“Thank goodness you saw us,” Melina exclaimed, hopping aboard. The driver was a gulden woman who looked to be in her late fifties; no curfew on her. There were no other passengers. “We weren’t even sure there’d be a bus out this time of night.”

The woman merely nodded, clearly not understanding a word. “Centrifuge?” Nolan asked, pointing straight down Elmtree. She nodded twice, repeating the word back to him. He was washed with a complex mix of relief, exhaustion, elation, and guilt (he was ecstatic to be getting out of this neighborhood, the quicker the better, but he felt bad about the intensity of the emotion). They were on the road to home.

He took a seat across the aisle from Melina, for he had nothing to say to her in bluetongue, goldtongue, or charade. This time, he watched the neighborhood unfolding outside his window, noting how the houses grew smaller and more dilapidated the closer they drew to the Centrifuge. He would have been truly alarmed to be passing through this district on foot as the night grew blacker around them.

But now they were delivered, safely and rapidly, to their destination, and soon they were in the familiar confines of the Centrifuge, albeit at an unknown gate. There was even a car awaiting them.

“You go to South Zero, right?” Melina said, letting him precede her so he could take the controls. “I’m South One. Let’s just share this one, and I’ll drop you off.”

“Sounds good,” he said, and pulled away from the curb. That was all they said to each other until they made brief good-byes at South Zero, and Nolan was finally on his way home.

*   *   *

And that day had been strange enough, but the next day was even stranger. Pakt had called an afternoon meeting that kept them all in the lab an hour past their usual closing time. Hiram and Varella, squirming in their seats, made no attempt to hide their disapproval of such a use of their time. They had barely wrapped up their discussion when they heard a faint “boom!” echoing through the mazelike baffles of the city’s skyscrapers. They all looked at each other in bewilderment.

“Did anybody else hear that?” Hiram asked.

“Was it inside? Outside? It sounded so far away.”

“Was it an explosion?”

“I can’t see anything out the window.”

“Wait! That was another one! I could feel it!”

“What direction did it come from?”

“West, I think.”

“No, south.”

“Could it have been something important?”

Almost as if in answer, the city began to wail with sirens, originating from police posts all over the city but converging toward one central spot. “Turn on the monitor,” Pakt said suddenly. “I think this is bad.”

So they hurried into Pakt’s office and turned on his little monitor and huddled around it in silence until a shaken indigo broadcaster appeared on screen, interrupting an everyday program.