Benny pulled back the shower curtain. The man stared back at him with surprised and sightless eyes. He’d gotten him in the side of the head. A lucky shot, or maybe not. He’d seen Martin before, when he came with Graham to get Helix. This wasn’t Martin.

“Shit,” Benny swore softly. If Graham found out he’d shot the wrong guy, he’d never let him go. Fuck Graham anyway, he thought. He’d been double dealing him from the start, he didn’t have to know about this.

Benny stood away from the shower and dialed Graham’s number. “Well?” said Graham, leaning over his desk.

“I got him. Now get me out of here,” Benny told him.

“Martin’s dead?”

“Yeah.” Benny hoisted his handgun into view for added effect.

“Good.” Graham nodded. “Go back to the ventilation shaft you came in by. Take it in towards the center of the building. It’ll open up into a large air shaft running down the length of the building. Take it down to the fifth floor. From there you can get out through a side duct and into a maintenance stairway. Be careful. You’ll be coming out on the third floor balcony, and there’ll be people around. Keep your head down and walk, don’t run, to the exit doors. You got it?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.”

“Good luck then, and bon voyage.” said Graham.

Benny followed Graham’s directions and found the air shaft without difficulty. He climbed down a metal ladder bolted to the side of the shaft. There was a steady breeze blowing down the shaft, tugging at his sleeves. Around the eighth floor, the shaft ended abruptly. Graham hadn’t said anything about this. Somewhere nearby a machine was humming steadily. Benny looked around. The only way out from here was through a wire mesh gate in one side of the shaft. It was padlocked shut. Benny stood to one side and shot the lock, the bullet ricochetting off the sides of the shaft. He pulled the grate open and crawled inside. If anything the wind was stronger here. He turned a corner and suddenly found himself being sucked head first down the duct. Up ahead he saw the whirring of huge fan blades. Benny pressed his arms and legs against the walls of the duct, trying to stop himself. He just managed to skid to a halt at the lip of the duct, where he teetered precariously for long moments while attempting to push himself back from the edge. The sound from the turbines was deafening. The duct walls vibrated with it, threatening to numb his hands and feet and send him plunging into the blades. Slowly, he inched his way back up the duct, eventually turning so his shoulders and feet pressed against the walls. He got out at the first access panel he could find, and stood in a narrow crawlspace between some plumbing and an optical fiber conduit, catching his breath and waiting for his heart rate to return to normal. He couldn’t understand what went wrong. He’d followed Graham’s directions, and they weren’t complicated. Of course, he realized, that was the problem. He’d followed Graham’s directions. Graham had meant for him to wind up there, he had no intention of ever letting Benny go. If he was going to get out of here, it was going to be on his own.

He quickly became lost in the building’s tangle of crawl spaces, access ways an air ducts. Eventually he found himself in an elevator shaft. Looking down he saw the top of an elevator rising towards him. He didn’t have time to get out of the way, so he jumped on top of it and rode it up several floors until it stopped and he could crawl off again. He found a small niche for himself beside a junction box. This was hopeless. He might as well just try to get to a stairway and hope the building’s security cameras would pass him over. He was ready to pry open the doors to the elevator shaft and take his chances when he heard the voices up above. “There used to be an exclusive men’s dining room up here, the Recess Club. My mother told a story-”

He knew that voice. It was Chango. She was up there. God knows why; screwing around again with stuff that was none of her business. Sudden rage blinded him. She was always harping on Ada’s death, trying to find out “what really happened.” He’d put up with it all these years, and all these years, she’d never let him forget, not even once, that he was to blame. Well, now she was to blame. If she hadn’t brought Helix to Vattown none of this would have happened, and he wouldn’t even be here now. Graham had betrayed him, and he’d never find his way out by crawling between the walls the way Chango did. If he was going to risk the maintenance stairs, he could do that any time, right now he had a chance to take care of that meddling sport once and for all.

oOo

Hector Martin ran down the corridor, punched the elevator button savagely and then changed his mind. He couldn’t wait for an elevator. He dashed to the stairway, glancing back the way he’d come. The corridor was still empty, but whoever had shot Slatermeyer had probably meant to get him instead. Once they discovered their mistake...

Hector ran down the stairs as fast as he could, the punctuation of his feet landing on the steps jumbling the thoughts in his mind.

It had to be Graham, or some agent of his — that young man he’d had with him when he took Helix, perhaps. How did the shooter get inside his apartment? Not through the door, unless he’d been there all along. No, Hector knew how he got in. Chango had come into his bathroom through the cold air return. If she could do it, so could somebody else. Hector couldn’t imagine Nathan Graham crawling through an air shaft on his belly. He would get his suit dirty. His lackey then, who was probably that vatdiver —

Benny - that Hyper had mentioned.

And something was happening to the multi-processor brain network in the building. He needed to talk to Lilith, but in his panic he had left his transceiver behind. It didn’t matter, she wouldn’t answer his call, she never did.

He realized this was a terrible place to be, an empty stairwell. If this Benny was after him, if he could crawl through the innards of the building, the last place Hector should be was anyplace isolated. He needed to get around a lot of people, and it would be preferable if they were all paying attention to him. He thought about the serotonin levels in the brains. That kind of change was bound to have effects nobody, least of all the office workers using the network, could be prepared for. He glanced at the number over the door on the next landing. Floor 19 — accounting. He went through the door and down the hall, striding past the reception area for the department of procurement. “Sir?” the receptionist at the front desk said, swivelling his head in Hector’s wake. Hector ignored him and pushed open the doors to a large office filled with desks and the insistent bleeping of transceivers.

He went to a desk in the middle of the office where a woman about his age was gazing absently at a cost-earnings chart. “Excuse me,” he told her and jumped on top of her desk. The holographic chart painted his pant legs with stripes of orange and blue. “Excuse me everybody,” he said to the surrounding hubbub. “Can I have your attention please?”

The office fell silent but for the continued bleepings of the transceivers, which went for the moment unanswered. Everyone was staring at him. A few bent their heads together to whisper questions. “Who is that?” “What’s going on?”

“I’m Dr. Hector Martin,” he said, getting blank looks from all around. “I invented the multi-processor brains,” he added, and saw some of them nod their heads in recognition. “I’ve been a researcher here at GeneSys for the past twenty years and-”

“Please,” said a balding man in a teal blue suit. “Don’t shoot anyone. Whatever they did to you, it wasn’t our fault. We’re just accountants.”

Hector shook his head and held his arms out at his sides. “I”m not going to shoot anyone. I’m not even armed. I realize this is unusual, but I had to get your attention, because soon, something even more unusual is going to happen.”