Somewhere before dawn I was awake. Some deeply-buried nerve in me had started tingling and wouldn’t shut up, and whenever that happens I can forget about getting back to sleep for more than five minutes at a time. I de-opacified the night curtain and saw the streets were now lined with wall-to-wall pilgrims carrying the traditional handmade paper-and-tin lanterns, creating a gently rocking ocean of glittering orange lights. The line of the orbital elevator, normally black against a grey pre-dawn sky, was lit up from top to bottom with spots of light that indicated incoming ships. At some point they would have to close that door to keep the planet (or at least the local landing pad) from becoming one big parking lot.

I got dressed, found the buffet was open, and took my excuse for breakfast out onto the roof. The grey in the sky had turned pink, and the streets below were still gridlocked with people—if anything, they seemed jammed in all the more tightly now. Behind the rumble and scrape of the occasional patrol vehicle cutting overhead I could hear countless low voices and the slow shuffling of feet. The posters for Angharad’s appearance now showed a countdown timer superimposed over her face. Evidently all those who couldn’t get a seat would be able to watch a planetwide broadcast of the goings-on through any number of venues

Standing at the edge of the roof, framed against that lightening sky, was Enid. She was raising and lowering first one leg, then the other, then her arms, then arms and legs in synchrony. She still wore the same leotard and divided-toe thick-soled footwear as before—although since it was all protomic it wasn’t like it would get too grubby with extended wear. She had, however, changed the color scheme: pastel blue up top fading to an electric scarlet down below, with her toes and heels the lighter blue for contrast.

“Quite a turnout,” I said around my kifli, indicating what was down below with a tilt of my head.

Enid pivoted in place, still flexing and bending. To my surprise she gave me a smile. “Are you going to see her?”

“I did promise her that much. You?”

She delivered a shrug that looked like it was part of her exercise. “I should. If nothing else so I can tell her I’m going on my own.” She bent deeply from the waist, then straightened herself again before asking: “I guess there’s still no way I can convince you to take me.”

My eggs were a little more edible than they had been before, but they were still lousy. I ruminated on that as a way to avoid thinking about answering her. Maybe, I told myself, the only answer she’ll take is the truth that will eventually come out if things go the way I fear they will.

“I’m not crazy about the idea of being responsible for someone right now,” I said. A nice, half-assed way to put it, I thought.

“Meaning what exactly?” She stepped down from the chair she had been standing on. And just in time, too: the first other morning patron, a woman with a giant rope of hair braided down past her waist, emerged from the stairwell and parked herself at the railing to watch the streets bristle with the faithful. From somewhere came the hiss and crackle of a lone firework.

“I’ve made some enemies in my time,” I said, groping for something that would sound impressive to her green little ears. “People who have a tendency to pop up when I least expect it. The last thing I want is for someone like you to be hanging around if that happens.”

She crouched on the chair next to mine and looked at me like I was telling a particularly bad joke. “You don’t think I haven’t seen trouble myself?”

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t want my trouble becoming your trouble. Because no matter how much money you throw at me, those problems won’t go away. They’re not the kinds of things you can bury with cash.”

“Enlighten me.”

Oh, boy, you are so asking for it, I thought. “Are you sure you want to be enlightened about this?”

“You were right about making it sound tempting.”

Rotten little pixie, I thought. “Trust me, it’s not like I want to.”

I took my sweet unmetered time finishing my breakfast, then led Enid downstairs and through the nearly-immobile crowds in the street out front.

Every belief system has its symbols. With the Old Way, it’s a lantern—one you can make out of nothing more than paper and tin, or paper and balsa, or just plain paper if you’re really stuck. You don’t buy them as-is; you buy the pieces—either by themselves or as a kit—and then you recite the Cycle of Nature, the Cycle of Grace and the Cycle of Spirit while assembling it. Down below—amongst the crowds, in the mouths of the alleys, and at the corners of the side streets—there were any number of people selling the kits from waist-high, roll-around cases.

I hadn’t put one together since before Biann died, and so it felt weird to even have a lantern kit in my hands at all. I bought two kits, one for each of us, and we stood with our foreheads almost touching and our faces to a wall as we put the lanterns together. No prayers from our lips, though; the whole thing was just a way to talk without being noticed. One of Angharad’s posters continued ticking off the minutes right in front of us.

“I told you about the accident—the ship I’d designed,” I said.

“I had a feeling this was about that.”

“In what way did you think it was about that?”

“I don’t know. Just that . . . if it was going to be about anything, that would be it.”

I lowered my voice even further than it already was and put my mouth right next to hear ear.

“My family,” I said, “and one of my best friends, were both on board that ship.”

She began to turn her head, but stopped.

