"I— expect you'll find a number of those tripwires are no longer connected." Lubin's voice was thin and strained.

"What, your pack-hunting Lenies? They can't get into the lines until the lines open. And even then, so what? They're her, Ken. They're concentrated essence of Lenie Clarke at the absolute peak of her game. They get their teeth into a tripwire, you think for a second they won't pull it themselves?"

Lubin cocked his head slightly, as if taking note of some interesting sound.

"It's still a good deal, Ken. Take it. You'd have a hard time killing me anyway. I mean, I know what a tough hombre you are, but your motor nerves short out just the same as anyone else's. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you're blind."

Realization stabbed Clarke like an icicle: Achilles, you idiot, don't you know what you're doing? Haven't you read his file?

Lubin was speaking: "So why deal in the first place?"

"Because you are a tough hombre. You could probably hunt me down by smell if it came to that, and even though you're having a really off day I'd just as soon not take the chance."

You're talking to Ken Lubin, she raged silently, trapped in her own dead flesh. Do you actually think you're threateninghim?

"So we disappear, you disappear, the world relaxes." Lubin wavered in and out of focus. "Until someone else kills you."

Clarke tried to speak. All she could force out was a moan, barely audible even to herself.

It's not a threat at all—

"You disappear," Desjardins said. "Lenie's mine. Saved her special."

It's an inducement…

"You're proceeding from a false premise," Lubin pointed out.

"Yeah? What premise is that?"

"That I give a shit."

Clarke caught a glimpse of muscles bunching in Lubin's left leg, of a sudden sodden pulse of fresh blood coursing down his right. Suddenly he was airborne, hurtling through the field and overtop the barrier from an impossible standing start. He rammed into Desjardins like an avalanche, pure inertia; they toppled out of sight behind the console, to the sound of bodies and plastic in collision.

A moment's silence.

She lay there, tingling and paralyzed, and wondered who to root for. If Lubin's momentum hadn't carried him completely through the field he'd be dying now, with no one to pull him to safety. Even if he'd made it across, he'd still be helpless for a while. Desjardins might have a chance, if the collision hadn't stunned him.

Achilles, you murderer. You psychopath, you genocidal maniac. You foul vicious monster. You're worse than I am. There's no hell deep enough for you.

Get out of there. Please. Before he kills you.

Something gurgled. Clarke heard the faint scratching of fingernails on plastic or metal. A meaty thud, like someone slinging a dead fish against the deck—or the flopping of a limb, stunned in transit, struggling back to life. A brief scuffling sound.

Ken. Don't do it.

She gathered all her strength into a single, desperate cry: "No." It came out barely whispered.

On the far side of the barricade, a wet snapping pop. Then nothing at all.

Oh God, Ken. Don't you know what you've done?

Of course you know. You've always known. We could've saved it, we could have made things right, but they were right about you. Pat was right. Alyx was right. You monster. You monster. You wasted it all.

God damn you.

She stared up at the ceiling, tears leaking around her eyecaps, and waited for the world to end.

She could almost move again, if only she could think of a reason to. She rolled onto her side. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, his bloody face impenetrable. He looked like some carved and primitive idol, awash in human sacrifice.

"How long?" she rasped.

"Long?"

"Or has it started already? Are the claves on fire? Are the bombs falling? Is it enough for you, are you fucking hard yet?"

"Oh. That." Lubin shrugged. "He was bluffing."

"What?" She struggled up on her elbows. "But—the tripwires, the kill-switches—he showed you…"

"Props."

"You saw through them?"

"No. They were quite convincing."

"Then how—"

"It didn't make sense that he'd do it."

"Ken, he destroyed Atlant—" A sudden, impossible ray of hope: "Unless that was a bluff too?…"

"No," Lubin said quietly.

She sank back. Let me wake up from this, she prayed.

"He destroyed Atlantis because he had another deterrent to fall back on. Making good on the smaller threat increased the credibility of the larger one." The man without a conscience shrugged. "But once you're dead, deterrence has already failed. There's no point in acting on a threat when it can't possibly achieve your goal."

"He could have, easily. I would have."

"You're vindictive. Desjardins wasn't. He was mainly interested in self-gratification." Lubin smiled faintly. "That was unusually enlightened of him, actually. Most people are hardwired for revenge. Perhaps Spartacus freed him of that too."

"But he could have done it."

"It wouldn't have been a credible threat otherwise."

"So how did you know?"

"Doomsday machines are not easy things to assemble. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort for no actual payoff. Faking it was the logical alternative."

"That's not good enough, Ken. Try again."

"I also subjected him to Ganzfeld interrogation once. It gave me certain insights into—"

She shook her head.

He didn't speak for a while. Finally: "We were both off the leash."

"I thought you gave yourself a new leash. I thought your rules…"

"Still. I know how he felt." Lubin unfolded—carefully, carefully—and climbed slowly to his feet.

"Did you know what he'd do?" She couldn't hide the pleading in her voice.

He seemed to look down at her. "Lenie, I've never known anything my entire life. All I can ever do is go with the odds."

It wasn't what she wanted to hear. She wanted him to describe some telltale glitch in Desjardins's shadow-show, some compelling bit of evidence that said the worst will not happen. She wanted some channel of ostensible input traced back to an empty socket, impossibly disconnected from its fiberop. Anything but a gamble based on empathy between two men without conscience.

She wondered if he was disappointed, even a little bit, that Desjardins had been faking it after all. She wondered if he'd really been expecting it.

"What are you so down about?" Lubin asked, sensing what he couldn't see. "We just saved the world."

She shook her head. "He was going to lose anyway. He knew that better than we did."

"Then we advanced the schedule significantly, at least. Saved millions of lives."

How many millions, she wondered, and then: what difference does it make? Could saving twelve million today make up for killing ten million in the past? Could the blood-soaked Meltdown Madonna somehow transmute into Saint Lenie In the Black, savior of two million net? Was the algebra of guilt really so elementary?

For Lenie Clarke, the question didn't even apply. Because any millions saved today had only been spared from a fate she'd condemned them to in the first place. There was no way, no way at all, that she would ever be able to balance those books.

"At least," she said, "the debt won't get any bigger."

"That's a needlessly pessimistic outlook," Lubin observed.

She looked up at him. "How can you say that?" Her voice was so soft she could barely hear herself. "Everyone's dead…"

He shook his head. "Almost everyone. The rest of us get another chance."