Huxley Mojave supplied our first real view of things, a bird’s-eye view (or dragon’s-eye, or pterosaur’s, or robot’s, or ariel’s) offered on the car’s screen. The mountainside hospital-prison had been quickly fortressed. Someone had severed a pipe, whose foaming spray made the lower slopes to the south and east an impassable cascade of white water and crumbling mud. At the main northern gate of the complex, two heavy construction cranes lashed their long necks like frightened brachiosaurs, and the lynch (or anti-lynch?) mobs stayed well clear. The only remaining approach was the forested crest above the hospital, which, in the predawn blackness, sparkled with the tiny lights of moving figures winking in and out of visibility among the trees. For a mob to reach the mountain so quickly it must have consisted of people who had clearance to land cars in this secure zone, so a mix of cops and the administrators who had already known Cato’s secret location, plus allies they tipped off. The hospital itself was a showpiece of spectacle architecture: curving folds of warm wood, like a tangle of ribbon candy, forming the core structure of walls, halls, balconies, and levels, while all remaining surfaces were glass, which glittered in the clarity of night. Achilles read some patterns in the movement on the slopes, a large group blocking several smaller ones, a parley in progress among some of them, but I concentrated on memorizing the hospital’s blueprints: the gauntlet I was about to run.