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circuit these days—it’s just good business, nothing special. Advertisers pay for the surgery to secure market share.” She touched her earlobe amplifier. “I’ve had this one as long as I can remember.” A rare octahedral array was buried in her brain, but even so, no one was going to hunt her down for a few bucks’ worth of scrap metal in her head.
    Katzi turned to examine the wreckage, tapping a finger on his knee. “Any payload in the shuttle? Drugs? Contraband? Weapons of insurrection?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Nothing that I know about.” Could her stepfather have stashed something in the escape pod, that bastard? Something easily jettisoned in an emergency, biohazards or meta-mindscapes? Could he be involved in something illegal?
    Katzi bobbed his breather. “Then what we have here is a mystery, Simara.” He rose to his feet and turned to address the crew. “We won’t leave anything behind this trip, kids, not a scrap of evidence. Don’t even pee in the sand. Let’s go.”
    They all jumped back to full activity, though Simara was dragging behind in the heat, her skin coarse with oily grit, bleeding at her waistband. A blazing orange crescent burned on the horizon behind a veil of red smog, and a webwork of lightning flashed brighter under low purple clouds in the distance. An evening breeze stirred the dust like small spouts of steam rising from the roasting sand. Surely hell could be no worse, but Simara was glad to be alive.
    They checked behind every bulwark for packages of powder, combed the wreckage for secret compartments or hidden weapons. Simara wondered what devious activity her stepfather might be embroiled in, the pervert. No evidence was exposed to the waning light as the sun mercifully hid its face below craggy hills—no mysterious vials of biological menace, no laser cannons or restricted armaments. Darkness fell suddenly as Simara stumbled back and forth loading wreckage on Sufi’s truck. She lost her orientation momentarily as she lurched forward through deep purple haze and bumped into the burly girl with an exclamation of pain. Simara fell back and landed flat on her spine.
    “Watch yourself, wench,” Sufi growled.
    Gravity claimed Simara like a magnet as she lay prostrate in the searing sand. She pushed a glove to find purchase and rolled onto her side, barely able to move.
    Sufi kicked sand at her. “Get up before you burn that parchment skin.”
    “I can’t see,” Simara said.
    “Turn on your night vision.” Sufi crouched down and switched on a battery pack at the bridge of her nose. “That better?”
    A viewscreen came to life inside Simara’s goggles, a caricature of the desert landscape in red and green. Areas of light became brilliant with eerie luminescence, and the sand glowed red with retained heat like an electrical element. She turned her head to view the strange virtual horizon where dark mountains disappeared into burning clouds. A demonic ghoul stood before her with the head of a gargoyle and a fiendish, phosphorescent body. A helicopter sounded in the distance with a beating whine of turbines.
    “Kiva!” Sufi exclaimed, and kicked another sting of sand at Simara on the ground. “Help me cover the truck. Quickly!”
    The urgency in her tone propelled Simara to her feet. She staggered to the dune buggy with her arms outstretched into a cartoon world. They unrolled a tarp behind the seats to cover the pile of mangled components in back, as the men scrambled to do the same at the other trucks, shouting instructions and cursing the gods. Sufi pulled Simara under cover as a brilliant spotlight beam approached like a mythical cyclops.
    “Keep quiet,” she said. “Don’t move.”
    Panic rose in Simara’s throat as the helicopter drew close. The noise seemed amplified by the hours of quiet, a horror of charging armies. Simara felt like a trapped animal cowering under a tarp with a devil at her side, the viewscreen in front of her a mad