As an Acquis web engineer, she had labored on the sensorweb for nine years, and its healing power was manifest. Once the web had been an aspect of the island. Now the island was an aspect of the web.

  Vera tore at her suspension clips, her webbing belt. She rid herself of her tunic and trousers. Her underclothes, those final skeins of official fabric, shivered and crumpled as they left her flesh.

  Vera sniffed and spat, shook herself all over.

  Naked, she was a native sliver of this island, one silent patch of flesh and blood. Just a creature, just a breath, just a heartbeat.

  VERA’S BOSS WAS AN ACQUIS ENGINEER: Herbert Fotheringay. The climate crisis had dealt harshly with Herbert’s home, his native island-continent. Australia had been a ribbon of green around a desert. Drought had turned Australia into a ribbon of black.

  The Acquis was partial to recruiting people like Herbert, ambitious people who had survived the collapse of nation-states. The Acquis, as a political structure, had emerged from the failures of nations. The Acquis was a networked global civil society.

  From the days of its origins in planetary anguish, the Acquis had never lacked for sturdy recruits. Herbert had been ferociously busy on Mljet for nine years.

  Herbert awaited her at his latest construction project: another attention camp.

  Attention camps were built to house the planet’s “displaced,” which, in a climate crisis, could mean well nigh any person at almost any time. Attention camps were the cheapest and most effective way that the twenty-first century had yet invented to turn destitute people into agents of a general salvation.

  Mljet was an experimental effort by a technical avant-garde, so its camps were small in scope compared with, say, the vast postdisaster slums of the ceaselessly troubled Balkans. So far, the island’s camps held a mere fifteen hundred refugees, most in the little districts of Govedjari and Zabrijeze.

  The refugees in Zabrijeze and Govedjari were among the wretched of the Earth, but with better tech support, they would transit through their unspeakable state to a state that was scarcely describable.

  Herbert’s newest campsite was a six-hectare patch of scalded, sloping bedrock that had once been an island dump. The dump had leaked toxins and methane, so it had been catalogued and obliterated.

  Vera walked into the camp’s humming nexus of construction cranes, communication towers, fabricators, heat-pump pipes, and bioactive sewage tanks.

  Seen with the naked eye—she wore no helmet today—the camp was scattered around her like the toys of a giant child. Their arrangement looked surreal, nonsensical. It was only through the sensorweb that every object, possession, and mechanism found its proper destination. One might say that the new camp was systematically networked … or one might say, more properly, that the sensorweb was becoming a camp.

  Vera stared through the camp’s apparent confusion, out to sea. Morning on the Adriatic. How pure and simple that sea looked … Although, when Vera had learned analysis, she had come to see that the famous “Adriatic blue” was spectrally nuanced with cloudy gray, plankton green, mud brown, and reflective tints of sky; that apparently “simple and natural” blue emerged from a wild mélange of changing cloud cover, solar angles, seasonal changes in salinity, floods, droughts, currents, storms, even the movements of the viewer…

  The sea had no “real” blue. And the camp was no “real” camp. There was a mélange of potent forces best described as “futurity.” They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.

  Feeling meek and frail without her helmet and boneware, Vera quietly slid into Herbert’s saffron-colored tent. Herbert was shaving his head with one hand, eating his breakfast with another.

  Herbert was ugly, red-faced, and in his early fifties. The dense meat of his stout body was as solid as a truck tire. He ran a buzzing shaver over his skull, which bore seven livid dents from his helmet’s brain scanner.

  Herbert’s exoskeleton, bone-white, huge, and crouching in a powered support rack, filled almost half his modest tent. Vera’s personal exoskeleton was a pride of the Acquis and had cost as much as a bulldozer, but Herbert’s boneware was a local legend: when Herbert climbed within its curved and crooked rack, he wore full-scale siege machinery.

  The burdens of administration generally kept Herbert busy, but when Herbert launched himself into direct action, he shook the earth. Herbert could tear up a brick house like a man breaking open a bread loaf; he could level a dead village like a one-man carnival.

  Herbert smiled on her with unfeigned loving-kindness.

