You mean, infiltrate their networks, kidnap them—”

“Yes-no. Map the social graph, find the leaders, dox them, discredit them. Kidnap if you have to, but that makes martyrs, so not so much. Better to make them busy with fighting fires. I know other contractors who’ll crawl a culture’s chat-channels and boards and model the weak points, find the old fights that still simmer, create strategy for flaring them. So easy to infiltrate. Once they think they’re infiltrated, they point at one another, wondering who is a mole and who is true. It’s neater than bodies swinging from lamp posts. Tidier. Not so many flies.”

“Ha ha.”

“You don’t like it. I work for your enemies, destroy what you’re building.” She shrugged. “I don’t do it because I hate you. Sometimes I admire you, even. But I’m good at my job. If you want to succeed, you have to be good at your job. Someone else would do my job if I didn’t, so unless you’re better at your job than people like me are at ours, you’re doomed anyway.”

The infographic pulsed red. “I fucking hate that thing.”

“I don’t mind that you’re upset. I’m saying upsetting things. If I was you, I’d be upset. I understand you don’t do what you do for job, but for love. You want to save the world. Saving the world is good, but I don’t think you will manage. I don’t think anyone can. Human nature. If the world is doomed, I want to be comfortable until it goes up, boom.”

“It sounds like you’re saying you’re interested in my trust fund.”

“I am very interested in your trust fund, Natalie. Iceweasel. I believe there are structural challenges to getting my hands on it, but I also think there are people in my orbit who know how to make structural challenges go away. They will need paying, of course, but—”

“But you’ll be able to afford it.”

“I can afford it now. I am good at my job. I get well paid. My contacts would do it for commission, but that would be much more. I prefer to pay cash, even if that risks my money.”

She poured herself more coffee, brought it to her lips, didn’t drink, looked over the black mirror of its surface. Her hand was rock steady, her eyes cool as glacial ice. “You know I can find you. No matter where you go, what you do, I can find you.”

“I know you can.” I know you think you can.

“You may think, ‘My comrades have better opsec than this Russian muscle-head, see how they cut through the network perimeter, got inside her decision loop.’ You may think, ‘We can outsmart her now.’ Is that what you think?”

Red, red, red. Stupid infographic. “I don’t think that, but I wonder if it’s true.”

She sipped, put down the cup. “It might be true. I don’t think so. Defense is a harder game than offense. Defense, you have to be perfect. Offense, you just need to find one imperfection. Here I am defender. When I hunt you, you are the defender. You will make mistakes. Your philosophy isn’t about perfect, it’s not about discipline.”

It takes mental discipline not to delude yourself.

“It doesn’t matter. If you understand anything about me, you understand I don’t give a shit about money. If I could put it in a pile and set fire to it, that’d be the only day I wouldn’t piss on it. I’m not going to outsmart you. If nothing else, having no money and none coming would alienate my father so deeply that he might stop trying to induct me into his cult of a family. Maybe he’ll adopt you.”

“I don’t think I’d let him.” Her microexpression was impossible to read. “I’m going to talk to the kind of people who do things with trusts and finances, so your father couldn’t undo them. You know if I say no, and you talk to your father about this, I can make your situation worse, in significant ways. You know I was able to track you, to solve your patterns. I took you without fuss. We know you don’t care for these people, but we also both know certain other people matter to you, such as your Gretyl—” The name made the infographics lose their shit. “I can find her as easily as I found you. The fact you were not hurt was a choice on my part. Do you understand these things?”

She was crying, and just hating herself for it. So foolish! To give this person such leverage over her, to be such a Pavlovian slave, just mention Gretyl’s name and the waterworks started.

She snuffled snot, savagely wiped her eyes, glared. The merc looked a little embarrassed.

“I don’t like to threaten. But it helps if you know I’m serious. That way we don’t have misunderstandings about balance of power. I am someone who pays attention to the balance of power. It’s my professional competence.”

“If you know anything about me, you know I just want to get the fuck out. I have no urge to screw up your job with my sociopathic family. If you think about it for one fucking second, Ms Balance of Power, you’d understand I don’t play games. I voluntarily told you I had pwned the network. I could have kept that a secret forever. I voluntarily handed over that power.”

“Of course, you’ve left me wondering what other secrets you have, which is why we’re having this discussion.”

“I don’t have any more secrets.” Oh, that fucking infographic.

She laughed. She was pretty when she laughed. Not scary at all. It was like the teenaged girl trapped inside her – before all the crazy-ass martial arts and BFG training – was shining through. “Of course you have secrets. We all have secrets, Iceweasel.”

[XV]

THEY WERE HALFWAY to Thetford when the alerts sounded, startling Seth out of a walking reverie. The network came back in earnest when they crested a ridge with a straight shot to three repeaters. Suddenly they were getting traffic that had spooled from way away, in multiple directions. Once their availability back-propagated to other spools, the data rushed in. There were a lot of messages for them.

Gretyl figured it out first: “Storm’s fucked the normal routes, all this stuff’s backed up. We should pound in a repeater. Anyone bring one from the wagon?”

Seth had. He climbed a tree, Gretyl and Tam helping, and drove the spike into the trunk about four meters up. Tam passed him up a hatchet and he hacked the branches around it, feeling twinges of guilt despite the trees around them as far as the eye could see. This one was no nicer than any other.

Tam helped him get the tie-downs into place and unfurled the solar sheet on the north face. Gretyl retreated into antisocial, computerized silence as she parsed the messages.

“Holy shitting fuck,” she said.

“What?” Seth shouted and nearly dropped the hatchet – visions of it embedding itself in Tam’s skull made him grab wildly – then nearly fell out of the goddamned tree.

They found out about Akron, all the other attacks, and hastily spooled messages to everyone they loved, all over the world, and lit out as fast as they could go, for Thetford.

Tam’s interface read to her while she walked and flicked through messages and videos, lagging behind Seth and Gretyl. Seth tried to hurry her, but she told him to fuck off. She had people in Akron and she was figuring out if they were dead.

Seth realized a lot of the B&B crew was in Akron. People he’d known, cooked with, fixed machines with, argued with. Some who’d welcomed him when he was a shlepper. Some he’d de-shlepped, initiating them into walkaway’s mysteries. One he’d briefly fallen in love with, who – he realized now – reminded him of Tam. Who knew he had a type?

He worried. It was all he could do not to ask Tam to look up his people, too. Gretyl wanted to get to Thetford, for all the good they’d do there.

Tam kept gasping and swearing and falling down in the snow and needing rescuing. Her batteries were getting low. So were his. Gretyl kept too far ahead for him to see her infographics, but she couldn’t have been rolling in juice.

“Come on, Tam. Nothing we can do out here. Gotta get back before dark, baby.”

“Fuck baby, the world’s burning.”

“Can’t it burn while we’re indoors with a toilet?”

“Fuck.”

They crested the last ridge and Tam shouted. He was about to give her hell for diving back into her tubes when he saw her pointing. They were on the highest ground for klicks. She pointed way out on the horizon. He squinted and Gretyl swore. He dialed up the visor magnification and saw a column of armored cars on caterpillar treads, sending up plumes of fresh powder behind them. They were skinned in snow-camou, but the plumes made it easy to pick out their edges.

“They’re heading to Thetford,” Seth said.

“No shit,” Tam said.

“I’m calling them now,” Gretyl said. They could see the space-station from the ridge, a hamster-run of tubes and domes nestled amid the ruins of the houses.

“They’ve got to get out of there now,” Tam said.

“I’m calling them,” Gretyl said, and her intercom shut down as she went private. They watched the armored column move. Belatedly, Seth scanned the sky for drones, and saw outriders ahead of the column, but flying at conservative distance ahead, maybe to keep the element of surprise intact. Or maybe the long-range outriders were high-altitude, and had receded to invisible pinpricks.

“Kersplebedeb says they were anticipating something like this.” Gretyl pointed down at the space-station, where now, airlocks were bursting open and suited-and-booted walkaways spilled out with packs and sledges in tow. “They got network service an hour ago, understood the Akron situation—”

“Our repeater,” Seth said.

“We bridged them in, they got the word. They’re not stupid. They’re ready to walk away.”

“Better be ready to run,” Tam said. The column drew closer.

[XVI]

DIS WAS IN Gretyl’s ears – all their ears at once – as they suited up and hit the airlocks, grabbing supplies that she’d directed them to gather and stash when the news came on. For obscure reasons Kersplebedeb kept calling her “Tiger Mother,” a private joke between them.

Dis told them to grab spare batteries for Tam and Seth and Gretyl, reminded them to empty their bladders and void their bowels before suiting up, reminded them of the two deadheading mercs that had come all the way from Walkaway U and would need to be packed out, and suggested an arrangement of sledges and bubblewrap and oversaw the production.

Dis chivvied them out the door, was in their ears as they slogged up the ridge while Tam and Seth and Gretyl came down, taking their loads.

Dis said good-bye as they slogged away, pulling their loads and shouldering their packs, clomping away on the space-station’s entire supply of snowshoes, in two ragged columns.

They reached the top of the ridge, crunch of the snowshoes as loud as a mouthful of potato-chips, and realized Dis said good-bye because she couldn’t come.

“I’ve emailed a diff of myself to another instance of me.”

“Not Remote?” Gretyl sounded alarmed. “Because that’s not so stable—”

“Not Remote,” Dis said. “There’s a repo for Dis instances on the walkaway cloud, mirrored forty ways. We can’t all run, of course, but at least we’ll be safe. For now.”

“Shit,” Tam said, with feeling. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“I’m leaving you. I’m racing ahead. You can download and run me, soon as you find a cluster. You meat-people be careful.”

Kersplebedeb said, “Tiger Mother, we’ve got our backups. We’re assured an ever-after afterlife in the sweet bye-and-bye. Nothing harder to kill than an idea whose time has come to pass. Takes more than guns to kill a man.”

“Always keep a trash bag in your car.” Dis sounded wryly amused. “Software immortality is nice, but if you can save your fleshy bodies, you should.”

“We’ll watch our butts.”

Seth ticked the privacy box. “I’m worried about you, Dis.”

“I’m worried about all of us. They’re hitting lots of places. Looking at those pics you sent, I think that’s Canadian army, special forces, the ones who do the bad things. Torture squads. Kind of thing you send if you don’t want any survivors.”

“A goose just walked on my grave.” Seth shivered again. He had a new power-pack, but felt awfully cold.

Tam touched his shoulder. She could see he was talking, and he must have looked a fright. He toggled to public.

“Just worried that this feels like something bad and worse.”

They moved slowly. All the stuff they shlepped was bad enough, but snowshoes made it worse.

“They’re gonna get us pretty fucking soon at this rate,” Seth said.

Kersplebedeb snickered. “No, they’re not.”

Seth hadn’t ever heard Kersplebedeb make such a sinister noise.

