NETFEED/NEWS: Doctor Sued for Keeping Patient Alive

(visual: Dr. Sheila Loughtin and Beltings' parents at news conference)

VO: In what the International Medical Association is calling "a frightening low point in corporate compassion," a doctor is being sued by an insurance provider for keeping a patient alive past the point which Trans-European Health Insurance claims is "either ethically or financially supportable." The patient, ten-year-old Eamon Sellings of Killarney, Ireland, has been in a Tandagore coma for almost a year, but his parents and doctor refuse to remove his life support despite the demands of the insurance company. . . .

"I'm sorry," Sellars told her, but it has to go all the way to the back. That way it will be hard for anyone to find the source—that might buy you an additional half an hour to get out."

Olga wiped the sweat out of her eyes and leaned back into the duct, wedging her shoulders so she could keep her hands free. The basement hadn't seemed that hot when she started half an hour earlier, but it was beginning to feel like she was working in a sauna. She angled the camera ring to pick up the corner where the flashlight had splashed white, trying to make sure Sellars could see. "Back there?"

"Yes, that should do it. But see if you can get it behind that bundle of cables so it's a little less visible."

Olga took a moment to wipe her wet, slippery hands clean on her coveralls before lifting the bottle out of her backpack.

"You have to prime it first," Sellars said, almost apologetically. "Twist the nozzle until it clicks."

She did, briefly fearful that despite the assurances of Sellars and Major Sorensen the thing might explode in her hands, but it made only the expected noise; a moment later she was pushing it into the space she had opened by yanking a twined cable of polymer-covered cables to one side. She sat up, rubbing her hands again, and said, "It's in. Do you want to see it?"

"That's all right. . . ." Sellars had begun when someone grabbed her waist from behind.

"Caught you!"

Olga shrieked and fell off the edge of the duct backward and landed on the concrete floor, banging her elbow painfully. Panicked, she scrambled into a crouch, conscious that she had no weapon except her flashlight, and that if Sellars triggered the smoke bomb now it would be more likely to asphyxiate her than to help her escape. She could hear his startled voice talking inside her head.

"Olga? What happened?"

She reached up and pressed the t-jack, damping the sound input. The man standing over her looked just as shocked as she did. He wore a J Corporation uniform like hers, and had a lot of gray in his hair, but his posture was that of a scolded child, arms held up, hands dangling.

"You're not Lena!" He backed up a step. "Who are you?"

Olga's heart was beating like a drumroll, as though she stood at the top of a platform about to leap out to a distant trapeze. "No," she said, trying to decide if she should take advantage of his obvious surprise and shove her way past him to the door. "No, I'm not."

He leaned toward her, squinting. His eyes were a little foggy and there was something strange about the shape of his facial bones, as though they had been hastily reassembled after being dropped. "You're not Lena," he said again, "I thought you were Lena."

She took a shaky breath. "I'm . . . I'm new."

He nodded solemnly, as though she had answered some troubling question, but he still wore a worried look. "I thought you were her. I was . . . I was just teasing. I didn't mean nothing. Me and Lena, we have a joke like that." He lifted his hand and briefly chewed on one finger. "Who are you? You're not mad at me, are you?"

"No, I'm not mad at you." She felt her pulse slow a little. She remembered seeing milky eyes like his in an accident victim who had gone through a sight-saving operation. Whatever was going on, the man didn't seem like a security guard who had just caught an intruder. She finally noticed the object behind him that her eyes had flicked across several times in the last seconds while searching for an escape route—a rolling plastic bucket and long-handled mop. He was a janitor of some kind.

"That's good. I was just playing a joke, because I thought you were Lena." He smiled tentatively. "You're new, huh? What's your name? I'm Jerome."

She briefly considered lying to him, but decided that it would do little good—either he would report an unauthorized person in the basement, or he wouldn't: the name she gave would make little difference if people started looking for her in earnest. "My name is Olga, Jerome. It's nice to meet you."

