The more he thought about it the more puzzling it was. For the moment all thought of triggering the Apep Sequence was pushed aside by the mystery before him.

Jolted by a sudden fear, he made a quick surveillance of the hangar-sized room that contained the Grail machinery, checking to make sure all was still functioning properly. On the cameras he could see that the huge space was empty of technicians, the banks of processors and switchers untended but still doing what they should.

So what is John Dread up to? Is he just testing my defenses? Or is it something less rational—he always had a childish mind. Perhaps this is some million-credit equivalent of a prank call to his old employer. Perhaps he doesn't even know whether I'm dead or still online.

Feeling much better, certain now that there was no true immediate danger within the building, Jongleur went back to the preparations for the Apep Sequence, but an anomaly in the program's readings brought him up short. It seemed an obvious fallacy. Somehow, he decided, in the riot of false information throughout the island, of alarms and alerts, even the crucial Grail network data had been corrupted. According to what was before him, the Apep program had already been triggered, which could not be right. The time recorded for the event was close to two hours ago. But he himself had only just begun initialization a few minutes earlier.

It must be an error, he thought. It must. The most obvious evidence was that the trajectories were completely nonsensical. Then a flicker on one of his surveillance screens took his attention away from even as important a matter as the fate of his rogue operating system.

Someone was moving. Someone was still in the building.

As he enlarged the picture, pushing the other camera views into the background, he saw the camera designation. A burst of terror went through him. The intruder was here—on the same floor as his own tank! For a hallucinatory moment he could feel himself plunged back into childhood—the smell of the airing cupboard, the starched towels and sheets pressed all around him, stifling him as he hid from Halsall and the other older boys. He could almost hear them.

"Jingle? Jingle-Jangle? Come out, Frenchie. We're going to debag you, you little sod."

With a little noiseless whimper he pushed the memory away. How? How could anyone get into my sanctuary?

The desperate hope that it was some brave technician who had elected to remain behind shattered into cold fragments as he studied the view-window. The intruder was a woman, a middle-aged woman with short hair. He had never seen her before. More astonishing still, she was wearing one of his own company's custodial uniforms.

A cleaning woman? On this floor? On my floor? It was so ridiculous that if he had not been gripped by fear at the invasion of his privacy, full of confusion and suspicion about all that was going on outside, he might have laughed. But at the moment he did not feel at all like laughing. He stared at her face, trying to see something in it that would tell him who she was, what she wanted. She was walking slowly and looking all around, clearly uneasy and surprised, exactly as someone would be who had stumbled into the room by accident. She showed no sign of an agenda, none of the intensity of a saboteur or assassin. Jongleur breathed a little more easily but he was still frightened. How could he get her out? There were no employees available—not even his security guards. He felt rage bubbling up.

She will hear me, he decided, and she will hear me loud. Like the bellow of an angry God. That will set her running. But before he let his voice thunder through the audio system he pulled up the room's security records, wanting to know how she had gotten in.

It was a simple blanket priority approval, the same thing his approved team of technicians used as they moved between floors. Olga Chotilo, Custodial Worker, it read. Something about the name seemed slightly familiar. More surprisingly, there was a code listed on her security trail that he did not at first recognize. Where had she just been? A long moment passed as he tried to remember—he had not seen that code for some time.

Upstairs, he thought, and his thoughts spasmed like dying things. She's been on the locked floor . . . the death-place . . . how could she have gotten in . . . who helped her. . . ? And at that moment he remembered why he knew the name.

Felix Jongleur's respiration grew dizzyingly shallow. His pulse wavered, then spiked. Again the calming chemicals began to pump, a river of heart's-ease flowing into his ancient body through plastic tubes, but it was not enough to stifle the sudden, overwhelming terror, not anywhere near enough.

The floor was as large as those beneath and above, but strangely empty. Here there was neither the cold magnificence of a thousand banked machines or the surreal tangle of an indoor forest. At the center of the huge, dark room stood only an arc of machinery, bulking high in a pool of light like a druidic ruin. In the center of the array, in a circle of marble tiles, four black pods lay in a triangular arrangement, one almost five meters square at the center, one about the same size just above it, and two smaller pods set a bit farther out.

Not a triangle, she decided. A pyramid.

Coffins, she thought then. They look like coffins for dead kings.

She moved forward, her feet silent on the sable carpet. The rest of the room lights came up slowly, so that although the spotlight was still strongest on the arrangement of machines and plastic sarcophagi, she could now see the distant walls; windowless, they were covered in something as dark and unreflective as the carpeting, so that even with brighter lighting the machinery at the room's center seemed to float in starless space.

Good God, she thought. It is like a funeral parlor. She half-expected to hear quiet organ music, but the room was silent. Even the automated warning voices did not trespass here in the tower's upper reaches.

When she reached the center of the room she stood for long seconds staring at the silent black objects, trying to overcome a tingle of superstitious fear. The middle pod was so big that its top loomed above her head, the second large pod a bit lower, the other two positively squat by comparison. She stared at the nearest, which lay to the right of the middle pod, but the plastic was opaque and seemed to join the floor smoothly. Plastic pipes that she guessed held cabling of some kind came out of ducts along the pod's side and burrowed into the black carpet like roots.

She passed it by and paused by the pod that topped the horizontal pyramid, the second-largest. She took a breath and reached out to it. When her fingers touched the smooth, cool plastic, a red light blinked on along the side; she jumped back, startled and afraid, but nothing else moved. Little glowing letters appeared beside the red light.

She leaned close, but carefully, not wanting to touch the thing again.

Project: Ushabti

Contents: Blastocyst 1.0, 2.0, 2.1; Horus 1.0

Warning: Cryogenic Seal—Do not Open

or Service Without Authorization

She stared, trying to remember what a blastocyst was. A cell of some kind—cancerous? No, something to do with pregnancy. As far as what a horus might be, she had no idea—probably another kind of cell. Olga could not even begin to guess why someone would want to keep cellular tissue in a huge tank like this.

Are these all the same? she wondered. Some kind of freezers for medical experiments? Are they doing some kind of genetic engineering here?