Rage rocked through him at the very thought of Vengerov. Tom tore his gaze from the screen and found himself looking at more of Vengerov’s work: the surveillance cameras, all directed at the crowd. His gaze drifted upward toward the drones hovering over them in the sky, scanning in images of the people in the crowd for future databases. He saw the massive wall of bulletproof, missileproof glass surrounding the steps up to the Capitol, all to protect those legislators put in office by voting machines and the caprice of the men behind those logos. Vengerov protected all those companies, maintained the security and the surveillance state that let them loom so large over the crowd.

When Heather signaled and hooked a neural wire between her interface node and the Capitol’s server, Tom’s consciousness filled with the buzzing of his neural processor and he jolted out of himself into the liberating formlessness of swapping signals, strings of zeros and ones, glowing electronic systems. . . .

Then with a rush, Tom soared into the ship Heather was steering. Her electronic sensors were focused on Medusa’s ship.

Go on, Heather thought at him. Go into her ship and damage it.

Tom found himself gazing at Medusa’s ship, soaring beneath the glowing neon array of skyboards, and a great certainty swelled in his chest that this time he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t hurt her again.

Tom, Heather urged him, why are you are sitting in my systems? Go after her.

Tom flashed for a moment to his distant body, ringed by the crowd. For a fleeting moment, he was behind Heather’s eyes, interfacing with her processor, seeing her legs crossed carelessly in front of her in the empty room near the Rotunda, the massive screen on the wall in front of her showing the expectant, proud faces of the most powerful men and women in the world, encircling their pretty little performers, Elliot and Svetlana. Tom saw Reuben Lloyd and Sigurdur Vitol, Joseph Vengerov and Pandita Rumpfa, Prince Abhalleman and the Roache brothers from Dominion Agra. . . .

His heart began to scorch his chest, seeing the masters of the world all in one place, and the full apparatus of the police state ready to protect them. They’d taken everything. Everything, and people simply had let them. People had meekly surrendered the world to them in hopes those CEOs would finally have enough, finally have reason to leave them be. But Tom knew better. Even if a Reuben Lloyd or a Joseph Vengerov possessed the entire rest of the Earth, and the solar system besides, they’d still begrudge Tom the ground directly under his feet, simply because it was his and not theirs. That’s the sort of people they were. There was never enough for them.