amodaresi/NoLiMa · Datasets at Hugging Face

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“But that ain’t Mrs. Quelton!” cried the landlady.
If Lexy had not caught the unhappy woman, she would have fallen; but those sturdy young arms held her, and, with Mrs. Royce’s help, they got her on the bed. White as a ghost, incredibly frail in her black dress, she lay there, scarcely seeming to breathe.
“It ain’t Mrs. Quelton!” repeated Mrs. Royce, in a whisper.
“I know!” said Lexy softly. “Will you get me water and a towel, please?”
Mrs. Royce went out of the room, and Lexy knelt down beside the bed. She did know now—the woman whom they had all called Muriel Quelton was really Caroline Enderby.
Lexy did not blame herself for not having known before. Looking at that face now, in its terrible stillness, she could trace the familiar features easily enough, but how changed! How worn and lined, how old ! The brows, the lashes, the soft, disordered hair, were black now instead of brown; but that merely physical alteration was of no significance, compared with that other awful change. It was Caroline Enderby, the gentle and pitifully inexperienced girl of nineteen, but it was Mrs. Quelton, too, that tragic and somber figure.
Emma, I was a Marine. Or I am a Marine. They don't actually let us retire, you know. They just put us on indefinite hiatus."
"And you served bravely in the desert, yes? Like all the other good Midwestern boys?"
"I did."
"You were no doubt very brave."
"No. The brave are the ones who come back in bags. I'm just feisty and clever and stubborn. Like a camel.
The best way to survive in a hostile environment is always to emulate the natives. "
"I'd rather imagine you as brave and lucky than camelish. A Lawrence of Arabia romance. " She tilts her head toward him. "Does it bother you to talk about the desert?"
"Not in generalities." Which is true enough. "Generalities are better, in fact, if you want to keep your illusions of romance."
"But it was exciting, wasn't it?"
He laughs without humor. "In the military, excitement is a dirty word. We avoid all things exciting if possible."
"I don't believe that. I think your life must have been very exciting, but you don't want to tell me."
“Tell me what?” asked Mrs. Enderby. “Come, if you please, Miss Moran! Tell me at once!”
“Caroline’s gone.”
The words were spoken. Lexy waited in great alarm, wondering if Mrs. Enderby would faint or scream.
The lady did neither. She came out into the corridor, shutting the door of her room behind her, and her first word and her only word was: “Hush!”
Then she glanced about her at the closed doors, and, taking Lexy’s arm in a firm grip, hurried her to Caroline’s room. Not until they were shut in there did she speak again.
“Now tell me!” she said. “Speak very low. You said—Caroline has gone?”
“Yes,” said Lexy. “I came in here after you’d gone to bed, and—you can see for yourself—the bed hasn’t been slept in. She’s taken her things—her brush and comb and—”
“And she told you—what?”
“Me? Why, nothing!” answered Lexy, in surprise. “I didn’t see her. I haven’t seen her since dinner.”
“But you know,” said Mrs. Enderby. “You know where she has gone.”
She spoke with cool certainty, and her black eyes were fixed upon Lexy with a far from pleasant expression.
She clicked off the phone and looked up with startled eyes. "It was somebody who said they worked for Children of Light. She wanted to know if you'd contacted me." Her face collapsed. "You. She asked me specifically about you . By name. How did—?"
"I have no idea." My hands were growing cold. Had Carly told them about me? Why would she do that? "Anyway, you handled it okay."
Which made me wonder. If Children of Light was such a perfect organization, why was Paula so frightened she immediately felt compelled to lie, to swear she hadn't broken their rules?
"Right." Her composure was slowly coming back. "Look, now that I think about it, why should they care? It doesn't make any sense. They got their money." She turned to me. "Let me have that release."
She seized the paper and endorsed it with a flourish.
My pulse was still in overdrive, but I hugged her, then signaled the crew that shooting was over for the day.
"Okay, everybody. Time to wrap."
The gang immediately began striking the lights and rolling up electrical cords. They would take the equipment back downtown and deliver the film to the lab, while I would head home. It had been a long day and lots of thinking was needed. Besides, it was starting to rain, a dismal spatter against Paula's grimy windows, as the gray spring afternoon had begun darkening toward sullen evening.
> San Francisco.
This was starting to feel familiar.
> Where in San Francisco?
I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. I jumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I got through half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood.
Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you a great lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from some movie are you? What's your emotional type? They fill them in and their friends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.
The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins for schools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to buy pizza and stuff.
But look at those questions. Think about my answers: Male, Chavez High, Potrero Hill.