“It’s not a giant secret,” I went on. “For those who know about it, it’s pretty common knowledge. You didn’t even know about the incident when I mentioned it, so it stands to reason you wouldn’t know that part either.”

“Your family?”

“I had a wife and a daughter. And there was my friend Cavafy Enno, a close associate with whom I’d collaborated on a lot of work.” Some of which, I reminded myself, had not been made public for damn good reasons. “And when they died, I blamed myself, and I went on blaming myself as I looked and looked . . . trying to find out what had gone wrong. I wanted to believe I was at fault, because if I’d made a mistake, that wasn’t as horrible as the alternative . . . ”

“Sabotage?”

“Murder. Just call it murder. You don’t tamper with a craft like that just to see what happens. You do it to kill people. Someone wanted them dead; someone probably wanted me dead. And I spent a year and a half waiting while other people sifted through the wreck and followed all the little leads that went nowhere—”

“You think whoever did this is here?”

“No. —Well, they could be here; they could be anywhere. But that’s what I’ve been doing. All this bumming around . . . I haven’t just been getting sun and looking for places to have breakfast on the roof. I’ve been looking and listening. At some point someone is going to screw up. Especially if they wanted me dead and messed it up the first time—”

“What if it wasn’t you they wanted dead?”

“I’ve thought about that.”

“Not as much as other things, it sounds like.”

Touché, sprite. “Well, without trying to sound arrogant—what else would be the point of an exercise like that? It wasn’t an accident; believe me, I made sure it wasn’t. That leaves sabotage. Not sabotage for terror, because nobody claimed responsibility. So sabotage for murder, or someone with sick tastes in thrills.”

I watched her hands as she slotted the last of the heavy paper into place and inserted the candle at the bottom of the lantern. Men and women in the shawls and wimples of Old Way pilgrims were wandering through the crowd, offering brass cisterns full of smoldering tapers; you took one, lit the candle inside, then passed it along to whoever else might need one. Enid did this, then held the lantern up to her eyes while the light inside bounced, flickered, and then brightened.

“So who kills thousands of people just like that?” I said. “Someone who has something bigger than human life on their mind. I was very Old Way at the time, and so I couldn’t help but think things like, ‘For a human being, what’s bigger than human life?’ It’s not as if I didn’t know back then that there were people, whole worlds, who did think like that. I knew those things, factually, but not in the same way I knew what the color of my wife’s eyes were without having to look.”

Enid held the lantern in both hands by its base. Its little light was being defeated, gradually, by the dawn that was splashing up the length of the adjoining street. Her face was detached and distant, the same look I’d seen her wear when she was doing her morning gymnastics. Probably didn’t hear half of what I said, I thought. She’s got at least as much on her mind as I do.

Both of us turned our heads at the yelp of a siren. Local police, armed with nothing more than batons and the occasional riot shield, were wading slowly up the street and insisting that the thoroughfares be cleared. The café up the street unlocked its swinging doors, and the part of the crowd that had been standing in the empty patio flooded inside—all except for a few who congregated near another of the countdown posters sprayed on an adjoining wall. And right in front of us, a little spicy-noodle place lifted its front shutter and let in a great many other people who probably weren’t coming there to eat either. There were posters on the inside, on the walls and ceiling, all ticking off the countdown.

I realized I’d only half-assembled my own lantern. I snapped together the rest of it in haste and touched fire to the wick. I didn’t even know why I was hurrying until the flame—first blue, then gold—grew on the wick. It was all about appearances; I didn’t want to look like I had no idea what I was doing. That’s the fear of a man who wears masks: he’s worried that if one falls away from his face even a little, the strings on the rest will also break.

“As soon as these streets are a little clearer,” I said, raising my voice a bit to get her attention, “let’s head on over to the Pavilion. It’s a short walk.”

Probably doesn’t matter to her how long the walk is, I thought. She’s young, and since when does an acrobat hate being off her feet? But her attention was still entirely on the lantern; it was only after another moment went by that she blinked and looked my way.

“Did you hear a word I just said?” I noticed now when I said things like that to her, I did have a smile. A bent smile, but a smile all the same. If she couldn’t figure out I didn’t mean any harm with that kind of teasing, she was going to have more problems than she could pay me to fix.

“I was just thinking about something.” Her eyes were still on the lantern as she said that. “The last time I put together one of these lanterns was the last time I saw Dad. Right after he dragged me to the camp. We were looking inside it together—through the top, like this—and it was like all the other times we’d done that before, just for a moment. No craziness, none of that. Just him and me. And I thought, ‘Well, if it’s like that now, maybe it can be like that again someday?’ ”

There isn’t anyone alive who hasn’t wanted that once in their life, I thought. And we’re still debating whether the real men are the ones who outgrow that feeling or find a way to actually make it happen.

