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I’ll meet you at the airport.”
    She shut the call down from her end. I stared at the empty screen. My own face reflected back at me. I put a mental caption on it. POWERLESSNESS: It’s What’s for Lunch.
    “It’s just for six weeks,” Mom said. “You’ll still have a month to spend with your friends before school starts.”
    “But not with Bonnie.”
    “Bonnie will be perfectly fine. I’ll check in on her. You know your friends will. You can check in on her from online. She’ll be the most checked-in-on horse on the eastern seaboard.”
    She was being reasonable. I didn’t want to be reasonable. I wanted to pitch a roaring fit.
    A year ago I might have done it. Too bad I had to grow up enough to have some impulse control.
    I cleared the table instead, and tossed the leftovers in the disposal and the dishes in the dishwasher.
    “We’ll go shopping tomorrow,” said Mom.
    “Do I get to pick my own prison uniform?”
    “As long as it’s on the list.”
    “Pith helmet? Sword cane?”
    “Possibly even goggles,” she said, “and a white silk scarf.”
    That was our old joke. When I was little, we were going to fly around the world in a biplane, and spy on Dad wherever he happened to be that week.
    “Dad’s not in Egypt,” I said. “Is he?”
    “Not that I know of.” Mom stood up and stretched. “I have a little work to do still. Then we’ll go out for dinner. Celebrate Bonnie’s baby.”
    I opened my mouth to say no thanks, I wasn’t celebrating anything today. Damn impulse control. What came out was, “Fine. Whatever.”
    Mom kissed me the way she did when I was six, a flying swoop on the forehead, and went off to do her judge thing. I had the house to myself and an afternoon to kill, and a few people to contemplate killing.
    So I did what any self-respecting writer type does. I holed up with my laptop and killed off a bunch of characters. Bloodily. With lots of screaming.



Chapter 6
    The gaps in the force field were closing. The oldest sector of the old city was almost out of reach. Meru fought her way through crowds so thick they seemed to have been put there deliberately to stop her.
    That was impossible. The web was the same as ever, no mention of anything in the old city, though Meru ran search after search while she struggled to get to the oldest sector before the field walled it off completely.
    Up above them all, the starwing circled slowly, invisible against the darkness and the starlight. As Meru’s desperation mounted, it began to feed on the field.
    This time it fed slowly. It skimmed the edges of the surging energy, drawing off just enough to slow the field’s advance.
    Meru reached the wall just ahead of the hum and flicker of the field—a handful of nanoseconds before it closed. She dived through the broken gate, tripped and fell and lay winded in a street as empty as the one outside had been full of people.
    There had to be people here. The web said there were, and the starwing could see and feel them, sparks of warmth inside the cold walls of brick and steel and stone.
    There was no one in the street. The air smelled strange. Meru had never been sick or known anyone who had, but some deep part of her knew what this was. Blood, vomit, and worse: bodies breaking down, voiding and bleeding and dying.
    These were the sparks that the starwing had passed to Meru through the web, with an undertone of jangling wrongness. For every living thing it found, there were a hundred that had been living once. The walls around her, the houses that lined the street, were full of the dead.
    The web refused to acknowledge them. When she searched with those parameters, it said, Not found , or else gave her yet another news report about a plague on a planet a hundred light-years away. There was no plague on Earth. The web said so.
    But it was here. She could smell it. She knew .
    Meru began to run.

    Anyone sensible would have run away. Meru ran toward the place where Jian had been. Her thoughts