Olga took a moment to wipe her wet, slippery hands clean on her coveralls before lifting the bottle out of her backpack.

"You have to prime it first," Sellars said, almost apologetically. "Twist the nozzle until it clicks."

She did, briefly fearful that despite the assurances of Sellars and Major Sorensen the thing might explode in her hands, but it made only the expected noise; a moment later she was pushing it into the space she had opened by yanking a twined cable of polymer-covered cables to one side. She sat up, rubbing her hands again, and said, "It's in. Do you want to see it?"

"That's all right. . . ." Sellars had begun when someone grabbed her waist from behind.

"Caught you!"

Olga shrieked and fell off the edge of the duct backward and landed on the concrete floor, banging her elbow painfully. Panicked, she scrambled into a crouch, conscious that she had no weapon except her flashlight, and that if Sellars triggered the smoke bomb now it would be more likely to asphyxiate her than to help her escape. She could hear his startled voice talking inside her head.

"Olga? What happened?"

She reached up and pressed the t-jack, damping the sound input. The man standing over her looked just as shocked as she did. He wore a J Corporation uniform like hers, and had a lot of gray in his hair, but his posture was that of a scolded child, arms held up, hands dangling.

"You're not Lena!" He backed up a step. "Who are you?"

Olga's heart was beating like a drumroll, as though she stood at the top of a platform about to leap out to a distant trapeze. "No," she said, trying to decide if she should take advantage of his obvious surprise and shove her way past him to the door. "No, I'm not."

He leaned toward her, squinting. His eyes were a little foggy and there was something strange about the shape of his facial bones, as though they had been hastily reassembled after being dropped. "You're not Lena," he said again, "I thought you were Lena."

She took a shaky breath. "I'm . . . I'm new."

He nodded solemnly, as though she had answered some troubling question, but he still wore a worried look. "I thought you were her. I was . . . I was just teasing. I didn't mean nothing. Me and Lena, we have a joke like that." He lifted his hand and briefly chewed on one finger. "Who are you? You're not mad at me, are you?"

"No, I'm not mad at you." She felt her pulse slow a little. She remembered seeing milky eyes like his in an accident victim who had gone through a sight-saving operation. Whatever was going on, the man didn't seem like a security guard who had just caught an intruder. She finally noticed the object behind him that her eyes had flicked across several times in the last seconds while searching for an escape route—a rolling plastic bucket and long-handled mop. He was a janitor of some kind.

"That's good. I was just playing a joke, because I thought you were Lena." He smiled tentatively. "You're new, huh? What's your name? I'm Jerome."

She briefly considered lying to him, but decided that it would do little good—either he would report an unauthorized person in the basement, or he wouldn't: the name she gave would make little difference if people started looking for her in earnest. "My name is Olga, Jerome. It's nice to meet you."

He nodded his head. It was. A moment later, he squinted again. "What are you doing? Did you lose something?"

Her heart pit-pattered again. The door to the duct still hung open behind her. She turned as casually as she could and pushed it shut, searching desperately for something to tell him. "Mice," she said at last. "I thought I heard mice."

Jerome's eyes got big. "Down here? I never seen any down here." He frowned. "Should I put down some traps, maybe? We had to do that for the roaches. I don't like roaches."

"That sounds like a good idea, Jerome." She stood up, brushing herself off, forcing herself to speak slowly and calmly. "I should get back to work upstairs."

"So isn't Lena coming in this weekend?"

Olga had no idea who Lena was, and now regretted having given her name—Jerome might not be too curious, but this Lena might be. "I don't know. If I see her, I'll tell her you were asking. But I've got to get back to work now."

"Okay." He frowned again, thinking. She took the opportunity to make her way past him toward the basement stairs. "Olga?"

She let out a breath and stopped. "Yes?"

"If you see Lena, maybe you better not tell her. See, I'm not supposed to be down here yet. 'Cause I'm supposed to do the other floor first. But I heard her down here—no, I heard you down here, huh? So I came down to do a joke on her. But Mr. Kingery might be mad if he knew I came down here to do a joke on Lena."

"I won't tell anyone, Jerome. Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you. You can come down sometime when it's time to have a break. I eat my dinner down here—except it's really breakfast, I guess, because I eat it in the morning. . . ."

"That would be nice, Jerome." She waved and hurried up the stairs, unmuting the t-jack as soon as she reached the next level.

". . . Olga, can you hear me? Can you hear me?"

She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, drawing the first deep breath she had taken in minutes. "I can hear you. It is okay. A janitor surprised me. I think he might be . . . how do you say it? A little slow."

"Are you on your own now?"

"Yes. But I need to stop and rest. I almost had a heart attack when he grabbed me."

"Grabbed you?"

"Never mind. Let me get my breath back, then I will explain."

"Sorry about all the stairs," Sellars told her. "But if we interfere with the surveillance cameras in the elevators too often, building security might wonder why so many empty elevators are going up and down."

"I . . . understand." But it didn't make it any easier not to fall over in a faint.

"Catch your breath. The plans I'm looking at say the patch room is on this floor."

She peered into the hallway in time to see a flirt of color at the end of the hall as someone stepped into the elevator. She froze, waiting, but no one got out, which was good. Sellars could hide her movements by looping the output from a security camera, but only if the corridor was deserted first. It wouldn't do to have people suddenly vanishing when they entered one end and then reappearing at the other end.

The elevator door whispered shut. Now the corridor was silent again, the long stretch of dark carpet empty as a country road at night.

Sellars' long-distance manipulation of her badge worked as well for the patch room door as it had for basement access. He had begun to loop the surveillance signals in the room even before she entered, so after the door hissed open she stepped in quickly and shut the door behind her. The room, a walkway a hundred meters long with machines in racks standing on either side like the monuments of dead kings, was surprisingly cold.

"I won't keep you here any longer than I have to," Sellars told her. "So let's get to work."

She found the machine he wanted after a few minutes' search, holding up her ring to give him a chance to double-check. She took the gray rectangle out of her backpack. "Do I push it into one of these holes?"

"No, just set it against the ends of those bits sticking out, then square it up. May I see? Excellent. Now hold it flat." There was a click; the gray box vibrated for a moment under Olga's hand. "You can let go now." She did. The box remained in place. "Why don't you go sit somewhere—out of view of the door, just to be on the safe side. This will take me a short while."

Olga found an old swivel chair in a niche behind some of the equipment and collapsed into it gratefully. There was nothing to do but stare at the rows and rows of almost featureless machines. She might have dozed for a few minutes. When she woke up she was shivering from the chill and Sellars was again in her ear.