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networks and downloaded thousands of classified files. She’d targeted the Pentagon, the State Department, the Saudi monarchy, and the Russian Federal Security Service. Her latest job was breaking into a Chinese government network rumored to hold files about the mistreatment of political dissidents. An anonymous source, code-named Dragon Fire, had opened a digital backdoor that gave her access to the network, allowing her to download a batch of encrypted documents. She’d started decrypting them several days ago and finally finished this afternoon, but because the documents were in Mandarin she still didn’t know what they said. So she’d forwarded the files to InfoLeaks, which would find Mandarin-speaking volunteers to translate them.
    And now, to celebrate the job’s completion, she was pretending for a few hours that she was a real New Yorker, a young hip woman enjoying an outdoor concert with her young hip friends. She surreptitiously relit her joint and concentrated on the music. The duet of the guitarists turned cacophonous, with loud random notes spilling from the amplifiers. But there was a pattern in the randomness. There was always a pattern. Layla saw the music as a stream of binary code, a long line of zeroes and ones floating over the crowd. It was like an encrypted file, a scrambled mess of data, and it was Layla’s job to decipher it, to make sense of the noise. So she did the same thing she always did when decrypting a document: She hunted for the encryption key, the special sequence that would unscramble the data. And after a few seconds she saw it: a string of exactly 128 ones and zeroes, floating in the air right beside the music. The key specified the algorithm that would unlock the code, converting the hideous nonsense into beautiful, readable information. She reached into the air and grabbed the key. The zeroes and ones glowed in her hand.
    Then the song ended and the key disappeared. The band played another song, but it wasn’t as good. The joint was no longer in Layla’s hand; she must’ve dropped it while reaching for the key. She tried to keep dancing, to recapture that ecstatic moment, but her buzz had already worn off. She drifted away from the crowd, all those happy young people, and left the amphitheater. She couldn’t pretend anymore. She was different from the others. She’d always been different.
    It was ten o’clock. Layla went to the dark, wooded area behind the stage and fished in her pockets for another joint, but all she found was an inch-long stub. She lit it anyway and listened to the distant music, which sounded trite and pointless now. Then the band finished its set and the crowd filed out of the amphitheater, heading for the lights of Fifth Avenue. But Layla walked in the opposite direction, going deeper into the park.
    She finished her joint while strolling down an asphalt pathway that meandered under the trees. Then she heard a voice behind her: “Hey, baby, want another? I got smoke.”
    She looked over her shoulder and saw the guy’s silhouette, bulky and tall. She called out, “No thanks,” and walked a little faster.
    The guy matched her pace. His shoes slapped the pathway. “Hey, slow down! Where you going?”
    Layla started to run. Her father had once told her: If you can’t win a fight, there’s no shame in running away. She saw a lighted area ahead, a large rectangle of asphalt, and at its center was a lone man on inline skates. He was practicing his roller-dancing moves while listening to his iPod. The guy wore gym shorts and a basketball jersey, and luckily he was just as big as the guy who was chasing her. Layla sprinted toward the roller-dancer, waving her arms and yelling, “ Hey! Hey! ” to get his attention. The guy stopped dancing and removed one of his earphones.
    “Yeah, what’s up?”
    Then she heard a metallic click. The roller-dancer’s head jerked backward and he crumpled to the asphalt. Blood fountained from his scalp. In horror, Layla