THE LAST MORTAL MAN
BOOK ONE OF THE DEATHLESS
SYNE MITCHELL

ROC
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First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, June 2006
10   987654321
Copyright © Syne Mitchell, 2006 All rights reserved
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For everyone who wants to live forever.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped make this book possible.  I must thank:
Editor, Liz Scheier, who kicked off this adventure by asking, "Have you ever considered writing a series?" She encouraged this book into shape and helped me weed out the occasional unwieldy goat metaphor.  Thank you for all your trouble and patience.
Ethan Allen, education manager at the University of Washington Center for Nanotechnology.  Thank you for the information and tour of your facilities.  I hope you can forgive the scientific extrapolations I made in the interest of story.
Leslie Howie, a friend and source of contacts in the science and writing fields.
Alyx Dellamonica, my diva of hardware procurement.  Buy her a drink at a con and perhaps she'll tell you the depths a technogeek like me will go for cool peripherals.
Copyeditor, Jan Mclnroy, for catching my bloopers and omissions.  Thank you for all your meticulous work.
Rachel Granfield, production editor, for shepherding the manuscript through the many twists and turns to publication.
Agent, Jennifer Jackson, for handling the money and contracts so I can spend more time writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Rachel Blackman, a reader, who recommended excellent resource books on nanotechnology.
Julie Kitzmiller, for a wicked fast critique when I needed an objective opinion in a hurry.
And, as always, eternal gratitude to my wonderfully supportive husband, Eric Nylund, and unreasonably patient little boy, Kai.  Without your love and understanding, I couldn't write.  Thank you.

        PART ONE Education of a Bodyguard
              
15 October 2034
T'm going to kill a man.  Tonight.  And die in the M-process.
  Murderers shouldn't have to take mass transit.  Alexa DuBois shifted in her tight sequined dress and glared at her accomplices.  Clay Tyrell wore a tuxedo, the left jacket pocket bulging with his bartender's apron.  His knee jiggled up and down in nervous spasms.  Justine Hansforth had forsaken her finishing-school training and was gnawing her cuticles like a dog worrying a bone.
  Rich white kids didn't know how to deal with pressure.
  Alexa turned her face to the window so she didn't have to look at them.  A heart-shaped caramel-colored face stared back at her from a riot of black ringlets.  Her full-lipped beauty was the one favor fate had thrown her way.  Everything else she'd had to earn.
  Outside the mag-lev train, a sleek silver acropolis rolled by, dotted with rolling lawns and gracefully manicured gardens.  When she'd lived in New Orleans, it had been a swamp, filled with industrial waste.
  Nano-biology, an artificial biology constructed by nanotechnology, had drained the coast, cleaned up the poisons, and revitalized southern Louisiana.  Lucius Sterling, CEO of Sterling Nanology, Inc., and patent
  
holder of nano-biology, was to be feted at a political ball tonight.
  If Alexa and her companions were successful, it would be his last.
  "You think anyone suspects?" Justine asked, rubbing her chin with her thumb like she was trying to remove a stain.
  Alexa could have slapped her for speaking aloud.  Barely eighteen years old, the peaches-and-cream blonde was a debutante who'd fallen for Clay's bad-boy looks and "power to the people" rhetoric.
  Alexa looked up and down the train car.  The other passengers were mesmerized by personal entertainment screens embedded in the seats in front of them.  But these days there were detectors everywhere.  Smart dust picked up everything: smog levels, temperature, even visual recognition of known criminals.  Comforting for ordinary citizens, trouble for their group.
  Alexa fought to keep her voice even.  Who knew if nano-scale microphones might even now be listening to the hard drumming of her heart? "Why? You plan on making an announcement?"
  "How's the dress?" Clay asked, looking casual except for the sweat beading his temples.  He was good-enough looking, with wavy brown hair gelled back from his forehead and a lean, strong build.
  Alexa slid her hands down along the skintight sequins, noticing the way the movement drew Clay's attention to her sleek curves.  Justine noticed, too, and folded her arms across her body, a frown puckering her face.
"Perfect."
  And it was.  Pard Holloway, a graduate student at the University of New Orleans, had taken an off-the-rack nano-biology dress, and tapped into the fabric's ability to custom-size itself to the consumer.  He'd created spots on the sleeve that, when touched in combination, would trick the fabric into compacting itself— and anything it made contact with—into a dense ball of Drexlerian gray goo.  That was Clay's plan.  Alexa had spent some long, sweaty nights seducing the nano-whiz into adding a few tricks of her own invention.  For her protection, she'd told him.
  Justine's glittering gown was a froth of organdy, even more resplendent than Alexa's, but she was just their ticket into the banquet, not a participant in the action.  Her father, Senator Hansforth, had allowed Justine to add a couple of her friends to the catering staff in exchange for Justine's attending and keeping up the illusion of a happy family.  Clay would tend bar, and Alexa would serve as a cocktail waitress.
  They were such babies.  At twenty-four, Alexa was only a few years older, but it felt like lifetimes of difference.  Clay claimed to have grown up poor, before the nano-biology boom made basic medical care and three squares a day every person's right.  But there was too much prep-school polish in his political speeches for Alexa to take his tales of poverty seriously.
  They'd met at the party of a mutual friend.  Half-past the drunk hour with the participants well on the way to stupor, Clay had held forth on the couch.
  "Fucking Lucius Sterling.  He's holding up evolution, keeping immortality for the rich." He waved his hand imperiously, issuing an imaginary edict.  "Let the middle class do all the dying."
  Justine sat on the arm of the couch, leaning toward Clay's glow.  "I hear the conversion to Deathless is expensive.  Ten million dollars, or more." She lowered her voice to a whisper.  "And my father says that afterward you're not human anymore, just a nano-biology copy of who you once were."
  Alexa had been on the way to the kitchen to get another whisky to dull the ache in her bones.  The doctors said she had only a matter of months, and hell
  
if she planned to go sober.  The name "Lucius Sterling" caught her attention, and she tarried in a nearby doorway.
  "Bullshit," Clay drawled, emphasis on the first syllable.  "If that were so, why would Sterling himself have gone through with it? He's just bleeding the economy, playing on rich people's desire to stay alive.  Look how cheap everything—food, housing, electronics—is now.  If he wanted to bring the price of conversion down, he could.  If something happened to him"—Clay snapped his fingers—"the next day Sterling Nanology would make conversion affordable for everyone."
  His words sent a thrill up Alexa's spine.  She'd lost so much family: to domestic violence, to cancer caused by pollutants in the groundwater, to foreign wars, to reckless accidents.  The DuBoises tended to die young.
  Now it was her turn.  An oncologist had told her that without a nano-level scrubbing of her cells, the aggressively metastasizing cancer would kill her.  Unfortunately, that procedure was nearly as expensive and costly as conversion itself.  It went way beyond what the free basic health care covered, and Alexa had no insurance or savings.  She was going to become another DuBois statistic.
  Until Clay's words sparked her imagination, Alexa's future consisted of a few months of morphine haze, followed by a purposeless death.
  "Yeah, right," said an East Indian guy wearing a University of New Orleans T-shirt that had seen better days.  His shoulders slumped like he'd spent too much time in front of a computer screen.  "Why wouldn't man number two be just as greedy?"
  Clay grinned as if delivering the punch line to a joke.  "Because man number two is Leonardo Fon-tesca.  Before Lucius got his venture-capitalist hands on him, Fontesca was an idealist.  Wrote about a world without death.  Matter of public record.  Read his dissertation."
"But Lucius is Deathless.  He's going to live forever," Alexa said from the doorway.  "There isn't going to be a tomorrow without him."
  Clay's eyes had flashed in the dim light, evaluating the ashy undertones of her face, the drink trembling in her hands.  Alexa realized Clay wasn't as drunk as she'd thought.
"Damn shame, that," he said and changed the topic.
  But later that evening, with the senator's daughter on his arm, Clay had sought out Alexa and a few others and continued their discussion in an underground coffeehouse with an excellent dust-filtration system.
  They'd talked through four rounds of lattes and a barista shift change, setting in motion the plan that carried them through to tonight.
  The mag-lev train pulsed with deceleration, bringing Alexa back to an uncomfortable awareness of the people around her.  She stood and pushed her way through the crowd.
  The terminal was four blocks from the hotel.  Even at that distance, Alexa saw the lights.  The Four Seasons was lit up like Broadway.
  Reporters clamored on the far side of a privacy rope, jostling with celebrity stalkers, the curious, and people desperate for immortality, hoping to plead their case to Lucius Sterling himself.
  Clay pulled Justine toward the back of the hotel, the servants' entrance.  "Come on.  It'll be at least an hour before the big guns arrive.  We've got to get ourselves security-checked and oriented."
  Alexa felt a spike of adrenaline at his words.  Security at the hotel would be tight.  She forced herself to exhale.  Had to stay calm for the sensors.  She slipped into the yogic breathing Clay had made them practice.  Nothing to worry about.  The scans weren't looking for the weapons they carried.  No one had ever imagined such weapons.
  As they passed through the security arch, Alexa closed her eyes.  She waited for alarms to sound.
  
  No reaction.  They passed through with a bleep and a green light.
  And why not? The tools of assassination she and Clay carried were currently nothing more than random molecules in sequins, harmlessly reflecting light.
  A woman with an electronic clipboard checked names.  Each person passed his or her hand into a device that read the identification chip inserted into the flesh between thumb and forefinger.  She waved Clay and Alexa through, pointing them toward the bar.  "Hurry up.  You're late.  You should have been here an hour ago for the setup.  But not you," she told Justine.  "You're guest, not staff.  Table eight, on your father's left.  You can get your friends hired, but you can't stand around distracting them."
  The debutante gathered up the bouffant layers of her skirt and made her way through the wide swinging doors that led to the dining room.  They all had roles to play.
  If she'd known the whole plan, Justine would have wet herself.  But Clay had played his mark well; he'd told Justine the action would be a political protest only, leaving out the suicidal attack.
  When they'd met in the coffee shop, it had taken Alexa only a few hours to realize the white boy was stone-cold crazy.  When Justine went to the bathroom, he'd grabbed Alexa's arm and looked in her eyes with a brightness that couldn't be explained away by the fifth of bourbon he'd consumed at the party.  "You know who I am, don't you?" He grinned.  "I can see that you do."
  Alexa had looked to the other two people sitting with them: the guy in the UNO shirt and a stoner.  The graduate student rolled his eyes behind Clay's back, but the stoner was a true believer, his face beaming with the secret.
  "God, my father, sent you to help me," Clay continued, tightening his grip.  "We're going to stop Sterling from holding humanity back from its destiny among the stars.  I must die again, to grant mankind eternal life, but not in some damn metaphorical way this time.  This time man's immortality will be fucking real."
  Justine emerged from the unisex bathroom, her face scrubbed wholesome clean, all traces of black lipstick gone.  Ready for the trip back to the sorority.
  Through clenched teeth Clay whispered, "Justine can't know.  She's a new soul.  She wasn't there last time.  Not like you .  .  .  Magdalene."
Alexa had nearly choked on her latte.
  As Justine snuggled up to her personal savior, Alexa had cut her eyes at Pard, the graduate student, wondering what he got out of this.
  It wasn't until later, in the sweaty confines of his off-campus apartment, that she understood.  Pard read her lines from Fontesca's PhD thesis, quoted the genius's dreams for humanity—which must have seemed the farthest fancies of science fiction at the time.  Clay was a deluded megalomaniac, but his hypothesis was correct: remove Lucius and Fontesca might just save the world.
  With a chill of superstition, Alexa wondered for the briefest moment if Clay was right about his destiny.  For the first time, her cancer seemed part of a grand design.  A chance meeting with idealistic terrorists, and the only thing missing from their plan was a woman with nothing to lose.
Someone like her.
  "Quit daydreaming," snapped the woman with the clipboard.  "You're already late." She handed Clay and Alexa earbuds.  "These transmit guests' orders to the kitchen.  I'll also use them to coordinate the banquet service and direct you."
  Alexa inserted her earbud, and it began an orientation speech about the proper way to greet and address guests, and other fine points of etiquette.  The Four Seasons prided itself on Old World glamour.  In an age when most up-scale restaurants provided the novelty of table-side meal generators, which synthesized any order a patron could dream up, and fought legal battles over recipe copyrights, the Four Seasons still employed human cooks and wait staff.
  Alexa smoothed her dress over her hips and was surprised to find her hands trembling.  Tonight everything would change.  Triumph or disaster, there was no going back.
A buzz rose from the front of the building.
  "Guests are arriving," the hostess announced over the earbuds.  "To stations."
  Alexa slinked out into the ballroom with the twenty other cocktail waitresses.  Each wore an identical skintight dress; only the colors varied.
  She saw Justine, smiling fatuously, her hand on the arm of her father, Senator Hansforth.  There was an unpleasant tightness to the girl's expression, and her eyes kept glancing at the kitchen doors.
  Alexa's gut knotted.  If anything spoiled tonight's precision timing, it would be Justine.  She was the weak link.
  Alexa caught her breath as she took in the banquet room.
  In honor of Sterling Nanology, Inc., the room was a nano-biology showplace.  Softly bioluminescent roses glowed blue-green in the centerpieces.  The master of ceremonies wore a dinner jacket that responded to his every motion by reconfiguring itself into a new style, whipping from Elizabethan doublet to skintight latex with amazing speed.
  Instead of names on place cards, the tablecloth projected tiny three-dimensional images of the guests, a live video of what they were currently doing—stepping out of limos, drinking at the bar, schmoozing at another table, all provided by the ambient smart dust video surveillance.
  Even the acoustics of the room had been altered.  Nano-scale speaker arrays canceled and amplified sound, so that although more than a hundred people were talking at once, each table was its own island of
  
sound, conversation clear without the usual hubbub of such events.  It was unnerving to move between tables, stepping through pockets of complete silence despite the laughing and chattering crowd.
  Alexa's gaze locked on the table at the front of the room.  Though the other tables were draped in burgundy silk, its tablecloth shone gold.  A pair of figures, in camouflage body armor that couldn't quite keep up with the flickering video-display place cards, hovered behind an empty chair, blinking in and out of view like prismatic wraiths.
  In the next chair sat Leonardo Fontesca, alone and probing the tablecloth with a pen computer.  He mumbled commands into its cap.  Before him, the tiny Fontesca flipped backward in time, retreating out of the ballroom, expanding his overcoat from a pocket, climbing into a limousine, driving away.
  "Sir," she asked Fontesca, "would you like something to drink?"
  "Absinthe," he replied without looking up.  "Or perhaps hemlock.  I'm feeling very Socratic tonight." He waved a hand dismissively above his head at the lights and the beautiful people.  "My work has exceeded even the generous expanses of modern good taste."
  "Er." Alexa was stymied.  She hadn't expected the man to order poison.  Was it a joke? "I don't think we have that in our liquor cabinet."
  He looked up with inhuman metallic-bronze eyes.  They glowed as if lit by an eternal fire, an odd note of beauty in an otherwise homely face.  Alexa had seen a documentary on the Deathless, but she had never seen one up close until now.  The gleam of those eyes prickled her arms into gooseflesh.  If she touched him, would his skin feel cold?
  She wondered if becoming immortal had changed his idealism.  His mind had been converted along with his body.  Was he even the same man? Their whole plan hinged on Fontesca's conscience.  Could they trust him?
  
  Fontesca returned Alexa's stare, pulling on his fleshy lower lip.  "You remind me of someone I once knew."
  Alexa forced herself to smile and play the cocktail waitress.  She posed, her hand on her hip.  "A girlfriend?"
  Fontesca frowned and peered closer.  "No.  Someone from my complex analysis class.  Sat two rows over, always smelled of gardenias.  But you're not her." He shook his head and started the video playing fast forward.  As the tiny Fontesca whipped through time, scurrying up the stairs, the real Fontesca sighed.  "Everyone reminds me of someone these days.  It's been decades—she's likely dead.  So many are."
  "But we'll put a stop to all that, won't we?" boomed a voice from behind Alexa.
  It was Lucius himself, close enough that she could reach out and touch him.  The wraithlike bodyguards at the table now numbered at least four, though they were hard to count through their camouflage.
  Alexa all but trembled with the excitement of finally being so near her target.  Terror and the desire to have it over warred inside her.  It was all she could do to smile and nod, praying the half-hidden bodyguards didn't sense anything amiss.
  An invisible hand drew back Lucius's chair and the big man sat down.
  And he was big, at least six-four, with the wide shoulders and lean hips of a linebacker.  From the ease with which he carried his bulk, she guessed it was his natural height, not a nano-biology modification.  His nose had been broken at some point in his past, giving his open face a streetwise flair.  He could have had that repaired during his conversion to Deathless.  Why hadn't he?
  "Stop flirting with the help," Lucius admonished Fontesca.  "She's only wangling for a bigger tip transfer." He snapped his fingers at Alexa.  "Scotch, neat." He winked at her.  "Something older than I am."
  
  Whatever work he'd had done to make an octogenarian look shy of forty, he hadn't taken it as far as Fontesca had.  He might be Deathless, but the warm brown eyes that met hers still looked human.  Judging by the gleam in them, she decided he'd helped himself to a few drinks on the ride over.  His face wasn't the pretty-boy handsome look that was all the rage in the nano-biology parlors.  His features were solid and his gaze full of self-confidence.  Combined with his powerful body—here was a man who could protect what was his.
  When his smile widened, Alexa realized that she'd been staring longer than was polite, and furthermore, he'd seen her sizing him up.
  "Scotch, neat," Alexa repeated tightly.  She was here to kill Lucius, not admire him.
  Clay had Lucius's drink ready when Alexa reached the bar.  "What do you think?" he asked Alexa.
  She squinted at the glass as if it had something to do with Clay's question.  "Looks good."
  Clay grinned celestially.  "Didn't I tell you this job would be perfect?"
  Their earbuds buzzed.  "Quit slacking.  Get those drinks on the floor."
  Alexa looked around but didn't see the hostess.  It was hard getting used to the new world order where everyone knew everyone's business.  How long until they could read your mind?
  Clay slipped a green glass onto the tray.  "For Fontesca."
  Alexa didn't ask which of the scientist's orders Clay had filled.  Fontesca was beyond the reach of poison.
  "Better hurry." He nodded at the chilled glasses, then his eyes locked with hers.  "You want to get back to the table before things heat up."
  When Alexa returned, Lucius was locked in conversation with a gorgeous full-lipped actress noted for her philanthropy.
"What I don't understand," said the actress, leaning

over his chair, "is why don't you just make everyone immortal?" She smiled and placed her palm on Luci-us's wrist.  "Starting with me, of course."
  "Honey, you already are immortal." He patted his lap for her to sit, but she just giggled and clutched his arm.
  Alexa snuck the glass into place, and Lucius snatched it up and gulped.  "The real reason why, dar-lin'," he told the actress, "is the world isn't ready.  One day we'll put the Grim Reaper out of business, but to support the trillions of people that would result, we need to build a different kind of planet.  Think cities miles high, solar collectors that scoop up most of the sun's output, the oceans colonized.  We're decades, perhaps centuries, away from that kind of progress."
  "Why not tell her the real reason?" Fontesca murmured.
  Alexa heard him only because she was at that moment leaning across to deposit his highball glass.
  Fontesca tapped his stylus against the table, and his tiny icon jittered between present and past, reaching for his drink and setting it down over and over like a corrupt video file.  He muttered, "Conversion doesn't work half the time and costs millions of dollars when it does."
  Lucius glared at him.  "Lot of shareholders here tonight," he said a bit too loudly.  He nodded at Alexa.  "And attentive wait staff."
  Fontesca took a sip of absinthe and watched the crowd, saying nothing more.
  "Oh, you'll get it done, sweetie," the actress gushed, chucking Lucius's chin.  "If anyone can change the world, it's you." She winked outrageously.  "I know it was you behind the shipments of food synthesizers to our Feed the World project in Mongolia.  Monte told me." The actress straightened.  "Oh, speak of the devil." She waved energetically across the room.  "I've got to go say hi." Kissing Lucius's forehead, she wiggled off.
"Another scotch?" Alexa asked.
Lucius  removed  a  handkerchief  from  an  inner pocket and wiped the lipstick away.  The white cloth immediately absorbed the stain and returned to its former pristine condition.  "After Angelica, scotch is mandatory."
  Alexa scooped up the empty glass.  "Was she right, about you donating food synthesizers?"
  The challenge in her tone made Lucius raise an eyebrow at her.  "You're not one of those boring Darwinists? I don't care how things were done in barbaric previous millennia.  If we can save even one—"
  Alexa stumbled back a step.  "No, not at all, sir." She flushed.  "I think it's wonderful."
  She whirled on her heel even as her earbud hissed.  "No conversations with guests.  Return to the bar for pickup."
  A philanthropic venture capitalist? It seemed an oxymoron, but she'd heard him describe his plans for the world—a Utopia worth building.  She'd taken Clay's descriptions of Lucius as a greedy capitalist as gospel and never looked further than the news headlines of Lucius's affairs with actresses and celebrities for indications of his character.  He might be all those things, but she'd heard the passion in his words when he spoke.  Perhaps he did want to make things better.
  And Clay expected Fontesca, with his morose predictions of doom and his glasses of poison, to save the world?
  Her step was uncertain, and she stumbled twice on her way back to the bar.
  Clay sloshed the second scotch onto the tray.  "What are you waiting for? This is taking way too long."
  It was her job to signal the attack.  The code phrase "I think you've had enough, Mr.  Sterling" transmitted over their earbuds would bring Clay out from behind the bar.  He'd be the distraction for the bodyguards, with his polemic rhetoric, while Alexa cringed against Lucius, getting close enough to reduce him to component molecules.
"I've got something sticky on my shoe." Alexa countered with a code phrase meaning that a hitch had sprung up.  "I'll work it off.  Just bear with me."
  "You'd better," Clay rumbled.  "I'd hate to deliver these myself.  I'm not as graceful as you.  Glasses might get broken."
  Sweat broke out on Alexa's brow.  If she didn't do her part and Clay had to improvise, innocent people might be hurt.  She hoisted the tray and strode off, feigning confidence she didn't feel.  She couldn't tell Clay the real problem—that she was starting to have doubts about their mission.
  Fontesca and Lucius had their heads together, surveying the other tables, when Alexa returned.
  "I used to think we could save mankind," said Fontesca.  "But look at this crowd.  The trivial uses they've put my life's work to: morphing jackets, video tracking.  Lab hours that could have found an end to birth defects or a way to clean up the nuclear waste at Hanford and Yucca Mountain.  But why bother?" He flicked the bioluminescent blooms, knocking loose a petal.  "We've got glowing flowers!" He subsided morosely, cupping his chin in his palm.  "Mankind isn't worth saving."
Alexa slowed her pace, listening closely.
  A voice out of nowhere: "It's a private conversation, miss." A strong, invisible hand gripped her upper arm.
  Alexa, whose nerves were already whipcord tight, shrieked.  The tray toppled and hundred-year-old scotch drenched Lucius and the bodyguard who had intercepted her.
  Alexa froze.  Her anonymity and any chance of staying close to Lucius Sterling were gone.
  "Return to your station.  Now!" hissed the hostess over Alexa's earbud.  The woman was already in motion, stomping across the distance from kitchen to Lucius's table as fast as her high heels could carry her.
Alexa dabbed at Lucius ineffectually with paper cocktail napkins that shredded and left him covered with lint.  "I'm so sorry, Mr.  Sterling."
  "Aw, Jeez," commented the cloaked guard.  "Lucius, I'm sorry."
  Lucius turned to the speaking patch of air.  "Taylor, decloak."
  The man appeared instantly.  His chest bristled with weapons: two automatic rifles, grenades, stun gun, and several knives.  But he would have been dangerous without them.  Standing six foot two, he was built like a martial artist, with well-defined muscles that moved fluidly.  "With all respect, sir.  She was in your strike zone, clearly spying—"
  "Do a circuit of the floor," Lucius interrupted.  "See if there are any other attractive ladies I need to be protected from."
  With the noise-canceling nanos in place, it took a moment for the crowd to notice what was going on, but elbow jab by elbow jab, attention turned toward the embarrassing scene.  Justine, halfway out of her chair, gaped openly at Alexa and the ruckus.  Senator Hansforth patted her arm, pulling her back into her seat.
  The hostess's face was scarlet when she reached Lucius's table.  She grabbed Alexa's arm, compressing the flesh.  "Back to your station.  Leave the earbud on the bar.  I'll have security escort you out." One more vicious squeeze.  "Mr.  Sterling's dry cleaning bill is coming out of your pay."
  Lucius stood and shook his jacket and pants.  "No worries." The liquid and lint sheeted off, leaving his clothes perfectly clean and dry.  He grinned at Alexa, and his big features were kindly.  "One of the benefits of owning a technology company is you get all the latest toys." Speaking to the hostess, he said, "Take it easy on the girl.  She's not the first to throw a drink at me—though most have better aim."
"You are very gracious," the hostess simpered.  She gave a short bow.  "We'll have your drink replaced immediately."
  The hostess frog-marched Alexa across the floor, keeping up a tirade about unqualified help and senators asking special favors and how it never, ever would happen again.
  Alexa didn't hear a word the woman said.  She was too busy trying to figure out how she would convince Clay to call off the attack.  She'd explain how heavily armed the guards were, tell him Fontesca had turned bitter since his college years, that Lucius was the one they had to save—
  Clay stepped out from behind the bar, carrying a tray: Lucius's replacement drink.  A purposeful grimace darkened his face.
  Alexa pulled free from the hostess and ran toward him.  "Clay, no!"
  Two security guards flanking the walls rushed forward and grabbed Alexa's arms, pulling her back.
  "I should have known you would betray me," Clay said in a conversational tone as he passed.  "Someone always does." He sidestepped Alexa's captors.
  "Stop him!" she screamed at the guards.  "He's going to kill Lucius Sterling!" She thrashed in their grip.  Her words disappeared into the dampening fields, and none of the guests even looked up.
  "Miss," said the guard on her right, half lifting her off the floor and giving her a shake, "you've been asked to leave."
  Clay was halfway across the ballroom.  Lucius, in conversation with Fontesca, had no idea that his destruction was bearing down on him.  The bodyguards flickered behind him.  All they saw was a waiter bringing a replacement drink and, in the distance, a clumsy waitress fighting two guards.
  Then Alexa saw the bodyguard who'd made her spill the drink.  Walking the perimeter, decloaked, with a sour expression on his face.
"Taylor!"
  She jammed her high heel down on the instep of the man to her right.  At the same time, she drove her fist into the other man's crotch.  Twisting free, she pelted after Clay.
  Taylor was suddenly in front of her.  She slammed up against his chest.
  "You have to stop that bartender! He's going to kill Lucius Sterling!" Her pulse pounded in her throat.
  Taylor looked where she pointed.  Clay's expression was serene, cheerful even.  He carried the drink reverently.
"Please!"
  Something in her voice must have convinced Taylor, for he vanished.  Moving inhumanly fast, he appeared in front of Clay, only a few paces from Lucius's table.  Through her earbud, Alexa heard his words.  "Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to return to the kitchen."
  Clay nodded and turned, then lost his footing and stumbled to his knees.  The tray fell, and Lucius's glass smashed into a thousand crystal shards.  Clay reached his hand out to the floor as if to steady himself.
  Because she knew what to look for, Alexa saw the black thread of nano-wire snake from Clay's cuff into the flooring, where it hooked into the hotel's power lines.
"Taylor, watch out!"
The ballroom lights flickered.
  Clay's other hand reached for his neckline.  He plucked a button from his collar and flicked it at Taylor.
  It hit the bodyguard's ankle.  Taylor gave an inhuman scream and clutched at his leg.  His foot disappeared.  Pard had reprogrammed the sizing nano-biology in the shirt to violently compact any mass it touched.  The lights dimmed as the nanos in the button drew power from the grid to push the atoms together.  The big man thrashed as his body and a portion of the floor were sucked into a dense gray marble, which dropped and cracked the hardwood flooring.
  The nano-biology working the sound buffers fell with the lights.  Shrieks filled the ballroom from those who had seen the attack.
  "Lucius Sterling," shouted Clay, rising from his knees, "you will no longer pervert God's plan." He took another step forward, strands of nano-wire trailing from his sleeves to the floor.
  A flash of light and a barrage of automated gunfire from Lucius's table panicked the crowd.  Chairs toppled as guests ran for the exits.  The noise was deafening.  The two mortal guards that had restrained Alexa huddled behind an overturned table.
  "Clay, stop!" Alexa shouted.  "You don't understand." She ran a few steps closer but was knocked aside by a trio of cocktail waitresses running back to the kitchen.
  In the eerie blue glow from the bioluminescent blooms on each table, Alexa saw Clay take two more steps, halving the distance between him and Lucius.
  Blood spread across the front of Clay's shirt, but he paid it no mind.  He'd come here to die.  His mouth twisted with hatred.  "Know me, Lucius Sterling.  I am God's wrath."
  Lucius toppled backward as unseen hands pulled him to the floor.  In the near-darkness Lucius's guards were invisible.
  Clay reached again to his neckline.  "Immortality is God's blessing for all mankind, not just the wealthy—" He hit the floor hard, as unseen guards slammed into him.  His head snapped back and struck the wood, a crack as sharp as lightning shattering a tree.
  A button spun in the air, catching the dim light and falling back toward the ground.  A man suddenly appeared on top of Clay, his camouflage suiting failing as his molecules crowded together.  His back arched, and he bellowed in agony.
  His comrade tried to pull him free, but succeeded only in getting caught in the effects.  Clay rolled free, laughing and spraying blood.  
  Soon the two men were gone.  Another heavy sphere dented the floor.
  Clay reached for his neckline once more and pulled his bow tie free.
  Alexa was already in motion, her heart pounding with the fear that she was too late.
  More nano-wires snaked into the ground.  Clay's shirt hummed as he drew more power.  Outside, the city lights of New Orleans went dark.
Clay spun the bow tie at Lucius's prone body.
  Alexa nearly tripped over Lucius as she fumbled with pressure points at her hip, then unfurled her skirt.
  The last of Lucius's bodyguards tried to snatch Clay's bow tie out of the air above Lucius, but succeeded only in adding to its mass.  The bow tie fell like a stone toward Lucius Sterling.
  Alexa pushed her hand through the skirt and, using its fabric to shield her from the bow tie's effects, snatched it out of the air.  For a second she was aware only of the sequined fabric in her hands, the impossible heaviness of the tie within its layers, and a wild joy that the improvements she'd seduced out of Pard had actually worked.
Then the tie began to suck in the fabric of her skirt.
  Alexa dropped the parcel and watched with horror as the floor was consumed.
  Clay cackled.  "You cannot escape God's will." He staggered backward and collapsed to his knees, coughing up a fresh gout of blood.  The crimson blossom on his chest was spreading, and his face was very pale.  He held up his hands cruciform, his face to the ceiling.  "Father, thy will be done."
  Lucius was scrambling away on hands and knees.  He held out a hand to Alexa to pull her out of the cavern opening up underneath them both.  "Come on!"
  They weren't going to make it.  Frantically, Alexa reached for the only weapon she had left.  She unbuttoned the mandarin collar of her bodice and the band of sequined trim pulled away.  Nano-wires dropped from her sleeves into the floor.  This was the weapon she'd brought to kill Lucius—and she had only seconds to throw it before it consumed her.
  Alexa's chest and arms heated as the nano-wire pulled power from the grid.  She flung the collar onto the collapsing mass of dress and bow tie, caught Luci-us's hand, and scrambled out of the hole.
  They ran, the ground giving way under them.  Behind them, the two nano-biology weapons warred, each trying to compress the other, drawing ever more power from the city of New Orleans.
  Cracks spread along the hardwood floor and splintered up the paneled walls.  A great rumble emerged as the hotel shifted on its foundation.
  Alexa's heart hammered in her chest in time with her feet.  She stumbled, kept aloft only by Lucius's massive hand.  Other bodies smashed against her in confusion, everyone running in a panic for the exit.  The sound of a thousand screaming voices deafened her.
  An explosion erupted from the crater at the center of the ballroom.  A flash of light, and sonic impact.  Gray droplets rained down, creating holes in whatever they touched: cloth, wood, flesh.
  Alexa's arm flared with pain and she looked in horror to a hole opening in her wrist.  She let go of Lucius and clutched her wounded arm to her chest.  She felt nauseated and unbalanced, as if falling into a great tunnel.
  Her knees cracked onto the wooden flooring.  Feet slammed into her shoulder and ribs as she went down under the panicked mob.  Something hard slammed into the side of her head, and then .  .  .  nothing.
  Alexa woke to an intoxicating absence of pain.  The background ache of her bones and all the other twinges of her cancer were gone.  It was the freedom of removing heavy shoes, the lightness of shedding a burden you'd forgotten you were carrying.  Half awake, she arched her back, reveling in the smooth play of muscle under skin.  She was naked, surrounded on all sides by soft, silken sheets.  The light was the early glow of dawn.
  Then she remembered: screams in the green-tinged darkness, nightmare images of Taylor's body being consumed by Clay's weapon, the press and smell of panicked bodies, the ballroom collapsing, her wrist, her skull being crushed—
  She jolted awake and sat up.  Her face hit a silken wall.  Frantic, she explored the space with her hands and found layers of glowing ivory silk in all directions, the size and shape of a coffin.  She tried to rise but was pressed on all sides, a caterpillar that couldn't break free.  She thrashed about, overwhelmed by claustrophobia.
"Am I in hell?"
  "Some might think so, darlin'," quipped a halfway familiar voice.  "But still they pay dearly to come here."
  Alexa stilled.  Her gaze darted around, but she couldn't see her companion through the fabric.  "Who are you?"
  The top of the cocoon peeled back, exposing her face and shoulders to fresh, cool air.  She took a deep, ragged breath.
  Lucius Sterling stared down at her.  "I think the more relevant question is who are youl"
Alexa pulled herself up so she could peer out.
  Fontesca stood a few paces away, gesturing in midair.  He looked like he was assembling an invisible puzzle.  The walls were covered with diagrams and tables made of memory paper.  As Alexa watched, the data in the charts updated.
She asked in wonder, "What is this place?"
"You are a guest of Sterling Nanology, Incorporated, in one of our experimental labs.  Though several law enforcement agencies, national and international, are also eager to be your host."
  Alexa's heart raced.  She was in Lucius's laboratory, miraculously alive and undamaged.  Did he know about her collusion with Clay?
"I—I saved you," Alexa offered.
  "Yes, you did," Lucius said.  "I'm an old man, and a jaded one, but it'll be a long time before I forget that night.  What I want to know is whyl"
  Alexa didn't know what to say.  If she told him she'd been part of the plan to assassinate him but had changed her mind, would he believe her? Even if he did, would that prevent him from taking revenge? Someone as powerful as Lucius Sterling could easily make a no-account girl from the bayou disappear.
  "Wouldn't you rather know how?" Alexa countered.
  Lucius tilted his head at Fontesca.  "Leo took apart your boyfriend's toys and got a pretty good idea of the mechanism.  A tricky hack, subverting the clothing's sizing capability into a weapon.  We've already released an update to the nano-biology genome to prevent this happening again."
  Alexa paled when he called Clay her boyfriend.  And Fontesca had already reverse-engineered Pard's work and created a patch.  How long had she been out?
"He's not my boyfriend."
  "Don't bullshit me," Lucius said, thumping the cocoon.  "We've got video of you and Clay Tyrell repeatedly going into a local dive together.  The Four Seasons admitted that you and Tyrell were hired only as a personal favor to Senator Hansforth's daughter.  We even found Tyrell's blog detailing his destiny as 'the returned son of God.' The only part that doesn't make sense is you."
  Lucius crouched beside the cocoon, his head level with Alexa's.  He met her gaze eye to eye.  "Why?"
He leaned over until their noses almost touched.  "You went there to kill me.  Why didn't you?"
  It was hard to look at him.  A lot of things that had made sense when she was in the coffeehouse with Clay now seemed like madness.  She'd planned to kill this man in front of her.  As much as she wanted to curl into a ball and hide, she owed him answers.  Her throat choked with shame, anger, fear of dying, and deeper things she couldn't name.  She opened her mouth to answer, but only sobbed.
  "Hey." Lucius's eyes softened.  "I know it wasn't my looks."
  Alexa sucked in a great whooping breath and tasted the salt of her upper lip.  "Clay—Clay told me you were holding the immortality technology hostage.  That with you gone, everyone could live forever.  I was so angry about dying, about everyone I loved dying.  I wanted to—" She wasn't making sense.  Words choked her.  There was too much to explain.  She cut to the heart of the matter.
  "You're not the man I thought you were," she whispered, tears still dripping off her chin.  "The world's better with you in it."
  A wry smile graced his blocky features.  "Now that's something I haven't heard in a great long while." He rocked back on his heels.
  He blew out a sigh that drained the amusement from his face.  "That doesn't change the fact that because of you and your friends, thirty-seven people died."
  Alexa pressed her knuckles into her eyes.  Images of darkness and screaming flooded her mind.  Justine's horror as she realized Clay's true intentions.
  "So, while I appreciate the vote of confidence in my right to walk the planet, you're going down.  But I'm not ungrateful.  I'll let you pick the agency: New Orleans police, Homeland Security, FBI, Department of Technological Terrorism—"
Alexa imagined a lifetime of institutional green walls, hard and pathetic women, the smells of bleach and urine.  "Can't you let me go? Please.  I've only got a few months to live.  I don't want to spend them in jail.  The attack wasn't my plan.  I tried to stop Clay.  I saved your life—doesn't that count for anything?"
  Lucius pursed his lips.  "I'm not sure you get credit if the terrorist attack you stop is your own.  But don't worry, sweets.  As a parting gift, Fontesca took care of your wayward cells when he fixed us up after the attack.  You'll be healthy enough for trial and the many decades of prison life that await you."
  Fresh tears rolled down Alexa's cheeks.  He was right.  She deserved to pay for the lives lost in the attack.  But to be locked up—for the rest of her natural life? She couldn't bear it.
"Please, isn't there another way?"
  Lucius stared at her for a long moment.  His brassy eyes were cold and inhuman.
  "People are dead, including four good men who died protecting me.  You think I can let one of the terrorists go because she bats her eyes at me and has a sudden change of heart?" He shook his head in disgust.  "I owe them better than that."
  "Locking me away won't bring them back." Alexa crawled out through the opening over her head.  "I believed Clay's lies.  Thought I was doing the right thing.  I was stupid, not evil.  Please.  Let me help.  There must be something I can do." Alexa pushed herself up on her arms, wriggled free, and fell naked onto the floor.  "Please.  Give me a week.  I'll tell you everything I know about Clay's plan, the weapons.  I'm no scientist, but I dated the guy who was.  I know things.  Things Fontesca may have missed."
  Lucius scanned her from head to toe, then plucked a robe off the wall and tossed it to her.
  Alexa wrapped the cream-colored cotton around her.  "One week." She cinched the tie tight.  "I didn't have to stop Clay." She lifted her chin.  "I could have run."
Lucius barked a laugh.  "You've got balls." He held up his forefinger.  "One week.  Saving my life buys you that much.  One week to tell Fontesca and my head of security everything you know about Tyrell's operation."
Alexa smiled with relief.
  "But don't get me wrong.  After the week is up, away you go to jail." His eyes skimmed her body.  "You're cute, but not 'defy Homeland Security' cute.  And don't think about escape.  My Maui estate is drenched in smart dust.  You'd only embarrass yourself."
  "I'm an obsessed idiot," Lucius muttered to himself.  Thirty feet below his balcony, Alexa swam in a glittering blue-tiled pool.  Her golden tan skin glistened when she broke the surface, rolled, and floated on her back.
  She wasn't as pretty as Angelica or as curvy as the pop singer he'd dated last week.  Alexa's body was tomboy lean, with a casual athleticism that reminded him of the surf girls who skimmed in and out of the waves on Ho'okipa Beach.
  Not glamour-beautiful, but easy on the eyes.  But it wasn't the skimpy bikini that kept him spying on her.  It was her words: "The world's better with you in it."
  It'd been years since anything had so surprised and touched him.  People flattered him, begged him, cajoled him, cursed him, fought him, slandered him, and every so often tried to kill him.
  It had been a very long time since anyone approved of him.
  Alexa pivoted and dove as gracefully as a cormorant.  She flew underwater with her arms stretched wide, reveling in the resistance and freedom of the water.
  "Half right," Fontesca commented as he stepped onto the wraparound balcony.
  Which meant Fontesca was calling him either obsessed or an idiot.  "Which half?"
  "Exactly," Fontesca said with one of those inward smirks that meant he thought he was being clever.
  Lucius ignored it.  Let Leo have his petty slights.  Sterling Nanology, Inc., held all the patents on his genius.  Lucius owned Leo's lifework; he could afford to be magnanimous.  "What's the latest on the trial?"
  "Clay Tyrell survived restoration.  His family financed nano-biology medical repairs.  Word is that he will enter an insanity plea and opt for neural restructuring."
  "Damn." Lucius rubbed his temple, where once he'd gotten tension headaches.  Now that he was Deathless, the motion was just a remembered tic.  "I wanted him to pay.  For Taylor and the others."
  "The medical bills and legal fees will bankrupt his family.  Isn't that punishment enough?"
Lucius shook his head.  "Just more victims."
  "If he truly was suffering a paranoid delusion, one that almost led him to his death, isn't Tyrell himself a victim?"
  "There's got to be a bad guy, Leo.  Thirty-seven people didn't die because of an act of God.  What about the grad student? The one who built the weapons?"
"Gone.  No one can locate him."
  "A quarter of the world is covered with nano-biology sensors and we can't find a friggin' grad student?"
  "Authorities suspect he was recruited into a terrorist underground.  They might have the resources to hide him."
"So New Orleans was what, a job interview?"
Leo shrugged.
  "Anyone else? My secretary tells me I'm getting hundreds of e-mails from the families, asking me to help them find justice.  They're not going to be happy until someone goes to jail."
  Leo shaded his eyes from the punishing Maui sun and watched Alexa pull herself out of the pool and recline in a lounge chair.
*       *       *

  Alexa's brain felt suctioned dry.  Fontesca had spent the past six hours questioning her about every minute detail of her meetings with Clayton Tyrell.  He would ask the same question five different ways, taking her over the same territory backward and forward.  Every detail, down to what kind of coffee Clay ordered and how he drank it.  She told him about her times with Pard, and he made her describe everything—which she did, until he was flushed and sweating.
God, she needed a swim.
  It was the only time Alexa could forget she was just days away from a lifetime of incarceration.  The warm water lapped her body like amniotic fluid.  In it she felt safe, weightless, eternal.
  She returned to her poolside guest cottage for iced-tea lemonade.  The room was small but amazing.  It didn't need space; anything she required was generated and recycled on the spot.
  In one corner was a food generator.  Alexa had tested its recipe bank with everything from blueberry-flavored marshmallows to lobster thermidor, and she hadn't yet found anything it couldn't manufacture in glorious flavor.  There was no closet, just a clothes hook containing a single robe.  The first night there had been a note on it: "Don't get any ideas.—L."
  The robe changed shape and texture according to her whim.  She could tell the garment what she wanted from it, down to the smallest detail, or simply state her purpose and let it select a flattering style and color.  The first time she wanted to swim, it had come up with the leopard-spotted bikini that hugged her curves.
  The furnishings were likewise configurable.  The leather couch converted into a luxurious four-poster at night.
  "News screen," Alexa told the room.  "Search: attack on Lucius Sterling, New Orleans.  Sort: new."
  Part of the wall morphed into a flat-screen TV and displayed a list of video clips and feeds.  Coverage of the attack was waning, other catastrophes taking precedence: an earthquake in Mexico had overwhelmed the earth-stabilizers and resulted in thousands of dollars' worth of property damage and one broken ankle; immortality protestors outside a conversion clinic got into a brawl when the half advocating for cheaper conversion to Deathless realized the other half wanted to outlaw conversion as murder, claiming that the original person was destroyed in the process.
  There were only three new clips about the assassination attempt.  Clay was pleading insanity and Pard was still missing.  They'd captured the stoner who'd been at the coffee shop, but he'd claimed to have been stoned the whole time, that he always sat at that booth, and had welcomed the strangers without having any idea what they planned night after night.  An unlikely story borne out by the immense levels of THC in his blood and fatty tissue.  Justine wasn't mentioned in any of the stories about the attack, though a second search on "Senator Hansforth's daughter" returned a listing in this week's lineup for the Luna Open off-world golf tournament.
  Alexa's own name returned op-ed pieces about why Lucius would protect one of New Orleans's assassins.  Respectable papers decried his abuse of power, stating that he should hand her over to the proper authorities.  Tabloids claimed either that she was undergoing an alien autopsy or that she was currently his love slave; one especially foul publication implied both.
  The families had posted v-blogs showing weeping survivors talking about the attack and calling for Clay's and Alexa's blood.
In short, nothing she hadn't seen before.
  She itched with anxiety.  Lucius was going to turn her over in two days, and with Clay undergoing treatment and Pard missing, she would be the only target for the justice system to satisfy the families.
  Escape was impossible.  The first day, Lucius's head of security had shown her the accumulated smart dust data that tracked every aspect of her existence on the island: location, temperature, sound, velocity, heart rhythm, even her seent.
"So if I fart, you know it," she'd quipped.
"Before you do" was his steady reply.
  She'd thought her life was over, that she could die doing one right thing.  But like every other scheme, it fell to shit and lies.  Now she was cured, likely to live for decades—in jail—for a cause that had been nothing more than a madman's paranoia.
  A box of tissues emerged from the chair near her elbow.  She grabbed one and wiped her face.  Maybe God knew what he was doing when he made the Du-Boises die young.  Perhaps they were just too stupid to live.
  This week in paradise was a mistake.  She should have begged Lucius to take her straight to jail.  She'd never known luxury and ease.  Having finally experienced the good life, she knew jail would be infinitely worse.  She tossed her crumpled tissue into the corner, where it sank into the floor.
  She wondered if Lucius had thought of that when he allowed her to stay.
  One thing a hard life had taught her was that feeling sorry for yourself rarely made things better.  And if paradise wouldn't last, she would grab as much pleasure as she could before it was gone forever.
  Alexa pushed herself upright.  And right now, happiness meant one thing.
  "Swimsuit." The batik dress she'd worn for Fontes-ca's daily interview split apart, snapping over her body like cut Lycra, and reformed itself into the perfect swimsuit.  It fit and flattered her in ways that seemed impossible for so little cloth.
  She checked herself out in the full-length mirror that appeared with any change of clothes.  She was doomed, but she looked good, and that gave her a little lift.
Maybe, she lied to herself, she could make Lucius fall in lust with her so she wouldn't have to go to jail.  There were worse things than being a trillionaire's love slave.
  But even that fatuous hope was dashed when she reached poolside.  Five built men were working out on the lawn, sparring and doing push-ups.  Lucius watched them avidly.  Just her luck.  All the reports of his dating actresses must have been a smoke screen.
  "Hey, Lu," Alexa said, setting her drink on a round glass table.  "I like your taste in men.  Can you spare me one?"
  Lucius gave her a hostile look.  "They aren't for play.  I'm interviewing bodyguards.  Short a few, if you'll recall."
  Alexa blew out a breath.  Definitely going to jail.  She dove into the water and swam a few laps.  Then she propped her elbows on the side of the pool and watched the men work out.  Colors varied, but they were all cut from the same mold, six feet plus and at least two hundred and fifty pounds, none of it fat.  They jabbed, kicked, and blocked like well-oiled machines.
  Lucius observed them at it, taking notes on a sheet of memory paper with a stylus.
  An idea came to Alexa.  Wild, impossible, and utterly right.
"Bit obvious, don't you think?" she said.
"What?" Lucius glared down at her.
  "These guys.  No one's going to mistake them for your driver."
  Lucius squatted next to her.  "That's the point.  No one's going to start anything with these guys at my back.  At least, no one sane."
  Alexa pursed her lips angrily, but let the comment go.  "Yeah, but that's also a problem.  These guys, they've been threatened what, once, in their entire lives?"
  A masculine chuckle from the man doing one-handed push-ups in the grass.
  "You need someone who's scared all the time, who sees the threat in every situation.  You know, like a pretty girl who survived New Orleans's slums, virtue intact."
Lucius grinned nastily.  "Know anyone like that?"
  Alexa splashed at him.  "Hey, I saved your life once already.  I'm ahead of these guys."
  Lucius stood.  "Doesn't count.  Keep swimming.  You look nice in that bikini."
  Alexa rolled over in the water, giving him the full view.  "Another reason to hire me." Then she dove and kicked to the far side of the pool.
  As she went under she heard the man doing pushups ask, "Who's she?"
  "Just someone who tried to kill me," Lucius quipped.  "Don't pay her any mind."
  The female assassin was beautiful.  Not the demanding glamour of the stars Lucius brought to Maui, the physical perfection that mesmerized and made you feel ashamed for staring.  No, Alexa's beauty was the comforting, wholesome beauty of a young wild animal, as warming as the scent of cinnamon.
  During their last session, Leonardo had counted seven distinct colors in the irises of her golden-green eyes, and he never felt shame once.  She was neither embarrassed by his attention—as he would have been—nor gratified, as were Lucius's starlets.  Her indifference made her easy to be with.  Like the woman from his complex analysis class.
  Alexa wasn't educated, but she was smart.  He saw that in the animation of her face, the way she answered some questions and, more important, evaded others.  Like now.
  Alexa reached across the table and picked up Leonardo's hand proprietarily, as if it were a candy dish put out for her benefit.  She turned it this way and that, gave it a little squeeze that sent his heart racing.
"So, your conversion to Deathless, did it hurt?"
"I believe I am the one asking the questions.  You are here to answer."
"Aw, Leo, don't be that way.  We've been through everything, what, a hundred times? You know what happened better than I do at this point.  I've got only a couple days left.  Then I go to jail for the rest of my life.  I'll probably never see another Deathless again.  Can't I ask one measly question?"
Leonardo pulled his hand back from her grasp and wiped it on his pants.  "Yes.  It hurts."
"Then why'd you do it? I mean you could have gone on for years just doing nano-biology repairs—"
Leonardo winced and held up his hand.  "Please.  Don't use that term.  All biology uses nano-scale processes.  The correct term is 'nanotech-engineered artificial biology.' Half the public doesn't even realize the biology I designed uses a completely different set of nucleotides."
Alexa stared at him blankly for a second.
O”kay.  But why did you convert? I mean, why not	 just fix what God gave you? And what happened to	 the original you? Are you the same guy, or some kind of Frankenstein copy?"
"Technically, you have now asked four questions."	 Alexa cocked her head and grinned at him.  "Come	 on, Leo, don't be like that." Her knee knocked his	 under the table.  "I told you everything, even about	 that time I poured warm honey all over Pard.  Strictly	 speaking, that wasn't relevant to the investigation, was it?"
Leonardo remembered that conversation and felt a	 stiffening in his crotch.  He shifted in his seat.  He knew	 she was manipulating him.  He just didn't care.	  He'd burned through all the relevant questions in	 the first eight-hour session, then pursued every detail over the following two days.  Since then, their meetings had just been an excuse to spend time in a room with her.
"I had a brain-degenerative disease, one that did not respond well to repair.  The question as to whether I would be the same man after conversion was, in my case, irrelevant.  I was already not the man I had once been."
  Leonardo looked past Alexa at the wall.  His face felt paralyzed with the effort not to show emotion.  The memory of not being able to marshal his thoughts, of slowly losing his brilliance—the one thing that made life bearable—of pissing himself because he could no longer control his bowel functions—it didn't bear thinking about.
"Wow.  I had no idea.  That wasn't in the news."
  "It was not something Lucius wanted known.  The stock price might have suffered.  And Lucius excels at controlling perception."
  "Okay, but say you hadn't been sick." Alexa leaned forward, elbows on the table.  "Would you have still done it? Would you let your mother be converted?"
"My mother is dead."
  "Come on, Leo." Alexa drummed her fingers on the table.  "You know what I'm asking.  Is conversion murder?"
  "Think of it like this: every day of your life, some of your cells die and are replaced by others.  In time, every cell in your body is replaced.  Is the old you dead? Did the person you used to be cease to exist? If so, when? Conversion is just an improvement of a process that is already happening."
Alexa chewed on a cuticle.
  Leonardo knew this wasn't an idle course of inquiry.  She was too involved in his answers.  "Why are you asking me this?"
  She looked up and stared at him thoughtfully, weighing some decision.  "I don't want to go to jail, Leo.  Will you help me?"
  Her appeal flustered him.  "You can't escape from the island—even if I was willing, there's too much surveil—"
  Alexa's hand on his wrist stopped him.  "Not that way.  By getting Lucius to hire me."
  Leonardo swallowed.  He was afraid of what she might be proposing.  Reluctantly he slid his glance along her body.  "As what?"
  Alexa lifted her chin to a stubborn height.  "His bodyguard."
  A bubble of laughter and relief burst from Leonardo.  Thank God.  She was only joking.
  Alexa didn't laugh.  "If I was converted, I'd be nearly invulnerable.  You could ramp up my strength and reflexes.  Build weapons into my body—guns or blades.  Something"—her hands fluttered in the air— "I don't know, unexpected."
Leonardo blinked.  "You're serious?"
"Deadly."
  He pushed away from the table and stared at her torso.  "How much do you weigh?"
  "Being small is an advantage.  No one would think I was anything other than eye candy—until I struck."
  Leonardo raised an eyebrow.  "And your being party to a past assassination attempt on Lucius Sterling would only add to the surprise."
  Alexa folded her arms over her chest, the golden tan of her skin set off by the mottled blue batik of her dress.  Her face scrunched with rejection.  "Don't mock me."
  Her hunched shoulders made him sad.  Leonardo had been teased often growing up, for being too tall, too ugly, for telling jokes no one else got.  His thesis on nanotech-controlled artificial biology had been refused by his advisors at Caltech as too outlandish.  Physical Review returned his articles.
  Rejection was an emotion that resonated in Leonardo Fontesca.
  "I apologize.  It's just that there are so many reasons your plan is impractical." He ticked them off on his fingers.  "Your size, criminal history, presumable lack of martial arts training, the enormous cost of conversion.  Half the modifications you describe are post-human and outlawed in nearly every nation on Earth."
"I can't go to jail.  It'd kill me."
  Fontesca blew out a breath.  He didn't want to say what he was about to, but it was her best chance.  "There are other ways to convince Lucius to have the charges against you dropped.  He has a weakness for beautiful, young—"
  "I'm no whore, Leo." She pushed away from the table and strode across the room to the door.  Looking back over her shoulder: "Even if I was, no one fucks the same whore forever.  But everyone always wants to be safe."
  "She wants to work for you," Leo said, fumbling his fingers into knots as he hovered behind Lucius's desk.  "She mentioned it again in today's session."
  "Don't need a mermaid bodyguard," Lucius grumbled, sorting through the R&D proposals Leo had dropped off.  The memory paper scrolled with miracles: a cure for all known birth defects; cheap, environmentally friendly housing; solar panels with ninety-eight percent efficiency.  Basically, a blueprint for a Utopia.
Lucius grinned.  People paid a lot for Utopias.
  "She makes some interesting points," Leo continued, "about being an unexpected weapon, like a last-chance derringer."
  Lucius looked up.  Leo was quoting her.  He would never have come up with that metaphor.  Lucius was willing to bet Leo didn't even know what a derringer was.
  Leo talked faster under Lucius's gaze.  "With a few new physical modifications I could design—"
  "No." Lucius tapped the memory paper proposals.  "This is the mission.  Miss DuBois is a temporary houseguest who is leaving tomorrow." He waved his hand dismissively.  "Right now I need to check in with the subsidiaries."
  Leo slunk out of the room, easing the door shut behind him.
  Lucius shook his head.  He did not need his pet Nobel laureate skulking around with a schoolboy crush.  The sooner Alexa left, the better.
  He leaned forward and slid his hands along his koa-wood desk, unlocking his terminal.  Nano-scale projectors embedded in the grain of the wood cast a virtual screen that hovered in midair.
  Senator Hansforth burst in on Lucius as soon as he connected to the mainland, his florid red face dominating the virtual screen.  Lucius scowled at the image.  How had the senator gotten past his blocking software?
  "This is obstruction of justice, Sterling.  Last I checked, Maui was still part of the United States and still subject to federal law.  You can't harbor a fugitive."
  Lucius scrubbed his hand over his face.  "Don't believe everything you read in the tabloids, Senator.  You, of all people, should know that."
  Hansforth did not respond to Lucius's gibe.  A story had run last fall, claiming the senator's chauffeur was fired because she was carrying the senator's baby.  Hansforth's lips tightened.  "I always verify my sources." His face disappeared behind a new image— that of Alexa leaning half out of the pool, bikini-clad breasts propped on her folded arms, smiling up at Lucius.
  The angle was wrong for a satellite photo.  It had to have come from Lucius's own security system.  His head of security would find and fix that leak by morning, or he'd have the man's balls.
  "// that image were genuine," Lucius said cautiously, "it'd be an invasion of my privacy."
  Hansforth blinked back into the foreground.  "That's rich, from the man whose technologies made privacy a thing of the past.  Don't cross me on this, Sterling.  That woman and her cohorts threatened Justine, coerced her into helping them with their plans, almost got us all killed.  She belongs in custody."
  
  "How is your little girl, Senator? Didn't I see that she was participating in the Luna Open golf tournament? My, doesn't her being on the moon make it difficult for authorities to question her about her part in the plot against my life?" Lucius leaned back in his chair and spread his hands.  "I mean, with the unreliable communications and lack of extradition agreements."
"Don't threaten me, Lucius.  I can bury you—"
  "Senator, I think you've miscalculated our relative worth to the world." Lucius pointed at the screen.  "You are one senator out of fifty, for a waning superpower, with a maximum term of eight years." Lucius pointed at his own chest.  "I am the CEO of the international company that holds the patents on nano-biology, the technology that's driving the future.  I can even offer immortality for those willing to take the leap.  Oh yes, and as the majority stockholder I have tenure for life."
  "None of that makes you above the law.  With these images, I can have you arrested."
  "The woman in that photo bears a striking resemblance to a woman who saved my life in New Orleans.  At an event where I believe—" Lucius tapped his finger to his lips in mock thought.  "Yes, where your daughter, coconspirator that she was, did absolutely nothing—"
  "Now wait a damn minute, Sterling! Justine had no idea—"
  "Now that we agree on." Lucius's blood was pumping.  He had the adrenaline high that came right before he smashed a competitor into the ground.  "Is it possible that your witless offspring mistook the actions of my undercover bodyguard—the one who infiltrated your daughter's terrorist cell—"
"My daughter is no terror—"
"—to sabotage their plans and save my life?"
  The red-faced senator stopped in midprotest and gaped, taking in this new view of events.
  
  Lucius took advantage of the pause to tap the surface of his desk and shut down the satellite connection.  He grinned, liking the roundness of his lie.  A few manufactured facts, past-dated employment records, and it would be a falsehood he could push through the State Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, and anyone else the senator might throw at him.
  He imagined the senator's face when he walked into the next fund-raiser with Alexa on his arm.  A wide grin creased his cheeks.  Alexa immortal and free, while Justine moldered in exile on the moon.  It'd be fun, for a few months at least.  Then he could sell her services to someone else.
Lucius leaned back, hands laced behind his head.
Damn.  I just bought myself a mermaid bodyguard.
  Alexa woke before dawn her last day on the island.  She couldn't sleep.  In less than twenty-four hours she would be on a plane, heading back to the mainland, and jail.  There'd be no bail for her crimes, no last walk around New Orleans, the city she loved best in the world.  It was gone to her forever.
  She slipped on the robe.  "Black, long pants and sleeves.  Mask and hood.  Skintight." Stretched thin to cover her body, the fabric was as light as silk.  "Camouflage," Alexa amended, hoping for the shifting invisibility that Lucius's guards had displayed at the banquet.  All she got was a mottled pattern of black, purple, and gray to match the twilight outside.
  She walked softly down the path to the pool, passed it, and kept going.  Her skin prickled, imagining the sensors that were even now recording her motion and her body temperature.  She kept her pace measured, all but muttering aloud, "Just a midnight stroll.  Nothing to see here."
  She prayed that the time it took the sensors' information to trickle up to the security staff would be enough for her to reach the ocean.
All week she'd been preparing, swimming laps until her body felt as if it had been pummeled by hammers, then languidly, cheerfully, swimming the next day, and the next, building up her stamina.
  Just because everyone told her escape was impossible didn't mean she couldn't try.
  There was another island, Molokai, only a few miles off the coast.  And between Lucius's harbor and that island pleasure boats anchored, enjoying the reef.  If she could reach one of those, she could plead for help or, if necessary, steal the boat.
  The lights of Lucius's mansion were off, save for the tiny strips that illuminated stairs and other hazards.  Alexa paused at the head of the path to the beach.  She listened for pursuit.
  A rustle in the landscaped bushes made her jump.  Then a croak.  It was only a frog.
  She crept down the winding path.  She startled at every breeze, every crunch of sand against rock.  She expected floodlights to blind her at any moment.
  The waves pounded into the moonlit sand with a relentless roar.  The water was cool against her bare feet.
  She gave one last glance at the bluff above her, wary of the pursuit that hadn't come.  Guess nano-biology sensors weren't all they were cracked up to be.  She let out the breath she'd been holding and ran toward the breaking waves, hands raised above her head, to dive into the foam.
  A pinpoint of flame illuminated the rock wall to her left.  Lucius sprawled in a lawn chair that had been hidden in the bluffs shadow.  He touched the match to a cigar.
"Got to say, I like your other swimsuit better."
  Alexa skidded to a halt, dropped her arms, and looked around.  As far as she could see, they were alone on the beach.  "You going to haul me in yourself?"
  Lucius took a long drag and sighed with pleasure.  "No.  I'm here to make you a business proposition."
He pointed with the cigar at the water.  "Unless you'd prefer to take your chances with the sharks and patrol boats."
  Alexa planted her hands on her hips.  "What kind of proposition?"
  Another long pull on the cigar.  "Tell me why you want to be my bodyguard.  It's a strange ambition for a young lady, to put herself in harm's way."
  He was toying with her.  He couldn't be serious.  "I'd be good at it.  And it's a way to get converted, something I could never afford in a million years.  All my life I've been fighting something or another.  Seems like the only talent I've got."
  Lucius studied her face like the secrets of the ages might be writ there.
  "Uh-huh." He sucked on his cigar.  He blew three perfect smoke rings.  "Now tell me the real reason."
  Alexa scrunched her face with disgust.  "Fuck you." She stomped up the beach toward the mansion.  "You caught me, fair enough.  But don't play me like some fucking mouse."
  Lucius jumped out of the beach chair and grabbed her upper arm.  His fingers were warm through the thin fabric.  The cigar glowed where it had fallen in the sand.
  "Wait." His face was blurry in the moonlight, and he looked faintly surprised.  "You are little, aren't you? I thought you were taller."
  Alexa pulled her arm free.  "I've got a tall personality." She glared at him, still feeling his fingers where they'd encircled her flesh.
  "I want to make you a bodyguard," he said in a placating tone.  "But if you're going to be in charge of my welfare, I need to know your motivations.  The real ones, not the speech you've spent the last week preparing."
  Alexa clenched her hands into fists, letting the bite of her nails clear her mind.  "Because." Tears prickled in her eyes, which only pissed her off more.  She dug her toes into the sand, grinding them into the wet grit.  She'd never been good at explaining, and now what she said would mean the difference between working for the world's richest man and spending the rest of her life in jail.  Her throat felt swollen shut.
An awkward silence stretched along the beach.
  "Why?" Lucius's words were so gentle, and there was sympathy in his not-quite-human eyes.  Anger, disgust, she could have stood against, but not kindness.  There hadn't been enough of it in her childhood for her to learn how.
  "Because I fucked up, okay?" Alexa screamed.  Her words were swallowed by the wind and the breaking surf.  "People died—because I didn't turn Clay in sooner, because I didn't stop him.  If I go to jail, I can't ever make things right." Alexa clawed her hands through her hair.  "I can't give those people back their lives, but I can save someone else.  I owe the world thirty-seven lives, and a DuBois always pays her debts."
  "Huh." Lucius bent and retrieved his cigar.  Tapped the sand from it.
  The suspense was crushing her.  "That a good enough reason?"
  He took a sip of smoke and considered her while he blew it out.  "That'll do."
"You'll pay for my conversion?"
  Lucius looked her up and down.  "That depends.  It's a ten-million-dollar process.  A bit much to spend on a whim, even for me."
"But your guards, they were all—"
  "An elite fighting force in charge of my personal protection.  And each of them signed a contract for fifty years' indentured service in exchange for becoming Deathless."
  Fifty years.  She was only twenty-four.  Fifty years was more than twice as long as she'd been alive.  Alexa looked at the moonlit waves, trying to imagine the person she'd be at seventy-four.
  
  With current medical treatment, she would be a youthful middle age, with another seventy years of life expectancy.  But what kind of life would she have rotting in jail?
  Or, for a mere fifty years of service, she could live for centuries, millennia maybe.  Assuming, of course, that she survived her employment.  She looked up at the stars, feeling their immense age and distance.  They were an overturned bowl of diamonds, stretching to infinity.
Offers like this came along only once in a lifetime.
"All right.  Fifty years."
  Lucius smiled a predatory smile.  "No, sweets, that was their deal.  Not yours.  You owe the world thirty-seven lives? Well, you owe me all the bodyguards' lost years of service."
  A cold wave passed through Alexa.  "Two—two hundred years?"
  He shrugged and waved the cigar over his head.  "Actually two hundred and thirty-four, including your fifty years and subtracting their time served." He leaned forward, smelling of tobacco and bourbon.  "I'm not asking for more than my due."
  Alexa rocked back on her heels, wishing she could run, or faint, or wake up from this parody of life.  Two hundred and thirty-four years.  Was he insane? She wanted the job, wanted the glamour and the immortality, but what he asked for in return was a kind of slavery.
  His eyes locked on hers.  The smell of his cigar made her dizzy and nauseous.  "We got a deal?" Lucius extended his hand.
  She took his hand.  It was like grasping a catcher's mitt—too big to encircle—but surprisingly warm.  It was a hand that hadn't done manual labor for a long, long time.  The muscles beneath remembered work, but the skin above had grown soft.
  "Yes," Alexa whispered.  But whether she spoke to Lucius or to the stars wheeling above, she couldn't say.
  
  Fontesca didn't know whether to weep or whoop when Lucius sent Alexa to him.  He'd wanted her to stay, had played Lucius to encourage him in that direction, but—
  Fontesca checked the reagent wells underneath the cocoon.  It was the third time, and they were—as they had been every other time—completely full.  He returned to the work-podium and checked the program sequence.  Everything needed to be flawless.  This conversion was important to him.  Fontesca didn't want even the tiniest transcription error as he converted Alexa's body from the four nucleotides of natural biology into the amino acids he'd designed as the basis for nano-engineered artificial biology.
  But the problem remained: Fontesca wasn't sure whether or not the procedure would kill her.  Not that it would go wrong, not with him watching over every detail, every step of the way.  Her conversion to Deathless would be flawless.
  No.  For the first time, the metaphysical question bothered him.  If he replaced every cell in her body— was that murder?
  Would he be killing that beautiful animal that he'd watched in the pool? The woman who haunted his twilight musings, now that he no longer needed sleep?
  "If not now, later," Fontesca mumbled aloud.  It was the mantra that had gotten him through last night, when Lucius had sent him the copy of her conversion contract.  She'd signed the original with a stylus, had licked its DNA blotter.  Her fate was sealed in binding legalese.  If Fontesca didn't do her conversion, then someone else—someone less skilled—would.
  He might be killing the original Alexa DuBois tonight.
  But if not now, later.  If she didn't convert now, then in future years she would certainly die, and by then her DNA would be too damaged by the aging process to rebuild the woman she had been.
  
No.  This way was better.
  He didn't feel any different post-conversion.  At least not disturbingly different.  His reflexes were faster.  Thoughts more precise.  For him, it had been like raising his head out of a murky puddle and seeing the vastness of the world for the first time.
"If not now, later."
"What?"
  Alexa stood in the doorway, her garment configured into a blue sarong and a leopard-print bikini top.  Her golden skin gleamed and there were red highlights in her black curls.  She was glorious, at the peak of her physical health.  And he could trap that perfection, keep her flawless forever.
  Fontesca gestured toward the fibrous layers of the coffin-shaped crucible.  The layers of silk were actually a nano-fabric, crisscrossed with trillions of pipelines that transported worker nanos and amino acids.  "It's ready now."
  "Robe." The garment around Alexa transformed into plush terry cloth.  She pulled the collar close to her throat and stared into the crucible.  "Leo, tell me the truth.  Were you different afterward? Are you the same person who went into the cocoon?"
  He wanted to enfold Alexa in his arms and comfort her.  But he wasn't the sort of man who could pull off a casual hug.  Fontesca licked his lips nervously.  "I'm an atypical data point.  I went in dying, I came out whole.  By definition, I was changed.  You'd do better to read the accounts in Sheehan's Death of Mortality."
  "I did." Her eyes were sunken, black-rimmed.  "Last night I followed every link on conversion I could find.  But there's no way to know what it's going to be like—really know—until it's too late to turn back."
"That's true of many things."
  She touched his arm lightly, met his eyes with hers.  "Will I die?"
Fontesca's heart hammered in his chest.  If he'd been a different kind of man, he would have snatched her up and fled Lucius and his technological empire, lived out the rest of her life on a hidden beach somewhere, watching her mellow into old age.
  But he wasn't that man, and in this time of nano-scale omnipresence, all the hidden beaches had been found.
"Yes."
Alexa recoiled, looked at the crucible with horror.
  "Entropy kills everything, even stars.  Even galaxies.  If you don't convert, you'll be dead in a hundred years or so.  If you do, the process may take aeons.  But one day the point of view that is Alexa DuBois will be gone."
  She blew out a self-mocking snort.  "You're not going to give me a straight answer, are you?"
Fontesca spread his hands.  "I have none to give."
  Alexa walked over to the crucible, stroked the silken layers of the rim.  "The pope is against conversion.  Says when we die is God's will.  He condemns full conversion as suicide."
"Lucius turned him down."
  She turned to him with a face full of amusement and disbelief.
  "A representative from the Council of Cardinals came to inquire about having the pope's Alzheimer's reversed.  While he was here, he asked how much more it would cost to convert the pope to Deathless.  Lucius refused to permit it.  Said he wouldn't create eternal religious icons."
  Alexa laughed.  "Lucius said no to the popel He can do that?"
  "Lucius is very particular about whom he permits to become converted.  As he owns all the rights to the process and equipment, he can sell his services—or not—to whomever he chooses." A power he took too much pleasure in, but Leonardo didn't feel it necessary to say that aloud.  She either already knew Luci-us's nature, or would soon learn it.
  
  "So." Alexa looked at the coffin-shaped crucible.  She blew out a long breath and dropped the robe from her shoulders.  "I guess it's time to do this."
  Her nakedness took all the air from the room.  It wasn't her body, but her complete vulnerability.  At this moment she surrendered her mortality into his hands.  When he was done with her, all that she was would be new.  All that she had been would be gone.
He swallowed.  "You're certain?"
  A smile twisted her lips ruefully.  "Never going to be that.  But yeah, let's get this done." She climbed up into the crucible and lay down, hands at her sides.  Like a doll in its packaging.
  Leonardo pulled the lid over her face and once she was sealed in, kissed its top.
"If not now, later," he whispered.
  The cocoon closed over Alexa, encasing her in rustling layers that pressed against her on all sides, even brushing her face.  I'm a bug, waiting to be reborn as a butterfly.  The animal part of her wanted to thrash free, to run away.
  She wished she knew how long it would take, what was involved.  She'd read accounts of people who'd been converted, tales of what their lives were like before and after, their thoughts about the process.  But no one spoke of the process itself.  The introduction to Death of Mortality had stated this was because the process was proprietary, and before Sterling Nanol-ogy, Inc.  (read Lucius) would grant permission for its converts to be interviewed, it had to be assured that any mention of the process would not include relevant and potentially revealing details.
  "Can you hear me?" Leonardo's voice was muffled by the layers of fabric.
"Yes."
  "I'm about to begin.  There will be some discomfort, but it won't last long."
All around her, the silk changed in viscosity, becoming thick as honey.  The fluid crept up her sides.  Her arms and legs were submerged in golden fluid.  It spilled onto her belly, crept up her cheeks, slid into her ears, tickled the corners of her mouth.  Alexa struggled to keep her head aloft.  Fought against panic.  But her eyes were wide and darting.
  "Let it take you," Fontesca said gently.  "You won't drown."
  The fluid oozed into her nose.  She coughed, fighting the strange feeling of being invaded.  It dripped down the back of her sinuses and into her lungs.  Breathing became harder.  She was suffocating.  She flailed against the fluid's warm embrace, and succeeded only in pushing herself deeper.  She scrabbled for the sides of the pedestal she had rested on, driven by animal instinct.
  Thought was gone.  She was filled with the red knowledge that she must free herself or die.
  But the cocoon only retained the sticky substance.  Her head submerged.  Alexa opened her mouth to scream, and her throat flooded.  Fluid invaded every orifice, through the pores in her skin, through her hair follicles.  She was a house riddled with termites.  The fluid gnawed at her, dissolving her in a way the cancer never had.
Aeons passed in darkness and fear.
  / will survive.  I will survive.  I will survive.  The words were a mantra and a promise.  A concept she clung to as the fluid chewed into her brain.  Thought gave way to random flashes.  A seizure of information from her past: squishing her toes into the mud of the Mississippi; her father throwing up after chemo, his bile frothed with blood; her first kiss, the boy who had tasted of cherry Life Savers; the smell of a dead raccoon on the side of the road; the rustle of paper during an algebra exam.
Silence.  Deep and eternal.
A heartbeat.  Two.  She was still alive.
The fluid thinned and drained away.  Alexa turned her head and vomited a stream of coffee-colored liquid.  Whooping with exertion, she sucked in breaths of air.  Each sweeter than the last.
  "Is it over?" Her voice was thick with fluid that still clung to her vocal cords.
  "This was preliminary," he said sadly.  "A first-stage preparation to cleanse your body of foreign biologi-cals: bacteria and viral infections."
  He'd said the discomfort would be brief.  It felt like she'd been under for days.  Must have been more than the usual amount of trash in her bloodstream.  "How long?" she croaked.  "How long was I under?"
  "Thirty seconds." He paused.  Let the information sink in.  "The entire process will take the better part of a week."
A tremor of terror ran through Alexa.
  "It's not too late," Fontesca urged.  "Your DNA is still human.  The contract could be voided."
  Alexa looked at the layer of dust on her skin.  It was gray, the color of a prison cell.  She'd made her decision.  There was no going back now.  "No."
He waited for her to explain.
  Alexa lay back down inside the cocoon.  "I'm ready."
"As you wish."
  A breeze fluttered the fabric of the cocoon, removing the residue from the last procedure.  Then the breeze turned cold.  A fine mist covered and chilled her.  Immediately her skin reddened and began to peel.  Every nerve on its surface ignited in growing agitation.
  Alexa closed her eyes and accepted the pain that was her purgatory and her only hope of freedom.
  
