"Basic medbay," Lenie said. "Nothing like this."

"We can improvise something," Lubin added. "Can the diffuser handle seawater?"

"Ninety minutes, tops."

"Okay. Go."

Ken turned and started down the beach.

Taka raised her voice: "What if—"

"We'll catch up with you afterwards," he said, not turning.

"I guess this is it, then," Taka said.

Lenie, still beside her, tried on a smile. It didn't fit.

"How will you find me?" Taka asked her. "I don't dare go online."

"Yeah. Well." The other woman took a step towards the water. A swirl on that surface was all that remained of her partner. "Ken's got a lot of tricks up his sleeve. He'll track you down."

White eyes set into flesh and blood. White eyes, sneering out from the circuitry of Miri's cortex.

White eyes bringing fire, and flood, and any number of catastrophes down on the innocent, all across North America. All across the world, maybe.

Both sets of eyes called Lenie.

"You—" Taka began.

Lenie, the Word Made Flesh, shook her head. "Really. We gotta go."

Parsimony

Achilles Desjardins was breeding exorcists when he learned he was a suspect.

It was a real balancing act. If you made the little bastards immutable, they wouldn't adapt; even the vestigial wildlife hanging on in this pathetic corner of the net would chew them up and spit them out. But if you set the genes free, provoked mutation with too many random seeds, then how could you be sure your app would still be on-mission a few generations down the road? Natural selection would weed out any preprogrammed imperatives the moment they came into conflict with sheer self-interest.

Sometimes, if you didn't get the balance just right, your agent would forget all about its mission and join the other side. And the other side didn't need any more help. The Madonnas—or the Shredders, or the Goldfish, or any of the other whispered mythic names they'd acquired over the years—had already survived this gangrenous quagmire long past any reasonable expectation. They shouldn't have; they'd codevolved to serve as little more than interfaces between the real world and the virtual one, mouthpieces for a superspecies assemblage that acted as a collective organism in its own right. By rights they should have died in the crash that took out the rest of that collective, that took out ninety percent of all Maelstrom's wildlife—for how many faces make it on their own after the body behind is dead and gone?

But they had defied that logic, and survived. They had changed—been changed— into something more, more self-sufficient. Something purer. Something that even Desjardins's exorcists could barely match.