NETFEED/CHILDREN'S INTERACTIVES: HN, Hr. 2.0 (Eu, NAm)—"Pippa's Potato Patch"

(visual: Pippa and Purdy looking for Cracky Hoe)

VO: Pippa wants to plant flowers, but Rascal Rabbit has other ideas and hides her tools. Also featuring a short episode of Magic Counting Box and when the wind blows the cradle will rock when the bough breaks the cradle will fall and down will come baby down will come baby down will come baby down will come baby. . . .

Just stay put," Catur Ramsey told her. "I don't think there will be enough smoke to make it all the way up to your storeroom, but you might keep a wet cloth handy to put over your mouth, just in case."

"By these calculations, it'll fill up the basement pretty good," Beezle said. "More than fill it up."

"Sellars wanted enough that no one could get down there right away and find out how much of a fire there was—especially since there won't really be a fire."

Olga looked at the vents high on the wall of the storeroom. "You are sure I won't be suffocated up here? Or in one of the elevators?"

"Trust me, lady," Beezle grunted.

"Trust you?" Olga was tired and nervy. She had been up and down so many elevators in the last forty-eight hours that she was starting to look for numbers every time she walked through a door. The idea of being caught inside one with smoke billowing in through the air ducts was terrifying. "Why should I trust you? Where did you come from—and who are you, anyway?"

"He's a friend," Ramsey said hurriedly. "He's. . . ."

"I'm an agent, lady. Didn't you know?"

"What?" Olga tried to sort it out. "A theatrical agent? A secret agent? What kind of agent?"

His noise of disgust was as vivid as a cartoon fart. "A software agent—I'm gear. An Infosect virtual assistant, manufactured by Funsmart Entertainment. Jeez, Ramsey, you didn't tell her?"

"I . . . I didn't . . . we were in such a hurry. . . ."

"Hold on, please. You . . . you have turned all this over to an imaginary person?" Something tickled her memory. "An Infosect? That is a child's toy! We sold it on Uncle Jingle. Years ago!"

"Hey, lady, I'm not the newest gear out of the box but I'm still the best."

"Mr. Ramsey, I cannot believe you would do this to me." It felt like betrayal. For the first time in many days of stress and danger tears sprang to her eyes. "My safety—a toy!"

"Ms. Pirofsky . . . Olga." Ramsey sounded like a boy caught stealing, almost stammering with contrition. "I'm sorry, really sorry. You're right, I should have told you. I would have told you, but things have been happening so fast. Beezle isn't just kiddie gear—he's been upgraded a lot. And I've been working with him for a while now. . . ."

"He's a child's plaything, Mr. Ramsey! We sold the damn things on my show. My God, he came in a box with a picture on it of a little boy saying 'Wow! My new best friend!' If you had a client on trial for his life would you get a Judge Jingle Courtroom Playset to do your research? I do not think so. But you're asking me to put my life in the hands of this . . . jack-in-the-box?"

"Yeah, it's nice to meet you, too, lady."

"Look, it's not like that, Olga, honestly." Ramsey sounded panicked now and it undercut a little of her anger. He was trying so hard. Foolish, maybe, but a nice young man, that was what he was, still at an age where he thought life could be argued into doing the right things.

But life doesn't argue back, she thought. It just rolls over you like the tide, over and over, taking away a little bit each time.

"Who am I fooling?" she said aloud, and almost laughed. "I came here because there were voices in my head, ghost-children talking to me. I'm sneaking around like a spy. We are going to burn down the richest man in the world's building—if only by accident. Why shouldn't a child's toy run the operation? Let's do it."

"I told you, Olga, I'm sorry." Ramsey had misread the swing in her mood, had taken the doomed amusement for pure sarcasm. "I can help you, but only with Beezle to. . . ."

"I just said we'll go on, Mr. Ramsey. Why not?" She did laugh now. It almost felt good. "Better to risk breaking your neck than never to look up at the sky, as my father used to say."

There was a moment of silence. "You know, lady," Beezle said admiringly, "you got a certain style."

"And that is all I have, at this point. But thank you."

