"Kind of like collectible action figures," she said, and named a certain science-fiction franchise that had lasted four films too long.

I woke up my laptop, my heart stuttering with shame.

First we Googled the name Mwadi Wickersham and got zilch. No smattering of irrelevant hits or even a "Did you mean…?" Just nothing.

It's unsettling when Google doesn't work. Like when my aunt Macy in Minnesota stops talking, you know some major shit is about to hit the fan.

But Futura Garamond was stamped all over the Web.

The first search gave us only a trash heap of hits on font libraries. It turned out that both Futura and Garamond are the names of classic fonts. Adding a couple of more terms {designer, City Blades) we found Futura Garamond the human being and learned that as a young designer, he had created typefaces for surfing and skater magazines, messy alphabets with names like YoMamals Gothic and BooksAreDead Bold. From font design he'd gone on to lay out the lyrics in countless CD slip cases, rebrand a major music magazine or two, and join the inevitable Web-design start-up destined to implode just after the turn of the century.

"Spot the trend?" Jen said as I leaned over her shoulder, my reading slowed by the new raspberry smell of her hair.

"Uh, yeah, I do."

Futura had been fired from every job he'd ever held, mostly for making text unreadable. His trademark was radical concepts like…

a two-column design in which you

but across them, resulting in random-

face of five hundred years of text design,

unlike that caused by flashing red and

ical equivalent of a paka-paka attack,

rage he had committed against legibil-

his desire to rewire the brains of those

didn't in fact read down the columns,

ized blocks of words that flew in the

creating a throbbing headache not

blue lights on a screen, a typograph-

This little trick wasn't the only out-

ity, but it was one that truly indicated

who chanced upon his work.

"Ow," I moaned after looking over PDFs of a few Garamond-designed magazine pages.

"I kind of like it," Jen said.

"But it hurts!"

"In a good way. I can see why people keep hiring him."

True, Futura never starved. He had mastered the art of getting fired with a splash, always managing to attract his next employers in the process. The outgoing bosses always looked uncool for trying to rein in his talents, and the new ones could always count on a more radical image until they too were forced to fire Futura, usually about when their magazine became unreadable.

“This guy's got a long list of enemies, ' Jen noted.

"Yeah, plenty of reasons to strike back against… well, whoever it is the anti-client's after."

"I don't see a Hoi Aristoi connection, though," she said.

I dragged the magazine off my bedside table and checked the first few pages.

"Well, Futura's name isn't anywhere in here."

"Who owns Hoi Aristoi?"

I said the name of a certain megacorporation known for its relentless grip on all media, including scores of newspapers and a certain faux-news channel.

"Whoa," Jen said, squinting at the screen after a Google cross-check. "Futura's been fired by at least four different companies owned by those guys."

"We have a motive."

"And check this out: A couple of years ago he decided to leave the getting-fired track 'to pursue his own interests. I wonder what those included."

I looked over Jen's shoulder again and read about how Futura Garamond's career had finally come to rest at a small design firm called Movable Hype, of which he was the sole owner and boss. The fired had become the firer.

"Check out that address," Jen said.

"Perfect."

Movable Hype's offices were down in Tribeca, about three blocks from the abandoned building where Mandy had disappeared.

I caught the glint of Jen's smile in the screen's reflection.

"Motive," she said, "and opportunity as well."

Chapter 25

"THIS IS THE CRÈME BRÛLÉE DISTRICT."

"Pardon me?"

"My sister identifies neighborhoods by the dominant dessert served there," Jen said. "We're west of green tea ice cream and south of tiramisu."

It was true. The first restaurant we passed was a tiny bistro tucked between an art gallery and a flat-tire fix-it place. Checking the menu, we saw that they indeed served crème brûlée, which is a small bowl of custard, the top layer cooked crunchy with a blowtorch. Pyromania is so often the handmaiden of innovation.

"How is your sister?"

"Less annoyed with me now that the borrowed dress has passed inspection and been found to have no rips or tears."

I may have flinched.

"Oh, sorry, Hunter. Forgot about your jacket for a second." She pulled me to a stop. "Listen, given that the whole disguise thing was my idea, I should go halfway with you on the refund disaster."

"You don't have to do that, Jen."

"You can't stop me."

I laughed. "Actually, I can. Where are you going to do, tie me up and pay my credit-card bill?"

"Only half of it."

"Still, that's five hundred bucks." I shook my head. "Forget it. I'll just make the minimum payment until I come up with something. Even more motivation to find Mandy. I hear that when people rescue her, she gets them more work."

"Well," Jen sighed, "it's not like I have the money anyway. Not after paying Emily's phone and cable. But I'll see what I can do with that jacket."

"I think it's DOA."

"No, I mean do something interesting with it. You might as well get a jacket out of this. AJen original."

I smiled and took her hand. "I'm already doing better than that."

She smiled back but stepped away, pulling me into forward motion again. When we passed a few steps later into the shadow of a long stretch of scaffolding, she halted, kissing me in the sudden darkness.

It was cool in the shelter of the scaffolding, the streets of the crème brûlée district almost empty on a summer Saturday afternoon. A cab passed, rumbling across a patch of cobblestones; no matter how many times they're paved over, the cars wear the asphalt away, and the ancient stones emerge again, like curious turtles out of black water.

"French Revolution," I said. My voice was slightly breathless.

Jen leaned against me. "Go on."

I smiled—she was getting used to my wandering brain—and pointed at the bumpy surface. "The hoi polloi were pissed off everywhere back in the old days, but the revolution succeeded only in France, because the cobblestones in Paris weren't stuck down very well. An angry mob could take on the king's soldiers just by pulling up the street. Imagine a hundred peasants lobbing those at you."

"Ouch."

"Exactly," I said. "Your fancy uniform, your musket, none of it's worth much in a hail of rocks the size of a fist. But in cities where the cobblestones were stuck down better, the angry mob couldn't do anything. No revolution."

Jen thought for a few seconds, then gave cobblestones the Nod. "So the hoi polloi could get rid of the aristocrats just because of a flaw in the glue, one that was right under their feet."

"Yeah," I said. "All it took was some Innovator to say, 'Yo, let's pick up these cobblestones and throw them. And that was the end of society."

We left the shade, and I looked back up at the aging building. The scaffolding clung to the front all the way up, six stories of metal pipes and wooden planks. A faded, decades-old advertisement adorned this side, the pattern of the brick showing through the crumbling paint. I could see where another building had once rested against it, nothing left now but a change in color in the bricks.