Argus jabbed him in the chest. "You muted it, Tristan."

  "Really?" Tristan tried to hide his unease. Argus knows something. "If you mean by opening the door for you, yes, I agree."

  Argus blinked, rapidly, three times in a row. A tic, as if something were jamming the signals from his brain to his mouth. Odd...

  Where did that come from?

  "Kiss your dreams of Selfhood good-bye, mime."

  Another attempted jab to Tristan's stomach, but this time Tristan brought his arm up and deflected it. He was quickly tiring of this.

  "Say your piece and go, Argus."

  "I told you that should have been my mission. If I'd gone I'd have brought back the right virus."

  Tristan froze as a blast of interstellar cold shot through his veins. He tried to keep his voice steady.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Th—that I have f-friends in the data-l-lab," Argus said, the stammer arriving a second after another succession of comical eye-blinks. "And they tell me they don't know what you delivered, but it's like no dataviron they've ever s-seen. They're sending s-samples around trying to iden-den-dentify it."

  Another succession of blinks. Argus opened his mouth. It was comical, the demented mime trying to—

  Argus's tongue lolled out and then, as if he was doing a trick to impress Tristan, the tongue began to expand like a balloon.

  Tristan laughed.

  "Argus, I didn't know you had—"

  The tongue expanded and popped, spraying Tristan with reddish goo. Tristan recoiled in horror as bulges appeared on Argus's face, pulsating, shifting, then expanding, blistering into open wounds.

  What the hell was going on? Too many fluxes was bad...all mimes knew that. But Tristan had never seen anything like this. Argus's eyes rolled in his deformed head, as if the milky orbs wanted to jump out of his skull.

  And then they did exactly that—a squishing noise, and then the white globes were hanging from their bloody sockets as something inside Argus's skull forced them out.

  Tristan gagged.

  "Joe! What the hell's happening?"

  Argus fell to his knees. He reached up to his neck and closed his hands around the throat. Some terrible pain there, or did Argus think he could stop whatever horror was going on inside his head?

  The Joe-face appeared and said calmly, "Sir, I have nothing in any medical or mime files on this phenomena. And there are no images in the Ocean that match—"

  The PDA's report was cut off by a strangled yell from Argus. His hands dropped from his neck as the fingers inflated like little bladders, swelling...but instead of popping like firecrackers, the flesh seemed to melt together forming, pinkish clumps at the end of his stumpy arms.

  Argus slid to the floor and curled up, gasping, groaning. His clothes hid whatever else was happening to his body. Tristan didn't know what to do. He was afraid to get closer, especially to Argus's head—his scalp kept bubbling, as if the hard bony structure of the skull had turned pulpy.

  Tristan felt the nutrient bubbling in his stomach.

  He'd never liked Argus, and a few times even had considered killing him, but this...no one deserved this.

  "Sir?"

  "Joe! You've found something?"

  "Yes, sir. I believe these are related incidents."

  A holobubble appeared before him, obscuring Argus's writhing body...cooking sans heat on the floor of Tristan's compartment.

  The bubble displayed others going through the terrible melting that Argus was experiencing.

  "What the hell...?"

  "Live feed from elsewhere in the warren, sir. Others seem to be suffering the same malady..."

  But exactly who was this happening to?

  Tristan's heart began to pound. What was going on?

  He stepped through the holobubble and saw that Argus had stopped breathing...and his body had begun to ooze into a puddle.

  Tristan ran to his door...and out to the warren.

  *

  Only mimes...only mimes were suffering.

  Tristan stood in the plaza in the center of the warren and had to remind himself to keep breathing, to ignore the smell, the carnage, the blood, the bubbling bodies... everywhere.

  Not every dying mime was in the same state. A few seemed to be taking longer to lose control of their cellular structure, while others had long since degenerated into brownish pools of undefined muck.

  Tristan forced himself to walk among the madness.

  One mime, his head tilted at an unhealthy angle, tried to open his mouth as if to say something to Tristan. Please...help me, perhaps.

