Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

The bleached, icy expanses of what had once been Arabia Desert stretched on and on, drift upon drift of white like spilled sugar, the misty sky almost the same color as the empty countryside. By the end of the second day, the miserable cold was no longer Paul's greatest concern. He was beginning to miss color the way a starving man misses food.

"But for me," Florimel said, "it is the waste of time I most regret. It is like being forced to walk down train tracks for hundreds of kilometers while trains pass on the other tracks. An entire system set up for instant travel, but we cannot make it work."

They had searched several more snowbound Arabian palaces in hopes of finding another gateway, with no luck. "If we could only see enough of this place to make some sense of it," Paul complained, as he had already done many times, "we could probably find the sort of place they usually hide their gates."

"Oh, chizz," said T4b. "So oughta just keep digging in the snow like some kind of dogs, us? Chance not."

"We have already agreed." Martine's plume of breath was the only sign she had spoken. Like the others, she was so wrapped in rugs pilfered from the icy fantasy castles that her face was all but hidden. Paul thought they all looked like piles of washing waiting to go in the machine. "We continue to the end of the river. At least we know we will find one there."

"I didn't mean to open up the argument again." Paul stared disconsolately at the line of the black river stretching ahead. "Just . . . thinking about Renie and the others . . . feeling so useless. . . ."

"We are all feeling the same way," Martine assured him. "Some of us may even feel worse than that."

It came up so slowly, perhaps because of the thickening mist, perhaps because the dark, cold water muted its normal vibrance, that Paul and the others were on top of it before they noticed.

"Op it," said T4b. "In the water around the boat—that blue light!"

"My God," Martine gasped. "We dare not go through on the river. Head for land!"

They applied their makeshift paddles, beautifully carved bits of paneling stolen from cabinets and chests in the empty palaces, to fight against the sluggish current. When the bow of the small boat grounded in the shallows they waded to shore through freezing water, losing several precious blankets in the process.

"I don't want to pressure you, Martine," Paul said, his wet feet already making him shiver, "but we're going to be frostbitten if this takes too long."

She nodded distractedly. "We are right at the edge of the simulation. I am trying to find the gate information." The river and its banks nearly vanished in the mists only a few hundred yards ahead, but some trick of the simworld's programming gave glimpses of greater distances, made it seem that there was more river and more land beyond. Paul wondered what would have been seen here before Dread covered the place with killing frost—an illusion of unending desert?

"I think I have it," Martine finally announced. "Pull the boat along beside us so we don't lose it. We must all walk forward."

They followed her small, shrouded figure through the drifts like a group of lost mountaineers trying to slay close to their Sherpa guide. T4b was the slowest, making his way along the river shore with the boat's rope, pulling the little craft against the current. He had been quiet much of the trip, even his usual litany of complaints muted, so much so that Paul wondered if the young man were going through some kind of personality change.

Paul could not help remembering a young soldier in his squadron, a lad from Cheshire with a thin, girlish face and a habit of talking about his family back home as though everyone in the trenches knew them and wanted to hear what they said and thought. The first bad bombardment had silenced him quite thoroughly. After seeing the reality of what the Germans wanted to do to them all, he became as miserly of speech as the most confirmed misanthrope in the trenches.

Six weeks later he had been killed by an artillery shell at Savy Wood. Paul could not remember him having spoken for days beforehand.

Startled, he pulled up. Martine had stopped in front of him and was studying the swirling mists with her blind eyes as though reading directions on a street sign.

What are you going on about? Savy bloody Wood? That isn't real—or your memories aren't, anyway. It was all make-believe.

But it felt real. The details of the World War One simulation he retained felt no different than the recovered memories of his real life, either the musty routine of his job at the Tate or his strange year in Jongleur's tower fortress.

So how do you know any of those memories are real? It was a question he didn't want to face, especially not here, in icy mists that might have cloaked the edge of the world, the reefs of Limbo. How do you know? How do you know Paul Jonas is even your real name—that anything you think happened actually happened?

"Step forward." Martine's croaking voice sent the phantoms flying. "We must hold hands as we step through, just to be sure."

"Did you find Egypt?" Paul reached out and took Florimel's callused fingers, even as she clutched T4b's free hand.

"Just s–step forward with m–m–me—I will explain when we p–pass through. Hurry! I f–feel like I am fr–freezing to death!"

As they walked forward, tangles of unsteady blue light curled up between their feet; sparks vibrated in the air like drunken fireflies. Paul felt the static lifting his hair.

