Panting with effort, she levered herself up and out of view of the room. Please don’t have infrared trackers or dogs. The thought of the dogs still woke her up in a cold, shivering sweat, some nights. Please just be muggers. Knowing her luck, she’d crossed paths with a couple of serial fuckmonsters, transgressive nonconsensual looking for a meat puppet. And she didn’t have a backup: that cost real money, the kind that Mom and Dad didn’t have. She shuddered, forcing back panic, braced her elbows against the walls of the duct, and flicked her rings to shutdown. She switched off her implants — backup brain, retinal projectors, the lot. Completely off. She could die there and nobody would find the body until they tore down the walls. There could be a gas trap, and she’d never know. But then again, the hunters might be following her by tracking her emissions.

“She come ’ere? I not am ’inking ’dis.” Scuffling and voices and, frighteningly, a faint overspill of light from a hand torch. A second voice, swearing. “Search’e floor! Have youse taken beneath dat?”

“I have. Tracer an’ be saying she — shirting vanish. Tracer be losing she. Signal strong al’way from she’s home. Prey be wise to sigint ’striction.”

Not some girl gang shit: they were stalking her, had followed her all the way from home. Forget muggers, forget ordinary sickheads. Wednesday stifled a squeak of pure cold terror.

“I an’ be checking over the way. You be clearing dis side an’ if-neg we-all be waiting mid-way. If she be hiding, she-an be come out.”

“An’ we be dumping nitro down here? Bath she in unbreathable?”

The second one replied, contemptuous: “You-an’ be finding rotten meat after, you be dumping ’de breathing mix. Contractees, t’ey wanting authentication.” Footsteps clattered over the grating, stopped.

They’re going to wait me out in the corridor? At least they weren’t going to flood the entire sector with nitrogen, but even hearing them talking about it was frightening her. Rotten meat. They want to know I’m dead, she realized, and the dizzying sense of loss made her stomach heave. How do I get out of this?

Just asking the question helped; from somewhere she dredged up a memory of her invisible friend lecturing her, an elevator-surfing run during happier days back home. The first step in evading a pursuit is to identify and locate the pursuers. Then work out what sort of map they’re using and try to locate their blind spots. Not to take the stairs or the elevator, but to go through a service hatch, carefully step onto the roof of a car, and ride it to safety — or as a training game, all the way to Docking Control and back down again without showing up anywhere on Old Newfie’s security map. She’d learned to ghost through walls, disappear from tracking nets, dissolve in a crowd. Ruefully, Wednesday recalled Herman’s first lesson: When threatened, do not let yourself panic. Panic is the most likely thing to kill you. At the time, it had been fun.

It still is a game, she realized suddenly. A game for them. Whoever they are. But I don’t have to play by their rules. With that realization, she managed to recapture a tenuous sense of self-confidence. Now where?

The duct was pitch-black, but she vaguely recalled it leading upward before she’d switched her gear off. It looked like it had been a house once, a slum tenement for cheap labor — so cheap it didn’t even have en suite bathrooms and automated amahs to do the cleaning. Apartments there were prefab assemblies: a bunch of sealed, airtight modules connected by pressure-tight doors, bolted together in a big empty space and linked to the pressurized support mains by service tunnels like this one. This duct had to run somewhere pressurized. The only question was whether there was room for her to follow it all the way.

Wednesday braced herself against the back of the tube and began to lever herself up. The pipes and cables with their regular ties and their support grid were nearly as good as a ladder, and their insulation was soft and friable with age, forming spongy handholds for her questing fingers. She paused every half meter to feel above her with one hand and tried not to think about her clothing: the boots were a miserable pain for climbing in, but she couldn’t take them off, and as for what the duct was doing to her jacket …

Her questing hand found empty space. Gasping quietly she reached up, then felt the cables bend over in a curve onto what had to be the top of the rooms’ outer gas containment membrane. A final convulsive heave brought her up and over, and left her doubled over across the cable support, panting for breath, her legs still dangling over three meters of air space. Now she risked turning on her locater ring for a moment, still dialed to provide a light glow. Glancing around, she felt an edgy bite of claustrophobia. The crawl space widened to almost a meter, but was still only half a meter high. Ahead, there was a darkness that might be a branch off to one side, in the direction of the front door if she hadn’t lost her bearings. Wednesday pulled her legs up and crawled toward it.

She came to a branch point, an intersection with a duct that had been built with humans in mind. The ceiling rose to a meter, and another quick flash of the ring revealed lighting panels (dead and dusty) and a flat, clear crawlway. She worked her way round into it, and shuffled along on hands and knees as fast as she could go. After about six meters she came to a large inspection hatch and paused. I’m over the road, aren’t I? She put her ear to the hatch and listened, trying to ignore the thudding of her pulse.

“—be not seeing any’ting.” The voice was faint and tinny, but distinct.

“But she not being ’ere!” Protest, muted by metal.

“’An being gone. Considered an’ we tracer ’coy with ’an wall ghost? Be telling you not she’an ’ere.”

“Tell you th’man she not being not here? I an’ you wait.”

Wednesday crept forward, taking shallow breaths and forcing herself not to move too fast. On the other side of the road there’d be another apartment module, and maybe a utility hub or a tunnel up to the next level, where she could get away from these freaks, whoever they were, with their weird dialect and frightening intent. She was still sick with fear, but now there was a hot ember of anger to go with it. Who do they think they are? Hunting her like dogs through the abandoned underbelly of the cylindrical city — the years fell away, bringing back the same stomach-churning fear and resentment.

Another node, another risky flash of light revealing another tunnel. This time she took the branch that headed toward the big empty cavern at the end of the passage. It ran straight for ten meters, then she flashed her ring again and saw a jagged edge ahead, dust and debris on the floor, what looked like the mummified turds of some tunnel-running animal and a pile of blown-out wall insulation. Beyond the ledge her light was swallowed by darkness and a distant dripping noise.

Shit. She knelt on the cold metal floor and glanced back. Below and behind her, two strange men were stalking her network shadow. Here in meatspace, though, she was blocked. Wasn’t she? She crawled forward slowly and looked out into the cavern. There could be anything here: a gas trap full of carbon dioxide, or a cryogenic leak, insulation ripped and walls so cold you’d freeze to them on contact. She sniffed the air, edging close to panic again. Herman would know … But Herman wasn’t there. Herman hadn’t followed her from Old Newfie. He’d told her at the time: causal channels broke when you tried to move an end point faster than light, and the one his agent had planted on her — a pediatrician who’d spent an internship on the hab when she was twelve — was now corrupt. She’d have to figure it out for herself if she wanted to get to Sammy’s party. Or anywhere. Home, even.