  But the mime's mouth was only an ill-defined open hole now...soon to disappear completely. One eye stayed fixed on Tristan, struggling so hard to hold it together, until the eye itself dribbled out of what once had been a head.

  Tristan staggered away. This can't be happening. This has to be a dream, a nightmare. But if it is happening, why isn't it happening to me?

  More steps, to where the melting mime bodies had been reduced to smoldering heaps, steaming from the heat of rapid cellular decomposition. Tristan tried to make sense of the horror. His fellow mimes seemed to have been thrown into a rapid flux...then into nothingness. Something was turning their bodies into raw organic material, with no genetic plan.

  The screams started to fade now, the madness—at least this part of it—coming to an end. The few humans who lived or worked near the warren looked on, their faces transfixed by the horror.

  Numb, disoriented, Tristan leaned against a wall and slid to a squat. He mind veered back to that key question.

  Why not me?

  Then the Joe-face appeared.

  "Sir, Cyrill wishes to speak to—"

  "Yes," Tristan said. Cyrill...Cyrill will know...

  And then Cyrill appeared in a bubble, his face contorted by rage.

  "Tristan—you did this!"

  Tristan shot to his feet and shook his head. His VAE program registered all of his gestures, his facial expressions. For Cyrill, it would be the same as seeing him.

  Can it register the fear in my eyes, Tristan wondered? The anguish? Can it pick that up?

  "I didn't do this, Cyrill. How can you say—?"

  "That cat's eye you sampled...they must have known you were coming. They wanted you to bring back a sample. And look what it's done—"

  The bubble filled with a dozen quick images of mimes scattered throughout the far-flung Kaze Glom, all going through the same cellular degeneration.

  "Every mime...?" Tristan said softly.

  "The virus is everywhere, spread by our own shuttles to all our worldwide centers of operation. Not every mime has shown signs of the disease yet, but we have to assume that the apparently healthy ones are infected and in the incubation period. Soon every Kaze mime will be reduced to a pool of goo.”

  A virus? Inside the Kaze’s borders, every mime was linked to the glom for information and instructions. But there had never been a virus. No way a virus could go undetected and attach itself to a routine mime location check. No way—until now…

  “And it’s all because of you, Tristan!."

  "Me?" Tristan was angry now. "Who planned the mission? You! Who designated which cat's eye should be sampled? You! I followed your orders."

  "Don't add insubordination to your crimes."

  "The deaths of all these mimes are on your head!"

  "Mimes? Who gives a damn about you mimes. We can always clone more of you—or at least we could. It's the DNA banks that matter, and they've been contaminated! Our Goleman stock is ruined. Our mime operations are crippled—Kaze Glom itself is crippled!"

  Tristan was missing something here. The shock, the horror... made it so hard to think.

  "You sold out, Tristan. You're a traitor to your glom!"

  "No. How could I—?"

  Cyrill thrust a finger at Tristan as though he could reach across the miles and jab him in the eye.

  "You know nothing? You did nothing? Then tell me this—how come you're still standing? How come you are alive while every mime—every Kaze mime, that is—lies dead or dying? Every one except—you!"

  Right, thought Tristan. That's it. I'm alive. And how that must look to Cyrill. Natural to think I'm a traitor.

  "Return to your quarters now, Tristan. I'm sending a Security team to bring you to the Tower. Maybe we can find what's keeping you alive. Remember, there's nowhere you can hide. Now, move—"

  Cyrill disappeared. He had a right to be scared. And angry—though Tristan didn't understand what had happened, or even why he alone survived.

  And then he remembered something.

  Cyrill didn't know he had a universal key.

  Cyrill didn't know he could go anywhere he pleased.

  I can get out of here...if I want to.

  But where? Where was safety?

  And another question: Who else had known what he was stealing? Now that he thought about it, for all the running and hiding, it hadn't been all that difficult to get to the cat's eye. That part had almost been almost easy.

  Too easy.