There were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile. Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure out who the Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.
She was cried out, and weak from hunger, and she understood what was coming next when he threw her down and grabbed the collar of her shirt and ripped it away from her, then gave her bra the same treatment. She was dazed from the knocks on the head, but she knew what was coming.
Valentine’s mother was a soldier. She’d been taught to kill. She’d taught Valentine to kill. Valentine never left the house without a clasp-knife, the knife she’d taken from the corpse she’d thrown out a fifteenth storey window some unknowable time before.
The knife was in her back pocket. She watched the boy’s silhouette work at the fastener of his trousers, while she stole a hand behind her and slowly, slowly took out the knife. She let herself make silent choking dazed sounds.
She knew what was coming next, but the boy didn’t.
But as he knelt down and reached out for the snap on her trousers, she showed him what was next. She took two of his fingers and just missed opening her own belly. He tried to jerk his arm away, but she had him by the wrist before he could, and she pulled him down on top of her, making sure that her knife was free of the clinch, free to slip around behind him and take him once-twice-three time in between his ribs, then again into his kidneys. Seeing the splatted corpses she tossed out of windows had given her a very keen idea of how anatomy worked.
“Yeah. It’s just . . .” She brushed a hand across the sleeping baby’s hair. “Men, you know?”
“Totally.” Actually, I didn’t know.
“I mean, Danny’s a sweet guy. He just doesn’t get how big a responsibility it is to raise a child.”
really he does.” She made it sound as if we were arguing about it. “It’s just . . . being involved in this scene is really important to him.”
“Being committed to radical change is cool.”
She shrugged. “He likes being important. I just wish we could get a place of our own. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I have to help my brother.”
“By hanging out with them?” She snorted. “That guy, Simon.
Are you together?”
“No. I just asked him if I could come to the meeting.”
“Is that what they’re calling it, a meeting? They sure love to talk, anyway.” She reached down, picked up beer bottle, shook it side to side, then set it down murmuring sadly “all gone” as if she was talking to the sleeping baby. “If the police come here and see us living in this dump and decide to jam us up . . . That’s what scares me the most.” She twirled a lock of the baby’s hair and wiped her eyes again. “If they took him away, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“I know that,” I cut in. “I’m not an idiot. Skip to the ‘how’ part.”
“High-altitude nuclear detonation is probably the easiest way,” said Checker.
I felt dazed. “Easiest?”
“Clearly you’re not up on your right-wing nut job blogs,” said Checker. “One high-altitude nuke could take out all the electronics in the United States. The good news is, no loss to human life, except of course for all of the countless people who are depending on medical electronics to keep them kicking—”
“Cars,” I said. “What about cars?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. Most cars are computerized these days—older ones might have a better chance? I don’t know—”
“We need to get out of the radius,” I said. “Checker, you’ve been backing up in the cloud, right? If we can get to a place that’s not fried, will the network be—”
“Distributed computing, it should be fine, well, depending on how much they took out—what if they have taken out the whole country?” Checker’s voice had gone very high.
“Would they?” I wondered. “They’re all about helping people. And last they knew we were still in LA. Plus, if they got provoked into this by what Steve’s group did and tracked it back to them—”
There would be no question of walking for many a month to come, but blessings seemed to multiply when the blinds could be opened and the bed drawn near the window; when mother, with pillows behind her, could at least sit and watch the work going on, could smile at the past agony and forget the weary hours that had led to her present comparative ease and comfort.
No girl of seventeen can pass through such an ordeal and come out unchanged; no girl of Rebecca's temperament could go through it without some inward repining and rebellion. She was doing tasks in which she could not be fully happy,—heavy and trying tasks, which perhaps she could never do with complete success or satisfaction; and like promise of nectar to thirsty lips was the vision of joys she had had to put aside for the performance of dull daily duty. How brief, how fleeting, had been those splendid visions when the universe seemed open for her young strength to battle and triumph in! How soon they had faded into the light of common day! At first, sympathy and grief were so keen she thought of nothing but her mother's pain. No consciousness of self interposed between her and her filial service; then, as the weeks passed, little blighted hopes began to stir and ache in her breast; defeated ambitions raised their heads as if to sting her; unattainable delights teased her by their very nearness; by the narrow line of separation that lay between her and their realization. It is easy, for the moment, to tread the narrow way, looking neither to the right nor left, upborne by the sense of right doing; but that first joy of self-denial, the joy that is like fire in the blood, dies away; the path seems drearier and the footsteps falter.
