Sam sat up. !Xabbu was on his hands and knees beside her, his face pressed against the earth, his chest expanding and contracting as if he were having a heart attack, sobs hitching in his throat. She crawled to him and put her arms around him.

"!Xabbu, it's me! It's Sam. Talk to me!"

The noises quieted a little. She could feel his compact body shuddering against her. At last he calmed. He turned toward her, his face wet with tears, but for a moment did not seem to recognize her.

"I am sorry," he said. "I have failed you. I am nothing."

"What are you talking about? We're alive!"

He stared, then shook his head. "Sam?"

"Yes, Sam. We're alive! Oh, God, I didn't think . . . I didn't know . . . but I did, I just forgot about it, like it was too painful or something. When I was in the temple in the desert with Orlando, it was just the same. . . ." She realized that !Xabbu was looking at her in confusion, and that she was babbling. "Never mind. I'm just so happy you're here!" She hugged him tightly, then sat up. She was still wearing her borrowed Gypsy finery, as was he. "But where are we?"

Before he could answer, they both heard a cry from farther down the slope. They climbed to their feet and made their way down the scree of dark, crumbling soil, and found Felix Jongleur on the other side of a small hillock. He was lying on his side with his eyes squeezed shut, writhing like a salted slug.

"No," the old man gasped, "you cannot. . . ! The birds . . . the birds will. . . !"

!Xabbu reached out a tentative hand. When it touched him. Jongleur's eyes snapped open.

"She is mine!" he shrieked, flailing at them. "She is. . . ." He stopped and his face crumpled. For a moment he seemed to look at !Xabbu and Sam without defenses, his eyes those of a hunted, desperate animal. Then the mask was back in place. "Do not touch me," he snapped. "Do not ever touch me. . . ."

"I have found it!" Azador shouted.

They turned. He was making his way up the hill toward them, bent against the steepness of the climb. When he lifted his head, his face was lit in an astonishing smile. "You were right! Come see!"

Sam looked to !Xabbu, who shrugged and nodded. As Jongleur was still raising himself to his feet with chilly if unsteady determination, they followed Azador back down the slope.

In a few minutes they had reached a place where they could look out across the last of the small hills to see the bowl-shaped valley as a whole. Like the ring of hills, it bore more than a passing resemblance to the top of the black mountain, but instead of a huge, pinioned figure, the valley was dominated by a monstrous crater filled with black water and strangely muted lights. A crowd of figures too distant to make out huddled along its rim.

"What . . . what is it?" Sam asked at last.

"It is the Well," said Azador triumphantly. He turned and clapped Jongleur on the shoulder so hard he almost knocked the old man over. "You were right! You are a wise, wise man." He turned and pointed. "Do you see them all down there? All the children of the One have gathered. The Romany will be there, too. My people!"

As if he had exhausted his patience waiting to show them, Azador now went scrambling down the hillside toward the plain, leaving Sam and the others stunned and staring.

NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Jixy Jinxing Jingle?

(visual: excerpt from Mirthday special)

VO: Creators and performers on the popular Uncle Jingle children's interactive are beginning to wonder what's going on. A series of strange happenings on the show have led some people at Obolos Entertainment, the show's producers, to suggest sabotage, with the implied suspect being WeeWin, a children's toy firm with offices in Scotland, but which is primarily owned by a subsidiary of Krittapong Electronics. In recent weeks characters on the Uncle Jingle program have disappeared mid-show, other objects not designed to be part of the environment have appeared, and some character interactions have been interrupted by unexpected noises one participant characterized as "moaning and roaring and even crying."

(visual: company spokesperson Sigurd Fallinger)

FALLINGER: "Could it be sheer coincidence that these attacks began right after we filed a large and completely justified suit for infringement on our intellectual property? We doubt it, let's just say that. We have some very strong reservations about that theory."

The Ticks were active around the base of the vegetal tower, dozens and dozens of pale shapes swarming in the evening darkness like maggots on putrefying meat. Renie, remembering how just a few of them had torn the rabbit, could not look at them for long without feeling sick.

She stepped back from the window. "We ought to be out of here before it gets light again—if it ever does." She looked over to Ricardo Klement, who still held the strangely deformed thing that Renie had begun to think of as the Blue Baby. "Any ideas? How did you get here in the first place?"

Klement never made much eye contact, so it was hard to tell if he had even heard her. After a long moment, he said, "We walked. I walked. With feet."

"Yeah, with feet." Renie had been angry with herself for crying, but if the alternative was being an emotionless jelly like this, she was proud of her tears. "Why didn't those things get you?"

Klement did not respond. The Blue Baby moved fitfully in his arms, a squirm of malformed limbs. Despite the horror of the thing's appearance, watching how Klement held it, like a stone or a piece of wood, almost made her want to take it from him and give it some kind of human contact. She went and knelt beside the Stone Girl instead.

"Are you okay?"

The little girl shook her head. "Scared."

"Yeah, me too. We'll get out of here, then things will be better." If I can only come up a machine gun or a flamethrower someone has conveniently grown out of twigs and leaves and left for me. The flamethrower idea tugged at her. "I wonder how they actually see," she thought aloud. "I mean, just the same visible spectrum as us? Or maybe they're using the infrared part as well."

The Stone Girl stared sadly at her stubby little fingers. "What's imfer red?"

"Hard to explain right now." Renie reached into her makeshift brassiere and pulled out the Minisolar lighter. "But I wonder if any of this green stuff will burn."

Now the Stone Girl looked up, eyes widening. "You're going to make a fire? That's dangerous!"

Renie laughed despite herself, a pained bark. "Jesus Mercy, child, we're surrounded by those carnivorous creepy-crawlies, waiting for the world to end, and you're worried about me doing something dangerous?" On an impulse, she leaned forward and kissed the Stone Girl on the top of her round, cool head. "Bless you. Come help me see if any of these leaves and branches are even a little bit dry."

As she chivvied the girl along, more to keep the child's mind occupied than anything else—she could certainly have worked faster on her own—it was hard not to think of Stephen. Renie had fought so many battles over the years, dragging the boy unwillingly through even rudimentary housework, doubling or even tripling the time she would have taken by herself, but determined that her brother at least would not grow up into the kind of man who assumed some woman would step into his life and do all the messy jobs.

The kind of man my father is, for instance. But even as she thought it, she remembered the days when she was young and Joseph Sulaweyo had come home from work tired and sore and gleaming with sweat. He did work hard once, she had to admit. Before he gave up.

"Is this dry, Renie?" the Stone Girl asked her.