PART TWO
Broken Heir

3 April 2099
Alexa, on Lucius's arm, stepped onto the red carpet.  She was clad in a black gown covered in feathers, but she wasn't here to party.  As she walked, she scanned the crowd, assessing threats, sniffing for explosives or unlicensed nanos, listening for even the merest whisper of dissent.  Among the murmurs, she heard more than one reference to "Lucius's Dark Lady."
  Her cover had been blown in Milan, where she'd taken out a quartet of enhanced assassins.  These days too many people were plugged into Gaia-Net, and even with all Lucius's influence, he hadn't been able to quash the images of her forearm blade beheading that last man.  The video had hit ten thousand minds the instant the smart-dust cameras had recorded it, and it spread from there.
  Fan nodes had sprouted up all over Gaia-Net, and Sterling Nanology was hounded with requests for post-human mods.  And of course there was the lawsuit.  The weapons that she and Fontesca had dreamed up violated international treaties.
  Any other businessman would have had Alexa lie low until the media and legal furor died down, but not Lucius.  He'd grabbed her ass and pulled her into one of those encompassing kisses that always left her weak-kneed and wet.
  "Fuck 'em," he'd said.  "You're my bodyguard, and this is the shareholders' annual meeting.  They want to see what nano-biology can really do—we'll show them.  Besides," he chuckled, "with you there, no one would dare threaten me.  Did you see the video?" He faked a shiver.  "Gory.  You're fierce, pet." He slapped her ass again and released her.  "Just the way I like you."
  So here she was, stalking down the red carpet in Manhattan, inspiring fear, awe, and admiration.  She'd come a long way from the trailer park in New Orleans.
  The meeting itself was the definition of boring.  Alexa stood behind Lucius on the stage, passing the time by imagining possible threat scenarios: gas attacks, sniper fire, tactical nukes.  She tapped into Gaia-Net from time to time, using her security clearance to access the sensors in and around the building.  All was as it should be.
  Lucius droned on about the company's vision, and how, on the brink of the twenty-second century, Sterling Nanology, Inc., was stronger than ever and set to revolutionize the world.  Aside from a few new details about self-growing housing, it was the same speech he had given the previous year.
  The firestorm started during the question-and-answer period.  Every other question was about her and the ethics of the CEO using Sterling Nanology, Inc., equipment for his own illegal pet projects.
  A particularly strident man in a lime green business suit jumped up and shouted, "Why do you even need a bodyguard if you're Deathless? You're virtually invulnerable."
  Alexa turned her head toward the man, and he visibly shrank back.  He'd asked a dangerous question.  She made a note of his face, looked him up in the stockholder records, and had his name and address within seconds.
Lucius grinned and spread his hands.  "You think a man like me gets that many chances to have a beautiful woman watching his body?"
  Chuckles from the crowd.  Lucius had a way with people, always had.  He could manage anyone, from the most suspicious stockholder to a distracted genius like Fontesca.  He even managed her.
  "Come on, the real question here isn't my personal security.  It's our joint financial security.  Yes, my lovely companion violates current international law.  But she's the future.  It's the law that's wrong.  Sterling Na-nology has spent the past eighty years perfecting the human body, doing away with disease, correcting bad genetics, and stalling aging.  But humanity was never meant to be trapped like a fly in amber." Lucius pounded the table, his eyes gleaming with purpose.  "Mankind was meant to evolve."
  A stunned silence—then a cheer rose from the crowd.
  "Sterling Nanology is going to change the face of humanity." He sketched out a banner in the air.  " 'Better Than Human.' That's the wave of the future."
  He'd distracted the crowd from his darkest secret: Lucius was not Deathless.  Not entirely.  Inside his Deathless body pulsed a human brain.  He'd had sperm cryogenically frozen before he'd permitted even that much of himself to be transformed.  In short, Lucius didn't trust the very technology that had made him -famous.
  Drop him from a height, and his Deathless body would survive, but the man inside would be forever gone.  And for long hours each night, he required the vulnerability of sleep.
  It was a secret she'd learned only after her own conversion, and one she'd never quite forgiven him.  He'd let her be converted without telling her it was a risk he himself wouldn't take.
  Alexa hadn't felt any different after the procedure, but late at night while she patrolled, she wondered which view of the world was right, Lucius's or Fontes-ca's.  Was she the same woman who'd crawled into that coffin?
  As the years had passed, she'd also regretted that she hadn't thought to preserve her eggs so she could have natural children when her service was over.  Of course, two hundred and thirty-four years of service had seemed like an eternity back then.
  The meeting ended peacefully.  There would be attacks, but they would come in memos and news stories.  Those assaults she could do nothing about.

29 September 2104
"I need you to train a new bodyguard," said Lucius.  "Gordon comes from Special Forces, he's combat-ready.  But you know how I like to be guarded, not too obtrusively but enough of a presence so the malcontents keep their distance."
  Alexa squinted against the Maui morning sunlight, then adjusted the opacity of the window through Gaia-Net.  Even dimmed, the view of sunrise lighting the breakers in tones of pink and salmon was breathtaking.  But Alex didn't care for the scenery.  She was perplexed.
  "But I'm your personal guard, and I don't take leave or sick days.  Why train someone else?"
  Lucius set his steaming cup of coffee on a tray beside the macadamia-nut waffles and coconut syrup.  Strictly speaking, his body no longer needed food, but he was never one to deny himself pleasures of the flesh.
  "Alexa, I don't explain myself to anyone, least of all to my employees."
  The word "employee" was a slap in the face.  She was, of course, but wasn't she also something more? They'd been sleeping together for decades.  Sure, every once in a while he'd take up with this starlet or that, but Alexa was always the one he came back to after the week or so it took for his fascination to wear off.  And he'd never sent her away during any of his affairs, not even during the legal battle over her post-human modifications, when his lawyers begged him to distance himself from her.  What had changed now?
  "Don't give me that bullshit, Lu.  I've been the shadow at your side, guarding your partially Deathless ass for the past seventy years.  You don't need to justify anything, but tell me what the hell's going on.  I can't protect you if I'm blindfolded."
  Lucius puckered his lips and glared up at Alexa.  He said one word: "Margo."
  Images of Lucius's current paramour flooded Alexa's mind, some of them from memory, others bleeding in from Gaia-Net.  She was a lean, organic woman in her late twenties, known for her husky voice and her wine-colored hair—which Alexa knew firsthand was chemically altered.  Margo had taken the entertainment industry by storm, winning an Oscar for best actress for each of her first three films.  Her physical form had been copyrighted and marketed as a line of Margo-modifications in the nano parlors.
  And she'd been trying to get rid of Alexa since she'd first taken Lucius's arm at a Climate-Disruption Benefit banquet.  For the past four months Alexa had suffered the woman's innuendos, slights, whining, and unreasonable demands, all designed to take Alexa away from Lucius for hours at a time.
"The IVF took.  Margo's pregnant."
  Alexa tightened her hands into fists until her knuckles cracked.  "You decided to have a child? With Margo?"
  "Yeah.  She's gorgeous, she's brilliant, and she makes me laugh.  I'm one hundred and fifty-two years old, and Sterling Nanology practically runs itself these days.  I decided it was time to take my sailors out of storage.  Try out fatherhood."
  
  Margo decided.  Alexa would bet this was her doing.  She'd finally found a card to play that Alexa couldn't trump.  "And you were going to tell me when?"
  "I'm telling you now.  Margo is carrying my son, and she finds your presence stressful.  She'd feel safer with a less-modified Deathless guard while she's expecting.  Margo has an irrational fear that one of your bone blades will malfunction and cut her stomach, hurt the baby."
  Alexa's voice was tight but level.  "Then perhaps she should put the child in an artificial womb, like any sane woman."
  "Alexa, you work for me.  You're not my wife.  I say train Gordon to replace you—you do it.  I can't trust a bodyguard who questions my orders."
  Alexa leaned her elbows on the breakfast table.  "No.  You can't trust a bodyguard who doesn't.  You want a Special Forces drone who follow commands without questioning whether they're in your best interest, you got him." She tapped her fingernail against the breakfast tray, rattling the dishes.  "But one day, blind obedience will let you down."
  Now that she was Deathless, Alexa could control the levels of synthetic adrenaline in her system.  Her heart didn't race as she stalked out of the room.  For her, anger was now a cold blue-white flame.
13 January 2105
Justine Hansforth patted the tissue-paper-thin skin of her father's hand.  It was so soft and thin she could feel the ropes of vein just under the surface.  His breathing was labored.  All the best physicians had examined him.  Geriatric failure.  In a world of eternal youth, he was dying of old age.
  All because Lucius Sterling held an unreasonable grudge against him for a few ill-considered words.  Sterling's cruelty was inconceivable.  Justine bit back her tears and kissed her father's hand, then lowered it onto the nanofiber sheets.  Dozens of threads snaked into her father's body from all angles, carrying the nano-scale living machines that scrubbed his arteries and cleared poisons from his liver.  But even with all this assistance, he was failing.  The only true cure was conversion.  An operation Senator Hansforth could easily afford—if Lucius Sterling hadn't blackballed him decades ago.
  Justine's hands balled into fists as she stalked out of her father's bedroom and down the hall.  Damn Lucius Sterling to eternal torment.  She'd been an innocent dupe during Clay's scandalous attack, the one that had meant the end of her father's political career.  But she wished now that she could go back in time and make sure Lucius's assassination had been done right.
  The door to her home office barely had time to morph open before she plunged into it.
  Her room was spacious, kept current through the high-end interior-design subscription from Pottery Barn.  At the moment it featured Oriental fabrics, burgundy and gold drapes, a desk that had reconfigured itself into a darkly lacquered piece with dozens of tiny drawers, and where the couch had been, a divan was piled high with jewel-toned pillows.  The room smelled of sandalwood and patchouli.  She'd liked last week's Danish Modern in beige tones better.
  But if there was any lesson in the modern age, it was the impermanence of form and the tyranny of fashion.  In a world where anyone could have anything, good taste was the only marketable commodity.
  Which was why Justine composed herself and arranged her features in a pleasant smile before she touched Gaia-Net with her mind and requested a connection to Lucius Sterling's personal line.
  Half an hour later, her request was granted.  Lucius appeared in front of her, a hallucination created by Gaia-Net in her visual cortex.  His bloated face was tan, highlighting the white scar across his broken nose.  Other than that, he was the same man she'd seen at the fateful banquet.  He wore cargo shorts and a Hawaiian-print shirt, and lounged incongruously in a leather wing chair.
  "Ms.  Hansforth.  I wish I could say this was a surprise.  How is your father?"
  Justine felt her reserve crack.  She upped her emotional dampers over Gaia-Net, hoping the software could fake a calm she didn't feel.  "Not well.  Even with the best of care, the doctors don't think he'll live out the week.  Please, I beg you to reconsider—"
  Lucius held out his hand.  "Please, girly, don't embarrass yourself.  Your dad made his bed.  Now he has to lie in it."
  "Die in it, you mean." No amount of software filtering could keep the passion from her voice.  "I can't believe you would consign him to death after a single argument.  Can't you forgive—"
  Lucius cocked his head sympathetically.  "Sweetie, there was more to it than that.  Details I hope you never find out.  And you are the last person to question my mercy.  After all, despite your part in an assassination attempt on my life, I allowed you to have conversion."
  Of course he had.  What was the point of a grand punishment if the memory of it faded in a single generation?
  Hating herself, Justine clasped her hands and begged her father's greatest enemy.  "Please.  Please let him be converted.  I don't want to lose him."
  Lucius hesitated, just long enough to permit the cruelty of hope.  Then he shook his massive head.  "Sorry, can't do that.  Eternity's too long to spend it looking over my shoulder."
  "You're not sorry," Justine snapped.  She cut the connection before her rage did irreparable damage to her hopes of his capitulation.  To the empty space where Lucius had lounged, she said, "Not now.  But one day you'll lose someone you love—and then you'll know sorrow."
  
7 February 2105
It was an ugly child, still nearly hairless after a year of life, with protuberant cheeks, tiny eyes, and sticky, grasping hands.  It stumbled around on stocky legs, each lumbering step hailed as genius.  Margo and Lucius were on the floor with it, laughing and propping its tiny body upright as necessary.
  Leonardo was amazed that humans had survived this long, if this was the kind of child produced by random genetics.  One might have hoped it would inherit Margo's grace and Lucius's cunning, but if anything the opposite seemed true.  Of course, what else could you expect with natural conception and gestation? Margo hadn't even availed herself of an external womb.  It had taken weeks of custom reconstruction to return her stomach to its taut, pre-pregnancy slimness.  Time he could have used perfecting his cure for multiple sclerosis.
  "Isn't he great?" boomed Lucius, grinning up at Leonardo.  The big man sprawled on the floor like a Roman emperor, one hand on his son's back.  The floor was morphed into a vast expanse of lambskin rug, soft and yielding underfoot, with ample grip for Ewan Sterling's tiny toes.
  "He's grown," Leonardo said dispassionately.  It was the only true statement that wouldn't give offense.
  Even that didn't please Margo.  Her full lips thinned in a compressed smile.  The expression threw the classic proportions out of balance, gave her a faintly reptilian cast.  Fontesca could have fixed that for her, but that would have required pointing out the flaw, and besides, he rather liked the way it exposed a bit of her soul.
  Ewan took another wobbly step toward the immense pile of brightly wrapped packages in the other room.  They'd been flooding in for days from every country on Earth, the low-Earth-orbit spas, even Luna City.  Gifts for the Sterling heir on the occasion of his first birthday.
  Lucius's Maui mansion was awash in fairy lights, tiny colored globes that danced on the wind and capriciously followed air currents.  Videos of Ewan at every stage of life from in utero to the present moment played on the walls.  Margo had spent days sequestered with Paris's top aesthetician planning the decorations, creating weeks' worth of work for Leonardo's teams.  But tonight it would be over.  The child would be feted, his image blasted across Gaia-Net, millions of dollars' worth of unnecessary presents would be opened—then Leonardo's life would regain its peace and focus.  Until next year's birthday party.
  A deep voice in the outer room.  "No, no.  Put those back at the security station.  They haven't been vetted." It was Gordon, the bodyguard who'd replaced Alexa as Lucius's head of security.
  Margo leapt to her feet and scampered into the foyer.  "Oh, they're lovely." A gasp.  "And look at this toy airplane!" She came back around the corner, her arms wrapped around a scaled-down biplane covered in gold and blue filigree.  A wide blue ribbon crossed over the seat, which was perfectly scaled for Ewan's tiny body.  "This is Alistair's work.  He only designs one piece a year." She ran her fingertips along the shining wings and sighed with atavistic pleasure.
  "Ma'am." Gordon interrupted her from the door.  "I need to take that back.  It came in with a group of presents that haven't been screened.  They were delivered to the mansion by mistake."
  Margo put the plane on the floor in front of Ewan, who cooed with delight and toddled forward, his grasping hands stretching for the tail.
  "This is our baby's birthday party, not a military action." She smiled the full-lipped version of her smile, which always melted men's hearts.  "Lu, tell him to leave the presents, at least the plane.  Look how Ewan loves it." She gestured at Ewan, who'd handover-handed himself along the plane and was now trying to crawl into the seat, headfirst.
  Lucius shook his head, smiling.  "I can't fight the both of you." He pulled the ribbon free and lifted Ewan into the padded seat.  "Gordon, take the rest of the presents to security.  We'll keep the plane."
  Gordon looked like he wanted to argue.  He scowled at Margo and opened his mouth.  Then snapped it shut.  "Yes, sir."
  "I'm going to dress for tonight's party," Leonardo said, inclining his head at Lucius.
  "Sure." Lucius didn't look up.  He was entranced, helping Ewan's chubby hands grip the flight yoke.
  The opulence was painful.  It reminded Alexa of all she'd lost when Lucius sold her security contract to Marcus Valiente.  This was the first time Alexa had been back to Maui since the reign of Margo.
  The woman's hand was everywhere, in the dancing colored lights that drifted after guests, the oppressive montage of baby video that turned every flat surface into a nauseating blur of motion and color, and the mounds of presents stacked in pyramids between buffet tables laden with nouveau cuisine, delicacies never imagined in nature: chocolate-flavored sea urchins, living licorice anemones, pork sushi.
  Alexa was grateful for her Deathless metabolism.  She drew the few replacement chemicals she needed from the air and ground, took energy from the sun.  Food was unnecessary.  Besides, she was working.
  She swept her gaze over the crowd gathered to pay homage to Lucius and his family.  It was unlikely that anyone here meant harm to Marcus—he was but one among thousands of guests—but decades of experience had taught her to leave nothing to chance.
  Marcus was on the waiting list for Deathless conversion, and he was quite paranoid, worried that someone would try to kill him while he was still mortal.  He'd made many enemies during his decades as a power broker in Venezuelan oil futures.
  Nearly ninety, he was lean and dark, with the smooth skin and fluid grace of a man in his thirties.  He glanced at Alexa casually, but she knew he was waiting for her opinion of the threat level.
  She inclined her head a fraction of an inch.  All clear.
  Marcus merged into the crowd around the happy family.
  Alexa had no choice but to stay at his elbow, making way for them both through the crowd, constantly on watch for the slightest gesture of threat or violence.  The scent of Margo's perfume hit her like a bad memory.
  Alexa's reputation and Marcus's money cut through the crowd like oil through soap bubbles.  Marcus grasped Lucius's shoulders and kissed him on either cheek.  Exclaiming, "Lucius Sterling! How well you look," he beamed down at the baby in Margo's hands.  "And the niflo, so healthy and strong.  Many blessings on your household."
  Lucius extricated himself and clasped Marcus's elbow.  "Looking good, old man."
  "As any would who had Lucius's own bodyguard watching over them." Marcus nodded back at Alexa.
  Alexa kept her face motionless.  She was furniture, a living nano-biology appliance.  People might refer to her, but they did not engage her in conversation.
  It was a shock when Lucius met her eyes.  They were the same warm brown she'd awakened to for decades.  But across the gulf of his mistress and child, he was a stranger.
He nodded.  "Alexa."
  The baby began shrieking for a toy airplane on the ground.  Margo chuckled ruefully.  "Mr.  Valiente, please forgive us.  You know how children are."
  "Yes, of course." Marcus pressed close to Lucius's ear.  Alexa's enhanced hearing picked up the words, along with every other conversation in the room.  She'd spent years learning how to listen to hundreds of voices and pick out relevant kernels from the chaff.  "I am still not on the schedule for conversion," Marcus said, and his whining tone made Alexa wince.  That was no way to handle Lucius Sterling.
  "Speak to my secretary," Lucius said by way of dismissal, then bent to help Margo quiet their sobbing child.  "This is a birthday party."
  A fresh wave of well-wishers pressed past Marcus, pushing him away from the happy family.
  "Does he not understand that each day he delays may be my last? Idiot.  Lucius thinks he can push Marcus Valiente aside.  He will learn to respect Valiente," muttered Marcus as he led Alexa toward the buffet.
  She could have warned Marcus about the smart dust microphones scattered throughout the compound, told him that his comments would be parsed out of the transcripts from the party and quite likely delivered to that selfsame secretary along with his request for conversion.
  But Marcus had made it amply clear that she was a weapon and a shield only, not someone to give him advice.  And in her book, anyone who referred to himself in the third person deserved everything he got.
  Alexa drifted behind Marcus, moving through the crowd as fluidly as the fairy lights that danced on air currents.  The conversations of the rich, powerful, famous, and talented drifted around her.  Nine-tenths of the world's populace would have sold their right arm to attend this party.
Alexa wished she was anywhere else.
  She watched as Margo led the assemblage in a round of "Happy Birthday." Across the room, the chubby baby that Lucius held aloft looked dazzled by the noise, and more than a little frightened.  He was seated in a toy biplane covered with filigree, clutching the wings in a death grip.
As the song faded into "and many more," the air- plane rose into the air and buzzed in a wide circle over the heads of the guests, who clapped and waved to the baby.
  Lucius jumped for the plane, but it was already out of reach.
  Alexa felt a jolt go through her.  Whatever was happening was not part of the plan.
  Margo's pretty face puckered with alarm.  The baby started crying and reached for his mother, leaning alarmingly over the side.  For a moment it looked as if he would fall.  Then the plane dipped under him, scooping him back into the seat.
"Get him down," Lucius shouted.
  The toy plane accelerated, zipping toward a window.  Gordon, the bodyguard Alexa had trained to replace her, jumped, collided with a guest in midair who'd had the same idea, and fell back, hands empty.
  Alexa was already in motion, running across the heads and shoulders of the crowd.  Shrieks and curses followed her progress.  She reached the window microseconds behind the screaming baby but could only touch the tail of the toy airplane, clawing curls of painted wood from the rudder.
  A clear canopy closed over the child.  The plane picked up speed and shot off into the night.
  Margo wailed and clawed at Lucius, screaming for him to get Ewan back.
  Alexa opened her hands and looked at the curls of painted wood.  They reminded her of something.  It must have been a pre-conversion memory, because it remained tantalizingly out of reach.
  Lucius lumbered through the crowd like a wallowing bear, pushing people out of his way.  He grabbed Alexa's arm.  His eyes were hot with rage and anguish.  "Get him back.  Now."
  Alexa felt a second, less substantial grip on her other arm, and then Marcus Valiente spoke.  "I hold her contract.  Until I'm scheduled for conversion, she stays to protect me."
  
  A vein pulsed in Lucius's temple.  If hate could kill, Marcus would have shriveled where he stood.  "Tonight.  If you sell back her contract now."
  "Done." Marcus released his hold on her arm.  The oral agreement was witnessed by the most influential people on the planet.  It would be binding.
  Alexa hit the sand outside the window before Vali-ente finished the word.  She pelted across the landscaped grounds in pursuit of the crying baby.  The sound was faint, muffled by the canopy, but it drew Alexa forward as she leapt over floodlit bird-of-paradise and hibiscus.
  Through Gaia-Net she called for a jet-cycle.  It caught up with her on the beach.  She leapt into the seat and revved the engine, shooting into the night on a cone of flame.  It was a moonless night, but the stars provided light enough for Alexa's enhanced eyes.  She zipped over black waves, trailing the gleam of starlight off the toy airplane.
  Even with the jet-cycle at full throttle, she could only pace the airplane.  They jetted through the night, the wind whipping Alexa's curls into tangles, ripping away the delicate silk of her skirt.  Her Deathless body noted the chill but did not suffer the shivering and frozen joints that an organic human body would have.
  She was an arrow shot from a bow, all senses on her target, ready for any deviation of course.  If the toy airplane dipped into the waves, she would have less than a minute to locate the baby underwater before he was lost in the depths.
  After nearly an hour had passed in pursuit, the roaring of the jet-cycle dimmed.  Soon it would begin to sputter as it ran out of fuel.  It was a pleasure craft designed for intra-island hops, not long-distance travel.  What would happen to the baby if she plunged into the sea? For that matter, how much fuel could the toy airplane carry?
  This far out on the Pacific Ocean, Gaia-Net broke down.  A, few nano-scale transmitters blew in on the trade winds, but not enough to create a signal.  One day the planet might be so saturated with smart dust that Gaia-Net would be pervasive, but not now, not yet.  Lucius would have sent reinforcements after her, but Alexa had no way to contact them, to warn them of her predicament or location.
  A radar wave passed over Alexa.  She felt the transmission as a prickle along her skin.  There was a ship out here.  And now it knew where she was, too.
  Twin blasts of light revealed a submarine bobbing on the dark ocean.  Missiles launched.
  Alexa dove off the jet-cycle, leaving it to its explosive doom.  She hit the water and willed her body temperature to match that of the ocean around her.  It would make her invisible to heat-seeking missiles.  She swam underwater, drawing what little oxygen her artificial-biological processes needed from the seawater.
  The submarine was still on the surface when Alexa touched it.  A woman stood in the hatchway holding the child.  She was backlit by a searchlight scanning the wreckage of Alexa's jet-cycle.  There was something familiar about the set of her shoulders.
  Alexa snaked up the side of the submarine, landing noiselessly.  A guard at the woman's side struck at her, but he was human, and was dead before he hit the       I water.
  "Give me the child," Alexa growled.  "Give me the child unharmed and you get to live."
  "Alexa?" The breathy voice registered surprise.  "Why are you here?" She turned.  The woman before her was flawlessly beautiful, with huge blue eyes, high cheekbones over a perfect mouth, waves of blond hair.  It was a face Alexa had never seen before, anonymous in its nano-biology-crafted beauty.  But despite the physical changes, despite the conversion to Deathless, the soul inside had not changed.  The girl Alexa had known was there in the slump of her shoulders, the gasping quality of her words.
  
"Justine?"
  "You don't work for him anymore.  I made sure.  Told Margo—" Justine took a step backward, clutching the child to her chest.
  Alexa stomped the hatch shut, clanging it against the head of a second guard and trapping the three of them on the surface.  "Justine.  Why?"
  "He's killing my father." The angry words set the baby to mewling.  Justine's metallic eyes were wild with grief.  "Won't let him take conversion—because of me, what I—we did." She pressed the baby's face to her shoulder to muffle his noise.  "You—trailer trash—he immortalizes.  But my father, one of the greatest senators who ever lived—the only person who ever truly cared about me—he's letting him die."
  Alexa had watched her own father waste away, eaten by cancer.  The waiting and worrying were worse than when he'd actually died and she'd been able to give over to grief, no longer feeling a desperate ache that there should be something more she could do.
  Alexa held out her hands.  "This isn't the way.  Give me the baby." Water from the choppy waves flecked her face.  She tasted salt.  "I'll speak to Lucius for you."
  "No." Justine tightened her grip on Ewan.  "As long as I have him, Lucius has to do what I say.  He'll have to save my father." The once-trusting debutante was gone, all softness replaced by suspicion and hard Deathless flesh.
  The changes saddened Alexa.  We did this to her, Clay and I, she thought.  We used her as a convenience and never calculated the cost to her and her family.
  "This isn't the way, Justine.  If anything happens to the child—"
  One of Justine's earrings chimed.  Alexa realized it must be a cell phone, more reliable in the middle of the ocean than Gaia-Net.
  The sound from the earpiece would have been inaudible to human ears.  Alexa heard a man's voice say, "Miss Hansforth, your father has passed on."
  
Justine threw back her head and howled.
  Alexa reached a hand toward the baby, then stopped.  If she tried to take him by force, Justine would resist.  Alexa had more training, but Justine would be just as strong and quick.  The baby could be hurt in their struggles.
  "He's dead.  Oh God.  I'm too late." Justine bent over at the waist, sobbing.
  "Give me the child," Alexa said in a level tone.  "What's happened is not the baby's fault.  You don't want to hurt him."
  Justine sank down to the hatch, the child in her lap.  "Oh God.  I can't believe it.  Why didn't you just kill me that night? Finish what you started at the banquet? I can't believe I was so stupid."
  The girl she had been rose through the beautiful mask, all the hurt and confusion Alexa had seen in Justine as her father had hustled her out of the Four Seasons ballroom.
  Alexa picked up the exhausted baby.  His face was blotchy and red from crying.  He'd likely sobbed the whole long trip across the water.  She saw lights in the distance.  Her backup.  Gordon and whoever else Lucius had hired in her absence.
  "Go back to the moon, Justine.  Live out your centuries in safety.  That's what your father wanted for you." With a thought, Alexa transformed the remains of her dress into a toddler-sized lifepod and tucked the baby safely inside.  "I won't tell Lucius it was you." Alexa stepped over the edge of the submarine's railing and plunged toward the sea.
  Justine's craft was submerged and gone by the time the rescue team pulled Alexa and the baby out of the water.
  They jetted back on a hovercraft, a fluttering blanket wrapped around them.
  Had she done the right thing? She'd let a dangerous enemy of her once-and-again employer go.  Not the
  
action of a dedicated bodyguard.  Why, then, did it feel like an old debt had been paid?
Alexa lowered the sleeping baby into Lucius's arms.
  Lucius swept Ewan up to his face, breathing in his baby scent.  "Thank God.  I thought I'd lost you."
  Margo hovered at his side, her hands trailing along the baby, checking every part of him.  "Ewan," she cooed.
  When Lucius lifted his head, there were tears.  In all their years together, Alexa had never seen the big man cry.
  "Who?" The word was a guttural demand for vengeance.
  Alexa shook her head.  "Got away.  My priority was the baby."
  Lucius's nostrils flared.  "We'll get him." He pressed his cheek against his son's forehead.  "Clean up," he told Alexa.  "Then come to the bedroom.  Ewan will be sleeping in the bed with us, but I want you in the room, in case there's a second attack."
  Margo's head snapped up from the baby.  Her blue-green eyes were hot.  "No.  Not her.  I want Gordon."
  "Gordon is an incompetent jackass.  He should have insisted that all the presents be vetted by security." His eyes met Alexa's.  "I need a bodyguard who will protect me, even from my own idiocy."
It was as much of an apology as she would ever get.
  "For all you know, she was behind the kidnapping!" Margo shouted.
  "She brought Ewan home," Lucius said in a low voice that should have warned Margo.
  "So she could fake a rescue, get back in your good graces.  Valiente wanted conversion, now he's got it.  Pretty convenient—"
  "There are two people in the world I trust, Margo." Lucius's voice was a distant roll of thunder.  "Alexa is one of them—you aren't."
  
  Margo's mouth snapped shut.  She pointed at Alexa.  "If that woman stays, I go."
  Lucius stared at the mother of his child.  A ripple of command across Gaia-Net.  The far door opened.
  Margo's mouth puckered and twitched.  She looked back and forth from Lucius to Alexa.  "You want your bayou whore, you got her." She held out her hands.  "Give me Ewan.  I'm leaving."
  Lucius drew the sleeping baby closer to his chest.  "Doesn't work like that.  You're free to go, but Ewan stays here."
  "I'm his mother," Margo howled in outrage.  "He needs me."
  "He needs to be protected." His voice softened.  "I have enemies, Margo.  In all the excitement about the baby, I never thought what an opportunity I was giving them.  Ewan stays."
  "But / can go.  Not a tempting enough target?" Margo's auburn waves were wild around her head and vibrated with rage when she spoke.  "Or do you just not care what happens to me?"
Lucius didn't answer.  The air crackled with tension.
  "That's right.  You never married me.  Disposable Margo.  Just another fling until you ran back to your Dark Lady." She stalked to the door.  "That's not how the law will see it.  I'm Ewan's mother.  I'll be back in a week for my son." The hinge resisted her attempt to slam the door, easing shut in her wake.
  Ewan snuggled deeper into Lucius's arms, his face red from crying for hours during his wild plane trip.
  Lucius said to the closed door, "You're welcome to try."
  "She's right, you know," Alexa said.  "U.S.  law gives the mother equal custody."
  Lucius's face remained blank.  Alexa sensed the hum of Gaia-Net transmissions all around her, but it was all locked up, with highest security.
  "Shh," he whispered.  "I'm asking Fontesca to build me something."
  
Alexa frowned.  "What?"
  Lucius came out of his Gaia-Net haze, the conversation apparently at an end.  His brown eyes were as hard as marble.  He cupped his son's head in a huge palm.
"An island.  My country, my custodial laws."
21 May 2107
From his bedroom balcony, Lucius looked out across the central valley of Elysium, the island he'd had Fon-tesca raise from the ocean floor.  After two years it was still mostly black rock.  Fontesca had used nano-biology to funnel magma up from the earth's core, mold it into a cone-shaped mass, and accelerate the cooling and decomposition process that would turn Elysium into a fertile paradise.
  Fontesca had grumbled that Lucius asked the impossible.  That fabrication had never been attempted on this scale.  He'd worked round the clock—not an ordeal, since he was fully converted, but he'd bemoaned the interruption of his personal research.
  Why hadn't Lucius simply bought a preexisting island?
  That question had slashed across Gaia-Net until it seemed the whole world wanted an answer.  The public reason he'd given was that Sterling Nanology was testing a new level of fabrication, massively scaled.  Humanity was on the brink of being able to reshape the planet, and Sterling Nanology was leading the way.  The truth was private, and much less admirable.
  Lucius was scared of losing his son, either to Margo or to the unnamed enemy who had kidnapped him.
  Alexa and the rest of the security team hadn't located any trace of the attacker, which was itself frightening.  To be able to hide a hostile intention in a world that was becoming increasingly transparent meant organization, and resources.
If he'd bought an existing island, he'd have inherited the laws and sovereignty that came with it.  But there was no precedent to cover the creation of new land.  Lucius claimed it as an independent island-nation and pulled political strings to make it so.  It had been distasteful; he'd had to buy off several heads of state with immortality—people he didn't particularly care to have around for eternity—but Elysium was his.  The smallest nation in the world.
And a message of strength to his unknown assailant.
  The island was also a fortress.  Designed into its core were bunkers, safe rooms, hidden laboratories, a labyrinth capable of hiding hundreds of Sterling descendants from every kind of danger, up to and including nuclear attack.
  Ewan played at his feet with a set of "sticky blocks" that Fontesca had created.  They attached at the corners and could be stretched and molded into fantastical shapes, snapping back to a cube when struck.  At three, the boy was the image of his mother, with a willowy frame, auburn hair, and pouty lips.  It was as if, having been denied her presence, Ewan's DNA took its revenge by re-creating her.
  Ewan sneezed.  The back of his neck was covered in hives.
  It made Lucius crazy to see his son sick again so soon.  The damn allergies cropped up faster than Fontesca could repair them.  Lucius had seen the first signs at breakfast.
  Alexa ushered Fontesca onto the balcony.  He wore a lab coat, contrasting against her dark body armor.  They looked like chess pieces from opposing sides: black queen and white bishop.
  "Another one?" Fontesca asked.  The words were a courtesy, the habit of an older generation.  Through the island's secured local Gaia-Net, Lucius had already communicated the problem.
  Ewan looked up from his blocks, saw Fontesca, and began to wail.  "No-no-no! I'm fine.  Don't need more medicine.  Don't want it!"
  
  Lucius's chest clenched as Alexa picked up the boy and tried to soothe him.  She murmured and patted his hair.
  "It's the island," Fontesca said.  "Too many volatiles in the air.  It's made his immune system overreactive, creating new allergies."
  "Then fix the air," Lucius growled.  His son's whimpering was like a dagger in his heart.  "Fix Ewan."
  "Perhaps .  .  ." Alexa began.  Gaia-Net filled with images of off-island destinations, places to visit.
  "No." Lucius shook his head.  "The world is filled with my enemies, people who would hurt the boy to get to me.  Margo has her latest champion in her custody battle.  And there is the unknown attacker who nearly stole Ewan when he was one." He pounded the railing.  "No.  This is the only place I can keep my family safe."
  Alexa opened her mouth, but said nothing.  Her Gaia-Net transmissions were silent.  She carried the whimpering Ewan down to the lab under the island.
1 October 2172
Lucius was a fly trapped in the amber of his own personality.  Leonardo, Alexa, and Lucius's descendants were trapped on Elysium with him, while the world beyond the ocean grew more populous and utopic, glutted with the designs and discoveries that sprang from Sterling Nanology's labs and Leonardo's genius.
  But the man himself, the aging mortal brain trapped inside a Deathless body, became more fearful and insular with each passing decade.
  Lucius's descendants were as thick as rats on the ground, and still he obsessed over each one as if he or she were precious treasure, hoarding them on the island until the age of majority.  Which in Lucius's fiefdom was the chronological age of thirty-five.
Worst was his affection for Jack.  Not only was the boy intelligent—talented enough to study nano-biology from Leonardo himself—but the random genetics that Lucius's children indulged in, rolling the dice with every conception, had spit forth in Jack a child that was the image of his grandfather: Ewan Sterling.
  The son Lucius had nearly lost in infancy he lost in truth when Ewan left Elysium and met his mother.  Ewan had sided with her version of events and hadn't spoken to his father—not even through Gaia-Net—for all the ensuing decades.
  So here was Lucius, with an approximation of his son, trying to set things right.
  And here was Leonardo, with that selfsame child dying in front of him.
  "I found him collapsed on the steps." Alexa laid the limp body down on an examination slab.  A tall and skinny nine-year-old, Jack covered two-thirds of its length.
  Alexa played her rescue for Leonardo over Gaia-Net, bypassing the slow inexactness of words.  Leonardo experienced the scene as she did.  Jack's lips were blue, his breathing shallow.  Alexa had blown a rescue breath into the boy's mouth and encountered no airway obstruction.
  Leonardo willed a transparent mask to cover the boy's mouth and nose and administer pure oxygen.  He hoped the boy hadn't been oxygen-deprived for long.  Jack had a fine mind.  It would be a shame if it were damaged.
  A thousand hair-thin needles rose from the slab, taking samples of blood, urine, and tissue.
  On the slab, Jack jumped as if he'd been shot through with electric current.  He began convulsing.
  "What the hell did you do?" Alexa shouted.  Her eyes flashed fear.
  Fontesca's heart would have raced if his body hadn't been engineered to stay calm in a crisis.  It was an
  
atypical reaction.  The nano-scale needles were so thin as to be painless.
  Results poured in from the slab's analysis.  The boy's system was flooded with histamine.  An allergic reaction.  Apparently he'd inherited that from Ewan as well.
  Fontesca willed epinephrine into the boy.  The slab responded with another needle.
  Jack twitched again as the shot went in.  His hazel eyes flew open, and his mouth gaped, trying to draw in breath through his swollen throat.
He should be getting better.
  Jack subsided back onto the medical slab, barely breathing.  His face drained of color.
  "What's happening?" Alexa asked in a taut undertone.  It was a sign of the depth of her panic that she'd forgotten Gaia-Net and resorted to the speech of her youth.
  Put him in the cocoon, Leonardo transmitted.  It was the only thing that might save him.
  Alexa lifted Jack off the slab, carrying him in her arms like an oversized baby.
  Blood seeped through the back of the child's lightweight silk tunic.  Blood where none should be.
  With any other child, Fontesca could have commanded the clothing off, and it would have folded itself neatly on the floor.  But Jack loved natural fibers, claiming anything else made him itch.
  "Wait.  Hold him right there." Leonardo extruded a scalpel from under his fingernail and sliced through the tissue-thin fabric.  He pulled it away from the skin.
  A pattern of bloody oozing sores had erupted on Jack's back, one Leonardo recognized: each wound was a site where a diagnostic tool had gone in.
  Leonardo's genius came from seeing the world as it was, not as he wanted it to be.  Nano-fibers were too thin to leave a mark, much less wounds of this order.  A lesser scientist might have let that incongruity puz-
  
zle him.  Leonardo immediately recognized the problem.  Confirmed it with a quick microscopic peek at the drop of blood he'd retrieved from Jack.  A war was waging inside the boy.  And now Leonardo knew the enemy.
  But how to isolate him from an allergen that was everywhere?
  "Fish tank," Leonardo muttered.  He transmitted to Alexa an image of the antique sixty-gallon tank in Lucius's menagerie.  It held a colorful variety of reef fish, all unmodified examples of natural biology.
  Alexa laid Jack back on the slab and was gone.  She returned in less than a minute, carrying the glass tank.  Her emotions leaked out through Gaia-Net, images of percula clown fish and anemones writhing on the floor.
  Fontesca curled the naked, bloody child into the tank and directed pure oxygen inside.  He laid the bloody silk tunic over the top.  Not airtight, but an improvement.
  Color returned to Jack's face.  He took one gulping breath, then another.  His eyes opened wide and he pushed against the glass.
  "Calm yourself," Fontesca said, satisfaction tinging his words.  His hypothesis was correct.  The boy would live.  "You have to stay in the tank, until—"
  "What the hell is going on?" boomed Lucius's voice from the doorway.  "Leo, what the hell have you done to Jack?"
  "Saved his life." Alexa pushed the big man out into the hallway.  "Shh, you're scaring the boy.  Let Leo work."
  As wise as she was beautiful.  Oh, Lucius, you don't deserve her.
  Leonardo turned back to the problem at hand.  It was fascinating.  Jack had developed an allergy to nano-engineered artificial life.  Every engineered life-form was an allergen for him—all of the Deathless, the island itself.  Even the very air, bursting as it was with smart dust, was poison to Jack.
How, then, to cure him, when all of the medical tools and techniques developed in the last century would trigger another attack?
  Lucius sent a blast of displeasure through Gaia-Net.  He missed the satisfaction of slamming a phone down in its cradle, but the infants he dealt with these days wouldn't recognize a handset.  Hell, half of the latest generation weren't even bothering to learn speech.  Parents hooked them up at eighteen months and suffered through the disruption of a toddler's elastic worldview and overweening passions just so their child could gain status as a "free thinker," his mind unburdened by the restrictions of spoken language.  "Connected parenting," they called it.
  The problem with the world was that humanity needed its restrictions.  What was civilization but an ordered set of restrictions, guiding the human animal into constructive behavior? Who could communicate with the latest generation, with their avalanches of feelings and sensations? Those weren't conversations—they were hallucinations.
  A phone rang in Lucius's mind, and in his mind he answered it.  An image of a seated man hovered before Lucius's desk, a trick of Gaia-Net tickling his visual cortex.
  "Where are the effing plans for my new space elevator?" shouted Arthur Gottsberg.  He was only fifty years younger than Lucius.  An old-timer who spoke the same language.  He projected himself as a powerful man in his mid-thirties, with a long, aquiline face and broad shoulders.  Usually he and Lucius got on like a house afire.
  But now Lucius was still angry from his last investor interaction.  "Don't take that tone with me, Arthur, or I will bury your elevator so far down the schedule—"
  Arthur blew out an explosive breath.  "And that would be different from what I'm already seeing how?"
  "Something's come up.  A very important project that's drawn off my best engineers."
  
  "Fontesca on holiday?" Arthur's mouth puckered with anger.  "Always was him made the discoveries— you were just the moneyman.  Wonder why no one ever stole him away from you.  Perhaps I should make him an offer—"
  Lucius slammed down internal shields around the image of Jack, bleeding and blue on the slab.  The boy had nearly died.
"Fontesca is busy with a special project—"
  Arthur jabbed a thumb at his chest.  "My project is special.  I've got a major hotel chain, an entertainment studio, and an exclusive spa interested in the elevator.  Trillions of investor dollars.  Lucius, you will not screw me on this."
  Lucius pinched the bridge of his nose.  "You want me to assign another engineer?"
  "No." Arthur pounded the arm of his chair.  "I promised my investors Fontesca.  You promised me Fontesca.  I need his design within the week—"
  Lucius disconnected.  Fuck Gottsberg.  Fuck his space elevator.  Mankind had waited a hundred thousand years to conquer the stars.  One Englishman could wait the few months it would take Fontesca to find a way to fix Jack.
  Gaia-Net indicated another high-level client was phoning in.  Everyone was angry about the delays.  Fine.  It wasn't the first time the world had been against Lucius Sterling.  It wouldn't be the last.
  Lucius set his local Gaia-Net to refuse all incoming connections other than those originating from Leo or Alexa.
  He spoke to the blessedly empty air.  "World, better watch your ass."
27 May 2178
Jack Sterling moved the black marble queen for Alexa, who sat outside the glass partition.  He thought of the animated chess sets he'd enjoyed back in the real world, with trumpets and battles during captures.  Like everything good in life, before his allergy.
  Weird to think it had been hiding in him his whole life, building up gradually as a series of slightly runny noses and the occasional sneeze, until his immune system hit its final straw and closed his throat.  Or perhaps his great-grandfather was right, and it'd been an attack by one of his enemies.  Lucius Sterling had a lot of enemies.
No one knew for certain.
  "You going to move this year?" Alexa asked.  Her honey-smooth voice sent a ripple down his belly.
  He pointed his finger at her, not looking up from the board.  "No kibbitzing." Looking at Alexa was always a risk.  His blood tended to carbonate when he did, which made thinking problematic.  He'd also begun having dreams about her.  Usually she was naked in those dreams.  He'd have enjoyed them a hell of a lot more if his pressurized chamber wasn't monitored 24-7 by a real live person.  Lucius didn't trust a computer, not even a semi-sentient nano-biology one to determine whether Jack was in trouble.
  It had been comforting when he'd been nine or ten, like having a parent watch over you until you fell asleep.  But now all the constant monitoring was a definite liability.  Not to mention humiliating.
Unlike his cousins, he didn't have self-cleaning sheets.
  None of his extended family came to visit him anymore.  It'd been six years since he'd been whisked away to Fontesca's private underground facilities.  You'd think a certified genius, a Nobel laureate, would have found a solution to his condition by now.  But no.
  Even his mom came only twice a year, on his birthday and on Christmas.  And then she spent the first half of the visit trying not to cry and the second half crying.  He thought about e-mailing her that she didn't have to come, but awful as the visits were, he missed her.  It didn't seem fair that one person could be both desperately lonely and oppressed by constant observers.
  
  Alexa pantomimed a yawn.  She checked an imaginary watch.
  Jack glanced at her—and for a moment forgot how to play chess.  Hell, for a moment he forgot how to breathe.
  Her skin was a warm golden-brown that made him think of polished bronze, if bronze could be soft and warm.  Her hair was a riot of black ringlets, lit with red highlights.  Her breasts were high and round and jiggled just enough that he knew she never wore a bra.  That thought made his crotch stiffen, and he casually shifted position to hide his lap behind the board.
  He leaned forward and slid his knight up and left, threatening her queen.  There was no animated pantomime performed by the pieces, no burst of ominous sound as there would have been with a proper chess set.  Just cold, dead marble and a glass wall between him and the world.
"I hate being a freak."
  Alexa met his eyes.  Hers were molten copper and tilted up at the ends, making her look exotic and dangerous.  "You're not a freak.  It's just an allergy.  Soon as Fontesca finds a cure—"
  "Yeah.  And when's that going to be? I've been in here six years." Jack knew he sounded like a whiny jerk.  But the emotion hit him too hard to hold back.  And who was he kidding? Alexa had changed his diapers.  She wasn't ever going to think of him in that way.  If he spent the rest of his life in isolation, no one would.  The thought of never being able to touch anyone made him curl in on himself.  "I wish you'd left me on the steps."
  "Don't be a fool," Alexa snapped, rising to her feet.  "You are the great-grandson of Lucius Sterling.  You lived in luxury for the first nine years of your life.  When—and it is a matter of when, not if—Fontesca cures your allergy, you will again.  Your greatgrandfather thinks so highly of you that he's put research on hold at Sterling Nanology for the past six years, losing billions of dollars in the process.  You're almost sixteen, for God's sake.  Start acting like it."
  
  Jack blew a hard breath out of his nostrils.  He was ashamed.  He straightened, feeling chided, and more than a bit angry.  "All right."
"Queen to B-4."
  What the hell do you know about suffering? Jack fumed inwardly.  You're immortal.  If Fontesca can't cure me, I'll be dead in sixty or seventy years.  No nano-biology treatments for me.  He'd read up on natural aging: the painful joints, shortness of breath, weight gain, blurred vision, enlarged prostate.  It would be death by inches, and that only after a pointless lifetime in a human terrarium.
  His only entertainments were chess and surfing Gaia-Net using an antiquated silicon laptop so limited it was like looking at the ocean through a carbon nanotube.
  Jack made her move on the board, then slid his rook into position.  "Check and mate."
  Usually Jack drew out the game, keeping Alexa with him as long as possible.  But her words had stung.  He wanted to be alone.
  Jack looked at the glass and knew that just outside were billions of nano-scale cameras, and somewhere beyond them his ever-present babysitter.
At least, as alone as I can be.
  "The suit works," Fontesca said, holding forth folds of thin plastic.  "It can protect him.  Jack could lead a relatively normal life.  Oxygen and other small molecules can pass through the membrane, but the larger nano-biology particles are blocked."
  Lucius came from behind his koa-wood desk and took the body-shaped environmental suit.  He grabbed it by the waist and ankles and tugged—hard.  The suit snapped taut.  Then a seam ripped.  Lucius poked the fingers of one hand through the hole.  "This is going to protect him?"
  Fontesca felt his face go red.  "I had to use conventional materials.  It's not as strong as nanofiber.  There is some risk, but with appropriate caution—"
  
  Lucius threw the suit in Fontesca's face.  "There are no acceptable risks where my great-grandson is concerned.  You will cure his allergies.  That is your current and only project."
  Fontesca pulled the suit off his face.  He wanted to strangle Lucius with it.  Nearly a week of processing, using antiquated methods, ruined in an instant.  He clenched his fists in frustration.
  "I can't keep banging my head against this.  The investors are itchy.  The competition is pulling ahead with new nano-biology processes.  I need to get back to work." He shook the suit in his fist.  "This is an answer."
  Lucius tore the suit out of Fontesca's hand and threw it against the desk.  His thick finger poked into Fontesca's chest.  "Don't speak to me of investors and profits.  I pulled you out of grad-school obscurity and made you the second-richest man in creation.  You couldn't even get your advisors to sign off on nano-biology research for your PhD thesis, much less get funding." He leaned in, breathing out garlic and cigar smoke, until his face was inches from Fontesca's.  Three sharp pokes.  "I.  Made.  You."
  "You're not thinking clearly," Fontesca said in a low, deadly voice.  "I told you this would happen.  The human brain isn't meant to last for centuries, even with the best upkeep."
  "Are you calling me senile?" Lucius was apoplectic with rage.
  "/ made your fortune." Fontesca advanced, hands clenched at his sides.  "The inventions Sterling Nanology is known for—they were mine.  The Nobel Prize in artificial biology—mine.  All mine." He drove Lucius back toward the desk.
The big man stumbled, surprised at Fontesca's rage.
  "After the first patents I could have gone anywhere, made another man rich.  Even now, all it would take is a thought over Gaia-Net." Fontesca swallowed.  He'd never spoken these truths aloud, hadn't even imagined them over Gaia-Net.  "I have been loyal all these years,
  
asking nothing more than the materials and equipment I needed in order to create.  But now you've given me an insoluble problem and taken away my nano-biology work." Fontesca raised his fist and shook it in Lucius's face.  "I can't create!"
  "Leo." Lucius held his hands palm up, his expression repentant.  "He's family.  My great-grandson.  And he shows such promise.  You're a genius.  You have to fix him.  If you can't, he's got only decades."
  It was incredibly frustrating.  Jack's allergies could have been repaired with a five-minute genetic alteration, using nano-biology.  But that was the one technology he couldn't use.
  Not even for fabrication of inert materials.  Jack was so sensitive that even minute amounts of nano-biological particles would set his allergy off.  And there was no disassembler that could completely remove all nano-biology, the disassemblers themselves being nano-biologicals.
  Trying to accomplish the task without nano-biology meant using faulty twentieth-century fabrication and gene-modification techniques, explained in pre-Gaia-Net records.  The few processes he'd gotten to work had been like trying to stack marbles with a ten-ton crane.
He'd explained all this to Lucius half a dozen times.
  "Perhaps you should ask yourself—ask him—how those decades should be spent," Fontesca said, bending to retrieve the wadded pile of plastic.  "Confined to an isolation room or walking around in this suit?"
  Lucius's brows knit together, and the look on his face was so sad that Fontesca pitied him.
"What if it rips?"
  "Then send him to a dead zone—create a park free from nano-biological particles for him."
  For a second, Fontesca thought Lucius would see reason.  He seemed to consider the option.  Then he shook his head.  "He'd be too vulnerable.  My enemies would use him to get to me.  The only place I can keep him safe is Elysium."
  
  Lucius looked at Fontesca, his face scrunched up like a child about to cry over a broken toy.  "You have to fix him."
  White-hot rage boiled through Fontesca.  He closed his eyes to keep from striking the man who had been his business partner for longer than either of them had ever expected to be alive.
  He straightened and laid the suit gently over his arm.  "I'll go now."
  "Thank you," Lucius blubbered.  "I knew you would help me."
  He was losing his personality, reverting to the sweet child he'd been before he'd become a ruthless man wielding a nano-biology empire.  It was happening more and more often these days.
  Next treatment-—whether Lucius willed it or no— Fontesca was going to finish the Deathless conversion on Lucius's brain.
  Jack pressed himself into the corner of the glass wall, trying to see Fontesca coming down the hall.  "Did he go for it?"
  Fontesca clutched the delicate suit in one fist.  He stopped in front of Jack's cell, his mouth tight.  "No."
  "What?" Jack pushed off the glass.  His face crumpled with anger and disbelief.  "Why not? It's flawless.  We worked on it for a month.  I could go out in the real world.  Not be stuck"—he slammed his hand against the side wall—"in here."
  "He says it's too dangerous." Fontesca wiggled his fingers through the rent as Lucius had done.  Then he shook out the suit and hung it on a hook opposite Jack's cell.
  "Aw, don't leave it there." Jack gestured at the damaged suit.  "What are you trying to do, taunt me?"
  Fontesca crossed the room to the lab.  He pulled out a roll of the material he'd fabricated to make the suit.  Cut off a piece, sprayed it with a bonding agent, and
  
carefully glued it in place over the ripped seam.  He backed off to study his handiwork.
"Consider it an opportunity," Fontesca told Jack.
  Jack sneered with all the force of adolescence.  "What kind of opportunity is that? It's half a room away and Lucius won't let me have it."
  Fontesca shook his head, fingers brushing his brow.  "You used to be my most promising student.  Think about what you want, and how you might get it, even with the limited tools at your command."
  Jack looked at his antique silicon-based laptop with disdain.  "Yeah, even if I cracked the cell's lock-codes and made it to the suit before my throat swelled up, what good would that do? He-who-must-be-obeyed would just have me thrown back in here." Jack wondered if Lucius would have Alexa do it.  To have her body pressed up to his, even for a moment, might be worth the humiliation—
  "He will," Fontesca agreed in a whisper that drew Jack's attention, "unless you leave Elysium."
  Jack stared at the repaired environmental suit.  It had mocked him for three weeks as he worked out the pass codes, typing away laboriously on his computer, which transmitted his instructions to an old wireless connection point.  Processors on the point source converted Jack's signal into something that could interface with Gaia-Net, in a crippled, limited way.  It was like trying to read a book by seeing only the placement of the letter O, so much of the context was missing in the translation to flat screen.
  He'd had nothing else to do with his time but stare at the suit and plot his escape.  He'd even refused Alexa's afternoon chess matches, afraid that her hyped-up senses would sniff out his guilty conscience.
  Lucius was off-island for the annual board meeting.  Jack had read about the stockholder dissatisfaction with Fontesca's being pulled off for one of Lucius's secret
  
projects—which Jack supposed was the search for a cure for his allergies.  Predictions were that the meeting in New York might erupt into chaos, so all the best security on the island had gone with him.
Which meant this was a now-or-never opportunity.
  There was too much Gaia-Net surveillance on the island for his escape to go undetected.  The trick was to get away before the data could be collated, interpreted, and acted on.  He would have one shot.  If Jack failed tonight, Lucius would know he intended escape and would turn his quarantine chamber into a prison.
  First was dealing with the human watcher who monitored his cell.
  The problem with human guards was that they bored easily, especially guards raised in a world of constant stimulation, where Gaia-Net entertainment was only a thought away.  Years of watching Jack without a crisis had turned their shifts into a mere formality to appease the old man.  At some point during the night the guards kicked back and lost themselves in the latest pleasures dreamed up by Gaia-Net's consensual reality.
  Jack tapped into the smart dust in the watcher's room, listening for the man's breathing to grow slow and heavy, indicating he was entering the REM state of heavy Gaia-Net entanglement.
  Jack typed furiously.  The hook holding the environmental suit was absorbed back into the wall.  The plastic crumpled to the floor, looking for all the world like a discarded snakeskin.
More keystrokes.  Nothing happened.
  Jack corrected the command onscreen.  It was a single word, but one that triggered three weeks of programming efforts.
  The floor of the lab began to undulate, each ripple pushing the suit a bit closer to the isolation cell, like driftwood riding the waves to shore.
  While the suit wriggled toward him, Jack checked in with his guard.  The man was still deep.  Jack guessed
  
Lucius's absence had taken a lot of the snap out of the security force.
  The suit lay on the other side of the isolation chamber's air lock, pressed up against the outer wall.  The problem was, no matter how Jack contorted the floor, he couldn't get the suit up and over the lip.
  He watched the suit rise and fall, failing each time to cross the threshold.  Far above him, the guard was cycling into wakefulness.
"Shit.  Shit.  Shit."
  He didn't have time for an elegant solution.  He grabbed an epi-pen out of his bathroom drawer and jammed it into his thigh, holding it in place for ten seconds.  The epinephrine hit his system in a rush, accelerating his heart and jacking up his panic.
  He crouched to fit in the air lock.  The only possession he took was his laptop.  There was no cycle-to-vacuum when the air lock moved items from Jack's environment to the world.  For that he was grateful.  One less hurdle.
  The outer door opened and Jack's skin immediately began to itch.  His lungs were on fire.  He scrambled into the suit, tugging it on as fast as he dared, careful not to rip it.  His eyes were watering so hard he had to fumble the internal zipper closed by touch.
  The suit clung to him like a second skin.  Breathing was hard, like trying to suck air through a pillow.  Between the suit and his swelling throat, Jack couldn't get enough air.  He dropped to his hands and knees, gasping against the plastic that clung to his face.  Had to calm down.  Take slow, deep breaths.  His chest burned.  Only tiny sips of air made it into his lungs.
  He clung to control.  If he panicked, it would all be over.
  Slowly, the pressure in his chest eased.  He still felt ants crawling under his skin, but he could stand up without fainting.
  He staggered toward the door.  His laptop showed that the guard watching his cell was rousing.  No doubt called
  
back to consciousness by the emergency code Jack had triggered.
  The lab door opened as Jack approached.  He felt a thrill as he stepped over a threshold he hadn't crossed since he was nine and had been carried down here for treatment.
  "Master Sterling! Wait!" It was the guard, running down the hallway with inhuman speed.  In seconds he would have Jack in his hands.
  Jack touched a button on his laptop.  The door slid closed in the guard's face and locked.  The sound of banging emanated from the far side.
  Jack tucked his computer under his arm and sprinted for the emergency stairs.  All hell was about to break loose.  He couldn't trust the elevator.
  He was out of breath by the time he'd climbed the three flights to the surface.  Sitting in a cell for years hadn't improved his stamina.  He flung open the door.
  The sky was filled with stars and a blinding full moon.  Jack stopped and gaped in wonder.  He'd forgotten how expansive the sky could be, how far the horizon could stretch.
  It made him feel unbelievably small, but he had no time for agoraphobia.
He took a step forward—and froze.
  Alexa stood in the shadow of a manicured palm tree, arms folded over her chest.  She stared at Jack.  Moonlight gleamed off her black body armor, a shadow within shadows.
  "I can't go back," Jack whispered.  "I can't live in that tomb."
  Alexa's bronze eyes were inscrutable, but Jack knew she had heard him.
  Off to Jack's right were shouts and the sound of men running toward the lab.  They'd be on Jack in a minute.  But it didn't matter.  He was already caught.  Alexa stood half a head shorter, but she could still pick him up over her head and haul him back underground.
Alexa's gaze slid toward the noise, then, faster than thought, she was gone.  "This way," she called to the others, running toward the beach.  The heavy male footsteps fought to catch up.
  For a second, Jack didn't understand.  Then it hit him—she was helping him escape.
Alexa's distraction wouldn't last long.
  Jack pelted toward the launch cannon, fumbling to type as he ran.  A long-distance drone, one that could take enough kick to make it to the mainland, slid into the cradle.
  He jumped in and pulled the cockpit down just as he heard shouts from the beach.  He uploaded his stolen launch codes and lay back in the crash couch seconds before the electromagnet accelerator kicked in.
  A single tap was his last act on the island home he'd known all his life.
He hurtled into the star-studded sky.
  Below, on the ground, the launch cannon shut down and began its annual maintenance cycle.  It would take at least an hour to restart.  Jack was gambling that Lucius wouldn't call in help to recapture his great-grandson; it would be a loss of face, and an opportunity for Luci-us's enemies.
  Crushed by acceleration into the gel of his seat, Jack didn't feel exultation or relief.  At that moment he felt only panic.  The drone was heading toward a dead zone, a nano-biology-free area where Jack would be safe from Gaia-Net observation and could live a reasonably normal life without modern technology.  He was sixteen, had no wilderness skills, and had spent the better part of his life in a glass box.
How would he survive?

     PART THREE The End of Immortality
         
1
11 April 2186
T
he Montana sky was a lacework of contrails; thousands of drones carried packages and passengers to destinations all over the globe.  The only clear blue was a pocket over Watershed Valley.  The no-fly zone was an eddy in the turbid river of commerce.
  But even that concession wasn't enough.  Particles of nano-biology blew in on the wind, fell from the sky in rain, and rode in on the wheels of hay trucks.  The world was polluted with the stuff.
  Jack Sterling sneezed, sending Liza, his bay mare, into a quick sidestep.  The sheep streaming by startled and plunged off in a new direction.  Dakota, his border collie, shook her head in irritation and darted left to redirect the sheep, nipping and circling to regroup them and push them toward the corral.
  Jack tapped his nose-plug inhaler to clear his breathing.  He'd have to shower well tonight, or he'd wake up covered in hives.
  Each year it was harder to keep his land pure.  Last
November a lightning strike downed a drone over the
eastern pasture.  A mist of nanology rained down over
hundreds of organic, non-modified sheep, ruining the
j	sanctity of their heirloom genetics and spoiling the
meat for the halal and gourmet food markets.  The whole flock had to be put down.

  More worrisome were the buttes to the south of the ranch.  The towering blocks of granite carved by glaciers had stood unassailable for aeons.  Now nano-biology constructors ate an ants' warren into the stone, turning hawks' havens into trendy housing and shopping malls.  The gray cliffs writhed with animated advertisements that blotted out the stars at night.
  Jack wondered how long he could survive against the relentless tide of progress.
  Dakota gave a sharp bark, startling Jack back to the task at hand.  He kicked Liza into motion and followed the flock.  The sheep flowed like water over rocks and around trees.
  Dakota worked the other side, keeping the flock tightly grouped and headed into the corral.  A torrent of bleating sheep burst through the gate, complaining and dodging each other's hooves.  One went down in a slick of mud and scrabbled up as her fellows cascaded around her.
  It was April, shearing season, and a whole cohort of Watershed Valley Mennonites had turned out to help.
  When the last woolly body was through, Liam, Jack's head shepherd, banged the gate shut.
  Dakota danced on her hind legs, barking delightedly.
  Jack lowered himself from Liza's saddle and looped the reins around a crossbeam of the corral.  He bent and scritched Dakota's ruff.  "Good girl."
  The barn was a flurry of activity.  Men in denim overalls formed an orderly assembly line, catching sheep and frog-marching them to the shearers.  True to their religious beliefs, the Watershed Valley Mennonites, like the Amish sect of Anabaptists, used only seventeenth-century farm implements.  The shearers pumped hand-powered scissors with brisk efficiency.  Two little boys rotated extra sets of the tools in and out.  When a shearer called out "blade!" one would run in with a newly sharpened set and take the old away to a whetstone.
  
  Jack leaned against the barn, peeled an apple with the pearl-handled pocketknife he always carried, and flipped a tangy slice into his mouth.
  No matter how many times he saw sheep shorn, it always amazed him.  The shearers flipped the sheep this way and that, controlling it with the pressure of their knees and elbows.  The fleece peeled away like the skin of an orange, dark with dirt on the outside, creamy white inside.
  Women, their dark skirts tucked into their belts, dashed in between the sheep to grab the fleece for sorting and cleaning.  One group pulled off the waste and beat the wool with sticks to flush out hay and dirt.  Others heated water over an open fire to wash the wool.
  Older men applied wound powder to nicks, trimmed hooves, and checked for disease.
  Over the course of a day's hard labor, two hundred and sixty enormous dirt-stained sheep would be converted into a flock of pink, slender animals and an enormous mass of drying white wool.
  When he was finished with the apple, Jack waded along the edge of the flock and helped Liam catch the next sheep.
  They worked side by side for hours, never speaking more than was necessary.  It had taken Jack years to get used to the quiet reserve of the Mennonites who worked his land, but over time, their peace had infected him.  Save for his clothes and the cut of his hair, he could have been one of them.
  Sarah, Liam's sister, collected a newly shorn fleece.  A dirt-stained apron covered her black dress and a white bonnet covered her golden braids.
  Her eyes met Jack's over the smelly fleece, and she blushed and darted away.  Jack was left with the impression of creamy skin, freckles, and the scent of hay and manure.
  The sheep in the pen suddenly began bucking and rolling their eyes heavenward.  Their bleating became
  
panicked.  A sound like a thudding heart pounded from the west.
"Cursed be!" shouted a shearer as the sheep he
held wrestled free.  Red streaked the half-shorn fleece.
The man cradled his hand to his chest, blood flowing
freely down his arm.
i	Jack was the first to reach him.  There was a deep
gouge between the man's forefinger and thumb.  Jack tied the man's wound with a clean handkerchief and showed one of the boys where to apply pressure.
  Then he vaulted over the corral fencing, ready to do battle with the incoming aircraft.  It was a well-maintained antique helicopter, kicking up dust as it bobbed toward a landing.  It was pre-nanotechnology, combustion-powered by synthetic fossil fuel.
  Jack signaled with his arms, waving the craft toward an empty pasture.
  "I told you—never near the barn!" Jack shouted, though he knew the pilot couldn't hear him over the cries of frightened sheep and the chuffing of the blades.
  The helicopter jinked sideways and settled to earth with the grace of a drunken dragonfly.
  A slender form stepped out of the cockpit, swathed in a transparent environmental suit that clung to the black flight suit underneath.
  The pilot was tall and well built, like all moderns.  Outside this valley, Sarah's freckles or Liam's crooked teeth would have been repaired at conception.  Appearance among the converted varied as skin tones and facial characteristics came in and out of fashion, but the flawless symmetry of their features gave them a uniformity Jack found distasteful.
  "Never land near the barn!" Jack shouted again.  He pointed back to the Mennonite men who waded among the bucking sheep, trying to calm them.
  The pilot's eyes flicked left.  If he felt any remorse for the panicked sheep or the man holding a wounded hand to his chest, he gave no sign.
  
"I've orders to bring you to Elysium."
  In the six years since Jack escaped from Lucius Sterling's private island, he'd never been home.  There was nothing for him there but a clean-room laboratory and endless blood draws and skin-prick tests.
  "Tell my great-grandfather that if he wants to talk to me, he can put on an environmental suit and come here.  I'm not going back."
  "I'm afraid, Mr.  Sterling, it was not a request." The pilot thrust forward a smart-ink document sheathed between acrylic plates.
  Jack snatched the plastic case and scanned the document.  It was a bill of sale for the Watershed Valley property to Mountainside Condominiums, Inc.  It hadn't been executed.  Not yet.  A dated DNA blot authenticated the buyer's identification and agreement to purchase.  The seller's information was incomplete, just the name of the ranch's legal owner, his greatgrandfather: Lucius Sterling.
  There it was, proof that his freedom was illusory.  Jack suspected the old man was secretly pleased with his daring escape from the safety of his clean-room prison.  But it was only an escape into a larger rat's maze—harder puzzles and better cheese, but just as much of a trap.
  Only Lucius's goodwill and vast fortune kept progress at bay.  Jack's welfare, and the security of the Mennonite community who had accepted him, depended on his magnanimity.
  Jack looked at the Mennonites.  They were frozen, as terrified as the sheep by the technological menace among them.  Liam knelt next to the bellwether, pinning him by the neck.  His expression was pensive.  Sarah stood just inside the shadows of the barn, her eyes wide.
  As much as he was tempted to try Lucius's patience, Jack couldn't risk their future.  He might find another haven; they had nowhere else in the modern world to go.
  
  "This a round-trip?" He kept his voice calm, despite the fear in his gut.  Lucius had known where he was for years.  Why call him home now?
  The pilot's stance was painfully erect.  "Mr.  Sterling does not confide in me."
  For an instant Jack wanted to shove the pilot, wanted to punish someone for what was happening.  But there was the contract—and the danger of nanol-ogy if he ripped the pilot's suit.     *
  Jack crawled into the helicopter.  Hand on the door, he looked back at the ranch, taking in everything in case this was the last time he saw it: the Mennonites, composed and tidy, Dakota's worried growling, the bleating sheep, the gray boulders strewn over hard-packed brown earth, the cloudless blue sky, the feel of the wind on his face—Sarah.
He sought her out among the shadows of the barn.
  Sarah's eyes met his, and her grip on the fleece she held tightened until her knuckles went white.
  Jack smiled sadly.  Over the past year, she'd left him little gifts on his doorstep in the morning: a pair of tiny blue forget-me-nots, a bundle of cookies, a linen handkerchief with his initials woven into the fabric, a perfect red apple.  He'd seen her at it through the window, but hadn't said anything.  What she wanted was impossible.
  Jack had been accepted by the Mennonites as a necessary defense against the modern world, a good man in his own way but ultimately not one of them.  Sarah's father had made that clear to Jack in a man-to-man conversation when they'd repaired a length of fence along the northern pasture.  Both men had agreed that the fence, while a hardship for sheep that might wish to stray, was necessary for the safety of all.
  The helicopter lifted off, and everything Jack had worked to build over the past six years dwindled away.
There were fences everywhere.

2
A
lexa patrolled the pearlescent catwalk that circled thirty feet above the children's courtyard.  Her lithe body was sheathed in a black-toned camouflage bodysuit.  She was an out-of-place shadow amid the salmon pink morning sun filtering through the walls.  The building had been grown to resemble a five-story conch shell, set on end.  Its rippling lip framed the ground-level play area facing the sea.
  As she followed the inner spiral of the catwalk, Alexa's eyes scanned for danger.  She verified the location and identity of the perimeter bodyguards, counted all sixty-eight children and twenty-two attendants, checked for suspicious packages, looked for out-of-place footsteps in the sand garden and the surrounding grounds.  The biological warfare sensors, blowing in the wind like flypaper, were still white, unmarked by the red streaks that indicated a dangerous viral or bacterial presence.
  Three months since the last attack on Sterling Nanotech, Inc.  Since then, things had been quiet— too quiet.
Something was brewing.  Alexa felt it in her bones.
  Island security had activated the perimeter web.  No aircraft or boat could come within fifty miles of Elysium without clearance.  Anyone foolish enough to try would be diced by an invisible network of dozen-molecules-wide titanium ribbons.  Gordon, the head of
  
security, wouldn't tell her why the barrier had been raised.  "Beyond your authority," he'd grumbled when she pressed him.
  Below her, the children—aged three months to seventeen years—screamed and splashed each other in a waterfall pool, napped in hammocks, and clustered around a science tutor to pull carbon nanotubes from solution.  The six teenagers used a portable gene lab to modify the patterns on the wings of monarch butterflies.
  Her perimeter check done, Alexa stepped off the catwalk, landing with a bounce step on the flooring sixty feet below.  Her bones flexed and recovered on impact.
  "Lex-za!" shouted two-year-old Hans.  His face was still baby chubby.  He ran at Alexa full tilt, arms flung wide.
  Her instincts kicked into play, analyzing the threat from the three-foot-tall boy.  Her subconscious calculated sixteen ways to stop his charge and render him unconscious.  She verified his scent—not a simulacrum sent to infiltrate the children's ward; no weapons in his pudgy fingers.  The sound of his footfalls gave her an estimate of the impending force and impact from his thirty-two-pound body.
  He was no danger, other than to himself.  A delicate human child, too young for conversion and thus as frail as the wings of the butterflies his cousins were brewing in the genetic manipulator.
  But a century and a half of guarding Lucius and his possessions from all threats—without even the respite of sleep—made risk assessment automatic.
  Alexa reined in an instinct to pin the boy to the ground with her foot.
  Instead, she launched Hans into the air, caught him gently, and lowered him to the ground in one smooth movement.  His wriggly body was warm under her hands.
  
  "More!" he demanded enthusiastically, holding out his arms.
  "No more." Alexa shook her head, suppressing a smile.  "I'm working.  To keep you safe."
  The little boy pouted, his lower lip protruding.  Then a butterfly with DEVON OBER ALLES inscribed among the patterns of its wings flew by.  The little boy batted at the passing insect and took off after it, raising a howl of protest from its teenage creator.
  Hans's nanny intervened, picking up the protesting toddler before he could clench his fist around the butterfly.  "Sorry," she told Alexa.  "He's overexcited.  His mother's back in the compound.  She decided to have a second child before conversion."
  Alexa had seen Hans's mother in the adult compound.  A bat-winged woman wearing layered fumy nanofiber tunics over her swollen belly.  Her beautiful high-cheekboned face had been set in the same pout Hans now displayed.  Lucius had refused her petition for a germ-line genetic modification that would allow his great-great-granddaughter to be born with tiny wings of her own.
  Alexa's keen hearing had picked up their argument from the other side of the adults' compound.
  "You're an antique!" Kalee had shouted.  "Mired in your prejudice for the unaltered human form.  If we can improve it, we should.  Isn't that what you always say?"
  Lucius's rumbling voice was unmistakable.  "You are a Sterling, engineered to the highest standards of human perfection.  I couldn't stop you from throwing that away on the latest body-mod fad, but I forbid you to tamper with the child.  She will be born a Sterling—not a freak."
  The argument continued, but Alexa stopped listening.  She'd heard it before, in endless variations.  Lucius was hidebound in his preference for the natural human form.
  
  Kalee had always been a brat.  Alexa remembered the woman's time in the children's quarters.  She had dunked younger children in the pool and stolen extra sweets at snack time.
  Kalee would stay long enough to give birth and hand the child over to the nannies of the children's compound.  Then she would be off for conversion— the monthlong procedure that Alexa had undergone, now compressed into a relatively painless day.
  It was so easy for Lucius's descendants.  Produce one or more children for posterity and receive the gift of immortality.  No centuries of service, no mortgage on your soul.  Alexa ground her teeth and tried, for Hans's sake, not to envy Kalee.
  Alexa walked among the children, watching the nannies play catch and peekaboo with the younger children, listening to the older children's enthusiasm as they used data-gloves to control the microscopic robots that pulled nanotubes out of solution.  The tutor explained how the superconducting properties of carbon nanotubes made modern power transmission lossless.
  It was Alexa's duty to protect not only the children's physical well-being but their emotional and intellectual health as well.  She monitored the child-care workers as closely as she monitored their surroundings.
  A year ago Alexa had reported a nanny who had angrily shaken her crying charge.  The woman was fired and returned to the mainland.  Lucius blackballed her from conversion to Deathless.  Even if one day she was able to raise the millions required for the procedure, she would be turned away from any lab that licensed the technology from Sterling, Inc.—and they all did.
  Alexa heard rumors of an illegal start-up trying to reverse-engineer the process, but so far nothing had been proven.
  A high-pitched whistling startled Alexa out of her reverie, and she crossed the courtyard in three swift
  
strides to the seaward side and looked up into the bright morning sky.
  "What is it?" murmured Hans's nanny, balancing him on her hip and following Alexa's gaze to the sunny sky.
  Alexa ignored the woman's question, focusing her preternatural hearing on the sound.  It was a racing drone, a rare sound.  She concentrated further, pushing back the nearby sounds of the surf and the children's laughter.  It was an unscheduled arrival.
  Some of Lucius's enemies, the ones who could pay for conversion but had been refused, could afford such a craft.  And the security web was lowering ...
  Alexa used the local Gaia-Net to transmit a silent warning to the children's nannies and tutors: Get the children inside.
  With practiced efficiency, the child-care workers gathered their charges and hustled them through shell-pink doors to the interior game room.
"It's just a drill," the genetics tutor told his students.
  A couple of the teenagers looked over their shoulders at Alexa, their faces drawn with doubt and concern.
  The air was filled with smart dust: transmitters, receivers, sensors of all types.  The local Gaia-Net hummed with communication exchanges.  Alexa picked up an encrypted security broadcast: All guard personnel, prepare for full quarantine at heliport four.  Follow emergency plan A.
  The noise was audible to the children now, and they rushed squealing through the doors.
  Alexa thought back a message to Elysium's head of security.  Gordon, the children are secure.  What's happening?
  Several seconds of delay.  Gordon answered other queries before her own.  He assumed that Alexa, the oldest of Lucius's bodyguards, was an obsolete toy he had tired of and banished to the children's wing to oversee playground disputes.
  
