He imagined Annie Courrèges boarding some government craft, whisked out to a moby en route to Brazil. Her own plans, whatever they had been, as suddenly and irrevocably altered as anyone’s would be, should someone like Lowbeer decide to alter them. Lowbeer wasn’t simply the Met. No one Lowbeer’s age was simply anything. He looked up at those lights, dimly flitting within the sagging bladders of an imaginary airship, and noticed for the first time that they were vaguely figural. Captive electrical souls. Who designed these terrible things?