From a ways away, and goddamned hard to hear. I turned the volume on the phone all the way up, but the ringing in my ears was still too bad for me to focus past it.
I needed an amplifier.... on the floor of the passenger side of my new ride and picked it up. A few rips and a twist and I had something that would bounce my sound waves into constructive interference. I tore a slot in the base and slid it over the phone’s speaker, then held the mouth of my makeshift amplifier up to my ear.
“...ain’t gonna let you go,” came Arthur’s voice, quiet and inexorable.
“You’re fucked up, man. You’re fucked in the head. You really wanna die for this?”
“I ain’t walking away.”
Checker was prone to asking far too many questions, but he knew an emergency when he saw one. Thirteen seconds later I had the freeway exit for a nearby hospital.
Hospital security is effectively nonexistent. At least when it comes to someone like me. I was lifting away from the roof helipad into a darkening sky before anyone registered I was stealing from them.
“And I want to be able to speak freely where we do this,” I said. “No spying; I mean it. I’ll bring the tech to check.”
“Don’t think that’s unreasonable,” said Arthur. “Anything else important?”
Halliday handed him the list. “I believe we’ve covered it.”
The only thing the Feds refused was us hanging onto a copy of the proof—they claimed they didn’t trust us to keep it secure. I pointed out that, considering it was still missing and uncontained, Halliday was going to be helping them propagate security overhauls everywhere anyway. They pointed out in turn that the security overhaul meant we wouldn’t be a threat to them and we therefore had no need for leverage.
I didn’t like it, but considering I’d be able to write the whole damn thing out myself afterward without them being able to stop me, I let it slide. I wasn’t too happy they wouldn’t know I was capable of releasing the proof—that was the point of leverage, after all—but maybe I could tell them later.
The Feds set up a safe house for Halliday in the mountains. It was some sort of abandoned estate, old but clean and in good repair. The NSA set up shop at a respectful distance, controlling access to the house. We’d been able to dictate that Arthur and I would have the freedom to move in and out—either a mark of how irrelevant they thought we were or how over a barrel we had them; I wasn’t sure which. Halliday herself wasn’t allowed to leave until we had finished, and after that we would set up new provisions for her protection. But right now all anyone was concerned about was getting her proof on paper.
“He can’t have family members visit?”
“Unlikely, at this point. We’re making arrangements to rep- resent all of the young people who were arrested, except for the informant, who has his own lawyer. Since he won’t be talking to us we’ll need to do some research on him.”
“I’ll start working on that.”
“You seem confused by what I mean when I say ‘we.’ We’ll have our investigators work on it, though we won’t have anything like the resources of the Justice Department. It’ll take time.”
“We don’t have time. I want Wilson out of there. Jail’s no place for him. He’s been there overnight a few times, but he’s still like, a total noob.”
“ A . . . what?”
“He’s clueless. It’s not a safe place for him. You guys focus on the law stuff. I’ll find out who Zip really is.”
“And how exactly do you propose to do that?”
“Uh, I probably shouldn’t go into detail.”
She looked past me at her computer’s sleek new Ubuntu desk- top, and her expression changed from superior and skeptical to “Oh,” like she just realized that I had skills, that I probably hacked into banks or NSA databases all the time, which I wouldn’t even try. Like I said before, I’m sure I’d be better at jail than Wilson, but I don’t want to find out. Ever.
Only, to her, it did not seem natural, that one little light shining out through the glass of the front door. It would be more natural, she thought, if there were only the darkness and the sound of the sea.
They turned into the drive. Their footsteps sounded strangely and terribly loud on the gravel, and became as sharp as pistol shots when they mounted the veranda. The captain rang the bell, and the sound of it ran through the house like a shudder; but no one came. He rang again and again, but nothing stirred inside the house. He knocked on the glass, and they waited, looking into the bright and empty hall; but no one came.
Captain Grey turned the knob, the door opened, and they went in. The door of the library was open, showing only darkness. The stairs ran up into darkness. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. Then, suddenly, a little breeze rose, and the front door slammed with a crash behind them. Lexy cried out, and caught the young man’s arm.
“Don’t be afraid!” he said; but his face was ashen. For a moment they stood where they were. “Miss Moran,” he went on, “would you rather wait here while I go upstairs?”
Tell Buddy he doesn't have to keep on calling me to say thanks. I'm just glad that he and Carla are all right. Tell him to enjoy his promotion!
When I got to the office this morning, I found Rhindquist wearing his old-fashioned pusher's uniform. I hadn't seen it since the day we met. I was surprised by how normal he looked in it: he could have been any pusher.