He nodded his head. It was. A moment later, he squinted again. "What are you doing? Did you lose something?"

Her heart pit-pattered again. The door to the duct still hung open behind her. She turned as casually as she could and pushed it shut, searching desperately for something to tell him. "Mice," she said at last. "I thought I heard mice."

Jerome's eyes got big. "Down here? I never seen any down here." He frowned. "Should I put down some traps, maybe? We had to do that for the roaches. I don't like roaches."

"That sounds like a good idea, Jerome." She stood up, brushing herself off, forcing herself to speak slowly and calmly. "I should get back to work upstairs."

"So isn't Lena coming in this weekend?"

Olga had no idea who Lena was, and now regretted having given her name—Jerome might not be too curious, but this Lena might be. "I don't know. If I see her, I'll tell her you were asking. But I've got to get back to work now."

"Okay." He frowned again, thinking. She took the opportunity to make her way past him toward the basement stairs. "Olga?"

She let out a breath and stopped. "Yes?"

"If you see Lena, maybe you better not tell her. See, I'm not supposed to be down here yet. 'Cause I'm supposed to do the other floor first. But I heard her down here—no, I heard you down here, huh? So I came down to do a joke on her. But Mr. Kingery might be mad if he knew I came down here to do a joke on Lena."

"I won't tell anyone, Jerome. Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you. You can come down sometime when it's time to have a break. I eat my dinner down here—except it's really breakfast, I guess, because I eat it in the morning. . . ."

"That would be nice, Jerome." She waved and hurried up the stairs, unmuting the t-jack as soon as she reached the next level.

". . . Olga, can you hear me? Can you hear me?"

She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, drawing the first deep breath she had taken in minutes. "I can hear you. It is okay. A janitor surprised me. I think he might be . . . how do you say it? A little slow."

"Are you on your own now?"

"Yes. But I need to stop and rest. I almost had a heart attack when he grabbed me."

"Grabbed you?"

"Never mind. Let me get my breath back, then I will explain."

"Sorry about all the stairs," Sellars told her. "But if we interfere with the surveillance cameras in the elevators too often, building security might wonder why so many empty elevators are going up and down."

"I . . . understand." But it didn't make it any easier not to fall over in a faint.

"Catch your breath. The plans I'm looking at say the patch room is on this floor."

She peered into the hallway in time to see a flirt of color at the end of the hall as someone stepped into the elevator. She froze, waiting, but no one got out, which was good. Sellars could hide her movements by looping the output from a security camera, but only if the corridor was deserted first. It wouldn't do to have people suddenly vanishing when they entered one end and then reappearing at the other end.

The elevator door whispered shut. Now the corridor was silent again, the long stretch of dark carpet empty as a country road at night.

Sellars' long-distance manipulation of her badge worked as well for the patch room door as it had for basement access. He had begun to loop the surveillance signals in the room even before she entered, so after the door hissed open she stepped in quickly and shut the door behind her. The room, a walkway a hundred meters long with machines in racks standing on either side like the monuments of dead kings, was surprisingly cold.

"I won't keep you here any longer than I have to," Sellars told her. "So let's get to work."

She found the machine he wanted after a few minutes' search, holding up her ring to give him a chance to double-check. She took the gray rectangle out of her backpack. "Do I push it into one of these holes?"

"No, just set it against the ends of those bits sticking out, then square it up. May I see? Excellent. Now hold it flat." There was a click; the gray box vibrated for a moment under Olga's hand. "You can let go now." She did. The box remained in place. "Why don't you go sit somewhere—out of view of the door, just to be on the safe side. This will take me a short while."

Olga found an old swivel chair in a niche behind some of the equipment and collapsed into it gratefully. There was nothing to do but stare at the rows and rows of almost featureless machines. She might have dozed for a few minutes. When she woke up she was shivering from the chill and Sellars was again in her ear.

"There's something wrong."

She was suddenly alert, heart speeding. "Someone is coming?"

