Trouble and Her Friends

Chapter Twelve

THEY WALK THE nets like the echoes of a dream, icons oddly twinned, disparate but somehow matched. The roads of light glow before them, around them, the datastreams coursing across the black and midnight sweep that is the net itself. The patterns are somewhat different this night, as every night, different in the details, the intersections and nodes where the information is traded, created, recreated, but the greater shape remains much the same. The highspeed lines swirl past, rigid geometry walled in strands of IC(E); corporate preserves loom out of nothing, their public spaces open, deliberately inviting, while discreet IC(E) walls them round, keeping secrets in. It’s a strange feeling, to be together again with no job in hand, just the desire to be out on the nets, and Trouble lets Cerise take the lead for now, walking them down the fields of light. They pass familiar walls, junction nodes they know, that every netwalker knows, from the shadows or the light, and Trouble half turns, expecting them to head down a primary lead, down toward the BBS and the doors that lead to Seahaven.

Instead, Cerise turns a different way, toward a node shrouded in IC(E), and Trouble has to scramble to keep up with her. Cerise pauses, waits, and passes them both through together. There is something familiar about the IC(E), Trouble thinks, but Cerise is already flickering ahead of her, and she has to hurry again to catch up. Cerise’s hand? she wonders. Cerise’s work? But Cerise is in no mood to talk, not now, and Trouble follows, close behind. The IC(E) is tight here, sharp geometry edged with sparks of light, clear and dangerous, and it’s only Cerise’s company that takes them through unscathed. Not that I couldn’t break it, Trouble thinks, even so deep in it, I could break free—but it wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be elegant. And, most of all, it would be more than obvious.

They are inside a preliminary wall, she realizes, at the edge of a major system. This is the space that you could reach most easily from the outside world, where the daily exchange of business takes place; no one cares much about that, and she catches herself looking ahead, toward the central core, a tall cylinder walled in with IC(E) so tight it looks like seamless glass. Light refracts from it, the core of the codewall invisible within the dazzle, only a thin line of purple, close to the base, to indicate that there is access at all. It is even more familiar, there is something about it, about the look of it, the taste of steel in the wind, even the brightness that flares back from it, that catches in her memory. It feels a bit like Cerise’s work, she thinks, but then there’s something more.

This is Multiplane, she says aloud, and sees icon-Cerise nod its cartoon head.

I need to pick up something, she says, and turns away. Trouble feels her invoke a mail routine, sees the packet flash from her hand and vanish against the cylinder, absorbed through its gleaming skin. She feels the IC(E) respond, too, and this time she knows what it is. It’s been remade, more than once, but this is the wall, the design that first caught Cerise’s eye. She hadn’t bothered to find out, then, whose IC(E) it was that Cerise wanted to crack; it hadn’t mattered, not after Evans-Tindale passed. But this was it, or its granddaughter program: Multiplane’s IC(E), Multiplane’s security, and that explained, more clearly than any words, how Cerise had come to work for Multiplane, and why.

She opens her mouth to say something, anything, she’s not sure what, just something to say, I know, I’m sorry—to say once again, I let you down. I screwed it up—but the IC(E) flickers again, and there is something in icon-Cerise’s hand, briefly visible before she stows it again in her toolkit. And the time for words is past, at least for now. Trouble sighs, and follows Cerise, close enough that their icons make a single shadow, back out of the IC(E) to the main roads of the net.

Outside Multiplane’s enclave—dim to the eye, here on the outside, unexpectedly discreet, now that she knows what, who, lies within—Cerise hesitates for the first time, turns to face her, the cartoon-woman shading to pink against the neon-streaked sky.

Where away?

Trouble shrugs, sees and feels the mock-uncertainty appear on the net, carried by the brainworm. The BBS? Or shall we try Seahaven?

The cartoon-woman grins, pale shadow of Cerise’s smile. Seahaven sounds like fun she says, and her voice is sharp and feral.

She has always liked a challenge, Trouble thinks, maybe even more than me. But the Mayor’s mine. She doesn’t say it—doesn’t need to say it, she thinks, but knows it’s more that she doesn’t dare, for fear Cerise will claim him too. She swings away without speaking, finds a line of light and lets herself fall into the datastream, carried away in its embrace. Cerise moves with her, less than a heartbeat behind, and they are carried together down toward the BBS.

As the streams slow, joining together, the competing flow and press of data filling every available channel, Trouble lets herself slide free, dropping down into the main plane of the Bazaar. She feels the virtual floor beneath her feet, and in the same instant the filters cut in and she is standing among the icon-shops, a swirl of adverteasing winding around her body. Cerise is there in the same moment, batting idly at a too-importunate image. It bursts in a shower of chaff, black and white confetti-shapes spelling out a manufacturer’s name, and Cerise brushes them away as well.

Where was it last? Trouble asks, delighting in the old ease, that she doesn’t have to be specific, and Cerise slants a smile to her, the icon-face sweeter than the tone of her voice.

*I went through Maggie-May’s. But I doubt he’ll let us in.*

We could be subtle, Trouble says, and lets her tone carry her preference. Try to fake him out. Or we could force it.

*Subtlety’s wasted on the Mayor,* Cerise answers. *Besides, you’ve never been subtle in your life.*

*So let’s go and see if he’ll let us in,* Trouble says.

They move along the corridors of the Bazaar, past glowing tents and boards where messages, images and text and sound, each overlaid with an icon or a name-sign, bloom like flowers against light-less walls. Trouble feels her muscles tense, relaxes with an effort, working her shoulders against the constraints of a chair she cannot truly feel. She sees Cerise’s image flicker, and guesses she is doing the same. The Mayor’s IC(E) is always good, some of the best; as she told Mabry, there are places where the interface alone, the structure of his dictated reality, is enough protection. To think of cracking it is maybe crazy, but it’s every cracker’s dream.

And then again, she thinks, it may not be necessary. The Mayor may still let them in, at least to the main volume; the point, she supposes, is to prove that she, that they, she and Cerise together, are still the best, are back better than before. They reach Maggie-May’s together, to find the space dark and empty, a hole in the illusion where the shop icon had been. There is no notice, just the haze of black-and-silver static, but Cerise turns, circling, calls to an icon Trouble doesn’t recognize. She directs her message, shutting out other ears, and Trouble bridles, but then the stranger answers, uneasy, flicks away as soon as icon-Cerise nods.

She had some trouble with Treasury, Cerise says, and Trouble imagines the twist of her smile.

So any word on a doorway?

The usual suspects, Cerise begins, and then the air opens in front of them, through the hole where Maggie-May’s had been. Through the oval, bright as a window, they can see the streets of Seahaven—a dry place today, bathed in a hot, hard light.

A dare? Cerise murmurs, and the icon cannot match the hunting note in her voice.

Certainly that, Trouble says, and steps through before she can change her mind.

The hole seals itself instantly behind her, a soundless thump and concussion of hot air that emphasizes the finality of the closing. Trouble wastes a single second on a curse, anger at her own stupidity, the sheer arrogance that tempted her to take this chance, then swings in a quick circle, surveying this Seahaven. It is remade today in stark simplicity, dirt road and sunlight and flat-fronted wooden buildings, a double line of them along the single road, the only road today, that leads straight to the Mayor’s Aztec temple. If there are other netwalkers, she doesn’t see them, though she thinks she feels a passive presence, watchers lurking beneath the shell of the images. But if they are that far buried, they can neither hurt nor hinder; she dismisses them from conscious thought, lifts her head to survey the temple. The Mayor will be waiting there—And then she has the image, belatedly, the grade-B western’s final scene, and she grins in spite of herself, wishing her icon remade as she could remake it, given time, and starts walking, slow and easy, hands at her side, up the dusty road toward the Mayor’s citadel.

Cerise swears as the door slams shut against her, reaches out to catch the codewall, and swears again as IC(E) sparks against her fingers, driving into the receptive nerves. She pulls back instantly, stands for a moment with numbed hands, wincing at the sensation of blood rushing back into damaged tissue. And there may be real damage this time, not just the illusion of it, detached pain flowing along the wires from the brainworm: it was serious IC(E), the kind she knows enough to fear. She works her fingers cautiously, feeling pain beneath the tingling, then reaches for a program. Her hand fumbles for an instant with the toolkit, briefly clumsy, and then the brainworm’s override cuts in and she feels clear sensation return. She chooses an icepick, and then a couple of lesser routines, frowns and peels the illusion away so that she is looking at the code symbols that make up the wall of IC(E) itself. It is complex, definitely the Mayor’s work, his best work, maybe, and despair touches her, cold beneath the adrenaline high. But she’s good herself, and knows it, has become something of an expert on IC(E) in the years with Multiplane, and she knows where to begin unraveling. She touches probe to code, and watches the patterns dance, marshaling forces to repel her pretend-invasion. She touches it again, differently, and sees a different pattern respond, a new defense writhing across the symbols. She touches it a third time, betting with herself that she knows what will happen, and the IC(E) answers as she predicted, a flash of light that would have shocked an unwary netwalker off the nets, overloading the cutout circuits. She knows the system now, knows its important parameters, and that means she can break it. All she needs, she thinks, and it becomes a kind of mantra, all she needs is time. There may not be time, Trouble may not have the time to spare, but she puts the fear aside, concentrating entirely on the codes in front of her. All she needs is time.

Trouble walks, and readies her programs, her best defense and the needle-sharp icepick that doubles as a disrupter, her best tool to unravel other people’s work. She calls them to hand, but leaves them uninvoked. She can feel the tingle of IC(E) to either side, hidden behind the false-front buildings, smells the cold, damp-metal tang of it, incongruous beneath the dry heat that bathes her. She ignores it, however—disdains it, really, wouldn’t deign to escape, to walk away from this challenge—and keeps going, and at last the Mayor comes out to meet her, a thin black-clad shape of a man, a shadow against the bright stone of his stair-stepped temple. He stands on the first platform like a priest, high enough to dominate, not so high that he cannot reach her, and Trouble curls her lip at him, lets the worm carry her contempt, strong enough that even he must feel it.

She sees she’s struck home as the worm carries his response, a deepening heat, and then the flattening of the light, as though he’s exerting himself to keep control.

Hello, Trouble, he says, and despite the apparent distance his voice is close and conversational.

Hello, Mayor, she answers, and keeps her voice equally calm. She stops where she is, perhaps forty virtual meters from the base of the pyramid. The first platform, where he stands, is four meters above her head, and if she goes much closer, she will have to crane her neck to see him properly. Quite a greeting.

*You’ve earned it,* the Mayor says grimly, and Trouble manages a grin she doesn’t feel.

Nobody messes with me, she says, and, remembering the lurkers, *not even you—Sasquatch.*

It is a shot at random, following Arabesque’s word, and she is remotely pleased when the Mayor waves his working hand, waving away the charge without denying it.

*You’ve done quite enough, Trouble,* he says. *This has to stop. This time I’m giving you fair warning, and if you don’t listen, I will bring you down.*

*That’s been tried,* Trouble said, the anger swelling in her. *You tried to shop me, and you blew it. And the worst of it is, I’m the one who’s been wronged here. It was my name your little friend stole, my programs he tried to use, me he tried to blame. The only thing I’ve done is to defend myself.* She shook her head. *I didn’t start this, Mayor, and you know it. But I will finish it.*

She hears her own absolute certainty reflected across the net, feels the distant stirring, like indrawn breath, as that same certainty reaches the lurkers. The Mayor’s icon cannot frown, but she senses the change of expression in the air around her.

*I’m making this my business,* he says at last. NewTrouble is my business, and I will deal with it. But in my own way, not yours. Leave it to me.

Trouble shakes her head, too angry to think of conciliation. *No. You had your chance, Mayor, you don’t get another one.*

And who do you think you are? the Mayor demands, stung at last into real response. *You’re nobody, just another half-competent bitch queer who thinks she’s good because she has a brainworm. You haven’t earned what you have, you haven’t worked for it the way the rest of us have, the real crackers, you just had it handed to you direct-to-brain. You don’t have any right to dictate to me.*

Fuck you, Trouble says, and then regrets it, the easy, unthinking answer, shoves the mistake away as unimportant and irretrievable. She takes a breath, mastering her own anger, looking for the words that will reach beyond him, that will touch the lurkers. *You know damn well that’s not how the wire works, and if you weren’t afraid of it, you’d have one yourself. It’s just the same as the implants, just like the dollie-slots, but it gives me an edge, yeah, because I’m not afraid of it, of what I can do with it. Or of you.* She stops then, breathing hard, pins him with her best glare because she’s told a lie. She is afraid—she’d be a fool not to be, he’s maintained Seahaven in the face of the law and the bright lights for ten years, and she’s never been entirely a fool. *NewTrouble’s a menace,* she says again, one last attempt at rational argument even though she knows it’s useless, at least if Mabry’s right. If newTrouble is this boy the Mayor’s been keeping—and he must be, there’s no other reason for him to behave this way, no matter how much he hates, fears, the wire—then he’ll do whatever he can to protect him, no matter what. *The Eurocops know who he is, you know, they’ll have him—*

You sold him, the Mayor says.

You sold me. Trouble blinks up at him, staring into false sunlight burning down out of a dust-white sky. The Mayor’s icon loses all resolution against that sky and the white stone of the pyramid; even the lions and eagles that crown the corners of each step have lost their distinct outlines. She risks a backward glance, sees the storefronts fading, faintly translucent, a hint of the white light shining through. She hesitates, weighing her words, and strikes. *If you can’t hack the rules…*

There is no warning, not even a drawn breath, and the Mayor strikes. She is half expecting it, had known it would be now if ever, but even so the blow—icepick? clawhammer?—hits hard, sending electric shivers through her defenses. She winces, feels the effect like pins-and-needles all along her limbs, dispatches her own icepick more or less at random, buying time. It slides harmlessly off the Mayor’s IC(E), kicking back painfully into her palm. She feels the jolt of it to her elbow, but readies it, and another, a different program, heart jolting against her ribs. She can taste adrenaline, and fear, knows and doesn’t care that the lurkers will feel it, too. There’s no time to worry about it: the Mayor’s clawhammer probes again, and she calls a secondary codewall into existence, reinforcing her defense. It takes excruciating time, like a gunfight in slow motion, too much time, either to attack or defend. The trick, she knows, is to stay with her decision, never succumb to the temptation to second-guess, choose another program—that and knowing when to cut and run.

