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Dominic had been gripping the cord so hard, his fingers had locked up. The hollow eyes of the children drilled into him. They looked like ghosts.

Qi reached for his helmet.

“Don’t!” Too late, he knocked her hand away—she’d already released the seal! He heard a gaseous hiss, and his breath caught. Damp atmosphere rushed into his helmet. It reeked of sulfur and burnt carbon, and his eyes stung. Then his heart jolted into action, and he choked. A fit of coughing bent him double. Qi pulled off his helmet and shoved an antiviral tab between his lips.

“Suck on that, Nick. It’ll help for a while.” Her voice sounded like a distant echo as she chattered on. “A lot of workers build up resistance to the toxins. Years of exposure and all that. Seems to run in families. Maybe it’s a genetic thing.”

He was too stunned to fight her. His muscles had stopped working. All he could do was imagine the unseen toxins whirling around him, invading his lungs, penetrating his skin. Soon he would begin to die. Vaguely, he became aware that Qi was wiping his cheek with her thumb. Was he crying? When she placed a filtering mask over his nose and mouth, he felt the elastic band snap across the back of his head. A moment later, he realized she was prying his fingers loose from the cord, so he let go.

Like the hollow-eyed children, he watched Qi in mute shock as she stripped off his surfsuit and ripped it with her knife to make sure it would sink. Then he watched her toss the knife after it. She might have kept the knife, he thought. When she was done, he hunched in his silk underwear on a rusty dented barrel, clasping his knees to his chest and shivering in the warm, stinking wind. Dominic Jedes wasn’t one to cower, but at the moment, all other options seemed beyond his reach.

For a long while, he sat on the barrel hugging his knees in blank, mindless shock. Clouds were turning colors on the northern horizon. Brick red and liver brown and furious white gold. The sun had reached its lowest point in the sky. It must be midnight, he realized.

Hours had passed, and he wasn’t dead yet. Perhaps those additives in his blood really worked as advertised. He blinked and rolled his shoulders, and he actually felt a little better. His expensive silk underwear had dried and matted to his skin. He recalled with irony the dozens of fresh pairs folded neatly in his closet in Trondheim. Not to mention the handsome trousers and jackets and patent leather shoes. At this hour, he should be dressing for dinner. Here he was, ZahlenBank’s savviest dealer—and he’d fallen into (his woman’s ambush like a junior clerk. She’d taken everything from him, and he’d let her. He had to laugh at himself. President of ZahlenBank, one of the ten richest men on the planet, and he couldn’t even order a cup of caffie.

Except for his silk shirt and trunks, he’d lost everything. He was barefoot. Qi had thrown his boots overboard. He’d lost his last Net node when the
Devi
sank, so he had no way to contact the NP. No way to receive the digital genie’s guidance. He felt crippled. Blast the NP! He hated to admit his dependence on that prying, nagging, artificial brain, but there it was. Still, one thing he knew. The NP would not be idle. The genie would find a way to rescue its flesh flunky. That gave Dominic some hope.

Then he remembered Qi’s words after the
Devi
went down. “Gig’s cloaking our position,” she said. That meant she was still in contact with her Org master. If she was wearing an earplug, maybe he could steal it.

The raft rode up a swell and crashed down the other side. Dominic drew a deep breath and watched the horizon. Like a piece of flotsam, a memory drifted through his consciousness: The summer solstice should be occurring about now. At least his nausea had passed. He squared his shoulders. Yes, he’d lost his wits temporarily, but now he was thinking again. He still had his banker’s cunning. Fear had shut him down, but he wouldn’t let that happen again.

“You are a seafarmer?”

He glanced in the direction of the voice. It was the old woman. She spoke English with an American accent as thick as syrup. She was sitting up now, resting her back against an overturned bucket. She’d pushed her plasticene veil back from her face, and her gray hair hung in limp coils that swung around her shoulders with each rocking motion of the raft. Her mask sat askew on her wrinkled brown face. Two tiny children squatted beside her.

“You farm?” she repeated the question.

“I’m a banker,” he said.

“Eh?”

He could barely see her black eyes peering out of the web of wrinkles. Only protes showed age like that. She was a dependent, too old to work. Dominic felt a surge of irritation. If not for Com charity, this woman would never have reached her ripe, withered age. Yet she’d deserted her Com. She didn’t have enough human gratitude to stay where she belonged. Dominic spoke through his teeth, “You’re a runaway.”

