The reflex kicked in now and she re-read her note to Kettlebelly -- Kettlewell! -- and felt a crimp in her guts. Then she hit send. She needed to pee, and apparently had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new incoming mail. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? I will never call myself Kettlebelly again. Your pal, Kettledrum. Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit. She did a little two-step at her bed's edge. Tomorrow she'd go see her editor about this, but it just felt *right*, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever. It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance and an hour's worth of fiddling with tweets from the press-conference, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell's insomnia was as contagious as his excitement. # Hollywood, Florida's biggest junkyard was situated in the rubble of a half-built ghost-mall off Taft Street. Suzanne's Miami airport rental car came with a GPS, but the little box hadn't ever heard of the mall; it was off the map. So she took a moment in the sweltering parking-lot of her coffin hotel to call her interview subject again and get better coordinates. "Yeah, it's 'cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn't been included in the USGS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I'll get you some decent lat-long." His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell's talent-scouts. The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they'd been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they'd been abandoned, they hadn't been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she'd left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually *farmed* by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail.