NETFEED/NEWS: Widow Sues Nanotech Firm Over Honeymoon Holocaust

(visual: Sabine Wendel at husband's funeral)

VO: Capping a tragedy that has already become fodder for comedians all over the world, Sabine Wendel of Bonn, Germany, has filed suit against the distributors of Masterman, a nanotech-based product advertised to cure erectile dysfunction. Although the manufacturers Borchardt-Schliemer insist their product is to be used only under a doctor's care, many distributors sell the product without prescription, and that is apparently how Jorg Wendel purchased the microscopic Masterman trigger-mites that led to the fatal accident dubbed "the Sexplosion" by many tabnets. . . ."

They stumbled down out of the hills and onto the desolate plain, lightning flickering through the sky behind them as they raced toward what looked like an ocean full of stars. A cluster of strange shapes lined its shores, waiting. Night was falling, the constellations overhead dimmer than those swimming in the pit.

It's like the end of H.G. Wells' Time Machine, Paul thought. The horrible last moments of Earth the time traveler sees—gray skies, gray soil, a dying crab-thing on an empty beach.

Bonita Mae Simpkins tripped and fell heavily, unable to use her crippled hands to stop herself. Paul leaned close to help her up. The roaring of the thing that had followed them from Egypt was muffled now by the intervening hills and the electrical storm still hugged the distant spot where the monstrous form had appeared, but Paul had no doubt that Martine was right—no matter how strenuously the operating system fought back, Dread would be after them soon. He was hunting them.

Mrs. Simpkins was whispering as he dragged her onto her feet. ". . . He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. . . ."

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Paul thought. I will fear no evil. But he did fear—he did. They had been swallowed by a nightmare.

The others were far ahead now, although Nandi Paradivash had stopped to wait. Paul put his arm around Mrs. Simpkins and hurried her forward.

"Thank you," she whispered. "God bless you."

Nandi silently pulled the woman's other arm around his shoulders so he and Paul could keep her upright. The pool of surging, flaring radiance seemed very close now. Some of the throng that surrounded it came swarming toward Martine and the others. For a moment, as his companions disappeared in the tide of bodies, Paul fought panic, then he saw that Martine and Florimel and the rest—that tall one was certainly T4b—were being surrounded but not openly menaced. In fact, the crowd that enveloped them acted more like the beggar children he had seen in Rome and Madrid than like an overt threat.

"Those people are . . . they are. . . ." Nandi was watching, too. "I have no idea what they are!"

Neither did Paul. As they reached the outskirts of the crowd he was astounded by the wild, seemingly pointless diversity of its parts—upright animals and creatures with human faces and the bodies of beasts, as well as others made of things from which no living being could ever be composed. The variety was amazing, but what was most astonishing about them was the apparent whimsy. It was an army of purely make-believe creatures that swarmed out to meet them, a population decanted from children's storybooks.

The nearest, a collection of anthropomorphic bears and goats, fish with legs—even a skinny and fat couple who Paul guessed must be Jack Sprat from the nursery rhyme and his huge wife, but whose silhouettes gave him a moment's nasty turn—now came running toward Paul and his two companions, even the most inhuman faces full of unmistakable fear, the childish voices shrill.

"What is it?" scrawny Jack Sprat cried. "Who are you? Did the One send you?"

"Who took the stars?" shrieked his wobbling spouse. "Have you seen the Lady?"

"Why won't she come to the Well? Why won't she tell us what to do?"

Caught up in the swirl of pleading creatures, Paul was rushed along toward the shore of the pulsing sea like a leaf going over the rapids. "Martine!" he shouted, struggling to hold onto Bonnie Mae and Nandi even as furry fingers and graspingly prehensile wings tugged at him. "Florimel! Where are you?" Someone yanked at Bonnie Mae so hard that Paul, still trying to keep her upright, lost his grip on her and was pulled off his feet. For a moment he was certain he would be trampled to death.

After all this, I'm killed by cartoons, he thought, choking in the dust. There's irony in that, isn't there?

Suddenly people around him began to shout in alarm; the bizarrely diverse collection of legs and feet hemming him in began to back away. Paul struggled to his feet and discovered Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins only a few meters away, staring. He turned to see what they were looking at.

It was not the most unusual sight of the day, but it was still a bit of a surprise.

Rolling toward them through the crowd, moving slowly to give the fairy-tale creatures a chance to get out of his way—but helping them along with occasional light flicks of his riding whip—was Azador, smiling hugely. He was perched on the driver's bench of a fantastically colorful coach pulled by two white horses.

"Ionas, my friend!" he shouted, teeth gleaming beneath the luxuriant mustache. "There you are! Come, you and your other friends—climb up or these idiots will step on your toes."

Paul could not help staring, and not just at the unexpected rescue. In all the time he had traveled with Azador, even in the toils of the Lotos-dream, the man had never seemed a fraction this cheerful. Paul looked up at the sky, which was almost pitch-black now, the stars dwindled to tiny points. How could anyone be in a good mood with this going on? Unless he's daft as a brush.

Still, it was better than being trampled by teddy bears.

Paul clambered onto the side of the wagon and helped Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins up onto the step beside him, then Azador clicked his tongue at the horses, cracked his whip, and turned the carriage back toward the flickering sea.

