He stepped through, a god with a heart of black fire. A mad god.

Paul could only lie in the dust, struggling to remember where he was, who he was . . . why he was.

It had been like traveling through the center of a dying star. Everything had seemed to collapse into infinite density; for a time he could not measure, he had thought he was dead, nothing but particles of consciousness dispersing in the void, moving farther and farther apart like ships lost from their convoy until communication failed and each became a solitary mote.

He was still not entirely certain that he was alive.

Paul pushed himself up from the ground, which was as dry and dusty as the courtyards of the Temple of Set. There was one huge improvement over Egypt: the sky was gray, spattered with distant stars, the temperature cool. Paul was at the base of a low hill, in the midst of a plain bumpy with other such hills. The landscape seemed strangely familiar.

Bonita Mae Simpkins sat up beside him, rubbing her head. "I'm hurting," she said in a flat voice.

"Me, too. Where are the others? Where are we, for that matter?"

"Inside, I think," said someone else.

Paul turned. Martine was making her way down the steep hillside, half-walking, half-sliding on the loose soil. She was trailed by Nandi, T4b, Florimel, and a boy he didn't recognize—a small, dirty child with raggedly cut black hair. The Wicked Tribe, their color muted in the twilight, circled above them like a swarm of gnats.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "And who's that little boy?"

"This is Cho-Cho," Martine announced. "Sellars' friend. You already met him—he just looked a bit different. We've been having a talk, and now he's going to be traveling with us."

"Chance not, lady," the little boy said sullenly. "You people loco."

Martine and the others reached the bottom just as Paul and Bonnie Mae finally got onto their feet. Paul felt so weary and sore he immediately wanted to lie back down. He had questions, lots of questions, but no strength to ask them.

"As to where we are," Martine said, "I think we are inside the operating system."

"But I thought we'd been inside it along, more or less."

"No." She shook her head. "We have been inside the Grail network, and the operating system extends throughout that network like invisible nerves. But I think now we are inside the operating system itself, or at least some private preserve of its own, kept safe from all its masters, Jongleur and the Grail Brotherhood, and now Dread."

"Renie said . . . she was in the heart of the system," Paul remembered.

"How can you know such a thing?" Nandi said sharply. "It makes some sense, but it can only be a guess."

"Because I touched the Other before it brought us through," she said. "It did not speak to me in words, but I could still understand much. And because we have been to a place like this before. Twice, although the first version, the Patchwork World, was unfinished. I failed to understand the similarity on the last occasion, but I am now seeing the patterns for a third time."

"We've been here . . . before?" Paul examined the naggingly familiar terrain,

"Not here, but something much like it—a place built for us to meet our host on neutral ground. You were not with us for the first one, Paul Jonas, but you must remember the second."

"The mountain!"

"Exactly." Martine showed him a ghostly smile. "And I hope that we will again find the Other waiting for us. Maybe this time we will understand how to speak to it."

"So where are we going?" Florimel asked. "The hills look like they're a little lower heading that way. . . ."

"They are," Martine said shortly. "But we do not need the hills or the slope of the ground to know. I can perceive a great concentration of data waiting out there, something alive and active and unparalleled, just as I could feel it waiting on the mountaintop." For a moment she looked very tired and fearful. "That is not quite true. It seems different this time—smaller, weaker. I . . . I think that the Other is dying."

"How can that be?" Florimel demanded, "It's just an operating system—it's code!"

"But if it like, sixes out, what happens to us?" asked T4b.

Martine shook her head. "I do not know, but I fear the answers." She led the others across the shallow valley and up the slope of the nearest hill. They had walked only a few hundred meters when Paul felt a prickling on the back of his neck,. as if something were following him. He whirled but he could see nothing behind him in the colorless hills. Still, something troubled the air, a tension, a tightening of pressure, that made him reluctant to turn his back again.

Martine also swung around, slowly, searchingly. She found a direction and cocked her head to listen for a moment.

"Run," she said.

"What are you. . . ?" Florimel began, then the sky split open.

From nowhere, winds howled down on them and the ground trembled. The trembling became general, the air and the earth all vibrating in shuddering synchronization, then something huge appeared on the hilltop they had just deserted, something vague and dark and beastlike. Heat lightning crackled around its misshapen head. The thing was on its knees, howling in rage and what sounded like pain, a barking roar that made Paul's ears throb. More winds came shrieking through the hills flinging horizontal dust, so that he had to cover his eyes with his hands and peer through the cracks in his fingers.

"I told you, run!" Martine screamed. "It's Dread! He followed us through!"

The vast figure on the hillside writhed in pain; its howl rose in pitch. "Something's fighting him!" Paul shouted. "The system! It's fighting back!"

"The system is going to lose!" Martine grabbed his arm and yanked him forward, leading him a few stumbling steps up the hill. The Wicked Tribe blew past, squealing helplessly on the breast of a gale wind. Paul turned to grab at Bonnie Mae, who had fallen; when he dared a look back he could see the immense, murky figure struggling to rise to its feet, outscreaming the storm winds, the lightning now flashing and snapping around its misshapen head.

Paul turned away from the sight and began to run. Behind him the roar of the beast rose and rose until all the world seemed to vibrate to a single animal cry of rage. The sky darkened. Overhead, the stars began to die.

Dulcie's heart was hammering.

What's he doing? What was he so worked up about? I've never seen him like that, even in the middle of the Atasco raid. Whatever it is, it's not even something real—it's something in the network, for Christ's sake. So why was he screaming at me?

She carefully closed her pad, waiting for her pulse to slow. He's not watching you, she told herself. She glanced at Dread's body, motionless except for the slow roll of the bed's machinery, but knew it proved nothing. He could be observing her through hidden cameras—maybe even through her own pad.

No, she told herself sharply. That's bullshit. Through the wallscreen, maybe, but he can't get into my own system—I have better security than most governments. If he was capable of that kind of gearwork he wouldn't need me in the first place.

Dulcie knew she wasn't going to be able to work until her nerves stopped twitching. She started the water boiling for a cup of Earl Grey. The old-fashioned way was slow, but she'd tried instant hot-pack tea. Once had been enough.

He doesn't know what you're doing, she told herself. And as long as you're careful, he's not going to. Just clean everything up.

But a more cautious side of her was not mollified. Why are you even doing it? Is it a challenge? Do you have to break into his private files just to prove you're better than him?