"So . . . so we're okay to go ahead?" Ramsey still sounded as though he were a few streets behind. "Set off the . . . the smoke device?"

"The bomb. Yes. Why not?"

"We'll be careful, Olga. We've got the ventilation diagrams—we'll keep a close eye on everything. . . ."

"Please, Mr. Ramsey. Catur. Just do it before I lose my nerve."

"Right. Right." He took a breath. "Make it work, Beezle."

"Okay, here goes. Three, two, one—bingo!" He fell silent as though watching something. Olga could not help wondering what a software agent saw—shapes? Colors? Or did it just read raw data, letting it flow past and through like a sea anemone sifting the ocean currents? "Yep. We have ignition!" the agent said cheerfully. Olga closed her eyes and waited.

"Shouldn't I have been in one of the elevators already?" she asked as the door closed behind her. "To save time?"

"We got smoke on three levels now, boss," Beezle reported. "Moving up fast, too. Since they were marked on the diagrams, I disabled a couple of the seal-off valves."

"Too risky," Ramsey said, answering Olga's question. "That's also why we're starting you from close to the top. We don't want anyone paying any more attention than necessary, so we're waiting until we know the guards have already started the fire procedures. Any alarms yet, Beezle?"

"Yeah, a bunch. Sellars prepared some virals to confuse things, though—change the outgoing codes on the alarms and send 'em to the wrong authority or make 'em give the wrong location information. They haven't even gotten word to their own firefighters down on the military base yet. It'll take at least a quarter of an hour before anyone off the island figures out what's happening, maybe longer."

A blatting noise began to pulse through the walls, a sequenced honking of robotic terror as though the building itself had smelled the smoke and taken fright.

"Here we go," Ramsey said. "Key the floor number, Olga, and let's see if the changes to your badge work."

She did, then clapped her hands over her ears. The alarm had jumped a notch in volume. "I can hardly hear you!" She imagined the sound shaking the walls as smoke billowed through the lower levels, the weekend employees running in terror, the few remaining cleaners, janitors—poor, slow Jerome. . . ! "What's going to happen to the people down there?" she asked in sudden dismay. "You said it wasn't toxic, but how will they breathe if it fills up?"

"It won't fill up," said Beezle in his cabdriver's growl. "I'm venting—makes it look better, anyway. Security is getting calls from all over the island."

"You're moving," Ramsey said with relief as the elevator rose.

"I know."

"Sorry, of course. I'm just watching you here. Up, up, up." He sounded almost giddy. Olga felt as though she had left her stomach behind.

"Are there still guards in security?"

"Doesn't look like it," Ramsey told her. "They're probably already trying to get people out of the building."

"Lots of activity downstairs, no activity on the security floor monitors," Beezle said. "But when the door opens, don't go in right away, got me?"

I take orders from a toy, she thought. "Got you."

She waited in the elevator at the forty-fifth floor, feeling Ramsey and Beezle at her shoulders like invisible angels. The alarm was still blaring mindlessly. They don't need to get the alarm calls on the mainland, she thought. They will be able to hear this all over Louisiana.

"Still no movement," said Beezle. The door hissed open.

There was no one in the tastefully-lit reception area but the screentop desk had been hit by the automatic override and instead of woodland scenes it now displayed a map of the floor with the exits blinking red. The alarm was more distant here, as though the upper part of the building was built of some heavier, more soundproof material, but a secondary alarm whispered through the air, an irritatingly calm female voice instructing whoever was listening to "proceed directly to your designated escape location."

Some of us do not have designated escape locations, dear. The door at the back read her modified badge and pinged open. Even with Beezle's report, she still went through it like a trainer entering the cage of a particularly unpredictable animal.

The guard area was empty, the neon data-hieroglyphs on the plexiglass walls like cave paintings of a vanished race. The calm female voice kept urging her over and over to go to her escape location but Olga was finding it easier to disregard now.

She presented her badge to the reader set into the thick plastic. The door opened immediately, as though pleased by the visit. She quickly crossed the glassed-in area to the black fibramic shaft she had seen the first time. Sure enough, there was an elevator door set into it and a black reader plate beside the door. She took a breath and held up her badge. An instant later the door slid open, revealing an interior covered in some expensive kind of leather.

