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slight, risks of being
    recognized.
    But she had gotten out and walked the last block to the Freedom
    Tower. It soared up into low-hanging clouds. One hundred and four
    stories of defiance to replace the lost World Trade Center towers.
    She had not yet been born when the towers fell, but she had seen
    the video. They’d had a unit on terrorism in school.
    The Tulip was not as tall as either the World Trade Center or the
    Freedom Tower.
    She had distinct memories of the videos of that day, September
    11, 2001. Funny that she recalled them so clearly. But there it was,
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    playing over and over in her mind.
    The jets.
    The initial explosions.
    The spreading horror of billowing smoke.
    Two hundred people leaping to their deaths rather than die more
    slowly of smoke and flame.
    The awe-inspiring, horrific collapse as the melted, hollowed-out
    building fell.
    Find and kill the twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all
    AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.
    It was all in the Tulip. The technology, the records, the scientists.
    The Twins. Up there at the top floors, what, sixty-seven? Sixty-eight?
    She’d been rather distracted the last time she was in the Tulip, hard to
    recall the exact floors where the Twins lived and looked out over the
    concrete and haze of the city.
    A single skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.
    Her breath came out in a cloud of ice crystals. She looked
    around, feeling obscurely guilty, but no one in the sparse crowd of
    tourists or the crew at work around a steaming manhole was look-
    ing at her.
    Under her breath, Plath made a sound. It was the sound of a slow-
    motion explosion.
    Lystra Reid watched Plath as she looked up at the Freedom Tower and
    knew exactly what she was thinking. Exactly. She was contemplat-
    ing destruction, yeah, yeah, yeah . Destruction. She was envisioning
    it already.
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    That was quick . But then, if you want great results, hire great peo-
    ple. Even if they are a wee bit nuts.
    Lystra had a Starbucks latte in her hand. One of the things she
    would miss, she supposed: convenient and at least somewhat drink-
    able coffee. There were things about this game space, this paradigm,
    that she would regret losing. But it was never good to become com-
    placent.
    Time for the 2.0. As there was a Grand Theft Auto 6, there must
    inevitably come a day when GTA 6 was done and a GTA 7 must be
    born. Even the greatest game was eventually played out. When you
    had squeezed all the fun out of Portal you needed a Portal 2, 3, 4 . . .
    “Yeah. Yeah.”
    She shivered—it was cold—and tossed the cup into a trash can.
    Her newest tattoo was itching, and she scratched her rib cage dis-
    creetly. She was just thirty feet or so from Plath. Plath was, what,
    fifteen years her junior? But they could have been sisters, perhaps, in
    a different world. Maybe, come to think of it, they would be, in this
    new game Lystra was creating.
    She acknowledged her own loneliness. Emotional honesty did
    not frighten her. There had been a price to pay for becoming what
    she was: rich, successful, powerful beyond what anyone would guess.
    Arguably at this point, the most powerful person on Earth.
    No, the truth never scared Lystra.
    Lonely? True. Strange? True, yeah. Yeah. Crazy? Well, once upon
    a time, yeah, but no longer.
    She closed her eyes and replayed the memory of seeing madness
    overtake Sandra Piper. God, that had been intense. The eye-stabbing
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    thing, wow, that was the kind of detail you got only from seeing
    things firsthand.
    She remembered a girl trying to strangle herself with a bed-
    sheet. Crazy people did crazy things. Back in the day, back in the old
    days, yeah. But never anything to match the weirdness of watching a
    famous actress stabbing her own eyes. Now that was crazy.
    Sad to think that she would have to retreat soon and watch the
    endgame play out from a distance. But not yet. There would be many
    rich,