She regarded me with piteous admiration. "A real old-schooler, aren't you? Truth, justice and the American way."

"That's me, Super-Corpse," I growled. "Up, up and decay." I looked out the window. "Pull over here."

The car complied.

"Download yourself someplace safe."

"Where are you going?"

"First I'm going to get twelve hours' sleep. Then... I'm going to hack a building."

26.

DONNER.

That night, in the seedy hotel room that I'd rented, the dreams found me.

She walks across a plain of cracked earth. Purple lightning flashes against a black sky. I can make out her favorite dress, a yellow thing, blowing in the wind, showing off her figure. She waves. But my feet are rooted to the ground. I look down, and they are rooted literally, twisting tendrils of vine wrapped around my ankles, growing into them, the tops of my feet beneath the soil.

I try to call out, but my tongue is swollen. All I can do is croak.

Elise stops.

Insanely, there's a boom box sitting on a burnt-out stump. "Is there a problem?" it asks. "Don't get snooty."

Its play light comes on. A song starts. Blues. Keb' Mo'. "Proving You Wrong."

It hurts Elise to hear it.

The wind has vanished. A shadow rises from the ground, an opaque thing with an amorphous body and black, swirling limbs. I try to scream. The phantom limbs wrap around her, and she cries out in panic, her eyes going to me.

Help me! she cries in terror. For God's sake, why are you doing this to me?

But I can't move. And even as it engulfs her, I recognize this swirling black shape.

It's my pain.

And as I watch, she is drawn down, down, until earth fills her screaming mouth.

I woke to someone banging on the wall behind my headboard.

"Shut up, shut up! Stop screaming or I'll call the cops!"

I put my face in my hands.

"Crazy motherfucker!"

Toward morning, I managed a couple sweaty, half-conscious hours, then gave up.

The dream came back to me.

There'd been a day when Elise had ordered me out. A separation. We reconciled eventually. But on that day, I'd left a boom box on a chair with a "play me" note, some kind of stupid dramatic statement. The song had been the song in the dream, "Prove You Wrong." "I'll prove you wrong," the refrain went. Elise thought it'd been left to hurt her. That it meant I'd prove her wrong about kicking me out. But it hadn't been. Of course in my stupidity, I hadn't thought that she wouldn't exactly be in the frame of mind to listen through all the lyrics. They'd actually meant I'll prove you wrong in thinking that I can't change. I'll change and be the man we both deserve.

Like many of my well-intentioned gestures, it had ended up hurting instead of helping.

Was Maggie right? Did people never truly see each other? Did they never really know who the other person was? I'd seen Elise through the veil of my needs, but now I realized that she'd already changed. I'd already broken us.

Too hard to think about.

So I spent the day nursing a shot glass and smoking and watching crap on the tiny display that some genius had epoxied to the wall. Entertainment programming hadn't improved in forty years.

When the clock read 1:10 AM, I got dressed.

The Chelsea lab was wrapped three-sided around a courtyard, used for exercising the employees when they weren't pulling overtime. Picnic tables and a white gazebo. In the summer, brass bands in gartered sleeves and boater hats played "Sentimental Journey" and there was free lemonade spiked with endorphin productivity enhancers.

I stood beneath a lamp post and fired a wooden match with a thumbnail, just a guy making his way home, pausing to light an illegal smoke. I let my disinterested gaze wander into the courtyard. Lights and security eyes everywhere. Crossing the space would be like walking a prison yard. I exhaled smoke and started moving. People didn't stroll at 2 AM. Anyone not moving with a purpose would be a subject of interest to police and predators alike.

I didn't like it. A pro would've cased this building for weeks, getting the routines down pat. They'd know every alarm system, air duct and firewall, know when the cleaning service worked and what access they had. How many security rounds were made, when, and by whom. Which guard was on what floor, whether he was lazy or alert, how long he'd worked there, when he got coffee, took a pee, whether he had any vices to distract him. They'd have ID good enough to pass a once-over and serious firepower if that failed. Multiple exit strategies. And they'd have a crew. Nobody was insane enough to take a building like this solo. Too many variables, too many special skills needed.

And I was about to try it all on my lonesome.

I remembered a seasoned old burglar, one of the last of the true career artists, before the smash-and-grab meth-heads changed the scene forever. The Dean, they'd called him. He'd worked the city for twenty-seven years without taking one prison jolt. We'd known he existed, but only as a shadow, an urban legend. He had a jacket three inches thick, over sixty unsolved but suspected cases, but not one arrest. He'd finally gone down at age fifty-eight not because of a mistake, but because of frailty: a heart attack in the middle of a job. The mark came home from his business trip and found the Dean lying beside the cracked safe in the bedroom, gasping for air. After he got out of the hospital and was brought into Booking, we were all there. Everybody wanted a look. He was royalty.

I could feel him looking down on me in disgust.

2:09.

