Excitement. Reawakened interest, after an hour of monotonous back-and-forth. Concern and threads of growing fear: this is a bomb after all, not an Easter egg. A few of the more skittish are already backing away, caution superceding curiosity. Clarke wonders idly about effective blast radius. Forty or fifty meters is the standard safe-distance during routine construction, but those guidelines are always padded.

She focuses. Everyone's a suspect, after all. But although the ubiquitous undercurrent of rage simmers as always, none of it has risen to the surface. There is no obvious anger at being thwarted, no obvious fear of imminent discovery. This explosive development is more puzzle than provocation to these people, a game of Russian Roulette nested inside a scavenger hunt.

"So what do we do now?" Cheung asks.

Lubin floats above them all like Lucifer. "Everybody note the sonar profile. That's how you'll acquire the others; they'll be too well-hidden for a visual sweep."

A dozen pistols fire converging click-trains on the offending object.

"So do we leave it there, or what?"

"What if it's booby-trapped?"

"What if it goes off?"

"Then we've got fewer corpses to worry about," Gomez buzzes from what he might think of as a safe distance. "No skin off my fore."

Lubin descends through the conjecture and reaches under the ledge.

Ng sculls away: "Hey, is that a good—"

Lubin grabs the device and yanks it free. Nothing explodes. He turns and surveys the assembled rifters. "When you find the others, don't touch them. I'll remove them myself."

"Why bother," Gomez buzzes softly.

It's a rhetorical grumble, not even a serious challenge, but Lubin turns to face him anyway. "This was badly positioned," he says. "Placed for concealment, not effect. We can do much better."

Minds light up, encouraged, on all sides. But to Clarke, it's as though Lubin's words have opened a tiny gash in her diveskin; she feels the frigid Atlantic seeping up her spine.

What are you doing, Ken? What the fuck are you doing?

She tells himself he's just playing to the gallery, saying whatever it takes to keep people motivated. He's looking at her now, his head cocked just slightly to one side, as if in response to some unvoiced question. Belatedly, Clarke realizes what she's doing: she's trying to look into his head. She's trying to tune him in.

It's a futile effort, of course. Dangerous, even. Lubin hasn't just been trained to block prying minds; he's been conditioned, rewired, outfitted with subconscious defenses that can't be lowered by any act of mere volition. Nobody's ever been able to tunnel into Lubin's head except Karl Acton, and whatever he saw in there, he took to his grave.

Now Lubin watches her, dark inside and out for all her unconscious efforts.

She remembers Acton, and stops trying.

Striptease

The final score is nine mines and no suspects. Either might be subject to change.