Chapter 17: The Bureau Comes for Drift

The transit corridor map-gap Drift had marked was a forty-second window between two sensor sweeps, and I used it at a walk because running draws pattern-recognition faster than movement does. I'd learned that in Jakarta, in a different city with a different kind of surveillance, and the lesson had held.

I was three blocks from the civic-core residential tower where I'd left my unregistered handset charging on a borrowed power strip when the handset rang.

Two short pulses, pause, one long. Drift's emergency signal. We'd agreed on it the morning I handed over my Bureau terminal, one of a half-dozen contingency codes he'd made me memorize before he'd let me leave the reclamation levels. I'd thought at the time that he was being professionally excessive. I'd been wrong before.