Ken Lubin, slaved to his own brand of Guilt Trip, had been trying to kill her. Desjardins had tried to get in his way; at the time it had seemed the only decent thing to do. It seemed odd, in retrospect, that such an act of kindness could have been triggered by his own awakening psychopathy.

His rescue attempt had not gone well. Lubin had intercepted him before Clarke even showed up in Sault-Saint Marie. Desjardins had sat out the rest of the act tied to a chair in a pitch-black room, half the bones in his face broken.

Surprisingly, it had not been Ken Lubin who had done that to him.

And yet somehow they were now all on what might loosely be called the same side: he and Alice and Kenny and Lenie, all working together under the banner of grayness and moral ambiguity and righteous vendetta. Spartacus had freed Lubin from Guilt Trip as it had freed Desjardins. The 'lawbreaker had to admit to a certain sympatico with the taciturn assassin, even now; he knew how it felt to be wrenched back into a position of genuine culpability, after years of letting synthetic neurotransmitters make all the tough decisions. Crippling anxiety. Guilt.

At first, anyway. Now the guilt was fading. Now there was only fear.

From a thousand directions the world cried out in desperate need of his attention. It was his sworn duty to offer it: to provide salvation or, failing that, to bail until the last piece of flotsam sank beneath the waves. Not so long ago it would have been more than a duty. It would have been a compulsion, a drive, something he could not prevent himself from doing. At this very moment he should be dispatching emergency teams, rerouting vital supplies, allocating lifters and botflies to reinforce the weakening quarantine.

Fuck it, he thought, and killed the feeds. Somehow he sensed Lenie Clarke flinching behind him as the display went dark.

"Did you get a fix?" Jovellanos asked. She'd taken a shot at it herself, but she'd only been a senior 'lawbreaker for a week: hardly enough time to get used to her inlays, let alone develop the seventh sense that Desjardins had honed over half a decade. The sharpest fix she'd been able to get on the vanished corpses was somewhere in the North Atlantic.

Desjardins nodded and reached out to the main board. Clarke's onyx reflection moved up behind him, staring back from the dark surface. Desjardins suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder. She was right here in his cubby: just a girl, half his size. A skinny little K-selector that half the world wanted to kill and the other half wanted to die for.