After I explained to Dezhda that the true identity of Ellery was, in fact, me ("That's such a pretty name, Sharkie, can I use it?") she got a call on her slab and had to rush home. Another shouting match, apparently.

My dad clapped me on the shoulder once she'd gone. Northmarch had sauntered off a minute ago to pore over his map some more. "I'm so glad to see you making friends, kid. She seems like a great person."

I'd expected this but it was still kind of embarrassing. "I've had friends before, Dad," I muttered. "I was friendly with most everyone at Dag's."

"Oh, you know what I mean! Not friendly but friends. And not like those kids you used to run with, either."

He wasn't wrong. I never hung out with any of Dag's employees outside work, except for the one birthday party-and as for the kids, there'd been one or two like Fidi that I'd actually liked, but mostly it was hang with them or be a recluse. Most of them had kept me on the outside because of my looks or because they thought I was a wet blanket. Dezi and Tanje felt different.

"Well, look. I've got a friend now, so maybe you can stop bugging me about it every time you see me?"

"Ha! Oh, sure. Finally I can move on to bugging you about getting married!" He burst out laughing while I stared him down.

"And on that note, I think I'm headed out. See you tomorrow morning, then?"

"Haha! Hah. Yeah. Tomorrow morning." His laugh petered out. "I hope you won't be wearing that."

I shuddered at the thought of dragging my precious suit through sap and mud. "Hell no. I'll be dressed to get dirty. Anything else I need to bring?"

"Nah. I'll put another pack together for you."

"Shit, you want me to stay and help-?"

Dad shook his head. "I'll do it faster anyway. And this isn't gonna cause problems for you at work? You sure you want to do this?"

"Yes. I'm coming." I didn't have to think about it. It didn't matter that it might be dangerous, or that the place gave me the heavy-duty creeps. I wasn't going to let my dad get fucked up 'cause I wasn't there.

He sighed. "Alright. We'll meet here tomorrow and take the truck up to Parkside. See you at six, right?"

"Right. Love you, Dad." I gave him a hug which he returned, patting me on the back.

"Love you too, El. Have a good one."

On the way out, I waved bye to Northmarch and flipped the kid at the door a chit. I'd just stepped outside when the worst nightmare of every D-block resident-maybe of everyone in Savlop-came true.

Blackout.

Sometimes it was just the ancillary power mains that went, due to unreliable supply or one of the utility cartels fucking around. Inconvenient, but not the end of the world. This one, though was everything. Lifelights and ancillaries gone. Total, complete, stygian, fuliginate, utter fucking darkness.

For just a moment, a mind-bending moment that seemed to stop the heart and last forever, everyone on the street united in fearful, hopeful silence.

Then came shouts, yelps of surprise or terror, a myriad of dancing blue-white LED beams as people whipped out their flashlights. Everyone carried one, here. Even gentle parents would hit their kids for forgetting their light. If you said someone 'didn't pack a beam,' you meant he was reckless to the point of stupidity.

I flipped on one of mine, glad I'd switched them into the suit when I changed. Around me it was like someone had kicked over a roach nest. People were moving around, running to get back to their homes, policing up children and pets, clustering together for protection. I decided to get back to the stacks before things got nasty. I sent Sawada a quick message to that effect then started jogging. I was going to feel freakin' wasted tomorrow.

The longer a blackout lasted, the worse things got. A few minutes of dark were an inconvenience. A few hours were dangerous, as opportunists, burnouts, and other less scrupulous elements took advantage of the situation to loot and worse.

A few days? Hadn't happened in my lifetime, but those who'd been around for the last one called it the Hellblink. The name said it all.

We got lucky this time. I hadn't even made it back to my apartment before things switched back on. The lifelights crackled and spat as they spooled back up to full power, as if they themselves were affronted by the interruption. The others I saw on the street all glanced up with that universal look of relief. I heard nervous chuckles, shaky jokes exchanged between strangers. Everybody united in their happiness that this wasn't the dreaded, half-mythical Big Off, when things went dark for good.

It only lasted a moment, though. People got back to what they were doing, back to their guardedness and mistrust. I got it. It seemed to me that such existential fear was too big, too impossible to contend with for long. If you couldn't change it there was no point worrying about it. A VTOL could crash-land on top on me at any instant, but I didn't live my life in an underground bunker.

