“I’m sorry if this hurts you. But it was for the greater good. We must sometimes do distasteful things to serve God’s design.”

Sasha’s vision went red. She stood and, without thinking, grabbed her now-lukewarm mug of coffee and splashed the whole thing in Alexander’s face. He yelled at her and sputtered like a goldfish. But she was already up and heading for the door. She flung it open, walked out into the crowded street and lost herself in the press of the crowd and the boiling waves of her own anger.

Chapter 13

Manny.

Manny woke up feeling like his mouth was filled with cotton and his head was filled with spiders. It took him a few long seconds to remember where he was and what had happened to bring him here. He activated his deck and was shocked to see that more than a day had passed since he’d dropped into bed. His first guess was that he was suffering some side-effect from Skullfucker Mike’s blood. He couldn’t think of any other times he’d slept that long, although he also couldn’t think of any other times he’d survived a drone attack and an intentional car crash in the same minute.

“Mierda!” he cursed, and then called out, “Reggie?” He looked over to the cot the journalist had been sleeping on. It was dark in the little room Nana Yazzie had provided. He could see the outline of Reggie’s empty cot and not much else. The room was just one ten-by-ten ­section of an old shipping crate. Manny knew the only things in the room, besides their cots, were a table with a built-in coffee maker and a pair of folding chairs.

Manny sat up, groaned as every poppable thing in his body popped, and then rose to his feet. As he stumbled to the door his deck started to populate with messages from friends and family back in Austin. By the time his hand touched the knob there were more than fifty translucent messages hovering at the edges of his field of vision.

He blink-selected a mass-response template, filled it with the names of everyone who’d sent him something, and typed out an update:

“Not dead. Details later.”

He almost sent it, but then he noticed one of the names: Aisha ­Martinez. Oscar’s wife. He could only see the first few lines of the message without opening it, but what he saw made it clear she was terrified for her husband. Manny de-selected her from the list, and sent the mass-message off to everyone else, and then scrolled through his messages until he found Oscar’s message stack. The other fixer still hadn’t said anything, not since the assault had begun.