“How about…have I been tracker pinged?”

“None since you lost your smartCuff last November. You left it at Fitz’s apartment after his party.”

“Yeah, yeah. Can you ping Savi’s mInet?”

“Yes.”

“Do it.”

“Her mInet is not responding.”

“Ping it again.”

“No response.”

“Fuck.” She’s super smart, so why isn’t she doing something to let me know she’s all right? Anything?

—

Like every city, Edinburgh’s Connexion hubs were arranged in a spider web pattern. On a map, it registered as concentric loops intersected at right angles by radial spurs. Commuters could walk in both directions around the loops, clockwise or counterclockwise, and inbound or outbound along the radial spurs. A simple mInet app called Hubnav told everyone the quickest route to their destination. Callum never bothered with it in the morning; his route to work was so familiar it had become simple muscle memory.

He walked into the metrohub on the junction with Young Street. It was a loop hub, with five pay barriers across the entrance leading to a drab gray-and-green tiled lobby. Apollo gave the barrier his Connexion code, and he went straight through. As in every hub lobby, portal doors faced each other on opposite sides. Standing between them was like staring at the infinity image when you stand between two mirrors, except it wasn’t himself he could see in all the identical lobbies stretching out ahead. Looking through the portal doors, he could see his fellow commuters walk between a few lobbies then turn off.

He automatically turned right to go through the clockwise circuit portal door that led to the Thistle Street hub, which in turn opened into the St. Andrew’s Square hub, which was an intersection hub, so turn right and through the inbound portal door of the radial spur directly to the Waverley hub.

Waverley was the center of Connexion’s Edinburgh metro network, standing on the site of the old train station. The twelve radial spurs that led into it emerged onto the floor of a plain circular building with a glass dome roof overlooked by the severe old castle perched on its stone cliff high above. At the center of the hub were two wide portal doors for the National City network—one in, one out. Even this early in the morning, it was busy. Callum took the portal door out.

The British National City hub was the Waverley hub built on an industrial scale, constructed twenty-five years ago on a cheap derelict industrial zone in Leicester; because its physical location was irrelevant, the accountants just wanted the lowest local tax rate on offer in the country. It was an annular concourse a hundred meters wide with high, polished black granite walls and a black-and-white marbled floor. Huge lighting galleries hung from an arched ceiling, bringing an intense noonday glare to the dense throng of twenty-four/seven commuters.