  “Vera, it was kind of you to come so early. There have been some important developments, a new project. I’ve had to reassign you.”

  Vera’s eyes welled up. “I knew you’d pull me out of that mine. I disgraced myself.”

  “Well, yes,” Herbert admitted briskly. Naturally Herbert had read the neural reports from all the personnel on-scene. Everyone felt regret, unhappiness, embarrassment, shame … “Mining work is not your bliss, Vera. A mishap can happen to anyone.”

  There was a long, thoughtful silence.

  People who had never worn boneware had such foolish ideas about brain scanners and what they did. Brain scanners could never read thoughts. Telepathy was impossible. That was a fairy tale.

  Still, neural scanners were very good at the limited things that real-life scanners could do. Mostly, they read nerve impulses that left the brain and ran the body’s muscles. That was why a neural scanner was part of any modern exoskeleton.

  Brain scanners also read emotions. Emotions, unlike thoughts, lingered deep within the brain and affected the entire nervous system.

  Grand passions were particularly strong, violent, and machine-legible.

  Acquis neural scanners could easily read ecstasy and dread. Murderous fury. Pain and injury. Lassitude, grief, hatred, exaltation, bursting pride, bitter guilt, major depression, suicidal despair, instinctive loathing, sly deception, abject terror, burning resentment, a mother’s love, and unstoppable tears of sympathy.

  Acquis neural tech was still a young, emergent field, but it was already advanced enough to create a vital core of users and developers. Herbert was one of those people. So was every other Acquis cadre on Mljet. Herbert was an Acquis neural apparatchik, a seasoned captain of the industry.

  Vera was his lieutenant.

  Heat prickled the back of Vera’s neck. “There’s no big debriefing for me, Herbert? You know as well as I do that I completely lost my wits down there!”

  “Yes, you suffered a panic attack,” Herbert said blandly. “It’s one of your character flaws. We all have them. It’s our flaws that give us our character.”

  Vera was now certain that there was something dreadful in the works for her. Herbert was much too calm.

  Vera analyzed her boss’s ugly face.

  Why did she love him so?

  When she’d first met Herbert, he had badly scared her. Herbert was old, ugly, foreign, and fanatical. Worst of all, Herbert had bluntly insisted that she stick her head into an experimental helmet that scanned people’s brains. Vera knew that ubiquitous computing was very powerful: she did not want that technology applied inside her skull. Vera feared that for good reasons. She had seen her loved ones shot down dead, and she had feared that less.

  Vera had obeyed Herbert anyway, because Herbert was willing to rescue Mljet. No one else of consequence seemed even willing to try. The Acquis were global revolutionaries. They got results in the world. They did some strange things, yes—but they never, ever stopped trying.

  So Vera had swallowed the panic and let the machine swallow her head.

  Vera had swiftly learned that wearing a brain machine was a small price to pay to learn the feelings of others.

  Herbert Fotheringay was an ugly man, but he had such a beautiful soul. Herbert had a touching simplicity of character. He brimmed over with kindness and goodness. For those who earned his trust and shared his aims, Herbert was a tireless source of strength and support. Herbert meant every word that he had ever said to her.

  She had joined his effort as a bitter, grieving eighteen-year-old, her home demolished and her loved ones shot dead or scattered across the world. Yet Herbert and his scanners had instantly seen beyond her fear and misery. The machines had sensed the depth of her passionate love for her homeland. Herbert had always treated Vera as the heart and soul of his Mljet effort.

  Herbert had made himself her mentor. He set her tests, he gave her tasks. She had eagerly seized those chances, and they had done so well. They had accomplished so much, together, side by side. The wounded island was healing before their eyes. Innovation was coming thick and fast, amazing insights, new services, new techniques. Transformations were bursting from her little island that were fit to transform the world.

  Yet every industry had its hazards. Herbert and Vera had been close colleagues for nine years. They were very close now—they were too close. It had taken them years, but now, whenever Herbert and Vera met face-to-face, there were strong bursts of neural activity in the medial insula, the anterior cingulate, the striarum, and the prefrontal cortex.

