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feelers, or buzzed heavily through the air, which still held the burnt metal smell of recent gunfire. Monk bugs only became intelligent when enough of them clustered together to form a Hive Monk: scatter them, and they were just mindless insects again.
    That was bad enough, but as Zen stood there staring, he noticed something worse.
    The necklace that he had stolen was still on the counter.
    So it wasn’t about that necklace at all. There was something else going on, and he had no idea what it could be.

4
    On his way back out he helped himself to a rain cape and a hat from the rack of secondhand clothes near the door. The cape was too small for him and came down barely past his waist, but the hat fit. He pulled the wide brim down to shade his face as he walked quickly back to busier streets, trying to hide in the crowds. He reasoned that the girl and her drone would be following him, told himself he was leading her away from Bridge Street, drawing the danger away from Ma and Myka.
    Truth was, he just wanted to be safely out of Cleave. He would hop on an outbound train, change at Chiba to the Spiral Line, change again onto the O Link at Kishinchand, be half-way across the galaxy before his pursuers knew he’d left town…
    But how was he going to do that? The girl might have friends. That drone she had sent after him in Ambersai might be buzzing the streets. She would be watching the station.
    He needed a plan. He stopped for a while in a damp, fern-grown cleft in the canyon wall where holo-images of the Guardians billowed like tethered ghosts above a row of data shrines. People kept stepping out of the crowds on the street to stand in front of this shrine or that, uploading electronic prayers. Human beings had always dreamed up gods to guide and guard them, and the Guardians were the last, best gods they had ever invented. Artificial intelligences, created on Old Earth, as immortal and all-knowing as the gods in old stories. It was the Guardians who had opened the K-gates, and helped the cor-porate families lay out the rails and stations of the Great Network. In olden days they had downloaded themselves into cloned bodies and walked among humans. Now they mostly kept themselves to themselves; beings of pure information, spread across the data rafts of every world, busy with thoughts too huge and strange for human brains to hold. Zen was pretty sure they wouldn’t be interested in his troubles.
    He decided to call on human help instead. He stole a disposable headset from a vendor’s cart and found a quiet spot among the shrines. The headset was just a cheap plastic one, but it did the job. One terminal fitted snugly behind his ear, transmitting sound through the bones of his skull. The other pressed against his temple, streaming images straight to the visual centers of his brain. As he opened a connection into Cleave’s data raft, a storm of gaudy ads was superimposed over his view of the wet street. He blinked them away and found a messaging site.
    He wanted to call Myka, but it was too risky; the girl in red was certain to be watching for messages. So who else could he turn to?
    Zen didn’t have friends. He’d left a few behind when he moved from Santheraki, and never bothered making new ones. The trouble with friends was, sooner or later he’d have to tell them about Ma’s troubles and his life on Bridge Street, and those were sadnesses that he preferred to hold close and secret. It fitted the image he had of himself, too—the lone thief, all stray-cat-cool, walking solitary down some midnight street. Oh, he’d talk and joke sometimes with the kids who met up at the Spatterpattern Club, but he couldn’t trust any of them to help him out of trouble this deep.
    That just left Flex. Flex was Myka’s friend, really, but maybe she would help him for Myka’s sake. Flex had just the skills he needed.
    With quick movements of his eyes he typed her contact details on a virtual keyboard, which folded away into the