I wrapped my arm around my lantern, like someone carrying home a trophy, and led Enid into the street. A copy of the poster had been sprayed underfoot at the next intersection, and I noticed everyone, save the two of us, was taking pains not to step on Angharad’s face. I watched my step from then on.

The Pavilion was unapproachable. Four blocks out from the main gate, there was a crush of hundreds of people all simply standing there, most of them with lanterns in hand. A few had scurried up onto the old-style lampposts and were peering or hollering out over everyone else’s heads. The clocks on the posters stood at T minus one hour.

We shoved our way through despite the occasional dirty look. “They closed the gates already,” someone shouted at me from behind. “I was just there. You won’t see a damn thing.”

“I’m an old friend of hers,” I shot back.

The Pavilion had a traffic circle out front, gated off from the main thoroughfare and staffed with wall-to-wall security forces. Every so often you saw one with a message on his riot shield: IF YOU HAVE A BIOMETRIC INVITATION PLEASE APPROACH HERE. I stepped up, let them scan us, and envied their jobs not one bit as they closed ranks to keep everyone else immediately behind from shoving through.

We stumbled out into the open air of the traffic circle, panting like we’d just been let out of a stuffy closet. There were only a few other people in sight; everyone else must have already taken seats inside. The façade of the Pavilion reminded me of a posh concert hall—a whole row of open doors at street level, and above them huge protomic windows that could be density-tuned to allow in everything from sunlight to fresh air in on a nice day. Not today, though: they were both opaque and solid.

More guards on the inside, yet another biometric exam, a silent protomic screening courtesy of the doorways we had to pass through (not that they were going to find anything on me, I was sure of that), and then finally the audience hall itself. The only seats left were in the roped-off VIP section down front. Guards escorted us to the first row on the left side and closed the rope as soon as we stepped inside. I felt like we’d just been put in a jury box. And given how the audiences at some of these things were supposed to be combative, maybe the feeling wasn’t far from the mark.

I turned in my seat and got a look at the other people in the gallery. Most of them seemed reasonably upscale: stylish dress, open and receptive faces, good genetics. The sort of people who were walking away in droves from the Old Way. Not like the crowds outside, most of whom hadn’t even been able to get in despite it being “open to all”. Had that been Angharad’s idea, even when she had to know full well there was no way to make good on such a promise for everyone?

I sat back and tried to think about something else. I ended up thinking about the research I’d done last night, about the fact that this building and its surrounding acreage were now all one big fat target for someone who wanted to make trouble.

Well then, I told myself, quit wondering about it and do something. If your gut feelings are right, you won’t be spending another day on this rock anyway.I tentatively switched on my CL, making sure to use a frequency that they weren’t likely to be jamming. I probably should have done it while I was still outside—odds are they’d be monitoring broadcasts in here—but I did it at a low enough wattage and at a brief enough interval that I doubted anyone would think it was more than transient atmospherics.

With the link up, I yanked some public sensory-surface surveillance of the city from several previous events of this magnitude. The presence of local defense forces and their movements throughout the city were easy enough to ferret out, looking much like time-lapse ocean currents on a weather map. I took averages of movements from five other events like this one, then compared them to the actual movements taking place throughout the city right now.

Oh, that ain’t right, I thought.

Not only were there fewer units near the hall or in the surrounding blocks, quite a few of them that were spread out through the city were apparently inching their way towards the south end of town—nowhere near where we were.

Hypothesis #1: The local security forces have a different protocol in effect for someone of the Kathaya’s stature. Not likely: why put less protection around her, then?

So, hypothesis #2: something else is going on, and it isn’t good news.

It only hit me later how over the course of the last couple of days I’d gone from wondering about whether or not I was in danger to wondering about whether she was in danger.

I sent out a quick broadcast to the Vajra to see if she was listening. Once I got back an OK from the ship, I told it: Send over Gunjita and Kanthaka. The most direct way to work with most anything made of protomics, after all, is just to plug into it via CL and think at it.

Even if you had been standing near the dock where the Vajra was resting, you probably wouldn’t have seen the port open in the top of the ship. It was just barely big enough to stick my head through, and it spat out something the size of a tennis ball. This something—Gunjita, I’d nicknamed it—was translucent, mostly spherical, and featured almost entirely transparent, dragonfly-like wings that allowed it to hover noiselessly. It spiraled up, then shot out towards the Pavilion a good five klicks off. I’d probably have to park it on the roof or on top of a light fixture or something. Gunjita had power enough to stay in flight for a few hours at a stretch, but I didn’t want to push it, and I didn’t want to draw undue attention to it, either. She wasn’t likely to be the only drone of her kind poking around up there today. Through her battery of sensory surfaces, relayed to me via my CL, I could see the sprawl of the city splayed out—as if projected on the inside of a hemisphere that domed me like an umbrella.