"It worked!" Ramsey sounded like he had been holding his breath.

"How can you tell? It didn't make any noise."

"Your ring. I've got the camera ring sending because we're going to need it. I saw the doors open."

But the doors in question had already closed again, this time with her inside, and the elevator was moving effortlessly upward. Three seconds, five, ten. . . .

"It's only supposed to be one floor up," she said. "Why is it taking so long?"

"Thick floors," said Beezle. "Just thought you might like to know, they're evacuating a buncha people out the front door now. Still no fire engines, nothing like that. I think Sellars may have had something else set up, too, to make sure everyone cleared out."

"What do you mean?" Ramsey asked.

"I'll tell you when I know."

The elevator stopped. The door opened into an airlock. Briefly, recorded messages about security and clean room procedures battled with the escape announcement, then gave up as the airlock door reader responded to her badge and the inner door hissed aside. Olga stepped out.

Her first thought was that she was watching a netflick, some science-fiction epic in full wraparound. It was harder work to convince herself it was real. The entire floor was one open room with only a few structural pillars to break what seemed like tens of thousands of square meters of floor space, and most of that space seemed to be covered with machines. The machine barn had no windows, only a continuous expanse of curving white wallscreen, currently painted with the escape route maps that had preempted the building's regular programming. The room was massive and, but for the quiet robot voice, as silent as a museum after closing. It was unreal.

But it was real.

". . . Directly to your designated escape location. Repeat, this is not a drill. . . ."

"Oh, God," Olga said. "It's huge."

"Lift the ring," Ramsey told her, his voice sharp with anxiety. "We can't see anything but the floor."

She made a fist and held out her hand, pointing it aimlessly down the rows of stacked, silent machines. She had thought the collection of machinery on the lower floor was imposing, but it was like comparing a toaster to the engine room of an ocean liner. "What . . . what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know. Beezle?"

"I ain't so good at reading visuals," the agent rasped. "Lotta translation effects, back and forth. But I'll give it my best shot. Just start walking. Give me a view side to side, will ya?"

Olga made her way up and down the rows as though led by her own outstretched hand, past what had to be billions of credits worth of gleaming machinery. First five, then ten minutes ticked away as she trudged along, her arm aching and stiffening. She could not help wondering if the firefighters were in the building now, and how long it would be until the security guards were back at their screens. Twice she stepped over things that suggested employees had been here recently but had vacated in a hurry—an expensive-looking, very small pad abandoned in the middle of a row, still fiberlinked to a port, and twenty meters away the shattered remains of a coffee cup and a puddle of gently steaming liquid.

She had just found a third artifact, a shapeless piece of synthetic fabric that she guessed might be some sort of clean-room headwear, when Beezle said, "I think that's it, boss."

She looked up to where her fist was pointing and saw a tower of components little different from many others, except that there seemed to be a greater-than-average number of huge fiberlink bundles snaking down into the floor conduits. "This?"

"It's worth a try," Ramsey said. "Will anything bad happen if you're wrong, Beezle?"

"The building might blow up. Just kidding."

"Funny," Olga said dully. The weirdness was beginning to get to her, not to mention the idiot voice still droning out the escape location warning.

"Sorry. Orlando likes stuff like that." This nonexplanation issued, Beezle began to give her instructions on where to place Sellars' mystery box. As before, she minutely changed its position several times until her instructor—Sellars the first time, Beezle this time, and if Beezle was gear, then what the hell was Sellars? she wondered—seemed satisfied; the box clicked, vibrated briefly, and adhered.

After a few long moments of silence Olga began to feel panicky. "Are you still there? Catur?"

"I'm here, Olga. Beezle, is it the right machine? What do you have?"

The silence again, but longer this time, much longer. Ramsey called Beezle several times in mounting anxiety. Only when almost a minute had passed did Beezle come back.

"Whoa," he said, his voice more than a little distorted. "I wish I could swear, but like the lady pointed out, I'm a children's toy. This is un-friggin-believable."

"What?" Ramsey demanded.

