"I used to," Sellars said. "I thought I would spend my life among them."

"Very lonely," the ship's voice said.

That at least had been real. No mere shipspeak program could manufacture a crippled bleakness like that. "Some people don't think so," he said, almost kindly.

"Lonely. Empty. Cold."

Sellars was drawn to respond—it was hard to hear such childlike despair and not. say something—but as the strangeness of the experience began to wear away the illogic continued to disturb him.

If all it wanted was to talk to me, why now? It was able to reach outside its network a long time ago—just look at the way it manifested in Mister J's, the way it's begun to explore other real-world systems. Why didn't it just contact me, instead of waiting until I was trying to enter the Grail network? In fact, even if it had to wait until I entered the network, why did it wait until this particular moment—I've been in the network many times. He tried to piece together what had happened just before the contact. We were struggling, or at least I was struggling with its security routines. Then I left it so I could go and open the data tap . . . all that information from the Grail network, that massive, overwhelming flow . . . and that was the moment it attacked me again. Pushed past my defenses.

When I opened the data tap.

"You, this one—we are the same," the ship-voice said suddenly. It almost sounded frightened.

"You've been using me, haven't you?" Sellars nodded. "You clever bastard. You waited until I broke into Jongleur's system, then piggybacked in on my access. There was something there you couldn't manage on your own, wasn't there? Something expressly designed to keep you out. And you needed me alive and connected until you could get into it." With that understanding came a deeper fear. What had his adversary fought so hard and so craftily to reach? What was it doing even now, while it entertained him with recreated memories?

And what would it do to him when it didn't need him any longer?

"No. Lonely in the dark. Don't want to be here anymore." The mechanical voice was becoming increasingly distorted.

"Then let me help you," Sellars begged. "You said that I am like you. Give me a chance! I want what you want—I want the children to be safe."

"Not safe," it whispered. Even the stars were growing faint beyond the window, as though the Sally Ride was now outracing their ancient light. "Too late. Too late for the children."

"Which children?" he asked sharply.

"All the children."

"What have you done?" Sellars demanded. "How did you use me? If you tell me, there might still be some way for me to help you—or at least help the children."

"No help," it said sadly, then began to sing in a mournful, halting voice.

"An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me. . . ."

Sellars had never heard the words or the simple tune. "I don't understand—just tell me what you've done. Why did you keep me here? What have you done?"

It began to sing again. This time, Sellars recognized the song.

"Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop. . . ."

And then the ship was gone, the stars were gone, everything was gone, and he fell back into the familiar confines of his Garden.

But it was a garden no longer, or at least not the comfortable, curved space he had nurtured for so long. Now it stretched for what looked like kilometers, vaster than the grounds at Kensington or Versailles, an almost impossible riot of greenery spreading in all directions.

It held together, Sellars realized. My Garden absorbed the Grail network information and held together. And I am still alive, too. The Other did whatever it wanted to do and then it released me. He checked to make sure his connection to the network was still open, that he still had contact with Cho-Cho, and was filled with relief to discover he did.

So what did the operating system do? he wondered. What did it want?

He flung himself into the acres of data, quantities of information that might take a team of specialists years to analyze properly. But there was only Sellars, and he did not have years or even months. In fact, he suspected he might only have a day or two left before things fell apart completely.

The revelations, at least some of them, came swiftly. As he examined the most recent events concerning the Grail network, for speed's sake tracking just through what had happened since he himself had opened the data tap, then delving frantically in the Grail Brotherhood's files to confirm his suspicions, he discovered what the operating system was and what it had done.

It was worse than he could have imagined. He did not have days. If he was lucky, he might have three hours to save his friends and countless other innocents.

If he was insanely lucky, he might have four.

They made themselves another camp of sorts among the ruins of Azador's Gypsy settlement. The shattered frames of the wagons loomed in the half-light like the skeletons of strange animals. Bodies of fairy-tale creatures lay everywhere, broken and dismembered. Many of the remains had been claimed and had been dragged away by friends and the Gypsies had laid out their own fallen kin at the edge of camp, covering the bodies with colorful blankets, but dozens of corpses still lay unmourned and unburied. Paul could scarcely bear to look. It was a blessing, in a way, that the Well was dying, the light fading.

The waters were almost entirely dark, the radiance that had once danced there only a flicker now; it barely touched the cocoon of cloudy gray overhead, so that even the few campfires seemed to give out more light than the Well. The growing shadow on both sides of the barrier held one other benefit: Paul had no doubt that Dread still waited beyond the cloud-wall, but at least they didn't have to watch that man-shaped point of infinite night pacing calmly back and forth on the other side anymore.

Out of his childhood a snatch of the Bible came to him. "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in if."

But there are two Satans in this universe, Paul thought. And one of them is in here. With us.

He stared at Felix Jongleur who, like Paul, sat some distance from the fire and the other survivors. Jongleur stared back. Their companions seemed far more interested in Orlando, who had not yet regained consciousness. But except for having been dead—something Paul thought was usually considered a fairly serious medical problem—the boy seemed to be suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion.

Nobody cares about me, he thought. Except the man who tried to kill me. But why should they care? They don't know what I know.

It had all come back—not just the terrible last moments in the tower, but with it all the little missing pieces, the day-to-day boredom and routine, everything that had been hidden from him by the post-hypnotic block.

"She's dead," he said to Jongleur. "Ava's been dead all along, hasn't she?"

"Then your memories are unlocked." Jongleur spoke slowly. "Yes, she is dead."

"So why was she here? Why did she keep . . . appearing to me?" He looked over at the others huddled around Orlando. They were only a few meters away but he felt so disconnected from them it could have been a Hundred times that. "Is it something like what happened to that boy—to Orlando Gardiner?"

Jongleur gave him a brief appraising glance. Even the firelight sparkling in his eyes did not make him look more alive. He looks like something stuffed, Paul thought. Something with glass eyes. Dead eyes.