"There are people waiting to see you, my friend!" Azador cried. "You will be so happy. We will sing and dance and celebrate!"

Not just a little daft, thought Paul as they rolled along beneath the dying sky. Utterly, utterly mad.

Azador's tribe of Gypsies had arranged the dozens of wagons they had retained into a semicircle along the shore of the strange crater, walling themselves off from the rest of the refugees and making a little city with wheels, the lacquered coaches shining both from the light of many campfires and the silver-and-blue glimmer of the great pit. Paul was grateful for the respite, however temporary, but he could not help looking back at the hills. Lightning still leaped above the hilltops, swift as swordplay, but the display seemed to have diminished, as if the contest being fought there was coming to an end.

Paul did not feel good about what that ending might be.

He was immediately distracted by people hurrying toward him, calling his name as they forced their way through the crowd of curious Gypsies. If they had not introduced themselves he would never have recognized Sam Fredericks and the Bushman !Xabbu, He might have guessed who the small, almond-eyed man was, given a slightly less confusing situation in which to consider it, but he had all but forgotten Fredericks' confession back in Troy about being a girl.

"It's . . . I'm astonished to see you both," he said. "And delighted." He hesitated. "Where . . . Where is Renie?"

!Xabbu's face fell. He shook his head.

"We don't know," Sam Fredericks explained. "We got separated."

!Xabbu seemed about to say something else, but Martine Desroubins, who it seemed had also survived the attentions of the fairy-tale crowd, was standing beside one of the wagons clapping her hands loudly. "Florimel, Paul, Javier—all of you," she called. "We must talk. Now." Suddenly distracted, she turned slowly toward the spot where Paul stood. Unlike him, she seemed to have no trouble seeing past the unfamiliar faces and forms. "Fredericks . . . !Xabbu?" She climbed down and fought her way through the crowd of refugees until she could put her arms around both of them.

Within moments Florimel had joined the group, laughing, seizing !Xabbu so hard Paul worried she would crack the little man's ribs. The Bushman seemed oddly reserved, but Paul thought it might be his own unfamiliarity with !Xabbu's human face. Even T4b allowed himself to be drawn into reunion embraces and the babble of half-articulated questions and answers.

"Enough," Martine said abruptly, although she still held Sam Fredericks' hand firmly in her own. "We do not come at a happy time, no matter how it eases our hearts to see you. Dread is behind us."

Fredericks screwed up her face in puzzlement. "Dread?"

"You have seen him only once, I think, on the top of the black mountain when he was the size of a god—an evil, angry god."

"Scanny! Yeah, I remember!"

"Well, that is the Dread who is coming—no, who is already here. The operating system fights him. There."

Only a few last flickers of lightning now blinked in the distant hills, gleaming scratches across the night sky, dim as firefly trails.

Paul and the others settled down around one of the campfires, huddled beneath the night. The Well pulsed beside them, a pit full of earthbound polar lights that turned even the few familiar faces grotesque.

Martine tried to keep some kind of order in the proceedings but curiosity and urgency made too volatile a mix: few questions were entirely answered before another volley had been launched. Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins and the little boy named Cho-Cho could only watch in amazement as the words fountained out of the others. Paul found himself almost as impressed by hearing the adventures of his own group recounted—it made a formidably strange tale—as he was by hearing what had happened to !Xabbu and Sam. But one element of their story struck him more powerfully than any other, until at last he had to interrupt Sam Fredericks in mid-flow.

"I'm sorry, but. . . ." His head was throbbing, his entire body so weak with stress and fatigue he could barely sit up, but he could not let this go. "I almost can't believe I'm hearing this. You traveled with Jongleur? With Felix Jongleur, the bastard who made this whole thing?" The bastard who stole my life away, he wanted to shout, but he could see by Sam's expression that she was not happy about it either.

"We . . . we thought we had to do it, even if it was majorly impacted." She looked to !Xabbu for support, but the little man had risen a few minutes earlier and walked off to do something, so she had to turn back to Paul. "Renie said . . . she said we might need him. Need what he knew."

Paul fought down his anger. "I'm amazed." He swallowed. "That you didn't just push him off a cliff, I mean. Or skull him with a rock." Paul sat up straight and tried to calm himself—there was much crucial information to share.

"Where did he go, finally? What happened to him?"

Sam took a moment to answer. "What . . . what do you mean?"

"When did you part ways with him, or did something eat him, I hope?"

Her age was truly apparent for the first time. She was suddenly a nervous teenager faced with an angry adult. "But . . . he's here." She looked at Paul and his companions as though they should know this already. "Right over there," she said, pointing.

Paul felt a kind of tightness around his temples, a band of pain. Only a few meters away Azador and a bald man in dark clothes stood watching them, Azador talking animatedly, his companion silent, eyes half-shut. "That's . . . that's him?" Paul's chest felt like someone was sitting on it. "That's Felix Jongleur?"

"Yes, but. . . ." Before Fredericks could get out another word, Paul was on his feet and running.