As Gunjita headed my way, the belly of the ship distended and released an oblong glob of its own hull, about two meters long and half a meter wide. Inside this pod, over the past hour or so, something had been forming from various reservoirs of protomic substrate. At first a featureless pudding with colors that resembled mercury swirled with melted white chocolate, it had sucked in its sides, hollowed itself out a bit on top, extruded flanges here, grew translucent there, the whole time chittering and squeaking like a neurotic balloon animal. In time that former piece of the hull had become a two-wheel, two-seat vehicle with driver-enclosure canopy. Its coloration was the same gold-red-and-black as the ship itself.

Kanthaka, as I called her, gunned her engine (fabbed much earlier and kept in storage until now) and sped off towards town. All this I also witnessed through the bevy of sensory surfaces both the ship and Kanthaka provided to me through CL. I’d elected to go with a ground vehicle, complete with fake temporary ID tags, since anything airborne bigger than Gunjita would draw more attention than I needed. I didn’t know how close Kanthaka would be able to get, what with the streets being either barricades or mobs, but a good escape—or an remote-control vehicular interception—was worth the cost of a traffic citation.

I glanced over at Enid. She looked more bored than anything else, like she was about to start kicking the seat in front of her if there had been one.

By the time the auditorium lights were switched off and the first round of pre-emptive applause rang through the room, I’d relaxed a bit. No usher had come over and given me stern words about switching off my CL, and I was getting back intermittent broadcasts back from Gunjita as she came closer. Apart from the city streets still being wall-to-wall faithful, there was nothing that drew my attention, let alone inspired panic—but nothing that relaxed me either.

Angharad entered from stage right to another loud wave of applause, accompanied by two of the women I’d seen in her retinue at our first meeting. She bowed once, deeply, at the edge of the stage, then settled on the cushion provided for her and bowed deeply once again. This time the audience returned the bow—Enid and I included, I noticed. Old habits.

“Thank you all very much for coming,” she said, her amplified voice still managing to somehow sound quiet and reserved. “I know that you are all busy people, and it never fails to impress me that so many of you set aside the time to come and listen, and speak to me. But I must apologize in advance.

“You see, there are a great many more people outside who wanted to participate. I learned only just now before coming on stage that the Cytherian authorities were so dismayed by the crowding and the potential security problems that they elected instead to pre-screen the admissions. That is, they admitted people not based on the order in which they were able to reserve seating, but on their potential status as a security hazard according to criteria that I was myself not made privy to or allowed to influence. The event was offered by me as open to all, with first-come seating, barring certain VIPs. Since this meeting is clearly not being held in that format, I’m afraid I can’t continue, and again for that I apologize . . . ”

The nattering and snarling all around was already pretty loud, but the guy behind me shouted “What?”, and that granted a great many more people the liberty to speak up just as vociferously.

Angharad raised her hands. “Please. Please—” She had the look of someone trying to take a dangerous toy away from a too-enthusiastic child, but her voice was firm and clear.

Enid turned around in her seat, wide-eyed at the sight of most everyone else shouting and half-rising from their seats. And she was smiling, too—maybe for the same reason I was also smiling, because there was indeed a sneaky thrill to be found in watching Angharad fight back like this.

“What are you grousing about?” I called out to the guy behind me who’d What?­-ed at the top of his voice. “It’s not like you paid to get in here, is it?”

“Therefore—” Angharad had raised her voice. Only slightly, but it was enough to carve a sizeable notch out of the audience’s own volume. “Therefore, I propose that everyone in an odd-numbered seat, except for the VIPs in the first two rows, give up their seats so that someone waiting outside can be brought in. I apologize again, but you are yourselves the victims of an unfairness that I did not know was being perpetrated—”

The audience remained noisy. One of Angharad’s aides and a black-haired man in the gray-and-brown uniform of a Cytherian security officer knelt at one side and had a heated conversation. The officer was stocky, with the slightly reddish skin, high cheekbones and spreading nose of an old-line Cytherian, and he looked like he would only smile if someone yanked back his cheeks with fishhooks.

Gunjita, are you there yet? I asked.

Gunjita told me she was still about a kilometer from the building. ETA: two minutes. She’d kept low to avoid being singled out, hopping from roof to treeline to roof again. The crowds below had grown that much noisier and invigorated by Angharad’s words, which were being broadcast from every single poster sprayed around town. The troop movements throughout the city were converging all the faster towards a building that my CL telemetry told me was the capitol.

