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wasn’t unusual; she was tall, attractive, her black hair cropped strikingly short—the kind of girl who would make for a nice display on their altar. What caught Cray’s attention was the way she handled them. A single wordless glance sent the two Crowleys packing in a hurry, off to find an easier convert.
    “Stand by,” he signaled the agents, stepping in for a closer look.
    The girl hadn’t spotted him yet. When Cray managed to get within a few meters, he saw the features of her face and the curves of her body in fine detail. She wore black secondskin and a black leather jacket, leaving very little to the imagination. Underneath, Cray traced the lines of a muscled physique—not the flawless product of steroid treatments or electromagnetic implants, but the harder edges of a life spent on the take. Cray had been a player long enough to know the difference. When she moved, she moved purposefully, not a single gesture wasted.
    She was magnetic.
    She carried a silver briefcase in her left hand. As she walked past, Cray closely watched the wrist of that hand, waiting for it to turn toward him and reveal the patch of bare skin that would tell him what he needed to know. If she were Zoe, and she had recently downloaded flash, it would still be there.
    A transdermal contact . . .
    It glinted at him briefly before Zoe tugged down on the black fabric to cover it up. But by then, she had made him. She was staring Cray in the face when he glanced back up.
    Then she did something he had never seen a runner do. She
smiled
at him. It barely touched the lips, but it was there: a knowing smile, an expression of kinship. Maybe she had just figured it out, but she had his number.
    Zoe bent down and placed her briefcase on the ground, her movements calculated and fluid. Her arms went up, as if she were already surrendering to him. Cray should have realized something was wrong in that instant. Maybe he did, but he just didn’t want to see it. Zoe was just so perfect, so everything he imagined her to be, that it just didn’t register.
    He took two steps toward her. The sound of a loud metallic click crossed the space between them—and that was when Cray sensed the danger. Zoe was better. She already knew the agent was behind her, and she was prepared.
    She moved fast.
    Zoe swung herself around, using outstretched arms to increase her speed to a blur. One hand clamped down on the agent’s neck, while the other grabbed the v-wave emitter he had been aiming at the back of her head. She then shoved the emitter into the agent’s face, hitting the trigger before he could react. High-frequency radiation flooded the agent’s cranium, cooking his brains in the space of a microsecond.
    He twitched once, then fell to the floor.
    Zoe came back around, finding herself back in Cray’s eyes. By then, he had his pistol aimed directly at her face.
    Her eyes darted down to Cray’s trigger finger, looking for a flinch. There was none—only a second of hesitation. Enough to tell her that Cray had no desire to shoot.
    She smiled again.
    Then a nova of white light obliterated that vision.
    A ripple of pulse fire opened up the floor in front of Cray. He felt a concussive wave and a flash of heat before he heard it; but by then he had hit the floor, weapon tumbling out of his hand. Other bodies fell on top of him—some alive, some not—trapping him under heavy weight and the smell of burned flesh. It was a signal for the stampede. Even in the dark, he could hear the screaming and the footfalls all around him. The terminal had become an instant war zone, and he was only moments away from being trampled to death.
    Cray pushed the others off, emerging from the pile to find himself immersed in total chaos. Two more bolts of pulse fire tore apart the air next to his head, cutting more people down and tracing a line that led straight up to a fleeing Zoe. She broke across the terminal at kinetic speed, leaping over anything that got in her way, dodging fire