Azador looked up. "Ionas, my friend!" he said, opening his arms, but Paul was already past him. He threw his full weight onto the bald man and dragged him to the ground. Jongleur had seen him coming, but Paul's anger was such that for the first moments there was no stopping him. He seized Jongleur's head in both hands and smashed it back against the ground, then climbed up onto him and began swinging at his face. The man fought back, throwing up his arms to block Paul's wild blows, writhing in an effort to unseat him. Paul had the satisfaction of feeling some of his punches land on Jongleur's hard head, but it seemed to be happening at a distance greater than the length of his arms. Voices were shouting in his head and his exploding rage seemed to have knocked time slightly out of joint.

Stole my life! Tried to kill me!

He swung again and again.

Bastard! Murderer!

He was grunting some of the words out loud. There were other voices too—Paul could dimly hear people calling his name, pulling at his arms—but Jongleur stayed coldly silent. The older man had weathered the flurry of blows; now his hand snaked up and clutched Paul's chin, forcing his head backward until his vertebrae threatened to separate.

"Kill you!" Paul shouted, but Jongleur was slipping away from him as though Paul were on the bank of a river and his enemy on a boat in the current. Dimly, through the haze of anger and adrenaline, he realized that he was wrapped now in several arms and was being lifted from the ground and off his quarry. At least two of the men holding him were Gypsies, muscular men who smelled of wood-smoke.

"Let me go!" lie bellowed, but it was no use. He was held too firmly.

"Just stop," Florimel said in his ear. "You will do no good, Paul."

Azador had pulled Jongleur back out of Paul's reach. "Why are you doing this?" the Gypsy demanded. "You are my good friend, Ionas. But this man, too, he is my friend. Why should friends fight?"

Paul heard Azador's words but could make no sense of them. He stared at Jongleur with helpless hatred. The older man returned his look, his face a mask of placid contempt, a trickle of blood from his nose the only sign of what had happened.

"Martine?" someone asked. Paul realized for the first time that the blind woman was part of the crowd pinioning him. "Martine?"

"What is it, Sam?"

"I can't find him, Martine." Sam Fredericks looked pale even in the odd, metallic light from the great pit. "He's gone somewhere—gone!"

"Who are you talking about?" Martine asked. Some of the people holding Paul began to loosen their grips, although the two Gypsy men still held him securely. "Who's gone?"

"!Xabbu," Sam said miserably. "He got up from the campfire but he never came back. And now I can't find him anywhere."

Watching the others split up into pairs to search for !Xabbu should have made Sam feel better, but it didn't. Something in the suddenness of his disappearance made her certain that what had happened to him was much worse than simply wandering off or getting lost.

!Xabbu doesn't get lost, she told herself and was miserable again.

She knew she couldn't just stand and wait for the others to come back, but she had no idea of where else to look. She had already been all along the fringes of the Gypsy camp, calling the small man's name into the press of refugees beyond the circled wagons, and that was probably what Martine and the rest were doing right now, too, but she could think of no better way to spend her time. Anything was better than just sitting here, cooling her heels at the end of the world.

When she turned she almost tripped over the Stone Girl.

"Your name is Sam, right?" the little girl asked.

Much as she wanted to right now, she couldn't just ignore the child. "Yes, I'm Sam."

"Your friend wanted me to tell you something."

"My friend?" She squatted beside her, suddenly intent. "What friend?"

"The man with curly hair and no shirt." The Stone Girl looked worried. "Isn't he your friend?"

"What did he say? Tell me!"

"I have to remember." The little girl wrinkled her loamy forehead. The poked holes that were her eyes squinted in concentration. "He said . . . he said. . . ."

"Come on!"

The Stone Girl shot her an offended look. "I'm thinking! He said . . . that you were with friends now so he could leave and he'd know you were all right." The frown turned into a pleased smile. "That's what he said! I remembered!"

"Leave to do what? Where did he go?" Sam grabbed the little girl's arm. "Did he tell you? Did you see which direction he went?"

She shook her head. "No. He pointed to where you were and told me to hurry up and go." The Stone Girl turned and indicated a spot far down the shoreline of the great pit. "He was over there."

And then Sam remembered. "Oh, fenfen! He thinks Renie's down there—he said he was going to go find her!" The Stone Girl looked at her curiously but Sam had no more time to talk. She sprinted across the long, gradual slope of the Gypsy camp, away from the wall of wagons and the campfires, down toward the uneven shore.

I should get the others, she thought. Paul and Martine—I couldn't stop him by myself. . . . But already she saw a slender figure silhouetted at the pulsing edge of the Well, familiar despite the unsteadiness of the outline. She knew she would never reach the others and get back in time.

"!Xabbu!" she shouted. "Wait!"

If he heard her he gave no sign. He stood a moment longer, poised at the edge of the glimmering ocean of blue and pale yellow and misty silver light, then took a few steps forward and jumped into the pit. It was not a dive but a suicide's staggering leap, the first graceless thing she had ever seen !Xabbu do.

"No! Noooo!"

Within seconds she had reached the spot where he had stood. There was no sign of him, only the strange ferment of light in motion.

He told me he was so scared of the water. But he jumped into . . . this. . . . She went cold from her feet to her head. He must have been so afraid. . . !