  Had Lani Rouge known what was in the cat's eye? Had Flagge Glom been waiting for Kaze to send someone in to steal it?

  He needed to think. If Cyrill caught him he'd run a complete psych probe and learn exactly what Tristan had done to get back. That alone would be grounds for his termination. But even without that, they'd undoubtedly take him apart to discover what was keeping him alive while others died.

  It occurred to him that he had two things working in his favor right now. The first was that no one knew he had a Universal Key. As far as Cyrill knew, Tristan was trapped in a narrow region of the Kaze Glom. The other was, with all mimes dead or dying, everyone would assume he was human. Amid all the chaos here, he'd wouldn't be checked until Cyrill sent out an alarm.

  And by then I can be out, Tristan thought. Maybe.

  But where to?

  I'm alive, I'm free...but like an old fable, I carry a curse...the mark of Cain.

  I've slain my brother—hundreds of my brothers.

  I sound like Krek, he thought.

  But he could use a brother right now.

  What would Okasan and Mung think? He'd sworn that he'd never reached the cat's eye; he had looked them in the eye and promised to try again and bring the sample to them if and when he succeeded.

  Lying was the least of his offenses. He'd played Trojan horse for one of the two major gloms, allowing it to cripple its major rival. He'd single-handedly upset the delicate balance of power, leaving Flagge Glom poised to become the supreme power on the planet.

  But the biggest loser in this would be the mime rebellion. They'd—

  Tristan reeled at the thought of what might be happening in the freezones, with all the runaway mimes going into meltdown.

  And Proteus...if they weren't dead yet, they soon would be. He thought of Krek with his braying laugh. He'd been tough, and harsh, but he'd had a certain joie de vivre that Tristan envied. And he'd saved Tristan's life on the tube platform.

  I'll bet Krek regrets that now, he thought. If he's still alive.

  If Tristan reached the freezone, he'd have to dodge any surviving Proteans... avoid them like...

  ...the plague.

  A choked, haunted sound—half laugh, half sob—burst from him and echoed away.

  But the truth remained. Any surviving Proteans would kill him on sight. And be perfectly justified in doing so.

  Alive, free...and cursed.

  Tristan began to make his way through the terrible deathscape of bodies. He wanted to run directly for the gate, but his restricted grid wouldn't let him pass. He had to get back to his compartment, use the universal key, and then get out before Cyrill's "escort" arrived.

  Tristan forced himself to maintain a hurried walk—the pace of a realperson who was upset, disgusted, but not on the run from anyone.

  *

  Tristan retched as he stepped into his compartment. The stench from Argus's remains was almost overwhelming. Holding his breath, he immediately retrieved the universal key and flashed it. Then he filled his pockets with concentrate packets, grabbed every template he could find, and ran for the hall.

  If he was lucky, he wouldn't run into the "escort" on his way out; if he was even luckier, Argus's remains might throw them off for a while, making them think that maybe this Tristan mime hadn't been immune after all.

  And if he was really lucky, he'd never see the inside of Kaze Glom again.

  But even if he managed to escape, he still had no safe place to go.

  Anyplace was better than here, though. He could think of only one group that wouldn't cast him out onto the street.

  "Joe, plot the safest path to Freezone North—"

  "But sir, Cyrill instructed you to go return to your compartment and await—"

  "I'm overriding that. I want to get back to the warehouse where I met Okasan yesterday morning.”

  And once at the freezone, I need to avoid all the security patrols and get back to the Holy Ribo Chapel.

  Hopefully, he still had friends there.

  He thought of his dreams of Selfhood, and how naive he'd been.

  Today the world changed, Tristan thought. And I was the instrument—the tool—of that change.

  A muting tool...that was all he'd ever been. He'd—

  "Mr. Cyrill will be very angry."

  He wished he had time right now to disable the PDA's situational logic components. Until this was over, he didn't need something reminding him every second of what he thought Tristan should be doing. Those days were over. From this moment on, Tristan made those decisions.