“But that ain’t Mrs. Quelton!” cried the landlady.

If Lexy had not caught the unhappy woman, she would have fallen; but those sturdy young arms held her, and, with Mrs. Royce’s help, they got her on the bed. White as a ghost, incredibly frail in her black dress, she lay there, scarcely seeming to breathe.

“It ain’t Mrs. Quelton!” repeated Mrs. Royce, in a whisper.

“I know!” said Lexy softly. “Will you get me water and a towel, please?”

Mrs. Royce went out of the room, and Lexy knelt down beside the bed. She did know now—the woman whom they had all called Muriel Quelton was really Caroline Enderby.

Lexy did not blame herself for not having known before. Looking at that face now, in its terrible stillness, she could trace the familiar features easily enough, but how changed! How worn and lined, how old ! The brows, the lashes, the soft, disordered hair, were black now instead of brown; but that merely physical alteration was of no significance, compared with that other awful change. It was Caroline Enderby, the gentle and pitifully inexperienced girl of nineteen, but it was Mrs. Quelton, too, that tragic and somber figure.

Emma, I was a Marine. Or I am a Marine. They don't actually let us retire, you know. They just put us on indefinite hiatus."

"And you served bravely in the desert, yes? Like all the other good Midwestern boys?"

"I did."

"You were no doubt very brave."

"No. The brave are the ones who come back in bags. I'm just feisty and clever and stubborn. Like a camel.

The best way to survive in a hostile environment is always to emulate the natives. "

"I'd rather imagine you as brave and lucky than camelish. A Lawrence of Arabia romance. " She tilts her head toward him. "Does it bother you to talk about the desert?"

"Not in generalities." Which is true enough. "Generalities are better, in fact, if you want to keep your illusions of romance."

"But it was exciting, wasn't it?"

He laughs without humor. "In the military, excitement is a dirty word. We avoid all things exciting if possible."

