The day of the attack, Piper texted me a street address in Mott Haven, a rough neighborhood of the Bronx made rougher by the unrest, with instructions to meet there before caravaning to Pittsburgh. I kissed the kids off to school and confirmed Granny could handle bedtime if needed—"Do I look dead yet?" was her answer—before taking I-95 up to the George Washington Bridge.

My phone's navigation led me to the draggy end of a commercial street. No storefronts appeared open. The largest, a former seller of pet supplies, had boarded-up windows with the message "EVERYTHING WAS TAKEN" in orange spray paint. I steered around an overturned oil drum to park.

Durwood had insisted I bring a gun, which I confirmed in my purse now. I'd been ambivalent about carrying but felt grateful now, the Ruger stiff against my side through the purse fabric.

I hedged up the sidewalk, eyes quick, alert for sign of the Mice. I spotted the nose-eyes-whiskers symbol sprawled over the ceiling of a liquor store, but the whiskers were lost in spreading mold spores: the graffiti was old.

An El Camino turned onto my street from several blocks up. Its front end was wrecked, the bumper sparking asphalt.

Instinctively I ducked into the alley beside the liquor store and squatted low. I was just choosing between calling the guys and drawing my weapon when an egg rolled to a stop beside me.

Really, an egg. I picked it up. White, hard-boiled by the feel of it. The shell read in shaky ballpoint, Nibble around back.

I twisted on my haunches. The back alley looked even more chaotic than the road, overwhelmed dumpsters spilling bags and loose trash, green-glass shards strewn like magnolia pedals in May.

I did draw my gun now. Holding it near my chest with barrel pointed out per Durwood's instructions, I hugged the brick building.

Razor wire separated the back alley from dilapidated clapboard houses. Behind the fence, a pair of dogs with tight-skinned skulls barked. I mastered my breathing, then—avoiding the dogs' eyes—walked along the rear of the building. Of three unmarked doors, one was propped by a square of cardboard. I heard faint noises inside. Peeking back to be sure I hadn't been followed by the El Camino driver, I slipped in.

Now I stood at the top of a stark, narrow stairwell. As I started down, the sides scraped my jacket shoulders. Another door awaited me at the bottom, a sign nailed over its frame.

LEWD BREW.

The original Lewd Brew—the Brooklyn cafe where the Mice had formed—had closed long ago. They must've smuggled out the sign.

I entered to a hive of activity. A guy in ripped jeans was distributing fliers. A barista stood behind an espresso machine, but flicking the tip of a hypodermic needle rather than making coffee. Lighting was harsh from yellow fluorescent tubes, and it certainly smelled like underground, dank with chemical tinges. After relinquishing my phone and gun—I had deleted all the guys' messages, expecting this—I looked around for Piper.

The hacker was off at a secluded booth, her laptop angled toward a cinder-block wall.

I slid in beside her. Our seat was an old church pew, painted purple.

"Ready for this?" Piper asked without taking her eyes from the screen.

"Absolutely," I said.

She glanced over. I thought she squinted at me, but maybe it was just because of the light. The other night, she'd started out wary when I had offered my information about Jim Steed's schedule. How did I know? Pittsburgh? What the hell did Steed travel all the way to Pittsburgh for?

I had improvised a decent explanation, that I'd come across the tidbit researching an expose for my blog, from Steed's Merry Maids housekeeper. It was the sort of thing they would know—I spent a few months with the Maids after my divorce.

Eventually Piper had accepted my story and said she would pass the info up the chain. The next day, I'd made Algernon. Hatch had gone ahead to Pittsburgh to plot tactics, while Josiah—

Oh God.

Josiah was right here.

I had been so focused on reading Piper that I hadn't noticed there was somebody sitting on the other side of her: Josiah.

"Our newest Algernon," he said in his reedy voice. "Helping us make the world a little less despicable, yes?"

I nodded, those pink Albino eyes seeming to claw for me from their sockets.

"Maybe you'd like to help us blacken Manhattan too? A further reward?"

He nudged Piper's laptop my direction. Piper's mouth tensed, but she did not stop him. On screen was a map of New York City divided by bright-green outlines. Josiah extended his hand, the fingernails painted black, in invitation.

I said, "What are we, er—supposed to be doing here?"

