And not even those, she remembered after a moment. Because her eyes were uncapped, now. She faced this radioactive doppelganger completely naked.

Is this what I was?

She took a breath, held it briefly, let it out. She focused on the panic button and released it.

"—me out!" the apparition screamed.

Clarke shook her head. "There's nowhere for you to go."

"Let me out or I'll grind every fucking address in here to pulp!"

"Answer some questions first."

"Answer this, you worm-riddled twat."

The universe flickered and went out.

Nothing but her own rapid breathing and the quiet hiss of Phocoena's air conditioner. After a moment, her headset etched a message across the void:

System Crash. Restart?

Y N

Clarke tried again.

"Let me out!"

She shook her head. "Tell me what you want."

"What do you want?" The question seemed to calm the monster down a bit. It even smiled. "You don't want to fuck with me, friend. I've killed more people than you can count."

"Why? Revenge? For the GA? For—for Daddy, for what he did while mom was—how could you care about that? How could you even know?"

The face desaturated, its black-light pigments fading as if in twilight. In moments it was blacks and grays and two angry, crystalline ovals of pure white.

"Are you trying to kill everyone?" Clarke asked softly. "Are you trying to kill yourself?"

It glared at her and spat, "Kill yourself? You—"

Dark, and void, and System Crash.

And the next time.

And the next.

The Skill of the Chase

The Skill of the Chase

A CSIRA drone, floating like thistledown just below the jet stream, caught the heat trace at 0300. It was warming Service Road 23 northeast of Skowhagen, and it shared certain characteristics with another source— two hours older— that had been glimpsed by a lifter shipping medical supplies out of Portland. Resupply hauls weren't normally charged with surveillance, but everyone was on alert since the word had come down from Sudbury.

Both signatures matched the emissions put out by a brand of hydrogen cell that hadn't been manufactured since 2044. Someone was driving the shit out of an old Ford Fugitive, traveling inland along back roads in the middle of the night.

One of Ouellette's vectors had driven a Fugitive. Lubin caught up with her somewhere on the far side of the New Hampshire border.

Desjardins had requisitioned him an ultralight. It wasn't as fast as ground-effect transport, but its cruising altitude was a lot higher and it drank fewer Joules than a chopper. Lubin was flying west at about two hundred meters when the Ford bounced sunlight into his eye. It was parked on the edge of an acid-washed bog full of rusty tannins and jagged waterlogged stumps. The wetland seemed to have grown since Highway Maintenance had given up on the neighborhood; a tongue of dark water lapped across a few meters of low-lying asphalt just ahead of the vehicle.