One of them was, indubitably, Peter’s face.

I stood back. “Shit.”

“Our face-recognition software pulled this up not five minutes after we got our first clear shot of him.”

“It has to be a mistake. Peter’s an eccentric, not a criminal. I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with an incident like this.”

Rosa briskly spun the screen back. “Tell it to the FBI. And in the meantime, this ‘harmless’ friend, this suspected bomber, this murderer, is holed up inside the Crypt—and you led him here.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Come down there with me and get him out.”

I hesitated. I dreaded walking deeper into this mess. But I knew I had no choice.

Rosa walked me to the high-speed elevators that would take us back into the downbelow. The doors slid open with a pneumatic sigh.

Once more I was swallowed up.

I stepped out into the now familiar crush.

Even as we hurried toward the scene of the crisis, I lifted my head and took deep breaths. The air was clammy and shallow, and my lungs pulled, trying to extract oxygen. But there was that powerful animal stink again, the musk of sweat and piss, of blood and milk, so suffocating, and yet somehow so exhilarating.

I was full of doubts about the Order, full of conflicting emotions. I had listened to Peter’s extraordinary arguments about eusociality and hives and Coalescents, a new form of humanity. And above all, stuck in my head, was the image of Lucia, a fifteen-year-old tortured by the exploitation of her fecundity by—well, by somebody in this place, for some purpose, not her own. But for all that it was good to be back. I belonged here: walking down these dense corridors again, I seemed to feel it on some deep cellular level. However the Order was sending me signals, through body language or chimp grunts or scent or whatever the hell, it was certainly getting through.

But the Crypt felt different today.

All those ageless female faces, and a few male, all with their smoky gray eyes, peered at me uncertainly, eyes wide, mouths downturned. I was sure that few of them would know anything about what was going on, but they picked up their cues from Rosa, and then from each other, and as we walked they all unthinkingly flinched away from me. That silent rejection hurt.

But even through this self-pitying ache, I noticed the Crypt was quiet: people spoke, but softly, leaning to whisper in each others’ ears. They even walked quietly, their feet padding gently on the floor. I listened for the hum of generators, the hiss and low roar of the air-conditioning systems, but could hear nothing.

“Silent running,” I said to Rosa.

“What do you mean?”

“Just like a submarine, trying to evade the sonar of the surface ships. We’re in a great, static, underground submarine . . .”