"I can hear them, Xiu."

Xiu could, too, the crunch of tires and now the faint whine of electric motors. The mystery car came around a last, unseen bend in the road, and she tensed to dive out of the way.

But on this road, cars could not speed. Its headlights slowly bore down on her. "Make way, make way." The words were loud, and the view-page in her hand came alight with flashing warnings about the penalties for interfering with the California Highway Patrol.

Xiu started to give way, and then she thought, But it's the CHPI want to talk to .

She waved for the car to stop. The vehicle slowed still more, then turned and tried to edge past her on the left. "Make way, make way."

"No!" she shouted and hopped back in front of it. "You stop!"

The car moved even more slowly. "Make way, make way." And it tried to pass her on the other side. Xiu jumped in the way again, this time flailing her backpack as though it could do some damage.

The auto backed up a yard or two, and turned slyly as if preparing an end run. Xiu wondered if she really wanted to jump in front of what happened next.

With every heartbeat, pain spiked through Tommie. After a moment he realized that was good news. He raised his head, saw that he was stretched out on the backseat of a passenger car. That was Winston and Carlos in the facing seats.

"Where's Robert and his little girl?"

Winston Blount shook his head. "They stayed behind."

"We split up, Professor Parker."

Scary memories were coming back. "Oh… yeah. Where's my laptop? We gotta call 911."

"We called, Tommie. Everything's okay now, this is a CHP vehicle."

Despite his haziness, that didn't make sense. "It sure doesn't look like one.

"It's got all the insignia, Tommie," but there was dawning uncertainty in Winston's voice.

Tommie slid his legs from the seat and pushed himself into a half-sitting position. The pain squeezed tight on his chest, clawed out along his arms. He almost blacked out again, and would have fallen forward if not for Carlos.

"Hold… hold me up!" Tommie looked forward. The car's headlights were on. The road was steep and narrow, with scattered remnants of asphalt surfacing, the sort of thing you might see in the East County, or in short stretches along the coast, a disconnected remnant of lost roadway. They slowed, negotiating deeply shadowed gullies. Bushes swept close around them. And now ahead he saw someone standing in the middle of the road. The car slowed to a crawl just five yards short of — it was a young woman.

"Make way, make way." Their car said over and over, trying to get by on one side and then the other.

The woman hopped from side to side, blocking them. She was shouting, and swinging a good-sized backpack at them.

Their car backed up a few feet, and Tommie heard the faint squeal of a capacitor preparing for something drastic. The wheels turned a few degrees — and the woman jumped in front of them again. Her face was bright in the headlights. It was a pretty Asian face… if you added thirty years to it, you got the face from some very distasteful turn-of-the-century papers in Secure Computing . She was the last person he'd ever expect to play "block the tanks at Tiananmen Square."

The headlights went out. The car jolted forward. Then the brakes engaged and they slid halfway into the ditch. There was a muffled explosion that might have been that capacitor slagging itself. The doors on both sides of the vehicle popped open and Tommie slid partway into the cool night air.

"You okay, Professor Parker?" That was Carlos's voice, coming from close behind his head.

"Not dead yet." He heard footsteps on the roadway. A light flared in a small hand, and the woman said loudly, "It's Winston Blount and Carlos Rivera — " and then more conversationally, " — and Thomas Parker. Y-You probably don't know me, Dr. Parker, but I have admired your work."

Tommie didn't know what to say to that.

"Let us pass," said Winston. "This is an emergency."

He was interrupted by the sound of wheels — but not from another car. A voice spoke from the darkness: "Where's Miri? Where's Robert?"

Carlos said, "They're still inside. They're trying to stop the — We're afraid that someone is taking over the labs."

Motors whined. It was a wheelchair, carrying someone all hunched over. But the voice was strong and irritated. "Damn it. Lab security would prevent that."

"Maybe not." Winnie sounded like he was chewing on broken glass. "We think that someone has… subverted security. We called 911. That's what you're interfering with." He waved at their car. It was halfway into the ditch, unmoving.

Tommie looked at the darkened passenger car. "No," he said. "That's a fake. Please. You call 911."

The wheelchair rolled nearer. "I'm trying to! But we're in some kind of a deadzone. We should go down the hill, find something we can latch on to."

"Dull" said Carlos. He was staring all around, the way kids do when their contacts fail.

The redoubtable Dr. Xiang waved her little handlight, light and shade sweeping up around her. Strange. There was a kind of hesitancy about her. X. Xiang was one of the true Bad Guys of the present era, at least one of the people who had made the Bad Guy regimes possible. You could never tell it by looking at her. She doused the light, and stood silently for a moment. "I-I don't think we're in a local deadzone."

"Sure it is!" said Winnie. "I'm wearing, and I can't see a thing except the real view. We have to get to the freeway, or at least get a line of sight on it."

And now Tommie remembered what Gu's granddaughter had said. Maybe the local nodes were being spoofed. Xiang had another theory:

"I mean the deadzone is not just here. Listen."

"I don't hear a thing — oh."

There were little sounds, insects maybe. There was faint shouting from over the hills. Okay, that must be the belief-circle diversion. What else? The freeway sounded… strange, not the constant, throbbing surf of wheels on road. Now there was only the faintest sound, a dying sigh. Tommie had never heard such a thing, but he knew how stuff worked. "Failure shutdown," he said.

"Everything? Stopped ?" said Carlos, horror climbing up into his voice.

"Yup!" Tommie's chest pain beat toward a crescendo. But hey, let me live long enough to learn what's going on !

The voice from the wheelchair said, "Even if we can't get word out, someone will notice."

"Maybe not," Tommie gasped out. If the blackout was large and spotty, with the appearance of natural disaster — why, it might cover something really big going on underground.

"And there's nothing we can do to help," said Winston.

"Maybe not." Xiang's words echoed Tommie's, but her voice was thoughtful, distant. She flicked her light at the backpack. "I've had a lot of fun in shop class. You can make so many interesting things now."

Tommie managed, "Yeah. And they all obey the law."

X. Xiang's laugh was soft. "That fact can be used against itself, especially if the parts don't know the big picture."

A lot of Tommie's old friends talked that way; it was mostly idle talk. But this was X. Xiang.

She pulled out a clunky-looking gadget. It looked like an old-time coffee can, open at one end. She held the coffee can where it could see her view-page. "Lots of gadgets are still working, they just can't find enough nodes to get a route out. But there's a big military base just north of here."

From the wheelchair: "Camp Pendleton is about thirty miles thataway." Maybe the speaker gestured, but Tommie couldn't see.

Xiang scanned her coffee can across the starless sky.

"This is crazy," said Winston. "How can you know there are nodes in your line of sight?"

"I don't. I'm going to shine signals off the sky haze. I'm calling in the marines." And then she was talking to her view-page.