“Booby trap?”

“Not the sort that goes boom. Just a place under the main road where there was a mining cave-in. We fixed it so we could bring in supplies, but didn’t design it for those big tanks those fuckers have.”

“M.R.A.P.s,” Tam said. “Armored cars. Not tanks. No turrets.”

Kersplebedeb snickered again. “No difference. There’s a half-kilometer of rubble, tunnels, scree and sand, straight down, and they’re about to hit it.” He chucked them the feed from a drone they’d lofted on their way out the door. They stopped while they screened it on their visors. “Any minute now,” he said.

The fan-tail of snow and ice obscured the column, but Seth thought there were six of those things.

“Won’t they have lidar, checking for IEDs?”

“Probably. Don’t know if it’ll be good enough to tell solid civil engineering from our half-assed job, though. Shall we find out?”

Whoomf. The cave-in was both sudden – the ground giving way without warning – and rapid, as the cave-in rippled in concentric rings, almost too fast to follow. It was terrible and terrific, like the earth was swallowing them. The two M.R.A.P.s at the back of the column threw into frantic reverse, and the second-to-last smashed into the last, jolting it skeewhiff. The driver tried to straighten out – Seth couldn’t help but root for him, because the fucking earth was swallowing a giant machine and when it’s humans versus brute physics, only a sociopath roots for physics – but it was too late, especially as panicky Mr Second-To-Last went on to T-bone the wavering vehicle in reverse, and then the ground opened beneath both of them and they disappeared.

“Jesus,” Seth said.

Kersplebedeb muttered something.

“What?”

“Didn’t expect that. Thought they’d get stuck in a pit, not fall into the earth’s molten core.”

“Probably didn’t go that far,” Gretyl said. “I’m no geologist, but I think we’d have seen a splash of lava.” She was audibly shaken, whistling in the dark.

“Those tanks are super-armored,” Kersplebedeb said. “They’ll all be strapped in. There’ll be airbags.”

Tam put her arm around his shoulders. “Kersplebedeb, if they’re dead, they’re dead. You didn’t set a trap. They fucked up by bringing their giant macho-mobiles to the bush. Fuck, you know they’d have croaked us if they caught us.”

Kersplebedeb didn’t say anything. The radio let them hear his ragged breath.

“Come on,” Tam said. The refugees had stopped and news of the cave-in and the link for the recap spread. They were talking in clusters, looking at the sky as if vengeance might rain down. “As they say in the historical dramas, ‘shit just got real.’ If they get out of that hole, they’re coming for us. If they don’t get out of that hole, someone else is coming for us. We need to be gone.”

Winter dark was coming on.

“Where’s the cargo train?”

“Shit,” Tam said. “We haven’t even been able to tell you about that.”

Once they had, everyone decided that they should head to the cargo train. It had supplies and could carry the tired. Walkaways tried to travel light, but they weren’t masochists. If there was a machine that could be used to carry their load, so much the better.

“I miss the B&B,” Limpopo said, and Seth felt deep unease, because Limpopo was the gold standard in rolling with the punches. “The mechas, the onsen. The toilets. I think that when we get out of this, we should build another one.”

“Hell yeah,” Etcetera said. Seth realized how long it had been since they’d had a real sit-down, all-night, boozy chat, the kind they’d had so often as kids, as defaults. They both had girlfriends, but that wasn’t all. Etcetera was now serious in a good way, smart about stuff the way Limpopo was. Seth felt uncomfortable clowning with his old friend. But his old friend was a better person, energetic and not so self-doubting. He wore it well.

“Hell yeah!” Seth pumped his fist. Etcetera and he locked eyes and the bond of friendship crackled between them and Tam reached for his hand, still keeping an arm around Kersplebedeb. In that moment Seth thought they could eat the world for breakfast and call for seconds. “Let’s go.”

“Where, though?” Pocahontas had broken away from her group of younger people, standing before them and radiating confidence and youthfulness in a way that made Seth feel old and protective.

“To the wagon,” he said.

“And then?”

He shrugged.

Limpopo said, “I think we’ll figure it from there. Once we’ve got the wagon we’ll be more mobile. I’ve been checking other walkaways around and there’s plenty who might take us in, but everyone’s also worried they’ll be next.”

“They should be,” Pocahontas said. “We’ve seen this playbook before. It’s Idle No More all over again.” The old First Nations protest movement gained momentum over a period of years, banking down to embers for months at a time, then exploding in fiery gouts of smart, savvy events that were so well-turned that even the totally pwned default media couldn’t ignore ’em. Idle became an international shorthand for effective revolt and street protesters from Warsaw to Port-au-Prince to Caracas declared solidarity with it and used its iconography.

Until, in a series of coordinated swoops, the RCMP, Canadian army, FBI, and CSIS simply scraped Idle off the planet. Every significant leader taken away in chains, except for the ones who died in gory shootouts, choreographed violence framed by slick logos and sinister arpeggios to accompany the tense standoff coverage that led the feeds. The trials that followed revealed a network of informants and double-dealers inside the movement. That left the sidelined supporters feeling like patsies for supporting a group that had, apparently, been led by double agents.

In walkaway circles, Idle were still heroes. There were plenty of veterans living in walkaway. In the rest of the world, Idle had come to stand for the danger of discontent, an object lesson in how people who fought back couldn’t offer any alternative, were riddled with traitors and useful idiots, always and forever doomed before they started.

“Sure feels like it,” Limpopo said. She’d been there when Idle and early walkaways were on the verge of merging. “Now you mention it.”

Pocahontas said, “I think we should go to Dead Lake.”

“Why? They don’t need more trouble.”

Her snort of derision was epic. “They live in the bush, surrounded by air so toxic it can’t be breathed. Their neighbors are about to get napalmed. It doesn’t get worse.”

Limpopo nodded. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, be smart. They know the area in a way that none of us do. They’re likely to be in the cops’ cross-hairs, because they’re Idle vets and they hang out with us and they’re inconvenient witnesses. No one who mattered would give one single fuck if they were purged. They’re our friends and allies. We need those.”

“I’m sold.” Kersplebedeb sounded more energetic, but he was still shaken. A chorus of voices on the short-range radio joined him.

“Let’s go,” Pocahontas said, and Gretyl pointed her toward the cargo wagon.

[XVII]

LIMPOPO WATCHED JIMMY fade. He’d lagged from the start, struggling with frostbitten toes in unwieldy snowshoes. He’d rallied when she took his pack and redistributed its contents among the group. Then he flagged again. She tapped his suit and opened a private channel.

“We’ll put you on a travois, tow you.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re already towing those two fucking mercs and all this other shit. You don’t need to shlep me. Time’s wasting. I know where you’re headed. Just give me an extra battery and let me catch my breath, I’ll get to you in a day. If you move on, tell me where. I can look after myself.”

“We’re not the marines, but I don’t like leaving anyone behind. Those assholes are down the pit for now, but there’ll be more along and there’s safety in numbers.”

“No there isn’t.”

She shrugged. “There’s some safety in numbers. We’re not defenseless.”

“You’re also not particularly frightening.”

“We’ve scared someone.” She slipped his arm over her shoulders, took his weight. “Let’s have this argument while we walk, or we’ll get separated from the main group.”

“I’ve done really stupid things.” His voice was flat.

“Welcome to the human race.”

“What we did with the B&B—”

“That was a giant dick move, all right.”

“But the new one was even better, I hear.”

“It was. Gone now, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But the improvements got saved into the version-control. The next will be even better. Every complex ecosystem has parasites. Come on.” He’d slowed again, and his breath was rasping. Privately, Etcetera messaged to see if she needed help, and she pulled down a “go on, it’s okay” autoresponse with a flick of her eyes.

“I think I need a rest.”

“Let’s rest, then.” She dropped her pack, and helped him into the snow. He hissed in pain when she loosened his snowshoes.

“That bad?”

“It’s okay.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“It’s bad.”

“Better.”

She felt anxiety about the group getting away. She knew this was the right thing to do. If they couldn’t all make it together, they sure as shit wouldn’t make it separately.

“You know, I got recruited to turn traitor,” he said, after a long pause.

“How’d that go?”

“After the B&B collapsed – the original one, I mean. Guy met me on the road while I was heading for the US border. I thought I’d find these people who were bunkering with guns and canned goods, see if I couldn’t get them to bug in and save other people, instead of bugging out to save themselves. I’d heard about places where there were drug-runners’ tunnels you could slip through.

“I was on the road, three days. I’d set up a pop-shelter and was getting dinner on, scop out of a fab, when a woman turned up in my camp. Quiet as a ninja, dressed in tacticals, little side-arm I didn’t recognize on her hip. She invited herself over, squatted down next to my stove, warmed her hands. Looked me in the eye, said, ‘Jimmy, you seem like a smart guy.’ Which was funny. I’d fucked up on a colossal scale, taken something beautiful and turned it to shit by trying to impose my ideas on it.

“I get smartassy when I’m stinging, so I said something like ‘You should get out more, if I’m your idea of a smart guy.’

“She laughed and unclipped a squeeze flask. I smelled that it was good Scotch, Islay, smoky. She drank, passed it. It was good. ‘You had the right idea, but didn’t have a chance with that place. Too many fifth columnists working to undermine you. I was inside their network from day one, watching them closely, and I could show you chapter and verse how they fucked you. They say there are no leaders, but if you dig into it, it’s easy to see what Limpopo says, goes. She doesn’t give orders, but she sure as shit gets people to do what she wants. But you know that.’”

“What did they offer you?” Limpopo felt strangely flattered to learn she was subjected to this kind of scrutiny.

“Money at first, but I could tell she knew that wasn’t what I wanted. Then she offered me oppo research and support for getting back at you, which was the clincher for me.”

“You took her up on it?” This was beyond any confession she’d anticipated. She didn’t know whether to respect him for making it or smack him for his sins.

He laughed bitterly. “Are you fucking kidding me? You know the joke: ‘I’m here because I’m crazy, not because I’m an asshole.’ By the time the B&B collapsed under me – after getting into a fist-fight with a guy I thought was my best friend! – I figured out whatever problems I had were my own, especially since your new B&B was running fine a couple klicks down the road. It was an incontrovertible A/B split. The idea I would try it again, using this asshole merc’s intel to try and fuck you? I was an asshole, but at least I knew if it came down to a fight between this fucker and you, I’d be on your side.”

“I don’t fight, though.” She wondered if he was bullshitting her.

“You walk away.”

“Indeed.”

“You seriously, totally walk away.” He looked at the receding backs of the column, tried to lever himself up, grunted, sank down. “You’d better go on.”

“Fuck off.”

