I stuff the torches in my bag and turn to lead the way. We take a direct route—we’re as sure as we can be that they’re not tracking us remotely, so now we need to clear the area before they get eyes on us physically. Keeping our heads down, we push through the marketplace, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll be coming back here at all. It feels like we’re on a track now, heading toward the confrontation I’ve been planning for years, with no way to avoid it. The rift, the whispers—they’re here on Corinth, so either we take the fight to LaRoux, or somehow, he’s going to bring it to us.

The elevator up to Mae’s level is quiet, and the difference from the cacophony of the market is obvious the moment the doors slide open. We squeeze past a bunch of door-to-door evangelists and a couple clearly on a date—locked at the lips and hips—and walk out into the neat and tidy streets of her neighborhood. The mid-levels lack the ostentation of Kristina McDowell’s penthouse, but the small, compact homes around here are nothing like the tenements in the slums, either. The buildings are no more than ten stories high, and most dwellings have a whole story to themselves. This is about the level where you start getting your own bedroom, even if it’s just a hidey-hole.

Mae’s three blocks away, and she opens the door on the third knock. Her mouth falls open when she sees me, and though I summon up a ghost of my usual smile, it doesn’t seem to help any. “Honey, what the hell?” she whispers, stepping back to gesture us urgently inside. “Your whole setup went dark an hour ago, and there’s some serious chatter about something going boom in the Botigues quarter. I’ve been frantic. Get inside, quick.”

I push the front door closed, leaning back against it and letting my breath out slowly. My heart’s still pounding, lungs aching as though I’ve been running for kilometers. This is Mae’s house, I tell my body. Start behaving. We’re safe here. “The truth is better than the rumors,” I say. “Mae, this is…” I pause. “Alice. Alice, this is Mae.”

Whatever Sofia was expecting, I’m one hundred percent sure this wasn’t it—Mae looks about as wholesome as they get, in one of the vintage tea dresses in fashion right now, hair caught up in a neat ponytail, as if she just slipped in from a social game of tennis. She looks like she should be serving on the fund-raising committee at her kids’ school—and in fact she does—instead of partnering me on the galaxy’s most notorious hacks.

Still, I’ve got to give my girl her due. She sticks out her hand to shake like she’s just been introduced to Mae at a cocktail party, and her smile looks a world better than mine. “We owe you,” she says simply.

“My friend, that’s one complicated ledger, trust me,” Mae laughs. “I’m assuming if we’re doing introductions, you’re sure you weren’t followed, honey?”

I nod, suddenly—uncomfortably—aware that I need to tell Mae not to refer to me as the Knave where Sofia can hear. As if I needed this day getting any more tangled. “I’m sure, but my den is gone. I had to burn it all.”

She lets out a slow breath. “You need gear?”

I nod again. “We won’t stay any longer than we have to, but this is the only place that has what I need to work out our next step. I thought…” But what I’m asking for is huge—the average user’s private enough about letting somebody onto their system. For Mae to let another hacker into her rig is akin to her inviting somebody to waltz on in while she’s naked. There’s no reassurance I can offer that would matter—the truth is, I could do whatever I wanted once she let me in, and she knows it. So it comes down to trust.

Mae nods slowly. “We’re in this deep, may as well go the whole way. Come on through, both of you. Let’s get you set up before the kids get home from school.”

I see Sofia taking it all in as we head out the back—I’m good at electronic networks, and she dominates the social ones, after all. So she’s doing what she does best. I see her study the school schedules on the screen in the kitchen, the photos of Mae and her kids, the comfy, mid-priced furnishings. Mae and her partner Tanya used a donor for the kids, then Mae ended up a single mom when it turned out raising babies was hard work. She shrugged, and said better to raise two than three. That’s what Mae’s like—the kids are the thing that matter. Sofia’s working that out, I’m pretty sure, from what’s on show here.

Though it’s very faint, she almost smiles when we head through into Mae’s office. I guess most of my kind don’t have well-tended potted plants and framed family portraits in their secret dens of hackery.

Me, I’m just itching to get over to Mae’s huge bank of screens. It’s like a gap inside me, having no way to get online—it’s an addiction, and I know it, but it’s one that works for me just fine. I tug on my sensor gloves and sink down into Mae’s chair. It hums softly, contours adjusting as it folds around me, and just like that, I’m at home. Behind me I hear Mae talking to Sofia about food and drink, but I’m already submerging in my world.

Most of the screens are taken up with forums, which Mae must have been checking when we arrived. They’re her specialty, though I dabble there as well. Say what you will about the conspiracy theorists, their paranoia comes in handy. If anything of interest makes it onto any corner of the hypernet, one of them’s going to notice it—and a couple of well-placed comments will send them marching off like an army of ants to investigate. Then all you have to do is sort the truth from the imagined shadows. Still, it’s worth it for the occasional gem, and that’s why the Knave provides anonymous, protected venues for their discussions. Looks like Mae was checking in on the Corinth Against Tyranny group—after their protest the day Sofia and I met, a bunch of their supporters are still missing. With the LaRoux stranglehold on the media, they’re not having any luck raising a fuss. This is the problem for all the groups who listened to Flynn Cormac’s infamous Avon Broadcast. Even if they do believe him, they’re never going to get the word out.

I slide in a couple of thumb drives to set up the programs I want, and watch the information start to fly by. For a moment I can see it before me, a vision of all my files streaming through the hypernet, locked down and encrypted beyond the wildest dreams of government agencies, part of an endless river of data. Does it all slide through hyperspace in some form recognizable to those who live there, the whispers? I wonder what they make of the stories we send—our love letters, our tax returns, and everything in between.

I shake away the question, and while I wait for them to run their security scans, I turn my attention to a discussion about Avon that takes up the top two screens on the right.

Nothing new on the first—a rehashing of the same old arguments about whether Flynn Cormac’s just a crackpot, no mention at all of Towers, some new data on the latest terraforming reports on Avon…and then. Oh, very nice. Kumiko and her band of Avon veterans, alleged Fury survivors, are chattering like I’ve never seen before. The author of the Avon Broadcast himself is coming to Corinth.

Someone’s copied and pasted the press release, with some sarcastic comments about how “the Man” keeps trying to pretend Cormac’s speech was all a lie. “Part of the official delegation from Avon, arriving in Corinth to present the credentials of the planet’s first elected senator to the Galactic Council and participate in the peace summit, Cormac is known for his involvement in the much-discussed Avon Broadcast, in which he claimed…” I know the rest.