Dorianna sits forward, an expression of intense focus stenciled across her features. Her skin--a shade more tan that Ilya’s own--seems as pale in the wash of blue-green light. Reflected ghosts of alphanumeric data-streams glint in the moisture of her eyes. “Fast work,” she says with raw admiration in her voice. “Your filters are incredibly fine, but…Laika is fast. I have no idea what protocols you’re using but they’re nothing like those in Centralist Space.” Ilya shrugs. “This is normal.” Dorianna shakes her head. “For you. Yeah.” “You’re one of us now,” Aleo says. “I know…but things still surprise me.” --Like the Black Cities; like the alleged mysteries of the Cloister. She is dealing, Ilya imagines, with too much information, too many stimuli. She should rest, he thinks, she should spend quiet time in an environment that challenges her in only the smallest of ways. An impossibility, however, until this blows over…until her would-be bomber/assassin is eradicated. Killed…Ilya reminds himself. Eradicate is too euphemistic a word: too remote and sterile. This can only end in death. One or multiple deaths. --As there are already. Laika has found reports about the explosion. Nineteen deaths. Nearly one hundred injuries. Nineteen deaths. And if fate and circumstance permit, there will be twenty. Ilya tastes a hint of bile at the root of his tongue. He holds his breath. He swallows. Hard. Arkady has returned from whatever streetside demands have called him away. Ivanna and Mihail crouch on work-stools like haggle-haired and dreadlocked gargoyles. They watch Dorianna with intense, unblinking gazes. “Laika will be done…maybe by daybreak,” Aleo says. “Maybe later.” “So,” Dorianna begins. “What’s the plan?” Ilya shrugs. “We’re running ID profiles through filters now, sifting out the ones that are most likely to point to our…friend. We’ll double filter them…maybe triple filter.” “So…” Mihail says, slowly. “You ride tomorrow.” It may be a question. Ilya nods. Aleo nods. “We’ll be ready.” **** By the following afternoon, Laika and her offspring are done with their search. With their purpose behind them, they’ve sublimated into a wash of digital compost: dead substrate, reinforcing the structure of digital space itself. New data shapes will come to occupy the virtual layers grown at the expanding edges of the datascape. It’s an aspect of the Nemaean digital realm; it grows, it recycles dead elements of itself. It is…in perhaps the smallest possible sense alive. Laika and her prodigious brood are now a part of it. --Like a good pet, buried in a plot of earth behind the family house--where trees and grasses grow and shower the air with blossom-scent when the summer rains come, and the belching chortles of rusalki gurgle in the seaward distance. Three contoured couches have been moved into the chamber; more scavenged furnishings from some long-decommissioned jump shuttle. They are the progeny of recycler dives and scavenger runs at the city fringes. They have been meticulously cleaned and stitched along the linear definition of one gash, another or another. Sensor caps darken the headrests, like the strangest, miniature fisherman’s nets; skeins of fiber optic cable trail from their rearward cuffs and vanish behind each of the seats. Ilya knows that their jacks are ported, that they’ve been meticulously calibrated. He recalls Arkady the night before, moving the couches into position, cleaning the caps with bursts of UV light from a small sterilizer gun, and clear solutions that stank of antiseptics and aldehydes. Ivanna, cradling a mug of something hot, glances at Aleo. “How many rides can we expect?” Aleo shrugs. “I don’t know. Short ones for sure…fifteen…twenty, in this area alone.” Mihail shakes his head. “Lot of running around,” he says. “We’ll shoot for ten runs,” Ilya says quietly, the beginnings of an idea forming behind his conscious thoughts. It’s nothing he can articulate, but there are other ways to find a killer. “Ten runs…it’s still a lot,” from Ivanna. --At which point, Ilya shifts his attention to the key arrays and command surfaces projected onto the face of the workbench. He types a command into the board and holographic tanks shimmer as lasers compress an image from the featureless fog. A map of the Black City region. There--on the black strand marked out as Rybnaskaya Ulitsa--he finds the mark of the car’s explosion. Smaller red tags lie scattered around a flashing bull’s-eye, like blood. Each red dot marks a death. There are too many for Ilya to focus on and he feels his stomach toss a quiver; he focuses away from the red marks and highlights a series of flashing blue dots. “These,” he says, “are our first targets. All within Black City and easily reached from here.” Mihail shrugs. “Three of these places…I know them.” He leans forward, the tips of his ropy dreads far below his