  "Forget Cyrill, Joe. Do you have the path?"

  Tristan's Roam Grid flashed with red lines showing a twisted, maze to the tubes, into the freezone, and onto the warehouse.

  Tristan picked up his pace. Even in the hallways the air was filling with the stomach-tightening stench of death from dead, decomposing mimes behind every door...

  He shut out the images, but he couldn't shut out the memory of the fear in Cyrill's face.

  War...the word echoed through his brain.

  War broke out today, he thought. And I'm a part of it.

  Another word replaced war, a word that before had no meaning for him, a word from vids, especially the strange vids about men with guns who stood and faced each other for honor and land in the ancient wasted lands to the west.

  Atonement.

  He could see only one course: Contact Okasan, join her. I...if she'd have him. If it wasn't too late.

  And then find Lani.

  PART FOUR

  INTO THE WAR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The freezone had changed.

  Tristan sensed it as soon as he stepped onto the platform at the Freezone North tube station. Tension so thick he could almost smell it.

  He looked across at the packed outbound platform. People were pushing, jostling for position to board the next tube. To the far right a fight broke out and a woman nearly fell from the platform.

  Fear, bordering on panic.

  Tristan could guess why: Mime meltdowns. The virus had undoubtedly hit the freezone by now, causing hapless mimes, whether here legally or not, to devolve into goo. Obviously the frightened people packed on that platform over there didn't know the virus was mime-specific. How could they? Who'd tell them?

  He couldn't see Flagge admitting to knowledge about the virus. And Kaze would be keeping it quiet for economic and public relations reasons. The world would know soon enough that Kaze Glom’s mime stock had been destroyed, but how could they admit that they had smuggled the deadly virus out of Flagge and contaminated themselves?

  They'd be the laughing stock of the worlds.

  Since most of the mimes here in the freezone were runaways, trying to pass as realfolk, all these terrified people knew was that some of their fellow zoners were dying horrible deaths, and if it was contagious, they wanted to be somewhere else. Fast.

  Yeah, it's contagious, Tristan thought as he turned away and made for the exit. It's a veritable plague. But not to worry—you're all immune.

  And so am I.

  Why?

  The question had hounded him all the way from Kaze.

  Tristan checked his grid as he hurried down the ramp, then struck off in the direction of the warehouse where he’d first met Okasan.

  Physically the freezone appeared just as he'd left it, but its mood, its ambiance, its populace, were different. Fewer people pushed through the streets, and none of them the usual strollers and amblers. These tight-faced zoners moved quickly, purposefully, as if rushing to get where they were going so they could shut the door behind them.

  A siege mentality had taken hold.

  If nothing else, it made travel easier. He made good time getting to the Bascombe district, but along the way he passed a putrescent puddle—all that remained of a freezone mime. People were giving it a wide berth as they hurried past or turned and ran the other way. Tristan averted his eyes as he passed.

  I did this…he thought. And then he whispered, "I'm sorry!"

  He kept a wary eye out for Flagge Security patrols but saw only two, and they were moving along as if they had a specific destination rather than on a search. Although he knew they wouldn't recognize him in this masque, their presence made Tristan uneasy. And that was heightened by the casual way they floated along...as if they owned the freezone.

  Tristan's stomach twisted at the thought that that might be on Flagge's agenda: claim Freezone North and annex it.

  He found

  a nondescript alley and hurried toward the door to the Church of the Holy Ribo. He saw no chime button so he pounded on the scarred, dusty surface.

  "Wallz! Salina! Anyone in there?"

  He pressed his ear to the door and listened. He thought he heard shuffling movement on the other side, but no one answered his call.

  "Please! It's me! Tristan! I need to—"

  Suddenly the door swung inward about thirty degrees. But no one was there—could this be a trap. Tristan took a step forward…

  Suddenly Wallz filled the opening, blocking it.

  "Tristan!" The pupils in his large bird eyes were dilated wide with alarm. "You can't come in. They're looking for you."