'Why?'

'Because she was cheating.' Doris's tone was placid. 'I knew she was. She's such a fool.'

'Cheating in her poisoning cla.s.s?'

'That's right,' said Doris, and shrugged. 'She was warned.'

'Still . . .' Abraham sounded hesitant. At last he walked away. Seeing the little smirk on Doris's face, Cadel also withdrew, thinking hard.

This injury, he decided, would have an excitatory potential. Some kind of action would almost certainly result, though the variables would be hard to calculate. He just didn't know enough about Gemini to plot a decent causation tree.

'Oi, Cadel!' Gazo was lumbering along, trying to catch up with him. 'What do you fink? Bit scary.'

'Mmm.'

'Poor Jem. I feel sorry for her, even if she can be a b.i.t.c.h. Where are you going?'

'To Hardware Heaven.'

'Oh.' Gazo stopped. The Virus wouldn't let him into Hardware Heaven. 'Well, I s'pose I'll see you later? At lunch?'

Cadel didn't reply. His head was too full of calculations. He made straight for his computer and spent the rest of the day wrestling with probability factors and external inputs. That evening, he couldn't help himself: he asked Kay-Lee if she thought it was possible to turn emotions into equations. Perhaps, she replied doubtfully, if they were a form of chemical equation. But chemistry, she added, wasn't her strong suit.

The next morning, when the twins turned up to their Forgery cla.s.s, both were sporting identical bandages on their right cheeks.

'We're twins,' said Ni, when asked what had happened, and everyone was dumbfounded. Ni's message was clear. She had cut her own cheek so that, once again, it was almost impossible to distinguish her from her sister.

Even Doris was impressed.

'Talk about blood is thicker than water,' she murmured. 'Where would they stop?'

Cadel wondered the same thing. And he was sure that he could work it out, given enough information a especially since Niobe's sacrifice had hugely reduced the range of possibilities. In the two remaining weeks of the first semester he struggled with his undeveloped program, lost in a mire of complicated mathematical and chemical equations. He also hovered around the twins as much as he could, trying to glean little nuggets of precious data. He had read their files, of course a Thaddeus had given those to him without a single protest a but the files weren't complete. He needed to know all kinds of things about Jem and Ni, like their comparative degrees of compet.i.tiveness, the composition of their combined self-image, what they liked to do in their spare time . . .

It didn't take him long to realise that their habits had suddenly changed. Though he had never before encountered them in the library, they now spent hours there, whispering together in the stacks. No longer did they giggle and flirt, and expose their tummies in skimpy little tops. Now they dressed in leather and camouflage colours. Now they were wary of everything and everyone, including Cadel. Even he found it hard to monitor them because they would edge away when he drew near.

Nevertheless, he didn't need round-the-clock video surveillance or even a predictive computer program to tell him what they were up to.

'I think they're going to plant a bomb,' Cadel told Thaddeus. 'I think they're mad at Dr Lasco, and they want to blow him up.'

'I'm not surprised,' Thaddeus said dismissively. He was busy preparing for a transmission from Dr Darkkon, tuning frequencies and plugging in cables. 'Half the time, I feel like blowing Luther up myself.'

'Oh. Right. Well...' Cadel didn't know how to continue. 'I thought I'd better tell you, anyway.'

'Thank you, Cadel, but you needn't worry.' Thaddeus flashed him a smile. 'The whole inst.i.tute is wired for sound a and pictures. Besides, Luther Lasco can look after himself. And I can't say I'd put much faith in those dizzy blonde extroverts. Pa.s.s me the pliers, would you?'

As it turned out, Thaddeus's lack of confidence in the twins' abilities was justified.

Just three days before the Easter vacation, Niobe blew two of her fingers off in a failed attempt to b.o.o.by-trap Luther Lasco's car.

TWENTY.

Cadel hadn't been looking forward to the holidays. He didn't have any friends to spend them with, and he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with himself, away from the inst.i.tute. When he discovered that Sark and Com and the other Infiltration students kept wandering into Hardware Heaven as if nothing had changed, he decided to follow their example. If they could spend their entire vacation tapping away at a computer keyboard, so could he.

The Virus wasn't around much, but that didn't matter: Cadel preferred to work on his own. If he was ever stumped by a particular equation, he could always ask Kay-Lee for help a and he frequently did. Sometimes, when he needed a break, he would work on his Partner Post correspondence. By now he was growing bored with Partner Post, and he wasn't devoting nearly as much time and effort to his emails. As a result, clients were beginning to drop off his list, disgusted that their perfect partners were forgetting their birthdays, not replying to their letters, and confusing them with other people.

Cadel didn't mind. He had saved up quite a lot of money, thanks to Partner Post. Much of it had been spent on fancy computer software, and the rest had been used to buy presents for Kay-Lee a until she stopped him.

