He reached out, touched the closest virtual card that hung in the air, and flipped it over to see the file display. An arrest record for prostitution. He flipped another. Prostitution and drug charges. And then another. Prostitution and drunk and disorderly.

Markov then swept his hand across the room, virtually grabbed all the pictures, and began to sort them, putting those with criminal records in a stack on one side of the room and those with non-arrest records, a smaller stack, in the air on the other side.

Lieutenant Jian rejoined him and started pulling down the tabs of those with arrest records. “I am sure the general will want us to round them all up, and then we can process them on our own terms,” said Jian.

“Think so? Your boy made his way through half the prostitutes in Hawaii. Arrest them all and you’ll have an uprising on your hands, but not from the locals,” said Markov, tabbing through the stack of those without arrest records, mostly hotel staff. “These poor maids, they deserved combat pay to come in here —”

Markov’s index finger stopped and rested on the image of a young woman that hung in the air. A driver’s license. He had seen her before. He flipped the picture over. Yes, the look in her eyes was different, but that was her, all right. What had the surf-shop girl been doing all the way up here?

“Traitor,” one of them snarled.

The glares of the locals waiting out the day in a thick cloud of marijuana smoke inside the old Quonset hut on Queen Street told her she was in enemy territory, even though she was among her own people. Their scowls and squints after they took in her outfit, a sea-blue tank top as tight as a bathing suit and iridescent white formfitting pants, gave the room a new menace.

“Whore,” another said with a cough.

A subdued Colombian reggae band played in the background. It was one of the banned global peace movement songs. She had to speak up to be heard by the girl behind the bar when she asked where the bathroom was.

“Customers only,” said a teenage girl with a crown-of-thorns tattoo wreathing her bald head.

“I just have to pee; please,” said Carrie.

“Then buy a coffee or a smoke,” said the girl.

“Just coffee,” said Carrie, tossing a hundred-RMN note on the counter.

“Bathroom’s back there. Lock’s broken,” said the girl with a look of disdain.

Carrie weaved her way through the low tables to the back of the restaurant. She kept her eyes on the floor, not out of embarrassment but out of fear that someone would trip her if she didn’t watch her step.

A man in this fifties wearing a dirty white wool cap mottled with ash burns winked at her from behind a pair of taped-up viz glasses. Then he beckoned her over, curling a plump finger. The simple act of signaling her made his massive weight stress the wooden chair further. He brushed crumbs and ash from his clothing, a formless black T-shirt that went down to his ankles like a dress. She gave him a quick glance that he would replay again and again on his glasses later.

“Piss off,” she said. “You can’t afford it.” Playing the act of someone past caring. Or was it an act anymore?

Then she moved carefully past him toward the bathroom.

She looked at her translucent G-Shock and saw she had three hours until the nine o’clock lockdown. The return of curfew had done more damage to Directorate troop morale than the local insurgents had.

She leaned in toward the mirror, reapplying lipstick. She was sure the two men following her had been Directorate. They’d had flip-flops, loose linen pants, and bright floral T-shirts, but the colors were too bright. The shirts had clearly been bought recently; they didn’t have the weathered look that real locals’ clothing had. Definitely Directorate, and she knew why they were after her.

She waited in the bathroom for fifteen minutes. Then she fixed her hair and washed her hands. Maybe they weren’t following her anymore, which made it time for her to go back out there and face the hate, anger, and poison she saw in the expressions of her fellow Hawaiians every day.

Hand on the doorknob, she paused and breathed, preferring the stink of the dirty bathroom to the lazy funk of the coffee shop.

The door crashed in before she had a chance to open it. A pair of black-gloved hands threw her against the bathroom wall, knocking a faded photo of Waikiki Beach to the ground; its cheap wooden frame broke into pieces. Then she was hauled to her feet, dragged along the corridor, and thrown forward onto the café floor.

She looked up just as a knee drove into her back. Coffee dripped from one of the tables onto her head and down her face, and she blinked the stinging liquid from her eyes. The customers were gone. She didn’t have to check to know the door was locked. Nobody who’d seen her walk in was going to call for help.

Carrie tried to push herself up, straining against the weight on her back, but a foot pressed down on her left arm. Then her right.

There were two of them, and they spoke in Chinese, short bursts that were getting angrier. She tried to see who was speaking, and a fist slammed her face into the wet floor. She strained again and was forced down by a forearm across the back of her neck.

Carrie opened her eyes wide, her breath escaping. She felt one of them pulling at her legs, tugging off her pants; one pant leg caught on her right ankle and was then yanked off. She could hear the man a few feet away arguing with the other one about something. Maybe chickening out, or maybe wanting to go first.

Carrie kicked free, scrambled to a corner, and then curled into a ball and started shaking, her half-naked body covered in spilled coffee and ash from the floor.

She closed her eyes. She thought of the visits at night, always after her mom had drunk herself to sleep. How she would lose herself, escaping to the moment after she would fall from her board, entering the churning froth beneath a powerful wave, inches from the razor-sharp beauty of a reef. In that chaos, there was a beckoning peace. In the churn, you could hear nothing at all, just a ringing in your ears. If you chose, you could lose yourself in that moment forever.

Then the wave would pass, and she would rise again to the surface with a gasp.

She reached back to the inside of her left upper arm and slowly peeled away a rectangular Band-Aid three inches long. A searing pain and the red trickle of blood began to flow.

The closer commando grabbed Carrie, pulled her out of the corner, and roughly dragged her upright. She did not fight him; her arms hung limply by her sides, and the Band-Aid dropped to the ground. He wrapped his right hand around her throat, his thumb just under her jaw. He was strong enough to lift her entire body up so that her toes barely touched the ground. Growling, he pulled her in close, reached down with his free left hand, and undid the clasp of his belt. He began to unzip his pants, but then he looked into her eyes, and froze.

The stillness and tranquility of her eyes drew him in, confused him, just for a moment. He didn’t even notice the flash in her right hand.

The blade itself was short, only one and a half inches and just a bit wider than a sheet of paper. Made of ceramic, the box-cutter blade she’d taken from her fiancé’s toolbox was sharper than a razor and would never rust, not even when hidden in her pain.

He did not even feel the first slash arcing upward; so fine was the blade’s edge that his body had difficulty registering the damage being done. Even before his opened femoral artery began to spray out, she had slashed downward and across, arcing across his stomach at an angle just above his bellybutton. He was pulling his left hand back to punch at her, his pants now falling to the floor, when he noticed his intestines were spilling out.