Donny searched his electronic inbox, and confirmed he had received the same notice there, even earlier. How he missed that was only partly explained by the even larger volume of unread inbounds that showed up in the queue. Donny wasn’t the kind of lawyer who could afford a secretary. And working in a system that had long been broken, he had learned to focus on what seemed to really matter for the clients. Sometimes at their expense, and more often at his own.

The most surprising thing about the news that Slider was dead, before the age of twenty-five, was how little it surprised Donny. The kid was a battle-hardened revolutionary who had processed his anger over what happened to his parents by taking up arms against the state. And he had been an effective one, a wannabe Robin Hood whose actions during the resistance and uprising got their share of public attention. He also earned more than his share of enemies, even among his supposed comrades. That was something he and Donny had in common. But more than anything, Slider was a risk-taker, reckless with his own life, and the idea that he had lost it on the job was entirely plausible. So much so that Donny had considered the risk when he first put the case together, convincing himself that he would quickly be able to identify other disappeareds and build up his class action to insure against that risk.

That calculation had not factored in Donny’s failure to adhere to basic business hygiene like checking your mail and keeping up your docket. He had let a simple delaying strategy by the defense ripen into a fatal trap. He had a week to try to come up with a way to slash his way out, but there was no obvious way to do it. It would have to start with trying to find the full story.

He grabbed his bag and found his Swissfōn, the mobile device he had to keep in his briefcase because it was too big for his pockets. The phone he’d had to get one of his former clients to help him sneak into the country, a baggage handler in Houston whom Donny had helped get a commutation for a crate of more lethal contraband he had leapfrogged past customs. They claimed the official surveillance was a thing of the past, and the phone was legal now, and could even be registered with the network without having to pay way too much to a crazy ex-BellNet guy to mask it behind an alias. Now and before, it was designed to be surveillance-free, protected by military-grade encryption, active countermeasures, and guaranteed no back doors. It was also, as a consequence, huge and ugly. The first time his grandma saw him pull it out when he visited her, she busted a gut, and made a crack about shoe phones.