The tops of the skyscrapers gleamed in various shades of silver and white. Lower, where the sun hit at the right angle, yellows and oranges ran up against grays and deep blues. Down at the street levels everything was a riot of color caked over with dirt and sweat, the uniformity of the landscape dissolving into storefronts, people, and the assorted detritus of the city.

At the corner of pavement where passing cabs splashed unwary pedestrians with dirty rain water a man and a woman argued, not with each other. The man was yelling in full, red-faced voice at someone on the other end of a headset mic who might not even deserve it. The woman argued on a teleset, dark glasses and red lipstick contrasting her chemical pale face. Someone had cheated on her, and she was damn well going to have the bitch's name or else.

Kim curled around their screeching, across the street, and moved on.

Up above the pedestrian level, on the scaffolding limited by courier access passes and others who were on special dispensation, the bars at the top read her scan and let her through as soon as she hit the entrance. After too many bike messengers had gotten injured or killed and too many projects had died for want of secure lines of communication, the corporations had banded together and gone to the city council with a plan. Since most couriers were on two wheels of their own choice, they could provide them with an alternate route to sidewalks, which put pedestrians at risk, and the streets, which put them and everyone else at risk. The city, not willing to risk most of its tax revenue by driving the corporations out, agreed.

Personally, she thought the city had become so overcrowded that they would have agreed to anything that took a burden off of their congested streets. They were now so crowded that not even beggars would lurk on corners for fear of being either trampled or infected with something they hadn't already become immune to. Body heat and body odor mingled with heat from the street vendors with their carts of food to create a miasma of disgusting odors and humidity that never went away, making everyone who had to walk worse-tempered than they already were. Even the subways were overcrowded.

She got to skate along the upper corridors, the couriers' skyways, they called them, although they were further topped by the corporate habitrails. Enclosed tubes with transparent arched tops and cushioned walkways for their drones to go from one building to the other without ever setting foot on the blasted, diseased concrete. Those were authorized retrofits from even the last century, before the streets had even gotten congested enough to build them regularly.

Everything was covered in germs these days, drug resistant, heat resistant. She passed under an intersection of corporate tubes and through the brief chill of shade. Amber-tinted shade, but shade nonetheless. The damn cities were like heat sinks, too, even years of research and science hadn't alleviated the fact that concrete soaked up heat like a sponge and let it out very, very slowly. If you were lucky there was about an hour between three and four in the morning, during the summer, when things cooled off enough to be human out of doors.

No wonder everyone was so cranky.

"Hey!" Kim skidded to one side of a pedestrian, walking far slower than the minimum speed limit on the skyways. Sometimes they climbed up there to sit on the edges and watch the city, or to get a walk that didn't reek of other people's bodies and sweat. The sitters, no one minded too much, as long as they stayed on the edges where the couriers didn't go anyway. The walkers caused accidents. "Get the hell back down on the pavement where you belong!"

The first part was a yell, the second, a mutter. By that time she was too far past the man for him to hear. She'd report him later, turn his description in to the cops, and they'd fine him. They always fined pedestrians for being where they shouldn't be. It wasn't in anyone's interests to have people go flying off the skyways and into street traffic, onto hard pavement.

Updated with the morning's maps and construction reports, her sat-nav whispered that she was two blocks from her destination. "I know that," she muttered at it, uselessly. Courier regulations kept the program embedded in her skullcap computer. Personal belief that maps were second-best to people who actually lived there kept her constantly irritated by it.

On the other hand, it had warned her about construction a few mornings when she would have otherwise missed it, so there was that.

One more block. She swerved past a fellow courier, nodding briefly, and hopped lanes down to the ramp. She'd be going through the front door for this one; they didn't have skyway access. She guessed the lab they used didn't or hadn't ranked high enough on the corporate ladder.

"Hey." Kim wheeled up to the front door, knocked her wheels back into her platform boots and waved her clearance pass. "Here with a package for Matheson?"

"Go on through."

The security guard didn't even look up. Now that was piss-poor security. Kim muttered to herself in City dialect and educated English about reporting him, not that she would. Poor security just irritated her on a matter of principle. She didn't look into all those juicy packages she delivered every damn day because she took her oaths to protect the integrity of the message and her honor as a courier seriously. Not all of them did. The security guard clearly didn't.

