Protruding sprightly from his neck, just above his imperfs, is a red-tufted dart.

Behind me I hear well-padded footsteps. I fight and beetle until I have rotated enough to see the figure drilling under the shelf supporting the K’plua. Even from the back I recognize the Rat Burglar immediately. The easy, assured movements. The arrogant, matadorlike attitude of indifference. He isn’t muting the drill. He isn’t using any monitors, just touch. And his deportment at the MacGuffin is the same paradox it always is: sacred and ruinous. He behaves as if he’s at an altar, but one he must desecrate. It is at once reverent and sacrilegious. I can’t explain it any better than that.

Another Rat Burglar cue: he doesn’t even bother to look over, to check on me.

I don’t know what he’s given me—or how he got it in my system—but it’s bad. It’s not a tranq or a paralytic or anything I’ve ever had before. I’ve got a grim feeling it’s acid. Or polonium-210. Dimly I wonder if this will be my last job. I have a vision of the Clean Getaway sailing off into distant tropical waters without me, Charlie waving goodbye from the bowsprit, obscured by prisming sea spray until she finally disappears like a beautiful wraith.

With a sharp metallic buzz the shelf bottoms out. The K’plua drops, the prox-cloud undisturbed. It is almost unbearable to watch for the fourth time as the Rat Burglar sprinkles a few darkly pigmented animal hairs on the floor—his calling card, by now a redundant gesture—and deposits my MacGuffin in his bag. Before it disappears from view I can discern the K’plua’s expression. It looks righteous; it looks pissed. Maybe it expected this of me.

Or maybe this is its way of expressing its opinion of my deception of Charlie.

My button, I realize, is only a few feet away. Although my stomach produces nauseating waves of gastric and muscular distress when I move an inch, I force myself to reach out an arm toward it. If I am going to die tonight, I think, I am going to bring the Rat Burglar down. I extend far enough to get a fingerpoint on the edge of the device. For a few agonizing seconds a finger tickles the edge of the hard plastic but then a gloved hand enters my line of sight, clasps the button, and slides it away like a puck. He bends down, putting his face very near to mine. He is wearing paint under his mask, naturally, so I can’t determine ethnicity, and his only odor is ammonia. Normally at this range my olfactory is so precise that I can discern what brand of deodorant someone is wearing, what kind of toothpaste they use, what they had for lunch, what hair product they have on, whether they take light or heavy starch. Sometimes I can even tell where they might live—close to the river, say, or near fish markets. At close range, I can pretty much detect and parse any emanations someone produces; it’s so reliable I can ID them out of a lineup blindfolded. But this guy has basically bathed in ammonia; I can’t figure out anything.