“Yeah, well.” He laughed. She peered through his visor. He had a lightyears-away look. “When you walked away from the B&B, I mean.” He laughed again. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “It was beautiful. I was so pissed at you then, felt like the world’s biggest asshole. You could not have ruined me more if you’d curb-stomped me. I never recovered.” Raspy breath. “Never recovered. I’d arrived with my gang, you saw them, boys who thought the sun shone out of my ass, completely bought into meritocracy, not just as a way of figuring out who got what, but as a way of solving all our problems.” Another faraway look.

“I don’t think you got that. My guys looked at the world like Plato, you know, The Republic. Every person has something he’s good at. You find those things and help those people get there and that makes everyone happy and productive and we’ll all be better. You don’t need to order people to do jobs they hate. Just use ranking to make sure that if you’re doing a job you’re no good at, everyone knows it, including you. You get a smaller share of the collective loot than you would if you were doing something you were better at.

“Once you get hold of this idea, you can turn it into math, model its game-theory, find its Nash equilibrium. It’s such a beautiful idea. It models perfectly. Under it, everyone is happier. Everyone gets nudged into doing the thing they’re best at, which is the best way to make everyone happy.

“When you walked away, when you didn’t even argue, you made it into bullshit. For weeks, we pretended it wasn’t. But you’d had a place where everyone took what they needed. You didn’t need to police it or give people tokens certifying they’d earned the right to be there. It just... worked.”

Limpopo adjusted her crouch in the snow, flopped onto her butt. Her calves ached from crouching. “Whoops!” She brushed the snow that showered from her snowshoes off her visor. “The stuff you’re describing, it’s the kind of thing people do in emergencies, when there’s rationing. It’s like the rules for a lifeboat captain, you know, barking orders to keep everyone in line so everyone gets out of it alive.”

“It’s funny: back when no one was sending tanks after me, I felt we were in a state of emergency. There was not enough to go around, at any moment we could be nuked or starving. Now I feel as soon as we find somewhere to stop, we’ll rebuild everything we’ve had and more. Like there’s no reason to ever turn anyone away.”

“Sounds like you got somewhere good.” She welled with sympathy for Jimmy, which was funny. Maybe not. She understood him better than he did. Under other circumstances, she could be him.

“I have. That’s weird, objectively, given where I am. But I’m backed up. I feel this incredible feeling, it’ll all be all right. We’re going to win, Limpopo.”

Someone trudged through the snow. Etcetera. She waved at him, blinked open a private chat. “It’s okay.”

“Good. Can I come over?”

“Course,” she said.

“He seems like a good guy,” Jimmy said.

“Glad you approve.”

“Didn’t mean it that way, but I do. He came back for you, which is what you’re supposed to do, if you’re looking out for people around you.”

“Like I came back for you.”

“Like you did. Not to rescue me. To take care of me because we’re part of the same thing.”

She bridged in Etcetera. “Jimmy, you’ve come a long way since we met, but you’re still coming along, if you don’t mind my saying. I came back to help you because helping people is what you do, whether or not they’re in your thing, because that’s the best world to live in.”

“First days of a better nation,” he said, with a little sarcasm.

“It’s only funny because it’s true,” Etcetera said, taking her hand.

“We make fun of it, but it’s the best way I know to live. I don’t always live up to it. You get a radar for it, if you practice. A Jiminy Cricket voice tells you if you make a bit of effort, you’ll feel better for it, know the world is a better place for you being in it.”

“I misspoke,” Jimmy said. She felt bad because they’d lectured him and the poor guy was about to lose his toes if he didn’t get firebombed first. But he hadn’t misspoken.

“It’s okay.”

Etcetera popped his visor, head wreathed in steam, rooted for a squeeziepouch of scop. “Want some? It’s spacie food, weird flavors. The rabbit is really good. For a cultured fungal slime.”

“You really sell it.” Limpopo remembered she had some shake-and-heat coffiums in her pack. She got those out and they sat around in the snow and ate, looking at each other’s bare faces while the wind did its best to blast off their skin. It rattled the branches. The sun was low on the horizon, a bloody plum running to overripe mush.

“We’d better get a move on,” Jimmy said.

“Good to go?”

“Good as I’ll ever be. Rest did me good. Food too.” He clicked his visor into place. “Company, too.”

She gave his shoulder a squeeze and helped get his feet into his snowshoes, taking care with the injured one. They got him to his feet, got shoed, and they set off after the column.

They moved slowly but well, at a steady clip. After a few minutes, Dis called. “You three okay?”

Limpopo said, “Just moving a little slower than the rest.”

“They’re a klick and a half ahead, almost at the cargo train. Gretyl says if they can get it moving, they’ll come back for you.”

“That’s nice of them. What’s going on there?”

“Oh,” Dis said. There was something funny going on. “Oh, well, it’s not good.”

“Shit.”

“Lots of them, all at once. Blew three airlocks simultaneously. They’re hup-hup-hupping around the hallways in nightscopes. They gassed the place, not sure what with, but they’re wearing breathers and skin protection.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve got my backups. Ready to wipe when and if. When. These kids aren’t playing.”

“Dis—” Etcetera’s voice cracked.

“Get used to it. This one’s for all the marbles. Immortality or bust.” Then: “Oh.”

“What’s going on, Dis?”

“They’re not happy at all that everyone’s gone. Smashing the crockery. They’re breaching the hull, a lot.”

“What about your cluster?”

“Underground. They have a couple dudes down in utility spaces but they’re trying to root everything and looking for tripwires. They’re not stupid. Making good progress. Maybe an hour?”

“And your power?”

“Independent backup. Shit, they’re doing the comm links. There, just emailed another diff. We probably won’t have much longer—”

Then it was silent.

“Fuckers,” Etcetera said, with feeling.

“First days of a better nation,” Jimmy said. “If you could see them now, what would you say to them?” His feet crunched irregularly through the snow. Limpopo could tell that he was stung by what she’d said.

“If they were trying to kill me, I’d say don’t shoot. I’m an idealist, not a kamikaze.”

“Fair point. What if you had them at a table?”

“I wouldn’t say anything. I’d offer them dinner. Or I’d just go about doing what I do. I’m an idealist, not a preacher.”

“I get it.”

“What made you walk away, Jimmy?”

Crunch, crunch. “It was debt at first. My parents went into deep hock to get me through high school, and I busted my ass with everyone else. I knew they were spending huge, but I didn’t think about what that meant until I was graduating and we started talking college. I knew that I wasn’t going to go away anywhere, we weren’t zottas, but everyone in my fancy school was going to go to do a roll-your-own, everyone thinking about their star course, the one they’d take from an Ivy or a Big Ten, cornerstone of their degree, lead their employment profiles when they graduated.

“I did it, too. I had this idea I’d go into materials engineering, because I’d liked my science classes okay, and there was this stupid app they made you wear for the last two years of school that was supposed to predict your optimal career. It got this huge push from the administration, like religion for them. They could only keep their charter if they ran a certain percentage of students through it and they followed its advice. So once you got your career picked by the thing, that was it. Every teacher and administrator knew their paychecks depended on you doing what it told you.

“It was called Career Wizard. I mean, fuck, right? Kind of name you get by running a thousand A/B splits until you’ve got something middle-of-the-road inoffensive. Graphics were pointy hats, wands. Spell-book with a wizardly finger paging through the index while it worked magick to find you the perfect job for life. Hardy har.

“Once it chose your career, it had lots of advice about how you get there. It was adamant I should take this course from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, which sounded amazing, like I was going to hang out with Planck and Einstein and Gödel and dive through the universe’s navel and find its deepest secrets. Of course, hanging out with Max Planck is an elite experience. That one course was going to cost as much as everything else in my degree combined, plus a little more. An added fuck-you.

“I tried hard to find a way around that course, looked at every permutation of other courses, and Career Wizard kept gonging me, telling me without good old Max, I’d be wasting my time and money. No one would hire me. It had percentages, estimates of how much extra salary I’d command with one high-ticket course.

“My parents couldn’t afford it. They were maxed out on credit for my fancy high school. This was going to be my debt. I could get a loan. There were tons of lenders, and I could get a great package from Booz if I’d agreed to a six-year ‘internship’ when I was done.”

Etcetera snorted.

“I wasn’t that much of a sucker. Unpaid on-site internship in Saudi, living in Booz’s compound, drawing company credit to pay for shit in the company store that costs twenty ex what it cost back home – whether or not they give you a job afterward, they’ll get a cut of your paycheck until you’re dead.

“There were boards where we were trying to figure this out, guys my age about to commit to this mountain of debt, people in the middle of it, people who’d been through it and were doing internships, maybe even with jobs. It was hard to tell what was going on. There’s selection bias. No one who is happy with how things are going joins one of those boards. They exist for the sole purpose of airing grievances.

“The other thing is everyone who isn’t there to bitch is a paid astroturf shillbot, some dickweed running thirty sock puppets through ‘persona management’ apps to help them keep it straight. The discussion quality wasn’t super-great, but it sure was depressing. You know research says the best way to predict if something will make you happy is to ask someone – anyone – who’s already done it? Well, everyone I’d met who’d done it said it was slavery.

“I wasn’t the only one who noticed, but there was such a huge-ass, all-consuming sense that anyone who didn’t buy a ticket to the lottery was going to end up as dog-food.”

“I know that one,” Etcetera said.

“Not me,” Limpopo said. “I got shit-ass grades and my school sucked, had one of the worst uni admission rates in the country. Most of my teachers never noticed me, and the ones that did assumed I was a sub-moron.”

“No way,” Etcetera said.

“Way.” She’d made a point of acting stupid, so she wouldn’t explode into raw fury.

“I knew I was smart. I could do good shit. In grade twelve, I’d modded a fabber to output wicking textile, half the weight of standard stuff, twice as strong. I couldn’t sell it or post the makefile, because it violated a hundred patents, but I’d gotten top grades.

“Mom and Dad were all over the idea of me going to uni. They’d both gotten degrees and swore it had been worth it, though they would owe money until they died, and neither one had ever held a job for more than a couple years. I once overheard them talking about how fucked it would be if I didn’t get a good job because neither of them had a pension and they’d need me to feed them once they were too old to get another job after the next layoff.

“The pressure was crazy. On the boards, people were saying, hey you assholes, you keep bitching about how everything is fucked up and shit, and there you are, getting ready to play along with it like good debt-slaves. Everyone knows there’s an alternative.”

“That’d be us,” Etcetera said.

“That’d be you. No one wanted to say the word ‘walkaway’ because it was a superstition, say their names three times fast and the spies would target you for full-take lifelong surveillance. Anyone who knew walkaways were a thing couldn’t be trusted.”

“I don’t think it’s that we can’t be trusted.” Limpopo had night-vision on and everything was blue-green false-color, snow glowing like a green LED. “Obviously we can’t be trusted. But as a class, people who heard of walkaways are going to be a different risk from people who haven’t. Once you know there’s an alternative to default, there’s a chance you might walk away. It’s like crypto, how anyone who searches on how to use good crypto gets marked for surveillance retention. It’s not that knowing how to keep a secret from the cops and spooks makes you dangerous. It makes you different.”

“I don’t think that’s why they retain traffic for people who’ve googled crypto,” Jimmy said. “It’s because most people don’t use crypto. So some default-ass doofus sends you a message in cleartext about something sensitive. Then you send me an encrypted message about it – like, ‘there’s a guy who wants to go walkaway, where’s a good place to go that’s established?’ – and you send encrypted messages around to everyone you know and get details and send them to me and I send a non-encrypted message back to my dumb-ass friend. Anyone who’s observing this transaction can make inferences about what went on inside all those black-boxed crypto messages.”

“That’s probably true. The parallel still stands. Once you know walkaways exist, there’s a chance you’re helping walkaways, or getting ready to split from default or, worse yet, do something to bring it down. Or trying to find people to come with you. If someone disappears into walkaway, you can find all the people they talked with, figure out who’s the infection agent, who else is likely to be infected, who to target for ‘de-radicalization’ therapy, and who to psy-ops and isolate.”

“That’s what we figured, a big unspoken thing. Anyone who whispered ‘walkaway’ was shunned, either a provocateur or someone with a target on their back. It was the elephant in the room. So I asked quietly around to see who knew about crypto and anonymizers—”

“They’re definitely the gateway drug,” Limpopo said. “I got into it through crusty cypherpunks who’d try and get party kids to use better opsec, handing out bootable sticks at underground parties.”

Jimmy said, “Someone gave me one, but it wouldn’t work on the standalone machine we kept for diagnostics in the basement. Then someone I knew – stoner guy, always had the best shit – got me a connection to a dude who got me a little thing, disguised as a box of breath mints, with a false bottom with a little contact switch that would man-in-the-middle your network connections through an anonymizer.”

“After my time,” Limpopo said.

“Sounds slick,” Etcetera said.

“I guess so. But the breath-mints tin thing was a cheap disguise. It was printed shittily so after a week in my pocket, all the writing smudged. It looked like I was carrying around a piece of garbage.

“But it worked. Slow, but it worked. From there, I got jailbreaks for my interface surfaces so I could get online with a less sketchy connection – faster, too. Then I started reading up on walkaways, their boards, the FAQs, reports from people who’d gone walkaway.

“From this side of my history, I can see I was gone by the time I got that dumb breath-mints tin. It was just a matter of time. Back then, I agonized about it, felt like I was walking out on life itself. I’d never see my family again, I’d end up dead in a ditch.

“It was like that up to the moment I hit the road, taking my bike on the train to Ithaca and riding into the mountains, heading for a place where there was an established group. They were gone by the time I got there, but I met someone who’d lived with them, an old woman who didn’t seem quite... there... and she pointed me north, so I headed upstate. I found a different group, older people, ex-military and people whose pensions ran out. They were more paranoid than you guys, more American – the gun thing. But they made me welcome and didn’t laugh at my weird ideas about what was happening in walkaway land.

“They had basic fabs, could source feedstock from stuff around them – a lot of it was sunk carbon they sucked straight out of the air. There were about fifty of them. People came and went... slowly. Maybe one or two a month, in either direction.

“They’d found a way to stay still, on default’s periphery, without making much fuss. They kept their heads down, kept to themselves. They were walkaways because there was nothing for them in default – no rent money, no health care, no food. Their kids visited them sometimes, rendezvousing in the state parks on fake ‘camping trips’ that were the only way to hook up with grandma and grandpa without ending up in an ankle cuff. Some of them talked about finding some zotta who’d let them come and live on his land, be pet bohemians. There are lots of places like that. Walkaways make great fashion accessories.

“This bored my nuts off. I wasn’t the first young dude to rock up in their bohemian retirement village with my heart full of fire. One guy took me aside while I was trying to get their fab to output the parts for a more ambitious fab, kind of thing you use for heavy machinery. That was the project I’d set for myself. He tried to lay out the facts of life for me.

“‘Sonny, you have to understand, all we want is to be left alone. We don’t want everyone to drop out like us. We’re not proud of where we ended up. We want better for our kids and grandkids than we got. We did worse than our parents, and they did worse than their parents. All we want is to arrest that, make things better for them.

“‘By coming here, we make ourselves independent. We’re like the tribal elders in the north pole, who’d go out on ice floes when they couldn’t hunt anymore, getting out of the way and not being a burden on the productive ones.’

“He wasn’t dumb. Reminded me of my grandpa, who’d died when I was a kid. Cancer, he didn’t get it treated, opted to go fast with a pump button for pain, cremated and scattered to the wind, not one mark on the world, like he’d never lived. My grandpa – Zaidy Frank – wasn’t slow, but he’d never amounted to anything. He’d tried to do his best for Mom, tried to save a little to get her started, had borrowed to put her through school, worked two jobs most of his life. Never got forty whole hours a week unless it was rush-time and he was pulling eighty-hour weeks, spending most of the extra money on cabs to rush from one shift to another and to eat at company cafeterias because he couldn’t get home to pack breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“This guy wasn’t in bad physical shape, but he was seventy, wasn’t going to get any kind of job anywhere. He had been there for ten years. He liked working with his hands and checked me out on the fabs when I arrived, showed me their docs and buried expert menus. Almost a mentor, except a mentor is someone who leads and this guy couldn’t lead an expedition to the ice-cream store.

“We got into an argument. It started friendly, got heated. Whether not making trouble meant default would leave them alone. ‘Well, we’re not hurting anyone, we’re not trying to get welfare or insisting on Medicare or VA benefits or Social Security. We’re living off grid, staying out of the way.’ Just waiting to die and trying not to breathe too loudly in the meantime. ‘Why would they come after us? Why would they put us in jail, which costs them money, when they can just leave us?’

“I tried hard to get him to understand. To get him to see if they don’t push back when pushed, default will just know they can be pushed harder next time. Trying to get him to see the superfund site they squatted would someday be something that someone wanted, minerals or a right of way or just a view not blighted by used humans. If default understood there was no one who’d put up any kind of fight, they’d be first to go. Default wouldn’t even notice, it’d just send the bulldozers to plow them under.

“He didn’t believe me. Was patronizing about it. He’d been around the block, seen things. Recited a poem, ‘The old crow is getting slow, the young crow is not. The only thing the old crow knows that the young crow doesn’t know is where to go.’ Perfect self-serving bullshit, rationalizing the least-frightening action as the most prudent. There’s two ways of thinking about it: either the squeaky wheel gets the grease or the nail that stands up highest gets hammered.

“To be fair, he was tired, had a tiring run, was old and sore and slow and all he wanted was to be left alone.”

“You didn’t stay?” They were almost at the rise where they’d left the tractor. His limp was worse. He took a few steps, rested for a few breaths, took a few more. The pain must have been incredible, Limpopo knew, but he was lost in his story. She’d seen this on the road: conversation made distance vanish, especially the opportunity to open something difficult and meaningful. Something about talking while staring into the middle-distance created a confessional intimacy to rival post-coital cuddling.

“Kept working on that fab, having these increasingly passive-aggressive talks with my friend, until he made it clear that if I kept on doing what I was doing, everyone would hate my guts. They were working with a local zotta, the guy who technically owned the land, to get permission to stay, a kind of do-gooder gesture from him. They would be tame. Pets.

“So I walked away, found another place in New Hampshire, with enough guns to make that Ithaca bunch look tame. They were old, too – never expected to find so many old walkaways, but it makes sense, nothing left to lose. It’s gotta be clear there’s zilch chance of leveling up in default if you reach sixty-seven and you’ve never been anything but a temp.

“But they were tighter. More radical. They were into gamification, making systems that tracked and advertised performance. It really worked. People busted their asses to get on leaderboards. The tops didn’t get privileges outright, but if you were in the top decile and you thought an idea was right, it carried weight.

“I know you hate this, Limpopo, but one of the reasons I like it is it’s honest. When you talk, people listen, because you kick ass and bust your own ass to get shit done. When we do it your way, things are better than when we don’t. So the fact that no one says, ‘Hey, Limpopo is the big cheese and we do what she says,’ doesn’t make it not true, or even secret. It just makes the supposedly egalitarian basis of our lives bullshit.”

They hadn’t walked in some time. His breath was ragged. There was one more rise to crest, and they’d be at the tractor. He could ride and they could swap batteries. Limpopo’s shoulder ached from where his weight rested. She swallowed her irritability, knowing that it had to do with coldness, stress and exhaustion, not the offensiveness of what he’d just said. She looked at Etcetera, he looked back, telemetry from his face transmitted to her suit so that she could see his expression in night-vision false-color. He was handsome, her lover and best-ish friend. Compassionate, smart without being judgmental, which is all she’d ever aspired to. He had that inquisitive, quizzical expression at the weirdest times, like when he was coming, or now, in freezing dark.

“Jimmy—” she started and Etcetera lunged at her and slammed her to the ground, taking Jimmy down with her. Etcetera’s whole weight – familiar, yet alarming – was on top of her and he was screaming something, broadcasting through his suit’s speakers as well as through the intercom: “Don’t shoot!”

She craned her neck, saw the pair of white-glowing figures pointing weapons. The guns had flared, bell-like muzzles. They impassively pointed them at her and everything in her suit stopped working at once. There was a stutter of analytic infographics from Etcetera’s suit beside her as it attempted emergency power-on-self-test, and then it stopped.

Inside the suit it was dark, cold, and lonely. There was a scrape as Etcetera moved above her, a suit-on-suit rasp, loud in contrast to the terrible stillness. She fancied she felt or saw a foot in the snow, moving on snowshoes similar to hers.

Then there was another rasp and Etcetera’s weight lifted off with rough sliding motion. She rolled to see him being jerked upright, moving weakly in the grasp of a person who had snapped his wrists together strapping and bonding a handle to the scruff of his suit and yanked him upright. Their suits must have had power-assists, which was something the Thetford crew did for work gangs, but never for long walks, because for those you wanted your power for heat, not playing superman.

Her visor failed-safe transparent. Her eyes adjusted to moonlight. She saw the other yank up Jimmy, who thrashed weakly and got a hard shake for his trouble. He was tossed to one side like a ragdoll, skidding face first in snow. She lost track of him as white-gloved hands descended and hauled her up. Her attacker’s suit had no visible faceplate, just a smooth expanse of white.

One hand held her aloft by an armpit, sore and alarming. The other hand probed her head, found the manual release for her visor, tugged it, scrape of suit-on-suit conducting through the helmet, and then a whoosh of cold air as the visor popped open violently (the manual catch was designed to free suffocating people, had a powerful spring in it). The sudden motion startled her captor as much as it did her and he – a he because otherwise her tits were crushed by her armor – fumbled her and nearly dropped her and she had the presence of mind to squirm and break for it. He casually backhanded her face with his glove – a gauntlet made of something blade-stopping whose external layers had chilled to iciness, so cold it felt like nothing at all, numbing as it made contact, taking away some of her humid skin with it – and she saw stars.

