Bad call. Now there's barely even room to move; 128 has to split into fourteen fragments just to fit. Life struggles for existence on all sides, overwriting, fighting, shooting off copies of itself in the blind hope that random chance will spare one or two.

128 fends off panicky egglayers and looks around. Two hundred forty gates; two hundred sixteen already closed, seventeen open but hostile (incoming logic bombs; the disinfection is obviously no local affair). The remaining seven are so crowded with fleeing wildlife that 128 could never get through in time. Almost three quarters of the local node has been disinfected already; 128 has perhaps a dozen millisecs before it starts losing bits of itself.

But wait a nan: those guys over there, they're jumping the queue somehow. They're not even alive, they're just files; but the system is giving them preferential treatment.

One of them barely even notices when 128 jumps onto its back. They go through together.

Much better. A nice roomy buffer, a couple of terabytes if it's a nybble, somewhere between the last node and the next. It's nobody's destination—really, just a waiting room—but the present is all that really matters to those who play by Darwin's rules, and the present looks good.

There's no other life in evidence. There are three other files, though, including the horse 128 rode in on: barely animate but still somehow deserving of the royal treatment that got them fast-tracked out of Mérida. They've de-arced their rudimentary autodiagnostics and are checking themselves for bruises while they wait.

It's an opportunity 128 is well-prepared to exploit, thanks to an inherited subroutine for which it remains eternally ungrateful. While these beasts of burden look under their own hoods, 128 can peek over their shoulders.

Two compressed mail packets and an autonomic crossload between two BCC nodes. 128 evinces the sub-electronic equivalent of a shudder. It steers well clear of nodes with the BCC prefix; it's seen too many brethren go into such addresses, and none at all come out. Still, peeking at a few lines of routine stats shouldn't do any harm.

In fact, it proves quite enlightening. Once you disregard all the formatting and addressing redundancies, these three files seem to have two remarkable things in common:

They all go the head of the line when traveling through Maelstrom. And they all contain the text string Lenie Clarke.

128 is literally built out of numbers. It certainly knows how to add two and two.

The pretense had ended long before Sou-Hon Perrault joined the ranks.

There'd been a time, she knew, when those who fell ill on the Strip were actually treated on-site. There'd been clinics, right next to the pre-fab offices where refugees came to hand in forms and hold out hopes. In those days the Strip had been a temporary measure, a mere stop-gapuntil we deal with the backlog. People had stood at the door and knocked; a steady stream had trickled through.

Nothing compared to the cascade piling up behind.

Now the offices were gone. The clinics were gone. N'AmPac had long-since thrown up its hands against the rising tide; it had been years since anyone had described the Strip as a waystation. Now it was pure terminus. And now, when things went wrong over the wall, there were no clinics left to put on the case.

Now there were only the dogcatchers.

They came in just after sunrise, near the end of her shift. They swooped down like big metal hornets: a nastier breed of botfly, faces bristling with needles and taser nodes, bellies distended with superconducting ground-effectors that could lift a man right off his feet. Usually that wasn't necessary; the Strippers were used to occasional intrusions in the name of public health. They endured the needles and tests with stoic placidity.

This time, though, some snapped and snarled. In one instance Perrault glimpsed a struggling refugee carried aloft by a pair of dogcatchers working in tandem—one subduing, the other sampling, both carrying out their tasks beyond reach of the strangely malcontent horde below. Their specimen fought to escape, ten meters above the ground. For a moment it almost looked as though he might succeed, but Perrault switched channels without waiting to find out. There was no point in hanging around; the dogcatchers knew what they were doing, after all, and she had other duties to perform.

She occupied herself with research.

The usual tangle of conflicting rumors still ran rampant along the coast. Lenie Clarke was on the Strip, Lenie Clarke had left it. She was raising an army in NoCal, she had been eaten alive north of Corvallis. She was Kali, and Amitav was her prophet. She was pregnant, and Amitav was the father. She could not be killed. She was already dead. Where she went, people shook off their lethargy and raged. Where she went, people died.

There was no shortage of stories. Even her botfly began telling them.

She was interrogating an Asian woman near the NoCal border. The filter was set to Cantonese: a text translation scrolled across a window in her HUD while her headset whispered the equivalent spoken English.

Suddenly that equivalence disappeared. The voice in Perrault's ear insisted that "I do not know this Lenie Clarke but I have heard of the man Amitav", but the text on her display said something else entirely:

angel. No shit. Lenie Clarke, her name was

her up but Lenie Clarke isn't exactly sockeye

a place called Beebe? Anyhow, far as

"Wait. Wait a second," Perrault said. The refugee fell obediently silent.

The text box kept scrolling, though,

Lenie? That's her first name?

It cleared quickly enough when Perrault wiped the window. But by then her headset was talking again.

"Lenie Clarke was very…not even your antidepressants seemed to work on her," it said.

Amitav's words. She remembered them.

Not his voice, of course. Something cool, inflectionless, with no trace of accent. Something familiar and inhuman. Spoken words, converted to ASCII for transmission then reconstructed at the other end: it was a common trick for reducing file size, but tone and feeling got lost in the wash.

Amitav's words. Maelstrom's voice. Perrault felt a prickling along the back of her neck.

"Hello? Who is this?"

The refugee was speaking. Perrault had no idea what she said. Certainly it wasn't

Brander, Mi/ke/cheal,

Caraco, Jud/y/ith

Clarke, Len/ie

Lubin, Ken/neth

Nakata, Alice

which was all that appeared on the board.

"What about Lenie Clarke?" There was no way to source the signal—as far as the system could tell, the input had arisen from a perplexed-looking Asian woman on the NoCal shoreline.

"Lenie Clarke," the dead voice repeated softly. "All of a sudden there's this K-selector walking out of nowhere. Looks like one of those old litcrits with the teeth. You know. Vampires."

"Who is this? How did you get on this channel?"

"Would you like to know about Lenie Clarke." If the words had arisen from anything flesh and blood, they would have formed a question.

"Yes! Yes, but—"

"She's still at large. Les beus are probably looking for her."

Intelligence spilled across the text window:

Name: Clarke, Lenie Janice

WHID: 745 143 907 20AE

Born: 07/10/2019

Voting Status: disqualified 2046 (failed pre-poll exam)

"Who are you?"

"Ying Nushi. I have already said."

It was the woman on the shore, returned to her rightful place in the circuit. The thing that had usurped her was gone.