"I don't believe that. I think your life must have been very exciting, but you don't want to tell me."

“Tell me what?” asked Mrs. Enderby. “Come, if you please, Miss Moran! Tell me at once!”

“Caroline’s gone.”

The words were spoken. Lexy waited in great alarm, wondering if Mrs. Enderby would faint or scream.

The lady did neither. She came out into the corridor, shutting the door of her room behind her, and her first word and her only word was: “Hush!”

Then she glanced about her at the closed doors, and, taking Lexy’s arm in a firm grip, hurried her to Caroline’s room. Not until they were shut in there did she speak again.

“Now tell me!” she said. “Speak very low. You said—Caroline has gone?”

“Yes,” said Lexy. “I came in here after you’d gone to bed, and—you can see for yourself—the bed hasn’t been slept in. She’s taken her things—her brush and comb and—”

“And she told you—what?”

“Me? Why, nothing!” answered Lexy, in surprise. “I didn’t see her. I haven’t seen her since dinner.”

“But you know,” said Mrs. Enderby. “You know where she has gone.”

She spoke with cool certainty, and her black eyes were fixed upon Lexy with a far from pleasant expression.

She clicked off the phone and looked up with startled eyes. "It was somebody who said they worked for Children of Light. She wanted to know if you'd contacted me." Her face collapsed. "You. She asked me specifically about you . By name. How did—?"

"I have no idea." My hands were growing cold. Had Carly told them about me? Why would she do that? "Anyway, you handled it okay."

Which made me wonder. If Children of Light was such a perfect organization, why was Paula so frightened she immediately felt compelled to lie, to swear she hadn't broken their rules?

"Right." Her composure was slowly coming back. "Look, now that I think about it, why should they care? It doesn't make any sense. They got their money." She turned to me. "Let me have that release."

She seized the paper and endorsed it with a flourish.

My pulse was still in overdrive, but I hugged her, then signaled the crew that shooting was over for the day.

"Okay, everybody. Time to wrap."

The gang immediately began striking the lights and rolling up electrical cords. They would take the equipment back downtown and deliver the film to the lab, while I would head home. It had been a long day and lots of thinking was needed. Besides, it was starting to rain, a dismal spatter against Paula's grimy windows, as the gray spring afternoon had begun darkening toward sullen evening.

> San Francisco.

This was starting to feel familiar.

> Where in San Francisco?

I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. I jumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I got through half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood.

Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you a great lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from some movie are you? What's your emotional type? They fill them in and their friends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun.

The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins for schools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to buy pizza and stuff.

But look at those questions. Think about my answers: Male, Chavez High, Potrero Hill.

There were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile. Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure out who the Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all.

She was cried out, and weak from hunger, and she understood what was coming next when he threw her down and grabbed the collar of her shirt and ripped it away from her, then gave her bra the same treatment. She was dazed from the knocks on the head, but she knew what was coming.

Valentine’s mother was a soldier. She’d been taught to kill. She’d taught Valentine to kill. Valentine never left the house without a clasp-knife, the knife she’d taken from the corpse she’d thrown out a fifteenth storey window some unknowable time before.

The knife was in her back pocket. She watched the boy’s silhouette work at the fastener of his trousers, while she stole a hand behind her and slowly, slowly took out the knife. She let herself make silent choking dazed sounds.

She knew what was coming next, but the boy didn’t.

But as he knelt down and reached out for the snap on her trousers, she showed him what was next. She took two of his fingers and just missed opening her own belly. He tried to jerk his arm away, but she had him by the wrist before he could, and she pulled him down on top of her, making sure that her knife was free of the clinch, free to slip around behind him and take him once-twice-three time in between his ribs, then again into his kidneys. Seeing the splatted corpses she tossed out of windows had given her a very keen idea of how anatomy worked.

“Yeah. It’s just . . .” She brushed a hand across the sleeping baby’s hair. “Men, you know?”

“Totally.” Actually, I didn’t know.