  That meant love. An emotion so primal was impossible to mistake. Love was Venus rising from her neural seas, as obvious to a neural scanner as a match in a pool of kerosene.

  Vera was very sorry for the operational burden that her love brought to Herbert and the cadres on the island. In the Acquis neural project, leaders were held to especially high standards. Since he was project manager, Herbert was in some sense officially required to suffer.

  To win the trust of the other neural cadres, to coax out their best efforts, their boss had to manifest clear signs of deep emotional engagement with large, impressive mental burdens. Otherwise he’d be dismissed as a fake, a poseur, a lightweight. He’d be replaced by someone else, someone more eager, more determined, more committed.

  There were people—especially the younger and more radical cadres on Mljet—who whispered that she, Vera Mihajlovic, should become the project manager. After all, she was twenty-six and had grown up within the neural system and the sensorweb, whereas Herbert was fifty-two and had merely engineered such things. Whenever it came to redeeming Mljet, Vera was burningly committed and utterly sincere. Herbert was older, wiser, and a foreigner, so he was merely interested.

  Herbert had his flaws. Herbert’s largest character flaw was that he was publicly in love with a subordinate half his age. Anyone who wanted to look at Herbert’s brain would know this embarrassing fact, and since Herbert was in authority, everyone naturally wanted to look at his brain.

  Such was their situation, a snarl that was humanly impossible. Yet it was their duty to bear the burden of it. So far, they had both managed to bear it.

  Herbert gently drummed his thick red fingers on his folding camp table. Heaven only knew what labyrinth of second-guessing was going on within his naked head. He seemed to expect her to make the next emotional move, to impulsively spit something out.

  What was he feeling? Had Herbert finally learned to hate her? Yes! In a single heart-stabbing instant, this suspicion flamed into conviction.

  Herbert despised her now. He hated all the trouble she had given him.

  He’d just claimed that he was “reassigning” her. He meant to fire her from the project. He would throw her onto a supply boat and kick her off Mljet. She would be expelled, shipped to some other Acquis reclamation project: Chernobyl, Cyprus, New Orleans. She would never proudly wear her boneware again, she’d be reduced to a newbie peon. This meant the end of everything.

  Herbert touched his chin. “Vera, did you sleep at all last night?”

  “Not well,” she confessed. “My barracks are so full of dirty newbies…” Vera had tossed and turned, hating herself for panicking in the mine, and dreading this encounter.

  “A good night’s sleep is elementary neural hygiene. You need to teach yourself to sleep. That’s a discipline.”

  She gnawed at a fingernail.

  “Eat,” he commanded. He shoved his soup bowl across the little camp table. She reluctantly unfolded a camp stool and sat.

  “Breakfast will stabilize your affect. You’ve spent too much time in a helmet lately. You need a change of pace.” He was coaxing her.

  “There’s no such thing as ‘too much time in a helmet.’ ”

  “Well, there’s also no such thing as a proper Acquis officer skipping meals and failing to sleep. Eat.”

  She was dying to eat from the simple bowl that Herbert used. That big warm spoon in her hand had just been inside Herbert’s mouth.

  Herbert edged past her and zippered the entrance to his tent. This gesture was a pretense, since there was very little sense in fussing about privacy in an attention camp. People made a big fuss anyway, because life otherwise was unbearable.

  Neither of them were wearing their helmets: not even neural scanning caps. Any emotion coursing through them would stay off the record. How dangerous that felt.

  Reaching behind his polished rack of boneware, Herbert found an ancient, itchy hat of Australian yarn. He stretched this signature bonnet over his naked head. Then he scratched under it. “So. Let’s discuss your new assignment. An important visitor has arrived here. He’s a banker from Los Angeles, and he took a lot of trouble to come bother us. This man says he knows you. Do you know John Montgomery Montalban?”

  Vera was shocked. This was the last news she had ever expected to hear from Herbert’s lips. She dropped the spoon, leaned forward on her stool, and began to cry.

  Herbert contemplated this behavior. He was saddened by the dirty spoon. “You really should eat, Vera.”