Enid had turned in her seat at least six times—boggling at the stage, the crowd behind us, the stage again. She consulted her seat number and whispered to me: “Am I getting booted out?” Well, loud enough that only a good friend would charitably call it a whisper.

“No, no,” I said. “First two rows—VIPs. We’re both staying. Relax, this is about to be more worth it than I dreamed.” I patted her shoulder. “And quit twisting around in your seat. You’ll wear out the velour.”

She gave my shoulder a punch that I decided on reflection was actually rather affectionate.

After two more heated-looking conversations between everyone on stage, the Cytherian security officer stepped up. He was willing, he told us, to compromise by having another meeting scheduled for tomorrow, with all who were previously excluded given a chance to speak . . . albeit with slightly more rigorous security in place. Half the people behind me were already out of their seat and looked resigned to just packing it in when Angharad nodded and said that was acceptable.

From outside and overhead, Gunjita told me the crowds were going slightly bonkers with joy. I predicted nobody was going to show up for work tomorrow.

No, not just joy. The central-southern sector of town was boiling, guards closing ranks in the streets and shoving people off into alleys and onto side avenues, always in one direction: away from the capitol building. Here and there were the signature blips and streaks of weapons being discharged.

It’s started, I thought. No: whatever it was, it had started before we’d ever come in here and closed the doors.

Vajra, I thought, undock and take cover in the bay.

I stood up. The half of the audience that was already on its feet was filing out with some grumbling, but nothing volcanic. The security officer had knelt down next to Angharad, but was not speaking: he was looking off at the floor with the distant, intense expression of someone being funneled more information through their CL than they could safely process. (Even on worlds like this, CL for the police and authorities was no longer seen as a hypocrisy; it was sometimes the only way to get the job done. But even they only chose to live with it so much.)

It took only one hop and five long steps to put me next to the security officer—and by extension, Angharad and her two female aides, who were now also kneeling to one side. They looked like they were bracing for bad news.

The security officer—his arm-badge read ASEKHAR—looked up at me. “Please, return to your seat immediately.”

“The two of them are with me,” Angharad told him. I didn’t need to turn my head to guess that Enid had given in to her curiosity and was now also standing behind me. I did need to turn my head, though, to see the baffled look on her face.

“If there’s something going on, you’d better fill us in,” I said.

Asekhar’s voice was tiny, clamped-down. “There appears to be some kind of . . . miscommunication with two of the divisions of the Civil Guard. They’ve stopped responding to orders and a number of non-government buildings are offline.”

“From where I come from,” I said, “we call that a ‘coup’.” I turned to Angharad. “I think we’ve got about minutes for you to get to your ship and get out of here.”

The walls and ceiling flashed bright red and a whoop-whoop alarm sounded throughout the building. Someone, probably our own erstwhile security man, had triggered the fire alarm. Everyone still seated blinked, slowly stood, and began to follow the rest of the audience outside. As long as they’re shaking their heads in annoyance and not stomping all over each other in panic, I thought.

“This should forestall anyone closing the building from the outside.” Asekhar stood up, then faced Angharad and did something I barely recognized at first: he pressed the edge of his upraised hand between his brows. I hadn’t seen that hard-core an Old Way salute since before I’d lapsed myself.

“Your Grace,” he said, “we should leave. Come.”

Angharad shook her head. “These people here are your first responsibility. Go protect them.”

Asekhar considered this for all of one second before saluting her again and bowing all the more deeply.

“Go around behind the stage,” he said, in the same tightly-wound tones, “and down the stairs marked ‘Auxiliary Loading.’ There’s a small underground exit there which leads out to a one-way street closed to foot traffic. But I don’t imagine there will be any cars right now.”

He left us with one last salute, which I returned only after it was too late.

“Mimu, Wani,” Angharad said to her retinue of two, “where are the others?”

“We do not know.” The one I believed was Mimu—the slightly shorter, more haunted-looking of the two—shook her head. “They should have been here five minutes ago.”

“Then you can probably assume they’re dead,” I said. I followed Angharad, as she in turn followed her two aides backstage as per Asekhar’s instructions. I allowed myself the luxury of one look over my shoulder to make sure Enid was also keeping pace. Still there, although her footfalls were growing louder and heavier. I saw now that her normally thin-soled footwear had become thick-soled and rigid, and her sleeves had grown to cover her hands in padded gauntlets. The reservoir of protomic substrate hidden in the small of her back on her outfit was being put to good use.

The Vajra fed me back some news. It had cleared its dock and headed straight into the adjoining bay without even so much as a shout from the control tower or a shot from a security station. I wanted to believe that meant the planetside security had their hands full with an insurrection, but I knew better: it most likely meant all the automated defenses and lines of communication were being shut down.

