“From here, we could walk greenways to Richmond Park, Hampstead Heath, and on, from either. Fourteen in all. And the hundred rivers, all recovered

Records, during the deeper jackpot, are incomplete to nonexistent, and more so in the United States. There was a military government there, briefly, that erased huge swathes of data, seemingly at random, no one seems to know why.

When she got to fifty-six, the window was gone, the balcony folded back up over it. The bugs were back, though, the transparent bubbles on their business ends facing where the window had been. She didn’t bother shooing them.

“We’re all poor, except Pickett, who’s maybe dead now, and one or two others.

Noted, wishing he hadn’t, a mons freshly mohawked since he’d last encountered it.

“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.”

“Information,” Lev said, “flows both ways. Someone must believe he knows something. Which, were it available here, would pose a danger to them.”

“Scares me, you do that shit.”

“Men,” she said. “Ella, my mother, she says the odds are good around here, but the goods are odd. ’Cept they aren’t odd, usually. More like too ordinary.”