  Lucius never said otherwise, but Alexa had served as his right hand for more than seventy years.  She knew him almost as well as Fontesca did.  She had been transferred after the first attack on the children's quarters.  Lucius considered her the most loyal and subtle weapon at his command.  He put her where she was needed, protecting his most precious possession— his descendants.
  Gordon.  Alexa allowed annoyance to color her transmission.  Current status? Do I need full biohaz-ard lockdown?
  Gordon's voice resonated in her ear so clearly he could have been standing behind her.  No threat to the children.  I'm sending Chet to take over your post.  Report to the audience chamber.  A note of resentment crept into his transmission.
Lucius asked for you.

3
Once the helicopter leveled off, the pilot handed Jack an environmental suit.  It blocked nano-biology particles, allowing only oxygen and a few other small molecules to transpire.  It would protect Jack when they landed.  He wriggled into it, banging his elbow in the cramped cockpit.
  After Jack was dressed, the pilot unzipped his own suit and threw the hood back.  He took three large drafts of air.  "That thing fits like a full-body condom."
  "Yeah, they're tight," Jack agreed, plucking at his own suit.  "So, why did the old man call me back?"
The pilot shook his head.  "Not my place to say."
  Jack understood.  Lucius liked to keep the upper hand.  Reveal nothing until the final moment.
  The pilot's eyes glazed over, and Jack guessed he was surfing Gaia-Net.
  Jack didn't mind.  He was used to silence and quiet reflection.  Often he spent all day with no more company than the sheep and Dakota, his dog.
  The helicopter landed at a private airstrip near Billings, and they transferred to a two-man drone for the 3,500-mile trip to Lucius Sterling's Elysium compound.
  The drone was sleek, with a mottled blue surface the hue and shape of a robin's egg.  It was covered with thousands of tiny hummingbird wings that currently lay flat against its surface, like scales.  After the
  
launch, those wings would rise and provide additional lift and maneuverability.
  The pilot helped Jack into the drone, then climbed in after him, pulling the hatch shut.
  The pilot's expression became distracted as he sent orders that Jack—with his lack of a connection to Gaia-Net—could not perceive.  The launch cannon tilted upward, sliding the drone into the launch pocket at the base of the tube.
  With a sudden shuddering pressure, the electromagnets of the cannon launched the drone into a high arc.  The Rocky Mountains blurred beneath them, soon replaced by an endless stretch of Pacific Ocean.  The drone traveled at several times the speed of sound, ripping clouds into streamers.
  In an hour, the Hawaiian Islands appeared as green-and-brown flecks on the sapphire sea.  Elysium was two hundred and fifty miles to the east, separate and recognizable in its unnatural symmetry and perfectly circular coves.  As a child, he'd read that Elysium had been open ocean until Lucius had Fontesca raise an entire island to demonstrate Sterling Nanology's technical prowess.
  The drone slowed in preparation for landing, rousing Jack from his musings of churning sea and boiling magma.
  He leaned forward and looked out the windshield at what had once been home, a lifetime ago.  To Luci-us's credit, his terraforming of Elysium was uncharacteristically tasteful, bringing in native species from other Pacific islands.  Save for the Sterling compound on the south end and a few rustic beach cabins, Elysium had a pristine glory not seen since the days of Polynesian exploration.
  The drone dove toward the southern tip of the island.  Waves crashed against black-and-tan beaches.  A half circle of structures faced the sea.  Grown by Fon-tesca's wizardry, they used native materials reinforced
  
by nanology into fanciful shapes.  They were still growing, at a pace matching that of the coral reef.
  The children's wing was pearlescent pink, an elegant spiral that rose from the ground like a seashell dropped from a giant's hand.  Lucius's palace faced the children's wing, a structure of smoky obsidian, looking like a wave-carved pebble at this height.  There were guest quarters grown from baobab trees and, at some distance from the other buildings, a waterfall that shielded the entrance to Fontesca's underground laboratory.  A place Jack knew all too well.
  The electromagnets of the decel cannon slowed the drone with a gentle pressure that pressed Jack into his seat.  The bottom of the cannon irised open and tilted to drop them—as gently as an egg onto a pillow—onto the receiving pad.  The drone's canopy popped open.
  Two beautiful Polynesian-looking women looped plumeria leis over Jack's head and kissed his cheek through the plastic of his environmental suit.  Despite their exotic looks, they were probably from Kansas or somewhere equally unlikely.  All the staff on Elysium were modified; none were who they appeared to be.
  Jack turned in a circle and took in the postcard-perfect view of palm trees, surf, and ocean, the fanciful structures that rose around him, testament to man's victory over nature.  It was so different from the rough-hewn cliffs of Montana.  Even the sunlight was more vivid here at the equator.  The colors were topaz, emerald, and sapphire, unlike the denim and dust of his ranch.
  The tropical landscape pulled at him with painful nostalgia.  It was both familiar and alien.  He'd spent the first sixteen years of his life here, frolicking on the beaches with the other Sterling children, hurtling down water slides, genetically modifying frogs, flying in virtual-reality tours over the island via the local version of Gaia-Net that Lucius provided for the children—until his allergy closed over him like a
  
shroud, blocking out everything but endless medical procedures.
  But those memories felt transparent, as if they'd happened to someone else.
  The pilot led Jack to Lucius's residence via a sand-colored slidewalk that wound through ferns and palm trees encrusted with orchids.  The cool obsidian of the main mansion was a relief after the hot sun.  The stone walls glowed gray brown as they filtered the harsh Elysium light.  The walls curved in organic shapes and cut sunbeams into muted rainbows, giving the place the feeling of a crystal cave.
  The opulence and casual manipulation of nature jarred Jack.  Six years of exile had given him an appreciation of hand labor and the simple lines of the rough-milled wooden homes he shared with the Watershed Valley Mennonites.
  The slidewalk shifted underfoot as it rippled them toward their destination.  Jack watched his balance; any fall might rip his suit.  He didn't trust the pilot to rush forward and save him.
"Jack?" a woman called from overhead.
  Jack whirled, hoping to see Alexa.  But no—the tone was too light, with none of the sultry Southern accent that had thrilled his teenage years.
  The question had come from a woman on one of the many interior pocket-balconies overhead.  She was at least eight months pregnant, wearing a diaphanous silken garment that changed color as random currents of air stirred its fabric.  One hand resting on her swollen belly, she leaned over the obsidian banister as far as she could for a closer look.
"It is you, isn't it?"
"Yes .  .  .  and you are .  .  .  ?"
  She hefted her wide hip over the railing.  Before Jack could protest in alarm, there was a rapid flapping and a whump and she was at his side.  In the shadows of the catwalk, he'd missed seeing the bat wings that now folded back into her shoulders.
  
  "Kalee.  Don't you remember me?" Her wide-set eyes studied his features.  "Your face is longer, and there are creases, here." She reached a hand to touch the crow's-feet that the Montana sun had weathered into his skin.
Jack stepped back, flinching from her touch.
  The pilot was instantly between him and the young pregnant woman.  "Don't touch him, Mistress Kalee.  His protective suit is fragile."
  Jack remembered her now.  They'd played together in the children's wing—until his allergies manifested and he'd been kept in isolation.
  Kalee sidestepped the pilot as if he were a piece of badly placed furniture.  "Of course.  That's aging, isn't it? How strange." She peered closely at his eyes but did not try to touch him again.  "Does it hurt?"
  Kalee had been fourteen when Jack escaped from Elysium.  He saw the echoes of the girl she had been in her wide cheeks and upturned nose.
"Not yet," he answered.
  Kalee grunted and placed a hand on her belly.  She looked down at her visibly rippling stomach.  "Active little mite.  I'm naming her Persephone.  Lucius would have had me leave her to the womb banks, but I wanted to go through the whole process this time, experience everything, you know?" She rubbed her belly affectionately.  "This is the last child I'll have before conversion."
  The pilot coughed delicately.  "Master Jack, he is waiting for you in the reception room."
  Jack didn't have to ask who "he" was.  "I have to go."
  "So they've found a cure, then?" Kalee smiled dreamily, still rubbing her belly.  "That's wonderful." She waved as Jack and his guards continued their walk.  "Come see me when you're fixed."
  Kalee's parting words left Jack disconcerted.  Had Fontesca found a cure for his allergy to nano-biology? Was that why Lucius had summoned him home?
  
  Jack and the pilot walked toward a giant koa-wood door.  The rare wood gleamed with golden fire.  At their approach it split into half a dozen fragments and opened a path into Lucius's reception hall.
  The room beyond had all the subtlety of a cathedral.  Sunlight streamed in through windows that might have been stained glass, save for the colors undulating like thick-flowing lava.
  Lucius sat on a raised dais, in a hand-carved chair of koa wood.  The spindles of the arms were DNA spirals, the handgrips clusters of water molecules, the headrest a burst of rays representing the carbon-nanotube-beanstalks that carried mankind into low Earth orbit.
  Lucius looked exactly as Jack remembered him: healthy, in an opulent, oversized way, like a lumberjack dressed in silk pajamas and set upon a throne.
  "Why am I here?" Jack demanded.  "I made it clear six years ago that I was tired of being Fontesca's lab rat."
  Lucius placed a hand on his chest.  "There's nothing so heartwarming as the gratitude of the young."
  A woman stepped from behind Lucius's throne.  In sugared tones, she said, "I never knew you to need gratitude, Lucius.  Just compliance."
Jack's breath caught.  Alexa.
  She moved like smoke in moonlight, and hadn't aged a day in the years he'd been gone.  Her slender form was as gently rounded as a teenage girl in the first bloom of youth, accented by the nanofiber bodysuit she wore.  Her face was that of a dark angel, the sharp angles of cheekbones and chin saved from harshness by the rounded lushness of her mouth and eyes, and a pert button nose.
Jack's mouth went dry and his heart pounded.
  Lucius noticed Jack's stillness and put a proprietary hand around Alexa's waist, drawing her toward his throne.  "The boy's smitten.  Do you affect all my male progeny this way?"
Alexa ignored the question.  "Why are we here? You haven't summoned me from the children's wing in more than a decade."
  Lucius tapped his finger against her hip.  In a soft voice he said, "Gordon, it's time."
  Guards from all branches of Sterling security poured in and took up positions on either side of the hall, standing at parade rest, dressed in garb ranging from camouflage jumpsuits to native tapa cloth and leaves.
  Leading them was a tall guard, nearly seven feet, with a loping, wolflike gait.  Like Alexa, he was clad in black nanofiber.  He stared longer than was polite at Alexa, standing at Lucius's right hand.
"Gordon," she said levelly, not moving aside.
  A flicker of emotion crossed Gordon's face, then he stepped to Lucius's left.
  The last person to enter the room was Fontesca, carrying a rolled-up cloth under his arm.  His shoulders were hunched, whether with shame or worry it was hard to say.
  Jack's stomach clenched at the sight of the man who'd been first his mentor, then his torturer, and finally his deliverance.  Like Alexa, Fontesca hadn't aged.
He didn't meet Jack's gaze.
  The koa door rebuilt itself, the seams disappearing into the shimmering grain of the wood.
  A murmur ran through the guards at the appearance of the reclusive scientist.  Then they quieted, looking attentively at Lucius, as if receiving unspoken commands.
  Alexa nudged Lucius with her elbow.  "Speak aloud.  Jack isn't on Gaia-Net."
  Every eye in the room turned to stare—first at Alexa, then at Jack.  He didn't need Gaia-Net to know what was behind the serious expressions and knowing looks.  The guards buzzed with gossip about who he was, and the allergy that left him unable to tolerate nano-biological modifications.
  
  Jack flushed.  This was why he'd abandoned the modem world, hadn't tried to live in it with environmental suits and glass partitions.  Six years living as a freak was enough.
  "So impertinent," Lucius said to Alexa.  "No wonder I exiled you to the children's wing." He turned to Jack.  "As I said, there is a new threat to Elysium and, indeed, to the entire world.  I am ordering full quarantine.  No craft comes within fifty miles of the island.  No drone, no boat, not even a message in a bottle."
Gordon straightened and looked at Lucius.
  "Aloud," Lucius reminded him, "for my great-grandson."
  In a voice rusty and wavering with disuse, Gordon fumbled.  "Sir, what .  .  .  type .  .  .  threat?"
  Lucius gestured to Fontesca as his answer.  "Show them."
  With a flourish like a stage magician, Fontesca unfurled the sheet rolled under his arm.  It snapped rigid, and he laid it on the floor.  A smoke of nano-biology particles billowed from its surface.  Pinpoint magnetic fields generated by the sheet's internal bioelectronics tamed those particles into the image of the idyllic garden city of Los Angeles.  Skyscrapers grew in the bright, clean air of the coastal city.  Sleek low-altitude vehicles darted here and there on hundreds of tiny hummingbird-wing scales.
  "Look here," Fontesca said, zooming in on a car that had paused to release its passenger.  The rear feathers crumbled and disintegrated into dust.  The car twitched, tried to take off, but the contagion spread.  The back half fell like ash from a spent cigarette, hitting the pavement and exploding into dust.
The passenger backed away, mouth agape.
  Within seconds the rest of the vehicle dissolved, a wisp of tissue paper devoured by flame.  Wind from a passing hover-car stirred the cloud so it floated over the passenger.
  
  He coughed, then fell to the ground screaming and twitching.  After a moment of thrashing, he lay still.
  When the screen's video was done, the final image— busy city, swirl of cinders, fallen passenger—hung frozen like a ghostly diorama in the air.  No one in the room spoke for long seconds.
"A new bioweapon?" growled Gordon.
  "No," said Fontesca.  "I analyzed the remains.  It's a new type of engineered life.  A rogue disassembler activated by the base nucleotides of nano-biology.  Unlike the disassemblers that nano-biology uses to reclaim materials, this one deconstructs indiscriminately.''
  Silence echoed in the room, as everyone took that in.  All the Deathless, the grown cities, medical modifications, transportation, food production, Gaia-Net, smart dust—everything ran on nano-biology.  Mankind had used Fontesca's discovery of four new nucleotides, distinct from and incompatible with natural biology, to build a parallel biology on Earth.  For the past two centuries, every major development had built on nano-biology.
  "A new type of artificial biology," Jack sputtered.  "One that destroys nano-biology on contact? This would cripple—I mean—" He waved his hands in the air, trying to grasp the scope of the problem.  It had been years since he'd studied with Fontesca, the details of nano-biology were hazy, but this—"How far could it spread?"
  Lucius shifted on his throne.  He looked every one of his two hundred and fifty years.  It wasn't in his flesh, which was timeless, but in the set of his shoulders and the world-weary ache of his voice.
"Son, the whole damn world is at stake."

4
Jack couldn't believe what he was hearing.  "If it's so lethal, why did it stop? Why didn't it take out the entire city?"
  Fontesca's face was set in lines of worry and grief.  "From what I can tell, the rogue disassemblers have a short life span.  They deconstruct all nano-biology they encounter until they reach apotheosis.  Then, as in natural biology, an internal process tells them to self-destruct."
  "Why did the man die?" Alexa asked.  Her eyes narrowed at the frozen video.  "He looks like a common worker, not Deathless."
  Fontesca tapped the video to enlarge the view of the fallen man.  "He'd had enhancements, a defective heart valve rebuilt with nano-biology.  When the disassembler deconstructed those repairs, he hemorrhaged internally and bled to death."
  There was a rustle of unease through the guards.  They were all modified, their bodies rewritten at a cellular level to be impervious to injury and aging.  Their DNA carried two additional chromosomes that evolution never intended.  They were as unnatural as the hover-car that had disintegrated.
  Only Jack, the freak, the one hundred percent all-natural human, version 1.0, was safe.  Jack, who had once been Fontesca's best student in creating artificial
  
life, who had broken out of Elysium's underground lab to live an isolationist's life in rural Montana.
  The weight of the guards' suspicion was a palpable force.  Pheromones of masculine fear tainted the room.
Jack wished he'd stayed in Watershed Valley.
  "Where did the weapon come from?" Alexa voiced the concern they all felt.
  Fontesca stared at Alexa for a long moment.  His expression was distant, and very sad.  "I can't tell you." He continued, "But it isn't natural.  Something this complex would take millions of years to arise out of random processes."
Another silence.
  Jack looked up at the soaring obsidian ceiling and imagined it raining down on him like soot.
  He contemplated skyscrapers dissolving around the workers who toiled in them, family housing evaporating, laboratories shredding like mist before sunshine.  With enough of these disassemblers, mankind could be returned to the Stone Age.  Only the few pockets of humanity untouched by nano-biology would have a good chance of survival: Jack's Watershed Valley Mennonites and a few Buddhist retreats in Tibet and Japan.  The rest of humanity—those who survived having their enhancements suddenly reversed—would have to relearn how to live in a world where things were made, not grown.  Millions would die.
  "If we don't know who created this, do we know why?" Alexa persisted.  "Who was the passenger?"
  "No one important," said Lucius.  "A junior designer for a body-mod firm.  He did assembly-line design work, nothing interesting or original.  My researchers haven't been able to track down any powerful enemies."
  Fontesca's fingertips tapped against his thigh.  "I can't believe it was created as a weapon.  There's no way to target it except by timing its release and apotheosis.  Too much room for error.  Too many casual-
  
ties." He noticed his hand's motion and shoved it in his pocket.  "I checked the academic, industry, and hacker areas of Gaia-Net.  There's nothing like this.  It uses eight nucleotides.  Four natural ones, and four that no one's seen before.  It's horrifically complex."
  "Why, Leo?" Alexa asked.  "Why would someone create something this dangerous?"
  Fontesca swallowed, looked sidelong at Jack.  "It could be useful ...  to a person with Jack's condition.  Perhaps its release was a mistake.  A delivery that broke open in the upper atmosphere."
Again attention turned to Jack.
  Gordon flexed a fist.  Spikes extruded from his knuckles.
  Jack held up his hands.  "Hey, I'm a sheep farmer." He spread his fingers to display the membrane that protected him from the air.  "With a debilitating allergy.  I can't even wear a video-shirt.  Forget working in a secret nano-biology lab."
  "Jack is not a suspect," Lucius boomed.  He made eye contact with all of his guards.
Gordon dropped his hand.  The spikes disappeared.
  Lucius stood and gestured at the frozen video display.  "I'm imposing quarantine on Elysium.  Now you know how serious this situation is.  No craft—air or sea—comes within fifty miles of Elysium.  Shoot any that cross that boundary.  I don't care if it's my great-aunt Sally or the president of the Northern Hemisphere Alliance.  No one gets in.  Anyone who leaves the island during this crisis stays out until it's over." His eyes swept the room.  "Even me."
  "Sir," Gordon asked in his rusted-metal voice, "what about windblown particles? This drone"—he pointed at the frozen image.  "If it picked up the disassembler in flight, it could be in the upper atmosphere.  It might rain down on us."
  "An excellent point," Fontesca said.  "Activate the UV dome.  If it gets hit, evacuate to the tunnels."
  
  "You have your orders." Lucius dismissed the guards.  "Secure my island."
Alexa moved to obey, but Lucius caught her wrist.
  Gordon was the last man out the door.  He saw Alexa still standing with Lucius, and frowned.  Then the koa-wood door reassembled itself, locking him out.
  The cavernous audience chamber now held only Fontesca, Jack, Lucius, and Alexa.  The ceiling polarized, directing the light into an intimate puddle around them.
  Alexa walked down the steps to the simulation.  She poked a finger into the display, distorting the imaging dust.
  "The fact that there's nothing about it on Gaia-Net," Fontesca said, "is telling.  Even a secret facility with a strong firewall would have leaks.  Subconscious thoughts would leak out while the researchers are asleep."
"Not if they slept in a dead zone," Alexa said.
  "Exactly," Lucius said grimly.  "I've had security teams go into all the remaining dead zones on the planet-—"
Jack's head popped up.  "Even Watershed Valley?"
  Lucius stared him down.  "You think your privacy is more important than the fate of every human on the planet?"
  Jack flushed.  He was a man now, respected in the Watershed Valley community.  Yet with a couple of sentences Lucius could make him feel like an ignorant child.
  "You thought /would create something like this?" Jack couldn't keep the indignation out of his voice.
  Lucius leveled a flat gaze at him.  "You didn't leave the island on the best of terms.  A disassembler that destroys all nano-biology? A protege of Fontesca who just happens to be deathly allergic to nano-biology? I had to check.
  
  "The point is," Lucius continued, "all teams returned with a negative report.  All teams but one.  The group we sent to the Chhoedi Monastery in Lo Mon-thang, Tibet." He paused.  "That team disappeared."
"How many?" Alexa asked.
  "A tactical team of two Deathless and four modded special ops."
  Alexa whistled.  "That's a lot of firepower to go missing."
  "I know." Lucius pointed a sausagelike finger at Alexa.  "That's why I'm sending you in to find out what happened."
  Jack's breath caught.  You didn't send a beautiful plaything into a military situation.  Had Lucius gone senile? There were those rumors that he'd kept his brain mortal.
  "You can't send Alexa." Jack slashed the air.  "That's crazy.  She's the guard for the children's ward, a glorified babysitter."
  Lucius turned to Alexa.  "What are you teaching the children these days?"
  Alexa raised one delicately arched eyebrow.  "Only what they need to know."
  Lucius leaned back in his chair and extracted a cigar from his shirt pocket.  He flicked the end and it self-lit.  "Boy, I can and will deploy Alexa on this mission.  I'll do so for the very reason that she's spent the last century watching over the children's ward: she's the best I have."
  Alexa glanced over at Lucius.  "Good to hear you admit it."
  "Don't let her size fool you.  Alexa's got years of experience on those hulks that were just in here, and Leo regularly updates her with the latest advances in nano-biology." Lucius held his palms out to encompass the island.  "If Elysium is Leo's Sistine Chapel, Alexa is his Mona Lisa."
  "Thought I was a sight prettier than that," Alexa drawled.
  
"Indeed," Lucius acknowledged.
  Jack wasn't convinced.  "But to send her but alone, while we cower here on Elysium? That's—"
  "A small team can infiltrate where a larger team would be spotted." Lucius puffed on his cigar, blew a double ring of smoke.  "And who said I was sending her alone?"
  "But—" Jack looked over his shoulder at Fontesca, then back at Lucius.  They were both too valuable to Sterling Nanology, Inc.  Surely Lucius wouldn't risk— Then it hit him.
"Me?"
It came out as more of a squeak than he'd intended.
  "You're perfect for this mission," Lucius said.  "A natural human with a detailed understanding of nano-biology.  You're immune to the disassembler's effect, and able to recognize an illicit lab."
  Jack looked sidelong at Alexa.  He thought of all the hours he'd spent with her, playing chess through a glass partition.  Then memories of Sarah and Watershed Valley filled his mind.  Back home they'd be harvesting the hay for winter.  He didn't belong in Lucius's fast-paced world of international intrigue.  Not anymore.
  Jack held up his hands and backed away.  "I'd like to help, but I'm just a man.  No special strengths.  And my knowledge of nano-biology is six years out of date.  You'd do better to have Alexa radio back what she finds.  Let Fontesca sort it out."
  Lucius pursed his lips.  "You're not thinking this through, boy." He poked the cigar in Jack's direction.  "There are two reasons why you're going to do this: yours and mine.  My reason is that I'm sending my most valuable servant into a dangerous situation.  That environmental suit you're wearing isn't designed for combat.  One tiny rip and you'd be toast.  The same goes for Alexa if this disassembler is around.  She needs help—the kind of help that won't melt away in her time of greatest need."
  
Lucius puffed.  "Then there's your reason—"
  Jack could see it coming.  The lever Lucius would pull to move him.  "You'll sell Watershed Valley if I don't." His face scrunched up with distaste.  "You'd throw a whole community out of their home to get your way."
  A flicker of disappointment passed over Lucius's timeless face.  "You don't know me.  You don't have any clue who you're dealing with.  The bill of sale was to get you on the helicopter.  You're my great-grandson.  I'd never sell your ranch out from under you." He took another puff.  "Have to say, though, I'm disappointed in your lack of imagination."
Jack waited, unconvinced.
  Lucius tapped the end of his cigar, extinguishing it, and slid it back into his pocket.  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, speaking in a conspiratorial tone.  "Your reason for going is that if this thing can be controlled, it's your ticket back into the modern world."
  A cold sweat blew through Jack.  Lucius was right.  If the disassembler could be controlled, destroying only nano-biology on his person, he could interact with technology again.  He'd have to wear gloves, but he'd be free of the constant threat of breaching his environmental suit.
  Jack remembered the thrill of creating new life with nano-biology.  He'd been good at it.  Fontesca said so.  And the world was filled with wonders he'd never seen.  He could travel.  Being there would be so much better than just reading about things on his laptop.
  Then he thought of Sarah and Liam, faithful Dakota.  The Mennonite families who, while not quite accepting him, had made room for a fugitive in their midst, sheltering him as best they could.  The thrill of riding the open range, directing the sheep like a coursing wave over hills and valleys.  Sleeping under the huge Montana sky that even the blight of urban sprawl hadn't conquered.
  
"What are you going to do, boy?"
  Alexa looked at him with knowing eyes.  All the temptations of the modern world were in that stare.
Jack opened his mouth, unsure of what he'd say.
"Yes."
  "Thought you'd see it my way." Lucius stood.  On the far side of the room, the koa-wood door slid apart.  "You will find a two-man drone waiting on the launch pad."
  Lucius lumbered down from the dais and kissed Alexa's cheek.  He whispered, "Hurry and fix this, pet.  Island life will be colorless without you."
  
5
W
ind from the launch pad ruffled Alexa's hair as she tossed her day pack into the two-man drone.  After more than a century and a half of service, everything she owned could fit in a shoe box.
  Her closets of dresses and skintight body armor, the racks of shoes and weapons, belonged to Lucius.  Dress-up accessories for his favorite doll.
  Her personal possessions were few: old paper photographs of family long dead, a love letter her father had written to her mother, a scuffed friendship bracelet made of russet and gold embroidery floss that she'd stolen from her first boyfriend.  There was almost nothing from her life post-conversion—a change of clothes and a disk full of her medical information.  It was as if she'd always known this day would come.  When Lucius would ask her—without warning—to leave again.
  Jack was twenty paces behind.  He'd stopped to grab a sack lunch.  Food was something Alexa hadn't indulged in for decades.  Alexa's body drew sustenance from solar radiation and ambient nano-biology particles.
  She hovered at the drone's door, hand on the rim.  Preflight diagnostics danced through her frontal cortex, but her mind wasn't on the local wind statistics.
  She had been at Lucius's right hand for enough years to see past his bluster.  He was scared.
  
  She and Jack were supposed to locate and stop production of the rogue disassemblers.  But what she and Lucius both knew—and left unsaid—was that this particular demon might not fit back into Pandora's box.  What if it was already in the upper atmosphere and, as a result of interacting with both natural and nano-biology bacteria, had learned how to reproduce itself? Despite the safeguards built into modern nano-biology, spontaneous hybrids did happen.  Bacteria swapped genes with abandon, cycling through generations and mutations with dizzying speed.  You couldn't stop nature.
  If this thing got loose, all of civilization was in jeopardy.  Everything depended on nano-biology.
  Alexa looked out across the Sterling compound and the impossibly bright morning sky.  Her eyes lingered on the shell-pink building.  She inhaled the scent of salt water and plumeria, the musky-sweet smell of babies.  Little Hans's pudgy cheeks, Elise's silky locks, Devon's love of puns, Mari's teenage dignified facade, which still occasionally broke into giggles.  They were the closest thing to her own children that she would ever know.
"Ready?" Jack asked, walking up behind her.
  Alexa closed her eyes tight, holding the images of all she had lost—all she might now lose—in her heart.  Then she let it go.
"Let's get moving."
  She helped Jack climb the stairs into the drone, mindful of his environmental suit.  With one last glance at the island that had been her home for nearly fifteen decades, Alexa pulled herself up after him.
  Being in the two-man drone was like lying in a double coffin.  They reclined side by side in seats that supported them from head to foot.  The structural support and impact-cushioning gel were necessary to counteract the drone's rapid acceleration to Mach 3.
  The intimacy of the arrangement was oppressive.  Joined almost literally at the hip, their elbows touch-
  
ing, Alexa and Jack were trapped, with no place to retreat for privacy.
  Alexa slowed her breathing, preparing for the meditative state that cleansed her mind now that sleep was unnecessary.  A prickling sensation made her open her eyes.
  Jack stared at her.  "I can't get over how you haven't changed."
  Alexa looked back at him.  He had.  The boy she had known had grown into a man of a sort rarely seen these days: weathered at twenty-two, with scars on his hands and a tanned face that already showed the hint of creases at the corners of his mouth and eyes.
  Most who could afford the conversion to Deathless chose an eternal youth of perfect skin and glossy hair.  There was something appealing about Jack's flaws, like the patina on a weathervane.
  "Of course not.  Fbntesca keeps me in repair." Like a car, she thought, a very-old-model car.  Every few years he completely updated her nano-biology, in a compressed version of the conversion she had first undergone.  After so many rebirths, was she even the same person? Or newly created each time, waking up with the previous Alexa Dubois's memories? It was a question she avoided contemplating.
  "So—what happened to my co-children?" asked Jack.
  He's trying to make small talk, Alexa realized.  It had been decades since she'd traveled with anyone who didn't immediately zone out into Gaia-Net for the entirety of the trip.
  She waved a hand negligently.  "Grown, bred, converted.  Most work for Sterling, Inc.  Others subsist on the trust fund and pursue the arts, or indulge in endless entertainment." Jack had to have known what would happen to them.  It was the path all of Lucius's descendants followed—except him.
  Alexa found Jack's attempts at socialization annoying.  Automated travel was her downtime.  Few
  
things threatened a drone in flight, and against those that did, she was useless.  It was the only time she allowed herself to turn off her brain's constant chatter of threat assessment.
  Jack had spent too long among his Mennonites.  He expected conversation.
  The wind on the launch pad roared as it increased and raised the drone into the mouth of the launch cannon.  Jack lapsed into silence as the drone tilted back, sank into the launch cradle, then was kicked into parabolic flight by a heart-stopping acceleration.
  Alexa folded her arms and lowered her lids, pretending to sleep.
  Still he stared at her.  It kept her on alert.  Her subconscious couldn't relax while he watched her.
She uncrossed her arms.  "What?"
  Outside, the wind whistled past at a ferocious 2,200 miles per hour, but soundproofing muffled it to a low-level hum.
  At last Jack said, "Do you really think we can stop this thing? You and I?"
Her response was flat.  "Yes."
  "What's wrong?" Jack's brows came together in puzzlement.  "Have I offended you?"
  Alexa shrugged, her shoulders rubbing his in the tight quarters.  "I'm a bodyguard, Jack.  I'm not your pal.  When you were diagnosed, I sat with you because assessing your well-being was my job.  Don't confuse that with friendship."
  Jack's mouth fell open.  His face reddened.  He snapped his jaw up with a clack of his teeth.  "So if we find this lab, you intend to do—what? Kill everybody inside? Is that what you've become? A soulless machine?"
  Alexa's nervous system came alive in response to his anger.  Muscles twitched under her skin, tensing for a fight she hoped wouldn't come.  "I do what needs doing.  I pledged two hundred and thirty-four years of service to Lucius Sterling, and I pay my debts."
  
  Jack raised up on his elbow and clenched his fist.  "You wouldn't—"
  Alexa's hand reflexively grabbed his wrist in defense.
  A high-pitched whistle, then the cockpit exploded in wind that whipped Alexa's hair and Jack's environmental suit.  The drone's pressure alarm blared.
"What the hell?" Jack screamed.
  Alexa scanned for the source of the hull breach.  There, a hole the size of her fist.  Her nervous system hyped with adrenaline, she watched the scene as if in slow motion.  The front leading edge of the hole grew in a rapid fractal pattern, a deadly snowflake of wind in the once-solid hull.  Black soot trailed from the unraveling edges as the drone was broken down into its constituent parts.
  The hole grew unbelievably fast, from fist-sized to head-sized in less than a second.
If it reached her she was dead.
  She was already in motion.  With her free arm she popped the harnesses that held her and Jack in place.  She stood, bracing her arm against the door, and flexed her legs, pushing with all her enhanced might.
  The asymmetric drag on the drone's hull started it tumbling, and they spun wildly out of control.
  Alexa pushed harder against the stuck door.  Her reinforced bones flexed.
The door seal popped.
  There was no time to plan a trajectory; the disassemblers would reach them in seconds.  Alexa grabbed the front of Jack's harness and kicked free of the falling aircraft.  They floated in free fall as the drone spun in ever-shrinking circles beneath them.
  Jack's eyes were wide behind his environmental suit, his mouth a round O of panic.
  Alexa pulled him to her chest and wrapped her legs around his waist.  Her bodysuit sensed the long moments of free fall and expanded the cloth between her
  
shoulders into a parachute.  She clung to Jack through the impact of its deployment.
  Her heart pounded.  Frantically, she searched her body for pain.  If even one of the disassemblers—tiny machines less than three hundred nanometers long— clung to her body or was inhaled, she would dissolve into dust.  Fingers wiggled, toes flexed.  There were no unexpected sensations.
  "Oh god, oh god, oh god," Jack chanted.  "What just happened?"
  Alexa tacked her parachute into the wind, flying away from the drone's projected crash site.  It was hard to gauge distance; below was the featureless expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
  Would the disassemblers sink under the waves or float like a deadly oil slick?
  "I'm guessing," Alexa yelled back over the rushing wind, "that someone at the Chhoedi Monastery doesn't want visitors."
  
6
J
ack clung to Alexa as they plummeted toward the endless waters of the Pacific.  Wind roared past em, flapping his environmental suit painfully against his ears.  Alexa's right arm held him cradled against her body.  Even with the parachute, they were falling fast.
  As their feet neared the whitecaps on the surface, the chute reabsorbed into the fabric between Alexa's shoulders.
They plunged into the water.
  Jack rose to the surface spluttering.  He paddled to stay afloat, neck deep in the cold water.  He was freezing and terrified.
Alexa reappeared at his side.  "You all right?"
"We were hit?" Jack spluttered.
  Alexa, treading water, glanced uneasily at the sky.  "The disassembler.  One or more impacted the hull.  You injured?"
  Jack did a quick self-inventory.  Fingers and toes were all present.  He wiggled the toes of his right foot again.  Dampness.  "I—I think my environmental suit ruptured." There was a tickle in his throat.  Psychosomatic.  Had to be.  Even if his suit was compromised, it would take longer than this for his throat to close.  Just the thought of it made his breath catch.
  "Shit." Alexa closed her eyes.  Her face took on a contemplative blankness as she zoned into Gaia-Net.
  
  When enough smart dust transmitters had been distributed all over the globe, people could be continually connected to an imagined world of information and entertainment.  Gaia-Net overlay the planet like a ghost world, no less real for its lack of a physical presence.
  "Help is coming," Alexa said.  Her hair was plastered to her scalp and cheeks.  She thrashed her way up until she was waist-high out of the water and looked around.  "Do you see any wreckage?" There was uncertainty in her voice.  Alexa sounded .  .  .  afraid.
  Jack kicked himself for not thinking of the danger to Alexa sooner.  If the disassembler found them, she was gone.  He was a man now, no longer one of her little-boy charges.  He should be helping, not relying on her.  "What about you? Any damage?"
  Alexa licked her lips.  "No—don't think so.  Not yet, anyway."
  Jack thrashed out of the water as far as his waist and peered around.  "I don't see anything on the surface." His foot was definitely wet.  "We have to get you out of here.  How long before they find us?"
  Alexa struggled up for another view.  "Not long.  A rescue craft is on its way from Pacifica Dome."
  Jack's instep itched.  He imagined the trillions of nanos that swam, drifted, and floated through the ocean, and the thousands of antibodies in his bloodstream mustering to repel the invaders.
Don't think about it.
  That was useless, like telling himself not to think of a pink elephant with purple polka dots.  Distraction was the only thing that would help.  "How did the disassemblers find us up there?"
  Alexa's eyes scanned the horizon.  Her face was turned away from him, her sharp chin and rounded nose in profile.  "Sabotage.  Had to be.  It's too big a coincidence."
"You think someone in Lucius's compound did this?" Jack waved his hands as he treaded water.  Images of the guards in the audience chamber flitted through his mind.
  "No," said Alexa.  "Not on Elysium.  The personnel are screened for loyalty on a monthly basis.  We'd just passed through the fifty-mile barrier when the attack came.  A vessel-launched missile could easily have delivered the payload." She continued scanning the horizon.  Her concern was now clear.  If whoever had brought them down was in an oceangoing vessel, it might reach Jack and Alexa before help could.
  Alexa slapped at the water, flailing to push away a dark shape just beneath the surface.
  "What?" Jack angled for a better look.  "What is it?"
  "Seaweed .  .  ." Alexa's voice wavered.  "I think it was seaweed."
  Jack realized that Alexa, his guardian angel and Lucius's fearsome weapon, was scared.  After more than a century and a half of invulnerability, she'd encountered something that could end her existence.
She was trembling, and it wasn't from the cold.
  Jack swam up to Alexa until their noses nearly touched.  He cupped her cheeks and forced her white-rimmed gaze to meet his.  "Can you still contact Gaia-Net?"
A moment's contemplation.  "Yes."
  "Then it's unlikely the disassemblers are active here.  You'd feel dead spots."
  She nodded, the tension in her shoulders easing.  "You're right.  We're safe—for now."
  Jack felt dampness wick up his leg.  His foot felt on fire.  He reached down and clawed at his ankle.  The relief his scratching brought was short-lived.  The irony of their situation struck him.  The disassemblers that would kill Alexa could save him.  "How long do you think it will take rescue to get here?"
"Half an hour." Alexa turned her face to the brilliant-blue sky, squinting into the sun.  "We're a couple hundred miles from Pacifica."
  Jack's throat felt as if he'd swallowed a cotton ball and it'd stuck halfway down.  He took a slow, deep breath and tried not to think about the nano-biology seeping up his leg.
  Panic wouldn't help.  Panic would only make things worse.  Half an hour.  He could survive for half an hour.  "Will they have nano-biology-free epinephrine? I lost my emergency kit—and my epi-pen—-during the fall."
  Alexa grabbed his shoulders and peered through the water-spotted plastic that covered his face.  "Sweet Mother of God—you're having a reaction."
  Jack swallowed around the lump in his throat, fought back tears from the pain in his foot.  "Back away—please?" Like all the converted, she exuded an aura of nano-biology particles: transmitting information to Gaia-Net, collecting solar energy, clearing away wastes, destroying viruses and bacteria, and a film of expired nano-biology machines.
  "Oh God!" Alexa swam ten feet away.  Her face twisted with her need to help him—and the realization of how futile that was.  Her eyes unfocused.  She was so flustered that she vocalized her request, shouting, "An allergic reaction.  Bring an isolation gurney, one that'll protect him from all nano-biology—I don't know, find something—and medication.  Hurry!"
  Jack paddled and struggled to breathe, his vision dimming.  He began to sink under the waves, then felt Alexa's slim body holding him up.  Under other circumstances, the feel of her, firm and pliant against him, would have been wonderful.
  But now her presence worsened his allergic reaction, swelling his throat until even his most frantic efforts drew in only a teaspoon of air.
  Which is worse, Jack wondered as the darkness claimed him, suffocating because you can't draw breath or drowning?
  
7
A
lexa felt Jack go limp in her arms.  Sweet Jesus, keep him alive until the rescue ship gets here.  She had medical field training and could perform a tracheotomy—if she had a scalpel—if they were on dry ground—if he wasn't so allergic to her that a mere touch would raise hives.
  Alexa inflated her bodysuit to keep them both afloat and forced herself to take a slow, calming breath, then plunged her consciousness back into Gaia-Net.
  The pervasiveness of nano-biology had given Earth what spiritual-minded people called a soul and what scientific-minded people referred to as a consensual reality.
  The manifestation of Gaia-Net was personal to the user.  - Alexa stepped into the French Quarter of New Orleans at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a few decades after post-Katrina reconstruction.  Refurbished Victorian buildings lined the streets, and vendors vied with performance artists and painters for the attention of half-drunk revelers draped in plastic beads.  Round-the-clock Mardi Gras.
  It was like being psychic.  As soon as Alexa connected, her mind expanded with the knowledge of every other connected person on the planet.  Half of the children born since Gaia-Net never learned to speak; instead, they sent increasingly refined messages with the speed and intimacy of thought and sensory impressions.
  Through Gaia-Net, Alexa simultaneously experienced the deadweight of Jack in her arms and the vibrating hull of the underwater vessel powering towards them.  It was fifteen kilometers from them and moving at one hundred fifty knots.  Still minutes away.
Minutes Jack didn't have.
  Alexa wrapped her arms around Jack's chest and compressed it, hoping to create enough vacuum to suck air into his lungs.  She didn't dare try to blow into his mouth, rife with nano-biology as she was.
  Medical procedures filtered into her memory from Gaia-Net: intubation, ventilators, nano-scaffolding, artificial gills.  She dismissed them all as impractical with the materials at hand.
  The captain of the rescue vessel sensed Alexa's urgency through Gaia-Net and spurred the rescue craft to desperate speed.
  Jack's lips were turning blue when the sleek gray pod of the rescue ship broke the surface.  Its wake of exhaust water turned the sea choppy, and waves crashed into Alexa's face.
  She held up her hand, and the captain extended a webbed hand holding a thin glass tube filled with clear liquid, one end sharpened into a point.  There was a glass rod inserted into the other end as a makeshift plunger.
  "We manufactured it on the ride over," said the captain.
  Alexa gripped the injector.  Jack's limp form bobbed in the waves with her.  A last worry panicked her.  "Has it been purified of all nano-biology? If not, this might kill him."
  The captain looked at Jack's darkening face.  No transmission was necessary.  Jack was dying.  Any hope was better than none.
  Alexa jabbed the rudimentary epi-pen into Jack's jugular and pushed the plunger.
  
  Jack's eyes popped open.  His mouth gaped, trying to draw air.
  "Relax," Alexa said soothingly, holding his head above the water.  "Let it work.  You're going to be all right."
Two crew members lifted Jack in through the side
.  hatch of the rescue craft.  Alexa climbed in after him.
She prayed that the synthesized epinephrine had come
in time.  And that it was free of impurities that would
trigger another reaction.
  Jack awoke in a room filled with blue light.  It wavered on the walls in dancing patterns.  He lay on a fibrous mat apparently woven of shiny green seaweed.  His clothes were damp and the environmental suit clung to his face.  He sat up and inspected his foot.  The puncture was covered with a white patch.  He ran his fingers along its smooth perimeter.  Would it hold?
  "Polyurethane-laminated nylon twill," Alexa assured him.  "You lose flexibility and oxygen transfer in the patch site, but it'll keep the seal."
  Jack turned his head and saw her seated cross-legged on the floor.
  Alexa nodded encouragingly.  "You're going to be all right."
  Sure he was.  His throat felt like it had been scoured with sandpaper and his ribs ached with every breath.
  "Where am I?" he croaked.  The ceiling was low overhead and gleamed with the soft blue translucence of chalcedony.
  "Pacifica," Alexa said, following his gaze.  "Four thousand meters under the Pacific Ocean." Shadows rippled as people moved in rooms outside the translucent walls.  "It's a domed city.  They do high-pressure research and manufacturing here: planetary-core modeling, crystallography, that sort of thing.  I should warn you.  Most of the people here have deep-sea body modifications.  They can be startling if you're not prepared."
  
  Jack watched the shadows moving overhead, then looked back at Alexa.  "They know about the attack?"
  Alexa rose to her feet in one swift motion.  "No.  I told them our drone malfunctioned.  That's all."
  Jack pushed himself upright, stumbled, then caught himself on the wall.  To his surprise it was warm and pliant under his fingers.
  "I contacted Lucius," Alexa said, hovering near in case he should stumble again.  "He's hired an undersea vessel for the rest of the journey to the mainland.  Our attacker will find it more difficult to disperse the disassembler through water than air."
  More difficult, Jack thought, but not impossible.  And that was assuming that whoever sabotaged their drone wasn't based in Pacifica.  He frowned, feeling the wall for seams.  "Where's the door?"
  "Anywhere you wish it to be," said a high, bell-like voice.  A slender man, barely out of childhood, stepped through the wall membrane.  It sealed behind him with a moist sound.  The young man pressed webbed fingers together and bowed.  "I am Dorn.  The mayor of Pacifica is my mother.  We are honored to host one of Lucius Sterling's descendants."
  Dora's skin was light gray and hairless.  Instead of hair, his scalp had crested into a dorsal fin.  He was naked save for a strand of shells around his waist, but his reproductive organs were not in evidence, either tucked away or temporarily omitted.  Jack looked away after a quick glance at the smooth groin.
  When Dorn stretched forth his hand in greeting, Jack saw a curious cylindrical protuberance under the young man's arm.  It aligned with his body, and the top opening held a feathery spiral.
  Jack accepted the handshake, mindful of his environmental suit.
  "May I show you around the dome?" Dorn asked with a charming smile.  "It will be a half hour before your vessel is ready."
  
  "No." Alexa's response was abrupt.  "We'll wait at the port."
  "Yes," Jack said at the same time.  "I'd like that." He'd never been inside an underwater habitat and might never have the chance again.  There wasn't anything they could do until they had a ship.  "Just a peek," he promised.
  Alexa's eyes flashed, but she said nothing.  She couldn't argue about the danger they faced without revealing the existence of the disassembler to Dorn.
  "We are most gratified," Dorn said, with another bow.  "Follow me, please." He stepped into the nearest wall.
  Jack looked warily at the patch on his foot, then followed.  For a moment he suffocated, as firm but yielding translucent flesh pressed on him from all sides.  It was like stepping into a giant jellyfish.  Then his leg broke out into the empty space on the other side and he was through.
  The scale of the city made him gasp.  The dome was enormous—as tall as Mitchell Butte back in Watershed Valley—and hollow.  He'd thought the underwater habitation was the residence of a few scientists, some manufacturing plants.  The size of the place was staggering.  It was truly a city on the ocean floor.
  A shell of pressurized living quarters surrounded an enormous lake of seawater.  City dwellers, all of whom sported adaptive body modifications, popped in and out of the water at random points along the shore.
  Light was channeled from the surface by an enormous golden pipeline that fractured into fiber-optic tentacles winding throughout Pacifica.
"H-How many people live in Pacifica?" Jack rasped.
  Dorn's eyes unfocused for a second, then returned to Jack.  His chest expanded with pride.  "Two hundred and twenty thousand, three hundred and forty-seven."
  As Jack watched, a little girl swam halfway up the outside of the dome and popped through the resilient
  
surface, which Jack now realized also served as an air lock.  She was followed by half a dozen classmates, tumbling out of the ocean and reorienting themselves to the two-dimensional surface of air.
  Jack imagined the disassembler tearing the dome into particles that the Pacific Ocean would spread far and wide.  The inhabitants, suddenly losing their modifications, would be left bleeding and incomplete, no longer able to extract oxygen from water or to withstand the crushing pressure of the Pacific Ocean floor.
Lucius and his secrets be damned.
  Jack blew out a breath.  "I have to talk to your mother."
  "She's in conference with the mainland, but I'm sure—"
  Jack lowered his voice to emphasize the urgency of his request.  "Now.  It concerns the safety of Pacifica."
  Alexa moved between Jack and Dorn.  Her face was anger and darkness, carrying the promise of pain.  In a low growl she warned, "You can't.  It'll start a panic."
  Once upon a time Jack would have given way.  But that was years ago, when he was a boy.  Living among the Watershed Valley Mennonites had taught him that sometimes a man had to do what was right, no matter the personal cost.
"They have to be warned."
  Alexa leaned so close their noses nearly touched.  "What good will that do? There isn't any defense—"
  "Defense against what?" Dorn asked.  A second pair of nictitating eyelids slid sideways over his eyes in rapid staccato.  A nervous tic, Jack imagined.
  Jack stepped around Alexa.  "Dorn, I'll explain everything—to your mother."
  "She is here." Dorn gestured to the emptiness on his right, clearly confused.
  "In person," Jack clarified.  "I'm not hooked up to Gaia-Net."
The eyelid flutter sped up.  "Of—of course.  This way.  But I should warn you, Mother is always busy— our products are marketed all over the globe—and she hasn't been body-conscious in years."
Alexa grabbed Jack's arm.  "No."
  Jack met her hostile gaze.  "Alexa.  Look around you.  No one would survive.  I have to do this." He shook off her grip.
  She looked at him appraisingly.  "Got some of the old man in you, after all."
  They rode an escalator of undulating cilia up to a higher level of the dome.  Dorn walked them through several walls until they emerged in a voluminous chamber two-thirds of the way up.  Twinkling stars of plankton winked outside in the light leaking from the window.
  In the center of the room, a skeletal figure lay immersed in a coffin-sized chamber of water.  Dozens of tubes ran into her body, delivering sustenance and oxygen, carrying away wastes.
Jack stepped closer.
  Gray eyelids snapped open over sharp, high cheekbones.  Her nearly lipless mouth worked silently.
  "I will speak for Mother," Dorn said.  He gestured at the side wall, where a pattern of light and shadow indicated another six coffin-sized tanks were embedded in the next room.  "Her cabinet ministers listen in via Gaia-Net."
  Jack crouched before the wasted woman.  "Can you hear me?"
  The woman's mouth gaped.  Jack heard her words behind him.  "Yes.  Welcome, Jack Sterling.  You honor us." It was Dorn's voice, but imbued with a regal sense of command.
  "There is a new threat in the world, a rogue disassembler that destroys all nano-biology." He described the video Fontesca had played, told the mayor about his mission and the attack on their drone.
  Alexa stared at Jack, but there was a vagueness in her eyes that told him she was lost in Gaia-Net.  Checking on their ship, or phoning Lucius?
  
  It was painful to look at the wasted figure in the tank, but Jack forced himself to do so out of courtesy.  He waited for a response, glancing once over his shoulder to make sure Dorn was still there.
  "What you say is intriguing." Dorn's voice parroted his mother's words.  "But I find nothing of it anywhere in the knowledge of the world.  An amusing fiction, then, but why do you tell us this?"
  The knowledge of the world? Then Jack understood her meaning.  "My great-grandfather, Lucius Sterling, erased all references to this disassembler from Gaia-Net, but I assure you, these events happened."
  Dorn's voice echoed in the room.  "What has happened is known.  What is not known has not happened."
The mayor's watery blue eyes closed.
  "Wait." Jack reached into the water, sending ripples across its surface.
Dorn squealed in horror and protest.
  Alexa's small, hard hand dragged Jack away.  Her mouth pursed with determination.  "Time's up, hero.  You told them; they don't believe you.  Their loss." She jerked a thumb at the way they'd come in.  "The ship's ready.  We're out of here."
  
8
P
acifica dwindled into a speck of light, swallowed by the eternal night of the deep ocean.  The underwater craft thrummed as its turbines propelled them through the water.  Jack and Alexa were seated face-to-face in the close quarters of the amphibious drone, their knees touching.
  "You stopped them from believing me," Jack accused her.  "You went on Gaia-Net and undermined my story."
  Alexa rolled her shoulders in a catlike stretch, then settled back into her seat.  "I could have, but, honey, I didn't need to.  Some people are so far into Gaia-Net that this"—she squeezed his hand—"is the dream world." She held her palm in front of his face.  "If I did this and told you my hand didn't exist—would you believe me? Of course not.  So why should the mayor of Pacifica believe something that contradicts what she knows of reality? As Lucius would say, 'It's not what's true, it's what people believe that matters.' "
"Don't quote Lucius to me," Jack grumbled, settling into his seat to stare at the endless dark of the vast deep sea.  He felt the awe of a space traveler.  At this depth the only light came from bioluminescence: twinkling plankton, the spotlights of anglerfish, glowing bellies of eellike snake dragonfish, and once, a giant living umbrella that descended in front of them, its tentacles ablaze with blue light.  *       *       *

  They emerged from the ocean at Hong Kong, trailing water, and entered a hailstorm of travel and commerce.  Brightly colored drones pelted the port from all angles: diving up from the sea and down from the air, delivering packages and passengers to one of Earth's most important trade cities.  Only the miracles of cross-talk and collaborative computing prevented collisions.
  Jack squeezed his eyes shut until the drone slowed for descent.
  They stepped out of the water drone and onto a moving walkway that swallowed them into the Hong Kong acropolis.  The crumbling pre-nano-biology skyscrapers had been razed and replaced with a single gleaming building to house the entire city.  It was possible to walk from one end of Hong Kong to the other without going outside.  Vine-encrusted terraces filled with flowers and hundreds of thousands of skylights made the acropolis of Hong Kong feel light and airy instead of oppressive.
  The people were a bewildering blend of colors, shapes, and sizes.  Jack had spent his childhood on Elysium, where Lucius's prejudice against post-humans kept body modifications to a minimum, and of course the Mennonites had none at all.
  He'd seen videos of modified people on his laptop.  But those tiny flat images and his brief exposure to Pacifica hadn't prepared him for the motion, sounds, and smells of this crowd.
  Hong Kong was alive with people sporting scales and feathers, even extra limbs.  Jack craned his neck to follow the progress of a man who could have posed for a statue of Shiva, his eight arms gesticulating wildly as he communicated over Gaia-Net.
  A squadron of tiny blue-black men and women, only a foot high, fought their way through the maze of automated walkways.  They shouted in high-pitched voices and jabbed electronic prods at the calves of people who didn't move out of their way.
  
  Alexa followed Jack's gaze.  "Commercial astronauts.  The extra melanin protects them from background radiation."
  "How many variations are there?" Jack asked with wonder, scanning the multihued crowd.  He saw feathers, fur, wings, double-jointed knees, additional arms, and—on one harried woman shepherding a troupe of children—twelve tentacles.  It was hard to focus on any one person, there was so much motion and color.
  Alexa shrugged her right shoulder.  "As many as can be imagined." She cupped Jack's elbow and steered him onto an intersecting walkway that angled off toward the air-drone terminal.
  When they reached the Sterling Nanology gate, it was a relief to leave the hubbub for the cozy privacy of a two-man drone.  Jack settled into the seat opposite Alexa.  Her features were familiar and reassuring after the panoply of body designs outside.  He stared at the smooth expanse of high cheekbones, her almond-shaped green eyes, and upswept nose.  Classic human.
  Though Jack hated to admit he had anything in common with Lucius, they did have similar aesthetics.  No amount of scaled glitter or feathery fronds could compare to the loveliness of Alexa, just as she'd been born.
  Alexa shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with Jack's inspection, but in the drone's close confines there was no escape.  They had thirty minutes of travel time before they would reach Tibet, and Alexa wanted to research the monastery via Gaia-Net.
"Do you need me?" she asked.
  His heartbeat increased a fraction at her words, so minimally that Jack himself probably didn't notice the change.  Jack shook his head.  "I'm fine."
  Alexa couldn't believe he still carried a childhood crush for her.  She'd changed his diapers, for God's sake.  Even in a world where chronological age was increasingly irrelevant, that meant something.
  
  Unfocusing her eyes, Alexa stepped into the noise and chaos of Bourbon Street on a Saturday night.
  Each person's visualization of Gaia-Net was unique, built of experience and imagination.  For Alexa, it was perpetually 2026, Saturday night, when she and a group of friends had used newly minted driver's licenses to travel into the city to shop and flash their nubile bodies at college boys.
  Alexa walked past bars blaring country rock and ragtime, alongside street vendors and pickpockets, past palmistry shops to the Lafayette Cemetery.  There she plucked red roses out of the air and laid them on six side-by-side graves.
  They were her old schoolmates, none of whom had survived into the twenty-second century.  Of all her friends, Alexa had been the only one to wangle the expensive conversion to Deathless.
  She blew a kiss at the last grave.  The one that held her memories of Frank, the boy who had been her first love, who had given her Life Saver-flavored kisses and only ever gotten to second base.  During her infrequent downtimes, she sometimes opened his grave and relived her memories of the seven months they'd known each other.  But not now.
  She left the graveyard behind her and traveled the street, ignoring the blandishments of prostitutes and their customers, until she came to a shop with a faded sepia globe in the window.  Brass bells jingled as Alexa stepped inside.  The virtual shop smelled of dust and ancient paper.  Curling maps pinned to the walls displayed cities and continents.  The man behind the counter was old and wrinkled in a way you never saw nowadays.  Alexa found his weathered face comforting.
  "I need information about the Chhoedi Monastery in Tibet."
  "Of course, dear," the apparition said.  When he spoke, Alexa realized his rasping voice sounded like her uncle John.  The one who had died of lung cancer when she was six.  A lump formed in her throat.  Gaia-
  
Net always affected her this way, stealing pieces of her childhood from her subconscious and displaying them in new forms, catching her unawares.
  The shopkeeper brought up a mailing tube, popped open one end, and shook out a piece of tan parchment.  Dark brown lines and letters appeared on the page as he unrolled it, showing the Asian continent.  The man tapped a liver-spotted finger on a point near the center of the page, and the image redrew larger, centered on Tibet.  Another tap and the mountain range expanded.
  "Oh dear," he said.  His hand trembled over a blank spot on the map.  Below it was the label CHHOEDI MONASTERY.  "It's a dead zone.  I can't see into there."
  Alexa tapped the paper to expand the hidden area.  In bold relief was the mountain pass to the monastery, the wall surrounding it.  But of the buildings inside that wall—nothing.
  "What about the historical archive?" she asked.  "There must be records that predate nano-biology."
  "Yes, of course." The man brightened.  He crossed the room to a wall-sized bookcase filled with square cubbyholes, each one holding a rolled-up map.  He pulled one out and scanned it.  Then another.  Soon the shelving was empty, a pile of maps on the floor.  His voice was bereft.  "It's gone.  Everything about Chhoedi Monastery is gone."
  A chill ran down Alexa's spine.  It was no easy task to erase information from Gaia-Net.  Each user cached data and memories that were updated and exchanged every time he or she logged on.  To have blanked out all references to the monastery implied a hacker who could touch and modify twenty billion minds—all in the time since Lucius's researchers had identified Chhoedi as a possible source of the disassembler.
  Lucius could muster the resources for such an undertaking, yes.  But until now, Alexa would have bet money that no one else could.
  
  A hidden organization, with capabilities rivaling those of Sterling Nanology? She and Jack were traveling blind into their stronghold—where an experienced team of operatives had already vanished.
It did not bode well.
  Jack stared out the drone's rear window, trying to distract himself from the possibility of another midair encounter with the disassembler.  Despite his efforts toward calm, his fingertips dug into the gel-filled armrests.
  The drone cut across China, streaming a contrail in its wake.  At last wetlands and river valleys gave way to the foothills of the Himalayas.  Fertile grasslands became deserts at higher elevations.  Here they began to outrun civilization.  As in Montana, nano-biology was making inroads on the hostile altitudes and steep slopes, growing shopping centers and new housing like lichens.  But the tallest peaks were still barren cathedrals of snow and ice, as they had been since the beginning of time.
  Jack glanced at Alexa.  She was quiet, breathing deeply, her closed eyes twitching under her lids.
  Not being able to connect to Gaia-Net was isolating, like being deaf in the hearing world.  In Jack's childhood he'd navigated the collective unconscious of the Gaia-Net sandbox that Lucius provided for the kids' wing.  It had been like having a mind with no boundaries.  Knowledge was there—all he need do was recall it.  His thoughts merged with the others on the network into a single, vibrant, ever-changing entity.
He would never have that again.
  Even if this mission was successful, he would only have bought himself freedom to walk the world, not be part of it.  He could interact with Gaia-Net through his computer and a radio-satellite network.  But that was like viewing the universe through a soda straw.  In a way, it was worse than the years he had ignored
  
the modern world, living like the Mennonites.  Connecting through his laptop prosthesis only reminded Jack of how much he'd lost.
  Jack wished he was back on the ranch, helping Dakota track down stray sheep, repairing fences with Liam.  He wanted clean open air, not this suffocatingly close environmental suit and coffin of a drone.
    The drone slowed and descended, passing over a walled city made of mud brick.  The endless expanse of tan desert was broken by a ring of lush green fields around the city, probably the result of irrigation.  The starkness of the city stood in contrast with the vibrant crush of Hong Kong.  The people here appeared as unaltered as Jack's Watershed Valley Mennonites, and if there were any nano-biology machines in the dead zone, Jack didn't see them.
  Prayer flags and laundry flapped in the wind.  There was no glow of video, no genetically modified pets, no organically shaped buildings.  The rectilinear forms of the houses had been weathered and softened by centuries of wind.  Jack felt his soul relaxed by the city's gentle permanence.
  With a soft bump, the drone landed, five hundred feet from the city walls.
  Jack stepped outside and instantly felt light-headed.  He stumbled.
  Alexa caught him.  "It's the altitude.  The city of Lo Monthang is thirteen thousand feet above sea level.  Breathe deeply and walk slowly."
  Jack placed his feet deliberately, as if working a tai chi form.  Even so, he was breathing hard by the time they reached the city's wall.
  Five men in sheepskin coats, carrying antique rifles, met them at the gate.  Jack didn't understand their language, but their halt gestures and grim expressions were plain enough.
  A middle-aged woman in beaded leather, carrying a chubby infant on her hip, stepped through the line
  
of men.  She shook her head sadly, as if denying a sweet to a child.  "You cannot enter here, Deathless One.  This is a pure place."
  The baby turned his head.  A wine-colored birthmark engulfed his right cheek.  It was the simplest of modifications, easily corrected in the womb—if they'd had access to nano-biological medicine.
  The whole village turned out to view the disruption.  Mothers paused in washing clothes or stirring pots; children paused in their play; fathers joined the line of men between Alexa and the wall.
  Alexa stepped in front of Jack, taking up a wide, balanced stance, her hands loose at her side.  Ready to fight.
  Adrenaline tightened Jack's spine.  He had to keep this from erupting into violence.  Despite their weapons, Jack had no doubt that Alexa could kill them all—and would, if they tried to prevent her from entering the city.
  Jack reached a hand toward Alexa to restrain her.  "Please—"
  His gesture alarmed the men at the gate.  One shouted a guttural sentence and lowered his rifle toward Jack.
Alexa was already in motion.
  She whipped along the line of guards, moving faster than Jack could follow.  With each step, another man fell.  Jack caught only flashes: an elbow strike clipping one man's head, her foot denting the solar plexus of another, a knee exploding sideways, a flurry of punches to the fourth man's chest.
  The last guard had only the time to lower his rifle before she was upon him.  In a graceful sweep, she caught the barrel of the rifle against the man's elbow and used it to lever his arm behind his back and bend him to the ground, the muzzle of his gun planted in the dirt.
When all the men were groaning on the ground, Alexa turned to the woman with the baby.  "Where are you hiding the outlanders?" Alexa's voice was fierce.
  The woman cupped the child's head and cradled him against her breast.  With her other trembling hand, she pointed at a building at the far side of the village.  Stone steps led up to a columned entranceway, and prayer flags fluttered between the columns.
  Alexa grabbed Jack's hand, pulling him forward.  "Come on."
  Still in shock from Alexa's violence, Jack let her lead him past the fallen guards.  His eyes were drawn to a man screaming in agony, his hands cupped over his shattered knee.  "We were supposed to keep a low profile."
  "They know we're coming," Alexa said.  "Let's not give them time for a second ambush." Her grip on Jack tightened as she led him down the dusty road, past mud-and-daub cottages and a tented blacksmith's shop.  Leather flaps came down over windows and children ran inside as they passed.
  The monastery towered over the buildings around it, a squat mud-brick edifice twice as wide as it was tall.
  Jack and Alexa climbed stairs to the colonnaded entrance.
  The heavy wood doors parted before they reached the top, and three men in saffron robes stepped out.  Two were in their forties.  The third was the oldest unconverted man Jack had ever seen.  Remnants of his wispy hair stuck up at all angles over his brown scalp.  His mouth was a wrinkled pucker, and his eyes were nearly lost under drooping epicanthic folds.
  When he spoke, his voice was the rustle of dried leaves.  It took Jack a moment to realize he was speaking English.
  "Revered visitors.  We must ask you to pass this place by.  The monks of Chhoedi embrace the beauty of impermanence." His eyes lingered on Alexa with
  
her high-gloss black jumpsuit and perfect figure.  "Your presence here endangers the peace we seek to create." He spoke with a soft and undeniable authority that made Jack want to beg the old man's pardon and get back in the drone.
  Alexa climbed the last few steps and stood face-to-face with the old man.  "We've come for the scientists you're hiding."
  The old man did not shrink back from Alexa's aggressive posture as the monks flanking him did.  He continued in his polite, soft voice.  "If such people were here, they would come to this place for isolation, peace, and protection from the world." He was a short man, of a height with Alexa, and met her gaze.  "We would not betray a guest."
  Jack scurried after Alexa and tugged on her elbow.    .  "Come on.  We don't even know if this is the right place.  The woman at the gate—"
  Alexa raised her head, as if scenting the wind.  "They're here." She lowered her head to confront the aged monk.  "Old man, step aside."
  He frowned and gathered his saffron robes closer around his body.  "Tibet has suffered many conquerors over the years, invasion first by the Chinese, then by Western ideals and promises of easy answers and comforts.  My teacher's teacher was told that his would be the last generation of Tibetan monks." He spread his hands to encompass the temple and the monks flanking him.  "And yet we are still here."
  Alexa's mouth tightened.  "You and your temple have survived up till now." Her voice was low but deadly.  "My employer asked me to locate a hidden laboratory in Lo Montang, and I will do that, if I have to take this temple apart brick by brick." She rolled her shoulders and widened her stance.
  "Alexa—no!" Jack grabbed for her, but she shook him off, knocking him to the ground.
  The old man stood in front of the closed doors, passive  and  immovable  as  a  mountain.   The  two
  
younger monks flanked him, their arms held loosely at their sides.
Jack clutched at Alexa's leg.
She kicked free.  "Stay out of this, Jack."
  There was an uproar from inside the temple, men shouting.  Rising above the others was a loud, abrasive tenor.  The two younger monks turned as the doors opened a crack.
  "You do not have to do this," the old man said without turning around.  His voice was world-weary.  "Dharma does not require it of you."
  A lean figure pushed through the doors.  "I can't let you be harmed, holy father—not because of me."
  The man wore loose-fitting saffron robes, but uneasily, as if unaccustomed to their drape.  He was dark-skinned, Indian or Middle Eastern, with a strong build and a newly shaved head.  His face was creased with age and sun, but what struck Jack most was an unnatural metallic gleam in his brown eyes.  An old Deathless?
  Alexa took a step back, stumbling.  "Pard? Pard Holloway?"
  
9
T
he man bowed his head in acknowledgment, hoisting the saffron robe up his shoulder.  "I knew Lucius's people would find me one day, but I prayed it wouldn't be you.  Please don't kill me in the temple.  I don't wish to defile—"
  "We're not here to kill you," Jack interrupted.  He glanced at Alexa.  "Are we?"
  Alexa let her gaze roam over the man in the doorway.  He had Pard's bone structure and posture.  The voice was right, and he smelted like Pard, but in these days of rampant body modification, there was only one way to be sure.
  She stepped forward and took his head in both hands and kissed him deep and long, tasting his DNA.
  "Alexa!" Jack shouted, his face a mask of disbelief and outrage.
  Within tolerances for age-related mutations, it was Pard.  Which was impossible.  Alexa pulled back.  "You're dead.  I witnessed your execution."
  Pard wiped saliva from his lower lip with his thumb.  The motion was deliberate and savoring.  "I know.  I saw you there."
  Jack grabbed Alexa's shoulder and pulled her away.  "What's going on? Who the hell is this? Why did you kiss him?"
The monks who had tried to restrain Pard stared, a variety of expressions on their faces: shock, disgust, envy.
  The old monk clapped his hands at the gawkers and shooed them back inside the temple.
  "She was testing my DNA," Pard said.  He looked speculatively at Alexa.  "You didn't know I was alive, much less here." His eyes narrowed.  "So why are you in Lo Monthang?"
  Alexa looked over her shoulder.  Tarps flapped down over windows as the crowd that had been listening dropped them.  "This is hardly a conversation to have on the temple steps."
  Pard placed his hands together and bowed to the old monk.  "Master Mahendra, your generosity toward me has been boundless.  Would you grant me one last boon? Allow these two guests of mine into the inner courtyard, so we may speak privately."
  The old man looked at Alexa, then at Pard.  He inclined his head into the ghost of a nod.  "The one who has put herself outside the wheel of time must not touch anything." Speaking Tibetan, he shuffled off in the direction the monks had gone.
  Pard pulled Alexa and Jack into the temple and led them through a second set of wooden doors to an inner courtyard.  At its center sat an enormous golden Buddha, three stories high.  His crossed ankles were a floor below, in the basement; Jack and Alexa stood at waist level; his shoulders rose above them, a railing encircling them on the second floor; the statue's head broke through the roofline overhead.
  "That is the Maitreya," said Pard.  "The Buddha-Yet-to-Come."
  "It's magnificent," Jack breathed.  It was carved of stone, gilded with gold foil, and decorated with necklaces of rough-cut rubies and sapphires.  Flickering candles lit the intricate mandalas painted along every wall.  The geometric patterns were richly colored and mesmerizing.  Centuries old, but preserved by the dry climate.
  
  "Are we alone?" Alexa asked, glancing at the second-floor railing and the opening in the roof above.  Lots of potential hiding places for eavesdroppers.
  "Master Mahendra is the only monk who speaks English.  And this is an hour of meditation.  No one will interrupt us."
  Alexa touched the face of the graduate student she'd seduced all those years ago in New Orleans.  The skin was rough and chapped under her fingertips.  "I saw you die."
  "That was Dave." Pard dropped his gaze, looking sad.  "I morphed him—full DNA rewrite."
Alexa searched her memory.  "The stoner?"
  "I picked up after the feds let him go.  His mind was gone from years of heavy use.  Toward the end of the transform, he actually believed he was me." Pard scrubbed his hands over his face.  "Not one of my proudest moments, but it was the only way to avoid the feds—and Lucius's assassins.  Are you here to kill me, Alexa?"
  Jack pushed between Alexa and Pard.  "How do you know this guy?" The scowl on his face was like Lucius's when a deal went bad.
  There was too much to explain.  Alexa plucked Jack's hand from her chest.  The combat-ready portion of her mind cycled through half a dozen ways to break it.  She ignored them and released it gently.
  "Pard created weapons used in an assassination attempt on Lucius Sterling.  Weapons to kill Deathless." She gave Pard a pointed look.  No need to explain that she had been one of the assassins.
  "Even if you escaped execution, how are you still alive? Lucius would never authorize your conversion.  You should be dead of old age, if nothing else."
  Pard collapsed onto a wooden bench encircling the giant Buddha.  "After the attack, a patron found me.  He spirited me away from the feds and kept me safe from Lucius's revenge.  I've spent the last century and a half trying to reverse-engineer the conversion pro-
  
cess." He gestured at his face and body.  "With some success."
Alexa alighted on the seat next to him.  "Who?"
  Pard shifted away from her.  "I don't see how that's any of your—"
  Alexa grabbed his robe and pulled him close.  "There are a lot of people who'd be interested to find out you're alive, and where you are.  I didn't come here looking for you, so I don't have any reason to tell them.  Of course, I don't have any reason not to—"
  A hard, unhappy breath.  Then Pard said, "Arthur Gottsberg."
  Alexa knew him.  He was one of the older Deathless, a hotelier with a string of low-Earth-orbit spas and luxury space stations.  He'd been to Elysium dozens of times.
  Jack, still standing, loomed over them both.  "That doesn't explain why you're hiding in a temple in the middle of a Tibetan dead zone."
  Pard sucked his teeth and frowned.  "Alexa, who is this man interrupting us?"
"Sterling's great-grandson."
  "Ah." Pard peered through the gloom at Jack.  "Yes, I see the resemblance." He stood.  "Two months ago Arthur asked me to design weapons for him.  I'd done small things for him in the past, personal protection devices and the like."
  Alexa folded her arms and glared.  "Did you learn nothing in New Orleans?"
  Pard's dark skin flushed.  "It was a cost of doing business.  But I would never build anything truly destructive.  I'm an idealist working toward a world where immortality is every child's birthright."
  Alexa stood and confronted him.  The top of her head barely cleared his chin, and yet she seemed to tower over him.  "In my experience, it is the idealists who are the most dangerous."
  Pard held up his hands.  "Not in this case." He bowed his head.  "Gottsberg demanded I create weap-
  
ons of mass destruction.  The sort of thing that could take out an entire city.  I refused.  When his demands escalated into threats, I found refuge here."
  Alexa concentrated on Pard, listening to his heartbeat and breathing, watching his face for the minutest of tells.  "Did you do any work for him before you left?"
  Pard held his right hand up.  "Hand to God, no." His eyes narrowed.  "What makes you ask?"
  Alexa told him about the disassembler that had been spotted in the upper atmosphere, its rapacious speed and effects.  She left the implications to his imagination.  "Sound familiar?"
  Pard shook his head slowly, thoughtfully.  "No.  Gottsberg's requests were along the lines of my banquet surprise.  But what you describe would have done the trick." He gave a low whistle.  "You thought this rogue disassembler was created here?"
Staring hard, Alexa asked, "Was it?"
Without flinching, Pard replied, "No."
  There were no giveaway twitches, no fear phero-mones.  Alexa believed him.
"Any idea who did it?"
  Pard rubbed his temples.  It was a gesture Alexa remembered from their months together.  "What you described would be incredibly complex.  It's fairly simple to create a dedicated disassembler.  It's done all the time to clean up nano-biology that's died or no longer necessary.  But to create something that could bind to any given particle of nano-biology and deconstruct it—there are only three or four people on the planet capable of something like that."
"Names."
  Pard gave a self-mocking smile.  "Well, me for one, and—"
  An explosion shattered the front of the temple.  Dust and chunks of rubble blew in through the doorway that separated the courtyard from the front hall.
Jack spun toward the sound.  "What the hell—"   Alexa barreled into Jack and sent them both sprawling to the packed-earth floor.  In a fluid motion, she rolled back and braced her shoulder against the door, slamming it shut.  She dropped the heavy wooden crossbeam into place.
  As the door closed, Jack saw five hooded men laying down a suppressive fire, the barrels of their rifles glowing with phosphorescence in the dimly lit temple interior as electromagnetic forces superheated air to propel needle-thin projectiles.
Jack started to rise.
  "Stay down," Alexa ordered, crouching low.  Bullets cut chunks out of the top half of the door.
  Through the muffling wood, Alexa heard monks scream as they were cut down.
  She grabbed a stone urn that must have weighed five hundred pounds and pushed it in front of the door.  "That won't hold them for long." She scanned the room for an exit.  Her gaze came to rest on the immense stone Buddha.  "We're going up.  Pard—oh shit."
  Jack followed Alexa's gaze.  Pard lay on the dirt floor in a spreading pool of red.  His hands clutched his throat, and his skin had already gone ivory with blood loss.  His lips worked.
  Jack dropped to his knees and lifted Pard's head.  "Oh God.  Alexa, you have to help him."
  Pard looked down at his blood-soaked chest.  "Only partial conversion .  .  .  resist aging .  .  .  not violence." His words were a faint whisper.  "Tell .  .  .  Mahendra I'm sorry.  Didn't think"—he coughed up froth and blood—"they would find me here." With a rattling breath, Pard's body went slack.
A small hand jerked Jack upright.  "Come on." "But—" Jack reached for Pard's lolling head.  "We can't—"
"He's dead."

