Renie forced herself to remain calm, although it reminded her unpleasantly of the grotesque patchwork creatures in the Kansas simulation—not only cruelty made monsters, it seemed. As Renie and her friend reached the fire the little creatures rose and greeted them with awkward bows. The tallest, whose shoulders were as high as Renie's waist, asked, "Are you searching?"

"No," the Stone Girl replied. "Just walking. Are you going to the Well?"

"Soon. But first we must find what we have lost. And we have lost everything, even our home!"

One of the other dwarfs was staring right at Renie. "Say Dives," he said mournfully.

"Um . . . dives," she answered after a moment, wondering whether this was a greeting ritual or some kind of test.

"No, they're from Say Dives," the Stone Girl whispered.

"Say Dives is gone!" the leader said, his mouth open from floating rib to floating rib in a gape of woe. "The meadows, the mountains, our beautiful caves! Gone!"

"The Ending has t–t–taken it all by now," said the one beside Renie, choking back a sob. "When I came home from work, my house was gone—and all my wives! The cats and sacks—all gone, too!" The other dwarfs echoed his misery in a wordless chorus of moans.

"The stepmothers came and told us we had to run away," the leader said. "The people that we meet here in the Wood say we must go to the Well. But we cannot go until we find our wives and our sacks and all our cats! There is a chance that they escaped!"

"A man without wives and kits and cats is no man at all," another proclaimed heavily. A deep, tragic silence fell on the gathering.

"So . . . so you people have stepmothers also?" Renie asked at last, finding herself a seat on a log near the fire, trying very hard not to stare at what to her was a pattern of ghastly deformities. The dwarfs beside her slid down to make room. She had to remind herself that however bizarre this seemed to her, these events were just as terrible to them as to any real-world refugees.

The shy-eyed fellow beside her, his face set so low on his belly that his belt looked like it must be strangling him, offered her a cup of something that steamed. "Stone soup," he said quietly. "It's good."

Renie's guide looked over, her face solemn with worry. "You eat . . . stones?"

The leader shook his head. "We would never harm you, friend—we eat only unliving minerals. Besides, if you will forgive me, you look to be mostly sediment. No offense, but that is not to our taste."

"No offense taken," the little girl said in relief.

"Does everyone who lives in . . . in these places . . . do they all have stepmothers?" Renie asked.

The dwarfs could not cock their heads, since they had no necks, but they bent themselves into several strange positions to indicate surprise. "Of course," said the leader. "How else would we know when danger is near? Who else would guard us when we sleep?" His lower lip drooped toward the fork of his legs. "But they can't stop the Ending."

So the stepmothers are part of the operating system, Renie decided. A kind of monitoring subroutine—maybe a harsh one, like the wicked stepmothers in all those stories. But where do the monsters, these Ticks and Jinnears, fit in? She tried to think of a nursery rhyme with a tick in it, but the closest she could come up with was "Hickory Dickory Dock," which wasn't very close at all.

"Where are you from?" one of the dwarfs asked Renie. She looked helplessly at the Stone Girl.

"Where The Beans Talk," the little girl answered. "But we went to the Witching Tree, and it told us it was time to go the Well."

It didn't tell me that, Renie thought morosely. It didn't tell me much of anything. A sudden thought led to her to ask, "Have any of you seen any others like me? A brown-skinned man and a girl with skin a little lighter?"

The dwarfs shrugged sadly. "But the Wood is full of travelers," one said. "Perhaps your family is among them."

Renie said nothing, struck by the idea. !Xabbu and Sam Fredericks, her family. It was true in a way, and not just in shared skin color. Few people had ever suffered greater hardships with their real families, and certainly no one had suffered anything more consistently peculiar.

Conversation wound down quickly. The dwarfs had made a heroic effort to be good hosts, but their hearts were clearly not in it, and Renie and the Stone Girl were exhausted. They curled up on the ground to rest while the dwarfs went on talking among themselves in quiet voices full of confusion and loss. Although she had proved herself much less bothered by cold than Renie, the Stone Girl pushed herself tight against Renie's body and within moments seemed to be asleep—so much so that Renie could detect no breathing at all. She wrapped her arms around the compact little form and watched the firelight glimmering in the treetops above her head. She was wandering now in a weird, childish dream-world—a dream-world under siege. She had lost everyone and everything. Of all who had come to Sellars' summoning, only she remained. Even the operating system, the god of this small world, had admitted defeat. What was there left to do?

I can hold this child, she thought. Even if it's just for one night, I can give her a little comfort, a sense of safety—even if it's an illusion.

So, as the huge disk of the moon crawled down toward the horizon and Renie eased into a sleep she desperately needed, that was what she did.

When she awoke, a diffuse glow had spread across the world, a sad gray light that did little to make things seem more hopeful. The dwarfs had gone, leaving only the embers of their fire behind. The Stone Girl was already awake, squatting by the dying fire, poking in the ashes with a stick.

Renie yawned and stretched. Even in this sickly dawn it was good to have a blanket to wrap around herself, good to have someone to talk to. She smiled at the little girl. "It feels like I slept a long time, but I guess I didn't. So if there's a moon here, why isn't there a sun?"

The Stone Girl gave her a quizzical look. "Sun?"

"Never mind. I see our friends are gone."

"A long time ago."

"Why didn't they wait for the sun . . . I mean, for morning?"

"They did. It's been this way since before they left." Renie now noticed for the first time that her companion was frightened. "I don't think there's going to be any more light than this."

"Oh." Renie glanced around. It was dark, the sky a mournful, shadowy gray. "Oh. Does this . . . happen very often?"

"That it doesn't turn into day?" The little girl shook her head. "Never."

Jesus Mercy, Renie thought, does this mean the system's shutting down now? Is this part of the Ending everyone's so afraid of? If the operating system were a person, Renie would certainly have diagnosed severe depression at the very least. "So is the damn thing just going to give up on us?" she said aloud.

And what if it does? If we're inside it, somehow, do we go, too? It was hard to believe that, locked as they were within the system, subject to damage and death just as in real life, she and her friends would survive a complete collapse of the network.

And Stephen, and all the other children here, trapped, helpless. . . .

"We have to get going." Renie struggled to her feet. "To the Well, I guess. But you'll have to lead us there."

Her guide balanced on her haunches and looked out at the encircling forest. "We need to find a bridge," she said listlessly. "Then we can go to More Very Bush. Or maybe to Counting House. There's a king there," she added.

Renie wasn't certain she wanted to meet this odd fairy tale's version of royalty—for all she knew, he might incline toward the Alice's Wonderland, off-with-their-heads model. "So we find a bridge." She hesitated. "Does that mean we have to find the river first?"