Oops, she thought, glancing around. That wasn’t very smart, was it?

Introspection had distracted Wednesday as she left home. Which wasn’t particularly bad, normally: even the sparsely inhabited subsidized apartment corridors had surveillance coverage and environmental support. But she’d turned two corners, taken a shortcut through a disused corporate warren with override-forced doors, and been heading farther toward the distal pole where the party supposedly was. Sammy and her gang (who were not the school bullies, but the arbiters of fashion and cool, and never let Wednesday forget how lucky she was to be invited) had done this before, taken over an abandoned apartment or office zone, or even a manufacturing cube, gutted it, brought in temporary infrastructure and bootleg liquor, and cranked up the music. Moving out into the distal zone was daring: the sub-basement there was some of the oldest housing in the colony, long abandoned and scheduled for restructuring and development some time in the next ten years or so.

Wednesday had been blindly running the inertial route map Johnny deWitt had nervously beamed her the day before, saved to her cache: a flashing ring on her index finger pointed the path out to her. In her self-absorbed haze she hadn’t noticed how very deep the shadows were getting, nor how sparse the pedestrian traffic was, nor how many of the corridor lighting strips were smashed. Now she was alone, with nobody else in sight. There was detritus under foot, broken roofing panels, a stack of dusty utility hoses, missing doors gaping like rotten teeth in the walls — this whole sector looked unsafe, leaky. And now it occurred to her to start thinking. “Why Johnny?” she asked quietly. “Johnny?” Short, spotty, and ungifted with any sense of fashion, he’d have been the class nerd if he’d been smarter: as it was, he was simply a victim. And he hadn’t beamed her the ticket with any obvious ulterior motive, no stammering invitation to hole up in a soft space for an hour — just plain nervous, staring over his shoulder all the time. I could phone him and ask, but then I’d look like a fool. Weak. But … if I don’t phone him, I’ll be a fool.

“Dial Johnny the Sweat,” she subvocalized. Connecting … no signal. She blinked in disbelief. Surely there should be bandwidth down here? It was even more fundamental than oxygen. With bandwidth you could get rescue services or air, or find your way out of trouble. Without it, anything could happen.

There were rumors about these abandoned hab sectors. Dismembered bodies buried in the cable ducts, surveillance cams that would look away if you knew the secret gesture to bypass their programming, invitingly abandoned houses where one of the rooms was just a doorknob away from hard vacuum. But she’d never heard rumors of entire segments that were blacked out, where you couldn’t call someone or talk to your agents or notepad, where maintenance ’bots feared to crawl. That was beyond neglect; it was actively dangerous.

She walked through a wide, low-ceilinged hall. From the rails along one side and the lack of decoration it looked to have been some kind of utility tunnel, back when people lived and worked there. Empty doorways gaped to either side, some of them fronted with rubble — crushed dumb aerogel and regolith bricks, twisted frameworks. Most of the lights were dead, except for a strip along the middle of the ceiling that flickered intermittently. The air was stale and smelled musty, as if nothing much stirred it. For the first time Wednesday was glad of her survival sensor, which would scream if she was in danger of wandering into an anoxic gas trap.

“This can’t be right,” she muttered to herself. With a twitch of her rings she brought up a full route map, zoomed to scale so that this corner of the colony’s public spaces was on the display. (The rings were another thing that rubbed it in; back in Moscow’s system they’d have been a bulky, boxy personal digital assistant, not a set of hand jewels connected to her nervous system by subtle implants.) The whole segment was grayed out, condemned, off-limits. Somewhere on the way she’d gone blundering through a doorway that was down on the map as a blank wall. “Bother.” The party — she dumped her follow-me tag into the map — lay roughly a hundred meters outside the shield wall of the pressure cylinder. “Shit,” she added, this time with feeling. Someone had put Johnny up to it, spiking her with a falsie — or, more subtly, run a middleman spoof on his hacked ring. She could see it in her mind’s eye: a bunch of mocking in-things joking about how they’d send the little foreign bitch on a climb down into the dirty underbelly of the world. Something rattled in the rubbish at one side of the hall, rats or -

She glanced round, hastily. There didn’t seem to be any cams down there, just hollow eye sockets gaping in the ceiling. Ahead, a dead zone sucked up the light: a big hall, ceiling so high it was out of sight, opened like a cavern off the end of the service tunnel. And she heard the noise again. The unmistakable sound of boots scuffing against concrete.

What do I — Old reflexes died hard: it took Wednesday a split second to realize that it was no good asking Herman for advice. She glanced around for somewhere to hide. If someone was stalking her, some crazy — more likely, a couple of Bone Sisters who’d lured her down there to whack her bad for wearing team invisicolors and carrying a cutter on their loop — she wanted to be way out of sight before they eyeballed her. The big cavern ahead looked like a good bet, but it was dark, too dark to see into, and if it was a dead end, she’d be bottled in. But the doorways off to the left looked promising; lots of housing modules, jerked airlocks gaping like eye sockets.

Wednesday darted sideways, trying to muffle her bootheels. The nearest door gaped wide, floor underlayers ruptured like decompressed intestines, revealing a maze of ducts and cables. She stepped over them delicately, stopped, leaned against the wall and forced herself to close her eyes for ten seconds. The wall was freezing cold, and the house smelled musty, as if something had rotted in there long ago. When she uncovered her eyes again, she could see some way into the gloom. The floor paneling resumed a meter inside the threshold, and a corridor split in two directions. She took the left fork hesitantly, tiptoeing quietly and breathing lightly, listening for the sound of pursuit. When it got too dark to see she fumbled her tracker ring round, and whispered, “I need a torch.” The thin blue diode glow wasn’t much, but it was enough to outline the room ahead of her — a big open space like her family’s own living room, gutted and abandoned.

She looked around the room. A broken fab bulked in one corner next to an exposed access crawlway. A sofa, seat rotted through with age and damp, occupied the opposite wall. Holding her breath, she forced herself not to sneeze. Words came to her, unbidden, on the breeze: “—fuck da bitch go?”

“One o’ these. Youse take starboard, I taken the port.”

Male voices, with a really strange accent, harsh-sounding and determined. Wednesday shuddered convulsively. Not the Sisters! Bone Sisters were bad — you crossed them, they crossed you and you needed surgery — but the white sorority didn’t hang out with -

Crunch. Cursing. Someone had stuck a foot in the open cable channel. Teetering on the edge of blind panic, Wednesday scurried toward the half-meter-high crawlway and scrambled along it on hands and knees, headfirst into a tube of twilight that stretched barely farther than arm’s length. The tube kinked sharply upward, pipes bundled together against a carrier surface. She paused, forced herself to relax, and rolled over onto her back so that she could see round the bend. Can I … ? Push from the knees, begin to sit up, stick boot toes into gaps in the carrier trunking, push …