The searchlight shouldn’t be either hot or cold. It’s merely a light. But it makes the painted porch floor glisten like ice, and it chills Janis. It cuts at her eyes. She can’t look directly at it.

By the time she and the punk reach the porch steps and stop, the crowd of would-be rescuers falls silent. They stand expectant, some with their mouths open, their faces as dull as those of cattle. They are all as common as dirt, and Janis can never be one of them; never has been, never will be. She has known herself to be above the ruck and rabble since she was nine, since the day she saw Francine on her knees, submissive and servicing that bastard in the way that he preferred, both of them as base as barnyard animals. In that instant, she knows she is not of their blood. The story of their family is a lie. Surely she was born to parents unknown, a husband and wife of the highest station, and soon after birth was kidnapped, sold into this squalid household, for the use and amusement of base and cruel people. Shortly after seeing him with Francine, Janis is alone with their so-called father, and though he doesn’t come on to her, she tells him that if she is in line behind her sisters to do what Francine does for him, she will bite it off, bite off what she can and spit it out and bite off more. She doesn’t belong in that family. She doesn’t belong among these people here tonight, either, and she is too high-born ever to belong among the “adjusted people” who have in their heads a web of a thousand filaments with which their betters manipulate them through the puppet theater of their lives.

Now she smiles at the girl beside her and smiles at these upturned faces.

This duplicitous little bitch has the skill to deceive the finest lie detector. The brat better con these cretins and send them home to their beds, because if this crisis can’t be smoothed away, there is a brain implant with the name Janis Dern on it. Janis will not tolerate being injected, reduced to the condition of property. At thirty, she is perhaps too old and not sufficiently beautiful to be stocked in one of the Aspasias, but she will not allow herself to be made property of any kind, for any purpose.

Aspasia is the name of the mistress of some famous mayor of Athens 2,400 years ago, and it is what they call the palatial, highly secret, membership-only brothels in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and D.C. where the Techno Arcadians with the greatest wealth and power go to indulge their most extreme desires. Not common whorehouses. Mansions of exquisite architecture. Decorated with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of art, antiques, and furnishings. Palaces of style and refined taste that make it possible for the members of the club to tell themselves that their sickest and most degrading desires are in fact as elevated as the elegant environment. The girls are stunning, each one as beautiful as the most striking supermodels, each one a perfect daughter of Eros. Totally submissive. Ready to satisfy the most extreme desires.

There is no demand they will refuse. Charming, seeming to be happier than angels, they live in Aspasia and never leave, never even have a desire to leave, not one passing impulse to be free. The injections administered to them are different from those used to make “adjusted people.” This ultimate nanoimplant deletes every last one of the girl’s memories. Deletes her entire personality and installs a new and much simpler one. She becomes a living toy. The process cannot be reversed. Who she was is gone forever.

Janis has been in the Aspasia that is outside Washington, D.C.

Because she is judged to be a fervid revolutionary, beyond all doubt devoted to the cause, she was allowed to go there as a guest of a man who is a member.

The experience haunts her dreams and motivates her to rise in the hierarchy of Techno Arcadia until she is beyond any risk of being punished with injection.

Now she smiles again at the girl beside her and again at the upturned faces of the rescuers, who seem almost to be a different species from her own.

She says, “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize.”

The man who took her to the Washington Aspasia is a hugely successful entrepreneur, Gregory, with whom she conducts an intense on-again-off-again affair, which is one way that she ascends the Arcadian ladder. She had heard whispers of the brothels, rumors so vague they weren’t credible. Sex with Greg is vigorous, interesting, and … edgy. With sly amusement, he sometimes calls himself Jekyll and Hyde, but it turns out there is some truth in this. She had seen only Jekyll, and he wanted her to accompany Hyde to Aspasia, not to participate but only to watch. Among other things, Gregory is an exhibitionist. And he felt that it would be interesting if, when Janis is in the future bedded with Jekyll, she would have in her mind the threat of Hyde. That night at Aspasia, for more than four hours, Gregory indulged in a demonic catalogue of depravities; he subjected the Aspasia girl—who had but a single name, Flavia—to degradations of which Janis never previously conceived. He didn’t stab Flavia to death at the moment of his last climax of the night, but later he suggested to Janis that the girl would have received the knife with a smile if he had wished to go that far and pay the charge required to dispose of her remains and install another girl in her quarters.

The revolution must be won, and Janis is determined to be one of those at the apex of this techno utopia, for otherwise there is no refuge for her in this world, no safety, no surcease from fear.

The freckle-faced bitch stands beside her, not immediately responsive to Janis’s introduction.

With the hand that is behind the girl, Janis twists Laurie’s belt, pinching her waist as a reminder that the little whore’s position is precarious.

She repeats, “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize. She called you out here because she misunderstood the situation.”

The deceitful slut clears her throat, smiles, and waves at the crowd, which Janis thinks is a clever touch, a convincing gesture.

“This nice lady,” says Laurie Longrin, raising her voice to compete with the chopper but letting no quiver of fear taint her words, “this nice lady would like you to leave, and if you leave, she’ll kill me.”

The stupid bitch has no common sense, no survival instinct. With her last three words, she tries to pull away, but she can’t wrench free of her captor’s grip.

Janis draws the pistol, jams the muzzle against the girl’s temple.

The crowd reacts and some of them start forward.

“Her death’s on you!” Janis shouts. “One more step, and I’ll blow her brains out. I chambered a round before I came out here, I’ve got some pull on the trigger, it’s a hair away from discharge, her brains’ll be all over your stupid faces.”

What now, what now? No refuge, no safety, no surcease from fear. Rejection, submission, enslavement, endless degradation. No pleasure left except to kill the hateful little shit.

24

CHRIS AND SALLY AND THE SIX from Austin ease back from their confrontational stance, separating themselves from the mob as well as from Janis Dern. Too many guns, too much emotion. No way this can end in a truce. Every action that Chris and his crew take from now on must be calculated to reduce the number of casualties on their side.

This is not his familiar partner, not the Janis with whom he’s worked for more than two years. There has been a dangerous fault line in her, some San Andreas of the mind, waiting for the right kind of stress to quake her. You think that you know a colleague’s mind and heart, know her far better than your sister, but maybe no one ever really knows the truth of anyone.

The helicopter’s searchlight evidently can be powered higher with the twist of a switch, because abruptly the beam doubles in brightness as it narrows in diameter, leaving a portion of the veranda in soft shadow even as it focuses on Janis and Laurie with such blazing intensity that it seems capable of setting them aflame, and the moths adance within it flicker like sparks rising from some infernal fire under the earth.

The girl shields her eyes with one hand, and Janis shouts at the chopper pilot, who of course can’t hear her.

The young Austin agent beside Chris says, “The crazy bastard wants to save her, but he’ll get her killed instead.”

It’s one of those occasions when Death plays games with the living, just to impress upon them that no one is immune from the touch of his fleshless fingers, not even freckled little girls.

Infuriated, driven by emotion rather than reason, with a one-hand grip, Janis takes an unlikely distance shot at the chopper.

The double crack of two guns echo together through the night, which is when Chris Roberts realizes the copilot at the open door must also be a well-trained sniper, perhaps former military.