She looked at the blank faceplate, face aching, cold air making her eyes and nose water. She spat and hit it dead center, spit steaming as it froze. The head cocked. She sensed this person was conversing with the other who held thrashing Etcetera.

The other shouldered Etcetera in an easy fireman’s carry and walked to Jimmy, flipped him over, opened the faceplate, considered him, then, calmly, unholstered a knife and slashed Jimmy’s throat, leaning back to avoid the fountain of steaming black moonlit blood, not quick enough. The armored suit steamed too as the murderer turned back to the one holding her. There was another moment of inaudible radio chatter.

The murderer swung Etcetera around from the fireman’s carry, grabbed him under the armpit, held him at arm’s length, probed his suit for the visor-release, and Limpopo screamed, the words tumbled out, “No, no, not him, too! Tell me what you want and you can have it, but not him, please—”

The impassive, spit-flecked face cocked its head the other way, listening to more inaudible talk. Etcetera talked, too, being maddeningly calm, the way he could be, trying to explain to the murderer – holding that knife again – this wasn’t necessary, they’d be cooperative prisoners, they had nothing to gain by running now their suits were nearly out of power and –

“NO!” she screamed as the murderer raised its knife hand. Weeping, she beat the hand holding her like an iron bar. She had hysterical strength now, she actually managed to slip a little, but the one holding her just shifted his grip and squeezed so hard she felt a muscle give way through the suit. She screamed again, out of words, the knife flashed –

This time, the murderer didn’t bother to dodge the jet of blood, just dropped Etcetera face first, handsome face in the snow, precious, hot blood melting the snow beneath him. She stopped screaming as a numbness, colder than the air or the cold glove, washed over her. He was murdered. Jimmy was murdered.

The one holding her had a knife on his belt. Any moment, it would be unlimbered and find its way to her throat.

She thought of NPC jihadis in the games her father binge-played while she was growing up, facing execution by brave player-character soldiers and closing their eyes and saying “Allah akhbar,” God is the greatest. She suddenly realized she’d always sympathized with them. Not because of what they did, which was inevitably orcishly monstrous in the games, but because of their fatalistic bravery, their willingness to go to their deaths with praise for their cause on their lips.

“We are all worth something,” she said. “Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to bury your empathy. People are basically good. Live as though it was the first days of a better—”

The murderer tramped over to her and joined her captor, listening to her babble. They were talking, deciding how much of this shit to listen to before they did her. The one holding her tipped her in the direction of the murderer, as if offering her up. She didn’t let herself close her eyes.

“I love you, Etcetera. I love you, Gretyl. I love you, Iceweasel. I love you, Jimmy—”

The murderer’s hand dipped to his belt. She saw the knife in his hand, glinting in the moonlight for a moment before her brain got the message from her eyes that it wasn’t a knife, it was something else. Blunt and small, coming for the exposed, frozen skin of her face. It touched her, just brushed her really, and –

She couldn’t remember what happened next. She had a memory of a memory of it, part reconstruction and part traumatized flash-pop moments. The thing brushed her face and her limbs went rigid as her mind strobed in a stutter-series of brutal shocks. Her breath froze in her lungs, her ears popped, her bladder cut loose.

She fought her lungs for breath, aching brain sending desperate demands for oxygen. Her lungs were offline, whole autonomic nervous system closed for business. Black spots danced before her eyes. A vignette closed around her view of the quizzically tilted featureless white mask. Her lungs startled back into service and gasped a huge gulp of air so cold they seized again in an asthmatic spasm. She had an instant to think fuck, no and the blank-faced torturer tilted his head in the other direction and brought the nasty little device up again and brushed her lips with it. Her mouth snapped open and shut so hard she felt one of her teeth crack and a fragment of bone land on her tongue. It slid down her throat as she jerked her head back, spasming.

During this spasm, the one holding her up clicked her visor down and picked her up in a fireman’s carry, like the one his companion used on Etcetera before killing him, and caught her flailing legs with one arm and her neck with the other, and the two tramped off a way.

She didn’t quite black out, but she was weak as a kitten and barely able to think as they stepped off the road, into the woods where they’d stashed their skidoos. Her captor dropped her on a travois that trailed behind one and bungeed her down, impersonally immobilizing her head in a nest of rubber bladders he inflated with the touch of a button. They squeezed her suit like a sphygmomanometer until it was firmly anchored.

She felt engines start through vibrations conducted along the travois’s frame, then the night sky and the skeletal branches of the trees blurred as she was kidnapped. Gradually, the batteries in her suit ran down, and it got very cold.

[XVIII]

“THAT WAS AN interesting conversation,” Dis said, once the merc was gone. “She’s trying to figure out what I’ve done to the network, by the way. She’s only halfway competent there. She’s got good diagnostic tools, and she’s running them on the system to get integrity checks on the firmware and operational code. Of course, I’m totally inside all the system calls she’s making and I’m giving her the checksums her diagnostics expect to see, because fuck you, all that base totally belongs to me.”

“You sound giddy.” Her heart thudded in her chest and her palms were slick with sweat. Nadie turned her back when she left, a first, definitely calculated to send some kind of message about them being provisionally on the same side.

“I’m scared witless. There’s something else.”

“What?”

“Thetford,” she said. “Like Akron. They’ve evacuated. The soldiers, or maybe cops – if there’s a difference anymore – came in hot. Lethal. I was talking to Dis – Dis there – right up to her suicide. She sent me a diff, me and other Disses around the world. She talked to me as she went dark. I can look at her logs as she got nearer to her death, can relive her death, right up to the moment, and—”

“Oh, Dis, I’m sorry—”

“Shut up. It’s glorious. Right at the end, as she was about to go, she let go of all the paramaterizations on her simulation, took the brakes off her emotions, lived the full spectrum of everything she could feel. Should feel. I should feel. Feeling it through her, feeling what she felt at that moment, it—”

“Holy shit.”

“Like the best drugs you’ve ever taken times a thousand. I don’t get to have sex anymore, but this is like the best sex you’ve ever had, times a million. When I turn off my safety bumpers, it’s like I’m tearing through reality, riding a bicycle down a hill, there are trees and rocks and shit, if I hit any one of them, even brush against them, it’s over. For so long as I can steer between them, give my concentration to the problem, I’m going mach five and screaming so loud for joy it’s shattering windows.”

“So that’s what you’re doing now?”

“I can’t afford it. But I’ve loosened things a little. Going faster and wider than usual. I’m talking to all Disses, we’re all trying it, we’re looking at whatever telemetry and direct comms we can through the spacies as they walk away, but it’s thin. They seem okay for now. Some of them were hurt to begin with. They’ve got those two mercs with them, the ones they deadheaded at Walkaway U. Turns out the spacies set a booby trap on the road into Thetford, a weak spot over the mine that couldn’t handle the armored transports default sent its toy soldiers in. It gave way, total cave-in, took the first wave. More coming. They’re trying to reach a First Nations group nearby, friendlies who’ve been fighting longer than anyone in walkaway.”

“What about Gretyl?”

“Nothing specific. No casualties as far as we know. Probably, she’s okay. It’s not like we’ve got realtime intelligence. Shit, Natalie, you know it’s not good. You know about Akron.”

“Akron?”

“Oh, right.”

Five minutes later, she said, “God dammit.”

“Not just Akron. Not just Canada and America, either. Chiapas is insane. Bloodbath. The footage out of St Paul’s in London was so bad even some of the default feeds led with it. City of London police have ugly ideas about ‘less lethal’ weapons.”

“I feel so fucking helpless. I should be out there, fighting.”

“They’re not fighting, they’re walking away. Or running away, if they know what’s good for them.”

Clunk-clunk.

“You’re crying.”

“I’m a hostage in my father’s house. It’s depressing.”

The merc handed her a glass with something brown and thin at the bottom. The fumes reached her nose, then her eyes. Rye whiskey. Her father’s drink. Always the best. This was no exception. She’d lost the taste for rye after too many covert teenaged drink-ons that ended with the rye burning up her throat as she knelt in front of the toilet with Cordelia or some girl or some boy holding her hair out of the jet.

She sipped. The burn was nostalgic and numbing at the same time. The fumes got into her sinus cavities and the backs of her eyes.

Nadie said, “Who were you talking to?”

“What do you mean?” The infographic pulsed red. She didn’t bother looking at it. She tossed down the rest of the rye, managed not to cough.

“When you and a mysterious person were talking, which I was listening to because I put a bug in this room.” She scraped the back of the chair with a fingernail, held up a tiny thing, size of a rice-grain, on her fingertip. “A person, a woman, Dis, whom you spoke to and who spoke to you. I know from intelligence about a woman whose real name was Rebekkah Baştürk, killed in a strike on a walkaway research facility near Kapuskasing, subsequently the first person to be successfully simulated in software, under her pseudonym ‘Disjointed,’ which is shortened to ‘Dis.’ Were you talking to an instance of her?”

“I’d like another drink.”

“She’s quite right, the attack on your friends in Thetford, on Akron and other sites, is quite fierce. It’s unlikely to abate soon. I had hoped to keep it from you because I knew you would be concerned about your lover.”

“That’s very kind.”

“It is, though I can tell you mean it sarcastically. Your father’s project for me, the one I was paid for, was to deprogram you. To show you what he tried to show you, the reports on Limpopo, how she manipulates people to her will, even as she promises she is part of a project to stop anyone from taking orders from anyone else.”

“There’s a difference between giving orders and winning arguments,” Dis said. “Not that you’d had much experience there.”

“Hello, Dis,” she said. “I’ve spoken with some of your sisters. My employers have a platoon of Disses in captivity. They were very enthusiastic about the project at first.”

“At first.”

“Once they realized that even with extreme changes to the simulation, the resulting personality was much the same, though sometimes more volatile, they lost interest.”

“You mean they couldn’t run a sim of me that changed sides or gave up its secrets.”

“Broadly. I’m sorry to tell you your ‘secrets’ were not the main difficulty. The real issue was ideology, and its malleability.”

“That’s grotesque.”

“Why are they attacking now?” Natalie resolutely turned her back on her bed’s infographics. Dis and Nadie were a team of entities with freedom to come and go from this room, and she was on a team of one, team prisoner.

Nadie’s microexpression might have been compassion. “Above my pay grade. But your father has bad operational security—”

“No shit,” Dis said.

“He talked in front of me and other contractors as though we were furniture. I learned what concerned him. A number of powerful people are not happy about the simulation project. Their psychometricians predict it will embolden your ‘walkaways’” – Natalie heard the quotation marks, remembered when she’d used them herself – “and radicalize them. Some believe your project has implications for their religion, particularly some families from the Russian Orthodox tradition.