Cerise worries at the Mayor’s IC(E), working alternately with her best icepick—a custom job, her own creation—and the lighter probes, assessing her progress. She’s getting there, the watchdogs muzzled or damped off, the alarms garotted, the traps spiked or circumvented, but there’s still a lot to do—meters of it, in the brainworm’s projection, and she hesitates for a moment, tempted to try an all-out assault. But common sense prevails—she’s good, but so is the Mayor; in an even match, the one who rushes first will, inevitably, lose—and she reaches for the icepick again, applies it to a stubborn knot of code. It resists, the feedback singing in her sore fingers, but then she’s found the inevitable weakness, and pries the program open. Its mechanism is clear, and she applies a routine from her toolkit, freezing it, and the section of the IC(E) that it controls, into immobility. That clears another meter or so of the IC(E), and she takes a cautious step forward, into the hollow she has cleared in the wall of code.

And then, behind her, she hears/feels a shift of air, a change in the net, and swings around faster than thought, sees a familiar shape hovering, on the verge of flight.

Silk, she says, and knows in that instant she is wrong, that this is newTrouble, the boy James Tilsen, as much as it is Silk. He, the icon, flinches, turns to run, and she reacts without thought, without hesitation, throws her sphere around them both, sealing them inside. She sees/feels him collide with the IC(E), rebound, his pain skittering briefly in echo across the net, and he turns to face her, eyes wide. She tastes his fear, the faint echo of it tainting the net, and then it’s gone, he has himself under control, and there’s only the icon facing her across the silver sphere. It’s an ordinary icon, generic man-shape roughly clad in leather, and there’s no reflection at all of Silk, except perhaps the hint of sensuality, the scent of burnt-sugar sex bittersweet to the tongue. He waits, braced in case she lets the sphere drop even for an instant, and she smiles at him, covering her own anxiety. The icepick is working still, slower because she isn’t there to direct it, but it will work on until the wall is breached. Her concern now must be with him.

Silk, she says again, because it frightened him, and sees him flinch again. Going to see the Mayor? She gets no answer—as indeed she expected none, goes on anyway, needing to force the issue. You can take me with you.

No way, the icon answers, sounds almost indignant, and flings himself sideways, at the same moment loosing a disrupter against her.

She parries, awkward but effective, and her guardian watchdog pounces on the stunned fragments, neutralizing them as it begins to consume the code. Her sphere holds, too, and Silk shakes himself, turns at bay.

Well, Cerise says, and smiles, not nicely. Silk waits, says nothing. Take me with you.

There is another pause, and then Silk looks away, voice gone sullen. All right. Loose the sphere.

Not yet, Cerise says, grim, and pulls a long-unused tool from her kit. She flicks it into existence, tunes it to Silk’s icon, and feels the leash slap home. Silk winces, but she ignores it, makes sure the tie is fast, testing methodically before she releases the sphere. The sphere vanishes, and she sees the codewall exposed, her icepick still burrowing slow and stubborn into the knotted code.

Well,she says again, and looks at Silk. He looks back at her, the icon showing the hipshot stance, the defiant stare that she remembers, and she thinks again of the touch of her—his—hands. He’s playing a dangerous game, reminding her of that, and a part of her admires his arrogance before she slaps the thought away. Open the door.

There is a last, minuscule pause, and then he steps forward. She calls back the icepick, in the same moment shortening the leash that holds him to her, and sees him reach deep into the violated code. Something sparks, and then the system recognizes him, his icon. The codewall vanishes, all but a few patches, segments of the wall already so eroded by her work that they can no longer respond even to legitimate stimulus. Seahaven opens before them, a dusty street lined with the tall false fronts of the frontier town, and they pass through together into the sudden heat. Silk tugs once at the leash, little more than an experiment, and she controls it instantly.

Walk, she says, and they start together up the long street.

The clawhammer slides away with a noise like a needle scoring plastic, and Trouble feels the sickening scrape of it against the codewall, bringing a skidding pain like the deliberate scratch of a pin. That means the wall is damaged, though only slightly. She feels the self-seal routine kick in, knows already that it won’t be finished in time, that she will rely on the inner wall. Her icepick returns to the attack, slower now, probing the convoluted codes. The Mayor brushes at it, but it finds a weak point and fastens on, burrowing, fretting loose the imperfect fragments, digging into the wall. The Mayor dispatches a watchdog—not one of his specials, with all its fancy iconage; this one’s a killer, plain sphere covering code that will shred almost any other program. The icepick keeps burrowing, blindly, oblivious to the watchdog chewing at its heels, and for a moment Trouble thinks it might succeed. And then the watchdog reaches vital code: the icepicks slows and fades, dissolves into directionless fragments.

Trouble swears, and feels a new touch, a cold mouth like a leech’s full of glassy teeth, against her skin. She swears again, under her breath, knowing what’s happened—she was concentrating on her own attack, forgot to keep an eye out for sleepers, and now she has one on her, already burrowed through the first codewall and onto her main defense. She stays calm with an effort, hating the touch of it, cold with the pain of a dozen razors’ cuts, calls the watchdog she bought from Jesse. For a long moment she waits, the cold pain gnawing at her, and then the watchdog catches hold, and the sleeper vanishes. The Mayor’s watchdog lurches forward, and her own program turns to meet it. She winces, unable to tell which one will win, but makes herself look away, reaches into her toolkit for another attack. This one’s a hammer, slow and crude, but she sets it bashing, hoping to distract the Mayor. She parries his icepick, looses a copy of the disrupter on it, and feels a lucky blow: the icepick shatters, scattering fragments. She ducks, but feels a few of them slap against her skin, distinct points of pain like bee stings.

She brushes them away, reaches for another program, triggers its response, another kind of icepick, to join the hammer already at work. The Mayor swats at the hammer, but it’s sturdy, resilient, bounces back each time he slaps it away. Trouble allows herself a quick smile, seeing that, looses a second copy of her icepick, hoping to overwhelm his defenses, then turns her attention to her own systems and the icepick worrying at her shields. Her watchdog is still tangled in fight, and she calls another copy, sets it to work.

Trouble!

Cerise’s voice, she thinks, but does not dare glance back toward it, just in case it’s some trick of the Mayor’s and then a second voice echoes, a voice she’s never heard, clear and young.

Eytan!

For an instant she can’t think who it means, and then remembers—the Mayor’s name is Eytan—but the Mayor’s already turning, leaping down like a superhero from the first level of his temple. He carries the cloud of his attackers with him for an instant, but then gestures stiffly, and the space of Seahaven itself twists and swirls around him like a twist of wind, and Trouble’s programs are gone. She freezes for half a heartbeat, appalled at the casual power, the sheer scale of the Mayor’s creations, and then her mind is working again, and she sees, knows, what he’s betrayed. Seahaven is fluid space—that much they’d all always known, that it was entirely the Mayor’s whim and so controllable from somewhere, but this, this sweeping destruction, proves that the control points are everywhere, and everywhere potent, potentially universal. And, therefore, potentially accessible to any cracker.

*Jamie—* the Mayor begins, and Cerise’s voice rides over his words, sharp as the crack of a whip.

*Be careful, sunshine, I’ve got a leash on him. Trouble, are you all right?*

Fine, Trouble answers, shortly, not surprised even now by the rescue—figuring the odds are still even, with Cerise here, since she’s brought newTrouble with her.

The Mayor says again, Jamie, and fear and anger both are sharp in his voice, crackle on the net like the scent of lightning.

Silk/newTrouble says, *I’m sorry—* and the Mayor’s voice cuts into whatever else he might have said.

*You’re wired,* he says, and Trouble risks a look backward, over her shoulder to where Cerise’s familiar icon stands beside a generic man-shape rough-clad in black, not quite matching the Mayor’s severity.

You little bastard, the Mayor says, voice flat again, the anger damped to a hint of sulphur. *When— How—?* And he stops, with what would have been the shake of a head if he’d himself been on the wire.

*I’m sorry* Silk/newTrouble says again, and sounds terribly young.

You cunt, the Mayor says, and the icon’s working hand convulses. Go home. The fabric of Seahaven warps again, twists and distorts and in an eyeblink wraps itself around Silk/newTrouble’s icon. Cerise swears, incoherent, lifts a hand to jerk short the leash, and the program kicks back, broken at the source. The section of image knots tighter, space stretching around it, painful to the eye, and then relaxes, smoothing out to restore the stark frontier town as though it had never changed. Silk/newTrouble is gone.

Cerise curses again, shakes a stinging hand, and Trouble swings back to face the Mayor. The ground roils under her feet, tipping her sideways, the air goes gluey, multileaved and flaking yellow-tinged as isinglass; she struggles for breath and balance, goes to her knees in the dust that rises to engulf her. Cerise calls something, but her voice is muffled, and Trouble closes her mind to it, concentrating on the space that has enfolded her. She closes her eyes as well, cutting off the visuals that threaten to override her system, feels the pressure on her lungs ease because she lacks the visual cue of dust to reinforce thick air. She could hit the panic button, drop off the net completely, she’d be safe then, but that would mean losing, admitting herself beaten. She reaches blindly into the spaces around her, groping spread-fingered for the hot spots, the control points that will allow her to break free of this program. She trips an emergency control, dangerous but necessary, kicks the brainworm to full power, full receptivity, and feels the heat and the thick air clog her lungs, illusion but dangerous, warning her of slower dangers. She ignores that, reaches out again, fingers trailing across illusory lumps and tingling wires, every touch magnified, and finally touches a hot spot, palms its burning circle in her left hand. She finds a second even as she analyzes the first, and cups them both, working through the system. The feeling is familiar beneath the generic heat, a system like systems she has used before. She shifts her left hand slightly, then her right, and feels the system controls wrap themselves around her fingers. She gestures—the old-style code, the old netwalker symbols—and feels some of the pressure ease from around her. She gestures again, with more confidence this time, and the wall of images unravels around her.

Cerise says, Christ, you gave me a scare. She lets her hands fall, lets another icepick flick back into obscurity.

Trouble takes a deep breath, ignoring the heat that lingers along with the fear, looks up at the Mayor’s palace. It turns a blank face to the rest of Seahaven, the usual windows and doors sealed with stone, even the battling statues vanished from the corners of the platforms. NewTrouble? she asks, and Cerise shrugs.

*Bounced him out of Seahaven—right off the nets, I think. Are you all right?*

Fine, Trouble says, sourly, not thinking, then looks at Cerise in apology. *I’m all right. But we have to do something about the Mayor.*

Yeah, but what? Cerise scowls, scanning the illusory space, empty now except for the icons. They have waited a long time, by the reckoning of the nets; the walls will be sealed tight, all the IC(E) in place and fully armed.

Go after him, Trouble says.

Cerise hesitates, her hands still stinging from the first wall of IC(E), knowing it would be smarter to take the draw and run, leave the Mayor to Mabry, to Treasury and the Eurocops. But that’s not either of their styles—and there is Silk to think about. He’s on the wire, one of them, doubly family, maybe, and she feels responsible. She nods slowly, works her hands again. The fingers that held the leash feel thick and clumsy, and worry stabs through her.

Are you OK? Trouble asks, her tone sharpening, and Cerise nods again.

Caught some IC(E) getting in here, she says, careful to keep her voice casual. Trouble looks at her, uncertain, searching, and she forces a smile. Stung my fingers a little, nothing more.

All right, Trouble says, and her tone is doubtful, but she starts toward the temple.

Wait, Cerise says, and reaches into her toolkit, triggers the iconage editor she had carried since she first went into the business. Trouble cocks her head to one side, but asks no questions; Cerise grins, and triggers a sequence, spinning an image into the air around them. Her touch is clumsy, but the shape that forms is recognizable enough: a gunfighter’s silhouette, battered ten-gallon hat and loose cap-shouldered duster, dark against the Mayor’s walls.

Trouble laughs softly. *Shouldn’t the hat be white?* she says, and makes the change. What brought this on?

Blame the Mayor, Cerise says, and gestures at the fading frontier town around him. *1 thought I’d beat him at his own game.*

After a moment Trouble nods, and reaches for the icon, drawing it over herself like a suit of clothes. Cerise spins a second copy for herself-—she keeps the black hat, but her kerchief is her own hot fuchsia, a single point of vivid contrast—and dons it, too.

He picked the game, Cerise says, and looks at Trouble remade, at an icon that seems suddenly more herself than the dancing harlequin had ever been. Trouble looks back at her as though she’d read the thought, and the icon’s wry mouth twists into a sudden smile.

When were we ever the good guys? she asks, and reaches for her toolkit.

Cerise doesn’t answer, moves to join her, to examine the featureless surface. Weren’t we always? she thinks, and runs one hand across the temple face, feeling sun-warmed stone beneath her palm. She finds a protruding bit of code, a defect, where the image has been corrupted—perhaps by collateral damage from the fight, perhaps just by wear and tear, by constant usage; whatever the cause, she catches hold of it, levers away the skin of the image. It comes away with a ripping sound, just a small patch of the illusion, perhaps as big as a man’s outspread hand. In that one spot, the codewall lies exposed, and she frowns, studying its pattern. Trouble moves up beside her, but she’s barely aware of the other’s presence, concentrating on the codes. It was made by the same hand that made the outer wall; there are similarities of style and shape, but otherwise it’s not much like that first barrier, a tighter, leaner code concealing a colder IC(E). She hesitates for an instant, thinking of the first wall, of her sore hands, then shakes herself, makes herself contemplate the exposed patterns.

Trouble reaches past the other icon’s shoulder, carrying the icon of a sleeper. She releases it beside the open patch of code, bends close to watch it apply itself to the codewall. For a moment it seems to make headway, and then the IC(E) reasserts itself. The sleeper slows, frozen, drops away to shatter against the illusory dirt.

*It shouldn’t’ve done that,* Trouble says, irrelevantly—she hates illusions that don’t quite work—and Cerise leans closer to the opening.

