For two pressurized seconds, I hold every body part I still have control over away from the duct's metal. The nine-volt battery is alive between the pads of my fingers. The whir of the HVAC fan, pushing air many floors down, whispers in my ear.

In my attempt to keep perfectly still, I lean too far forward and begin tilting out over the brownout mechanism.

Nothing has happened yet. The thought occurs to me that electrical circuits are fast.

One second becomes two.

Two become three.

My tilt worsens to a teeter—I am about to pitch forward and land on the brownout circuits. Will anything happen if I smash them? Could some spark be produced and do the job of this battery I just snatched?

Not caring to learn these answers, I duck my shoulder at the last second and crash into the empty—and safe—corner of the duct. The noise is stupendous.

Three seconds become five.

Five become ten.

We're safe.

I squirm over onto my back and fill my lungs with hot, filmy air. The duct's metal sides pin my ears and the spikes of my hair to my head. My skin is a petri dish of grotesqueries—sweat, dirt, blood, scab, stuck clothes.

And I don't care.

Paul calls up, "Deb, what's your status? Are you okay?"

I exhale. "Yeah! All good up here."

I crawl back to the removed HVAC vent, plodding on all fours, sore in my butt and back, nudging Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt ahead. Of forty original quills, she has about seven left.

Paul is waiting underneath the vent. He's helping me down onto the table we pulled over before when my grimy arm slips. He stops my fall by bracing my left foot, and as he releases it, we are both watching the contact.

I think about my belief, forty-odd hours ago, that Paul had impure thoughts about my feet. It seems such a strange, petty inference now—so ignorant, so cavalierly drawn.

"You need to get to a hospital," he says, glancing from one abrasion to the next. "Those monsters put you through the ringer."

I pick a dust bunny from a gash on my elbow, extracting a thread of blood. "Hospital later. I have a few to-dos ahead of it in the queue."

Paul grins. In the fullness of his face, I don't see condescension or think of his McGriddle intake. All I see is warmth.

He says, "Why am I not surprised?"

We slog down to the lobby together. My heart still pumps double time, but my brain has given up the fight, processing the scene in a sort of happy haze.

People stream through the exit, gushing outside to sidewalks or Muni, anyplace but here. The evacuation is hasty but controlled; Susan went ahead the moment the detonator was disabled and let everyone know the imminent threat had been removed.

The lobby glass shows cracks, but none of the panels got punched out. Apparently Security Kyle ran downstairs and escaped by the parking garage—which Elite had secured with a simple padlock, easily broken by bolt cutters—then circled back around front to disable Oleg's double-door lock.

"Take your time, let your body readjust to the natural world," Susan is saying, raising her nose with a savoring air. "Again—you have my apologies, your families have my apologies—please, relax, take as long as necessary coming back to the office."

Her message is having its intended effect. People pause to buckle their briefcases or be sure of outer pockets. A few are even lingering to watch some of the Cape Canaveral launch on the lobby TVs. Scaffolding towers are being wheeled away from the spacecraft, and CNN has placed a countdown timer in the corner of the screen.

Paul retrieves his stuff, which he dropped at the foot of Semperinity before scampering off to defuse the charges with me.

"Don't spend all day on fixes," he tells me. "Whatever the data says, remember: it's one day. Launch is important, but it's still just one day. Don't go whac-a-mole'ing it."

"Gotcha," I say. "No, I won't. Quick peek. I promise."

He chuckles, surely tallying up how many I've broken these last two days.

We hug.

When I pull away from the embrace, I find Carter Kotanchek waiting, fidgeting behind us in place.

"Perfect. Two birds, one stone." He smacks his hands together slickly. "Look, I got something to say to both of you. This disaster's all me. Truly. I screwed the pooch. Jeopardized everything we built here. Regardless of anything else, how it shakes out...I'm done. Goin' upstairs now to clean out my desk."

I reach out and smooth his summer-weight suit. The shoulder won't lay flat.

"That would be appropriate," I say. "Don't try swiping any pens."

He makes no rejoinder.

I walk up with Carter as far as Two, then veer off for the engineering area. The place looks like Times Square on January first—paper shrapnel blowing through the halls, half-drunk cups of brown liquid everywhere. Somebody toppled Minoj's sit-stand workstation; purple gel oozes from the monitor.

I need to get out to Crestwood Psychiatric. Mom has either compartmentalized the episode with Elite's scrambled-egg forcer, lumped it in with the rest of her life's many indignities, or flipped out utterly. Ten minutes won't make a difference.

First, I need to know what happened with carebnb.

Back on my workstation, I punch up the San Francisco street map. Blinking dots for Wanda, Cecil, and 135 other unhoused beta users inch about the screen. I tab into Nightly Report, which gives me a chunk of numbers.

I never bothered formatting this, creating some snazzy dashboard, since I am the only one—for now—who'll be using it to monitor carebnb performance. The numbers come straight from the database, unadorned sums or percents. They look crappy.

The story they tell is even crappier.