"Treating darkness with darkness," he intoned. "When all become blind, like us, then positive change can proceed."

Seeing him for the first time in a month, I was startled. Josiah had been visually arresting at Ted Blackstone's mansion, but now his appearance slapped you across the face. His ghost-white hair was stringy and frayed. His wrist looked sharp on Piper's laptop, like part of the chassis, and his plaid button-down shirt flapped in front of him as though hollow. The aggressive mint smell was stronger than I remembered. When he spoke, it puffed ahead of him with searing potency.

"Is that the power grid? Can the kernel—" I stopped, wondering if I should hide my knowledge of the kernel. I was an Algernon, right? "Can it disrupt the power grid too?"

Josiah referred the question to Piper with blistering eyes.

"Relay tables," she said. "Kernel can scramble the relay tables for thirty minutes before they figure out an override."

"Thirty minutes without power?" I examined the map, confirming it didn't extend as far south as New Jersey—Granny, the kids. "That's hospitals, schools. Fire departments. That could really cause a lot of, you know..."

"Mayhem?" Josiah said, expelling a fresh blast of whatever he'd been ingesting.

I looked to Piper. I wondered when they'd gotten the capability to penetrate public utilities, whose idea it had been. Josiah didn't have the technical chops to do it alone. He seemed to be spinning out of control, following his own rhetoric down the rabbit hole. Like if you gave him a neutron bomb, he'd use it—and figure out the rationale later.

Piper sniffed. "Whatever we do, needs to be quick. I'm in the relay tables now. Hanging out there exposes us."

Josiah seemed to notice my concerned look hadn't gone away. "Albany Electric services 95% of the New York Metropolitan area. Last year, they turned out the lights on eighteen-hundred disadvantaged households who'd fallen behind on their bills. During the same time period, their own profits exceeded $52.2 million." His whole face squeezed at million. "In light of such insanity, mayhem is called for. Nay, mayhem is required."

I thought about Karen's class, which had recently added a General Breakdown of Order drill to its rotation of Fire, Tornado, and School Shooter simulations. And he was going to sit here giving me "Nay?"

Mastering my anger—reminding myself the guys hoped to nab Josiah and end it all tonight—I said, "Want me to choose? Fine, I'll choose. I don't mind."

I leaned close to Piper's screen. My first instinct was to pick a tiny zip code, but then it occurred to me that tiny zip codes might be tiny because they contained large concentrations of people—inner cities, the poor. I didn't think Manhattan would be smart due to the media attention an outage there would provoke.

Finally, feeling growing annoyance among my fellow Algernons, I chose a medium-sized zip code in Staten Island.

Piper jabbed a few keystrokes, then waited. The borders of my Staten Island zip blinked, then dimmed—her laptop speaker emitted a tinny-sounding fzzzz—then turned black.

Skeletal fingers closed around my forearm. "Do you feel that in the universe?" Josiah asked. "It's 50,000 seniors hyperventilating because The Price Is Right is gone. As we speak, they're writing their congressmen to get Albany Electric's contract nullified. As we speak, injustice is running backwards up the pipes. The scrotums of comfortable men are feeling itchy. Gerbils are eating their own tails."

He took out his phone and tweeted the part about the gerbils.

Josiah walked away from our booth and drifted among the other Mice. Over the door of the cafe was a strange clock. Hard to read, almost psychedelic, it featured two counter-spinning circles and waves of red, purple, and green rolling through the face. Josiah stared at this clock now, his eyes alternately swelling and shrinking.

He resumed with a hypnotic air, "Factory-farmed meat is putrefying in warm refrigerators...I see it all in my head, people, it's running ahead triple speed in my frontal cortex, it's blooming, it's spreading, it's replicating. Wallpaper is bubbling away from walls and popping, creating black holes to other universes..."

I glanced sideways to Piper. Her face was still, but her tongue bulged her lower lip. I checked the rest of the room. Were we still on board for this? Josiah's style had always been lyrical, on the trippy side, but this was a lot to swallow.

Before I could gauge the others' buy-in, Josiah's phone buzzed. He checked the caller and became suddenly focused, all otherworldliness gone. He answered. The whole cafe watched. He spoke quietly, hunched over and intense.

When the call ended, Piper asked who it was.

"Friends," Josiah reported, and stashed his phone. "We need to go. Forward to Pittsburgh."