All three of the laughing, coffee-toting, VEIL-wearing schoolgirls had done this as a matter of course. It was probably a free-and-mandatory service offered by their prep school. The security cameras on the front of Zula’s condo building had looked them up. For that matter, Zula’s glasses had outward-looking cameras that could have done the same thing, had she shown any interest. She didn’t bother. But the odds were that their PURDAH records were all carefully gardened and censored by some combination of their parents and their school. Their names and faces would be concealed. But there was probably enough public data to suggest that they were exactly what they looked like: ordinary schoolgirls, VEILed and in PURDAH, not because they wanted to hide any malign intentions, but just to keep the creeps at bay, and to make sure that when they turned in their SATs and their AP exams, they’d be judged fairly.

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Zula turned downhill and began walking briskly. This was her main form of exercise. Where she worked—the headquarters of the Forthrast Family Foundation—there was an employee gym. And where she lived, there was a gym for the use of residents and their guests. As she walked down Capitol Hill and into South Lake Union, she passed a windowless pink building with a tiny sign on the door that according to rumor was a boutique gym, so exclusive that you had to apply for membership and pass strenuous tests. Another gym, a few blocks farther along, occupied the entire ground floor of a skyscraper; several dozen elliptical trainers were lined up facing the window, occupied by early-rising, heavy-breathing nerds watching movies or doing work in head-mounted displays. She passed a steampunk gym where historically aware nerds with waxed mustaches worked out with Indian clubs of polished mahogany sourced from ecologically sustainable plantations. A glassed-in crag of artificial stone where harnessed nerds groped at CAD/CAMmed handholds with chalky fingers. A revamped warehouse where robed nerds fought solemn duels with simulated light sabers. A striped tent where upside-down nerds swung by their knees from a flying trapeze. An open-air obstacle course where parkour ninjas vaulted fences and ran vertically up concrete walls. A park where squads of nerds dropped and did push-ups under the faux-stern glare of a pretend drill sergeant. A thumping boîte where female nerds practiced their pole dancing. Cementing these establishments together like mortar between bricks was an equally far-fetched assortment of dining and drinking establishments where those who had just worked off a lot of calories and tuned up their bodies could further enhance their health by drinking smoothies made of pulverized botanical curiosities, or balance the scales by consuming things that were decidedly not good for them.