even though she’d expected it, and reached for her box of spares. Miss Kitty’s IC(E) had been set to kill—and what the hell the woman thought she was doing, Cerise added silently, transmuting fear to anger, I don’t know. The whole nets have gone crazy—they must have, if anybody’s actually supporting Evans-Tindale. And if Miss Kitty tried to kill me. Though that probably wasn’t personal. She closed her eyes for an instant, remembering the frozen icon and the sudden smell of death. No, probably not personal at all, she decided. If I were abandoning a grey-market space—and I think she must’ve done just that—that’s the way I’d play it. A striking icon to catch people’s attention, and then hair-trigger IC(E) to go after whoever tried to follow me. Or, like Miss Kitty did, whoever showed up first.
She rubbed her arm where the IC(E) had touched her— there were no marks on her skin, just the tingling reminder of a near miss in her nerves—and then began methodically to shut down the system. She couldn’t replace the fuses with the machines running, and she couldn’t go back out onto the nets until the fuses were replaced: no choice, she thought, and swung away from the system. The media wall was still talking at her, the screen now showing a panel of suits discussing the implications of the change. She scowled at them, worked the remote to mute the sound, and only then recognized one of the suited figures as George Aferiat, who had written software for the first dollie-slots and their associated implants, and who had also run a shadow space in the BBS before he’d gotten law. There was nothing more zealous than a convert. She lifted her middle finger to the screen, and turned back to the message board.
It didn’t take a lot of work to retrieve Carlie’s message from the trash—even cheap machines had the option these days, and her system was far from cheap. She glanced at the linked machines—everything was shut down and saved; all she had to do was wait for the chips to cool and trigger the playback. Carlie Held’s voice poured from the little speaker, as perfect as though he himself stood beside her.
“Cerise, Trouble, if either of you’s there, pick up, we’re in deep shit.” There was a pause, and Cerise pictured him standing in the tiny office that served his storefront surgery, the privacy handset swamped in his huge hand. “OK, you’re not there. OK. If you haven’t heard, Evans-Tindale passed— goddamn Congress overrode the veto—which means the worm stays illegal, and Treasury gets to make the law on the nets. I need to talk to you —we all need to talk. Call me as soon as you can.”
Cerise heard the click of the connection breaking, and a red light flashed on the tiny status screen: end of message. She swore under her breath, and reached for her own handset, touched the codes that would connect her with Carlie’s surgery. She heard the beeps as the system routed her call—a local, twelve sharp musical tones, seven for location, three for payment, two for privacy—and then waited as the ring pulsed in her ear. She counted six, and knew Carlie wasn’t answering—wasn’t there—but let it ring a dozen more times, staring at the posturing suits in the media screen, before she finally hung up. Carlie was gone, too.
And that was ridiculous, she told herself. She jabbed buttons again, punching in another number— Arabesque, Rachelle Sirvain in the real world: another local call, just in the next ward, five minutes away by the subway. The phone rang, rang again; she counted ten before she hung up, fighting sudden panic. It was almost as if she was the last one of them left, the last survivor— She shoved that thought away, and punched a third number. This time, the answering machine picked up on the third ring.
“Hi, you’ve reached five-five—”
Cerise broke the connection—Dewildah was gone, too— and punched a final set of codes. In the media screen, the talking suits had disappeared, to be replaced by a head, a serious-looking woman who wore secretarial goggles. The phone rang, rang again, and then a sharply accented voice said, “Hello?”
Cerise let out breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Butch. Thank God you’re home.”
“Cerise? Are you all right?”
She could hear the concern in Butch van Liesvelt’s voice, and managed a shaky smile. “Yeah—well, no, Trouble’s gone and there’s all this with Evans-Tindale—”
“Yeah.” There was a little pause, and Cerise could hear in the background the indistinct sounds of someone talking— television, probably, she thought. In the screen, the image changed again, became a pair of lists showing the differences between the Amsterdam Conventions and Evans-Tindale. In one corner of the screen, a much smaller talking head—male this time—babbled away, mouth moving without sound.
