Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

She stood paralyzed on the platform, watching the arc of the trapeze as it sailed out toward her, paused, then swung back into the shadows at the top of the big tent. She knew that she must leap out and catch it on the next swing or else she would never reach it, would be stuck on the high platform forever. But she knew just as firmly that there was no net, and that a fall onto the sawdust-caked center ring beneath her, invisible in the glare of the spotlights, would be like an eighty-foot swan dive onto cement.

The trapeze swung toward her again and its slightly diminished arc confirmed that she would get no more chances. She tensed her muscles and felt the edge of the platform through the soles of the soft shoes, letting herself lean forward against every shrieking instinct until her balance was compromised and there was no turning back. As the bar neared the end of its swing, slowing to the moment when it would finally stop and hang in space for a fraction of a second, she leaped outward into the pillars of light, the unending dark.

Only as she touched the rung, clutched, and felt it squirt from her grasp like a bar of soap—only in that moment when she too was briefly weightless, but with all of death and eternity solidifying around her, changing her from a person into a mere proof of gravity—did Olga realize she was dreaming. The dream-audience bellowed in distorted surprise and terror, deafening her even as she fell, then she was gasping on the floor of the storeroom where she had fallen asleep, shivering and struggling to catch her breath as the air-conditioning vent above her head roared like a jet engine.

By the time she had found the water fountain and taken a long drink the trembling was beginning to subside. Some deep frequency in the air-conditioning was starting to make her feel ill, so she picked up her belongings and moved to the other side of the storeroom.

The unintended nap had done little to make her feel better. She could still feel the moment of slippage and freefall, something that even after years of working over a net, practicing with her father and his aerialists, never completely lost its terror.

Wouldn't be much of a circus unless there is a chance someone might die.

Strangely, the thought gave her a little comfort. Nothing was assured in that life or this: even a safety net was no guarantee. Jansci, the Hungarian wire-walker, a good friend of her father's, had fallen to the net during practice, caught his foot as he was bouncing up, and had somehow gone over the edge. A mere fifteen-foot fall, but it had paralyzed him.

No guarantee, even with a net.

She drank a little more water, then tried Catur Ramsey's line again, but whatever magic had once connected her through the telematic jack to the real world outside this artificial black mountain was gone. The coach was a pumpkin once more, the footmen had become mice. She would have to do it on her own.

She packed her meager belongings and headed for the service elevator.

Almost a full day of living like a rat in the walls of Felix Jongleur's house had made her cautious. When the elevator hissed open on the mezzanine floor she peered around the edge before stepping out, then shrank back into the interior until the young man at the end of the corridor had rounded the corner and disappeared. He was wearing a collarless shirt and work pants, but seemed more like a business employee in casual clothes than a custodial worker—perhaps a young manager on the way up, anxious to impress the bosses with unpaid overtime.

Even the minions of Hell don't have to dress up on weekends, she decided. I don't remember Mr. Dante mentioning that.

As she held the door open and waited a few extra moments for safety, she could not help thinking about the dozens of oh-so-ordinary employees she had seen around the building, all doing oh-so-ordinary things. In fact, she had seen no evidence that her own reasons for being here were anything but delusional. J Corporation headquarters, once she was past its forbidding black facade, held nothing she could not have found in any downtown skyscraper. Even the hardened office for the squad of security guards was not excessive if you considered that the building was also the residence of one of the world's richest men.

Any reasonable person would have to admit that the fantasies of lost children and worldwide conspiracies seemed more and more farfetched—and Olga herself was a reasonable person.

Can you be reasonable and still be insane? she wondered. That would seem to be stretching the rules a bit.

When she felt certain the hallway was empty, she made her way down the stairs from the mezzanine onto the ground floor of the vast, pyramid-roofed lobby. Although she had seen several people crossing from one elevator bank to another, at the moment it was empty—almost shockingly so, in the way only a closed public building can seem. She hurried across the black marble floor toward the main reception desk, the echo of her footsteps sounding as loud as gunfire. When she reached the desk she made a show for the hidden cameras of accidentally tipping a square vase of flowers across the countertop, so that the water and the fading irises from Friday morning splashed out onto the floor in front of the desk. Pretending she had not noticed what she'd done, she hurried back up to the comparative safety of the mezzanine.