She knew that if she considered for another second her better sense would take charge—she would turn and walk back to the Gypsy camp with a hole right through the middle of herself. Lost Orlando, she thought wildly. And Renie. Not !Xabbu, too! She tottered on the edge for an instant, then flung herself after him.

It was not water that rose up to claim her but something far more strange—a vibrant, fizzing, electrical wash that seemed to flow right through her. Her eyes popped open as if yanked by strings but there was no depth or breadth, nothing at all to see but an impossible simultaneity of blackness and blinding light.

How can I find him. . . ? she wondered, but only for a second. The scintillant ocean contracted around her, squeezing her up and out like a bar of wet soap from a fist. Orlando said . . . it didn't want me. . . . Then she was lying stunned and twitching on the bank, unable to do anything but stare at the Well as lazy bubbles of light formed and burst beneath the surface. She watched them with a strange detachment, wondering if this was what it felt like to die. Voices were coming closer, Florimel's and Martine's and others, all shouting something that must be her name, but she could feel nothing except the uncommon sensation of having been tasted and then spat out again.

Paul knelt down beside Florimel. "Is Fredericks all right? What's wrong with her?"

Despite all that had happened, Florimel had not lost her distinctive bedside manner. "How in the devil's name should I know? She is breathing. She is semiconscious. God alone knows what caused this."

"Jumped," T4b said. "Just jumped in, all sayee lo. Saw it, me."

"But why?" Paul asked.

Martine was squinting out toward the pulsating lights with the expression of someone leaning into a terrible windstorm. "She was searching for !Xabbu. . . ."

"Jesus, does that mean. . . ?" Paul's stomach lurched—to find them both after all this time, then to lose one of them so quickly, maybe both of them. . . .

Martine abruptly swung around, putting her back to the unstable sea. Her face was haggard. "We have a greater problem now," she said.

"What?" Paul stared at the Well, but saw nothing different. He turned until he was facing the same direction as Martine, looking out across the plain. "Oh. Oh, damn."

It was only a distant speck and should have been invisible in the deep twilight, but the man-shape had a disturbing negative radiance of its own, as if it were not entirely part of the world through which it passed.

"He's not a giant anymore," Paul said. That startling change should have given him hope, but there was something so horridly fascinating about the thing named Dread walking toward them across the dead gray land, stride after measured stride, that it seemed to make no difference. Fear washed through Paul, a sick, paralyzing terror as powerful as the aura around the Twins, but somehow even worse: where those two were cruel and destructive, this lightless specter seemed a thing of pure, focused evil.

"He has shed what was unnecessary," Martine said. "He has been burned and battered until he has hardened like a black diamond. But it is him." Her voice was listless with horror. "The Other could not keep him out."

Their companions had seen it, too, and stood staring in drop-jawed surprise, mesmerized by the advancing figure. Voices cried out all around them, wails of despair that proved the refugees could sense what was coming. As the invisible cloud of fear swept over them the fairy-tale folk at the outer edge of the encampment turned and fled from the distant stranger, shoving their way toward the Well. Their flight set off a mass panic; hundreds more joined them, shrieking down the slope towards the edge of the great pit like a herd of deer running before a wildfire. Paul and the others had to make a wall around Sam Fredericks, linking arms to keep themselves from being swept over the edge by the crush of maddened refugees.

"Where is Nandi?" Martine shouted. "And the Simpkins woman and the little boy?"

"Somewhere in the crowd!" Paul held on to T4b's arm for dear life as a trio of weeping goats backed into them. Even when Paul smacked at the nearest with his fist, the goats paid no attention, bleating, "Troll, troll, troll!" in tones of helpless horror as they stared out at the approaching shadow.

I just hope he kills that bastard Jongleur first, was Paul's only coherent thought.

The crush of terrified creatures was shoving hard now, pushing them back despite their best efforts, until Paul could see the Well just behind them. Some of the other refugees were forced screaming over the edge of the pit; they disappeared into the silent wash of light and did not come up. T4b's elbow was locked in Paul's; the youth was murmuring what seemed to be a prayer. Florimel screamed at them all to move closer together to keep Fredericks from being stepped on. Paul felt another arm slip through his and a body push close against him. It was Martine. Something of a child's unalloyed fright was in her face. Paul hooked her arm more tightly.

Dread had reached the edge of the encampment. He stopped on ground that had been torn and churned by fleeing refugees and lifted his hands as though he would take the entire huge throng in his arms. His face was a thing of shadows, the human features plain but somehow inconstant, the eyes blank white crescents. Only the teeth were clear—a huge, avid grin. The shape radiated such triumphant, heedless, blood-smeared power that the nearest refugees, untouched, fell down shrieking and writhing.

Martine was not even looking. She had shoved her face against Paul's arm. "This must be . . . the terror the Other feels," she moaned.

Paul thought it seemed pointless to analyze anything. It was the end, after all.

"Oh, you're all so clever." Dread's laughing voice was in every ear. "But I know you're here somewhere." The dead white eyes swept across the whimpering throng.

He's looking for us. Paul's heart was skipping, staggering. He knows we're here, but he's not sure where.

The shadow-man and everything around him suddenly grew dim.

And I'm going blind like Martine. . . .