Hermy the gate guard seemed no worse for wear, and he'd found himself some new literature: Kitty LaGrade and the Chasm's Lost Tribe. The illustrated edition, of course. Not quite my taste but as long as he opened the fucking gate for me-it only took me banging on the window three or four times-I couldn't care less. He raised an eyebrow at my clothes but buzzed me through.

When I got inside I stowed the suit away in its bag-au revoir for now, my friend- and got a quick shower. When I got back to my box I set my alarm and immediately crashed. I'd need all the energy I could spare tomorrow.

Next morning I peeled myself out of bed with all the vigor of a rad-sick octogenarian. Without a regular job to get to every day, I'd gotten used to sleeping in. I clumsily got dressed in coveralls and an army jacket, tucking the cuffs into my steeltoes before tying them. My hair I yanked back into a messy knot on the way out the door. Slukh and coilgun both came along, plus my knife, three flashlights, a headlamp, and-of course-the glittersaw with a couple spare two-foot blades and batteries. If Northmarch wanted to hack at brush like a caveman, that was his prerogative. I had technology.

The weather was brisk for my walk down to Sawada's. It was early enough in the spring that the mornings still had a nip. The sun's red ember was about as visible as it ever got. It faintly backlit the Pall, showing crazy patterns and shapes in the blackness: spiderwebs, broken glass, long thin columns like prison bars and towering shapes like King's fortresses. As usual for D-block, you wouldn't think it was early; there were just as many people coming on and off weird shifts as usual, and it's not like the light ever changed. A circadian rhythm was the preserve of the uptown elites in Vitroix and B-block. I enjoyed these morning hours, though. Something about waking up so early was refreshing. It made the day's potential feel limitless-or it would have if I didn't already know it was gonna suck.

When I got to Sawada's I went round back-he still hadn't changed the gate code-and let myself in through the back door. Northmarch and Dad were flitting around the workshop, sipping caff between final preparations.

"Morning, guys." I yawned. "Mind if I grab a cup?"

"Good morning, Sharkie."

"Mornin', El. Go ahead." My dad noticed the saw and leaned back, impressed. He had on high mud boots, jeans, a work shirt, and what I called his 'old man vest'-a ratty smartcloth thing studded with loops and straps and pockets. "Man, you came prepared! Where'd you get the buzzer at?"

"Borrowed it from work," I said, nonchalant.

He squinted at me. "Borrowed or 'borrowed?'"

"Actually borrowed, Dad. Boss trusts me." Man, I wished he'd drop it. I hated lying to him but now was not the time to start dropping bombshells.

"This is one of your automatic saws, yes? It will come in very handy, I think." Northmarch came over, letting the steam from his mug warm his face. I saw he now had a stubby revolver hanging from an elastic lanyard around his neck, with filed-off sights and a cutaway trigger guard. "Your arm will be less tired than mine, certainly."

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"Maybe we can trade at some point," I joked, giving my arm a shake. "I've been slacking on my lifts."

"Perhaps, perhaps," he said with a smile. "Here is your pack." He showed me over to one of the workbenches, where sat three smallish milsurp rucksacks.

Dad opened one up and showed me the contents. "We've all of us got six quarts of water in the bladder here, rations and jerky and stuff, spare lights and batteries, two hundred feet of 770 cord, a folding saw, and some lightweight camping gear."

"C-camping? We're staying in there over the fucking night?" This was not what I signed up for not at all, not at all-

"Oh, hell no!" my dad said, almost as taken aback as I was. "We ought to be out by this evening if all goes well. The extra supplies are for my buddy Justin."

I rolled my eyes. "Last name 'Case'?"

He grinned. "You betcha. We probably won't even have to get 'em out."

"Ach, now you have done it," Northmarch said, rubbing his forehead. "Now we will be in there weeks." I guess the tornagena had the same concept of 'jinxing' we did.

"Aw, it won't be that bad." His smile grew a little worried as Northmarch kept quiet. "Will it?"

"...It should not be," answered Northmarch after a pause. "But even so. There is a saying of my people: 'Look for ibex, load for pergato.' You would say...'Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,' I think." He tapped the weird little gun around his neck. "Are you armed, Sharkie?"

"Oh, yeah." Without thinking, I pulled open my coat and showed him the holstered coilgun.

"N-nice-looking piece, El," muttered my dad, curiosity and concern warring in his tone. "What did you get that for?"