  There was a resonant boom from the room outside, and more chunks of wood flew off the interior door.
  Alexa pulled Jack's arms around her throat.  "Hold on tight." With him clinging to her back, his legs wrapped around her waist, she climbed the stone Buddha, scampering up it as lightly as a squirrel up a tree.
  The door below burst open just as they topped the Buddha's shoulder.  Gunfire tore chunks out of the stone statue.  Alexa leapt onto the mud-brick roof.  She ran across the rooftop, Jack bouncing on her back like a piece of luggage.  The distance between them and the next building was twenty feet, impossibly far.  Even with her strength, they'd never make it.  Jack squeezed his eyes closed when he realized that instead of slowing, Alexa was increasing her pace.  He felt her muscles bunch under him, then a free-fall sensation.
  His eyes popped open as they hit the next roof.  His arms gave way, and he fell from Alexa's back, bruising his shoulder.
  "You all right?" she asked in a hurried whisper, inspecting his environmental suit.  She slapped a white polyurethane-laminated nylon patch on his shoulder.  Her pupils were fully dilated, making her eyes look black.
Jack checked the seals on his suit and nodded.
  "Stay here," Alexa whispered, indicating with a palm-down motion that he should stay low.  "I'll be back." She crossed the roof to the far edge, pivoted and ran at Jack, then leapt over him and back onto the monastery roof.
  Jack huddled on the cold roof, clutching the bruised shoulder of his twice-patched environmental suit and wondered what he would do if she didn't return.
  Stupid rookie mistake.  Alexa cursed herself as she landed on the temple's roof.  She couldn't believe how careless she'd been.
Minutes ago, she'd heard a yak-drawn cart pull up outside, but she'd been so focused on Pard's story that she'd dismissed the possible threat—until they pulled out assault rifles.
  Alexa pivoted around the Buddha's head and swept the legs of the first attacker to emerge onto the rooftop.  A clench of her fist in combination with a mnemonic command caused a barbed blade to extrude along her left forearm.  It hurt like hell, but she was used to pain.  As the man fell, she sliced through his jugular, down to his spine.  She waited a moment to see if he would rise, but these weren't converted; they were just run-of-the-mill modified soldiers.
Whoever had sent them hadn't expected her.
  She didn't bother to pick up his rifle.  A melding of nano-biology tissue and metal, it would be trigger-encoded to his DNA.  And there was an imprecision with range killing—you could never be sure you'd taken out all targets.  Alexa didn't want to worry about leaving anyone on the ground to shoot at her.  She'd already fallen out of the sky once during this mission.
  The roof trembled with the reverberations of cannon fire below.  They were taking the monastery out good and proper.  Alexa wondered if they'd come for more than Pard.
  She dropped to her belly and looked down along the giant Buddha statue.  She saw a figure moving around.
  He yelled up in Spanish, "Blackbird One, what's taking so long?"
  That was one advantage for her: there wasn't enough nano-biology present to use Gaia-Net.  They would have to talk aloud to communicate.
  Alexa slipped her legs over the edge of the roof and jumped onto the back of the statue's head.  The gilded stone was slick, and she slipped several centimeters until her fingers caught on a carved curl.  Creeping with feet and hands, she circled to the Buddha's ear and half climbed, half slid to the second-
  
floor level at his waist.  The soldier was below and to her right, prodding Pard's corpse with a toe.
  Alexa didn't see anyone else in the room.  There would be at least two men maneuvering the cannon in the antechamber.  That left one more out there somewhere.  She didn't have time for certainty.
  She leapt, aiming for the man's throat with her blade.  She didn't want him to have time to scream and alert the others.
  He twitched aside at the last minute, well trained for a human.
  Her blade caught him in the stomach, cut him open sternum to groin.  He was dead, but not before he could yell out a warning.
  The cannon fire in the other room paused.  Then the Buddha's knee shattered in a hail of shrapnel.  Razor-sharp stone fragments caught Alexa in the face, neck, and shoulders.  A flash of white-hot pain and a temporary blurring in her right eye, then the nanos in her body repaired the damage, closing around and forcing out the stone shards.
  Alexa didn't wait for the repairs to finish.  She ran.  The body cannon was mounted on a chest harness, worn by a soldier built like an ox.  Alexa extruded a spike from the base of her heel and slid like a baseball player under the barrel of the cannon, her upraised foot piercing the soldier's groin.
  By the time she'd rolled free, reabsorbed the spike, stood, and decapitated him, her vision was clear.
  His partner dropped the cannon's ammunition pack and fled screaming toward the front of the temple.
  The stone floor was slick with monks' blood.  She saw Master Mahendra's white downy head among the corpses.  Then she was on the fleeing solider, dragging him backward by his shoulder and using his arm as a lever to slam him facefirst into the floor.  She sliced his neck and left him to bleed to death face-to-face with the Zen master's corpse.
  
  She felt a twinge of regret for the old man's passing.  There weren't many like him left.
  The last black-clad figure emerged from the far end of the temple carrying two squirming captives, one under each arm.  With one deft motion, he cupped both chins with his palms and snapped their necks.  In Castilian Spanish, he asked Alexa, "Where is the Sterling boy?"
  A chill of adrenaline raced down Alexa's spine.  She knew him.  Chiang Hu-Dong, in service to Marcus Va-liente, indentured for three centuries.  Like her, he was one of the Deathless.
  For the first time since the attack began, Alexa realized she might not win.
  
10
Chiang Hu-Dong moved lightning-fast and was on Alexa before she could step free of her last victim.  He grabbed her waist, taking them both to the floor.  Spines extruded from his chest as they fell.  Alexa twisted in his grasp, tearing gashes in her chest and hip as she wrenched herself free.
  There was no time.  She couldn't afford to fight him—couldn't risk losing.  Jack was on the roof waiting for her.  Alexa dashed toward the room with the giant statue, running so hard that her feet kicked up flakes of stone in her wake.
  Hu-Dong was only a thought behind.  His fingers reached for her, extruded into tentacles that stung with thousands of tiny hooks and sought to adhere to her flesh.
  Alexa slashed herself free with her arm blade and climbed, her fingers clawing strips of slippery gold-leaf free as she ascended.
  He was behind her, a shadow moving at the speed of dark, gaining on her.
  As Alexa pulled herself over the rim of the roof, his hand fastened around her ankle, fusing from fingers and palm into a solid ring of bone—and tightened.
  With a cry of anguish, Alexa pulled her foot free, breaking all of the bones in her instep.  With her heel, she kicked Hu-Dong in the face, catching him between
  
one handhold and the next.  He wavered, lashing out with his free hand for a grip, but it hadn't time to transform back from a bony cuff and he slipped and plummeted three stories to the stone Buddha's base.
  Her pupils fully expanded, Alexa saw Hu-Dong in the darkness of the earthen-floor basement, rise and flex his hand back into a useful shape.  In seconds, he'd be on her.
  Wedging her back against the Buddha's cheek and her feet against the rim of the roof, Alexa pushed with all her might.  Her nano-biology-perfected body hummed with strain as her internal structures rebuilt to give her strength.  The statue, carved in place from a single stone, weighed tons.  It groaned with strain as Alexa pushed.
  Her wounded foot screamed in agony, but Alexa had lived through aeons of pain in her lifetime.  There was nothing but her will, three stories of leverage, and the inexorable inertia of stone.
  With a grinding crescendo, Alexa's will prevailed.  The statue crumbled as it fell, cutting a swath through the main building of the temple, which had already been weakened by cannon fire.
  Alexa scrabbled to catch the rim of the remaining rooftop as the statue fell away beneath her.  It tore through the wood-beamed ceilings and smashed mud-brick walls into rubble.  She heard a roar of agony and fury as Hu-Dong disappeared under the statue's chest, tons of solid stone.
  It wouldn't stop him for long.  Like her, Hu-Dong was nearly indestructible.  Alexa prayed that Jack had stayed where she left him, that their drone hadn't been discovered and destroyed, and that she could get Jack away before Hu-Dong broke free.
  The grinding roar of falling stone and the collapsing temple made Jack's mouth go dry.  What the hell was going on? He risked a peek over the edge of the roofline and gaped at the destruction.  The statue of
  
the Buddha-Yet-to-Come had fallen, taking out a swath of the Chhoedi Monastery.
  A dark figure hauled itself over the edge of the roof and limped in his direction, obscured by clouds of dust.  Jack braced himself in case it was one of the assassins.
  Alexa hobbled into view.  Her skintight bodysuit was shredded over her waist and hip.  Blood pooled in her footsteps, and the right side of her face was a mass of purple bruises.
  Jack ran to her and caught her around the waist, taking her weight and helping her sit.  She was surprisingly heavy for her size.
"Are you all right?"
  She didn't answer immediately, apparently in silent communion with her wounds.  She turned her head and spat out a gobbet of bloody phlegm and a tooth.  "One was converted.  He's trapped, but not for long." Alexa pressed a palm to her waist and winced with pain between breaths.  "Got to .  .  .  get away .  .  .  from here."
"I'll go get the drone," Jack said, pushing off to stand.
  Alexa grabbed his elbow.  "How are .  .  .  you going to ...  fly it?" She tapped the side of her head.  "No network." The bruises on her face were already lightening to a greenish yellow.  Alexa pressed both palms against the mud roof and with a determined grimace, stood.  She closed her eyes.
  Jack guessed she was summoning their drone.  He looked over his shoulder at the still-clearing dust, half expecting to see the Deathless assassin rise from the debris.
  When he turned back, Alexa stood straighter.  The blood oozing from her wounds had stopped.  She breathed easier.
  "No use." Alexa shook her head.  "I can't make a connection.  The only transmitters in the dead zone are a few random nano-biology particles that drifted in on high-altitude winds." She limped to the edge of the roof and scanned the outskirts of the village visually.  She dropped her head in defeat.  "Shit."
  Jack followed her gaze and saw the red ruin that had once been their drone.  It had been eviscerated, and a pack of skinny dogs were busy tearing the carcass apart.  Gray and grizzled, they reminded him of the coyotes that harassed his flocks back in Montana.
  He kept looking.  There had to be .  .  .  "There." Feeling a rush of triumph, Jack pointed to the other side of the wall, to the west.  Three two-man drones rested on a dusty knoll.  An enterprising villager in ages past had opened a passage through the wall to a garden beyond.  There were many such informal breaches in Lo Monthang's security.
  Jack considered the drones.  "How many men attacked the temple?"
  Alexa nodded, taking his meaning.  "Five.  Guess they weren't planning to take prisoners.  They may have left a guard with the transport." She stooped, pulled off her boot, and massaged her instep with a sharp inhale.  When she was done, she lowered her weight onto the wounded foot.
"Better?"
  Alexa bounced experimentally on the foot.  "It'll do." She pulled her boot back on and pushed the gel-seal closed.  She extruded a rope from her bodysuit, and they climbed down the roof and raced through the village as fast as Alexa's wounded foot and Jack's human physiognomy would allow.
  Villagers cowered in their houses and peeked out through windows, yammering in foreign tongues.  When Alexa drew near, wooden doors slammed and yak-skin curtains were hastily pulled shut.
  As she ran, she periodically looked over her shoulder.  The expression on her face was one of professional wariness.  But Jack remembered how she'd looked on the roof, with blood and dust caking her face.
She'd been scared.
*       *       *

  As Alexa ran, she tried to extend her senses through Gaia-Net, to learn if there was another adversary waiting in front of them, to feel whether Hu-Dong had broken free of the giant Buddha.  But she was as mind-blind as a newborn kitten in the Lo Mon-thang dead zone.  It panicked her to be wounded and unable to sense the world beyond her physical senses.  Her skin prickled with the knowledge that she could be blindsided at any moment by an unseen enemy.
  A chicken, squawking, ran out from behind a building and Alexa screeched to a halt, fists up, preparing to fight.  Until she realized the nature of her attacker.
Jack thumped into her back.
  "Wait here," she whispered over the pounding of her heart.  "I'm going to check around the corner."
  The mud-brick houses were an organic collage created by centuries of building onto preexisting walls, a cubist's nightmare of sprawling rooms and multilevel rooftops.
  Alexa slid along the irregular wall, ignoring the ache in her foot and the cold air on her midsection.  She darted between a few houses until she came to a rough-hewn opening in the city wall.  Beyond were a wilted garden and the attacker's drones.
She waited, but nothing moved outside the wall.
  With a sigh and the rising hope that finally something was going right, she darted through the hole in the wall.
  One of the drones tilted sideways as something shifted inside.
  The hatchway opened, and a man emerged.  "What the hell took so—" The man, speaking Spanish, broke off.  He reached into the drone for his weapon, but Alexa was on him.  She grabbed his hand, bending it forward until the wrist snapped and his gun dropped back into the drone.
  From the direction of the monastery came a rumble like far-off thunder.  The sky overhead was cloudless blue.  Alexa knew they didn't have much time.
"Jack!"
  She twisted the screaming guard's wrist up behind his back, pushing him facefirst into the dirt, her foot on the back of his neck.  "Don't make me kill you," she warned him in guttural Spanish.
  Jack ran around the corner, his face concerned.  He took in the scene in seconds and hopped into the drone.
  Alexa heard the patter of inhumanly fast footsteps, closing quickly.  She had a moment's admiration for Hu-Dong's determination.  Then she stomped down hard, shattering the guard's right knee, and jumped in the drone after Jack.
  The guard screamed.  He would be all right.  Rebuilding a knee was child's play, a regular assignment the tutors gave the children on Elysium.
  Linking into the drone via its nano-biology network, Alexa programmed a new destination.  They were lucky; if the guard hadn't opened the door for her, she'd have wasted precious seconds battling security protocols.
  The thousand tiny wings lifted the drone's sleek body into the air.
  A line of dust raced toward them as Hu-Dong streaked between the mud-brick buildings.
  Alexa popped open the hatch.  Air buffeted them and the drone lost altitude, dipping low and right in response to the additional drag.
"What are you—?" Jack demanded.
  Alexa hooked her foot under her seat and picked up the guard's rifle.  She leaned out, aimed, and destroyed the other drones.
  Hu-Dong skidded to a halt and took cover behind a building.  She'd gotten only a glimpse of the damage, but it chilled her.
  The left side of Hu-Dong's face was crushed, his arm a shattered ruin, and intestines leaked out of the cavity that had once been his chest.
  Alexa knew she'd made an enemy for life—and with both of them Deathless, that might be a very long time indeed.
  
11
Alexa sighed with pleasure as they flew out of the dead zone.  The fog lifted from her mind and she could once again touch the twenty billion other minds on Gaia-Net.  After being alone in her head for so long, it felt like coming home.
"Are we safe?" Jack asked.
  She thought of the expression on Hu-Dong's ruined face and was glad she no longer needed sleep.  The hatred of it would have given her nightmares.  Another enemy added to an already too long list.  But then, she hadn't felt safe since she was eleven years old and her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  Why should now be any different?
  "He can't follow us," she said.  "We destroyed his drone, and there's no way for him to call out for another.  Either Valiente will send a search party or Hu Dong will have to walk down the mountain." With another part of her mind, she adjusted the drone's course for the city-state of Chicago, where Lucius maintained a business complex.
  She fell into a meditative state while they traveled, giving her damaged body a chance to recover.
  The attack hit Alexa like a tsunami, slamming into her and sending her tumbling, with no sense of up, or air.
She spasmed and gasped as her lungs dissolved within her chest.  A gleaming skyscraper trailed into smoke, raining down dust that alighted on her skin like fire, burning where it touched.  In a line, more buildings fell, like blades of grass cut by a scythe.
  She fell from the sky, her extra arms streaming into smoke as she fell.  She twisted, tried to call out for rescue, but all the drones swooping nearby burst into feathers.  Towers fell.  The world was falling.
  She was on the sidewalk, hands over her head, ducking and fending off debris that included bodies, whole and in pieces.
  The sound of her screams deafened: a hundred thousand voices in half a dozen languages, some with only the incoherence of primal fear, never having learned human speech.
  Alexa's vision became pockmarked with black.  She was losing cohesion.  All that she was, all that she would be, was falling apart.
  A violent shaking rattled her teeth.  Her chin was slick with spittle.  As her vision cleared, she saw Jack's worried face.
  His hands crushed her shoulders and he shook her again.  "Alexa!"
  "I'm back." She pried one of his hands free.  Her mouth tasted metallic.  "Wh-what happened?"
  "You had a seizure," Jack said, his breathing quick and light.  "I thought you were going to tear the drone apart."
  "Gaia-Net." Alexa wiped her mouth on her sleeve and got up from the floor.  The headrest of her chair had snapped off and was now hanging by a scrap of fabric.  She sat hugging herself and rocking.  "There've been more attacks.  I-I experienced dying a thousand times over.  So much pain, so much terror." She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes until she saw sparks.  "The disassembler was released in—" She reached out to Gaia-Net gingerly, as if prodding a sore tooth with her tongue.  "Beijing, London, Bombay, the Mojave spaceport."
  
  She squeezed her eyes shut against images of a space elevator going up in smoke.  The disassembler had climbed the low-Earth-orbit beanstalk from the Mojave spaceport, dissolving as it went.  The station had safeguards against micrometeor punctures, but no amount of fill foam or bulkheads could protect those onboard.  The hull dissolved into disintegrating fragments, spiraling the inhabitants of Mojave Terminus into space.
  Alexa pulled back until she received only text sum
maries of the damage.  "Seven heads of the converted	s
families gone, each over two hundred years old.  The
speculation is that someone's targeting the old fami
lies." She cocked her head and listened.  "They're or
dering all air traffic grounded."
  The drone dipped in response to the Gaia-Net command.  Alexa mentally tried an override, but it was no use.  The drone turned toward the nearest city, St.  Petersburg, Russia.
Jack dragged his fingers through his hair.  "Lucius?"
  Alexa kept her connection on low bandwidth and transmitted a query.  "Elysium hasn't been affected.  Though there are reports of Lucius's security forces shooting down two incoming vessels." Her expression grew somber.  "One was carrying Sterling relatives."
Jack's face went pale.
  They both knew Lucius considered his descendants his greatest treasure.  He had destroyed family to maintain quarantine.
  "Someone used the disassembler." Jack's voice was flat.  "Knowing that thousands of innocents would be killed.  Who would do such a thing?"
  Alexa thought of Hu-Dong.  Last she'd heard, Marcus Valiente held his contract.  The Venezuelan was prideful and could be vindictive.  But if he was behind this, what was his motivation?
  Jack interrupted her grim thoughts by placing his hand on her knee.  "We have to find out." The look on his face was eerily like Lucius's, right before the hostile takeover of a rival corporation.  "We have to stop them."
  It was an irony so bitter it made her laugh.  The champion for nano-biology was the one man who would be better off without it.
  Jack stared out the window as the drone zipped across Western Europe.  For the first time in his life he was glad to be disconnected from Gaia-Net.  Alexa's face was yellowish green, and her eyes were haunted.  She'd told him in an emotionless voice what she'd experienced through the Net, and that secondhand recitation was enough to inspire nightmares.  Since then, she'd pulled her knees to her chest and gone silent.
  His first instinct was to hug her, promise her everything would be all right.  But there was no room in the low-ceilinged cockpit.  How comforting would his plastic-wrapped embrace be, anyway? And, of course, things wouldn't be all right.  Even if the attacks stopped now, tens of thousands were dead already.
  He thought of his ranch in Watershed Valley and all the nights he'd glared at the lights encroaching upon the nearby cliff faces and wished them wiped off the earth.  The memory gave him a guilty ache.  As if his desire to protect his valley had somehow been given form by a capricious god.
  Sarah and Liam—all the Mennonites—wouldn't even know that disaster was raining down all around their community.  Not until the inhabitants of the nearby cliffs flooded into Watershed Valley seeking a haven from their crumbling civilization.
  The Mennonites, prompted by Scripture to feed the hungry, would offer aid to all who came, until they were overwhelmed by refugees and all starved.
  They were almost to St.  Petersburg.  The city was a miraculous blend of state-of-the-art nano-biology and six hundred years of Russian history.  Lacework stone bridges crisscrossed the Neva River side by side with gossamer nano-wire spans.  Stone cathedrals encrusted with intricate carvings and topped with gold minarets sprouted like mushrooms in the shade of the sleek spires of three-hundred-story skyscrapers.
"Where are we landing?" he asked Alexa.
  She roused herself, looking at him with groggy eyes.  "Headquarters of the Russian division of Sterling Na-nology, Inc.  They're expecting us.  There's a conference to discuss the current crisis and the results of our mission." She licked her lips nervously.  "Lucius is not happy."
  The drone landed on top of one of the largest buildings on the skyline.  Cold, thin air braced Jack as he followed Alexa out of the drone.  Far below, sunlight glinted off the Neva River and dozens of golden minarets.  The view was breathtakingly beautiful.  It was hard to believe that anything was wrong with the world on such a day.
  The flat roof rippled, and a man-sized bubble emerged from it.  Alexa shoved Jack behind her, putting her body between him and a potential threat.
  Anger flared in Jack.  He was a man, not a child clinging to her leg for protection.  He stepped back to her side, earning a scowl.
  The bubble broke into petals and opened like a flower, revealing a somber blond man in a tight-fitting jacket emblazoned with the silver Sterling logo.  "Welcome to the Saint Petersburg offices of Sterling Nanol-ogy, Inc." His pronunciation of English was Gaia-Net perfect.  He stepped past Alexa to clasp Jack's hand in both his own.  "I am Vasily Toboshev, vice president of the Russian division of Sterling Nanology." He looked at the sky as if it might fall on them at any moment.  "Come with me."
  The extruded elevator swallowed them down and sideways, into the heart of the building.
  Vasily chattered as they traveled.  "It is an honor to host a descendant of the mighty Lucius Sterling.  It is only a shame that your cousin Adnos Sterling cannot be here to greet you." A nervous smile lifted his blond mustache.  "He was called back to the family compound last week."
  "When the Sterlings go to ground," Alexa muttered, "watch out."
  If Vasily heard her, his expression gave no sign, but he lifted her hand to his lips and said, "The beautiful Alexa, personal bodyguard to the great man for more than a century and a half.  We had thought you a legend, but here you are, in the magnificent flesh."
  As the elevator slowed and the wall ahead parted, Jack was struck by the thought that Lucius, having predicted the current crisis, had called home all of his relatives a week ago.  All save one—Jack.  The defective, disposable one.
  The conference room Vasily led them to was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling video wall.  Onscreen, Lucius wore a blue-and-white-striped bathrobe over his blocky frame and chewed the end of a smoking cigar.  It was an eccentric habit; fewer than a hundred people in the world smoked, all of those converteds born in the twenty-first century.  He was on the beach.  In the background rose the pink spiral of the children's wing and the organic obsidian of his personal chambers.  It was sunset, and tiki torches fluttered in the Pacific Ocean breeze while shades of pink, lavender, and gold streaked the sky.
  "Alexa!" Lucius demanded as soon as she and Jack entered the room.  He jabbed at her with the glowing end of his cigar, the gesture rendered imposing and godlike by the fact that his image was thirty feet tall.  "What the hell happened in Tibet? You were supposed to stop this mess.  Not trigger Armageddon."
  Alexa took a breath before she answered, and only Jack standing at her side could have heard the slight tremor in her exhalation.  She glared up at Lucius's image.  "Tibet wasn't the source.  There was no secret lab, just one of Gottsberg's pet scientists hiding out.  He was as surprised as we were about the disassembler.  Before I could question him further, assassins attacked—intending to capture or silence the fugitive.  He's dead.  Now this.  What do we know about the attacks?"
  Lucius chewed angrily on the cigar, then pulled it from his mouth.  "Damn.  I'd hoped for more from you, Alexa." He stubbed out the cigar.  "We've got nothing.  Seven letter bombs delivered by seven different delivery services, no record of who shipped the packages, tens of thousands dead, including some of the oldest and most powerful Deathless."
  "It's the same mechanism as before?" Jack asked, not sure if he should mention the disassembler.
  "Yes." Lucius flipped his hand up in exasperation.  "Fontesca confirms that it's the disassembler." He shook his big head.  "No reason to keep it secret now.  Panic in the streets? Already happening.  Governmental quarantines? Check.  Shutdown of the world economy? You bet." He wiped sweat from his forehead.  "Reprisals against the man who gave nano-biology to the world? In the works."
"How do we stop it?" Jack asked.
  "Well, now, that is the sixty-four-billion-dollar question." Lucius puffed on his cigar.  "Tell me more about the assassins in Tibet."
  "Hu-Dong," Alexa said, stepping closer to the big screen, "and some modified humans.  I didn't have the opportunity to question them, but we have their drone.  It may offer clues."
  Lucius turned to Vasily.  "Have security go over that drone with molecular sniffers, full scan.  I want every nano on that craft identified and tracked down to its maker.  Also, run a check on Hu-Dong.  Check who currently owns his contract."
  "On it." Vasily nodded, and his eyes went blank as he forwarded the commands to the appropriate parties.
  Lucius's image began to break up in static.  It froze for an instant, then suddenly went to double speed as the frames tried to catch up to the buffer.  Gray speckles bloomed like mold on the image.  His words were blurred by a sibilant hiss.
"Lucius!" Alexa shouted.  "You're breaking up."
  Vasily twisted his hands together.  "Gaia-Net never goes down.  Never." He stared up at the ceiling.  "It must be here—the destruction has reached Saint Petersburg.  It is raining down on us like God's judgment."
  "Shut up!" Alexa commanded.  She focused on the screen.  "Lucius!"
Sirens wailed outside.
  Vasily fell to his knees, crooning in Russian.  Jack was fairly certain the man was praying.
  In the static-spattered image, Lucius looked over his shoulder.  His lips moved.  Seconds later the sound caught up.  "—Breach in the nano-wire net."
  Gordon, Lucius's head of security, ran onscreen, grabbed Lucius's arm, and pointed at the sky.  In the background, the obsidian tower of the adults' quarters caved in, deflating like a broken souffle.
  Lucius pushed Gordon away.  His words came in broken stutters: "—save the kids—them aw—"
  Gordon ran ten paces toward the children's wing, then screamed.  The leg he planted on the earth unraveled from the foot up.  He toppled forward.  The hands he tried to catch himself with evaporated.  His body burst into dust as it hit the ground.
  Bodies fell from the toppling obsidian structure.  They twisted in the air like flash paper, dissolving before they hit the ground.
  The disassembler burned through the buildings.  It left no man-made object in its wake, only dust and native vegetation.  One of the children's science teachers ran behind Lucius, screaming, his hands covering his eyes.  He fell headlong into the surf.
  Jack tasted salt and realized he was crying.  He hadn't lived there for six years, but Elysium was still home.
  
  "Lucius!" Alexa's hands were raised as if in supplication, or as if she hoped the image on the wall could leap into her arms.  She had been perfected into a biological machine with one purpose, to keep Lucius alive.  And here, halfway across the globe, there was nothing she could do.
  The static cleared, granting a brief image of the leveled estate: a few palm trees and a jumble of orchids in piles of bark where their pots had dissolved.
  Lucius took a puff from his cigar, his ever-present smile gone.  "Jack, you're on your own, my boy."
  The pink seashell dome of the children's wing crumbled like a sugar confection hit by the tide.  Children rained down from the upper stories.  In the coral-colored dust, little Hans stood up and wailed.  Dozens of children pulled themselves out of the dust—the only unmodified humans on the island, too young to have undergone the change.  An older child limped over to Hans and hefted him onto her hip, hugging him tightly.  Her eyes were wide with horror.
  Lucius grunted with pain.  He pointed his cigar at the children.  The static flared up, then subsided again.  "Alexa—save—" were the only words Jack caught as disassemblers climbed Lucius's body, pulling apart protein bonds as they went.  His shoulders and neck prickled into insubstantial fog.  Lucius's mouth gaped, but whether to scream or to give one last order Jack would never know.
The big man's cigar fell to the sand.
  The image washed into static and went blank as the disassembler disassembled the ambient transmitters, and the island of Elysium, once home to the founding fathers of nano-biology, became a dead zone.
  
12
"Lucius." Alexa fell to her knees before the wall-sized screen.
  Her world had imploded.  It wasn't possible that he was dead—not Lucius Sterling.  He was the mountain that dominated her landscape, the foundation on which she stood, eternal.  The world might fall, civilizations might crumble, but Lucius Sterling would go on.
  Over the decades, Alexa had wished him dead half a dozen times.  He had ruled her life with a capricious insensitivity for her own wishes: ordering her to show off her enhancements to others like a trained dog, forcing her to put her life in jeopardy to defend his, then selling her contract to Valiente at Vargo's bidding.
  She'd prayed that her replacement, Gordon, would fail in his duties, that somehow one of Lucius's enemies would find a way to kill him.  So she could be free.
  It was impossible he was dead.  If he was, she would be elated, not kneeling in front of a wall-sized blue screen feeling as abandoned as an orphaned child.
If Lucius was gone, she was free.
But free to be .  .  .  what?
"Alexa?"
  A hand touched her shoulder.  For an instant the timbre of the voice filled her with hope and despair.
  
Those resonant tones—it had been a hoax, another of the old devil's tests of her loyalty.
  She flashed up, relief in her chest, and biting words for Lucius on her tongue—but it was only Jack, looking lost and sympathetic.  "I can't believe," he whispered, "that he's gone."
  His voice roughened with grief, Jack sounded like his ancestor.  A muscle in his jaw flexed, just as Luci-us's had.  His normal demeanor was so self-effacing, so unlike Lucius, that it'd never struck Alexa before how much Jack favored the old man.
  Behind him, Vasily chewed on his thumbnail, ruining an expensive manicure.  "What are your plans, Mr.  Sterling?"
"My plans?" asked Jack, turning.
  Vasily placed a hand on his chest and performed a little bow.  "I will, of course, manage your holdings in Saint Petersburg, but the other vice presidents, they await your instructions."
  Alexa felt Gaia-Net sucking at her like an outgoing tide.  All of Lucius Sterling's employees, business rivals, investors clamored to confirm the transmission they'd just seen.  Everyone asked the same question, whether with horror, dread, or glee: "Is Lucius Sterling really dead?"
  "My instructions?" Jack asked.  "Why do they need instructions from me?"
  "Because, Mr.  Sterling, every other descendant of Lucius was on Elysium." An ironic sadness lit his eyes.  "For their protection.  You are the sole inheritor"— he nodded at the now-blank screen—"above the legal age of majority.  Once probate clears, you will control all the resources of Sterling Nanology, Inc."
  The words hit Jack like a blow.  He, in control of the most valuable corporate holdings on or off Earth? Too much had changed in the past few minutes.  He couldn't wrap his head around it.  Two minutes ago he
  
had been a disabled sheep farmer in danger of losing his ranch.  Now he was the richest man alive?
  "The children," Alexa said, shaking her head as if to drive off a fly.
  "The Sterling children are too young to inherit—" Vasily began.
  "No—" Alexa ran over his sentence.  "The children stranded on Elysium, they're too young to have undergone conversion.  Seventy children are alone on the island with no food, no shelter, and no one to take care of them."
  Jack thought of the Mennonite children.  They'd been without nano-biology all their lives.  They would know how to survive in a wilderness.  But Sterling children, used to a privileged world in which they had only to imagine something for it to become real, in which hunger and thirst were fulfilled before the need became conscious, how would they survive in a land suddenly turned unresponsive? They had no way even to call for help.  And who would go to their aid, with Elysium tainted by the disassembler?
"Their tutors?" Vasily offered.  "Surely they will—"
  Alexa leapt to her feet in a fluid movement.  "No.  They all had extensive modifications.  It was a perk of working on Elysium.  Cheap mods." Her hands clenched into fists at her sides.  "There won't be anyone to help the children."
  "Jack." Alexa put a world of pleading into that one syllable.
  He saw in her face the desperation of a guard, unable to save that which she'd sworn to protect, a weapon rendered useless, a mother whose children were in jeopardy.
  He turned to Vasily.  "Can we use my new wealth to hire someone to rescue the children from Elysium?"
  Vasily shook his head.  "Even with the efficiency of Gaia-Net, probate will take days to clear.  You don't own the money yet.  Also, the disassembler is still ac-
  
tive on Elysium.  It's too hot for drones or automated transport.  Impossible."
  "What about dropping supplies, parachuting food and water in?" said Jack.
  "These are children." Alexa's nostrils flared with anger.  "Some as young as two months.  We can't leave them on their own.  Not for a week.  Not even for a day.  They have to be rescued now."
  Vasily raised his hands.  "I don't see how, unless you know of a secret cult of unaltered ninjas who use only pre-nano-biology transport.  Hmm?"
  Alexa grabbed the collar of his shirt and twisted it tight around his neck.  "This isn't a joke.  The lives of—"
Jack interrupted her with a single word.  "Montana."
  Alexa dropped Vasily and turned on Jack.  "You fucking coward! I can't believe you'd aban—"
  Jack cupped Alexa's round cheeks in his hands, forced her to meet his eyes.  "We'll take the children to Montana.  There are people in Watershed Valley— natural humans—who can travel with me to Elysium and bring the children back.  They'll be safe there, whatever comes." It was asking a lot of the people who had sheltered him: to care for a flood of orphans who would be grieving for loved ones and the life they had known.  And though he believed they would rise to the challenge, he could not commit their aid until he talked to Liam's father and the rest of the elders.
  Alexa pulled free of his hands.  Her eyes held a wary hope.  "The people you live with, they'll do this?"
  "There's only one way to be certain.  We need to call the ranch."
  In Montana, Jack's house stood apart, only a few yards from the Mennonite village, but the small span of space held a large philosophical difference.  Jack was limited to twenty-first-century technology by his allergies, not by choice.  He was cut off from the modern world, not in retreat from it.
  
  His was the only house that had a satellite dish on the roof.  It connected his antique laptop to Gaia-Net.  It was like looking at the world through a pinhole, but it was essential that Jack keep the lines of communication open.  It was how he purchased the expensive petroleum fuels his machines required, how he had paid tribute through regular contact with Lucius.  Jack was the only one who ever opened his laptop, sat in front of its built-in camera and allowed his picture to be transmitted by radio waves to a satellite that connected him to the greater world.
  As they placed the call through Gaia-Net and waited, Jack pictured his laptop lying on his rough-hewn oak desk, beside a manual typewriter and the loose accounting ledgers he used to keep records of his flock.  In his imagination he heard its persistent chirrup, like an annoyed cricket.
Would anybody answer?
  Liam had watched him use the laptop to place calls.  Standing out of the camera's range, he had watched Jack order new breeding stock from a Brazilian rancher who specialized in heirloom genetics.  Liam had held himself stiffly throughout the call, relaxing only after Jack closed the laptop.  "How many miles did that thing carry your voice?"
  When Jack told him, the youth had whistled.  "Seems a voice could get lost, traveling that far."
  Sixteen chirrups.  Would anyone walking by hear the ringing through the wooden walls? If they did, would they answer? Please, he pleaded, trying to reach out to Liam through force of will alone.  Please answer.
  Jack needed the Mennonites' help.  Travel was shut down between the borders of Russia and the European Union.  Vasily had tried to arrange passage to the North American Alliance and had been told that it was impossible—at any price.  People were terrified.  No amount of money could compensate for the risk of becoming contaminated with the disassembler.
Only the Mennonites could start the process of res- cuing the Sterling children.  He needed them to prep the C13QJ cargo plane they used for livestock transport, fuel it for travel across the Pacific, and contact Louis DeGroot—a retired pilot who lived a hermit's life, without nano-biology or electricity, in the hills above Watershed Valley—to fly it for them.
  Every day of delay put the children in greater jeopardy, especially the infants.  Their nano-biology wet nurses were destroyed.  After even a few days of starvation, the babies would be weakened past saving.
  They didn't have time to wait for probate or for the disassembler to burn out.  Jack would have to do this with his own resources.
Twenty-two chirrups.
  Jack pounded his fist against Vasily's crescent-shaped desk.  His shoulders hunched.  "No one hears it.  Or if they do, they aren't answering."
  Alexa paced the room like a caged cat.  She jabbed a finger at Vasily.  "You have to get us a drone out of here."
  Vasily lounged back in his executive chaise.  It flowed along his spine, providing perfect support for his neck and shoulders.  He raised his hands in helplessness.  "Everything, I have tried.  There is a ukase against air travel.  Even the usual bribes do not work.  What good is wealth, my contacts tell me, if your client brings the contagion? If you launch, government security forces will shoot you down."
  The wall screen lit up, showing a dimly lit background and a blurry out-of-focus peach-colored shape.  "Jack," a female voice whispered tremulously, "is that you?"
Someone had answered Jack's call.
"Sarah?"
  The onscreen image trembled and pulled back, resolving into a close-up of Liam's sister.  The freckles that crossed her nose were magnified, and only the top half of her face was visible.  Her eyes creased with pleasure.  "You're all right.  When you didn't come back that night—I was worried."
  
"Where's your brother?" Jack asked.
  The image blurred into red-gold hair as Sarah checked behind her.  "The northern pasture, with Father." The face returned, a close-up of her left cheek and eye.  "They'd be furious if they knew I'd been inside your house.  But I—I had to close up your pantry.  If you weren't coming home soon, the mice would've—are you coming home soon?"
  "Sarah, hold the laptop farther away," Jack said.  "I can't see you."
  The picture changed, showing Sarah's lovely face, her braids frizzing in the humidity and a blush across her cheeks.
  "I need you to take my laptop to your father.  I—" Jack looked back at Alexa.  "We need his help."
  Sarah shook her head, sending her braids wrapping around her shoulders.  "I couldn't.  If Father knew I'd touched your things he'd be furious.  He already tells me I'm too familiar."
  "This is important, Sarah.  Children's lives are in danger.  I need his help, and the help of the entire community, to save them."
  "Children?" She cocked her head at the screen, her bonnet strings dangling.  "Whose children?"
  "Orphans, seventy of them.  They're trapped on an island without food, and if we don't rescue them, they'll die."
  Sarah clapped a hand over her mouth.  "Merciful Lord!"
  "I need your father and Liam to ready the plane.  Will you take this phone to them so I can explain what I need?"
  Sarah frowned, but she nodded.  "Of course." Her eyes focused on something behind Jack.
  Jack turned and saw Alexa, her taut body sheathed in its skintight black bodysuit, ripped at the waist and shoulder, exposing caramel-colored skin.
"Who is she?" Sarah asked.
Embarrassed, Jack waved Alexa out of the camera's view.  "A friend.  She works for my great-grandfather, the one who holds the title of the ranch." Held, Jack corrected himself silently.  It was hard to accept that Lucius was gone and Jack now owned the ranch outright, and Alexa—he supposed she now worked for him.
"Hurry," Jack urged.
  Sarah snapped the clamshell shut, blanking the screen.  It was nearly half an hour later when Liam opened the phone.  In the background Sarah's father held her by the arm and shook her, his face angry.
  "Mr.  Sterling," Liam said placidly.  "My sister came running into the field half crazed with stories of orphans, and carrying your laptop.  Do you know what this is about?"
  Jack filled Liam and his father in on what was happening in the world, including the plight of Jack's relations on Elysium.  He explained his plan, and what was needed.
  "You ask much," Liam's father said.  He stood back from the phone, speaking at a distance while Liam held the modern object.  "I will take your words to the elders.  We shall see."
  Jack knew there was no point in arguing.  The Men-nonite elders, the eight oldest men and women in the village, were implacable in their judgments.
  "Thank you, sir," Jack said.  "When they've decided, simply open the laptop.  I'll keep the connection open."
The clamshell closed, blanking the screen to blue.
  From the corner where she'd been banished, Alexa asked, "Will they help?"
  Jack nodded.  "I believe so.  They take Christian charity seriously, especially where children are concerned."
  A niggling doubt clouded his confidence.  They also cherished their isolation from the modern world.  Would the elders condone a group of their men venturing out to bring worldly children into their village—
  
who would no doubt be a disturbing influence as well as a drain on precious resources?
  Vasily paled suddenly.  "It cannot be so." The fear on his face was out of proportion to the recent conversation.
  Alexa pointed at the wall screen.  "Put it on, so Jack can see." Her voice was tense.
  An aerial view showed Manhattan, an acropolis so tall, its highest spires bowed from the inertia of Earth's rotation.  Nearly a billion people lived and worked inside its gleaming silver-green shell.  For centuries, Manhattan had been the center of industry, the arts, and finance for the world.  The city's southern tip was covered in smoke—no, was unraveling into smoke.  A breeze pushed the dark cloud into the Financial District, leaving nothing behind but bare bedrock and a pile of inorganic rubble—pre-nano-biology mementos and the contents of roof gardens.  Mixed in among the debris were the corpses of those who had fallen when the buildings dissolved.  From this vantage point they looked like broken dolls.  Jack was glad that he wasn't part of Gaia-Net, able to feel the sensations of the people who were engulfed, taken in by a circumambient fog of disassemblers.
  They watched Manhattan fall.  The towers of Wall Street crumbled into dust.  The glass dome over Greenwich Village shattered and rained down in shards.  The disassembler burned northward, winking out the lights of Broadway and disintegrating the staggered rooftops of the Upper East Side and the West Side.  Alexa's face was hard and still.  Vasily wept, covering his eyes from the destruction.
  So many people dead.  It was almost inconceivable.  Within minutes, Manhattan was flattened to bare dirt, save for a few historic stone edifices and piles of the dying and the dead.
  Only Central Park was spared, a mocking bit of green amid the blackened devastation.
"Turn it off," Jack said.
The screen blanked to blue.	I
  "A billion people," Alexa said in a dead, flat voice.  "Two minutes ago, enjoying a busy workday.  Now— gone."
  The floor under Jack's feet felt uncertain.  Might not the disassemblers, even now, be eating their way through its structure? He wanted solid earth under his shoes.  He wanted home, Montana, and natural humans around him.  People who might survive the coming apocalypse.
  
13
E
xperiencing the billion deaths in Manhattan rocked Alexa, especially so soon after the trauma of the first wave of attacks.  Victims splashed their pain across Gaia-Net as the disassembler tore them apart.  A flare of panic and falling, before the nano transmitters themselves were destroyed.  It was too terrible.  Alexa pulled away from Gaia-Net.  It was so pervasive there was no way to shut the connection completely off, but she tuned down the suffering until it was only a guilty ache in her chest.
"Just Manhattan?" Jack whispered.
  Vasily grabbed his head and moaned, still lost in images of destruction.
  Alexa picked the Russian up by his collar and slapped his face.  "Snap out of it."
  Eyes glazed with pain, Vasily nodded.  He swallowed once, twice.  "Yes.  I am ...  okay.  Thank you.  I was lost."
  Alexa nodded at the wall screen.  "Show him the map."
  A globe appeared on the screen, the space elevators projected on the z-axis.  Most of the map was lit up with blue-and-green transmission-strength figures.  Where the latest destruction had occurred was an unrelieved black: Manhattan, Paris, Brasilia, Beijing, London, Bombay, the Mojave spaceport, and the tiny dot that had been Elysium.
"Three new targets: Manhattan, Paris, and Brasilia," Jack said.  "Since the attacks began, they've all been major cities.  Have any less-populated places been hit?"
  Alexa dipped into the surface of the roiling hell that was Gaia-Net.  It was clogged with people calling desperately to friends and family, begging for help and asylum, challenging governmental officials to stop the disasters.  It was a virtual riot.  "Only Elysium."
  "This can't be random," Jack said.  "Spontaneous mutations in nano-biology wouldn't happen simultaneously all over the globe—not just over population centers.  Do these targets have anything in common?"
  Alexa studied the map.  Her mind drifted back fifty years to when she traveled everywhere on Lucius's arm, escorting him to banquets and board meetings.  She'd been to most of these cities.  All of them, in fact.
  "Sterling Nanology," Vasily said, his voice leaden.  "All of them housed the international headquarters of Sterling Nanology." His eyes widened.  "As does Saint Petersburg."
  "Then I strongly suggest," Alexa said, stepping nearer until she loomed over the seated Vasily, "that you find us a way out of Russia."
  Jack watched a video translation of news stories about the attacks.  Little was known about how they started.  Conspiracy theories ranged from terrorists' carrying the nanos in person, to environmental pollution causing the destruction, to its having been a package-bomb delivery.  One locus of gossip even speculated that this was the first step of an alien invasion.
  One thing was certain: no one had stepped forward to claim responsibility.
  "Impossible!" Vasily threw up his hands in exasperation.  "It cannot be done.  No one will sell us passage."
  "Can't we sneak across?" asked Jack.  "There's eighteen hundred miles of border between the European Union and Russia.  They can't guard it all."
  
  Alexa shook her head.  "Gaia-Net.  It's been years since you were connected.  The technology is denser now.  Nano sensors are everywhere."
"Could we jam them?"
Alexa and Vasily exchanged a glance.
  "No." Vasily's tone was world-weary.  "We have a lab working on this problem—in secret—with no success.  There are too many distributed sensors to fool.  One, a hundred, might be possible.  But with nano-scale sensors, there are billions per cubic meter, checking various parameters: temperature, motion, salinity, humidity.  It is impossible." His mustache lifted in a smile.  "But there is hope.  No new attacks for the past hour.  Perhaps Saint Petersburg will be spared, and we are safe here."
  Not the children, Jack thought.  He imagined them under the pitiless Elysium sun, with only the few remaining native trees for shade and no food or milk for the infants.
  Alexa went suddenly rigid.  She said quietly, "It's here."
  Vasily was already running for the exit when Jack heard the screams from the hallway.
"We have to get you out of here," he said.
  Alexa grabbed Jack, threw him around her shoulders, and ran—overtaking Vasily and pushing through a crowd of people to the stairwell.  "There isn't time.  The building is disintegrating."
  Jack bounced up and down painfully as she ran down the stairs, leaping over executives and research personnel.  Twice Alexa knocked an executive, cursing, to his knees.  Other workers scrambled out of her way.
  "I'll get you to ground level," she said when they were temporarily away from the crowd.  "Or as close as I can.  I won't have time to do more."
  Jack squirmed in her grasp.  "Put me down!" Her tiny hands were like steel cables around his wrists and ankles.  "Put me down, goddamn you!"
A body plummeted down the center of the stairwell.
Alexa leaned back to look up and Jack saw a cloud of particles falling their way.
  Alexa ran faster—faster than Jack imagined possible.  The stairwell became a blur of railings and screaming people.  She kicked steel-bolted doors open without hesitation.  They burst out of the skyscraper onto a wide, tree-lined boulevard.  Drones filled the sky, carrying passengers away from the scene.  Alexa set Jack down on the far side of the six-lane street and panted, hands on her knees.
  The St.  Petersburg offices of Sterling Nanology began to collapse, like a marshmallow in flames.  Towers and offices melted into a miasma of dust that drifted into nearby buildings and began to devour them as well.  The disassembler was all around them.
  "You should be safe," Alexa panted.  She looked up at Jack, her face drawn in lines of fear and courage.  "I'm sorry.  I can't do more.  Your suit should protect you."
  She held up her hand.  A pinhole in her ring finger expanded, consuming her flesh.
  "No." Jack ripped open the zipper along the front of the suit that protected him from nano-biology.  It was made of a non-nano-biology polymer, engineered so that nothing on the nano-scale could permeate it except oxygen and a handful of other specified molecules.  Jack pushed the flexible helmet off his head and jammed it onto Alexa's dark curls.  "It will protect you."
Tears blossomed in Alexa's eyes.  "It's too late—"
  "Put it on!" Jack shouted.  He summoned all the authority of the Sterling family name into one word: "NOW!"
  Anger lit Alexa's eyes, and she moved too fast for Jack to follow.  He expected to die—that she would strike him down for his impertinence.  Her last act before dissolution would be to lash out at the family that had held her in bondage for nearly two centuries.
Then he was struck by a coughing fit that dragged him to his knees.  His eyes teared.  Jack realized what an idiotic thing he'd done.  The disassembler was working all around him, but in the meantime he'd unsuited in the middle of a city full of nano-biology.
  A cloud of smoke blew over Jack, obscuring his vision.  His throat closed.  Jack pressed his head against the cold earth and waited to die.
A spark of pain jabbed his right thigh.
  Slowly his breathing eased and the bright specks of light tunneling his vision abated.
  A hand lifted his elbow, helping him to his feet.  Jack noticed it had only three fingers.  Half of the palm was eaten away.
"Alexa? You're alive?"
  She slid a shoulder under his armpit to steady him.  "So far." Her face was swaddled in the transparent environmental suit, which tented around her button nose.  Designed for Jack, it was huge on her and puddled around her wrists and ankles, but it looked better on her than it ever had on him.  "You took a huge risk."
  Jack rubbed the sore spot on his leg, and his fingers encountered an empty epi-pen injector.  "Didn't Lucius always say, 'With great risk comes great reward'?"
  "No.  He said: 'Only a fool sticks his neck out for someone else.'"
  Jack raised his head, and the sunlight made him wince.  The skyline was gone.  The only building for miles around was a one-story seventeenth-century church with stained glass windows and gold minarets.  There were mounds of dust everywhere, and the moans of the dead and dying.  Somewhere in the distance a child wailed.
  Jack sought out the children over the piles of debris.  A young boy, maybe six or seven, staggered naked, holding his arm and screaming.  An old man pulled himself to his feet.  He was dressed in clothes with patches at the knees and elbows and over it all he wore a white apron.  A dishwasher, maybe, from an
  
exclusive restaurant that served all-natural foods, the kind that bought Jack's mutton.  The old man cradled the boy, whose nakedness indicated that before the destruction, his clothes had been the finest nano-biology.  The dishwasher draped his apron over the boy to clothe him and cuddled him to his side, brushing his hair out of his face and promising it would be all right.  Though, of course, it never could be.
  Only natural humans and children too young for conversion would survive.  The disassembler left in its wake a city of orphans and its poorest inhabitants.  It reminded Jack of something Sarah's father always said.  At last it had come to pass: the meek inheriting the earth.
  Alexa gestured with her ruined hand.  "With all this devastation, why wasn't I destroyed?"
  "I'm guessing a single nano got inside the suit.  Its lifetime expired before it could do more damage.  That's one thing working in our benefit." Jack pointed at the other side of the Neva River.  Skyscrapers stood undamaged, as if nothing was wrong in the world.  "The nano doesn't seem to self-propagate.  Its life span limits it to a given region."
  Alexa's eyes narrowed.  "Just what you'd want in a weapon.  We have to find the person who did this."
  Jack didn't answer, but he had a plan.  "We take a water drone, while everyone's panicked.  With the distraction taking up all the Gaia-Net bandwidth, we might be able to sneak across the Baltic Sea to Finland."
  Alexa nodded, her face grave.  She reached for the zipper of the environmental suit.  Jack stopped her, his hand over hers.  He was surprised how small and warm it felt.  Lucius's enforcer, the fierce protectress who had safeguarded Jack's childhood, was no more than a teenager, frozen in amber.  "Wait until we're clear of Saint Petersburg.  There are still disassemblers floating around."
"But your allergies—I don't have another epi-pen."

  "I feel the slightest tickle in my throat, we'll switch."
  Alexa led Jack around piles of rubble that had fallen when the skyscrapers collapsed: antique books with torn pages and splayed spines, the smashed frames of classic artwork, broken sculptures, the dirt-less clump of a spider plant.  Mixed in among the debris were people, most still and lifeless, but one or two still twitching in their death throes.  A man, his eyes bleeding down the front of his face, moaned and clawed the steel girder pinning his legs.
  Jack stopped and put his arms around the girder— it wouldn't move.  Alexa pulled Jack away.  "We have to get across the border.  We're not doctors.  Emergency services will help them." She herded him like a sheepdog would, steering him away from the worst of the survivors.
  Wearing the environmental suit felt odd.  Nanology could not pass through, which meant access to Gaia-Net was blocked.  Alexa was alone with her thoughts.  It was unnerving.  She no longer knew the location of everyone and everything around her.  It was worse than being blind.  The loss of her Gaia sense made the world feel flat, unreal, as if she was moving through someone else's dream.
  They walked to St.  Petersburg's city center, on the edge of the destruction.  The disassembler stopped the instant its self-regulated life cycle expired, leaving buildings on the perimeter of the destruction half destroyed in a ragged line.
  Alexa stopped Jack with the back of her arm.  Any farther and he risked a deadly allergic reaction.  But if she disrobed here within the perimeter of the destruction, any remaining nanos would eat away at her flesh.  Another thought made her heart sink: contamination.  The nano-biology that powered her post-human body had no doubt sloughed off bits of itself
  
inside Jack's suit.  Putting on the suit would be as dangerous for him as stepping into the city.
  Then an idea too simple to fail crept into her mind.  "Wait here."
"What—"
  "Trust me." She patted his cheek.  "Be ready." Alexa ran through the damaged perimeter into the city, several blocks deep.  She waited a moment to see if she'd brought destruction with her, clinging as dust on her protective suit.  But when she placed her hands on a parked drone, it did not crumble.  With a puzzled Jack watching from the distance, Alexa unzipped and climbed out of the protective suit.
  With the suit gone, Gaia-Net flooded back into her consciousness, a discursive babble of fear and speculation about the attack on St.  Petersburg.  She pulled the empty suit inside out, exposing whatever nano-biology she had shed inside it, wrapped it into a tight cylinder, and stuffed it into her boot to weight it.  Then, using her whole body for leverage, she hurled her boot back across into the destructive zone, past Jack, into the area where nano-biology was still being deconstructed.
  Jack looked over his shoulder at the wadded-up suit in Alexa's boot.  When he turned back toward her, comprehension lit his face.
Alexa waved him to join her, and he nodded.
  She held her breath while Jack dressed, worried that not all the nano-biology particles she'd shed would be destroyed.  But he zipped up the suit and gave her the thumbs-up sign.
  Jack caught up with her and handed her back her boot.  "I thought you were abandoning me for a moment there.  But, good plan."
  Alexa heard a sound that raised the hairs on the back of her neck.  What now? She stuffed her foot hurriedly into the boot.  They turned the corner onto Sadovaya Street and could see the Neva River.  The long expanse of the Troitsky Bridge crossed the ice-
  
cold river.  With a squeal of protesting metal, the drawbridge was opening.  Alexa hefted Jack over her shoulder and ran for all she was worth toward the bridge— their best chance of escaping the destroyed side of the city was being shut off.
  Usually the bridges opened only at night, to permit access to the Baltic Sea.  Sometimes exceptions were made for important shipments, but there were no boats waiting for egress now.
  A throng clogged the Dvortsovaya Embankment.  Business executives with the latest body-mods cheek by jowl with students and service-sector workers.  Gaia-Net was loud with their importunate cries.  Alexa pushed through to the riverside and glanced.left and right.  The Birzhevoy and Liteyny bridges were rising as well.  The governmental edict was clear: the south side of the river was being quarantined.
  People on the bridge screamed as it rose.  A woman lost her grip on the handrail and fell heavily into the crowd behind her.
  Alexa estimated distances and Jack's weight.  She had to move fast.
  With a howl across Gaia-Net, she ordered the people between her and the bridge out of the way.  Some stumbled sideways, and she shoved the others away in her haste.  As she ran, Alexa hefted Jack higher on her shoulder.
  "Wha—" He tried to speak, but the air was crushed from his lungs as she leapt over a cowering man.
  There wasn't breath to spare on explanations.  Alexa dashed up the rising drawbridge, her sticky-soled shoes and inertia holding her to its ever-increasing angle.  With a cry of rage and triumph, Alexa topped the rising bridge and with a powerful leap, launched them into space.
  She half expected to be plunged into the icy waters of the Neva.  But her hip hit the slope of the far half of the bridge, and she skidded down the rising roadway, braking by digging in the heels of her boots.
  
  Through Gaia-Net, she felt the incredulity of those left on the south side of the river—and the stirrings of something hostile.
  "HALT, THIS BRIDGE IS CLOSED, STAND WHERE YOU ARE." A trio of riot-control golems spoke the words simultaneously, like a Greek chorus.  The shape-shifting nano-biology constructs were in their ground configuration: six spider-thin legs, for stability at any speed, supporting a praying mantis torso with glowing amber eyes and two flexible appendages.  All three pairs of tentacles blossomed open, displaying rows of needle-sharp sedative darts.
  Alexa hesitated.  Even the slightest nick of Jack's suit would be fatal.  On the other side of the scales was the rising paranoia of the converted on this side of the river.  It permeated the local Gaia-Net like a miasma: stop them, at any cost; the deaths of two weighed against thousands; raw fear.
  The middle golem's arms twitched backward a millimeter—but that was all the warning Alexa's hyper-tuned nervous system needed.  With Jack draped across her shoulder, she leapt up and over the golems, landing in a crouch to absorb the shock.  Before they could react, she ducked into the gardens north of the Peter and Paul Fortress, weaving through the terraced terrain and behind trees.
  In the distance she heard the spang of darts hitting the bridge's uprights, cutting through the air that she and Jack had occupied seconds ago.
  The golems followed like charging beetles, tearing up the landscape in their fervor to gun down the intruders.  She sensed a dozen more approaching from the riverbank.  They were tracking her every movement.
  As good as she was, she couldn't avoid them forever—not carrying Jack.
  "Mayor Petrovsky," she called through Gaia-Net.  She'd met the mayor of St.  Petersburg when Lucius came to negotiate for space to build his Russian head-
  
quarters.  It was unlikely he would remember a businessman's bodyguard, but she had to try.  "Mayor Petrovsky, I lived through the attack on the south side of the river—don't you want to know how?"
  There was no response.  Alexa worried that her message had been blocked by the privacy and security layers that protected the mayor—or that he heard but didn't trust her.
  As she darted behind a stone lion to avoid another spattering of bullets, Alexa projected images of the destruction, reliving the collapse of the Sterling Nanol-ogy building, the pain of losing her fingers, and her escape to the safe zone.
  The circle of golems was closing.  She had to find a weak point in their ranks and punch through—or they'd catch her.
  Jack said something that ended in a grunt as she leapt over a rosebush, but she had no time to hear him.  All her attention was on avoiding the golems and refining her plea through Gaia-Net.
  The golems were twenty feet away.  The constructs were fast, not as speedy as Alexa, her body engineered by Fontesca himself, but fast enough to catch her.  One mistake and their darts would slam home.
  "Petrovsky!" Alexa shouted with all her will.  "I was at ground center.  Call off your golems and I'll tell you how I survived."
Ten feet.
  Alexa ducked behind a wrought-iron bench with stylized leaping griffins.  Bullets cut sparks from the metal and removed a wing feather.
  Jack wriggled, and repositioning him so he didn't fall took seconds Alexa couldn't spare.  Golems surrounded them—the original three, plus six more from the fortress.  There was no way to avoid the next hail of darts.  She could leap over them, but they would still bring her and Jack down.
  Alexa raised her hands and heard Jack's words for the first time: "Put me down—save yourself."
  
But it was too late to save either of them.
  In unison, the golems raised their weapons.  Nine sets of projectile blossoms faced them.
  Alexa sent one last plea: "Petrovsky—I can save you from the disassembler.  Don't you want to know how?" It was impossible.  None of her messages had reached him, but she couldn't stop trying.  It wasn't in her nature to concede defeat.
  Alexa tensed, readying herself for one last charge against the golems.  She wouldn't be able to protect Jack, but she could avenge him.
"HOW?" The voice boomed over Gaia-Net.
Alexa stumbled.
"HOW DID YOU SURVIVE?"
  She sent images of the suit, explanations of its function, how it allowed only oxygen and a few other small molecules to pass through, blocking all nano-biology.  The suit was built with old technologies; only five had been created, for the exclusive use of Jack Sterling and Lucius's employees.  Impulsively, she offered one to Petrovsky in exchange for passage back to the North American Alliance.
  "I COULD TAKE IT BY FORCE," the voice boomed.
  The golems advanced another step, their hulking bodies mere centimeters from Jack and Alexa.
  Alexa slid her arm around Jack's neck and extended a blade from her forearm.  Jack's eyes were wide with fear and confusion.
  She pushed her blade against the environmental suit and spoke aloud as she transmitted the thought over Gaia-Net: "Not before I destroy it."
  
14
T
he golems halted in their progress toward Jack and Alexa.  They opened and closed their projectile blossoms as if cycling through conflicting commands.
  "I don't bluff," Alexa said aloud and through Gaia-Net.  She extended the knife's edge until it dented the environmental suit over Jack's neck.
  Petrovsky hesitated.  Alexa felt him pulling at her, testing her resolve for weakness.
  Jack was very still under her hands.  His eyes were wide and scared.  He reacted now as he had when he was nine years old and one of Lucius's guests had brought a designer pet to Elysium.  Half the size of a horse and as tall as Jack himself, the creature was modeled on medieval griffins and was a melange of parts: hawk's head with a razor-sharp snapping beak, twenty-meter wings that beat the air, the claws of a lion.  It fixated on the young boy, who had hidden in Lucius's audience chamber during an ill-fated game of hide-and-seek.
  The two men were oblivious to the deadly game of griffin-and-boy playing out as they conferred about profit sharing.  Alexa had intervened, shepherding Jack to safety and comforting him through a week's worth of nightmares.  "You have to stand up to predators," she had advised him then.  "Don't show fear.  It only excites them."
  
  The sliver of her mind that was not busy convincing Petrovsky that she would carry out her threat experienced a moment of sadness while wondering who Jack considered the predator now: Petrovsky—or herself.
  Grudging admiration filtered through Gaia-Net.  "Lucius always said you were a castrating bitch."
  Inwardly, Alexa winced at the crude words.  Of course he did.  What good was a weapon if nobody feared it? And Lucius loved to exaggerate.  He probably told his business partners she wore a nuclear device for a tampon.
  Alexa returned only smug diffidence.  "He didn't know the half of it.  I was always on good behavior in his presence."
  "I want all four of the other suits," Petrovsky said.  "Hand-delivered by you within a day."
  "One.  Secured drone.  Within a week." She relaxed her grip on Jack.  He rubbed his neck and stared at the ground, his cheeks inflamed.  But there wasn't time to deal with his emotions now.  She had to pin Petrovsky down on the details.
"A week! Half of Russia could be gone by then."
  "Then make sure you stay in the right half.  A week's the best I can do.  There's a quarantine on."
  Petrovsky was new-world, grown up in the time since Gaia-Net became pervasive.  He didn't ask the question Alexa expected: "How can I be sure you'll keep your word?" His generation knew that a betrayal would be instantly felt across the globe.  They lived in the post-privacy era of no secrets, where a worldwide reputation could be made or destroyed with a single act.
  Alexa, a child of the twenty-first century with its wars and upheavals, was not so trusting: "How will you get us out?"
  "I will send to you a relief-effort cargo drone.  Before our own catastrophe we pledged humanitarian support to Manhattan." He transmitted a smug expression.  "With the suit you have, surviving ground
  
zero of the dissolution will be no problem for you, daT
  Jack rode with Alexa in the back of the cargo drone, jammed in between boxes of blankets and rolls of neo-skin bandages.
  "I'm sorry about what I did back there," she said.  "I had to convince Petrovsky I would carry through on my threat."
Jack said nothing.
  "You understand, don't you? If he hadn't believed I was serious, he would have killed us both."
  Her words sounded hollow.  Jack rubbed the spot on his neck where her blade had pressed against his vocal cords.  Logically, he understood her point.  But there was something visceral about having his childhood protector turn on him.  He'd never before contemplated just how dangerous Alexa could be—to him.
"Yeah," he said, his voice flat.  "I understand."
  Alexa shifted, her knee grazing his, and looked into an imaginary distance.  "We're close to landing."
  The drone set down on the edge of the damaged zone, far enough away from ground zero that dissolution wasn't a concern.
  Even from half a mile away Jack was appalled at the destruction.  The towering acropolis of Manhattan was gone, replaced by mounds of dust interspersed with body parts and antiques.  Here and there a historic building jutted up from a drifting gray dune: Grand Central Station, the original facade of the Guggenheim Museum, the arched point of the Chrysler Building.  Seagulls whirled overhead in white spirals of hungry feathers.  Jack was glad his suit blocked out everything but oxygen; he couldn't smell the corpses.
  Alexa shifted at his side, her feet tapping as if she wished to run from the potential disaster facing them.  "Gaia-Net said the destruction in Manhattan has stopped.  They've been able to deploy golems to clean
  
up the mess.  If the disassembler's stopped, it's stopped for good, right?"
  Jack shrugged.  "We don't know enough about its life cycle.  If it just burns until all the fuel is gone, yes.  But if the disassembler cycles between an active period and hibernation—" He took a petty revenge from her fear.  Let Alexa, the invulnerable, know what it's like to have her life threatened.  "There's no way to tell."
  Worker golems came to unload the aid supplies, and Jack and Alexa stepped out of their way.
  "I've summoned a drone," Alexa said, strolling farther from the disaster site.  Everyone who had survived the disaster had fled.  The only living things moving in Manhattan were the aid-worker golems, natural humans rummaging through the piles of debris for plunder, and a legion of seagulls and rats.
  The drone that landed seconds later was sleek and bore the Sterling Nanology logo on its side, an 5 melded into an N that fractaled into ever smaller pieces.
  Jack didn't try to hide his surprise.  "Isn't travel restricted?"
  Alexa stepped into the drone and held her hand out to him.  "Sterling Nanology helped make the North American Alliance a world power after the 2109 crash.  Lucius's name plus the promise of an insanely generous campaign contribution just bought you a pass through to your ranch in Montana—with military escort, of course." She gestured at five half-sized unmanned drones hovering overhead.  They were eerily silent, clad in a camouflage skin that continually adjusted to its surroundings.  If you didn't keep your eyes on them, the unmanned drones disappeared into the background of clouds and darkening sky.
  Jack put his foot on the bottom rung of the luxury drone, taking Alexa's hand.  "Are they coming with us to protect us, or to blow us out of the sky if we pose a threat?"
"Exactly."

*	*	*
  Jack was silent on the trip to Montana.  Alexa found it hard to meditate.  Her peripheral vision kept returning to Jack.  He was uneasy, making a show of watching the landscape below while in reality keeping an eye on her.  Though she knew the genesis of his distrust, it still pained her.  For decades she'd protected Lucius's descendants.  Not once in all that time—in all the time she'd worked for Lucius—had she harmed one of the Sterling clan.  He had to know she'd been bluffing.
Still, he'd had a scare.
  Alexa needed his goodwill.  Jack, as the only Sterling over the age of majority, was the sole heir of Lucius's fortune.  When probate cleared, he would own everything.  And that included her contract.  If she got on his good side, perhaps she could entice him to free her.  Or, a darker part of her soul whispered, she could threaten him into it.
  Still, she didn't completely believe the old man was dead—despite the confirmation resonating through Gaia-Net, despite what she'd seen on the video screen.  It could all be a test of her loyalties.  It wouldn't be the first Lucius had pulled on her over the decades.
  The drone landed near the entrance to the ranch.  Jack told Alexa to put down there both to keep from offending the Watershed Valley Mennonites and to protect his sanctuary from contagion.  He stepped out first.
  The Montana sky was flat blue, like old denim.  A tumble of clouds in the west promised thundershow-ers.  The air had a pre-storm electric feel that prickled Jack's flesh even through the protection of the environmental suit.  "You can't come in," he said, looking at the sky.  Jack hoped Seth had the flocks in the barn.  The storm looked like a bad one.
"I'm   not   staying   here,"   Alexa   protested.    She clasped her hands behind her back and pulled upward, stretching her back after the hours in the drone.
  Jack whirled on her.  "Did you miss the part where Lucius died? I'm the head of Sterling Nanology now.  That means you work for me, and I won't have you upsetting my neighbors or polluting one of the few places on the planet where I can live without"—he plucked at the fabric of the environmental suit— "this."
  Alexa's hands fell to her sides.  She lifted her chin.  "I can't protect you if I'm not at your side.  Let me wear the suit and—"
"No."
  Her eyes narrowed.  "You're taking me to Elysium.  The Sterling children need—"
  "No.  I'm not." Jack hadn't realized that was what he was going to do until he said the words out loud.  "Those children lost their parents and the only home they've ever known.  It evaporated before their eyes.  They don't need protection anymore.  It's too late for that.  What they need now is reassurance and comfort." Jack rubbed the front of his throat.  "Comforting ...  is not your strong suit." He pointed at the gate crossing the road and the cattle guard.  "Stay here, and don't let anyone in.  I'll send word when I have a new assignment for you."
  Alexa snapped her head like a horse bothered by a fly.  "That's insane.  I'm one of your strongest assets.  I can—"
  Jack shouted his exasperation.  "Haven't the Deathless done enough to the world?" His hands clenched into fists.  "Maybe human beings aren't meant to live forever."
Her eyes widened as if he had slapped her.
  Alexa's reaction spurred Jack on, a shark scenting blood.  He wanted to hurt her, make her feel the fear and pain he'd experienced in St.  Petersburg, when he'd been sure she would kill him—and knew, knew to the marrow of his bones that there was nothing he could do to stop her.  "I own you.  Do as I say, or I'll have your conversion revoked."
  Alexa's nostrils flared and her eyes were murderous, but she said only, "Yes, sir."
  Jack strode up the dirt road toward the pickup parked just inside the cattle gate.  It was covered with tan dust and likely hadn't been moved since the last grain shipment.  The door squealed a protest as Jack opened it.  Seated on the cracked vinyl, he could see Alexa, standing where he had left her.  Her motionless pose, the rents across her stomach, her half-missing hand, her mussed hair, and the forlorn tilt of her shoulders gave her the look of an abandoned doll.
  The pickup started on the third try and belched forth a cloud of blue-gray diesel smoke.  Jack put the truck into reverse, hauled the steering wheel around, and headed down the dirt road toward home.
  In the rearview mirror he saw that Alexa still hadn't moved.  The first drops of the storm hit her face and shoulders, leaving tracks in the dust on her cheeks and arms.
  
15
Rain pelted Alexa, growing stronger as the storm broke.  Rivulets of water and dust slithered down her body, dripped off her fingertips and chin.
  She watched Jack drive away, hating him more in that instant than she had ever hated Lucius.  Lucius had been a dog from the day she met him.  She'd expected nothing more than lascivious, self-indulgent caprice.  But Jack—she'd thought he might free her from her indenture.  "I own you," he'd said.  She stomped a crater into the dust.  The rotten apple didn't fall far from the tree.
  Her first thought: Walk away.  There were people who would hire her off the books—if she could earn their trust.  What was the market value, after all, of a renegade bodyguard whose employer had been murdered?
  It was muzzy-headed thinking.  A symptom of being born in the pre-Gaia-Net era.  Earth was a closed system.  There were no hidden places anymore.  Every person on the planet was continually in contact with every other person.  There had been a brief blip of privacy laws and security measures when Gaia-Net first went live in 2056.  But those had faded away within a generation, dismissed as the quaint paranoia of their parents.  Those born since the Net was formed embraced Gaism.  Wars, crimes of violence, miscom-munication, became a thing of the past.  Who could hurt another person when he simultaneously shared his victim's pain?
  The interconnectedness of all things made Alexa want to retch.  It trapped her in Jack's service.  He would have to legally free her; otherwise she would be renegade and hunted down by a squad of Deathless enforcers.  She'd be stripped of her conversion—a process that inevitably killed.  The council of the converted was strict in enforcing obedience to the terms of indentured servitude.  They had to be.  When ordering immortal killing machines around, discipline was essential.
  But she'd be damned if she was going to spend her last eighty-eight years of service standing at this gate like a yard dog.
  The pickup truck rattled down the rutted dirt road.  The center of the lane was thick with weeds.  The Men-nonites used the road only once a month, when they went into town for the few supplies they couldn't manufacture on their farms.
  Jack refused himself another look in the rearview mirror.  If he looked back now and saw Alexa again, beautiful and broken, he'd relent.  And it was too soon for that.  He wanted her to know who was boss—so she'd never threaten him again.
  The dogs were the first to welcome him home.  A pack of six border collies yipped and leapt into the air, running ahead of the truck, their tongues hanging out.  Dakota led the pack, her bright eyes gleaming with gleeful intelligence.
  When he drove into the town, the women paused in their labors—hanging up clothes, cooking stew, changing a child's diaper—to see what the ruckus was about.
  "Jack!" Sarah's grin might have cracked open the world.  "You're home!" She leaned forward as if she wanted to fling herself into his arms, but her feet
  
stayed planted on the earth, and her hands clutched the handle of an egg basket.
  Even so, her mother clucked softly.  "Sarah, remember yourself." The older woman was a softer, larger version of Sarah.  And though her words were a warning, the intonation was not unkind.
  Jack unzipped the environmental suit and stepped out.  His skin rejoiced in the feel of the fresh air, and a breeze ruffled his hair.  "Where's your father?" he asked.
  She cocked her head toward the northwest edge of town.  "Pumping fuel from the underground tanks.  Louis came down from the hills this morning."
  Jack nodded his thanks and strode off in the direction she indicated.  Louis DeGroot flew acrobatics at air shows, he and the planes both antiques, left from the days when men piloted planes instead of riding as passengers in drones.
  The fuel station sat outside of town in the shade of a rusted lean-to that housed the pickup truck they used during the dry season to carry water to the far pastures.  Currently it was dwarfed by the hulking profile of Louis's C130J cargo plane.  It loomed thirty-eight feet high, an expanse of gray aluminum with high wings, a rear-loading cargo bay, and four turboprops.
The air was redolent with the scent of gasoline.
"Mr.  Wiens?"
  "Jack!" Liam emerged from behind the outbuilding, wearing denim overalls with a red kerchief sticking out of his back pocket.  He clasped Jack's hand in both of his own.
  They walked around the building and found Liam's father, Samuel Wiens, fueling Louis DeGroot's cargo plane.  Samuel climbed down from the ladder he'd used to reach the wing tank and pushed up the brim of his black felt hat with a forefinger.  "Welcome back."
Jack returned Liam's welcoming handshake, then looked up at the fuel hose snaking into the plane.  "How many gallons?"
  "Nearly eight thousand once we drain the underground tanks." Samuel nodded at the pump's counter, spiraling down.  "Louis says the plane can carry enough fuel to get there, but not enough to get back." His voice was somber.
  Jack thought of Elysium.  What would have survived the disassembler? If they were stranded on the island, there were edible plants—mangos, avocados, pineapples—and fish.  "There is fuel on the island.  Lucius had a racetrack for his antique cars.  It might be enough to fly the loaded cargo plane back to the mainland."
Samuel nodded reflectively.  "May God will it so."
  "Either way," Liam said, clapping Jack on the back, "I'm with you."
  A look of pain bordering on anger flashed across Samuel's face, but he said nothing, turning away to check the remaining fuel on the pump's dial.
  "I appreciate the offer," Jack said.  "Not sure how many we'll need, though.  Each person we take means using more gas."
Samuel's shoulders relaxed a fraction.
  "Seventy children?" Liam said with easy, oblivious confidence.  "You'll need help."
  Jack nodded.  He hadn't allowed himself to think beyond the technical details.
  Seventy scared children who had seen the adults they'd relied on die hideous deaths.  They would be traumatized, would need the comfort of the familiar, someone who could make them feel safe.  They needed their kick-ass guardian angel in black body armor.
  As terrible and frightening as Alexa had been in Russia, she could be tender with a frightened child, as she had been with him, all those years ago in Fontes-ca's underground lab.
He would have to relent and let her come with the expedition.  But he would tell her later, after she'd served a little time in purgatory.
  Jack helped Samuel and Liam finish siphoning the tractors.  As they pulled out the last hose, a clangor arose from the houses.  It was the summons for the noontime meal.
"You'll eat with us?" Samuel asked.
  It was the first time Jack had been invited into one of the Mennonite homes.  Before, the community had permitted him to live among them, a necessary compromise with the modern world to keep development at bay.  But in subtle and unspoken ways, they'd made it plain that he was among them, but not of them.  Until now.
"Yes, sir.  I'd be honored."
  Jack was not the only outsider at the table.  Louis DeGroot, a swatch of grease across the bridge of his nose, looked like a wild man in hand-sewn leathers, untrirnmed beard, and shoulder-length hair.  He might have been a prophet back from years of wandering the wilderness.
Without rising, Louis extended a hand.  "Jack."
  Jack shook the old man's baseball mitt of a hand.  It was rough from years of airplane mechanics and hard living.  "Thank you for helping us rescue the children from Elysium."
  Louis waved away Jack's words as if they embarrassed him.  He tore off a chunk of crusty bread with his teeth.  "Always wanted to see the Pacific."
  Sarah leaned over Jack's shoulder and ladled chicken stock into his bowl.  She was lovely in a crisp white linen apron with a delicate huck lace woven into its top edge.  Her golden braids were pulled back under her bonnet and her cheeks were flushed.  When she was done serving, Sarah settled next to her mother, sneaking glances at Jack from under her thick lashes.
She was everything Alexa was not, Jack mused as Louis rattled off aviation figures and flight plans—soft and rounded where Alexa was hard and lean, gently deferential where Alexa was fiercely determined.  It was hard to imagine that two such different people shared a gender.
  "So," Louis concluded, "the upshot is I know we can get there, we can even take on a small cargo of supplies, but there's no coming back." He pursed his lips, a motion that twitched his beard.  "Not without resupply."
  Jack blew out a breath.  "There's a fuel depot on the north shore of the island.  But with Gaia-Net down, I don't know how much is left.  I've ordered a drone tanker to resupply Elysium, but we don't know yet if the disassembler has burned out there.  So there's no telling when the tanker will be able to make landfall.  We should pack at least a month's worth of food and medical supplies."
  "See, you'll need me," Liam said.  He held a pheasant wing halfway to his mouth.  "I'm the best fisher in town."
"Pride," his mother chided softly.
  "And presumption," his father agreed.  "Mr.  Sterling has not invited you, and has not Louis just explained that weight affects fuel consumption?"
  "Mr.  Sterling and Mr.  DeGroot need my help," Liam argued.  "They can't manage seventy children alone.  Not for a month."
  "That's why I'm going." Sarah's sweet soprano cut through the male conversation.
Liam looked at her as if his pet dog had spoken.
  "I'll look after the children, while Ja—Mr.  Sterling finds a way to bring us home." She stared fixedly at her plate as she spoke, her cheeks as red as if her father had slapped them.  In a meek voice she finished, "And I don't weigh much."
  "You most certainly will not!" her father roared, half rising out of his seat.  He looked at his wife, whether for support or an explanation of his daughter's temerity, Jack couldn't say.
  
