Carnival

It would have been to Cricket, because Jean was not connected. She tightened her robe and scrubbed her eyes on the sleeve. “One second.”

She dropped her connex at night, except for the flat security and a couple of emergency codes. If it had been really important, Lucienne would have spared the couple of extra keystrokes and sent to one of those.

But there were messages waiting. The one from Andrй, which she hadn’t answered. One or two from connex acquaintances, people she knew from online groups. And one from Lucienne.

She looked at Jean, so he would know. His face paled under his stubble, but he didn’t speak.

Cricket opened the message.

And would have fallen if Jean had not caught her.

It was a sense-dump, night water and darkness, the smell of lubricant and the texture of the flashboat’s controls in her hands, all subsumed by a hypodermic stab to the left of her spine, the building pressure of a migraine like the handle of a knife pressed to her eye. She gasped but couldn’t make her diaphragm work. Jean’s hands on her shoulders guided her back, cushioning her until she slumped against a chair. The robe was everywhere, he must have been getting an eyeful, but he caught her under the chin and made her look into his eyes. “You need EMS.”

“No,” Cricket said, a shrill, spasming whine. She couldn’t lift her hand to push at him, so she thumped the heel on the deck for emphasis. She felt him jump. “No doctor. Just…a minute.”

Dying. Cricket—no, Lucienne was dying. Lucienne knew she was dying, and she knew why. And there was no time to explain.

So she showed.

The file was encoded, and Cricket’s breath came back into her with a rush as the flood of numbers washed away the swelling pain in her head. Lucienne had swamped her connex, a massive core-dump—

Corrupt. Corrupt. Corrupt.

“Shit!” The word of the day, apparently. Cricket scrambled to save, to back up, to dump what Lucienne had sent her into a protected hold. Cricket was an archinformist. She had better security protocols than most governments. And she knew how to sling data, and how to repair it—

She went after it, the bones in Jean’s wrists creaking as she clenched her hands. But the file was incomplete. And a non-holographic transmission, so what she had was a chunk of data, but not the sort of chunk that could give her a fuzzy picture of the whole. This was a linear string. And Cricket was pretty sure she could find the key, because Lucienne would have wanted her—or Jean—to crack the code. But she only had part of it…

CARNIVAL

A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2006

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Bear

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN-13: 978-0-553-90304-1

eISBN-10: 0-553-90304-7

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