Renie opened her eyes to a gray world. At first all she could make of it was vertical shadow, darker on one side of her than the other. Only after a few searching, puzzled moments could she begin to make sense of it.

She lay on a path, a bit of rough stone running along the edge of a wall of stone, a little like the corkscrew trail that had led them up and down the black mountain. But as if to prove that every version of reality here had its inversion, this path seemed to curve around the inner rim of a great, circular hole: a great and empty blackness lay beside the path, but she thought she could just make out an opposite wall beyond it.

A pit, she thought. I'm stuck on a trail down the side of some huge pit.

The Well, she remembered a moment later. That's where the Stone Girl said we were going.

Where did the light come from? Renie looked up and saw something like stars in the murk far above her, a circular field that, she reasoned, must be the top of the hole. It was a vast, wide circle, but a momentary hope that this signified she was close to it disappeared when she tracked the far side of the pit upward. It would be hours of climbing to reach that opening, even if this massive hole was something closer in scale to the real world than the impossibly tall black mountain had been.

That's it—this thing is like the mountain turned upside down . . . inside out. . . . was the beginning of a thought, then the muted sound of a child sobbing snapped her attention back again.

Stone Girl. She's somewhere below me.

Renie tried to get up, groaned, then tried again. Her body felt like a damp sack that might fall to pieces with the slightest rough handling. Her head seemed far too heavy for the strength of her neck.

On the third try she dragged herself onto her feet. The path was uneven but wide, the light of the oddly foggy stars enough that, with care, she could navigate it safely.

The crying came again, at intervals. As Renie stumbled downward, as minutes became what seemed closer to an hour, she began to fear that some trick of the acoustics was leading her farther away from the source of the noise, that it might actually be above her. Only the fact that the Well itself, if that was truly what it was, slowly became narrower, its far wall looming closer with each long circle, kept her from giving up in despair.

At last, when her already exhausted body and mind were close to collapse, she found the bottom of the Well. But the bottom was out of reach.

The trail tapered to an ending which left her perched still some ten or fifteen meters above the base of the pit, where a thread of dark water flecked with subdued blue light murmured across the rough stone. A small, bent shape huddled beside this modest river.

"Is that you?" Renie asked. The figure did not look up. The quiet sound of weeping floated to Renie's perch, heartbreaking and ghostly. "Stone Girl?"

The small shape went quiet. For a moment she feared it was all illusion, that she had mistaken some nodule of rock on the bottom of this pointless place in this most pointless of universes for a child, that the sound of weeping came from nowhere or everywhere, that she should just lie down here and die and solve all problems once and for all. Then the child looked up. It was Stephen.

NETFEED/NEWS: Sea Squirt Squad—A Damp Squib?

(visual: S3 members wearing fish masks and kilts)

VO: The "Sea Squirt Squad," the militant arm of an anti-net group called the Dada Retrieval Collective, have failed on another attempt to, in their words, "kill the net." For the fifth time since announcing this goal, a Sea Squirt action has gone badly wrong. This time, an attempt to destroy the sales records of one of the main online retailers, which would theoretically have meant a loss of billions in revenue, resulted only in buyers receiving electronic Christmas cards several months out of season.

(visual: DRC member wearing Sepp Oswalt mask)

DRC: "You people are underestimating what a shock it was for Jewish and Islamic shoppers to receive those Christmas cards. We've had a few setbacks, seen, but we're well on our way to achieving our goal. Just wait until we hack the national elections."

Calliope Skouros sat in the wreckage of a Saturday morning—unwashed coffee cups and breakfast plates, some of which dated back to Wednesday, the news blaring across most of her wallscreen while some children's show that had caught her attention fizzed and giggled in an inset panel—and wondered what it would feel like to have a personal life.

It wasn't sex she was thinking about, particularly, just company. Wondering what it would feel like to be sitting next to another human being—Elisabetta the waitress, just for instance—and talking about the day ahead, maybe planning a trip to a museum or the park, instead of wondering how much longer she could go without doing her laundry, and whether if she ate that other waffle she would have to skip having a bowl of ice cream after dinner.

When work crashed, when the job changed dramatically, as hers had when she and Stan had been pulled off the now officially moribund Merapanui case, it was a lot harder to ignore the emptiness.

Maybe I should get a pet, she thought. Yeah, chance not. Imprison some poor dog in here all day while I'm working? There are laws about that.

It had been a busy if boring week, mostly spent catching up on unfinished paperwork—a curiously old-fashioned expression, so redolent of ancient offices and dusty files. With Merapanui closed, she and Stan had rolled back onto a number of other pending matters, most of them of the grim, foot-slogging variety, interviewing sullen or intentionally stupid witnesses about stabbings, canvassing neighbors for the last damning details of domestic disputes that had suddenly turned fatal. What was it about the Merapanui case that had kept her so fascinated? The sniff of brimstone that seemed to accompany all reminiscences of John Dread? Or was it the hopelessness of Polly Merapanui, as overlooked in death as she had been in life, waiting with the patience of the perpetually put-off for someone to give her savage murder some meaning?

It's over, Skouros, she told herself. You took your shot. It didn't work out. Now you get to do laundry. That's what life is shaped like.

She tightened the belt on her sagging dressing gown, then began to pick up cups and spoons.

The message had been left on her work account near the end of Friday afternoon. It was from Kell Herlihy in Records, and its importunate blink reminded her how tired she had been at quitting time yesterday, how even checking her mail had seemed like a cruel imposition, and of her tiny, pleasurable feeling of escape when she had decided against it,

It can wait, she told herself now. Probably the stuff on what's-his-name, the Maxie Club arson guy. But what else was there to demand her attention except the last Belgian waffle?

Fifteen seconds after she had opened the message, she was on the central database, trying to find out Kell Herlihy's home number.

When she finally made the call the screen came up dark. She could hear two or three kids arguing loudly in the background, plus a loud play-by-play of what sounded like Aussie Rules. "Hello?" a woman said.