“Look,” van Liesvelt said abruptly, “I’m heading over to Marco Polo’s. Carlie called from there, he said he and Max were there already, and that Arabesque was on her way. I was just going to call you and Trouble, I talked to Dewildah already—”
“Trouble’s gone,” Cerise said again.
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean she’s gone. She packed up her stuff and left, I don’t know where she is.” Cerise took another deep breath, fought back the baffled anger. “Or why, exactly, but I think I can guess. I’ll meet you at Marco Polo’s. We can talk there.”
“You sure?” van Liesvelt asked, and Cerise felt her eyes fill up with tears. Of all their oddball group—a half-dozen or so crackers who had dared both the brainworm and the risks of realworld contact—it was van Liesvelt, shambling, physically graceless Butch, who’d done the most to take care of all of them.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll see you at Marco Polo’s.”
She cut the connection before van Liesvelt could ask anything more. She set the handset back on its hook, taking ridiculous care with the placement, waiting until the tears were gone again before she turned her mind to business. She worked the remote again, shutting down the media wall, and grabbed her leather coat off the hook by the door before she could change her mind.
The wind had risen since the afternoon, curled in as she opened the door, bringing the smell of the wet streets and driving a handful of tattered leaves around her ankles. Cerise shivered, tucking her chin down into the coat’s high collar, then had to reach back to pull the door shut behind her. She jammed her hands into her pockets, wishing she’d remembered gloves, and tore the lining again where she’d cut the pocket for a borrowed gun. This wasn’t a particularly bad part of town, no more than most, and better than some, but there had been times when she needed a gun’s threat to balance the odds. Or to get them out of whatever Trouble had talked them into. It hadn’t happened often—Trouble was generally reasonable, cautious—but every now and then she’d accept a challenge, even one that hadn’t been meant, and they would all have to live with the consequences. Like now.
Cerise shook the thought away, the memory of Trouble furious and confident, facing down a pair of local boys with knives. She had downplayed it later, always pointed out that the kids had been maybe thirteen, fourteen years old and obviously trying their first mugging. But Cerise had never forgotten the crazy grin, the sheer, black- hearted determination, and had been, herself, more than a little afraid. She had caught the look again four months ago, when Evans-Tindale passed the first time, and had done her best not to see it. Trouble had said then that she was quitting, that they couldn’t go on if the bill passed, and she had obviously meant it.
It was almost dark out now, and all the streetlights were on, swaying gently in the cold wind. Cerise shrugged herself deeper into her heavy coat, stepping more quickly across the moving shadows, heading for the nearest subway station at the corner of Elm and Cass. Not that it was all that far to Marco Polo’s, less than a dozen blocks, but it was cold, and dark already, and the secretary gangs, the dollie-girls, tended to lurk on the fringes of New Century Square. As she came out into the brighter light of the intersection, however, she saw the lines waiting beyond the ticket booths, men and women huddled into drab, windproof coats, here and there the brighter cloth of a student uniform, and she muttered a curse under her breath. The system was backed up again—it had never been built to handle the current loads—and she could easily walk to the Square before she even made it down onto the platform. She lengthened her step, heading up Cass into the teeth of the wind.
Once she had passed the intersection, with its bright lights and the low-standing brick station, foot traffic thinned out. This was mostly small shops and offices, all of which closed promptly at five to let their people get out of the city-center before full dark, and the doors and ground-floor windows were barred, steel shutters or heavy grills drawn tight over their vulnerabilities. Security lights showed like blue pinpoints in the corners of a few windows, and there were metal mesh sleeves across the swaying streetlights, casting webbed shadows over the pooled light. A few of the lights were broken anyway, leaving patches of greater dark, and she crossed them warily, wondering if she’d been stupid after all. But she was already past the bus lines at Stadium Road—not that they were running, it wasn’t a game night—and it would take longer to walk back to the station than it would to keep going. She could see the lights of the Square in the distance, the haze of gold neon bright at the end of the street, the gold-and-red bars of the Camberwell Beer sign just visible between a pair of buildings: only another
