Kurt coughed hard, his chest spasming against Alan’s back. Alan set him down, as in a dream. As in a dream, he picked his way through the flames on his porch and reached for the doorknob. It burned his hand.
It was locked. His keys were in Kurt’s door, all the way up Augusta.
“Around the back,” Bentley called, headed for the fence gate. Alan vaulted the porch rail, crashing though the wild grasses and ornamental scrub. “Come on,” Bentley said.
His hand throbbed with the burn. The back yard was still lit up like Christmas, all the lights ablaze, shining through the smoke, the ash of books swirling in it, buoyed aloft on hot currents, fragments of words chasing each other like clouds of gnats.
“Alan,” Kurt croaked. Somehow, he’d followed them back into the yard. “Alan.” He held out his hand, which glowed blue-white. Alan looked closer. It was his PDA, stubby wireless card poking out of it. “I’m online. Look.”
Alan shook his head. “Not now.” Mimi, somewhere up there was Mimi.
“Look,” Kurt croaked. He coughed again and went down to his knees.
Arnos took the PDA in hand and peered at it. It was a familiar app, the traffic analysis app, the thing that monitored packet loss between the nodes. Lyman and Kurt had long since superimposed the logical network map over a physical map of the Market, using false-color overlays to show the degree to which the access points were well connected and firing on all cylinders.
The map was painted in green, packets flying unimpeded throughout the empty nighttime Market. And there, approaching him, moving through the alleys toward his garage, a blob of interference, a slow, bobbing something that was scattering radio waves as it made its way toward him. Even on a three-inch screen, he recognized that walk. Davey.
Not a coincidence, the fires.