From a secure place in a copse of potted ornamental trees she waited and watched as an agonizingly slow trickle of J Corporation workers checked in through the inset security door for some weekend catch-up, or wandered across the lobby from one part of the building to the other. Several of them seemed to notice the pool of water and spilled flowers in front of the desk, but if any of them decided to notify someone about it they used their telematic jack to do so. Olga had no way of knowing for sure.

An hour went by. Somewhere between twenty and thirty employees had trekked across the lobby but the spilled vase still lay untended. The huge clock on the wall, a rectangle of gold the size of a panel truck inset with Egyptian figures and characters, showed a few minutes past eight o'clock. Saturday night, her time almost half gone, and nothing accomplished. Olga had always been a patient woman, but now she felt herself stretched like a thin cord, vibrating in every breeze, poised to snap. She had all but decided that she would have to take the risk of exposing herself on a search of the lower floors when a gangly figure shuffled out of the service elevator and across the lobby floor pushing a plastic bin on wheels, a mop resting on one shoulder like a sentry's rifle.

Relieved, Olga let out a long-held sigh of breath. She watched for a moment as the custodian gathered up the fallen irises with slow, careful movements, then lowered the mop. When she was sure she was right—who knew how many custodians actually worked here on weekends?—she hurried to the elevator and got in. A minute later it was summoned to the lobby level. She did her best to look surprised when he got in.

"Well, hello, Jerome," she said as he bumped his bin over the tiny gap between car and door. She gave him her best smile. "What are you doing up here?"

"I don't know anything about that, Olga." He spoke mildly, but was clearly troubled. "All those floors are closed. I only been up there when the security fellows ask me to come help move something." He sat thinking with his mouth open and his milky eyes almost shut, half a sandwich in his hand, arrested on its upward journey.

Olga forced herself to take a bite of the liverwurst sandwich he had insisted she share. Since she had vetoed eating in the custodians' lunchroom, convincing him instead to join her in the storage room—she had spent so much time there it was beginning to feel like home—she had not felt it polite to turn down the sandwich, despite her extremely mixed feelings about liverwurst, "So . . . so you've been to those floors?"

"Oh, sure. Lots of times. But only up to the security office." He frowned again. "Once to the room above that where they have all these machines, because one of the bosses was angry there was mouse poop there and he wanted to show me. But I told him I didn't even clean that room, so how was I supposed to know there were mice up there?" He laughed, then embarrassedly cleaned a morsel of liverwurst from his chin. "Lena said the mice were going up in the elevator! That was really funny."

Olga tried to suppress her almost panicky interest in this second machine room. What good would it do her, in any case? She had no idea how to attach Sellars' device, or what to attach it to, and no Sellars to benefit from its use anyway. But it was in the part of the tower she wanted to visit. "So could you take me up there?"

He shook his head. "We're not supposed to. We'll get in trouble."

"But I told you, if I don't, I'll get in trouble."

"I still don't understand," he said, chewing vigorously again.

"I told you, my friend from the other shift took me up there Friday, just to show it to me. But I dropped my wallet up there, you see? By accident. And if someone finds it I will get in trouble. And I also won't have my cards for shopping and things."

"You'd get in trouble, huh?"

"Yes. They will fire me for sure. And I won't be able to help my daughter and her little girl." Olga was torn between self-loathing and increasing desperation. Nobody but a man with some serious thinking problems would buy an ill-concocted story like this. She was taking advantage of Jerome because he was credulous and eager to please—probably brain-damaged—and she felt like the lowest scum imaginable. Only by thinking of the dream-children as though the memories were a mantra, of the way they had flocked to her like frightened birds seeking shelter, their imploring, hopeless voices, could she ease the pain of what she was doing.

"Maybe . . . maybe we could just tell some of the fellows in security," Jerome said at last. "They're pretty nice guys, really. They could get it for you."

"No!" She softened her tone and tried again. "No, they would have to file a report, otherwise they'd get in trouble, see? Then the friend who took me up there would get in trouble, too. I don't want someone else to get fired because of a mistake I made."

"You're a nice person, Olga."

She winced, but tried to keep her smile. "Is there anything you can do, Jerome?"

He was clearly very distressed by the idea of breaking the rules, but she could see him thinking carefully. "I could try, but I don't know if the elevator will open. Which floor did you lose your wallet on?"