Carebnb didn't work. Though 34.7 percent of active users checked into a host location (I'd been estimating between thirty and thirty-five the first night), only 1.8 percent finished there.

I click through comments left in my auto-feedback prompt, which fires after every quit or logout event.

"lady kept looking in at me like i'm a rat. i don't need that."

"Cool idea but my 'guest' insisted on insulting art my wife's friend makes, extremely uncool."

"Just left."

There were a bunch like this last, people who seemed to think they had to type something just to get the app to release their phone or wristband.

The data is imperfect, but I draw one fundamental conclusion: people didn't help each other.

When placed in situations where they could either bail or overcome some issue, they bailed. They held tight to their own interests. I had known the host-user rapport would be vital to carebnb's success, but I believed people would goodwill their way through glitches and misunderstanding. They'd make it work. Good would outweigh inconvenience.

Stupid, I guess. After all my fretting over servers and ports and uptime stats, it wasn't technology that sank me. The tech was golden.

People were the problem. The very premise, the idea that if you enabled people with tools and the opportunity to help their fellow human—and to be helped—they would. They would seize the opportunity. They'd run with it.

Instead, they ran away.

I am deep in my own dread when Susan saunters to the threshold of my cubicle. She props her forearm against the border, one hip jutting opposite, making a delicious line of her body.

"How did launch go?"

I look over from the screen, surprised.

She explains, "Paul told me last week. I had him allocate another few gigs of bandwidth to the /t server."

I bob my head at the disclosure, which is meant to cheer me but doesn't.

"Big fail," I say. "Users left. Hosts judged them, I think—I dunno. Everybody found something to complain about."

"People do that." Susan lolls her head to one side, then straight back—some yoga studio neck stretch. "That doesn't make it a failure. It's only a failure if you quit."

"Wow. After all that, a pep talk?"

She blows out a breath. "You don't need my advice—we both know that. But look, it's homelessness. It's hard."

I know she's right—I know hard problems don't melt in a single day—but in this moment, she has no business telling me that.

"When are you bringing in SFPD?" I ask. "Oleg took three bodies home, and I know where each one fell—if the cops need to collect fibers, whatever."

Susan's prior look of resolve changes to sheepishness. She looks at the slim tops of her shoes.

I continue, "You aren't bringing them in?"

An intellectual shock registers in my brain, but I don't feel it. That elastic has been stretched too far to snap.

"For better or worse," Susan says, "Blackquest 40 is settled. It's over. The casualties were all on their side—thanks to you. Nobody got injected or lost their job. The company is solvent—more solvent than ever, after your triumph at the last second."

I raise my arms listlessly overhead, shoulders whining at the effort.

"Hooray."

She steps into the cube and takes both my hands in hers, a touch that reminds me of the one she used in the dead of last night (the night before?) to keep me in the fold.

"The person who's suffered the most here is you, Deb. If you tell me you need to press charges, we'll go to the police. We will. I can explain how the training was all a charade—how Elite fooled us, how we signed a contract under false pretenses. You just say the word and we'll go."

She lets go of my hands and pivots as if about to stalk off and do just that. The offer is clever—what else would I expect from Susan Wright? She's been careful in her wording, not saying she'll come clean, only that she will "explain."

The moral choice has been laid squarely upon me. If I need justice, or revenge, or mollifying, I can have it—at the expense of my coworkers.

"Forget it," I say. "I don't see how this is going to work, though. Over a hundred employees, nobody's gonna report this to the police?"

Susan says she's sure somebody will. With a resigned wheeze, she concedes the authorities will have questions. She'll just have to bite the bullet and answer them.

I'm sure she will—and equally sure none of those bullets will graze her.

I could challenge her with more logistics, but what would be the use? Susan with corporate politics is like me with algorithms: she plays seven steps ahead.

"Well, back to the grind." I click over to the depressing carebnb comment log. "Enjoy the rest of your day."

I retrain my eyes on text.

Susan crinkles her brow. "Going home soon, right?"

I nod. "Yep. One last thing, then I'm gone."

She pauses, and in that pause I read calculation. She is digging into carebnb, right? She gives me a long look, but leaves without further questions.

Once she's gone, I switch from carebnb—which I will dive hard into in a sec—to the low-level financials database. I can't access the journal entry credits from my machine, which doesn't have the drivers that the executives' machines do, but I can use my super access to see the granular data underneath.

Because I've seen those murky cash flows firsthand, I know just what they look like under the hood.

I open a query on finance_journal_detail. The payer_id is still seared in my head from those frantic moments in Carter's office. I bound my results by this value and ask to get back all fields, sorted by user name.

This will show me every time the Russian money was added, or changed, or viewed, by anyone.

The results return in a blink—nobody's doing any work, network traffic essentially nil. Red rows flood a black screen.

Of thirty-four times the secret money was accessed over the last months, thirteen belong to the user name carterK.

By now, the user name of the other twenty-one is no great mystery. I scroll anyway to be sure.

susanW.