Every detail, he marveled. They thought of every detail. . . .

Twenty paces later he stepped through into burning air and sunshine that struck him like a hammerblow.

The river still flowed, but hundreds of meters below them now, glinting in harsh sunlight at the bottom of a raw, red mud canyon. The dirt road on which they stood was less than a dozen meters wide. It felt something like being on the trail up the side of the black glass mountain once more.

"It is . . . the index said this is. . . ." Martine sounded a little dazed. "Dodge City. Is that not a place in the old American West?"

Paul's whistle of surprise was interrupted by a loud yelp of alarm from T4b. They turned to see the young man stumbling back from what had been their boat, but was now a large wagon on spoked wheels. Odd as the transformation was, it was not so much the wagon that seemed to have startled him as the beast yoked to the wagon.

"W–w–was holdin' the rope on the boat, like," T4b stuttered as he halted beside Paul. "We come through, holdin' that instead!"

The shaggy black creature in the traces had something of the shape of a horse, but its back legs were too large and its front legs had knuckled hands like those of a great ape. Its face was long, but not as long as a horse's, and tiny ears lay close to the sides of its bulging forehead.

"What is it?" Paul asked. The creature had bent to graze on dry grass beside the narrow dirt road. "Something extinct?"

"Nothing I have ever seen," Florimel said. "Not with fingers, no. I think it is something made up."

"None of this is what I expected." Martine swiveled her sightless gaze back over the canyon. On the far side, contorted shapes that Paul had briefly taken for human watchers, but which now he saw were cacti, stood along the ridgeline. "I . . . do not think there were such large mountains in Kansas, even in the nineteenth century."

"Why are we here?" Paul was grateful for the hot sun—he was even beginning to sweat a little. He dumped his rugs, which had changed their pattern but not their general substance, onto the dusty road.

"To imitate the old joke," Martine said, "there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the Egypt sim-world still exists, or at least it is still on the index. The bad is that we could not get to it from the Arabian Nights world."

"Can we reach it from this one?"

"Not if we go all the way through," she said. "The river gate at the end of this simulation opens to something called 'Shadowland'—or once did, anyway. But there appeared to be a secondary gate, the kind that would be somewhere in the middle of the simulation, that we can use."

"And that will take us to Egypt?"

"Yes, as far as I could tell. It is hard to be certain because some of the codes that indicated status were indecipherable to me. But I believe the chances are good."

"Hey!" T4b shouted. "Op this!" He had wandered a sort distance back up the sloping road and was peering at something in the dry grasses. "Hole in the ground, but with like a frame around it. Some kind of treasure dungeon, something."

"Stay with us, Javier," Florimel called to him. "That sounds like a mine shaft. It will not be safe."

"So what now?" Paul asked. "Where do you think this other gateway is?"

Martine shrugged. "If this simworld is named Dodge City, I would think that the city would be a good place to start looking." She pointed down the canyon. "If we are at one edge of the simulation, then it must be in that direction. Do you see anything?"

"Not from here." He turned to Florimel. "Do you know anything about horses? If that's what that thing is supposed to be?"

She favored him with a grim smile. "I have dealt with a few. Again, the benefits of growing up on a rural commune. Why don't you throw the rugs into the back so we have something to sit on?" She turned and shouted down the road to T4b, where the top of his black-haired head showed above the long weeds. His arm went up and down, as though he were waving at something. "Damn you, Javier, if you fall down in there and break your legs, I am not going to pull you out. Come and help us."

"Deep, utter," T4b said as he rejoined them few moments later. "Took that rock like about a minute to hit the bottom."

"Jesus," Paul said in weary annoyance, "can we just get going?"

They piled into the wagon. Florimel had indeed managed to gentle the horselike creature, although Paul thought it looked at the rest of them with something less than trust as she climbed up onto the bench and took the reins. When the rest of the company was seated on the hard boards she clicked her tongue softly and the creature began to move down the gentle incline. The road was narrow and the canyon opened starkly to their left, a fall that would last several seconds should any of them be unlucky enough to try it, and Paul was glad of the beast's deliberate pace.

"It is so strange," Florimel said. "It is a river valley, but it seems so . . . raw." Indeed, the edges of the canyon wall, banded in red and brown and orange, glistened like meat. "So new."

"I've never been here," Paul said, "I mean, in the real world, but I agree with Martine—I don't think there are many mountain ranges in Kansas. T4b? Do you know anything about it?"

