At sixteen hundred hours, Dagmar was on the roof of the hotel. The top two floors were a series of suites and penthouses, and Dagmar needed a special key card to go there. She’d had to get off the elevator a floor below and go up the stairs. To keep the riffraff out, the top two floors had the same key card locks as the elevator, but the roof door was not so equipped.

By this time she was completely familiar with the hotel stairs. She’d followed Tomer Zan’s instructions and found her six escape routes from her room. By the time she was finished searching out staircases and finding out whether they led outside the hotel, she was tired and covered with sweat. This called for a shower, a change of clothes, and lunch. As the hour she’d chosen for lunch was completely random, she presumed that any hypothetical kidnappers were at least as confused as she was.

She had looked up Zelazni Associates-she had at first spelled it Zelazny, like the writer-and discovered that it was an Israeli firm dedicated to “personal protection” and, it appeared, all things military. The word mercenary was nowhere on its Web site, but that’s what they were. Their offices were in Tel Aviv and South Carolina-nowhere, she observed, near Jakarta.

She stood on the roof in the bright, humid daylight. The dry monsoon was from the north and carried the scent of burning Glodok, the bone and body fat of Chinese mothers and children. The roof had a fringe of the red tiles that were popular here, but most of it was a flat expanse of tar grown soft in the equatorial sun. The housing for the elevators and banks of solar cells and big ten-foot-tall aluminum boxes holding air-conditioning gear made the roof cluttered, so Dagmar made her way to the eastern side of the hotel tower and stood there in the bright sun for a long time, looking up. The tar oozed out beneath her feet, the hot sun prickled the side of her face, and she wished she’d been able to wear her panama. Every so often she brought her watch up into view, checked the time, and lowered her arm.

When it was five minutes past the hour, she looked out over the landscape of modern towers and, beyond the shining emblems of modernity, the vast landscape of the city, made indistinct by humidity and smog. There were other pillars of smoke rising besides Glodok, though none as large, and she wondered what political statements, neighborhood grudges, or mere criminalities were being played out.

This was what a travel writer would call “the real Asia,” the world of those who had been lured to the city on the promise of a better life, then found that every promise, however unspoken, had been broken. Now their life’s work had gone for nothing, their savings were useless, and they were under siege by their own military.

They were a tough people, Dagmar presumed, if they were here at all; but they could be forgiven for being angry. She could only hope that she wouldn’t become a casualty of that rage.

An amplified Javanese voice echoed between the buildings. The speech was rapid, urgent, and male. Dagmar stepped closer to the edge of the building and looked down the slope of ornamental red tile to the street below.

Past the crests of the trees that lined the street, Dagmar saw thousands of people marching north up the street under homemade signs. They were close-packed and orderly and hadn’t yet turned into a mob, though Dagmar wondered how many clubs and knives were hidden away under loose clothing.

The amplified voice wasn’t a part of the demonstration but was coming from a police line stretched across the road ahead of it. They looked like the police she’d met the previous day, with khaki uniforms, helmets, and shields. There seemed to be very few of them compared with the demonstrators.

The bullhorn fell silent. The demonstrators kept moving forward. Then the amplified words came again. Dagmar had a sense that they were the same words, only spoken more rapidly.

Dagmar’s nerves gave a leap at the window-rattling boom of shotguns. Gas canisters arced high above the crowd, splashed down in little flowers of white. The crowd began to move-some running forward, some clumping, some trying to move back against the pressure of the thousands coming up from behind.

The officer with the bullhorn was yelling.

Shots hammered out. Not shotguns this time, but rifles, the rip of automatic fire.

The whole crowd screamed at once, fury and mourning and pain wrapped up in one vast primal sound.

Dagmar remembered the young cop from the car, the boy whose whole life experience seemed derived from Felony Maximum IV. Who made machine-gun noises with his lips as he triggered an imaginary weapon.

I always take the MAC-10.

Aside from a handful that went crazy and charged, the crowd surged away from the police line, leaving behind specks of black and red on the pavement. The officer kept yelling through the bullhorn. The demonstrators who charged were gunned down, and bullets flew past them into the crowd.

Their sprawled figures were tiny. Dagmar could cover their dead forms with her finger and make them go away.

The crowd screamed as if it were one huge animal, and the animal fled. The shooting continued, more deliberate now, as if the police were picking their targets. The signs and banners the crowd had been carrying fell and lay abandoned along the pavement.

Dagmar stepped back from the edge, tar pulling at her shoes.

The scent of burning Chinese was strong in the air.

Once upon a time there had been four of them, Dagmar and Charlie and Austin and BJ. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games.

They met at Caltech, where they majored in computer science. They spent a lot of their time staring into screens, and computer games had a limited appeal for eyes that were already weary of looking at 525-line images. They preferred games played with paper and pencil-RPGs, where each could pretend to be someone different from themselves, yet someone they had created.

Unlike their peers who preferred computers to human company, each was comfortable around other people. Austin and Charlie even knew how to talk to girls-and BJ was a fast learner.

Other people wandered in and out of the games, but these four were constants. They were all role players-they could stay in character for hours and shared a dislike of players whose chief motivation was to manipulate the rules in order to gain rewards or treasure.

Dagmar was a scholarship student. Her mother worked in a dry-cleaning establishment; her father was a bartender who had descended over time to a barfly. Dagmar had grown up preferring game worlds to her own life, though sometimes the latter intruded, as when she’d discovered that her father had pawned her computer in order to buy vodka. Caltech, in Pasadena, with its smog and perfect weather, was the best life she’d ever known.

When she ran her own games, she used GURPS as a rule set and created her own worlds of adventure, all crafted in meticulous detail. She specialized in elaborate plots with enormous sets of characters, sometimes so complex that after the game had run on for weeks or months, she herself forgot who had stolen the jewels, or murdered the Antarean ambassador, or double-crossed the Allies on the eve of World War II. Her games required hours of research to put together, but on the other hand, she enjoyed research.

Charlie’s games were agreeably eccentric. In one game the players were ravens in a quest for the magic that had given them human intelligence; in another, they were zombies in search of human brains to eat. In a third, they were ordinary people who had somehow been shrunk to the size of hamsters. Other sorts of players-those who wanted to kill monsters, plunder treasure, and rack up experience points-recoiled from Charlie’s campaigns as if they transmitted plague. Dagmar, Austin, and BJ loved them.