“Over here,” she whispered. Ambrose joined her. A few feet away, Nelson sensed the absence of riders and quietly went to sleep.

Mistletoe’s mind reeled as the jump cuts began to unspool. Jiri. Ambrose. Dita. The cops. And what now? What came next? They couldn’t sit here in the dark forever.

Aunt Dita. She didn’t want to think about it. She reached out and grabbed Ambrose’s softly manicured hand, instantly conscious of her own calluses and cuts. Together they slid down the wall and sat close in the silence. She listened to the pounding of their hearts slow gradually, beat by beat. This boy was strange and annoying, but she had to admit that it felt nice to be pressed against his warm body after such a frantic escape.

“Tell me the rest,” she whispered, finally.

“The rest…”

“You ignored the message from the lady. Carpe somnium, Ambrose Truax. You went up to see your father.”

“I don’t think it really … I mean, right now?”

“I just need to hear it, okay? I need to hear something or I’ll go crazy.”

Jiri’s pleading eyes. Aunt Dita’s exploding house.

“Okay,” he said. “I ignored the message. It seemed crazy, and it was time to get on with it—my father was waiting on the top floor.”

Mistletoe closed her eyes.

The darkness was the same.

4

PROCEDURE LEVEL SEVEN

AMBROSE TRUDGED BACK across the snowy courtyard of UniCorp HQ, retracing the fuzzy edges of his filled-in shoe prints. Inside the lobby he glanced around for the guard who had hijacked his palm receptor. He could always take a moment to access the personnel database, lock down the building. He could make demands of any Security Associate and they would be met immediately, without question. But that was probably what the terrorists were hoping for: Disruptive Incident at UniCorp HQ.

“Mr. Ambrose!” Danielson emerged from the other side of the fountain and handed him a small tan pellet. “Thought you might like a cup of tea before we went up. Lost each other in the great fleshbound shuffle, eh?” He winked as Ambrose swallowed the pellet. Immediate warmth spread from the center of his stomach, radiating out into his arms and legs. A slight peppermint aftertaste formed in his mouth. It was very good tea. He began to relax.

It was nagging him, though, that the guard had access to the kind of red-hot transfer that could override his receptors. An unexpected override was a breach of professional etiquette, the kind of thing he would expect from Len, for whom everything was an urgent matter. But as he made his way across the lobby beneath the product of his family’s peculiar genius, the shock of the renegade transmission faded to something distant and unimportant. He was a UniCorp Process Flow Team Leader, and there was the future of the company to consider. He approached the silver bullet-shaped elevator reserved for management-level Associates and flashed his palm. The door slid noiselessly aside.

“Good luck, sir,” Danielson said. They shook hands, and Danielson repeated the company motto: “Better life in Unison.”