The youth was staring out of the back of the wagon. "About what?"

"Kansas."

"That a city, something, right?"

Paul sighed.

"It is new," Martine said. "At least, I can feel something in the geological information—I cannot think of a better way to say it—that suggests it has changed much and is still changing." She frowned. "What is that clanking?"

"The very poor suspension of this wagon, perhaps," said Florimel sourly. "By the way, this thing pulling us is not what I think of as a native American animal either, when you come to it. In fact, I am reminded of. . . ."

"Fenfen!" T4b shouted suddenly, pointing back up the slope. "Op it! Look!"

Paul turned to see a huge, glittering shape slide out of the mine shaft. For a moment it was only multiple starbursts of bouncing light, then the great head heaved around toward them, and with the bright reflections gone, Paul could suddenly see it clearly.

"Sweet Jesus," he said. "It's some kind of snake!"

But it was more than that—it was another thing like their horse, familiar yet strange. As the monstrous creature heaved more of its bulk out of the shaft, he saw that its body was studded with great chunks of copper and silver, as though its bones were metal and protruded through the horny, patterned skin. Instead of a smooth tube, it was segmented like a child's toy, but weirdest of all were the wheels at the bottom of each segment, great round buttons of bone.

"It's a. . . ." Absurdly, even in heart-pounding fright he found himself grasping for the proper term. "A mine train—ore cars!"

The thing writhed, squeaking and scraping, out onto the road. For a moment it tried to draw itself into a circle, but there was not enough room for its massive coils in the flat space along the edge of the cliffs. It rose up swaying, just its front two sections looming several meters high, and for a moment its huge, faceted rose-quartz eyes seemed to consider their wagon, halted and helpless as Florimel tried to calm the terrified horse-creature. A tongue like a hardened stream of quicksilver flicked out, then flicked out again, then with terrifying speed the serpent dropped its head and slid down the road toward them.

"Get out," Paul shouted. "It's corning! We'll have to run!"

"Chance not!" T4b slithered out of the wagon and onto the front bench and snatched the reins from Florimel. "Done this one before, me—just like Baja Hades!"

He whipped the horse-creature's flank with the end of the reins until it gave a shrill whistle of pain and surprise, then leaped away down the road so suddenly that the wagon almost tipped over. It was all Paul could do to cling to the side. As soon as he regained his balance, the wagon wheeled around a bend and he spun sideways again to crash into Martine and almost knock her over the low railing. The snake-thing had fallen out of sight behind them.

"Flyin' now!" T4b whooped. "Told you, done this before!"

"This isn't a game!" Paul shouted at him. "This is bloody real!"

Florimel took advantage of a section of straightaway to fling herself into the back of the wagon with the others. She grabbed fiercely at the board railing beside Paul.

"If we survive," she gasped, "I will kill him."

The odds on that outcome rapidly became worse; as the careening wagon picked up speed on an increasing slope, the vast head of the serpentine creature came around the corner behind them, followed by its juddering body. It had wheels, as well as the great muscular power of its ore-knobbed body to push it along. It was gaining on them.

They thundered over rocks in the road and for a moment Paul felt himself rise weightlessly off the wagon bed, then gravity reasserted itself, slamming him down hard on his back on the boards. A body, either Florimel's or Martine's, thumped on top of him and drove out the air, so that for a moment the sky exploded with daytime stars.

A second later the wagon tipped up at an alarming angle as the terrified horse dragged it around another bend on two wheels. From his position, it seemed certain to Paul that they had run off the side of the road and were hanging over pure nothing.

When all four wheels were touching ground again, Paul clambered up onto his hands and knees with the idea of putting Florimel's plan into action now, on the chance that they would not live to kill T4b later on. Instead, as he lifted his head up above the wagon floor, he saw the terrible face of their pursuer only meters behind them. The creature saw him, too. A mouth full of draggled iron fangs opened wide, displaying black depths as impenetrable as the pit out of which it had crawled.

Paul decided not to strangle the teenager just yet.

"It's catching up!" he shouted.

T4b crouched lower on the bench, snapping the reins against the horse-creature's back, but the animal had no greater speed to give them. Another bump and Paul felt himself flung up in the air again, and for a moment was heart-stoppingly certain he would be flung out the back of the wagon and into those waiting jaws. Instead he tangled with Florimel and the two of them slid and crashed into the back railing of the wagon.