"This place is carrying the dataflow of a major city, I kid you not."

"Which city?"

"Not a real city," Beezle grunted. "Don't be literal. I'm just talking about how much throughput there is. Amazin"! There's a whole light farm on the roof of the building—a laser array like you've never seen, pumping data up, readin' it comin' back. Weird, too—some kind of boosted cesium lasers according to the schematics. You want me to do some research?"

"Not now," said Ramsey.

"What is it?" Olga wondered. "All this data—is it this Grail network I have been told about?"

"Don't ask me." Beezle sounded almost surly. "I'm not up to this. You just can't understand the quantity of data ridin' through here."

"But didn't this Sellars make any provision. . . ?"

"Look, lady, I don't know what Sellars had planned. He sure didn't leave any notes about what he was going to do with this if he tapped into it. And even with all the upgrades and extra processing power Orlando rigged up for me, I can't begin to make sense of it—you might as well try to run all the UN Telecomm data through an abacus!"

For a toy, Olga thought, he sounded quite convincingly overwhelmed. And he had an admirable way with metaphor as well. "So what do we do? Mr. Ramsey?"

"I . . . I guess we've done all we can," the lawyer said. "Until we can contact Sellars again. Beezle, are you sure you can't, I don't know, hook up enough processing power to make some sense of it—any sense at all?"

The agent's snort was answer enough.

"Right," said Ramsey. "Then I suppose we really have done all we can. Good work, Olga. We'll just hope it all comes to something—that Sellars gets back to us and that he had some idea of what kind of processing this would take." Catur Ramsey did not sound entirely convinced. "So we might as well get you out. . . ."

Olga looked around the massive room. "Not yet."

It took Ramsey a moment to hear what she'd said. "Olga, that place is going to be swarming with firefighters and cops soon, not to mention J Corporation security. Get going!"

"I'm not ready to go." A calm she had not felt in hours, perhaps days, descended on her. "I didn't come here in the first place just to put in some vampire-tap or whatever your Sellers called it. I came here because the voices told me to come. I want to know why."

"What are you talking about?" He had gone from irritated to panicky and was swiftly moving on toward something even more extreme. "What the hell are you talking about, Olga?"

The alarms were still going, both the distant wordless pulse and the empty female voice. "I'm going up to the top," she said. "Where this terrible man lives. Uncle Jingle's house, I guess you could call it. Uncle Jingle's lair."

"Wow." Beezle manufactured a whistle. "You really are crazy, lady."

"Actually, it's probably true," she said, perfectly happy now to be talking to a piece of code. "I spent a. long time in a sanitarium when I was younger. And recently—well, we all know what it means when you hear voices in your head."

"You're hearing voices in your head right now," Beezle pointed out.

"Yes, you are right. I'm getting used to hearing them." She turned and began to walk across the impossibly wide room toward the elevator.

"Olga, don't!" Ramsey was desperate now. "We have to get you out of there!"

"And I am getting quite good at ignoring them, too," she added.

It was a little easier now, but not much. He didn't feel like he was dying quite so quickly.

For the hundredth time, thousandth time, he had no idea, Sellars repulsed an attack and still managed to hold open his connection into the Grail network. With all the experience he had gained from this horribly protracted encounter, as well as from his earlier incursions, he was still amazed by how the thing reacted.

He floated, bodiless, in a darkness that seemed alive with malice. Now that he had survived the original blaze of resistance the secondary attacks continued to come in waves, the timing random. Sometimes he had almost a whole minute to consider and plan, then the assaults would resume, storm following storm, and his every thought was once more focused on survival.

He had learned from his previous connections that there was more to the system's defenses than merely the technical countermeasures, however sophisticated. It could manufacture all the traces, blowbacks, and disconnection attempts that he expected from top-of-the-line gear, attacking and defending and then counterattacking so quickly that it was like fighting war in space at light speed. But there was a purely physical side, too, perhaps the same thing responsible for the Tandagore illness: during each attack he could feel the security system reaching not just into his system but into him as well, trying somehow to manipulate his autonomic responses, to slow or speed his heart rate and respiration, to reprogram his neural circuitry.