Blind?

The air was growing thick, foggy. Paul tried to blink it away but the fog was not in him but before him, a sticky density forming above the shimmering pit and around them all. At first he thought it was something of Dread's doing, the metaphorical air being sucked from an entire world, but the dark figure seemed disconcerted, lifting his hands in front of his face, fingers twitching as if to tear away a curtain.

"But I crushed you!" Dread snarled. "You can't stop me now!"

There was a curtain, Paul saw in astonishment—a wall of rapidly thickening mist forming between Dread and his victims. The gossamer-thin, translucent barrier rapidly grew thicker, a hemispherical wall of cloud coagulating all over the Well, transparent enough that the carbon-black figure of Dread could still be seen through it, thick enough to reflect some of the dull shimmer from the pit. The shadow-man lunged forward, scrabbling at the solidifying fog, and the cloud strands stretched to what seemed the breaking point . . . but they did not break.

Dread's scream of frustration rattled in Paul's skull, made him crouch shivering on the ground. All around him refugees were running mad, knocking each other down, trying to escape something that was in their heads. The cry rose until Paul thought his brains would boil, until he felt sure there must be blood running from his nose and ears, then it trailed off like storm winds passing.

For a moment there was silence. Inside the dome of cloud it was the silence not just of pain but of astonishment, of a last-minute reprieve beyond all hope.

Martine's voice was faint with agony and shock. "I . . . I can feel such . . . oh, my God! The Other has put up a last-ditch defense, but it has . . . little strength left."

The figure behind the wall of cloud had grown very still.

This can't last, The icy words pricked at Paul's ears. He could hear children sobbing all around him, unable to escape the voice of the bogeyman. "It's only a matter of time."

The dark figure spread his hands again, pressed them against the barrier. The nearest refugees wept and tried to force themselves farther away, but Dread was making no attempt to break through this time. "I know you're there—all of you." He paused. "You, Martine. We've shared something, sweetness. You know what I mean."

She had fallen on her face. Paul put his hand on her back, felt the convulsive shudders.

"It's going to be very bad if you make me wait," Dread murmured. "Pain. And not just for you, little Martine. Screaming—oh, there will plenty of screaming. Why don't you just come to me now and save the innocent ones?"

"No," she said, but it was a hollow whisper that even Paul could barely hear.

"Come out," said the dark shape. "I'll show you those secret places again. Those places in you that you didn't think anyone could find. You know it's going to happen. Why wait? The fear will only get worse." The voice deepened, turned horribly seductive. "Just come to me now, sweet Martine. I'll release you. You won't have to be afraid any more."

To Paul's horror she began to squirm toward the barrier on her stomach. He grabbed her waist to hold her back, but whatever pulled at her was strong, horribly strong. Flailing, sobbing, she fought him until he had to wrap both his arms and legs around her. T4b shoved his way through the crush of bodies and grabbed her shoulders and at last Martine stopped struggling. She wept harder now, her body shivering convulsively. Paul put his face against her cheek and held her tightly, murmured meaningless assurances in her ear.

"Well," said Dread. "Then we'll have to play it a different way," He moved sideways along the barrier, swift as a spider on a web, then stopped. "Just because I'm on the outside doesn't mean I can't touch you at all. Doesn't mean I can't make it . . . interesting. This little wall the operating system threw together may keep me out for a few minutes—but it also means you're locked in with some old friends of yours." He pressed his fingers against the barrier, tenting the net of mists inward. "They're everywhere, aren't they? The whole network is rotten with the things. Harmless enough, this lot." He chuckled. "Until I wake them up."

In the puzzled hush that followed, Paul pulled Martine up into a sitting position but kept her wrapped firmly in his arms. A thin scream floated up from farther down the shoreline, then another and another until a chorus of shrieking filled the air. That part of the crowd began to shove outward in all directions, a frenzied rush like rats off a burning ship. Something was growing at the center of the disturbance, a bizarre and complicated shape swelling up and out as if unfolding out of the dry dust.

No, Paul saw, and his guts twisted. Two shapes. He could hear Dread laughing inside his head, T4b cursing helplessly behind him. Martine hung in his arms like an empty sack.

Jack Sprat and his wife blossomed outward in a sprawling explosion of flesh until they towered over the other refugees. Sprat's bony fingers twisted and stretched like fast-growing twigs. His legs lengthened, his toes humped and clawed, even his face stretched and distorted until he was as tall and gnarl-limbed as an old tree. He reached out his skeletal claws and snatched up a squealing shape covered in fur and wearing a pink ribbon, then tore it to pieces, raining bits down on the refugees struggling to escape.

Sprat's wife was expanding like a fairground balloon, her arms and legs remaining doll-tiny while the great gross body spread and crushed the helpless creatures packed in around her. The head began to disappear in the humped inflation of shoulders, until all that could be seen was a huge hippopotamus mouth full of crooked teeth, gaping on the lumpy bosom. She leaned, folding like a great pudding, then came back up with a dozen more fairy-tale, figures in her maw. She swallowed slowly. Her neck distended, small shapes still moving inside it.

"Where is the princess?" Jack Sprat had no eyes now, only a crease across the narrowest part of his head.