"No. It's just . . . this is the wrong room. The wrong equipment. As far as I can tell, none of this machinery has any connection to the Grail Network. It's all just the regular J Corporation telecom infrastructure. There's got to be another plan room—something very large."

"So what do we do now?" She was tired and could not help feeling a little resentful. It was one thing to turn your destiny over to mysterious strangers, but when those strangers had apparently sent you on a wild goose chase, it was another thing altogether.

"I truly don't know, Olga. I'll have to spend some time on the problem. I'll come back to you in one hour. In the meantime, take the tap off that machinery, then I think you should go to that storage room we talked about and wait. I've keyed your badge for it. If you go now, you can be there in five minutes. I'll massage the stair cameras."

"More stairs."

"I'm afraid so."

The storage room took up much of a floor, a huge warren full of stacks of unopened shipping boxes and unused furniture. Once Sellars looped the surveillance signal, Olga made her way to a far corner and settled herself behind a set of privacy screens in the most comfortable executive chair she could find.

She dozed again, and woke up thinking how strange it was that she should be here in the very center of the black tower, the thing she had seen in so many dreams, and yet the children who had led her to this place had vanished like shadows in the sun. The silence in her head was almost painful.

There was silence of another kind, too. She checked her internal display. Almost two hours gone. Sellars or Catur Ramsey should have called her by now. She stood and stretched, limbering herself, then found the storage facility's restroom. When she had finished, she called Sellars. There was no answer. She called Ramsey but he wasn't answering either, so she left a message for him.

It's a hard problem, this one, she guessed, and settled in to wait a bit longer.

Two hours turned into three. Olga felt a cold certainty settle on her like mist. They weren't going to call. Something was wrong—very wrong.

Four hours became five, then six. The dim safety lights high overhead continued in permanent twilight. The stacks of boxes stretched away like dozens of cardboard Stone-henges, stashed and forgotten by busy Druids. Olga's certainty had hardened into something frozen and miserable.

She was alone in the middle of the black tower. First the children had left her, now Ramsey and the man Sellars. She had been deserted again.

"I can make no sense of it," Sellars finished.

Ramsey tried to look helpfully attentive, but Sellars' explanation had lost him some time back. "Well, there must be some other equipment in the building somewhere."

"No," the old man said, "it's not that simple. All the data lines from that building come out of that patch room and get handed over to the telecom providers. And every thing in the building—even Jongleur's private offices and residence at the top of the tower—pumps out through those lines. I couldn't be missing anything as significant as the amount of throughput needed to manage the Grail network. It would be like hiding the data from all of NASA."

"Nassau?" Ramsey frowned. "The Bahamas?"

"Never mind. Before your time." Sellars took a moment to inhale through a chemical-scented rag clutched in his knobby hand, a rag that had begun to seem as much a part of him as the kerchief of a Versailles courtier. Ramsey thought the old man's breathing seemed worse just in the last two days, and could not help wondering how long a being so frail could endure this kind of stress. "But I must come up with something," Sellars continued. "Your Ms. Pirofsky is waiting patiently for a call back."

"I don't understand. You've already hacked into the Otherland system, haven't you? So why can't you find it now?"

"Because I've never been able to hack into it from Felix Jongleur's end." Sellars sighed and lowered the rag. "That's why I thought Olga's . . . incursion, for lack of a better word, might prove to be a help. I've never been able to touch the operating system, no matter what I tried. I got into the network through the Telemorphix end, where the gross maintenance of the system is done. I've been in and out of Telemorphix at will for years. I might as well be drawing a paycheck." His smile was perfunctory.

Ramsey shrugged. "So what do we do?"

"I don't know. I just. . . ." For a moment he physically faltered, then raised a shaking hand to his face as though surprised to find his head still attached. "Time is pressing now. And there are other things pulling at my attention. Any one of them might be crucial."

"Can I do anything to help?"

"Possibly. Just having you listening . . . it forces me . . . it forces me to make a little order out of the chaos. Sometimes we think we know things too well, and it's only when we try to explain them. . . ." He straightened. "Look. I will show you one of the matters that is tugging at me most strongly."

