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