I shrugged off my jacket, tore out the lining, and started rolling that into a ball as we hustled down the stairs in question and down a wide hallway. Said stairs were wide and not very steep, and from the look of them could be converted into an escalator or a loading ramp. All of it had the slightly too-clean, too-new look that all protomic architecture has—yes, even the stuff that’s been programmed at the factory to have a weathered, lived-in texture. The only thing worse than synthetic youth is fake age.

We didn’t get halfway down the stairs before they flattened out and became a ramp. The only thing that saved us from tumbling into each other like rocks falling off a truck was the grab bars on the walls. Someone had probably plugged into the building’s configuration grid; if they were able to get far enough in to do that, they might be messing with the—

—the fire doors, which just then were wrenched open from the outside. Four men in domestic security forces armor, same as the fellows who’d been standing guard over Angharad in the Summit Lodge, charged us with guns drawn.

Well, I thought, at least the fire doors still work. That gives me an excuse to strike back the same way.

“You!” the one targeting me shouted. “Disengage any protomics on your person and lie down on the ground!”

Gunjita, I commanded, strut your stuff for this crowd.

Gunjita came from behind through the still-open doors and buzzed figure-eights around all four guards—literally buzzed them, disabling her stealth mode to make a noise like a king-sized bluebottle banging against a windowpane. And just for jolly, she also sprayed the two in the rear with a faceful of protomic pixie dust that congealed on their visors, clogged the barrels of their weapons and crystallized in the joints in their armor. The cops had gear two to three generations behind what the actual criminals (or me) were throwing around, especially on a backwater like this. A guard managed to still draw a bead on Gunjita and blast her to pieces, but she’d done her job: she’d bought Angharad’s two aides enough time to pick remaining targets and attack.

It helped that Mimu and Wani had never stopped moving in the first place. One snapped out a pronged blade and jammed it sideways into a guard’s armor joint. I heard a loud electric paf!, smelled ozone; the guard sagged against her, but he somehow still managed to pull the trigger of his weapon as it pressed up against her side.

Don’t look at it, I told myself. Especially don’t think about it.

The jacket lining I’d been wadding into a ball was now the consistency of pizza dough, and would never become anything else after that. I ducked around Angharad—who had wisely pressed herself to one side of the corridor, out of everyone’s way—and flung what had been the jacket at the second guard’s gun. It mushroomed in flight and flattened out slightly, knocked the weapon back against his chest and glued it there, and splattered over most of the rest of his torso for good measure. The mess flowed into every crack, jammed up every moving part, weakened every joint, trashed every transceiver and processor it oozed across.

Something thumped hard against my shoulder. It was Enid’s left heel. She’d jumped up and used me as a springboard, and with both feet dropped a flying kick across the top of the second guard’s shoulder. I heard something break, and it wasn’t her now-heavily-shod foot. The guard spun halfway to one side and toppled over like a felled tree. His armor and weapon were all fused into a single useless lump of brittle crystalline slag, along with what was left of my jacket lining.

“Mimu! Wani!—”

Angharad had turned from the wall to see what had happened to her aides, gasping out their names. I reached down to heave Wani (the one who’d been shot first) across my shoulders. She was too limp to be anything but dead. Mimu had a dazed look, and when she lifted her hands away from her side they were painted red-black from the hole that had been gouged there. The gunshots must have blown through and hit her too, I thought.

“Your Grace,” she whispered, “you mustn’t stay.”

Nobody sounds that calm unless they know they’re gone, I thought. Wani suddenly felt twice as heavy as before.

Mimu had not even finished the sentence before Angharad held up two fingers and swept them up and down twice in the air between them, eyes closed. The thread between the living and the dead was now severed.

“Henré, you must leave them too,” she said. “They all swore they would die if they must. You know this.”

I thought about it for all of one second, then put Wani down. Mimu received her into her own arms, and the two of them sank to the floor.

“You can’t!” Enid shouted, but she still kept pace with us as we charged for the doors.

Behind us, in the moments before we burst through and out into the garage ramp, I heard the first notes of the “Ode to Impermanence”, in what could have only been Mimu’s keening voice:

O swiftly rushing blood

When in time you beat no more—

I led the way to the top of the ramp, but I could feel my own lips moving to fill in the rest of the verse:

It rushes not for me, but thee

Ye whom I have come before . . .

Protomics: a palette of substances which are machinery built on a molecular scale. With commands from a CL or some other source, they can not only change shape but gain or lose different properties, according to which of the five different grades of product they belong to. Some can carry electrical signals, or act as transceivers—at least until they’re switched off and become insulators. Some can vary their density: solid to liquid, liquid to gas . . . although, as you can imagine, they typically do that only once before they’re spent. Some can vary in hardness, from cloth that’s luxurious enough to wear to sleep, to a shiv hard enough to put a hole in God’s forehead.

