“No, we think we know who is behind it,” Vann said. “It’s not the same thing.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“I want to share your optimism,” Vann said. She held up her cup. “I’m not entirely sure I’ve had enough of this to do so.”

“You might have had enough,” I suggested.

“Not yet,” Vann said. “But soon. Think maybe a shot more will do it.”

I took the cup and walked down the hall toward the stairwell, pausing at Tony’s room as I did so. His body lay there, appearing to sleep. His threep was missing. I wondered if anyone remembered to feed Tony today, but then saw his nutrient levels were topped off.

Tayla did that, I thought. It’s good to have friends.

I went to the kitchen, poured out a shot of bourbon, and brought it back to my room. Vann was asleep, snoring lightly.

Chapter Twenty-one

I WOKE UP AT nine thirty and for a moment panicked that I was late for work. Then I remembered that since I had been shot at twice last night, I had been told to take the day off, unless I wanted to talk to the mental health staff. I preferred the day off.

I skimmed through some e-mail, waiting to see if my brain would be willing to collapse back into sleep. No luck. Awake it was, then.

I got into my threep in the apartment and looked around. Vann wasn’t on the couch. I assumed that she had headed back to her place. Then I heard her voice downstairs.

She was in the family room, with Tayla and the twins, watching the monitor. On the screen there was a riot. It was happening on the Mall.

“What the hell happened?” I asked, looking at the monitor.

Vann looked over, cradling a cup of coffee. “You’re up.”

I gestured at the monitor. “Maybe I should have stayed asleep.”

“Then when you woke up it would have been worse,” she said.

“Someone firebombed a tour group of Hadens,” Tayla said.

“Seriously,” I said.

Tayla nodded. “The Hadens were grouped up, ready to go to the Lincoln Memorial, and then some assholes drove by and chucked a Molotov cocktail at them.”

“Which is less effective on threeps than on human bodies,” I said.

“The assholes found that out when the threeps took off after them.” Vann pointed at the monitor. “Look, they’re showing the video again.”

The video was from the point of view of a tourist phone. In the foreground a little kid was whining to her parents about something. In the background, a car swerved toward a group of tightly packed Hadens. A young dude popped up out of a sunroof, lit a Molotov, and flung it at the Hadens.

The tourist now turned his full attention to the flames. Several Hadens were on fire, flapping and rolling to put themselves out. The rest of the Hadens starting running toward the car. Whoever was driving—it was obviously on manual control—panicked, took off with his friend still half out of the sun roof, and rear-ended the car in front of him. The Hadens reached the car, pulled the young man out of the sunroof, and yanked the driver out of the car.

Then the beatdown truly began. By this time one of the threeps hit by the cocktail had made it over to the car. It began kicking the bomb thrower, legs still aflame.

“It would be funny if the entire Mall and Capitol Hill area weren’t now on lockdown,” Vann said.

“You can’t say the dudes didn’t deserve it,” I said.

“No, they deserved it, all right,” Vann said. “It’s still a pain in the ass for everybody else.”

“Do we need to go in?”

“No,” Vann said. “In fact I just got a phone call telling me that you and I are on medical leave until Monday. We’re supposed to let Jenkins and Zee follow up on all our stuff.”

“Who are Jenkins and Zee?” I asked.

“You haven’t met them yet,” Vann said. “They’re goddamned idiots.” She pointed to the screen. “The good news is they’ll handle this and all the other penny-ante crap we had to deal with this week so we can focus on the important stuff.”

“So we’re not doing medical leave after all,” I said.

“You can,” Vann said. “Personally, I’m kind of pissed off about being shot. I want to take the people who made it happen and screw them right into the wall. And while you were sleeping, Shane, the other shoe dropped.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Vann turned to Tayla and the twins. “May I?” she asked, and reached up to signal the monitor to switch stories. She flipped through several until she pulled one up, full screen. The image with the story was of the Accelerant logo.

“It’s that asshole Hubbard,” she said. “He’s buying the Agora from the government. The servers, the building, and everything else. He’s taking Haden space private.”

I was about to respond when a call window opened up in my field of view. It was Tony.

I connected. “Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m at the FBI building,” Tony said. “Where are you?”

“I’m at home,” I said. “Medical leave.”

“Fine,” Tony said. “I’m coming to you, then.”

“What’s up?”

“I’d actually prefer to speak to you about it someplace private,” Tony said.

“How private?”

“However private we can make it.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“You were right,” Tony said. “About me being wrong. But it’s a lot worse than that. A lot worse.”

*   *   *

“Glasses on,” I told Vann.

She put on her monitor glasses. “Hit me,” she said.

I pinged her and let her into my liminal space. Then I entered it myself.

There was a threep standing on my platform. It was Vann.

She held out her hands, looking at her representation. “So this is what that’s like,” she said. Then she looked over to me. “And that’s what you look like.”

“Surprised?” I asked.

“I hadn’t actually thought of you having a face before, so, no, not exactly,” she said.

I smiled at this, and realized that it was the first time that Vann had ever seen me smile.

She looked around. “It’s the goddamned Batcave,” she said.

I laughed.

“What?” she said.

“You reminded me of someone just there,” I said. “Hold on, I need to bring Tony in.” I pinged Tony a door.

He stepped through and looked around. “Spacious,” he said, finally.

“Thank you.”

“Kind of looks like the Bat—”

“Tell us the bad news,” I prompted.

“Right.” A neural network popped up above us. “This is Brenda Rees’s neural network,” he said. “It’s a Lucturn model, the Ovid 6.4 specifically. It was a fairly common model from eight years ago, and it’s running—well, was running—the most up-to-date software for its model. I’ve done patches for this network a few times, so I’m pretty familiar with its design and capabilities.”

Tony pointed to Vann. “You asked me if I thought it would be possible to lock in an Integrator with a commercially available network.”

“You said no,” Vann said.

“I said I didn’t think so,” Tony said. “I didn’t think so because the code that allowed it to happen in Sani’s brain was optimized for a network that was itself optimized for locking in Integrators while giving the client control. Purpose-built software for purpose-built hardware.”

“But you were wrong,” I said.

“I was wrong,” Tony said.

“Why were you wrong?”

“Because I was thinking about Johnny Sani’s network incorrectly,” Tony said. “I told you that it wasn’t a prototype. That it was a release-level brain. Well, it is. But it’s also a proof of concept, the concept being that if you knew the hardware and the software really well, you could have the client take total control of the Integrator’s body. It’s not something anyone tried to do—well, that we know about. There’s probably some asshole NSA initiative to do just that.”

“Focus,” Vann said.

“Sorry,” Tony said. “Sani showed that it could be done. Now all anyone needed to do was translate that proof of concept into existing, general networks. And to do that you would have to do a couple of things. One, you’d have a deep understanding of the networks you were using. You’d have to know the hardware really well. Two, you’d have to be a complete fucking wizard at programming.”