Try this, she says, and touches a probe to a single strand of code. She is still clumsy, a little less accurate than she needs to be, but the codewall sings under her touch, a deep bass note that reverberates through their bones. She’s found a hot spot within the wall of IC(E), a space that give access to a deeper layer of control, a structure more fundamental than the IC(E).

Careless, Trouble says, meaning the Mayor, and reaches for the same point, delicately brushes the same bit of code. The music answers again, true and deep as some great bell. She takes a breath, bracing herself for the necessary attack, the necessary risk, and Cerise touches her arm.

Let me, Cerise says.

Trouble hesitates, recognizing the logic—Cerise’s hands are already burned; she herself is unhurt, and should remain so, to deal with the Mayor—and in that instant Cerise reaches past her, deep into the maze of coded IC(E). Light flares, momentarily blinding, and Cerise winces at the numbing chill that wraps around her. The cold dims her tactile sense, masking those receptors, but she gropes anyway toward the faint heat of the control points. And then she has it, and the light fades, dims, and then vanishes completely, revealing a new world within the temple walls.

Nice, Trouble says, and Cerise smiles, rubbing her hands to warm them. For a moment she thinks it’s nothing more than cold, nothing more than an illusion of the brainworm, but then she feels something beneath the cool, a faint, distant ache, all the more worrisome because she’s sure it’s real.

*Let’s get on with it* she says, and Trouble looks more closely at her.

You all right?

Yeah, Cerise answers, and, when Trouble says nothing, just keeps looking. *I’m OK. Let’s go*

OK, Trouble agrees, not entirely certain, but closes off her concern, and steps through the opening.

She catches her breath as the new illusion takes hold of her, spins her perspective, and then she has compensated, steadies herself against the brainworm’s insistence that she is upside down and sideways. She closes her eyes, lets herself go limp, and the brainworm and the temple-space together turn her right, so that when she opens her eyes she is standing perpendicular to the opening Cerise made, looking out at a world that hangs at a bizarre angle. Cerise’s icon performs the same maneuver, spinning against the bright opening until it’s oriented with the strict and sober geometry, drab black and a grey that isn’t even close to silver, that makes up the Mayor’s private space. Satisfied that Cerise is with her, Trouble turns, scanning the net around her for traps and watchdogs. She sees nothing, the brainworm finds nothing it can translate to sound or smell or taste, not even the wet-steel tang of IC(E).

Weird, Cerise says, and Trouble nods, knowing exactly what is meant.

A pattern, a line like a road, brighter grey than the planes that wall in this entrance space, stretches away from them, edged with thinner lines of black. It zigzags through the irregular slabs that rise like trees, like the stones of Stonehenge, disappears into an illusory far distance: the temple, like most virtual spaces, is bigger on the inside than the outside, and even with the brainworm’s assistance, sight fails before the road ends. A shiver of light, like a dusting of stars, runs beneath the bright surface, shooting away into the interior, flickering in and out of sight between the irregularly spaced planes. Trouble catches her breath, looking instantly for watchdogs, for attacking programs, but there’s still nothing, just the pure still sense of the code itself in the air around her.

*I suppose that’s an invitation,* Cerise says.

Trouble nods again, still searching for IC(E), grateful that her brainworm is still tuned high. I feel like Dorothy, she says, and steps out onto the path. Another flicker of light runs away beneath her feet, like ripples on the surface of a pool; to either side of the grey band, the illusory floor drops away—not a surprise, but she walks carefully nonetheless.

*That wasn’t Kansas back there,* Cerise mutters, and follows. The same scattering of light ripples away from her, and Trouble feels the faint warmth of it rush fugitive under her own feet.

*Might’ve been,* Trouble says, as much to chase away her fears as because she thinks so, and takes another few cautious steps. Old Kansas, in the old days. Where the hell is the IC(E)?

Cerise shakes her head, the brainworm carrying the gesture like a scent of oil, a taste of peppermint. *Worry about that when we find it—or when it finds us.*

Her voice is grimmer than her words, but Trouble laughs anyway, and keeps walking, lines of silver rippling away from her along the grey slab that is the path. There’s still no sign of IC(E), though the plane that was the floor drops further away below them until it vanishes in a haze like black fog—she would say that the path is rising, but the brainworm denies that, tells her she is walking straight and level. Slabs of featureless grey, some narrow as sheets of steel, others thick as stone, rise on either side, set at angles to the walkway; ahead, the path jogs sharply left, around a stone pillar that looks almost blue, the blue of a shadow, among the shaded greys. And still there’s nothing else, no watchdogs—she glances back in spite of herself, the fuchsia spark of Cerise’s neckerchief the only color in the bleak grey-and-black, almost painful to the eye, sees only Cerise, the icon’s face set in a faint, unhappy frown. And no IC(E) either, not even the hint of it drifting up from the black fog virtual meters below the walkway. The lights beneath her feet, the silver ripples like moonlight on water, aren’t IC(E) either, aren’t anything that she recognizes; she is getting used to them, though, and has to make an effort now to feel their fugitive warmth as they flicker away from her along the narrow path.

The blue-grey monolith looms ahead, its edges smoothed, rounded not by weather, nature, but as though ground by some massive machine. Trouble eyes it warily, suspecting a trap, dispatches a copy of a watchdog toward it. The program—stripped down to carry more features, its icon little more than a red disk— floats cautiously toward it, circles it, and returns again.

Passive system? Cerise says from behind her, and Trouble shrugs.

*This program’s supposed to catch those as well,* she answers, but they both know that it’s hard to simulate the output of a brainworm, the usual trigger for passive IC(E). A watchdog, even a complex one, is still only a limited program, and therefore, inevitably, imperfect.

Cerise makes a noise that is almost a laugh, short and angry, but says nothing. Trouble starts walking again, her best defensive routines invoked ready, trembling in her hands. She feels a tremor beneath her feet, a shudder different from the passage of the wavelets of light, and fixes her eyes on the hulking stone. It stays precisely as it is, releases nothing, no program or IC(E), just the blue-grey bulk of it beside the brighter grey of the path. Trouble hesitates, still watching, then starts to step past it, along the path that turns sharply left around it.

Her foot reaches out, but in the wrong direction, sliding somehow off the edge of the path. She staggers, trying to correct, but, though she can see the path plainly, can feel it still solid under one foot, she still reaches in the wrong direction, throwing herself even more off-balance. She can feel herself falling, flails backward, back toward the security of the walkway, and then she feels Cerise’s hands tight on her shoulders, dragging her back and down, so that they both stumble heavily, Cerise collapsing backward into a sitting position, Trouble in her lap. Cerise grabs for the edge of the path— it’s wide here, but nothing’s wide enough, not at that moment— and swears again as she cuts her fingers, grabbing a raw program edge.

Jesus Christ, Trouble says, splays her own hands firmly on the path, grateful for the solidity beneath her touch. What the hell was that? So this is what the other crackers had tried to describe, the ones who’d tried to crack Seahaven, what they meant when they said the architecture of the Mayor’s space defended itself, without IC(E)—without anything except a cracker’s overconfidence and fear to help it along.

Cerise untangles herself from the other woman’s icon, shaking her right hand—it feels bruised only, this time, but the accumulated aches are beginning to amount to a constant pain, warning her to be more careful. What happened?

*I—don’t know,* Trouble answers, and sounds almost surprised. She studies the path, still turning sharply to the left, and levers herself up onto hands and knees. For a moment she feels distinctly silly—crackers, real crackers, do not crawl through the architecture they are exploring—but dismisses the thought, focusing on the walkway in front of her. She reaches out again, feels Cerise’s hands close with reassuring strength on her ankles, and reaches again to the left. Her hand goes right, against her will, against all common sense; she frowns, concentrating, tries to bring her hand to the walk, and finds her hand jigging back and forth, unable to obey.

IC(E)? Cerise asks, but her tone says she already knows it isn’t.

Trouble answers anyway, *Not like any I’ve ever seen.* She reaches out again, and again she misses, but this time she’s closer. She grits her teeth, lays her hand flat against the surface of the walk, and slides it forward, following the path. Silver ripples fan out ahead of her, teasing, showing her the way she should go, but her hand obstinately refuses to obey, slips from side to side, advancing in fits and starts that bring her closer and closer to the right-hand edge of the walk. She is almost at the end of her reach, braces herself on that hand and shuffles forward, Cerise still clinging to her ankles, then reaches out again. There is something familiar about this, the halting progress, the way her eyes and her senses do not match—

*It’s a mirror* Cerise says. God damn.

*That’s it,* Trouble says, and the illusive memory appears: a child’s toy, a puzzle, a box with a hidden mirror and a series of figures to trace. You reached in from the side, and looked through the plate in the top, not realizing that you were looking not at your hand but at its mirror image. She had fought with the thing for hours, her finger jittering from side to side as she tried to figure out how to do what she could so plainly see, her shoulders tightening with sheer frustration, until at last she’d mastered it. The problem was, she couldn’t quite remember how she’d done it. She inches forward another few dozen centimeters, her hand still flat on the walkway’s surface, reaches out again and slides suddenly off the edge of the plane. She falls forward, catches herself clumsily, and hears Cerise swearing again behind her.

*I’m OK,* she says, and tries to pull her hand back. For a moment she can’t do it; the movement that should work just leaves her flailing in nothingness, and then, quite suddenly, she has it, and slides forward another meter, two meters, crawling, scrambling on hands and knees to get as far as she can before she loses the knack of it. Cerise follows, clumsily, a reassuring weight on her legs and ankles. Then at last they’ve turned the corner and the intangible pressure vanishes, as though the mirror is behind them and they are once again looking at the walkway itself.

Through the looking glass, Cerise says, and releases her hold on Trouble’s ankles.

Yeah, Trouble says, and pushes herself cautiously to her feet. But what happens when we hit IC(E)?

Cerise looks at her and doesn’t answer, stands up more slowly, scanning the volume around them. There is still no hint of IC(E), none of the metallic taste to the wind. *You don’t suppose there isn’t any.*

No, Trouble says, and Cerise smiles.

*Neither do I. But we’ll have to deal with it when we find it, won’t we?*

Trouble grins back, acknowledging the too-obvious logic of the other’s answer. It hides real concern, and real danger, and they both know it—but, as Cerise said, there’s no point in trying to anticipate it. Ahead, the walkway stretches empty, the silver ripples running ahead of their footsteps, travels perhaps fifteen, twenty virtual meters before it zigs again to skirt an encroaching plane. Trouble eyes that distant monolith warily, but starts walking toward it, feeling the walkway steady again underfoot.

She slows as she comes up on the turn, takes the time to check for IC(E)—there’s no sense in taking any risks, not here, not now— and, as she’d expected, finds nothing. She slides a foot forward, testing the path, takes five cautious, shuffling steps before she finds the point where the image reverses. She makes a sound, a sharp intake of breath, and Cerise’s hands close reassuringly tight around her waist.

How do you want to work it? Cerise asks.

Trouble doesn’t answer, but eases her foot forward, manages to take a step without going too far wrong, drifting too far to the left and the path’s edge. She takes a second step, Cerise braced behind her, ready to save them both, and then a third, and a fourth. It’s easier this time, something about the reflection is simpler, so that she passes through the backward space still standing, and draws Cerise after her onto the new straightaway.

Nice, Cerise says. She works her shoulders, loosening tight muscles, looks ahead toward the next pillar, and the monolith beyond that, where the path begins to zig back and forth at irregular and ever-decreasing intervals. *That, however—*

Yeah, Trouble answers. I see it. And she can smell something, too, they both can, the first faint whiff of IC(E) in the wind. For an instant she wonders if it’s worth it, if there’s anything real to be gained in this pursuit—after all, even if she, they, win, defeat the Mayor, the nets will turn a blind eye, say it’s because she was on the wire, or because there were two of them, anything to pretend it wasn’t a defeat, not of their hero—but she’s come too far to turn back now. She wants to win, to prove to herself if to no one else that she is better than the Mayor, and there’s newTrouble to consider as well. He is on the wire, family in that sense if not the other, and she owes him, as she would owe van Liesvelt or Arabesque, or, better example, Fate. For me, then, she thinks, and maybe for the kid, too.

*It’s still a long way off,* Cerise says. She stands in the center of the walkway, eyes fixed on the middle distance, on nothing in particular, tasting the wind. This is something she’s good at, better than Trouble, better than anyone they know, and she takes her time, teasing all the information she can out of the hint of a flavor. *Stationary, too, but powerful. I don’t recognize the style from here, but that may change as we get closer.*

Trouble nods, grateful for the insight—she can taste only the presence of the distant IC(E), not the subtle shifts and delicate differences—makes herself say, *You don’t have to come.*

Cerise looks at her blankly for an instant. *Don’t be stupid.*

Trouble hasn’t expected any other answer, but she’s momentarily startled by the intensity of her relief, grins because she can’t find the words. Cerise smiles back, touches her shoulder once, gently, the gesture carried through the brainworm, then looks ahead.

*Let’s go.*

They make their way along the elevated pathway, slowing each time they come to a minor reflection of a turn. Trouble is getting the knack of them now, as she learned to read the distorted reflection in the childhood toy, and she moves with more confidence, making her way around the corners now with only the occasional misstep. To either side, the black fog rises higher, though it’s impossible to tell if that’s because the floor, whatever, wherever, that may be, is rising too. It isn’t IC(E), however, and Trouble ignores it, concentrating on the maze ahead of them as the turns come closer together, offering less and less chance to recover from the effort of the previous corner. At least once, she thinks, they must have crossed their own path, but the mirror-display, the mirrored perception, makes it impossible for her to be certain. Cerise follows grimly, holding tight to Trouble’s icon, fighting an unexpected nausea. The abrupt shifts in perception, the effort of changing her point of view almost as soon as she’s settled on one, is overloading her system; her inner ear can’t quite keep up with the brainworm’s transmissions, and the pain in her hands is a nagging distraction.

Hang on, she says at last, and Trouble stops, looking back over her shoulder, eyebrows rising in question. Cerise ignores it, concentrates on her own system, and resets the brainworm, lowering the intensity of its display.

You all right? Trouble asks, and Cerise nods, impatient with herself.