The metal wall was behind a grove of cherry trees. It would have been the corner if this building had corners. The area, only about two feet square, appeared to have contracted beyond the lights and cameras, just like Armitage had said.

Only one way to find out. I slid fast and direct off the pavement to a spot behind the trees. No way to hide the detour.

I waited to see if I'd caused a reaction.

The neighborhood stayed asleep.

2:14.

This building topped off at ten stories, thank God. A smaller, three story section faced me. I pulled the grappling pistol from the valise, aimed and fired. A filament cable hissed up and out. The fusion piton melted into the concrete just below the lower roof. I checked the tension, hung the bag around my neck, and hit "rewind" on the side of the gun.

It hauled me up so fast that I had a blast of vertigo. I could only close my eyes and hang on while I rocketed upward. Then I was swinging myself over the lip of the roof and retracting the cable, wondering at what floor I'd left my stomach.

The access grill was reinforced steel, bolts and straps. I passed the palm-sized device Armitage gave me over the thing. Two metal tendrils shot out and insinuated themselves into the output nodes of the panel.

"Hacking building AI," the device said. "Please wait." A couple beeps later, the access grill's locks detached with a muted thunk. "Security overridden," it said. "Have a nice crime."

I consulted a GPS router loaded with the building's schematics. I lowered myself through the hole. A maintenance shaft. A couple twists and turns later, I found the connection to a ventilation duct. It ran over the main hallway. The duct's aluminum grill had screws, so I cut through them with a tiny laser torch. I dropped down into the corridor.

Now it would get tricky.

I edged down the hall. The proximity unit strapped to my thigh would alert me before I tripped any security sensor, and before any human guards got too close.

I turned the corner and ran smack into Maggie.

She shimmered at the contact. I fell back into a defensive position.

"Plasmagram," she said nasally.

I put a hand over my heart. "I youthed a year! What the fuck are you doing here?"

"I can run interference."

No time for a debate. I pointed a gloved finger at her, letting her see in my eyes just how serious I was. "You're going. Now. I don't need your help."

"Then you know that a guard is about to turn the corner."

Sure enough, footsteps could be heard, getting louder, and my thigh was vibrating urgently. I spotted a utility closet, and pulled Maggie in behind me.

It was tight. We found ourselves body to "body" amidst the brooms, buckets and shelves of toilet paper. I could feel her trim form pressed against me.

Her eyes wandered my face. "Wish I could smell."

"Dummy up," I said.

"Bet you smell good. Musk, clean sweat, lingering soap..."

"Will you be quiet?"

Then we heard the guard approach outside.

The door handle jiggled. Shit. I closed my eyes, a statue. The guard tried the door again, testing the lock. If it opened, I'd have to move on him. Come at him low, take him off his feet, then finish him. Knocking someone out in real life was messier than the movies. Causing enough trauma to shut down a brain risked a concussion, a fractured skull, or outright death.

Maggie brought her hands to my face, touched my skin. Her fingers pulsed as plasma met flesh. They roamed the curves of my face. The danger of the situation, combined with her touch, was suddenly and intensely erotic.

Finally, the guard's footsteps diminished down the hall. I exhaled, sweat beading my brow. Maggie was still touching my face, cheeks, lips.

"What does this feel like?" she asked.

"Okay, c'mon. Stop it."

Her tone hardened. "What's wrong, tough guy? Afraid to get turned on by an artificial girl?"

Christ. Her timing was amazing.

I slid past her, opening the door.

There were two sets of main doors to the genetics lab with a sterile foyer between. Each had its own security apparatus, a redundant set-up to annoy staff and burglars alike. Both sets were constructed of industrial security glass, framed in metal Xs that allowed a view of the lab beyond.

As we approached the outer doors, my leg sensor vibrated again. I put a hand up and we froze. I clicked my flashlight to infrared and cursed under my breath. Laser beams crisscrossed the hallway a meter in front of us, floor to ceiling. An impenetrable web of light.

"I thought I already overrode security."

"Must be a dedicated program," she replied.

"What is it? Motion detector?"

"Worse. It's a DNA alarm. Those lasers analyze any organic material above a certain weight. They'll ignore a mouse or a dust bunny but a human will instantly set it off."

I cursed colorfully. "I can't exactly hide my DNA."

Maggie nodded. She was chewing her lip.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"There's that inept lying again."

Maggie looked at the floor a moment. "There may be a way, but I'm not sure I like it."

I opened my palms. Try me.

"You wondered before how I become physical, right? Well, the short version is that I download myself into a small receptacle... call it my heart, whatever. This device projects the plasma and nanobits which collectively form my body."

"This receptacle actually rides around inside its own projected body?"

"Right. If I were to dematerialize, my software construct would return to the device or be transferred to another unit, another computer. The particles would be re-absorbed into the device."

"How does this help us?"

She hesitated. "If you hold my heart close against your body," she said, "I might be able to reset my physical parameters to rematerialize around you. Sort of like a second skin."

"Around me? You mean I'd be inside you?"