The wallscreen sprang to life in a blaze of pure light. Ramsey jumped. A moment later, the image resolved into the tangle of strange greenery that Sellars called his Garden.

"I've seen this before," Ramsey said gently.

"Not this you haven't." Sellars gestured and part of the picture jumped forward into magnified resolution. A cluster of fungus, gray and sickly, but still somehow with the shine of a new thing, had erupted from the ground around the base of one of the more complicated plants. "It just happened today, while I was working with Olga. I had all kinds of alarm messages waiting for me when I got off the line with her."

"What is it?"

"It's the operating system," Sellars said. "The Grail network operating system. Or rather, it's a pattern that looks like what the operating system does when it singles something within the network out for attention—a sort of locus of special interest."

"I have no idea what any of that means," Ramsey said, "but I guess I'm learning to be comfortable with complete and chronic ignorance. And I have to say that I'm impressed—you're the first person I've ever heard actually use the word 'locus' in conversation."

He won another smile from the old man. "What it means is that for the first time since the system went haywire, for lack of a better word, I've found a symptom of the operating system within the network. Well, the operating system is everywhere in the network, of course, but the part of it that seems intelligent, that seems to make actual choices, has been absent since things broke down. Now it's back."

"And that means. . . ?"

"In the past, as I think I told you, it was the method I used to locate my volunteers within the network. So perhaps what this concentration of attention represents is the location of the poor people I've put into danger—the people who have been hidden from me for days." He closed his eyes, thinking. "One of the reasons I wanted to get into the system from Jongleur's end was so I could bypass the network's very fierce security and have a proper chance to search for them myself. And there they are—maybe. God only knows how long this opportunity will last."

"Sounds like you need to try to contact them again,"

"I agree—if I can get in. As I think I told you, the system hasn't even allowed me to sneak Cho-Cho into the network the last few times I've tried." He paused for a moment, consulting some private source of information. "I have half an hour before I told Ms. Pirofsky I'd get back to her. That should be plenty of time for the attempt, even if it's successful—I've never been able to hold off the network security systems for more than a few minutes." He nodded toward the door separating their room from the Sorensens'. "I'll need your help. It may work differently when the boy's not asleep."

"The boy?"

"Of course, the boy. I doubt things have changed enough for the system to allow me in by myself." He inhaled from the cloth again. "But as I said, it may work differently this time—I've never tried it when Cho-Cho was awake. You can make sure he doesn't fall off the couch."

All three Sorensens stood in the doorway, watching with the sickened fascination of bystanders at the scene of an accident, even though nothing had happened yet. Christabel in particular looked frightened, and Ramsey felt a sudden tug of shame. As grown-ups, they had all failed these two kids pretty thoroughly, at least when it came to shielding them from life's uglier moments.

"Oh, for goodness' sake," Sellars said testily. "I can't get anything accomplished with you all hovering over me. Leave me alone with the boy. Mr. Ramsey will be able to help me if I need anything."

"I still don't understand what you're going to do to him, but I know I don't like it," Kaylene Sorensen declared. "Just because he's a poor little Mexican boy. . . ."

Ramsey saw Sellars bristle. "Madam, he's as much an American as you are, and certainly has a greater claim to it than I do, since I wasn't even born here." His glare softened. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Sorensen. You have every right to be worried. I apologize. I am . . . very tired. Please try not to worry. We have done this several times, Cho-Cho and I. But I do need some privacy so I can concentrate. Time is growing short. Please."

She set her jaw, but took her daughter by the hand and pulled her away from the door. "Come on, Christabel. Let's go out and sit by the pool. I'll get you an ice cream."

"Be careful, Mister Sellars," the little girl called, hesitating in the doorway. "And . . . and take care of Cho-Cho, okay?"

"I promise, little Christabel." Sellars sagged a little as the girl and her mother disappeared.

