For a few dozen feet they had high-rate connectivity. Ads and announcements appeared on the walls; someone's medical research project loomed like a monster on the left. She gave Lena and Xiu a continuous video as they turned another corner — and lost all outside connectivity.

Juan slowed, drew Miri to a stop. "This place is really dead."

"Yeah," said Miri. They walked forward a few more paces. Except for her point-to-point link with Juan, she might as well have been on the far side of the moon. And there was another corner ahead. She pulled Juan forward.

Around the corner, the corridor ended at a closed door. "I can't ping your grandpa anymore, Miri."

Miri looked at the map she had cached. "This has to be where they are, Juan. If we can't get through, we'll just pound on the door." Suddenly she didn't care too much about embarrassing Robert and his friends. This was too strange.

But then the door opened and a man in dark clothes stepped out. He might have been a janitor, or a professor. Either way, he didn't look friendly. "May I help you?" he said.

"How did they find us?"

Rabbit a made warning gesture. "Not out loud, Doc," it hissed. "They might actually hear you." It seemed to look over Alfred's shoulder. "I'd say they're following the girl's grandfather."

Vaz glanced at the heap of clothes that lay by the caisson. He sminged back, voice format: "Those clothes are still transmitting?"

"Well, of course. To the outside, it looks like the old guys are just sitting around, maybe playing cards. I'm faking everything, even their medicals."

Alfred realized he was grinding his teeth.

"That Gu kid is such an pain," Rabbit continued. "Sometimes I think she — "

Alfred waved his hand and the creature disappeared — along with all public network communication. There was now a deep local silence, a hard deadzone.

But his milnet link was still in place, a fragile chain that led through his mobiles to his stealthed areobot and thence across the Pacific. Alfred's analyst pool in Mumbai was estimating sixty seconds till the deadzone got serious attention from the campus police and fire departments.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: This can't be sustained, Alfred.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: I'll clear the deadzone in a few seconds. This was why successful missions had a Local Honcho. He probed the mobiles that had made it into the building: the children were about thirty feet away, well inside the deadzone, and still coming. He could hear them, right through the plastic wall. He glanced at the door; it was locked. Maybe he could pretend to be empty air while they pounded on the door. No they'd just back off and call the police.

Okay, time for direct action. Alfred set the twe nearest mobiles into motion. These were network-superiority bots with essentially no antipersonnel capacity, but they would be a distraction. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the hall, confronting two children and a folded-up bicycle.

"May I help you?"

Miri tried to glare at the old fellow. Self-rightcous indignation came hard when you were trespassing and trying to think of a good lie. And her link to the outside world was still fully dead.

Juan stepped forward and just blathered out the truth. "We're looking for Miri's grandfather. We ping him somewhere behind you."

The janitor/professor/whatever shrugged. "There's no one here but myself. As you know, network connections are very unreliable this evening. The building shouldn't have allowed you down here. I'll have to ask you to go back to the public area." There was a sign by the door now, one of the standard biohazard symbols that covered a lot of the classrooms and labs in Pilchner Hall. You might think the public net was coming back up — except that Miri still couldn't probe behind her line of sight.

Juan nodded as if the old man made perfect sense. He walked forward a couple more steps, at the same time relaying what he saw back to Miri.

The room beyond was brightly lit. There was some kind of hole in the floor, and she could see the top of a metal ladder.

"Okay," said Juan agreeably. He was fiddling with something on his bike. But point-to-point, his words were on fire:

Juan –> Mid: See the clothes! piled on the floor beside the pit.

Miri — > Juan: Time to go. Get outside, get where they could call the cops. She shrugged, as casually as she could, and said, "We'll be on our way then."

The stranger sighed. "No, it's too late for that." He started toward them. Behind her there was the snick of something hard on the floor and she saw dark things scuttling toward her.

There was no way back and no way forward.

And then Juan made a way forward. He bounced his bike toward the stranger. There was a screech of rubber. The wheels spun up with all the power from the regen brakes, and the bike exploded across the room, smashing into the stranger and the equipment behind him. Miri ran forward, toward the pit. "C'mon, Juan!" She knew where Robert must be, and how she could put out the alarm.

She scrambled over the edge, saw metal rungs. "Juan!"

Mr. Janitor/Professor was back on his feet and staggering forward. He had something pointy in his hand. Miri was frozen for an instant, watching the pointy thing swing toward her.

Orozco was such a runt. He couldn't stop someone like that. But he tried. The bad guy staggered back and the thing in his hand made a bright purple flash. Miri felt a numbing tingle all across her side. She tipped over the edge of the pit, managed to grab a ladder rung with the hand that still had feeling. But her feet swung through emptiness. She pawed with her numb hand, missed, and fell onto very hard concrete.

All her imagery was gone; maybe her Epiphany was fried. But she could see the circle of light above, and she could hear.

"Run Miri! Run — " Juan's shout was cut off by a meaty crunching sound.

Miri ran.

23

The UCSD library riot was the news of the evening. No doubt it would be echoing back and forth across the world for the next few weeks, a new twist in the trajectory of public entertainment. It was also a bright spot on Bob Gu's situation board. Too bright. Bob watched the analysts — even people with specialties as remote as forensic virology — cluster around that single locus in Southern California.

There are other things going on tonight, guys . The DEA raid in Kern County had triggered real violence in the Canadian North. That was outside of Bob's watch area — but it might indicate that something more than simple enhancement drugs was involved. If not for the library riot, he'd be seeing dozens of theories floating up: Maybe the Kern County business was a cover for immigrant bashing. Maybe something more lethal than enhancements was involved. Analysts were great at such wild conjectures, and equally great at feeding on them, reducing them to rubble — or finding solid evidence and drawing in the firepower that Bob Gu commanded.

But tonight — well, the UCSD riot did have the taint of a classic diversion, covering something big and bad and elsewhere in CONUS Southwest. Alice had doubled the size of the analyst pool. Now there were specialists from the Centers for Disease Control, even folks from other watches. Normally, she would have groomed her unruly mob of specialists; she had the breadth and the depth and the charisma to bring even academic civilians into line. But tonight, Alice was part of the problem. Every time he redirected the group into a wider view, she drew it back. She was the one who had diverted the virologists. There was a tight little cluster of bioscience types that grew brighter and closer, bandwidths rising. Alice was not studying the riot per se, but its connections to the bioscience labs that surrounded the school. Except for the diversion of their night staff, the labs showed all green. And the harder she pounded on the lab network security, the cleaner it looked.