  "Temper," Rebecca advised her husband.  "Sarah means a kindness by her offer, misguided though it may be."
  "You are a child," Samuel told his daughter.  His voice was tensely controlled.  "You do not understand what you are saying.  But it is unthinkable that you would put yourself in danger—or travel without a female chaperone."
  Sarah looked up from her plate, and her huge blue eyes were flashing.  "I'm a year older than Mother was when Liam was born.  Was she a child then, facing the danger of childbirth?"
  Samuel slapped her.  It was the hard slap of a farm laborer who'd beaten wayward dogs and forced sheep into pens.
  Sarah fell out of her chair onto the floor, cradling her face.  Her blue eyes blazed hatred.
  "You will not speak of such things," her father shouted.  "And in front of strangers!" With a trembling hand he pointed toward the back of the house.  "Go to your room and meditate on your disobedience.  I will attend to you after supper."
  Jack stood up, wanting to protect Sarah.  But whatever he said would only make her punishment worse.  He'd never seen her so defiant, and he wondered if her father's fears had been realized.  That contact with Jack had changed her.
  "I apologize for my daughter," Samuel said, replacing the napkin on his lap.
  "We should go." Jack nodded at Louis.  He reached a hand out to the girl and helped her up.  "Do as your father says," he murmured.  "We're not taking anyone but Louis and me, and two milk goats."
  Sarah straightened her dress and smoothed her rumpled apron.  Tears leaked out of her eyes, but she looked not sad, but angry.  Without a word, she exited the room.
  Samuel and his wife exchanged a long look as Jack and Louis left the building.
  
  "I shoulda belted that sumbitch," Louis muttered as soon as they were clear of the Wienses' narrow porch.  "Hitting the girl wasn't right."
  Jack glanced back at the whitewashed wooden house.  "It'd only make things worse."
  With an ache in his chest that he hadn't done more, Jack led Louis back to the cargo plane.  It was nearly filled with the few supplies they could afford fuel to carry: blankets and rope for shelters, grain and cheese, some vegetable seeds—just in case—and two milk goats tethered to the plane's left wheel.
  "Going to run through the preflight checklist," Louis said, climbing into the cockpit.  "Be ready in an hour or so.  This old bird hasn't flown in a while.  I want to give her a thorough going-over."
  Jack nodded.  "I'll register the flight plan.  Make sure no one will shoot us down over Seattle."
  It took all the clout Jack could muster, and the promise of considerable bribes, to get clearance across Montana, Idaho, and Washington.  They had to fly above thirty thousand feet at all times.  Any deviation from the registered flight plan, and the cargo plane would be shot out of the sky.  The state's fears about the disassembler were heightened when the officials learned he'd be flying an old-style plane, one that could survive the disassembler, a craft perfect for distributing it in the upper atmosphere.
  One official even hinted that Jack might be behind the attacks, taking out Elysium as a way to inherit his great-grandfather's fortune.  The man set aside his suspicions only after Jack pledged a five-million-dollar campaign contribution.
  Louis knocked on the doorjamb to Jack's office.  Jack had been so involved in negotiations that he hadn't heard the man come in.  He jumped at the knock.
  "I tried knocking half a dozen times.  When you didn't answer, thought I'd come in and make sure you were all right." Louis jerked his thumb over his shoul-
  
der.  "Bird's ready.  They're loading up the milk goats now."
  It would have been simpler to take a lactation device, but the machines used nano-biology to interact with the child's immune system, stage of development, and environment, mimicking breast milk's ability to adapt to the child and provide antibodies for his immature immune system.  Because generating the perfect baby food was an interactive process, all the machines provided on-demand feeding.  There were no stockpiles of generic formula.
Milk goats would have to do.
  Louis pushed up the bill of his baseball cap.  "You know how to milk them things?"
  "Well enough." Jack closed his laptop, shutting down its power, and tucked it under his arm.
  "There's one last thing we need," he said.  He stood and picked up the -empty environmental suit.  He walked out of his house and saw a boy of eight pulling weeds with his mother.
  "Mrs.  Wyck, may I borrow Benjamin for a moment? I need him to run an errand."
  The boy brightened, looking up at his mother with hope and a willingness to be released from his present drudgery.
  A wry smile tugged her lips, and the middle-aged woman ruffled the hair of her youngest.  "Be back quick as you can."
  Jack handed the folded environmental suit to Benjamin.  "Take this to the lady standing at the front gate and tell her to put-it on.  Then lead her back to the plane."
  Benjamin's mother pursed her lips unhappily at the mention of a strange woman at the gate.  But she said nothing, merely bent to pulling weeds with extra vigor.
  Benjamin ran off with the suit, kicking up clouds of dust in his wake.
  Jack followed Louis to the plane, and they ran through the inventory of supplies, checking that every-
  
thing he'd need to feed and house the children was there: dried meats and vegetables, water, a rubber tarp to make a simple dew collector, the milk goats, tarps for shelter, ropes and poles to tie up the tarps.  Everything was in order.
  They had everything they needed, save one last piece of cargo.
  Jack heard footsteps running toward them.  He poked his head out of the cargo bay.
  Benjamin ran up, panting, toting the empty pressure suit over his shoulder.
  Jack looked up the road, but saw no sign of Alexa's black-clad form.  "She wouldn't come?"
Benjamin shook his head.  "She wasn't there."

16
T
he drone was whistling through the sky, thirty thousand feet above Idaho, when the first warning came.  Its message blasted Alexa through Gaia-Net, a fiery wash of red and orange, the taste of brimstone and bitter lemon: THIS SECTION OF AIRSPACE IS CLOSED.
TURN BACK OR BE DESTROYED.
  Alexa blocked the connection with a mental shrug and urged the drone to greater speed.
  The nano-biology machine did its best to comply, but it was a mass-grown model, not one of the custom hybrids she'd traveled in with Lucius.  There were limits.  It was a wonder it hadn't been destroyed over Montana.  But no one in the big-sky state, so well-known for harboring misanthropes and iconoclasts, had accosted her for flying over their airspace.  Idaho was less forgiving.  If she could just make it over the Cascade Range ...
  The drone's proximity alarm itched across Alexa's skin like a case of hives, growing painful in its intensity.  She leaned over and saw the silver flash of approaching missiles.
  She was still three hundred and ten miles east of Snoqualmie Pass.  Alexa sighed.  She hoped her boots were up to the challenge.
The drone exploded in a hail of flesh and feathers.
  The missile's impact was a shattering blast of pain.  Alexa's nano-biology-enhanced flesh scavenged the
  
drone's debris, absorbing it to heal her even as she plummeted toward the earth.
  She expanded the parachute in her body armor, tacking to slow her descent and plan her route across the mountains.  Government forces would be able to track her through Gaia-Net, even with the patchwork outages caused by the disassembler—she'd have to move fast to stay ahead of their pursuit.  If she reached Seattle, she could hide in the Sterling Nanology corporate headquarters, which, under her guidance, Lucius had reinforced to withstand Armageddon.
  She pulled the brake cords and landed at a full run.  The parachute billowed behind her, absorbing back into the fabric between her shoulders.
  Alexa heard the whumps of battle golems landing in the woods behind her.  She ran through a protected forest.  Douglas firs and cedar trees towered above her and filtered the light to shadows.
Ten impacts.
  A whistling sound overhead, then a splatter of white webbing crossed the trees in front of her.
  Alexa jinked left, catching a strand of the containment web on her sleeve.  The strand of nano-biology pulled on her, drawing her toward its center.
  She extruded a fingernail blade, sliced the sleeve from her arm, and kept running.  She could hear the golems crashing through the underbrush behind her.
  Overhead was the high-pitched whine of a golem in aerial configuration.  Another three whumps landed in front of her.
They had her surrounded.
  Five golems closed in on Alexa, their spider legs crunching salal underfoot as they circled her.  Each pair of tentacles bore a different weapon: energy cannons, lasers, monofilament line, blades, plasma arcs.  No sedative darts; they were bent on her destruction.
  Alexa had only seconds to break through their ranks and escape.  She whirled to her left, seeking the weak point in their circle.  Two golems maneuvered
  
around an old-growth cedar.  Their torsos skimmed the bark to either side.
  But they hadn't blocked off all avenues.  Alexa ran full tilt at the tree, extruding cleats from the soles of her feet as she hit the trunk.  Without pausing, she ran straight up the tree, clawing branches out of her face.  When she was above the level of the golems' reach, she pivoted around the tree and dropped to the ground, sucked in the spikes from her feet and ran as fast as her engineered body could go.
  She heard turbines whine as some of the golems restructured and took to the air, trying to outpace her.  Behind her she heard the scrabbling of ground pursuit and the crash as underbrush and saplings were pushed aside.
  The hiss and crackle of a plasma arc burned lightning strikes into the trees ahead of her, and Alexa ? zigzagged her course.  It was unlikely that the golems could kill her, but they could dismember her and scatter her body across the forest.  She had no time to waste lying on leaf-littered ground watching slugs copulate.
  Lucius had given her one last command: protect the children.  She understood now what she had to do.
  A golem appeared in front of her, a vanguard of the others.  His right tentacle flicked and the tip broke off into a three-armed bolo.  The line connecting the spiked weights was a monomolecular nanotube, slicing everything in its path.  The tops of a patch of salmon berries collapsed onto the ground, and a sixty-foot-tall Douglas fir groaned and toppled.  Alexa ducked, and the bolo passed over her head.  Then jets on the weights fired and it reversed course toward her.
  The golem advanced on her with blinding speed and launched another heat-seeking bolo.
  One of the weights caught her elbow, jabbing a spike deep into the joint.  The other weights pivoted around that point, whipping the monomolecular line toward her body.
  
  Alexa dropped to her heels and snatched the weight from her elbow.  Holding the spiked ball above her head, she circled her hand, using the weapon's inertia to keep the deadly strands aloft.  The weight extruded spikes into her palm.  Alexa inhaled sharply, but she was used to pain.
  The rest of the pursuers were closing in.  She heard them in the forest.  There was no time.
  She dodged the remaining bolo and used the one she held to flog the golem ahead of her into pieces.  The tentacles fell writhing to the forest floor, followed by half a dozen chunks of torso and thin black legs.  The light in the amber eyes faded as its triangular head hit the leaf mold.
  She tore the spiked weight free from her hand, losing a chunk of flesh in the process, flung it away, and ran.  She'd been lucky.  She had to reach Seattle before her luck ran out.
  
17
A
lexa's defection bothered Jack all the way across Idaho and Washington.  He was oblivious to the hum of the cargo plane's engine and the panoramic views out the copilot's windows.  All he could think of was Alexa.
  After Benjamin had returned with the news that the bodyguard was no longer waiting at the front gate, Jack had gone to see for himself.  There was no sign of a struggle, and the drone was gone.  He'd tried to search Gaia-Net, but hadn't been able to locate her through the antiquated porthole of his laptop and satellite uplink.
  He'd been too harsh.  Jack saw that now.  He'd let his fear push her away—and now she was gone.  The question was, where?
  Jack had lost his most valuable ally.  As Louis piloted the droning cargo plane over the brilliant blue waves of the Pacific, Jack prayed she wouldn't become an enemy.
  The stuttering bleat of one of the milk goats woke Jack from his reverie.  Metal clanged from the cargo hold as the animal repeatedly kicked and thrashed against its bonds.
  Louis pulled off his headphones and glared back at the hold.  "What the hell's going on back there?"
  "I'll check it out." Jack unbelted his five-point harness and climbed between the seats.
  
  The cargo hold was dimly lit by high round windows that were blocked by sacks of grain and piles of blankets and tarps.  The two milk goats were in the center, tied to a support post.  The shorter, black-and-white one thrashed on the end of her tether, kicking and tossing her head.  The brown goat looked on in fascinated horror.
  "Easy now," Jack soothed her.  He held his hands forward and approached the agitated goat cautiously.  Her hooves, newly trimmed for the trip, were sharp.
  Something white flashed behind the goat's rump.  A rat?
Jack leaned down to peer between the goat's legs.
  Staring back at him with frightened blue eyes was Sarah Wiens.
  Jack pushed the panicked goat aside and helped Sarah to her feet.  "Sarah? What?" He looked at the pile of blankets she had hidden under.  "How?"
  Sarah bit her lower lip and looked up at him pleadingly.  "Don't be mad.  I only want to help.  I can take care of the children.  You and Louis will need a woman to care for the little ones."
  Jack thought of Sarah's father and how furious he would be.  Disobeying, riding in a plane with two men and no chaperone.  Samuel would beat her in earnest next time.  If her virtue was questioned, she might even be shunned.
  "Louis, we've got a problem." Jack led Sarah to the cockpit.
  "What kind of—" Louis glanced back, then did a double take.  "Holy mother of shit—the girl stowed away?"
Sarah blushed and bowed her head.  "I'm sorry."
  Louis rubbed his gray-stubbled chin.  "I thought the plane felt overweight on takeoff."
  "We've got to take her back.  Her family will be frantic when they find her missing."
  "We're halfway to Elysium." Louis jerked his thumb in the direction they'd come.  "Ain't enough
  
fuel to turn back now, even if the kids on that island could spare the time.  And from what you tell me, there's little babies with nothing to eat."
  Sarah wrung her hands.  "I won't be any trouble.  I'll do anything you ask.  I only want to help."
  Jack raised his hand in frustration.  "Sarah, how could you be so stupid? Do you have any idea—"
  Sarah cringed, expecting a blow.  Her shoulder was up to protect her ear, and her hand covered her cheek and eyes.  It was an automatic gesture.
  The sight froze him.  He wondered how much "spare not the rod" went on in the Wienses' household.
He blew out a long sigh.
  Louis, his pilot's eyes missing nothing, said gently, "The girl's right.  We can use the help.  I ain't changed a diaper in forty years."
  "Her family's going to be frantic.  I can't even send them a message that she's all right."
  Sarah relaxed her posture.  A timid smile brightened her face.  "They won't worry.  I left them a note explaining everything."
  Somehow, Jack doubted her mother and father would find it a comfort.  But there was nothing to do but accept the situation.  He pulled a crate of farm tools over to the cockpit entrance.  "Sit here."
  Sarah settled herself primly on the rough wood, folding her hands in her lap.  In her dark blue dress and white bonnet she looked for all the world like a penitent schoolchild.
"And don't do anything unexpected," Jack pleaded.

18
T
he night passed in a haze of skirmishes as forest gave way to desert, mountain passes, manufacturing districts, and finally, the outskirts of Seattle.  By dawn, Alexa was limping from a crushing blow to her leg that shattered the kneecap, and her energy reserves were flagging.  Her nano-biology body couldn't repair damage or refuel while she was running, and she had no time to stop.  Her body ached with exhaustion; even Fontesca's best engineering failed under hours of flat-out exertion.
  With Gaia-Net pinpointing her location at every step, there was no way to evade her pursuers.
  But she could see it—the silver spire that glowed pink in the reflected sunlight.  The building that housed the North American headquarters of Sterling Nanol-ogy, Inc.  It towered above the surrounding skyscrapers, nearly a thousand floors high.  Inside its walls were executive offices, distribution and customer service wings, designers' suites, and laboratories.  The building was also a stronghold, a refuge—if she could survive long enough to reach it.
  As she ran, Gaia-Net was a clamor of contradictory orders: the border guards insisting that she was a fugitive and that local law enforcement should assist in her capture; Alexa claiming that she was on a mission for Lucius Sterling and should be granted corporate
  
immunity per his contract with the city; others issuing counterclaims that his death invalidated that agreement.
  The headquarters building was only three blocks away.  Alexa wanted to weep with relief.  She'd taken out half the golems over the course of the night; only a ragtag band of three of the original border guards still followed her
  Suddenly the early-morning sky lit up with searchlights and the whine of high-speed turbines.  A general announcement went out over Gaia-Net to clear the streets.
  Twenty praying-mantis golems landed between her and the front doors of the Sterling building.  This was it, the final standoff.
  In the seconds before they fired, Alexa inhaled.  Every pore of her body opened up, pulling nutrients from the air and from the very ground she stood on.  It hit her like French Quarter coffee, jolting her nervous system.
She leapt.
  Her body pivoted in midair like a cat's, and she aimed her feet sideways, at the second-floor windows of Sterling Nanology's headquarters.  Bullets, bolos, and electrical discharges followed her trajectory.
  The windows of the building were impenetrable, like those of all modern skyscrapers, sealed shut.
  Her soles inches away from impact, Alexa transmitted a quick burst of memorized random characters at the building, a secret command code known only to Lucius, Fontesca, and herself.
  A hole irised open in the center of the window.  Alexa landed in the middle of a middle-management conference room.  A hail of bullets smacked the far wall, then the window closed.  The riot of gunfire ceased instantly.  Lucius's fortress was soundproofed and generated its own atmosphere.  She'd made it.  Alexa slumped on the floor in relief and exhaustion.
  
Her energy reserves were so depleted that she didn't think she could move.  And she was grateful that she wouldn't need to.
  Her respite was short-lived.  Alexa heard shouting and the pounding footsteps of someone in full flight in the hallway.
Had the golems found a way in?
  Alexa dragged herself to the doorway and clung to it to stay upright.
  Three men in chameleon suits ran down the hall in her direction, their bodies blending with the wood-grain walls.  They carried two folded packages of clear plastic.
  Alexa recognized their burdens.  Two of the five environmental suits Fontesca had created were stored here, the Seattle offices being closest to Watershed Valley.
  The intruders were stealing what she'd fought all this way for.  Without an environmental suit, she couldn't fulfill her mission.  Without a suit, she would be vulnerable to the disassembler.
  How had they gotten here ahead of her? A paranoid thought invaded her mind: had she been followed? From Russia?
  "Stop!" Her voice cracked on the words, shocking her with its threadiness.
  One of the camouflaged men turned.  Almond-shaped eyes narrowed in her direction.  With his free hand he pulled down the mask that covered the lower half of his face.  A smile twisted his fleshy lips.
  Holding the suit that Alexa desperately needed was Hu-Dong.
  
19
D
rop the suits," Alexa said.  "I don't want to fight you."
  Hu-Dong took in her exhaustion and her wounds, saw the way she clung to the doorjamb for support.  His smile widened.  In Castilian Spanish he replied, "I'm sure you don't." He'd recovered completely from the hundred-ton statue she'd dropped on him in Tibet.  The golden skin of his face gleamed with vitality.
  He tucked the environmental suit he held under his left arm and caressed Alexa's cheek with his right hand.
  She wanted to hit him, to pull away, but if she let go of the doorway, she would slump to the ground.  The on-foot flight from Idaho had used up all her reserves.  In time her body would take what it needed from the ambient nano-biology to repair itself.  But time was what she didn't have.
  "I couldn't call for help in the dead zone of Lo Monthang." His words were lethally sweet.  "It took me eight hours to dig out from under the statue.  I lost a leg and the better part of my pelvis.  Do you know how much that hurts? Hmm?"
Alexa opened her mouth to answer.
  Before breath could leave her mouth, Hu-Dong snaked his thumb under her chin, extruded a blade, and cut Alexa's throat to her spine.
  
  Her hands flew to her throat and she crumpled to the floor.  Pain clouded her thoughts.
  As close as a lover, Hu-Dong whispered, "Die." In a blur of motion, he sliced twenty bone-deep wounds all over her body.
  Alexa cried out, her overtaxed muscles too weak to defend herself.  Her attempts to block Hu-Dong came too late.  He laughed at her and leaned in again, lips tickling her ear.  "When the disassembler comes, it will burn you alive.  Alexa DuBois, Lucius Sterling's enforcer, his angel of destruction, will be soot and ashes.  No resurrection for you, querida." He held the environmental suit where she could see it.  Just out of reach.  "But I will go on forever."
Hu-Dong stood.
  Without his support, Alexa landed chest-down on the carpet.
  Hu-Dong ground his heel into her outstretched palm.  "You, we'll use to grit the path in winter."
  Every nerve in Alexa's body cried out in pain, exhaustion, hunger.  She could feel her body collapsing in on itself, as its various parts warred for waning resources.  Her repair systems were so desperate for material that they scavenged her internal organs to rebuild bones and muscle.  Her breath whistled through her cut throat.
  Through dimming eyes, she saw Hu-Dong and his team walking away down the hallway.  Unhurried.  Jaunty.  Talking about a Nano-Wars tournament they'd seen last night on Gaia-Net.
  Memories flashed through Alexa's dimming mind: the first time she'd had sex, an awkward fumbling between two cars in the parking lot of the True-Shot Tavern; the grip of her father's hand as he breathed his last; the searing pain of conversion and Fontesca's sorrowful face as she went under.
  Focus.  She had to focus.  Alexa clawed at the carpet and pulled herself forward through the spreading pool
  
of black nano-biology that had replaced blood in her body.
  Hu-Dong reached the elevator at the end of the hall first.  He pushed the button and turned for one last look at Alexa.  From far away she heard laughter: ".  .  .  Should drop the building on her, just for .  .  ."
  Strands of RNA, combining, separating.  Fontesca had made her memorize the pattern: the eight base nucleotides of nano-biology, in a random string fourteen characters long.  He'd been able to read DNA sequences for meaning, like an augury reading bones.  To Alexa they were just an endless sequence of letters: RLRESOUS-DORNEE.
  The random string resonated in Alexa's head.  Nano-biology transmitters in her brain broadcast the sequence to the local Gaia-Net, where they activated the building's panic button.
/ will not die.
  Stepping into the elevator, Hu-Dong paused, pivoted in her direction, a puzzled expression on his face.  "What did you—"
/ will not die alone.
  The windows and doors in the entire building winked out of existence as walls flowed over them.  The elevator shaft filled like a throat swelling shut.
  Hu-Dong's partner, already inside the elevator, screamed as the building flowed over him.  His struggles to break free only hastened the process as the elevator melted, flowing over his body.
  "You witchV Hu-Dong spat.  In two strides he was in front of Alexa.  He kicked her head, flipping her faceup.  "What have you done?"
  Alexa crawled on her belly, pulling energy and nutrients from the living building.  Her throat was too ruined to speak, so she thought the words at him: I've locked down the building.  No one gets in or out while I'm alive.
Hu-Dong set the precious environmental suit down on the floor and pulled Alexa to her feet by her collar.  "That is easily rectified."
  He planned to slice her brain and devour the pieces.  Incorporate her nano-biology into his system.  Her body would still be living, but without conscious thought.  Her memories, including the building codes, would be at Hu-Dong's disposal, and the will that was Alexa would be gone.
  Her body still too wounded to fight, Alexa fought Hu-Dong with the only weapon at her disposal: the building.
  Spikes extruded from the floor and the ceiling, a row of razor-sharp teeth.
  Hu-Dong leapt nimbly away, dropping Alexa in his haste.
  She barely felt the blow as her chin bounced off the carpet.  All of her consciousness was in the structure surrounding them.  Her vision was generated by the millions of photosensors embedded in the walls and ceiling.  Her brain combined the many inputs into a fractal image of the room.  Hu-Dong appeared as a glowing infrared blur, hateful red emanating from his head and chest.
  Alexa instructed the nanofabricators in the carpet and the air to scavenge molecules from his body.  A war began on the nano-scale, as Hu-Dong's nano-biology immune system fought back, destroying the invaders.
  "Woman, stop," Hu-Dong ordered, scratching at his inflamed skin.  He pounded his fist against the steel teeth that separated him from her body.
  She imagined closing a fist around his body, and the far half of the corridor shrank around the converted assassin.  Hu-Dong struggled against the pressure like a landed fish, thrashing and bucking.
  You shouldn't have come here, Alexa thought with anger and disgust.  The great Hu-Dong, picking at the ' corpse of Sterling Nanology like a scavenger.  Tell me.  Who sent you?
  
  Through her fractal vision, Alexa saw beads of sweat on Hu-Dong's neck.  His mouth contorted in pain and rage.  His brow buckled with fear.  He ground out: "My employer is .  .  .  confidential."
  / could devour you.  Alexa transmitted back his earlier intentions for her.  Her hand closed, and through hundreds of thousands of pressure sensors in the walls, she felt every millimeter of Hu-Dong's body.  She squeezed.
  Hu-Dong's elbows and knees shattered first, and his pain was a white-hot burst of emotion over Gaia-Net.  His skull flexed like a Tupperware container, ready to burst.
  Petrovsky, he projected.  There was no breath left in him for words.  The mayor of Saint Petersburg.  He purchased my services to retrieve the environmental suits.
  So.  One was not enough.  Alexa relaxed her grip on Hu-Dong, felt him inhale.  Or perhaps he didn't trust me to keep my word.  Her body had been repairing itself as she waged her mental war.  She pushed herself up on one hand and crawled toward the elevator shaft.  She willed the elevator to return and open.
  A bloody wave spilled out onto the carpeting.  Hu-Dong's accomplice had been only partially converted.  An assassin in training, no doubt.  His corpse was crumpled like an old tissue.  Between his mangled hands was the ruin of the environmental suit.  In her haste to prevent his escape, she had clenched the elevator shaft completely shut.  His bones had shattered and shredded the flexible suit.
  "I keep my promises," Alexa whispered on newly repaired vocal cords.  She didn't yet have complete control over her head—the major neck muscles were still rent—so she spoke looking at the floor.
  She focused her will, and a package drone flitted over from the supply closet.  "Mayor Petrovsky," she whispered, thinking aloud an address in St.  Petersburg.  The drone opened a gaping maw and swallowed the
  
damaged suit, looking like an overfed guppy.  Then it zipped away on a thousand hummingbird wings.
  Alexa didn't care if it reached its destination.  She'd sent it; her bargain was fulfilled.  The rest was up to Petrovsky.  Let him work out the bribes, if he could.
  Hu-Dong thrashed in his cocoon of wall and carpet.  "You can't keep me in here forever.  I'll get out.  Release me, and I'll leave peaceably."
  Alexa considered his offer.  He was right.  Save for scattering his parts across the globe, or dropping him into a disassembler hot zone, there was little she could do to stop him from coming after her.  Unless she sliced pieces off his body and incorporated his nano-biology into her own.  But the thought of blending his molecules with hers made Alexa ill.  She didn't trust him, and she was too weak to fight him off physically; his will might overwhelm hers and take over her body.  But there was a third alternative.
  With a thought, the hallway rippled like a tongue, transporting them into the bloody elevator.  They were swallowed down, their bodies lightened as the car plummeted.
  "Where are you taking me?" Hu-Dong asked from the shell that still encased him.
  "The underground garage." Alexa's voice was stronger, more rasp than whisper now.
  Alexa felt Hu-Dong relax.  It was all she could do to shield her intentions from him.
  The lowermost level of the garage had the damp, cool sensation of a cave.  Biolight clusters glowed on the walls, drenching the expanse of smooth growstone in soft green.
  Alexa opened an eye slit in Hu-Dong's prison so he could take in the view.
  An acre-sized room filled with vehicles.  From the latest-model sport drones, all gleaming feathers and jets, to antique muscle cars, a nitrous-injected Cobra, a pristine 1966 Ford Mustang.  It was the best collec-
  
tion of Lucius's toys on the mainland.  Had been, Alexa corrected herself.
  "You're doing the wise thing," Hu-Dong said, relief in his voice.  "What is between us is not personal.  We are both warriors for hire.  An honorable profession."
  Alexa said nothing as she strode over to a drone in the corner.  The feathers were matte black.  She touched the canopy and it opened, the drone coming to life and hovering before her.  A thousand wings beat completely soundlessly, using the same baffles as owl feathers.
"Hide," she told it.
  The drone faded from view.  Photo reflectors on its skin projected the wall and floor behind the drone, rendering it effectively invisible.
  Alexa searched the local Gaia-Net for the drone's location, but there was nothing.  In addition to visual camouflage, the drone presented a false image of empty air to all nano-biology sensors in the area.
  Alexa stroked the vehicle.  Her hand—fooled by Gaia-Net's perceptions—felt nothing, but she knew it was there.
  It was a prototype Fontesca had developed for Lucius.  There were only three people in the world it would respond to, and Fontesca and Lucius were dead.
"Reveal."
The drone faded back into view.
  With infinite care, Alexa crawled into the drone.  Her bruised body sank gratefully into viscoelastic foam.
  "Thank you for releasing me," Hu-Dong said.  "I will—"
"Elysium."
  The stealth drone launched itself with Mach 4 speed through the underground exit tunnel.  Alexa was pressed deeper into the foam seat.  The cut across her throat stretched and stung as inertia tugged at her skin.
  
  The drone's windows tinted as she popped into the early-morning sunshine.  When she exited the building, Alexa transmitted one last command.
  Behind her, the walls of the lowest level in the parking garage collapsed, dropping the headquarters of Sterling Nanology twenty feet—with Hu-Dong still inside.
  Freed from the cargo hold, Sarah was like a wide-eyed child.  She was amazed by the plane and its technology.  Currently her face was plastered to the copilot's window.  She halfway sat on Jack's lap craning for a better view of the islands below.
  "I can see the path of the Ring of Fire!" she exclaimed.  "The islands look like spilled drops of batter."
  Despite the discomfort—both sociological and physical—of having a teenage Mennonite girl sprawled across his lap, Jack smiled.  For the past six hours she'd questioned him mercilessly, asking about the world outside the ranch: politics, fashion, mores, geology, technology.  She was a fast learner, absorbing knowledge at a geometric rate.  His head felt as if it had been vacuumed clean.
  "Miss." Louis jerked a finger at the jump seats farther back in the cabin.  "I'm landing soon.  You should belt in."
  Sarah whimpered her disappointment but complied.  She pushed away from Jack's legs and wended her way back.
  His view clear, Jack gazed down at the green crescent that had once been home.  The central volcano rose above the island, the peak towering over the eastern lobe.  Jack craned his neck to see the southern beaches of Elysium, looking for the Sterling family compound.  But the plane was banked for landing, and all he could see was the painfully bright Pacific Ocean and the back of the mountain.
"Any radio contact?" Jack asked.

  Louis shook his head gravely.  "Nothing.  Not on any frequency." He lowered his voice so it wouldn't carry back to the cargo hold.  "While you were in the back dealing with the girl, I did a flyby over Oahu." His creased eyes were as sorrowful as a basset hound's.  "It's all gone—the Honolulu hotels, the observatory, the floating towns.  All that's left is dust and corpses."
  Jack couldn't breathe.  He'd been hoping that somehow the disassembler had been contained, had burned itself out with minimal destruction.  But instead it had drifted across a gulf of nearly two hundred and fifty miles to reach the Hawaiian Islands.
  "There'll be survivors there, too," he whispered.  "We'll have to find a way to help them." His gaze slid back to the cargo hold.  What had seemed like a mountain of supplies in Montana was now woefully inadequate.
  The plane circled Elysium, and the southern coastline came into view.  Jack saw the barren patch that had once been the Sterling family compound.  Plum-eria and palm trees thrust forlornly out of dunes of gray-black dust.  The gorgeous architecture—the spi-raling pink whorl of the children's wing, Lucius's imposing obsidian palace, Fontesca's laboratories—all gone.
  His heart ached.  Everyone from his old life had lived on Elysium.  All were now dead: Lucius, Fon-tesca, his mother, his siblings, an endless stream of cousins.  One minute he'd been part of a sprawling, unkempt family tree.  Now he was its only scion.
  Him, and the children.  He prayed the older ones had helped the little ones find food and shelter.
  "Don't know what we'll find down there," Louis said, his voice pitched low so it wouldn't carry back to Sarah.  The dread in his voice echoed Jack's worries.
  The Elysium sun was pitiless, and food would be scarce with all the meal generators destroyed.
Had they come too late?
Jack scanned the beach for signs of life, but saw only scattered corpses.  The plane dipped lower, scar-
rying a cloud of seagulls away from an unidentifiable figure sprawled on the sand.
Louis brought the C130J down on a packed earth
clearing that had once been a marble-tiled courtyard.  Clouds of dust billowed around the plane, obscuring Jack's view.
  If there were survivors, surely they would come to investigate.
Louis taxied the plane in a circle, parking the tail
against a dune, out of the wind.  He turned the engine
off and nodded in Sarah's direction.  "I'm going to
secure the plane.  Perhaps she should help me?"
i	Jack nodded.  He didn't want Sarah confronted with
j	the rotting corpses on the beach.  The girl thought she
|	was on an adventure.  He wondered how long it would
be before the horror of the situation hit her.
  Louis climbed out of the cockpit.  He leaned over Sarah and spoke softly, pointing at the sets of wooden chocks for the wheels.
  Sarah's eyes followed Jack pleadingly, but he didn't make contact.  She nodded to Louis and slung a heavy set of blocks over her shoulder.
  Jack stepped onto the sand and unzipped the environmental suit he had donned when they approached the island.  He sniffed the air.  No sneeze.  Not even a tickle in his throat.  For the first time in years, he could breathe freely on his island home.
  Jack left Sarah and Louis trying to secure the plane by tying rope around a nearby boulder.  He walked south down the beach.  His feet sank into the mingled sand and dust.
  Nothing grown of nano-biology had survived.  When
Jack had lived in the children's wing, a menagerie of
engineered birds had fluttered throughout the com
pound, singing Mozart and jazz-fusion classics.  Geneti
cally altered geckos and frogs had glowed with a clash
|	of colors only a child would design.
I
!
i

  Now the only birdsong was the screeching of hungry gulls.  Jack walked past the pile of dust that had once been Lucius's library.  An olive-green anole skittered around a splayed tome.  Jack bent and picked it up.  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written in the eighteenth century by Edward Gibbon.  Molecular storage had enabled mankind to house three millennia of writing in a chip the size of a thumbnail.  But such storage had proved fugacious.  If the disassembler covered the world, only the knowledge contained in bulky paper volumes like this would survive.  Ironic that paper, such a fragile medium, endured.
  The ruin of the Elysium compound filled Jack with a leaden sadness, and cold anger.  The last round of attacks had been too coordinated to be mere chance; someone had intentionally caused this destruction.
Why would anyone do this? Why?
  He remembered workers plummeting from the sky in St.  Petersburg.  His parents, siblings, cousins, exploding into smoke.  With one lethal act, every adult in his family had been murdered.
  Jack clenched his fist and made a silent vow: he would find out who was responsible; he would make them pay.
  A flutter of motion caught Jack's peripheral vision and he whirled.  Nothing.  The gloom of the desolate beach was getting to him.
Where were the children?
  Jack cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "Hello? This is Jack Sterling, Uncle Jack.  I've come to help." He paused and listened.  No response.  "I have food and water."
  A sound like a child's wail snapped his head around, but it was only a pair of seagulls fighting over a dismembered crab.
  Jack looked to the north.  Louis and Sarah had finishing tying up the plane.  Louis waved broadly.  Jack raised his hand to signal that he was coming back—
  
I	and then he heard a weak mewling on the other side
I	of a knoll that hung over the sea like the knuckle of
I	a fist.
:j	He scrambled through the sand, his feet kicking up
plumes of dust.  He crested the hill and saw a black beach stretched out below him.  A cluster of thirty children huddled in a half circle, their skin red and peeling in the sun, their diaphanous tunics in tatters.  The children were gathered around something crumpled at the edge of the ocean.
  A girl no older than thirteen held a baby who wailed feebly, its arms and legs hanging limply, too weak to flail.  She looked up at Jack and her face was smudged with dust save for the twin tracks of clean skin left by her tears.  Her wide brown eyes were hopeless.  Her mouth fell open at the sight of him, but she said nothing.
  Jack walked up to the crescent of children, peering over their shoulders.
  The little ones shrank from him, eyes wide with fear and distrust.  They'd lived a lifetime of horror in the past week.  Older children cuddled the little ones to them, giving and receiving comfort.
  "Fix!" wailed a toddler who couldn't have been more than two.  She jabbed a chubby finger at the crumpled figure on the beach.  "Fix it!"
  "I'm here to help," Jack told the children as he pushed his way through to the center, afraid of what he'd find.  "I've brought food and supplies."
  A teenage boy nodded and clutched Jack's arm.  "Everything melted.  It's all .  .  .  gone," he blubbered.  "I thought it had stopped.  But then she—she fell from the sky."
  Jack pushed aside the last two children and saw what they were looking at.  The figure lay on its side, its face a welt of bruises obscured by a transparent film.  Blood spattered the film.  There were marks on the beach from where she'd clawed her way out of the sea.  One leg splayed at an unnatural angle.
  
  Her right arm cuddled the sobbing two-year-old to her chest.
  Green eyes glared up at his approach, then softened with recognition.
  Jack's throat tightened with horror and relief.  He choked out a single word.  "Alexa."
  
20
J
 Tack lifted Alexa in his arms.  Her slender body was
I unexpectedly heavy, dense with bioengineered muscle
nd reinforced bone.  Jack saw wounds on her flesh be-
[	neath the plastic.  Who could have done this to Alexa,
j	Lucius's enforcer? It scared him to see her so damaged.
  The two-year-old that Alexa had cradled wailed and reached for her, his face twisted by grief.  The teenage boy shushed the toddler, explaining that 'Lexa was
I
i	hurt and needed medicine.  Then he looked up at Jack.
|	"I'm Devon." The introduction was more challenge
i	than courtesy.  "Who are you?"
          Jack looked down at the blond boy teetering on the
I	edge of manhood.  His clothes were torn and dirty, his
•	face painfully sunburned, and his hands trembling.  But
his expression was determinedly brave as he asked Jack to identify himself.
  "Jack Sterling." His hands were full with Alexa, so
he nodded instead of offering his hand.  "I'm your
uncle ...  or something."
|	Devon's shoulders relaxed.  "You're that guy who
;	lives on the farm.  I've heard about you."
j	At Devon's words the other children drew closer.
|	A little girl murmured, "Uncle Jack." Small hands
i	clutched at his pants and shirt.  Big-eyed faces looked
j	to Jack for answers.  The children's faith in Jack to
*	make everything all right was unnerving.
i

  He led them in a ragtag procession up the knoll and toward the plane.
  Sarah's hands flew to her face when Jack walked into view.  He didn't know whether it was the condition of the children or Alexa's crumpled form.  Probably both.
  Louis removed his ball cap and wiped sweat from his forehead.  "There were seventy kids on the island.  Where are the rest?"
  Devon shook his head.  "We are all that—" He swallowed hard and started over.  "We're all there are.  The children's wing ..  ." He gestured at the dust dune that had once been a luminous pink building, five stories tall.
  Louis nodded and said nothing more.  He unpacked the three huge canvas tents from the belly of the C130J.
  Jack laid Alexa down gently in the shade cast by the plane's high wing.  He wanted to wash the blood from her face, to do something to help her.  But they were separated by her environmental suit.  "What are you doing here?" he asked gently.  "I'd have thought you'd've sold your services to the highest bidder.  The Deathless would have fallen over themselves making offers."
  Alexa licked her lips.  "Protect .  .  .  Sterling children." Her eyes flicked to the kids that clustered around her, like chicks flocking to a wounded hen.  "It's what ...  I do."
  Jack peered at her wounds through the plastic, taking in her bruised face and the gaping gash across her neck.  "You look like hell."
  Alexa's cracked lips pulled into a painful smile.  "Ran into the competition." She blew out a sharp breath of pain as she pulled her dislocated leg into place.
  "If you look this bad," Jack whispered, "I'd hate to see the other guy."
  
  Worry creased the inside corners of her eyes.  Her gaze slipped toward the horizon.  "So would I."
  Jack and Louis set up the tents with the help of the strongest teenagers, pounding holes in the packed earth for the uprights, spreading the tarps, and hoisting them into place.  The back of Jack s neck itched.  He told himself that it was just sweat dripping down from his unwashed hair.  He didn't want to put on the smotheringly hot environmental suit.  But white contrails streaked overhead, scarring the clear blue sky.  It wouldn't be long before particles drifted down from high altitudes and poisoned the island against him.
  While the men erected the tents, Sarah tended to the children, unpacked and distributed food and water, smoothed balm on the worst of the sunburns, and bound cuts and gashes on feet and hands.
  An hour later, exhausted from raising tents, unloading crates, and searching in vain for additional survivors, Jack sought Sarah out.  She sat erect on a crate that had once held carrots, milking the brown-and-white goat that had betrayed her presence on the plane.  A pair of eight-year-old twin boys watched her every gesture.
  "How is everyone?" Jack asked.  He nodded in the direction of the children huddled under the biggest of the tents with Alexa.
  Sarah picked up the bucket and poured the frothy milk into four waiting glass bottles with rubber teats.  Jack had seen them used on the ranch to suckle bummer lambs whose mothers had died in lambing.
  She told the boys, "Take these to Alyssa and Oletus.  They're waiting."
  The boys carried the bottles as carefully as holy chalices, hustling through the sand to where the older girls waited with the smallest of the babies.
  When they were gone, Sarah tucked in a stray blond curl that had worked free from her bonnet.  "That
  
woman won't let me tend her.  Her wounds—she should be dead." Her blue eyes were full of fear and wonder.  "Why isn't she dead?"
  Jack licked his lips, not sure where to begin.  "Alexa has been altered by a technology called nano-biology.  Her body is man-made.  It's not her I'm worried about.  She'll recover."
  Sarah stared uneasily at Alexa, seated under the wing.
"How are the children?" Jack asked.
  Sarah's attention snapped back to Jack.  She took a shuddering breath and leaned close to whisper, "We may lose the babies.  They're so weak.  There's a five-month-old too weak to lift his head.  They're all so listless and dehydrated.  They've given up." Tears cut clean channels through the grit on her face.  Her voice broke.  "How could God be so cruel?"
  Jack took Sarah into his arms and rubbed her back.  "Shh, it'll be all right.  We'll do what we can.  You have to have faith."
  Sarah clung to him like the child she'd so recently been.  She laid her head on his shoulder and sobbed.  After a moment she pulled back, wiping her nose with a linen handkerchief from her skirt pocket.  "I'm sorry," she said in a small voice.  Her tone strengthened.  "You're right, of course.  Father would have beaten me bloody for blaspheming.  The Lord's will be done." She put the handkerchief back and straightened her shirt.  "Hard things happen.  Like when Mama's baby was stillborn.  We get through them." She slid past him.  "Excuse me.  I have to see to the children."
  Jack was amazed.  In an instant, he had seen the death of the fluttering, giggling girl Sarah had been and the birth of the strong, reliable woman she would become.  He shook his head and wondered if he'd ever really known her at all.
  Alexa drew an X in the sand, cutting off the triple line of O's in the game of tic-tac-toe she had started
  
to entertain the children.  It was a five-by-five grid, and the children who were not too far gone into shock and hunger were collaborating to try and beat her.
  She wished she could do more to comfort them, but the damned environmental suit kept her separated from them.  She was a plastic-wrapped doll.  She couldn't even do the things she was good at: there was no enemy to fight.  And if there was, she couldn't stand, much less protect them.  Her senses of smell and hearing were muffled by the suit.  Make that a broken plastic-wrapped doll.  As useful as trash.
  What was worse, she couldn't tell what was going on in the outside world.  With the suit on, she was completely unable to make contact with Gaia-Net, even if the network had been reseeded by now.  The only thing that gave her hope was the lacy white lines of commerce overhead.  If drones were able to fly, nano-biology must be reestablishing itself.  She wondered how long she'd have to wait to take off the damn suit.
  The disassembler payload seemed bigger on Elysium than for the other targets.  The other strike zones had come back online within forty-eight hours.  Here, more than seventy-two hours after the attack, there were still enough disassemblers to disintegrate her drone in midflight.
  Fortunately, years of paranoia had caused her to put on the environmental suit as a prefhght precaution.  But it was a salvation that itched and chafed.  Worse, it prevented her body from drawing nutrients from the air and ground.  Her body ached with a cellular hunger.  She focused on the game to distract herself.
  Alexa drew another X to howls of protest from Devon and Mari, the two children most interested in the game.  They put their sun-bleached heads together and whispered furiously, oblivious that even with her hearing muffled by the suit, she still knew what they said.
  
  Her feelings about Lucius's death roiled with conflict—shame at failing as a bodyguard, satisfaction at being released from her contract, and .  .  .  sorrow? Lucius had never been a friend.  He was too self-absorbed for that.  But he had given her immortality, then had been a constant irritation in her life for centuries.  His loss was like a pulled tooth.  She couldn't stop feeling for the hole he left in her world.
  On the edge of her peripheral vision, Alexa saw Jack comfort the Mennonite girl, Sarah, against his chest.
  Stupid.  Alexa stabbed the ground with a finger.  He should never have brought the girl here.  She was just another potential victim.  Someone else to protect.  And from the look Jack gave Sarah when they separated, she would be a distraction—and distractions could be lethal in an emergency.
  Sarah straightened her stance, wiped her face with a folded handkerchief, and walked over to Alexa and the children.
  "I need someone to help me set up the cots and lay out blankets."
  Devon and a girl named Shirley looked up ques-tioningly.  Other children raised blank and hopeless eyes in Alexa's direction.
  Alexa nodded brusquely in the direction of the piles of sticks and blankets.  "It's all right.  Go with her."
  The older children helped the younger ones hobble toward the tents.
Sarah bent to put her shoulder under Alexa's arm.
  Alexa stopped her with an upraised hand.  "I don't need your help." With her free hand, she pushed off of the plane, rising to a crouch.  The pain in her dislocated leg blotted out the world.  She swayed, and a soft warmth buoyed her.  Sarah was at her side.
  Gritting her teeth, Alexa took a step toward the tent, pulling out of Sarah's helpful grasp.
  "Let me help you," the young woman said.  "There's no need—"
  
  Alexa ground out words through clenched teeth.  "I.  Don't.  Need.  Your.  Pity."
  Sarah's brows knit together in consternation.  "Don't be prideful.  I only want to—" She reached out to support Alexa's wavering hand.
  Alexa caught Sarah's throat and squeezed until panic shone in the girl's face.  "I have seen thousands of people die.  Most, I killed myself.  Now stand aside."
  Sarah fell back, rubbing her neck.  Her expression hovered between shock and rage.
  Alexa knew she'd just made an enemy.  She couldn't muster the energy to care.  She walked toward the tent, step by painful step.  Each time she shifted her weight, the bones in her wounded hip ground together.  But each step was easier.  She would work through this.  She had lives to protect.
  Jack jumped when someone tapped him on the shoulder.  He'd been trying to trim the flickering wick of a kerosene lantern with his pocketknife.  He jumped, singeing his finger.  He sucked on it and turned, muttering, "What the—?"
  Alexa's face stopped him cold.  Her cheeks were gaunt and crescents of purplish-brown underlined her eyes.  Her bodysuit clung to a figure that, once lean, was now skeletal.  The nano-biology of her body had scavenged all the available building blocks it could from the inside of her environmental suit—all the blood spatter was gone, reabsorbed back into her veins—but she needed more nano-biology components to restore her to full health.  Without access to additional resources, her body had absorbed its own muscular tissue.  This was the first time he'd seen her standing since her accident, but the effort it cost her .  was enormous.  Sweat beaded her upper lip, and her knees trembled.
  Jack dropped his hand.  The small burn he'd suffered was insignificant compared to her pain.
"Alexa, let me help you." He reached an arm around her waist and helped her settle on a downed palm tree that had been converted to a rude bench.
"Your neck looks bad," Alexa said.
  Jack touched the raised hives.  "Good news for you," he said with an attempt at a laugh.  "It'll be safe for you to get out of that suit soon."
  "You should suit up now." Alexa's bruised eyes burned into his.  "I'm fresh out of epi-pens."
  Jack met her gaze.  Moments passed, but she didn't give way.  He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the fire.  "Yeah.  You're right.  Damned nuisance.  Just wanted to—"
"Pretend you were normal?"
  He looked at her sidelong.  Even gaunt and broken she was beautiful.  "Yeah."
  "No one's normal.  The sooner you get used to that, the longer you'll live."
  Jack heaved a sigh.  "You're right.  I'll put it on after dinner." In the meantime, he relished the Pacific Ocean breeze that ruffled the hairs on his arms and the scent of plumeria.
  It was wonderful to be home without his allergies.  Like being a child again.  If he closed his eyes he could almost believe that he was nine years old, Lucius was a powerful relative who ran the world, and his mother and father would be by before bedtime to tuck him in.
  "Can your laptop connect to Gaia-Net?" Alexa's question snapped Jack out of his reverie.  "We need to find out what's going on in the world, and I can't"—she plucked at the environmental suit— "receive anything through this."
  Jack left the cozy fireside and found his laptop inside the C130J's cockpit.  He fired it up.  Old wireless protocols transmitted radio signals into the night air.  Somewhere high above, particles of nano-biology responded to the wave, reorienting themselves to the signal and forming spontaneous networks.
  The screen of the laptop lit up with a constellation of video images.  Jack tapped three fingers on the key-
  
board, and the gesture-recognition software opened up one of the video feeds.
  A beautiful man with alabaster skin and a body like a Greek statue spoke: "Three days after the disaster, and still no one knows where the deadly nano came from.  Authorities appear confident, however, that the attacks were man-made in origin, and not the work of random mutations in nano-biology.  Sources close to the World Consortium cite the coordinated timing of the attacks, as well as the fact that the world's most powerful Deathless appear to be the targets.  From Johannesburg to Reykjavik, from Tokyo to Brasilia, the destruction centered around compounds of the rich and immortal." The commentator's face took on a practiced expression of disapproval and concern, tilting forward, with the corners of the mouth pulling slightly down.  "Despite assurances by world leaders that the engineer of these attacks will soon be brought to justice, riots continue—"
  "This thing is like looking at Gaia-Net through a pinhole," Alexa complained, leaning over his lap.  "How can you find anything on this tiny screen? You lose all the nuances of actually being there—sight, sound, touch."
  Jack jerked the laptop out of her reach.  "Sorry if my primitive technology offends.  It does, however, have the advantage of actually working.  Don't like it, take off that suit and take your chances."
  Alexa cocked her head at him, her dark eyes regretful.  "Sorry.  It's just, you get used—"
  "I know," Jack said.  "I used to be able to surf Gaia-Net through the children's interfaces—before.  It was like being many people at once, smarter, faster, everywhere." He hugged the laptop.  "But that's all in the past.  This—well, it's what we have." He tapped the keyboard and slid his fingers left and right, opening up a series of video clips: Paris's skyline falling, leaving only the historical buildings.  It was like a time-lapse video of the city's construction, in reverse.
  
  A mob in Geneva stormed the World Consortium headquarters, demanding action, then screamed and dispersed when a prankster threw a box of cornstarch into the air.  Twenty-two people were crushed and rushed to a nearby hospital for reconstruction.
  Someone had created an animated video lampooning Lucius Sterling as the progenitor of the plague and showing him hiding out in an underground bunker with a Deathless Hitler and Jim Jones.  Links to the video took the spoof seriously, calling for Lucius Sterling to step forward and confess.
  Criminalists in Rome plotted the spread and timing of the attacks on a virtual globe.
  "That one," Alexa said, leaning over Jack.  "I want that data."
  Jack tapped the slick surface and downloaded times, places, spread, and containment statistics.
  "What about this?" Jack tapped the cartoon, enlarging the image, which showed Lucius as a bubble of a man chewing a cigar and spanking a half-naked Osama bin Laden.
"Conspiracy theory trash.  We saw Lucius die."
"On video.  It could have been faked."
  Alexa licked her plum-colored lips.  "It was Gaia-Net.  I felt what it was like to dissolve.  There's no faking that.  Besides"—she cocked her head at the tents—"they were on the beach with Lucius when it hit.  Gerri inhaled him, tasted his ashes on her tongue.  She still won't eat.  They can tell you how real it was."
  Jack followed her gaze.  Sarah offered a bowl of soup to a redheaded girl with a clamped-shut mouth.  She hugged her body as if afraid she would fall apart and stared out at the sea.  What was it like to be so young and watch your whole world disintegrate? Jack couldn't imagine.
  Jack skimmed the news channels.  The statistics were astounding.  Of the thousand and fifty Deathless alive before the attack, only ninety remained.  All were sequestered in unrevealed locations.  Rewards for the
  
capture of the parties responsible for the disassembler had been bid up to the trillions.
"May I?" Alexa held out her hands.
  Jack handed her the computer and ate a cold dinner of beef jerky and apples while she retrieved information.
  The sun set, painting the western sky in bands of orange, salmon, and lavender.  The colors were hatched with lines of drone traffic.  The breeze from the ocean turned cold, and Jack crossed his arms over his chest.  As soon as the sun set, he'd put on his suit.  He did not scratch the welts rising on his arms.
  With Lucius gone, and the world in turmoil, would the no-fly zone over Watershed Valley be honored? This might be his last day in the open air.  He wanted to savor every second.
  Louis strode up to the fire, carrying an armload of driftwood.  "Who's she?" He nodded at Alexa, who still bent over Jack's laptop, absorbed.  He frowned at the environmental suit that clung to her features, a transparent gleam in the firelight.
  "Alexa DuBois," Jack said.  "She was my bodyguard before I came to the ranch."
  Louis grunted and sat down, feeding one of the smaller pieces of wood into the fire.  He offered his hand to Alexa.  "Louis DeGroot.  Used to fly antique biplanes for a traveling air show."
  Alexa glanced at him briefly and did not take his hand.  She cocked her head at the laptop and asked Jack, "Did you know Elysium was the last target hit?" She bent closer to the screen, absorbed.  "That's odd."
  Louis grunted as he sat down.  He told Jack, "I've scouted out the fuel storage tanks." He leaned back to enjoy the fire.  "There's enough for island hopping.  And a sweet little restored Cessna single-prop.  Nothing like what we'd need to make it to the mainland." He picked up Jack's packet of beef jerky and tore off a chunk.  "Unless you fancy trying one of the sailboats."
  
  Alexa recoiled from the laptop with a sharp intake of breath.  Firelight played across the plastic covering her face.  Behind it, her expression was stricken.
  "What?" Jack asked, sliding over to see what had caused her reaction.
  "They've reconstructed flight paths for the drones that delivered the disassembler from a linear regression of traffic." She pivoted the laptop so Jack could see the converging lines on.  the screen.  "The point of origin is .  .  .  Elysium."
  
21
"0>n of a bitch!" Jack jumped to his feet, hands tJclenched.  "Are you telling me this is another example of Lucius playing God? A power-play? A weapon that rebounded and bit him in the ass?"
  Alexa shook her head.  "I can't believe that.  Lucius wouldn't allow anything that dangerous to be developed here."
  "The big man have enemies?" Louis asked, his shoulders hunched against an imaginary wind.  "Maybe one a them framed—"
  Alexa clutched the laptop so hard its titanium case creaked.  "Lucius—if he loved anything, he loved the children." Even to her ears, her voice was feeble, unconvinced.
  "Lucius loved having descendants," Jack fumed.  "Loved knowing that his seed was spreading across the earth.  We were no more to him than—"
  "Lucius loved them," Alexa shouted.  She stood there a moment, nostrils flaring, then her chest deflated.  "He loved you most of all.  You were the most like him.  The only one who defied him.  He gave Fon-tesca billions to fund research to cure you, even after you escaped."
Jack sat back down.  He hadn't known.
  Sand crunched as Sarah stalked up to the fire.  "Hush," she ordered sotto voce.  "The children can hear you, and you're scaring them."
  
  "The children should damn well be scared," Jack said.  "We're sitting on Armageddon central.  The disassembler that's destroying the planet?" He jabbed a finger at the ground.  "Came from here."
  "This regression," Louis asked in his smoker's voice.  "You sure of the result?"
  Alexa mentally combed through the hundreds of thousands of bits of data she'd gleaned from Gaia-Net: wind speeds, damage reports, camera records of cargo drones.  It all added up to a single result.  "Yeah.  It's solid."
  The old man ran his fingers through his hair.  His world-weary eyes were scared.  "And other people know this? Folks with the means for a little payback?"
  Alexa's eyes flew open.  She bolted from Jack and the fire.  At the ocean's edge, she unzipped the hood of her environmental suit and inhaled the balmy night air.  Gaia-Net filled her consciousness: weak and thready, not fully reestablished.  But enough.  The rumbling engines of destruction.  The white-hot anger and outrage of mobs and governments.  Below the surface, like dark, darting fish, the cold, implacable hatred of powerful people grown used to immortality.
  People with the resources to make their displeasure known.
  The laptop slipped from Alexa's hands into the sand.  "The Deathless," she gasped.  "They're coming."
  Jack stumbled backward—even at this distance Alexa's nano-biology affected him.  Coughing and gasping, he darted into the C130J cargo plane.
  Sarah ran after him, her skirts billowing.  She cast a single fearful look back.
  Only Louis remained.  He grabbed Alexa's shoulders and shook her until her head rattled.  "What do you mean? Who's coming?"
  Alexa pulled out of his hands and pushed herself upright.  Her body had taken sustenance from the ambient nano-biology.  She felt stronger, less like a walking corpse.  "There are only a handful of Deathless
  
left, but that's enough.  They're sending everything they've got: assassins, golems, missiles.  Some want to obliterate the technology.  Others want to possess it.  We have to evacuate."
  Jack stumbled out of the plane, sheathed in an environmental suit.  Sarah was at his side, holding him upright.  "There's no place to go," he said hoarsely.  "Our plane doesn't have enough fuel to reach the mainland, and the nearby Hawaiian islands are as bad off as Elysium.  We're trapped."
  A wailing rose from the tents, and two thin figures darted toward the fire.  Alexa was immediately on guard, sinking into a crouch.  It was Devon and Mari.
  "We heard you shouting." Devon looked sick.  "Please.  What's going on?" His knees trembled.  "Is the disassembler back?"
Sarah said, "Shh.  It's going to be—"
  "We deserve to know," Devon said.  "We're not babies.  Not after what we've been through." He held his chin high, but there were worried creases on his forehead, and his eyes were moist.
  Alexa put her arm around his shoulders and spoke softly.  "Wake the others, get them ready to move." She pointed at the livestock.  "Sarah, bring the goats."
  "The plane's out of fuel," Louis protested.  "Even if we drain the tanks here, we won't have enough to get more than a couple hundred miles out to sea.  It's suicide."
  "No." Alexa drew herself up to her full height, feeling stronger than she had in days.  "Because we're not leaving the island."
  Jack wanted to throttle Alexa.  She'd nearly killed him by pulling off her hood.  Now she was giving orders that were patently insane.  "We can't hide on the island.  There's nothing left.  No buildings, no infrastructure, hardly any vegetation.  You're proposing we sit on the beach with signs reading: 'Not the survivors you're looking for'?"
  
  Alexa pulled off the rest of her environmental suit and folded it into a thigh pocket.  "Elysium is still here.  It was built using nano-biology, but the island itself is non-living rock.  If it survived, perhaps Fontesca's underground lab did as well.  It'll have been stripped of nano-biology, but we can shelter there."
  "That's right.  Lucius mentioned evacuating to there if the disassembler hit." Jack looked out across the ruined compound, where Lucius and the other adults had died.  "So why didn't he?"
  "No time.  The disassembler hit too quickly.  If the attack originated here, they wouldn't have had time to get to the bunkers."
  "What's to keep the Deathless from finding us there? We'll be trapped."
Alexa raised her chin.  "You have a better option?"
  It stopped him.  One thing Jack knew from his childhood years: Alexa was a survivor.  If she thought this was their best chance, he was with her.  Grudgingly, he said, "All right."
  Sarah didn't know what to make of the black-clad woman, now so miraculously improved.  She dressed like a harlot and gave orders like an elder.  But the children trusted her, so she couldn't be all bad.  Right now Alexa was pushing a path through the underbrush like Moses parting the Red Sea to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.  Or—considering her skintight, provocative clothing—perhaps she was a demon, leading them all into hell.
  The world outside Watershed Valley was so confusing.
  Sarah hoisted up the toddler on her right hip, careful not to crush the infant on her left.  Her shoulders ached with the strain, but there was no time to stop.
  The fearsome woman was frightened, and she had transmitted her worry to Jack and Louis.  Whatever she was, the men took her counsel.
As much as Jack argued with Alexa, he obviously trusted and respected her opinion, and from the wa] his gaze clung to Alexa's curves, lusted after her a: well.
  Ducking through the underbrush, Sarah glared a the woman's taut rounded buttocks and slender calves Alexa's body was as perfect as Salome's in the hug< family Bible with the color plates.  Her heart-shapec face was surrounded by tousled curls that never tan gled and bounced fetchingly around an overly buoyan bosom.  Her skin was the soft, flawless fawn of a bab; rabbit, without a pock or a freckle.  She didn't looi like any of the women Sarah had grown up with Around her, Sarah—one of the prettiest girls in th< valley—felt as drab as a donkey.
Sarah was trapped between hatred and envy.
  Jack had told her Alexa had once been a rea woman, before she went into service for his great grandfather.  That he had changed her, turning her intc a violent, sexual doll.  Was that what men in the out side world wanted? Sarah cut her eyes sideways.
Was Alexa what Jack wanted?
  Alexa pushed through the underbrush, held it asid« for the others to pass, and then quickly obscured th< marks of their passage.  Her ears strained for th( sounds of an approaching missile or drone.  The infor mation she'd received off Gaia-Net indicated th< Deathless were coming, but hadn't said when or how And though her contact had been brief, it was possibk the Deathless had noticed.
  Louis carried a small boy on his shoulders and witl his free hand led a string of three school-age children The older children helped the younger ones.  Jack era died one of the recovering infants in his arms.  Saral carried the other.  The Mennonite woman surprisec Alexa.  She'd imagined the girl a liability, someone who would panic and need tending to.  Instead, Sarah was matter-of-fact in the face of danger and obeyed
  
commands without question.  If only Jack were so biddable.
  "Why are you wasting time with that?" Jack asked.  He stood aside, holding back bushes so some of the smaller children could pass.
  Alexa finished brushing away their footsteps.  She pitched her voice low so the others on the trail would not hear.  "If the Deathless find us, they will torture us for information in ways you can't imagine.  For revenge, they'll kill all of us—even the babies.  Every bit of obfuscation helps."
  "Nano-biology is reseeding the island," Jack argued, hefting the sleeping baby on his shoulder.  "This ground is probably littered with smart dust sensors by now.  The Deathless will know where we are.  With Gaia-Net working again, there's no privacy, no hiding, no escape."
  "It's not fully recovered.  The signal fades in and out.  Data will be unreliable.  If we can get underground before then, we may be safe."
  Then she heard it overhead, the sound she'd been dreading—the whir of incoming drones.  Alexa picked up the smallest child ahead of her and passed through the crowd.  "Hurry!"
Her panic was infectious and the children ran.
  The path to Fontesca's lab passed through a bamboo garden.  The leaves and culms rustled in the wind, a nervous susurration.  Out the other side was a pile of black boulders that marked the entrance.
  Alexa put down the child she carried and strode up to the apparently featureless rock wall.  She'd expected it to be standing open, gutted when the disassembler ran rampant over Elysium.  Excitement prickled along her spine.  If the basalt door's molecular seal was tight enough to keep the disassembler out, there might be functioning technology inside.  For the first time she had hope that they might survive the Deathless's attack.
  
  Tentatively, Alexa pressed her hand against the rock wall.  Its surface warmed, scanning her fingerprints and tasting the skin of her palm to verify her DNA.  "It's working," she called back excitedly.  "Any moment now."
  Jack jiggled a fussy baby on his shoulder.  The words he murmured were soft and soothing, but his eyes— locked on the door—were frightened.  Alexa realized that this haven had been, for several years of his childhood, Jack's prison.  He'd be all right.  He was Lucius's great-grandson, after all.  There'd be time for therapy and recriminations when and if they survived.
  Alexa crouched in front of the stone wall.  "Just a second longer .  .  ." She pressed her palm against another part of the stone.  Please don't let it malfunction.
The door did not open.
  She slammed her palm against the basalt again and again.  There had to be some functioning sensor left.  More whirring overhead.  If she didn't get the children underground soon, they'd be killed—or worse.
  A Gaia-Net message bloomed in her mind: Access denied.  Current occupant has reset command codes.
  Current occupant? The words felt like a stone in Alexa's chest.  She whispered aloud one word.  It was filled with all the hatred accumulated over one hundred and fifty years of service:
"Lucius."

22
L
ucius, you bastard! Open the goddamned door! I've got the children with me." Alexa slammed her fists against the stone wall, chipping the stone.  "Open up, or so help me, I will lead the Deathless to your doorstep and let them take their revenge."
  Jack, waiting with the others farther down the slope, called up: "Lucius? Alive?"
  The children stirred, buzzing with whispers.  Some looked hopeful.
  Alexa wanted to strangle the old deceiver.  The children thought he was their benevolent ancestor.  Their protector.  They didn't see him for what he was: a self-serving coward who would sacrifice them all to save his own skin.
  "Open this door," she growled, "or I will break it open and skin you alive." She picked up a nearby rock, prepared to pound it against the wall.
  A Gaia-Net image formed in Alexa's mind.  Startled, she dropped the rock.  The face was one she'd known for centuries, but it wasn't Lucius.  She saw the hawk nose and somber eyes of Leonardo Fontesca.
  Lucius can't open the door, Leo answered.  He's dead.
  Alexa immediately changed tactics.  Leo, you have to let us in.  I have the children with me.  The other Deathless believe the disassembler was launched from Elysium.  They want revenge.
  
  The image faded.  In sorrowful tones, Fontesca answered, Icon't.  Letting you in would breach quarantine....  I can't risk it.
  One way or another, Leo, we're coming in.  Alexa raised her arm and extruded her right forearm blade.
Behind her, Sarah gasped.
  Alexa pressed the molecule-thin edge of the blade against the door's seam, and extruded her blade farther.  Her body quickly used up the consumable nano-biology in the air and began pulling mass from her bones.  I'm not letting these children die.  She grunted as her bones became brittle, but she could feel the edge of the door's central bolts, steel pins hidden behind a meter of solid black basalt.  Her legs trembled, barely able to hold up her weight on lacework bones.  Just a little bit more .  .  .
  Fontesca's image frowned, detecting how close she was to forcing the door.  Stop.  Alexa, I don't want to hurt you.
  Funny, she grunted, pushing a little farther.  / don't have the same reservations about you.
  I built you, Fontesca pleaded.  This won't work.  I know the limits of your body.
  Alexa felt her ribs crack as she strained against the door, trying to reach deeper.  The bones in the rest of her body were thinning, giving up their mass to her blade.
  She was nearly a third of the way through the bolt embedded inside the stone wall.
  She slitted open her eyes and looked back at the children.  Their sweet, soft faces watched her worriedly.  Overhead the sky was lit with fire, and explosions could be heard in the distance.  The attacks had begun.
  You don't have the bone mass to cut completely through the door.  Not without sacrificing yourself.
  Tears flowed freely down Hans's chubby face, but he didn't cry.  He was too scared.  His mouth was open in a rictus of pain and fear.
  
  In that instant Alexa knew she'd give everything to save him.  Her whole hateful existence had been about staying alive.  For what? More centuries of an empty existence?
  She'd been friendless for so long.  If she died right here, converted herself into a single sliver of solid will, what would be the difference?
  She screamed and pushed all her being into one bright shaft of bone.
The steel bolt parted.
  The door slid open and Alexa fell forward, every bone in her body shattering as she hit the gleaming silver-and-white floor.
  Jack cried out when Alexa collapsed.  He handed the baby he held to Devon and scrambled up the hill.  He knelt beside her.  Alexa, his tough-love guardian angel, who'd pricked him out of self-pity time and again.  Alexa, who was supposed to be invulnerable, lay impossibly flattened on the floor.
  Her pelvis and rib cage were crushed as if she'd fallen from a great height.  The only thing robust about her was the gleaming blade protruding from her forearm.  It glistened white, a meter-long protuberance shaped like the head of a scythe.
  "Alexa." Jack felt tears well and fall down his face.  He touched her cheek and recoiled as the bone crumbled under his touch.
  Alexa's tongue moved thickly in the ruin of her mouth: "In-thide.  Ge' in-thide."
  It took Jack a moment to decipher Alexa's slurred words.  He pinwheeled his arms, gesturing the others up the hill.  "Everyone inside.  Now!"
  The children wailed as they passed Alexa, but Jack pushed them aside, not letting them touch her.  Louis had to physically restrain Hans.  The old man carried the toddler under his arm.  Hans kicked and screamed with all the might of his two-year-old fury, trying to get to Alexa.
  
  "Whats wrong? Why cant you reabsorb the blade?" Jack asked, kneeling in front of Alexa.  He hovered, afraid to touch her again.
" 'attered.  'etched i' 'oo far."
  Jack pieced together the sentence.  Alexa's body comprised a community of nano-biological machines working in concert to keep her functioning.  By pushing her skeletal structure to limits it was never designed for, she'd broken down its cellular network.  It was analogous to rappelling down a cliff, then pulling the rope down with you; there was no way to recover.  The bone in her blade couldn't be reabsorbed because the mechanisms that repositioned its molecular structure had been disrupted.  She might eventually heal, but it would take years.
  Tears stung Jack's eyes.  Carrying her was out of the question in her fragile state.  "What can I do to help you?"
  Alexa's eyes slid sideways to the cluster of children.  She whispered, " 'ave 'em."
  "I will," Jack promised.  He kissed the air just above her temple.  "I'll save them all." Two of his teardrops spattered on her chin.
Alexa winced.
  "I love you." His hand hovered over her face, shaking at his impotence.  He couldn't abandon Alexa— but he had no choice.
  Sarah hung near the end of the crowd, watching Jack with red-rimmed eyes.  The children she held clung to her, their faces buried against her shirt.
  Jack stood up.  "I'll be back for you," he promised.  "Once I've settled things with Fontesca, I'll be back.  And I'm sorry for this next bit." Jack placed his hands under Alexa's feet and eased them across the threshold, into the bunker.
  Alexa grunted, her face tightened into a red ball of pain, but she did not scream.
  He didn't let himself dwell on the way her ankles moved like cooked pasta under the skin.
  
  The door cleared, it sheathed shut, the joint in the stone sealing to invisibility.
  Jack stepped over Alexa.  He promised again, "I'll be back for you."
  The last view Alexa had of Jack was from the knees down.  He reached out his hand and clasped Sarah's.  They disappeared down the gleaming white staircase.  Hans's wailing dwindled to an echo.
  How easily they discard you, whispered Fontesca in her mind.  They don't understand your true worth.  The gleaming floor underneath Alexa softened to the consistency of butter.  But I do.
  The butter melted and Alexa was engulfed in an airless, weightless void filled with painful white light.
  "We can't just leave her," Sarah said, looking back up the curving staircase.  The black-garbed woman was hidden by the top stairs.  "She gave of herself to protect us."
  The single glance she'd allowed herself of Alexa's ruined form haunted her.  Sarah was grateful that Hans's screaming made it hard to think about the woman's flattened body.
  Jack swiped his sleeve across his wet cheeks.  "We can't move her.  She's too fragile.  If we tried, it would only damage her more.  The only person who can help her now is Fontesca.  We have to find him."
  He loves her.  The thought was a stone in Sarah's heart.  She'd read his lips when he spoke to Alexa.  But how could she hate a woman who selflessly gave up her life to save the children? She is better than me: stronger, more beautiful, and more courageous.  No wonder he loves her.
  Sarah's cheeks burned with shame as she thought how she'd followed Jack from Montana, thrown herself shamelessly at his feet—while all the while he'd loved a worldly avenging angel, not a grubby-faced Mennonite farm girl.
  
  The only way to redeem herself was to do right by the children.  If she could protect them, keep them safe, then perhaps God would forgive her folly and hubris.
  "What is this place?" Devon asked in a quavering voice.
  "Fontesca's underground labs.  We'll be safe here," Jack said, but his voice wasn't convincing.
  Sarah looked up from her feet and inspected her surroundings.  She'd hidden in root cellars during Montana's rare tornados.  This was nothing like that close dank space; this was fairyland.
  Glistening silver stars sparkled in the alabaster walls and ceiling.  Colored balls of light flitted around their feet, illuminating the path like helpful pixies.  The flooring looked like marble, but was as soft underfoot as a thick wool rug.
  The chamber brought to mind tales her sisters had told each other at night, whispering under the covers about mortal men that traveled to the land of the fey and danced for a night that lasted three hundred years.
  Hans's wailing broke off with a snuffling sob.  He batted at the colored lights.
  "Are we safe here?" Sarah whispered.  The high ceiling and curved walls made her feel exposed.  There were no visible doors.  It was like being in an alabaster jar.
  Jack cupped his hands around his mouth.  "Fon-tesca! We're here! Show yourself."
  The dancing colored lights scattered and his words echoed back to him.
  "There is no need to shout." A man stepped out of the wall.  He was tall and gaunt, his shoulders stooped.  His dark eyes burned with intelligence, taking in the room at a glance.  "There is nothing in this place I do not see or hear."
  Jack rushed forward and grabbed the man's wrist, intending to drag him up the stairs.  "Alexa—you have
  
to help—" He jerked off his feet as though he'd hit a brick wall.  Fontesca moved not an inch.
  "Don't speak her name to me," Fontesca snapped.  "You're not worthy of it, Jack Sterling."
  The walls rumbled, and Sarah felt the reverberations in her stomach.
  "I will protect Alexa," Fontesca continued in his calm and cultured voice.  The corners of his mouth tugged down in disgust.  "But you and these offspring cannot stay."
  A muffled boom echoed from the door at the top of the stairs.  A war raged outside, as various factions of the Deathless fought for possession or destruction of the disassembler.
  "You can't send these kids out into that!" Louis exclaimed.
  Fontesca's eyes slid away from the children.  "I don't have enough supplies for us all.  If you stay, we're all dead."
  "Then you go out there." Jack jabbed his hand at the front door.  "We know the disassembler originated on Elysium.  You're the only one who could have built it.  You've never been anything other than Lucius's lapdog."
  Fontesca's slap happened so quickly Sarah never saw his hand move, only heard the crack and saw Jack reel backward.
  "Lucius," Fontesca hissed.  "Why is it always about Lucius? He was nothing but a parasite."
  "Then why did you build him a weapon that destroys nano-biology?" Jack took a step forward, oblivious of the red handprint on his cheek.  "When I was your student, you said it was all about science, the thrill of discovery."
Fontesca's hands clenched into fists.
  "Nano-biology was my creation," Fontesca fumed.  "At first Lucius funded my work—then he made it his own.  At the end, I couldn't build new creations with-
  
out his permission." He spat the final words.  "Without violating his copyrights and patents."
  At his angry words, the smaller children and babies began to cry.
  Jack's face lit up with comprehension.  "You destroyed nano-biology for revenge."
  "You understand nothing." Fontesca's head cocked, as if he listened to unseen voices.  "No Sterling ever did." He stepped back into the wall and it closed around him.
  Jack rushed to the wall, but his hands hit only smooth stone.  "Damn."
  Sarah bit back her panic and rocked the child in her arms, cooing and rubbing his back.  They were in the house of a madman.  And at any moment the walls might collapse and crush them all.
  