The woman nodded. “My name is Juanita Inez. These are my grandchildren. They’re free.”

Stolen property, he would have said. You’ve doomed them to early graves. But Dominic knew better than to reason with an uneducated prote. He heard a scuffle on the other side of the raft, and he rose on wobbly knees to see over the mound of junk. At the far end, Qi and the two older children struggled to lift a three-meter length of pole. Dominic recognized they were trying to stand the pole upright to make a mast. Now he understood the white plastic sheet he’d seen trailing in the water. It was a sail. Slowly, he crawled over the wave-tossed barrels to help Qi. Orange paint chipped off and stuck to his palms as he went, and when a jagged piece of metal scraped his bare knee, he cursed aloud.

A small brown foot stepped on his hand, and he glanced up at the fierce, sullen face of a child. The boy wore no mask. He was naked, with arms like sticks, a round belly and a nose caked with mucus. Dominic couldn’t guess his age. The boy balanced with feet wide apart on the barrels and swayed like an athlete in perfect tune with the waves. For one long second, he deliberately leaned all his weight on Dominic’s hand. Then he raced away over the barrels toward his brothers with the mast.

The boy’s weight wasn’t much. Dominic hardly felt it. What he felt was the insult. He wiped the boy’s footprint off his hand and stood up straight, then swung his arms madly at the sky and fell backward. Cautiously, he got his legs straightened out for another try. This time when he stood, he spread his feet wide, as the boy had done, and flexed his knees to take the impact of the rolling deck. He tried a few steps, then paused. His workouts at the gym hadn’t gone for nothing. He could do this. Another careful step. Another. When he reached the far end of the raft, he was able to hold the mast in place while Qi secured it with guy lines.

The little boy never stopped scowling at him. It took them an hour to rig the plastic sail. When he sat down to wipe sweat from his eyes, the boy sat beside him and tugged his sleeve. In pantomime, the boy bunched up his little brown fingers, poked something imaginary into his mouth and pretended to chew.

“I don’t have food,” Dominic said.

The boy dropped his chin with an air of disgust and went back to his grandmother.

Later, when the children were out of earshot, Qi whispered to him through her breathing mask. “You told them you’re a banker?” She giggled and patted the barrel beside her, inviting him to sit. “Workers think a banker is a machine that dispenses coins.”

“Do you have any food?” Dominic squatted a couple of barrel lengths away and watched Qi warily. She shook her head no. “What about water? You gave the old woman our only water sack. She’ll drink it in one gulp. We need to ration it.”

“Calm down. It’s not a problem.” Qi dangled her bare feet over the edge and kicked at the fetid ocean. She seemed completely at ease.

Dominic adjusted his mask. He was hungry and thirsty and tired, while this skinny dark spy girl seemed as fresh as ever. He wondered how old she was. Late twenties? Maybe she took energy tabs, but that didn’t explain her total lack of fear. He envied her that. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

“Mmm. I love this view. We’re below the smog layer, so we can see a long way. Look.”

She pointed north, where the clouds were brightening to fiery crimson. The sun was already rising again. A whole day had passed since he left the beach in West Spitzbergen. Barely forty hours ago, Dominic had been sitting in his office in Trondheim. He recalled that now with astonishment.

“You sleepy? Put your head in my lap,” Qi said.

“I’d prefer answers. You control this situation, I’ll concede that much. But you still need something from me. If you expect my help, you’d better be more forthcoming.”

Qi dipped up a handful of grayish sea fluid. She studied it for a moment as if searching for life-forms. Then she flung it away. Behind her, the improvised sail flapped steadily. They were running with the wind, due west.

“I watched you rig that sail,” he said. “You set us on course for somewhere. Are we moving toward the
Benthica
?”

“The
Pressure of Light
,” she answered. “I can’t tell you anything, Dominic. Be patient. You’ll know soon enough—”

“That’s not acceptable!” he shouted.

In response to his shout, the sullen little boy popped up over the mound of barrels and glared at him. Dominic glared back. Then the boy made a face, and Dominic clenched his jaw. Sweat prickled under his face mask and made his nose itch. He continued more quietly, “Major, I know we’re undercover, but you can’t expect me to pretend I’m a prote. I haven’t the least notion how protes behave. I’m not trained for espionage. They’ll see through me at once.”