Major Sorensen was the last to leave. "I'll be in the next room," he said as he shut the door. "Holler if you need me."

Cho-Cho had pushed himself to the far end of the couch where he waited like a trapped animal. "What you think you gonna do?"

"Just what we have done before, Señor Izabal. Except this time, you're going to be awake. I'm going to send you through to that other place."

"How come awake?"

"Because I can't afford to wait until tonight. My friends might have moved again by then."

The boy scowled. "What you want me to do?"

"For now, just lie down."

Cho-Cho did so, but with the kind of careful attention that suggested he expected at any moment to be hit with something. It was not hard to see the fear under the bluster.

If people's insides were their outsider, Ramsey thought, it would be this kid, not Sellars, who was scar tissue from head to toe.

Sellars leaned forward until he could lay a trembling hand along the boy's neck. Cho-Cho shook him off and sat up. "What you doing, loco? Touching me and all that mierda?"

The old man signed. "Señor Izabal, I strongly suggest you lie down and shut up. I'm just making contact with that thing in your neck, your neurocannula." He turned to Ramsey. "I could actually just narrowcast to it, but it's a pretty shoddy piece of street engineering and I get less interference if I'm actually making contact."

"Hey! Me, I racked plenty efectivo on that, old man."

"You were robbed, sonny." Sellars laughed weakly. "No, don't get angry, I'm just teasing. It does the job well enough."

Cho-Cho lay back along the couch. "Just don't get funny."

Sellars made contact again. "Close your eyes, please." When the boy had done so, the old man shut his own, lifting his face blindly toward the ceiling. "Do you see the light yet, my young friend?"

"Kind of. All gray, like."

"Good. Now just wait. If everything goes well, in a few minutes you should find yourself inside the network, as you have before—that place you admired so much. You'll have my voice in your ear. Don't do anything until I tell you."

Cho-Cho's mouth had fallen slackly open. His fingers, pressed into fists only moments before, uncurled.

"Now. . . ." said Sellars, then fell silent. He was still as stone, but unlike Cho-Cho, he seemed not unconscious but vastly absorbed, as distant as a meditating holy man.

Ramsey watched, feeling as nearly useless as he ever had. The silence continued long enough that he was just beginning to wonder if flicking on the wallscreen for some news would interfere with whatever Sellars was doing when the old man jerked upright in his chair, his hand snapping away from the boy's neck as though the skin there had burned him.

"What is it?" Ramsey hurried to Sellars' side, but the old man did not speak. He twitched violently and his eyes opened wide then squeezed shut. A moment later he collapsed forward. If Ramsey had not wrapped his arms around the thin body, light as a bundle of sticks, Sellars would have fallen onto the floor. Ramsey pushed him back upright, but the old man only lolled in the chair, limp and silent. The boy still lay on the couch, equally slack, equally still. Ramsey tried to shake Sellars awake, then sprang to the boy, his desperation increasing with each second. The boy's head bounced on the cushions as Ramsey tried to bring him back, but lay still when Ramsey stopped.

"They're both still breathing." Sorensen let go of Sellars' wrist and stood up. "Their pulses feel regular."

"If this is Tandagore, that doesn't mean anything," Ramsey said bitterly. "My clients . . . their daughter has had normal pulse and respiration for months, the whole time she's been in a coma. Her friend did, too—he's dead now."

"Jesus." Sorensen jammed his hands in his pockets—to make it less obvious how helpless he felt, Ramsey suspected. "Jee-zuss. What the hell kind of situation are we in now?"

"The same as we were, just a bit worse." Ramsey felt so heavy he could not imagine how he would ever stand up again. "Should we take them to a hospital?"

"I don't know. Shit." Sorensen walked across the room to sit down in the other chair. There would have been room on the couch, since the unconscious child stretched only two thirds of the length, but Ramsey was not surprised by the major's choice. "Does being in the hospital help those other Tangadore kids?"