Not only can you build just about anything out of them, you can get things to build themselves out of them.

There’s no class of protomics, from clothing to children’s toys to ship’s hulls, that’s not made in accordance with strict behavioral parameters. In ages past you couldn’t sell baby’s sleepwear without ensuring it wouldn’t touch off like kindling if it was draped over a radiator. Today, protomics come with internal lockdowns on their programming to restrict their behavior and keep them from being unduly “repurposed” (read: weaponized).

And if you believe those restrictions do a damned thing to curb their illegal use, I have hectares of waterfront property to sell you.

Who here is honestly surprised that the galaxy-wide protomic black market commands tens of trillions in currency each month alone? Or that one of the hobbies of those engaged in promoting such a market is staying two steps ahead of the police, inventing new self-concealing protomic programs that let you walk around armed to the teeth in nothing but your pajamas without the sensors (or censors, ha ha) so much as sniffing sideways at you?

I’d had my own little cache of unlocked protomics for a while now, courtesy of an old friend. I could reshape my clothes as needed, vary hardness or density within certain ranges, do all kinds of fun things. The Vajra was the same way. Ditto Gunjita; ditto Kanthaka.

For the most part I kept all talk of that arsenal to myself, as the last thing I needed was to advertise I was a walking reservoir of contraband. I’d been holding off for a moment when there were guns at my head. Now there were guns—and while they were pointed at someone else, that was more than enough of an excuse.

The glob I’d made from my jacket lining was one of the many ways I could weaponize what I had on my person. Most of those weaponizations were defensive: shockproofing my clothes, creating a missile shield, covering the floor with frictionless confetti that made stepping on it like surfing on banana peels. Enid’s clothes had a few of their own, from the look of it: the gauntlets, the shoes. All legal in most places, as long as you didn’t flash them around in public too much.

At least until the day your life—and maybe the life of someone nearby—depended on you doing exactly that.

Right before we’d exited stage left I had Gunjita shoot me a grid of the building—layout, emergency zones, wet wall, floor plan, everything—and so it now took me only a few seconds to figure out where we were in relation to everyone else flooding out of the building. The loading-dock exit we’d been directed towards was indeed closed to ground traffic, but only for full-blown vehicles, and so Kanthaka had managed to sneak through one of the adjoining alleys by nosing between a pair of traffic-control pylons.

I’d programmed Kanthaka to be cheeky. She was more than living up to it.

The garage ramp, and the street beyond, were empty, but behind walls and around corners I could hear the susurrus of what could only have been crowds in motion.

I put two fingers in my mouth and gave a soft little whistle, just to be flashy. Kanthaka roared into view at the far end of the loading bay where it met an alley’s mouth. At my whistle, End and Angharad looked like they had been expecting a horse to gallop up.

I jammed myself into the driver’s seat; Enid jumped in behind me, and Angharad fit—just barely—in the rearmost spot. I’d subdivided the passenger seat into two, which added a bit to the overall length of the ride but didn’t seem to have compromised its structural integrity.

I sent us tearing down the alley even before I had the canopy closed all the way and opaqued. Too bad about Gunjita biting it, I thought: I’ll have to get the rest of the telemetry I needed on my own. Still, this trip was bound to be a short one, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t dope out another Gunjita if I really needed it—but right now I was concentrating on getting us out, out, out.

By the time we emerged from the mouth of the alley, Kanthaka had already grown a little camouflage. Police markings—the Port Cytheria Public Safety Section shield—along with matching colors for the lights, a siren, and an ID code cloned from another already-wrecked car it had passed along the way. Nothing like the presence of authority to compel crowds to step out of your way. Odds are there was no vehicle of this configuration used by the police on Cytheria, but by the time anyone twigged to that we’d already be around the corner and gone.

The crowding wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, but all of the traffic was moving in one direction: away from the Pavilion. All of the event posters had gone blank. One of them was big enough to cover an entire intersection; I drove over it, leaving a tire-print double chevron pattern of dead pixels.

“Where are we going?” Enid shouted (and right into my ear, too). “They’re going to lock everything down if they haven’t done it already!”

“Easy, easy,” I cooed back at her. “They can’t keep a ship from leaving if it’s already out of dock unless they shoot at it, and I’m not planning on hanging around long enough to be shot at. —Your Grace, are you okay back there?”

“ . . . Yes,” Her Grace said after a long moment. I couldn’t see her—my eyes and attention were on the interlacing streets in front of me and on the feeds coming in through my CL—but from the sound of her, she was just as bewildered as when guns were being pointed in her face.

