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light. It’s been switched off, isolating us in here, and I want to know why.
    The night-lights are still on—three-inch round panels in the ceiling that emit a dim red glow from the far end of the visible spectrum—but the only point of light I can see is the red pinpoint in my overlay, telling me I am still shut down. Without the network node, Guidance can’t get in to switch me on. The Red can’t reach me. What the fuck am I supposed to do without my goddamn overlay?
    Sleep.
    I should sleep.
    But I’ve already been sleeping for hours; I was asleep long before the lights went out because there is fucking nothing to do in a six-foot-by-eight-foot cage when your overlay goes down. I don’t even have a fucking paper book and I have no idea what the fucking time is.
    Sometime later—a long time later—I see movement beyond the window in the cellblock door, and then the door opens, admitting a figure rigged in a dead sister, one that advances to stand facing me, just on the other side of the glass door. It’s too dark to tell who it is, but then the figure speaks. “You’ve been awake a long time, Lieutenant.”
    Master Sergeant Mary Chudhuri.
    “The network node is out,” I tell her.
    “You noticed that?”
    “I did. What the hell is going on?”
    “Officially? We’re on lockdown. Preemptive action to curtail a suspected security hole in our local network—which means we’re cut off from direct communication with Guidance. I’ve got Phelps stationed down the hall beside a landline, but I’m not feeling very secure. How about you, King David? Any insights? Any particular shit we need to be ready for?”
    I shake my head. “God doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
    I used to have a sixth sense when it came to impending danger. Matt Ransom wanted to believe it was the voiceof God that guided me. It turned out to be God in the form of the Red, but even the Red can’t reach me with the local network shut down. I am the sparrow that has fallen out of God’s sight after all. That doesn’t mean I can’t sometimes figure these things out on my own. “Just as a gut feeling?” I tell the master sergeant. “Fuck yeah, something is up. Court-martial starts tomorrow. If a coalition of dragons wants to shut us up”— if the president wants to shut us up —“the time to slam us is now. With no network access it’ll be easy. No call for help can get out.”
    Chudhuri is a silhouette outlined in dull red, but I can see the nod of her helmeted head. “Maybe. Or maybe your dragon strike force found a softer target. The mediots are reporting that Thelma Sheridan is dead. They’re saying she was murdered in her cell.”
    I stop breathing. I don’t blink. For three seconds I am utterly still, a trapped animal obeying an instinct that tells me if I don’t move I won’t be noticed and then, maybe, I can hide from the truth—because if it’s true, we’ve lost.
    The whole point of our mission, of First Light, was to bring Thelma Sheridan to trial, to expose what she’d done, and to implicate those who had aided her and those who had allowed her to get away with it. The only head of state willing to host that trial was Ahab Matugo, who took custody of Sheridan when our plane landed in Niamey. It was his promise to bring her safely to trial, but if he’s failed, if it’s true Sheridan is dead, First Light will have been for nothing. We will have delivered an American citizen into the hands of an incompetent kangaroo court and no one will give a shit about our reasons why.
    I ask, “Has there been any official confirmation? Has Matugo issued a statement?”
    “The news just broke.”
    I ponder the situation, and because I need some kind ofhope to hold on to, I say, “Matugo is a damn good strategist. He might let a rumor like that live for a while, just to cut down the odds of someone else trying to murder her.”
    “My concern, Lieutenant, is what a rumor like that will do to the odds of someone trying to murder