23
A
lexa's eyes opened to the flickering light of a bio-luminescent candle.  Bacteria roiled within the globe like a living lava lamp.  She stretched and felt no pain.  Her right arm lifted easily, the blade that had weighted it, gone.  Her body felt strong and alive, better than it had in days.  Beneath her was a surface both buoyant and soft.
  She sat up and examined herself.  Her black bodysuit was completely repaired.  The environmental suit she'd picked up in Seattle was folded safely in her right thigh pocket.
  Her momentary relief was dashed by the sound of footsteps and her returning memory.  Alexa leapt off the table.  "Jack!"
  "No, Alexa." Fontesca stepped from the wall and held out his hands to her.  "It's Leo.  I heard you waking.  How are you feeling?"
"Where's Jack? Where are the children?"
  Fontesca cocked his head as his dark-rimmed eyes studied her form.  "They are in a holding room, safe for now.  But you haven't answered my question.  How do you feel?"
  "Good." Her words were grudging.  "Thanks." She looked around the room.  It was as spare as a monk's cell: a sleeping platform and meditation pillow were the only furniture, a single phalaenopsis orchid the only decoration.  Such rooms were common in the time
  
of nano-biology.  Why collect things when anything you wanted could be manufactured at will?
Alexa hated the soulless room.  Her chamber in Luc-
ius's   mansion   had   been   filled   with   antiques—
bookshelves holding paper volumes, an overstuffed
i	chair, an opulent four-poster bed covered with ruffled
pillows in shades of mocha and merlot.  Lucius had
teased her about the bed, since she no longer required
I	sleep, but he allowed it just the same.
i:	She narrowed her eyes at her benefactor.  "Why
I	aren't you dead? I thought you were killed in the
attack that claimed Lucius."
  "No.  I'm a survivor.  Like you." Fontesca touched her cheek with the back of his hand.  "We have much in common.  More than you imagine."
  Alexa had always known that Fontesca lusted after her.  A harmless infatuation.  But he was different now—more focused, more determined than she'd ever seen him.  He'd been Lucius's right-hand man for nearly two hundred years.  What had changed?
  She caught his hand and pitched her question low so that it was almost a growl.  "What have you done, Leo?"
His eyes met hers, unflinching.  "What I had to."
  "You killed Lucius!" Disbelief made her voice squeak.  "Why? You and he were partners for centuries.  He loved you like a brother—"
  "Lucius loved Lucius—no one else." Fontesca jerked his hand free.  "He gave me my start, then expected me to spend the rest of my life paying for it.  You should know what that's like."
Alexa took a long breath.  She did know.
  She understood Fontesca's frustration.  But what he had done, what he was capable of, frightened her.  She locked that emotion deep in her chest and asked, "Why now, Leo? You put up with Lucius for nearly two hundred years.  Why turn on him now? What did Lucius do—"
Fontesca threw his hands in the air.  "You and Jack—you don't understand." He paced in a circle.  "You think the world revolved around Lucius Sterling."
  Alexa tensed, preparing to defend herself if it came to that.  Fontesca had no martial arts training, but his body was as well engineered as hers, perhaps better.
  "Then what's it all about, Leo?" She made her words soft and loving, though she wanted to strangle him.  For Lucius's death, for the Sterling children who had died when the buildings fell, for all the trauma and pain that Fontesca had caused.  She suspected he was the architect of the disassembler.  After helping mankind develop immortality, Fontesca had thrown wide the gate and let death back into the world.
  In a guttural voice, Alexa said, "Why, Leo? I have to know."
  Fontesca's lips pursed.  They were chiseled and sensual, designed for passionate kisses or cruel expressions.  Though all his life, Fontesca had indulged in neither.
  "I'll do better than that," Fontesca said with the excitement of a child with a guilty secret.  "I'll show you."
  When Fontesca didn't reappear, Jack climbed the stairs to check on Alexa.  She was gone.
  "How's the girl?" Louis called from the big room downstairs.
  Jack shouted back, "She's go—" then lost his breath as the ground below his feet opened up and swallowed him.  He fell onto a slide that curved in a wide arc and shot him into the middle of a room.
  "Jack!" Alexa helped him to his feet.  Her grip was strong, healthy.  Her bodysuit was whole.  Jack clapped her shoulder in wonder.  "You've recovered."
  Her eyes flicked sideways, and Jack turned to see Fontesca.  "You cured her?"
"Of course.  I would never let Alexa die."
Jack looked up at the chute he'd fallen through.  It was gone, sealed back into a wall.  "What have you done with the others? Sarah, Louis, the children?"
  Fontesca smoothed a wrinkle from his shirt.  "They are safe.  I am not a monster." He looked up.  "Lucius was the monster."
"Lucius?" said Jack.
  "Santa Claus in a Hawaiian shirt.  All this destruction was his fault."
  "Leo." Alexa's voice was a warning.  "What have you done?"
  Fontesca held his hand out to her.  "I-I finished what you started in New Orleans.  Lucius was the roadblock in human evolution.  He and all the other Deathless who wanted to keep immortality to themselves."
  Alexa didn't take Fontesca's proffered hand.  There was a tightness in the way she held her body that made Jack uneasy.  He'd seen Alexa's face when Lucius died.  She'd been devastated.
  Fontesca's shoulders hunched.  Both hands were out now, pleading.  "He stole my discoveries—patented them.  Made deals with the government that rendered aspects of my research illegal." His hands clenched into fists.  "The only work he'd let me do was refinements of existing nano-biology.  Would you tell Michelangelo to spend the rest of eternity painting daisies on dinnerware?"
  "That made him a capitalist, not a monster," said Jack.  "You could have walked away."
  A tremor ran up Alexa's right side.  A single tear rolled down her cheek.
  Fontesca shook his head.  "No, I couldn't." He gazed at Alexa.  "Lucius doesn't let his prized possessions go easily.  Does he, love?"
  Alexa launched herself at Leonardo, crashing him up against the basalt wall.  "You weak, selfish shit." Spittle flew from her mouth.  "Do you know how many people you've killed with your goddamned research? Thousands are dead—so you could keep your patents?"
  
  Fontesca looked down at her, unruffled.  "No.  It wasn't about revenge.  It was always about the work.  Creating is what I do.  Lucius, the world governments, the cabal of the Deathless—they didn't have any right to tear down my creation."
"The disassembler?" Jack asked.
  Fontesca looked at him with scorn.  "That was a side effect." He plucked Alexa's hands from his collar and held them as delicately as crystal.  "I've taken nano-biology a step farther, added additional nucleotides, removed the restrictions that prevented it from interacting with natural biology.  Genetic structures so elegant it nearly makes me weep to contemplate them."
  He's insane, Jack thought.  Cold-bloodedly, fanatically insane, and he, Alexa, Sarah, and the children were in his power.
  Alexa pulled her hands free.  "Why, Leo? What is so important that you'd destroy the world?"
  Fontesca's long, dark face broke into a grin.  "Come." He held out his hands to Alexa and Jack.  "I'll show you." His voice was as light and happy as a child's.
  Her face clouded with dark emotions, Alexa grasped one hand.
Jack took the other.
  Alexa and Jack followed Fontesca down a hallway that telescoped ahead of them.  The effect was like walking the wrong way on a moving sidewalk in a room eight feet long.  At last, the hallway irised into a room.  The far wall was transparent.  Beyond it a holding cell like those Jack had lived in from the time his allergy became life-threatening to the time he escaped.
  Lounging on the bed, dressed in pink-flowered overalls over a yellow shirt, her bare feet idly kicking the air behind her, was a twelve-year-old girl.  A Siamese kitten batted at the stylus she was using to write on an electronic tablet.
  
  Alexa's heart froze with foreboding.  Had Fontesca stolen a child?
  She was beautiful, in the way all children are beautiful, with a pink bow mouth and flawless tawny skin.  But more than that, her enormous green eyes, button nose, and pointed chin were perfectly symmetrical.  A halo of brown curls cascaded over the straps of her overalls.
  Fontesca pressed his palm to the glass and said, "Hello, Isobel."
  The girl dropped the stylus and rolled off the bed.  She ran to the transparent barrier, her face lit with delight.  "Papa!"
  
24
"^Vfour daughter?" Alexa breathed.  "Impossible."
  X Nano-biology was incompatible with natural biology—it had been designed that way to prevent it from escaping into the wild.  As a consequence, the Deathless could not procreate.  That was why Lucius insisted that his descendants produce offspring before they undertook conversion.  She'd never heard that Fontesca had banked sperm.
  "In the modern world, nothing is impossible." Leonardo looked at them over his shoulder.  "Merely .  .  .  difficult."
"You cloned yourself," Jack said.
  Alexa couldn't take her eyes off the girl.  She was luminous, with a heart-shaped face and dark, intense eyes.  Even the confusion on her face as she studied the strangers couldn't erase her beauty.  But it was more than the miracle of her existence that drew Alexa's attention.  There was something hauntingly familiar about the child.
  "You understand nothing," Fontesca retorted.  "Cloning is a simple and shortsighted process, making ever-degrading copies of an imperfect original.  What is the elegance in that? Isobel is so much more." Fontesca gestured Alexa closer to the glass partition.
  "I built Isobel molecule by molecule, using my next-generation nano-biology."
  
  Isobel's gaze flitted between Jack and Alexa.  "Papa, who are these people? Did you make them?"
  Fontesca knelt and looked up at Alexa and Jack from her perspective.  "No, precious one, they're visitors from the outside world.  The place I go when I leave you."
         Their faces side by side, the resemblance was impos-
j	sible to miss.  "She looks like you," Alexa said warily.
Fontesca had always unnerved her—a bit too intense, and brilliant beyond her ken.
"Of course, I started with my own DNA as a tem-
'	plate.  But a little girl who looked like me?" He pulled
a face.  "I would not wish such a fate on anyone."
Fontesca held his hand out to Alexa, summoning her
to his side.
  Alexa took his hand.  It was unpleasantly damp.  He's nervous.  The great Fontesca—sharp intellect ruling all lesser emotions—was anxious.  She repressed the impulse to wipe her hand on her sleeve and let him draw her to the glass divider.
  "Human biology is based on the union of two distinct DNA strands," Fontesca continued.  "This mechanism produces diversity, which allows the species to thrive, trying all possible permutations.  Mankind as a parallel-processing computer for evolution."
  Alexa stared at Isobel, trying to puzzle out why she seemed so familiar.  My mother's lips, Alexa thought incongruously.  She has my mother's mouth.  Revelation hit and Alexa pulled her hand free from Fontesca's grip and stepped back.
  "Leo." Her voice was harsh and low.  "What have you done?"
  He turned to her, his dark eyes hooded with pain.  "Is she not perfect?"
"Papa?" Isobel's eyes puckered in worry.
  Fontesca patted the glass soothingly.  "A moment, princess.  We have to give her a moment to adjust." His voice was filled with a tenderness Alexa had never heard from him before.  Leonardo as he would have
  
been if the world had accepted him, instead of turning away from a brilliance it couldn't comprehend.
  Fontesca beamed.  "I wanted the best possible blueprint, the best genes to merge with my own."
  "You mean .  .  ." Jack looked at the child: the shape of her chin, her high cheekbones, her slender frame.
  "Alexa." Fontesca laid his hands on Alexa's shoulders.  She didn't resist as he turned her to face the glass cubicle.  "Meet Isobel.  The first meta-human, built of next-generation nano-biology.  Your daughter."
  The walls of the underground chamber shook as an explosion rocked the door.  Sarah had never heard anything so loud in all her life.  She clutched the baby she held to her chest, shielding him with her body.  "Merciful Lord!"
  Now that Jack had gone off with that dark woman, it was just her and Louis with thirty children she'd met only a few days ago.
  "Lexa!" Hans cried, covering his ears and grimacing at the ceiling.  "Want Lexa!"
  The younger babies picked up his distress, and soon everyone under the age of three was crying.
  Sarah crouched to cuddle Hans with her free hand.  "It's all right.  I'm here.  I'll keep you safe."
  The toddler pushed Sarah away with undisguised scorn.  "No want you! Want Lexa!"
  There was a lot of that sentiment going around.  How could such a dangerous and cold woman inspire these children to trust her? Come to that, why did Jack? Sarah took a long, deep breath to calm her nerves.  She was exhausted and terrified.
  Hans screamed at the top of his lungs, "Want Lexa!"
  Part of Sarah wanted to slap the coddled brat.  The impulse filled her with shame.  Before she could speak further words of comfort, the walls trembled.
  Hans was in her arms in a flash, clinging desperately to her neck, face buried in her shoulder.
  
  Devon and the other teenagers, bless them, were doing what they could to comfort the little ones.  But their wide eyes and trembling hands showed they were just as terrified.  The circle of children shrank as everyone huddled together.
  / can't do this.  Sarah shook her head at her own presumption.  She'd stowed away on the cargo plane because she thought she could help Jack.  No—be honest.  She came because she thought Jack would want her with him.  That if he could only see her, he'd want her the way she wanted him.
  But the modern world wasn't her world.  She wasn't powerful and strong like Alexa, wasn't wise like Jack.  She couldn't help these children, couldn't protect .  them.  She looked up, squinting into the darkness, trying to see what hell lay behind the door outside.  Her heart pounded in her chest so hard she could barely breathe.  She was as panicked as the littlest babe.
  / should never have come.  I can't do this.  Jack was right, I'm just a child myself.
  Across a sea of frightened children, Sarah's eyes locked on Louis's.  The grizzled pilot held a child in each arm, a third rode on his shoulders, and others clutched his legs.
  He spoke, his rumbling voice carrying beneath the crashes and bangs outside.  "Pardon my French, Sarah, but I'm sure as hell glad you're here."
  Jack reeled.  But now that the revelation had been spoken aloud, he wondered why he hadn't seen it immediately.
  Alexa moved faster than thought, her arm across Fontesca's throat, slamming him up against the glass partition.
  Isobel jumped back, hands covering her mouth, eyes wide with fear.
  "How could you play God this way?" Alexa screamed.
  
  Fontesca braced his hands on her wrist and elbow, leveraging room to speak.  "I thought you'd be pleased.  You wanted children; I saw the way you looked at Lucius's brood."
  Alexa pressed harder, cutting off his air.  "I should kill you."
  "No!" Isobel shouted, her fists pounding on the glass.  "Don't hurt my father!" Her face, compressed in anger, was an uncanny mirror of Alexa's.
  Alexa looked down at the child, stared for a long, silent moment, then released Fontesca.  "I wanted children—my children." Her voice was a hoarse whisper.  "Not this virtual rape.  Were you ever going to tell me about her?"
Fontesca rubbed his neck.
  Jack said, "Perhaps we should finish this conversation elsewhere."
  Isobel's expression was angry, but tears rolled down her cheeks.  "Papa, what's going on? Is that woman really my mama? Why does she hate you?"
  "Shh." Fontesca knelt in front of her and touched the glass as if he could reach through it and wipe away her tears.  "I'll explain everything.  We adults have some things to work out first."
  Isobel stomped her delicate foot.  "You're going to talk about me.  Let me listen."
  "I'll explain later," Fontesca soothed.  "These people have things to tell me they wouldn't feel comfortable saying in front of you.  We wouldn't want to embarrass our guests, would we?"
  Isobel's green eyes flashed, showing clearly that she damn well would.  "Come back soon," was all she said.
  Fontesca led them away from the clean room, through the telescoping hallway that terminated in a laboratory.  One wall housed a molecular manipulator and a suite of DNA-processing equipment that fit into a casing the size of a twenty-first-century laptop computer.  Another wall was a Gaia-Net screen.  A bed in
  
the corner disappeared as they walked in, dissolving into the floor.  Three cup-shaped chairs extruded to take its place.
  Alexa's face was set in cold, hard lines.  She didn't sit down with Fontesca and Jack.  Instead she paced like a caged animal.
"How old is she?" Alexa demanded in a cold voice.
"Twelve."
  She rounded on him.  "You create a child from my DNA—without my consent—and keep her hidden in an underground bunker for twelve years!" She shook her head as if trying to shake off a horsefly.  "Leo, this is crazy, even for you."
  Fontesca grabbed handfuls of his hair.  "I wanted to tell you, but she wasn't ready.  I spent decades creating her DNA using a twelve-nucleotide structure: four from biology, six out of nano-biology's eight, and two completely new nucleotides.  Do you have any idea what complexities are involved? The number of possible combinations is twenty-seven times that found in all of nature—more when you factor in nature's amino acid redundancy.  Old-style nano-biology was simple in comparison." He paused for breath.  "The twenty-first-century world was afraid of nanotech and limited the first version to artificial structures that couldn't interfere with natural biology.  All that time we were only replicating nature—not trying to surpass it."
  Jack kept his face stony, and crossed his legs.  Fontesca was insane.  He'd grown up admiring the man's genius, had studied with him, hoped one day to work at the great man's side.  In all that time, he'd never considered the psychology of a man who didn't only want to play God; he wanted to best him.
  "Next-generation nano-biology is designed to interact with nature, to evolve."
  "Why, Leo?" Alexa asked, and from her tone it was obvious she wasn't interested in the specifics of the technology.
  
  Leo knelt in front of Alexa and took her hand in his.  "Because I needed someone to love; someone en-.  tirely mine.  I wanted you, innocent, before the trauma that fossilized your heart.  I wanted to protect you from poverty, disease, loss.  I would have told you about her—when the time was right."
  Alexa pulled Leo to his feet, bones crunched together in his hand.  "Twelve years, Leo." They stood eye to eye.  "She's been alive twelve years."
  "Isobel," Fontesca rasped, "is my crowning glory— and my greatest sorrow." His voice was on the edge of tears, but he held Alexa's gaze.  "I failed her.  It was a stupid, unforgivable mistake.  We live in a nano- -biology world.  It's everywhere, like oxygen: in the water we drink, the dust that covers us, the very air we breathe into our lungs.  When I quickened Isobel, I didn't take that into account." His gaze slid over to Jack.  "She didn't grow up like a normal child, exposed to background levels of nano-biology over the first three years of life as her immune system developed.  Her immune system—I designed it myself—was fully intact the moment she was born."
  Jack had studied immunology from the time he was diagnosed.  He knew what was coming, but he let Fontesca say the words.  Confession was good for the soul.
  "The old-style nano-biology in her lungs and bloodstream triggered a severe histamine response.  Her throat started to swell shut with her second breath.  Such a precious tiny infant, convulsing and blue in my hands." His voice trembled.  "It took me eight minutes to synthesize an epi-pen.  Another year to reverse the brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation.  I couldn't risk that happening again.  Even as few as three first-generation nano-biology particles are enough to trigger a response."
  "So you put her in a glass box for the rest of her life," Jack said.  He was furious on Isobel's behalf.  It wasn't fair: her creation, becoming allergic, forced to
  
spend the rest of her life in solitary confinement, all because Fontesca wanted something to love? "You're not fit to be a father.  Next time, adopt a puppy."
  "You fixed her brain damage," Alexa said.  "You couldn't fix an allergy?"
  "Don't you think I tried!" Fontesca snapped.  "Brain damage is a structural problem.  She was a newly born infant, she hadn't learned anything, she didn't have neural mapping to destroy.  I reconstructed her brain back to its original state.  But an immune response isn't static or centrally located.  It's like Gaia-Net, a distributed group of cooperating entities, constantly responding to the environment, constantly evolving.  I tried to rewrite its programming, but the allergenic response kept recurring.  A bacterial culture, I would have destroyed and regrown, but not Isobel, not my daughter."
  Fontesca gestured to Jack with an upraised palm.  "It was the same dilemma I had with Jack.  Medical nano-biology has been perfected over two hundred years and can cure any ill—except an allergy to nano-biology itself.  I had an infinite toolbox—of tools I could not use."
  "What about this next-generation nano-biology?" Alexa challenged.  "Couldn't you use that?"
  "It took tens of thousands of scientists two centuries to hone modern nano-biology medical techniques.  I couldn't replicate that in a more complex system, working alone."
  "What did you do, Leo?" Alexa asked him.  "I know you didn't give up.  You can't leave a puzzle unfinished; it's not your nature." She jabbed a finger at the roof.  "Tell me why you set off the attacks that have brought down the wrath of every Deathless on the planet." A head shorter than Fontesca, she was still menacing.  "They're not going away.  If any of us are going to walk out of here alive, I need to know what you did."
"I-It was supposed to be a palliative.  Internal to her lungs and bloodstream.  Unable to live outside her body."
  "What was?" Alexa's eyes were murderous.  "What did you do, Leo?"
  He squirmed under her inquisition.  Deathless himself, and Alexa's architect, he couldn't be afraid of her.  Fontesca knew what she was capable of.  Yet he was flustered, clearly uncomfortable.
  A chill ran down Jack's spine.  "The disassembler-it's next-generation nano-biology, isn't it? Escaped from your lab."
  Fontesca was silent a moment before he answered.  "I built the disassembler," he confessed, spittle flecking his lower lip.  "God help me, I built it to save her—but I built it wrong."
  "You knew," Jack said.  "When you showed us the video in Lucius's audience chamber.  You knew where it had come from."
  "Not for certain." Leo shook his head.  "The disassembler was created to be specific to her DNA.  It needed her unique cellular machinery to replicate.  It shouldn't have been able to survive more than a few milliseconds outside her body.  At first I didn't want to believe the incident had anything to do with her."
"But it did," Alexa said flatly.
  "I don't know how," he insisted.  "I use an incendiary air lock.  After food or a package is delivered to her, I take the empty air lock's temperature up to a level that nothing, not even her disassemblers, could survive.  Nothing leaves her chamber that is not incinerated, but—" He twisted his fingers into a painful rope.  "The bioload of disassemblers that Isobel produces is a thousand times what I designed for.  If even two or three disassemblers survived—The air lock vents to the upper atmosphere.  It could have caused the destruction we saw."
  Jack felt Pard Holloway dying in his lap, smelled again the scents of his blood, cordite, and grinding stone.  He jumped out of his seat and pushed Alexa
  
aside, confronting Fontesca.  "You set Pard up," he accused.  "Sent us to Tibet to blaze a trail that Vali-ente's assassins could follow.  Then when he was dead, you could tell the Deathless that the disassembler was Pard's doing."
  Fontesca's eyes were filled with sorrow.  "No.  Not intentionally.  I only wanted to deflect attention away from myself.  I had no idea Valiente and Gottsberg would go so far.  I only wanted to buy time to relocate Isobel.  I did not know Pard had such powerful enemies."
  The ceiling overhead rumbled with several rapid-fire thunderclaps.
  Jack glanced up.  The walls were bolstered with nano-biology, engineered to survive anything short of a direct nuclear explosion.  Then again, all it would take was the tiniest of cracks in Isobel's quarantine, and the reinforcements would dissolve, leaving Jack and the others in an unstable cavern beneath twenty thousand tons of basalt.
  "Powerful enemies?" Alexa threw her hands up in exasperation.  "Leo, do you have any idea what you've done? You created something that deconstructs nano-biology, something that can kill the Deathless, something that threatens civilization itself—and you didn't think they would strike back?" She gestured at the reverberating ceiling above them.  "You just thought you could hide out in this bunker until the furor died down? The Deathless are the most ruthless and powerful people in the world." Alexa stepped forward and bounced her palms off Fontesca's chest.  "And the only thing that can kill them—has killed hundreds—is you."
The building around them shook again.
  Alexa's mouth twisted into a grimace of disgust.  "You may be a brilliant scientist, but you're a lousy strategist."
  Fontesca fell back into an office chair.  "I knew that once they learned of the disassembler, they would
  
come after her—after us.  She's too valuable a weapon.  That's why I sent the packages to destroy the worst of the Deathless, to turn them against each other." His hands trembled as he raised them in a gesture of surrender.  "I underestimated the disassembler's potency.  The packages were supposed to destroy a room, a building—not cities."
  Images of St.  Petersburg dissolving behind them as they ran filled Jack's mind.  Thousands dead and dying, crying out for help that would never come.  When he spoke, his voice was barely audible.  "You sent them."
  Either Fontesca didn't hear or he ignored Jack.  His attention was all for Alexa.  "Hate me.  I deserve it.  But please, help me save Isobel."
  
25
A
lexa lowered her head.  "Why Elysium?" she whispered.  Even after all Fontesca had revealed, she'd hoped that unleashing the disassembler on Elysium had been a mistake, an unplanned accident.  Sending death to far-off places was nothing compared to destroying people you saw every day, with whom you exchanged pleasantries, shared meals.  It was the worst kind of betrayal.
  She grabbed a handful of Fontesca's tunic and twisted the neckline tight.  She raised him out of his seat until they were nose to nose.  "Thirty-eight children—innocent children—as precious as Isobel is to you—died in your attack on Elysium." She was shorter than Fontesca, so his feet trailed the ground.  She cinched the fabric tighter.  "Lucius I might someday forgive—there were times I wanted to kill him myself—but nothing is worth killing children."
  "Isobel," Fontesca choked.  He reached up and pulled her hands slowly apart, his strength overwhelming hers.  When had he become so strong?
  He fell to his knees on the floor.  "Isobel is worth anything." He grabbed the armrest of the chair and pulled himself upright.  "Isobel is perfection: beautiful, intelligent, unique.  She is the future of mankind."
  Alexa took a step back, wary.  If Fontesca had upgraded his conversion, he might be stronger than she was.  Stronger than any Deathless alive.  What he didn't
  
have was her years of combat experience.  "Isobel is a menace.  She's not the future of mankind—she's its destruction."
  The walls shook again, and in the silence that followed, Alexa could hear the children in the outer room screaming.  At any moment an explosion might crack Isobel's quarantine.  Even the smallest hole would be enough to release the disassemblers.
  "She's your daughter," Fontesca protested, his watery eyes filled with disbelief.  "You have to save her."
  Alexa took a step toward the hallway.  "If Isobel destroys civilization, what's left of humanity to reseed the earth? A handful of inbred religious fanatics? Buddhist monks?"
  Fontesca stretched out his hand to her.  "You wouldn't harm her.  She's your flesh and blood."
  Alexa felt the local network surge with transmis-.  sions, detailing the positions of commandos and assassins outside the door.  The bunker was alive around her, responsive to all commands made within its walls.  Fontesca had considered his hideout so secret and secure that he hadn't added internal security.  Scanning .  the building, she instantly located Isobel's quarantine room.
  Alexa pulled the environmental suit out of her pocket and with inhuman speed slipped it on.  "Leo," she irised a tunnel in the nano-biology walls, "all my kin are dead."
  Jack was stunned.  Alexa and Fontesca's confrontation had happened so quickly.  Alexa had disappeared through a tunnel, then Fontesca had donned an environmental suit and opened a tunnel in the wall to cut her off.  In their haste, they left him behind.  What threat or help could he possibly be? He was only mortal.
  It was impossible for Jack to overtake the two Deathless.  He couldn't bend the walls to his will.  He couldn't  match  their  speed.   There  was,  however,
  
something he could do.  He crossed the room to the waist-high counter that supported Fontesca's nano-biology lab.
  Jack opened the lab's silver cover, unfolding it like a book.  The left side was a projector that displayed a holographic interactive model of the molecules being manipulated.  Without a network connection, Jack couldn't think the lab to life, so it sat inert and unresponsive.  But there was a chance—Fontesca had programmed voice-command crutches for Jack during his quarantine, and if Fontesca was careful around Isobel, he would have often worn his environmental suit in the bunker.  There was a chance—
"Display."
  The gray surface on the left glowed and an image of three-dimensional blocks appeared a foot above its surface.  The blocks were labeled by functionality:
RECORDS, WORK IN PROGRESS, NEW PROJECT, INCINERATE.  The last command was a safeguard every nano-biology workstation possessed, the ability to raise the working crucibles to solar temperatures and obliterate any structure within.  A protection against nano-biology particles escaping into the wild.  And utterly useless if the researcher released them intentionally.  Jack touched a gloved finger to the RECORDS block.  Listings for Fontesca's laboratory diary filled the air, ordered from most recent backward.  Jack opened the latest entry and began to read.
  Alexa dashed through the tunnel she'd formed.  She had to get to Isobel before Fontesca did.  She concentrated on the pounding of her feet, the rasp of breath through her lungs, and didn't dwell on what she would do when she found Isobel.
  She turned a corner and heard screams—and the spatter of automated gunfire.  She skidded to a stop and paused, her hands on the wall of the tunnel.  The children were on the other side.
  
  "Please don't—" Sarah screamed.  Her voice was lost in another barrage.
  Alexa glanced down the tunnel.  If Fontesca reached Isobel before she did, they might escape.  "Shit!"
  Hans's keening, terror-filled wail decided her.  Alexa parted the wall and stepped into combat.
  Ten armored men trotted down the curved stairs, automatic rifles at the ready.  Two more men at the base of the stairs held assault rifles on the crowd of children.  Sarah and Louis stood in front of them, waving their arms in surrender.
  "Don't move," said one of the soldiers.  His face was covered by a goggled helmet that made him look like a fly.
Sarah and Louis froze, hands extended.
  Louis was closest to the wall as Alexa stepped through, and she could see sweat sliding down the side of his gray-stubbled cheek.
  Hans kicked out of Devon's hold.  He screeched "Lexa!" and ran toward her as fast as his pudgy little legs could pump.
  The soldier who had given the order tracked the boy with his rifle.  His hand tensed around the trigger.
  "No!" Louis dove sideways, placing his body between the bullets and the boy.  His body twisted in midair.
  Alexa launched herself across the room, knocking the soldier's rifle arm toward the roof.  The spitting weapon got off half a dozen rounds before it flew free.  Three bullets hit her in the waist, hip, and thigh.  Alexa extruded her arm blade and slashed down and sideways, taking his head.  The soldier wasn't Deathless, just a body-modded human.  There was no time to glance back to see what damage the other three bullets had done.  His head hit the floor, and she'd just made thirteen new enemies.
  Alexa charged the other soldier on the ground, snaked her arm around his and, using his body as a
  
shield, forced him to fire a barrage up the stairs.  The troops above retreated and returned fire, making him dance with the impact.
  "Get the children into the tunnel," Alexa shouted over her shoulder.  In that quick glance she saw Louis on the ground, bloodied.
  Sarah worked over him, tearing a bandage from her underskirt.
"Now!" Alexa ordered.
  Was the woman a fool? From the smell, Alexa knew he'd been gut shot.  They didn't have the time or materials to treat him.  Alexa liked the cantankerous old pilot, but Louis DeGroot was a dead man.
  She walked up the first three stairs, directing the soldier under her hands like a puppet, firing his assault rifle.  His goggles hid his face, made him seem more insect than human.  Alexa was grateful; it made it easier when she snapped his neck.  Only when she'd driven the rest of his comrades up around the bend of the staircase did she notice that he and his gear were protected by a clear environmental suit like the ones she and Jack wore.  His beheaded partner wore one too.  Where the hell had they gotten those?
  There wasn't time for puzzles.  Alexa's own suit was perforated by bullet holes.  She stripped the soldier with a single zipper pull and pulled off his environmental suit.  It took only a few seconds.  But that was long enough for her friends upstairs to regroup and toss a grenade, bouncing like a child's ball, down the stairs.
  Alexa picked it up and tossed it back, satisfied by the screams topside.  But she wasn't fooled.  They would be back, with reinforcements.
  The environmental suit and two rifles tossed over her shoulder, Alexa scooped up two toddlers and ran toward the tunnel.  She shoved them into the hands of Devon and Mari, who stood at the mouth of the tunnel, shepherding the younger children in.  Their eyes
  
were wide and shell-shocked, but they did what needed doing.  Good kids.
  Sarah still crouched over Louis, her hands pressed against his abdomen, crying.
  Alexa grabbed her elbow and pulled her away.  A fresh gush of blood poured out of Louis's stomach.
  "What are you doing?" Sarah screamed, clawing her way back toward Louis.  "He'll die."
  Alexa shoved Sarah harder, sending her sprawling in front of the tunnel.  "He's dead already.  We can't save him.  If we try"—she nodded at the stairs—"we'll all die."
  "She's right," Louis groaned.  His left hand cupped his belly, holding in his intestines.  "Save the kids."
  Sarah struggled against Devon.  "This is supposed to be a world of miracles—of people who are immortal.  Save him!"
  She was right.  In almost any other situation, Louis's wounds would have been trivial to repair.  But not here, not now.  Alexa looked at the man at her feet.  Damn.
"A favor?" Louis asked.
  Alexa knelt, extruding the blade from her arm.  "I'll make it quick."
  Louis shook his head.  "Not my style." He reached his free hand toward the guns at her shoulder.  "All I want is a chance to get even."
  Alexa hefted the guns for weight, and left him the one with more ammunition.  She braced the gun under his armpit, and aimed it at the staircase.  All he'd need do would be to pull the trigger.
  Alexa bent and kissed the dying man's lips, tasting blood.  It wouldn't be long.  She was glad of that.  "Give 'em hell."
  Then she grabbed Sarah, carried her forcibly over the threshold, and with a thought, sealed the tunnel opening behind them.
When she let go of Sarah, the Mennonite woman sprang to her feet, clawing at Alexa's face.  "You pitiless harlot, you can't abandon him!"
  Alexa slapped her.  Hard enough to whip Sarah's head around and knock her to the floor.  The Crack rang through the tunnel.
The whimpering children fell silent.
  "Louis was man enough to die for these kids.  Be woman enough to save them."
  Sarah looked up, blood dribbling from her nose and the corner of her mouth.  "I'll see you damned in hell."
  Tiny hands clutched at Alexa's pant leg, and she looked down to see Hans.  His face was pale and very, very scared.  Blood spattered his face, but none of it seemed to be his.  With a silent upwelling of gratitude, Alexa hefted him onto her hip and hugged him close.
  "I'm sure you will," Alexa answered.  "But not today." She waded through the group of children, leading them up the tunnel toward Fontesca's lab.
  Behind them, from the other side of the wall, came the staccato rattle of gunfire.
Jack nearly ran into Alexa rounding a corner.  She
looked wild, a blood-streaked toddler on her hip and
an assault rifle slung over her shoulder.  The rest of
.  the children followed close on her heels.  At the far
end of the crowd was a tight-lipped Sarah.
  He came up short, nearly dropping Fontesca's nano-biology lab, which he'd tucked under his arm.  "Where's Louis?"
"Gone," Alexa said.
  "She let him die," Sarah cried from behind the children.
  Alexa continued as if the other woman had never spoken.  "An attack force wearing environmental suits." She nodded at the folds of plastic draped over her shoulder.  "Don't know where they got them.  We're totally blocked in."
  "No, we're not." Jack tapped the lab under his arm.  "I skimmed Fontesca's records.  There's a tunnel, a
  
nano-biology-powered escalator, all the way up to the summit of Sterling Caldera.  At the top is a concealed heliport."
  Shifting her weight, Alexa handed Hans over to Jack.  "Get the children to safety." She shed her damaged environmental suit like a molting snake and zipped up the one she had taken off the dead soldier, leaving the hood open.
"Where are you going?" Jack asked.
  Alexa ducked into the passageway that Fontesca had opened to cut her off.  "Unfinished business."
  The tunnel shook, nearly throwing Alexa off her feet as she ran full tilt down the shaft.  Up ahead she heard a child's scream and redoubled her speed.
  Fontesca crouched before Isobel's quarantine unit, his hand on the glass.  "Shh.  It's all right, honey.  Everything's going to be all right."
  Isobel's bright eyes were filled with tears and her chin quivered.  She huddled against the glass, trying to draw Fontesca's comfort through its cold, hard surface.
  Without looking back at Alexa, Fontesca said in a lower tone, pitched to stay on this side of the glass.  "I've thought it through.  There's only one way to save her."
  Another explosion shook the bunker and with it came the sound of falling rubble.  Isobel shrieked, her limbs flailing for purchase against the barrier.
  "Only one way to save her and the others you hold so dear.  Her disassemblers can destroy their weapons." Fontesca stood and reached toward a control panel beside Isobel's quarantine unit.  "Zip up your hood."
  Alexa saw what he intended.  "Leo, no!" She pointed at a pile of plastic at his feet.  "Put on your suit."
  Leo kicked it over and Alexa saw the rent in the hip line.  The seam had parted under stress.  "I ran.
  
Too fast." He shook his head.  "But you can't outrun fate."
  Alexa looked up and met his dark, intense eyes.  Eyes that had shepherded her into immortality.  "Leo, we'll find another way."
  "You talk fierce.  But you won't let a child die," Fontesca continued in his low-pitched voice.  A ghost of a smile touched his lips.  "I've seen you in the children's wing.  It's not your nature." Before Alexa could stop him, Fontesca pushed the button.  The glass barrier sheathed open.  He knelt in front of Isobel, arms outstretched.  "Come give Papa a kiss."
  Alexa halted in disbelief.  With numb fingers she zipped up the hood of her environmental suit.  She prayed Fontesca hadn't doomed them both.
  Isobel hesitated at the threshold.  "You said I had to stay in the room.  That it was dangerous to leave."
  "Hurry, sweetie, there isn't time." Fontesca's fingertips trembled in midair.  "Just one quick kiss."
  Isobel ran into his arms and threw hers around his neck.  She kissed his cheek and laid her head on his shoulder.  "I've always wanted to touch you without the plastic."
  Tears streaked through the dust of Fontesca's face, spreading from the mark of her kiss.  "I know, precious one.  Me too."
  Then IsobePs arms collapsed around nothingness.  She toppled forward into dust.  Fontesca was gone.
  
26
I
sobel landed on her hands and knees in the dust of what had once been her father.  She looked up, her mouth distorted with desolation.  When she spoke, her voice was the barest squeak.  "Papa?" She whipped her head around, panicked.  "Papa, where are you?" She froze, staring at the smudges of black dust on her hands and arms.
  The nano-biology floor under Isobel evaporated like alcohol on a griddle, a spreading pool of dust and the original stone floor of the bunker opening around her.  The destruction flowed up the walls, dissolving them and exposing metal girders centuries old.  The steel was pocked with rust and groaned under the sudden resumption of the ceiling's load.
  Alexa grabbed the little girl's hand and pulled her to her feet.  "We have to go."
  "No!" Isobel kicked and thrashed.  Her whole body swung from her delicate wrist.
  Alexa shifted her hand for a more solid grasp on the child's forearm.
  Isobel pulled a stylus from the front pocket of her overalls.  "You killed Papa! This is all your fault! We were fine until you came here." Her face reddened with rage.  She swung the stylus at Alexa's side.  With her whole body, Isobel screeched, "I hate you!"
Twisting her body, Alexa dodged the blow.  She gave Isobel a shake.  "Your father asked me to protect you."
  Isobel dug the tip of the stylus into the juncture of Alexa's thumb and forefinger, catching the membrane of Alexa's environmental suit.  "I'll rip it," the little girl threatened.  "I'll rip it and you'll die." The dark scowl on Isobel's face showed her deadly resolve.
  Alexa froze.  The stylus point wasn't razor sharp, just a tip for drawing free-form art.  But it was solid enough to rip a hole.  Alexa was fast, but even the tiniest rent would be the end of her.  She'd just seen evidence of how quick and relentless dissolution was.
  Alexa released Isobel and jumped back, hands raised in supplication.  "Please.  I'm here to help—"
  The stone floor under their feet shook and roiled, sending up clouds of black dust.  Isobel coughed, choking on the residue that recently had been her father.
  With the girl distracted, Alexa knocked the stylus away.  She tucked Isobel under her arm, holding her far enough forward that she couldn't bite.  "I'm saving you, whether you like it or not."
  The metal ceiling buckled, groaning under the weight of rock above.  The constant pounding of explosions outside had made the region unstable.
  "Crick!" Isobel shrieked, twisting her body around.  "I won't leave Crick!"
  Alexa had no idea what she was yowling about.  There wasn't time to go back.  She hustled Isobel down the hallway, the girl bouncing on her hip.
Isobel went limp, sobbing.
  Alexa turned a corner and was brought up short.  Fontesca's lab was filled with rubble.  A landslide engulfed the far wall, blocking the way to the airstrip.  Alexa lowered Isobel to the floor and cupped her hands.  "Jack! Where are you?"
  A muffled cry from the other side of the rock.  The floor shook again, and Alexa heard the rattle of footsteps charging down the staircase in the front room.
"Effing hell!" Alexa rolled rocks out of the way, careful not to tear her environmental suit.  She had to clear the path before the soldiers caught up with her and Isobel.  "Damn it all," she swore, rotating a boulder out of the way.  "Help me," Alexa shouted over her shoulder.  "If you want to live, help me clear this."
Isobel gave no reply.
  Furious and frustrated, Alexa opened a path through the rocks, her hands a blur.  Suddenly, the wall collapsed outward, and Jack's hand pushed through.  His face peered at her through the small opening they'd cleared.  "Hurry," he urged.
Alexa spun to grab Isobel and push the girl through.
Isobel was gone.
  In a heartbeat.  Gone.  Girl-sized tracks in the dust led back the way they'd come.
  Crick.  Alexa suddenly knew what Crick was.  The kitten.  Isobel had gone back for her kitten, the only living thing she'd been able to touch her whole life.
  "Isobel!" Alexa ran after the girl.  The walls shook with another detonation, throwing her to the ground.  The girders that held up the ceiling squealed a metallic protest and buckled.  A crossbeam broke loose.  Alexa scurried backward on her hands and butt.  The metal slammed into the floor where she had been just seconds before.
  She pulled herself into a crouch; there wasn't room to stand.  "Isobel! Answer me!"
No reply save the distant sounds of gunfire.
  Alexa shouted with every ounce of breath in her lungs: "Isobel!"
Silence.
  Alexa pounded a fist into her forehead and fought back stinging tears.  Why did every goddamned person who shared her DNA die young? Damn Fontesca for giving her someone else to lose.
  For a moment despair and self-pity overwhelmed her.  It'd be easy to take Fontesca's way out, unzip her suit.  Then she shook herself fiercely and crawled to the far end of Fontesca's lab.  The collapse had shaken
  
open the hole she and Jack had started.  Alexa pulled herself through on her stomach.
"Where's Isobel?" asked Jack.
  Alexa met his eyes and saw shock register on his face as he took in her expression.
"Gone."
  The word was a hole in her stomach.  She'd failed so many people recently: Lucius, the children, Leo, and now a daughter she would never know.  "Come on," she said, pushing her way past Jack.  "It's not safe here."
  They stepped onto the escalator that spiraled around the molten core of Sterling Caldera, the central volcano of Elysium that Fontesca had raised to create the island.  It tickled underfoot as thousands of cilia carried them up the incline.  Nanology cooled the black basalt surrounding them, and a bioluminescent layer covered the ceiling, bathing the tunnel in a greenish glow.  They were two-thirds of the way up the mountain when they caught up to Sarah and the children.  Alexa couldn't see past the crowd.
"What's the holdup?" Jack asked.
  Sarah's voice sounded panicked.  "The magic carpet underfoot—it vanishes.  The tunnel ahead is in utter darkness."
  Alexa pushed her way forward.  The escalator was indeed gone, a powdering of dust all that remained on the basalt steps.  A cry from Jack made her look back.
"It's gone here, too.  It's the disassembler."
  They were plunged into blackness.  Several of the children screamed.
  Her environmental suit suddenly feeling as thin as tissue paper, Alexa touched the tunnel walls.  Without the nano-biology refrigeration, the heat from the volcano's core was going to get unbearable.
  She wondered if the tunnel was structurally sound without its nano-biology reinforcements.  Alexa thought of Hu-Dong, buried beneath nine hundred stories of the Seattle Sterling Nanology building, and
  
shuddered.  Immortality trapped in darkness under an immovable pile of debris.  She didn't want to share his fate.
  Alexa triggered the emergency lights on her nano-biology bodysuit.  Light glared along the suit's many seams, outlining her form with brilliant illumination.
  "Follow me." Alexa gestured, waving her arm up the incline.  "We have to keep moving."
"Inhuman," Sarah breathed.
  Alexa would have been insulted, but she'd given up any claim to humanity long before.  She pushed ahead.  They were losing precious time; the stone steps were uncomfortably warm, even through Alexa's double layers of environmental suit and boots.  The barefoot children whimpered with each step.
  Sarah knelt and began to tear more strips from her underskirt to pad the feet of the younger children.
  Alexa jerked her up by her elbow.  "There's no time.  We have to hurry to the top."
  Putting her elbow free, Sarah glared at Alexa.  "You'd let their feet blister?"
  "Better that than see them burned alive." Alexa encouraged a whining four-year-old with a firm hand.  "Kayla, show me how fast you can run up the stairs.  The faster you run, the cooler your feet will feel."
  Wide-eyed with anger, Sarah cast a silent appeal to Jack.
  Jack pulled off his shoes and slipped them onto a seven-year-old girl.  They fit her like clown shoes, but she smiled in shy gratitude.  He picked up the nearest toddler and followed Alexa's lead.  "She's right," he told Sarah.  "We have to hurry.  The heat will only get worse."
  Sarah said nothing more, only picked up the nearest child and began climbing, her chin jutting out stubbornly.
  Jack didn't know what to do about the growing feud between Sarah and Alexa.  They'd figure it out later.
  
Right now he needed them both to cooperate.  The stone steps burned his feet.  The children walked on their heels and the outsides of their feet, protecting their tender arches.
How much farther did this hellish tunnel go?
  The lights from Alexa's bodysuit flickered as she ran lightly up the stairs, creating disturbing shadows on the roughrhewn walls.
  It felt like suffocation, this many bodies in an enclosed top-hot space.  The children were tired and frightened past endurance.  They whined and complained.  Some of the older ones sobbed quietly as they walked, their pain evident only in the shuddering of their shoulders.
  "Come on," he encouraged.  "It's only a little farther to the top.  The sooner we get there, the sooner we get to Montana.  I'll take you to a ranch that has clear skies, mountains, dogs and horses."
  A little girl slumped to the floor, then jumped up crying and shaking her palms.  Jack pulled her onto his back, careful not to bump her head on the tunnel ceiling.  "One step.  Everybody just take one step— then one step more."
  In the dim light, he exchanged a look with Sarah.  Her hair had come loose from its braid and curled around her face in the heat, frizzing like dandelion fluff.  Her cheeks and forehead were flushed from heat and exertion, and sweat streamed down her neck.  She had never seemed so beautiful.
  So slowly that Jack thought at first it was only his imagination, the tunnel began to grow brighter.
  Devon, who was with Alexa near the front of the group, yelped, "I see sky!"
  The flagging children perked up.  "Let me see!" "Me too!" "Out of my way!" "Hur-ry! My feet hurt!"
  Another twenty feet, and Jack tasted fresh air.  It was nectar after breathing sweat and fear for the past twenty minutes.  Whatever door had once graced the
  
end of the tunnel had dissolved, leaving only a dusting of ashes on the last few steps as testimony to its existence.
  Jack helped Sarah up the last step to freedom, following on her heels.  They stood on top of Sterling Caldera, ten thousand feet above sea level.  The heliport was hidden from aerial view by a rock overhang.
  All of Elysium lay before them.  It was an island aflame: the trees of the parklands burning, beaches scarred by crawling submarines more turtle than machinery, the fireworks of an ongoing campaign of shell and mortar fire over the entrance to the bunker.  Five different armies seemed to be laying siege to Elysium; the Deathless were not leaving the destruction of the disassembler to chance.
  Jack was grateful they had survived the tunnel.  The sooner they left Elysium, the safer they'd be.
  Alexa knelt over a pile of ashes, digging an gloved finger through them.  "How did the disassembler get here before us? I thought it spread slowly."
  Jack barely heard her.  His eyes squinting in the shadow of the rock shelf, he turned in a complete circle.  "Where's the plane?"
  Alexa dribbled dust from her fingertips.  "Looks like four, maybe five drones."
  "No." Jack shook his head.  "Fontesca's records clearly showed he had an old-style cargo plane gassed up and ready to go.  It was to be his transportation off Elysium in the event the rogue disassembler escaped quarantine.  He would never have trusted a drone under those circumstances." He raised his hands.  "So where's the plane?"
  Alexa left the safety of the rock shelf and climbed down the crater rim.  She was quickly out of view.  A few minutes later her voice floated up.  "Jack, come here."
  Jack rushed to the edge and peered down.  There was a second rock ledge.  He followed her path, slip-
  
ping and sliding down until he stood in its shade.  Set into the basalt were loops of steel.  Tie-downs for an aircraft that wasn't there.
  "But Fontesca's last entry this morning mentioned the plane.  He was—"
  Alexa pointed mutely at a trail of footprints through the layer of reddish-brown silt that covered everything.  Small prints, as might be left by a twelve-year-old girl.
  "That's impossible," Jack said.  "You said Isobel was killed." Horror widened his eyes.  "Fontesca wouldn't have made two!"
  "I lost her in a cave-in," Alexa admitted.  Her eyes shifted from Jack's, and her mouth worked like she wanted to spit.  "I assumed she was dead."
  "But how could she have gotten here ahead of us? We'd have crossed paths in the tunnel."
  "There." Alexa pointed into the farthest corner of the rock ledge.
  It took Jack's eyes a moment to adjust after coming out of the bright Elysium sun.  Then he made out the rectilinear shape.  "Is it—"
  "A pre-nano-biology elevator.  When she passed us, that must be when our escalator vanished." Alexa shook her head.  "What I don't understand is how Isobel could fly the plane."
  That Jack could answer; it had been in Fontesca's diary.  "Fontesca upgraded the twenty-first-century jet to full autopilot, pre-nano-biology silicon-based electronics."
  Jack sat down hard on the ledge overlooking the island.  Their only hope of escaping the island was gone, along with a little girl who could unwittingly destroy the world.
  He was hiding on top of a mountain with thirty burned and terrified children, without supplies.  Below lay five armies of soldiers, all with search-and-destroy orders.
  Jack pressed his forearms over his roiling stomach and willed himself not to throw up.
  
27
I
sobel nuzzled Crick's fur.  She was in the pilot's seat of the jet.  The headrest cradled the air six inches above her head, and her feet dangled above the pedals.  She didn't notice her surroundings as she cried into the cat's neck.  There was no sound, just silent, gulping tears.  It hurt too much for sound.
  The Siamese kitten licked her chin with his rough pink tongue.  He seemed to share her preference for quiet.  He had been uncharacteristically noiseless, not mewling once since she had dragged him from under her bed.
  He had shivered inside the front of her overalls as she fought her way to the elevator, crawling over rocks and through clouds of dust.
  She'd heard—but hadn't answered—that evil woman's calls.  Isobel knew from fairy tales that the witch always pretended to be nice, just before she cut the children up and threw them in the oven.  No way was that woman her mother—she had to be an impostor, come to destroy Papa.
  Isobel did as Papa had taught her and found the elevator shaft.  He'd shown her simulations of how its counterbalance worked.  She'd pushed the single button that took her to the top of Haleakala.  She cried harder as she remembered the game he'd made of memorizing the access code, Silly Sally Ate Three Pepperonis in a Cup: SS83PC.  He'd even brought her
  
three slices of pepperoni—her favorite—in a porcelain teacup so she would never forget.
  He was the best papa in the world, kind and funny, and always playing with her—except for the times he had to go away.  And anyway he'd brought Crick to keep her company.
  Until she came along.  That witch in black.  Didn't the evil ones always wear black? If Isobel ever saw her again, she'd make her pay.  She'd tear off her plastic and crumble her into black dust.  Just like—
  —Oh no—just like Papa.  The memory of her first and only touch of her father's stubbly cheek curled Isobel into a ball.  He'd said it was all right to step out of the room.  That it was safe.  She'd believed him.  That's what he was always working on, all the tests, making it safe for her outside.  She had never guessed that the one in danger—all that time—was him.
  "Papa." The word was a wail compressed into a whisper.  She clutched Crick tighter, pressing her face into his fur.
The kitten squirmed, then settled into a raspy purr.
  The worst had been when she'd stepped into the plane.  The autopilot had greeted her, in Papa's voice.  For one glorious second she'd known it was all just a stupid mistake.  Papa wasn't really dead, he was just hiding up here, waiting for her to find him.
"Papa!" she'd cried in joy and disbelief.
  "Welcome," the autopilot had repeated, in Papa's voice, but not Papa.  A dead, machine voice.  "Please state your destination."
She had sobbed when she realized the truth.
  "I did not understand that.  Please state your destination."
  Isobel knew all the capitals of the North American Alliance, all the foreign capitals.  Papa had told her if anything happened to him, her mother—a sweet, loving woman with leaf-green eyes—would take care of her, would protect her from the world.  He'd told Isobel to go to Watershed Valley, Montana.  But Isobel's
  
mother wasn't from Montana.  She was Cajun.  Isobel wanted her mother now; she didn't want to wait for her at some sheep ranch.  She'd find Mother herself— and how proud her mother would be when Isobel appeared on her doorstep.
  In as firm a voice as she could muster, Isobel quavered, "New Orleans, Louisiana."
  Sarah hugged the baby she held over her shoulder.  He was sound asleep, his arms hanging limply from his shoulders, drool seeping into her dress collar.  At least someone was at peace.  Sarah stretched her mouth into a semblance of a confident smile and moved among the children, inspecting their burns and scrapes.  Nothing that wouldn't heal in time, but it was worst with the little ones.  Poor Hans had blisters between his toes and cried when she touched his feet.  She could just slap that pitiless harlot for forcing them to walk on hot rock.  Just because Alexa was invulnerable didn't mean others were.
  Jack had followed Alexa down the crater half an hour ago.  Whatever they were doing, she hoped Jack would come back soon.  They had to get the children off the mountain before dark, Sarah was unfamiliar with tropical climes, but she knew mountains.  Even in summer, they could be killing cold.
  "Look!" Devon was far out on the ledge, farther than Sarah would have liked, but she was too tired and sore to waste energy on rebukes.
"Is it Jack?"
"No.  Something's happening to the mountain."
  With a jolt of fear, Sarah hauled herself to her feet, careful not to wake the baby.  She walked cautiously to the ledge.  Far below were the soldiers that had tried to kill them—and had killed Louis.  The memory of those gunshots turned her bowels into water and made her breath catch in her throat.
"See the change?"
Sarah peered, squinting into the sunshine.  After a moment she realized what Devon meant.  Destruction poured down the mountain like the Red Sea, transforming machines of death into ashes.  Some things, older machines made of metal and plastic, survived, but the sleek craft that spewed fire like hell's own aviary and the crawling turtle-tanks on the beaches melted into nothingness.  Where the wave crested, the bright points of explosion faltered.  A line of ants ran from the change, and Sarah realized those must be men.  Were they so polluted with the new technology that they were endangered, like Alexa? Didn't they trust their clear magic suits to save them? Apparently not.
"Hey there," Jack called.  "Can you give us a hand?"
  Devon reached down and helped Jack and Alexa climb over the ledge.  They were covered in red grit.  Jack's face was drawn, and he didn't meet Sarah's eyes.
  "Can we leave now?" she asked him, hefting the baby higher on her shoulder.
  He leaned close to her and whispered, "No plane.  It's gone."
  Devon's eyes widened.  Despite Jack's low tone, he'd clearly overheard.
  "Don't worry," Sarah told him with more confidence than she felt.  "God will provide."
  Alexa murmured a curse that Sarah didn't catch, and didn't care to.  She wouldn't let the woman's hea-'   then ways infect her.
"Why not use the soldiers' planes?" she suggested.
  Jack brightened.  "It's not a bad idea.  Odds are the Deathless sent pre-nano-biology troop transports.  You wouldn't want your ground crew falling out of the sky."
  Alexa pulled at the environmental suit where it hugged her neck.  "Yes, great idea, only there are thousands of fully armed soldiers between us and the hypothetical planes.  Normally, I'd be all for those
  
odds, but with the disassembler in the air, the tiniest rip in my suit and I'm gone."
  "Actually," Sarah said, pointing at the line of retreating ants with her free hand, "I don't think they'll give you any trouble."
  Alexa glanced over her shoulder, saw the wave of destruction, and sucked in a breath.  "Holy Mother of God."
  Alexa raced down the mountain, cutting across the switchbacks and over the high desert that gave way to forest.  Only her heightened reflexes kept her from slamming into century plants and eucalyptus trees.
  Sarah's plan was the only one worth considering.  Still, Alexa didn't like it.  Chances were, not all of the soldiers had panicked.  Some might remain behind, confident that their environmental suits, or their lack of modifications, would protect them.  Soldiers Alexa would have to take out—without damaging her own suit.
  Easy for Sarah and Jack to lay out what had to be done from the safety of a hidden mountain sanctuary.  It was Alexa who had to implement it.
  She dodged right, around a flaming eucalyptus tree.  She was getting close.  She'd spotted the troop transport from the top of Sterling Caldera, using the telescopic vision of her reengineered irises.  She'd been able to spot three planes from her perch, and this was the nearest.
  The other concern, besides loyal troops, was the fact that sooner or later—probably sooner—the panicked soldiers would return to their posts.  Alexa planned to be gone before that happened.
  She slowed as she neared the landing spot.  The woods around her were thick with smoke from the bombing.  She skirted patches where the underbrush had burned, but still the ground was hot underfoot.  Alexa prayed the soles of her environmental suit
  
wouldn't melt.  She ran from cover to cover, zigzagging her approach on the plane.
  It was a wasted effort.  She didn't see any troops.  There was dust in addition to the smoke, and no small arsenal of pre-nano-biology weapons: assault rifles, bazookas, grenades.  The Deathless must have emptied the Smithsonian preparing for this campaign.  Mixed in among the, dust were environmental suits filled with soot, casualties of the smallest nicks and punctures.  Alexa thought uneasily of the damage she must have done to her suit running down the mountain.
  She picked up a suit and examined it briefly.  It was identical to the ones she and Jack wore, down to the zip closures.  Suits she'd thought limited to a production run of five.  Then she saw it: a tiny Russian flag painted on the shoulder.
"Petrovsky."
  The mayor of St.  Petersburg had made good use of the damaged suit she'd sent him, using it as a prototype.  Though she was surprised he'd accomplished it so quickly.  Of course, unlike Fontesca, Petrovsky hadn't had to worry about nano-biology contamination when he'd copied the suits.  He could use modern manufacturing methods.  He probably had access to a governmental nano-replicator, capable of copying items at a molecular level.
  That done, he'd sent his troops into Elysium.  Grave robber.  When the children were safe—and other matters dealt with—she'd pay Petrovsky a visit.  If it took decades to locate the worm's hidey-hole, so much the better; revenge was a draught that improved with age.
  It was then that she heard the heartbeat, fast and hard.  She might have caught it earlier if she hadn't been distracted by the suit.
  "PyKa BBepx!"A man wearing a pilot's flight suit under a clear environmental suit held a pistol in a firm two-handed grip.  His voice was commanding.
"You don't have to die," Alexa responded in Rus- sian.  "I have only come for the plane.  Step away and I will not kill you."
  Both eyebrows shot up in surprise.  "You are very sure of yourself."
  Alexa shifted her weight imperceptibly, readying herself.  "You know what I am."
  She saw his eyes flick and take in her skintight nano-biology bodysuit, the perfection of her features and body, her confident stance.
  In truth, Alexa was scared.  The disassembler had recently passed over this ground.  She was faster than this Russian, but all it would take was the merest nick, or for her suit to rip from strain as Fontesca's had, and she'd be so much grit for the garden path in winter.
  The Russian's hands twitched, whether to fire or surrender, Alexa didn't wait to see.  She launched herself at him, coming in low, under the bullet's trajectory, knocking into his waist.
  They fell, the man beneath her, well trained, already pivoting to hit and roll.
  Then he was on his back writhing in agony.  He cursed in Russian, his mouth frothing around the words.  It took only seconds.  When he stopped, Alexa nudged him with her foot.  A half-burned shoot of bamboo jutted up from the ground like a punji stick, tearing a fist-sized hole in the man's suit.  Not Deathless, just modified enough for the disassembler to be fatal.  No doubt Vasily had recruited the least modified of his men, but aside from a few pockets of humanity and children, everyone was modified these days.
  With an inward shudder, she prayed Vasily hadn't thought to send children.
  "BM xaM Oron!"A group of six men climbed the hill, returning from their panicked flight.  They raised assault rifles and fired.
  Moving as fast as thought, Alexa ducked into the troop transport and cranked the motor.
  More shouts from outside and the rat-tat-tat of bullets punctured the plane.
  
  It had been years since she'd flown this model, but it was like riding a bike.  Alexa engaged the vertical takeoff jets and flattened her pursuers with a violent gust of wind.  The sound of gunfire fading into the distance made her smile.
  At the rumble of a plane overhead Jack looked up with both hope and dread: hope that it was Alexa, dread that they'd been spotted by one of the enemy armies.  The right wing of the cargo plane dipped in greeting, and Jack released a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
  There wasn't any room in the crater for an improvised airstrip, and for a moment Jack feared they'd have to go down the mountain to rendezvous.  Then something miraculous happened; jets on the wings pivoted vertically and the big-bellied plane settled on the crater floor like a swan on a lake.
  Alexa popped open the cargo bay and waved them down.  "Hurry! I was spotted.  We don't have long."
  Jack helped Sarah and the older children lift the little ones over the ledge.  Many of the smallest were asleep, seeking refuge in slumber from exhaustion, fear, and the blisters on their feet.  Jack envied them their trust that the adults would take care of everything.
  He stepped onto the plane amid a bevy of children and paused when he saw the line of bullet holes.  He touched the blossomed metal.  They went all the way through the hull.
  Alexa helped an eleven-year-old boy up the last stair.  She saw Jack's gesture.  Their eyes locked.  "Previous owner didn't want to sell."
Jack didn't buy her flippancy.  "You all right?"
  Alexa made a show of scanning her arms and legs.  "Yep.  Still among the Deathless."
  When they were all loaded, Alexa pulled the door shut and hopped in the pilot's seat.  She revved the engine and the plane leapt into the air.  "Good news
  
is," she said over the plane's rumble, "the radio works."
  Jack climbed to the front of the plane and asked the question he didn't want to ask.  "How much fuel?"
  Alexa's hands and eyes were occupied, reading gauges, adjusting dials.  "Full tank.  Enough to get us halfway across the Pacific."
  Jack groaned and collapsed into the copilot's seat.  They'd failed.  After surviving the disassembler, soldiers' attacks on the bunker, the trek through the blistering tunnel, this was where it ended.  He wondered if the Deathless would accept their surrender.  He doubted it.
  Alexa tossed him a radio headset.  "Which is why it's a damn good thing the radio works.  Call in a midair refueling tanker."
  "But the disassembler—no one would be insane enough to risk—"
  "Offer triple—quintuple hazard pay.  Buy a fleet of mercenaries to guard the tanker from the Deathless forces.  Offer anyone who helps you free conversion.  Better yet, make the soldiers on our tail a better offer." A grin widened Alexa's face.  She gripped Jack's upper arm and shook him.  "I heard the news on the flight over: probate just cleared on Lucius's estate.  You're now the richest man alive, with income greater than the GNP of many continents.  Time to throw that weight around."
  Sarah looked up from the foot she was bandaging when Jack and Alexa emerged from the cockpit.  Jack was rumpled, with a puzzled, hopeful expression.  Alexa wore her usual expression of detached indifference.
  It irked Sarah how much they were a team.  It should have been her at Jack's side, helping him, comforting him.  Jack had told her that Alexa had been his nanny when he was a child, had raised him.  But Alexa didn't look like Sarah's idea of a mother figure,
  
clad in a skintight union suit more suited to harlotry than child care.  The transparent oversuit only further accented Alexa's curves, stretching tightly across her hips and breasts.
  Still, her first action was tending to the children.  She rearranged Hans's blanket and spoke soothingly to Devon and Mari, praising them for their bravery and help with the little ones.
  Sarah shook her head in confusion.  How could anyone so single-mindedly ruthless and blatantly sexual be kind? But she recalled how the children looked to Alexa for reassurance and protection, how Alexa put herself in danger for them.  Could someone that devoted and loving be all evil? It made no sense.
  The Bible said, "He who is not with me is against me." Which was Alexa? Sarah knew what her father's verdict would be: one look and he would cast her out as a harlot.  But Jack trusted the woman, treated her as an equal, a partner, a friend.  Who was right?
  Jack sat down next to Sarah, his hands on his knees.  "We've set course for Montana.  I've hired people to make sure no one bothers us at the ranch." He licked his lips nervously.  There was something he wasn't telling her.
  Sarah didn't ask what it was.  She leaned into him, feeling the firm warmth of his body along her shoulder, hip, and knee.  Even here, in this shuddering metal bucket, miles above the earth, surrounded by sleeping and sobbing children, touching him made her feel like a bride on her wedding day—made her long for the secrets of the wedding night.
  "I don't want to go home," Sarah said.  "I'm not the same girl who left." She brushed her hair back from her face and looked down at the dirt-smudged dress clinging to her legs.  Her petticoats had all gone to bandages.  "I don't know who I am anymore."
  Jack put his arm around her, a familiarity he would never have allowed himself in Watershed Valley.
  
"You're Sarah Wiens, the bravest, smartest, prettiest girl I know."
  Sarah bloomed under his praise, until she hit the wall: "girl." That's all she was to him—a girl, like his cousins they'd rescued from Elysium.
  Ruefully, she looked across the plane at Devon.  He had seemed so young during the crisis, so emotionally open compared to the men she knew, but looking at the size of him, the wisps of down on his cheek and upper lip, she realized he was her own age, perhaps even older.  Her face heated.
  Jack noticed her discomfiture and raised her chin with a knuckle.  "What's wrong?"
  "I—" There was no way to explain without embarrassing herself further.  "I'm worried what my father will say on my return.  I left without permission." Her flush deepened until it was almost painful.  "And without a chaperone."
  Jack pulled away from her, as if remembering himself.  "Surely your father won't think—I mean, he knows me.  And Louis was with us—"
  Sarah pressed her palms to her flaming cheeks.  "Two unrelated men are not chaperones.  As for knowing you—I'm not sure that will be a comfort to my father.  In his eyes, my virtue is compromised."
  Hope flared in his eyes.  "But you weren't alone with two men.  Alexa can vouch—" Then he looked at his buxom, black-clad guardian.
Alexa arched an eyebrow at him.
Jack sank back in his seat.  "Perhaps not."

28
A
lexa circled the military cargo plane over an empty pasture.  The Montana sky was blue-gray, threatening rain, perhaps even a storm later that night.  She set down with a bounce and a bump, misjudging the distance.  "Damn.  Damn.  Damn," she swore as she clicked the engine off.
  The squadron of fighter-drones Jack had hired to escort them to the mainland peeled off and headed for the perimeter to add their surveillance to the infantry's efforts.  Lucius's money had done its magic, though her heart still fluttered with panic as she recalled the near midair collision with the rusted antique refueling plane.
  Her first impulse at being earthbound once more was to jump out and kiss the ground.  Instead, she peered out the window and taxied the plane around to check for hostiles.  A group of black-clad Mennonites walked over the hill: thirty men in formal suits and hats and behind them a smattering of women in unadorned dresses, the tallest of whom had Sarah's coloring and stubborn jaw.  As a whole, the Mennonites were as dour a group as Alexa had ever seen.
  She had misgivings as she climbed out of the pilot's seat.  The Sterling children had been coddled on Elysium, and they had dressed as the mood took them, in brightly colored silks, feather boas, or nothing at all.  They were safe on the island; even UV radiation
  
had been filtered out by the dome that sheltered Luci-us's holdings.
• They weren't converted, but they were children of the modern age, as familiar with nano-engineering and genomic manipulations as their Mennonite counterparts were with letters and sums.  How would they fit into an eighteenth-century world?
  Alexa popped open the cargo bay doors.  As Jack passed her to greet the approaching elders, she whispered, "I'm not sure this is a great idea."
  Without taking his eyes off the welcome party, he replied, "We don't have any choice."
  Alexa didn't know how the children would be received, but she could tell from the full-length skirts and submissive postures of the women that she would challenge their cultural expectations.  "With the Sterling money, you can build another compound— anywhere you choose."
  "Where? This valley is self-sufficient, immune to the disassembler.  If I tried to re-create Elysium, where would I find staff? The Deathless would bribe my employees to spy for them.  I know these people.  They're old-fashioned, but they're moral and loyal.  I'd trust them with my life—with all our lives."
  Alexa didn't point out that was exactly what he was doing.  If he didn't see that already, words wouldn't help.
  Sarah slipped timidly out of the plane, smoothing her skirt over her legs and rewrapping the bun at the nape of her neck.  She brushed her clothing, trying to slap off layers of dust, ash, and red grit.  It was no use.  She looked like what she was—a bedraggled refugee.
  Alexa hung back in the mouth of the cargo hold, both to guard the children and to reduce the impact of her appearance.
  Mari, one of the older girls, scowled at the approaching adults.  "Why are they dressed like that?" Like many of the children, she showed signs of Hawaiian ancestry, with naturally tan skin and wide cheek-
  
bones, but her nose was pure Gaelic, pointed, with delicate nostrils.
  Would Jack's Mennonites accept the children's mixed heritage?
  "It's their tradition," Alexa replied, only half listening to the children's comments.  Her attention was fixed on Jack and the greeting about to begin.
  Sarah twisted the front of her skirt between her hands, all too aware of how improperly it clung to her legs without the insulation of her petticoats.  There was an iron tang in her mouth, and she realized that she'd bitten her cheek.  The pain helped—clearing the panic that threatened to engulf her.  She had never disobeyed her father before; now she returned, guilty of disregarding his order to stay at home and of running off with not one but two unrelated men.
  It was fortunate she'd spoken to no one of her feelings for Jack.  No one knew she loved him, which would save their gossiping about the real reason she'd run away.  Sarah would tell them the men needed help with the babies.  Any man would.  It was that obvious.
  Sarah's resolve failed and her throat went dry the moment she saw her father's hands.  They were clenched into fists at his sides.  Her gaze slid upward to the cords of muscle tight along his neck.  They always stood out so just before she or her siblings got a beating.  Sarah couldn't make herself look at his face.
Jack extended a hand.  "Mr.  Weins."
  Samuel Wiens looked at Jack's hand as if it were a sidewinder, then said, scowling, "For six years, we offered you our labor and friendship.  We pledged to help your family when they were in need.  Is this how you repay us? By seducing and dishonoring our daughters?"
  "Sir, I—" Jack dropped his hand and scanned the faces of the other Mennonite elders.  "That's not what—I assure you—"
Samuel's face darkened like a hailstorm about to hit the peaks.  "The assurances of a fornicator are—" The muscles of his shoulders bunched.
  "Father, no!" Sarah leapt between her father and Jack, her hands upraised in supplication.  The words tumbled out of her in a rush: "It wasn't like that.  I snuck onto the plane—to help with the babies.  Louis and Jack never pinned a diaper, and babies need a woman's touch.  The idea was mine—all mine.  When the plane took off, Jack and Louis didn't know I was there."
  Her father trembled.  "It's worse than I imagined.  You took it into your own head to play the harlot." He raised his fist.  "You Salomel"
  Sarah turned her face from the blow.  Years of practice had taught her how to take a punch, tempering just enough of the force so it hurt less, but never to make him miss.  That only increased his rage.
The blow never fell.
There was a collective gasp from the elders.
  Sarah cracked open her eyes and saw her father's arm still upright, his wrist trapped in Alexa's grip.
  "Not today," Alexa said quietly.  In an economy of motion that bordered on dance, Alexa twisted Samuel's arm behind his back and drove him to his knees.  She pivoted him to face the open cargo hold.  She leaned down and spoke into his ear, a low whisper that carried across the crowd.  "See those children? Each one owes their life to your daughter." Alexa released her grip on Samuel and stepped back.  "Sarah did nothing wrong.  She was an angel of mercy sent by God."
  Samuel stumbled to his feet.  "What would you know of God's will?" He pointed to Alexa and accused Sarah.  "Is this whom you consort with now? A faithless landlord and an unnatural harlot?"
The skin around Alexa's eyes tightened.
  Sarah held up her hand before Alexa could act.  "This woman's dress and ways are strange to us, but she put herself in harm's way to save us.  The Bible
  
says, 'Judge not, lest ye be judged.'" Sarah stepped to Alexa's side and took the woman's hand, surprised at its delicacy.  "Did not our Lord himself take Mary Magdalene under his protection?"
  Sarah lifted her head and met her father's angry eyes without flinching.  "My actions will be judged good or ill by God—not you."
  Sarah had never seen her father's face so red.  "The devil has you in his grip," he spluttered, "that you show such disrespect to your father and mother.  The elders"—he waved at the other Mennonites—"wished to hear your story before they decided whether you could remain in our society.  But I have heard and seen enough." His eyes scanned Alexa's skintight jumpsuit, and his hard gaze settled on Sarah.  It took all her will not to crumple and beg his forgiveness.  "I do not know you," he intoned.  "You are no daughter of mine."
  Sarah's mother gasped, and her hands flew to her mouth, but she did not contradict her husband.
  "You are not welcome in our house." He turned, placed his right arm around his stricken wife's shoulders and led her away.
"Father!"
  Samuel's foot hesitated only a moment before taking the next step.  He did not turn back.
"Where shall I sleep? What of my clothes?"
  Sarah's mother turned her head toward her daughter's voice, but Samuel's relentless pace kept her from a reply.
  The remaining elders murmured, and gazes flicked between the retreating Samuel and his dishonored daughter.
  Jack cleared his throat.  "I am sure Mr.  Wiens will change his mind, when he knows the whole story." When he had the full attention of the elders, he continued, "Now we need to settle these children with families who can help them."
The Mennonites looked sympathetically at the clus- ter of burned and grubby children huddling in the open cargo door.
"Who will help them?" Jack asked.
  For a long moment, no one spoke.  Then Mrs.  Klaasen, one of the few women on the council of elders, spoke.  "I am too old for babes in arms, but my home could welcome as many as three, school age and older."
  Paul Albrecht, a tall man whose hair was dusted with gray, spoke next.  "God has not blessed us with a child."
  Sarah knew from talk around the quilting circle that Rachel Albrecht had caught and lost six stillborn children.  The white ash crib Paul had built the first time his wife was with child was as yet unused, gathering dust in the attic of their small house.
  Paul cleared his throat and caught up the hand of the slender woman at his side.  "Until now." Rachel had tears in her eyes.  She looked at the babies in the plane as if the gates of heaven themselves lay before her.
  Matthew van Haegen, a well-respected elder and the pastor of their church, said, "Whatever our opinions of Sarah Wien's actions, and Mr.  Sterling's part in them, the children are innocents and must be cared for.  There are many in the town who have agreed to open their hearts and homes to them."
  "Send those who offer homes to my cabin," Jack said.  "We also need donations of food, clothing, and medical supplies.  Once the children are fed, clean, and bandaged, we'll sort out who goes where."
  "And make it perfectly clear." Alexa pointed her finger across the elders, fixing them with a hard, immortal stare.  "Any one who raises a hand to these children—or in any way harms them—won't have to worry about God's vengeance.  I'll get there first."
  The elders as a group frowned at the warning, save for Mrs.  Klaasen in the back, who allowed herself the ghost of a grin.
  