"Grab her!" Florimel shouted as he struggled to extricate himself. For a moment Paul had no idea what she meant, but then saw that Martine also had hit the back of the wagon at such an angle that she had nearly flown out. She was clinging with one leg and one arm, her left leg dangling only a few inches above the dirt, too stunned even to cry out.

Paul scrambled along the railing, but could not get a firm hold on Martine's flailing limbs as he fought against the wagon's ceaseless jouncing. Florimel grabbed him, helping to anchor him as he worked to better his grip. T4b was staring back in alarm, and as if sensing his inattention the horse-creature had slowed a little. The pursuing serpent gave a creaking hiss and rose up behind them, looming over the wagon like the terrifying figurehead of a Viking ship.

The wagon abruptly swung to the right as the horse followed a tight curve in the hillside. Paul, Florimel, and Martine were all flung to the outside rail of the wagon; for an instant, Martine lifted off the railing and was in open air with nothing below her but the painted strata of the canyon. Paul felt her sleeve begin to rip under his fingers, the material pulling apart at the seams, even as the dragon head darted down at them and the giant stony jaws clacked a hand's breadth from Paul's head.

Paul yanked Martine back down into the wagon, banging her skull against the rail in the process. The serpent reared again, then paused and abruptly rolled sideways, its hiss a shriek of surprise, and fell away behind them.

Paul clambered to his knees, staring. The tail of the serpent had failed to make the last sharp bend, even as the head had driven in for the kill. Much of the creature's bulk had already skidded down the steep slope in a billow of dust. As Paul watched, the great head whipped back and forth as it tried to gain purchase with the part of its body still on the mountain road, but too much of its back end was sliding downward. With a screech like failing brakes, the head thrashed toward them once, sun glinting from the copper nodes, then it was gone over the side like a yanked rope.

Moments later a grinding crash echoed up to them, the sound of a vertical train wreck.

Paul slumped back to the wagon bed. Martine and Florimel lay beside him, breathing in shallow, rapid gasps. The wagon was still jolting swiftly down the winding road, swaying dangerously at every turn.

"It's gone!" he shouted. "Javier, it's gone! Slow down!"

"This thing's locked up! Won't go slow!"

Exhausted, Paul sat up. The boy was pulling back as hard on the reins as he could, but although the horse had modified its pace a little, it was still moving down the hill road at a near gallop.

"It can't slow down," Florimel groaned from the boards beside him. "The wagon will run over it. Find the brake!"

"Brakes? On a wagon?"

"Great God, of course there is!" She clambered past Paul and leaned across T4b's lap. She grabbed something there and pulled up. There was a groaning noise and for a moment the wheels dug, then rolled again, but this time a little more slowly.

"Damn," said Paul. "I can't tell you how happy I am you knew that."

They were still rolling downhill at a whistling pace, but all four wheels now remained in contact with the ground. Paul, Martine, and Florimel dragged themselves back into the center of the wagon bed as the rocky hillside rushed past.

"Everybody all right?" Paul asked.

Martine groaned. "I have scraped most of the skin off my hands. Otherwise, I will live."

"Hey!" shouted T4b. "What about some charge for the driver?"

"What?" Florimel rubbed bruised knees. "Is he asking for drugs?"

"Charge!" T4b said, and laughed. "You know, rep!"

Paul, who was at least glancingly conversant with street slang, was the first to figure it out. "Thanks. He wants us to thank him,"

"Thank him?" Florimel growled. '"I would give him a painful spanking if I didn't worry we'd go over the cliff."

T4b scowled. "Didn't get eat by no snake, you. What's your boohoo?"

"You did a good job, Javier," Martine said. "Just keep your eyes on the road, please."

Paul spread his legs to brace himself, then leaned against the front of the wagon bed, watching the hill road wind away behind them. The sun was dazzlingly bright, only an eyelash short of noon. Raw metal glinted here and there in the ragged landscape.

"I doubt that either that snake or the horse pulling us were part of the original package for this place," he said. "Does that remind you of anything?" He was startled by a line of black appearing on the ridge beside them. It took a moment before he realized it was some kind of cable. He raised himself on his elbows and turned to look ahead. The cable paralleled the road, stretched along sentinel tree trunks.

Telephones? Not in Dodge City. Telegraph, must be. He eased himself back and watched the hill road and the line of black sliding away behind them.

