Heisen took her elbow and urged her forward.

“Confused, eh? Well, that’s perfectly normal,” he said,

“under the circumstances.”

She looked directly at him then, and something about his face, the small pinched lines of it, the long narrow nose, that brush of red hair… She knew that face. It took only a small act of imagination to see it covered with a demon mask of red and green lines. “You’re my doctor!”

“Your wetsurgeon, yeah.” The walk bridged a pond thick with water lilies. Pierrots waited on tables by the water’s edge. “Not to worry, though—I’m off-program. I wouldn’t turn my worst enemy over to those bastards at Deutsche Nakasone on my own time. Not that I have any choice when I’m programmed up…” The crowd thickened and slowed and came to a halt. “Here. We go downtown now.”

The elevator bank was set by the druid tree’s trunk, its vacuum sleeve tunneling right through the root network.

The cars were dirty and harshly lit and a whiff of urine and stale body sweat emanated from them. As the crowd swept forward, Rebel stared up wistfully, flashing on a quick fantasy: She would fight her way free of the crush and scramble up the tree trunk, nimble as a squirrel, moving faster and faster as she swarmed higher and the gravity grew less, surging from limb to limb. Until, at the very top, she would pull knees to chest, brace toes against bark, and leap… soaring high into the air, body taut and outstretched, her flight slowing gradually, until at the last possible instant she’d touch axis and be snagged by the magnetic line, to be hauled far and away from here in the time it took to draw a breath.

(But she didn’t have the armbands or leg rings for the magnetic field to grab. She would plummet like a stone, with excruciating slowness at first, then faster, a wingless Icarus, curving down to smash bloody dead against the city walks. It was a stupid fantasy.)