to help, just say so. But stop trying to dissuade me." She slammed the stylus down. "Are you in or out?"
"I'm in," I said. "I'm in."
"Then get dressed," she said.
I was already dressed. I said so.
"Put on Roman's armor. We need to be on even footing with Osborne if we're going to catch him, and that stuff won't fit me."
"What about Roman?"
"He'll be back," she said. "We have his d-hopper."
* * *
What did I call it? "Outlandish technocrat armor?" Maybe from the outside. But once I was inside, man, I was a god. I walked on seven-league boots, boots that would let me jump as high as the treetops. My vision extended down to the infrared and up into the ultraviolet and further up into the electromagnetic, so that I could see the chemically-encoded housenet signals traversing the root-systems that the houses all tied into, the fingers of polarized light lengthening as the sun dipped to the west. My hearing was acute as a rabbit's, the wind's soughing and the
