"No." The voice was Spectrally faint, perforated with dropouts. "No, Ramsey, it's me."

He recognized it. His hackles rose. He could not help staring at the boneless, broken shape in the wheelchair. "Sellars? How. . . ?"

"I'm not dead, Mr. Ramsey. Just . . . very busy."

"What happened? You—your body's here. You and the boy are both. . . ."

"I know. And I have very little time to talk. The system is collapsing—dying, I think. I don't know if I can get it to release its hold on the boy—or on me, for that matter. . . ." For a moment the transmission simply stopped—a pure slash of emptiness—then Sellars' whispery voice returned. ". . . vitally important. We have to find the operating system's data path so we can tap into it. Everything depends on that. You must help Olga Pirofsky. . . ."

The signal failed this time for so long that Ramsey was certain he had lost him. Sellars' living body mocked him with its silence.

". . . And don't do anything drastic with either of us. I'll reopen the connection hourly, if I can. . . ." Sellars' voice faded again. This time, it did not return.

Ramsey stared at the pad, now as mute as the old man and the sleeping boy.

"No!" he said, not even aware he spoke out loud. "No, you can't—I don't know what to do! Come back, damn you! Come back!"

Christabel could tell from the way her father was whispering to her mother that something was really wrong. She was so busy watching them talking with their heads close together that she forgot all about her ice cream until it fell off the stick and landed in a big cold blob on her foot.

She kicked it into the bushes beside the hotel pool, then rinsed her foot clean with some water from the pool because the sun was already making it sticky between her toes. It only took a few seconds, but when she looked up, her daddy was gone again and Mommy was looking at her funny. It made Christabel's stomach go flippy. She ran toward her mother.

"Christabel, never run by the pool," Mommy said, but her eyes were flicking back toward the hotel, and Christabel could tell she was hardly thinking about what she was saying.

"What's wrong?"

Her mother was putting things back in the big straw bag she'd carried down from the room. For a moment she didn't say anything. "I'm not sure," she said at last. "Your daddy said Mr. Sellars and Cho-Cho. . . ." She put both hands on her eyes, like she did when she got a bad headache. "They're not feeling well. I'm going to see if there's anything I can do to help. You can watch some net . . . Christabel?"

She hadn't waited for her mother to finish. She had known all day something bad was going to happen. She wasn't running, exactly, but she was going up the stairs from the pool as fast as she could, thinking of poor Mister Sellars and his hooty voice and how tired he looked. . . .

"Christabel!" Her mom sounded angry and scared. "Christabel! You come back here right now!"

"Christabel, what the hell are you doing in here?" her father growled as she crashed into the room. "Where's your mother?"

"She ran away from me, Mike," Mommy said, trying to hold on to the sunblock and other things she hadn't had time to put back in the bag. "She just. . . . Oh my God. What did you do to them?"

"I didn't do anything to either of them," her father said.

"Mister Ramsey, what happened?" Mommy asked.

Christabel could not stop staring. Mister Sellars looked horrible, propped up in a chair like one of the Mexican mummies she had seen on the net, his mouth open in an "o" like he was trying to whistle, his eyes half-shut. The frighteningly blank face blurred as her own eyes filled up with tears.

"Is he dead?"

"No, Christabel," Mister Ramsey said. "He's not dead. In fact, I just talked to him."

"You telling me he looks like that, and he talked to you?" said Christabel's daddy.

"He called me."

"What?"

While the grown-ups spoke in quiet but excited voices, Christabel reached out and touched Mister Sellars' face. The skin that had always looked like a melted candle was harder than she would have guessed, firm as the leather on her dress shoes. It was warm, though, and when she leaned close she could hear a little noise from deep in his throat.

"Don't die," she whispered close to his ear. "Don't die, Mister Sellars."

It was only when she turned away from him that she noticed Cho-Cho on the couch. Her heart thumped around in her chest like it was going to fall out. "Is he sick, too?"

The grown-ups were not listening to her. Mister Ramsey was trying to explain something to her parents, but they were interrupting him to ask questions. He looked tired and really, really worried. All the grown-ups looked that way.

"And I can't even call her," he was saying, talking about someone Christabel didn't know. "For some reason, I can't connect with her number. She must be going crazy!"

Staring down at Cho-Cho, Christabel thought he looked like a different kid than the one who had teased her, frightened her. His face wasn't hard when he was sleeping, not scary. He looked little. She could see the plastic thing behind his ear—his 'can, he had called it, when he bragged to her about it—and the rough skin around it that hadn't healed right.

"Are they going to die?" she asked. When the grownups still didn't answer, she felt something get hot inside her, hot and angry and eager to come out. She shouted, "I said, are they going to die?"

Mommy and Daddy and Mister Ramsey turned to her, surprised. She was a little surprised herself, not just because of the shouting, but because she was crying again. She felt upside-down.

"Christabel!" her mother said. "Honey, what. . . ?"

She stuck out her lip, trying to keep some of the crying inside. "Are they . . . are they going to die?"

"Ssshh, honey." Her mommy came over and gently lifted the little boy up from the couch, then sat down with him on her lap. "Come here," she said, then reached out and pulled Christabel toward her, too. Christabel didn't like the way the boy looked, not just normal asleep, but floppy, and she didn't want to touch him, but she squeezed up against her mother's side and let her put an arm around her.

"All right," Mommy said quietly. "It's going to be all right." She was stroking Christabel's hair, but when Christabel looked up, her mother was looking down at Cho-Cho and she seemed like she wanted to cry, too. "Everything will be all right."

It was Mister Ramsey who finally answered her question. "I don't think they're going to die, Christabel. They're not really sick—it's more like they're sleeping."

"Wake them up!"

Mister Ramsey kneeled down beside the couch. "We can't wake them up right now," he said. "Mister Sellars has to do it, but he's very busy right now. We just have to wait."

"Will he wake Cho-Cho up, too?" For some reason, she hoped it was true. She didn't know why. She would be happy for the boy to go away somewhere else in the world, but she didn't want him just to lie there all floppy forever, even if she wasn't around to see it. "You have to save him. He's really scared."

"Did he tell you that?" her mommy asked.

"Yes. No. But I could tell. I've never seen nobody so scared in my whole life."

The grown-ups went back to talking. After a while, Christabel slid out from under Mommy's arm and went to look for something warm. She wasn't strong enough to pull the cover off either of the beds, so she got two big towels out of the bathroom and wrapped one around Mister Sellars' narrow shoulders. She draped the other one over the little boy, pulling it up like a blanket to just below his chin, so it looked like he really was just having a nap on her mother's lap.