"Tandagore. No. Well, I suppose it keeps them from getting bedsores." A thought flickered past. "And they have to be fed with a drip. And catheterized, I guess."

"Catheterized. . . ? Christ." Major Sorensen seemed more depressed than frightened—Catur Ramsey wished he could say the same of himself. "I'd better go tell Kay what's going on." He frowned. "I don't know how we'll be able to take them to a hospital. The kid, yeah, but we put an advisory out on Sellars from the base to every emergency room on the Eastern seaboard, because we thought he'd be having breathing problems. Shit. Breathing's about the only thing he isn't having problems with right now."

"Don't look at me, Major. Sellars was in charge of this whole thing. I was just along for the ride."

Sorensen regarded him with something like sympathy. "Yeah. Some ride, huh, Ramsey?"

"Yeah. Some ride."

When Sorensen had disappeared through the connecting door, Ramsey went looking for his pad, hoping that he had some first-aid information on Tandagore in the research he had done for the Frederickses. When he picked it up, the small device was vibrating.

Oh, my God, he thought. It must be Olga. She's been waiting for at least an hour—she must be panicked. But what can I tell her? He fumbled the device open to take the call. I have only the most general idea of what Sellars was trying to do, and not a clue as to how he was going to go about it.

"Olga?" he said.

"No." The voice was Spectrally faint, perforated with dropouts. "No, Ramsey, it's me."

He recognized it. His hackles rose. He could not help staring at the boneless, broken shape in the wheelchair. "Sellars? How. . . ?"

"I'm not dead, Mr. Ramsey. Just . . . very busy."

"What happened? You—your body's here. You and the boy are both. . . ."

"I know. And I have very little time to talk. The system is collapsing—dying, I think. I don't know if I can get it to release its hold on the boy—or on me, for that matter. . . ." For a moment the transmission simply stopped—a pure slash of emptiness—then Sellars' whispery voice returned. ". . . vitally important. We have to find the operating system's data path so we can tap into it. Everything depends on that. You must help Olga Pirofsky. . . ."

The signal failed this time for so long that Ramsey was certain he had lost him. Sellars' living body mocked him with its silence.

". . . And don't do anything drastic with either of us. I'll reopen the connection hourly, if I can. . . ." Sellars' voice faded again. This time, it did not return.

Ramsey stared at the pad, now as mute as the old man and the sleeping boy.

"No!" he said, not even aware he spoke out loud. "No, you can't—I don't know what to do! Come back, damn you! Come back!"

Christabel could tell from the way her father was whispering to her mother that something was really wrong. She was so busy watching them talking with their heads close together that she forgot all about her ice cream until it fell off the stick and landed in a big cold blob on her foot.

She kicked it into the bushes beside the hotel pool, then rinsed her foot clean with some water from the pool because the sun was already making it sticky between her toes. It only took a few seconds, but when she looked up, her daddy was gone again and Mommy was looking at her funny. It made Christabel's stomach go flippy. She ran toward her mother.

"Christabel, never run by the pool," Mommy said, but her eyes were flicking back toward the hotel, and Christabel could tell she was hardly thinking about what she was saying.

"What's wrong?"

Her mother was putting things back in the big straw bag she'd carried down from the room. For a moment she didn't say anything. "I'm not sure," she said at last. "Your daddy said Mr. Sellars and Cho-Cho. . . ." She put both hands on her eyes, like she did when she got a bad headache. "They're not feeling well. I'm going to see if there's anything I can do to help. You can watch some net . . . Christabel?"

She hadn't waited for her mother to finish. She had known all day something bad was going to happen. She wasn't running, exactly, but she was going up the stairs from the pool as fast as she could, thinking of poor Mister Sellars and his hooty voice and how tired he looked. . . .

"Christabel!" Her mom sounded angry and scared. "Christabel! You come back here right now!"

"Christabel, what the hell are you doing in here?" her father growled as she crashed into the room. "Where's your mother?"