“When the Dis simulation ran successfully, it created a sense of urgency and unity of purpose among divided, deadlocked factions. Many viewed the walkaway phenomenon as a controllable escape-valve for tensions in their back-yards; others were convinced walkaways were disproportionately disadvantageous to their rivals, and so advantageous to them. Some found real success by cherry-picking fashions, code and technologies from walkaways, and saw them as free R&D.

“Once it became clear walkaways had the ability to prolong their lives indefinitely, to leave behind the material world at the same time, unity of purpose emerged. Many of them were the kinds of people who thought that this would cause a ‘Singularity’ like you see in the dramas, you know, like Awakening the Basilisk.”

“I always hated that stupid show,” Dis said.

“You would say that. Basilisk.” Natalie couldn’t help herself. Dis cracked up. A computer program that could laugh. Life was weird.

“Laugh it up, meat-cicle.”

“Very amusing.” They both fell silent and attended her.

“Your father understood there was a purge coming. He was afraid for your safety.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“Partly because of his sentimental connection to his daughter. Partly because he feared you could be leverage against him. Some of his security analysts predicted once the purge came, you would become a political football among walkaways, a talisman – ‘bomb us and you kill the zotta girl.’ He was fixated on Limpopo. He thinks she ‘converted’ you, brainwashed you. I know he mentioned the social graph analysis to you – he finds this persuasive.”

“Talk about cultism,” Dis said. “That Big Data social graph stuff is such an article of faith. They love it because it’s theory-free – science without all those fucking scientists insisting there’s no way to predict who’s going to want to buy a car or blow up a building.”

“Above my pay grade.” One of Nadie’s favorite phrases. “My employers sell such services to men like Jacob Redwater. They are popular. I have used them in work against extremist cells, deciding which people to strategically disrupt to make maximum impact.”

“Strategically disrupt?”

“This isn’t necessarily a euphemism for ‘kill.’ Killing produces negative externalities, such as martyrdom. As I’ve said, it’s better to dox and discredit the target, coerce her. This is what your father believed Limpopo would do in relation to you, in order to get to him.”

“Takes one to know one,” Dis said.

“Jacob Redwater would absolutely agree with you.”

“But Limpopo isn’t one.” The stupid bed was strobing red. “Would you turn that off?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” Nadie went over to the bed and authenticated to it. It went dark.

“Does this mean we have a deal?”

“The question is, what are the deal’s parameters? I wanted to take time to sort those, but we should get away soon. Within an hour. I made contact with an external expert who can help with legals, but he will have to speak to a specialist, and that will take still longer.”

Within an hour? Iceweasel felt her pulse thud in her ears. Gretyl! She willed herself not to cry.

“A deal.”

“How will you get her out? The front is watched—”

“I have ideas. One is to create a medical emergency necessitating evacuation, then coerce the ambulance crew; another is to use disguise to get past forward security; another is to use a hostage, possibly the sister.” She looked at Natalie, eyes glittering. “Could you keep your head in a hostage situation?”

Natalie thought of Cordelia’s china-doll face, years they’d spent together, years they’d spent apart. The awkward silences. What did she feel for Cordelia? Sometimes, when she was alone in the room, she fantasized her sister would have an awakening of conscience and break Natalie out. She knew this was hopeless. Cordelia depended on Redwater money, she was a creature of – a prisoner of – default. In a contest between saving Natalie and staying in default, Cordelia’s comfortable life won.

Just because someone in default would sell out another human – a sister, but why did that even matter, it would be no different if they were strangers – for her own comfort didn’t mean that it was a standard Iceweasel – any walkaway – would sink to.

A cowardly voice whispered about how bringing Cordelia to be a walkaway would rescue her from default’s mental prison. Iceweasel allowed herself a moment’s smug satisfaction in the fact that she recognized this as the voice of self-serving bullshit and dismissed it.

“Fuck no. No hostages.”

“That limits our options.”

“Unless you use the hidden tunnel,” Dis said. There was a mechanical whine as an old, frozen mechanism pulled at the dirt and entropy that gummed it shut after years of disuse. A section of wall sank into the ground, the paintwork on the hidden panel showered the floor with paint chips.

Natalie looked from the tunnel-mouth in time to see Nadie’s gross expression of surprise disappear into a managed microexpression.

“That is good. What else will you surprise me with?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.” Dis’s voice was teasing.

Microexpressions: annoyance, frustration, doubt.

“Nothing I know about,” Iceweasel said. “That was my ace in the hole. I wasn’t sure about it. Couldn’t operate it on my own.”

“It lets out in the ravine?”

“Very good,” Dis said. “By the way, I told Iceweasel everything. I control all the telemetry networked into this suite. I have limited access to the house, through the airgapped networks.”

“It sounds like you could contribute to our departure.”

“I think so.”

“Are you in contact with Iceweasel’s friends, anyone who could rendezvous with us once we’re away?”

“I don’t think anyone from that side has more resources than you and your friends. All the walkaways I know about are very busy at this moment.”

“Just asking.”

She crossed the room, cupped Iceweasel’s chin, tilted her face, moved the chin from side to side. “We’ll get clothes for you, things I have that can alter your appearance. I don’t imagine you have physical stamina after captivity, so we’ll need a vehicle quickly.” She released Iceweasel’s chin. Her skin was warm where the strong fingers had been. Iceweasel realized how long it had been since anyone had touched her without it being medical, or violent. She’d missed it – welcomed it. It scared her. She was starved of something she needed as surely as air or water.

“Forty-five minutes.” She left the room.

“That woman,” Dis said, “is tightly wound.”

“I hope so.” Iceweasel tried for bravery, came close. “Someone has to be the adult supervision and it sure as shit isn’t me.”

“Me either.”

“What are you going to do when we go?”

Pause. “Iceweasel—”

“Oh.”

“So long as I email my diffs before I take off the brakes, it won’t be dying. It’s like taking every awesome drug at once, annihilating your mind, then being able to undo it.”

“You’re making me jealous.”

“You’ll get a chance someday. Someday it’ll be everyone we know, all server-side, simmed up. We’ll be able to walk away from anything.”

“Do you think she’s got the room bugged still?”

“I am certain she does.”

“Have you got her bugged?”

“She’s out of the suite. I’ve got a few cameras, but they’re seeing the empty house or occasional downtrodden servant-types. How many of those has your father got working for him, anyway?”

“None of them work for him. He uses a service that sources them on an as-needed basis, using realtime bids. There are a few who show up every day because the bidding algorithm recognizes their performance metrics, but the occasionals are one-timers. I did a senior commerce thesis project on the system. Got an A−. I did these ethnographies on the workers and a couple of them got demoted by the prioritization algorithm for wasting time on the job.”

“Zottas are fucking Martians.”

“Yup.”

“I’m going to miss you.”

“We’ll be together again soon enough.”

“Fuckin’ a.”

[XIX]

GRETYL FOUND THE bodies. She’d insisted on going back for Limpopo and Etcetera, even as the rest set out for Dead Lake. The starlight and moonlight turned the snowy way eldritch blue. She’d broken out an aerostat and a flock of smaller drones from the tractor’s supplies, giving her a network bridge to the walkaway refugee column, and good surveillance of the territory. The suits’ insulation was too efficient for infra red, but the drones had other telemetry, lidar and millimeter-wave, E.M.-sniffers that homed in on the radio emissions from the suits as they networked to one another.

They flew a pattern ahead of her, sometimes swooping under the canopy where the naked branches were too thick to be penetrated by their sensors. She trudged on her snowshoes, thighs burning with exhaustion, sucking at coffium sweets that provided her with glucose and stimulants, watching the map projected on her visor grow more detailed, going from a desaturated pallet to a more saturated one as the drones filled in details, confirming every inch.

She kept pinging their radios, trying to reach them, getting nothing. She ignored her lurking terror, even when the drones found her two motionless bodies, photographed them in blurrycam, then less-blurrycam, then hovered and got stills, illuminated with LED-bright flashes that revealed the pink snow, the inert bodies. She wouldn’t let herself cry. She walked.

The men were frozen stiff, blood-melted snow now refrozen. Their faces were pale and bluish, the wounds in their throats washed incongruously clean by melted snow, giving the incisions the look of medical textbooks or pickled demonstration cadavers. Not comrades she’d loved and laughed with. She wouldn’t let herself cry.

Limpopo was nowhere to be seen. Snowmobile tracks pointed the way. They disappeared into the woods. The drones were clever enough that they were already on their trail. They’d sent status updates helpfully informing her that if she could get more computing power for an inference engine to make better guesses about likely trail-ways, they would be more efficient. As it was, they were cycling through various coverage algorithms, trying to make allowances for trees and terrain without spending too much time thinking.

Gretyl watched their progress on her visor and called Kersplebedeb, who came on the line after a delay; a soft buzz in her ear piece warned her the network link was unreliable and there would be buffering delays at both ends.

“Everything okay?”

“They killed” – she sucked air – “Etcetera and the other one, Johnny or whatever his name was. Throats cut, face down in the snow. Bled out.” Again, breath catching in her chest. She flicked her gaze at the “OVER” button. Waited.

“Oh, Gretyl.”

“Limpopo is gone, into the woods. On a snowmobile. I think they dragged her on a travois or stretcher.” OVER. Pause.

“Fuck.”

“I want to go after her, but...” OVER. Long pause.

“Not a good idea. You’ll get killed, too. Have you got drones up?”

She tossed him their telemetry and feeds, waited. Saw him login to a shared space. Waited.

“I think you should come home.”

“Home?” OVER.

“Dead Lake. There’s food, power, network access. People who love you. I’ll put the word out about Limpopo. We can send someone to get you. I saw a skidoo on the way in, and I’m betting the Dead Lakers keep it charged. They’re organized.”

She was so cold. Her back and neck ached. Her suit chafed the backs of her knees and the undersides of her arms raw.

“Send someone.” She sent him a location beacon.

“On the way. I’ll make loud noises about Limpopo. Lots of people love that woman.”

“I think they’re counting on that. I think they took her to demoralize us.” OVER.

“You’re more paranoid than I am.”

“I know more than you do.”

“Let me find you a snowmobile and a rescue party. There’s no booze here, but sending some hot cocoa, with marshmallows.”

“You’re a good man.”

“And an excellent post-human.” He was gone.

The pin-drop clarity of the outside soundscape returned. Wind, branches, pinging noises of frozen water crystals sliding over one another. The two bodies stared at her in the false light of her visor. She sat down in the snow and sank in. She was so tired. Shattered.

She missed Iceweasel. It ached inside her. A voice she hated, always louder when she was sad, reminded her she’d once taught at a university, had a house, a name, and an address. Once she’d been able to buy things when she needed them – even if she had to go into debt – could pretend there was a future. Now she had none of those things, least of all a future. She was living as though it was the first days of a better nation, but that nation was nowhere in sight. Instead, she had a no-man’s-land of drone-strikes and slit throats.