I needed to reset, she says. *I’m OK now.*

Trouble hesitates, remembering—almost too late, she thinks— that Cerise has had troubles before with rapidly shifting perceptual fields, something like vertigo when her brainworm is set at its higher levels, but knows, too, that she has to trust Cerise. She nods back, starts again toward the next obstacle, three turns in quick succession that seem almost to loop the path back on itself, and feels the touch of a vagrant breeze on her face, cool against her skin. With that warning breeze, like the first soft breeze that comes before a storm, comes the smell of IC(E), damp metal, the tang of copper like the taste of fear.

Shit, she says, half to herself.

Cerise says, The center, there, at that loop. She sounds a little better, freed from the full intensity of the brainworm’s input; her tone is detached, analytical, too calm to be afraid.

Trouble considers the apparently empty space, the source of the vagrant wind, of the scent of IC(E), and the loop of walkway that seems to circle around it. She can only see so far, trace a portion of the line, before she loses her place, as though it is some kind of Mobius strip, or, worse yet, derived from one of the etchings beloved of crackers, where perspective twists and impossibly separate things are in fact intimately connected—where the waterfall is its own source and figures climb both sides of a stairway. It’s no wonder no one’s ever beaten the Mayor, she thinks, on the wire or not, then puts the fear aside. This has to be the Mayor’s inner sanctum, and she refuses to allow that it might not be—even the Mayor has technical limits, storage limits, she thinks, no matter how much time and space he’s liberated from other sources, and this has to be it. And if it isn’t, she thinks, well, I’ll keep going.

Any sense of what it is? To her, the IC(E) is just inchoate IC(E), the indistinguishable unspecific taste that means poison, danger.

Cerise tilts her head to one side, considers. *The Mayor’s work,* she says, and Trouble snorts.

*Tell me something I don’t know. *

*The Mayor’s work,* Cerise goes on, placidly, as though the other hasn’t spoken, *very like the outer walls, only woven tighter—reminds me a bit of my own work at Multiplane, too, but I can’t quite tell you how.*

You should be flattered, Trouble says.

*If it’s mine,* Cerise answers. It could be an illusion, trying to sucker us in.

*That’s a nasty thought,* Trouble says, and Cerise shrugs.

*I’ve some mirrors of my own—to make you think my IC(E) is set like yours, not the kind we’ve been playing with—in our inner walls. It tends to confuse people.*

That would be an understatement, Trouble thinks, trying to imagine reaching for what should be a familiar program and feeling the jolt of hard IC(E). She says, *I’ll watch it, then,* and she keeps walking, on toward the place where the fabric of the Mayor’s world shimmers and turns back on itself. Underfoot, the silver ripples are brighter, and she catches an occasional glimpse of their light toward the end of the walkway, as though all the wavelets that they have set dancing have collected there beneath the surface of the walk.

As she slides a cautious foot into the first turn, she finds herself reaching once again in the wrong direction, tries to pull back as she has done before, and finds herself suddenly trapped, her outstretched leg jogging back and forth without making any progress. Cerise reaches to steady her, a comfortable weight, hands rock solid on her shoulder and waist, and Trouble struggles to bring herself into alignment with the walkway. Her foot obstinately refuses to move the way she wants it; instead, she slides closer in spite of herself to the edge of the walk.

Easy, Cerise says, her own voice strained, and Trouble feels the hand on her shoulder move to her waist, Cerise’s weight thrown backward to anchor them both.

Trouble doesn’t answer, tries again, and again stands frustrated, muscles knotting as she tries to bring her foot back to the left. It’s worse than any force field, because she knows there’s nothing there, nothing really blocking her way—but then, none of it’s real. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and edges her foot forward a dozen centimeters, opens her eyes again to see that she has gone in the right direction, has actually taken a step the way she wants to go. And that gives her the answer.

*We’ll have to crawl,* she says, and Cerise releases her.

*You’re going to have to guide me,* she says, and Trouble nods.

I can do it. She drops to her knees without waiting for an answer, and Cerise copies her, wraps a hand tightly in the skirt of the icon’s long coat. Trouble nods, grateful for the protection—one good thing about iconage, you don’t have to worry about your clothes being ripped away when they should protect you; they’re an integral part of any image—then reaches forward, eyes open, and sees her hand stray to the edge of the walk. She flattens her hand against it, careful not to put her weight on it, to avoid the jagged edge of the unfinished program, then closes her eyes and runs her hand forward, keeping the edge centered in her palm. She brings her hand in again, until she can just feel the edge of the walk against the edge of her hand, and draws her body up to meet it, Cerise’s weight heavy on her legs and hips. She opens her eyes again, half afraid to look, half afraid that in spite of the evidence of her senses she will be off the path and falling, careening down into the black fog, and finds herself perhaps half a meter further along the walk, not quite past the turn. She closes her eyes again, reaches out, the program edge scratching along her palm, draws her body after, and checks her position. Still safe, still making progress, though without dignity or grace, and she manages a breathless laugh before she starts again. She reaches out again, repeats the process, and this time she’s through the perceptual mirror, Cerise still clinging to her coat. Trouble turns back, grabs the hand that is clinging to the icon-coat, and pulls her through. Cerise, eyes closed tight, accepts the help, comes scrambling through, silver light radiating from her.

What the hell were you laughing about? she demands, scowling, pushes herself up onto one knee.

Us, Trouble says, how we must look.

Cerise gives her a sour look. *Yeah, I bet the Mayor thinks it’s funny, too.*

That stings, and Trouble has a sudden vision of how they must look from outside, two cowboy-hatted icons crawling, more clumsy than children, on a grey-and-silver bridge through a black-and-grey geometric universe. It is silly, and she hates looking foolish— and then she laughs again, acknowledging the absurdity. It may look stupid, they may look like clowns, unskilled mimes trying to act out some strange disaster, but they’ve come further into the Mayor’s world than anyone else has, than anyone she’s ever known or heard about in all the years she’s been on the net. *I don’t think he’s laughing,* she says, and knows absolutely that it’s true.

Cerise looks sour for a heartbeat longer, then, slowly, returns the smile. She pushes herself upright, holds out her hand to help Trouble to her feet. He better not be, she says, and looks left, off the edge of the walkway. The smell of IC(E) is stronger now, and she can feel its dank weight, but no corresponding icon stands visible. She considers probing it, trying to force some image to emerge, but decides against it. There are still two more turns to the walk, and logically it will eventually lead to the wall of IC(E), and whatever it is the IC(E) protects: she’ll wait until then to try her probes.

The next turn is much the same, the distortion perhaps a little more complex, and Trouble feels her way along the walk with her hand. Cerise follows, eyes closed tight, letting the other woman pull her along through the mismatch of vision and sense that leaves her seasick, and then, as she crawls, dragged at Trouble’s heels, she catches a first faint sound, the rustle and stir of watchdogs, search-and-destroy programs moving somewhere in the distance.

Trouble, she says, and Trouble says, I hear.

She pulls herself to her feet, turns to pull Cerise up as well, and the first of the programs pops into sight. Cerise studies it, goes intent and still, analyzing the taste of it. She reaches into her toolkit, selects a counterroutine and sets it loose, releases a second and a third copy as well to patrol the space between them. The first copy churns toward the watchdog, meets and tangles it; the programs fall, turning slowly end over end, but she doesn’t bother to watch the end. She reaches into her toolkit again, evokes another version, and then her own icepick, queues them ready for use. She has movable IC(E) as well, a variation of the privacy sphere, and far more effective, but she holds it ready, not yet deploying it.

How many? Trouble asks, and Cerise shrugs.

Five that I can be sure of, maybe more. Now what?

Trouble takes a deep breath, looks over her shoulder at the final corner, where the walkway seems to turn back on itself and the smell, the cold of IC(E) is strongest, then looks back at Cerise and the watchdogs, arrowing down on them. Why the hell did he wait until now? she says, and is briefly angry at the irrelevance. To her surprise, Cerise grins.

*I think we’ve got him worried,* she says. *Those aren’t part of the main program.*

*That’s something,* Trouble says, looks back at the final corner, deceptively ordinary. She knows what will happen if she tries to step through it, to walk the path as it stands, she’s tried it before, practiced it all along the length of this walkway, and that means, she thinks, that this one will be different, somehow. The Mayor would have to be a fool to use the same method, the same kind of program, here where it matters most, and the Mayor has never been a fool. And there was the IC(E) to deal with, as well. Can you watch my back? she says, and Cerise glances at her.

How do you mean?

Keep those off my back until I can figure out how to turn the corner, get to the IC(E) so I can break it.

Cerise nods. I can do that.

Thanks, Trouble says. Stay close.

She moves cautiously toward the last corner, testing each step, ready to throw herself backward as soon as she finds the point where the mirror’s reflection begins. Cerise follows, walking backward so that she can keep an eye on her own counterroutines and on the approaching watchdogs. They are swarming in from every direction now, more and more of them visible in the distance—the Mayor has evoked multiple copies, more copies than she’s ever seen before in any one volume of the net, and she spins a few more copies of her counterroutine into the air around her. The second watchdog engages a counterroutine, and then the third; the programs are well matched, the counterroutine damaging the watchdog beyond function even as it itself is destroyed. She looses another copy, and another, eyeing the oncoming wave of watchdogs: the icons, simple half-spheres, coded red and yellow for warning, brighten the dark volume.

Trouble reaches out again, and, finally, feels her hand slide in the wrong direction, out away from the walkway. Found it, she says, and hears Cerise sigh in relief.

*I’m rigging our own codewall,* she says, my own IC(E). As she speaks, she sets the program running, sees the first clear-glass spokes of the lattice spin themselves out of thin air, and stoops to guide the forming wall. Her counterroutines fan out from it to face the watchdogs, backed by the secondary counters and then by a brace of icepicks. She will be able to release some of her programs through the IC(E)—it’s programmed to let them through—but that opening is a weakness that the Mayor may be able to exploit, if he can analyze the wall’s construction in time. She closes her mind to that thought, and concentrates on the wall itself. The spikes of IC(E) are stronger now, thicker, building on each other like crystals growing out of a solution, and she guides the pattern, walling herself and Trouble inside a glittering dome.

Trouble looks back over her shoulder, sees them encased in shards of bright glass—tinged here and there with purple, with fuchsia, a reinforcement lattice within the main system. She can leave the defense to Cerise—she has no choice, and anyway Cerise is the better at running IC(E); it’s always been her specialty and she’s had the time at Multiplane to hone her skills. Her own job is to concentrate on the Mayor, to root him out of the heart of his system, so that all of this, all the effort and anger, won’t have been in vain. She reaches out again, feels her hand stop as though she’s hit a barrier, knows it’s only the mismatch of sight and reality. She takes a deep breath, concentrates, and eases forward into chaos.

Chapter Thirteen

THIS TIME THE disorientation is worse, so that she can barely move at all, muscles throbbing with useless effort. Then, as she starts to pull back, to try again, her hand moves by chance as she wants it to go, straight ahead along the path traced by the walkway. She freezes in sudden understanding, her hand still outstretched toward the invisible IC(E). The silver ripples are puddled under her feet, solid silver that shimmers like cloth in a breeze. This time the mirror has inverted her perception as well as reversed it, or at least partly so; she must reach down to move ahead, as well as right to go left. But knowing isn’t the same as doing: she tries to take a step, and nearly falls, saves herself only by a graceless twist. There’s only one thing she can do, what she’s been doing all along, and she drops again to her knees, eyes closed, and gropes forward, running her hand across the surface of the walkway. It seems to rise slightly under her fingers, and she slides cautiously forward, not daring to open her eyes. She finds first one edge, and then the other, sweeping her hand back and forth like a blind woman’s cane, slides forward again on her knees. She reaches out, and her fingers shock painfully against hard IC(E), the pain of it driving up into her shoulder and down into her ribs.

She cries out, eyes flying open, and sees the world flung sideways around her, the walkway twisted like a Mobius strip, so that Cerise and the wall of their IC(E) hangs at an impossible angle. In the same instant an illusion of gravity tugs at her, so that she can feel herself on the verge of falling, a heartbeat, a second, a fraction of a second away from losing her grip on the walkway and spilling out into empty space. She squeezes her eyes shut, and the worst of the sensations vanishes. The pain in her arm returns, but the pins-and-needles feeling is already fading: just a warning, really, this time, just to let her know this IC(E) is diamond-hard.

She clings there, the red-black darkness behind her eyelids a perverse comfort, bracing herself to try again. She needs to see the Mayor’s IC(E) to breach it, needs to find a control point and destroy the illusion of invisibility, but to do that, she has to open her eyes. Tune the worm lower? she thinks, and discards the thought as quickly as it forms. She needs the full input, the full intensity and range of sensation, if she’s to beat the Mayor. She opens her eyes, swallowing nausea, makes herself ignore the tugging gravity, her palms flat on the walkway’s cool surface. She can still feel herself starting to fall, resists the temptation to go with that illusion, and flattens her whole body against the path, pressing herself, hips and thighs and breasts and shoulders, into the silver surface as though she would embrace it. She lays her cheek against the rippling light, imagines she feels the faint ebb and flow of it against her skin. The falling sensation recedes a little, and she shifts her head to study the invisible IC(E) and the illusion that protects it.

The shield is very well made, a seamless, recursive image, the walkway twisting back on itself; its surface stretches without flaw, without a glitch in the code to give her a handle. And even if she found one, she thinks, she couldn’t reach it, not lying flat like this, trapped by the illusion that surrounds her… She suppresses the thought, shifts her head again. Gravity clutches harder with each fractional movement, threatening to pry her from her place. She tells herself it is unreal, an image, a sensation, transmitted by the brainworm; tells herself then that she is coated in glue, that she will stick to the walkway, that she cannot fall. Slowly, she reaches out again, sliding her hand along the cool and silver-rippling surface, gropes for the control points she has found before. She finds nothing, just the inchoate, general presence—not even warmth, just the tremor of movement—of the silver ripples that have gathered there under her body. She starts to reach for the IC(E), to try a blind assault, but stops herself, makes herself pause again and think. There is something about the way the light moves beneath her body, something familiar in the faint sensation…

And then she has it, the source of the memory and of the answer all in one: the light is an echo, incomplete and nearly insubstantial, of the bright control points she has seen outside the pyramid. Either it hides the control points in its diffuse light or it is in itself a control mechanism, fragile and ephemeral, hard to manipulate but as effective as any more permanent node. She lies very still, letting the sensations seep through her, the gentle pulse gather against her skin. No control points are hidden in the seashell flicker; the light itself, the cool delicate ripples of it, is the mechanism. She presses her hand flat, as though she would force it through the rigid surface, spreads her fingers and watches the ripples spread and then return, rebounding from the edge of the invisible IC(E). She shifts her hand again, wriggling her fingers, feels the ripples build, bouncing back from the IC(E), from the walkway’s edge, from the surface of her body. The feedback swells, a flush of heat now present in the walk beneath her hand, where the program has to manifest in order to maintain control of the illusion. She waits, letting the substance build, and feels an override cut in, emerging to banish the program before it can be manipulated. She closes her hand, feeling the pulse of the override strum through her body, and her fingers sink deep into the solid warmth of a temporary control point. She twists her hand, shuts off the override, and the program vanishes, leaving her abruptly chilled. But the control point stays warm in the palm of her hand, as though she holds a handful of embers.

