Trouble sat unmoving in the darkened room, the sea-damp air chill on her bare arms. Beyond the half- opened window, the fog rolled past in slow billows, bringing a smell like peppermint and gasoline with it from the beach. She sniffed it automatically—the peppermint smell was like the one her bioware used to label a particular class of data—but did not move to close the window. The lights, linked for economic reasons to a motion-sensor, had turned themselves out while she was out on the net; they would not go on again until she touched the switch. There was enough light from the window, from the neon on the street below, to show the shapes of the furniture, and the flickering telltales on her hardware cast faint orange light across the table where she’d set up her system. She stared at it, noting successful shutdown with one corner of her brain, thinking about Cerise. She had expected Cerise to come to Seahaven herself—that was Cerise’s style, to step briskly in when angels would think twice before acting—but she had not expected quite so rapid a response, if only because she had not expected Multiplane to be able to act so fast. The fact that they had meant that Cerise had been expecting—something, and had set up her departure in advance. And will I go to breakfast? Trouble thought, and smiled, seeing the icon again in imagination, Cerise’s cartoon-woman walking toward her under the green-glass dome of the BBS. It had been a strange thing to see her again, to feel her presence, silk and steel and taut-strung wire; stranger still to feel her own response, heart turning like a wheel, rolling over into the familiar habit of trust, despite everything— and that was foolish, stupid beyond permission, as Cerise herself would say. Old habits die hard, but die they must: I’ll go to breakfast, she decided, but not without setting up some fallbacks of my own first.
She turned back to the system, wincing a little at unanticipated stiffness in her shoulders and back. She had slipped sideways at some point, come back from the net to find herself slumped painfully against the side of the chair. The dol-lie-cord slithered across her shoulder, and the healing flesh around the new socket was starting to hurt again, a dull throb of pain at the back of her head. She would make the fallbacks in the morning, she decided, when she was fresh and rested, and freed herself from the system. She undressed in the dark, not bothering with the room lights—her eyes had adjusted now to the dimness, and it seemed pointless to put on a light for the few minutes she would be awake and active—used the toilet, and crawled between the clammy sheets. She fell asleep watching the blink of the system telltales mirroring the neon.
She woke to brilliant sunlight, slanting in under the imperfectly lowered shades, lay blinking for a moment before she pushed herself upright. She was still stiff from the previous night’s work, and the back of her head felt bruised, puffy and sore to an exploring touch. She grimaced, and swung herself out of bed, hoping that a shower would help. Washed and brushed and dressed, she felt a little better, but the muscles of her neck still twinged with each unwary move. She rolled her head from side to side as she moved toward the media center, touched keys to call up time-and-temperature. It was later than she had realized, well past nine, and she swore under her breath. Cerise wasn’t a morning person, and when she said breakfast, she meant ten o’clock and no earlier, but that barely left Trouble enough time to reach Eastman House. I knew I should’ve taken care of fallbacks last night, she thought, and shook the anger away. It was too late, that was all; she’d have to chance it. But I must stop being stupid about Cerise. She shut down the sleeping system, unplugged the central brain, and shoved it into her bag along with what was left of her money and the disks she had collected—her emergency kit, the absolute minimum that would let her walk the nets—then let herself out of the room, sealing the room lock and the extra override behind her.
It was about a half-hour’s walk into Seahaven proper, across the drawbridge that spanned the Harbormouth. Trouble walked easily through the nearly-empty streets, seeing only a few people gathered outside the waffle shop behind the beach arcade. It was low tide, and the air smelled of salt mud, and oil, and, faintly, still, of peppermint. It was cool, the breeze off the water cutting through her vest and jersey, but the sunlight was warm. Crossing the drawbridge, it struck diamond highlights from the water left in the central channel, and lay in sheets across the exposed flats, where the mud was still wet from the receding water. A boat was moving along the dredged channel, heading for the fish docks, and a trio of gulls wheeled behind it, following the scent of food. They were very bright against the autumn trees that lined the horizon. At the top of the bridge, the concrete changed to metal mesh, and Trouble walked warily, careful of the slick surface. From that point, she could see down into Seahaven and beyond, past the seawall that enclosed the town and even out onto the beach itself. The sand lay in ugly patches, green and grey and oily brown, sand changing to sludge at the tideline. Even at this distance, she could see the heaped seaweed smoldering as the air hit it, releasing the chemicals it had collected from the sea. The remains of the Pavilion Bandstand were very bright against the blues of sea and sky, and someone had scrawled the beginning of a word,
It was more crowded here, runabouts moving along the narrow streets, and a bus passed her halfway up the avenue, carrying the night shift home from The Willows. She kept walking, moderating her pace so that she didn’t seem too conspicuous, turned at last onto the little road that led toward Eastman House and to The Willows beyond. The sidewalk here was well repaired, like the roadway itself, and the grass to either side was expensively maintained, the irrigation and fertilizer heads showing like brass nails at regular intervals. There would be one- way filters buried beneath it to keep the beach chemicals from leaching into the new-laid soil, Trouble knew, and security devices laced into the neat hedges that bordered the property. For an instant she wished that she could have approached it on the wire, so that she could see the networked security blazing out of ground and trees, but that was beyond even experimental capacity now.
She did not hesitate at the entrance to Eastman House, but marched between the carved pillars as though she owned the place—as though she’d been invited, which she had. The doorman eyed her warily, taking in the casual, uncorporate clothes, but held the door open, and even offered a smile. Trouble grinned back, unable to keep from enjoying his uncertainty, and crossed the lobby, her bootheels echoing when they hit the strips of
