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mountains that towered around Yunhe. If I'd wanted, I probably could have found the mountaintop waste lake that had laid my town to waste.
    Instead, I looked out across the Yunhe that Xiaohao had made. His model world. As far as I could tell, there were no traditional homes here; in their place were half a dozen more dormitory houses, each surrounded by vast tracts of vibrant farmland. Here and there in the fields stood enormous, gleaming towers: new model accumulators hybridized with wind turbines. To the south, at a point roughly equidistant from each of the dormitories, I saw Xiao's vision of a town square. Open air market, playground and pool, small restaurants, even an amphitheater. Everything was linked by a web of red brick paths. It was lovely. The gardens, the farms--everything was lovely.
    I shut down the sim.
    Yunhe disappeared, and I smelled the ocean again. Smartfans surrounded me in an eager semicircle, cooled me with a kind of mad mechanical enthusiasm. Ships' horns sounded in the distance. I took three swift, deep breaths--a trick I'd learned in college for exiting sims as quickly as possible--and ran out the door. Somehow it was easier to believe in the real world with a full pair of lungs.
    The security officers outside of the Administrators' offices were less genial than the ones on the border. They surely knew my face, but still they held their position in front of the door, and they neither smiled nor nodded. There was even a little smirking twist in the corner of the squad leader's mouth--my panic must have leaked out of my eyes, visible to everyone.
    "State your business," said the squad leader, plaintive and automatic. He was short, broad-shouldered, and wore a few days' stubble. I briefly wondered if I could force my way past him, gave up on the idea as quickly as I'd conjured it. Dozens of people decided that they had business with the Administrators every day: accusations of chicken theft or wi-mo hacking, petitions for divorce or consolidation of tent-space. This man's entire job was to stand in the way of desperate people's grievances.
    "I need to see my father," I said.
    "Do you have an appointment?"
    "He called me. Asked me to come as quickly as possible."
    "You won't mind if I confirm that," he said.
    I smiled sweetly and said that I wouldn't mind at all. I had an understanding with Jung, my father's secretary. The squad leader unfolded his wi-mo, carried on an extremely short subvocalized conversation with an invisible party, and then frowned.
    "Go on, then," he muttered.
    I stepped inside the Quonset hut. The place was sweltering. Two parallel rows of secretaries glanced up from paper-plastered desks, every sweaty face transparently terrified that I had come to make more work. I found Papa in the back of the hut, softly berating Jung over something to do with ledgers. Jung looked relieved to see me.
    "Papa," I said, "may I speak to you in private?"
    He raised an eyebrow but nodded, beckoned me to his office and closed the door. We sat on either side of his desk, and my eye flicked to the painting behind his head: a battle scene from the War Above. Murmured arguments about fishing zones floated from the office next door; the partitions between offices were more of an affectation than a proof against sound. I spoke quietly.
    "When will Xiao go free? He looks awful."
    Papa sat back and sighed. "Yuen. It's not clear that he will ever go free."
    He didn't blink as he said it. His eyes were always wide and wary and unblinking, as if he'd never stopped looking down on the entire world at once, never given up the divine-eye view from space. He ran one hand across his gray-black beard, which had only recently started to fill in. "You know we can't look the other way on this, sweet. We'd countenance sedition and burn every scrap of our credibility all in one clean sweep. Xiao made his choices, and he's left us with none."
    Goosebumps raised across my neck. "So," I said, barely a whisper, "you're going