I drive my droid-Hot Wheel around, hoping she'll stumble into audio range of Oleg and Jared's summit of the despicable. I catch snippets of other conversations, Minosh telling a database engineer "the query must go much, much faster!", Graham's silky voice asking Prisha to bring him up to speed on my optimization logic. I steer past all this, banging walls, zooming blind, quite possibly going in circles.

I hear no Oleg. No phlegm-ball. They must've gone behind a closed door.

I can't waste any more time. Whatever Jared is telling Elite, I need to get out ahead of it. Dire as my situation is, claustrophobic as these digs are, I do have an advantage: they don't know where I am or what I'm doing.

They also don't know that I know about the explosives, assuming Graham hasn't blabbed about our rushed tête-à-tête. I wish now I hadn't blurted out to him about the charges, but it was the right move at the time. He knows more—and it was worth the risk to see whether I could get it out of him.

The explosives are in the HVAC system, and I, myself, am in the HVAC system. Let's start there. I crawl around Twelve, up one duct and back down its partner, and find none.

Is it possible they just wired the one floor? Maybe they aren't bothering with vacant floors, or figure the top will cave after the bottom eleven crumble. I crawl back to the vent Graham left loose for me, thinking to sneak down and check Eleven, but it isn't loose. Then I remember the facilitator who poked his head up into the duct. He must've tightened them.

I slam the vent three times with the flat of my fist before realizing I'm being dumb. Yes, it happens—especially when exhaustion has my brain feeling like an abacus stuck in tar.

Why leave the ducts?

The HVAC network extends all through the building; why make a racket getting out here and back in on Eleven when I can just use the intra-floor ducts?

The main trunk is on the north side of the building. I worm through a crinkly section of duct to reach it, then lower myself in. The air from below toasts my feet and billows my pant legs. The fit is so tight that I don't fear falling—my shins, hips, and forearms fix me in place against the stiff metal sides. I rattle my way down until my toes find the next gap. Feet first, I work myself into this gap and shimmy into another crinkly elbow section. I turn myself around awkwardly—I feel metal compressing my spikes at the midpoint—and crawl forward into the eleventh-floor ducts.

I haven't gone five yards when a voice sounds below.

"Hey, you hear that?"

I freeze.

A second voice says, "Hear what?"

"That noise," the first voice says. "In the ceiling. Here—listen for a sec."

I quiver from the effort of keeping perfectly still, one arm chicken-winged to the side, a strained smile fixed on my lips for no apparent reason.

After a time, the second voice says, "Ghosts. Gotta be ghosts, or else a rat."

The first speaker growls this off, and their footsteps dissipate up the hall.

Phew.

I must make less noise. Eleven isn't fully occupied, but it's not vacant like Twelve either. The problem isn't my knees and feet, which slide along in constant contact with the duct, making only a low shuffle. It's my upper body, these elbows and wrists I have to pick up and plunk down repeatedly, that causes the echoing knocks and clonks.

I pull my shirt up and grip its tail in both fists, using it as a kind of impact-deadening cloth underneath me. Now my tummy is exposed and my breasts're only a bra clasp away from calling out "Bingo!", but I am traveling more quietly.

I push Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt in front of me, her screen illuminating a few inches ahead. It takes five minutes to traverse the length of the floor. I scrunch through a U-joint to start back by the return duct, and am just thinking Elite hasn't bothered with Eleven either when my nose tickles.

More almonds.

My pulse right back in my throat, I crawl another few knee-steps and locate the squat black cube. It blinks red like the previous one, and has the same tangle of white wire leading to its hinged-antenna transmitter. This placement seems hurried, not tucked against the side of the duct or otherwise secured. Two coils of the wire are still bound in twist-tie as though fresh from the original packaging.

They just popped the vent, slid this bad boy in, and moved along. It was the middle of the night; they needed to get them all planted before anyone woke.

These bombs—they can't explode on their own. There must be a trigger somewhere, an activator whose command cascades through the transmitters and kicks off Armageddon.

But where?

My guess: someplace accessible to a certain corporate-training faker who must buy stressballs by the gross.

And separating said faker from his trigger won't be easy.

What if I disabled the transmitters? Could I neuter their antennas, climb through the building snipping all their connections—such that Oleg waltzes off at the end of Blackquest 40 with false confidence that the second he and his gulag merge onto the Bay Bridge, he'll tap a button and blow us all to kingdom come. Instead he'll take a big fat whiff.

It's an appealing plan. Unfortunately, I'm not a bomb tech.

For all I know, these charges could be rigged to explode on losing link to their transmitter. The whole circuit could be rigged—one snip might blow up not only me, but Susan and Prisha and everybody in the joint.

Hm.

I move Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt's screen around, examining the cube and transmitter, thinking.

The components seem solid. At both terminal points, the wires terminate inside the casing—no frayed copper twisted together, nothing you'd dislodge with a bump.