shoulders. “I know a few as well,” Ivanna says. “Spacer hangouts.” --More bars like the Red Lion, and as Ilya thinks of that, it comes to him that the killer may easily lurk in such an establishment. Listening. Watching. Asking the right questions in just the right tone of voice. Black City bars are data-exchange nodes for anyone who knows how to work them; excitement bubbles within Ilya’s gut and plucks along the sweep of his spine. “You’ll want to hit them all, I suppose,” Arkady says from his perch. “If we can.” Ivanna shrugs and places her mug on the workbench. “Then let’s do it…the longer we talk, the more we miss.” **** The ride, when it comes is a shocking plunge into split perspectives. Ilya knows that he’s still in the underground street-hacker’s nest, reclining in the firm cushion of a modified flight couch; but, he feels himself walking through the surface streets of the Black City. Aleo walks beside him, in Arkady’s flesh and the only telltale of Aleo’s presence is a , brief, playful glimmer in Arkady’s eye: punctuation to the smallest possible smile of quiet reassurance. It is Arkady’s face, but Aleo’s smile…and that is more disconcerting than Mihail’s body-sense jostling against Ilya’s own. As quickly as Aleo’s impish expression blossoms, it vanishes. Is gone. Completely. Mihail is bulkier than Ilya; the set of muscle and bone is…off. The temptation to modify Mihail’s walk is strong, but Ilya keeps tight reign on his own impulses, and he feels Mihail’s consciousness brushing against his own…probing him, interrogating him with sensations like the half-whispers of subjective telepathy. Mihial, Ilya realizes, is an inquisitive sensory host. Dorianna, nested within Ivanna’s efferential nerve centers, keeps tight control over her own impulses. She betrays nothing through smiles or smirks; she reveals nothing of herself in shifts of posture at odds with the set of Ivanna’s body. She’s ridden before. Probably innumerable times, and it dawns on Ilya that as an anthropologist, she has ported herself into the perceptions of countless individuals: informants ready to give her a full-sense taste of their culture for whatever price they’d been able to negotiate. Mihail is an accommodating horse--keenly attuned to the wishes of his rider. Ilya can imagine an easy friendship with him. He rides Mihail through four bars in four sections of the Black City; the hunt is going slowly, and Ilya feels disappointment gnawing through his conscious thoughts. But in the fifth bar, a place simply called The Keg, Dorianna gasps through Ivanna’s lips and throat, and Ilya senses--in some animal-instinct way--that the situation has just changed. It is a narrow and claustrophobic strip of cramped bar-space. A haze of smoke clouds the air, wafted gently by the languid spin of ceiling fans. The Keg is a spacer’s hangout--riggers and station crews mill at the main bar and cluster around tables. Most wear their gray overalls, open over crisp undershirts in various reds, blues, whites… There are no pilot-swimmers here. “What is it?” Aleo asks, through Arkady. The shift in voice is disconcerting. “A familiar face,” Dorianna says. “Someone who shouldn’t be here.” She casts a glance in the direction of the main bar itself. Ilya follows her gaze through Mihail’s eyes and spots a single man at the focus of Dorianna’s slight nod. He is a tall man, relaxed over an amber drink capped with white foam. Beer. He wears his hair in a neat buzz-cut and Ilya reads implications of the military there. Though Ilya remains in the nest itself, Mihail has access to the data-sea, and Ilya makes use of his nodes to skim for information on this stranger. There is no name; his ID tags are unfamiliar, and thus on the roster of anomalous identities that Ilya and Aleo have compiled. No name. Untraceable ID. “I’ll bet my left tit that this is our bomber.” In this moment only, Dorianna seizes fuller control of Ivanna’s nervous system. Though the voice is Ivanna’s, the accent in which she speaks is pure Earther-Centralist. A baleful glower swims in her eyes. There is an open table against a wall; Ilya sees that it will give them a clear view of the bar. He guides Mihail in that direction. The others follow. He claims a seat facing the bar and makes a show of calling a menu onto the table face. He orders beer. Something simple. Though he doesn’t stare, he keeps the stranger centered in his focus. Seated now, Dorianna studies the man at the bar through Ivanna’s eyes. “How do you know this man?” Aleo/Arkady asks. “I was engaged to him. I ended it a year before coming here.” Arkady/Aleo smiles, but the expression is devoid of humor. “And he just so happens to show up here. On Nemaea itself, in the Black City heart of Fyodorov.” “So,” Dorianna/Ivanna begins. “What do we do?” “We get rid of him,” Aleo/Arkady says. **** ...more to come...