"It is like Kunohara's world," Florimel said. "Those mutations he said had just begun there. Perhaps Dread has done something like that here as well."

"That would be a quick and perhaps amusing way to spoil things," Martine said. She spoke slowly, obviously still tired and sore. "And he has so many worlds to ruin. Just turn up a few randomizing factors, perhaps, then sit and watch someone's carefully-crafted simulation turn into something bizarre."

Another telegraph line now hung below the first, twin black streaks along the left side of Paul's vision. The wagon rattled and lurched down the stony road. Paul groaned. It was hard to imagine a less comfortable way to travel—he was surprised he hadn't broken any teeth with all the jaw-snapping bounces. "Can't we go any slower?"

"Not if you want Mister Horse in front of this ride," T4b said crossly.

Now there were telegraph lines along the canyon rim as well, so that the wagon rolled between two high, sparse fences of black cables. Paul wondered if this was another misshaping of the original simulation, and if so, what weird communication ran along these extra cables. Or were they merely empty copies?

"I think I see a town," Florimel said. "See, down at the bottom of the canyon."

Paul clambered to the edge of the wagon and squinted. The sun's glare off the canyon walls was fierce, making the river at the bottom a twisting line of silvery fire, but there was certainly something along the river's edge just before the canyon bent and blocked the rest of the river valley from view, something that seemed too regular to be stone on the canyon floor.

"Martine, can you tell if that's really a town—Dodge City, or whatever this is? I can't see it very well."

"We will reach it soon enough." She reached up and rubbed listlessly at her temples. "Forgive me."

"What in hell is going on?" Florimel said.

For a moment Paul thought she was talking about Martine's unwillingness to come look; then he saw that just ahead another half-dozen cables ran in from the hillside and then bent off a leaning pole and stretched over the top of the roadway like a musical staff with no notes. An instant later they were bouncing along beneath the awning of black lines, and Paul could not help seeing that the cables now surrounded them on all sides. They hung loosely, a meter or two of empty space between each pair, so they were not in any way trapped, but it was still an unsettling sight.

"I don't know," Paul belatedly answered Florimel. "But I don't like it very much. . . ." He looked up past T4b just as the wagon rounded a bend, still traveling in a tube of telegraph cables. The young man swore and jerked back hard on the reins. Their horse was already trying to slow up, but the weight of the wagon behind it was too much and the creature's knob-knuckled feet were furrowing the roadway.

Just a few dozen meters ahead the cables all ran together, knotted in a crooked black mandala across the middle of the wide road. It looked like. . . .

"Christ!" shouted Florimel, tumbling as the horse tangled in the traces and the wagon began to sway alarmingly. "What. . . ?"

It looked like a huge spiderweb.

"Get out!" Paul shouted. The horse had bolted to the inner side of the roadway and the wagon could not make a sharp enough turn to follow. The wheels dug and skidded. The whole wagon began to tip even as it plunged swiftly forward into the swaying net of cables, now only a stone's throw away. "Jump—now!"

Martine was wrapped around his legs. The wagon bed was tilting up sideways, lifting them inexorably toward the canyon side of the road. Paul bent down and grabbed the blind woman, then did his best to climb to the rising side of the wagon, hoping to leap out toward the hillside, but Martine's weight was too much for him.

One of the wagon wheels snapped with a noise like a gunshot. A splintered piece of spoke arrowed past his face and the whole wagon groaned like a wounded animal as it tumbled onto its side.

Paul had no chance to pick spots. He grabbed Martine and flung himself off the wagon bed. Something sticky caught at him, sagging beneath his weight, and for a moment he had the alarming sight of nothing but empty air beneath him, of the full vertiginous drop down the crazy-banded side of the canyon. He half-slid, half-fell down the row of cables until he was sitting in a painful, twisted position in the roadway, stuck at the nexus point of two of the black bands, with Martine lying motionless across his lap.

Before he could even look for the others, the wagon and the trapped, tethered horse rolled into the web of cable blocking the roadway, flinging up a dense cloud of dust. One of the horse's legs was obviously broken; it writhed helplessly in the wreckage of the wagon, a mess of kicking black fur and splintered wood dangling from the sticky web.

Then the web's builders appeared—hairy gray-and-brown shapes climbing up from the canyon or down the hillside, scuttling along the strands like spiders.

