The contents of the hidden drawer were mostly plastic and base metal, but they gleamed at her eyes with more promise than a chest full of rubies and diamonds. A small Sony notebook PC and its accessories, a power supply and CD drive. With shaking hands she opened the computer's lid and pushed the power button. The screen flickered, and LEDs flashed, then it shut down again. "Oh, of course." The battery had run down in the months of enforced inactivity. Well, no need to worry: New Britain had alternating current electricity, and the little transformer was designed for international use, rugged enough to eat their bizarre mixture of frequency and voltage without melting. (Even though she'd had a devil of a time at first, establishing how the local units of measurement translated into terms she was vaguely familiar with.)
Closing the suitcase, she felt the tension drain from her shoulders. I can go home, she told herself. Any time I want to. All she had to do was walk twenty-live paces north, cross over again at the prearranged time, and then find an electric light socket to plug the computer into. "Huh." She glanced at her watch, surprised to discover that fifty minutes had already passed. She'd arranged to reappear in three hours, the fastest crossing she felt confident she could manage without medication. But that was before the cramps and the migraine had hit her. She stood up clumsily, brushed down her clothes, and oriented herself using the small compass she'd found among Burgeson's stock. "Okay, here goes nothing."
Another tree, another two hours: this time in the right place for the return trip to the side alley behind the workshop. Miriam settled down to wait. What do I really want to do? she asked herself. It was a hard question to answer. Before the massacre at the betrothal ceremony-already nearly a week ago-she'd had the grim luxury of certainty. But now... I could buy my way hack into the game, she realized. The Idiot's dead so the betrothal makes no sense anymore. Henryk's probably dead, too. And I've got valuable information, if I can get Angbard's car. Mike's presence changed everything. Hitherto, all the Clan's strategic planning and internecine plotting had made the key assumption that they were inviolable in their own estates, masters of their own world. But if the U.S. government could send spies, then the implications were likely to shake the Clan to its foundations. They've been looking for the Clan for years, she realized. But now they'd found the narcoterrorists- one world's feudal baron is another world's drug lord -the whole elaborate game of charades that Clan security played was over. The other player could kick over the card table any time they wanted. You can doppelganger a castle against world-walkers, but you can't stop them crossing over outside your walls and planting a backpack nuke. In an endgame between the Clan and the CIA or its world-walking equivalent, there could be only one winner.
"So they can't win a confrontation. But if they lose..." She blinked. They had Iris, Patricia, her mask-wearing mother. Could I let her go? The thought was painful. And then there were others, the ones she could count as friends. Olga, Brill, poor innocent kids like Kara. Even James Lee. She could cut and run, but she'd be leaving them to- no, that's not right. She shook her head. Where did this unwelcome sense of responsibility come from? Damn it, I haven't gone native! But it was too late to protest: they'd tied her into their lives, and if she just walked out on them, much less walked willingly into the arms of enemies who'd happily see them all dead or buried so deep in jail they'd never see daylight, she'd be personally responsible for the betrayal.
"They'll have to go." Somewhere beyond the reach of a government agency that relied on coerced and imprisoned world-walkers. "But where?" New Britain was a possibility. Her experiment in technology transfer had worked, after all. What if we went overt? She wondered.
