Too late.

She planted her left foot and delivered a Nelson-starting kick to Ivor’s shin with her right. At the last second, she remembered she was wearing vintage steel-toed boots from Jiri’s shop and felt a twinge of regret. Ivor looked, for the first time, like an old, frail, broken man. The kick spun him sideways. As her momentum carried her past, she caught the shock in his eyes.

The stunner clattered to the floor. She kicked it behind a row of scan-tubes.

“Sorry,” she yelled over her shoulder as she turned to sprint toward Nelson.

She was halfway there when the black goat-dog emerged from behind a mess of wires and skidded into her path, toenails clacking against the hard ground, the stunner clenched in its jaws. A thick string of slobber dangled from the end of the weapon.

Mistletoe stopped. The dog seemed bigger now as it grinned at her, baring a row of teeth that stretched impossibly far back into its skull. It cocked its head to the side and looked at her quizzically. She swallowed. The only dogs she knew were the mangy vagrants that roamed the subcanopy streets, more scared of her than she was of them. This was something else—she wasn’t even sure it was a dog.

Behind her, Ivor groaned in pain.

The goat-dog dropped the slick baton between its front paws. It twitched once, twice—and growled. Mistletoe’s pigtail bristled down the back of her neck. She swallowed dry air. The goat-dog advanced cautiously, poised to leap. She glanced longingly at Nelson. So close. The goat-dog’s hair stood up in a spiky wave along its back. Mistletoe wondered if it would go right for her throat and how, exactly, that would feel.

“Patricia!” Ivor’s voice behind her said sharply. “Sit!”

Instantly, the creature’s ears perked up like eager periscopes. Mistletoe thought, Patricia? The goat-dog sat on her haunches and panted expectantly.

“Stay!”

She turned around. Ivor was sitting on the ground, hugging his knee to his chest, glaring at her. Magnus knelt beside him, completely still.

Mistletoe didn’t know what to say. Thanks seemed horribly inappropriate. She nodded at Ambrose, who remained suspended in the middle of the wire trunk.

“I’m taking him with me. How do I get him out?”

“You don’t,” Ivor said bitterly, rubbing his shin. “Of course,” he added, “you can do what you want—I suppose I can’t stop you. But if you disrupt his login externally, with the fresh hardcoding still raw and exposed, I can’t guarantee his safety.”

Mistletoe chewed her lip. She looked past the free-floating externalized data, the color fields and text blocks, into Ambrose’s wide-open Cabbage Patch eyes. There was a chance that Ivor was bluffing, that if she ripped Ambrose away from the wire trunk, he’d wake up and be fine and they’d escape together.

“Mild disorientation is one possibility,” Ivor said. “Severe damage to the frontal lobe is another.”

She didn’t want to take the chance. But if she left Ambrose here, where would she go? She watched the old man examine his leg. To keep from feeling sorry for him, she reminded herself that he’d ordered her around like she were nothing but a mindless cog in his personal machinery of revenge against Martin Truax. She decided that she would be better off figuring things out on her own, even if it meant leaving Ambrose—for now.