Dulcie ran a comparison study of the two files, drumming her fingers impatiently until the processing marker stopped flashing.

Two files with the same name, She saw, excitement rising again. And the J Corp. version is smaller than the Jongleur version. Bingo!

A moment's spin of the digital tumblers and the larger file was open. Dulcie's fingers were no longer rapping on the edge of the pad but curling like the claws of a hunting bird ready to swoop. The extra information was secured in a lower layer, like a smuggler's false bottom bolted to the undercarriage of a truck. She keyed it open, holding her breath.

Something whined like a dental drill.

Files and signifiers began to leap onto the screen and dissolve. Message pointers flashed like tiny explosions. Her system defenses were screaming, the high-pitched alarm so painful that for a moment she could not understand what was happening.

Oh, shit—a 'phage! But why isn't my gear stopping it?

She had opened the file without proper permission and had set off a dataphage, one that her own gear apparently did not know how to handle. Within moments it would destroy all the material in the file, not just delete the markers but chew the actual data off the storage. God only knew what else it might do on the way—maybe take her whole system down.

Once, as a teenage babysitter in someone else's house, she had dumped an ashtray into a wastebasket and, without realizing it, set the wastebasket's contents on fire. The flames had climbed the long drapes of a picture window before she wandered back into the room. The feeling of terror and transgression had been just like this. It was all she could do not to leap up and smash the pad against the floor in an attempt to kill the horrible thing she had awakened.

Knowing that every second was critical, she switched the pad over to voice command and began calling up emergency measures, her system's equivalent of the volunteer fire department, since the dataphage's explosive onset had already overwhelmed her built-in regulators. Within a few moments she had managed to isolate the cancerous 'phage from the rest of her own data, but that was doing nothing to stop the destruction of the disposal file she had copied from Jongleur's system. And despite her quick move to firewall the damage, the 'phage seemed to have done odd things to her system already: the communications markers were flashing, as though she herself had been trying to obtain an outgoing line.

Another minute's frantic work enabled her to find another piece of emergency gear she had almost forgotten she had, allowing her at last to grab the isolated section of data and freeze it, but the destruction was huge if not total. She very much doubted there was anything left of the original group of files.

But that's just a copy, she reminded herself. The primary version's still there on the Jongleur system. I'll just call it up and copy it off again, then be more careful with it next time. . . .

It was only then that she understood the significance of the blinking communications marker. With dawning horror, she disconnected, but it was already too late. The implanted dataphage was an extreme measure, constructed not only to destroy the pirated file but to call out and destroy the master file, too, probably after sending a high-alert warning to the owner of the file to give them a chance to countermand.

But if Jongleur's not around, then the whole thing is just gone now. Gone. And if he is around, then I've just told him that someone has one of his most sensitive files.

A quick check confirmed her growing misery. The master file in question was now officially nonexistent.

"Shit," she said aloud. "Shit, shit, shit!"

"What's the problem, sweetness?"

Dulcie shrieked and her pad slid from her knee and thumped on the carpeted floor. Dread was standing beside her, all long, tawny muscles and bare skin, wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist so that he looked like a statue stepped down from its plinth. She had not even heard him approach.

"God, y–you scared me!" But the mere fact of his sudden appearance was not the only reason for her stuttering heart. The pad lay faceup on the floor, full of incriminating data. She dropped to her knees and picked it up, babbling to cover her real terror. "I didn't know . . . I thought you were . . . it's so quiet in here, but I didn't hear you. . . ."

As he stared at her, an amused smile quirking his mouth, she blanked the small screen. "Didn't mean to give you a heart attack," he said. "What's up?" He squinted at her pad. "Why aren't you using the wall?"

"My eyes . . . it gives me . . . makes my head ache, sometimes."

He nodded. "What pissed you off so badly?"

"What?" She was desperately trying to remember what was still open and flowing to the pad. What if he wanted to access his system? "Oh, just . . . some problems with security on some of Jongleur's files. Some of his banking stuff." As far as she knew, Dread's accounting data was still live and connected, her own gear waiting for further search requests. She cursed herself for not having done the prudent thing and copied the files she was examining to her own system. She had a desperate, clammy feeling that if he found out, something worse than the usual firing might be the result. She tried to calm her unsteady voice and speak lightly. "I've been doing this for hours and I'm ragged, utterly. Are you up for a while?"

He cocked his head. "Why?"

"I don't know. Could we go out and get some dinner, something? Just get out of here for an hour or two?"

Something moved behind his dark eyes; she prayed she hadn't caught him in a suspicious mood. "Right," he said after a moment. "Why not? Are you buying?"

She forced herself to laugh. "Sure. Just let me tidy up a few things. . . ."

While Dread was pulling on clothes, Dulcie closed and locked off everything, then ran her cleanup gear. She was trembling so badly she had to set her pad down on a table-top so she didn't drop it again.

How can he move so quietly? He got out of that thing and walked all the way across the room behind me and I never heard him. Maybe he really is a vampire. It wasn't a very good joke, not at the moment. She finished and turned off her pad, then wiped her sleeve across her face. The room was cool, but she was sweating.

Maybe Renfield needs to think about getting into another line of work. . . .

Dread was quite charming over dinner, flashing those white teeth, playfully exaggerating his Aussie machismo to try to make her laugh. If Dulcie had been meeting him for the first time she would have been quite taken by his stories of the strange places and even stranger folk he had met in his peculiar line of work. If it had been even a week earlier, she might have had that third glass of wine, even a fourth, and let herself descend into warm compliance. Instead, she spent the entire meal thinking about how close she had come to being caught, wondering every time he gave her one of his penetrating looks whether he was about to reveal that he knew what she had been doing.

Whether he suspected her of misbehavior or not, there was definitely something going on beneath the surface. Dread had always been subject to oddly high-flown, almost feverish bouts of enthusiasm. That was going on tonight, but it was twinned somehow with the watchful Dread she also knew, as though he were keeping a tight rein on himself because he knew he was on the brink of letting go entirely. As they walked back from the cafe he fell silent, looking neither at her nor the rain-spattered streets, but keeping his eyes fixed at a point somewhere above the invisible horizon. There was an unusual bounce in his step, a subtle but consistent flexing of muscles, as though he alone of all humanity had overcome gravity but had decided to maintain the pretense of obeying it.