Finally, the word had come from Kharls's people. He was to come here and investigate certain matters. One of them would be a familiar one. When Jacob had heard that, he had gone along with it all meekly enough. Concord Intel had its competencies. They had managed to set him up in a solid identity here. But he waited, and once he was here he made a few other quiet contacts, activating assets he knew were here—his Company's assets. He had received a new set of instructions from a quiet, husky woman's voice over the comms in his apartment one night. They would get him out after it was all over.He never realized that there might have been a pattern in the words she spoke to him over the comm. There had been no obvious code words, but there had been one trigger left, one last failsafe, the one which the Concord people had not found and disabled.Fool, he thought. I was a fool.It was going dark quickly now.Behind him, in the alley, Gabriel could hear footsteps, heavy ones. Helm, he thought. For all his bulk, Helm moved faster than any of them in light gravity like this."Gabe!""Not now," Gabriel whispered, keeping his eyes closed, diving into the darkness.Ricel was struggling now, arms flailing as the seizure locked his lungs and his nerves in spasm. Gabriel shut his eyes and thought hard. There was something there in the background, lurking.The conditioning, he thought, from the Concord side. He could see it, like the inside of one of the irradiated onions Enda sometimes made him peel, though this structure was not nearly as tidy. Here was layer after layer of quarreling instructions and interdictions, big parts of Ricel's mind that other parts were not permitted to look at, areas fenced off by chemical or attributional barbed wire, blocked away except at certain times or under certain circumstances, waiting for key words or triggers to be issued. It was a terrible patchwork of a mind. It had been a wobbly enough place when it started, but now it looked like a building that had experienced an earthquake and been partly rebuilt, then had suffered another, and another, and had been reconstructed each time by people intent on removing or entirely subverting earlier structures. The original structure was still in there somewhere, but it had been terribly compromised. The load-bearing members had been cut into, and now, now.Now it was all crumbling. Here on this damned grim world it had all gone to pieces finally. So let it end now. It was going to anyhow.Gabriel tried to push his way in, tried to shoulder his way underneath the collapsing beams as the dust and detritus of a disintegrating mind came sifting down all around him. They came down illuminated in a growing darkness, as if fire lived in the debris, glimmering a little as it fell and went out. Pieces of memory, pieces of mind, fell down all around Gabriel, and the observing presence in the back of his mind warned him, You had better get out of here. It will take you down with it. Unwise to stay in a dying mind—They had told him that at Epsedra, too, when he stayed with his buddy, who had been shot, and pulled him out. Crazy to stay! You can't help him! Leave him with the medics! Then later on he was shot himself, but Gabriel couldn't make himself care because he knew he had done the right thing. He would do it now. He stayed there, stayed while Ricel's mind came fully undone and cast itself loose from the moorings that held it into the body. All over now. All done. Now it began, the long coast down into the darkness, down one last time.The slide, Gabriel thought sadly.Half lost in terror, the other seized on the image from a time when there was no fear. The slide. Climb the ladder, laughing. Pause at the top, teetering. Look down to the bottom, but there the bottom was only darkness, and there was no telling what was down there or who might be there to catch him.Sorrow. A pause. It was all over.Bye, Threefer, Gabriel said.Jake Three jumped and went down the slide into the darkness.Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut so as not to see what Threefer saw as he went down, down into the darkness, out the other side."Gabriel."It was too dark to see. There was no telling who was calling him. "Gabriel."He could find no voice with which to answer. He could find no direction in which to turn. It was dark. Light sifted down through the darkness, unperturbed. A great distance away, someone said, the darkness comprehendeth it not."Gabriel!"His eyes snapped open. His back hurt wretchedly. He was kneeling over what he held in his arms, the cooling body of a man. Strange how quickly you became aware of the wrongness of the temperature.There was a clatter of footsteps at the end of the alley. Gabriel looked up after a few moments and found Welsh and a number of men in dark uniforms and goggled helmets staring down at him from all sides. Helm and Delde Sota and Grawl and Angela crowded against the sides of the alleyway."It must have been heart failure," Gabriel said, as if every death was not heart failure to some extent. "I heard him." He looked down at the very still face, the eyes still open and looking up past him, the hands clutching him so that Gabriel had to pry them away. It took some effort."Just like that," Gabriel said. "Just like that. After—""Gabriel," Enda said.The sorrow with which she spoke the word was also part warning. Gabriel did not need it. He knew where they were and who surrounded them, but the irony of it, after all this while, was terrible. It's all over now, Gabriel thought, and who can I tell? What evidence is there? What evidence will there ever be that can stand up in a court?He let go of Jacob Ricel and stood up.It led to questioning, a lot of it, as Gabriel had thought it would. He and the others spent several long hours in the nearest police station, all of them being questioned first by the police and then by the army. Finally, last in a long line of questioners, Gabriel was not at all surprised to see Major Norrik turn up.He sat down across the table from Gabriel, dismissed the guard, and waited for the door to close."So tell me what happened," he said.Gabriel knew better than to protest that he had already told about thirty people. "I thought I had lost something out of my pocket back there at the cross street. This." He brought out the luckstone and put it on the table.Norrik looked at it blankly. "It's a rock.""It's some kind of silicate mineral, a composite," Gabriel said. "Some planets have beaches full of them. A friend gave it to me as a souvenir a while back. I'm kind of attached to it." He was studiedly telling the truth, not knowing what kind of voice analyzer they might have working on him right now. "At the time I thought maybe it had fallen out and gotten kicked into the alley. I went down there a little way to look, and then I heard this noise like something grunting. This man was down there having some kind of fit." Gabriel shook his head."It wasn't anyone you knew or recognized?"Here it came. "No," Gabriel said.Norrik looked at him. "Why did you leave your guide?"Gabriel shrugged. "I just wanted to find the stone, that's all. It's a keepsake, a luckpiece." He made a face. "Turns out I'd forgotten that I put it in one of the top pockets. I didn't realize that until after all this was over, with this poor guy."Norrik simply looked at him for several moments. Some of these people have implants, Gabriel thought. Who's he listening to, and what are they reporting on me?Or is he listening to something else entirely? The thought was awful. It reminded him of that sensation that he did not want to feel at all—At last Norrik nodded. "Mr. Calvin," he said, "your stay here is starting to prove inconvenient. We'd appreciate it if you'd leave the planet immediately and move on to your next destination without delay."