But Sellars was not an unsuspecting child stumbling into the jaws of a hidden monster. He had been studying the system a long time and had modified his own internal structures until most of the grosser attempts to manipulate him physically could be routed down harmless pathways, their force wasted on buffers almost as a lightning rod drew away the deadly force of electricity. Even so, as long as he was trapped online, struggling with the network's defenses, he had to remain completely disconnected from his physical self so his old, worn body would not pull itself to pieces in seizure. The security system might not be able to kill him yet, but neither could he disengage from it without losing contact with Cho-Cho, and he could not let one more innocent disappear into the darkness at the heart of the system—he had too many such sins on his conscience already. And although the operating system was clearly weakening, probably failing, he could not hope for that kind of release, since its ultimate collapse would probably also doom those who remained online. Sellars and the system remained locked together, neither able to let go, failing enemies trapped in a death dance.

The latest wave of attacks stuttered to a halt. He hung in the blackness, trying desperately to think of a way to break the impasse. If he could only understand what he was fighting. . . ! Dark and angry as the thing seemed to him (he had struggled against such anthropomorphic characterizations for a long time, until he realized that by doing so he was underestimating the subtle unpredictability of his enemy), there was far more to the operating system than that.

The most immediate part of it, the security programming which was trying its best to kill him, was only one head of this particular Cerberus. Another head watched him and considered him while the battle raged—even seemed, in some paradoxical way he could only feel but not define or explain, to wish him no ill. He could not help wondering whether the security system responses were something over which the operating system as a whole had almost no control, just as an ordinary human could not consciously control his own immune system. This second head, he guessed, was the part of the operating system which had achieved something like true intelligence. It must also be the part that let children like Cho-Cho into the network unharmed—for how could a mere security system know whether a human user was a child or not?—and which avidly followed his volunteers through the network.

There was a third head, too, Sellars sensed, a silent one that was turned away from him, but what it thought about—what it dreamed?—he could only guess. In some ways the third head frightened him most of all.

A new wave of defensive blitz began with no warning, a violent all-out burst that swept him up like a hurricane and for long minutes pushed all considerations but mere survival from his mind. Again he felt it trying to reach into his very mind. The attempt failed, but Sellars knew that if the stalemate went on long enough this damnably bizarre and clever machine was going to find a way to subvert his defenses. He began to wonder just how long he had been here in this no-place, wrestling with Cerberus.

After he had weathered the storm and had snatched a few seconds of much-needed rest, he accessed his own system long enough to discover that almost a full day had passed since he and Cho-Cho had first contacted the network. An entire day spent fighting for his life! No wonder he was exhausted.

In the real world it was already Sunday afternoon. He was running out of time. If the system killed him, or if he killed the system, he would fail. He needed to find some other way. His only hope was that Olga Pirofsky and Catur Ramsey could place the data tap and that the Grail network information would somehow provide answers.

No, he told himself, not just answers, but a solution to this impossible problem.

But he could not even afford to check in on their progress until he had weathered at least one more round of attacks by the security systems. He had stolen moments in the earliest lulls to make a few emergency calls and to find and activate vital defensive gear, but he needed far more time than that to deal with the data tap.

The next assault came quickly enough that he was glad he'd waited. It was as violent as any of the others, but even as he fought off the multipronged attempt he thought he sensed something different this time, a slight lessening of what he could only think of as the resolve behind the attack. When he had suppressed all but the most basic of the security routines, the ones that could be safely left to his own built-in defenses, he prepared to turn his attention to what was happening in the J Corporation tower. But just before he shifted to his own system and his connections to the real world he stopped and hesitated in the darkness, troubled by something he could not name.

That hesitation saved him. The attack that followed mere instants after the defeat of the last was the most savage so far, not just a redoubled assault on his connection but a concentrated, many-fronted attempt to break down his resistance to the more subtle and more devastating physical feedback. For long moments he could actually feel the thing reaching for him down the connection, a monster just on the other side of a splintering, flimsy door, and Sellars knew real terror. The blackness of no-visual became another kind of blackness, an endless void in which he was lost, isolated, pursued.