The receptionist cracked her gum into some poor idiot's ear and directed her to the right office on the softboard. They definitely didn't warrant a skyway entrance when they were on the ground floor only. She wondered how they afforded the services of a bonded courier, but then decided it wasn't her job to ask questions. Matheson printed for the package, and she was off and rolling to her next job, sweat already clinging to the backs of her knees. Better than a climate controlled office with lunch clinging to her mid-section and Legionnaire's in the air ducts.

The lab doors hissed closed, creating a negative pressure environment that kept the boogeymen in and the hostile outside world, out. He wiped his hands on his coat, now that he was in a place where he could do such things.

"There, now, let's see. What was I going to ... Ah-hah!" Over to the terminal to check in and note down his findings. There were aspects to the retrovirus that were slow and ponderous to uncover, and it behooved someone as scatterbrained as he could be to record every new development so more organized minds could put it in some form of order. "A place for everyone, and everyone in their place. No," he frowned. "That doesn't sound quite right."

Absently, he rubbed his forearm, rucking up the white sleeve of his inert lab coat.

"What time is it?" he asked the air. "Is it lunch-time yet?"

Dr. Murdoch habitually spoke to the air, though no one could tell whether or not he believed it spoke back. In the interests of keeping him out of trouble and keeping him from scaring the interns they had installed voice recognition software and a rudimentary Zulu Class AI to direct him. "It is two in the afternoon, Doctor Murdoch," the AI told him.

"Ah, yes, thank you, Jeeves."

No one understood why he called it Jeeves. Or if they did, they kept it to themselves.

"I think I'll have a cookie."

Floor-level lighting, similar to those used in planes and movie theatres, took him to the researchers' cafeteria. There were cookies there, always cookies or cake or some kind of baked good resting on the refrigerator in case a late night scientist with a problem on his or her mind got the munchies. He reached up, but the box was pushed too far back, risking tipping it over and spilling the delicious treats all over the ground. Damn.

A hand came down on his shoulder before he could get on the chair. "Do you really think that will hold your weight without tipping?"

Murdoch frowned. "What are you trying to say?"

"I'm trying to say that a stepstool might be a better proposition." His friend smiled, pulling out the little stepstool from between fridge and cabinets, propping it up and locking it in place. "The right tool..."

"... for the right job, yes, of course." Now he smiled again, but this time he let the other man get the box of cookies. "I had a, er. Craving."

"You have more cravings than my wife," Dr. Rimbaugh pointed a finger at him, taking a cookie and passing him the box. "Stranger ones, too. Have you eaten lunch yet?"

"Yes." Wide-eyed innocence even as he took three cookies in case he was reprimanded.

"No, you haven't. You're a terrible liar." Another thing they regularly stocked in the scientists' cafeteria were tins of soup. Long-lasting, so they could go for up to years at a time without much decay, and nutritious and easy to make, so no one could hurt themselves making it and so that they didn't get bored halfway through or decide it was too much trouble to heat a can of soup. Which had been known to happen. Both of those. "Don't fill up on cookies," Rimbaugh told his friend, making them both something to eat.

Murdoch muttered something that might have been an agreement, but sat readily enough and pushed away the box of cookies to indicate that he'd confine himself to the three (two and a half, now) in hand. After a moment, Rimbaugh dragged a chair over with the muted sound of rounded aluminum on inert carpet and stretched out, waiting for the tone. "I think I've got it," Murdoch told him, grinning and dripping crumbs.

"Got what?" Of course the moment he got settled the microwave chimed, and he went and pulled out their lunches, grabbing spoons and setting the bowl in front of the other man. "Eat first, talk in a moment."

"I'm not a child," he muttered, but did take a couple of hesitant bites at first, blowing on the soup until he was more comfortable sipping on it. His pride and his glee at having solved one part of the mystery won out over his resistance at being talked to and taken care of. "I think I've figured out the obedience problem. The domestication sequence. We always had that problem, you remember, the sequence could never be specifically directed to latch on to a specific person or group of persons."

