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I’m sorry, but I do. Today. Now.”
    Ms. Townsend turned back to gaze at her. Amy, to her intense discomfort, felt herself redden. “I’m sorry, but I need the advance. Our rent is due Friday. I’m sorry.”
    “Of course,” Ms. Townsend said with sudden and bewildering gentleness. “Just stay here and I’ll have the guard bring you a check.”
    “Cash,” Amy said. “We . . . I don’t have a checking account.” Banks charged fees.
    “Cash, then. And on Monday we’ll open an account for you.”
    “Thank you.”
    The cash appeared with startling promptness, along with a family health-insurance card. Amy signed a receipt—at least this paper was short enough for her to actually read!—and was ushered out. The money and her precious card both safe in her bra, Amy treated herself to a bus ride home.
I have a job, I have a job, I have a job
—but like hell it was “testing video games.” They were testing something else in that alley. What? And why lie about it? Well, whatever it was, she hadn’t been hurt, only scared. And for this amount of money, the scare was worth it. Whatever else was going on, Amy would discover it eventually. Meanwhile, she had the rent for Mrs. Raduski and health care for Gran and money for groceries—
    I have a job, I have a job, I have a job!
    The words sang in her head all the way home, acquired a beat, and then a tune. Her foot tapped on the bus floor, her head bobbed in time. Amy couldn’t stop smiling. She didn’t notice the boy with the sunglasses and heavy backpack. She didn’t notice the woman emerging from the grocery store as Amy got off the bus. She didn’t notice any of the microcameras.

    * * *
    “So we have our five,” Myra Townsend reported to the gray-haired man in his exquisite hand-tailored suit in his penthouse office. He sat behind an antique mahogany desk, the city forty stories below like his own personal carpet. She stood on the actual carpet and held up one manicured finger after another. “The slumming socialite that viewers can despise, the desperate little climber they can root for, the gorgeous hunk they can drool over, the dummy they can laugh at, and the geek they can be confused by. Plus Lynn, of course.”
    The man looked up from his desktop, the surface of which shimmered with changing graphs. “What about the dancer?”
    “We eliminated her.”
    “Put her back in. We can have six plus Lynn.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I want to see the completed pilot by the twenty-first.”
    She looked startled. “But that’s only—yes, Mr. Taunton. By the twenty-first.”
    “And on Saturday a rough cut of the first footage.”
    “We already agreed on that.”
    “Fine. And Myra—this time, no legal ends dangling. No room for lawsuits, no matter what you devise for those kids.”
    “There won’t be any legal issues.”
    “There better not be,” the gray-haired man said, and went back to studying the graphs shimmering on his desktop like living jewels.

Four
    F RIDAY
    BY THE TIME Amy’s bus reached her neighborhood, her elation had been replaced by cunning. She was going to need a strategy. Two strategies: one for dealing with Gran and one for dealing with Kaylie.
    She pondered tactics while buying bread, milk, cheese, butter, and sliced turkey at the ramshackle grocery store two blocks from her building. The store, no bigger than Gran’s apartment, was run by Mr. Fu. His name, he had told her once, meant “happiness” in Chinese, but Mr. Fu never looked happy, and neither did his wife. He gazed at her mournfully from behind his sagging counter.
    “Mr. Fu, do you have any bananas?” Gran loved bananas.
    “No bananas.”
    “Oh. Well, just these things, then.” The Fus had emigrated from Beijing just before the Collapse. Very bad timing. America, its economy in such a shambles that many had predicted the country would not survive, had disappointed the Fus. This made Amy try extra hard to be nice to Mr. Fu, which in turn made her feel