"The princess!" his wife belched out. A small, sodden creature tried to escape her mouth but was sucked back in and vigorously chewed. "Our pretty, tasty princess!"

They began to wade through the crowd, Jack Sprat tangle-fingered and five meters tall, his wife humping along beside him like a massive jellyfish, killing as they went. The refugees, trapped between the wall of fog and the pit and unable to scatter, trampled each other in mindless terror. Bodies and pieces of bodies flew through the air. The screams rose to an unbroken chorus of wailing.

Forced backward by the crush Paul could only clutch Martine and struggle to keep her sagging form upright. Light strobed and flashed from the pit behind them as though some kind of terrible conflagration was building, but Paul was hemmed so tightly now he could not look around, could barely breathe.

"Give us the princess!" Jack Sprat had something in his twiggy fingers that might once have been a living being. He was using it as a club. "Bring her to us!"

They were only meters away from Paul and the others now. The light leaped and burned on them, making them even more grotesque.

"Stop!" The voice was thin, but it cut through the chaos like a razor. "Stop!" it cried again. "You are hurting them—killing them!"

The huge, deformed shapes paused, eyeless and rapt, facing out toward the pit.

"Our princess." Jack Sprat's wife almost groaned it, a ravening hunger finally introduced to the ultimate feast. "Princess!"

The shrieks of the wounded and dying still drifted to the skies, but even the refugees had slowed and stopped as if under compulsion, turning from their murderers to stare out at the pit.

She hung above the agitated sea of light with her arms spread wide, hung on some invisible cross of misery, flickering in and out of existence like an image on ancient celluloid film. It had been so long since he had seen her that Paul had forgotten the beauty of her presence, the great light that could shine through even this corrupted incarnation.

"Ava." His voice was choked, no more than a murmur. "Avialle."

She did not see him, or did not care that he was there. In the sudden stillness she flickered and grew even more insubstantial, her ghostly face full of pain and horror.

"Let . . . them be. She was beginning to smear like dirt on a rain-spattered window. "You . . . are . . . hurting us. . . ."

"We eat you, princess bellowed Jack Sprat's monstrous wife. "Come home!" The Twins began to shuffle toward the edge of the pit, sweeping bodies from their path or crushing them into the dead gray earth.

She moaned, a sound that swept across the shore, then brought her arms together in front of her face in helpless resignation.

"Avialle! Avialle!"

It was not Paul's voice this time. A man was shoving his way through the press of refugees toward the hovering apparition. It was Felix Jongleur.

"Avialle!" the bald man screamed, and this time Paul could hear the rage beneath the desperation. Jongleur's face, pale and full of crazed intensity, seemed to grow so bright that Paul could see nothing else, not even the shimmering angel shape that had haunted him for so long. "Come to me! Avialle!"

His words echoed in Paul's head, growing instead of diminishing, until all he could hear was her name sounding over and over, tumbling through his brain like a bullet, smashing his mind into fragments so that the blackness beneath came up and swallowed him whole.

Oh Ho!" someone said.

Ava shrieked and threw herself backward out of Paul's arms. He turned to see the grinning, misshapen face of Mudd peering through the trees.

"Naughty, naughty," said the fat man. "What have we here?" But despite the mockery, Mudd seemed a little uncertain, as though he too had been caught by surprise.

"Leave us alone!" cried Ava.

"Oh, I don't think so." Mudd shook his large head. "I think Mr. Jonas has overstepped his privileges." He gave Paul a look of gleeful malice. "I think some punishment is in order." Now he turned his leer on Ava. "For both of you, perhaps."

"No!" Ava leaped to her feet but stumbled, tangled in her long nightgown. Mudd stretched out a heavy hand to seize her, or perhaps just to steady her. Seeing that great paw reach toward her, Paul snatched up the first heavy thing he could find, a rock the size of a fist, and flung it into Mudd's face. The big man bellowed in pain and fell backward, when his hands came away from his forehead they were covered in blood.

"I'll kill you, you little shit," he rasped. "I'll pull your bones out!" Paul yanked Ava to her feet and ran. Behind him, Mudd was talking to someone, talking to the air. "Attention! Security to Conservatory Level. Now!"

Branches slapped Paul's face as he pushed Ava before him, running blindly through the tangle of trees. Where could they go? This was not a true forest, it was a park on top of a skyscraper. Security would be coming up in the elevators. There was no way down.

He slowed to a walk. "This is pointless, Ava. We can't escape, and you might be hurt." And they're going to hurt me no matter what, he thought but did not say. "Is there some way you can contact your father directly?"

"I don't know! I only speak to him when he . . . calls me." Her eyes were wide, feverish, as though she were the one who had drunk too much. Paul felt himself growing cold and distant, everything happening at a great distance. "I can't let them hurt you," she said, tears welling up. "I love you, Paul."

"It was all foolish," he said. "We should never have let it happen. I'll give up."

"No!"