Rimbaugh nodded, sipping his soup. "I remember."

"The obedience is coded to those they recognize as belonging to the family unit, by smell, by scent, more than anything."

"You're not telling us anything we don't already..."

"Let me finish!"

Rimbaugh held up his hands, gesturing for the other man to go on. Murdoch nibbled a cookie for a moment instead.

"The sequence can be tailored. To a specific set of pheromones that we create. That mixture is then applied to the commanding officers in the unit, and they become the, the alpha dog, so to speak."

He pointed a finger at his fellow in triumph while he stuffed his mouth with the rest of the cookie, the soup having already vanished into the hungry aether. Rimbaugh considered it, swirling the spoon around the bottom of his bowl. "It's not a bad idea. The question is, is it practical. The goal is to adapt the foot soldiers themselves, not the elite commanders. Adapting commanders makes them less susceptible to command."

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps," he shrugged. "In any case, at least, it is a place to start. Well done, my friend," he smiled, clapping the other man on the shoulder. "Well done. Have another cookie."

Lunch time. Not literally or according to a fixed time on a clock, but close enough. Kim took her food in the bullpen tonight. When things were slow she could skip on home for lunch, grab or throw something together and come back in time for her next assignment. Right now, things were busy, and she could be called out at any time to fill in between her contracted assignment.

The bullpen had a couple of vending machines with pre-packaged, chemicalized meals and a drink machine that dispensed all the forms of caffeine their hyperactive hearts could desire. There were also two large refrigeration units, too big to be called refrigerators in the way of things you found at home, and an ice chest. On the opposite side there was a table with disposable plates and flatware along with several microwave reheaters. When she couldn't get in she brought her lunch, leftovers from dinner or a sandwich, something. Sandwiches, today.

"That look good."

And by that he meant he wouldn't touch it if he'd just come off shift and it was the only food in the place. She knew that expression on his face. "Hi, Tom. Bye, Tom. Lay off my lunch, Tom." The last part would be lost on him, maybe. He didn't speak English, but they got by in City, the unofficial pidgin dialect of couriers and street traders, and cops if they knew what was good for them.

"It smell gross."

Tom wasn't actually his name, but everyone had so much trouble pronouncing this real name that he just went by Tom. He also hated the smell of anything that wasn't beef, pork, or chicken. "It's mild goat curry and sour cream. Come on, you'll love it. Real wheat bread."

"Real real?"

"Mebbe not. Here, you taste..." Kim waved the sandwich around under his nose. "You know you want to try it..."

"Put that away before he knocks it out of your hand and we all end up wearing it." Scofield rolled his eyes and slid into the bench next to her, unrolling a mat with utensils and tortillas on it. The next thing he put on the table made both of them groan and Tom push back from the table, swearing in his native tongue. Kim looked at it, then flicked her gaze up to Scofield's face.

"You think your mushu is going to make it any better?"

It wasn't; it was so bad that Tom left the table, smacking the vending machine on his way out. Kim rolled her eyes and bent over her sandwich, wolfing the rest of it down in a few bites and somehow managing to keep it out of her hair. Unintelligible noises emerged from between chewing and behind the curtain of stringy black.

Scofield chuckled, wrapping up a mushu burrito and spreading plum sauce over the top. "What was that?"

Kim swallowed. "Did you really have to do that?"

"I wanted to talk. He doesn't have clearance." He shrugged. "Besides, it's just mushu chicken. Not like it smells weird."

"Scofield, I can't identify half the shit in that thing. And it must be three days old because mushu isn't supposed to smell like that." Sandwiches bolted down, she pulled out her comb and pulled her hair back into its usual severe ponytail, then wrapped that up and stuck a stick in it. Today it was a chopstick.

Scofield shrugged. "Made it myself. Cabbage, chicken, and some other stuff. I hear you got the new defense contract, how's that working out for you?"

She swallowed back what she wanted to say, which was to snap at him for talking about classified material in a crowded room. Granted, the ambient noise from the chatter and the hum of the equipment was loud enough that maybe no one would bother trying to listen in but you couldn't count on that. The next thing that came to mind was more acceptable. "How the hell do you know about that?"

