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reinforcements arrive. It seemed that the cult of Ullikummis was growing into a religious movement that was sweeping the country at an alarming rate, and the Cerberus people were considered a very trivial but very dangerous threat to that movement. Thus the decision had been taken to evacuate the redoubt-cum-prison, to split up the targets and keep the fifty or so Cerberus personnel safe. Farrell had been partnered with Sela Sinclair. Sinclair was a lean-muscled black woman, ex-U.S. Air Force, and had been cryogenically frozen back in the twentieth century to be revived two hundred years later. Thanks to her military background, Sinclair had acted as security detail for Cerberus, and was frequently involved in field missions. If nothing else, Farrell should be safe with her.
    Lakesh had made swift contact with a black-market trader called Ohio Blue, an old friend of the Cerberus operation whose underworld contacts gave her ideal access to hiding places for the Cerberus team. Thus, Farrell and Sela Sinclair had engaged in a mat-trans jump that sent them to what had once been the southernmost edge of Arkansas, way out near the border of Louisiana, where Blue’s operation was centered. Ohio Blue was a glamorous figure. Farrell guessed she was in her late thirties, with a cascade of long blond hair that reached halfway down her back and was swept in peek-a-boo style to mask her left eye entirely. Like her name, Ohio always wore blue; the first time she and her security crew had greeted Farrell and Sinclair at the entrance to the old military redoubt, she had been dressed in a floor-length sapphire gown that glistened with sequins and had a hip-high split that left her right leg bare when she walked.
    Farrell and Sinclair had traveled with six other Cerberus staff, including Brewster Philboyd and a weeping Reba DeFore. All of them were split into pairs at the destination redoubt, where Ohio’s people led them to various safehouses dotted across the area.
    Ohio’s people had escorted Farrell and Sinclair to a dead town that had once been a suburb of Bradley. It looked as if a bomb had hit it, which was very likely what had happened. The asphalt of the streets was churned up into broken chunks, weeds and plants and whole great trees emerging through the wreckage that had sat, unrepaired, for two hundred years. Once upon a time, this had probably been a nice neighborhood, the kind of place where you’d let your kids walk their new puppy, where the evening sun would keep you warm as you sat and read a book on the rocking chair hitched on the wooden veranda, the balmy air granting you that indefinable sense of contentment. Now, it looked like a suburb of hell. One half of the street was just gone; it was simply not there, only the occasional markings where houses or apartment blocks had once stood, old pipes overflowing with swarming plant life and buzzing insects.
    The other side of the street still looked somewhat like a street. There were houses there, eight or nine of them, but it was hard to be sure given the state of the last two, which looked more like something that had washed ashore from the ocean depths even out here, two hundred miles away from the nearest shore. The other houses stood on ruined foundations. Three of them had sunk into the ground, crumbling so that they sat like the steepled fingers of a pair of hands, propped against one another for support. A conifer grew out of one and into the roof of another, its cone shape striving up through the eaves of the second house and into the sky where birds flocked all around it, cawing and chirruping. The other houses were dirty, weather-beaten and overgrown with moss and mold, but they at least looked durable. If nothing else, the street seemed about right for the state that Farrell found himself in—a blue funk.
    The suburb of Bradley was surrounded on all sides by swamp and jungle and forest, much of it impassable even in these days of so-called civilization after the