"We could really use some help here," Clarke said.

A sigh from somewhere, from everywhere. "Like the last time you came to town. Some things never change, eh?"

"This is your fault, you fucker. Your dogs—"

"Standard-issue post-pulse security, and did I tell you to go up against them blind? Ken, what got into you? You're damn lucky I noticed in time."

"Look at him! Help him!"

"Leave it," Lubin insisted, barely above a whisper. "I'm all right."

The building heard him anyway. "You're far from all right, Ken. But you're not exactly incapacitated either, and I'm not stupid enough to let down my guard to someone who's just broken into my home by force. So let's work this out, and then maybe we can get you fixed up before you bleed to death. What are you doing here?"

Lubin started to speak, coughed, started again: "I think you know already."

"Assume I don't."

"We had a deal. You were supposed to find out who was hunting us on the ridge."

Clarke closed her eyes, remembering: The rest of the plan doesn't change.

"In case it hasn't sunk in yet, I'm dealing with quite a few demands on my time these days," the room pointed out. "But I assure you, I have been working on it."

"I think you've done more than that. I think you solved it, even before you lost so much of your resource base. We can tell you how to get that back, by the way. If that factors into your analysis."

"Uh huh. And you couldn't have just phoned me up from Podunk, Maine or wherever you were?"

"We tried. Either you were busy dealing with all those other demands on your time, or the channels are down."

The building hummed quietly for a moment, as if in thought. Deeper into the lobby, past dormant information pedestals and brochure dispensers and an abandoned reception counter, ruby LEDs twinkled from a row of security gates. The leftmost set turned green as Clarke watched.

"Through there," Desjardins said.

She took Lubin's elbow. He limped at her side, maintaining a subtle distance; close enough to use her as a guide, far enough to spurn her as a crutch. An asymmetrical trail of dark sticky footprints marked his passage.

Each gatepost was a brushed-aluminum cylinder half a meter across, extending from floor to ceiling like the bars of a cage. The only way in was between them. A black band the height of Clarke's forearm girdled each post at eye level, twinkling with color-coded constellations—but the whole band flushed red before they were halfway across the room.

"Oh, right," Desjardins remarked. "Security will cut you into little cubes if you try to sneak anything past." A curved panel beneath the display slid back at their approach. "Just throw everything in there."

Lubin felt out the chamber, set his pistol and belt down inside it. Clarke followed suit with her own weapon while Lubin struggled to remove his pack. He shrugged off Clarke's attempted assistance; the pack clanked on top of the pile. The panel slid shut.

The wraparound display bloomed into a riot of images and acronyms. Clarke recognized some of them from Lubin's tutorial on the way up: taser and microwave gun; mechanical springlift; aerosol flypaper. Other things she'd never seen before. For all she knew Lubin had brought them from his stash at the bottom of the Atlantic.

"Is that an electron stripper?" Desjardins asked. "And a pulse bomb! You brought your own tiny pulse bomb! Isn't that cute!"

Lubin, his jaw set, said nothing.

"That's everything, then? No nasty biosols or hidden freakwire? Because I'm telling you, those gates are very unforgiving. You walk through with any—"

"Our implants," Clarke said.

"Those will pass."

Lubin felt his way between the gateposts. No klaxons sounded, no lasers lanced down from overhead. Clarke stepped after him.

"The elevators are just around the corner," Desjardins said.

Completely disarmed, they stepped into Desjardins's parlor. Clarke led Lubin with soft words and an occasional touch. She didn't dare speak her mind, even in a whisper. But she gave his arm the slightest squeeze, and knew after all their long years together that he'd know what she meant: He didn't buy it for a second.

Lubin replied with a blind glance and the twitch of a bloody lip: Of course he didn't.

All according to plan. Such as it was.

She had to take the physics on faith.

She could buy everything else that Lubin had laid out on the way up. It didn't matter whether Desjardins believed their story, so long as he thought they might be useful. He wouldn't try to kill them outright until convinced otherwise.

Which didn't mean that he wouldn't still try to disable them. He wasn't about to let anyone into his secret lair without taking precautions—disarming them, confining them, cutting their strings.

Nothing lethal, Lubin had predicted, and nothing that will damage the structure. That limits his options. We can handle it.

Fine, as far as it went. It was how they were going to handle it that she couldn't quite get behind.

A good half-liter of water sloshed through the plumbing in Clarke's chest, unable to drain because of the tape on her electrolysis intake. Five hundred milliliters didn't sound like much. When she swam through the deeps a steady current of seawater flowed through her implants, endlessly replenished. It hardly seemed possible that the stagnant dregs trapped there now would last more than a moment.

Four hundred fifty grams of molecular oxygen, Lubin had said. That's almost what you'd get in two thousand liters of air.

Her head couldn't argue with the numbers. But her gut was no mathematician.

A rank of elevators stood before them. One set of doors was open; soft light spilled from the compartment behind.

He'll confine us first.

They entered. The doors slid shut. The cage began to move.

Down.

This is insane, she thought. This can't work. But already, she imagined she could hear the soft hiss of gas from hidden nozzles…

She coughed and tripped her implants, praying to some indeterminate deity that Lubin hadn't fucked up his calculations.

He hadn't. A familiar, subtle vibration started somewhere in her chest. Her guts writhed and flooded with their own private stock of isotonic saline. The liquid rose in her throat and filled her mouth. Brief nausea accompanied the flooding of her middle ears. A salty trickle ran down her chin before she remembered to clamp her lips together. The world muted, all sounds suddenly faint and distant except for the beating of her own heart.

Just like that, she lost the urge to breathe.

The descent continued. Lubin leaned against the wall of the elevator, his face a bloody cyclops mask. Clarke felt warm wetness on her upper lip: her nose was running. She reached up and gave it a scratch, inconspicuously jamming the plug in her left nostril tight against the leak.

Suddenly her body thrummed, deep inside, an almost subsonic quaking that vibrated her bones as though they were the parts of some great bass instrument. Faint nausea struck her in the throat. Her bowels quavered.

The two most likely options, Lubin had mused, are gas and infrasound.

She didn't know if gas was in Desjardins's arsenal—for all she knew the air around them was already saturated. But this was obviously some kind of squawkbox. The sound dish must stretch across the whole ceiling of the elevator, or maybe beneath the floor. The walls focused its vibrations, built resonances within the cage. The sound would be tuned to build intolerable harmonics in the lungs and middle ears, in the sinuses and trachea.

It made her sick even with her airways and hard cavities flooded; she could scarcely imagine the impact on unbuttressed flesh. The implants didn't deal with gastrointestinal gases—deep-sea pressure collapsed those soft pockets down with no ill effect—and acoustic attacks were generally tuned to harder, more predictable air spaces anyway. Desjardins's squawkbox was doing something down there, though. It was all she could do to keep from vomiting saline all over the compartment, from shitting in her diveskin. Any dryback would be on the floor by now, soiled and retching or unconscious. Clarke clenched at both ends and hung on.