No more, she'd instructed. This is ridiculous. Anyone would think you were trying to prove something. I know how you feel, Stormer a just relax. I'm not going anywhere.

At lunchtime, Cadel would buy his usual chicken roll or ham and cheese focaccia at the refectory, which remained open during the holidays. Here Gazo would wait for him like a faithful dog. It was clear that Gazo had almost no one else to talk to. Cadel couldn't help feeling sorry for him. Though Gazo lived on campus, surrounded by students who also lived on campus, he was obviously unpopular. People avoided him, despite his protective suit.

'Them twins,' Gazo complained one afternoon, 'they look right through me, like I don't exist. Why do they afta be so snooty? They only got a "C" on their Law exam.'

'You mean they're still around?' Cadel was surprised. 'I thought they must have gone away to the beach, or something. I haven't seen them. What do they do with themselves?'

'Shoplifting, mostly.' Gazo leaned across the table, lowering his voice. 'Did you hear what happened? Wiv them twins?'

Cadel, who had been peeling bits of alfalfa off his chicken roll, looked up. He studied Gazo's expression.

'They're fighting,' he said at last.

'Oh.' Gazo slumped. 'You heard.'

'No.' In fact, Cadel had calculated the probabilities. 'What have you heard?'

'Only what's going round the dorms,' said Gazo. 'Jem decided she wouldn't blow her fingers off to match Niobe, even if Ni cut her own cheek for Jem's sake. So Ni's mad at her, now. She's put some kind of poison in Jem's fingernail polish, because Jem's going round wiv her fingers all covered in bandaids. Weird, eh?'

Cadel grunted.

'They're not nice, them girls.' Gazo glanced around the refectory, folding his arms. 'They're not talking to each uvver, no more.'

Cadel wasn't surprised. Curiously enough, he wasn't too pleased, either. Although he had predicted this fight as a likely outcome, it was not one that he approved of. The thought of Jem and Ni slugging it out filled him with a deep sense of discomfort, for some reason.

'They come and go,' Gazo added, 'but they don't do it togevver. I ain't seen 'em for a week. I ain't seen n.o.body much, except Kunio. Not from our year. What about you?'

'Not really,' Cadel replied. In fact, he had seen Abraham only the night before. It had been late a about half past nine a when Cadel had looked up from his computer screen and realised that he would have to get home quickly, or run the risk of alarming the Piggotts. (He didn't want to do that, in case they had second thoughts about the inst.i.tute.) Hurriedly he had packed his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and scampered out of Hardware Heaven. He hadn't expected to find Abraham using the lift.

Chalk-white, his eyes concealed behind an enormous pair of wrap-around sungla.s.ses, Abraham had confessed that he preferred to work at night. He had even considered living in the dormitories so that he wouldn't have to brave the sunlight when cla.s.ses began again.

'At least I'd be able to stay indoors,' he'd said. 'Out of the sunlight, you know? I hate sunlight.'

He had given Cadel a ride home in a little bomb of a Ford Cortina that smelled of chemicals and mouldy carpet. During the trip, he had talked non-stop about the dwindling sum in his bank account, the ghastly people he shared his house with, and the way his family kept sticking their noses into his business.

'They think I'm insane,' he'd lamented. 'They actually think I'm insane, when they wouldn't know one end of a chromosome from the other! It's ridiculous.'

Cadel had looked out the window, clutching his backpack against his chest. The street lights had flowed past. He had seen into people's houses, catching glimpses of families laying tables and watching television. These glowing images always made him feel sad a he didn't know why.

'Why do you want to create vampires?' he'd suddenly asked.

'What do you mean?' Abraham had sounded astonished. 'Why shouldn't I?'

Cadel had struggled to phrase his next question without causing offence. 'The thing is a I can't quite see the point, really. Perhaps you could explain.'

A long pause had followed. At last Abraham had said, in withering accents: 'Well if you don't know the answer to that already, Cadel, it makes me wonder what you're doing at the inst.i.tute.'

This remark had lingered in Cadel's head. He had pondered it that evening, and again the next morning. Abraham was a little bit mad, of course, but was he also a little bit right? Was Cadel missing something really, really obvious? Were his occasional doubts shared by other students? Was the inst.i.tute really his natural habitat?

Certainly Gazo wasn't entirely comfortable there. He didn't like the Yarramundi campus, or the way he would sometimes hear animals squealing at night. He complained about the students who set fire to litter bins and stuck razor blades into library books. He had even been forced to put rat traps in his dresser because of all the theft happening in the dorms.

But Gazo was an idiot. Surely, for that reason, his opinions didn't matter?

'I know Doris is visiting her granny,' Gazo was saying, as the refectory slowly emptied. 'She's lucky she's got one. I can't even get a job, wiv my suit on. It gets a bit boring.'

'You should study,' Cadel remarked, through a mouthful of chicken.