"Yes." They had him and they could do what they wanted to him. He had a sudden thought, an unlikely glimmer of hope. "Can you talk to your helper—the one you call the ghost? Can you contact him now?" It was perhaps the only insurance he could provide against simply being swatted and disposed of like a troublesome insect. If the intruder could enter the communication lines, perhaps it could contact his friend Niles Peneddyn. At the very least he could construct a message for Niles, tell him something of what was happening. It would make it much harder for Jongleur's men to make him disappear—perhaps he could even use it as a bargaining chip. "Can you contact him?" he asked Ava again.

"I . . . I don't know." She stopped and closed her eyes. "Help me! My friend! I need you now!"

In the silence that followed Paul could hear the sounds of pursuit—not just Mudd's voice now but several others too, shouting back and forth through the trees—along with the alarmed shrieks and whistles of birds. The first security team must have arrived, he decided, and were even now fanning out through the artificial forest behind him.

"He's . . . he's not answering me," Ava said miserably. "Sometimes he doesn't come right away. . . ."

Now I know why they wanted to hire someone like me, who didn't have one of those implanted jacks, Paul thought bitterly. I thought it was because it looked too modem, but they just didn't want anyone who could communicate freely with the outside world.

"Where is he?" The sharp, high-pitched voice echoing through the trees was Finney's. Jongleur's dogs were all out now, in full cry. Paul considered sitting down and waiting for the inevitable.

"Help me!" Ava cried to the air.

"Forget it." He felt little more than anger now—anger at himself, at this foolish, deluded girl, even at Niles and his upper-class contacts. "It's over."

"No." Ava pulled her arm from beneath his hand and dashed away into the trees. "We'll go beyond the forest—there has to be a way out!"

"There is no way out!" Paul shouted, but she was already crashing through the thick vegetation. His legs as heavy as in a nightmare, he stumbled after her.

All around him the hunters were closing in, narrowing the angle, hemming their escape. Ava was plunging ahead as though the forest would truly come to an end, as though they might burst from the trees to see hills and meadows and freedom stretching before them.

"Come back!" he shouted, but she was not listening. Her billowing nightgown snagged on trailing branches, but she still moved much more swiftly than he could, an elusive phantom. He struggled after her, trying to remember what was ahead of them. Another elevator? No, not on this side. But wasn't there a fire escape? Hadn't Mudd or Finney said something about that the first day?

Yes. "You'd better hope you never have to use it, Jonas," Mudd had told him, grinning. "Because the window's sealed. Mr. Jongleur doesn't like the government telling him how to run his own house."

Sealed. But sealed how? Smacked and poked by branches, stumbling over the bumpy, artificial forest floor, he could scarcely think. Ava was a dozen meters ahead now, calling for him to hurry. He also heard the pursuers clearly, clipped voices passing information to each other, efficient as robots.

"Don't be stupid, Jonas!" Finney sounded only steps behind. "Stop now before you get hurt."

The hell with you, mate, he thought.

"Paul, I can see the end of the trees. . . !" Her voice was full of hope. A moment later she cried out, an animal howl of pain and misery. Paul's heart lurched. He crashed through the last of the branches to find Ava frozen and stupefied at the end of the natural earth, staring at an empty white wall. Seamless, without openings or features of any kind, the wall stretched straight up for ten meters before curving up to roof the entire floor and display the artificial sky. The space between forest and wall also bent away to either side, hidden within a few paces by the tangling trees.

"It's . . . it's. . . ." Ava was stunned.

"I know." Paul's heart was beating so fast he was dizzy. The bland curve of the outside wall gave no hint of what to do. Their pursuers were crashing toward them, only moments away. He had to pick a direction. He had no idea where to find the fire escape. Opposite the elevator—but where would that be? They had run through the forest in a zigzag track and might be a hundred meters from it or more.

Left, he decided, his thoughts flickering like agitated fish. Coin-flip. Fifty percent, and it probably won't matter anyway. He grabbed Ava—she seemed light as a small child, almost hollow-boned—and pulled her along, the curve of the wall.

Some of the tree branches snaked out beyond the bounds of the artificial forest. They scraped at Paul's face as he tugged the girl forward, forcing him to put a hand in front of his eyes. He could barely see, and did not notice at first when the branches stopped touching him. Something cool and smooth pressed against his other side, something more slippery than the wall.

Paul stopped and uncovered his eyes. The sweep of the entire island stretched below him on one side, although the view was strangely distorted, the colors blurry and prismatic. The window ran from a few feet above his head down to knee level, perhaps five by five meters. Beneath their feet lay only smooth parquet—the artificial woodland curved away from the wall and its inset window here, broadening the walkway, forming a space between glass and forest wide enough to park a couple of trucks.

Mudd was shouting in the trees, bellowing like a bull as he hurried closer. It sounded like he was knocking the trunks down with his bare hands.

"He's here!" Ava said in a strangled voice.

"I know." Paul wished he had another rock—it would be a great pleasure to try to smash the fat man's ugly teeth. Or put out one of Finney's little snake eyes.

"No, I mean my friend—he's here!"

Paul looked around, half expecting to see a spectral figure, but of course there was nothing. His eye flicked down to the weird view through the window, the buildings far below bent crazily up toward him as though reflected in the bowl of a spoon. The glass is energized somehow, he thought. Some kind of electrical charge running through it—probably one of those hyperglass things, meant to keep anyone from firing a missile through it and blowing up Jongleur and this madhouse of his. . . .