"She ran away from me, Mike," Mommy said, trying to hold on to the sunblock and other things she hadn't had time to put back in the bag. "She just. . . . Oh my God. What did you do to them?"

"I didn't do anything to either of them," her father said.

"Mister Ramsey, what happened?" Mommy asked.

Christabel could not stop staring. Mister Sellars looked horrible, propped up in a chair like one of the Mexican mummies she had seen on the net, his mouth open in an "o" like he was trying to whistle, his eyes half-shut. The frighteningly blank face blurred as her own eyes filled up with tears.

"Is he dead?"

"No, Christabel," Mister Ramsey said. "He's not dead. In fact, I just talked to him."

"You telling me he looks like that, and he talked to you?" said Christabel's daddy.

"He called me."

"What?"

While the grown-ups spoke in quiet but excited voices, Christabel reached out and touched Mister Sellars' face. The skin that had always looked like a melted candle was harder than she would have guessed, firm as the leather on her dress shoes. It was warm, though, and when she leaned close she could hear a little noise from deep in his throat.

"Don't die," she whispered close to his ear. "Don't die, Mister Sellars."

It was only when she turned away from him that she noticed Cho-Cho on the couch. Her heart thumped around in her chest like it was going to fall out. "Is he sick, too?"

The grown-ups were not listening to her. Mister Ramsey was trying to explain something to her parents, but they were interrupting him to ask questions. He looked tired and really, really worried. All the grown-ups looked that way.

"And I can't even call her," he was saying, talking about someone Christabel didn't know. "For some reason, I can't connect with her number. She must be going crazy!"

Staring down at Cho-Cho, Christabel thought he looked like a different kid than the one who had teased her, frightened her. His face wasn't hard when he was sleeping, not scary. He looked little. She could see the plastic thing behind his ear—his 'can, he had called it, when he bragged to her about it—and the rough skin around it that hadn't healed right.

"Are they going to die?" she asked. When the grownups still didn't answer, she felt something get hot inside her, hot and angry and eager to come out. She shouted, "I said, are they going to die?"

Mommy and Daddy and Mister Ramsey turned to her, surprised. She was a little surprised herself, not just because of the shouting, but because she was crying again. She felt upside-down.

"Christabel!" her mother said. "Honey, what. . . ?"

She stuck out her lip, trying to keep some of the crying inside. "Are they . . . are they going to die?"

"Ssshh, honey." Her mommy came over and gently lifted the little boy up from the couch, then sat down with him on her lap. "Come here," she said, then reached out and pulled Christabel toward her, too. Christabel didn't like the way the boy looked, not just normal asleep, but floppy, and she didn't want to touch him, but she squeezed up against her mother's side and let her put an arm around her.

"All right," Mommy said quietly. "It's going to be all right." She was stroking Christabel's hair, but when Christabel looked up, her mother was looking down at Cho-Cho and she seemed like she wanted to cry, too. "Everything will be all right."

It was Mister Ramsey who finally answered her question. "I don't think they're going to die, Christabel. They're not really sick—it's more like they're sleeping."

"Wake them up!"

Mister Ramsey kneeled down beside the couch. "We can't wake them up right now," he said. "Mister Sellars has to do it, but he's very busy right now. We just have to wait."

"Will he wake Cho-Cho up, too?" For some reason, she hoped it was true. She didn't know why. She would be happy for the boy to go away somewhere else in the world, but she didn't want him just to lie there all floppy forever, even if she wasn't around to see it. "You have to save him. He's really scared."

"Did he tell you that?" her mommy asked.

"Yes. No. But I could tell. I've never seen nobody so scared in my whole life."

The grown-ups went back to talking. After a while, Christabel slid out from under Mommy's arm and went to look for something warm. She wasn't strong enough to pull the cover off either of the beds, so she got two big towels out of the bathroom and wrapped one around Mister Sellars' narrow shoulders. She draped the other one over the little boy, pulling it up like a blanket to just below his chin, so it looked like he really was just having a nap on her mother's lap.