He held on somehow, and when the probing, searching thing touched him at last he was even able to send a jolt of resistance back down the partially opened channel. He was certain that he felt the nonphysical presence flail in pain and surprise, then the entire attack was suddenly withdrawn.

The beast had limped back to its cave.

His heart and respiration spiraling up to near-critical levels, his mind reeling at what he'd just felt, but desperate to take advantage of whatever time he had bought himself, Sellars left his automatic systems in place to warn him of a new attack, then slid back into his own system.

His beloved, carefully-nurtured interface, the Poetry Garden in which he had spent so much time, tending, planting, pruning, simply being, was all but gone now. It had been replaced by a mutant tangle of activity, a sprawling chaos of data root and virtual vine in which only he could have discerned even a trace of order.

He took a moment to issue some crucial messages and set a few small works in motion, then turned his attention to the slender black sapling that had sprung up at the edge of the sea of vegetation. Three vines had crept up its dark verticality, climbing to a surprising height. He knew what two of the creepers represented, but about the third, its livid, unnatural color and texture more like plastic piping than vegetable, he was less sure. Sorensen? It seemed odd the Garden would represent him in such a way. With foreboding, Sellars made a connection.

Like a phantom he listened in on Catur Ramsey's conversation with Olga and although he shared Ramsey's worry about her, and even debated cutting in to echo Ramsey's warning, the larger and more pressing issue of the data tap would not allow it. He did permit himself a brief moment of amusement at the identity of the third vine. Orlando Gardiner's software agent! What an idea—but a good one. Working together, somehow they had found a way to install the data tap. Sellars found himself admiring and liking Ramsey even more, and Olga, too. He wished he had more time to get to know them both. It was unfortunate that he was probably not going to be alive long enough to do so.

He quickly turned his attention to the data tap, accessing Beezle's captured visuals to carefully examine the linked array of knowledge engines that seemed to power the Grail network. Even without knowing their exact nature and location he had suspected what the software agent had now confirmed and had arranged with the people of TreeHouse, among other resources, to make sure he had the processing power to cope with the influx of data. He checked and then rechecked his already labored calculations. He whispered the prayer which had accompanied him at takeoff on every flight. He opened the tap.

The Garden exploded.

It was too much information—beyond imagining. The constraints of his Garden burst and dissolved, the models incapable of keeping up with the flow. Within a heartbeat his entire system was teetering on the brink of collapse. When that happened, he knew, everything would be lost. He would be trapped in the blackness of the Tandagore coma without even an online existence, or helpless before the next defensive cycle of the operating system. Everything would fail. Everything.

He fought, but the Garden was dying all around him, collapsing, reduced in microseconds to random, nonrepresentational bits. Before his inner eyes the intricate matrix of greenery devolved into abstract patterns of dark and light, flashing randomly, warping and seething like a nest of stars.

Then just as it seemed nothing worse could happen the alarm signals began. The operating system had launched another attack, trying to sever his connection to the Grail network.

No, he realized. It's reaching for me. For me. He felt the system's probe thrust past his crumbling defenses and into his mind. He was helpless before it.

Sellers screamed in shock and pain as it touched him, but there was no sound to be heard in that empty place of endlessly streaming data, no hope and no help—only the mindless throb of a universe being born.

Or a universe dying.

She didn't know how she had got back to the chair or why, but she was staring at her pad again. Only minutes had passed since she had opened her employer's locked storage but they seemed to have ground past as slowly as geological aeons. A tunnel of darkness surrounded her, narrowing her sight until all she could see was the screen, the terrible screen. On it a file called Nuba 27 was now playing. Dread was doing unspeakable things to a woman in what seemed to be a hotel room, the sunlight streaming in through the windows giving everything a stark, ghastly clarity.

Get up, Dulcie thought. Get up. But the tunnel around her hid everything except the screen. All she could see was the horrid, bright hotel light. Get up. She wasn't even sure if she was talking to the woman strapped to the plastic-draped bed or to herself.

A dull bonging sound intruded on her even duller thoughts. She realized she had turned off the sound on the file, a tiny mercy in an eternity of horror, because she had not been able to make herself listen anymore. The musical soundtrack had been even worse than the screaming. So if the sound on the file was turned off, what was making that noise?

