"We've got hours of recordings, broken up into shorter sound bites to make them easier to handle." Mouse handed him a headset. "What we're going to do is play a recording for you to translate. Speak into this microphone. It's hooked to that computer there with speech-recognition software. It will type in your translations as you talk."

"Okay." Ukiah slid the headset on. The word "okay" appeared on the monitor beside him.

"Here's the first." Mouse opened a folder labeled "Angel" and clicked on the first file.

A man spoke, in Hex's emotionally dead voice, a phrase in the Ontongard language: "Returning/rejoining/regrouping at gathering/den/nest."

"The speaker is returning to the nest," Ukiah said, and the words wrote themselves on the text.

Mouse glanced to Ice, who nodded. "All right, and the next one?"

They played through eleven more segments, growing longer in length, but of no great importance; all in Ontongard with no English intermixed. The speakers changed, but not the tone or delivery. Played back-to-back, it was like listening to a dozen people trying to mimic one person. Mouse nodded as Ukiah translated them, as if he already knew what the clips contained.

They were testing him, Ukiah realized. They were seeing if he actually understood the language and was not just making up random comments.

After the last one, Mouse looked again to Ice. "He nailed them all."

"Good, good." Ice swung a chair around and straddled it, facing backward. "Play him the last call we managed to record."

Mouse closed the "Angel" folder and picked a program off the toolbar via an icon of a reel-to-reel tape deck. The resulting program quickly scanned through the selected recording, did a voice recognition on the speakers, produced photographs of a young black woman and a middle-aged white man, and rendered out a complex 3-D tree of colored nodes. The woman was identified as Demon BU1-623-S, alias unknown, and the man as Demon B3-215-S, alias Peter Caldwell.

"What are the numbers for?" Ukiah tapped the numbers for the man and was startled as a window opened giving more information: Peter Caldwell, six-one, a hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. Nest: Caldwell and Associates Engineering, Totten Pond Road, Waltham.

"The first set is the nest they belong to." Mouse closed the window. "This is a demon from one of the Buffalo nests, speaking to a Boston nest."

"Since they rarely travel solo," Ice said, "a nest number gives us a truer idea of their movements."

Mouse nodded and tapped the last part of the identifying number. "The S indicates that these are Speakers, which means they're the ones who usually do the phone calls for their collective. We thought this meant the Speakers were also the leaders, but we learned they're kind of like salmon swimming upstream. They all react—individually or as a mass—in identical fashion to whatever predetermined goal they currently have locked into their collective brain. Killing the Speakers doesn't throw them into confusion."

"But it means one well-designed trap," Ether said, "presented to them individually, will trap them all."

"It's the only way we can hope to fight them," Ice said.

Phone numbers were shown. The Buffalo Get was using a phone in Butler, Pennsylvania; the Boston Get was in Waltham, Massachusetts.

"I am in Butler," the Buffalo Get reported. "Ae missing, not destroyed, thief unknown. New incursion of aware hosts discovered. Partial Get recovered."

"That's what they call us: aware hosts," Mouse said as Ether added, "We think they're talking about Eden."

"Neutralize," the Gets harmonized as they agreed on a course of action.

"Neutralized," the Buffalo Get stated.

The Ontongard then bombed Eden Court, reducing the grand mansion to smoking rubble.

"This part we don't understand," Ice murmured.

"Female host has interacted with breeder," the Buffalo Get said.

"Prime's breeder?" the Boston Get asked.

"Prime's," the Buffalo Get said.

"Capture and contain," the two spoke in duet.

"Contained female," Buffalo reported. "Incubation, nine months."

"Incubate." Again the duet.

Ice leaned in, stabbing a key to pause the conversation. "What are they talking about? Ping is the only female missing."

Ukiah had avoided all thoughts of Ping and the night he spent with her and Core. Beyond the raw emotions of his rape lay the whole ugly inevitability of conception; he was a breeder and she had been all but painted with the breeding drug, Invisible Red. All the implications—from Indigo's reaction to another woman bearing his baby to the Ontongard holding Ping—and therefore his unborn child—churned in his stomach like icy snakes.

"Well?" There was fear and hurt, but also steel resolve in Ice's eyes.

"They have Ping," Ukiah admitted. "She's pregnant. They're keeping her alive and untouched until she has the baby."

"So she hasn't been possessed?" Ice asked.

"No."

As Ice relaxed, Mouse restarted the recording.

"Breeder contamination/infection/adaptation detected in one male," the Buffalo Get reported in Ontongard. "Survival possibility excellent."

Breeder contamination? Core was dead, and he was the only male Ukiah had interacted with for any length of time. They had to be talking about the missing Parity—but how? True, high on Invisible Red, Ukiah had nearly choked the boy to death, but that was just minutes before the Ontongard captured Parity. There couldn't possibly have been enough time. Ukiah flashed back to the beating he gave Parity in the hall. Wait, the contamination was already in Parity's blood . . .

Mouse had paused the recording and the cultists looked at him expectantly.

"What did it say?" Ice demanded.

How could Parity already have been infected? Realization dawned on Ukiah. "Did Parity handle my son at any point?"

"The nephilim?" Ice looked surprised at the question. "Yeah. It bit him in the leg; he needed stitches. Why?"

"They're planning to possess Parity; he's probably one of them now. Anything he knew, they now know."

Which included everything about him and Kittanning.

"Shit," Link hissed. "At least he was just an initiate."

Ice looked troubled but signaled Mouse to continue the recording.

"Contain breeder," Boston said.

"Current whereabouts of breeder unknown," Buffalo reported. "Aware hosts more dangerous than previously thought."

"They must not be allowed to interfere with the priority project," Boston and Buffalo stated together.

"Returning to confer," Buffalo said, and hung up.

"This was Saturday morning. There haven't been any more phone calls."

"Does Parity know about this place? Sanctuary?"

The cultists looked at each other.

Mouse shook his head. "No. Until the demons hit Pittsburgh, Sanctuary was restricted to inner circle only."

"Ping knows where it is," Ether pointed out.

"She wouldn't talk," Link said.

"She's alone with the demons," Ether said. "She has to be scared shitless. Who knows how long she can hold out?"

"Go check on the fortifications," Ice said wearily. "All of you."

"All?" Mouse squeaked like his namesake.