As she was preparing to exit the system a microsecond’s jarring of her awareness kicked her pulse rate over a hundred. The analyze program gave her only garbage about what had happened, but she knew the disturbance came from some other presence in the system snooping on her and the data she’d just finished downloading into her deck. Her alarm seed monitors had not spotted the intruder, so he was probably well cloaked. She leaped from the SAN and into the grid beyond.

Her child persona spun around to see a black figure with a leather bag fleeing into the distance. She gave chase, keeping pace with the figure, wanting only to get a better look. Racing past a bewildered pair of street-walkers, she followed the figure to a SAN that screamed black IC, the deadly countermeasures programs, at her.

The figure stepped into the SAN, then turned to face her. It was utterly faceless. Where its face should have been, there gaped a bleak nothingness, a vortex of swirling emptiness.

Numbed, half-paralyzed with fright, Francesca suddenly flew back out of her chair, the trodes snapping out of her datajacks and their leads dangling over the worktable.

She was astonished. Checking her deck quietly, she found no damage. The data was downloaded and ready for the frame to decrypt and analyze it. But this was the first time she’d ever been dumped from the Matrix by a simple glance from another decker persona. For all the power of that faceless thing, however, neither she nor her deck were damaged. She’d have expected it to deploy some vicious black IC, but it hadn’t. What the hell was going on?