Carnival

The pain was asphyxiating. She fought for breath–diaphragm spasming, the gasp more like a whine if she was being honest–and blinked until her vision cleared. And then she picked up her honor, holstered it, found the crutch left‑handed, and forced herself up, to face the mirror again.

The twenty‑fifth attempt was no more successful than the third.

Pain couldn’t force her to stop, but eventually the bleeding and nausea did. She holstered her honor one last time, resettled the crutch under her armpit, and hobbled to the balcony. Julian was still down there with the other boys, ru

Lesa hitched to a stop a few steps shy of the railing. She stared down, at the ru

She took two steps back, into the frame of the doorway. “House,” she said. “I need to speak to Julian. Please have Alys send him down.”

When Lesa summoned them again, even Kusanagi‑Jones could tell she had not been resting. Her color was worse, her hair tangled and the knees of her trousers stained with chlorophyll. And then there was the matter of the slender dark boy curled on the seat before her terminal, pecking at the keys with concentrated precision.

“Miss Pretoria?”

She gave him that eyebrow, but stepped aside to allow him into the room, Vincent at his heels. The door clicked as it contracted shut behind them, and Kusanagi‑Jones paused and glanced over his shoulder. Vincent caught him looking, of course, eyebrows quirked and the faintest hint of a smile–an expression that slid through Kusanagi‑Jones’s heart like a skewer. He would have sworn he could feel the muscle contracting around penetrating metal, trying to beat and only managing to shred itself a little further.

Three months, on the Kaiwo Maru. Three months they could have had. And he had been too much of a sodding coward to even reachfor it.

Then Vincent’s half‑smile turned into a real one, as if he knew exactly what Kusanagi‑Jones was thinking, and loved him for it, or in spite of it. And Kusanagi‑Jones smiled back.

So it went.

Kill or be killed.

Vincent took him by the elbow and steered him into the room. “You have the look of a woman with a plan,” Vincent said, and the corners of Lesa’s eyes crinkled, an expression that made Kusanagi‑Jones homesick.

“Can you shield this room?” she asked.

“Shield it from what?”

“Electromagnetic monitoring.”

Vincent glanced at Kusanagi‑Jones, who looked right back, silently. “Yes,” Vincent said. He touched his watch. “The whole room?”

“It’d be more convenient. I’ve already isolated it from House.”

“Angelo?”

Kusanagi‑Jones nodded, and slaved his wardrobe to Vincent’s. Between them, they had enough foglets to manage a Faraday cage, since their wardrobes–given time–could manufacture more as needed.

The process took a few minutes, and Lesa said nothing further throughout, which seemed an indication for communal silence. “There,” Vincent said when it was done. “I’ve added eavesdropping countermeasures.”

Lesa didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at Kusanagi‑Jones and asked, “Did you download Kii’s medical program?”

“He did,” Vincent answered.

“Do you still have it?”

Julian, who hadn’t spoken, came up beside Lesa, close enough to feel her body heat without the childish admission of actually touching her or stepping behind her. Kusanagi‑Jones looked at him, not at Lesa, and held up his left arm, stripping the sleeve off the forearm to show the status lights on his watch. Only one blinked green now, the slow flicker of the nanodoc condition readout. The rest glowed red or dark amber, for critical infection.

There was more amber than there had been an hour before, and not just because Kusanagi‑Jones had grabbed a nap.

“I need that,” Julian said.

Kusanagi‑Jones let his arm fall, and his sleeve drop over it. “The program?”

“A copy of it.” He shuffled forward, forgetting that he had been half hiding behind his mother, and grabbed Kusanagi‑Jones’s wrist to pull him toward the terminal.

Bemused, Kusanagi‑Jones was about to step forward and follow, until Julian froze and turned back, gazing up at Vincent with stricken eyes.

Vincent, sod him, was waiting for it. He smiled at Julian and waved him away, Kusanagi‑Jones included.

Nice to know I’ve still got his mark stamped between my eyes.But he went, as Vincent must have known he would.

“What frequency does it use?” Julian asked, and Kusanagi‑Jones told him. And then queued and transferred the archive copy of Kii’s program as soon as the protocol co

“What exactly are you pla

“Julian’s been working on quantum decision trees,” Lesa said.

“Fractal,” Julian corrected, without looking up from his displays and the holographic array floating in the air before him. “Fractal decision trees.”

“Which means what, in layman’s terms?” It almost sounded as if Vincent knew what was going on. Which was fine with Kusanagi‑Jones, because he certainly didn’t. He could code a little, hack a wardrobe license as well as anybody–which was to say, not very well at all–but whatever Julian was doing with confident, sweeping gestures of his hands over the holopad was beyond him.

“House has its own programming language,” Lesa said. “Julian’s been learning to code for it.”

“It uses four‑dimensional matrices,” Julian said. “You would not believe how tricky.” He looked up, and seemed to realize that Kusanagi‑Jones was still standing behind him, peering over his shoulder with a befuddled expression. “This is going to take awhile,” he said, with a child’s sublime confidence in his field of expertise. “You might as well get something to eat. I won’t have anything done before tomorrow.”

“But what,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, folding his hands together to keep his fingers from tightening, “are you doing?”

“Kii’s a computer program, right?” Lesa said. “I mean, he’s Transcendent. He’s a machine intelligence. So theoretically you could rewrite him–”

“A virus,” Vincent said.

“A worm,” Julian corrected. “Or more like…like…repurposing the worm he wrote for Miss Kusanagi‑Jones.”

“Call me Angelo,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, unable to contemplate the specter of this infant calling him Miss anything. A week was overtime on this planet. Ten days was beyond the call of duty.

Julian glanced sideways enough to grin. “Anyway, we’ve got a worm. I just have to, you know, tweak it.”

“It’s not Kii,” Kusanagi‑Jones said reluctantly. It was such an arrogant, audacious plan. Exactly the sort of thing Vincent would come up with, really.

He hated to punch holes in it.

“What do you mean?” Lesa asked. She had sat back down on the bed, and Kusanagi‑Jones was glad. He’d seenher feet, even if she was determined not to show the pain.

And Vincent was looking at him, too. When he’d rather hoped that Vincent would pick up the thread and do the explaining. “It’s the Consent,” Kusanagi‑Jones said. “Not a hive mind, really. But the community makes up its mind and Kii does what the Consent decides. Democracy by decree. Everybody votes, and whatever gets voted up retroactively becomes everybody’s idea. Biochemical. So when Kii says it’s not his decision, he’s not saying anything more than the truth.”

And anyway, he didn’t care how good the New Amazonians were at programming for their adopted domicile, he didn’t believe for a second that the child could actually hack a Transcendent brain. And he didn’t think any of them wanted to live with the consequences of failure.