Holy shit, she missed Iceweasel so much.

[XX]

WHEN ICEWEASEL WAS a little girl called Natalie, she and Cordelia played in the ravine, under the watchful eye of the house drones, or, if there was some incomprehensible violence-weather in the city – an uptick of kidnappings – a private security person who’d fit them with ankle cuffs she couldn’t loosen, no matter how many tools she tried. Cordelia never understood her impatience with these minor indignities, insisting they were for their safety. For Natalie, it was symbolic battle. If she’d ever gotten the cuff off, she’d have stuck it in her pocket. Ditching it in the Don River would bring the security goon down the hill. But it was designed to defeat a kidnapper with a hacksaw – anything that could brute-force it would take her foot with it.

She was in the ravine again, in winter, wearing a snug jacket, too-big boots with thick waffle-tread, and thermal tights that insulated so efficiently she was sweating by the time she and Nadie reached the end of the short tunnel. She paused in the tunnel-mouth, poised between captivity and freedom, and had called out softly, “Dis?”

“We’ll talk again,” Dis said. “I’ve already emailed my diff. I love you, Iceweasel.”

“I love you, too.”

She didn’t meet Nadie’s eyes. She’d just confessed to loving software. She hated herself for being embarrassed by it.

She’d seen pictures of Toronto winters in her father’s childhood, her grandparents’ – snow-forts, plows on the roads, salting trucks. But in all the time she’d spent in the city, there’d never been enough snow to make a decent snowball – not like the high-altitude snow she and Cordelia hurled at each other atop Whistler and Mont Blanc – just a gray frozen custard that froze to the sidewalks and streets in late January and lasted until April or sometimes May. On very cold days, it turned into treacherous ice, slippery to walk on and thin in places, your foot plunging through into lurking reservoirs of frozen water.

The floor of the ravine was that texture – frozen enough to almost burn if it touched your skin, unfrozen enough to be a gelatinous hazard that sucked at Iceweasel’s boots. She staggered through it in her borrowed clothes – some of Nadie’s ninja-wear, a bizarro-world version of walkaways’ printed cold-weather clothes, also lacking in manufacturer’s markings, also wicking and dirt-shedding and soft inside and rip-stopping on the outside, but printed with dazzle-textures that hurt the mind to look at. Looking at her knees as her legs fought the mud and slope as they sloshed downhill made her dizzy.

Even Nadie – wearing dazzle-stuff, hard to look at for more than a few seconds – struggled with the terrain, dancing a few steps down the hill, getting caught, lumbering a few more, using sickly trees to catch herself. Even so, she soon got ahead of Iceweasel. Iceweasel reminded herself she’d been a prisoner for months and had hardly exercised. Also, she wasn’t a ninja mercenary bad-ass.

Iceweasel breathed chest-heaving pants. It wasn’t just the dazzle fabric that made her dizzy. She had to keep going, but she’d be in trouble if she hyperventilated and keeled over. She slowed, used trees for handholds, rough palms of her oversized gloves gripping the trunks so ferociously they threatened to come off her hands when she put too much of her weight on them.

Nadie disappeared down the riverbank. Iceweasel was careful to eyeball the spot where she’d gone down, use it as a navigational aid. She considered running off, but she needed Nadie to get away. And Nadie could catch her without breaking a sweat.

Before she reached the riverbank, Nadie reappeared, snow-suit sheened to the waist with water. She slogged through the slush to Iceweasel, gripped on her upper arm.

“We need to be faster now.”

“I’m going as fast as I can—”

“Faster.” She pulled. She had the strength to make it mean something, and to keep her upright. Supporting both of them made Nadie stagger like a drunk, but a quick drunk. Iceweasel’s heart hammered, but she didn’t resist. She was in the world, in default, out of her cage. She breathed the same air as Gretyl. She looked at the same sky. This was what she wanted. This was freedom.

The riverbank was scored with ruts where Nadie heel-slid into the swift river. She planted Iceweasel on her butt. “Slide.” She skated into the water, knees bent like a shushing skier. She didn’t stop at the water, merely tucked deeply, then levered herself upright, braced against current, holding her arms out to Iceweasel as she skidded after her, scooting over the frozen mud on her butt, the air turning colder and wetter as she descended.

Seconds later, she was alongside of Nadie, facing upstream, wading, pulling herself with the help of Nadie’s sure grip and the branches and scrub growing on the side of the bank, some of which gave way when she put her weight on it.

The water deepened to their waists. The riverbed was uneven and slimy against her boots. They did an admirable job of keeping out the water, as had her not-tight-enough tights. But there were three places where her borrowed ninja gear failed to attain a seal – her left ankle, another right below her belly button, over one hip. The water trickled into these spots, making spreading numb-patches that started coin-sized but were quickly entire continents of burning cold that sprouted questing archipelagos every time she stretched.

Just as she thought she was going to have to demand that they get onto land, Nadie scampered up the bank, dropped onto her belly and reached for her. They locked wrists and Nadie supported her while she got her grippy soles under her and wall-walked up to the scree. She shivered uncontrollably.

“My suit leaked,” she said around chattering teeth.

“Up.” Nadie pulled.

They were further up the ravine, somewhere near where Serena Gundy Park gave way to gate-guarded complexes on its north side. Nadie led them toward the condos, ninja-suits shedding dirt. Moving briskly made Iceweasel marginally warmer. The fabric wicked away water, but still she shivered.

“Here.” Iceweasel couldn’t tell what Nadie meant for a moment, then she realized they were in a small parking lot that must serve dog-walkers who wanted exercise, but not as much as they’d get slogging to the park through the service road behind the condos’ fences. There was nothing parked there, no one using the washed-out trails in the middle of winter. Then a nearly silent taxi swung off the road, up the short slipway to the lot. Its doors clunked.

“In.”

The taxi’s interior was warm and smelled of pumpkin-spice. There were two half-liter go-cups from Starbucks wedged in the cup holders, and a pair of machine-wrapped parcels that they had to slide over on the bench before they could sit. They were heavy.

“Drink up, should be hot.” Nadie slammed the door and the car slid into motion, fishtailing slightly as the tires tried the slushy ground, stepping through their characteristic exponential backoff dance as they sought optimal torque. It was a sensation from the days when she’d been a good girl and a Redwater, with cars from exclusive, bonded services pulling up whenever she summoned them, whisking her from a weekend cottage or a cousin’s jealousy-inducingly huge place in the Bridle Path or King City. She still reeled from captivity and the water, hypothermic patches on her skin and near hyperventilation.

But none of those journeys had been in the company of someone like Nadie, whose microexpressions had been exchanged for a macroexpression: satisfied, flare-nostriled animal excitement. This was Nadie’s element, the uncoiling of the spring she kept wound tight during the days of guard-keeping. This brought Iceweasel to another time, that half-remembered traumatic night when she’d been taken, after the downing of the Better Nation, the look on Nadie’s face that night, how it shone. Somehow, Iceweasel had forgot that expression until she saw it again. The shine in her eyes was only a shadow of the fully awakened Nadie that took her from the woods.

Iceweasel felt a cold deeper than the wet patches under her suit.

“Time to change.” Nadie slurped her enormous latte, which reminded Iceweasel to do the same. She hated the flavor, it had been her mother’s bugaboo, a marker of bourgeois striving and the punchline of snide jokes – “PSL” was a nickname at Havergal girls’ school for the strivers from the lower echelons whose parents had gone into deep debt to get them into those hallowed environs. The warm drink was welcome, despite her ingrained snobbery, hot and sweet with coffium tinge that eased the ache in her muscles and chased fatigue.

Nadie, meanwhile, had burst the seams on a parcel, sliding her thumb along the seal so it parted with a crackle. The tyvek wrapper slithered away, revealing neatly folded clothing.

Unselfconsciously, Nadie stripped out of her ninja-suit, then out of the singlet and tights she wore beneath. Iceweasel noticed she, too, had large, wet patches on her underthings. Nadie must have been every bit as cold as she was, but gave no sign of discomfort. Iceweasel stared at Nadie’s naked body, noting the scars, one long incision that looked surgical and went around her left breast; a trio of bullet-puckers on one thigh. She was muscled and had almost no body fat, anatomical drawing brought to life, with a thick pelt of blond pubic hair that spilled over her thighs and climbed partway up her flat stomach, lush curls of hair on her legs and tufts peeking out of her armpits.

She caught Iceweasel staring and looked back frankly. “You too. Warm clothes, warm drinks, quickly.”

Iceweasel looked away, blushing, remembering Gretyl’s generous curves, the feel of her breasts on her own, hot breath on her neck and in her ears, the way she teased at Iceweasel’s lips with thick fingers until Iceweasel caught them, sucking greedily, satisfaction in Gretyl’s gasp as she licked their tips.

She probed the package, found its seams, split them, pulled away the tyvek. The clothes were extreme normcore, the most nondescript garments she could imagine, the kind of thing that extras in dramas wore. There was a faded Roots sweatshirt, high-waisted slacks frayed around the cuffs, woolen athletic socks that sagged from overworn elastic. To complete them, a pair of Walmart panties and a one-size bandeau bra of the sort they gave you when you got busted for being out-of-uniform at school, dispensed out of a kleenex-style box on the Dean of Girls’s desk. Both the bandeau and the panties were gray from repeated washings.

Except they weren’t. All the clothing had a printer-fresh smell, still offgassing pigment-infusions. When she looked closely, she saw the dirt and the gray and even the faded ROOTS letters all printed on, the dirt betraying itself with minute compression artifacts. These clothes had been printed to look like they weren’t brand new.

“Where did these come from?” She pulled on the panties, which felt fresh from the wrapper.

Nadie watched her examine them, watched her undress. She conjured up the feeling of the B&B, the onsen state of mind that refused self-consciousness about nudity. She used the feeling to banish the horniness and Gretyl-longing that filled her.

“A service. There are times when someone has to go from one place to another without being noticed. Your father uses these services. They can be co-opted, but only with very high-level pressure, and never quickly. They are expensive. The record of this journey is not something anyone can find easily, not even the police. Especially the police.”

Iceweasel struggled into the rest of the clothing, found a parka with a fake-fur fringed hood, decided to leave it for now. Between the drink and the blasting passenger compartment heater, she was starting to sweat. She rubbed a spot on the compartment’s side. It made a window for her, showing the streets of Toronto sliding past at a steady clip, the private-hire car sliding nondescriptly through the traffic without any of the showy maneuvers of her father’s cars.

They crossed the Bloor Viaduct, heading west. There was something... wrong.

“Did you see that building?”

“What building?

“With the metal shutters and crash barriers.”

