At the last word, the screen went blank. A moment later, "ACCESS GRANTED" flashed up and the door of Dread's hidden room opened.

The fifty-six files were ordered by date, the first over five years old and simply labeled "Nuba 1." She opened it and discovered it was sight-and-sound, but only 2D, not full wraparound. In many ways the quality was even worse than the lab experiment files. The whole thing had been shot by a single very primitive camera fixed in one place, like surveillance footage.

At first it was hard to make sense of it. The picture was extremely dark. She only realized after watching for half a minute that the concrete pillars in the foreground were some kind of outdoor structure, the support for a freeway ramp, perhaps, and the dark background near the top was actually night sky.

Movement near the base of one of the pillars, hidden in shadow despite a pool of light from what she guessed was a sodium lamp on the freeway above, proved eventually to be two human figures, although the human part was only an educated guess until at least a minute of the footage had passed. At first she thought the dark, indistinct shapes against one of the farther pillars were making love—first a hand, then a leg extended out into the light splashing down beside them. Then, with an indrawn breath of horror, she became sure that the larger one was strangling the former. But even that seemed not to be true, since after a moment the larger figure stood and the smaller was revealed to be still moving, slumped against the pillar but holding out its hands as though imploring the large one not to leave. The only sound in the file was the continuos rumble of traffic, muted and low, as though the camera were closer to the roadway than the events being viewed.

It was hard to see what happened next and harder still to understand why anyone should bother to make a record like this of it. The quality of the image was maddening, as though someone had found a way to reroute the footage from a security camera with a bad correction chip. Why? What did it all mean?

The larger figure leaned over the smaller, exhibiting something that shimmered palely for just a moment, catching a glint of the overhead light—a bottle? A knife? A folded piece of paper? The small figure seemed to be arguing or pleading, with much movement of hands, but Dulcie's bad feelings about the whole thing were eased a bit by the fact that the smaller one made no attempt to escape.

The larger shape knelt beside the smaller, holding it so close that again they appeared to be making love, or at least preparing to do so. For a long time—it was two minutes' worth of file but it seemed even longer—the two shadowy shapes were merged. Every now and then a hand would emerge again, waving slowly as though to the distant camera or to a departing train. Once the hand emerged, stretching to what must have been its greatest reach. The spread fingers slowly closed, like a flower shutting for the night, a movement almost beautiful in its simplicity.

At last after many minutes the larger figure rose. The smaller still sat against the pillar, but before Dulcie could see anything more the footage ended.

Dulcie sat staring at her pad with a sour taste in her mouth. It was impossible to tell exactly what had been happening and it might take hours working with her enhancement gear before she'd even be able to guess. But whatever she was going to do, she should do it on her own time, on her own system. It was foolish sitting here with Dread's secrets exposed—better to copy everything, then deal with it on her own terms.

But she could not resist opening a few more files, just to see if everything Dread had stored so carefully was as ambiguous as what she had seen. She selected a few more, turning her attention first to one labeled "Nuba 8."

The images in Nuba 8 were much sharper, although they also seemed to have been downloaded from a security camera, this one on the stairwell of what looked like a large office or apartment building, also at night. The scene was lit by floodlights; the figure of a woman, when she emerged from the glass door with her purse under one arm and her keypad in her hand, was quite clear. She was young, perhaps Dulcie's age, dark-haired, slender. She paused on the bottom step and fumbled in her purse, withdrawing a cylinder that looked like some kind of chemical defense weapon, but even as she did so she looked up in startlement. A shadow moved in front of her, swift as a flitting bat; an instant later the stairwell was empty. The image jumped and changed, the footage now coming from a different camera in an underground parking lot, but the woman being shoved toward it by an indistinct figure in dark clothing was recognizably the same, even with her face disfigured by terror.

Disturbed as she was by this brief bit of horror flick—was this Dread's ugly, awful secret, that he collected snuff footage?—Dulcie was even more disgusted by herself than she was sickened by what she was watching.

It figures, she thought. The first guy I get interested in for months and he's into this kind of horrible shit. Thank God I didn't let him. . . .

The woman was shoved to the ground. There was no sound in this file, but Dulcie didn't need to hear it to know the woman was screaming. Then the man who had thrown her down onto the cement floor looked up to the camera—he had known it was there all along—and smiled as though he were sending a snapshot home to his family.

Dulcie didn't find out until later, but that was just what he was doing.

She gaped in unbelieving horror as John Dread, also known as John Wulgaru and Johnny Dark, elaborately bound the woman's wrists and gagged her with duct tape, then produced an extremely long knife. He arranged everything with care so that the security camera would have the best possible angle. Watching, Dulcie felt as though she were paralyzed and could not turn away, as though she too had been tied down, with nothing left in her control but her staring, horrified eyes.

It was only when a soft, sentimental piano melody began to play, joined alter a few bars by strings and an artificial choir, and Dulcie realized it had been added to the footage afterward, that something snapped inside her. She staggered to her feet, whimpering, then fell down twice before she could make it to the bathroom to vomit.

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"Stephen?" Renie scrambled along the ledge, searching desperately for some way to crawl down to the boy, but the path ended within a few meters, rejoining the wall of the pit like heat-fused glass. "Stephen! It's me, Renie!"

His head tilted up slowly, his shadowed eyes catching a glint of slow fire from the stars high above, but he gave no other sign of recognizing her. Could she be wrong? It was dark here in the pit despite the distorted, weirdly bright stars overhead, as dark as late evening, and he was many meters away.

Renie crawled back and forth at the end of the path like a leopard trapped on a branch. "Stephen, talk to me. Are you okay?"

He had stopped crying. As the echoes of her call died away she heard him sigh, a trembling exhalation that stabbed at her heart. He was so small! She had forgotten how small he was, how vulnerable to the world and its cruelties.