A gull flew past. The eyeball in its beak looked at her for an endless, beseeching instant.

And then, for the first time—through a billion logic gates, endless kilometers of fiberop, and a microwave bounce off geosynch—Sou-Hon Perreault looked back.

Brandon. Venesia. Key West.

My God—everybody's dead.

Galveston. Obidos. The Congo Massacre.

Shut up! Concentrate! Shut up shut up…

Madras and Lepreau and Gur'yev, place to place to place the names changing and the ecozones changing and the death toll never sitting still for a fucking instant but always the same song, the same endless procession of body parts buried or burned or torn apart—

Everybody's in pieces…

Lima and Levanzo and Lagos and that's just a few of the L's, folks, lots more where those came from

It's too late it's too late there's nothing I can do…

Her botfly sent out an alarm as soon as she went offline. The Router queried the medchip in Perreault's spine, frowned to itself, and sent a message to the other registered occupant of her apartment. Her husband found her trembling and unresponsive at her terminal, tears bleeding from her eyephones.

*

Part of Perreault's soul lived on the long arm of Chromosome 13, in a subtly defective gene that coded for serotonin 2A receptors. The resulting propensity for suicidal thoughts had never been an issue before; catalyzers buffered her in life as well as on the job. Certain pharms were rumored to sabotage each other's products. Maybe that was it: someone had tried to undermine the competition, and Sou-Hon Perreault—a defective derm pasted onto her arm—had walked into the aftermath of the Big One without realizing that her feelings were still on.

She was no good on the front lines after that. Once you went that seriously post-traumatic, the cats it took to keep you stable would short out your midbrain. (There were still people in the business who had seizures every time they heard the unzipping of a fly; body bags made the same sound when you sealed them.) But Perreault had eight months left on her contract, and nobody wanted to waste her talents or her paycheck in the meantime. What she needed was something low-intensity, something she could handle with conventional suppressants.

They gave her the refugee strip on the west coast. In a way it was ironic: the death toll there had been a hundred times greater than in the cities. But the ocean cleaned up after itself, for the most part. The bodies had been swept back to sea with the sand and the cobble and any boulder smaller than a boxcar. All that remained was moonscape, scoured and buckled.

For the moment, anyway.