Someone tried to walk into the bathroom, but Gatz turned, raised his glasses, and glanced at them. They went away.

I sat down on the sink. “Okay. Here’s the news: New York almost burned to the ground, Barnaby Dawson’s a Monk but I don’t think it took, because he’s beating the tar out of people and telling them he’s looking for me. And a Vid reporter recognized me on the fucking hover and might be a problem.”

“The redhead,” Gatz drawled. “I recognized her.”

“Oh, yeah.” I grinned at Gatz. “The Teutonic Fuck says hello.”

Gatz did his best to grin back, which wasn’t anything pleasant to see. “He still able to walk?”

“Yeah, but he won’t ever breathe out that nose right again.”

“Good. Teach the bastard to threaten to throw me out the window.”

“Blow each other later, okay?” Tanner said, putting her hands on the top of her head and wincing as if in sudden pain. I wondered suddenly if Milton was doing the same somewhere else, silently and maybe unconsciously mirroring her twin. “Your System Pig is a Monk? But it didn’t take? And now yet another person is trying to kill you? And we’re going to see your face on the Vids?” She threw her hands into the air. “I’m following a child. Lord, take me now. I’m ready.”

“Shut the hell up.”

A few moments of silence followed, during which someone else tried to get into the bathroom, only to run into Gatz. I ran a hand over my face and nodded. “All right. You did good. The gang’s all here, huh? A base of operations and everything. That’s great. Brother West?”

“Still with us. Sis and I are goddamned bright chicks-we snagged an AbZero freighter unit, supposedly shipping nanotech. Too cold to open up, too cold to scan effectively, the Pigs couldn’t open it. Kieth faked up the freight papers for us. Brother West traveled in comfort, and we picked him up at the hover pad easy as pie. Snagged us a brand-new hover, too. We spent a few hours going over it with a sledgehammer and a blowtorch, though, so now it looks like the original hover left over from biblical times.” She grinned. “Your ride awaits, sir! Take care not to smudge your fine duds on anything as you alight the carriage.”

The hover did look like complete crap, but ran smooth and steady. Tanner pulled up outside what appeared to be a completely respectable office building in a well-kept if largely abandoned business block, the sort of empty area with brand-new buildings that spoke of a recent cleanup of riot damage-which was more than you could say of New York, which had let most of its ruined areas rot.

“Haymerle Road!” she shouted. “End of the line.”

I leaned forward. “This is where we’re set up? Looks a bit too active for my liking.”

She nodded. “Sure, that’s what we all said. But Kieth insisted. Said that these office buildings get sealed up when no tenants are around, left in hibernation. No one comes around and checks on ’em because their security is handled by Droids connected to a private network, or some shit. Anyway, he got us in-no big deal, three-year-old tech at best-and then Ty waved his nose at the network and took over. It’s an old Droid factory. When the owners check its status, it looks like a typical day, complete with faked security footage.” She grinned. “Meanwhile we got the Droids doing chores for us. I tell you, Cates, that Kieth is a genius.”

We got out and I looked around. If you put a few hundred people in the streets it would have looked like some of the more prosperous sections of New York. I felt naked without people pushing and shoving at me, their dirty hands on me. Our flight over had revealed London to be half-empty, a dying city bereft of citizens. I wondered if the presence of the main hive of the Electric Church had anything to do with that.

“Where’s the Abbey from here?”

She waved her hand northward. “See the spike?”

I saw, in the distance, a tall towerlike structure with a square top, a round, charred disc set in the middle. The whole thing was blackened from fire, sticking up over the very tops of the buildings on the horizon like a baleful reminder of the Riots.

“I’ll get this off the street,” Tanner said from within the hover. “Go on in with Wonderboy there. I’m sure Kieth can’t wait to fill you in.”

I followed Gatz to the door, which whisked open as we reached it. A faceless white and black Droid-humanoid torso on top of a wheeled chassis-cocked its head and waved us in.

“Come in, come in!” its synthetic voice chimed. “Welcome to the House of Kieth. Mr. Kieth is currently in the Assembly Room.”

I glanced at Gatz. He shrugged as he followed the Droid in. “Kieth’s got a weird sense of humor,” he growled.

Inside, the building was dusty and abandoned, wires hanging out of the walls and holes gouged into the concrete where machinery used to be. A lot of factories and offices stood empty everywhere; landlords usually set up Droid armies like this to keep squatters and crooks out. The evidence of Kieth’s work was everywhere: I could see the guns mounted quick-and-dirty on the walls, the steel plates ready to slam down and cut off any route into the building at the touch of a remote. I’d seen field setups in my day, and this one struck me as impressively complete and solid-looking, considering our resources and the time frame. The Droid led us along narrow corridors lit by cheap make-you-squint ambient lighting until we emerged into a huge cavern empty except for the small camp of equipment and too-bright floodlights set up at the far end like stark metal trees.

“Mr. Kieth! Authorized visitors! Mr. Kieth! Authorized visitors!”

Ty Kieth’s bald head appeared over the rim of a large back cube, connected to smaller black cubes by endless cables. “Cates! Ty is glad to see you’re alive!”

“Glad to find I was on the entrance list for the House of Kieth,” I drawled. “Get a Vid in here, okay? We need to know what’s going on.” As we approached, I realized that one of the pieces of equipment was the Monk, standing perfectly still in the focus of the lights. Its face had been removed, and its torso remained exposed. “Is it… functional?”

Kieth glanced at it. “Sure is. We’ve been doing a lot of work with Brother West, Cates. I think you’re going to be amazed.” He glanced around. “Nice digs, eh? Between Ty and the Twins, we’ve rewired this whole thing and the suits that own this place don’t know a damn thing! Fully shielded: We could set the place on fire and the SSF satellites wouldn’t know it for days. There are five Droids, by the way. Ty calls them Bob. Bob One, Bob Two, like that. This is where they used to assemble Droids. You can see where the lines used to be.”

I walked up to Brother West and stood in front of him. “What’s up with him?”

Kieth sprang into animation, jumping up, wiping his hands on a rag, and running over to one of the black boxes. “He’s fine, Mr. Cates, just fine. Ty’s had a lot of time to dig around in there. Found the behavioral modification chip, learned how to selectively disable it. Want to see?”

I nodded. “Very much.”

Although the back of its skull still looked normal enough, from the front the Monk looked totally inhuman, a mass of wires and boards for a face with two delicate cameras where the eyes should be. It stood ramrod straight. I wondered who West had been. The Electric Church seemed to draw most of its converts from the lower classes, criminals and the working destitute. West might have been someone I’d known, or someone like someone I’d known. I wondered if he’d gotten what he wanted. Or deserved.

Kieth fiddled with his equipment and began punching into a small keyboard. “All right,” he said, “meet Mr. West.”

The Monk spasmed, twitched, and fell to its knees with a shriek. Its hands came up and began pounding on its skull violently.

“Let me out,” it said, its voice perfectly modulated and sounding strangely reasonable. As it continued to speak, the reasonable tone gave way to increasing volume and a ragged quality that made my skin crawl. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”