"The one with the machines."' It seemed likely to be the most sparsely occupied, and there might be a way to get to the other floors—didn't even the highest-security, most supervillainish buildings still legally have to have stairways and fire escapes? As for how to get rid of Jerome so she could investigate in peace, she would have to think of something on the fly.

Maybe you could club him unconscious when you get there, Olga, she thought sourly. Just to make the whole thing complete.

Jerome put the rest of his sandwich back in the vacuum bag and carefully sealed it. He seemed to have lost his appetite. "We can go up and see, Olga. But if it doesn't work, don't get mad at me, okay?"

"I promise." And may God forgive me for this, she thought.

Ramsey looked around the room, trying to take it all in. Even for a virtual environment, where gravity was not an issue and cubic footage was equally an illusion, it was insanely cluttered. A grisly pile of heads in transparent boxes, a collection of human and nonhuman trophies more like flash-freeze holograms than actual decapitations, dominated the multilevel space, but there was plenty of competition. Strange objects were stacked everywhere, swords and spears and complete sets of armor, gems the size of Catur Ramsey's virtual fist, huge skulls of animals that could never, thank God, have actually lived in the real world, even a banister that was a huge, immobilized snake with a head half as long as Ramsey was tall. The walls, where they could be seen between the leaning piles of memorabilia, showed two scenes whose complete disparity were the only reason Ramsey knew they were displays rather than what was supposed to be outside Orlando Gardiner's electronic home in the Inner District.

The Cretaceous swamp, where even now a mother Hadrosaur was chasing away a slender Dromeosaurus that had made a couple of halfhearted lunges toward her eggs, was a pretty obvious thing for a kid to be interested in; the other, a vast and seemingly lifeless landscape of red dust was a little less understandable.

All in all, it was a boy's room in a place with no limits, and these were the proud possessions of a boy who would never come back to claim them. Ramsey could not help thinking of the child-king Tutankhamen, his tomb stuffed with personal effects dug open and exposed to view millennia after his death. Would Orlando's room just remain on the net? He supposed the Gardiners would have to keep paying for it. But what if they did? Would someone stumble across it generations in the future and try to make sense of the mind and world of a forgotten child from the twenty-first century? It was a strange and pitiful thought, a life in all its complexity reduced to a few toys and souvenirs.

Well, maybe not a few. . . .

A hole opened in the floor and something like the head of a ragged black dust mop emerged, accompanied by a cloud of cartoon dust.

"Thanks for meeting me here," Beezle said.

"No problem. Is this. . . ." He wanted to ask if the place was special to the agent, but again found himself confused. It wasn't even like Beezle was a real artificial personality. He was a kid's toy, essentially. "Do you come here a lot?"

Beezle's goggling eyes rolled and then settled. His answer was strangely hesitant. "I know where everything is. So it's a good place. To do things."

"Right." Ramsey looked around for someplace to sit. The only obvious thing designed for human comfort was a hammock stretched in one corner.

"You want a chair?" Beezle reached down into the hole in the floor and, with a few strange sound effects, produced a chair three or four times his own size. "Si'down. I'll tell you what I found."

As Ramsey made himself comfortable, Beezle produced a small black cube, then flicked it so that it opened into a foggy three-dimensional shape that hung in the middle of the room. A moment later the fog inside dispersed, revealing a tall black object.

"That's the J Corporation building."

"Yep." Beezle tapped the transparent cube and the building opened like a paper book, revealing its interior. "This is from that guy Sellars' notes."

"You found them!

"Yep. What is this guy, anyway, a robot or something? He keeps his notes in machine language."

"He's not a robot, as far as I know, but it's a long story and I'm in a hurry. Can you put me back in touch with Olga Pirofsky?"

"You wanna see where she is?" Beezle waved a misshapen foot and a tiny red dot gleamed into view about one third of the way up the structure. "Sellars has a trace on her—she's got a badge or something, right?—and you can track it off the readers they got on all the floors. It's a weak signal, but it's enough to triangulate her."

As Ramsey watched, the red dot slowly began to move sideways. She's alive, anyway, he thought. Unless someone's carrying her. "Do Sellars' notes tell you what he planned to do? Something about tapping into the building's data stream, that's all I know."

"Kind of," Beezle said, cabdriver voice suddenly distracted. "Your friend—she's moving."