A window opened up in the corner of the pad screen. In it, a figure in an overcoat stood in a doorway. For a moment she thought it was only some elaboration of the file's horrors, a second victim perhaps, her employer about to arrange some hideous duet of grunting and screeching, then she slowly came to understand that the doorway in the view-window was the loft's seen from the security camera over the door. It took another long time and more ringing from the doorbell, before she realized it was really happening. Right now.

Close your eyes, a voice urged her. Let it all go away. Never open them again. It's a nightmare.

But it wasn't a nightmare. She knew it wasn't, even though at this moment she knew very little else. One of her hands was clutching an empty coffee cup so hard her fingers had cramped, although she did not remember picking it up. She looked up through the tunneled swirl of darkness and saw Dread still lying on his coma bed, a million miles away.

The light of stars, she thought disjointedly. It takes years, it seems so cold when it gets here. But if you were close, it would burn you right up. . . .

The doorbell rang again.

He's going to kill me, she thought. Even if I run. Wherever I go, whatever I do. . . .

Get up, stupid! This last voice was very faint but something in its urgency cut through the fog in her head, the disassociated murk that was her only protection against pure shrieking animal terror. She clambered to her feet and almost fell down, bracing herself against the back of the chair until her legs were shaking a little less. The chair squeaked. She jerked her head in panic to look at Dread but he still lay unmoving, a god's effigy carved in dark wood. She stumbled to the stairs and went down them like a crippled woman. The doorbell sounded again but the speaker was upstairs; here on the bottom landing it was only a distant sound, like something sinking into the ocean.

I'll lie down here, she thought, after a while I won't even hear it.

Instead some inner compulsion made her reach out and thumb the security lock, then open the door. From up close she could see that the figure in the doorway was shorter than she was, although more heavyset. Dark curly hair, eyes narrowed in suspicion or annoyance. A woman.

A woman. . . . she thought. If it's a woman, I have to tell her something . . . warn her. . . . But she couldn't think. She couldn't remember. The darkness was very thick.

"Excuse me," the stranger said after a moment, her voice deep and firm. "Sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I'm looking for someone named Hunter."

"There's . . . no. . . ." Dulcie leaned on the doorframe for support. "There's no one here by that name." A part of her was glad. She could close the door now and walk back upstairs and pull the blackness over her like a blanket. But . . . Hunter? Why did that name sound familiar? Why did anything sound familiar, for that matter?

"Are you sure? I'm sorry, did I wake you up?" The woman was looking at her carefully, concern and something else in her expression. "Are you feeling all right?"

It came to her then, as if a memory from another country, even another lifetime. Hunter—that was the name on all the documents for the loft. She had seen it on Dread's system, thought it just a random pseudonym, but now. . . . "Oh, God," she said.

The woman stepped forward and took her arm—gently, but with a grip that suggested she could squeeze a lot harder if she wanted to. "Do you mind if we talk? My name is Skouros—I'm a police detective. I have a few questions." Her eyes flicked across the darkness behind Dulcie. "Can you step outside?"

Dulcie was caught, paralyzed, as if possessed by some slow seizure. "I . . . I can't. . . . He. . . ."

"Is there someone else home?"

It was a funny question, really—where was that place, after all? Otherland, they called it. Other. Somewhere? Nowhere? That was why Dulcie laughed. But when she heard herself it was not a good laugh. "No. he's . . . gone. . . ."

"Let's go up, then. Is that all right with you?"

She could only nod. I'm a ghost, she thought, trying to remember what it had been like on the other side of the darkness. It doesn't matter—summoned or banished. I can't do anything about it.

As they went up the stairs the woman in the coat took something out of one of her pockets. For a moment Dulcie thought it was a gun, but it was only a little black-and-silver pad. The woman held it up to her mouth as though to speak into it, but Dulcie had suddenly remembered the files were still open on the screen of her own pad, open and running for anyone to see. Nuba 27. Those fingers wiggling, like something lost and drowning at the bottom of the ocean. . . . Even through the freeze she felt a rush of embarrassment, as though the scenes of horror were something of her own, something shameful, and as they reached the top of the landing she took the woman's hand.

