But Kimi could. And that made her proud.

She'd done what the great spirit had asked her to: glitch-ing up a program that some FTL decker named Raymond Kahnewake was working on. The great spirit had showed Kimi how to use a complex form that would do the job. She'd memorized its pattern, then jacked into the FTL mainframe and inserted the form she'd been taught. She'd been extra, extra careful to do it just right. And the great spirit had praised her work.

But then Raymond Kahnewake had designed another program-one that did pretty much the same thing as the first. And so the great spirit had told Kimi it was time to play a game with him, a game that would scare him into being good. The great spirit said he was a dangerous man, that he had to be stopped from making things that would hurt Kimi and her friends-that would hurt the great spirit itself.

To prepare for the game, Kimi made sure the security guards at the FTL Technologies headquarters in Cheyenne got to know her. She deliberately got caught playing on the building's high-speed elevators, riding them from the second-floor creche to the building's uppermost, twentieth floor and back again. And she made sure the guards saw her playing "coup counter" up and down the halls, stalking the FTL workers with her toy bow and suction-cup-tipped arrows. This was all practice for when she would count coup against Raymond Kahnewake.

Kimi was frightened about confronting an adult, and the game the great spirit had asked her to play seemed a little silly. But she didn't question it. She loved the great spirit and would do anything for it. She'd practiced, and she was ready. Even so, she'd put the game off as long as she could, just in case the great spirit changed its mind. Maybe she should log on and see…

Kimi ran to the side of the game room and dropped her lacrosse stick, pretending to be out of breath. It was an easy fake; she was a pudgy girl with short legs, at least a head shorter than any of the other nine-year-olds in the room. Her long black hair was cut in bangs over her forehead and elsewhere hung down to her waist. It hid the flesh-toned datajack high above her right ear; the cyberdoc who'd done the implant had only shaved a tiny patch on her skull, leaving her hair long.

Slipping out of the game room, she walked down the hall to the water fountain. She took a drink, glanced around, then ducked around a corner to a public telecom unit-a terminal that was connected with the outside world, rather than with the FTL mainframe. She pulled a fiber-optic cable out of her pocket, plugged one end into the port that would normally be used to connect a cyber-terminal to the telecom, and slotted the other end of the cable into the datajack above her ear.

She closed her eyes and threw her mind into the Matrix, then followed a familiar dataline to the Seattle RTG. SANs blurred past like beads on a neon string until she found the one leading to the LTG where her friends liked to hang out-a system hosted by Toys 4 U, in which the latest toys were displayed in virtual in all their simsense glory. Amid the flash and commotion, Kimi found three familiar personas. Their icons floated toward her, bright and reassuring: the grinning pink plastic doll that was Technobrat, the segmented green body of Inchworm, and the bulbous white snowman Frosty with his carrot nose and red and white scarf. Kimi's own persona was based OH the trideo character Suzy Q. Her icon was a fuzzy turquoise bear with oversized eyes and a high-pitched voice.

An unfamiliar figure hung beside Frosty-a fluffy white mouse with a big pink bow around its neck and a bright pink nose and ears. A thin piece of fiber-optic. cable formed its tail. Its face looked funny; after a sec Kimi figured out it was because the mouse didn't have a mouth.

"Hoi," Kimi squeaked.

"Hoi," the mouse answered. The sound came from its silver whiskers, which were vibrating.

Inchworm reared up on his tiny legs, waving a multitude of arms at Kimi. "Hoi, Suzy Q. Did you complete your mission?"

"You mean the coup-counting game?" Kimi's bear icon hung its head. "Not yet."

Technobrat's doll face scowled at her. "You were supposed to do it before the experiment began." The doll gestured, and glowing numbers appeared in the air beside it. The display showed the local time zone for the grid: 9:46:57. "See? It's almost time. We begin in three seconds."

"The great spirit only said that today was the last day I could do it," Kimi squeaked. "I didn't know it had to be this morning!" She looked at the numeric display, which hung motionless. She was talking with her friends at the speed of thought-a second in the Matrix felt like minutes sometimes. Hours even. In the meat world, her body was between breaths, between heartbeats-even though her heart was beating furiously from having exerted herself in the game.

Exercise wasn't the only reason her heart was pumping rapidly. Kimi was scared. She'd almost let the great spirit down. She had only seconds to go.

And that was bad. If she hosed up, maybe the great spirit wouldn't love her any more. She couldn't let that happen. She had to carry out her mission, even though she knew she was already too late.

"Bye!" she squeaked, and broke her connection with the Matrix.

09:47:00 PST

The Matrix collapsed to a pinpoint of light. Red Wraith's body collapsed with it, his mistlike form compressing to a single perfect sphere. Something wrenched free of itself, and Red Wraith could no longer feel his meat body. He was used to being unable to feel pain-that much was normal. But now he couldn't feel anything. Not the press of the chair against his spine, not the feather-light weight of the deck in his lap, not a single physical sensation. Nada.

It reminded him of the explosion of the cranial bomb- the seconds he'd spent floating free, detached from his clinically dead body, before the trauma team had found and revived him. It was all just too fraggin' familiar…

Another wrench, and the world expanded to an endless sea of gray static. Red Wraith hung suspended in this infinite void, a tiny pixel of consciousness bobbing gently in featureless space.

No, not so featureless. He was aware, now, of a figure just below him: a man floating peacefully on his back, eyes closed. A man with the face of Daniel Bogdanovich- the decker who was Red Wraith-and the ghostly body of his persona. His arms were crossed upon his chest and the misty tendrils that were his legs were splayed. His chest was still, his face waxen, lifeless.

Dead.

In one horrible flash of recognition, Red Wraith realized what must have happened. While his mind wandered the Matrix, his meat bod must have experienced one of its spastic attacks. Somehow, the needle hidden in the fingertip compartment of his right forefinger had been activated, and deadly toxin had been injected into his palm. He cursed his decision to keep the toxin ampoule loaded as a last, finger-flick-fast line of defense against anyone who broke into his houseboat while he was accessing the Matrix. His own weapon had done him in. Unable to feel the sting of the needle, he was paralyzed and dying, unable to reach for the antidote that would neutralize the poison. In another moment or two, he would be dead.

Yet a part of him still remained.

Red Wraith's consciousness-his soul-was no longer connected to the Matrix, no longer connected to his body. It was here, in some sort of weird limbo.

But where was here?

And why had his Matrix persona come with him?

Lady Death experienced a moment of wild disorientation in which she flashed past a mirror image of her persona icon-was it the mirrors utility she had created to deceive her guardians?-and had a momentary sensation of somehow being separated from the Matrix icon that was her on-line "body." Then she found herself firmly back within her persona, floating in an empty void. And yet she still felt somehow detached from reality.