"I saw. . . ." Ramsey began, then suddenly realized that the red dot had stopped its horizontal movement and was now slowly rising. "Oh, my God, what's happening? What's she doing?"

"Service elevator. She's going up."

"But the top of the building. . . ! That's where Sellars said the private quarters were, and the security guards. I have to stop her!" He had a sudden thought. "Will her badge let her in up there?"

Beezle gave as much of a shrug as a creature with no shoulders and too many legs could manage. "Not unless she's done something to change it. Let me check." After a moment's silence, he said, "Nope. She could stop on the security floor, but if she tries to get out anywhere else above the forty-fifth she's probably gonna set off all the alarms."

"Christ. Can you put me in contact with her?"

"I haven't finished looking through all this stuff yet, but I'll try." Another hole in the floor opened next to Beezle. He made a move toward it, then stopped. "You know they got a whole army base on that island? Why the heck you wanna mess with someplace like that, anyway?"

"Just hook me up!" Ramsey shouted.

Beezle took a few shambling steps and dropped into the pit. Moments later the electronic cottage resounded with the clang of something being hammered and the earsplitting voopa-voopa of a wood saw.

"Good Christ, what are you doing?"

Beezle's voice echoed as it drifted up out of the hole in the floor. "What you asked me to do, boss. You wanna let me work?"

The red light was climbing steadily up the tower. Ramsey could not bear to watch. He turned to the rusty desert that covered one whole wall. He could see now that there were small beetlelike shapes in the sand, half-buried and as motionless as fossils. He dimly remembered reading something on the net about the MBC Project on Mars, how the little robots had stopped working.

That'll teach them to trust machines, he thought bitterly, wincing as the saw started up again, accompanied by what sounded like a jackhammer, shaking the walls of the 'cot until it seemed the whole thing might fall down. A plume of dust floated up out of the hole. A dragon's skull vibrated off a shelf and shattered, a piece of the jaw coming to rest beside Ramsey's feet.

In the midst of it all, the red dot rose serenely upward.

Despite the smoothness of the silent elevator, Olga felt as though a giant had grabbed her in its fist and was lifting her up, up toward a monstrous face she didn't want to see. She suddenly knew exactly why she'd dreamed of the circus, all its performers now dead and gone—a part of her life that was equally dead. It had been just like this, the climb up the ladder to the high platform, no matter how many times she did it: part of it had been almost mechanical, hand over hand in practiced motion, and even the surface of her mind had been full of rote memorizations, all the things her father had taught her to set her mind and prepare herself for whatever might come.

"Always you must be inside your thoughts and outside your body, my dear one." She suddenly could almost see him in the elevator with her, as close as Jerome was standing, Papa with his neat, graying beard, the scar across the bridge of his nose where his own brother's heel had broken it when they were young performers. It was only one or many scars—his large hands were ribboned with them, scored by nets and tent cables and guy wires. He often claimed that on his days off, he played catch with Le Cirque Royale's knife thrower. The first time he had said it, when she was three or four, she had been terrified until he assured her it was a joke.

He smelled of pine resin, always, which he used to keep his hands dry in the ring. That and her mama's cigarettes, those foul Russian things, even after all these years the two smells always brought back her childhood in an instant. Watching her father with his big hands on Mama's shoulders, or wrapped around her waist from behind while they watched rehearsal. Mama always, always with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her chin lifted to keep the smoke out of her eyes. She had been ramrod straight, slender, her dancer's body hard and muscular well into her seventies, before she got sick.

"My Polish princess," Papa had called Mama. "Look at her," he had always said, half-mocking, half-proud. "She may not be royalty, but she's built like it. No rear end on her at all, hips like a boy." And then he would give Mama a playful swat on the backside, and she would hiss at him like a cat being annoyed by a child. Papa would laugh, winking at Olga and the world. Look at my good-looking wife, it meant. And look at the temper she has on her!

They were both long gone now, Mama dead from cancer, her father following not long after, as everyone knew he would. He had said it himself: "I don't want to outlive her. You and your brother, Olga, God grant you long lives. Don't take offense if I don't stick around to see the grandchildren."

But there weren't any grandchildren, of course. Olga's brother Benjamin had died not long after her parents, a freakish piece of bad luck when his appendix had ruptured while he was on a mountaineering holiday with friends from university. And long before that she had lost her own baby and her husband in the same week—her entire chance at happiness, it had seemed then and still somehow did.

