Here it comes. I feel a mortal sense of dread, my stomach loosening in anticipation of the denunciation I can feel coming. There's got to be more to this than a furtive library book, and I have a horrible sinking feeling that he's figured out the soap impression and the plaster of paris and the mold I'm preparing for the duplicate keys—

"No!" Fiore booms from the pulpit. "This cannot be!" He thumps the rail with one fist. "But it grieves me to say that it is —that Esther and Phil are not merely adulterating their souls by sneaking their vile intimacies behind the backs of their ignorant and abused spouses, but are adulterating the fabric of society itself !"

Huh? It's not me that he's going after, but the thrill of relief doesn't last long: There's a loud grumble of rage from the congregation, led by cohort three, whose members are the ones Fiore is accusing. Everyone else looks round and I turn round with them—not to go with the crowd could be dangerous right now—and see a turbulent knot a couple of rows back, where well-dressed churchgoers are turning on each other. A frightened female and a defensive-looking male with dark hair are looking around apprehensively, not making eye contact, but trying to—yes,they're looking for escape routes as Fiore continues. Something tells me they're too late.

"I would like to thank Jen in particular for bringing this matter to my attention," Fiore says coolly. My netlink dings, registering the arrival of more points than I'd normally rack up in a month, an upward adjustment I can blame on the fact that I'm in the same cohort as the little snitch. She's scored big-time with this accusation of adultery. "And I ask you, what are we going to do about the sickness in our midst?" Fiore scans the audience from his pulpit. "What is to be done to cleanse our society?"

My sick sense of dread is back with a vengeance. This is going to be a whole lot worse than anything I'd anticipated. Normally, Fiore singles a handful out for ridicule, laughter, the pointed finger of contempt—a minor humiliation for sneaking a library book out of the reference section would be nothing out of the ordinary. But this is big bad stuff, two people caught subverting the social foundations of the experiment. Fiore is on a roll of righteous indignation, and the atmosphere is getting very ugly indeed. A roar goes up from the back benches, incoherent rage and anger, and I grab Sam's hand. Then I check my netlink and freeze. He's fined cohort three all the points he's just given to Jen! "Let's get out of here before it turns nasty," I mutter into Sam's ear, and he nods and grips my hand back tightly. People are standing up and shouting, so I sidle toward the side of the aisle as fast as I can, using my elbows when I have to. I can see Mick on the other side, yelling something, the tendons on the sides of his neck standing out like cables. I don't see Cass. I keep moving. There's a storm brewing, and this isn't the time or place to stop and ask.

Behind me Fiore shouts something about natural justice, but he's barely audible over the crowd. The doors are open, and people are spilling out into the car park. I gasp with pain as someone stomps on my left foot, but I stay upright and sense rather than see Sam following me. I make it through the crush in the doorway and keep going, dodging small clumps of people and a struggling figure, then Sam catches up with me. "Let's go ," I tell him, grabbing his hand.

There are people in front of us, clustered around—it's Jen. "Reeve!" she calls.

I can't ignore her without being obvious. "What do you want?" I ask.

"Help us." She grins widely, her eyes sparkling with excitement as she spreads her arms. She's wearing a little black-silk number that displays her secondary sexual characteristics by providing just a wisp of contrast: her chest is heaving as if she's about to have an orgasm. "Come on!" She gestures at the dark knot near the Church entrance. "We're going to have a party!"

"What do you mean?" I demand, looking past her. Her husband, Chris, is conspicuously absent. Instead, she's acquired a cohort of her own, followers or admirers or something, Grace from twelve and Mina from nine and Tina from seven—all of them are from newer cohorts than our own—and they're watching her, looking to her as if she's a leader . . .

"Purify the polity!" she says, almost playfully. "Come on! Together we can keep everyone in line and hold everything together—and earn loads more points—if we make a strong enough statement right now. Send the deviants and perverts a message." She looks at me enthusiastically. "Right?"

"Uh, right," I mumble, backing away until I bump into Sam, who's come up behind me. "You're going to teach them a lesson, huh?"

I feel Sam's hand tightening on my shoulder, warning me not to go too far, but Jen's in no mood to pick up minor details like sarcasm: "That's right!" She's almost rapturous. "It's going to be real fun. I got Chris and Mick ready—"

There's a high-pitched scream from somewhere behind us. "Excuse us," I mumble, "I don't feel so good." Sam shoves me forward, and I stumble past Jen, still stammering out excuses, but the situation isn't critical. Jen doesn't have time to waste on broken reeds and moral imbeciles, and she's already drifting toward the group in the Church door, shouting something about community values.

We make it to the edge of the car park before I stumble again and grab hold of Sam's arm. "We've got to stop them," I hear myself saying. I wonder what that toad Fiore thought he was unleashing when he transferred so many points from one cohort to another. Doing that to the score whores is only going to have one result. At the very least, cohort three is going to rip the shit out of Phil and Esther—but now we've got Jen, trying to spin the whole thing as social cleansing in order to position herself at the head of a mob. I can see a hideous new reality taking shape here, and I want nothing to do with it.

"Not sensible." He shakes his head but slows down.

"I mean it!" I insist. I swallow, my throat dry. "They're going to beat Phil and Esther—"

"No, it's already gone past that point." There's an ugly quaver in his voice.

I dig my heels in and stop. Sam stops, too, of necessity—it's that, or shove me over. He's breathing heavily. "We've got to do something."

"Like. What?" He's breathing deeply. "There're at least twenty of them. Cohort three and the idiots who've gotten some idea that they can parade their virtue by joining in. We don't stand a chance." He glances over his shoulder, seems to shudder, then suddenly pulls me closer and speeds up. "Don't stop, don't look round," he hisses. So of course I stop dead and turn around to see what they're doing behind us.

Oh shit, indeed. I feel wobbly, and Sam catches me under one arm as I see what's happening. There are no more screams, but that doesn't mean nothing's going on. The screaming is continuing, inside the privacy of my own skull. "They planned this," I hear myself say, as if from the far end of a very dark tunnel. "They prepared for it. It's not spontaneous."

"Yes." Sam nods, his face whey-pale. There's no other explanation, crazy as it seems. "Ritual human sacrifice seems to have been a major cultural bonding feature in pretech cultures," he mutters. "I wonder how long Fiore's been planning to introduce it?"

They've got two ropes over the branches of the poplars beside the Church, and two groups are busy heaving their twitching payloads up into the greenery. I blink. The ropes seem to curve slightly. It might be centripetal acceleration, but more likely it's because my eyes are watering.

"I don't care. If I had a gun, I'd shoot Jen right now, I really would." I suddenly realize that I'm not feeling faint from fear or dread, but from anger: "The bitch needs killing."