“Like clients see through you at ZahlenBank? You’re as clear as water, aren’t you, Nicky?”

Dominic rolled his head to stretch his neck muscles. He looked at her sideways. When she smiled, he noticed how her mocking black eyes crinkled almost shut.

She said, “Tell them you’re a banker if you like. It doesn’t matter. They’ll hear your educated accent and your college vocabulary, and they’ll trust anything you say. Only the smartest workers go to college. They’ll respect you.”

Dominic frowned. “Protected employees do not attend college.”

“Sure they do. Who do you think runs the production lines? Who keeps the equipment working? Who takes care of the sick? You think some aristo exec would stoop to that kind of work?” Qi laughed. “You’ve been locked up inside too long, Nick-O.”

“Where’s the
Benthica
?” he asked.

“Dominic, Dominic. So many questions. Look at the sunrise. Isn’t it beautiful? Have you ever seen dawn with your naked eyes?”

“How long before we arrive?”

Qi rocked back and let out her boyish hoot. Then she hopped up and dove at him bodily. She tumbled him over and started wrestling him on top of the barrels, bruising his shoulders, knocking his mask sideways and tickling him under the arms. “Ask one more question, and you go for a swim, Nick-O!”

Her playfulness ended abruptly. She sat up listening, while Dominic struggled to get his mask back on. “Shhh,” she whispered.

Then Dominic heard it, too. A sucking liquid noise. Far away, but growing louder. “What is it?” He sat up, cocking his ear. The noise was echoing out of the west, and they seemed to be heading straight for it. He said, “It sounds like the edge of the world.”

THEY
sailed steadily westward toward the booming roar, shading their eyes and squinting into the horizon. In the distance, a slate gray object projected from the ocean, and Dominic saw it gleam intermittently between swells. The roar gradually resolved into a loud pulse of churning waters, and the closer they approached, the larger the object grew. By the time they came within half a kilometer, the din was deafening, and the structure loomed up like a colossal black wall blocking half the sky.

The noise drove Dominic to cover his ears. He stared dumbfounded. The ship was so enormous, it could have held a city. Its gargantuan rust-streaked hull was shaped like a drum, squat and cylindrical with a flat top, and there were no portals or openings. Just below the waterline, a ring of slime-crusted machinery circled the drum, slurping up water and rapidly spewing it out again. This action caused the ring to revolve briskly around the hull, creating a dangerous wake of boils and whirlpools. Their little raft was sailing straight for it.

When Qi hauled the sail down, Dominic sprang forward to help. At last, he recognized the strange craft. It was a factory ship. He’d seen them in holographs on the Net. These titanic vessels lumbered at the edge of swift ocean currents and generated power from hydrodynamic differentials. At the ship’s core whirled a thick column of turbines, and inside its huge hold, robots and protected employees manned the revolving rings of production lines powered by the turbines. Such a ship could manufacture anything from cars to caffie pots. But the factory ship wasn’t alone.

Clustered in its shadow, just beyond reach of its treacherous wake, Dominic saw a mat of floating debris, and as they glided closer, the flotsam resolved into the outlines of fragile little boats. Junkers they were, cobbled together from polyfoam crates, PVC tubing, plastic jugs and billboard panels. Beer logos and snippets of advertising copy slanted across their sails in a bright linguistic patchwork. Dominic even saw a hazardous-waste tank lodged among the trash. There must have been fifteen or twenty of these boats, each with its crew of men, women and children, exposed to the atmosphere, worn-out, beaten down and clinging—like animals, he thought.

“Runaway protes,” he said aloud.

Qi couldn’t have heard him over the din. When she finished tying down the sail, she stood and shouted, “This is our rendezvous.”

It took Dominic about a second to grasp that the protes were sheltering in the factory’s infrared shadow to hide from satellite scans. A fairly clever idea. He wondered who thought of it. At the top of his voice, he yelled, “What Com owns this factory? Are the executives complicit in this?”

Qi put her mouth close to his ear. “Don’t get your shorts in a wad, Nick. There’s only one exec on board, and he stays zonked twenty-four/seven on Mellow Yellows. That exec doesn’t even know we exist.”