The elevator stopped. The lights went out.

He knows, she thought. He figured it out, of course he figured it out. How could we think he wouldn't? How could he not notice?

Any second the elevator would lurched back into motion, drag them up through this ruined, booby-trapped derelict where sixty-five floors of countermeasures would turn them into—

Her head cleared. Her bones stopped tingling. Her bowels returned to the fold.

"Okay, guys." Desjardins's voice was tinny and distant in Clarke's flooded ears. "End of the line."

The doors slid open.

An oasis of bright machinery on a vast dark plain. That's what naked eyes would have seen: the Second Coming perhaps, a Christ-figure bathed in light and technology while all around was an infinite void.

To Lenie Clarke there was no darkness. The void was a converted parking garage, an empty gray cavern stretching half a city block on a side. Evenly-spaced rows of support pylons held the ceiling from the floor. Plumbing and fiberop emerged from the walls, crawled along their surfaces like a webbing of sparse vines. Cables converged into a loosely-bound trunk, winding along the floor to a horseshoe of workstations lit by chemical lightstrips.

Christ was someone Lenie Clarke had met before. She'd first encountered him in darkness much deeper than this, a prisoner of Ken Lubin. Back then, Achilles Desjardins had been a man convinced he was about to die.

It had been so much easier to read him, then.

Clotting blood cracked around Lubin's lips. His chest rose. Clarke shut down her own implants, yanking the plugs from her nose before the tide had fully receded within her. In the center of the room, in the heart of a high-tech horseshoe, Desjardins watched them approach.

"I thought I could make up for it," he said.

In some strange, twisted way it was actually good to see him again.

"For being a monster," he explained, as if someone had asked. "Why I joined the Patrol, you know? I couldn't change what I was, but I thought—you know, if I helped save the world, maybe that could make up for it somehow." His mouth spread in a rueful smile. "Pretty stupid, right? Look where it got me."

"Look where it got everyone," Lubin said.

Desjardins's smile vanished. There was no shielding on his eyes, and yet somehow he was suddenly as opaque as any rifter.

Please, Clarke thought. Let this all be some monstrous, stupid mistake. Tell us we've misread everything. Please. Prove us wrong.

"I know why you're here," he said, looking at Lubin.

"You let us in anyway," Lubin observed.

"Well, I'd hoped to be at a bit more of an advantage by now, but whatever. Nice trick with the implants, by the way. I didn't even realise they'd work without your diveskins sealed up. Pretty stupid mistake for Achilles the Master Pattern-Matcher, eh?" He shrugged. "I've had a lot on my mind lately."

"You let us in," Lubin repeated.

Desjardins nodded. "Yeah. That's far enough, by the way."

They were four meters from his fort. Lubin stopped. Clarke followed suit.

"You want us to kill you?" she asked. "Is that it?"

"Suicide By Rifter, huh?" He snorted a soft laugh. "There'd be a certain poetry to that, I guess. But no."

"What, then?"

He cocked his head; the gesture made him look about eight years old. "You were the ones who pulled that kin-selection trick with my Lenies, weren't you?"

Clarke nodded, swallowing on the realization: So he's behind those too.

He's guilty after all….

"I figured," Desjardins admitted. "It's the kind of thing that would only occur to someone who knew where they came from. Not many of those left up here. And the thing of it is, it's easy enough to do but it's not so simple to undo." He looked hopefully at Lubin. "But you said you knew how to—?"

Lubin bared his teeth in a bloody rictus. "I lied."

"Yeah. I kind of figured that too." Desjardins shrugged. "So I guess there's only one thing left to talk about, isn't there?"

Clarke shook her head. "What are you—"

Lubin tensed beside her. Desjardins's eyes flickered to the side for the merest instant; cued, the surface of a nearby wall sparkled and brightened before them. The image that resolved on the smart paint was hazy but instantly recognizable: a sonar composite.

"It's Atlantis," Clarke said, suddenly uncertain.

"I see it," Lubin said.

"Not real-time, of course," the 'lawbreaker explained. "The baud rate's a fucking trickle, and with all the range and cover issues I can only sneak in and grab a shot like this once in a while. But you get the idea."

Lubin stood motionless. "You're lying."

"Word of advice, Ken. You know how some of your people kind of just go off the deep end and wander into the black? You really shouldn't let them take squids when they go. You never know where their security transponders might end up."

"No." Clarke shook her head. "You? It was you down there?" Not Grace. Not Seger. Not the corpses or the rifters or the M&Ms or even two lousy guys on a boat.

You. All along.

"I can't take all the credit," Desjardins admitted. "Alice helped me tweak ßehemoth."

"Reluctantly, I'd guess," Lubin said.

Oh, Achilles. One chance to fix the mess I made and you fucked it up. One chance to make peace and you threaten everyone I ever knew. One lousy, faint hope, and you—

How dare you. How dareyou.

A thin, final straw vanished in her hand.

She stepped forward. Lubin reached out with one mutilated hand, and held her back.

Desjardins ignored her. "I'm not an idiot, Ken. You're not the main attack force, you're just all you could scrape together on short notice. But you're not an idiot either, so there are reinforcements on the way." He held up his hand to preempt any protest. "That's okay, Ken, really. I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, and I took all the necessary precautions. Although thanks to you, I do seem to have lost a certain finesse when it comes to my big guns…"

His eyes jiggled slightly in their sockets. His fingers twitched. Clarke remembered Ricketts, sweet-talking his way into Phocoena with a wink and a glance.

The image on the wall dissolved. Numbers appeared in its place.

"Now I am in real-time contact with these guys. Can you see them, Ken? Channel 6?"

Lubin nodded.

"Then you know what they are."

Clarke knew too. Four sets of lats and longs. Depth readings, zeroed. Targeting ranges. A row of little flashing icons that said holding.

"I don't want to do this," Desjardins said. "It was going to be my retirement home, after all. I never wanted to blow it up, just—hobble parts of it. Smooth the transition, so to speak. But if I'm gonna be dead anyway—"

She twisted in Lubin's grip. But even mutilated, Lubin was immovable. His hand shackled her arm like a granite claw, oily with coagulating fluids. She could only slip in his grasp; she could not break free.

"I do have other options," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Contingency villas, you might say. I can go to one of those instead." He lifted a hand to the telemetry. "You've got a lot more riding on this than me."

He planned it for years, she realized. Even when we thought he was helping us. And ever since we've been cowering in the dark like good little rabbits while our lines went dark and our contacts dried up and it was himall along, cutting us off, fumigating the place so there wouldn't be any uncooperative tenants around when his luck ran out and he needed a place to hide…

"You asshole," she whispered, straining.

He didn't look at her. "So when are the cavalry coming, Ken? How did you call them in? How much do they know?"