It was gonna be a great ride.
Les beus knew it, too.
There were two kinds of uniforms swarming across the concourse: police and rifters. Les beus bristled with shockprods and botflies and armored exoskels. The rifters had their fake diveskins and their cheap white contacts. Everything else, Vive knew, was bravado. Maelstrom had called out, and they'd come on faith and adrenaline. By now it was pretty obvious that faith wasn't all that necessary; the enforcer presence was more than enough evidence that something big was in town.
So far, nothing had exploded. Both sides were still jockeying for position, maybe pretending—to those scattered pedestrians who still hadn't grabbed the bone and vanished—that there was really nothing to worry about. The police had cordoned off whole sections of the concourse, not herding yet but well into corral mode. For their part, the rifters were testing the perimeter; milling along halls and slidewalks, dodging back and forth across the exoskel lines, always stopping just short of anything the antibodies could cite afterward as provocation. Botflies swarmed overhead like big black eggs, taking pre-game footage of everything.
Both sides were behaving really well, all things considered. Which made sense, kind of, since neither side was mainly there for the other. Vive figured things would heat up pretty quick once the star attraction showed up.
Her watch beeped. That was a surprise: the opposition always jammed the local frequencies way in advance, before anything even broke out. It kept people from organizing on the fly.
"Yeah?"
"Hey, we got through!" Lindsey's voice.
"Yeah," Vive said. "Forces of darkness slow on the draw today."
"I forgot to say I want mustard. Oh, and Jen wants a samosa."
"As well as a dog, or instead?"
"Instead."
"'Kay." Lindsey and Jen were at the perimeter, keeping an eye on enemy movements while Vive went for supplies. They were all veterans now, pros with two or three actions under their belts. All of them had been gassed or shocked at least once. Jen had even spent a night in a pacifier, from which they'd all learned a timely lesson in the importance of pre-game nourishment: POWs didn't get fed for at least the first twelve hours—bad enough in any case, but worse when you'd gotten yourself all 'dorphed up for the party. Cranking your BMR really brought on the munchies.
There was a row of vending machines lined up on the far wall of the concourse: medbooths, fashion dispensers, arrays of prepackaged foods. Vive shouldered her way through the crowd, homing in on a holographic Donair turning in space like some edible Holy Grail.
Someone grabbed her from behind.
Before she could react she was inside one of the medbooths, pushed up against the sensor panel. A woman with shoulder-length blond hair pinned her there, one hand splayed against Vive's sternum. She wasn't on the team; she had a visor across her eyes, and a backpack, and the rest of her wasn't rifter either. A pissed-off pedestrian maybe, caught in the swarm.
The medbooth door hissed shut behind her, blocking the deciblage from outside. The woman leaned back, opening a bit of a space in the crowded enclosure.
"What is this?" the woman said.
"This is really rude," Vive snapped back. "Also kidnapping or something probably. Not that those—"
"Why are you—" The woman paused. "Why the costume? What's going on?"
"It's a street party. I guess you never got invit—"
The woman leaned fractionally closer. Vive shut up. There was something about this situation that was starting to give her serious pause.
"Answer me," the crazy woman said.
"We're—we're rifters," Vive told her.
"Right."
"Lenie Clarke's in town. Haven't you heard?"
"Lenie Clarke." The crazy woman took her hand off Vive's chest. "No shit."
"None at all."
A sudden dim sound, like distant surf, filtered in from outside. The crazy woman didn't seem to notice.
"This is insane." She shook her head. "What are you going to do, exactly, when Lenie Clarke shows up?"
"Look, we're just here to see what happens. I don't make up the threads, all right?"
"Get an autograph, maybe. Get a gram of flesh or two, if there's enough to go around."
Suddenly, that voice had turned very flat and very scary.
She could kill me, Vive thought.
She kept her own voice sweet and reasonable. Meek, even: "We're not hurting you. We're not hurting anyone."
"Really." The crazy woman leaned in close. "You sure about that? Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even is?"
Vive broke.
It wasn't a plan. At least it wasn't a very good one. The medbooth barely held both of them, and the door was behind the crazy woman: there was no room around. Vive just sprang forward like a cornered dog, tried desperately to squirm past. Both fell back into the door; the door, obligingly, slid open.
Even in that split-second, Vive took it in: a botfly nearby, spewing canned warnings about orderly dispersal. The movement of the crowd, no longer vague and diffuse but concentrated, pushed together like a school of krill in a purse seine. Conversation fading; shouts starting up.
The herding was underway.
Vive's momentum carried the crazy woman less than a meter before the edge of the crowd pushed back. The rebound put both of them inside the booth again. Vive launched herself low, under the other woman's arm—sudden, tearing pain over one eye—
"Ow!"
— and a hand closed around her throat, pushed her back, her legs shooting out from under her, her feet briefly trampled by some nameless crowd-particle until she pulled them back with a cry and the door slid shut again, cutting the outside world down to a faint roar.
Oh, felch…
Aviva Lu sat on the floor of the medbooth, her legs pulled up in front of her, and forced her eyes to track upward. Crazy Woman's legs. Crazy Woman's crotch. It seemed like it would take forever to get to the eyes, and Vive was terrified of what she'd find when she got—
Wait a second—
There, just to the left of Crazy Woman's sternum—a tear in her clothing, a hard crescent glint of metal.
That's what cut me. Something metal on her chest. Sticking out ofher chest…
Crazy woman's hand. Holding her visor, broken in the scuffle, one earpiece gone. Crazy woman's throat; a turtleneck sweatshirt covering any disfigurement there.
Crazy woman's eyes.
What had she said? That's right: Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even is?
"Oh, wow," said Aviva Lu.
"You're kidding," said Lenie Clarke. They stood facing each other, breathing each other's air in the medbooth.
"One thread said you were infected with nanobots that could reproduce outside your body and start fires when they had a big enough population. They said you were fucking your way across the world to infect everyone else, so we'd all have the power someday."
"It's bullshit," Clarke said. "It's all bullshit. I don't know how it got started."
"All of it?" Vive didn't know what to make of all this. For the Meltdown Madonna, Lenie Clarke didn't seem to have a clue. "You're not on some kind of crusade, you're not—"
"Oh, I'm on a crusade all right." Lenie flashed a smile that Vive couldn't decompile. "I just don't think any of you want to see it succeed."
"Well, you were down in the ocean," Vive said. "For the Big One. What happened down there?" It couldn't all be detritus, could it? "And on the Strip? And—"