So I'm the last, she thought. That line from Mama's and Papa's parents and grandparents ends with me—maybe ends today, right here in this building. For the first time in days she felt truly overwhelmed. So sad, so . . . final. All the plans those people made, the baby blankets they knitted, the money they tucked away, and it all comes down to an aging woman probably throwing her life away over a delusion.

The elevator seemed to be creeping upward as slowly as a rising tide, the little squares on the black glass panel lighting one after the other. So sad.

"Do you have a family around here?" she asked Jerome, just to hear some human noise.

"My mom." He was squinting at the blinking lights on the panel as though hypnotized. She wondered how well he could see. They climbed from 35 to 36 to 37. For a modern elevator, Olga thought it seemed cruelly slow. "She lives in Garyville," Jerome went on. "My brother lives in Houston, Texas."

"Olga? Can you hear me?" The sudden voice in her head made her jump and gasp.

"What's wrong, Olga?" Jerome asked.

"Just a headache." She put a hand to her temple. "Who is that?" she subvocalized. "Mr. Ramsey, is that you?"

"Jesus, I never thought I'd get through again. You need to get off the elevator."

She looked at the panel. 40. 41. "What are you talking about? How did you know. . . ?"

"Olga, you look really sick."

She waved her hand to show she didn't want to talk.

"Just get off the elevator!" Ramsey's obvious panic cut through her confusion. "Now! If that door opens above the forty-fifth floor, you're going to set off alarms all over the building. Security will be on you before you can blink."

The feigned headache was becoming real. "Stop the car," she told Jerome. "What floor are we on?" The blinking panel suggested it was 43. "I need to use the restroom, Jerome. Is that okay?"

"Sure." But even as he pressed the button, the car had already moved up another floor. Olga found herself holding her breath. The car slid to a stop and the door hissed open, revealing a carpeted hallway and a bizarrely festive lighting scheme. It took her a moment to see that the walls were hung with shimmering pieces of neon art. Jerome stood in the open doorway. It took Olga a moment to realize he expected her to know where the restrooms were. After all, she was an employee, wasn't she?

"I haven't been on this floor," she explained. When he had told her where to go, she asked him to wait in the elevator lobby, afraid that someone might notice an elevator stopped on one floor too long.

The restroom was empty. She sat down in the farthest stall and pulled up her feet. "Tell me what's going on," she said to Ramsey. "Where did you people go? I've been trying to call you all day."

His explanation did not make her feel any better about anything—in fact, it was hard to think of something more carefully designed to destroy what little confidence she had left. "Oh, God help us, Sellars is . . . gone? So who is this Beezle who is helping you out? Is he one of that army fellow's specialists or something?"

"It's a long story." Ramsey didn't sound very eager to tell it. "Right now, we have to figure out what we're going to do. Are you in a secure place?"

She had to laugh at that. "I am in enemy territory, Mr. Ramsey! I am about as secure as a cockroach standing in the bathtub when the light comes on. If someone doesn't smash me with a shoe, yes, I suppose I am just fine."

"I'm doing my best, Olga, honestly. You don't know how hard I've been trying to get back in touch with you since Sellars . . . since whatever happened to him." He took a deep breath. "I'm going to put Beezle on with you. He's . . . he's a little eccentric. Don't worry about it—he's very good at what he does."

"Eccentric I can live with, Mr. Ramsey."

The voice, when it came, was like that of some ancient comedian from the Television Era. "You're Olga, right? Pleased to meetcha."

"And you." She shook her head. Sitting fully-clothed on the toilet talking to an escapee from the Catskills circuit, probably twenty vertical feet or so from armed men who would be happy to kill her, or at least beat her senseless, if they knew what she was trying to do. There has to be an easier, more sensible way to commit suicide, she told herself.

"Look, if there's a bunch of machinery up there, that may be just what Sellars wants," Beezle told her after she explained what she had heard from Jerome. "We won't know until we find it, and even then we won't know anything anyway, since according to Ramsey this Sellars is kind of a sleeping partner at the moment." His snort of indignation was audible and almost funny. "But if you try to walk in there without authorization, you're lunchmeat, seen?"

He sounded a bit old to be using kiddie slang, but Olga had spent her life among showfolk who liked affecting Bohemian airs. "Seen, I suppose."