"You know I've always been into guns, Dad. You still save the mags for me, even. New job just pays a little better, so I could finally snag one." I gave him a sly little smirk. "It's a SiKaHae coilgun, by the way."

"I wasn't going to-"

"You were."

"Okay, yeah, I was gonna ask. Fucking sue me." He threw up his hands all mock-frustrated.

"You would need a court for that, would you not?" asked Northmarch. He actually sounded confused. "I had thought legal arbitration the preserve of uptowners."

"It's just an expression, man," I said as Dad nodded. "I've only ever seen a court on TV, and just about everyone around here's the same. Even guys who get carced don't see a judge. What do they call it, Dad?"

"'Indefinite administrative hold.' They can chuck you in an isocube as long as they want while you 'wait' for a judge to come available."

"How cruel," muttered Northmarch. "In the dark, criminals lose a finger, or have their tattoos defaced, or are killed if they merit it. These things are painful, but at least they are not prolonged. Civilization is quite a strange and contradictory place."

"Agreed, so what say we leave it for a little while!" My dad threw on a jacket, then pulled his old caseless-loading ten-milly from a locker and strapped its holster on. "You two ready?" We nodded in unison and picked up our bags. "'Kay, hop in the truck! Let's go." He snatched up his rucksack and marched out the back door.

I couldn't help smiling a little as we went outside and my dad locked up. He'd always been like this, patient as a trapdoor spider until some invisible line was crossed and he decided he'd had enough.

Our ride to Parkside was to be his ridiculous little kei truck. It was only nine feet long and six wide, with a two-seat cab over the engine and a folding-side tipper bed. The front end had round, bug-eyed headlights and a grille that made it look like it was smiling. Whenever I'd folded myself into it to do pickups or deliveries, I'd felt like an actual clown. Luckily I wouldn't be in the cab this time.

My dad hopped in the cab and fired it up while Northmarch and I got in the bed, the suspension sagging noticeably. "Good in back?" Dad hollered. Northmarch nodded so I slapped the roof and we were off.

The truck was battery-drive with a backup synfuel generator. With this much weight in it, the ringading little two-stroke kicked in almost immediately. Northmarch and I were serenaded by its buzz as my dad ducked and wove through traffic as best he could, plying the horn liberally. He was a different person behind the wheel; man was an inveterate leadfoot barely held in check by lack of horsepower.

After nearly being flattened by a Bussomat and being cursed at more than I had since the time I bent Dag's three-quarter drive breaker bar, we arrived, parking in a vacant lot beneath a single lifelight pole. We hadn't quite gone all the way to Tanje's place. His building fronted on the north edge of the park, but the gravel lot we'd parked in was along the western side. If I remembered the map right, it extended east a few miles into what had once been demo land, then petered out into runoff marshes and deadlands before reaching the first of the quarries. Overall it had a trapezoidal shape, with the western side being the shortest.

My dad was still in his get-shit-done mood. Almost before Northmarch and I hopped down he was levering the truck’s front end up onto its built-in jacks-the whole vic was less than fifteen hundred pounds. I got the back end raised, then Dad went around pulling the wheels. He shut them in the lockbox under the bed, then tossed the locking nuts that held them on into his pack. Someone with a winch and a flatbed could still drag it away, but unprepared opportunists were out of luck. This didn't stop someone tipping it sideways out of sheer spite, but flipped over beat gone.

"So. What's the plan, man?" Dad asked Northmarch. I got the feeling he knew but was doing it for my benefit.

"First, we must needs go into the park a short way to rendezvous with Morranne. They have left blaze marks pointing to the meeting point, but past there we will be reliant on them for navigation. My previous visits were brief, and the paths change day to day. Morranne has lived their entire life in there. A better pathfinder could not be asked for."

"Why couldn't your friend meet us out here?" I was already nervous. I could see the tops of the trees from here as fringed shadows against the red-black of the sky. They moved in patterns too slow, too rhythmic for any normal living thing. They didn't seem inanimate, just...patient. I shivered a little, hoping the other two didn't notice.

"Morranne is not the most trusting or...comfortable with others. They prefer not to leave the forest. In fact, they do a great favor by helping us already."

I nodded, frowning. All well and good, but that didn't mean I had to like it. "Alright. Let's get this over with, I guess."

"Don't get too excited, kid," smirked my dad. I just shook my head.

