She wandered around the room, wondering if she could go and talk to Mister Ramsey. Mommy wasn't supposed to call for another ten minutes and Christabel felt like that would be the longest ten minutes ever in the world. And she was hungry, too. And even more bored than sad. She thought she should have gone to the grocery store with her mother.

She was looking in her daddy's coat pocket for the pretzels he had taken away from her that morning because she wasn't supposed to have pretzels for breakfast, when she found the Storybook Sunglasses.

She was surprised a little, because she had thought Daddy had left them behind back at their house. As she thought about the day when they had left, she had a really bad homesickness. She wanted to see the other kids again—even Ophelia Weiner, who wasn't always stuck up. And sleep in her own room again, with her Zoomer Zizz poster and her dolls and animals.

She took the sunglasses back to the couch and put them on, just looking at the black for a moment, because it was more interesting than anything else in the stupid, sad hotel. Then she touched them to turn them on, and although the sunglasses stayed black, Mister Sellars' voice was in her ear.

At first she thought it was one of his old messages. But it wasn't.

"If this is you, little Christabel, tell me our code word. Do you remember?"

She had to think for a moment. "Rumplestiltskin," she whispered.

"Good. I want to tell you something. . . ."

"Where are you? Are you okay? Did you wake up?" She was already halfway across the room, heading for the connecting door to go see him, but when the questions had stopped jumping out of her mouth he was still talking. He hadn't even heard her.

". . . And I can't really explain it to you, but I'm very, very busy. I know it looks like I'm sick, but I'm not—I just can't be in my body right now. I hope you're not too worried."

"Are you going to get better?" she asked, but he had started talking again and she finally understood that it was only a recording, that he hadn't called her up to tell her he was awake. He hadn't even called her. It was just a message.

"I need you to listen very carefully, little Christabel. I don't want you to be frightened. I have only a few moments, then I'm going to be very busy again, so I want to leave this for you.

"I suspect Cho-Cho is in just the same situation that I'm in—that he looks like he's sick, or sleeping. Don't worry too much. He's here with me."

She wanted to know where "here" was, but she knew it wouldn't do any good to ask.

"I'm leaving this message for two others reasons," Mister Sellars' voice went on. "One is that no matter what we say, grown-ups can't always make things come out right. I hope I will see you again and talk to you, and that we will be friends for a long time. But if something happens to me—remember, Christabel, I am very old—I want you to remember that I think you are the bravest, kindest little girl I have ever met. And I've been around a long time, so that is not small praise.

"The other thing I want to tell you is that if I manage to . . . to stay well for a little while longer, and some of the other things I'm trying to do also work out, I may need you to help me one more time. I'm not quite sure I understand it myself yet, and I don't really have time to tell you anyway—I'm as busy as the night we burned my house down and I went into the tunnels, do you remember?—but I want you to listen to me now and think about what I'm saying.

"When you first met Cho-Cho, I know he scared you. I think you have come to see that he is not as bad as all that—perhaps you understand that he has had a difficult life and does not trust people, that he is worried that only bad things will happen to him. His life has made him different than you, but there is a lot of good inside him.

"I want you to remember that, little Christabel, because I may need your help. If I do, I will be asking you to . . . to meet someone. That is the only way I can explain it. And that someone may seem even more different and frightening than Cho-Cho. You will have to be as brave as you have ever been, Christabel. And that is very brave indeed. . . ."

NETFEED/NEWS: Suing Do-Gooder Parents for Doing too Much Good

(visual: Wahlstrom heirs entering Stockholm courthouse)

VO: The four children of the late Gunnar and Ki Wahlstrom, famous Swedish environmental activists, are suing their parents' estate, demanding that the Wahlstroms' substantial bequests to environmental organizations be given to them instead.

(visual: Per Wahlstrom)

WAHLSTROM: "Everybody thinks what we are doing is so terrible. But they didn't have to live with parents who paid attention to everything but their own children. Not a one of us cared a fig for whales or rain forests. What about us? Don't we deserve something for putting up with absentee parents for all those years? They cared much more about snails than they did about us."

Paul ran up to the front of the temple praying that the Wicked Tribe had exaggerated. As he skidded through the door the heat and light hit him like a small explosion and for a moment he could only stand, blinking against the dazzle.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw it first as a homeless shadow—something black sliding swiftly along the desert sands. Even though he had been prepared, warned by the children, it was only when he saw it climb one of the nearby hills in just a few steps, the dust of its seismic footsteps billowing behind it, that he realized how terrifyingly huge it was.

It paused on the hilltop, a colossus come to life. The doglike muzzle lifted as it howled and seconds later the air outside the temple, kilometers away, surged and snapped. Then it lowered its head and began to run once more.

Paul stumbled back through the door on legs that felt like burned matchsticks.

"He's coming! Dread's coming!" He lurched to a halt just inside the inner chamber. Florimel and T4b and the others looked up at him, eyes wide and faces slack from terrors that seemed to have no end. "They're right—he's huge!"

Only Martine had not turned. She was facing the pure white human silhouette that had appeared to them moments earlier and now hung just above the ground like something out of a puppet show. "Tell me," she asked it, "can you talk to Sellars?"

"El Viejo?" The thing squirmed, making its outlines hard to distinguish. "Sometimes. I hear him. But he's all busy right now. Said I was supposed to stay with you."

"Then he gave you a death sentence!" Paul heard something close to utter despair in Florimel's cracked voice. A distant sound like a monstrous drum being pounded—boom, boom, boom—sent faint vibrations through the massive stones of the temple floor.

"Gonna step on us!" T4b shouted.

"Silence, please." Martine turned away from them to face the great black sarcophagus lying at the center of the chamber. "Stay together," she called. "Someone get the little monkeys."

"What are you doing?" asked Nandi Paradivash, even as he summoned the Wicked Tribe down out of the air with urgent gestures. A few of them settled on Paul, clinging to his clothes and hair.

"Just be quiet. Martine s eyes were closed, her head down. "We have only moments."

The floor was shaking in earnest now, as though bombs were being set off deep beneath the temple. Each titan footfall was louder than the last.

"Hear me!" Martine called out. "Set, Other, whatever your name is—do you remember me? We have met before, I think."

The sarcophagus lay secretive as an unhatched egg. The shuddering made Paul stagger to keep his balance.