"They're not mine," she explained. "I didn't know. I . . . he. . . ."

And as she turned, still clutching the woman's hand, she saw that the coma bed was empty.

"Just tell me. . . ." the woman began, but didn't finish. Air huffed out of her in a popping wheeze and she staggered forward, four or five steps across the loft floor, then fell down on her face. A huge knife stuck out of her back as though it had simply appeared there, a few inches of blade showing between the handle and the redness oozing out around the place where it had slashed through the overcoat. Dulcie could only stare at the woman, talking one moment, silent and motionless now. The blackness was coming back, closing in swift as wind-driven fog.

"Ah, sweetness, what have you been doing while Daddy was away?"

Dread stepped out of the shadow behind the loft door. He was wearing his white bathrobe, loosely tied. He walked past her, cat-silent on bare feet, and stood over the policewoman. Her eyes, Dulcie saw, were still open. A bubble of red spit was trembling at the corner of her mouth. Dread crouched down until he was only centimeters from the woman's face.

"I wish I had time to do you properly," he told her. "You must have worked hard to wind up at my door. But things are happening fast and I can't stop for games." He stood up, grinning, full of manic energy that lit him up like a Christmas tree. "And as for you, Dulcie, my pet, what have you been up to?" His gaze slid to her pad, still sitting on the chair, the screen flickering with violent motion, and his eyes opened just a little more—they were already as wide as someone on the downhill rush of a roller coaster. "Well, you have been a nosy little bitch, haven't you?"

Without realizing it she had been backing toward the small area of counter where she had set up the coffee makings. "I didn't . . . I don't . . . why. . . ?"

"Why? Well, that's the question, isn't it, sweetness? Why? Because I like to. Because I can."

She paused, her spine against the drawer, her fingers feeling for its handle. She had remembered what was in it. Something had finally jolted her back to life, a splash on her thoughts cold as ice water, and for the first time in an hour she could think. Oh, Jesus, keep him talking, she told herself. He's a monster, but he likes to talk.

"But why? You . . . you don't have to do it."

"Because I can get sex the legitimate way?" The smile lingered. He was high, high on something, high as the sky. "That's not what it's about. And sex—it's nothing. Not in comparison."

She was easing the drawer open, silently, slowly, afraid that her hammering pulse and trembling fingers would make her slip and pull it out too far, send it clattering to the floor. "What . . . what are you going to do to me?"

"Get rid of you. You know that I have to, love. But you've done good work for me so I'm going to make it quick. Terminations should be quick and humane, right? Isn't that what the business manuals all say? Besides, I'm very busy right now—very, very busy." He smiled; if she had not known now what was beneath the mask she would have sworn it was a true and kind thing. "And I can do without you now. I've got things under control. You should see what's going on with the network and your old friends! I hated to leave, even for a minute—things are very exciting there right now—but I believe in keeping an active relationship with my employees."

The drawer was open. She let out a little terrified sigh to mask the sound of her hand searching. There was no need to fake the terror, no need at all. He was watching her with mesmerizing intensity, his pupils big and black as the barrel of a. . . .

Gun. Where's the gun?

She swung around as quickly as she could, risking all, and pulled the drawer all the way out. It was empty.

"Looking for this?" he asked.

She turned back in time to see him pull it from the pocket of his bathrobe. The curling-iron barrel came up and pointed right between her eyes.

"I'm not an idiot, sweetness." Dread shook his head in mock-disappointment. "Oh, and you know what I said about quick. . . ?"

He let the barrel swing down from her face to her middle. Dulcie felt herself punched in the belly and flung backward even as she heard the loud, explosive crack. then she was on her side, trying to understand how so many things could stop working all at the same time. She wanted to make noise, to scream for help, but couldn't: something was crushing the air out of her, a huge fist squeezing her chest. Her hands had flown instinctively to her stomach. She looked down and saw blood welling between her fingers. When she lifted them away, it began to drip down to the floor where it formed a spreading pool. "I changed my mind," he said.