Spiders would have been bad enough. These things had the faces of dead buffalo, with hanging tongues and rolling eyes, atop their malformed, many-limbed bodies. Worst of all, they were even more clearly part-human than the insect-monsters of Kunohara's world. They hissed with hungry pleasure as they advanced down the swaying cables. The first of them to reach the middle of the web began to pull the living horse apart, bickering in wet, piping voices over the best bits, ignoring the creature's agonized squeals as they began to feed.

Paul tried to drag himself upright, but the sticky cables held him like a strong hand.

"CODE Delphi. Start here.

"It seems pointless to me even to record these thoughts, since I cannot believe we will ever leave this place, but the habit dies hard.

"It is dark here, the others tell me—some kind of underground nest, filthy to smell and unpleasant to hear. I wish I could limit myself to those two senses, but in my own way I can even see the things moving, eating, coupling. They are horrible. I am running out of hope. My strength is all but gone.

"I suppose we are alive only because they feasted on the horse first. The sounds it made dying were. . . . No. What is the point? Is there something we can do? I can think of nothing. There are dozens of the monsters. We should have tried to escape when we were first seized. Now we are in their nest. Any hope that they eat only animals has been destroyed by the human bones that lie everywhere, in careless piles. Those I touched have been picked clean of flesh and broken for marrow.

"Horrible things. T4b, who has spent most of the time praying, called them 'rotten-cow spiders.' I have not had a clear impression of them. What I perceive is the mass of them, the limbs, the voices—almost human, but my God, that word 'almost'. . . !

"Stop, Martine. We have faced situations as bad as this and survived. Why is it that I am so weak, so weary, so miserable? Why have the past days felt like work too hard for me to do?

"It is. . . .

"Good God. One of the things came to sniff at us. Florimel drove it away by kicking at it, but it did not seem frightened. They do smell of rotted meat, but they also have another scent, something strange I cannot define, something nonliving. This whole place, this simworld, seems to be in a paroxysm of change. The others can see only what is at this moment, but I can perceive the changes that have happened and those that are about to happen. Dread has grabbed the place and squeezed hard. This world has not resisted him any better than would a fistful of butter. Heaven only knows what these poor creatures were. People, perhaps. Ordinary people with ordinary lives. Now they live in holes in the ground and squeak like rats and eat things that are still screaming.

"Where is Paul? I cannot sense him near me anymore. But the noise and heat and confusion make it difficult. . . .

"Florimel says he is just a few meters away, on his hands and knees. Poor man. To have gone through so much, only to end here.

"I cannot stand this anymore—any of it. Ever since the Trojan simulation I have been dazed as an electroshock victim. In between the terrors and lesser distractions I have tried to find myself, the Martine I know, but it is as if I have been hollowed. The memory of the last hours of Troy haunts me. How could I do such a thing? Even to save these friends, how could I bring death to so many? Rape and torture and destruction? And after watching the pitiable humanity of Hector and his family, too.

"I tell myself over and over that they were only Simulaera, not real, only bits of gear. Sometimes I believe it, for hours at a stretch. Maybe it truly is so, but I know that I cannot stop seeing the spear plunging into that Trojan soldier's stomach, the horror on his face. How can I know that was not someone like us, still trapped in the system, forced to play out his part in a famous war? Not likely, perhaps, but still . . . still.

"I dreamed last night that the great burning light of my own blinding came streaming out of his wound. I dreamed that I fell into a darkness even greater than the one I have known.

"I cannot stand this place. I cannot live with this madness. I ran away from all of this years ago. I am not meant to care this much. I do not want to be terrified anymore, to see my friends threatened and hounded and killed.

"I do not want to meet Dread again.

"There. That is perhaps the greatest fear. I admit it! Even should some improbable thing happen, should we drag ourselves out of this stinking pit, away from these cannibal monstrosities, it does not take magic to know that any road back to the real world must run through him. He handled me as though I were a child—made me whimper. Made me beg him to stop, and all without needing to cause any physical pain. Now he has the power of a god, and he is furious.

"Oh, merciful Heaven, I don't want this.

"It's all too much. I wish could turn off these senses. I want to cover it all over, bury myself in the dark—but not this dark! Escape . . . I don't want this!

"They're coming toward us, a great group of them. Are they . . . singing?

"Paul is gone—Florimel says so. Have they already taken him?

"T4b! They're coming! Get over here with Florimel and me!

"I wish he had his armor. I should . . . if this is the last . . . I should . . . but. . . .

"Oh, God, not this. . . !"

CHAPTER I6Badlands

CHAPTER I6
Badlands