"What is this psycho place?" demanded the white silhouette fearfully.

Bonita Mae Simpkins was praying. "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. . . ."

"Listen! I am Martine Desroubins," she said to the low black box. "I taught you the story of the boy in the well. Can you hear me? I am trapped here in this simulation world, and so are many others that you brought into your network. Some of them are children. If you do not help us, we will die." The moment stretched. They could hear the roar of the approaching monster's breath, hissing like a sandstorm. "It will not listen to me," Martine said at last, her voice raw with despair. "I cannot make it listen."

The ground shivered so violently that the whole temple seemed to shift around them. Trickles of rock dust filtered down the walls; Bonnie Mae and T4b were knocked off their feet. Then the footsteps stopped. Even the monstrous sound of breathing was stilled.

Paul licked his lips. It was almost impossible to speak. "Try . . . try again, Martine."

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and put her hands to her head. "Help us, whatever you are—whoever you are. God damn it, I can feel you listening to me! I know you are hurting, but these children will be killed! Help us!"

Something exploded like a bomb above their heads. There was a second concussive crash, then another and another. Flung onto his back, Paul could only stare upward in horror as huge fingers poked through the rocky walls at the top of the great temple. A moment later, with a sustained smash of sound and a rain of falling stones, the entire roof of the cavernous chamber tore free and rose up into the air. A boulder the size of a small car rolled unsteadily past Paul and crashed into the far wall, but he could not even move. Sunlight blazed in, the limitless desert sky now spread above them once more.

The monstrous jackal-headed figure shifted the roof to one side and dropped it. Stone dust boiled up like a mushroom cloud as the giant leaned into the gaping wound that had been the top of the temple room. It smiled, tongue lolling out from jaws that could gulp a Tyrannosaurus like a boiled chicken.

"I'M NOT VERY HAPPY WITH YOU LOT," rumbled Anubis. More stone and dust showered from the crumbling walls. "YOU LEFT BEFORE THE PARTY STARTED—AND THAT'S A BIT RUDE."

Only Martine was standing, still swaying beside the sarcophagus. Paul crawled toward her, intent on pulling her down before the monster reached in and beheaded her like a dandelion puff.

"Help us," he heard her say again. It was little more than a whisper.

"WELL, WELL. WHAT'S THAT WIGGLING ALONG THE FLOOR?" the thing said gleefully.

The sarcophagus began to come apart. Cracks streamed along its angled edges, red light leaking like blood; a moment later the whole thing shifted inside out, as though it contained not the corpse of a god but some new dimension of space-time, unfolding and expanding like a slow-motion detonation until the utter black and the bright, bright glaring red were all Paul could see.

"It's screaming. . . !" he heard Martine cry, her own voice cracked with agony, but she was fading like a dying signal. "The children are. . . ." Paul's head seemed to be filling with fog—chill, empty, dead.

"WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL. . . ?" was the last thing he heard—a thunderous bellow from above, but already curiously muffled—then even that stone-shattering noise dwindled away as Paul was swallowed by silence and nothingness.

Growling wordlessly, sputtering saliva that fell like rain onto the dusty floor, Dread scrabbled in the debris for long moments, like a child who has discovered nothing in his birthday-present box but tissue paper. They were gone.

The growl rose to a choking snarl of rage. Black spots burst before his eyes like negative stars. He kicked over a temple wall, sent another crashing down with a flailing hand, then bent in the swirling dust and grabbed a stone obelisk. He snapped it loose from its base and hurled it as far as he could. A puff of desert sand marked its distant landing.

When he had smashed the entire temple complex into lumps of crumbling sandstone, he stood in the wreckage. The anger was still there, pressing on the front of his brain until he felt it might catch fire. He threw back his head and howled, but it brought no relief. When the echoes had died in the distant mountains, the desert was silent again, still empty but for himself.

He closed his eyes and screamed, "Anwin!"

It took several seconds before she responded, and through each of those seconds a pulse beat in his skull like a hammerblow. When the window opened, hovering in midair against the desert sky, her eyes were wide with shock and surprise. He didn't know if she was seeing his real self or the mountainous form of Anubis, god of the dead. At that moment, he didn't care.

"What? What is it?" She was sitting in a chair—the angle suggested she was seeing him on her pad instead of the wallscreen. She looked not just startled but guilty and for a fleeting instant his rage cooled enough to wonder why that might be. Then he thought of Martine and her little friends winking out right beneath his fingers and the choking rage fumed up inside him again.

"I'm on the network," he gasped, trying to tame his fury enough to communicate, when what he really wanted to do was tear down the universe and stamp on it. "A connection has just . . . opened up. I need to follow it—go through. It's something to do with the operating system." The operating system itself had defied him—that was the most galling part. When he realized what was happening he had sent a bolt of pain through it that should have frozen every function. He had half-thought he would destroy the thing once and for all, but had been too angry to care. Instead, it had absorbed the punishment and acted anyway. somewhere. It had defied him! And they had defied him, too. They would all pay.

"I'll . . . I'll see what I can do," she stammered. "It may take a little while."

"Now!" he shrieked. "Before it closes completely, or disappears, or whatever. Now!"

Her eyes wide with something more animal than mere guilt, more electric than surprise, she bent to her machinery.

"It's still there," she said. "You're right. But it's just a backdoor in the programming."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It's a way in and a way out of the network, except it only seems to open inward. I can't explain because I don't really understand." Her terror had been subsumed by concentration, although he could see her fingers trembling above the screen. Even in his white-hot rage he could admire her all-deflecting absorption, her total love for what she did.

Kindred souls, in a way, he thought. But still different enough that my kind of soul has to eat your kind of soul. He would take care of her when he had finished destroying Martine and the others—had the Sulaweyo bitch been with them? He hadn't had time to notice—and after he had reduced every last bit of volition in the operating system into whimpering imbecility.

"I've hooked it up for you as best I can," she said at last. "It's a bit like one of the gateways in other parts of the. . . ."

"Go away now," he said, disconnecting her. He narrowed his focus until he could almost see the dwindling point of transit like a will-o'-the-wisp still floating above the shattered sarcophagus. He could feel his twist strong within him, glowing like a hot wire in his forebrain, roused without his intention, as sometimes happened when he was hunting. Well, I'm hunting now, he thought. Too right I am. They had mocked him, the freaks, and now they thought they were safe. I'm going to find them all, then I'm going to pull them into pieces, until there's nothing left but screaming.