"Don't be scared," she whispered into his ear. She patted his arm, then leaned close again. "I'm here," she told him so quietly that even Mommy couldn't hear her. "So please don't be scared."

"Wrapped around a fibramic core which was one of the earliest uses of this hybrid material for a high-rise office building. The convoluted shell of custom-manufactured, low-emissivity glass, the shape of which has almost as many interpretations as interpreters, has been likened to everything from an upraised finger to a mountain or a black icicle. The resemblance to a human digit has spawned more than a few wry comments over the years, including one journalist's famous assertion that having secured everything he wanted from the pliant Louisiana legislature, J Corporation founder Felix Jongleur was offering one-half of the peace sign to the rest of us—in short, folks, he's flipping us off. . . ."

Olga paused the research file, freezing the bird's-eye view of the immense building in which she was now marooned. She was in full surround, but it was too much effort to change the viewpoint, and in any case she didn't know enough about buildings like this to be able to look for anything specific. What had Sellars said—there had to be another room with all the rest of the machinery? Without his guidance and protection, she didn't have a prayer of being able to locate it. Not without getting caught. And that was his interest, anyway, not hers. What could she learn about the voices that had drawn her here from investigating telecom equipment?

She sighed and surfaced from the wraparound long enough to make sure she was still alone in the vast storage room, then let the file—obtained from a specialty node about skyscrapers—play on.

"Topping out slightly under three hundred meters, not counting the radio mast and satellite arrays on the roof, the J Corporation tower has been surpassed by several newer buildings since its construction, most notably the five-hundred-meter Gulf Financial Services skyscraper, but it is still one of the tallest structures in Louisiana. Known primarily for the massive engineering work that went into creating the artificial island on which it stands—or which surrounds it, since the building's foundations go down as deep as the island's—and its spectacular ten-story Egyptian-themed atrium, the tower is also reputed to be the residence of Jongleur himself, the corporation's reclusive founder, who is said to keep an extensive penthouse complex on the top of the great black edifice, from which he can look down on Lake Borgne, the Gulf, and most of southeastern Louisiana and no doubt think about how much of it belongs to him. . . ."

The view of the atrium had given way to a long shot across the lake, its waters turned burnt tangerine by the setting sun, with the black spike of the tower jutting above it—a view much like Olga's own first sighting of it. She closed the file and shut off the visual override, so that the storage room sprang up around her. She had kept her incoming call line open. Ramsey and Sellars had still not tried to get in touch with her.

Olga rose to her feet, disturbed by how much she had stiffened up.

You are old. What do you expect?

But it was more than that. It was hard enough to admit that she was on her own—that whatever must be done she would have to do herself. The physical weariness and the ache of her muscles, overtaxed by a full day's cleaning and then uncountable stairs climbed at Sellars' direction, made it all seem even more impossible. What could she hope to accomplish, anyway?

Animals, when they're trapped and can't do anything, after a while they just curl up. Go to sleep. She remembered reading that somewhere. That was her own best choice, it seemed certain: just stay here, wait, doze. Wait.

Wait for what?

Something. Because I can't do anything on my own.

But even in her own head, even with her own self telling her such a sensible thing, that made her angry. Had she come much of the way down the continent to huddle like a rat in a hole simply because this man Sellars had been distracted? She had not even heard of him when she had made her decision to come here—she had planned to do it alone from the first.

But what had she planned to do, exactly? Olga had to admit that she had been so daunted by the problem of getting into the heavily-guarded corporate headquarters that she had not thought much beyond that. Sellars' intervention had in that way been a blessing. Where did you go to search for missing voices, ghost children?

To the top, she thought suddenly. This man built this place. He owns Uncle Jingle. He is the one poisoning children's minds, somehow, making them sick. If he is up there, then at least I can let him know that someone knows he is doing wrong. If I can get up there. If the guards don't kill me. I'll tell him to his face, then whatever will happen will happen.

What else can I do?

Olga began to pack up her few possessions for the journey to the top of the mountain.