His bushy graying eyebrows shot up. "I got my sources. So you are working the lab job?" Her respect for him went up a couple notches when he didn't name any names or continue to press for details. "How're you finding that?"

"Why do you want to know?"

She knew a second after asking that he wasn't going to tell her anything. Even without watching and waiting for him to finish rolling up his next mushu, poking everything into place and slathering it in plum sauce again. He didn't say anything between finishing that wrap and the first bite, between the first bite and the second, and finally she just sighed and shook her head. "No reason," he answered her, not looking up. "Just curious."

"You don't do, just curious. Not about a cherry assignment or a classified one and this was both." Air conditioned buildings, waiting around for reply before being sent back on a direct route. Assignments for this employer could take all day and most of it spent inside climate controlled space. Where they actually cleaned the air scrubbers on a weekly basis. "You know something."

But he wouldn't ask her any more about it, and she wouldn't tell. Just as she knew that if she pressed, he'd get up and leave, he knew the same thing. Couriers by the job description were a secretive bunch, protecting their clients right down to anonymity of distinguishing features and vital statistics if they had to. It came with the job description; you didn't get far spreading your secrets all over the city.

By the sound of it, he'd been on defense contracts before, and switched off. Defense contracts were hush-hush but paid very, very well, and usually came with a lot of regs for courier and company both. Even within the group they didn't talk to each other about defense contracts, and she hadn't told anyone about this one. Why he was asking or how he knew, she had no idea, but it sounded like he was trying to warn her off. She didn't understand. All she'd done was run lab results and datapads between buildings, but she had only been on the job a couple of days. Maybe there was something she should be looking out for. And Scofield and his bland blue-gray eyes weren't going to tell her what that was. He had a better poker face than any of the five or six cops she knew. Then again, they were finance cops.

"I know a lot of things. I know advanced geometry, two languages, and that you're about to be wearing that sandwich if you keep drinking your milk like that. Don't eat so fast, you'll choke."

Yeah. Subject tabled. She took a long sip off the bottle in defiance and did end up hiccuping half of it back over her mouth and chin. "Dammit."

Scofield snickered. "Told you."

She stopped by St. James' place after work, mostly because she didn't feel like going home alone to her apartment. Their place was a wreck anyway, it was always a wreck and she always ended up helping them pick up when she came over. Kept her mind busy, which her empty apartment didn't. And she had half an idea that her coming over was the only way anything got picked up at all. On the other hand, the dishes were always clean and the dust never settled anywhere, so probably no one had any right or reason to complain. It was just hard to chase after a teenaged boy and work a full-time job at the same time.

"And you're sure he worked for these people? This, this same company whose contract you're working now?" Clayton St. James was an old friend, but sometimes he was just a little overprotective. She put it down to him becoming a father at a young age.

Kim shook her head. "I'm sure, and I'm just as sure I'm not going to get anywhere asking him about it until I have something else to ask about. Something specific to confront him with, not just guesses."

Scofield always had been kind of an asshole anyway. More than likely he was testing her, making sure she was as smart as she thought she was.

St. James shook his head, following her train of thought at least some of the way. "He's playing games with you."

"Of course he is, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about this being sort of shady." She thought about that for a second, then pulled herself up out of the pit of his sagging couch to help with setting out dinner. "It's a defense contract. It's a defense firm, at least half of them are corrupt in some way. If they're only a little corrupt, they overcharge and skim off the top. Use it to pad their work environment, as a cushion against their contract getting shut down. That's probably most of them."

"Anyone ever tell you you're a terrible cynic?" He sipped on the spoon, then hissed.

Her lips pressed together for a minute or two before she finally shouldered him over. "You know it's hot, why do you just stick it in your mouth like that?" Smelling the soup worked well enough. It smelled pretty good. It would have been stew but they ran out of chicken, so soup and dumplings would have to do. "Hey, squirt! Suppertime!"

"Don't call me squirt," Lyle clambered out of his top bunk and landed hard on the ground, running around the piles of clothes in boxes and tablets and things to the table, where he flopped into a seat with a less jarring thump.

