As she often did when she needed a new train of thought, she pictured Aunt Dita, the only person who ever took her to do anything fun. It was Aunt Dita who helped her pick out just the right scent for her pigtail, jasmine and rye, and helped her dye it blue with mashed-up roots. And it was Aunt Dita who snuck her topside into UniCorp Park’s Designated Young Person Recreational Zone, where there were scoot-ramps and a free Unison simulation that was supposedly just like the real thing.

Unison: the grand culmination of all human social networks. BetterLife. The Mass Hallucination. However it was marketed and advertised, it barely mattered to Mistletoe. She couldn’t afford the hardcoded ID that allowed access to topside Eastern Seaboard City, much less a coveted Unison login.

Angry curses exploded from inside the house. She turned her head. Jiri slapped an ancient cell phone twice with his huge hand, then threw it hard against the floor. Like all subcanopy residents, he had to try several battered old cells to pick up the faintest of signals, and she always watched the scene—big frustrated man, tiny helpless phone—with puzzled amusement. He picked up another one, pressed a button, and started yelling.

“Yes, but—yes. Is what I said. Of course I am at home, it is where…” His shoulders slumped as he lowered his voice. “Now? Yes. Okay. I understand. Ma buh.”

He looked out through the plexi, ashen-faced, and did not seem to see her. She waved. Something was wrong. She opened the door.

“Jiri?”

His eyes snapped down to hers. “Come inside. Shut the door. Stay here.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Stay inside, Anna.” He looked so distraught she didn’t bother to correct him, just watched as he squirmed into his overcoat and patted the pre-Unison handgun in the pocket. He thought she didn’t know about it, but he was always absently tapping it through the fabric. “I come back later.”

“Where are you going?”

“Later, I explain.” At the door he turned to her again, opened his mouth, hesitated. “If I…”

“What?”

“Mistletoe. I forget, always. Stay inside. I see you again later.”

The door slammed behind him, and she listened to the hum of the elevator fading down the shaft. She ran to the balcony and located the shiny dot of his bald head among the crowd. He was on foot. Not going far, then. She watched as he elbowed through a trio of yellow- and orange-painted gypsies, knocking one of the men into the ragged procession of buggies and scoots that inched its way through the streets all day and all night. Most people disabled their traffic alarms down here, but some proved frustratingly hard to silence, and Little Saigon was always thick with gentle reminders in a thousand languages to drive slowly and carefully, as if there were ever an opportunity to speed on the choked roads. She glanced at Nelson, then turned back to the scene below in time to catch Jiri disappearing behind a shanty-stack down the block, near the cluttered access road where reprogrammed A.I. transports trucked scrap for junk lords. A few more seconds, and she would lose him for good.