“I mean, Danny’s a sweet guy. He just doesn’t get how big a responsibility it is to raise a child.”

really he does.” She made it sound as if we were arguing about it. “It’s just . . . being involved in this scene is really important to him.”

“Being committed to radical change is cool.”

She shrugged. “He likes being important. I just wish we could get a place of our own. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I have to help my brother.”

“By hanging out with them?” She snorted. “That guy, Simon.

Are you together?”

“No. I just asked him if I could come to the meeting.”

“Is that what they’re calling it, a meeting? They sure love to talk, anyway.” She reached down, picked up beer bottle, shook it side to side, then set it down murmuring sadly “all gone” as if she was talking to the sleeping baby. “If the police come here and see us living in this dump and decide to jam us up . . . That’s what scares me the most.” She twirled a lock of the baby’s hair and wiped her eyes again. “If they took him away, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“I know that,” I cut in. “I’m not an idiot. Skip to the ‘how’ part.”

“High-altitude nuclear detonation is probably the easiest way,” said Checker.

I felt dazed. “Easiest?”

“Clearly you’re not up on your right-wing nut job blogs,” said Checker. “One high-altitude nuke could take out all the electronics in the United States. The good news is, no loss to human life, except of course for all of the countless people who are depending on medical electronics to keep them kicking—”

“Cars,” I said. “What about cars?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. Most cars are computerized these days—older ones might have a better chance? I don’t know—”

“We need to get out of the radius,” I said. “Checker, you’ve been backing up in the cloud, right? If we can get to a place that’s not fried, will the network be—”

“Distributed computing, it should be fine, well, depending on how much they took out—what if they have taken out the whole country?” Checker’s voice had gone very high.

“Would they?” I wondered. “They’re all about helping people. And last they knew we were still in LA. Plus, if they got provoked into this by what Steve’s group did and tracked it back to them—”

There would be no question of walking for many a month to come, but blessings seemed to multiply when the blinds could be opened and the bed drawn near the window; when mother, with pillows behind her, could at least sit and watch the work going on, could smile at the past agony and forget the weary hours that had led to her present comparative ease and comfort.

No girl of seventeen can pass through such an ordeal and come out unchanged; no girl of Rebecca's temperament could go through it without some inward repining and rebellion. She was doing tasks in which she could not be fully happy,—heavy and trying tasks, which perhaps she could never do with complete success or satisfaction; and like promise of nectar to thirsty lips was the vision of joys she had had to put aside for the performance of dull daily duty. How brief, how fleeting, had been those splendid visions when the universe seemed open for her young strength to battle and triumph in! How soon they had faded into the light of common day! At first, sympathy and grief were so keen she thought of nothing but her mother's pain. No consciousness of self interposed between her and her filial service; then, as the weeks passed, little blighted hopes began to stir and ache in her breast; defeated ambitions raised their heads as if to sting her; unattainable delights teased her by their very nearness; by the narrow line of separation that lay between her and their realization. It is easy, for the moment, to tread the narrow way, looking neither to the right nor left, upborne by the sense of right doing; but that first joy of self-denial, the joy that is like fire in the blood, dies away; the path seems drearier and the footsteps falter.

From a ways away, and goddamned hard to hear. I turned the volume on the phone all the way up, but the ringing in my ears was still too bad for me to focus past it.

I needed an amplifier.... on the floor of the passenger side of my new ride and picked it up. A few rips and a twist and I had something that would bounce my sound waves into constructive interference. I tore a slot in the base and slid it over the phone’s speaker, then held the mouth of my makeshift amplifier up to my ear.

“...ain’t gonna let you go,” came Arthur’s voice, quiet and inexorable.

“You’re fucked up, man. You’re fucked in the head. You really wanna die for this?”

“I ain’t walking away.”

Checker was prone to asking far too many questions, but he knew an emergency when he saw one. Thirteen seconds later I had the freeway exit for a nearby hospital.