And that’s all she needs. The Mayor set his reality to respond to these controls; she adjusts it, carefully, feels gravity vanish and then return, oriented now so that she can stand straight against it, feel its pull through the soles of her feet. She strips away the illusion covering the IC(E), and a wall like a tangle of thornbrush spun from glass blinks into existence in front of her. The light that streams from it is all but blinding, hiding detail. She blinks, eyes watering, looks away, and in that instant the control point evaporates in her hand. She braces herself for the return of the illusions she has banished, but the walkway stays beneath her, and the wall of IC(E) remains. She studies it, head cocked to one side, does her best to ignore time passing, the knowledge that there’s only Cerise watching her back, keeping back the active defenses. The pattern of the thorn wall shifts and shimmers, writhing as though alive, as though with heat, and then, quite suddenly, she sees it, sees the key. It is like Cerise’s work, just as Cerise said, the complexity of the system elaborated and reelaborated from a matrix Trouble remembers all too well. She smiles, tasting triumph, reaches into the glittering hedge; the spines stab her hand, and then skid painfully along her arm as she reaches deep into the tangled code, leaving dark trails like blood against her skin. She ignores them, ignores the pain shivering through her, finds the single branch that is the key to the pattern. She takes it in two fingers, delicately, presses down and away. The glass resists, impossibly, bends and stretches, and then, suddenly overloaded, snaps like a brittle twig. The wall of IC(E) vanishes as though it had never been.

She stands at the edge of a space so mundane that it must mirror reality, a room crowded with hardware, a room with a desk and a lamp and a single window that shows rooftops and the arc of the Parcade Ferris wheel. The Mayor stands in the center of that space, frozen in the heart of his machines, at one with his machines, clothed in sheets of chips and wrapped with flickers of wire, each hand splayed wide across control mechanisms impossibly magnified, so that with the flick of a finger he shifts electrons, changes, recreates his world. They stand facing each other for an instant, perhaps six heartbeats, Trouble smiling, knowing now she has him, the Mayor’s face unchanging, still the blank icon, but she can feel the same knowledge chilling him. And then he closes his hands, the magnified controls shattering, spinning away, and the illusion winks out, disappears, and the Mayor with it, dropping away from the net leaving nothingness behind, an empty hole, so that Trouble has to fight to stay where she was, not fall off the nets after him.

You bastard, she shouts after him, knowing it’s useless, *you cowardly son of a bitch—*

And she stops as abruptly as she’s begun, standing on the edge of nothing, an absence ofvirtuality, because he’s beaten her after all. By running like this he’s denied her her only chance to prove herself, because the Mayor’s friends will always say—the net itself may always say—that she never faced him directly, and that if she had, she would have lost. It won’t matter that he ran, that he was the one who chose not to meet her; it will always be her failure— and maybe it is my fault, she thinks, I should’ve known, should’ve stopped him—

She shoves that thought aside, furious with herself for allowing it—it is not her fault, not her choice or her cowardice, but the Mayor’s, and there will be plenty of people who’ll see it—and turns back, toward the space where Cerise still stands behind her guardian IC(E), the icon braced, stance utterly intent, absorbed in the delicate and deadly ballet of battling programs that Trouble can only just make out, distorted, through the glasslike wall.

Cerise turns her head, the icon’s head, as though she senses some change in the air behind her. *Trouble—?*

*He’s run out on me,* Trouble says, furious, and Cerise looks back at the programs struggling on the other side, struggling against, her wall of IC(E). The icebreakers are moving more slowly now, by rote programming rather than the Mayor’s hand; the watchdogs, too, are suddenly clumsy, awkward against the counterroutines’ attacks.

Any data? she asks, and Trouble shakes her head, staring into the hole. When the Mayor dropped offline, he took his immediate volume with him; with it, she thinks, she is certain, went all the vital data. The air is empty, tasteless, around her.

No, she says, voice flat. *There’s no point in staying. Let’s go.*

Cerise grins and nods, closes her fists tight over the emergency control. Trouble copies her, and the world, the Mayor’s world, blinks out around them.

Trouble sat up abruptly, wincing from a stiff shoulder, reached angrily for the datacord and jerked it out of her dollie-slot. Cerise copied her, more slowly, her fingers clumsy and stiff. She freed herself from the machine, and then laid her hands flat against the edge of the table, studying them warily. As she had feared, the knuckles were swollen, the fingers puffy as though with heat. She grimaced, recognizing a familiar injury, and Trouble reached across to touch her shoulder.

“You OK?”

“Froze my fingers a little,” Cerise said, and Trouble winced again, this time in sympathy.

“You should see a doctor—”

“In this town?” Cerise managed a laugh. “I might as well post a sign on the net that I’ve been cracking.” She bent her fingers cautiously, made a face at the jarring pain. “Maybe Mabry can recommend someone.”

“We should find him,” Trouble said, grimly. “He must’ve missed newTrouble at the flat—”

The door slammed open as though the locks had never been set, bounced against the far wall. Mabry caught it one-handed, flung it closed again behind him, practically in the face of the frightened desk clerk. Trouble caught a brief glimpse of her pale, red-lipped face and the master key hanging in a nerveless hand before the door had shut, and Mabry was in the room.

“You’ve blown it,” he said. “I warned you, and the deal’s off. Cerise, I expected better of you—”

“Hold it,” Trouble began, her own temper rising, and Cerise said, “Wait a minute, Mabry. We didn’t warn the kid.”

“Then how the hell did you know he was warned?” Mabry glared at them impartially, one hand still knotted in a fist at his side.

“Because we ended up chasing him on the nets,” Cerise said, impatiently. “What happened?”

Mabry stared at her for a moment, then took a deep breath, visibly controlling his temper. “We lost the kid—he was coming up to the flat, and something spooked him. He got off the elevator a couple floors early, and then we think he went back down the fire stairs while we were still figuring out what happened. He must’ve jimmied the alarms. And if either of you had anything to do with it—”

“We didn’t,” Cerise said. “My word, Vess.”

Mabry was silent for another long moment, then, slowly, nodded. “For now.”

“We went to Seahaven,” Trouble said, and hoped he wouldn’t ask why. “The Mayor challenged me, and then the kid showed up—”

“He was running from you, Vess,” Cerise interjected. “I don’t know where he was, realworld, but it was after he’d got away from you.”

Mabry nodded again, as though that explained something. “Go on.”

“The Mayor bounced him right off the net,” Trouble said. “And then he jumped me. We went after the Mayor.”

“Why the hell didn’t you go for the kid?” Mabry muttered.

“I told you,” Trouble said, “the Mayor dumped him offline. Like he’d tripped the emergency cutout. We couldn’t follow him.”

“And we’ve lost Novross.” Mabry’s other hand tightened briefly to a fist, and then, with an effort, he made himself relax. “All right. I want everything you can tell me about the Mayor, about the boy, about this encounter.” He gave a singularly mirthless grin. “After all, you still haven’t given me newTrouble.”

“Don’t threaten me,” Trouble began, bit off anything else she would have said.

Cerise said, softly, “We kept our part of the bargain, Vess. You wouldn’t want to break yours.”

Mabry made a face, waved the words away. “All right, yes, sorry. But this is important. If we lose the Mayor now, if he gets a chance to run, start over somewhere else—”

“All right,” Trouble said. “All right.” She closed her eyes, calling up the memory of the Mayor’s virtuality, spaces within spaces, the western town and the Aztec temple that contained the walkway and its mirrors, that in turn contained the last small space, the volume that had vanished with the Mayor. She could almost see it now, the machines and the Mayor merged, and the dull room that contained them, table and lamp and the window that overlooked the Parcade—

“I can find him,” she said aloud, and felt a surge of glee. He hadn’t beaten her after all; he had betrayed himself instead, and she could prove it. Both Mabry and Cerise were looking at her, Mabry frankly skeptical, Cerise wary, and she grinned at both of them. “The last volume, the one at the very end of the path, Cerise—it was based on his realworld location, I’m sure of it. You wouldn’t construct something like that unless you were copying something real, it was too plain, too mundane for it not to be real.” She broke off, took a deep breath, controlling her excitement. “The point is, there was a window, with a view of the Parcade. If we can find the view, I can find the Mayor.”

There was another silence, and then Cerise moved, swinging back to the media center, swollen fingers clumsy on the controls. “There’s a tourist mock-up of the town, supposed to let you see what your rooms will be like, what the views will be, that sort of thing.” Her hand slipped, jarring her fingers, and she swore under her breath, scowling at the screen.

“Let me,” Mabry said, and Cerise stepped reluctantly aside. Mabry finished entering the codes, triggered a three-dimensional model of the town.

“What did you see?” Cerise asked, and gestured for Mabry to call up the inquiry screen.

“He was overlooking the Parcade,” Trouble said. “The western end, with the Ferris wheel. There were houses in the way, so you couldn’t see the street itself, just the Ferris wheel.”

“How many streets?” Cerise asked. Mabry seated himself at the controls, heavy face intent on the screen and the menu of questions.

Trouble frowned, trying to remember. “Three, maybe? I think there were three rows of roofs, anyway.”

“How high up were you?” Cerise asked.

“High,” Trouble answered. “At least two stories, maybe three or four—the nearest building was a little away, you’d be looking down on it.”

Cerise nodded, looked at Mabry. “Run it, see what it comes up with.”

Mabry did as he was told. The model vanished, to be replaced by a swirling paisley pattern.

“Come on,” Cerise murmured, staring at the screen “Come on.”

Trouble leaned over Mabry’s other shoulder and willed the holding pattern to clear. After what seemed an interminable time, the paisley swirls vanished, and a message appeared: NO EXACT MATCH AVAILABLE. “Oh, shit,” Trouble said, and turned away.

“See if there’s a possible location,” Cerise said calmly to Mabry, and the big man touched keys, frowning slightly. The holding pattern reappeared, but only for a moment, then was replaced by a section of the city model—four, maybe five blocks of nondescript houses, on the far side of the Harbormouth bridge, where the solid land fell away into the Slough A message appeared with it: SIMILAR VIEWS EXIST IN THIS APPROXIMATE AREA.

“Now, that’s more like it,” Cerise said, and Trouble turned back to the screen.

“That’s where I’d expect to find him,” she agreed.

Cerise nodded, studying the image. “A view of the Ferris wheel, you said, and a bunch of housetops.”

“Yeah.”

“What about there?” Mabry asked, and slid the cursor across the screen to circle a tall rectangle colored the pale green of a rooming house.

“Why not?” Cerise said.

Mabry touched keys, and images flickered across the screen as he moved the cursor from floor to floor of the rooming house. All were views from the windows that faced the Parcade; all showed housetops and the Ferris wheel above them in the distance. “Well?”

Trouble shook her head. “Definitely not there.” She studied the screen, trying to imagine what it would take to transform the images she had just seen to the one she remembered. “What about that one?”

Mabry touched keys again, calling up the views attached to the house she had selected. Trouble watched them through, but shook her head again. “It’s close, though. Try next door.”

Mabry worked his way down the street, selecting two more houses, shook his head as the images from the third popped onto the screen. “This of course assumes that he’ll stay put long enough for us to catch him. Even if we find the place, he’ll be long gone.”

Cerise looked at Trouble, who said nothing, her eyes fixed on the screen. Cerise said, carefully, “I’m not so sure about that, Mabry. There’s no real reason for him to run—he doesn’t know what, if anything, Trouble saw, and he doesn’t know we know Seahaven. He’s been invisible for a long time, and he’s got hardware there—it must be substantial, to run Seahaven. I think he’ll stay.”

“It would be stupid,” Mabry said, but he sounded slightly more optimistic than he had. “Where next?”

Trouble pointed, touching a house across the street from the one they had viewed before. “That one.”

Mabry selected it, ran the images, moving up from the ground floor. Trouble held her breath as the pointer reached the top two floors, relaxed with a sigh.

“That’s it.”

“You’re sure?” Mabry asked, but he was already calling up the address.

“Of course I’m sure,” Trouble answered. “That’s the view I saw, anyway.”

“That’s near where Blake used to live,” Cerise said, and shook the thought away as irrelevant.

Mabry shoved himself away from the media center, not bothering to shut down the program. “Your phone? I need to call— ”

“We’re coming with you,” Trouble said, and pointed to the handset resting on the coffee table.

Mabry picked it up, began punching numbers. “Do you think that’s wise? I thought you had a reputation to uphold.”

Cerise grinned at that, reached across the keyboard to close down the system. “Oh, we have reputations, all right—”

“—and I fully intend to keep mine,” Trouble finished. “Nobody crosses me, Mabry. Nobody.”

“Suit yourself,” Mabry answered, and turned away to speak softly into the handset.

Cerise looked at Trouble, lowered her voice cautiously. “You sure you’re sure?”

Trouble nodded again, knowing the question she was being asked. After all this, Cerise was saying, after being dragged back into the shadows and finding out again that she had a taste for it, did she really want to throw herself irrevocably into the bright lights, turn herself into nothing more than a syscop? “I’m sure,” she said, and Mabry tossed the handset onto the couch.

“Let’s go,” he said, and swept out of the room without looking back.

