I should have been paying attention to the older man, but my mind had gone blank. I pictured myself walking through the city, inches from people. Standing next to Gleason, next to Wa, shaking Pick’s hand. Pick, who’d lived forever and might have lived another eternity, until I’d come along. I saw Glee, grinning at me. Ooh, Avery’s a father figure. I swallowed something thick that had lodged in my throat. “You said,” I managed to croak, “you said something about a second signal?”

I imagined a cloud of death around me.

“Yes!” Terries shouted from the other end of the lab, where he was rooting around in a cart of discarded equipment, cables, and mysterious black boxes. “It looks like a beacon signal, pinging a location in Europe, probably Paris by the looks of the EIP address, but I’d have to dig a little deeper to confirm that. I don’t know what it could be for. We saw that in the other nanobots, the regular ones that all the victims to date have had. Same name embedded in it, too.”

I nodded absently, my mind a second or two behind each word, trying to catch up. It was as if I was translating each word as I heard it, looking them up one at a time, everything coming to me in slow, lazy waves. Then I focused, staring at the doctor’s back. “A name?”

“In cleartext no less! Taking credit for the work.” He paused and looked over his shoulder at us, smiling, his teeth white and straight and perfect. “Taking credit for killing us all.”

From outside and above us, there was a burst of deep, pounding static, and then a mellow, golden tone, the sound of all the Vid screens clearing their throats. Normally silent, with text crawls, all the newer Vids were equipped for sound and erupted into booming stereo whenever there was an important announcement.

“Attention,” boomed a generic male voice, pleasant and controlled. It reminded me of the Monks. “By Emergency Decree under Charter regulation Six-six-ten, the System Security Force has declared a state of general emergency. All citizens are requested to remain inside their homes until further notice. Noncompliance will be met with force. Attention: By Emergency Decree under Charter Regulation Six-six…”

The message repeated again and again, and we just stared at each other. A trickle of sweat made its way down my back, slow and itchy.

“This shit,” Jabali said deliberately, “is beyond me.”

I kept my eyes on Terries’ back as he continued to rummage. “What was the name, Doc?” I wanted to know who’d done this to me. I remembered being on my knees, a cold gun against my skin, being told that I would be punished again. My hands twitched at my sides. I remembered, and I wanted revenge.

“Kieth,” he said, reaching down into the bottom of the cart. “Ty Kieth. Odd name, don’t you think? But then those people are always clever. Always clever, and never smart.”

The name hung in the air. I knew Ty Kieth. I’d known Ty Kieth for years. He’d been there when I’d taken down the Electric Church, and he’d helped me build the beginnings of my organization in Manhattan, setting up security nets and communication systems. I knew the nose-wiggling, bald-headed bastard.

And I knew he wasn’t who I was looking for. Ty Kieth was capable of a lot of things, but he would never have spent his time building something like this unless he’d been forced to-or been paid an awful lot of yen for his troubles. All Ty Kieth wanted to do was fiddle with shit in his lab in peace. When he’d left New York a few years before, there hadn’t been any amount of money or begging that could convince him to stay: he’d had research to do.

Ty Kieth in Paris, I thought. Good enough for a start.

“Thank you, Doc,” I said, waving Jabali forward. “I’m sorry I had to-”

The older man turned away from the cart, and I paused. He was holding a gun on us. It was bright and shiny, brand-new, and looked like it had never been fired before. It was a new Roon model; to my eye it looked like it cost about sixty thousand yen. I was the richest man I knew and I’d never seen a gun that expensive before.

Terries held it as if it might explode at any time, but he had his finger in the right place, so I chose to stay still and not take chances.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cates,” he said, smiling. “You’re the only reason I’m not dying.” He shrugged. “I can’t let you leave.”

XI

Day Five: A Certain Freedom in Being Completely Fucked

Deciding not to make things worse, I stayed still-besides, the doctor’s gun was pointed at me. Jabali and I had more or less unconsciously followed your best practice and kept far apart, and now he took advantage of the gap by yanking out his own piece and covering the good doctor with it.

“Doc,” he said, “don’t pull a fucking rod unless you mean to use it. You don’t mean to use it. That makes you a shithead.”

Jabali glanced at me. I didn’t look at him, but I gave a curt little shake of the head. I didn’t want to kill the Doc; I was killing enough people on a daily basis as it was. The wail of the emergency Vid announcement continued to buzz around us, muffled by concrete and glass, and I put my hands up carefully.

Hesitation wasn’t attractive in a Gunner. Hesitation got you killed, and a feeling of unease filled me like black jelly.

“I’m sorry,” Terries said smoothly, shrugging. He was used to being in charge, you could tell. He thought having the gun in his hand made him in charge again. A moment before he’d been shaken, hesitant, cowed, and now he was grinning at me as if one of us hadn’t killed nearly sixty people, killed them while looking them in the eye. “If you walk out the door, I am on a rapid countdown to a horrible death.”

“You have my blood sample,” I pointed out. “You can work with that. You don’t need me to work on this.”

He nodded. “Perhaps, Mr. Cates. That’s a small sample, though. And we don’t know the behavior of these nanobots. Perhaps they are tuned to your biorhythmic signature and will revert if you are not within close proximity. Perhaps they go inert or self-destruct if they detect they are not in a live biological system.” He shrugged. “Mr. Cates, letting you walk out of here would be akin to suicide.”

“So, you want to just keep me pasted to your side for the foreseeable future?” I smiled. “What’s next, asking me to tie myself up?”

Jabali snorted. Terries smiled, and when he started to move his free hand in a shell gesture all my instincts lit up like bright red alarms: Avery Cates, fucking moron. The lights went out. There were no windows in the lab, and the darkness was absolute. As adrenaline sizzled inside me, I let my legs just collapse under me, going limp, hitting the floor like a sack of shit. Two shots burped, the muzzle flashes bright as a strobe, showing me Jabali and Terries in a still life, all blue-gray.

I started crawling immediately, trying to be quiet. I had the floor plan of the lab in my head, mostly-what I’d seen, anyway. Not measured out, but I could bang against the walls. The floor smelled like disinfectant, and my breath was hot and sour around me as I pulled myself with my elbows, pushing with my knees. This was what I got for being fucking lazy and arrogant, put on the floor by a fucking civilian. This was what I got for hesitating.

“Mr. Cates,” I heard Terries say, and then Jabali’s gun exploded three times, fast, followed by shoes scraping on the floor and something heavy crashing over. Terries was learning fast that he wasn’t really in charge. He was also learning the golden rule of gunfights: things only counted as advantages if they didn’t make the situation worse for you, too.

I glanced up, eyes roving blindly, and saw the tiny glowing spots of the elevator buttons, very close. I fixed my position in my mind and started crawling toward it.