Hospital security is effectively nonexistent. At least when it comes to someone like me. I was lifting away from the roof helipad into a darkening sky before anyone registered I was stealing from them.

“And I want to be able to speak freely where we do this,” I said. “No spying; I mean it. I’ll bring the tech to check.”

“Don’t think that’s unreasonable,” said Arthur. “Anything else important?”

Halliday handed him the list. “I believe we’ve covered it.”

The only thing the Feds refused was us hanging onto a copy of the proof—they claimed they didn’t trust us to keep it secure. I pointed out that, considering it was still missing and uncontained, Halliday was going to be helping them propagate security overhauls everywhere anyway. They pointed out in turn that the security overhaul meant we wouldn’t be a threat to them and we therefore had no need for leverage.

I didn’t like it, but considering I’d be able to write the whole damn thing out myself afterward without them being able to stop me, I let it slide. I wasn’t too happy they wouldn’t know I was capable of releasing the proof—that was the point of leverage, after all—but maybe I could tell them later.

The Feds set up a safe house for Halliday in the mountains. It was some sort of abandoned estate, old but clean and in good repair. The NSA set up shop at a respectful distance, controlling access to the house. We’d been able to dictate that Arthur and I would have the freedom to move in and out—either a mark of how irrelevant they thought we were or how over a barrel we had them; I wasn’t sure which. Halliday herself wasn’t allowed to leave until we had finished, and after that we would set up new provisions for her protection. But right now all anyone was concerned about was getting her proof on paper.

“He can’t have family members visit?”

“Unlikely, at this point. We’re making arrangements to rep- resent all of the young people who were arrested, except for the informant, who has his own lawyer. Since he won’t be talking to us we’ll need to do some research on him.”

“I’ll start working on that.”

“You seem confused by what I mean when I say ‘we.’ We’ll have our investigators work on it, though we won’t have anything like the resources of the Justice Department. It’ll take time.”

“We don’t have time. I want Wilson out of there. Jail’s no place for him. He’s been there overnight a few times, but he’s still like, a total noob.”

“ A . . . what?”

“He’s clueless. It’s not a safe place for him. You guys focus on the law stuff. I’ll find out who Zip really is.”

“And how exactly do you propose to do that?”

“Uh, I probably shouldn’t go into detail.”

She looked past me at her computer’s sleek new Ubuntu desk- top, and her expression changed from superior and skeptical to “Oh,” like she just realized that I had skills, that I probably hacked into banks or NSA databases all the time, which I wouldn’t even try. Like I said before, I’m sure I’d be better at jail than Wilson, but I don’t want to find out. Ever.

Only, to her, it did not seem natural, that one little light shining out through the glass of the front door. It would be more natural, she thought, if there were only the darkness and the sound of the sea.

They turned into the drive. Their footsteps sounded strangely and terribly loud on the gravel, and became as sharp as pistol shots when they mounted the veranda. The captain rang the bell, and the sound of it ran through the house like a shudder; but no one came. He rang again and again, but nothing stirred inside the house. He knocked on the glass, and they waited, looking into the bright and empty hall; but no one came.

Captain Grey turned the knob, the door opened, and they went in. The door of the library was open, showing only darkness. The stairs ran up into darkness. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. Then, suddenly, a little breeze rose, and the front door slammed with a crash behind them. Lexy cried out, and caught the young man’s arm.

“Don’t be afraid!” he said; but his face was ashen. For a moment they stood where they were. “Miss Moran,” he went on, “would you rather wait here while I go upstairs?”

Tell Buddy he doesn't have to keep on calling me to say thanks. I'm just glad that he and Carla are all right. Tell him to enjoy his promotion!

When I got to the office this morning, I found Rhindquist wearing his old-fashioned pusher's uniform. I hadn't seen it since the day we met. I was surprised by how normal he looked in it: he could have been any pusher.