"So we have to monkey with your badge some more. I don't know what Sellars planned. I haven't found any notes about this, but I'm still looking. He might have had some legitimate code to plug in, but I ain't got it. Maybe you could find someone who has access already, then I could, y'know, counterfeit an authorization,"

"There's a janitor who's helping me," Olga said hesitantly. "He's been up to those floors at least once or twice."

"What?" Ramsey had been listening in. "Olga, we can't tell anybody. . . !"

"I didn't tell him anything," she said angrily. "Give me some credit. I told him a big, stupid lie. He is braindamaged, or perhaps a little retarded, so you can imagine how I feel right now, using him like this." She was close to tears again, "Would his badge information help you?"

"Yeah." There was a moment's silence as the stranger named Beezle considered. "Maybe we could make it look like the janitor got off at the wrong floor or something—y'know, like he was just messin' around. . . ."

"If you do anything to get him in trouble, I will kill you!"

"Kill me?" The raspy laugh sounded in her ear. "Lady, the kid's parents tried to unplug me for weeks and didn't get to first base, so I don't know how you think you'd manage it."

Completely thrown by this bizarre non sequitur, Olga could think of no response.

"Look, just get us his badge information," Ramsey said after a moment. "You still have the ring, don't you?"

"I can do a better job with her t-jack," Beezle said.

"Fine. Just do that, Olga. Then we'll decide what to do."

Feeling like a character out of some antique farce, she hurried out of the restroom and trotted down the corridor. Jerome was standing stock-still in the elevator lobby, looking at his shoes. The overhead lights gleamed on his prominent facial bones, making him seem like some machine that had run down and stopped.

The custodian lifted his head when he heard her. The smile changed his misshapen face into something lovable, an old doll, a broken but familiar toy.

"I just wanted you to know I'm almost done," she said. "Oh, my shoe. Can I hold onto your shoulder?" She steadied herself while she pretended to adjust the shoe, taking care to lean her telematic jack close to his badge, then she hurried back to the restroom. Ramsey and his new friend were already analyzing the results.

"I can make something to get you in," Beezle said at last. "But it won't fool anyone if they check up, and they'll probably notice you going in. The schematic says there are security cameras all over that floor. There are some little indicators that are probably drones, too."

"That won't work," Ramsey said miserably. "Even if she had time to plant Sellars' little package, and we got the right place first time, someone would check the place over if they found her in there with a forged clearance. They must have engineers on call."

The relief that washed over her at the idea of being barred from the upper floor made Olga realize for the first time how frightened she was. "So it's hopeless?"

"I can't do miracles, lady," Beezle grated. "My owner Orlando always used to say. . . ."

"Hang on," said Ramsey, interrupting yet another puzzling remark. "You brought in more than one package. We can set off the smoke device."

"How is that going to help?" In a way, Olga had already begun to accustom herself to failure. Every spur to going on, even the memory of the children, had been blunted by her growing fear. She desperately wanted to see the sky again, to feel real wind on her face, even the warm bathwater that they called air down in this part of the United States. "It is not going to blow the doors off or anything, and it is too far down in the building to hide me from anyone without choking me to death at the same time."

"But if they have to evacuate the building they won't be paying much attention to who's getting on and off at the forty-sixth floor or whatever."

"You said they had cameras. Even if they don't see me at that moment, they can access the footage when they find out it's a false alarm."

"If we're lucky—if you're lucky, I should say, since I know you're the one taking the risks—you'll be done by then, maybe even out of the building, and none of it will matter. So you'll have to be quick with the tap. Just plant the device, then get out."

She felt dizzy. "I . . . I will try. Are you going to set off the smoke bomb now?"

"Not yet," Ramsey said. "Beezle needs to fake your clearance—pretending to set the building on fire won't do us any good if you're still locked out of that floor. And I'd like to study Sellars' notes. I called you in a hurry, so I've hardly had a chance to think." He sounded glum again. "I wasn't really trained for this kind of thing."

"So who was? Me?" Olga lowered her feet to the restroom floor.

"Can you find somewhere safe to hide again? We'll call you at midnight."

"Fine." She cut the connection, feeling a bit like she was watching the departure of a boat that had dropped her off on an isolated, uninhabited island.

