When Laura closed her eyes, she could still see chests

.laboring beneath tom shirts and the gloved, probing fingers of the paramedics. Somehow the screams had been the worst, more unnerving than the sight of blood. That nerve-shredding din of pain, the animal sounds people made when their dig- nity was ripped away .. .

Eleven dead. Only eleven, a miracle. Before this day she'd never known how tough the human body was, that flesh and blood were like rubber, full of unexpected elasticity. Women, little old ladies, had been at the bottom of massive, scram- bling pileups and somehow come out alive. Like the little

Chinese granny with her ribs cracked and her wig knocked off, who had thanked Laura over and over with apologetic nods of her threadbare head, like the riot was all her own fault.

Laura couldn't sleep, still dully tingling with an alchemy of horror and elation. Once again the black water of her night- mares had broken into her life. But she was getting better at it. This time she had actually saved someone. She had jumped out into the. middle of it and rescued someone, a random statistic: little Geoffrey Yong. Little Geoffrey, who lived in

Bukit Timah district and was in first grade and took violin lessons. She'd given him back, alive and whole, to his mother.

"I have a little girl myself," Laura had told her. Mrs.

Yong had given her an unforgettable spirit-lifting look of vast and mystical gratitude. Battlefield gallantry, from sister-soldiers in the Army of Motherhood.

She checked her watchphone again. Just now noon, in

Georgia. She could phone David again, at his hideout at a

Rizome Retreat. It would be great to hear his voice again.

They missed each other terribly, but at least he was there on the phone, to give her the view from the outside world and tell her she was doing well. It made all the difference, took the weight off. She needed desperately to talk about what had happened. To hear the baby's sweet little voice. And to make arrangements to get the hell out of this no-neck town and back where she belonged.

She tapped numbers. Dial tone. Then nothing. Damned thing was broken or something. Cracked in the crush.

She sat up in bed and tried some functions. Still had all her appointment notes, and the list of tourist data they'd given her at customs... . Maybe the signal was bad, too much steel in the walls of this stupid barn. She'd slept in some dumps in her day, but this retro-fitted godown was pushing it, even for

Rizome.

A flicker on the television. Laura glanced down.

Four kids in white karate outfits-no, Greek tunics-had rushed the reporter. They had him down on the pavement outside the hospital, and they were methodically kicking and punching him. Young guys, students maybe. Striped bandan- nas hid their mouths and noses. One of them batted at the camera with a protest sign in hasty, splattered Chinese.

The scene blinked away to an anchor room where a middle- aged Eurasian woman was staring at her monitor aghast.

Laura quickly turned up the sound. The anchor woman jerkily grabbed a sheaf of printout. She began speaking Chinese.

"Damn!" Laura switched channels.

Press conference. Chinese guy in medical whites. He had that weird, repulsive look common to some older Singaporeans

-the richer ones. A tightened vampire face, sleek, ageless skin. Part hair dye, part face-lift, part monkey glands maybe, or weekly blood changes tapped how teenage Third Worlders ...

...ull function, yes," Dr. Vampire said. "Today, many people with Tourette's Syndrome can live quite normal lives."

Mumble mumble mumble from the floor. This thing looked taped. Laura wasn't sure why. Somehow it lacked that fresh feeling.

"After the attack, Miss Ting held the prime minister's hands," said Dr. Vamp. "Because of this, the transfer agent contaminated her fingers also. Of course, the drug dosage was much lower than that received by the prime minister. We still have Miss Ting under observation. But the convulsions and so forth were, ah, never in question in her case."

Laura felt a surge of shock and loathing. That poor little actress. They got Kim through something he touched, and she held his hands. Holding the hands of her country's leader while he was foaming and screaming like some rabid baboon.

Oh, Christ. What did Miss Ting think when she realized she was getting it, too? Laura missed the next question. Mumble mumble Grenada mumble.

Frown, dismissive wave. "The use of biomedicine for political terrorism is ... horrifying. It violates every conceiv- able ethical code."

"You fucking hypocrite!" Laura shouted at the box.

Light rap at her door. Laura started, then tugged her cotton

T-shirt lower, over her underwear. "Come in?"

Suvendra's husband peeked around the door, a natty little man wearing a hair net and paper pajamas. "I am hearing you awake," he said politely. His accent was even less compre- hensible than Suvendra's. "There is a messenger at loading gate. He ask for you!"

"Oh. Okay. Be right down." He left and Laura jumped into her jeans. Grenadian cadre jeans-now that she'd broken them in, she liked them. She kicked on cheap foam sandals she'd bought locally for the price of a pack of gum.

Out the room, up the hall, down the catwalk stairs, under the arching girders and the dusty arc-lit glass. Walls lined with domino stacks of container shipping, socketed steel boxes the size of mobile homes. A dock robot sprawled wheelless on a hydraulic lift. Smell of rice and grease and coffee beans and rubber.

Outside the godown, at the truck dock, one of Suvendra's

Rizome crew was talking with the messenger. They spotted her, and there was a quick flare of red as the Rizome kid stomped out a cigarette.

The messenger's sandaled feet were propped on the handle- bars of his rickshaw, an elegant, springy tricycle framed in lacquered bamboo and piano wire.

The boy leapt from his seat with easy, balletic grace. He wore a white muscle shirt and cheap paper slacks. He looked about seventeen, a Malay kid with brown shoe-button eyes and arms like a gymnast. "Good evening, madam."

"Hi," Laura said. They shook hands, and he stuck his knuckle into her palm. A secret-society shake.

"He is `lazy' and 'stupid,' " the Rizome kid hinted. Like the rest of Suvendra's local crew, the Rizome kid was not

Singaporean, but a Maphilindonesian, from Djakarta. His name was Ali.

"Huh?" Laura said.

"I am `unfit for conventional employment,' " the messen- ger said, meaningfully.

"Oh. Right," Laura said, realizing. The kid was from the local opposition. The Anti-Labour Party.

Suvendra had scraped up a little solidarity with the leader of the Anti-Labourites. His name was Razak. Like Suvendra,

Razak was a Malay, a minority group in a city 80 percent

Chinese. He had managed to cobble together a fragile local mandate: part ethnic, part classbased, but mostly pure lunatic fringe.

Razak's political philosophy was bizarre, but he had held out stubbornly against the assaults of Kim's ruling party.

Therefore, he was now in a position to raise embarrassing questions on the floor of Parliament. His interests partly coincided with Rizome's, so they were allies.

And the Anti-Labourites made full use of the alliance, too.

Ragged bands of them hung out at the Rizome godown, cadg- ing handouts, using the phones and bathroom, running off peculiar handbills on the company Xerox. In the mornings they grouped together in the city parks, eating protein paste and practicing martial arts in their torn paper pants. People gathered to laugh at them.

Laura gave the kid her best conspiratorial glance. "Thanks for coming so late. I appreciate your, uh, dedication."

The boy shrugged "No problem, madam. I am the ob- server for your civil rights."