Trouble followed, said over her shoulder, so softly Cerise wasn’t for a second sure she had heard correctly, “I want to be in at the kill. If I’ve gone over to the enemy, I want to do it right.”

Cerise hesitated, shook her head, uncertain of her feelings, or at best sure only of one thing, that she would see this through to the end. She followed both of them down the emergency stairs and out into the lobby.

Mabry had commandeered a car from the local cops, unmarked but with police equipment, sophisticated net monitors and local tie-ins. prominent on its control boards. There was a driver as well, a skinny, nondescript young man with pale brown hair and a recruit’s flashes below The Willows’ insignia on his shoulder. He looked momentarily as though he might protest, seeing the two women, but Mabry said, “You have the address?”

The young man swallowed whatever he had been going to say. “Yes, sir.”

“Then let’s go.” Mabry climbed into the front seat beside the driver, and Trouble and Cerise scrambled into the narrow passenger compartment. “You notified Treasury as well?”

The driver put the car into gear, edged forward out of the driveway in front of Eastman House. “Yes, sir. They’re on their way.”

“Good,” Mabry said, and leaned back against his seat. Trouble looked at Cerise, saw the other woman’s pale face intent on the road. Then Cerise looked at her, dark eyes wary, and they both heard the sound of sirens, distant now, but coming quickly closer.

“What the hell?” Trouble said, softly, and Mabry leaned forward to query one of the systems plugged into the main board.

“—hostage situation—” The voice blared from a speaker, and Mabry reached hastily for a datacord and plugged it in, cutting oft the voice.

“Who the hell can he be holding hostage?” Cerise asked. “Not Silk, surely.”

“Who’d care?” Trouble agreed, her eyes on Mabry.

The big man glanced back at her, his expression unreadable. “He’s tied into the city computers. Threatens to erase system software if he’s attacked. Can he do it?”

Trouble nodded slowly, remembering the sheer scale of virtual Seahaven, of the power, hardware and software, that the Mayor needed to maintain the illusion. Turn that power on a city system, and no IC(E) would be sufficient; at that scale, brute force alone would be enough to shatter the city’s coding, leave all the files, all the city systems, open and vulnerable.

“Does The Willows care?” Cerise asked, with a smile that did not touch her eyes.

Mabry’s eyes flicked toward her, and then away again. “The Willows is tied in to city services—drainage, the pump system, sewers, traffic control, all that. If Novross crashes those, The Willows doesn’t have sufficient backup power to keep things running.” He turned back to the control board, running one hand along a sensor strip. “Besides, the city systems contain the tax records.”

“Ah.” Cerise’s smile widened into open contempt.

The sirens were louder now as they crossed the Harbormouth bridge, and the local cops had set up a hasty roadblock halfway down Ashworth Avenue. Other cops were fanning out from the roadblock, moving along the storefronts to shut down the businesses and force the citizens indoors. Out of harm’s way, or, more likely, just out of their way, Cerise thought. Mabry extended his credentials to the waiting cop, a man in full armor under his coveralls, with a stunstick at his belt and a pellet gun slung across his shoulder.

“Where’s Starling?”

The cop didn’t answer at once, but studied the folder with its double ID carefully, checking both identification and warrant before he returned it to its owner. “Down by the house,” he said. “He’s directing the operation.”

“Wonderful,” Trouble muttered.

Mabry said nothing, gestured to the driver. The young man pulled the car sharply around the end of the barricade, and started down the narrow street.

The cops had removed some of the parked cars from this end of the road, though they’d left others in place as makeshift barricades. Two fast-tanks were pulled into place across the street, one with its rear treads resting precariously on the soft ground that edged the Slough, the other blocking the roadway entirely. A trio of armored cops—wearing state badges rather than The Willows’ insignia—crouched in its shelter; a fourth man, equally armored, stepped out of its shadow and waved the car to the side of the road. The driver slowed obediently, and Mabry lowered his window to confer with the approaching officer.

Cerise laughed sharply. “You’d think the man was a fucking terrorist. Look at all this.”

Mabry glanced back at her, then turned to hand his credentials to the armored man. “Where’s Starling?”

“Mr. Mabry,” the cop acknowledged, straightened slightly as though he would have saluted. “Mr. Starling wants to see you right away. Down there, sir.” He pointed toward a third, smaller car, recognizable as police only by the way it was parked, slewed deliberately across the road to provide protection behind its bulk.

“I want to see Mr. Starling,” Mabry said, and levered himself out of the car. “You two, wait here.”

“Fine,” Trouble said to his back. She watched him make his way down the street, broad-shouldered in his battered jacket, conspicuously casual among the armored and uniformed police huddling behind the cars.

“What the fuck do they think they’re doing?” Cerise demanded. “He’s a cracker, not a gunrunner.”

Trouble saw the driver’s shoulders twitch, and a detached part of her admired the man’s self-control. “Yeah,” she said, deliberately provocative, “crackers don’t generally go around shooting cops.”

Cerise shook her head, still furious. “They got to be crazy, reacting like this.” But that was Evans-Tindale for you: the laws had been written by people who feared the nets, and it was that same fear that made things escalate, spiraling out of control.

Another siren sounded, a deeper note this time, and Trouble twisted in her seat to stare back the way they’d come. A fire engine, one of the heavy tower trucks with a lift basket on the front and a massive ladder-and-hose station at the back, was making its way ponderously down the street. One of the armored cops shouted and waved, and the driver edged their car in closer to the curb to let the fire engine pass. There were more armored men clinging to its sides.

“All this for software?” Trouble said. “They’ve got to have backups.”

The driver turned in his place, pale face very serious. “We can’t let him get away with the threat—we don’t dare let him crash the city systems.”

“This isn’t going to stop him,” Cerise said. She shook her head again. “This is not how you deal with the net.”

“They must have somebody trying to stop him on-line,” Trouble said, but her tone was less confident than her words. All this hardware could only be an admission of failure, a desperate attempt to stop something that couldn’t be dealt with in virtuality—and this would have to fail, too, she thought. If the Mayor really did hold Seahaven’s systems hostage, really had gained control of them through the net, then the fastest, most surgically efficient realworld attack would be seconds, minutes too slow. Starling, at least, would know it; she wondered bleakly if any of the others realized just how ineffective they really were.

“Trouble!” That was Mabry, striding back toward the car, his jacket flying open around him. “Cerise!” He lifted a hand, beckoning, and the driver popped the rear doors.

“Bet you he wants us to go cracking for him,” Cerise said, and swung herself neatly out of the compartment.

Trouble followed more slowly. “I don’t make bets on a sure thing.”

“We have a problem,” Mabry said.

“No shit,” Cerise murmured.

Mabry pretended he hadn’t heard. “Novross does seem to have control of the city systems. Starling and his lot have been trying to dig him out for the past half hour.”

He tilted his head toward a black van that sat behind the line of cars. A cable snaked from a shielded port and disappeared into the door of the nearest building: Treasury’s special netwalkers, Trouble realized.

“They haven’t made much progress, but they’re still working on it,” Mabry said. “But the main thing is, Novross wants to talk to you.”

He was looking directly at Trouble, but even so she frowned in confusion. “To me?”

“To you,” Mabry agreed.

Trouble looked at Cerise, who shrugged, looked back at Mabry. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Mabry answered. “He’s not precisely forthcoming on the matter. But he wants to talk to you—he says he’ll negotiate with you. And only you.”

“I doubt that,” Cerise said.

“She’s right,” Trouble said, and dredged a smile from somewhere. “We’re not exactly on friendly terms. But I can crack his IC(E)—let me in that van, and I’ll get him off the nets.” It wouldn’t be that easy, she knew, would take time and effort and probably more tools than she had with her, though Treasury might have some of what she would need—

Mabry shook his head. “It’s not on, Trouble. I’m sorry. Starling thinks his men can handle it, but he needs time. They need time. And Novross wants to talk to you.”

“He could kill her,” Cerise said sharply. “Did you think of that? Or is that what Starling has in mind?”

“He’s promised full cover,” Mabry said. Behind him, machinery whined, and the fire engine’s bucket rose jerkily into the air, swinging slightly from side to side. An armored figure was just visible over the edge of the bucket, gauntleted hand cupped to a headset in his helmet. The bucket rose higher, swung slightly sideways, so that the men in the bucket—there were two of them, Trouble realized—had the Mayor’s windows in their field of fire. “And I intend to hold him to it.”

“Not good enough,” Cerise said.

“What exactly am I supposed to do?” Trouble asked.

“Keep him talking,” Mabry answered. “Buy us time.”

“How?”

“He said he wants to negotiate,” Mabry said, “so negotiate. Offer him—whatever it is he wants, I suppose. No, offer passage out of the country, then we can haggle over how and where. Try to keep his mind off the nets. He’ll probably have demands of his own, anyway, so see what they are and we’ll go from there.”

“Great,” Trouble said. “I’m not a fucking negotiator, I don’t know what I’m doing—” And I don’t want to get myself killed, not by the Mayor, not after I’ve won—not for The Willows, anyway.

“He says,” Mabry said, “and I emphasize I don’t know if if’s true, but he says he has a line to the local nuke. He says he can override local controls, cause a catastrophic failure.”

“You don’t think he does,” Trouble said.

“No.” Mabry’s face twisted in a grimace half of frustration, half of rage. “And I don’t think Starling does, either. But it’s fucking useful for him, gives him access to all of this.” He gestured broadly, the sweep of his hand including the tanks and the fire engine and the huddling cops. In the distance, Trouble could hear the beat of a military helicopter, sweeping down from the base to the north. “And I—we can’t afford to take that chance.”

He was right about that, Trouble thought reluctantly. She tilted her head, looked up at the Mayor’s building: just another cheap Seahaven rooming house, paint peeling on the sides where it was less likely to be seen. The Mayor’s windows, uncurtained, unshaded, unlike all the others in the building, turned blank glass to the street. I should say no, she thought. Starling’s just trying to use me, use this threat to get me to do what he wants, maybe even get me killed, just like he’s used it to call out all this, local cops and state and God knows what all else. It was all but impossible to get into a nuke’s internal systems, even for the Mayor—they were built to stand up against all intrusion attempts, there were cutouts and realtime requirements, and the crucial systems were supposed to be completely disconnected from the nets. But if they weren’t, if the Mayor had gained access… He was just crazy enough, just desperate enough, to try something, and no one could stand by and let that happen. She shied away from the image that presented itself, out of ancient video, smoke billowing from a broken dome, radiation fires smothered in concrete; that wouldn’t be what happened, not quite, but the area would be poisoned worse than it already was. And no one had ever honestly calculated the probable deaths. She looked back over her shoulder at Starling, still standing in the lee of the unmarked police car, conferring with Levy and a man in armor, not knowing whom she resented more, the Mayor or Starling himself.

“You’d still be better off with me running the nets,” she said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Mabry snapped. “But that’s not the deal.”

Trouble took a deep breath. “I want complete immunity, all charges past and present dropped.”

“Done.” Mabry nodded, with decision. “I will see to it personally.”

“And for Cerise as well.”

“Agreed.”

“He’ll fucking kill you,” Cerise said. “Trouble, don’t do it.”

Trouble looked at her, swallowing her own cold fear. “Look. He’s one of us, a cracker, a netwalker. Since when did we start carrying guns?”

“I did.”

“You weren’t exactly representative.”

“Neither’s he.”

“That was a long time ago, and in the city. And it’s not the same. If’s not the Mayor’s style.” Trouble took another long breath, tasting salt and the ubiquitous oil. The air was thickening, fog swirling in from the sea: not a good time for that, she thought, and automatically squinted upward, looking for the helicopter. It was still there, a dark shape against the white sky, but when she looked east, the outlines of the beachfront buildings were already blurred. “He doesn’t gain anything by killing me—”

“Except personal satisfaction,” Cerise snapped.

“Yeah.” Trouble shivered, told herself it was only the first wisps of fog. “But he loses his chance to walk out of here.”

“Do you really think Starling would let him walk?” Cerise asked. “Do you really think he thinks Starling will let him walk? Trouble—” She broke off abruptly, the rest of the sentence unspoken. I’m not losing you now, she would have said, not again, and this was not the time for declarations.

“But if he really can get into the nuke?” Trouble said.

“There’s no way he can,” Cerise said. “No fucking way.”

Trouble looked at her, and Cerise made a face, answered her own question. “Except he’s the Mayor, and if anyone can, it’s him, and we can’t take that risk anyway. Not on this coastline.” She sighed. “All right, do it. But I’m coming with you.”

“He said alone,” Mabry interjected. It was no more than a token protest, but Cerise turned on him anyway.

“So get me in there without him knowing it, sunshine. I thought you people were supposed to be good. And I want a gun.”

“All right,” Mabry said. “Let’s go.”

They followed him down the narrow street, Mabry careful to keep the line of parked cars and runabouts between them and the rooming house. The cops, local and state, clustered in twos and threes behind the inadequate barricades, looked up as they passed, but their expressions were invisible behind the dark-tinted faceplates. Starling came to meet them, Levy and the armored stranger—probably some kind of senior police officer, Trouble thought, just from the amount of braid and badges, but she recognized only The Willows’ insignia among the clutter—following a few steps behind.

“Well?” Starling asked, and Mabry nodded.

Trouble said, “I understand he wants to talk to me. Is that right?” In spite of her efforts at control, her voice came out too loud, uncertain.

Starling said, “That’s right. I gather you’ve agreed.”

“I want all charges past and present dropped,” Trouble said, “for both me and Cerise.”

“That can be arranged,” Starling said.

“I’ve agreed to it,” Mabry said, mildly, and Starling’s lips tightened momentarily.

“All right.”

“Now,” Trouble said. “Just what is it you want me to do?”

“I just want you to keep him talking,” Starling said. “Distract him while we isolate him on the net, so that the rest of our people can move in.” He nodded to the fire engine. “We’ve got a sniper team there. They can take him out as soon as we’re sure the nets are safe.”

“That wasn’t in the plan, John,” Mabry said.

“You’d be better off letting us run the nets,” Trouble said, without much hope. “We’ve beaten him before.”

“No, thanks,” Levy said.

Starling said, “It’s you he wants to talk to. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

“But there are some things you can do about protection,” Trouble said.

