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interminable martial arts movie they'd been working on for the past three weeks, when he spotted Dana.
    She was poised at the edge of the dance floor, right up against one of the big standing speakers, lifting and dropping her feet--her bare feet--to the pulse of the bass and working her elbows as if she were doing aerobics or climbing the StairMaster. Or maybe, somewhere in her mind, she was square dancing, do-si-do and swing your partner. Her eyes were closed tight. Her knees jerked and her feet rose and fell. The red filter caught her hair and set it afire.
    “So what do you think, anything worthwhile?” Deet-Deet was saying. Deet-Deet was five foot four and a half inches tall, he was twenty-five years old and he affected the Goth style, despite the fact that most of the SFX world had long since moved on to a modified geek/Indie look. His real name was Ian Fleischer, but at Digital Dynasty people went by their online aliases only, whether they liked it or not. Bridger himself was known as “Sharper” because when he'd first started as a dust-buster, when he was earnest and committed and excited about the work they were doing, he was always hounding the Scan-Record people for sharper plates to clean. “Because I don't know if I want to stay out too late,” Deet-Deet added, by way of elucidation, “and that sake, I think, is really starting to hit me. What do you mix with that, anyway--beer? Beer, I guess, right? Stick to beer?”
    Bridger wasn't listening. He was letting the lights trigger something inside him, allowing the music to seep in and transfigure his mood. The line moved forward--maybe ten people between him and the bouncer--and he moved with it. He had a new angle now--a new perspective from which to study this girl, this woman, heroically fighting her way against the music at the edge of the dance floor. Up came her knees, down went her fists, out swung her elbows. Her movements weren't jerky or spastic or out of sync with the beat--or not exactly. It was as if she were attuned to some deeper rhythm, a counter-rhythm, some hidden matrix beneath the surface of the music that no one else--not the dancers, the DJ or the musicians who'd laid down the tracks--was aware of. It fascinated him. She fascinated him.
    “Sharper? You with me?” Deet-Deet was gaping up at him like a child lost at the fair. “I was saying, I don't know if I--you see anything worthwhile in there?” He raised himself up on his toes to get a better look. The music collapsed suddenly and then reassembled around the bass line of the next tune. “Her? Is that what you're looking at?”
    They were almost at the door, twenty-five or thirty people gathered behind them, the mist shining on everything now, on the streetlights, the palms, people's hair.
    Deet-Deet tried one last time: “You want to go in? Think it's worth the five bucks tonight?”
    It took him a moment, because he was distracted--or no, he was mesmerized. He'd been involved in two major relationships in his life, one in college and the one--with Melissa--that had died off three months ago with the sound of a tree falling in the woods when no one's there to hear it. Something tugged at him, the irresistible force, an intuition that sparked across the eroded pan of his consciousness like the flash of the strobe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I'm going in.”
    Now, as he pulled himself up out of the haze of recollection to see that the woman with the child had vaporized and the cop with the white sideburns had been replaced by a female with drooping, possibly sympathetic eyes, he got to his feet. What time was it? Past four. Radko would have a fit. He'd had a fit. He was having a fit now. Bridger had missed an entire afternoon at work just when the team needed him most--and what had he accomplished aside from having a nice nap at the public's expense on a choice buttock-smoothed bench in the downtown San Roque Police Station? Nothing. Nothing at all. Dana was still locked up back