When the store grew silent again, she moved quickly down an aisle of toaster ovens, past a bin of cell phones, to a closet at the back of the store. Here she slid aside a second keypad. Jiri had absolutely not trusted her with his special inventory, but she’d snooped and discovered his password. She waited for the click and pulled open the heavy door with two hands.

A dim light in the back of the long closet illuminated two neat shelves of metal weapons: short, nondescript stunner batons like the one she’d snagged from Ivor; long, hollow disruptors that fit over your forearm and tapered to a point when you made a fist; L-shaped handguns with pre-Unison parts. She scanned the row of disruptors until she found the smallest. Its gray casing was crisscrossed with deep scratches, revealing the silver plating beneath.

You match Nelson, she thought, slipping her hand inside until the tube covered her forearm. She closed her fist, and the orange point sprang forward into firing position in front of her knuckles. She flicked open her hand, and the point slid back into its casing, hiding the entire weapon beneath her sleeve.

“You need a name,” she whispered. But nothing came to her.

Next to the shelves Jiri had stacked dusty boxes of bullets. She was working her way down the row of ancient ammunition when her shoe sent a metal object sliding across the floor. It hit the wall with an alarming clank. Cockroaches rearranged. She knelt and found a rectangular metal box the size and weight of the tattered dictionary Jiri had kept in the house. She shook it. The contents shifted with a feathery shuffle. She turned the box over in her hands but couldn’t find the locking mechanism in the dim light. And there were no seams in the metal—the box was welded shut. What had been so important to Jiri that he’d locked it away inside the weapons closet?

With the disruptor beneath her sleeve and the box in her hand, she left the closet, pushed the heavy door shut, and waited for the cockroaches to reposition themselves in the dark. Then she crept down the aisle, past the massage chair Jiri never let anyone buy because she loved it so much. At the door she took one last look at the shop, then opened it a crack to peer out at the street. No sign of the cops. They could be watching somewhere, unseen, but that was a chance she’d have to take for the rest of her life. She stepped outside and shut the door behind her.

Back in the dim space beneath the porch where she had left Nelson, Mistletoe ran a finger around every inch of the box, feeling for the tiniest imperfection in the metal casing. Nothing. There was only one thing to do. She clenched her fist, and the disruptor sprang from her sleeve, closing around her hand. She flicked aside the safety lock with her thumb. Vibrations jiggled her arm and numbed the back of her neck. She shrugged away the strange sensation and placed her thumb against the bottom of the slide panel—the lowest power level, barely a spark—and the vibrations faded to a distant quiver. She shut one eye, aimed at the box, and jerked her elbow back.