Starling waved his hand again, a broader gesture taking in not only the snipers but the men crouching behind the lines of cars. “You’ll have backup.”

Except when I’m inside, Trouble thought. But the men in the fire engine’s bucket would provide some cover, as much as she could reasonably expect.

Cerise said, “Yes. Well. I’m going with her.”

Starling frowned, and Trouble said, “It’s not negotiable.”

“He said alone,” Starling began, and Mabry shook his head.

“It can be done, John. It’s better this way.”

“And I want a gun,” Cerise said.

Starling sighed, looked at Levy. “Ben?”

Levy reached into his jacket, freed his pistol from the shoulder holster, and reluctantly held it out butt first. “Do you know how to use this?”

Cerise took it, automatically checking the magazine— full—then cocked it, putting the safety on. “Oh, yes.”

“Then let’s get on with it,” Starling said. “Mabry, you take Ms.—Cerise—around to the front door. Keep behind the cars, he can’t see down into the street too well.” Mabry nodded, motioned for Cerise to follow him. “Ms. Carless—Trouble. We’ll wait here.”

Trouble nodded, not daring to speak for fear her voice would break, watched as Mabry and Cerise made their way cautiously across the street and disappeared finally behind the line of parked cars. At last there was a flicker of movement beside the doorway, and Levy sighed.

“They’re in position.”

“Right,” Starling said, and reached for a handset. “Novross.”

There was a long silence, not even the crackle of static, and Trouble wondered for an instant if she was off the hook at last. Then the machine clicked, and the Mayor’s voice came dearly through the tiny speaker.

“I’m here.”

“We’ve done as you asked,” Starling said. “Trouble’s here, and she’s prepared to act as our representative.”

There was another silence, shorter this time, and then the Mayor said, “About time. Send her up.”

“She’s on her way,” Starling said, and looked at Trouble. “You’re on.”

“Thanks,” Trouble said. She took a deep breath, and stepped out from behind the car. She did not believe, in spite of everything Cerise had said, that the Mayor had a gun; it wasn’t his style, was unlike anything else he’d ever done, but even so, she felt an odd, tingling sensation on her forehead, and then between her breasts. It felt very real, so real that she looked down at herself, half expecting to see the bright dot of a targeting laser, but there was nothing there. She shivered again, convulsively, and wished she thought anyone would believe it was from the fog.

Cerise was waiting in the doorway, pressed against the wall under the shelter of the arch, out of the line of vision of the single securicam. It looked broken, blinded by too many nights in the salt air, but there was no point in taking chances. Trouble looked up at it, wondering if the lens were really as scratched as it appeared, looked back down at the locks and the intercom board with its list of names. Before she could decide if she should press the bell, the one marked “Novross” in a neat, orderly hand, the buzzer sounded, and she reached out almost automatically to push the door open. It gave under her hand, and Cerise slipped ahead of her into the darkened hallway. Trouble followed, letting the door close behind her.

The lights were out in the hallway, the only brightness filtering down through a distant skylight over the stairway. Cerise said, her voice little above a whisper, “They must’ve cut the power to the building.”

“Which should’ve cut the net link,” Trouble murmured.

Cerise nodded, managed a grim smile. “Except that he had a hidden line. Just like we had.”

“Just like everyone,” Trouble said, and started up the stairs. Cerise followed, silently, copying the other woman’s movements, staying half a flight behind. She had the pistol out and ready, safety off, just in case; it was heavier than the one she had used, a heavier caliber, the weight awkward in her hands.

Trouble paused at the first landing, listening, but heard nothing, not even the usual noises of a building’s miscellaneous machinery. She looked back, saw Cerise braced against the wall of the stair below, pistol held in both hands, the barrel tilted toward the ceiling. The sight was somewhat reassuring; Trouble forced a smile, and climbed the rest of the way to the third floor. There was only one door off the landing, and it was closed, but light showed through at the edges of the frame. So this is it, Trouble thought, but didn’t move closer at once, looked around instead for cameras. She didn’t see any, even in the shadows where the walls joined the high ceilings, but she was careful not to look back as she stepped up onto the landing. Cerise was behind her, there on the last landing; she could see what was happening well enough.

Trouble took a deep breath, and knocked on the white-painted door. For a crazy moment she thought she was going to giggle—it was too incongruous an image, her tapping on the metal door as though she were any visitor, this a normal visit—and she bit her lip hard, knowing that if she started laughing now it would be impossible to stop. The Mayor wouldn’t understand, she thought, wouldn’t be amused, and that realization was almost enough to send her over the edge.

“It’s open,” the Mayor’s voice said from inside, and the desire to laugh vanished as quickly as it had appeared. This time, Trouble did look back, to see Cerise hurrying silently up the stairs, to flatten herself against the wall, just out of the line of sight from the doorway.

“I’m coming in,” Trouble said, and heard herself shrill and nervous. She pressed lightly against the door, wary of booby traps, stories of bombs and electrical charges coming back to her from the old days, the Mayor’s days, when crackers had fought their battles off the nets as well as on, but nothing happened. She turned the knob, wincing in advance of an explosion, and the door swung open with the gentle groan of imperfectly oiled hinges.

The Mayor was standing exactly as she’d seen him last, frozen in the heart of his machines, hands splayed wide over the control surfaces, wires and chip boards wreathing him. And then she saw the differences as well, recognized that there was only one wire, the long cable of a datacord running down from a socket at the back of his skull, saw too that the chip boards were portable flatscreens, propped awkwardly across the main machines. Whatever else he’d planned, this was a jury-rigged defense, Trouble realized. And a defense of his home, in some strange way: there was a table with a microwave on it in one corner, and a futon on the floor beneath the windows. A slight figure lay curled on that, asleep or unconscious, face turned toward the wall: newTrouble, she thought, Tilsen. So he was here all along.

“Trouble,” the Mayor said, and she answered, “Mayor.”

The lights were working here, a single, badly shaded bulb dangling over the central work space, throwing the Mayor’s face into grotesque shadow. He was a thin man, cadaverously thin and pale, a shadow of light stubble further hollowing his cheeks, but his hands on the controls were sure and competent, his whole stance that of an El Greco prelate. Trouble stared at him, surprised at how much like his icon he was, and knew that he was staring just as curiously back at her.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised.” The Mayor’s voice was slow, too, and faintly slurred, and Trouble realized that he was still at least half on-line, some part of his brain holding off Starling’s men from the city systems. “You never really were one of us.”

So that’s the tack you’re going to take, Trouble thought, and dredged a laugh from somewhere. “No,” she said, “I’m not, and never was one of your kind. I’m better.”

The Mayor frowned, magisterial, would, she thought, have shaken a finger at her had he been able to free himself from his boards. “Very cocky. How unwise. Where’s your girlfriend?”

“Here,” Cerise said, from the doorway. Trouble didn’t dare look back, but saw the Mayor’s frown deepen.

“I would advise against using that,” he said, and one hand shifted on the board. A beam of ruby light shot from the ceiling, struck the worn floor just at Trouble’s feet, blinked out as quickly as it had appeared. Smoke curled from the cheap tiles, and it was all Trouble could do not to take a step backward.

“You’ll still be dead,” Cerise said.

“And so will your friend,” the Mayor answered. He fixed his eyes on Trouble, dismissing Cerise from his calculations. “I really didn’t think you’d throw in with them. Not in the end.”

“You didn’t leave me any alternatives,” Trouble said, stung more by the disappointment in his tone than by his words. “Christ, do you think I’m going to stand by and let you play silly buggers with the local nuke?”

“You believed that?” The Mayor gave a snort of contempt. “I thought you were at least technically literate. You should know it’s not possible. They—” He jerked his head toward the window. “I’d expect them to fall for it, but not you. Not even you should be that ignorant.”

Trouble felt herself flush, said, “Not so ignorant I couldn’t break your IC(E), Mayor.”

“That was the worm, not you,” the Mayor answered. “But real technical knowledge? I should have known better than to expect it.”

“Starling said you wanted to talk to me,” Trouble said, through clenched teeth. “So what do you want?”

“I had thought,” the Mayor began, and broke off, hands moving busily across the control surfaces. “But it doesn’t matter. What I want now is to be rid of you. You’re a disgrace to the nets, and the least I can do, the last thing I can do, is clean up the mess I inadvertently caused.”

His eyes slid sideways, toward the boy on the bed, and in that instant Trouble flung herself backward. The laser spat fire, the beam striking the tiles where she had stood. Cerise fired in the same instant, the noise enormous in the high-ceilinged room, kept firing, and with her second shot the snipers fired, too, shattering the windows. Trouble flung herself down, hands instinctively covering her head against the rain of glass, saw the Mayor’s body falling, torn, jerking with the impact of the bullets. Cerise screamed something, crouching against the wall by the door, a shriek that resolved itself at last into words.

“Stop it, you stupid bastards, stop firing! He’s dead!”

Whether they heard her or not, the shooting stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Trouble lifted her head cautiously, saw the floor paved with glass like broken ice, and the Mayor’s body sprawled bonelessly across his machines. A coil of smoke was rising from one of the consoles, and she crawled forward hastily, trying not to look at the body, groped for the kill switch and cut the power. The Mayor’s hand hung down, almost close enough to touch; there was no blood on the thin fingers, but she could smell it, acrid and unmistakable, and kept her eyes down, not wanting to see the ruin of his body.

“Silk?” Cerise said, and Trouble looked at the slight figure on the futon. The glass has fallen all around him, shards glittering on his body, and she winced and moved toward him, sweeping the bits of glass awkwardly out of her way. She could hear footsteps on the stairs now, the heavy tread of running men, but she ignored them, began picking the slivers of glass carefully away from the mattress and the boy’s clothes. Cerise came to join her, dropping the automatic on the floor beside her, picked flinchingly at the larger pieces.

“He doesn’t seem to have been cut,” Trouble said, doubtfully, grimaced as a sharp edge sliced her finger. She sucked at the cut, and Cerise brushed the last obvious pieces away from the mattress.

“Turn him over,” she said, and her voice was sharp with fear.

There was something wrong with him, Trouble thought, as she helped Cerise ease the boneless weight onto its back, something very wrong about the way he moved, about the open, staring eyes. “I think he’s dead,” she said aloud, and groped for a pulse in the slim neck. He looked barely fifteen, not the seventeen Mabry had claimed for him, slim, sweet-faced, with huge brown eyes that stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

“Dead?” Cerise echoed.

“What happened?” Mabry said, and Trouble turned gratefully, to see armored cops crowding into the room behind Mabry and Starling.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The glass didn’t cut him, not seriously—”

“Here,” an armored man said, and held up an injector. Starling took it, inspected the label and the discolored tip, then made a face and handed it to Mabry.

“Gerumine,” he said, and Mabry grunted.

“It’s a euthanasiant,” he said to Trouble. “I wonder if he took it himself, or if Novross gave it to him.”

“You don’t know that’s what happened,” Cerise protested automatically, pushed herself to her feet. Her hands were shaking, and she jammed them into her pockets.

“Well, he sure didn’t take it,” Starling answered, nodding to the Mayor. “And you two didn’t, and the injector’s been used. That doesn’t leave many choices, does it?”

Trouble shivered again, stood slowly, glass crunching under her feet. “Jesus,” she said, and then, “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Mabry said.

Cerise said, “He said he was cleaning up the mess, the mess he’d caused. I suppose Silk was part of it.”

Like me, Trouble thought. It could’ve been me—fifteen years ago, it might have been me. The fog was thicker now, drifting in through the shattered windows, cold and wet on her skin.

Mabry touched her shoulder, turned her away from the two bodies, newTrouble’s and the Mayor’s, urged her toward the door. Trouble went unresisting, and Cerise followed more slowly, looking back toward the boy’s body and the grey-jacketed medics kneeling beside it.

Mabry paused on the landing, touched Trouble’s shoulder again. “This—incident—presents an opportunity for us, one that I don’t want to see go to waste. It’s important, Trouble, will you listen?”

Trouble made a noise that might have become laughter, bit her lip again to keep it from swelling to full hysterics. “I’m listening.”

“Seahaven, virtual Seahaven, is without a Mayor now,” Mabry said. “If we had somebody legal in charge, somebody we could trust—”

“Me?” Trouble said, and lifted a skeptical eyebrow.

“It would make sense,” Mabry said. “You’re an old-style netwalker, you’ve been a syscop, you beat the Mayor at his own game. The nets would have to respect your claim, and we’d be able to crack down on Seahaven.”

Cerise grinned. “You shot the sheriff, Trouble, that means you get to be marshal.”

“I’m still on the wire,” Trouble said automatically. “People may not believe I beat him.” But the idea was tempting: to have Seahaven for herself, to take over that space, that status, for her own… And there would be other opportunities too—maybe Mabry wouldn’t approve, and Starling, Treasury, certainly wouldn’t, but the possibilities cut both ways, not just not to return to the shadows, she’d come too far for that anyway, but to redefine the bright lights, begin again the action Evans-Tindale had cut short. From Seahaven, with Seahaven’s sanctuary as a base and a passport, she could do anything.

Mabry said, “You could do it. Times are changing; the wire doesn’t matter so much anymore—too many people have them now. And you’ve earned it. That’s the thing nobody else can ever claim. You beat him.”

Trouble nodded slowly. “It can’t be this easy.”

Mabry grinned, showing very white teeth. “Probably not,” he admitted. “But in the long run, there isn’t anybody else. And even Treasury isn’t so stupid as to leave Seahaven untenanted, when they can have you in charge.”

“All right,” Trouble said, and nodded again. “All right, I’ll do it. Conditionally.”

“Of course,” Mabry said.

Cerise turned away, left them talking, walked down the stairs as silently as she’d come. Her hands were aching now, worse than ever, from the recoil; she rested a hand on each shoulder to try to reduce the swelling, hugging herself against the cold and the irrational feeling of loss. Not that she’d lost anything, not necessarily, but Silk was dead, and the Mayor—though he was no loss—and Trouble would become Mayor in her turn—She bit off that thought, knowing she was being maudlin, hysterical, and not knowing how to stop. Should I go back to the hotel? she wondered, get my runabout and get out of here, or should I just start walking, keep walking until I feel safe again? The street was still full of cops, a knot of them standing beside the fire engine, its bucket once again fully retracted, armored men clustering around the two snipers in congratulation; there were more cops at each end of the street, their mottled grey uniforms blurred even further by the thickening fog. She should probably thank the snipers, too, Cerise knew; they had saved her life. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it, couldn’t quite get past the cold that filled her, and stood with her hands on her shoulders in the fog, wondering what to do.