The restroom door hissed shut behind her as she headed back to tell Jerome that her plans had changed. It was some small solace not to have to drag him into danger. She thought of the lost children. She seemed fated to be their paladin and protector whether it made sense or not, and even whether she wanted to or not. She hoped they appreciated it. What was it her mother had used to say about gratitude?

"You should be grateful to me now, while I'm still alive. It will save on postage."

But I wouldn't mind paying the postage, Mama, she thought. If I only had your address.

Her mother wanted her to go to the store with her, but Christabel just didn't want to go. She didn't want to do anything. She told her mommy that she wanted to stay at the hotel and watch the wallscreen, but she really didn't. Mommy and Daddy had a little fight—Daddy didn't like Mommy going out where someone might see her.

"We just need to lie low," he said.

"I'm not going to lie so low my child eats nothing but junk food," she said. "We have a kitchen as part of this room and I'm going to use it. That child hasn't touched a vegetable that wasn't deep-fried in days."

It was a small fight, and it wasn't the reason Christabel was feeling bad, but she still didn't like it. Mommy and Daddy didn't make jokes anymore. Daddy didn't put his arms around Mommy, or lean over and kiss her on the back of the neck. He picked Christabel up and gave her hugs, but he wasn't happy and neither was Mommy. And since the bad thing had happened to Mister Sellars and the boy, they hardly talked at all without fighting.

"Are you sure you won't come with me, honey?" her mother said. "You could pick out some cereal you like."

Christabel shook her head. "I'm tired." Mommy closed the door and came back into the room to feel Christabel's forehead, then sighed. "No temperature. But you don't feel good, do you?"

"Not really."

"We'll be getting out of here soon," Mommy said. "One way or the other. I'll bring you home something nice."

"Call if you're not going to be back by half an hour, Kay," her father said.

"Half an hour? It'll take me that long just to get there and back." But for a moment the little angry look she almost always wore these days went away and she looked at Daddy the way she used to. "If I'm still out, I'll check in an hour from now. I promise."

When she was gone Daddy went off to the next room to talk to Mister Ramsey. Christabel tried to watch the wallscreen, but nothing was interesting. Even Uncle Jingle seemed stupid and sad, a story about Queen Cloud Cat's new baby, Prince Popo, getting lost at the circus. Even the best joke in the whole thing, when Uncle Jingle got his foot caught by an elephant and it started swinging him around and around and around in a big circle, only made her smile.

Feeling bored, but also like she was going to cry, she opened the connecting door and went into the next room. Her daddy was talking to Mister Ramsey, both of them looking at Mister Ramsey's pad so they didn't even see her. She walked down the hall to the bedroom where Mister Sellars and Cho-Cho were lying side by side on one of the beds, still quiet, still not moving. She had gone to look at them a lot of times, always hoping that she would see Mister Sellars' eyes open so she could run to her parents and Mister Ramsey and tell them he was awake. They would be very proud that she had noticed, and Mister Sellars would sit up and call her "Little Christabel," and thank her for watching over him. Maybe Cho-Cho would wake up, too, and would be nicer to her.

But Mister Sellars' eyes weren't open, and she couldn't even see his chest moving. She touched his hand. It felt warm. Didn't that mean someone wasn't dead? Or were you supposed to touch their neck? People were always doing it on the net, but she couldn't quite remember how.

Cho-Cho looked very small. His eyes were closed, too, but his mouth was open and a little spit was on the pillow. Christabel thought that was pretty yick, but decided it wasn't his fault.

She leaned in close. "Wake up, Mister Sellars," she whispered, loud enough for him to hear if he was listening, but not loud enough for her daddy to hear in the other room. "You can wake up now."

But he didn't wake up. He looked bad, like something that had been run over and was lying by the side of the road. She felt like crying again.

Uncle Jingle didn't get any better. She tried a bunch of other shows—even Teen Mob, which her parents didn't like her to watch because they said it was "vulgar," which meant bad or scary, she wasn't sure which. Maybe both. Her daddy came back then so she had to change to another show fast.

"Why on earth are you watching lacrosse, Christabel?" he asked her.

She guessed that was the name of the game. The people were swinging sticks at each other. "I don't know. It's interesting."

"Well, I'm going to lie down for a few minutes. Your mom should be calling in a quarter of an hour, so if she doesn't call, come wake me, okay?" He pointed at the clock in me corner of the wallscreen. "When that says 17:50, okay?"

