"Jesus!" Gabe leaped over the laptop to kneel down next to him. He felt for a heartbeat, trying to not to panic. The virus couldn't kill anyone without sockets, it couldn't be that bad-
"Just guessing myself," Gina said tonelessly, "I'd say he fainted from hunger. When's the last time you ate?"
Gabe looked at her, startled, taking notice for the first time of the ache that had been growing in his stomach over a period of hours. "Christ, you had to bring it up." He turned to Flavia.
"No food here," she said. "But I got a car. Wait till dark. We'll go shopping."
32
"You've changed," Sam said, trying not to fidget. She still couldn't believe he was there.
Gabe nodded. "So have you. Changed." He glanced over at the group, where Keely was stuffing his face from a seal-pack and giving an account of the impossible all-night drive in a car-a real car, not a hotwired rental-from Fairfax, mostly through backyards, it sounded like, to Venice. Sam couldn't imagine driving without GridLid, as clunky as it had always been. Not having any idea of what might be even half a mile ahead sounded like an easy way to get killed to her, especially in the dark; Gabe had to remind her that most of the streets were parking lots except for stretches the Guard had managed to clear with bulldozers. To let the emergency vehicles get through.
But of course. Sam felt foolish. You didn't even have to go up Palos Verdes to see the smoke from downtown L.A. Welcome back to the Age of Smog. She started to say something to Gabe and saw that his gaze had gone to Gina Aiesi again. The woman was sitting on the floor near the remains of Jasm's homunculus, head back against the wall, eyes closed. A little ways away from her, the Beater stood by alone, as if he were waiting for someone to tell him what he could do with himself.
"I forgot to tell you the good news the last time I saw you," Gabe said suddenly, still looking at Gina. "Your mother left me."
There was a pause, and then they both laughed.
"I'm sorry," Sam said, putting a hand to her mouth. "I don't know why I'm laughing, I don't know why it hit me funny."
"The shock of the mundane," her father said. He dug something out of his pocket. "And I got this today. Or yesterday, now."
She took the slip of paper from him. "What is it?"
"It's a ticket. I got a ticket for riding my bicycle on the sidewalk."
Sam burst out laughing again. "You rode a bicycle?"
"Actually, it was stolen."
"You stole a bicycle? My father stole a bicycle?" She laughed harder, and then she was hugging him, and he was hugging her back awkwardly, as if he had forgotten how.
"Sam-What-Am." Keely materialized beside her and pinched her arm gently.
She gave him a halfhearted swat. "That's 'Sam-I-Am.' And only Fez calls me that."
He unslung his laptop from over his shoulder and sat down next to her in the work island. A few hours of sleep and half a dozen seal-packs had taken the wild-man stare out of his face, but he still looked exhausted to her. "How long has Jones been dead?"
"Maybe a day. I knew you'd end up going to see him."
"I always view the body. Actually, he's just stuporous. I got him to open his eyes for a few seconds, but I don't think he saw me." He looked over at Gator's work island, where Fez and Gabe had been deep in conversation for over an hour. "They sure got chummy on short acquaintance."
Sam nodded absently. She'd been forcing herself not to stare at them. "Did Fez give you the complete rundown on Art Fish?"
"Yah. Not much I hadn't suspected for a while. I think I topped him with Visual Mark and the Computer Zombies from Hell."
"That sounds almost as good as Tunnels through the Void."
"Nowhere near as good as that. Fez also told me that was how you managed simultaneously to save Art from the Big Eat and sort of reincarnate the net. Warping information."
She gave a short amazed laugh. "God. It didn't occur to me that I might owe it all to Beau. But I guess it is a little like that. Intergalactic subway system. At the time I laughed in his face."
"A common reaction to Beau," Keely said. "I would tell you I could never figure out what you ever saw in him, except in that particular glass house I shouldn't be throwing any stones."
Sam smiled to herself. They could have been in the middle of the genuine apocalypse, and they'd still be trying to figure out their relationships. Human beings, they never quit. On the other hand, she thought, looking at Keely's drawn features, it gave them something to think about besides dead bodies, of which there were plenty.
According to what Art had been able to piece together, along with what Keely and Gabe had told them, the infected were still out there and still dropping dead. Some had died immediately, others later, even after they had disconnected from the infected interface. Rewrite to destruction, Art had called it.
"I don't suppose you have any more to eat," Keely said after a bit, sounding a little sheepish.
Sam laughed. "We've got seal-packs coming out of our ears. Rosa made a food run just before everything blew."
"Rosa always was the practical one," Keely said as he followed her back to her squat space. " 'Never mind the tech shit, when do we eat?' I wish I'd thought of that when I was busy raiding uninfected equipment."
Sam dug several packs out of the hole in the floor. "Let's see what she left me: fruit compote, fish compote, fortified banana mash, navy bean soup compote-ha, ha, very funny, Rosa-dairy pack with real cheese-"
He took the dairy pack from her and tore open the top. "Haven't tried this one yet, and I wouldn't want to deprive you of something as wonderful as navy bean soup compote, especially if it's a personal gift. It's nice to know the survivalists were good for something, isn't it." He scooped out a blob of the soft white goop with two fingers, made a face, and put it in his mouth. "God help me, it does taste good. But then, a shoe would probably taste good to me right now. Especially if it's not drugged."
"Well, if you want more, the survivalists are all camped up Palos Verdes trying to make their radios work and selling us poor shortsighted slobs their least favorite gourmet flavors while they dine on squirrels and birds."
Keely made a revolted noise. "We'll have to factor that into the long-range ramifications of this thing, won't we?" He sighed. "God. If I hadn't picked that night to get toxed to the red line, I might have been able to stop it. They'd have caught me, and I'd have been canned well into my next lifetime because it would have killed Mark, but he was dead anyway. And maybe none of this would have happened."
"That's a big if, Keely. Too big."
He shrugged. "I was there. I have to think about them. All of them, even that son of a bitch Rivera. He went miserable and in pain and probably scared because he didn't know what was happening to him. None of them knew what was happening. Except Mark. He knew, and he couldn't do a thing about it, except ask me for help."
"Don't," Sam said urgently. "You don't know anything for certain."
"Yah, I do. You should have seen the message he left me. It didn't leave much doubt." He crumpled the seal-pack.
"Stop it," she said, grabbing his hand. "You really want to claim this is all your fault? Claim you're Napoleon, too, while you're at it. But before you go full stone tilt, you could think about a few other things. How we can make a real net out of the sympathetic vibration technique-"
"Art calls it the Vibrator Technique," Keely said.
"He would." Sam rolled her eyes. "How we can access whatever it is Art brought back with him. What we're going to eat when the survivalists run out of fortified banana mash and dairy pack with real cheese." She gave him a hard shake. "You want me to tell you you're a shit? Okay, you're a shit. Now be a useful shit. You know how. Gabe told me about that little show you put on in Fairfax, when you hacked the message through." She laughed a little. "It made me wish I'd been there."