I could gather them up. I could move down the ducts and collect them—at some point, I'd need a trash bag or something, but that's details. What would I do with all these explosives? If I could get them underground to the parking garage, would that help? Couldn't a big blast there bring down the building anyway?

How about high instead of low? If I stashed the lot in a corner of Twelve, the blast might necessitate a new roof—but people below could escape their offices.

Maybe I should just nab them for now, stow them someplace like a ground-floor bathroom, then the instant Elite turns up Market Street out of sight, sprint them outside and hurl them far, far away.

How far—to the sewer? Into the bay? Would I have time?

It's a lot of questions.

I decide that one way or another, gathering the charges is worthwhile. It opens up options.

I backtrack to the main HVAC trunk and lower myself to the ducts at Ten. This floor is packed with E-wing and other business personnel, so again I must be quiet.

Carrying around the one explosive doesn't help. It's only a few pounds, but the two units are unwieldy—especially with my shirt tail balled in my fists.

That trash bag would be fantastic about now, but no way I'm going to risk dropping through a vent here. Maybe I'll hunt around for something when I get to Eight.

I push on. It's hot and sour and dry, and I feel like a turtle pushing its own shell through a smaller animal's tunnel. Every time I slink low enough to graze the bottom, my sweat picks up more dust—they've mixed to a raunchy film on my bare midriff and the tops of my hips. I wipe some away with my shirt and fall forward, landing on my sore ribs.

I hear fragmentary conversations below. I think about stopping over Susan's or Carter's office to listen, but don't have my orientation here and can't judge where they are. Probably they've left—or been taken from—their offices anyway.

Now that I'm lugging my own almonds, my nostrils are no help finding the next charge—I smell it constantly.

I nearly trample the next black box, somehow missing its blinking light, smothering it with my impact-deadening shirt.

It doesn't blow.

Once I've recovered, I follow the box's wire to the hinged-antenna transmitter. I am just considering how in holy hell I'll carry another one of these too when I spot a second wire coming from the transmitter.

I shift Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt to gain light. This second wire is black and runs to the bottom-left edge of the duct. I bump sideways on my forearms to investigate.

The wire runs down into the tenth floor by a dime-sized hole. When I pass my index finger along the nearby duct, it comes up with metal shavings: freshly drilled.

What's underneath me? It must be the trigger location! Some utility closet or vacant workspace Elite commandeered.

What if it's not, though? What if I peek down and find Carter's office?

Or Susan's?

I don't know how or why this could be, but I fear it instinctively—that Elite might co-opt her the way they've co-opted Graham. That somehow I'll end up with Psycho shower-scene music playing and my cherished mentor holding the knife.

Well, if it's going to happen, it might as well happen now.

I sidle up to the hole and try that peek, but it's a no-go. The black wire just barely fits down its hole, nothing at all visible around its sides.

I crawl ahead for a vent, hoping to dip down possum-like for a peek at an office nameplate or other identifying feature. The nearest one is ten yards away, though. I'd have to drop completely out of the duct and walk back approximately the same distance through the hall. No doubt I'd be seen.

I crawl back to the hole. I try again to orient myself, to gauge whose office I'm near from memory. My mind floats off the elevators and catalogs who's sitting where, but now I'm sure this is the stairwell side. I try again but get hung up on what color carpet I'm looking at. Sea foam? Ecru?

I can't. The synapses just refuse to hold it together.

Could I enlarge the hole? With what? There will be a corresponding hole in the ceiling panel too. Anything sharp risks piercing the wire and causing early detonation.

I could make my own hole—offset a few inches, safe—if I had a drill. Some battle bots have them, but not Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt. She's a peacenik.

One thing she does have, though, is GPS. And a full-office GPS schema lives on the Shared Resources server, which is inside the building, Wi-Fi accessible.

Tired as I am of tapping out scripts on her sticky, rounded keyboard, I have to. There's a programmatic solution—and right now programming may be the only thing my damaged brain can manage.

I clack away. The script will obtain Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt's current geo-location, then cycle through every office on Ten, calculating her distance to its center coordinates. At the end of the loop, Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt will output the name of the person with the closest office.

It should work.

I press RETURN on the last command, then, with an involuntary yawn, execute the script.

The result are back before my mouth has closed.

O. MOHAMMED.

I puzzle a moment at the screen before the face comes to me. Oh right, Omar. He's a nondescript account manager. I know him a little from Boeing; Carter had him hammer out the terms of the Phase II contract. Dogged personality, detail-oriented. Outgoing. Sales dude all the way.

Before I can form a hypothesis about why Omar appears to be at the center of Elite's boom-boom cover-up plan, the public address system clears its throat.

"Hello Miss Bollinger," I hear—everyone hears. "This is Jim Davis speaking. Wherever you are, please make your way to a computer monitor and navigate to the Intra-1 video channel. We have something important to show you. Something you will want to see."