The dog leapt six feet into the air, like a hooked marlin.

Its fur smoldered. A wedge of flame split it along the spine, bursting its body open.

Flame poured out of it.

It exploded wetly. A grotesque air-burst of steam and stink, spattering the crowd. It flopped to the pavement, dead in- stantly, a bag of burning flesh. Threads of impossible heat glimmered in it .. .

Laura was running.

The Tamil had her by the wrist. The crowd was running, everywhere, nowhere, into the streets where taxis screeched to sudden halts with robot honks of protest... "In here,"

the Tamil said helpfully, jumping into a cab.

It was silent inside the cab, air-conditioned. It took a right at the first curb and left the bank behind. The Tamil released her wrist, leaned back, smiled at her.

"Thanks," Laura said, rubbing her arm. "Thanks a lot, sir."

"No problem, la," the Tamil said. "The cab waiting for me." He paused, then tapped his cast with the cane. "My leg, you see."

Laura took a deep breath, shuddered. Half a block passed as she got a grip on herself. The Tamil looked her over, his eyes bright. He'd moved very fast for an injured man-he'd almost sprained her wrist, dragging her. "If you hadn't stopped me, I'd still be running," she told him gratefully. "You're very brave."

"So are you," he said.

"Not me, no way," she said. She was trembling.

The Tamil seemed to think it was funny. He nudged his chin with the head of his cane. A languid, dandyish gesture.

"Madam, you were fighting in the street with two big data pirates."

"Oh," she said, surprised. "That. That's nothing." She paused, embarrassed. "Thanks for taking my part, though."

" `An integrationist,' " the Tamil quoted. He was mimick- ing her. He looked down deliberately. "Oh, look-the nasty voodoo spoilt your nice coat."

There was a foul splattered blob on Laura's raincoat sleeve.

Red, glistening. She gasped in revulsion and tried to shrug her way out of it. Her arms were caught behind her... .

"Here," the Tamil said, smiling, as if to help. He held something under her nose. She heard a snap.

A wave of giddy heat touched her face. Then, without warning, she passed out.

A sudden sharp reek dug into Laura's head. Ammonia. Her eyes watered. "Lights..." she croaked.

The overheads dimmed to murky amber. She felt old, sick, like hours had marched through her on hangover feet. She was half-buried in something-she struggled, sudden claus- trophobic rush ...

She was lying in a beanbag chair. Like something her grandmother might have owned. The room around her was bluish with the grainy light of televisions.

"You back to the land of the living, Blondie."

Laura shook her head hard. Her nose and throat felt scorched.

"I'm..." She sneezed, painfully. "Goddamn it!" She got her elbows into the shifting pellets of the beanbag and levered herself up.

The Tamil was sitting in a chair of plastic and tubing, eating Chinese takeout food off a formica table. The smell of it, ginger and prawns, made her stomach tighten painfully.

"Is that you?" she said at last.

He looked down at her. "Who you thinkin', eh?"

"Sticky?"

"Yeah," he said, with the chin-swiveling nod of the Tamils.

"I and righteous I."

Laura knuckled her eyes. "Sticky, you're really different this time ... your goddamn cheeks are all wrong and your skin ... your hair.... You don't even sound the same."

He grunted.

She sat up. "What the hell have they done to you?"

"Trade secrets," Sticky said.

Laura looked around. The room was small and dark, and it stank. Bare plywood shelving weighted down with tape cas- settes, canvas bags, frazzled spools of wiring. Heaps of poly- urethane sheeting, and styrofoam noodles, and tangled cellulose.

A bolted wall rack held a dozen cheap Chinese televisions, alive with flickering Singapore street scenes. Against the other wall were heaped dozens of eviscerated cardboard boxes: bright commercial colors, American cornflakes, Kleenex, laun- dry soap. Gallon paint cans, tubing, rolls of duct tape. Some- one had tacked swimsuit shots of Miss Ting inside the grimy kitchenette.

It was hot. "Where the hell are we?"

"Don't ask," Sticky said.

"This is Singapore, though, right?" She glanced at her bare wrist. "What time is it?"

Sticky held up the smashed wreckage of her watchphone.

"Sorry. Nah sure I could trust it." He gestured across the table. "Take a seat, memsahib." He grinned tiredly. "You, I trust."

Laura got to her feet and made it to the second chair. She leaned on the table. "You know something? I'm goddamn glad to see you. I don't know why, but I am."

Sticky shoved her the remnants of his food. "Here, eat.

You been out a while." He scrubbed his plastic fork on a paper napkin and gave it to her.

"Thanks. There a ladies' room in this dump?"

"Over there," he nodded. "You feel a sting, back at the

Bank? You be sure to check you legs for pinholes in there."

The bathroom was the size of a phone booth. She had wet herself while unconscious-not badly, luckily, and the stains didn't show through her Grenadian jeans. She mopped herself with paper and came back. "No pinholes, Captain."

"Good," he said, "I'm happy I don't have to dig one of those Bulgarian pellets out of you ass. What the fock you doin' in that Bank crowd, anyway?"

"Trying to call David," she said, "after you screwed up the phones."

Sticky laughed. "Why you nah have the sense to stay with your Bwana? He nah as stupid as he look-have the sense not to be here, anyway."

"What are you doing here?"

"Having the time of my life," he said. "The last time, maybe." He rubbed his nose-they'd done something to his nostrils, too; they were narrower. "Ten years they train me for something like this. But now I'm here and doin' it, it's... "

It seemed to drift away from him then, and he shrugged and waved it past. "I see your testimony, right? Some of it.

Too late, but at least you tell them the same things you tell us. Same in Galveston, same in Grenada, same here, same everywhere for you, nah?"

"That's right, Captain."

"That's good," he said vaguely. "Y'know, wartime

... mostly, you do nothing. Time to think ... meditate

... Like down at the Bank, we know those fockin' bloodclots hurry down there when the phones shut down, and we know they be just like those bloodclots we got, but to see them

... see it happen like that, so predictable ..."

"Like wind-up toys," Laura said. "Like bugs ... like they just don't matter at all."

He looked at her, surprised. She felt surprised herself. It had been easy, to say, sitting there together with him in the darkness. "Yeah," he said. "Like toys. Like wind-up toys pretending to have souls... . It's a wind-up city, this place.

Full of lying and chatter and bluff, and cash registers ringin'

round the clock. It's Babylon. If there ever was a Babylon, it's here."

"I thought we were Babylon," Laura said. "The Net, I mean. "

Sticky shook his head. "These people are more like you than you ever were."

"Oh," Laura said slowly. "Thanks, I guess."

"You wouldn't do what they did to Grenada," he said.

"No. But I don't think it was. them, Sticky."

"Maybe it wasn't," he said. "But I don't care. f hate them. For what they are, for what they want to be. For what they want to make of the world."

Sticky's accent had wavered, from Tamil to Islands patois.

Now it vanished completely into flat Net English. "You can burn down a country with toys, if you know how. It shouldn't be true, but it is. You can knock the heart and soul out of people. We know it in Grenada, as well as they do here. We know it better."

He paused. "All that Movement talk your David thought was cute, cadres and feed the people... . Come the War, it's gone. Just like that. In that madhouse under Fedon's Camp, they're all chewing. on each other's guts. I know I'm getting my orders from that fucker Castleman. That fat hacker, who's got no real-life at all just a screen. It's all principles now.