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acting alone?”
    “Didn’t you hear the way he screamed at me? He wasn’t alone. He had been sent.”
    “Sent,” Pikul said. “Out to a rural town, on the chance you might be there.”
    “You don’t know anything about this business I’m in.”
    “I’m learning fast. You mean all that? That there’s a group of people out for your head?”
    “How would you explain what happened back there?”
    “Everybody likes a conspiracy,” Pikul said. “It’s more satisfying than just one crazy guy doing one crazy thing.”
    “Suit yourself.”
    She turned away again. He sneaked another look at her and saw, in the light from the dash, that she was biting her lower lip. She still gripped her injured shoulder.
    They drove into the deepening night. The only sign of habitation was the occasional glimpse of a light from a house or a window, flickering beyond trees. Every now and again Allegra would turn stiffly in her seat to look back, to see if anything might be following them. Nothing ever was. Just the road ahead in the headlight beams, the road behind in the dark, the trees and the undulating hill country.
    “Well, what’s next?” Pikul said in a while. “What are we going to do out here? Do you know your way around? Do you know any country people?”
    “Not country people,” she said. “But I know games people, and most of them are out here. The countryside’s scattered with games development people, project coordinators, little assembly factories . . . you name it.”
    “That’s weird. I never knew that.”
    She gave him a look that he caught by chance, turning toward her briefly as he drove. The look told him he never knew anything.
    “Cities are full of bad microwaves, bad thermals, bad electrooptics, digital networks, FM transmitters, bleepers, radar alarm devices. There’s so much of that shit you can’t shield it out anymore. Readings aren’t true. The whole industry moved out of the city years ago.”
    “Silicon Valley, and all that?”
    “No. That’s still the city. I’m talking about farms, small holdings, houses in valleys, places where crowds and traffic don’t go. That’s the future, you know. The industrial revolution brought people into the cities, and the electronics revolution, the systems revolution, is taking them out again.”
    “So you can find your way around.”
    “Some.”
    “Where are we heading at the moment?”
    “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need somewhere to stay tonight. That’s a start.”
    “Do you have somewhere in mind?”
    “Not immediately. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
    “But there are places you know where we can hide out?” he said.
    “Maybe . . . but I’m discovering I have some enemies I didn’t know I had. ‘Death to Allegra Geller!’ How’d you like to hear somebody coming at you with a gun screaming your name at you?”
    “Wow,” Pikul said, thinking about that.
    “ ‘Death to Ted Pickle’ . . . pretty scary, huh?”
    “It’s Pikul, not Pickle. Anyway, how’d you—”
    “It says ‘Pickle’ on your name badge.”
    “I don’t pronounce it that way.”
    “Okay, I’m sorry. You can drop the Allegra and call me Geller. Almost everyone else does, the ones who know me. I like that, never been comfortable with my given name.”
    “All right . . . Geller.”
    “That’s fine, Pikul. Now we’re friends.”
    He thought about that too, and decided he liked it. He just wished she’d act like a friend. She seemed to have an attractive personality, what little he’d seen of it in the church, but toward him she exuded suspicion, fear, belief that he was part of the conspiracy against her.
    “That gun the guy brought with him,” he said. “How did you know how to fire it? I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
    “It has a trigger,” she replied casually. “I guessed it was meant to be pulled, so I pulled it.”
    “May I see it?”
    “Later. You know, I’m thinking I might use it in my next game.”
    A pothole