He turned and began to head back toward the bedroom.

"General Yacoubian, sir," Christabel's daddy said. "I want to ask you again if my daughter and Mr. Ramsey could be released. It would just be a lot easier for everyone. . . ."

The general turned around, and Christabel thought his eyes were as bright and strange as a bird's. "Easier? It's not me who has to make things easier, Sorensen. It's not me who has to answer the questions." He started toward the room, then stopped and turned again. "See, someone named Duncan from your office copied me on a request for labwork—something I should have been copied on automatically, but for some reason you held it back from me. Made for interesting reading, I have to say. A bit of scientific analysis you had done on some sunglasses. Very interesting sunglasses, they were, too. Ring a bell?"

Captain Ron looked completely confused, but Christabel's daddy turned as pale as if something had leaked out of him.

"So just sit tight and keep your mouth shut until I'm ready for you." The general smiled again. "You might say some prayers, too, if you know some." He turned and walked back into the bedroom, then shut the door.

There was a long silence. Then one of the men in black, the man called Pilger, said, "If the kid's hungry, there's some peanuts and chocolate in the minibar," before turning back to watch the wallscreen again.

The thing is, Dulcie told herself, I don't really know him all that well

She was surveying the routine maintenance levels of Dread's system, which he kept in a state rather similar to his household decor—sparse and colorless. Where her own system had the equivalent of notes and unfinished projects lying around everywhere, not to mention all kinds of strange coding bric-a-brac—everything from long out-of-date utilities and code-busters which she'd hung onto just in case she ever bumped into such a system again to algorithmic representations so interesting she saved them almost as objects of beauty—Dread had nothing out of place, nothing that was not absolutely necessary, nothing that gave any hint of his personality at all.

He's so guarded. One of those anal-retentive types. Probably rolls all his socks the same way. But after spending her childhood in her mother's aggressively bohemian care—most mornings young Dulcinea Anwin had not only needed to clear plates of spoiling food from the previous night's dinner party off the kitchen counter before making her own breakfast, but also had to make a circuit of the house putting out candles that had been left burning and evicting guests who had fallen asleep in strange places—she thought that a certain rigidity about order was not the worst trait a man could have.

She had finished running diagnostics on their project's house system, which, despite the rather uncommon strains Dread was putting on it at the moment, was holding up nicely, and she was busy making records of some of the events from their incursion into the Grail system for future study when she bumped across something odd.

It was a partition of sorts in Dread's own system, a boxing-off of data, but that wasn't the unusual thing about it. All systems were divided for organizational purposes, and most people who spent a lot of time working directly online were as idiosyncratic about how they arranged their system environments as they were with their RL homes. What she had seen of Dread's space was in fact so nonidiosyncratic she was almost disturbed by it: he had never bothered to change any of the settings, names, or infrastructure of the original system package, for one thing. It was a little like realizing the pictures on your manager's desk were the fake ones of smiling catalog models that had come with the frames. No, there was nothing unusual about partitioning your storage. What was interesting about this partition was that it was invisible, or supposed to be. She checked the directories, but there was no listing to correspond with the fairly extensive secured area onto which she had stumbled.

A little secret door, she thought. Why, Mr. Dread, you do have some things you want to keep private after all.

It was sort of cute, really—a boy thing, like a hidden treehouse. No girls allowed. But of course, Dread was a beginner with this stuff, and Dulcie was a very, very hard girl to hide things from.

She hesitated for a few moments—not very long at all, really—reminding herself that it was wrong, that not only did her boss have a right to his privacy, he was also a man who did a lot of dangerous things for dangerous people, people who took their security very seriously. But Dulcie (who almost always lost these arguments with herself) found the idea more a challenge than a discouragement. After all, didn't she run with a dangerous crowd herself? Hadn't she shot someone only a few weeks ago? The fact that she was having regular nightmares about it, and now wished she had invented an excuse not to do it—faulty gun, jammed door lock, epileptic seizure—didn't mean she was suddenly unfit to run with the big boys.

Besides, she thought, it will be interesting to have a peek into his mind. See what he really thinks about. Of course, it might just be his account books. Anybody this much of a neat freak might be pretty serious about hiding their double-entry stuff.

But the small bit of poking and prying she allowed herself failed even to turn up a keyhole, let alone a key. If there was something interesting on the other side of the door, she was not going to find it out so easily. With the faintly shamed feeling that had visited her as a young girl rooting through her mother's bureau drawers, she erased all records of her investigations and dropped back out of the system.

Her employer's secret compartment was still nagging at her half an hour later as she stood over his sleeping form, which lay nestled like a piece of dark jewelry in the while padding of the coma bed.

It's true—I really don't know anything about him, she thought, looking down at his heavy-lidded eyes, at the minute movement of his irises between the mesh of black lashes. Well, I know he's not the most stable person in the world. It was hard not to remember each and every one of his flashes of anger. But there's something else in him, too—something calm, something knowing. Like a big cat, or a wolf. It was hard to avoid animal analogies—Dread's compact grace somehow did not seem quite civilized.

She was watching the way his cocoa-colored skin took and softened the clinical glare of the overhead lights when Dread's eyes popped open.

"Hello, sweetness," he said, grinning. "Bit jumpy today, aren't you?"

"My God. . . !" She fought to regain her breath. "You could have warned me. You've been out of communication for almost twenty-four hours."

"Been busy," he said. "Things are hopping." His grin widened. "But now I'm going to show you a little something. Come join me."

It took her a moment to understand it was not an invitation to climb into the coma bed—an unpleasant thought even had her feelings about the man himself been less ambivalent: the low murmur of its engines and the constant slow movement of the bed surface made her think of some kind of sea creature, an oyster without a shell. "You mean . . . on the network?"

"Yes, on the network. You're a bit slow today, Anwin."

"Just a few thousand things to do, that's all, and about two hours of sleep." She tried to keep her voice light, but this teenage jocularity was making her tense. "What do I do. . . ?"

"Access the way I did, and make sure you're in full wraparound—you're going to need it. When you hit the first security barrier, your password is 'Nuba.' N-U-B-A. That's all."