Huw finds that she doesn’t give a shit for this tiresome emo nonsense. It’s transparently clear that it’s not Bonnie talking anyway—it’s the rootkit, using Bonnie’s personality as a sock puppet to manipulate her. Well, that’s okay by Huw. Huw doesn’t feel anything, but she remembers how she ought to act, how she would have acted, back when she was in the throes of lust or love or something. It’s trivially easy to calm Bonnie’s fears, to apologize for not trusting her—to pretend not to have seen the rootkit lurking gray and bloated in the wreckage of her moral maze—to agree it’s all a misunderstanding and anyway Huw hated 639,219. And so she holds Bonnie’s wrists as the floor carries them toward the exit and the djinni spins them around and down through bubbling blue layers of reality, back to the polished floor of the lobby of the Tripoli Marriott. “It’s all going to be okay.” Huw soothes Bonnie, who is whimpering and writhing but evidently in the grip of some kind of BDSM compulsion field, courtesy of the lurking djinni : “We’re going to go in there and explain that it was all a mistake and I’ll give evidence.
