"There's something wrong."

She was suddenly alert, heart speeding. "Someone is coming?"

"No. It's just . . . this is the wrong room. The wrong equipment. As far as I can tell, none of this machinery has any connection to the Grail Network. It's all just the regular J Corporation telecom infrastructure. There's got to be another plan room—something very large."

"So what do we do now?" She was tired and could not help feeling a little resentful. It was one thing to turn your destiny over to mysterious strangers, but when those strangers had apparently sent you on a wild goose chase, it was another thing altogether.

"I truly don't know, Olga. I'll have to spend some time on the problem. I'll come back to you in one hour. In the meantime, take the tap off that machinery, then I think you should go to that storage room we talked about and wait. I've keyed your badge for it. If you go now, you can be there in five minutes. I'll massage the stair cameras."

"More stairs."

"I'm afraid so."

The storage room took up much of a floor, a huge warren full of stacks of unopened shipping boxes and unused furniture. Once Sellars looped the surveillance signal, Olga made her way to a far corner and settled herself behind a set of privacy screens in the most comfortable executive chair she could find.

She dozed again, and woke up thinking how strange it was that she should be here in the very center of the black tower, the thing she had seen in so many dreams, and yet the children who had led her to this place had vanished like shadows in the sun. The silence in her head was almost painful.

There was silence of another kind, too. She checked her internal display. Almost two hours gone. Sellars or Catur Ramsey should have called her by now. She stood and stretched, limbering herself, then found the storage facility's restroom. When she had finished, she called Sellars. There was no answer. She called Ramsey but he wasn't answering either, so she left a message for him.

It's a hard problem, this one, she guessed, and settled in to wait a bit longer.

Two hours turned into three. Olga felt a cold certainty settle on her like mist. They weren't going to call. Something was wrong—very wrong.

Four hours became five, then six. The dim safety lights high overhead continued in permanent twilight. The stacks of boxes stretched away like dozens of cardboard Stone-henges, stashed and forgotten by busy Druids. Olga's certainty had hardened into something frozen and miserable.

She was alone in the middle of the black tower. First the children had left her, now Ramsey and the man Sellars. She had been deserted again.

"I can make no sense of it," Sellars finished.

Ramsey tried to look helpfully attentive, but Sellars' explanation had lost him some time back. "Well, there must be some other equipment in the building somewhere."

"No," the old man said, "it's not that simple. All the data lines from that building come out of that patch room and get handed over to the telecom providers. And every thing in the building—even Jongleur's private offices and residence at the top of the tower—pumps out through those lines. I couldn't be missing anything as significant as the amount of throughput needed to manage the Grail network. It would be like hiding the data from all of NASA."

"Nassau?" Ramsey frowned. "The Bahamas?"

"Never mind. Before your time." Sellars took a moment to inhale through a chemical-scented rag clutched in his knobby hand, a rag that had begun to seem as much a part of him as the kerchief of a Versailles courtier. Ramsey thought the old man's breathing seemed worse just in the last two days, and could not help wondering how long a being so frail could endure this kind of stress. "But I must come up with something," Sellars continued. "Your Ms. Pirofsky is waiting patiently for a call back."

"I don't understand. You've already hacked into the Otherland system, haven't you? So why can't you find it now?"

"Because I've never been able to hack into it from Felix Jongleur's end." Sellars sighed and lowered the rag. "That's why I thought Olga's . . . incursion, for lack of a better word, might prove to be a help. I've never been able to touch the operating system, no matter what I tried. I got into the network through the Telemorphix end, where the gross maintenance of the system is done. I've been in and out of Telemorphix at will for years. I might as well be drawing a paycheck." His smile was perfunctory.

Ramsey shrugged. "So what do we do?"

"I don't know. I just. . . ." For a moment he physically faltered, then raised a shaking hand to his face as though surprised to find his head still attached. "Time is pressing now. And there are other things pulling at my attention. Any one of them might be crucial."

"Can I do anything to help?"

"Possibly. Just having you listening . . . it forces me . . . it forces me to make a little order out of the chaos. Sometimes we think we know things too well, and it's only when we try to explain them. . . ." He straightened. "Look. I will show you one of the matters that is tugging at me most strongly."

The wallscreen sprang to life in a blaze of pure light. Ramsey jumped. A moment later, the image resolved into the tangle of strange greenery that Sellars called his Garden.

"I've seen this before," Ramsey said gently.

"Not this you haven't." Sellars gestured and part of the picture jumped forward into magnified resolution. A cluster of fungus, gray and sickly, but still somehow with the shine of a new thing, had erupted from the ground around the base of one of the more complicated plants. "It just happened today, while I was working with Olga. I had all kinds of alarm messages waiting for me when I got off the line with her."

"What is it?"

"It's the operating system," Sellars said. "The Grail network operating system. Or rather, it's a pattern that looks like what the operating system does when it singles something within the network out for attention—a sort of locus of special interest."

"I have no idea what any of that means," Ramsey said, "but I guess I'm learning to be comfortable with complete and chronic ignorance. And I have to say that I'm impressed—you're the first person I've ever heard actually use the word 'locus' in conversation."

He won another smile from the old man. "What it means is that for the first time since the system went haywire, for lack of a better word, I've found a symptom of the operating system within the network. Well, the operating system is everywhere in the network, of course, but the part of it that seems intelligent, that seems to make actual choices, has been absent since things broke down. Now it's back."

"And that means. . . ?"

"In the past, as I think I told you, it was the method I used to locate my volunteers within the network. So perhaps what this concentration of attention represents is the location of the poor people I've put into danger—the people who have been hidden from me for days." He closed his eyes, thinking. "One of the reasons I wanted to get into the system from Jongleur's end was so I could bypass the network's very fierce security and have a proper chance to search for them myself. And there they are—maybe. God only knows how long this opportunity will last."

"Sounds like you need to try to contact them again,"

"I agree—if I can get in. As I think I told you, the system hasn't even allowed me to sneak Cho-Cho into the network the last few times I've tried." He paused for a moment, consulting some private source of information. "I have half an hour before I told Ms. Pirofsky I'd get back to her. That should be plenty of time for the attempt, even if it's successful—I've never been able to hold off the network security systems for more than a few minutes." He nodded toward the door separating their room from the Sorensens'. "I'll need your help. It may work differently when the boy's not asleep."