ir smelled of the abstruse polymers that kept it hanging in a brusque bob that
brushed her firm, long jawline.

I'm getting a sunburn, and the pebbles on the roof are digging into my ass. I
don't know if I'm going to push the pencil or not, but if I do, it's going to be
somewhere more comfortable than this roof.

Except that the roof door, which I had wedged open before I snuck away from my
attendants and slunk up the firecode-mandated stairwell, is locked. The small
cairn of pebbles that I created in front of it has been strewn apart. It is
locked tight. And me without my comm. Ah, me. I take an inventory of my person:
a pencil, a hospital gown, a pair of boxer shorts and a head full of bad cess. I
am 450' above the summery, muggy, verdant Massachusetts countryside. It is very
hot, and I am turning the color of the Barbie aisle at FAO Schwartz, a kind of
labial pink that is both painful and perversely cheerful.

I've spent my life going in the back door and coming out the side door. That's
the way it is now. When it only takes two years for your job to morph into
something that would have been unimaginable twenty-four months before, it's not
really practical to go in through the front door. Not really practical to get
the degree, the certification, the appropriate experience. I mean, even if you
went back to university, the major you'd need by the time you graduated would be
in a subject that hadn't been invented when you enrolled. So I'm good at back
doors and side doors. It's what the Tribe does for me -- provides me with
entries into places where I technically don't belong. And thank God for them,
anyway. Without the Tribes, *no one* would be qualified to do *anything* worth
doing.

Going out the side door has backfired on me today, though.

Oh. Shit. I peer over the building's edge, down into the parking lot. The cars
are thinly spread, the weather too fine for anyone out there in the real world
to be visiting with their crazy relatives. Half a dozen beaters are parked down
there, methane-breathers that the ESTalists call fartmobiles. I'd been driving
something much the same on that fateful Leap Forward day in London. I left
something out of my inventory: pebbles. The roof is littered, covered with a
layer of gray, round riverstones, about the size of wasabi chickpeas. No one
down there is going to notice me all the way up here. Not without that I give
them a sign. A cracked windshield or two ought to do it.

I