"Count yourself lucky I'm humoring you in your senility, old man."

"Nobody made you come along, Ellery. You could still-"

"Nope. No, no no," I interrupted. "Nice try, but no. Let's go find your old church already."

"If you're quite done..." said Northmarch gently, "we need only head down the slope. One more thing, though:" My dad and I waited expectantly. "This first part of the trip will likely be one of the more dangerous ones. The bereft and desperate-the same sort that tried to assault you, Sharkie-prefer the outskirts. Those that brave the park's interior usually do not leave. So be on your guards."

On that sobering note we got moving, flashlights bobbing in the early morning gloom. For perhaps the millionth time in my life I wished for some light-amplification gear, but the stuff was tightly regulated and incredibly expensive. Low-light and thermal-capable optical implants were the same, even from the black clinics. Sawada'd told me it was a blatant anti-insurrection measure. If we deeks ever got too rowdy, Admin would just flip off the lights on us and send in Enforcement-the dreaded Masks. If they could see us and we couldn't see them, well, any battles wouldn't last long.

We headed through a rust-eaten chain-link fence, down a steep swale, and it was right there, solid as a wall. The ground went from dirt, to sparse grass, to higher grass mixed in with weird weeds topped with fluffy pods, unseen creepers catching at my feet, and then we stepped over the first tree and we were in, making our slow way deeper into the park.

Already I was learning a lot about nature; namely that it fucking sucked and I hated it. Northmarch called it a forest, but it didn't look like the ones in ancient movies. Back then the trees had grown toward the sky, toward sun. They all stood vertically, neat and parallel as fenceposts. These trees had no such guiding light.

Their trunks wove and wended, growing up and down and to the side, looming out of the dark at random. They bent in right angles and U's and corkscrews, curved overhead like domes or hugged the earth like fat woody snakes. The trees ranged from thinner than my wrist to thicker than my waist, forcing our path to meander. Their branches split off random as carcinomas, ending in spade-shaped leaves or clusters of buds or sprays of green-black needles. The ground-huggers tripped me up as I walked, the twisters sent off random elbows and knobs to catch me in the gut or tabletop me, and the sideways reachers did their best imitation of my most ancient and hated enemy-low doors. It was incredibly dark in here as well, reminding me of yesterday’s power outage.

I rubbed the fresh bruise on my forehead with one hand while running the saw with my other-I was glad to have brought my headlamp. The trees were only the biggest obstacle. The underbrush was thick and lush as well. My saw bit through woody shrubs whose branches ended in clusters of clinging burrs, purplish, cube-shaped succulents bristling with two-inch thorns, monster twelve-foot ferns whose jagged, dark-red leaves were furred with stinging hairs. Thorns and fronds tugged at my clothes, my bootlaces, my hair. Prickly leaves scraped my knuckles. Vines and creepers and tanglers hung between trunks and stalks like party bunting, covered in bug-catching sap or predatory fronds. One of the latter brushed my face, and the feel of its leaves reflexively curling shut was like tiny fingers on my cheek. I shuddered and slashed it down with especial viciousness.

Northmarch and I quickly and wordlessly worked out a system for breaking trail. I took out woodier obstacles or unavoidable trunks with the saw, he slashed the softer stuff down with his khukuri. My dad hung back a little bit, keeping watch. He was the least fit among us and mature enough not to bluster about it. It was hard work, and nervous, and the feel of the place was unwelcoming and oppressive. Northmarch would occasionally point us this way or that as he found blazes, but otherwise we didn't talk except in necessary monosyllables.

After perhaps half an hour and an encounter with a pale hanging moss whose spores left Northmarch and I light-headed, we took a short break. Our stopping point was by park standards a clearing. A couple stray trunks with bark like lead foil followed the ground in a curve, creating something like a semicircular bench. Squatting at its center like some avant-garde performer was a round bluish bush with lacy branches. A single tall stalk came up from its center, topped with a necklace-sized ring at head height. Why? As I lowered myself to sit, still dizzy, I saw a firebug fly into the ring-but instead of passing through, it hung there suspended. Now I noticed the membrane stretched across there, thin and clear as bubble soap. Even as I watched, the bug dissolved and disappeared. A reddish flush flowed down the bush's stalk, and I thought I saw it swaying back and forth just the tiniest bit. Laughing.

I decided that I did not like this place.