"Tell him to turn off the window," Paul said. "The power, the electrical power—it has to be turned off or we can't reach the fire escape stairs."

"I don't understand," said Ava, but apparently something did. The window abruptly changed, the view leaping out clear and unwarped, the sky gray, the air full of drizzle, the buildings beneath them now as sharp-edged as some kind of expressionist sculpture.

The wall began to flicker around the window. For a split-instant Paul thought, wildly, that it too might dissolve, everything illusion, leaving them standing naked to the elements. Instead the angry, hawklike face of Felix Jongleur appeared ten meters high along the wall, first twinned on either side of the window, then multiplying outward all the way along the curve.

"WHO SET OFF THE ALARMS?" It was the face of an angry god, a voice like a controlled explosion. Paul shrank back, fighting not to drop reflexively to his knees. "AVIALLE? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

"Father!" she cried. "They are trying to kill us!"

A group of security guards dove out of the bushes onto the walkway and rolled to a crouch, leveling an ugly variety of guns that Paul had not dreamed existed outside of net dramas. The effect of frightening, fatal efficiency was undercut slightly as the guards saw the massive face of Felix Jongleur—one of them even let out a cry of startled surprise. All stared with their mouths open. Finney strode out of the trees just a few meters from Paul, his expensive suit snagged in several places, covered with leaves and dirt.

"WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE?" Jongleur roared.

Ava wept, sagging against Paul. "I love him!"

"It's under control, sir," declared Finney, but he looked nervous. Twenty meters down the curve of the wall, on the other side of Paul and Ava, Mudd smashed out of the forest like an angry rhinoceros, followed by a half-dozen more guards.

"There you are, you little Limey bastard," grunted Mudd. He had tried to wipe the blood from his face but had only managed to smear it into a warpaint mask. "Somebody shoot him."

"Shut up," Finney snapped.

"No!" Ava swung herself in front of Paul. "Don't hurt him—Father, don't let them hurt him!"

The nightmare had swung far out of control. Whatever the girl believed, Paul did not think for a second that Jongleur would spare him—they just didn't want it to happen in front of her. He took a quick glance over his shoulder, then flung himself backward and turned to scramble toward the lever at the edge of the window frame. For a moment he had it in his hand, could even look down and see the black metal rail of the fire escape outside the window, then one of the guards' guns went off in a series of explosive pops. The bullets stitched past him, blowing fist-size pieces of construction foam out of the wall and spiderwebbing the heavy glass above his head.

"ARE YOU MAD?" Jongleur bellowed, his face replicated all along the wall like the masks of an enraged god. Colorful birds, startled by the gunshots, had abandoned the trees and now filled the air, squawking and fluttering. "YOU COULD HAVE HIT MY DAUGHTER!"

"No more firing, you idiots!" shrilled Finney.

Paul lay on the ground below the sill, strengthless, almost numb. He had lost. The window was still closed. A huge hand tightened on his collar and yanked him to his feet.

"You little shit." Mudd leaned close. "You can't even imagine the trouble you're in."

Finney had grabbed Ava and was pulling her back toward the forest. "Father!" she cried, struggling hard. "Father, do something!"

"SEDATE HER," Jongleur said. "THIS WAS A MISTAKE AND SOMEONE WILL PAY."

Finney stopped. "But, sir. . . !"

"AND PUT THE TUTOR SOMEWHERE, TOO. WE'LL DEAL WITH HIM LATER."

Mudd shoved Paul toward the guards. One of them stepped forward as if to catch him, but instead raised a fist and smashed it into the side of Paul's head. He dropped, his skull bursting with fireworks and flapping birds.

"No!" shrieked Ava, then she had pulled free of Finney and was running toward Paul.

"STOP HER, DAMN IT!" thundered Jongleur.

Finney snatched at her nightgown, which held for a heartbeat, then tore. One of the other guards threw himself at her feet, and tripped her, sending her staggering backward toward the window. Some of the birds that had settled on the sill fluttered up in panic; she snatched at them wildly, hopelessly, as she struck the glass.

The bullet-pocked window splintered in a thousand jagged cracks and for a single quantum instant she hung there, suspended against emptiness as if frozen in flight, surrounded with radiating lines like a stained glass angel. Then the window collapsed outward in a sparkle of broken crystal and she was gone into the gray air.

A dull clung as she hit the rail of the fire escape. An endless second before Paul heard her scream begin, then an eternity before it whistled away and faded. It might have been a wordless yowl of terror. It might have been his name.

Everything was silent then—Finney, Mudd, the guards, even the giant, astonished masks of Felix Jongleur, a curving hall of petrified images. Suddenly a cloud of colors, of sparks, of something Paul could not at first understand, swirled out of the trees and darted out through the shattered window.

The birds.

Wings beating, whirring, a murmur of questioning calls finally rising to a many-voiced screech of triumph, the birds escaped their long prisoning, sprang out into the rain-misted sky and then scattered, bright feathers shimmering like the shards of a broken rainbow.

In the stillness that followed, a single gleam of blue-green drifted down through the space between the trees and the shockingly empty window, riding the air in broad loops until it settled at last on the floor between Paul's hands.