"It's live," she said, not looking up from the viewfinder. "Going out live to my blog. Daily readership half a million. They're watching you now, every move. Do you understand?" The officer said, "Put the camera down, ma'am." She held the camera. "I can't quote the First Amendment from memory, not exactly, but I know it well enough that I'm not moving this camera. It's live, you understand -- every move is going out live, right now." The officer stepped back, turned his head, muttered in his mic. "There's an ambulance coming," he said. "Your friend was shot with a nonlethal rubber bullet." "He's bleeding from the head," Lester said. "From the eye." Suzanne shuddered. Ambulance sirens in the distance. Lester stroked Perry's hair. Suzanne took a step back and panned it over Perry's ruined face, bloody and swollen. The rubber bullet must have taken him either right in the eye or just over it. "Perry Mason Gibbons was unarmed and posed no threat to Sheriff's Deputy Badge Number 5724 --" she zoomed in on it -- "when he was shot with a rubber bullet in the eye. He is unconscious and bloody on the ground in front of the workshop where he has worked quietly and unassumingly to invent and manufacture new technologies." The cop knew when to cut his losses. He turned aside and walked back into the shantytown, leaving Suzanne to turn her camera on Perry, on the EMTs who evacced him to the ambulance, on the three injured shantytowners who were on the ambulance with him, on the corpse they wheeled out on his own gurney, one of the newcomers to the shantytown, a man she didn't recognize. They operated on Perry all that night, gingerly tweezing fragments of bone from his shattered left orbit out of his eye and face. Some had floated to the back of the socket and posed a special risk of brain damage, the doctor explained into her camera. Lester was a rock, sitting silently in the waiting room, talking calmly and firmly with the cops and over the phone to Kettlewell and the specially impaneled board-room full of Kodacell lawyers who wanted to micromanage this. Rat-Toothed Freddy filed a column in which he called her a "grandstanding bint," and accused Kodacell of harboring dangerous fugitives. He'd dug up the fact that one of the newcomers to the shantytown -- not the one they'd killed, that was a bystander -- was wanted for holding up a liquor-store with a corkscrew the year before. Lester unscrewed his earphone and scrubbed at his eyes. Impulsively, she leaned over and gave him a hug. He stiffened up at first but then relaxed and enfolded her in his huge, warm arms. She could barely make her arms meet around his broad, soft back -- it was like hugging a giant loaf of bread. She squeezed tighter and he did too. He was a good hugger. "You holding in there, kiddo?" she said. "Yeah," he murmured into her neck. "No." He squeezed tighter. "As well as I need to, anyway."