  When the elders had gone to disperse the word to the townspeople, Jack came up behind Sarah and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.  It was an unforgivable familiarity for two not married, but instead of shrugging the gesture off, Sarah covered his hand with her own.
  "Don't worry," Jack said.  "I'll talk to your father.  He'll come around."
  Sarah wasn't so sure.  Four years ago, John Con-wentz had jokingly slighted her father's skill at whittling.  Since then, Samuel Wiens refused to touch his carving knife and never again sat near the Conwentzes at church.
  Rachel Albrecht stayed behind as the others left.  "Sarah, I spoke with my Paul and he agrees.  You are welcome to stay in our house." Her face glowed and her eyes kept darting back to the plane.  "I have it in mind to take all three of the babies." As she said the words her thin lips broke into a tearful grin.  "Your help would be a blessing."
  Jack fell into his feather bed with intense gratitude to the geese who had given their lives for such comfort.  Every muscle in his body was sore from the past few days' exertion, and he was as exhausted as the newly dead.  It had taken half the night to place the children—Alexa had insisted on interviewing each prospective host family, parents and children both.
  Some of the families had been offended by Alexa's appearance and her blunt questions, but Sarah had tempered their indignation by explaining that Alexa was the children's protector and, like a good sheepdog, was wary of whom she entrusted with her charges.
  The children had cried at being separated from each other, clinging to the only family they knew.  Again Sarah had intervened, explaining to each that they would see each other every day in school, that here, unlike Elysium, the houses were too small to sleep
  
them all together.  Devon had looked mutinously at the giant barn, but gone quietly enough with Mari and Lisle to Mrs.  Klaasen's house.
  Hans had been the worst, clinging pitiably to Alexa's neck and crying whenever anyone else touched him.  At the end, the father of the family who'd adopted him had picked up the screaming toddler and hefted him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, letting the boy vent his fury on his brawny back.
  "He'll settle once he's with us.  Our youngest was the same way with Mary."
  Mary was at his side, patting Hans's back and cooing encouragements.  "All is well, sweetling.  All is well." Jack heard her comment to her husband as they left, "You'd think the woman was his own mother, the way he carries on."
  Hans had been the last to go.  Alexa sat stock-still, her features half hidden in the lamplight.  Only a gleam on her cheeks let Jack know she was crying.  He crossed the room to offer comfort.  "Alexa, it's all—"
  Alexa stood up abruptly.  "I'm going outside." Without meeting his eyes, she left the room, her back straight.
  Jack had stayed up, catching up on his e-mail until the oil in the lamp ran low.  There were hundreds of messages: accusations, a welcome statement from the VPs of Sterling Nanology, seven lawsuits.  Trying to assimilate his new position as one of the world's major capitalists made his stomach roil.
  Alexa still hadn't returned by eleven, so with the lamp guttering, he'd set his laptop on standby, blown out the wick, and crawled into bed.
  "She'll be all right," he whispered as he sank into the goose down.  Of course she would.  There was nothing in the valley that could harm her.  It was his last thought as sleep claimed him.
  Jack woke when the covers shifted.  "Um?" he said, still groggy with sleep.
  
A hand slid across his chest.
  Suddenly he was awake, his heart pounding.  Who? Then the feel of the hand registered, a delicate, soft hand; a woman's hand.
  He'd known Alexa shared Lucius's bed.  Now that he had inherited her indenture along with the rest of Lucius's possessions, did she assume he would make the same demands of her? And a dark part of his soul whispered, "Why shouldn't he?"
  Jack placed his hand over hers, stopping its progress.  "You don't have to do this."
  Fool! argued his id.  Alexa—the woman you've lusted after since you could lust is offering you her body— take it! But there was more than morality holding Jack back; there was embarrassment and fear.
  Twenty-one years old, and he had never been with a woman.  His allergy had come upon him when he was nine.  He'd spent six years in quarantine, then another six living with the Mennonites.  He'd read books, watched videos on his laptop.  He knew how things were supposed to go—but watching someone ride a bicycle was very different from doing it yourself.
  But her body was so soft next to his.  He felt her firm breasts press against the side of his chest, rousing him.  Jack suppressed a moan.
  Slender fingers found his lips.  "Shh.  If we are to have the punishment of fornication, should not we have the pleasure of it as well?"
Jack sat bolt upright.  "Sarah?!"
  "Of course it's me," came her teasing reply.  "Who else—" A long silence.  She drew her hand away from him.  "Oh." Jack felt her pull away from him and sit up.  "I am a fool.  Why would you desire me, when you could have her?" There were tears in her voice.
  "No." Jack wrapped his arms around Sarah's rigid body and brought her to him.  The scent of her was warm and intoxicating.  He rocked her as he would a child, murmuring into her neck.  "It's nothing like that.  Alexa had an .  .  .  arrangement with my, um, uncle.  I
  
thought she meant to offer me .  .  .  well, the same courtesies.  I never imagined that you—"
  "Do you love her?" Sarah asked.  Her breath brushed the hairs on Jack's arm.
  Jack wasn't sure how to answer.  "My relationship with Alexa is .  .  .  complicated.  She helped raise me from the time I was a baby.  It's natural I would feel affection—"
  Sarah hit him with a barrage.  "Your words were, 'You don't have to do this.' You were willing to have relations with her.  You lust after the woman."
  "Um." Jack felt himself wilting under the weight of her accusations.  Alexa had always been, well—Alexa.  As timeless and unapproachable as a goddess.  Desiring her was a theoretical exercise.  You might as well pine for the moon.  Talking to Sarah about actually having sex with Alexa made it suddenly sound perverse.
  Sarah pushed back from him and jabbed his chest with her finger.  "You lust after her.  Admit it."
"Well .  .  .  perhaps."
  Her voice was tight with emotion, a hairsbreadth away from a little-girl squeak.  "And me? Do you have feelings for me?"
  Jack had never considered it before.  Sarah was pretty, even beautiful under the right conditions, but she was a Mennonite and he was not.  Jack's mouth gaped open like a landed fish.  He'd have traded places with that fish rather than answer Sarah's question.  "Uh—"
  On the desk by the window, Jack's computer blared to life, trumpeting the emergency attention signal.  The top pivoted open, filling the room with a blue-white glow.
  Jack leapt from the bed and pulled his chair up to the desk, reading the scrolling text: EIGHT THOUSAND,
THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE DEAD IN NEW ORLEANS.  DISASSEMBLER ATTACK.  EFFECTS SPREADING.  EMERGENCY EVACUATION—

  The door to Jack's one-room cabin burst open.  Outlined against the full moon was Alexa, in fighting stance.  In a glance, she took in the room, then froze at the sight of Sarah, clad in a white shift that had slipped down to reveal a creamy white shoulder and part of a swelling breast.
  Alexa dropped her hands.  "I see you're not in danger—not immediate danger, anyway."
  Sarah pulled up the sleeve of her nightgown and tucked her hair over her shoulder.
  "It's not what it looks like," Jack said, waving Alexa over to the computer.
  "Well, it's sure not a chess tournament." Alexa was at his side, leaning over the laptop.  Her eyes widened.  She spoke one word in a whisper: "Isobel."
  
29
T
he world was falling apart, in every direction, and it was all her fault.
  New Orleans was beautiful from the air, an explosion of colors and shapes.  Positioned along the Gulf of Mexico, the organically shaped buildings looked like a pile of improbable seashells cast by a giant's hand.
  Isobel knew that someone down there could point her toward her mother—Papa always told her everyone on Gaia-Net knew everyone.  She would have them tell her where to go and then keep it a secret, so she could surprise her mother.
  Jets along the plane's wings pivoted, blasting blue fire down so they could land.  They set down in the center of a place the navigational screen called the French Quarter.
  Some of the buildings were squat and rectangular, like those she'd seen in historical images, and hung with signs brightly painted in old-time colors and covered in fussy trim.  They encircled a patch of green that Isobel recognized as a park.
  Above and behind the old buildings were spires and towers and geodesic domes.  They gleamed like soap bubbles in the sunlight, colors dancing across their surfaces.  From time to time a window of translucency would migrate across the surface, and Isobel would catch glimpses of beautiful people.
  
  "Oh, Crick, isn't it wonderful!" Isobel breathed.  She held the kitten up so he could see.
  Crick batted at the hand that held him upright with needle-sharp claws and tried, to bite her thumb.
The plane settled and the jets turned off.  WE HAVE
ARRIVED AT THE DESTINATION NEW ORLEANS, Said the
Papa, not-Papa voice.  The door popped open with a gentle whoosh.
  Isobel couldn't wait to see everything up close.  She tucked Crick into the front pocket of her overalls and climbed out of the pilot's seat.  The air was filled with the scent of hot sugar and coffee, coming from an open-air cafe.  Sunlight beat down on her head and shoulders, making her squint.
  When she set foot on the pavement, it boiled and disappeared, making her stumble as she dropped down a few inches.  The textured gray surface rolled away from her, exposing cracked pavers and broken cobblestones underneath.
  The wave passed over the grass, singeing it black, and the bright signs and facades of the storefronts cracked and peeled into grimy hues and missing letters.
Then the change hit the people in the cafe.
  A man jumped up, knocking over his table and the delicate heart-backed cafe chair.  He clutched his throat, gargling incoherently.  He was young and handsome, smartly dressed in a charcoal gray suit with silver buttons.  His face contorted in pain, blood dribbled down his chin, and he fell to the ground, twitching.
  The other patrons stopped eating and chatting and looked over.  Then it was upon them.  They screamed and flailed like broken marionettes, tossed this way and that by an angry puppeteer.
  Isobel was too frightened to move.  She stood frozen, her eyes wide, unable to look away.  It was happening again—like Papa.
  The hair melted off a porcelain-skinned blond woman, her skin shriveled, and she toppled facefirst into the floor.
  
  Clothing evaporated, leaving everyone in the cafe naked.  They clawed at their skin and writhed in agony.
  IsobeFs mouth hung open, tears pricking her eyes.  She couldn't breathe.  Papa said it was dangerous for her to go outside—had he meant thisl All these people, the grass, the buildings, hurt because of her?
A rumble like thunder crashed across the sky.
  Isobel looked up into sunlight and cloudless blue, confused.
  Like a rose burning from the inside out, one by one, the beautiful buildings began to fall.
  Dakota barked outside Jack's window, jumping between barks so that her head kept appearing in the window for an instant.
  Jack left Alexa at the computer and crossed the room to Sarah.  He lifted her by her elbow.  "You have to go.  Others will have heard the alarm." He glared at his overly enthusiastic canine protector.  "Or the dogs.  They mustn't find you here."
  Sarah pushed his hand away.  "I'm already ruined.  What does it matter if their suspicions are confirmed?" Her blue eyes settled on Alexa, hunched over the laptop.  "Unless, of course, you prefer to be alone."
  Jack blew out an exasperated sigh.  The civilized world was crumbling, and instead of stopping it, he was arguing with a half-dressed Mennonite girl, trying to assuage her ego.  He grabbed her elbow again and pushed her toward the door.  "You don't mean that.  You're just feeling hurt and rejected.  Go.  If you stay, you'll regret it." He bent down and kissed her forehead.  "You're a good girl, Sarah.  I know it; the others will, too."
  She stiffened at the word "girl," straightened her nightgown on her shoulders, picked up a black cloak from where it lay puddled by the door, and shrugged it on.  "One day, Jack Sterling, you'll regret tonight— and all you lost."
  
In a swirl of wool, she was gone.
  Without looking up, Alexa said, "I didn't know you liked them that young."
  Jack took the seat next to her and combed his fingers through his hair.  "I don't—I mean, Sarah's— it's ...  complicated." His face heated when he recalled the last time he'd said those words.  Jack was glad the feeble light of the computer didn't reveal his blush.
  Alexa had a map of New Orleans on the laptop's screen.  A black cancer spread outward from the French Quarter.  She tapped the blight with a fingernail.  "That's the epicenter, where Gaia-Net drops out." She looked up and locked eyes with Jack.  "We have to stop her."
  Jack considered for a moment the troops he'd hired to escort them home from Elysium.  But involving anyone else would be too risky.  If word of Isobel's existence leaked, the fury of all the Deathless would be unleashed against them.
  Alexa hadn't merged with Gaia-Net since Elysium.  No one else in the world knew that the source of the disassembler was a little girl.  Local and federal governments would send containment troops to seal off the area.  The Deathless would send agents to investigate the scene and bring back any new information.  But only Jack and Alexa knew what to look for.
"I know," Jack said.
  The black circle was visibly spreading, even at high zoom.  Within thirty seconds it engulfed another mile in diameter, as Jack watched helplessly.
  "This is worse than the other attacks," Alexa said.  "This time it's not a fixed number of the disassemblers running until they reach apotheosis.  Isobel's immune system continually generates more in response to the nano-biology in her environment.  If we don't stop her—"
  "I know." Jack pulled on jeans under his nightshirt.  He zipped up.  "Let's go."
Alexa stayed seated, her eyes bright.  "I'm not talk- ing 'bring her back safe and sound to the ranch' stop her.  I mean stop her.  Permanently."
  Jack froze, his hand on the door latch.  "You want to kill a twelve-year-old girl?"
  Alexa was on her feet and in his face before Jack could blink.  "Don't make- this any harder than it is.  I didn't ask for this—Isobel didn't ask for it.  An asshole played God, and the end result is a broken little girl who could destroy the world." Alexa pointed back at the death toll ticking along on the computer.  "The people IsobePs killed don't care how old she is.  They're just dead.  And every one of those deaths is my fault because I didn't have the courage to do what needed doing in the first place.  I let a rockslide do my work.  The first rule of security: thinking someone's down for the count isn't good enough—you make sure." Alexa narrowed her eyes.  "I have to go."
  Jack stopped her leaving by leaning all his weight against the door.  "It doesn't have to be that way.  Isobel can be contained.  If we keep her away from nano-biology—"
  "The Deathless will find out about Isobel.  Once they know she exists, they'll come after her—and keep coming.  Those that don't want to kill her will want to use her as a weapon to keep the other Deathless in line.  She'll be a prisoner, a slave." Alexa slammed her fist against the doorframe, and the cabin rafters rattled overhead.  "I wish I'd never lived to see this day."
  "As the holder of your indenture, I forbid you to go," Jack said.  He pointed at the silver rectangle that lay on his desk next to the laptop.  "We've got Fontes-ca's lab.  It's been years since I worked with nanotech-nology, but—"
  Alexa patted Jack's cheek.  "There's no other way.  Fontesca left us this mess.  I'm going to clean it up." She lifted Jack out of the way and ran into the darkness, headed toward the military plane they'd stolen on Elysium.
—-——- I his laptop and Fontesca's lab under his left arm.  Running out the door, he nearly knocked over Paul Al-brecht and Pastor van Haegen.
"Jack, what is happening?" asked the pastor.
  Jack grasped his shoulder.  "An emergency.  If anything happens to me, Sarah inherits everything: the ranch, my holdings—everything.  I'll transmit a new will once I'm in the air.  But you make sure the town knows it.  She's to use the money to take care of the children and herself—if I don't come back."
  Pastor van Haegen's eyes widened at Jack's dire words.  "But, Jack, surely—"
"No time," Jack called over his shoulder.
  Alexa was on the wing, refueling the aircraft's tank from stock Jack had trucked in yesterday.  He had no illusions that she'd wait for him once she finished.
  "Get away from the plane," Alexa growled as he approached, switching the gas hose from one wing to the other.
  "It's my plane.  If you take it without my permission, that's theft." He climbed into the copilot's seat.  "On the other hand, if I go with you—"
  Alexa leaned over the open canopy and confronted him face-to-face.  "You won't stop me from doing what needs to be done."
  Jack settled into the seat and belted himself in.  He opened Fontesca's lab on his lap.  "Then perhaps I'll redefine what, exactly, needs doing."
  "It's three hours from here to New Orleans.  You're going to find a cure to Isobel's condition in that time? Something Fontesca tried to do for over a decade without success?"
  Jack pursed his lips and studied the lab's display.  He looked up and caught Alexa gazing at him with undisguised wonder.
"You got a problem with that?"

30
A
DNA strand made up of twelve different types of colored balls twisted in the air.  Enzymes worked on the strand, teasing it apart, unzipping it, building from its encoding proteins never before envisioned.
  Jack's brain felt tight in his skull.  Over the past three hours of flight time, he'd read the last year's worth of Fontesca's lab notes, trying to absorb everything, find something the genius had overlooked, a perspective he hadn't considered—a way to fix Isobel before Alexa killed her.
  Jack stared at the writhing proteins until they blurred in his watery eyes.  He blew out a sigh, covered his face, and gently thumped his forehead against the copilot's yoke.
  Alexa reached out and cupped his chin the way she had when he was a baby.  "You tried.  You're a good man, Jack Sterling." Her hand fell.  "Now we do this my way."
  Jack slapped the nanotech lab shut.  The midair simulation winked out.  "Twelve base nucleotides.  Not nature's four, not even the alternate eight of nano-biology.  But a combination of most—but not all—of them, added to that, two more that no one's ever considered.  Do you have any idea how many possible combinations there are with twelve base nucleotides?"
  
  Alexa opened her mouth to respond, but Jack was on a rant.
  "The three-nucleotide codon combinations go as third power.  Nature's four nucleotides give sixty-four possible combinations—of which only twenty produce nonredundant amino acids.  Nanology's eight expand the number of possible codons to five hundred and twelve.  But twelve? That's what?" His wiggled his fingers in the air.  "One thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-eight possible codons? Fontesca was either brilliant or totally barking insane."
  "Both." Alexa moved her hand to his shoulder, massaging the tightness there.  "Jack, you mean well, but face reality.  What you're trying to accomplish is just not possible."
  Jack pressed the pads of his thumbs into the pressure point between his brows.  He breathed deeply.  "I don't accept that.  Fontesca spent the past decade working on a cure for Isobel's condition." He held up his thumb and forefinger.  "He was this close.  I just have to bridge the gap.  Figure out what he missed.  Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can see things the original researcher overlooked."
  "And sometimes there isn't a solution." Alexa withdrew her hand and rested it on the yoke in front of her, eyes forward.  "Not one that we'd like, anyway."
  Jack stared out at the sea of clouds beneath them.  They were less than an hour away from New Orleans, and so far he'd only followed in Fontesca's tracks, reading about Isobel's creation, her allergy to nano-biology, how Fontesca had tried to cure her by creating the disassembler, and his complete surprise at the quantities of disassemblers her body spawned, all the cures he'd tried since then.
  Jack couldn't stop himself from babbling.  "I mean, on one hand, it makes sense.  If you're going to create a new nano-biology, you'd pick and choose from what went before.  All four of nature's nucleotides— of course you'd include those, that's an experiment
  
that's been running for four billion years, why not take advantage? Then he chose six of the eight nucleotides from the original nano-biology—he left out the parts that prohibit nano-biology from replicating—"
  Alexa looked over at him.  "What are you talking about? My body repairs itself.  I've seen entire buildings grow overnight.  How is that not replication?"
  "The nano-biology machines that keep you healthy and do construction are long-lived, but outside of a lab, they don't replicate.  It was part of the original design, a base pair of nucleotides whose positioning in the structure of nano-biology prevents it from being able to create copies of itself.  A Drexlerian fail-safe.  If nano-biology could reproduce, it might grow out of control, or mutate."
  Alexa pursed her lips.  "That's why Deathless can't have children."
  "Exactly.  Each of you is like a fly trapped in amber.  The nanos keep you running, build you back to a consistent state, but you never change—not without re-programming in a lab."
"Something that wouldn't work for a child."
  "Exactly.  So Fontesca left those structures out— illegal, but then so was mixing nano-biology with natural biology.  The real problem was, when Isobel became alive, her body was filled with the ambient nano-biology that covers everything these days.  It's in the air all around us, sharing space with the viruses and bacteria.  Her system recognized everything—except their reproduction-limiting structures.  He'd created her immune system to be extra vigilant, so it overreacted, causing an extreme allergy."
  "Which he tried to cure by having her system create the disassembler.  But that worked much better than he'd ever imagined, causing the havoc we're trying to clean up now.  I was there when Leo told us, remember?" She tapped her full lower lip.  "What I don't understand is why he didn't just turn off the disassem-
  
bier.  She'd be deathly allergic to nano-biology—as you are—but she wouldn't be a threat to civilization."
  Jack opened the lab on his lap.  The simulation was still changing, enzymes merging, splitting, rebuilding each other.  "The disassembler is a part of her biology.  She needs it to be able to break down the non-natural nucleotides that are a consequence of cell death.  Without the disassembler, they build up in her system and become toxins.  Fontesca tried to tune her body's reaction so that it produced just enough of the disassembler to protect her without harming the nano-biology around her—but the attempt killed too many of her internal disassemblers and nearly killed her.  So he came up with a different plan." Jack tapped the screen to display an image of a twisted strand of DNA, comprising twelve different-colored nucleotide balls.  "That's what this is."
  Alexa looked at the patterns, then shook her head.  "What is it?"
  "An antidote-nano.  It's a next-generation nano-biology gene modification that, when inserted in a natural organism, spawns a nano that searches out and destroys free-floating disassemblers."
  Alexa frowned.  "If he designed an antidote-nano, why not just put it into an aerosol spray?"
  "Because an aerosol might overpower Isobel's system with antidote-nanos and spiral into the situation where she sickens from her own toxins.  Fontesca didn't want to risk that again.  A living creature can respond dynamically to the bioload of disassemblers in the air.  It was Fontesca's plan that Isobel would live with this creature as a companion, and together they would reach bio-stasis."
  "The cat," Alexa said, her eyes widened with sudden understanding.
  Jack nodded.  "Fontesca bought two identical-twin kittens: Watson and Crick.  Not as pets, but as test subjects.  He gave Crick to Isobel and experimented on Watson."
  
"What happened?"
  "Watson died.  Like Isobel, he needed a version of the disassembler in his cells to process the non-natural nucleotide wastes.  But the antidote-nano his body generated overwhelmed his natural processes."
"And Crick?"
  Jack shook his head.  "Fontesca never got that far.  He was still trying to solve the problem when the Deathless struck Elysium."
  Sarah pulled the hood of her cloak down to obscure her face and slipped around the corner of Jack's cabin to avoid the trio of men, led by Pastor van Haegen, that stormed up to Jack's door.  She slipped like a shadow around back doors and avoided the houses with lamps lit.
  A door opened the next house down, and Mrs.  Klaasen stuck her head out.  Sarah froze.  If anyone found her outside with only a nightshirt and cloak on, she would be ruined.
  "Dear boy, go see what all the fuss is about," Mrs.  Klaasen commanded in her old-woman's voice.  "Mari and Lisle, you'll wait in here with me."
  Sarah heard muffled words of protest.  She was trapped between Mrs.  Klaasen's house and the fence line.  People stirred in the village, awakened by the computer's beeping and the dogs' commotion.  If she didn't get back to the Albrechts' house soon, her absence would be noticed.
  Devon stepped out of the house, a too-short brown cloak around his shoulders.  He saw Sarah and started to speak.
  Sarah shushed him with a finger to her lips and caught his elbow.  "Don't tell anyone you saw me."
Devon frowned and started to ask a question.
  Sarah laid her finger against his lips.  "I'll get in trouble.  Please.  Just don't."
  He nodded, and his eyes flicked toward Mrs.  Klaasen's door.
  
  "The men are at Jack's house.  His laptop raised an alarm." She pushed him gently in the right direction, "Go!"
  Sarah crossed in front of Mrs.  Klaasen's house, ducking below the windowsills.  It was only a few more houses to the Albrechts'.  Fortunately they were at the far end of town from Jack's cabin.  The townspeople at this end were still asleep.
  Thankful to find the wood-frame house in darkness, Sarah eased the door open—wincing when it creaked—and slipped inside.  She tiptoed across the room toward the pallet of blankets Rachel Albrecht had laid for her near the hearth.
  "Where were you?" Rachel's quiet voice came out of the darkness.
  Sarah's heart stopped.  She saw the outline of the older woman in the moonlight, rocking one of the three babes on her chest.  "I-I had to go to the privy."
  Mrs.  Albrecht rocked.  "Why not use the chamber pot inside the door?"
  "I didn't think it seemly, not being related to Mr.  Albrecht—"
  Silent rocking and the sound of the baby suckling on a lamb's bottle.  "You were gone a long time—for the privy."
  Sarah's face felt so hot she worried it would glow.  She crossed to her pallet, threading her way around the crib, the Albrechts' bed, and the rocking chair.  "I lost my way in the dark.  The path from your cabin isn't the one I'm used to."
  Sarah lay down, a small measure of relief in reach-       ;
ing that safe haven.	)
  "Don't bring dishonor on this house," Mrs.  Albrecht said.  "I took you in out of charity, but I won't      j tolerate lies, or wrongdoing.  Do you understand me?"       }
  "Yes, ma'am," Sarah answered in a choked whisper.  "I understand."
*       *       *

  Jack fiddled with the placement of nucleotides in the antidote-nano gene.  He was trying to add an internal cleanup routine that would cause the antidote-nano to use its own mechanisms to break down its own non-natural nucleotides as it reached apotheosis.  It was like designing a fire to burn away completely and leave no ash.  As the antidote-nano disassembled itself, there was less and less of it to complete the process.
  He stared at the writhing model of the DNA strand until his eyes dried out and it fuzzed into a pair of snakes.
  Then it hit him: why did the antidote-nano gene
have to be self-contained? It was so simple a solution
he couldn't believe Fontesca hadn't thought of it.  If
Crick was always with Isobel, the gene wouldn't need
to be a closed system on its own.  Symbiosis.  The
antidote-nanos simply needed to break down into a
form the disassembler could destroy.  Instead of using
its own biology to clear its system of nano-biology
nucleotides, it could use Isobel's.  Jack just needed to
tie the production levels of the antidote-nano to the
level of toxins in the cat's body.  When they increased,
lower the rate of antidote-nano production so Isobel's
!	disassembler could clean them out.  Then when the
toxin levels decreased, restart production of the antidote-nano and drive the disassembler back to controlled levels.
  A feedback mechanism.  Like squeezing one end of
a balloon to inflate the other.  The two systems inter-
I	acted to create a single, stable whole.
!	It was obvious—too obvious.  Jack couldn't see a
flaw in his reasoning, and that made him nervous.  Fontesca was a genius.  Surely he'd thought of this— and rejected it for some reason.  There was no mention of it in his notes.  Fontesca couldn't have overlooked this possibility.  Could he?
On the other hand, Fontesca had tested Watson as a closed system.  Away from Isobel, because he didn't want to distress her by possibly causing her to see a kitten suffer and die.
  "Alexa, why did Isobel run away from you back at the lab?"
  "Huh?" Alexa pulled the radio's earbud out of her ear.  "I was negotiating a pass through Texas airspace for the AI pilot.  I missed your question."
"Why did Isobel run away from you?"
  Alexa looked at him as if Jack had lost his mind.  "She was worried about her kitten, Crick.  She wanted to save him."
"Did she?"
  Alexa shrugged.  "I don't know.  Why? Is it important?"
  "Maybe." Jack felt an upwelling of hope.  "I think I've found a way to make Fontesca's scheme work— but I need an unmodified cat to inject." Jack made a few tweaks to Fontesca's model, to increase the rate of antidote-nano creation and add in the dependence on an external source of disassemblers.  Then he began the simulation.
"Will it work?" Alexa asked.
  "I don't know." Jack explained how he planned to tie Isobel's and the cat's biology together.  "And it depends on whether Isobel has Crick with her.  I doubt we'll be able to find a non-modified kitten at the last minute.  The pet trade is pretty heavily modified."
  "I'll check Gaia-Net, see if I can locate a cat breeder in Louisiana who specializes in natural biology." Alexa stuck the bud back in her ear.  Jack knew why she used the old technology.  She couldn't risk merging with Gaia-Net.  It would be monitored by Deathless information spies.  If they found out about Isobel, he and Alexa would never have a chance to get near her.
  Jack watched the simulation run.  A bar graph displayed the computed relative strengths of disassembler and antidote-nanos.  The lines rose and fell in a chaotic
  
pattern.  Jack wondered if it would work.  His knowledge of nano-biology was rusty, and of next-generation nano-biology, nonexistent.  Surely there was some reason Fontesca had rejected this idea out of hand—hadn't even bothered to annotate it in his lab diary.
  Even if Jack had stumbled on something new, it would be all too easy to make a trivial mistake in the modifications he'd made to Fontesca's last sample.  And in nano-biology and genetics, even an infinitesi-mally small error could mean the difference between a protein that worked and one that was poison.
  The sky overhead was dark with the dust of dying things.  Isobel sank into a heap and wept.  Her tears caked the silt on her face.  The black residue covered every surface within sight.  Everything around her was grimy and ugly.  The beautiful lights she'd seen from the air were gone, and the sugary smell of doughnuts was smothered under the prevailing scents of shit and blood.
  When she closed her eyes, Isobel felt her father's warm body holding her, hugging her.  He could make her safe, protect her from the world.  He was the only person she had ever known, her whole life.  The only flesh-and-blood person.  Isobel squeezed her eyes tighter and tried to recall his face, how his cheek had felt rough against hers.
  Then she felt him crumble.  All the love and security in the world falling away to ash.  She was left holding nothing.
  Isobel clapped her hands over her ears and screamed in grief and rage.  Even that couldn't keep the image of her father's crumbling face from her mind.  She could imagine it now—had seen it happen to so many people today.  The look of surprise, then pain.  Some faded away completely, others dropped, twitching, like so many broken dolls.
Her chest wriggled, then she felt the prick of tiny claws.  Crick's head popped out of the front of her overalls, his eyes wide with fright.
  Isobel reached down, but before she could stop him, Crick launched himself from her body.
  He landed on all four feet, kicking up a cloud of dust.  He sneezed once, then tore off at top speed, heading for the rim of a crater.  His tiny legs sank into the dust.  He bounded rather than ran, gathering his springy body and hurling it forward with each step.
  "No!" Isobel ran after him, arms extended.  "Crick, come back!"
  Her pursuit only frightened him more, sending him plunging away faster.  He ran toward the bright lights and good smells of southern New Orleans, which, so far, was beyond the disassembler's influence.
  Isobel ran, stumbling, catching herself from falling with one hand.  She had to catch Crick! Had to! He was the only thing left in the world that she loved.
  "Holy Mother of God, look at that," Alexa breathed, looking down on the devastation.  As dawn broke over Louisiana, its pink-gray light added to the surreal sight below.
  The coast of Lake Pontchartrain was built a solid hundred stories high the whole way around.  The sprawling acropolis was broken here and there by historical districts, but other than that it was a wall of lakeside living, shopping malls, and amusement parks.
  Except for New Orleans.  The city on the western rim of the lake had been taken back to the salt flats that the first indigenous people had fished.  The gap in the wall of luxury condos looked like a missing tooth in an open mouth, the black plain that sprawled in its place a festering cavity.
  And it was growing.  Another row of skyscrapers tumbled into nothingness, dropping a few non-nano-biology possessions into the dunes of dust.
  How powerful was this girl, that something spawned from her body could take out an entire city? As Alexa
  
watched, the three bridges across Lake Pontchartrain went up like flash paper.
  A ring of flashing lights showed a governmental presence, but they were staying well back.  Over her radio earbud came a barrage of flight warnings and a notice that southern Louisiana was under a strict Department of Defense quarantine.  Alexa ignored the hails and dove for the center of the destruction.  It must have seemed a suicidal move from the ground.
  Isobel's path was easy to follow.  The cavity was lobed, showing the girl's progress south toward the Mississippi River.
  "How's your cure?" she asked, pulling the earbud out and tossing it on the floor.
Bar graphs were still rising and falling.
  Jack shook his head.  "Don't know.  It's staying chaotic; it hasn't reached bio-stasis."
  That didn't sound good.  Alexa had given herself the luxury of believing she might not have to kill Isobel.  The AI dipped the plane low over the ground, only a thousand feet up.  "I need to know: will it work or won't it?"
"I can't know until the simulation finishes."
  Another row of skyscrapers fell.  From the far side of Lake Pontchartrain, the National Guard launched a volley of missiles that shot plumes of dust into the air when they hit the ground.  A useless gesture, but Alexa understood.  They felt helpless and needed to do something with all that ordnance.
  An ant was moving in the dust, trailing a line of smoke behind it.  An ant before which lines of buildings crumbled and fell way.
  Alexa dropped the plane lower, three hundred feet off the ground.  The ant resolved into a small figure.  Alexa narrowed her pupils farther than human eyes could resolve and saw a scared little girl, with a dirty, tear-streaked face.
  It was like looking into a mirror that showed the past.  Alexa knew that grimace of pain.  Her own green
  
eyes crinkled like that when she cried; her nose swelled into the same shade of red.  Even in the middle of chaos, destroying thousands of lives and billions of dollars' worth of property, the little girl hadn't given in to terror or grief.  She was on her feet, moving with purpose.  A tiny, beautiful, willful child.
Isobel was magnificent.
  Alexa's chest ached.  She didn't want to kill her.  But she was honest enough to realize the shameful truth: if it came down to her or the child—she would.
  "You're out of time," Alexa snapped.  "I need to know if we're doing this your way or mine.  Will it work?"
  Jack bit his lower lip, his eyes darting around the simulation's readout.  He looked trapped.  Then he tapped a button and the image froze.  "Yeah." He un-snapped a syringe from the holder molded into the lab side of the case, stuck it into the readout port, and extracted a liquid carrying millions of copies of a feline retrovirus that would infect Crick with the ability to create antidote-nanos to neutralize Isobel.
  He held it up to Alexa as if offering a toast.  "Yes.  It will work."
  Alexa's hearing was as finely tuned as her sight, and she had centuries of practice at interrogation.  She knew Jack was lying.
  
31
T
he military cargo plane came in low over the ruined city, kicking up a fog of dust until Jack could see nothing past the nose cone.
  Alexa worked the AI, in low urgent whispers, plotting a course down.  It fought her.  The maps in its memory showed New Orleans as a vibrant acropolis, not a desolate plain broken occasionally by craters and historic landmarks.  It refused to land in the middle of a skyscraper that was no longer there.
  "Damn you." Alexa bounced her fist off the console above the AI's speaker.  "Manual control."
  The AI responded: "MANUAL CONTROL IS COUNTER-
RECOMMENDED FOR LOW VISIBILITY, LOW ALTITUDE	"
"Manual control.  Now."
"MANUAL CONTROL, CONFIRMED."
Alexa took up the yoke.  "You buckled in?" Jack checked his five-point harness.  "Yes.  Why—" The plane lowered into a swirling miasma of dust that worked its way through the cracks in the fuselage, dimming vision inside the cockpit.  The wheels bounced off a solid surface under the dust.  Jack imagined packed earth, or an old pre-nano-biology asphalt street, then the plane was in the air again.
  Alexa reduced throttle and tried again.  Visibility was less than ten feet.  The AI was shut down, and both her environmental suit and the lack of ambient nano-transceivers meant she had no link to Gaia-Net.
  
She had nothing more than her own skill and instinct.  Jack hoped that sometime in her long life she'd passed an instrument-landing course.
  The plane settled like a dragonfly onto a lily pad.  There was a bump, then the sounds of wheels rolling.
  Jack blew out the breath he'd been holding.  Thank God.  They were going to—
  One of the plane's wheels stuck.  The plane pivoted, canting up.  Its wing brushed the ground.  It all seemed to be happening in slow motion.  Was this how Alexa always saw the world, with her accelerated nervous system?
  Jack dangled from his safety harness, staring at the ground.  Then he was upside down, the plane falling, then darkness—
  Jack woke to a splitting headache.  He had no idea how long he'd been out: seconds, minutes, hours? His mouth was gritty and tasted of soot.  He moved his hand toward the buckle of his safety harness and saw black grains under the plastic.  There was a breach in his suit.
  Adrenaline jolted him awake, and he looked over to the pilot's seat.  Alexa was gone.  For a second he imagined her dissolved into nothingness, deconstructed by the nano.  No.  If that had happened, she'd have left behind an empty suit—unless she'd had enough time to crawl out of her seat before disintegrating.
  "Alexa!" His voice was panicked.  Jack released the buckle of his safety harness.  The underarm seam of his environmental suit caught on the copilot's yoke and ripped open as he tore free of the seat.  Too big to patch.  Shit.
He called out again.  "Alexa!"
  "Here," she said from outside the plane.  Her arms emerged from the swirling blackness and helped him out of the cockpit.
  The dust began to settle.  Jack could see the plane's wheel suspended in midair, one wing pointed toward
  
the sky, the other bent back on itself against the ground.  It wouldn't fly, not without major restoration.
  Jack reached back into the plane, extracted Fontes-ca's lab, and opened it.  The syringe was intact, still full of Isobel's only hope.
  Alexa led Jack through the dust, toward the part of New Orleans that had once been the French Quarter.  Here and there among the piles of dust were the buried hulks of pre-nano-biology brick buildings.  When they were fifty yards away from the crash, Alexa said, "Wait here.  I'll find Isobel."
  "No." Jack caught her arm.  "I'm going with you." He didn't trust her alone with the child.  Alexa was Deathless.  No matter how much she cared for the Sterling children, she was a woman who'd chosen eternal life over her humanity.  Isobel threatened that existence.
  Alexa turned on Jack.  She was inches shorter than he, but that didn't stop her from being imposing.  She tapped the case Jack held.  "You don't know this will work."
  He shifted it out of her reach.  "And you don't know it won't."
  She cocked her head at him, as if reasoning with a child.  "Come on, Jack.  Face reality.  Fontesca worked for years on a cure.  You're going to find it in a couple of hours during a plane flight?"
  A chill ran through Jack at her calm demeanor.  Alexa acted as if the premeditated murder of a twelve-year-old girl was no more troubling than taking out the trash.  "We have to at least try.  She's your daughter, for God's sake."
  "No!" Alexa's expression went cold.  "She's not.  I never carried her in my body, never inhaled her soft baby smell, never saw her first steps, never helped with her homework.  I don't have a daughter.  All Fontesca created was a half-breed clone.  She shares half my DNA, but she's not family."
Alexa fixed Jack with a stare he felt all the way to his marrow.  "I'm not sorry you're tenderhearted.  Lucius raised his descendant to be better than he was.  But me—I was Lucius's right hand.  He trained me to do what needs doing." She leaned forward, kissed Jack's brow, and—before he could grab her— disappeared into the roiling dust.
"Alexa!"
No answer.
  "As your employer—the holder of your indenture— I command you to come back!"
  Nothing but the wind and the far-off sound of sirens.
  Jack kicked a mound of dust.  "Shit.  Damn.  Fuck." Somewhere under this curtain of cinders were a scared little girl and her cat.  And he had to find her before Alexa, an inhumanly fast assassin with centuries of tracking experience, got there first.
  The pounding on the door startled Sarah out of sleep.  Who? It was still dark outside.  Not even a hint of morning light filtered through the oil-cloth windows.
"Let me in, Albrecht! You can't hide her from me!"
  Her father's voice froze Sarah, as if stillness could make her invisible.  But why should she think that? It had never saved her before.
  All three babies stirred and, at the next barrage of furious pounding, began to cry.
  Sarah heard Paul Albrecht rise from his bed.  "What in the name of—" He stumbled across the floor, accidentally kicking the crib and sending the little ones into higher-pitched wails.
  "Merciful Lord," said Rachel, "who would call at this hour?"
  Paul Albrecht opened the door.  His body was outlined in his linen nightshirt by the dancing flames of a glass lantern.
Sarah's younger brother, Mark, held the lantern aloft.

The boy cast a sidelong fearful glance at his enraged father.
  "Slut!" Samuel Wiens shouted, pushing the door open against Paul.  He outweighed the schoolmaster by forty pounds.  "Whore! I heard of your bargain with the outsider.  How many times did you open your legs before he promised you his riches?"
  "Sir!" Paul pushed on the door, half closing it on Samuel.  "There are women and children present.  Amend your language! Explain yourself—and this visit!"
  Sarah saw her father's mouth work, as it always did before he struck.  She opened her mouth to warn Mr.  Albrecht, but couldn't speak.
  Instead of hitting Paul, her father fixed him with a hard blue stare.  "You harbor a viper in your nest.  You will thank me for not leaving her a single night in your household.  That creature"—he pointed over Paul's shoulder to where Sarah cowered by the hearth—"has shamed herself with Jack Sterling."
  Rachel bent over the babies, trying to soothe them from their high-pitched wailing.  "Shush.  Shush now, little ones."
  Paul followed the accusing finger, and his eyes softened on Sarah.  "That may be proved, or it may not.  In the meantime—"
  Sarah stood and picked up the nearest child, a nine-month-old girl swaddled in the softest lamb's wool.  She bounced the baby on her shoulder, patting its back, while Mrs.  Albrecht picked up the other two.
  "Jack gave the proof himself before he left.  On his death, he wills all his worldly possessions to Sarah.  Not to my guardianship, as might be proper for a young woman, or to Pastor van Haegen for the good of the community—but to Sarah herself.  What would a girl know of running a ranch?"
  Her father's angry words made Sarah's head spin.  In the tail end of sleep, she had trouble making sense of them.  "Has something happened to Jack?"
  
  "I only pray it may be so," her father growled.  He fixed his hard stare on Sarah.
  She felt the waves of his fury like an invisible tide rushing in.  Why did he hate her so?
  "He left with his other whore, the dark one." He cocked his head, and his eyes glittered in the lamplight.  "Tell me, does he share you in his bed, or take each of you separately?"
  Rachel sucked in a breath and buried her head between the children she held, cupping her hands over their ears.
  Sarah couldn't move.  She patted the child in her arms as mechanically as a metronome.  All her life her father had struck out at her, at all the children.  But never before others.  Not until now.
  Paul Albrecht's stance grew rigid.  "Samuel, you'd best leave." His voice held an edge of violence Sarah wouldn't have guessed possible from the schoolmaster.  "The devil's anger has you in its grip.  We will speak of this in the morning." He began to push the door shut.
  "Everything he owns, all the Watershed Valley property, his holdings in the world beyond, belong to that one upon his death, to the whore who kept his bed." Samuel's mouth twisted and he spat at Sarah.  "You should be cast out like the viper you are."
  "Samuel Wiens, control yourself," ordered the booming voice of Pastor van Haegen from outside the Albrecht home.  "Anger is a sin."
  "Rachel Albrecht," Samuel shouted.  Strong hands of the men accompanying the pastor closed on Samuel's arms and pulled him away from the door.  "Look to your husband.  Ask yourself why he protects the girl."
  Rachel's gaze snapped to Sarah, taking her in head to foot.
  Sarah cringed inwardly, knowing what the older woman thought of her.  Imagining how she looked, clad in only an oversized shift, one sleeve sliding off
  
her shoulder.  Rachel knew Sarah had gone out, and she already suspected the girl of misdeeds.
  Her father's last words filtered in through the oilcloth windows as he was dragged away, "Sarah, you are shameless.  I should have drowned you at birth."
  When Samuel and the others had gone, the babies quieted.  Two fell asleep, and the third fussed for a bottle.  Sarah held him on her lap and rocked him as Paul helped Rachel stoke the fire to warm the milk.  They spoke in a quiet murmur, and Sarah knew they talked of her.
  Once the pan was heating, Rachel came back to Sarah and took the babe from her arms.  "We think it best you go.  You may keep the dress and petticoat I gave you, and the blanket.  But for our family's sake, we can shelter you no longer."
  Sarah wasn't sure she understood.  "You want me to leave now? Before morning? I've done nothing wrong—I swear it."
  Rachel patted the child on her shoulder.  "That's as may be.  But you bring trouble with you, Sarah Wiens.  You have problems, I'm sorry to say, beyond our provenance.  We have to consider the welfare of the babies." Rachel looked away for the final words.  "It is better you find housing elsewhere."
  Sarah looked past Rachel to Paul at the woodstove, stoking the fire.  His eyes stayed resolutely on the wood.  "Rachel manages the household.  It is her decision."
  Sarah bit her lip to keep from shouting "Coward!" at him.  Her father's words to Rachel had done their damage.  Sarah slipped on her shoes, pulled the worn dress and petticoats Rachel had loaned her over her nightdress, and wrapped the wool blanket they'd allowed her over her shoulders.  The soles of her boots were nearly worn through from being burned in the tunnel, but they would do.
"Take this." Paul Albrecht handed Sarah the re- mains of the loaf of bread they'd eaten at midday.  Their fingers touched, but not their eyes.
  Sarah took the meager offering and stepped out of the snug cabin, and walked away from the haven of the Albrechts' home.  The Montana predawn was breathtakingly cold, crystallizing Sarah's breath into fog.
  Sarah prayed her father was in bed, and not still roaming the town.  If he found her alone—Sarah doubted she would survive the beating.  She jumped at every crackling twig, the sounds of movement from the pasture, the hoot of a barn owl.
  Why would Jack leave her everything? What did he expect her to do with his property? In his eyes, she was barely more than a child; he'd made that clear enough.  He had to have known his declaration would lead the townspeople to gossip.  He'd given to Sarah what a man gave only a wife, implying that she had performed for him as a wife.  Was this a punishment for coming to him? Or an unthinking act of love? Did he—please God, no—think of her as a daughter?
  Sarah huddled in the lee of the barn and tucked the wool blanket over her head like a hood, and around her hands and feet.  The warmth of woolly bodies inside made her marginally warmer.  With no one to take her in, what would become of her?
  Another worry gnawed at her, as chilling as the early-morning air.  Where was Jack? What was he facing that he might need an heir? She blew her nose and felt the freezing tracks of tears roll down her cheeks.
  "Please, God," she whispered to the stars, "keep him safe.  Don't let Jack die."
  
32
A
lexa ran in a crouch, following oblate depressions in the dust.  A casual observer would have missed the millimeter-deep footsteps, but Alexa had spent decades training in tracking and field observation.
  She moved cautiously over the uncertain surface.  A layer of ankle-deep soot made it impossible to see the ground.  She shuffled her feet, feeling her way.  New Orleans was a nostalgic city, and there was no telling what antiques might lie under that powdery black blanket.
  Her environmental suit felt microns thick.  It was all that' protected her from the swirling hell of disassemblers all around her.  A rusty nail, a sharp bit of rock, and she would be gone, crumbled into dust within seconds, as Fontesca had.
  It was almost noon, but the normally punishing Louisiana sun was unable to penetrate the black dust suspended in the air.  The dimness gave the city a feeling of twilight.
  The discipline of tracking kept her mind busy, staved off thoughts about what she would do when she found Isobel.  Quick.  Painless.  Beyond those two words, Alexa didn't allow herself any mental pictures.
She'd never killed a child before.
No.
Focus on the trail.
She couldn't afford emotions.  Her resolve had to be firm.  Anything less, and she might hesitate.  That would only make Isobel suffer, when .  .  .
  For an instant Alexa wondered if she was doing the right thing.  Perhaps Jack was right.  No.  Impossible.  If there was a cure, Fontesca would have found it.
  Alexa surprised herself with a pang for Fontesca's passing.  They'd never been close.  Lucius kept him working in the lab, away from others, and Fontesca's brilliance made talking to him awkward.  Alexa always left in awe of him, but with the unsettling feeling that she'd missed half the conversation.
  He'd lusted after her from the moment they'd met.  That was nothing unusual; many men did.  But he seemed to have a depth of feeling for Alexa, or perhaps for that long-lost woman from Caltech.  Alexa wished she'd tried to know him better.
  Something in the tracks stopped her: twin lines of tiny circles the size of twentieth-century nickels bounded away from Isobel's path.  Round tracks were feline, and these were so small.  The kitten.  It had to be.
Isobel's footprints swerved after the kitten's.
  Moving carefully over the blanket of dust, Alexa followed their trail.  Her thoughts were a collage of conflicting emotions.  If Isobel had brought Crick all this way, then perhaps ...  It was impossible , .  .  But perhaps .  .  .
  Alexa heard the girl before she saw her.  The harsh breathing of suppressed sobs.
  Isobel huddled under the upraised hooves of a golden horse.  The statue was in mid-trot and gave the impression that at any second Isobel would be crushed.  The horse's rider held aloft a pennant.  The brightly polished bronze had been a gift from France in the late 1950s.  The woman astride the horse was as indomitable and doomed as Isobel herself: Joan of Arc.
  "Go away!" Isobel shouted when she saw Alexa.  "You killed Papa!"
  Alexa didn't argue.  Why cause the girl any more pain?
  
  "I hate you!" Isobel picked up a handful of grit and threw it at Alexa.  It disintegrated into a puff of smoke.
  Isobel was so full of life and spirit.  Every line of anger on her face, the way she clenched her face, reminded Alexa of someone.  Aunt Clara when the pain came on her.  Daddy when he'd been laid off from the plant.  The pout of her mother's mouth.  There were echoes of the whole DuBois clan within Isobel.
   Too damn bad for you, Alexa thought.  Should have been born to something lucky.
"Find your kitten?" Alexa asked.
  Isobel froze, anger replaced by fear, and something that pricked Alexa's heart even more: hope.  "Do you have Crick?"
  That was all the answer Alexa needed.  Whatever small hope she'd held out that Jack's solution might have worked, it was impossible without the cat.
  Quick.  Can't use the blades.  Snap her neck.  Never see it coming.  A kindness.
  Alexa crouched and held out her arms.  "He's safe.  I'll take you to him."
  Isobel's eyes were hooded with wariness.  But she crawled out from under the horse and rider.  She sidled forward a step.  "Where is he?"
  "Back at the plane." Alexa forced a smile.  "We're going to take you to a safe place." Alexa circled a finger at the destruction all around.  "Away from all this."
  "Papa said I should never go outside." Tears flowed down Isobel's face.  "B-but I didn't know why." She raised her face to the sky.  High overhead was a tiny patch of blue.  "I swear.  I didn't know why."
  "Shh.  Shh.  It's all right now." Still crouching, Alexa took a step closer.  Then another.  She slipped her arms around the girl's back.
  Isobel collapsed against her neck.  "Oh please, please.  I want my papa," she cried like a child half her age, lost in terror.  "Papa."
Alexa bowed her head until her brow touched the top of Isobel's hair.  She couldn't feel its softness through the environmental suit, but she could feel the firm, warm child in her arms.  For a moment, Alexa closed her eyes and imagined what it would have been like if her life had gone another way.  How it would have been to have a daughter as brave and beautiful as Isobel.  To have seen her grow up, and heard Isobel's sweet high voice call her mama.
  Alexa drank in a warmth she hadn't felt in centuries.
  No matter what she'd said to Jack, no matter what logic dictated, her blood and flesh knew better: the child in her arms was family.
  Alexa suddenly understood Fontesca.  No matter how many people had died, how many might still.  She would never let anyone harm the child in her arms.
  "Alexa! No! Don't do it!" Jack ran toward them in a cloud of smoke, windmilling his arms for her attention.
  Isobel raised her head and looked with alarm at Jack.  She trembled in Alexa's arms.
"Don't hurt her!" Jack commanded.
  Isobel looked up at Alexa, eyes filled with betrayal and horror.
  "Sweetie—" Alexa's comforting reassurance was cut off by Isobel's foot.  The child was a wild thing in her arms, biting and scratching.
  Alexa let go and the girl kicked free, stumbled in the dust, got up and kept running.
  A pain in her left forearm made Alexa look down.  Two crescents of teeth marks had left indentations in her flesh and in the plastic of the environmental suit.  Alexa watched two black pinpoints on her arm bloom into freckles, then dime-sized patches.  Where the disassembler spread, deconstructing her flesh into constituent atoms, the skin flaked and fell off.
  Funny.  It didn't hurt.  Alexa had always thought death would hurt when it came.
  
33
J
ack saw Alexa with her arms around the girl's head.  He'd seen her use the same grip to kill a terrorist wno'd posed as a tutor in the children's compound.
"No! Don't do it!"
  He knew it was already too late.  Alexa could flex, and the girl was gone.  But Alexa's arms didn't twitch.  She lifted her head, and twin tracks glittered along her cheeks.  Alexa, the implacable destroyer—crying?
  Then things happened fast: Isobel exploded out of Alexa's grip.  She hurtled across the landscape, kicking up a cloud of dust in her wake that set Jack to coughing.
  He expected Alexa to shout at him, or give chase.  But she just stood there, staring at her arm.
  Jack ran to her side and saw the destruction spreading across her flesh.  "Oh, Jesus!" He yanked the repair kit out of his hip pocket and slapped an adhesive polyurethane-laminated nylon patch over the teeth marks.  "We have to get you to the plane and out of here."
  Alexa shook her head.  "It's too late." She didn't seem angry or murderous, merely sad.  "One or two disassemblers is enough to finish me.  All you've done is bought me time."
  Jack combed his fingers through his hair.  "I thought—oh Jeez.  I mean—you were there and she—"
"The cat's missing.  Your cure won't work.  You'll have to take her in the plane and go." She nodded at a pair of helicopters chuffing overhead.  "Quickly."
  Jack's heart shredded.  Alexa—oh God!—Alexa was dying.  She was everything to him: friend, mother, goddess.  Immortal and eternal.  Dying—because he'd misunderstood her intent.
Destroyed—his fault.
  In Jack's peripheral vision, Isobel stumbled over an obstacle hidden by the six-inch layer of dust blanketing the ground.  She hit the ground hard, the impact shooting a black cloud into the air.  She tried to stand, then fell back down, shrieking and clutching her leg.
  Right now Jack didn't care whether Isobel lived or died.  He certainly didn't care about a sprained ankle.
He should have let Alexa take care of her.
  Helplessness washed over his anguish.  There was nothing he could do to save Alexa.  The silver case he carried under his arm dug into his ribs.  He stared at its satin-brushed silver surface.
No.
There was something he could do.
  It was insane, unlikely to work, and more likely to kill him than anything else.  But there was exactly one thing Jack could do.
  He shucked off his torn environmental suit.  Then he popped open Fontesca's portable lab and pulled out the injector.  He pumped his fist until the vein rose and pressed the injector over the raised blue line.
"Jack, no! Your allergies—"
  Sixteen tiny jets of air shoved the nano-biology 2.0 gene modifications into his bloodstream.  They were designed to enter subcutaneously, to spread slowly through his system.  They were designed to infect a cat.  Jack prayed the virus was one of the few that could cross over.  Fontesca might have used a multiple-target vector, hoping to inject Isobel herself once he perfected the cure.
  Then his blood was on fire and he collapsed to his knees.
  
  Alexa crouched next to him, cradling his head on her shoulder.  "Jack, you idiot," she whispered.  "What have you done?"
  There was too much pain to think clearly.  "Isobel." He ground out the word through clenched teeth.  "Bio-stasis."
  He'd grown cocky.  His allergies hadn't responded to second-generation nanology before this—
  Oh God, it hurt.  Jack grit his teeth until his jaw popped.  His neck was a solid block of straining muscle.  He couldn't breathe.
  Alexa pulled Jack to his feet.  Through his haze of pain he felt her left arm give way—it crumbled like sun-damaged paper.  She caught him with her right arm and hefted him onto her good shoulder.
  Then she walked, dragging his feet along the ground behind her.
  Jack felt every artery, vein, and capillary in his system, fiery roots spreading through his flesh, carrying white-hot agony.  The animal part of him began to seize and kick.
He didn't want to die.
Didn't.  Want.
  Images flashed through his brain: bright sun glinting off the waves in Elysium; the taste of salt water; Alexa laughing as she captured his rook; struggling for breath during Fontesca's lecture; the scent of plumeria in bloom; his blandly beautiful mother crying perfunctory tears; pacing the floor of his quarantine room, so familiar that he knew how many tiles crossed its floor; masturbating under the covers where Fontesca's cameras couldn't see; escaping across a moonlit patio, Alexa's eyes luminous in reflected light before she led the guards astray; sunrise over Watershed Valley, painting the bluffs pink and blue; the smell of sheep and wet wool; Sarah blushing and peeking at him through lowered lashes.
  Far, far away Jack felt his body convulsing against the ground, thick clouds of dust choking his lungs.
  
Such a stupid way to die.
  Then peace washed over him.  After a lifetime of struggling for breath, he hadn't expected that.
  The world retracted to a tiny pinpoint of blue sky overhead.
  His hand clutched something warm and soft.  Flesh.  Whose?
It didn't matter.  Nothing mattered.
Death was coming.
Jack took one last breath.  He was ready.

34
S
omething wet and rough rasped the tip of Jack's nose.  Was this the worst hell had to offer?
  Jack sat up and a white kitten with brown points on his nose, paws, and tail fell into his chest.  When Jack coughed, the kitten dug in needle-sharp claws.
  Jack rubbed his eyes.  They were crusted over with dust.  He lay in the center of a black plain.  A mile away buildings rose into the sky, glittering with lights and three-dimensional projection billboards.
  The kitten crawled up his arm and nestled on his shoulder, under his ear.  It purred like a tractor.
  "Careful." Jack's voice was hoarse and dry.  It hurt to talk.  He spoke anyway, to dispel the deathly silence ringing in his ears.  "I've got something that could make you sick."
  Next to him, lying facedown, was Isobel's prone body.  She was half sunk into the dust.  Jack regretted wishing her dead.  She was so tiny.  He reached out his hand, touched her calf—and drew back in surprise.  It was warm under his hands.
  Isobel's chest rose and the dust around her face whirled into eddies.  She coughed and sat up, rubbing her face.  "Papa?"
  There were no words that could comfort a child who'd lost everything.  Jack didn't even try.
  Isobel's face crumpled as she looked around and memory erased the gentle fantasies of sleep.
  
  Jack pulled the little girl into his arms and held her tight against his chest, rocking her as she cried.
  Crick shifted position, crawling painfully across Jack's back to lick the salty tears from the little girl's face.  His pink tongue was streaked with black.
  Her face still buried in Jack's neck, Isobel reached up a hand to stroke the kitten.
  Jack looked up and saw, half-buried in dust, wrinkled clear plastic in a human form.
  Alexa's environmental suit: empty.  Grains of black clung to it electrostatically, inside and out.  The plastic was shredded.  Jack imagined Alexa's death throes, blades extruding from her body as she fought against an enemy too small to see, much less cut.
  Jack turned his face away, not wanting to look.  It was obscene, the indomitable will of Alexa DuBois reduced to component molecules.  Her strength, her drive, her beauty—all gone.
  Jack clutched the child in his arms tighter.  Tears prickled his eyes.  Lucius's right-hand bodyguard had died as she had lived, protecting his descendants.
  The kitten on Jack's shoulder arched and hissed and tried to climb Jack's head.
  A golden brown hand emerged from the dust, clawing the air for purchase.
  Jack pushed Isobel away and set the kitten in her lap.  He ran to the hand and gripped it, pulling hard.
  A bare shoulder emerged from the dust, followed by a swanlike neck and a bowed head covered in masses of black curls.  The head lifted, and Alexa stared at him with bloodshot eyes.  "You survived," she said in a gritty voice, without inflection.
  Jack crushed Alexa to his chest, kissing her cheeks and face over and over.  "Oh God, I thought you were gone.  Gone forever." He couldn't believe it.  "The antidote-nanos—they must have worked fast enough to neutralize the disassemblers inside your environmental suit.  How did you know to cut it open?"
Alexa returned his embrace one-handed, but tight—   , so hard that Jack felt bones creak.  "I learned a long time ago .  .  .  not to give up on a Sterling."
  Isobel caught up with Jack and clung to him, whining, "Don't leave me."
  Jack reached back and pulled the girl to his side.  He had a momentary thrill of fear at having Alexa and Isobel in close proximity, but if Alexa was alive, the cure must have worked.  His system and Isobel's had reached bio-stasis.
  "It's over," he soothed the little girl.  "I've got you.  You're safe."
  Alexa pulled back her head and cocked it, listening.  "Don't know about that.  Company's coming."
  After a second Jack heard it too, the high whine of incoming drones.  With the disassembler in abeyance, the local government was able to move in.  They would have detected the reestablishment of Gaia-Net almost immediately.  This close to the intact districts of New Orleans, ambient nano-biology transmitters drifted in quickly to reestablish the network.
  Seconds later, white cones of light converged on the trio from half a dozen drones flashing blue and red.  "Hands in the air." The same reedy voice emanated from all six drones.  Twelve projectile ducts locked on target.
  "You are under arrest for conspiracy to commit terrorism."
  Sarah's fingers were so cold that they trembled and slipped off the door latch to Jack's cabin.  A light snow was falling, and her place by the barn had become too cold.  To survive, she had to either slip in with the sheep or come here.
  "He would leave me all his wealth," Sarah whispered to the empty room.  "The loan of his cabin should pose no problem."
  Jack had left in such haste that his nightshirt was flung over his unmade bed and his laptop computer sat open, a faint light emanating from its screen on
  
the desk.  A red glow from the woodstove gave Sarah hope.  If there were live coals, starting a fire would be easy.  She slipped inside and shut the door behind her.
  When Sarah passed in front of the computer, it brightened.  Moving pictures played on the screen, but without sound.  She froze.
  Jack lived among the Mennonites, but Pastor van Haegen and all the parents made it clear to the children of the village that his ways were tainted.  His presence was the lesser evil, necessary to protect them from the greater world.  By mutual agreement, Jack kept the few technologies he allowed himself to his cabin.
  Sarah had secretly observed Jack using his computer.  She'd stood on tiptoe and peered in early in the morning, when she had left anonymous tokens on his doorstep.  She knew the tiles on the bottom part were important.  And she had heard him mumbling to it but had not been able to make out the words.
  "I have flown through the air, and survived the attack of men with unimaginable weapons," Sarah said, encouraging herself.  "I will not quail from an animated book." She leaned closer.
  The scene it displayed looked like new pasture after a burn to clear out blackberries and small trees.  Around the rim were houses as tall as bluffs, covered with glittering lights.  In one corner a woman with impossibly regular features moved her mouth in silent speech.  Judging from the worried expression on her face, whatever was happening was important.
  Sarah flexed her thawing fingers and touched the largest button.  Nothing happened.  She tapped a few more at random, trying to emulate the rapid-fire taps Jack used.  More images popped up, overlying the disaster scene: flock records, spreadsheets of breeding plans, unintelligible spiraling diagrams, nothing she wanted.  Sarah made a noise of disappointment and sat back.
  
  At the moment she admitted defeat, the infernal machine relented.  A window popped to the forefront.  Scrawling across the bottom were the words: LIVE COVERAGE OF BREAKING NEWS, HIGH RELEVANCE TO PREVIOUSLY SAVED SEARCH.  In the video were three huddled figures among a crater of ash.
Sarah gasped.
  One of the three was Jack.  With him were Alexa and a child.
  The female narrator suddenly expanded and filled the screen, hiding Jack's image.  Her voice came on, loud and blaring.  "And these three at the epicenter are suspected to have had something to do with the terrible events afflicting the city."
  Frustrated, Sarah clawed at the blond woman's face, trying push her image out of the way.  "Shh.  Quiet," she ordered the machine.  "Stop covering him."
  The computer made a whining noise like a mechanical sigh, and the screen went black.
Sarah poked the tiles again.  "Return.  Awaken."
No response.
  Jack had been in trouble.  The dust—it looked like Elysium.  More destruction.  Sarah remembered the soldiers who had shot Louis.  If he was in a place like that, he was in danger.  She had to get help.
  But who? The elders could do nothing in the outside world, even if they wished to.
  Sarah knew Jack used his laptop to send messages.  If she could get it to respond, perhaps she could contact him.  Help him.  Or find someone who could.
But how?
  Sarah pounded on the tiny tiles in frustration, but she received nothing in response other than bruised fingers.  If only she knew more about the outside world.  Then she realized that in the village were those who did.
  Sarah rushed out of Jack's cabin and ran full tilt toward Mrs.  Klaasen's cabin.  The town was beginning
  
to stir in the predawn hours.  A rooster greeted the sun and warded off potential challengers for his harem with a series of yodeling cries.
  Sarah was so intent on her mission that she didn't see the figure at the well until she barreled into him and knocked him down.
  "Hey! Watch it!" Devon pushed himself off the ground and gathered up an empty wooden bucket.
  Sarah's heart leapt with gratitude.  Here was exactly the person she needed.  She grabbed Devon's hand.  "Come.  Jack's in trouble.  You have to help."
Devon's lean face puckered in confusion.  "Me?"
  Sarah tugged harder, dragging him a few steps in her direction.  "You know how to use the devil's book, yes?"
He reared back from her.  "What?"
  "The talking book." Sarah let go and pantomimed the finger gestures Jack used on the tiles.  "With moving pictures." She grabbed his arm.  "Please.  You're the only one who can help Jack." Sarah stared at him, her heart in her eyes.
  Whatever Devon saw there convinced him.  He set the bucket down beside the well and ran with her to Jack's cabin.
  Sarah pushed him inside ahead of her and dropped the locking bar across the door.  If they were found together, the town would assume that all her father said about her was true, that she had seduced and misled Devon—no matter that he was as old as she and should be responsible for his own conduct.
  None of that was important now.  Jack was in trouble.
  Sarah fluttered her fingers in front of the unresponsive machine.  "It showed me images.  Jack and his dark-skinned handmaiden—"
Devon looked at her sharply.  "Alexa?"
  "Yes.  In trouble.  They were in a place like the place we rescued you.  They looked frightened."
Devon's long forefinger sought out a button Alexa hadn't seen on the side of the machine, and the screen displayed an animation of rolling waves under a speeded-up sunset and sunrise.
"Impossible.  Nothing scares Alexa."
  Sarah didn't argue.  She leaned over his shoulder.  He smelled like wood ash.
  The pictures came back.  Or at least, the close-up of the beautiful worried woman.
  "There." Sarah jabbed at the lower left quadrant of the screen.  "The image of Jack and Alexa here before this woman covered it up."
  Devon swirled a finger over the tiles and the woman slid out of the way, exposing ten more moving pictures underneath.  More twirling, and suddenly there was Jack, full screen, shouting something into the air.
  Sarah turned frightened eyes to Devon.  They were so close she felt his breath on her cheek.  "We have to help them."
  The sky was a writhing mass of drones: the flashing blue and red of the Louisiana troopers, the blue gray of the feds, and the matte black of mercenary troops.  They buzzed and jockeyed for position around Jack, Alexa, and Isobel.  In the distance the mantislike golems marched over the border between untouched New Orleans and the blackened plain.
  Alexa had never seen so much automated weaponry in one place.
  "They're moving in now that the disassembler has been neutralized," she told Jack in a whisper.
  Even if she'd been at full strength, there were too many.  The physics of the situation made it impossible.  They couldn't kill her, but they could distract her, pull her away from the others long enough to destroy them, then imprison her.
  The buildings in the distance writhed, straining upward like fast-growing weeds.
"What's happening?" Jack asked.
Alexa zoomed in on the changes, then licked her lips.  "They're reconfiguring the towers into a solid parabolic shield.  My guess is that they're about to drop some heavy ordnance."
  Jack hugged Isobel to his side.  "I thought we were under arrest."
  "Sure.  The federal guard"—Alexa pointed to the cloud of drones—"wants to arrest us." She indicated the approaching golems.  "And the Louisiana forces are looking for payback." She nodded at the buildings reconstructing themselves.  "But the Deathless want us permanently gone."
"Can't you reason with them?"
  Alexa tried to connect to Gaia-Net.  Whispers, nothing solid.  "There aren't enough ambient transmitters to send a message." Alexa looked down at the child clinging to Jack.  "If you stepped away from Isobel, would the reaction—"
"No!" Isobel clung to Jack's leg.  "Don't leave me."
  Jack knelt down and hugged Isobel.  Over the girl's shoulder, he said, "I don't know how long it would take her body to build up an excess of disassemblers." He nodded at the wall forming in the distance.  "And even at full strength, it won't stop conventional explosives."
  Suddenly the drones darted away like bubbles dissolving from a drop of oil.
  Alexa laced her good arm through Jack's.  "This isn't good."
  The sky streaked with white—at least a hundred missiles incoming.
"Take Isobel," Jack said.  "Run."
  Alexa shook her head and knelt down and hugged her daughter from the other side.  "It's too late."
  She bent her head over Isobel's and kissed the child's soft hair, inhaling her sweet scent.  This is what Fontesca died for.  Alexa wished there was some way to save her.
  Wind riffled Alexa's hair and swirled the dust around them into eddies.  Then a hole in the world
  
opened up.  Hovering in midair, with no visible source, a man's hand reached out from the interior of a drone.
  Alexa, who'd seen camouflage-drone prototypes, had never seen anything like this.  The illusion was flawless.  Even two feet away she couldn't see the visual distortion of the hull.  Where had it come from?
"Get in."
  Alexa clasped the hands of their savior, then looked up into the titanium-blue eyes of another Deathless.
  
35
A
lexa let go, but the man had her in his grasp.  She pushed at him with her free hand, forgetting that it had disintegrated, and fell into the drone on top of him.  He shifted her over his shoulder and pulled Jack and Isobel aboard.  Without waiting for everyone to strap in, the Deathless took off at full speed, flattening Isobel and Alexa against Jack's chest.
  Seconds later, a shock wave shook the drone, tossing it like a toy boat on the ocean.
  For long seconds the drone fought to maintain a straight course, its thousands of wings whining with strain.  When the ride smoothed out, Alexa charged the man, wrapping her good arm around his throat and extending the bone blade inward just enough to prick him.  "Who are you? What do you want with us?"
  A ring of titanium scales erupted from his neck, deflecting Alexa's arm blade.  In one swift motion he reached behind his shoulder and pulled her over, onto his lap.  "If you wanted a hug, you only had to ask."
  Alexa pulled his jaw forward with her fingers, narrowing her eyes.  "I don't know you—you're newly converted."
  "With all the latest factory upgrades." His metallic blue eyes reflected light like anodized titanium.  His blond hair was cropped close against his scalp.  "Dyson
  
Rader, at your service." He hooked a thumb in Jack's direction.  "Well, his, actually.  As of a half hour ago."
  Alexa pushed off Dyson's lap and turned to the back of the drone.  "Jack, you hired this guy?"
  Jack's face remained calm, but his eyes gave him away.  He didn't have any more idea than she did what was going on.  "Apparently one of my better business decisions."
  Alexa turned back to Dyson.  "Where are you taking us?"
  "Watershed Valley, Montana." He touched the control panel of the drone, adjusting course.  "With luck, your enemies will think you died in the blast—for a while, anyway."
  Alexa narrowed her eyes.  "I don't trust a bodyguard who takes bids."
  Isobel peeked out from Jack's shoulder and whispered, "Is he a bad man?"
  Dyson, like Alexa, heard the whisper.  He grinned, showing sharp white teeth.  "Very bad, little one.  But sometimes bad men are the most useful."
Alexa didn't let up.  "Who was your last employer?"
  "Dante Fabroni.  Recently deceased by the outbreak of the disassembler in Milan.  Not expecting to die, he designated no heirs, and my indenture was placed on the market.  Mr.  Sterling's representative put in the highest bid, and"—he spread his hands grandly—"voila."
  "I don't trust him," Alexa told Jack.  "This could be a ruse."
  Jack's expression remained as calm as if they were on a joyride with a trusted chauffeur, not fleeing for their lives at the hands of a deadly enemy.  Alexa was proud of him.  Lucius taught his descendants never to show weakness.  There were too many people in the world who would use them and try to take advantage of the Sterling wealth and name.
  Dyson was charming.  Many assassins were.  It was easier to slide a blade into a relaxed and cooperative
  
target.  She'd used similar tactics herself.  Most likely, he would deliver them to the highest bidder.
  Jack was bewildered.  Dyson Rader had ridden in and saved them at the last minute—then claimed to be Jack's employee, but Jack hadn't hired him.  It made no sense.  The snake-fast man worried Jack; he'd flipped Alexa over his shoulder like she was nothing.
  But what concerned Jack more was the delicate balance he and Isobel had between his allergy and her destructive power.  They had reached bio-stasis, but it wasn't static.  Their two biologies remained in constant opposition, his antidote-nano destroying her disassemblers, until toxins built up in his body, then production fell until her disassembler cleared out his system and it once more kept hers in check.
  A delicate balance, like the interplay between rabbits and coyotes on the ranch.  Too many coyotes, and the rabbits are killed outright; too few, and the rabbits overpopulate and starve.
  This precarious give-and-take allowed him to ride thousands of feet above the earth in a drone with two Deathless and no environmental suit—Alexa's had been forgotten in the hurry to leave New Orleans.  But if his and IsobePs systems fell out of equilibrium, either he would die of anaphylactic shock or all four of them would plummet from the sky—and only two would hit the ground.
  Jack snuggled Isobel into the crook of his arm, hoping proximity would help keep the balance.
  Alexa's lips pursed as if she tasted spoiled food, but her eyes never left Dyson.  "Where did you get this drone?"
  "Jack's personal assistant sent it to pick me up." He grinned at Jack.  "And what a cute thing she is.  Most moderns don't go for the underage look—and freckles.  I haven't seen anyone wear freckles since the twenty-first century."
Jack nodded benignly; Dyson would hear his heart race, but Jack hoped he'd discount it as jealousy.  He was talking about Sarah.  Simple, farm-raised Sarah, who'd never used a machine more complicated than a foot-powered spinning wheel.  That Sarah had gone on Gaia-Net and hired a Deathless bodyguard to rescue them?
  Alexa tipped her head at Dyson.  To Jack she said, "Tell him to jump out of the drone."
  "Didn't like my freckles comment?" Dyson chucked Alexa under her chin.  "Don't worry, love, you're still the fairest of them all."
  Alexa jerked her head away.  "We don't need Dyson.  We can't trust his loyalty, and his knowing our final destination is dangerous.  If he jumps now, we can change course.  It will be safer."
  Jack glanced at the drone's controls.  "We're thirty thousand feet up.  No parachute could—"
  "I agree, no parachute.  We might need them later." Alexa's tone hardened.  "His loyalty is for sale, he's—"
  "Hey.  My contract was sold—not my choice.  I am nothing"—his blue eyes narrowed in anger—"if not loyal."
  Alexa leaned forward until her turned-up nose was millimeters away from Dyson's.  "Then prove it.  You're an unknown.  Jack will be safer with you gone." Seconds passed.  "Why hesitate? Afraid?"
  A muscle in Dyson's jaw clenched.  "You're even crazier than all the stories.  No wonder Sterling put you out to pasture." His gaze flicked over to Jack.  "Tell her to back off, okay?"
  Jack swallowed, reminded himself he was not sending the man to his death.  "No, she's right.  We don't know you."
  "You're serious? You want me to jump out of the drone?"
  Alexa kissed the tip of Dyson's nose.  Her eyes were inches away from his.  She stared into his metallic blue irises, her lips quirked into a mocking smile.  "Don't worry.  It only hurts when you land."
  
  Dyson's hand snaked into Alexa's hair.  He smashed his mouth against hers in a deep probing kiss.
  Surprise stopped Alexa from biting off his tongue.  It had been so long since anyone had touched her that way that by the time she realized what was happening, it was over.
  "So you'll miss me," Dyson said, challenge in his eyes.  He swung over to the door.  "Hold on to something."
  Jack hastily belted himself and Isobel under the same harness.  Alexa wrapped her hands around the pilot's harness.  Dyson didn't make sense.  Too brash, too fresh.  Was he flirting, or using sex as a weapon to confuse her? Both?
  Blowing a kiss to Isobel and Alexa, Dyson jerked open the hatch.
  Wind buffeted them wildly, slashing Alexa's curls across her face.  She tensed, waiting for him to make a move.
  Dyson's lean frame was silhouetted against the bright morning sky.  The buckles on his black bodysuit gleamed.  He caught Alexa checking him out and gave her a slow, lascivious wink.
  Then he spread his arms and fell back into nothingness.
  Alexa sealed the door and took Dyson's place in the pilot's seat.  She was glad the sleazebag was gone, and yet—what if she was wrong and had just thrown away a useful, if annoying, ally?
  She shook her head.  No sense second-guessing herself now.
  She ran a quick check to make sure he hadn't clung to the outside of the drone.  Then she scanned the drone for surveillance equipment.  It was clean.
  Alexa relaxed a fraction, let the nano-biology of the drone wash over her, starting the long healing process it would take to replace her arm.  Her body could produce an armory of weapons by rearranging its struc-
  
ture using programmed patterns, but healing— reestablishing disrupted networks of collaborating nanites, collecting usable nano-biology components from the environment—could take days, weeks, for this much damage perhaps a month.
  Isobel's eyes were huge.  She stared out the window, fixated on the clouds below.  "He—he jumped."
  Alexa bent down and stroked a finger along the girl's cheek.  "Don't worry, Sugar.  It won't hurt him— any more than he deserves."
  A wind rippled across the southern pasture.  The sheep grazing nearby glanced over with dull curiosity, then went back to cropping grass.
  Sarah had waited all night with Devon at the dropoff rendezvous they'd specified when they'd hired the man Devon called "one of the Deathless." After they'd made arrangements for him to rescue Jack and Alexa, Devon belatedly delivered water to Mrs.  Klaasen, then slipped back to join Sarah in the pasture.  Through the early hours of the morning, they'd huddled together under Sarah's woolen blanket.
  The stars had given way to pink and golden streaks coming in over the eastern peaks.  Sarah had never been alone with a boy who wasn't related, much less shared a blanket with one.  If the townsfolk saw her, it would mean more disgrace.  If her father learned of it, another beating.
She was too soul-weary to care.
  In the past few days she'd seen too much destruction to worry about Mrs.  Albrecht's sensibilities or Pastor van Haegen's admonitions against sin.  Even her father, who had dominated her life with pronouncements and tantrums, seemed only a vague threat.  Like a summer hailstorm: possible, but not worth the worry.
  Sarah leaned into Devon, grateful for his help with the computer and for his body heat.  She didn't ask what excuse he'd given to Mrs.  Klaasen, or if he'd told
  
his host he was leaving.  When Jack returned safely, a small lie wouldn't matter.  And if he didn't, nothing would ever matter again.
  Throughout the night, Sarah asked questions, both to assuage her curiosity and to pass the time.  "What does 'Deathless' mean?"
  Devon shifted against her.  "Converted, you know .  .  ." He looked at her, their faces only inches apart.
  He had green-brown eyes and a mole above his left eyebrow.  She hadn't noticed that on Elysium.
  "I guess you don't know.  They're powerful fighters, you can't hurt them—not permanently.  They heal.  They're immortal.  And most of them are beautiful, too.  I mean, if you could completely rewrite yourself, why not?"
"Like archangels?"
  Devon raised an eyebrow.  "Yeah, I guess.  Sort of.  But Dyson Rader was human, before his conversion to Deathless."
  There was so much to learn about the outside world.  Sarah wanted to know everything, right now.  She sighed.  It would take years, if ever, before she felt comfortable in a place where buildings could change form and inanimate objects had a will of their own— where everyone was beautiful, and some were immortal.
  Sarah tucked the homespun blanket more tightly over her feet.  "What happens at conversion?"
  Devon blinked.  "You want to know how the nano-biology works? All the details? It would take hours, days even."
  Sarah glanced meaningfully at the pre-dawn sky.  "We have time, at least for a primer."
  Devon scratched his nose.  "Well, you decide what you want to be like, and a machine engineers a version of you with those changes.  Then you go through a series of transformations in which your native biology is replaced, at a cellular level, with nano-biology."
  
  Sarah frowned.  She'd only partially understood Devon's words.  "But Jack told me nano-biology cannot interbreed with the natural world, to prevent hybrids.  How can something be part human and part nano-biology?"
  "That's why it's called conversion." Devon's lecturing tone sounded like a schoolmaster.  "All of your natural cells are replaced with a nano-biology equivalent."
  There was a long silence.  Sarah's mind whirled with the implications.  "Then he's no longer human? Before, he was a living man; after conversion he's just an unnatural machine? Why would anyone consent to such a thing?"
Devon frowned.  "No.  He's still him, just converted."
  The sun was over the mountain now, and Sarah held up her hand to block its glare.  "But his body is completely destroyed in the process."
  "Cell by cell, but that's not the same thing as dying."
  Sarah bit her lip.  "Isn't it? If I cut down a tree branch by branch, it's just as dead as if I chop through the trunk.  What happens to his soul?"
Devon looked flustered.  "I don't—"
  But then the breeze that had troubled the pasture intensified over the landing site, kicking up dust in a circle nine feet wide.  A door opened in midair and Jack stepped out.
  Sarah launched herself into Jack's arms, not caring if anyone from the town saw.  His arms were around her, and she would never care about anything else.  She raised her face for a kiss.
  Jack pressed his lips against her forehead and gave her one last squeeze before he released her.  "I hear we have you to thank for our timely rescue—my personal assistant."
  Sarah's face heated.  In the flash of relief at Jack's being safe, she'd forgotten he didn't love her—at least not the way she wanted.  She stretched a hand toward
  
Devon, who rose from the ground.  "I could never have worked your talking book without Devon's help."
  Jack reached into emptiness and pulled out the little girl Sarah had seen in her vision.
  She was tan, with green eyes and a pert nose.  A beautiful little girl save for the insolence in her eyes.  She wrinkled her nose and looked at the milling sheep.  "Something smells."
  Alexa emerged from the drone with a long-legged step.  Her curls were mussed around her face.  One tendril stuck to her ripe lips.  She brushed it away awkwardly with her left hand.
  Sarah gasped when she saw that Alexa's right arm was missing from the shoulder.
  Alexa covered the wound with her good hand.  "It will heal."
  She's one of the converted, Sarah realized.  The Deathless, like Dyson Rader.  No wonder she was so beautiful.  Sarah looked at Devon to confirm her suspicions, but he didn't see her glance.  Devon stared at Alexa like a moonstruck calf.  It made Sarah sad.  She knew what it felt like to love someone who thought you were a child.
  Alexa paused only a moment to stroke the child's cheek.
The girl flinched from the familiarity.
  If Alexa felt snubbed, she gave no sign.  Her green eyes scanned the horizon.  "We shouldn't stay out in the open.  It's only a matter of time before they realize we're alive, if Dyson hasn't reported back already."
  "Where is Mr.  Rader?" Sarah asked, trying to look through emptiness into the drone.
  Alexa's face was grave.  She exchanged a significant look with Jack.  She'd mentioned changing their destination, but it'd been a bluff.  If Dyson really was working for the other side, this was the first place they'd check.
"That's what I'm worried about," said Alexa.

36
A
lexa closed the drone's hatch and commanded it to park, cloaked, on Jack's roof.  She led them through the village, toward Jack's cabin, her senses alert for danger.  They were too exposed here.  Too ? many people in the outside world knew where Jack lived, and it wouldn't be long before the Deathless found out he hadn't died in New Orleans.
  Alexa hadn't realized how much she depended on Lucius's fortune and reputation and Fontesca's brilliance.  It was lonely, being Jack's only defense against the world.
And what good was a one-armed bodyguard?
  "Perfidious slut!" roared a man's voice.  Samuel Wiens charged from between two cottages, his hammer hands clenched into fists.  He bore down on Sarah and snatched the blanket from around her.  His hand raised for a backhand slap—
  —that never landed.  Alexa put herself between the man and his target, her good arm extended to take the blow.  "Not a fast learner, are you?"
  Her speed surprised the man, and he drew back for a second.  Then he took in her injuries and smiled.  It was an ugly expression, devoid of mirth.
  "I know what you're thinking," Alexa said in a low, intimate voice.  "But one arm's all I'm going to need."
"Alexa, no!" Sarah shouted.
Alexa didn't listen.  Every idiot who didn't know any better deserved one warning, and Samuel Wiens had already had his.  After the uncertainty of dealing with Dyson Rader, it felt good to know who the bad guy was.
  A huge hand reached for her hair, but Alexa had already spun away.
  Her metabolism was revved for combat.  The people surrounding her might as well have been statues.  She fell to the ground, pivoted on her good hand, and swept the Mennonite off his feet with her leg.
  "Like to beat up little girls, huh?" She whipped her elbow across his nose and felt a satisfying crack.  "I'm a little girl." Alexa snaked her wrist under his chin and around his neck.  Her legs wrapped around his upper torso, pinning his arms.
  The big man bucked and thrashed, pounding her against the dirt.  If she'd been human, her ribs would have shattered.  As it was, she laughed.
  A crowd poured out of houses to see the commotion.  Alexa wondered if Samuel's dignity would ever recover.  "Want to beat me up, big man?"
She flexed her arm, cutting off his air.
  Samuel's face turned a purplish red.  His mouth gaped.  He couldn't have answered if he wanted to.
  "Alexa! Enough!" Standing over her, Jack looked angry, and scared.
  Alexa gave one last squeeze and let go.  She bounded to her feet in a single motion.
  Samuel rolled to his belly and pushed up on his hands.  He coughed in the dust.
  Bending over him, Alexa said, "I'm going to teach Sarah everything I know.  Think about that next time you raise a hand to your daughter."
  She glared at the crowd.  Most of the men looked at their shoes.  One or two nodded silent approval.  Others seemed to consider taking up Samuel's fight.
  Liam was one of the latter.  Blood flushed his face and his heart pounded.  He looked at Sarah, then his vanquished father, then Jack.  His hands balled into
  
fists.  Without a word to any of them, he helped his father to his feet and half led, half carried him away.
  "How could you be so stupid?" Jack railed at Alexa once inside his cabin.
  Sarah and Devon had been dispatched to borrow a dress for Isobel.  Her jumper was filthy with soot.
  "Rolling around on the ground with one of their most respected citizens?" Jack continued his rant.  "We need the town's goodwill.  They've taken in the Sterling children—or had you forgotten?" He threw his hands up in the air furiously.  She'd never been this cavalier working for Lucius.
  "What they need is a healthy dose of respect," Alexa said.  "If we're going to live among these backward—"
  "Not we—you." Jack cuddled Isobel to his hip.  The little girl was following the fight silently, her eyes wide.  "Isobel and I are going into hiding—but you'll stay here.  Integrating into a new culture will be hard enough without them thinking you're the slut-bride of the devil." He scowled.  "I'm starting to think I threw the wrong Deathless out of the drone."
Alexa's head snapped as if Jack had slapped her.
  Jack continued, "A bodyguard who doesn't follow orders is worse than no bodyguard at all."
  Alexa stretched a tanned hand toward Isobel's soft brown curls.  "I'd never harm—"
The little girl flinched away.
  "Up until a few hours ago, you were willing to kill her if need be." Jack felt Isobel press herself into his back.  "I'm not sure I trust your new attitude."
  Her full lips parted, but no words came out.  There was a pained crease between her eyes.  "But .  .  .  she's my daughter."
  The anguish in Alexa's tone stabbed Jack with pity, but not enough to deflect him from saying what had to be said.  "No.  She's a 'half-breed clone' you didn't even know existed until a few days ago.  What about
  
the Sterling children you've helped raise since birth? The ones who've lost their parents, teachers, home.  You're the only common thread to their past.  The only thing they can rely on.  And they'll be hanging out in the wind, ripe for plucking as hostages.  You'd abandon them?"
  "I—" Alexa looked out the window to where Hans played with Mari.  Her grass-green eyes sought out Iso-bel, hiding behind Jack.  She sat down heavily on the bed.  "You can't take her away from me.  You just can't."
  "Alexa, you were at Lucius's side for more than a century.  You're a cultural icon.  Wherever we go, you'll be recognized."
  "The world's changed since you were in it." Alexa spread her hands.  "Nanology's too pervasive.  There aren't any hiding places anymore.  Once the Deathless learn that you didn't die in New Orleans, your image will be flashed across every mind in the world.  You might as well make your stand here."
  Jack held his hand out.  "Give me a piece of your sleeve."
Alexa cocked her head at him.  "What?"
  It annoyed him that she still questioned his orders.  "A piece about the size of my palm.  Tear it off."
  Frowning, Alexa extruded a finger blade and sliced her sleeve.  The fabric attached to her shirt immediately began to repair the hole, the fabric shifting, becoming microns thinner all over to flow in and cover the rent.
  Jack took the fabric from Alexa, then nodded to the closed door.  "Go stand outside."
  Alexa crossed the room to exit the cabin.  "What does this—"
  He handed the scrap to Isobel, draping it across her palm.  "Hold this for a minute, sweetie." He pried her other hand from his pants and held her at arm's length.
  
  Isobel struggled to reach him.  "Don't go." Her face twisted in anguish.  "Please! Don't leave me."
  Jack pointed at the open door.  "I'm going to be standing right outside.  You'll still be able to see me.  I just need to make a point.  There's something Alexa doesn't understand."
  Isobel's jaw jutted in a pout.  The expression was eerily like Alexa's.  "Then you'll come right back."
  Jack kissed her brow.  "I promise." He lifted her hand.  "Hold this where we can see it."
  In three swift strides Jack crossed the house that had been his home for the past six years.  He stood just outside the threshold, shoulder to shoulder with Alexa.
"So, what?" she asked.
  "Wait," Jack told her.  "And watch." He felt it starting; an itchy sensation along his skin.  It was frightening how quickly it returned.  His safety lay no more than a few steps from Isobel.  He hadn't expected that.
  "No." Isobel wailed at the nano-biology cloth in her hand, holding it aloft as if it might burn her.
  The edges of the fabric dissolved, floating free as dust, then it folded in on itself like burning tissue and collapsed into ashes.
  "No-no-no-no—" Isobel's voice broke into an incoherent wail of despair.
  He'd made his point.  Jack launched himself across the room and clutched the little girl to his chest, breathing in her hair.  The itchiness in him ebbed as together they reached equilibrium, the next-generation nano-biology modifications he'd injected into himself balancing and canceling Isobel's disassemblers.
  "It's all right," Jack cooed.  "I've got you.  It's all right." He looked up.
  Alexa stood in the doorway, her mouth open and her chin quivering.  "I didn't realize." She took another step back, her tan face ashen.  "She reverts so quickly."
  
  "You can't come with us," Jack said.  "I'll need all my concentration to find a solution to our problem.  I can't be distracted by you."
  "I could wear an environmental suit," Alexa offered, but her tone was defeated.
  Jack closed his eyes.  Part of him wanted to say yes.  Alexa was as much a comfort to him as to any of the other Sterling children.  Strong, beautiful, utterly loyal.  But with one mistake, Jack could destroy the first woman he'd ever loved.
  He opened his eyes.  "It's not forever.  Just until I can synthesize a permanent cure." He tried to smile.  "Come on, you're immortal.  You've got time."
  "You don't," Alexa pointed out.  "Neither of you.  What makes you think you can succeed where Fon-tesca failed?"
  "Blind hubris?" Jack offered.  "After all, I am the great-grandson of Lucius Sterling."
  She smiled.  A watered-down grimace, but it was a start.
  Sarah knew Jack and Alexa shared a secret the moment she walked in the door.  They were both smiling, but there was an undercurrent of tension.  Living with her father had taught her that appearances were often deceiving.
  Devon followed her, toting two large buckets of water for Isobel: one to wash, the other to rinse.
  "Are all well?" Sarah asked, putting the shift and dress she'd borrowed from her little sister on the bed.  She'd been lucky; her father was out mending fences in the east pasture and Sarah had been able to speak to her mother alone.  Rebecca had cried and held her daughter and begged her to make peace with her father, but she hadn't offered any support or protection.  Sarah hadn't before questioned why her mother had never intervened.  Before Alexa, she'd had no idea that a woman could.
Sarah snuck glimpses of Alexa as she lit the fire in the woodstove to heat water.  Her arm was beginning to grow back, and a tendril of bone poked out of the ragged flesh like a white taproot.  Alexa lounged against the wall near the door, talking to Jack like an equal.  She did not scurry around doing menial tasks or agree with his every statement, and Devon had explained that Alexa was an indentured servant.  Imagine what a free woman of the outside world would be like.
  An even more uncomfortable thought occurred to her.  Alexa, a living machine who didn't particularly like Sarah, had done more to protect her than her own mother.
  "No!" Isobel clung to Jack with both hands when Sarah tried to lead her to the bath.  "He keeps the bad dust away.  If I leave him everything will go all black and crumbly."
  "Shh." Jack knelt down to her level.  "I'll be right on the other side of the curtain.  That's close enough.  And no one here would be hurt by you, even if I wasn't here.  They're all natural people, like you and me." Jack's eyes darted to the bed.  "Except Alexa."
  Isobel glared, then brightened at Jack's last two words and dropped her grip.  "That's all right, then." She flounced through the makeshift curtain vengefully.
  
37
"T A 7e need to find out what's going on in the
  V V world." Alexa paced the wooden floor of Jack's cabin while Sarah bathed Isobel.  "The Deathless could be closing in on us and we wouldn't know it—and that Dyson Rader has probably reported back to them by now."
Jack touched the laptop on his desk, "I could—"
  "If you log on," Devon said, "it'd be easy to track the satellite uplink back to the ranch."
  Alexa had nearly forgotten about the boy.  He'd hovered near the door since he'd brought the water.  "Shouldn't you get back to your foster home?"
Devon shrugged.  "I'd rather stay here."
  "Once we're gone," Jack said, "you can go off the ranch and connect to Gaia-Net."
  "You're leaving?" Sarah asked from behind the blanket.  Her voice was tense with emotion.  In the silence that followed, the sound of Isobel's splashing was audible.
  The computer on Jack's desktop purred as the lid rotated up.  He jumped.  "What the hell—"
  A man's face filled the screen.  He was well groomed, in his forties, dark brown hair swept back from his forehead, a goatee bracketing his thin lips.  His eyes were so dark as to be nearly black.
  The sight of him would have frozen Alexa's blood in her veins, had she still been alive.  It was a face
  
almost as well known as Lucius's: Marcus Valiente, her onetime employer, a Venezuelan oil baron, and a force to be reckoned with, even among the Deathless.
  "Senor Jack Sterling, how well you look." His voice was less than pleased.
Jack stuttered, "Ho-how did you—"
"Dyson Rader," Alexa murmured under her breath.
  Valiente's eyes swept the room behind Jack.  "But where is your young companion? Where is the girl?"
  "She died," Alexa snapped.  "You killed her with your missiles."
  Valiente's thin lips elongated in a mockery of a smile.  "The beautiful Alexa DuBois.  You should come back to work for me.  I would treat you better than any Sterling."
  "Need a replacement for Hu-Dong?" Alexa shot back.
  Valiente turned his snake-black eyes to Jack.  "The Sterling household has much to explain.  I and the other Deathless request your presence at New Avalon."
  Alexa had been once to the low-Earth-orbit space station.  It was a wonderland of nano-biology, the whole station alive and responsive to Gaia-Net transmissions.  The richest of the Deathless maintained apartments there.  It was also where the voluntary council of Deathless met to collaborate on world politics, trade, and legal matters pertaining to the converted.  Rumor was that if a Deathless was convicted of a capital crime such as reneging on indenture, he or she could be executed by being loaded into a capsule and shot into the sun.
  "I insist that you be my guest, you and the little girl."
  "I told you—she is dead, and my allergy makes it impossible for me to—"
  Valiente cupped his hand in front of the camera.  A sphere appeared above his palm displaying Alexa, Iso-bel, and Jack disappearing into the cloaking drone.  "I
  
do not see an environmental suit.  You have apparently overcome your affliction, Senor Sterling.  My congratulations." Valiente closed his hand into a fist, and the bubble of light winked out.  "Two hours.  I give you time to dress and bathe." He smiled at something behind Jack.  Jack spun in time to see Sarah pull a soapy Isobel back behind the blanket.
  "Two hours," Valiente repeated.  "Then you must present ypurself, and the little girl, at the Casa Negra beanstalk."
"Otherwise?" Jack asked.
  Valiente smiled.  "Watershed Valley is a treasure, so pure a reminder of simpler times.  It would be unfortunate if Lucius Sterling's legacy was destroyed."
  Alexa had no doubt he would follow through on his threats.
  "They've just come from a disaster site and might harbor the disassembler in their lungs," Alexa warned.  "New Avalon is the last place you want these two."
  "And yet, somehow, Senorita DuBois, you survive.  But be assured, we will take all necessary precautions." Valiente pursed his lips and kissed the air.  "Two hours, Senorita DuBois.  Do not disappoint me.  I am not as forgiving as your late master."
  Jack picked up the chair in front of his desk and smashed it against the floor, stomping it over and over until it lay in wooden shards.  The violence felt good; it distracted him from his rising panic.  "Two hours? We can't hire a defensive force in two hours.  Even if we could, they'd be likely to turn against us once they learned what Isobel can do.  We can't even run.  Where could we hide in two hours?"
  "Don't you get the point of Valiente's message?" Alexa threw her hands up in agitation.  "There isn't.  any place to hide.  Earth is a small town.  Everyone knows everyone else's business.  Gaia-Net makes it impossible to keep secrets.  How do you hide when
  
bacteria-sized surveillance machines permeate the air?"
  "Dead zones," Jack said.  "That's what Fontesca was doing.  Creating places to hide Isobel.  Winnowing down the number of powerful people who were trying to kill her."
  He had a sudden empathy for his former mentor.  What Fontesca had done was wrong and had killed thousands of innocents.  But Jack now understood the despair that had driven him to it.
  "Scared the remaining Deathless into a murderous panic is more like it," Alexa said hotly.  "Leo never did understand people."
  "That's it!" Jack cupped Alexa's cheeks in his hands and kissed her full lips in an exuberantly chaste smack.  It was the first time he'd touched her flesh to flesh since he was ten.  He was surprised how hot her skin felt, and he'd forgotten the cinnamon spice of it.  A thrill rushed through him that was more than just elation at seeing a path out.
  Alexa stepped back and put a hand on Jack's chest, pushing him to arm's length.  "Whoa, there."
  A gasp escaped Sarah, who had peeked around the curtain at Jack's outburst and seen the kiss.
  Jack's face flushed, but he ignored it.  "Leo got it wrong.  Fear is a better motivator than destruction.  Let your enemies meet you halfway by imagining the worst." He pointed to Isobel, whose face joined Sarah's at the curtain.  "We still have a way to manufacture the disassembler.  And we've got two hours to distribute it in booby traps around the globe."
  Alexa frowned.  "One flaw there.  An empty threat is just that—empty.  We've got a way to manufacture the disassembler, but look around you." She spread her hands to encompass the Mennonite village.  "This isn't exactly a state-of-the-art facility.  Not since the eighteenth century.  How do you propose to transport the disassembler? Gunnysacks?"
  
  Jack grinned.  His plan was insane, desperate, but he was beginning to think it might just have a shot.  He turned to Sarah.  "Your mother pickled her radishes yet?"
  "Mason jars?" Alexa looked at the two dozen wide-mouthed glass jars on Jack's table and didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  "You're going to threaten the most powerful cartel of immortals Earth has ever known with the breath of a virgin vacuum-sealed into twenty-four canning jars?"
  Jack fed more wood into the fire and poured water into the four enormous cooking pots he'd borrowed from the Mennonites.  "Got a better idea?"
Alexa shook her head.
  "Then take the drone on the roof and procure twenty-four remote charges, each with a distinctive key.  We need you gone while we do this."
  For a second, Alexa considered taking the drone and running, not coming back.  But only for an instant.  For the first time in centuries, she had family.  She wasn't giving that up—not while she had strength in her body.  She rubbed the stump of her arm, willing it to regrow faster.
  Isobel wept.  Since New Orleans, she panicked whenever Jack was out of her sight or more than ten feet away.  After she finished her bath, she'd clung to his side once again, close as a limpet to a rock.
  Alexa climbed easily onto the roof of Jack's house and felt along the cloaked drone for the door handle.  The Mennonites and the Sterling children bustled about below, feeding the fire and sterilizing jars.  Animosities were set aside against a common foe; the town was working as a coordinated unit.  Alexa hesitated a second, watching them, wondering how it would feel to belong.  Then she hopped in the drone and jetted off, contacting a purveyor of munitions known for his discretion.
#       *       *

  Sarah set another log on the fire.  There was only an hour and a half left in the allotted time.  Perhaps enough time to finish the canning, perhaps not.  Unfortunately, water boiled in God's good time, and all the wood in the world couldn't rush it.
  Her mother worked on the other side of the fire.  From time to time, they exchanged glances, but they didn't have the luxury of time or privacy for speech.  Sarah wasn't sure she would have wished it.  What could she tell her mother—I threw away my honor and my place in the family for a man who loves someone else?
  The memory of Jack kissing Alexa was imprinted on her mind, as if she'd stared too long at the sun.  No matter where she looked, what task she put her hands to, all she could see was the kiss: Jack's lips on Alexa's, his pale skin against her tan, the joy in his face, the indignation in hers.
She doesn't love him.
  It was the only thing that kept Sarah from bursting into tears.
  She doesn't love him, and he doesn't love me, and if Jack's plan doesn't work we might all be dead soon.  She shook her head.  There were more important things afoot than her bruised heart.
  Devon set a crate of twelve jars at Sarah's feet as delicately as if each one held Christ's own blood.  "Here they are.  Is the water ready?"
  Sarah held a jar to the light and inspected it.  It looked like ordinary air.  "They're really in there? The tiny monsters that destroyed your home?"
  He flinched when she mentioned Elysium, and she was immediately sorry for her thoughtlessness.  Devon shrugged away her pity.  "As far as we can tell, yes."
  "And this will be enough to stop the people who want to hurt us?"
  Devon shrugged again.  He looked like her brother Abe the first time he'd joined the shearers, scared but determined not to be.
  
  Sarah reached out and took his hand, gave it a comforting squeeze.  "Don't worry, Jack knows what he's doing.  He's protected the town all these years."
  His face pinked, and Sarah knew she'd embarrassed him by noticing his fear.
  "How hot does the water get during canning?" he asked.
"We bring it to a full boil."
  Devon nodded, but did not look happy.  He stared into the fire.  He had a calculating look on his face.  "That's what, two hundred and twelve degrees?"
"What's wrong?"
  Devon shook his head.  "Nothing.  I'm sure Jack took the canning temperature into account.  I'm worrying over nothing.  We better get these disassemblers into the pots.  Time's running out."
  They worked side by side.  But Devon's body moved stiffly, as if holding something in, and he did not tell her what secret caused the frown in his brow.
  
38
A
lexa took the crate of vacuum-sealed jars from Jack's hands.  They were still warm from the water bath.
  "Don't drop them," Jack warned.  His throat itched.  There weren't enough disassemblers in his system to protect him from Alexa for long; he had to get back to Isobel.
  Alexa pulled the crate against her body to steady it, her regrown arm still weak.  "Right." She checked the lids.  "No leaks?" If air was able to equalize the pressure between the jar and air, the disassembler would escape and destroy Alexa, the cloaking drone, and anyone unlucky enough to be underneath her flight path.
  Jack wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.  "Three failed the smoke test.  These are safe."
  Right.  It was like holding twenty-one primed nuclear bombs.  One sneeze, one stumble, and she was gone.
  Alexa was glad Jack had insisted on a private rendezvous outside of town for the handoff.  Ostensibly, it was to keep her safe from any free-floating disassemblers left over from Isobel.  It also kept the children from seeing how scared they both were.
  Alexa settled the crate oh so carefully into the drone, then handed Jack the remote.  She'd assembled the detonators on the flight back.  All that was left
  
was to attach them to the jars.  "You really think this will work?"
Jack sucked his teeth.  "No way to know."
  Alexa looked at the jars with their gleaming silver lids.  They'd chosen industrial targets: drone breeder hives, tidal generators, empty office buildings.  But still .  .  .  "If this goes wrong, we could kill a lot of people.  Maybe everyone." Guilt and fear burned her stomach—why hadn't Fontesca fixed her emotional responses when he fixed the rest of her? She wished her nerves were as impervious as her body.  "Do you think what we're doing is right? All that for the life of one little girl?"
  Jack grinned wryly.  For a moment it was like seeing Lucius's ghost.  "Civilizations fall every three thousand years or so.  What's one more?" He touched Alexa's cheek, a comforting caress.  "Besides, Valiente doesn't want to destroy Isobel.  He wants to harness her power.  His controlling the disassembler would be worse than anything you or I would do."
  Alex nodded, kissed Jack's cheek, then hopped into the drone.  She felt like a perverted Santa Claus, crossing the globe in a matter of hours, delivering small parcels of death.
  The sun was high in the sky, and Alexa still hadn't returned.  Jack waited by the front gate, the same place where they'd said good-bye.  He checked his watch.  Twelve minutes past Valiente's deadline.
  What was keeping her? He tried not to think about how fragile the mason jars were and all the things that could go wrong: air turbulence, an accident with the munitions, a attack from Valiente's forces.
Devon came running up the road.  He skidded to a halt before Jack, hands on his knees.  "You need to.  Come.  See this." "What?" Jack asked.  "Is Alexa back?" Devon shook his head.  "The west pasture.  Golems." Jack ran back with him and found the Mennonite men gathered in the town square, muskets and pitchforks in hand.
  Pastor van Haegen pointed to a line of six-legged giants advancing from the west, tentacles raised aggressively.  "What have you brought down upon us, Jack Sterling?"
  "They look like hell's own demons," said Paul Albrecht.
  Jack had never seen so many golems in one place.  They covered the western pasture like locusts.  Thousands of gray bodies marched in a staggered phalanx, their spider-thin legs stabbing the grass into mud.
  He had to contact Valiente, get him to hold his forces off.  "They're golems," he told the nervous men.  "Man-made creatures halfway between animal and machine." He ran toward his cabin.
  "Coward!" shouted Sarah's father.  "Come back and fight."
  "I'm trying to stop them," Jack shouted over his shoulder, "to get Valiente to call them off.  It's our only hope."
    The grumbling that followed indicated that few .   bought his story.
  Jack took the three steps into his home in one leap, grabbed his computer and powered it up.  He opened a messaging window.  "Valiente, come on." He carried the computer outside, striding back to the assemblage.
  The men clustered around, looking alternately at the black screen and the approaching line of golems.
  With the chime of an accepted connection, Marcus Valiente appeared onscreen.  "Senor Sterling." His lips pulled down at the corners.  "You deny my hospitality."
  "The devil himself," whispered a man's voice behind Jack.
  Valiente's eyes moved from Jack.  "No, senor, not the devil." He smiled at the Mennonite.  "I am the man the devil fears."
  The man stumbled back, mumbling, "Get thee behind me, Satan."
  
  Jack shook the computer.  "Call off the golems, Va-liente.  I don't want anyone hurt."
"Very well.  I will send my emissary to collect—"
  "No.  I'm not leaving." Jack pulled the remote out of his shirt pocket.  He held it up to the computer's camera.  "I've stashed twenty-one containers of the disassembler at various locations around the globe— including the Casa Negra beanstalk.  If you and the other Deathless on New Avalon don't want to go flying off into space, you'll have your forces stand down and leave—immediately."
  Valiente blinked.  Then his lips spread in a slow, unpleasant smile.  "Lucius Sterling would be proud of you, little man.  But your bluff is only that.  The airspace around Casa Negra is heavily guarded.  We would know—"
  "You saw the cloaking drone we escaped in at New Orleans.  It's as invisible to radar as it is to visible light.  Alexa used it to plant our weapons." Jack turned the remote in his hand, displaying the numeric keypad.  "I type the code, and you're gone."
  Valiente arched an elegant eyebrow.  "Be my guest.  I am not in New Avalon."
  Jack's mouth went dry.  Of all the responses he'd anticipated, this was unexpected.  Was it true? "Now you're bluffing."
  A dry chuckle escaped Valiente.  "Did you imagine that I survived forty years in the Venezuelan oil cartel on my looks? It is not my custom to give my location to enemies, explicitly or otherwise."
  Jack keyed in a combination, one of the first containers Alexa would have set.  "You've a tidal generator in San Francisco, powers half of the West Coast.  Kiss it good-bye." He pressed the largest button on the controller.
  Valiente looked startled, then laughed.  "For a moment I believed you, little man.  No more negotiations.  I will take what I want." The window closed.
  In the far-off pastures, the golems resumed their march forward.
  
  Panicked, Jack brought up the Gaia-Net view of the San Francisco coastline, searching for any sign of destruction.  Nothing.  The tidal generators caught the surf's momentum in giant webbed turbines.  The generating station lay farther inland, a set of powerfully wrought buildings that dominated the industrial sector like a scene from the twentieth-century movie Metropolis.  They looked as if they would stand forever.
  Why hadn't Alexa planted the container? Had the ignition switch malfunctioned? The radio signal been lost between satellites? A worse thought occurred.  Had Alexa not yet delivered that jar? Was she even now disintegrating into dust?
"What do we do?" asked Pastor van Haegen.
  "Pack the women and children into the cargo plane—"
"Who will pilot it?"
  Jack blinked.  Then cursed himself for a fool.  "The farm truck, then, the tractors, horse-drawn carts.  Anything that will roll.  They can't be here when the golems arrive."
  Something tugged on Jack's sleeve.  He turned his head and saw Devon, white-faced.  The boy pointed mutely at the road out of the farm.
  A new line of mantislike golems flew in, their landing jets kicking up clouds of dust as they transformed into ground configuration and settled onto the burned grass.  More landed to the north and south.
The town was surrounded.
  Sarah huddled in the sheep barn with the other women and children.  Every muscle in her body strained against Isobel.
  The girl thrashed and clawed at her arms.  "Let me go! I want Jack!" She kicked the ground frantically and screamed, "I hate you!"
  Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and anger, Sarah adjusted her grip around the girl's waist, trapping her wrists.  The other women and children watched
  
the battle wide-eyed, but did not intervene.  Perhaps they thought Isobel was possessed.
  Isobel bowed her back, slamming Sarah's against the wall.
Perhaps the girl was possessed.
  Sarah fought against an urge to squeeze the child harder.  She bent her head low and whispered in Iso-bel's ear.  "Jack wants you safe.  And safe you will stay.  Now hush." Another adjustment of her grip.  "There are creatures outside that want to harm us."
  Isobel quit screaming, but her green eyes were murderous.  "I hate you," she mouthed silently.
  Tears pricked Sarah's eyes.  On Elysium she'd seen what modern weaponry could do.  What hope did Jack and the other men, with their pitchforks and single-shot rifles, have against it?
  As Mennonites, they practiced nonviolence—save for her father's weakness—and were uneasy with the idea of war.  Jack had explained three times to the townspeople that the things coming to kill them were not men but a hybrid of machine and insect.  That defending the town would no more violate their principles than shooting the wild dogs that sometimes attacked the flock.
  She heard a murmuring among the women, a familiar cadence: the Lord's Prayer.  Sarah silently echoed the sentiments: Lord, please protect Jack.  Please protect us all.
A sound like thunder rolled in the distance.
Then a spattering like hailstones on a metal roof.
  Screaming erupted from the far side of the barn.  Rachel Albrecht jumped up, a baby cradled on either hip, then toppled forward, her apron spreading blood.
Everything seemed to move in slow motion.
Sarah froze, unable to breathe.
  Sunlight pierced the dusty barn like spears, jabbing in through holes left by projectile needles.
  
39
T
he line of golems, still a hundred yards distant, raised their tentacle arms.  They opened into deadly six-petaled blossoms filled with rows of needle-thin darts.  Light flared from their tentacles, a sonic boom, then the high-pitched whistling of projectiles through the air, their target not the cluster of men in the town center but the barn housing the children.
  Splinters flew from the weathered gray wall of the eighteenth-century barn.  Pumped on adrenaline, Jack saw them drift slowly out and fall as softly as feathers.
  "God, no!" Jack was already in motion, pounding toward the barn, when he heard the high-pitched shrieks of children in pain.
  Names echoed in his head with every too slow footfall as he pounded towards the barn: Isobel, Sarah, Devon, Benjamin—a litany of all the Elysium and Mennonite children he'd failed.
  In the distance, the golems advanced on the town, shooting intermittent barrages of needles.  Jack ducked around the corner of the barn, narrowly avoiding another onslaught.
  The Mennonite men were in retreat, hiding behind buildings.  An occasional boom of rifle fire.  In his peripheral vision, Jack saw the spider-thin leg of a frontline golem blow off.  It had no effect on the monster's advance; its five remaining legs charged on.
Jack swung wide the door to the barn.  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the hellish scene.  The barn was dimly lit by shafts of light.  The ground writhed with screaming figures trying to crawl away from the barrage that continued to disintegrate the far wall.
  Jack dropped to the hay-strewn floor.  "Get down.  Get on the floor.  Crawl toward my voice." As his eyes adjusted, he analyzed the situation.  In the far corner were parked the gas-powered combine and tractor.
  "Get behind the tractor," Jack shouted, pointing the way.  "It'll protect you."
  "Jack!" A panicked voice rose above the pandemonium.  Sarah's sweet soprano.  She'd never sounded more scared.  "Jack, we're over here."
  He belly-crawled toward the sound of her voice, inhaling the scents of stale straw, manure, and blood.  If anything had happened to Sarah .  .  .  Bodies pressed against him going the other way: shoulders and hips nudged him aside.  Once a bare foot crushed his hand.
  Jack groped about on the dirt floor.  In this corner of the barn it was too dark to see.  "Sarah?"
  "Here." Her voice was close.  Then her hands were on him and she was kissing his face.  Light all-over kisses of relief.  Wetness streaked her cheeks.  "I was so scared you were hurt."
  From the strength of her voice, Jack knew she wasn't wounded.  "How's Isobel?"
  In answer, a small pair of arms clamped around his waist like a vise.  Isobel buried her face in his belly, her shoulders trembling.
  "Come on." Jack dragged Isobel forward.  "We've got to get you to safety." As if any place in Watershed Valley was safe anymore.
  On hands and knees, Jack carried Isobel underneath him like a mother cat trailing a kitten.  He scurried to lead them away from the wall of golem fire.
  A crash of splintering boards, then the barn lit up painfully.  One of the golems had broken through the wall, inches away from where Sarah and Isobel had
  
been huddling.  If Jack hadn't come for them, they'd have been punctured by its daggerlike feet.
  Isobel squealed and clung tighter, wrapping her legs around his hips.
  The golem's amber eyes scanned the carpet of squirming, wailing people.  It pivoted its head to the open door as the town's men rushed in, brandishing weapons.  Its tentacles raised, still glowing from the last barrage.
  Then it tilted left.  Its triangular head cocked down at its feet in surprise.  It toppled sideways, dissolving into smoke before it hit the floor.
  And Jack realized what an idiot he'd been.  He had hidden away his most powerful weapon, thinking of Isobel only as a little girl, to be protected.  Not as what she was: their best hope of survival.
  Jack peeled Isobel's hands apart, straining so hard he feared he would break her fingers.  "Let go.  You have to let go."
  "NOOOOH!" With every ounce of strength she fought to stay linked to Jack, in the circle of his protection.
  "You can destroy the golems," Jack urged, pushing away her knees with his elbow.  "But not if you're holding on to me.  We have to separate, like with the jars."
  But Isobel was frightened beyond reason.  She clung to Jack desperately, her fingers sinking into his flesh.  "No-no-no-no-no!"
  Sarah's face was pale in the light streaming through the hole in the wall.  She nodded once at Jack, tensed her lips, and grabbed Isobel around the waist.  Bracing her foot against Jack's hip, she pulled the girl free.  They fell over backward into straw.
  Feeling three times a coward, Jack ran.  He had to put distance between himself and Isobel so her body could overproduce the disassemblers.  Two paces outside of the barn, and his breath became labored.  There was so much nano-biology in the air that he could
  
survive for only a few minutes away from her side.  He stumbled to his knees, gasping for breath.
  All around him men and women carried children away from the barn, scattering to the imagined safety of their houses.
  "Don't go," Jack tried to shout.  "Stay near Isobel." But his throat had closed to a pinhole.  His words were no louder than a mouse's whisper.
  He gasped for breath, his eyes swelling shut.  A black spike of a leg lowered toward his chest.  He tried to scuttle out of its way, but he was too weak from lack of oxygen.  His fingers clawed the dust, scraping it into ineffectual lines.
  The foot, cold and hard as ceramic, pressed into his chest.  The skin of Jack's chest was on fire as the point pressed into his sternum.
  Jack pushed up against the golem's leg, but his hands slid off the slick shaft.  In a panic, he scrabbled for a better handhold.  His chest was agony.
  He didn't want to die this way—not after everything he'd overcome.  His mouth stretched into a grimace as he grunted against the immovable golem, trying to push it sideways.  He had to—
  Suddenly, the pain in his chest receded.  Black flakes drifted over him.  His breath eased minimally, and he lifted his head.
  Isobel had done it.  The golems faded into nothingness like under-the-bed monsters when the light turns on.  Rank after rank disintegrated.
  The golems in back retracted their legs, extruded thousands of tiny wings all over their torsos, and retreated.
  A cheer went up from the Mennonites, along with more than a few cries of "amen."
  The golems settled back to earth half a mile away— and opened fire.
  The needle projectiles were unaffected by Isobel's disassembler; they didn't use nano-biology for inven-
  
tory tracking or heat seeking.  They slammed into body and wood with deadly efficiency.
  Jack slithered along the ground to a nearby building and crouched behind its stone foundation.  As the disassembler cleared his body of poisons, he regained some of his strength.  Many of the women and children—including Isobel and Sarah—were still trapped in the barn.
  He needed a way to deliver Isobel's nano to the golems.  If only he'd thought to establish a defensive perimeter of exploding mason jars.  Hindsight, as always twenty-twenty, was no use now.
  A shadow moved among the golems, darting with inhuman quickness.  It zigged left, then cut back right.  The high noon sun reflected off it when it moved, a bright plastic glare.
  As it drew near, Jack saw it to be a man, a sword strapped across his back.  He moved too fast to be anything other than Deathless.  The figure crossed the perimeter the golems had vacated, his environmental suit shining in the sun.
  Something about the Deathless was familiar: Asian features, short, powerfully built body.  A scene snapped into focus: Tibet, one of the men who had led the attack on the temple.  The one Alexa had dropped a statue on.
  The assassin snatched up a small figure hiding under a porch.  He lifted the child effortlessly in the air.  He studied the squirming girl's features for less than a second, then with a snap of his wrist broke her neck and tossed her body aside.
  "No!" Jack was on his feet, but it was too late to save her.
  The assassin bounded, like a terrier after a rat, toward a running boy.  Jack stooped for a fallen scythe and raised it above his head.
  It was hopeless.  His strength and reflexes were no match for the assassin's.  All he was doing was hurrying
  
his death.  But Jack couldn't stand by while the man offhandedly slaughtered children.  Not and live with himself.  Screaming an inarticulate battle cry, Jack charged.
  The assassin dropped the boy and ducked Jack's blow.  He pulled his katana from its sheath.
  Sunlight glinted silver off his irises and the assassin's eyes widened in recognition.
  Suddenly Jack realized there was one alternative worse than death: capture.  Valiente had had centuries to perfect his methods of torture.
  The assassin sheathed his blade and lunged at Jack, grabbing his arm and yanking it nearly out of the socket.  He pulled Jack's face up to his, glaring with intense black eyes.  "Where is the girl?"
"Go to hell," Jack spat.
  Slipping Jack's arm into an effortless hold, the assassin applied pressure until Jack's joint screamed.  "Tell me—where is the girl?"
  A flash of black fluttered across Jack's vision.  Firm hands slid between him and his attacker's grip.  A sound like an axe splitting wood, and the assassin was thrown back.  Jack pivoted, expecting Alexa.  A long leather coat swirled around Dyson Rader's lean form.  "Find your own girlfriends, mate."
  The assassin climbed to his feet and rushed Dyson.  They clashed in a blur of straight punches, hooks, and roundhouse kicks.  Spikes and blades erupted from Dyson's limbs and the assassin's blade flashed, countering every blow.  They dodged between buildings and over the roof of the barn.
  Dyson landed in front of Jack and grunted, "I suggest you grab the girl and run for it."
  He wasn't wearing an environmental suit.  Jack opened his mouth to warn him, but there wasn't time.
  Another flurry of attack and defense.  The assassin lunged for Jack, but Dyson beat him back, kicking at his head.
  
  Jack shook off his paralyzing fear and sprinted for the barn.  He wasn't sure yet how to escape the assassin, but he had to get to Isobel.
  Then another thought occurred.  Jack skidded to a stop and looked back at the combatants.  Alexa had been sure Dyson had tipped off Valiente.  What if he was working for Valiente, or some other Deathless, and this supposed rescue was another ploy to get him to reveal Isobel's hiding place?
  He cupped his hands and shouted across the distance, "How do I know I can trust you?"
  Dyson shot Jack an incredulous glance and nearly had his head taken off by the assassin's blade.  As it was, a tuft of blond hair fell to the ground, and sun glinted off the patch of newly shaven scalp.
  "You don't, mate." Dyson riposted with a slicing uppercut that would have disemboweled the assassin if the other man hadn't dropped to the ground, sweeping Dyson's feet.
  Dyson hopped back out of reach.  A strip of black leather curled to the ground where he'd been standing.  Dyson shouted over his shoulder, "But it doesn't look like you have much choice."
  Alexa scratched the elbow of her newly grown arm.  The muscle was thin, and the fingers still withered, but it would do.  Her body had used ambient nano-biology in the factories and laboratories she'd visited to accelerate her healing.
  The mountains of Montana flowed beneath the drone—but not fast enough.  Despite going at top speed and truncating the list of sabotage sites, she was still getting back to Watershed Valley seven minutes late.  Prevailing headwinds and an out-of-season hurricane over the Atlantic had cost her precious time.
  The drone's tactical display lit up, showing golem ground forces and a wider circle of support craft.  Icons danced in midair, green outlines of the barn, houses,
  
and non-nano-biology life-forms, red for ground troops, yellow for aircraft.  Patches of the display were black, indicating no signal.
  "Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit." Valiente had made good on his threat and attacked the valley.  The black patches could only be Isobel's disassembler at work, tempered by Jack's presence in town.
  That combination meant that Alexa's fighting skills were desperately needed on the ground.  But she didn't have an environmental suit; she'd lost hers fleeing New Orleans.  Engaging in combat could mean her obliteration.
  She slipped the cloaked drone through the circle of craft hovering on the perimeter of the farm.  They never even knew their security had been breached.
  Alexa gritted her teeth and dove toward town center.  "Fontesca, I hope you're in hell; we've got a lot to discuss."
  The drone swooped over the town, giving Alexa a view of the carnage.  Bodies, not a few of them children, lay on the ground bloodied and crushed.  Her chest lurched when she saw a little girl facedown in the pasture, her limbs splayed as they'd landed when she fell, her neck canted and broken.  The child wore skirts and a bonnet, but it was clearly Lisle.
  If she survived this, Alexa vowed, Valiente would die: permanent, irreversible death—and it'd be a long time coming.
  Figures scurried among the buildings as the Men-nonite families and Elysium children tried to find haven.  Alexa scanned them for the real targets of the attack, Jack and Isobel.  Then she saw a figure in black leather and her nostrils flared.  Dyson Rader.
  The Deathless carried Jack easily under one arm, Isobel under the other.  He pelted toward the perimeter.  If he reached transport, she'd have no hope of stopping him.  The cloaking drone was built for stealth, not midair combat.
Alexa commanded the drone to hover a thousand feet up until she or Jack summoned it.  Then she opened the hatch and leapt.
  Alexa's body twisted as she fell, as agile as a cat.  She spun her hips to land on Dyson's shoulders with both feet, caught him under his neck and arched her back to flip him backward.  Jack and Isobel tumbled free.
  Dyson popped to his feet and slashed out with a blade extruded from his arm.  His eyes widened when he saw her.  "Wha—"
  Alexa ducked the attack and—in the instant he hesitated—extruded a spike along the back of her fist and pinned his knee to the ground.  She twisted her wrist, releasing the spike, and stepped back.
  "Dyson," Jack cried, and knelt by the Deathless, face full of concern.  What the hell was he doing?
  Pain and outrage twisted Dyson's face.  He leaned up on one elbow and pointed over Alexa's shoulder.  "Watch out." Reflected motion flicked across his eyes.
  Alexa ducked and spun, a line of fire cut across her back ribs.  Blood dripping from the shallow wound, Alexa looked up from her crouch and saw what Dyson had run from.
Impossible.  She had buried him.
  Hu-Dong smiled a slow, evil smile as her blood dripped from his katana.  "Thank you, Ms.  DuBois.  They almost got away."
  With sudden painful clarity, Alexa realized that Dyson had been helping, not abducting Jack and Isobel.  "Run!" she shouted.
  Dyson grunted, pulling at the stake that pinned him to the ground.  "That's what we were doing," he grumbled.
  Hu-Dong darted past Alexa after Jack and Isobel.  Alexa grabbed his elbow and swung him back.  They pivoted around each other, slashing for each other's vitals.  Deathless couldn't be killed in hand-to-hand combat, only incapacitated.  But that would give the winning side time to capture or escape.
  
  Hu-Dong was, if anything, faster than he'd been the last time they'd fought.  Alexa saw no signs that he'd had a nine-hundred-story building collapse on top of him.  She had time to wonder for only a second, then lost herself in the mindless zen of attack and defend that left no time for higher thought.
He sliced, she blocked.
She kicked, he pivoted away.
  Each attack she led took them farther from Jack and IsobeFs flight.  Each attack of Hu-Dong's took them closer.  They circled each other in a deadly dance.
  Alexa noticed something new; Hu Dong was fighting defensively, careful of his environmental suit.  It shaved milliseconds off his attacks.  She could use that.
  "Alexa!" Jack's voice was filled with horror and panic.
  Why was he still here? Because she hadn't had time to summon the drone down.  Alexa took a step toward him, lost her balance and fell.
  Her foot dissolved in a blend of agony and numbness she'd felt before.  She'd fallen into a pocket of disassemblers.  No.  Not yet.  Not while Hu-Dong lived.  She scrambled with her hands and good foot to escape, but the nanoparticles were methodically deconstructing her leg, as relentless as stop-action gangrene.
  Hu-Dong pivoted, a feral grin pulling back his lips behind the sheen of his environmental suit.  In her peripheral vision, Alexa saw his katana rise.  She'd never evade it in time—but she scrabbled harder against the bare earth trying.
  A blow knocked her breath away; a sideways rush, not the eviscerating cut she'd anticipated.  Strong arms held her and they bobbed together in a limping run.  She was overwhelmed by the scent of leather.  Dyson.
  Clinging to his shoulder, she saw Hu-Dong in pursuit.  He gained ground rapidly.
  "The hot zone—you shouldn't have—come back," Alexa gasped.  Her ankle, gone, felt on fire.
Neither of them wore an environmental suit.

  Dyson dropped Alexa at Jack's feet.  "Most people just say 'thank you.'" He turned, limping, and ran back to intercept Hu-Dong.
  Jack brushed the dust from Alexa's leg with trembling fingers.  "Oh God."
  Isobel clung to him like a limpet, arms around his chest, her huge eyes made larger by fright.
  Alexa glanced down.  Her leg was missing from mid-calf down, but the reaction seemed to have stopped.  If she understood the technology, Jack's presence had counteracted the disassemblers.
  "I thought I'd killed you," Jack babbled, brushing a strand from Alexa's face.  "I hit the remote and nothing happened.  I thought I'd triggered it prematurely and destroyed you in the drone."
  She pushed him out of her view, wanting to follow the fight between Hu-Dong and Dyson.  Jack was in shock.  He wasn't thinking clearly.  She didn't matter— if Dyson fell, they were gone.  "No.  I was just delayed by bad weather.  I disabled the remote detonation until the parcels were set—basic munitions."
  Hu-Dong's blade flashed like lightning in the noonday sun.  Dyson, hobbled by the wound she'd given him, fought a losing battle.  With each attack, Hu-Dong progressed another step toward their hiding place.
  "We have to get to the drone." Alexa summoned it mentally, hoping there were enough ambient transmitters in the air to get her message through.  She grabbed Jack by the collar of his shirt.  "You and Isobel have to escape."
  "I'm not leaving the townspeople," Jack argued.  "They'll be slaughtered."
  "They'll be slaughtered anyway," Alexa screamed.  She pushed him away with her hands.  "It's your only chance—Isobel's only chance."
  "No," Jack argued.  "There's another way." He pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, cradling Isobel in his arms.
  
  Dyson howled and clapped his hand to his stomach.  He whirled and, instead of blood, trailed a fine mist of dust.  He crumpled to the ground, his leather coat covering him like a shroud.
  Hu-Dong leapt over him, running full tilt toward Jack, Isobel, and Alexa.  They were out of time.
  "You want her?" Jack screamed, thrusting Isobel at Hu-Dong.  "Take her.  Just let the rest of us go."
  "Noooo!" Screamed Alexa.  She tried to run forward, to stop Jack, but she stumbled and fell to her knees.
  Isobel clawed at Jack, leaving red welts on his arms and neck in her panic to cling to him.  "No-no-no! Don't leave me!"
  "You've caused enough trouble, you lab accident." Jack mercilessly shoved the little girl into Hu-Dong's arms, then—before the assassin could react to his change in fortune—darted away, losing himself in the maze of houses.
  Alexa added a second name to her list.  Rescue Isobel from Hu-Dong.  Then kill Valiente and Jack Sterling.  How could he be such a coward? A tiny voice in the back of her skull whispered of some of the ignoble things she'd done to survive over the years, but she shoved it aside.
  Isobel shrieked and thrashed in Hu-Dong's arms.  "Jack, come back! Don't let him take me.  Don't let him!"
  Dyson lifted his head, agony etched on every feature.  He reached out a hand to the girl, powerless to aid her.
  Alexa pushed to her feet, half hobbling, half hopping toward Hu-Dong.  If he planned to kill the girl, she would never reach him in time to prevent it.
  For his part, Hu-Dong looked startled.  His fine black eyebrows lifted in surprise and his katana hung limply from the fingers of his left hand.  He stared down, wide-eyed, at the little girl cradled against his chest.
  
  It happened so swiftly and subtly, Alexa almost didn't believe the evidence of her senses.
  Isobel grunted and her eyes narrowed in apparent pain.  Hu-Dong's shoulders twitched.  The girl's lips moved in the barest of whispers, then she was falling limp toward the ground.
  Alexa's enhanced hearing picked up the single word the girl had spoken: "Die."
  In her hand Isobel held Jack's pearl-handled pock-etknife, blade extended.
  Hu-Dong clutched his stomach.  Across his rippled abdomen was a thin red line.  The barest of cuts for one of the Deathless, easily healed—save for the thousands of disassemblers crawling through the sliced plastic of Hu-Dong's environmental suit.
  Hu-Dong clawed desperately at his disintegrating belly, but that only widened the hole.
  Isobel, fists clenched at her sides, shrieked incoherently at the would-be assassin, each exhalation releasing more of the deadly disassemblers.
  The black destruction burned through Hu-Dong like ignited flash paper.  His torso disappeared first, then his arms and legs, and finally his head, his mouth stretched wide in wordless agony.  His environmental suit toppled forward, empty save for a fine black silt.
  Burning numbness touched Alexa's skin in half a dozen spots.
  This was their plan, Alexa realized.  While she and Dyson distracted Hu-Dong, Jack and Isobel had crafted this scenario.  Even as the disassemblers deconstructed her flesh, pride swelled in Alexa's chest.  It had been a terrible risk, and Isobel had been so brave.
  Dyson's cry of pain as the disassemblers found him shocked Alexa to her senses.  Somehow she found her feet and half ran, half crawled to his side.  She pulled him upright and over her shoulder.  "We have to get out of here."
  Jack could reverse the effects of the nano, but Jack was nowhere to be seen.  Isobel's influence was spread-
  
ing, and the little girl didn't give signs of stopping anytime soon.
  Together, she and Dyson fled.  Awkward as a couple in a three-legged race, they careened off buildings and hit the ground more than once.  They passed through the front line of golems seconds before the disassembler hit the heavy-footed machines like a wave, blasting them into ashes.
  Alexa sent another call to the drone.  Please let it come.  Let it not have been destroyed.
  Then she saw it, a translucency hovering like a mirage a hundred yards ahead.
  "Come on," Alexa urged Dyson.  His feet had grown heavier, and she tried not to dwell on how far her hand now sunk into his side.
  Dust exploded in Alexa's face as the disassemblers caught them up, destroying the golems around them.
  Shoving Isobel into Hu-Dong's arms was the hardest thing he'd ever done.  Jack felt a thousand times a coward.  Though some small part of him had relished it, prayed he could just run and keep running.
  When she began screaming, it cut through him.  Either their plan was working or Hu-Dong was torturing her.  A pocketknife was no weapon against death incarnate.
  He didn't stop in his flight, though.  Whatever the outcome, the die had been cast.  It remained only for him to do his part.  He ducked into his house and grabbed his laptop, then dashed back outside and kept running.  He didn't pause for breath until he got to Mrs.  Klaasen's house, as far as he could get from Isobel without running into the line of golems.  His breath came hard, whether from the exertion or the nano-biology of the hovering golems he couldn't say.  They greeted Jack with a spattering of projectiles.
  Jack ducked around the corner and pulled the remote from his pocket.
If what Alexa said was true, the remote should work this time.  He pressed it to his forehead and sent up a silent prayer.
  Isobel could destroy the nano-biology weapons here.  But Valiente would send more, and conventional weapons as well—unless Jack struck back.
  He flipped open his laptop and waited for it to make contact with the radio-based satellite overhead.  When the connection was complete, he said, "Show me Casa Negra."
  The nanotube beanstalk appeared onscreen.  Twenty-three thousand miles of carbon fiber that acted as an elevator into space.  On the other end was New Avalon, dangling in orbit like a pearl on the end of a string.
  What he was about to do would kill thousands.  Jack didn't let himself think about that.  There was no choice.  No other option.
  Jack entered a code and jammed his thumb down on the transmit button.
  On the screen the beanstalk shriveled like a vine hit by flame.  The destruction traveled from the base along the elevator.  A quarter of the way up, the tension overcame the line's dwindling strength and it snapped free.  The lower section of beanstalk whipped the earth in a line five thousand miles long.  In orbit, the upper half catapulted New Avalon into space like a rock from a sling.
  The image on the screen pixelated into black as the disassemblers converted the remains of Casa Negra spaceport into a dead zone.
  
PART FOUR
Waking Up Alive

A
lexa and Dyson sat side by side on top of a butte riddled by condominiums and trendy shopping malls.  The ventilation tower behind them sucked clean air into the complex with wet whooshes.  Using their telescopic vision, they watched the forces surrounding Watershed Valley disintegrate.  The golems were the first to dissolve, blowing away in the wind like smoke figures.  Then the outlines of drones hovering farther out pulled into cloudlike streamers and fell apart.
"Why don't they retreat?" Dyson mused aloud.
  Alexa rubbed above her missing ankle and made a guess.  "With Hu-Dong dead, they have no local control, and there isn't enough ambient nano-biology to support remote commands."
"Think there will be reprisals?"
Alexa opened her mouth to reply—
—then it hit.
  A roar like a thousand waves crashing in on them at once.  Panic and death in a line five thousand miles long.  The outrage of thousands of people—suddenly cut off.
  They knew.  In that instant Alexa and Dyson— everyone on Gaia-Net—had experienced all that happened.  They'd burned alive in the disassembler reaction that destroyed the Casa Negra spaceport, hurtled off into space in the opulent New Avalon with the
  
Deathless, and been crushed by the falling beanstalk when it snapped in two.
  Alexa grabbed Dyson's arm.  It was too much to take in all at once.  The Jack Sterling she'd raised, the man she'd rescued from Watershed Valley, could never have done this.  "Jack," she whispered, "what have you become?"
  Isobel's shriek ended and she collapsed in the center of town.
  Jack, on his way back, saw her fall.  He rushed to her side.  The golems and drones that surrounded Watershed Valley were gone, and the lights in the far-off buttes wavered.
  He pulled the child into his lap and brushed the curls from her forehead.  Her skin was clammy.  Jack cradled her against his chest and rocked her.  Tears pricked his eyes.
  He was a coward—and worse—to let a little girl do his fighting for him.  Her body had exhausted itself under the strain of destroying so much nano-biology in so short a time.  How could he have asked her to attack Hu-Dong all on her own, to take responsibility for saving them all?
  One of Jack's tears dotted Isobel's cheek.  If anything happened to her .  .  .
  He looked up and saw the carnage all around him.  Men, women, the tiny bodies of children broken, and cast aside.  This wasn't their fight.  They were just in the way.  It was Jack's presence that had brought Va-liente's deadly attention.
  Jack reached in his pocket and his fingers found the detonator remote.
  What kind of people would ambush a peaceful valley of harmless sheep ranchers? The Mennonites were right.  The outside world was corrupt.  People who thought only of their own advantage, their own pleasure—and not the cost to others in life and property.
  
  Rachel Albrecht wailed over her dead husband, heedless of the gash in her throat that spilled her life's blood down her chest.  She leaned forward and cradled his face in her hands, her trembling fingers brushing his lips.
  All around Jack was the death and pain of a people who had harbored him and made him welcome.  For six years, Watershed Valley had been his refuge in a world that had threatened and rejected him.
  Pulling Isobel into a tighter embrace, Jack took the remote out of his pocket and thumbed open its cover.  He typed in the master command code.  The one that would detonate all remaining containers and unleash the disassembler all over the world at once.
  He placed his thumb on the red button and felt his pulse throbbing against the plastic.  A few millimeters, and the connection would trigger—his will be done.
Jack tensed his arm, ready to press the button.
A stinging slap knocked the remote from his hand.
  "How dare you?" Sarah's blue eyes were bloodshot from crying.  She gestured angrily at the war-torn town.  "Is this not death enough?" Her chin quivered, and her voice trailed off in a painful squeak.  "You would bring more?"
  A sob broke free from Jack's chest and his shoulders shook with grief and guilt.
Sarah was there.
  They embraced, forming a bridge over Isobel in Jack's lap, and cried for all that had happened and all that Jack had done.
  Sarah helped Jack carry Isobel to his cabin and settle her into his bed.  He sat at her side, holding her hand and smoothing the little girl's forehead.
"Will she live?" asked Sarah.
  "I think so." Jack looked up.  "She just needs rest.  I'll stay with her to keep the reaction from starting up again."
Sarah nodded.  There was much to do, tending the     I wounded, burying the dead.  She kissed Jack's stubbled cheek, a sisterly gesture, cupped his chin for a moment, then left him.
  The remote was where it had fallen.  Sarah scooped it up and snapped the cover closed.  It was barely bigger than her thumb.  It seemed impossible that such a small thing could destroy cities.  But Jack had vowed that it was true.
  A hand tightened on her upper arm painfully.  She looked up into the angry face of her brother, Liam.
  "She's calling for you," he said.  "Why she would want to see her whore of a daughter is beyond me.  But it is not my place to judge."
  Fear gripped Sarah's throat.  The word that escaped her was painful: "Mother?"
  Sarah ran with her brother back to the wood-frame house that had once been her home.  Going up the steps, Sarah was struck by how small it now seemed, how foreign.  In less than a week, this place had gone from home to childhood memory.
  Her mother was in the back bedroom, lying in the bed where Sarah and all her siblings had been conceived and born.
  Rebecca Wiens had aged years since the morning.  Deep lines bracketed her mouth, and she was so very, very pale.  The blue and white coverlet was stained red above her mother's chest.
  Sarah reached to lift the woolen blanket, but her mother stopped her with a cold hand.  Her eyes focused beyond Sarah.
  "Liam," her mother whispered.  "Go.  And close the door."
  Trained to obedience, Liam went, but his eyes were hot on his sister.
  "Thirsty," said her mother.  She reached a trembling hand to a water pitcher beside the table.
  Sarah poured water into a glass and held it to her mother's lips.
She drank deeply, downing two-thirds of the water before she took a breath.  "Sarah." She held the back of her wrinkled hand to Sarah's face.
  Sarah put down the glass and covered her mother's hand with both of her own.
"Forgive me."
  Sarah's own thought, but her mother's voice.  The tears that had hovered in her eyes spilled down her cheeks, and she sobbed.  "No, there is nothing to forgive.  I'm the one who needs forgiveness.  I brought down shame—"
  Her mother stilled Sarah's outburst with a gentle finger across her lips.  When Sarah was quiet she rasped, "There is no greater shame than a mother who does not protect her children.  I knew.  I saw.  I said nothing." Her pale blue eyes shut in pain.  "God have mercy on my soul."
  Sarah started to rise.  "Mother, let me call the doctor.  Change your bandages.  Please."
  The older woman clung to her daughter, drawing Sarah back down to her side.  "There are others in worse need.  This is God's judgment.  As I did not protect you, he has not protected me.  I-I thought it a woman's place to keep quiet, to persevere." Rebecca coughed, bringing flecks of blood to her lips.  "I was not strong enough, not brave.  Be a better woman than I was .  .  ." Her voice trailed off and her head slid sideways.
  Sarah cradled her mother's head and rained kisses upon her brow, her cheeks.  "Mother, don't go.  I forgive you.  I forgive you."
  Her mother's eyes fluttered open and looked one last time upon her daughter, shining full of love and pride for Sarah that she'd never shown in life.  Then her eyes glazed, and she was gone.
  Sarah sobbed so hard she felt her heart would leap out of her mouth.  She clutched her mother to her and rested her head on her mother's cooling chest.  She wasn't ready to be grown, to be brave, to be the strong woman that was her mother's dying wish.  She only
  
wanted to be a little girl, to have everything be the way it had been.
  The wooden door burst open and Sarah looked up into Liam's anguished eyes.
  "She's gone," Sarah sobbed, swaying, still clutching her mother's body.
  Liam's lips twisted in grief and hatred.  "This is your fault," he hissed.  "You and that filthy outlander.  You've orphaned us: Father's lying dead in the street."
  He crossed the room in two angry strides.  Sarah waited for him to hit her.  His jaw clenched the same way their father's did before one of his rages.  In that moment, Liam could have been her father, twenty years younger.
  Liam shoved Sarah to the floor.  A lethal whisper, "Get out."
Sarah didn't move.  She was too scared.
  He shouted in a voice that raised the cords on his neck: "GET OUT!"
  Sarah scrambled to her feet and bolted from the family home, not slowing until she reached the street.  Outside the bedroom window, she heard the sounds of Liam's grief.
  He'd been excluded, she realized.  Their mother had sent him away and robbed him of the chance to say good-bye.  Of all the things she'd taken from him, that last memory of their mother's love seemed most cruel.
  Her limbs leaden with shock, Sarah wandered along the main street.  Here and there families reclaimed their own, gathering the wounded, loading the dead into carts.  There were many carts, covered with the cotton sacks used to transport wool.  It was an obscene parody of the village's happy market days.
  A small figure lay facedown in the grass alongside the road.  He wore the filmy garments of the Elysium children, too lightweight for Montana in the spring.  Sarah rushed to the child and turned him over, looking for signs of life.
  
  It was Hans.  His little neck dangled at an impossible angle and his sparkling blue eyes were glazed.  One tiny fist clutched a broken dandelion.
  Sarah bent over his body, too wounded to cry.  She pressed her forehead to his cold one.  They'd won.  The attackers had been destroyed.  But oh, the cost.
  
AFTERMATH
I
t took hours to gather the wounded and clear away the dead.  Jack stayed inside, close to Isobel, so she could heal.  But if he was honest, he was scared to face the accusations of the town folk.  He had destroyed their world.
  While the Mennonites outside wrapped bandages and loaded the dead onto carts, he worked his computer, putting into action a plan he prayed would keep them safe.  It was the only way he could make amends.
  When the final transaction was complete, Jack peeked out his window.  An early bat flew curlicues across the emerging stars.  In the distance, he heard the sound of crickets.  In the corral, cows bleated in distress, too long past their milking.
  Jack snapped his laptop shut.  Isobel was still sleeping.  Her chest rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm.  He left a note for her on the bedside table and tucked the woolen blanket under her chin, then crept out the front door.
  Jack wandered the town like a ghost, avoiding the crew of men alongside the church, digging an endless series of graves.
He walked to Sarah's family home.  He stood there a
moment, then gathered up his courage and opened the
door.  It was answered by Jacob, Sarah's twelve-year-
j	old brother.  The three younger Wiens siblings clustered
behind him.  All their eyes were red and swollen.

  "Where is Sarah?" Jack asked.  He pitched his voice low and soft.
  The boy shook his head angrily.  "Don't know." He lifted his chin.  "Liam says you killed Mother and Father.  That so?"
  "I—" Jack took a step back, not sure how to answer the boy's fury.  He hadn't known the Wiens children were orphaned until this moment.  "No.  The people who killed your parents were after me, but I didn't—"
"But they died because of you.  Your fault."
  Jack spread his hands in defeat.  "If you see your sister, tell her I'm looking for her."
  The four children clustered in the doorway and watched him with huge, accusing eyes.
  He found Sarah in a pasture off the main road, weeping over a toddler's body.  He pulled her up and into his arms.  She clung to him in a suffocating grip.
  "Shh.  Shh." He patted her back.  "I heard about your parents.  I'm sorry."
  Sarah wiped her face on the hem of her skirt.  "Is Isobel .  .  .  ?"
  "Resting.  I think she'll be okay.  That's not why I came." Jack took a deep breath and forced himself to meet her gaze.  "I'm leaving the valley."
Sarah inhaled sharply.
  Jack hurried to explain.  "Isobel and I can't stay here.  It's too dangerous—for us and for the town.  We're going into hiding.  I've left warnings for anyone who might still be looking for us.  More charges will be detonated if there is any attack on Watershed Valley.  The town should be safe." He took a deep breath.  "But if any of the townspeople want to leave, I've purchased flats in the buttes to the west.  They can live there rent free in perpetuity.  An annuity will pay for food, utilities, and other living expenses."
  Sarah nodded, taking it in.  "You offer us new lives, to replace the ones taken?"
Her accusation stabbed him.  Of all people, he'd expected Sarah to be on his side.  "It's all I can offer.  I can't resurrect the dead."
  A soft snort.  "How reassuring.  With all the miracles I've seen, I was beginning to think we lived in a time when gods and demons walked the earth."
  "Will you tell the others?" Jack handed Sarah a paper with names and numbers listed on it.  "This explains the details of the transaction.  Devon can help you—"
"No."
  Jack wasn't sure he'd heard Sarah correctly.  Why would she turn down his offer of assistance? "No?"
  Sarah raised desolate eyes to Jack.  "I want to go with you."
  Jack bent his head.  "Don't ask me that.  Anything but that."
  She cupped his cheek.  "I love you.  Even after all that's happened, that hasn't changed."
  He covered her hand with his own, breathing in the smell of her skin.  "I know.  But where I'm going—it's going to be hard, and dangerous—"
"I'm not afraid."
  Jack smiled.  It felt like shards of glass in his chest.  Sarah had braved so much, lost so much on his account.  He couldn't risk hurting her further.  "As much as I'd like you to be with me, the town needs you more.  Healing takes more strength than destruction."
  Sarah looked past Jack to the line of men digging graves.  They worked by lantern light now, and would likely dig all night.
  She sighed deeply.  Her hand fell from his face.  "Where will you go?"
  In that moment, Jack saw the death of the child Sarah.  The girl who had stowed away on a cargo plane would have never given up so easily.  The woman Sarah had become saw the bigger picture beyond her own girlish infatuation.
He loved her in that instant, and if it had made any
/ kind of sense, he would have taken her with him.  Living on the run, he could use her selfless strength.  But it wouldn't be fair, to Sarah, to her orphaned siblings, or to the Elysium children who had no other advocate among the Mennonites.
  "Into hiding.  I plan to set up a secret laboratory.  Find a permanent cure for Isobel.  One that will let her—and me—live in the world."
  "Will I ever see you again?" The words were sharp, brimming with tears.
  Jack hugged Sarah to his chest.  It was hard to breathe around the lump in his throat.  "No."
  She stiffened in his arms.  Pushed him away.  Her lips were set in a tight line, but her eyes were dry.  "Godspeed, Jack Sterling.  Take care of yourself." Sarah picked up the dead child and cradled him in her arms.  Shoulders squared, she left Jack, not once looking back.  She walked toward the townsmen, to help bury the dead.
  When Sarah had gone, Jack blew out a breath and cradled his head in his palms.  His silly schoolgirl admirer had become a force to be reckoned with.  And he, an outcast of no consequence, had become the owner of a vast fortune and the most hunted man alive.
  Jack walked back to his house in the dark.  Inside, Isobel had awakened and was munching on one of the apples he'd left on the bedside table.  She looked weak, but better.
  He opened his laptop and waded through windows of vitriol and speculation about his whereabouts and his culpability in the recent disaster at Casa Negra.  He transmitted an encrypted message to Alexa: "SEND
THE DRONE.  WE'RE READY."
  Alexa dispatched the cloaking drone to Jack's house with a thought.  He had a brief opportunity to disappear before the world recovered from the shock of Casa Negra and came looking for him.
  
  The Montana sky was as big as its reputation.  Even light pollution from the condos in the butte under them wasn't enough to blot out the stars.  Proximity to the exhaust tubes and the rich nano-biology they spewed healed her missing limbs and Dyson's ruptured stomach.  Her foot and hand were tender, sensitive to even the slightest breeze, but growing stronger every minute.
"Call from the boss?"
Alexa looked over in surprise.  "How did you know?"
  Dyson sat cross-legged on the roof, hands resting lightly on his knees.  "You dropped out of Gaia-Net.  Just for a second, but a guy notices a thing like that.  I do, anyway."
"He wanted the drone.  He's going into hiding."
"Where?"
  It was a casual question, but it prickled Alexa's paranoia.  Despite all he'd done, she still wasn't sure she could trust him.  He might only be waiting until the price was right to betray them.
"Didn't say."
  He stood in a smooth motion, not using his hands.  He smiled his crooked grin.  "But you have a guess."
  Alexa shrugged.  "I'll call for transport." She stood slowly, testing her weight on her new foot.  The bones flexed, but it held.  She looked over the edge of the apartment complex, six hundred stories down.  "It's a long walk back to Watershed Valley.  He wants us to guard it against future attacks."
  "Oh come now, aren't you curious? Where in all the connected world could a wanted man hide?"
  Alexa called for a drone, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips.  Jack hadn't revealed his location to her, but she had a pretty good guess.  After seeing him jump out of a drone at thirty thousand feet, Alexa wondered how Dyson felt about heights.  ...
  The cloaked drone flew low and fast over the crumpled landscape of Tibet.  Eternal snow capped the
  
peaks and reflected sunlight in a blinding glare.  Valleys were filled with clouds.
  Isobel was rapt, hands pressed to the window, watching each fold and rise of the terrain.  For a little girl who'd lived all her life in a clean room, this was unimaginable space.  "Does it go on forever?"
  "Nothing does," Jack answered.  Melancholy had settled in his chest like a bad cold.
  At her alarmed look, he amended, "But it goes on far enough."
  His thoughts kept returning to all that had been lost: the wondrous compound on Elysium, Fontesca's genius, Lucius's tenacity, Alexa's comforting loyalty, the safe haven of Watershed Valley, and—though he tried not to think of her—Sarah.
  His goal was hubris: to find a solution to a problem Fontesca had struggled with for years.  More likely he'd spend the rest of his life in isolation, with an argumentative little girl who could accidentally destroy the world.
  Assuming, of course, that Valiente and his associates didn't track him down first.
  He hoped his threat of further releases of the disassembler would be enough to protect his privacy and the safety of Watershed Valley.  But a queasiness in his stomach doubted it would work for long.  What Isobel represented was too powerful, and fear lessened over time.
He wondered if they would ever be safe.