The elevator stopped between floors.
Nyx looked at the walls, then at the floor indicator displaying a number that was not, strictly speaking, a floor, then at Proxy.
"There's five," he said, watching the feeds scroll across his deck. "All in the building. One on the second floor moving east, two on the ground floor, one on the third, wrong end, but that can change, and one I can see only intermittently on the ground floor cameras and then I cannot, which is the one I am thinking about most."
"So we fight them," she said, in the tone of someone offering a perfectly reasonable solution to a minor inconvenience.
"That's a great idea. You have about twelve rounds left in that magazine, and I have a handgun I do not know how to use particularly well. So no, we are not fighting them."
"I could fight them with the handgun."
"That is not better."
She tilted her head. "Right. I prefer if you have at least one weapon. I could use the knife?"
"Nyx."
"I'm helping!"
"You're being you, which is currently the same problem."
He had the building layout on his cyber vision beside the feeds, the two overlaid into a real-time map of where everyone was and where the windows to escape between them sat.
The windows were narrow, and getting narrower, as the five contestants spread through the building's floors.
"The jungle cuts us off from the network completely. Staying in the resort keeps our advantages active as long as we do not get seen."
"And if we get seen?"
"We run very fast and you use the twelve rounds."
She brightened slightly at that. "And the knife!"
He started the elevator again, to the second level, which had a thirty-second window of empty corridor before the contestant he was tracking would round the far intersection.
He watched the feed. Twenty seconds. Fifteen.
The doors opened and he moved, and she was immediately on his sleeve, half a step behind and matching him exactly, which was the most cooperative she'd ever been in the history of their acquaintance.
The corridor was empty, and they were through it and into the secondary wing before the thirty seconds closed.
The casino was on the east side of the second floor, and it was exactly what a resort casino looked like after years of nobody caring about it.
The tables were still set, chips still racked in their trays, card shoes still out, the screens dark along the walls except where restored power had woken a few into looping corporate screensavers that threw a pale blue glow across the display.
He took them through it low and fast, using the rows of gaming tables as cover, moving between them in the crouched shuffle of someone who knew exactly how much clearance each table offered and did not want to test the margin.
Nyx followed with the smooth, easy movement of someone whose implants had turned walking into a subconscious action.
Then she stopped.
He felt the sleeve pull.
He turned.
She was standing at a blackjack table, picking up a chip, turning it over in her fingers with the interest of someone who had found something interesting and intended to inspect that interest thoroughly.
He crossed back, took the chip from her fingers, put it back in its tray, and looked at her.
She looked at him with wide, soft eyes. "It's heavy," she whispered.
"It's a casino chip."
"I thought they were lighter than this."
"That sounds like surprisingly useless information."
"Hmph." She fell into step beside him again, reclaiming his sleeve. "I was just thinking it'd be nice if we had a casino trip one day."
He didn't bother to reply and moved. She kept pace.
From somewhere on the floor above them a crush came down. A heavy impact and walls breaking apart, reduced to rumble, the percussion of someone who searched by destroying everything in his path rather than looking at it.
That one had been on the third floor when he'd last tracked it, but sound traveled oddly in abandoned buildings, and he did not love the ambiguity.
"The loud one is looking for us the hard way," he said, very quietly.
"I heard," she whispered back, her voice warm, soft and close, as if they were having a comfortable conversation at the bar rather than moving through a dead casino in the dark. "He's going to find us eventually like this."
"Maybe. The question is whether that happens on our terms or his."
"I like my terms better," she said.
"Your terms involves the knife."
"The knife is an excellent tool."
"I'm sure it is."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I could use the butt of the SMG."
"We are done discussing this."
She smiled at the back of his head. He could feel it the same way he could feel most things she did in close proximity, just knowing it was there.
They came out of the casino through a service door on the far side and into the museum corridor.
It was narrow and long, the resort's own history apparently, because a place that expensive needed mythology to justify itself.
There were framed photographs behind glass, about the original opening, the construction, executives shaking hands over things that had long since become irrelevant, and display cases with artifacts that had seemed important at the time.
A long, thin space with both ends visible only if you were already in it.
He checked both feeds before committing. Clear, near end. Clear, far end.
Seventeen seconds before the contestant he was tracking would come into range of the far camera.
He moved.
The corridor felt different from the casino. The casino had been wide enough that emptiness was a resource. Here the walls were close enough that the space between them and any mistake was in centimeters rather than meters.
He kept his footfalls silent, heel to toe, weight transferred forward slowly, the old floor under the carpet shifting in ways that had to be felt before being trusted.
Nyx moved behind him the way she moved through everything in close quarters, her implants doing what they did, her presence so near that her breathing was audible.
That was when he felt it through the resort network.
A pressure at the bottom of his connection.
A probe signal, moving through the resort's systems, feeling for the presence of whoever was already occupying the network.
The unknown netrunner was in the residual systems, following the active nodes back toward their source, and they were good at it.
He could feel the intelligence of it in the way the probe moved, a targeted signal work that came from someone who had spent real time learning how networks breathed.
He pressed into the wall and put his hand out to stop Nyx.
She stopped immediately. He felt her watch the change in him the way she always did it, her eyes flickering amber.
"Network," he said, barely a whisper. "Someone else in the system."
"Can you stop them?"
"I can manage for now. It's like..." he paused, looking for the right word, because accuracy mattered here.
"Someone is reading the same book I am in. I can make it harder to find the page I am on. But she'll keep looking, and eventually she'll find something I left a mark on."
"What does that mean for us?"
"It means the resort stops being entirely ours. And it means I cannot depend on the feeds the way I have been."
She was silent for a moment, pressed against the wall beside him, the SMG held low and ready out of reflex.
"So I was right that we should have fought them at the start."
"You were not right."
"In retrospect..."
"You were not right."
He pushed back against the probe signal carefully, misdirecting it toward dead nodes, sending it in circles through the network lower systems where there was nothing to find.
It would hold for a few minutes. Then she'd recalibrate. Then he'd have to do it again.
He started moving.
They reached the junction at the far end, service stairs going down to the east wing on the left, main corridor back through the casino on the right, and he pulled up both feeds at the same time.
The stairwell camera caught the blur of a figure on the landing below. Heavy armor, shoulder-mounted unit, positioned with the patience of someone who had decided to watch a door rather than open it.
The main corridor camera showed something that was not quite a person, a displacement in the air, a shimmer at the shadows where the camera's depth processing could not fully track it, moving slowly and then not moving at all.
Neither of those were good.
He looked at the third option.
A door at the far end of the museum corridor, almost behind them, set into the wall, SERVICE ACCESS, and his deck showed it connecting to a maintenance shaft between floors.
He started back toward it, his mind already reaching through the network to work the panel.
A glass case shattered at the near end of the corridor, at the other side.
A chrome-obsessed augmentation fanatic stood at the corridor entrance.
Chrome covered his skull, his jaw, much of the visible surface of him, the modifications dense enough that the line between hardware and person was an aesthetic question as much as a biological one.
He did not look down the corridor to search it.
He looked at the first display case within reach and put his fist through the glass.
Then he moved to the second one.
The sound filled the entire corridor.
Proxy had the service door panel open.
He looked at Nyx.
She was looking at the figure at the end of the corridor with the expression she got when there was a prey ready for her to pounce on.