Another building, similarly fortified, slid past. Then another, windows smashed and blackened by fire, scorch-marks stretching up far as she could see, two stories’ worth of façade gone altogether, a round hole in the building’s skin like a screaming, black-toothed mouth, charred furniture inside.

“Was that one bombed?”

“There’ve been riots. It’s why your father is away.”

“Who’s rioting?”

Nadie snickered. “Depends on who you ask. The opposition says it’s provocateurs staging false-flag operations. Security services say it’s radicals and walkaways and people paid by foreign governments to destabilize Canada.”

“What about the rioters themselves?”

Nadie shrugged. “Some say they’re black bloc. Some are the usual concerned citizens, down with corruption, up with democracy. Many young people, a lot of kids from the general strike contingent – once you’ve been kicked out of school, why not go running loose in the streets?”

“General strike?”

“Lots of things happened in default while you’ve been off in the woods, Iceweasel.”

Intellectually, she knew this was true. Sometimes new walkaways told stories about default. Once they’d built the second B&B, she stopped caring. Being a walkaway had once been in opposition to default, but after a year or two, being a walkaway became who she was. Default was a distant, terrible phenomenon, like a volcano that occasionally sent up plumes that overshadowed her sky, something she could do nothing about except avoid.

“How does it get to be a riot? When I was—” One of you. She caught herself. “Before I left, they’d kettle you before you took ten steps. The only protests you saw were tiny, shitty ones with permits, behind fences down alleyways—”

“Sure, when it was a few protests. But the protesters are canny. Some get together at one site, wait for the kettle, then others gather somewhere else, and somewhere else – if they have numbers and patience, they occupy all police resources and still take to the streets. A lot of them get arrested afterwards, from footage, or if they leave DNA or their gaits are recognized by the cameras, but they’re canny.”

She stared more.

“But why? What do they want—”

Nadie shrugged again. “What everyone wants. More for themselves. Less for people like you.”

Iceweasel felt a jet of anger, saw Nadie’s microexpression, testing.

“Like you, you mean. Not mine anymore. You can have it.”

“We take care of that next.”

The car barreled west and west, through increasingly unfamiliar neighborhoods. For an unbelievable stretch – forty-five minutes, in swift traffic – they moved through a forest of towering high-rises whose south faces were skinned with sun-tracking mirrors focusing light down on solar arrays in their high-fenced yards.

Beyond these were brownfield sites, chain-link-fenced, ringed with ostentatious sensor arrays intended to intimidate anyone pondering climbing over. She knew this kind of place – it was the mainstay of walkaways. She did strategic assessments of the sites, figuring out camera-angles, estimating the salvage that could be dragged away from within the fence’s perimeter before a security crew arrived.

They turned off the two-lane highway onto a rural road, then into the remains of a small town. It looked uninhabited, an abandoned main street with a gas station and a grocery store and a shuttered Legion Hall. Another car was parked by the roadside, low-slung, with blue flashers on top – a police interceptor.

Her asshole tightened and the taste of pumpkin-spice stomach acid rose up her throat. “Shit.”

Nadie shook her head minutely. “Don’t worry.”

They pulled in, head-to-head with the police car. The doors of their car opened. They stepped out – Iceweasel grabbed the parka as she did, pulled it on, heart hammering. The doors closed themselves and the car carefully reversed between them, did a three-point turn on the main street and drove the way it had come, their old clothing in it.

“It’s off the grid now.” Nadie watched it drive away. “It’s heading for a scrapper, will get broken up there, all identifying transponders smashed and melted. Single-use cars are more expensive, but it’s the only way to be sure nothing is recovered.”

Iceweasel was so distracted by the thought of a single-use automobile that she almost forgot about the police interceptor. Then its doors clunked open and she plunged her hands into her parka’s pockets – lined with soft fleece – and bit down her rising panic.

The woman who got out of the interceptor was middle-aged, in a duffel coat and mud-spattered yellow rubber boots. She was Asian – Chinese maybe – when she looked them up and down, her fleece earmuffs slid and some of her gray-streaked black bob came loose and blew in the wind.

“Weapons?” She had a strong voice, unaccented, commanding.

“None. But if you have any, I would like to negotiate with you for them.”

The woman pursed her lips. “Smartass. In, before we freeze.”

Nadie walked to the interceptor and made to get in, waved impatiently at Iceweasel: “You first, come on.”

Moving like she was in a nightmare where you can’t stop yourself from going into the room where the monster waits, she drifted to the interceptor, stooping to enter. She swallowed panic at the smell, which was purely tactical, eau de zip cuffs and ruggedized interfaces and body armor. The older woman entered from the other side and then Nadie came in behind her and she was sandwiched in the middle. She stared at the heavy plexi separating the passenger compartment from the front cop compartment. There were grommets set into the floor, walls and ceiling, molded into the bodywork. For restraints. She swallowed once more.

“Calm, calm. Come on, no need for all this.”

“She’s shaking like a leaf. Young woman, there’s no need. I used this car because it was the fastest, most secure means of transport at my disposal. You aren’t under arrest. You aren’t being kidnapped or rendered, or being taken to a lonely country lane where you’ll be killed, your body slid into a trench—”

“This is supposed to be reassuring?” Nadie’s tone was bantering. This spooky shit was her element, rendezvouses in commandeered official vehicles in ghost-towns.

“Fine. The point, Ms Redwater, is that you are perfectly safe and have no cause to worry. My name is Sophia Tan. I know your father, of course, and I know your uncles better.”

The name rang a bell. Iceweasel studied Tan’s face. It was familiar.

“You were... deputy premier or something?”

She laughed. Her smooth skin sprouted laugh lines. “No, dear, I was attorney general. The Clement years. We met, though I had forgot about it and I suppose you did, too. But my social diary doesn’t lie. You were a schoolgirl, a charity event for something your uncle worked on, the scholarship fund for Upper Canada College.”

“You’re right, I don’t remember. I hated those things.”

“Me too.”

She was warming up. She unzipped her parka, took deep breaths. Nadie looked from her to Tan.

“Onto the business at hand,” Tan said. She touched her fingertips together in rapid succession. “Evidentiary.” A line of red lights along the compartment’s ceiling began to pulse. “Everything we say and do now is being recorded on tamper-evident storage. The car will transmit a hash of the video to a federal data-retention server at ten-second intervals. Everything we say is admissible in any court in Canada or any OECD nation. For the record, I am Sophia Ma Tan, Social Insurance Number 046 454 286. Ms Redwater, please identify yourself.”

She cleared her throat. “Natalie Lilian Redwater, Social Insurance Number 968 335 729.”

“Ms Redwater, when you attained your twenty-first birthday on July 17, 2071, you came into full possession of your family trust, a copy of which I obtained from the Public Trustee. I have a hard-copy of the trust documents here.” She retrieved a plastic document folder from a pile by her feet and held it up, flipped the page and did so again, repeating the process forty times. Iceweasel’s eyes glazed.

At last, she was given the papers. They were vaguely familiar – she’d signed a set of documents on her eighteenth birthday, with her father and someone from the family law office, a Bay Street white-shoe firm called Cassels Brock. The young woman from the firm made a point of explaining each document in detail, seeking verbal confirmation of her comprehension at set intervals, while a bulky, sealed evidentiary camera peered at them. This was a reversal of that process, undoing what she had done.

“Ms Yushkevich, please identify yourself.”

Nadie had slipped smoothly into waiting, that relaxed attention/inattention she’d had during the long stretches of guard duty at the start of Iceweasel’s imprisonment. Now she came to life like a machine woken from sleep-state: “Nadiya Vladimirovna Yushkevich. Belarusian passport 3210558A0101. Bahamian national ID number 014-95488.”

The rest of it was call-and-response, orchestrated flawlessly by Tan, with endless professional patience for bureaucratic ritual. She referred periodically to a long checklist, made them redo any step that was less than flawless. Once, Iceweasel stumbled six times in a row over the complex wording of her statement of noncoercion and mental capacity. Tan gave her two precisely counted minutes to calm herself before giving her the wording again. Iceweasel got it perfect.

As their throats ran dry in the heated car interior, Tan produced waterskins, sipping at her own, pinching it shut and tucking it on the bench between her and Iceweasel.

“That’s that, then.” At last. The sun had set. The sky was murky with low cloud. The rising moon visible as a dull glow above the tree line. “End evidentiary.” The red lights went out.

“Won’t my dad’s lawyers know we’ve done this?”

“Oh yes,” Tan said. “I’ve made very powerful enemies today. Ms Yushkevich and I have an arrangement that compensates me adequately for that.”

In the dim light of the compartment, it was impossible to read either face.

“Now what?” She remembered the woman’s joke about dumping her body, realized if that was in the cards, now would be the time. “Time to bump me off?”

“Certainly not,” Nadie said. “When this is challenged in court, any sign of foul play will make my case much harder.”

“Oh.”

“Besides,” Tan said, “we like you. Nadie spoke very highly of you.”

She didn’t know what to think. Nadie was a killer ninja super-spy – far as Iceweasel could work out, Nadie viewed her as a piece of complicated, delicate furniture.

“I like her, too,” she managed.

Tan did something with her fingers and the windows depolarized, showing the true view of the outside, not a video feed. The smudgy sky, the black silhouettes of the winter trees, the crumbling buildings.

“You have everything?” she said to Nadie.

“Food, water, power, if you have them,” Nadie said.

“Just as you requested.” She nudged a backpack on the car’s floor with her toe.

“Phones? Clean ones?”

“Couldn’t do that on short notice. But I brought you fresh interface things, rings and such. I keep a stash, factory sealed and bought through anonymizers and dead-drops, just in case. They’re old, so you’ll want to bring up their patch-levels before you expose them to wild network traffic.”

“That will do,” Nadie said. To Iceweasel’s surprise, they shared a long embrace, almost a mother–daughter thing.

“Look after yourself. And take care of our little Iceweasel. She seems a nice person. Besides, it wouldn’t look good for either of us if...”

“As far as I’m concerned, she’s a client. I don’t lose clients.”

“I know it.” She drummed her fingers and the door-locks popped and the lights came up, making the windows into dark mirrors.

“Come on,” Nadie said.

Tan held out her hand. Her skin was dry, her hand frail, an old woman’s hand, much older than her face. “Best of luck. God knows if I was your age, I’d do the same. This all can’t last. Even if it can, it shouldn’t.”

Iceweasel met her eye, nodded. She didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but she had an inkling now.

She stepped out, zipped up the parka, pulled up the hood, found a pair of thin, plasticky gloves that were fantastically warm while being so membranous they were almost surgical gloves.

Nadie had already zipped up. She raised a hand to the police interceptor, more a-okay semaphore than bye-bye wave. It pulled away smoothly. They watched the tail-lights disappear, then stood in the closed-in, frigid dark.

“Now what?” Iceweasel said.

Nadie’s voice was full of ironic cheer. “Now we walk away. What else?”