“I can’t read the text, but I can understand the images, the ideas and belief and excitement of the readers.”

“So what happened to not creating intelligent beings from books?” Deb whispered. “I thought Lena was the exception to that rule.”

“I think these are clones,” I said slowly. “Quick-grown in a laboratory, and written to be a blank slate. They probably created her as a batch of cells.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I don’t think she can wake up while she’s plugged in.” I grimaced as I tried to make sense of it all. “It looks like she’s based on that old myth that humans only use ten percent of their brains. She was written to be a semiautonomous multinode supercomputer.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Every piece is part of a larger, smarter system.”

“How smart?”

I didn’t answer. “Talulah, are you still there?”

“Just made it to the bookstore. I’ve been listening in. Clones as a biologically networked computer? Very cool.”

“I need you to hack into every camera you can, throughout the country, and run facial matches on Kiyoko Itô. But don’t use any New Millennium or Porter network.”

“How many do you think are out there?”

“I wish I knew.”

“All right. I’ll see if I can crack one of the customer service terminals here in the store and make this my base of operations, just as soon as I can figure out how to keep people’s attention elsewhere.”

“What about Vince? He should be able to conjure up a ‘look-away’ spell to keep people from noticing.”

She sighed. “He wanted to catch the end of the movie.”

“Tell him to get his ass over there, and that if he makes it in less than five minutes, I’ll help him find the truth about his runaway crow.”

I turned back to the Kiyokos. It looked like each one had a psychic link with all her sisters. I glimpsed combat scenes from her book, where a team of Kiyokos moved impossibly fast, relying on inhuman teamwork and precision to disable a larger force of armed soldiers. The book was called . . . it translated to All of One, by Shunrō Kuronuma.

I’d hoped to wipe the prison’s servers and erase the evidence of our break-in. Lethe water would probably work to wipe these four, but if they were linked to Kiyoko in Vegas or any additional clones, we were in trouble.

“Can’t you use one of those books to mind meld with them and find the sirens?” Deb asked.

“I don’t think so. It would be my one mind against at least four of them, maybe more. They’d overwhelm me the second I touched their thoughts.”

“Then maybe we should stop wasting time. Shoot them to bring the system down, and let’s get back to searching.”