"Sure thing, squirt," she grinned at him, ladling soup into a bowl and adulterating it with a generous handful of dumplings.

He made a face at her, to his father's audible amusement behind her. She made one back at him, and it went back and forth for a little bit before they settled. Everyone tucked into their soup and had their mouths full when Lyle asked a question through his dumplings.

"So, you're working for defense now?"

She exchanged a look with Clayton. That wasn't the impression she'd meant to give, nor what she wanted the boy to be fixating on right now. Not when she didn't have the details, not when she barely knew, herself, what was going on or whether or not it was safe. And it wasn't like she could tell him anything even if she had known. "I'm working for a defense contractor, yeah, but it's mostly office buildings." Poor choice of words. She knew it the second they were out of her mouth.

"Mostly?" Lyle pounced on the qualifier.

She pointed her spoon at the kid and her gaze at the father. "That boy is way too clever for his own good, you know that?"

Clayton grunted. "I think about that every day. He's got a point, though. Are you sure it's only office buildings?"

"I'm sure it isn't only office buildings. I'm also sure I don't want to know any more..." Which directly contradicted everything she'd been saying all day. Dammit. "Okay, I'm sure I don't want the consequences of knowing any more. Conspiracy theories exist for a reason; most of them aren't true, but there's enough truth to them that people get a little nervous when you start accusing them of ..."

"Murder? Experiments on the general public?" Clayton slurped his soup and then chewed on a dumpling. "Appropriation of resources, starting private wars? Overthrowing governments? Setting up friendly dictators?"

Every suggestion made his son's eyes go wider and wider. Kim dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and tried to ignore the conversational bait. And not to yell at Clayton for encouraging his son. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't want to know. You don't want to know," she looked over at Lyle, pointing a stern finger in his direction. "You're safer not knowing."

Lyle muttered something that didn't sound like a compliment. She didn't bother with subtlety after that. "He's going to try and break into the central office computer, isn't he."

"What do you mean try? I'm pretty sure he has your next two weeks' schedule already." But he gave his son a quelling look that did seem to have Lyle pretty cowed. At least as far as ducking the boy's head to his soup and making him chew loudly on dumplings. Little smacking noises. They couldn't see his expression.

Kim looked over at Clayton. Surely he didn't think that was the end of it. But Clayton had turned back to his soup, too, and since they all slurped for the next few minutes in silence it seemed to be the end of the conversation at least. She'd have to trust that Clayton knew what he was doing.

"I got, uh. Homework to do." Lyle pushed back from the table with enough force to rattle everyone's spoons against their bowls and climbed back onto his bunk again, pulling the curtain. Small electronic sounds emerged, the dull and faint thud of fingers on the keypad, hisses and muted beeps.

Kim looked over at her friend, eyes following him up as he rose to clear the table. "Something I said?"

Clayton dropped the dishes into the sink a little harder than he needed to and shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. "We had a fight a few days ago about a new unit for him to study on. Not that he needs it, but in order to keep up with the rest of his friends on the network he needs the latest in hardware, and we can't afford it. Not for anything ... not for anything not school related."

Her teeth caught her lower lip again. "You know ... you do know those skills he's practicing with his friends, they'll probably help him get a job out in the world, right? Hell, he could probably go work as a security expert. If he's really that good..."

"But we don't know if he is, because all he does is play around with his friends. And I won't let him risk that much on a maybe, on the chance that he is as good as he thinks he is. If he can be patient, when he's old enough, I'll send him to take the quals and we'll see if ..." Clayton's shoulders were tense, knotted, she could see it even through his dress shirt. "We'll see if he's ready."

Everything about the conversation screamed argument. Old argument. She hadn't been around often enough to see it, and now she wondered how long it had been brewing. Without an answer, she sighed, slumping back into her chair as Clayton started to clean the dishes. "Your idea of ready and his idea of ready don't sound like the same thing."

"I know," Clayton ground out. Then sighed. "I just hope he doesn't get caught again doing something stupid he thinks he's ready for."

Kim pulled herself out of the chair and started picking up the radius of clutter around her. "Amen to that..."