I had wondered how she could possibly know anything about junior lodge cliques. But, admiring her and wanting to learn, I hadn’t said anything.

“I only want to protect you and Miranda, Drew,” Leisha said, “and to help any way I can.”

I looked out the plane window, at the sunlight reflected blind-ingly on the metal wings, until the shapes behind my eyelids blotted out the ones in my mind.

The plane, which had been so carefully checked for duragem-dissembler contamination in Seattle, must have become contaminated in Atlanta. It went down over upcountry Georgia.

It was the KingDome all over again, except that this pilot didn’t pray or curse or moan, and we were flying at twenty thousand feet. The sky was a hazy blue, with clouds below that blocked any view of the ground. The plane listed to the left, just slightly, and I saw the flesh on the back of the pilot’s neck change from light brown to a mottled maroon. Leisha looked up from her briefcase. Then the plane righted and I could feel my mind, which had clenched into a tight hard shape like constipation, open again.

But the next moment the plane lurched again, and began to shudder. The pilot spoke to his console in low, urgent orders, simultaneously punching in manual commands. The plane nosedived.

The pilot pulled it up so hard I was thrown against Leisha. Her bright hair filled my mouth. Her briefcase hurled forward, against the back of the front seat. The briefcase said, “For maximum utility, please hold this unit steady.” A long, thin, thread spun itself in my mind.

Leisha grabbed the back of the front seat and pulled herself off me. “Drew! Are you all right?”

The plane dropped. The pilot stayed with it, issuing orders in a monotonous voice controlled as machinery, manipulating the manual. Leisha’s briefcase said, “This unit is deactivating,” in a clear high voice like a trained soprano. Leisha’s hand groped to check my restraints. “Drew!”

“I’m all right,” I said, thinking, This is not all right. The thread spun itself out, stretching tauter and tauter.

We plunged through the clouds. There was a shrieking high in the air, almost sounding above us, as if it were coming from some entirely different machinery. Then the plane hit flat on its belly on marshy ground. I felt the hit in my teeth, in my bones. Leisha, thrown once more against me, said something very low, a single word; it might have been “Daddy.”

The second the plane smashed into the ground, the sides lifted. But it couldn’t have been the same second, I thought later, because nobody would design crash equipment that way. But it seemed only a second until the sides lifted and the passenger restraints sprang free. Leisha pushed me out of the plane, the same moment I caught the acrid smell of smoke.

I dropped on my belly into four inches of water covering mucky ground. Leisha splashed down beside me, falling to her knees. Without my powerchair I felt myself flailing, a desperate fish, holding myself above water on my elbows. I crawled forward, pulling myself with my upper arms through the muck and away from the plane dragging my useless legs behind.

Leisha staggered to her feet and tried to lift me. “No, run!” I screamed, as if the smoke billowing out from the plane blocked sound and not sight. “Not without you,” she said. I could feel the plane behind me, a bomb. I screamed, “I can go faster on my own!” Maybe it was true.

She kept on tugging at my body, though I was far too heavy for her. The smoke thickened. I didn’t hear the pilot climb out — was he hurt? My left palm slipped in the mud and I fell face first into it. Frantically I tried to get back up on my hands and drag myself forward. “Run!” I screamed again at Leisha, who wouldn’t leave. Hopeless, hopeless. She wasn’t strong enough to carry me, and the plane was going to blow.

The thread snapped. The lattice in my mind, as in Seattle, disappeared.

Someone ran toward Leisha from the other side of the plane. The pilot? But it wasn’t. The man tackled Leisha and she fell on top of me. Once more my face was pushed into the mud. Then I heard a faint pop. When I fought my eyes free of the mud, I saw the air around the three of us shimmering. A force shield. Y-energy. How strong was it? Could it withstand—

The plane exploded in light and heat and blinding color.

I fell back into the muck, pinned under Leisha. The world rocked and I saw a tiny black water snake, terrified at the intrusions into its swamp, dart forward and bite me on the cheek. The snake started as a thin thread, then became a blur of close motion, and then the world went black as its shiny scales and I didn’t know if the thread held or not.

He was a GSEA agent. When I came to, three of them stood around me in a circle, like the ring of doctors around my bed decades ago, when I was crippled. I lay on my back on a patch of relatively dry, spongy ground at the edge of the shallow lake. Leisha sat a little way off, her back against a custard-apple tree, her head bent forward on her knees. Across the swamp, Kevin Baker’s plane burned, its smoke rising in billowy clouds.

“Leisha?” I heard myself croak. My voice sounded as alien as everything else. Only it wasn’t alien at all. I recognized the heaviness of the muggy air, the whine of insects, the scummy pools and waxy-white ghost orchids. And over everything, the gray dripping beards of Spanish moss. I had been raised in upcountry Louisiana. This was — had to be — Georgia, but much of the swampy country is the same. It was I who had become the alien.

“Ms. Camden will be all right in a moment,” an agent answered. “Probably just a concussion. There’s help on the way. We’re GSEA, Mr. Arlen. Lie still — your leg is broken.”

Again. But this time I felt no pain. There were no nerves left to feel pain. I raised my chin slightly, feeling the pull in my stomach muscles. My left leg lay bent at a sharp, unnatural angle. I lowered my chin.

The shapes slithering through my mind were gray and indistinct on the outside, spiked within. They had a voice. Can’t do anything right, can you, boy? Who d’you think you are — some goddamn donkey?

I said aloud, like a little boy, “A snake bit my cheek.”

A second man bent to squint at my face. It was covered with mud. He said, not harshly, “There’s a doctor on the way. We’re not going to move you until she gets here. Just lie still and don’t think.”

Don’t think. Don’t dream. But I was the Lucid Dreamer. I was. I had to be.

Leisha’s voice said thickly behind me, “Are we under arrest? On what charges?”

“No, of course not, Ms. Camden. We’re happy to be able to assist you,” said the man who had squinted at my cheek. The other two agents stood blank-faced, although I saw one of them blink. You can convey contempt with a blink. Leisha and I consorted ” with, assisted, Huevos Verdes. Gene manipulators. Destroyers of the human genome.

I saw Carmela Clemente-Rice standing beside the lattice in my mind, a clean cool shape, vibrating softly.

“You are Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency,” Leisha said. It wasn’t a question. But she was a lawyer: she waited for an answer.

“Yes, ma’am. Agent Thackeray.”

“Mr. Arlen and I are grateful for your assistance. But by what right—”

I never found out what legal point Leisha had been going to make.

Men dressed in rags burst from behind trees, through tangled vines, from the mucky ground itself. One moment they weren’t there, the next they were — that’s how it felt. They hollered and shrieked and whooped. Agent Thackeray and his two comtemp-tuous deputies didn’t even have time to draw their guns. Lying flat on my back, I saw the ragged men foreshortened as they raised pistols and fired at what seemed like, but couldn’t have been, point-blank range. Thackeray and the two agents went down, the bodies twitching. I heard somebody say, “Hail, yes, she’s an abomination, that there’s Leisha Camden,” and a gun fired again: once, twice. The first time, Leisha screamed.