"Mentiroso," the boy snarled. "Heard what you said before. All gonna die here."

"Not if Sellars can help us." He inched a little closer. "Please, just come with me. I won't touch you, I promise. No one will touch you. I'll just turn and walk back to the others, and you walk with me." The boy crawled a little farther away. Paul looked around, but none of the others were coming, although a few were watching with a kind of glazed curiosity. "Look. I'm getting up now and I'm going back to the fire. You come with me if you want. We're friends here." Who is this boy, anyway? What can I say to him that will convince him? "There really are people in the world who want to help, you know. There really are."

He waited a few seconds, but the boy did not move or speak. Knowing that he was almost certainly doing a foolish thing—how many minutes did they have left, in any case?—Paul got up, turned, and walked deliberately back to the campfire. He did not look back. He heard no sounds behind him: if the boy was there, he was moving silently across the gray, dead ground.

Florimel and Nandi were nearest; they looked up at him with a question in their eyes. Paul stopped beside them, then carefully sat down, eyes still averted.

"Anybody touch me," the boy promised, "I cut them."

"Then you just sit there," said Florimel.

Paul cleared his throat. "Sellars is talking to him."

"What?"

"He trying to," the boy said sullenly. "But it locking up my head."

The others around the fire had turned toward them now. "The child is terrified," said Bonnie Mae.

"Just tell us what you think he is trying to say," said Florimel. "That is all we want. Martine, are you listening?"

"I am . . . trying. It is . . . There are . . . distractions."

Paul could tell it was far worse than a distraction. Martine Desroubins had the look of someone suffering a five-alarm migraine.

"He talking again," Cho-Cho said suddenly. The others leaned toward him. "He say . . . he say. . . ." The boy sighed and his eyes squeezed shut. For a long, tense moment he was silent, his jaw working. "This . . . is very difficult," he said at last. "I apologize . . . for the confusion." But though it still was Cho-Cho's voice, a child's voice, the intonation had changed.

"Sellars?" asked Florimel. "Is that you?"

"Yes." Cho-Cho's eyes remained closed even as his mouth moved, as though the child were talking in his sleep. As though he were possessed, Paul thought. "In fact," Sellars continued, "I have many apologies to make, but we don't have the time. It is not easy to manipulate the child's neurocannular connection to speak directly to you, but what I have to say is too important and too complicated to be relayed through little Cho-Cho."

"What's going on?" Florimel's voice held anger as well as relief. "Where have you been all this time? While everything in this damned artificial universe was trying to kill us?"

"No time to explain, I'm afraid. I am deep into the workings of the network and the operating system and my head feels like it's going to explode—and that's the least of our problems." Paul could hear the incredible strain even through the child's supple voice.

"You know about Jongleur escaping, then?" he asked.

"What?" The boy's face remained impassive but the voice was clearly startled. "Jongleur?"

Paul told him, with help from the others.

"He was planning it all along," said Sam Fredericks miserably.

"It's not your fault, Frederico," Orlando told her. "But if we get another chance, let's cut his head off, okay?"

"Oh, my," said Sellars. "Is that . . . do I hear . . . Orlando Gardiner?"

Orlando grinned sourly. "Pretty scanny, huh?"

"Explanations must wait until later—if there is such a thing as later," Sellars told him. "The operating system is failing, preparing for its own destruction. I need to make direct contact with it now. That is our only hope to preserve the system long enough to get you out, and it's a very thin hope. Quick, now. I saw some trace of a contact, just minutes ago, between your group and the innermost workings of the system."

"Yes, Renie Sulaweyo is there, in the center of it. That is who we were speaking to with the access device," Florimel said heavily. "But Jongleur has taken it."

Paul waited for Sellars to say something, anything, but the voice that spoke through Cho-Cho's virtual body had gone silent. "So is that it?" Paul asked at last. "We were ready to give up before we heard your voice. Is that all you've got to give us?"

"I am thinking, damn it," Sellars snapped. "But I confess I am at a loss. I have tried everything possible on my end, but the conscious part of the operating system has isolated itself and won't respond to me."

Paul turned to Martine Desroubins, who seemed to be listening with only half her attention. "Martine, you told me how you found your way out of that other strange world—how you and !Xabbu managed to open a gateway. Could you do it again?"

"Open . . . a gateway. . . ?" The pain in her voice was palpable. She and Sellars both sounded like they were trying to carry on business while being stung to death by bees. "Renie . . . !Xabbu . . . they are . . . beyond any gateway, I think."

"But you had the communicator in your hand." Paul leaned closer, trying to keep her focused. "Can't you . . . feel it? You said when we came back from the mountain to Kunohara's world that you fell a connection, sensed it with your mind somehow—that you held on so we could follow it back. Come on, Martine, you can do things none of the rest of us can do! We have no other chance!"

"Do it," T4b said. He put out a hand and touched the blind woman's fingers. She flinched a little, startled. "Be strong. Don't want to get sixed, us—not yet!"

"But that connection to Kunohara's world was alive," Martine said weakly. "I caught it just before it faded!"

"Try," Paul urged her. "We need you. No one else can do it."

"He's right," Florimel said, but gently. "It is in your hands."

"It is not fair." Martine shook her head violently. "Already, the pain . . . I cannot . . . bear it."

Paul crawled to her side and put his arms around her. "You can," he said. "You have already done miracles. For God's sake, Martine, what's one more?"

She put her hands in front of her face. "When I did not care," she whispered hoarsely, "I did not hurt so much." She shook her head as Paul started to speak. "No. Do not bother to say it. I must have silence."

Renie stared at the lighter in baffled fury. The orange moon hung low in the sky, a mocking face. "No! I heard her—you heard her, too! She was right there!"

"I did hear her," !Xabbu said. "But I heard Jongleur's voice as well."

"What happened?" Renie could not reconcile the extremes—the joy of hearing Martine speak, the moment of exhilarating contact with their friends, then the ugly surprise of hearing Felix Jongleur's voice bark out something about a priority override. And now. . . .

"Nothing," she said, running through the sequences again. "It's dead."

!Xabbu reached out his hand. Renie passed it to him, then turned her eyes back to the minuscule form of the dying mantis. "I hope you're happy," she snarled down at it. "Our friends are gone now. If I wasn't certain it was Jongleur who did it—if I thought it was you. . . ."

Dying. The everywhere-and-nowhere voice was so faint now as to be almost inaudible. Tried to last . . . until the children . . . could be . . . saved.

"The children?" Renie asked bitterly. "You haven't saved any children. Didn't you hear? Jongleur, the man who built you—he's in charge again now."