“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “I wasn’t counting on getting this much exercise either when I woke up. Also, while I hate to leave anything of yours behind, Your Grace, right now I’d rather be in my own ship than someone else’s. I have the feeling it’s the safest place around right now.”

“There is no ship of mine worth getting killed over, Mr. Sim,” she said, and tightened her grip on my shoulders..

Kanthaka shot between pairs of traffic-control pylons and churned up sand as we sliced across the beach. I didn’t bother switching the tires to off-road mode; I just scythed through the surf and let Kanthaka take us to where the Vajra was pacing the shore, spewing up surf both fore and aft from where her repulsor field scythed into the water. On my command, she dropped the field just long enough for me to augur head-first into the silvery white womb of her internal loading dock. The dock was barely wide enough to hold Kanthaka; the three of us had to each turn sideways to step into the main cabin.

The cabins of the Vajra was entirely reconfigurable, like the rest of the ship’s hull around it. Right now I was in get-us-out-of-here-in-a-hurry mode, so the main cabin consisted of nothing more than a control surface for the pilot and acceleration couches for up to four passengers. Most all the fixtures were the greenish hue and watery translucency of industrial-grade glass, an echo of the water we’d just plowed through.

I caught a look at Angharad as she was settling into the seat and letting it cocoon her; her lips were moving fast and her eyes were closed. Enid, on the other hand, had her eyes open wide and her knuckles grinding hard against each other in her lap.

Everyone’s got their own way of praying, I thought.

Vajra, I commanded, give us an escape maneuver.

Our stomachs flattened against the backs of our chests as the Vajra’s repulsor field put a crater into the water and sand below, and the ship trailed a ribbon of mist as it shot upwards. A pity there was no one below us to see, as they might well have been treated to a nice rainbow.

Looked like I had been right about whoever was taking control: they’d seized not only the groundside controls, but the planetary defense network, too. That network had nodes in orbit from around three hundred fifty kilometers up all the way out to some thirty-five thousand. What it didn’t have in sophistication it made up for in sheer numbers: anyone who flew into all that would be worried to death pretty quickly as each satellite locked onto you, closed in and bombarded you at close range with everything from protomic restraints (e.g., my jacket lining, or Gunjita’s gunk) to hard alpha radiation. Anything that didn’t want to be treated to such a hard-luck breakfast had to ride one of the planetary elevators like everyone else. Such defense systems were a great exploitation of the time and effort it took to traverse the atmosphere of a planet to make an entanglement jump, and the time it took to approach a planet after making such a jump.

The defense nodes here had three disadvantages, and I planned on exploiting all of them. One: this particular grid had mostly been built to stop external attacks. It wasn’t as good at keeping someone from leaving the planet. Such things did exist, but they were that much pricier and were deployed around worlds that were either a little more populated, a little more strategically important . . . or home to the life-plus-twenty-five types. You didn’t find them on resort worlds, where more people wanted to get in and stay than get out.

Two: those types of defense grids were definitely not designed to stop someone leaving in a ship made mostly out of black-market protomics.

Three: from what I could tell, the defense grid was still in friendly hands, and I had a valid exit visa.

By the time we were ten percent of the way through the defense grid, nothing had happened.

At the twenty percent mark, nothing went right on happening. Keep it up, I thought.

At thirty percent, I gave into temptation and switched on the planetary news. It was broadcasting nothing but standby signals. I said something intemperate out loud that made Enid sock me in the arm and demand to know what I was getting so uptight about.

At fifty percent, the news feed cut out entirely. I tasted sweat from my upper lip and blood from inside my cheek from where I’d unthinkingly chewed it.

At seventy percent, a whole galaxy of dots on the screen in front of me started to grow brighter and closer.

I didn’t try to duck away. I found the lowest and nearest orbiter and aimed right at it to cut down the amount of possible engagement. Since those dumbasses were programmed to let the closest node to an aggressor take precedence, all I had to do was run up to them, smack them on the nose and shout Tag! You’re it!

Two of them took potshots at me with an alpha beam once they got close enough. Only a minimal amount of the hull boiled off before it extruded a few strategically-aimed parabolic reflectors and used those to burn out the other nodes chasing us from behind. Twiddle the hull’s index of refraction a bit, eject a well-timed cloud of tinsel, and I could confuse any projectiles aimed at us into missing just enough.

A part of me wondered, if this coup failed, whether or not I’d be billed for making this mess. Somehow I doubted it.

And then finally came the moment when there was nothing in front of us but space and sun.

Goodbye, Cytheria, I thought. A shame I never got to go surfing.

I kicked in the entanglement engine and sent the Vajra farther from Cytheria than light had traveled in the entire time I had been alive.

Next Chapter: Chapter Five