“Cerise?” Trouble said from behind her. “Ah, your hands.”

“Yours aren’t in great shape, either,” Cerise said, and Trouble looked down as though surprised to see the thin cuts that crisscrossed her palms and ran up the sides of her hands.

“It’s the glass,” she began, and Cerise said, “I was there, I know.”

“I know.” Trouble looked past her, toward the end of the street where the fog was thickest. “I wanted—I need to talk to you. Before I agree to this, there are some things I need to settle.”

“Such as?” In spite of herself, Cerise heard the old bitterness, the old anger, in her voice, and Trouble grimaced.

“Look, how many times do I have to say I fucked up? I don’t want to do it again, Cerise, I don’t want to leave, or for you to leave me, OK? If I take Seahaven, will you run it with me?

“And if I won’t?”

Trouble spread her hands. “Then—whatever. Is Multiplane hiring?”

Cerise stared at her for a long moment, not sure she had heard correctly, then, slowly, she began to laugh. “I don’t believe you said that.”

“What’s so goddamn funny?” Trouble glared at her, and Cerise got herself under control with an effort.

“I’m sorry. It’s just—you giving up Seahaven? To work for Multiplane? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Will you run it with me?” Trouble asked.

Cerise nodded, slowly. “It’s kind of a dumb question, sweetheart. Is there anybody who doesn’t want Seahaven?”

Trouble nodded back, reached out, careful of Cerise’s hands, touched first her shoulder and then her cheek. “It’s not going to be the same.”

“It never is,” Cerise answered. She forced a smile, and a lighter tone, knowing perfectly well what Trouble meant: the old days were long gone, and there was no going back, no matter what the regrets. “You’ll just have to bring the law in, Marshal, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” Trouble said, sour-voiced, but she was smiling. They stood close together against the chilling fog, the sky grey as glass above them, waiting for Mabry to return.

Chapter Fourteen

TROUBLE STANDS IN the heart of Seahaven, her Seahaven now, on the patch of nothing, black and slick as glass, where the Mayor’s palace once stood. She has kept the rest of the space the way he had it that last day, the dusty street and the false-fronted buildings, the heat and the sun and the dust, and she’s kept the icon Cerise made for them, the dark gunfighter’s shadow against the virtual sun. The control points, the space itself, eddy around her body like the kiss of the wind: a new sensation, still, the full power of the interface filtered through the brainworm, as though she has no skin, as though she walks naked through the system. It is a strange feeling, vulnerable and powerful all at once: she is getting used to it, and without it Seahaven would be less than it was. And that she cannot, will not, allow: she’s come too far, risked too much, to let this space be anything but more than it was under the Mayor’s rule.

Ahead of her, the street is busy, icons clustering by the wall, wood now, not stone, where the artists work and messages are posted, others clustering by the door to the saloon where the real business is done. She built that herself, borrowing from the memory of Miss Kitty’s years before, and is pleased. Cerise is in there now— she can feel Cerise’s presence even through the swirl of signals, the constant rumble along her nerves. There are plenty of others, too, and she stops, mostly because she can, the novelty not yet worn off, lets the brainworm and the fabric of Seahaven itself tell her who is talking there. Dargon is there; triumph enough in itself, that he’ll still come to Seahaven even though he doesn’t think, isn’t sure, she’s earned the right to it. Arabesque, too, like a taste of salt, and Helling, and a dozen others she sees as flickers of an icon, an eyeblink image in her mind. The shadows still come to Seahaven, and she doesn’t, won’t stop them, but she welcomes the bright lights as well.

That in itself has been enough to drive off some of the shadows, the ones who are deep enough in the shadows that they have their own outside system, their own network of protectors and enemies in the realworld. Of all of them, only Fate has ventured into Seahaven more than twice, and he hasn’t brought his business with him. That brings a flicker of regret, but she quells that sternly. She can’t afford it—more than that, she isn’t the Mayor, this isn’t his Seahaven anymore, and she will live by the rules she’s made, not by his.

She sees the sky thin on the fringes of the townscape, where she sketched the echo of desert to blend into the artificial distance, feels in the same moment the slap of a door opening, like the sting of sand against her skin. She doesn’t move, looks up instead, not recognizing the hand behind the flurry of code, and sees a shape like the silver sketch of a bird, brighter even than the heat of the sky. She has been more than half expecting him, but she waits, lets the icon fall to her own plane, before she moves to meet him. Her shadow goes before her, falling across him like a chill wind, and she feels him turn, feels the dispersal routine ready in his hand.

Hello, Starling, she says, and for the first time she thinks he might be afraid.

Trouble, Starling’s voice is as it always was, the same easy tone, but Trouble feels the tension surrounding him, the tension of readied programs, carried on the live air of her Seahaven, and she has to hide her own elation.

Welcome to Seahaven, she says, and lets her shadow fade a little.

We need to talk, Starling says. *My bosses aren’t exactly pleased with what you’re doing.*

Really? Trouble doesn’t bother to sound convincing. She feels a flicker in the air, doesn’t have to look back to know that Cerise has come to the doorway of the saloon, stands looking out into the dusty street. *I don’t know why not, they got what they wanted. Seahaven’s not a refuge space anymore.*

They expected a bit more cooperation,* Starling says. Under the circumstances.

Trouble shrugs, enjoying the easy play of her icon. *I’ve done what I can, under law. But I have a direct-drop open node on the Euronets that puts this space under the Conventions, not Evans-Tindale. I have to abide by those rules. *

And, she doesn’t say, doesn’t have to say, the Conventions protect the nets as much as they protect the realworld. It’s not the clearest situation, and she knows it—there have been rulings for and against her open-node argument—but Starling knows it, too, and knows that the nets will be solidly behind her. Trouble can feel the quiver in the air that means that icons are gathering, the other netwalkers coming out to see what’s going on, what Starling wants. She doesn’t look back, but she can tell they fill the false windows of the saloon and gather on the boardwalks to either side of the street.

Starling says, *That argument’s been overruled before. It won’t hold up in court.*

Maybe not, Trouble says, *but maybe it will. Charge me and we’ll see what the judges say.*

There is a little pause, and she feels Starling withdraw a little, preparing his retreat. *Give me half a chance. We’ll be watching, believe me. Every transaction, every payday, every single packet of data that comes out of here—oh, yeah, we’ll be watching.*

Go ahead, Trouble says. *I’ve nothing to hide. But I hope you plan to get warrants for all that.*

Oh, yeah, Starling says, grim-voiced. I play by the rules, Trouble, remember that.

*I don’t forget,* Trouble says, but already he’s moving away, turned his back to her, the blank side of the icon, heading for the nearest node. She lets him go, and the lurkers move warily away, giving him a wide berth. She feels the node open, and the icon flicks away. She sighs, acknowledging at least his competence—he will play by his rules, she’ll give him that, and he’ll do it well—and turns away.

Cerise says, *He wasn’t pleased.*

No, Trouble says, and turns to face her, seeing the icons that still wait in the windows and the boardwalk. She ignores them, their presence a weight in the air around her, says, Still, somebody has to do it.

I hope Max is right about this one, Cerise says—the open-node defense was Helling’s idea—and Trouble grins, lets the brainworm carry her pleasure onto the net.

*The law’s ambiguous, statute law and common law both. Besides, the main thing is still to get the Conventions established—to get people to push for it again.*

Cerise shrugs—she’s less certain of it than Trouble, of the ability of the net to cooperate and of the realworld to pass the laws they all need—but she’s said that all before, says only, Well, if anyone can do it, you can.

Someone has to, Trouble says. She looks around at the space that is Seahaven, the careful details of the street and the buildings and the vivid artwork flattened slightly in the harsh light, tastes the dust and heat. It was bought with a death—whatever she thought of the Mayor, he’s dead, and if it wasn’t at her hands directly, it was close enough, and she wouldn’t have the hardware or the software or the authority if he weren’t dead—and she can feel that burden sometimes like a wall pressing in over the dome of the false sky that bounds the city. Someone has to, she says again, as if his ghost is somewhere in the machines that create this Seahaven, as if he might have cared, and turns away, walks back down the vivid street, the dust soft and almost real against her feet.

The sun was sinking toward the horizon beyond the long window, its pale disk almost obscured by the dull clouds. Trouble watched it idly, saw the lower limb drop below the last layer of cloud, and looked away, blinking, as the fen ran suddenly with watery light and shadow.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” The voice was sharply accented, not of the educated class, and Trouble blinked again, trying to drive away the green reflections that floated in her eyes. She recognized the man; Mabry had pointed him out as one of the conference’s local sponsors, a senior Eurocop who was smart enough to realize how useful the nets could be, but she couldn’t remember his name. The man—he wasn’t very tall, about her own height, with wavy hair that had gone grey at the temples and eyebrows that arced like a bird’s wing— smiled as though he recognized her dilemma and held out his hand. “Jack Callier. Regional chief constable.”

“Mr. Callier.” Trouble took his hand, warily, trying to remember what else Mabry had said about him. When she had agreed to speak at the annual European Conference on Computers and the Law, she hadn’t realized that cops’ politics were as complicated as the nets’, and she still wasn’t sure enough of all the factions.

“I enjoyed your talk,” Callier went on.

“Thanks,” Trouble said, and waited. It wasn’t that the Eurocops had been hostile, exactly, but they didn’t know her, and the ones who did know her reputation knew her as a cracker better than as the new marshal of Seahaven.

“I don’t mind telling you it’d make my job easier, if your lot signed the Conventions,” Callier went on, with an easy grin that invited confidences. “What do you think the chances are of getting it past your legislature?”

Trouble shrugged, on familiar ground here, and felt herself relaxing in spite of herself. “Not this session, I’m afraid. We haven’t got the support right now, and no one wants to risk a vote yet. As more and more of Congress is dollied-up, have the implants, I mean, we get more and more backers, but until enough of them have actually dealt with the nets, it’s hard to explain why we need the Conventions when we’ve already got Evans-Tindale.”

“I heard your people elected someone—a senator, was it?—who was on the wire.” That was one of the few women there, a rawboned accentless woman called Dumesnil, who was a senior agent in Europol’s computer intelligence division. “Hello, Jack.”

Callier nodded. “I don’t know if you know Anne Dumesnil, Ms. Carless?”

“Trouble. Please.”

“And I’m Stingray,” Dumesnil said. “Jack’s not on the wire—or on anything, for that matter.”

Trouble nodded, impressed—Stingray had made a name for herself on the Euronets, was accounted a force in tracking the software black markets, someone even the shadows spoke of with grudging respect. She looked across the room, looking for the other faces that had come out of the shadows: Cerise and Max Helling, standing by the buffet table, the pair of net cops that everyone called the Terrible Twins, a black woman whose hair was braided with functional-looking beads and wires, a man in a deliberately conservative suit and a mane of untidy dark hair. There still weren’t enough of them to make policy, but at least they were there at all.

“I started out a street cop,” Callier said. It had the sound of a set speech, something he’d practiced, and Trouble dragged her attention back to the conversation. “And a street cop I’ll always be. At least at heart.”

“Not in that suit,” Dumesnil said, and Callier laughed. “So what about this congressman? Is it true?”

“Yes, but,” Trouble said, “he’s only a member of the House of Representatives, he was elected from a district that’s not only historically liberal but also technophilic, and he got his worm when he was a subsidy student for a European corporation, and then only because he couldn’t do his research without it. All very legal and aboveboard.”

“Surely it’s a start,” Dumesnil said.

“I hope so,” Trouble said.

“This must be quite a change for you,” Callier said, and there was something in his voice that made Trouble look sharply at him. “Working the bright lights after all those years in the shadows. How do your old mates feel about it?”

Trouble looked at him for a moment longer, trying to assess what she was hearing in his voice. Challenge? she thought. Mockery? Something of both, but not quite either one. “Does it matter?”

“It might,” Callier said.

Dumesnil stirred uneasily, but then said nothing.

Callier said, “I don’t know about on the nets, but on the streets, turning cop’s going over to the enemy.”

“I suppose it’s not that different,” Trouble said. It took an effort to keep her tone level, detached, and she wished with sudden passion that Cerise were with her. Or maybe not: Cerise would take Callier apart, or try to, and that, she thought, was not the answer now.

“So how do you feel about it?” Callier asked. “Which one bothers you more, being legal or that you were in the shadows?”

“Jack,” Dumesnil said, a warning in her tone.

“No, it’s important,” Callier said. He smiled suddenly, the unexpected gesture taking some of the sting out of his words. “It is important.”

Trouble said, slowly, compelled in spite of herself by the change of pace and tone, “Yeah, if’s a problem, my coming out of the shadows. It couldn’t not be a problem. The way I figure it is, I was a kid when I started—I didn’t have a lot of other choices, for reasons that are none of your business— and in a way I’m grateful to Evans-Tindale because that gave me the chance to get out. But I don’t regret it, not exactly— I’ve done the best I can. I’m still trying, still trying to do what’s right.” She stopped abruptly, embarrassed by her own passion and her own lack of certainty, and saw Callier relax.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I was a right tearaway when I was a kid, caused all kinds of trouble myself—nearly killed another kid once, just lucky I didn’t.” He saw Dumesnil looking at him, and grinned again, the expression wry. “Yeah, I didn’t think you knew that, Annie.”

“It doesn’t fit you,” Dumesnil said, expressionless.

“It’s true. He pulled a knife on me, I hit him with a piece of pipe, broke his shoulder. I was aiming for his head.” He looked back at Trouble. “But you got to grow up sometime.”

Trouble nodded. She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, a shadow crossing against the cool greys and browns of the window, and turned to see Mabry making his way toward them, bulky against the dying light. She lifted a hand in greeting, but turned back to Callier. “Sooner or later,” she said, and Callier nodded back. Mabry beckoned, and she excused herself, moved to join him, into the cool light of evening.