Takashi leaned forward and traced a parallel line with his finger. A fat red dragon with scaly wings folded back along its midsection slithered out from the other end of the field. The lion picked up its head and eyed the dragon warily.

“Well.” Sonia turned to Ambrose. “For me it was mostly business. Where else can a fifteen-year-old girl make this kind of money? Out there, you need patents and teams of engineers. In here, you just need the raw material, the ideas and concepts.”

If you’re fifteen, I’m Adam Trevor.

“You don’t program Apps all by yourself, though, right?”

“I’m a UniCorp subcontractor. They do the legwork and take a cut.”

Ambrose was surprised at her candor. “So you’re not really an independent developer?”

“As much as anyone is, I guess. If you think UniCorp doesn’t have a hand in what you create in here, you’re a fool.”

“Like the MEIC,” Takashi said. “It’s a user-created and -maintained space, but UniCorp could pull the plug anytime they want. All this”—he gestured toward the lion and the dragon, which began circling each other carefully—“vapored away in a microsecond.”

“Why would they do that?” Ambrose asked.

“Who knows what’s going through his head?” Takashi said.

Sonia shot him a withering glance. Takashi’s Mood-shadow diminished beneath the bench. He focused his attention on the field below, where the dragon had spread a pair of massive, translucent wings, inscribed with veins like bloodshot eyes. They flapped lightly, just enough to raise the dragon’s body above the lion while keeping its tail on the ground. The lion pawed the dirt.

“Going through whose head?” Ambrose asked—but he knew.

Sonia bit her lip and gave Takashi a small nod. He grinned, and Ambrose felt a fierce upsurge in Takashi’s Thoughtstream.

Takashi Nakamura wants lion blood.

The dragon folded its wings and dove straight for the lion’s neck. The lion twisted sideways and the dragon sunk its dagger-teeth into the lion’s furry back. The lion roared and was joined by a chorus of answering howls. Dozens of lions sprang from hidden pits and converged onto the dragon, which flapped madly upward, its long red tail flailing at snapping jaws. The dragon shrieked, and its own reinforcements swooped over the crumbling stone wall of the stadium in a scaly blur of red, yellow, and green.

Ambrose recognized the scheme: they were orchestrating chaos to cover a risky in-Unison conversation. A battle like the one raging around them could scramble UniCorp scans for a few precious minutes.

“Martin Truax,” Sonia said, finally. “The creator. He who giveth and taketh away.”

“What about him?”

“Chatter among freelancers like me is mostly speculation. Half of it’s idle, half of it’s strategic, designed to throw everybody off, make room for your own ideas, beat other homebrew types to the punch. But lately it’s been off-the-charts twitterbrained. Like, Martin’s gone rogue and even his own advisers don’t know what he’s up to, because he’s planning to spring Version 3.0 on everybody unannounced, wipe everything that came before. Logins reset across the board. Profiles erased. People are saying there won’t be any warning. No ramp-up. Just zap—he unveils the upgrade, and in the end nobody even cares that it’s this big ambush because the opportunities are unimaginably game changing.”