  “Just send me back down into the mine.”

  “I know that you have a troubled family history,” said Herbert. “That’s not a big secret, especially on this island. Still, I just met this John Montgomery Montalban. I see no need for any panic about him. I have to say I rather liked Mr. Montalban. He’s a perfectly pleasant bloke. Very businesslike.”

  “Montalban is that stupid rich American who married Radmila. Make him go away. Hurry. He’s bad trouble.”

  “Did you know that Mr. Montalban was coming here to this island? It was quite an epic journey for him, by his account. He took a slow boat all across the Pacific, he personally sailed through the Suez Canal … Making money all the way, I’d be guessing, by the look of him.”

  “No. I have never met Montalban. Never. I don’t talk to him, I don’t know him. He isn’t supposed to be here, Herbert. I don’t want to know him. Not ever. I hate him. Don’t let him stay here.”

  Herbert lowered his voice. “He’s brought his little girl with him.”

  Vera raised her head. “He brought a child? To a neural camp?”

  “That’s not illegal. It’s against Acquis policy for people in radical experimental camps to have and bear children. After all, clearly, morally—we can’t put kids into little boneware jumpers and scan their brains without their adult consent. But it’s not against policy to bring children here, on a visit. So Little Mary Montalban—who is all of five years old—came here all the way from California. She’s here to see you, Vera. That’s what I’m told.”

  Vera’s shock lost its sharpness in her dark, gathering resentment. “That little girl is Radmila’s child. Radmila sent her baby here. I was always afraid it would come to this. This is all some kind of trick!” Vera caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Radmila can never be trusted. Radmila is a cheat!”

  “ ‘Cheat’ in what sense? Enlighten me.”

  “You can tell just by looking at Radmila that she has no morals.”

  “But Radmila is your own clone. Radmila looks exactly like you do.”

  Vera shifted in her chair in anguish. “That is not true! The fact that we’re genetically identical means nothing. We are very, very different. She’s a cheat, she’s evil, she’s wrong.”

  There was no more “Radmila.” Once there had been a Radmila, and she and Radmila had been the same. They had been the great septet of caryatids: seven young women, superwomen, cherished and entirely special, designed and created for the single mighty purpose of averting the collapse of the world. They were meant to support and bear its every woe.

  The world had collapsed and the caryatids were scattered all over: they were wrecked, shot, exposed, scattered and broken into pieces, their creator hunted and hounded like a monster … And in the place of beautiful Radmila, magical Radmila, that noble creature Vera had loved much better than herself, there was only the diseased and decadent “Mila Montalban.” A rich actress in Los Angeles. Mila Montalban took drugs and dressed like a prostitute.

  “Vera, why do you say such cruel things? Your brother George—he suffered like you suffered, but he would never say such demeaning things about his sisters.”

  Far from calming her, these words spurred instant, uncontrollable fury. “I hate Radmila! Radmila makes me sick! I wish that Radmila was dead! Bratislava died. Svetlana, Kosara, they died, too! I wish Radmila had died with them, she should have died! Running away from me, forever—that was only a foul thing to do …”

  “I know that you don’t really feel that way about your sisters.”

  “They’re not my sisters, and of course I feel that way. They should never have existed, and never walked the Earth. They belong in the grave.”

  “Your brother George is alive and he’s walking the Earth,” said Herbert calmly. “You talk to George sometimes, you’re not entirely isolated from your family. You don’t hate George in that profound way, do you?”

  Vera wiped hot tears from her cheeks. She deeply resented her brother Djordje. Djordje lived in Vienna. Djordje had disowned his past, built his shipping business, found some stupid Austrian girl to put up with him, and had two children. Nowadays, Djordje called himself “George Zweig.”

  She didn’t exactly want Djordje dead—he was useful—but whenever Djordje tried to talk to her (which was far too often), Djordje scolded her. Djordje wanted her to leave Mljet, leave the Acquis, get married, and become limited and woodenheaded and stupid and useless to everybody and to the world, just like himself and his fat, ugly wife.