"Renie," it said, "can you hear me? It's Martine. Renie, are you there?"

She had fallen into a sort of half-drowse, exhaustion having finally overwhelmed everything else, and for a long moment she could not even remember where she was.

"!Xabbu, what's going on?" She stared at the dry pan, the thorn bushes and the brightly starred sky, trying to imagine where Martine could be. Could you dream inside a dream?"

"Can you hear me, Renie?" Martine asked again.

"It is in your kaross." !Xabbu pointed at the antelope-hide garment she wore. Renie fumbled out the device. It was still a lighter, just as it had always been, although it now seemed the most unlikely object in an entire, unlikely world. She pressed hot points in sequence, praying she had remembered the right order. "Martine? Martine, is that you?"

"Renie! Oh, what a blessing to hear you. Where are you?"

She looked at !Xabbu, then down at the small shape of Grandfather Mantis crouched at the bottom of the gulley beside the trickling stream. It lay on its side now, legs drawn up. It must still be breathing, she thought distractedly, or all this would be gone.

But do gods breathe? she wondered an instant later.

"I'm . . . I don't really know. Inside the operating system, I guess. But that's only the beginning of how bizarre this all is. !Xabbu is with me. . . ."

"Can you hear Sam Fredericks?" Martine sounded absolutely joyful. Renie felt tears spring to her eyes. "She. . . ."

Abruptly, the transmission stopped.

"Martine?" Renie asked after a moment. "Martine, are you still there?" She turned to !Xabbu. "It just . . . cut off."

The mantis stirred. She could hear its words in her head but they were desperately soft, "You should not . . . should not have spoken. The All-Devourer will follow your words now. It will come straight here."

"Did you cut us off?" Renie crawled to her feet, aware as she did so of the absurdity of standing up to shout at a dying insect. "Those are our friends!"

"Too late. Too late for them." It was only a whisper, faint and distant. "All we had left . . . was a little time. And now it is gone."

"Martine!" Renie shouted at the lighter. "Martine, talk to me!" But when the device finally spoke again it was not Martine's voice she heard.

Azador backed away from the blind woman, who was already struggling up onto her knees, apparently not badly hurt. "Mine!" he said feverishly. "They thought they could take it from me—my gold! But Azador does not forget!"

Orlando snarled and raised his sword, but before he could take a step toward the thief someone shouted, "Nobody move!"

With a nightmarish, underwater feeling, Sam turned to see that Felix Jongleur had snatched up the boy Cho-Cho, who struggled like a scalded cat until Jongleur laid the broken blade of Orlando's old sword against the child's throat.

"I am not bluffing," said Jongleur. "Unless you wish to see your only connection to this man Sellars killed before your eyes you will sit down and stay seated." He turned a baleful stare on Orlando. "Especially you."

Azador moved toward Jongleur, the lighter in his cupped hands, a look of reverence on his face. "Look—is it not beautiful? You were right, my friend. You said the blind woman would have it and you were right!"

Jongleur smiled. "You have been very patient. Will you let me see it?"

Azador stopped, his joy suddenly turned to suspicion. "You cannot touch it."

"I do not want to touch it," Jongleur said. "I only wanted to look, to make sure they had not tricked you—you heard what they said about a copy."

"It is no copy!" Azador said indignantly. "I would know! This is mine!"

"Of course," said Jongleur.

Cho-Cho suddenly wrenched free of the old man's grip and dashed away across the Gypsy encampment. Azador turned to watch the boy go, and as he did, Jongleur grabbed Azador and set the broken blade against his neck then dragged it across his throat. Already gurgling blood, the Gypsy turned toward his supposed ally in amazement and tried to strike at him, but Jongleur grabbed his arm. Azador sagged and fell to the ground. Jongleur stood over him, holding the lighter in his red-smeared hand.

"Bastard!" shouted Paul Jonas. Orlando said nothing but was already moving toward the bald man.

Jongleur held up the lighter. "Careful. I could easily throw it into the Well from here, couldn't I? Then you have lost your friend Renie."

Orlando stopped short, breathing like a mastiff on a choke chain, his whole face disfigured by fury,

"I knew it!" Sam darted a look at Azador. The Gypsy's blood had made a blackish puddle on the shadowy ground beneath him. His dying eyes were still wide in astonishment. "I knew it!" she screamed at the old man. "You liar! You murderer!"

Jongleur laughed. "Liar? Yes, certainly. Murderer? Perhaps, but not if you mean him." He poked Azador with the toe of his Gypsy boot. "He is not even a person. He is another copy, just like the Twins. Just like my Avialle."

"Copy?" asked Paul haltingly.

"Yes—a copy of me," Jongleur said. "A rather poor and incomplete one from early in the process, given a home here by our rogue operating system. Perhaps it was taken while I was sleeping, I cannot remember. It certainly seems to have been dominated by a parade of my boyhood fantasies. That ridiculous Gypsy camp, the kind that only ever existed in Victorian fiction—I recognized it immediately." He smirked. "When I was a child I used to pretend that I came from such a place, not from my so-boring home and my so-boring parents."

"What do you think you have accomplished, Jongleur?" demanded Martine Desroubins, her face still smeared with dirt from Azador's assault. "This is a standoff. We will not let you escape with the lighter."

"Ah, but you cannot stop me." He showed his teeth in a predatory grin. "I have been waiting very patiently for this. Now I am going home to pull the plug on you and my ex-employee and my entire recalcitrant system. Be grateful—there should be no pain. I imagine your hearts will simply stop." Jongleur held the lighter up. "Priority Override," he said. "Tears of Ra."

An instant later he was gone, vanished entirely from the dead lands beside the Well.

NETFEED/NEWS: Arizona—The Voucher Society?

(visual: Thornley in front of state capital building)

VO: Arizona's first Libertarian governor, Durwood Thornley, is proposing to extend the school voucher system to a whole variety of taxpayer opt-outs, and his critics are not very happy about it. Thornley's proposed system would allow a variety of ways to reroute taxes for services that the individual taxpayer does not want to support. As an example, Thornley's staffers suggest that people without cars could redeem their roadbuilding vouchers for repair work on patios and sidewalks, or taxpayers without pets could use animal control vouchers to pay for extermination of unwanted house and yard pests. . . .

For a moment he feared that the override had not worked—that somehow the system had managed to undo its own basic programming—but the moment of darkness dissolved into the familiar depthless gray of his own system. He could feel his body again—not the robust physicality of the false form but his actual dying body, floating in its tank, maintained only by the careful attention of countless expensive machines. But for all the horror of returning to his true condition, it was still a wonderful feeling.

Felix Jongleur was home.

And now to trigger the Apep Sequence. There was no question the Other had to be destroyed, especially if Dread had it in his control. It was a shame to lose the millions of hours of work that had gone into it but this particular operating system had long since proved his worst fears to be underestimations.