"Okay, Daddy." She watched him walk into the bedroom, then switched back to Teen Mob. The people on the show always seemed to be talking about who was dancing with who—dances she hadn't heard of, like "Shoeboxing" and "Doing the Hop." Someone said "Klorine will play Bumper Cars with anything in sprays," and Christabel wasn't sure if they were talking about another dance or real bumper cars, even though there hadn't been any on the show, because someone else said, "Yeah, and that's why she's always getting hurt," which sounded more like cars than dancing. She turned off the wallscreen.

It didn't seem fair. Mister Sellars was sick, maybe dying, and they didn't even call a doctor. What if he needed some medicine to get better? Mommy was at the store buying things, but Christabel knew you didn't get real medicine at the grocery store, just fruit-flavored cough medicine and things like that. When you were really sick, like Grandma Sorensen, you had to have medicine from the drugstore, or even go to the hospital.

She wandered around the room, wondering if she could go and talk to Mister Ramsey. Mommy wasn't supposed to call for another ten minutes and Christabel felt like that would be the longest ten minutes ever in the world. And she was hungry, too. And even more bored than sad. She thought she should have gone to the grocery store with her mother.

She was looking in her daddy's coat pocket for the pretzels he had taken away from her that morning because she wasn't supposed to have pretzels for breakfast, when she found the Storybook Sunglasses.

She was surprised a little, because she had thought Daddy had left them behind back at their house. As she thought about the day when they had left, she had a really bad homesickness. She wanted to see the other kids again—even Ophelia Weiner, who wasn't always stuck up. And sleep in her own room again, with her Zoomer Zizz poster and her dolls and animals.

She took the sunglasses back to the couch and put them on, just looking at the black for a moment, because it was more interesting than anything else in the stupid, sad hotel. Then she touched them to turn them on, and although the sunglasses stayed black, Mister Sellars' voice was in her ear.

At first she thought it was one of his old messages. But it wasn't.

"If this is you, little Christabel, tell me our code word. Do you remember?"

She had to think for a moment. "Rumplestiltskin," she whispered.

"Good. I want to tell you something. . . ."

"Where are you? Are you okay? Did you wake up?" She was already halfway across the room, heading for the connecting door to go see him, but when the questions had stopped jumping out of her mouth he was still talking. He hadn't even heard her.

". . . And I can't really explain it to you, but I'm very, very busy. I know it looks like I'm sick, but I'm not—I just can't be in my body right now. I hope you're not too worried."

"Are you going to get better?" she asked, but he had started talking again and she finally understood that it was only a recording, that he hadn't called her up to tell her he was awake. He hadn't even called her. It was just a message.

"I need you to listen very carefully, little Christabel. I don't want you to be frightened. I have only a few moments, then I'm going to be very busy again, so I want to leave this for you.

"I suspect Cho-Cho is in just the same situation that I'm in—that he looks like he's sick, or sleeping. Don't worry too much. He's here with me."

She wanted to know where "here" was, but she knew it wouldn't do any good to ask.

"I'm leaving this message for two others reasons," Mister Sellars' voice went on. "One is that no matter what we say, grown-ups can't always make things come out right. I hope I will see you again and talk to you, and that we will be friends for a long time. But if something happens to me—remember, Christabel, I am very old—I want you to remember that I think you are the bravest, kindest little girl I have ever met. And I've been around a long time, so that is not small praise.

"The other thing I want to tell you is that if I manage to . . . to stay well for a little while longer, and some of the other things I'm trying to do also work out, I may need you to help me one more time. I'm not quite sure I understand it myself yet, and I don't really have time to tell you anyway—I'm as busy as the night we burned my house down and I went into the tunnels, do you remember?—but I want you to listen to me now and think about what I'm saying.

"When you first met Cho-Cho, I know he scared you. I think you have come to see that he is not as bad as all that—perhaps you understand that he has had a difficult life and does not trust people, that he is worried that only bad things will happen to him. His life has made him different than you, but there is a lot of good inside him.

"I want you to remember that, little Christabel, because I may need your help. If I do, I will be asking you to . . . to meet someone. That is the only way I can explain it. And that someone may seem even more different and frightening than Cho-Cho. You will have to be as brave as you have ever been, Christabel. And that is very brave indeed. . . ."

CHAPTER 36Without a Net

CHAPTER 36
Without a Net