'I do study,' Gazo sighed. 'I study a lot. But I can't do it all the time. Not like you. Hey, what are you doing upstairs? Are you hacking into the CIA's computer system a stuff like that?'

'No,' Cadel replied. In fact, he had recently decided that someone was hacking into his system. It hardly seemed possible that anything should have breached his firewalls, but he had started to notice one or two flickers of activity that worried him. They were very subtle, but they were unmistakably there.

His solution had been to build a special program, full of locks and traps, to lure the invader into an exposed position. This had worked, but only up to a point. The questing tentacles of code had, more than once, appeared in his system; but when he'd tried to trace them back to their source they had broken up, dissolving into a meaningless soup. It was intensely frustrating. He did, however, have an idea for a virus that might stop the rot. If it was to bond with the invading code and prevent it from self-destructing, then perhaps he'd have a chance. But he would have to construct the virus on another system. A discrete system. Otherwise the mysterious hacker would know what he was up to...

'Oh!' Gazo suddenly exclaimed. 'h.e.l.lo, Maestro.'

Cadel jumped. He hadn't noticed Max's approach, despite the fact that the Maestro's bodyguards now numbered three. It was odd to see Max in the refectory. Normally, he didn't join his colleagues for lunch.

'Cadel,' he said, surveying the two students from beneath weary eyelids. 'What are you doing here?'

In response, Cadel lifted the remains of his chicken roll.

'You working? Studying?' Max wanted to know, and Cadel nodded. 'Where?'

'Computer room.'

'Private project, is it?'

'Sort of.'

'Vee can't be around much.'

Cadel shook his head. Gazo, who obviously couldn't bear to be left out, added: 'Cadel's here all the time. He loves working here. Even in the holidays.'

'Zat so?' Max studied Cadel's face, as if searching for something. Cadel kept his expression bland, though he was secretly annoyed. Why shouldn't he be working upstairs? What was Max's problem?

'Heard you talking about your old man,' Max continued, removing a cigar from his pocket and lighting up. There were no non-smoking areas at the inst.i.tute. 'Speak to 'im much?'

'Sometimes,' Cadel rejoined, cagily.

'Keeping an eye on you, is he?'

'Yes.'

Max nodded. Puffing at his cigar, he stared at Cadel for a moment longer. Then he jerked his head at his bodyguards, and they all went to buy cappuccinos a all four of them.

Cadel headed in the opposite direction, making his way to the door. 'Hey, Cadel.' Gazo had followed him. 'You didn't finish your roll.'

'I wasn't hungry.'

'They're a bit scary, aren't they? Them blokes.' Gazo glanced back over his shoulder. 'Do you fink they're in the mafia? Abraham says they are.' 'Gazo.' Cadel stopped and turned. 'Don't you have anything else to do?'

Gazo faltered. His whole body slumped.

'Not really,' he mumbled. 'I told you.'

'Well, I have. I'm working. Why don't you go and a I don't know a watch TV? Go for a run?' 'I can't. Not in this. I can only run at night, when no one's around.' 'Well, go and write to my dad, then,' Cadel suggested. 'Tell him how you're doing.'

Gazo's face brightened behind its plastic shield.

'Yeah?' he said. 'You fink I should?'

'Definitely.'

'Okay.'

'Good,' said Cadel, moving away. But Gazo's voice pursued him.

'I dunno his address! Cadel!'

'Just give me the letter,' Cadel called back. 'I'll pa.s.s it on.'

'Will you? Oh, great! You're a mate, Cadel, fanks a lot!'

Cadel went straight home to work on his virus. He worked away until two o'clock in the morning, undisturbed by the Piggotts. (Stuart was in New York at the time, and Lanna was in bed with a migraine.) The next day he also spent at home, working feverishly. The day after that he worked until three o'clock in the afternoon, before packing his bag and hurrying off to the inst.i.tute. He couldn't wait another night. He wanted to test out his new program immediately.

When he arrived at Hardware Heaven, he found an envelope sitting on his keyboard. It was addressed to him. Inside were Gazo's letter to Dr Darkkon, and a covering note for Cadel.

Deer Cadel, it said. This is my leter for your dad. I hope you get it. I hope your not sick. I dont know were you live or I coud visit you. I have to tell you importent news. Your freind Gazo.

Cadel shook his head over this message. He wondered what the important news was. Something to do with theft in the dorms, no doubt. Cadel tucked the letters into his pocket and glanced over at Com. Com was always in Hardware Heaven, tapping away at his keyboard like a robot. He was more like a computer than a person; he never displayed the slightest interest in what anyone else was doing. That was why Cadel tended to ignore him.

Sark wasn't around; nor was Dr Vee. Cadel had the room pretty much to himself and quickly took advantage of the fact. He set about tracing the source of the mysterious probes that were infiltrating his programs.