No. The devil. Still . . . the devil. The one who hurts and hurts. . . .

"I feel something," !Xabbu said quietly.

"What?"

"I . . . I am not certain. Distant." He frowned and closed his eyes. "Like a faint spoor. Like the musk of an antelope on the wind, half a day away." His eyes opened wide. "The string game! Someone is asking about the string game!"

"What are you talking about?" Renie began, and then she remembered. "Martine! Isn't that how you and Martine. . . ?"

He closed his eyes again. "I can feel something, but it is so . . . difficult."

No. The wind-murmur of the mantis voice had become a little stronger. No, you must not open us again to . . . to. . . .

"Shut up!" Renie squirmed in anger. "Our friends are trying to call us!"

The mantis struggled up onto its bent-twig legs. The tiny eyes were filmed, dark. You will lead the devil here too soon—steal the last moments. . . .

"I think I am losing it." !Xabbu held the lighter so tightly Renie could see his knuckles bulging, pale against his brown skin. "She is so far away!"

Will not . . . must not . . . No!

"Stop it!" Renie said, then the desert began to melt around them, the dark night colors, the amber moon, even the flaring stars all smearing. "Stop!"

It was too late. The sky and the ground ran together, swirling as though someone had dipped a stick into a paint pot and begun to stir. Renie threw out her hand to seize the tiny insect but it was simultaneously growing and dwindling, dominating everything even as it receded, shrank, became a tiny spot of nothing that sped away before her.

After a long chaotic moment the world came to rest again.

"!Xabbu?" she breathed, swaying with dizziness.

"I am here, Renie." His hand touched hers, clutched, held.

They were still in the desert, !Xabbu's imaginary Kalahari, but now it was somehow also the pit in which Renie had spoken to the false Stephen. The stars, moments ago so bright, were now almost unimaginably distant, faint as the last embers of a fire. Renie and !Xabbu crouched on a rim of earth that had been the outskirt of the dry pan, but the land had stretched up above them into the walls of the pit, and the gulley and its tiny trickle of stream had dropped away far beyond their reach, half a hundred meters below their ledge. Despite the distance and the dying stars, the light had the impossible clarity of a dream. Renie saw that the shape huddled beside the stream didn't resemble a mantis any longer, but neither was it a child. It was something else entirely, something not quite definable-small, dark, and very much alone.

All will die. The breathy voice rose up like smoke. Could not . . . save the children.

A glimmering silver something lay on the rough gray stone floor of the pit, as hopelessly beyond reach as though it were on one of the stars overhead. As she watched it, it suddenly sprouted legs. Like a tiny metallic beetle, it crept away from the child-thing, limping blindly until it toppled over the edge into the river and was gone.

The lighter, Renie realized. The little flicker of hope she had felt in the desert finally went out. We've lost it. We've lost everything.

"This is the sun," !Xabbu murmured beside her. For a moment, she thought he was talking to her, but his eyes were shut, and what he said made no sense. "Yes. And now it moves lower. Fingers so, thumbs wide. There—it sets behind the hills."

She could not keep her eyes closed a moment longer, no matter what the risk. Already the lassitude was creeping over her, a dark fog shot with red light and tiny, bursting stars. Another moment and she would find it easier simply to give up. The gnawing ache—it was in her back, she knew, but it felt as if it went right through her body and out through her chest—was growing more distant. The pain was receding.

Calliope Skouros knew this was not a good sign.

Should have waited until Stan called back, she thought, and coughed up another bubbly spill of blood. Wish he was here. Look, Chan, I could tell him. I wore my flakkie for once. Kept the blade from going all the way through my lung and into my heart. That's why I won't be dead for at least another two or three minutes. Plenty of time.

Yeah. Plenty of time for what?

Calliope tried to roll over from her side onto her stomach. If she could crawl there might, just might, be something she could do—maybe drag herself down the steps and out the front door of the loft. Also, there would be less chance of snagging the knife on something. She knew she couldn't pull it out—the blade and the shock-absorbent gel of the flak jacket were probably the only thing keeping the wound even partially sealed. Without the knife that had almost killed her, she'd die in seconds.

It was no use. Her arms weren't strong enough to roll her onto her stomach, which meant they certainly weren't going to lift her body. All those hours in the gym and all she could do was thrash uselessly, like a fish hauled onto the deck of a boat. She might be able to pull herself a few inches but she would never make it down the stairs. She coughed and a sudden spike of agony went through her. For a long moment afterward she could only grunt and clamp her jaws against the scream that would probably open the wound fatally wide.

Something made a little sighing noise behind her. Calliope strained to lift her head, but could see nothing from her angle on the floor. Johnny Dread must be on the other side of the room—she had heard him walk across the floor and climb into what must be the strange bed in the corner and had not heard him move again. Who had made the noise?

The woman—the woman who lived with him. The one he just killed.

Calliope scrabbled herself a little to one side, pivoting slowly on the axis of her hip and sliding through a puddle of her own blood, until she could see the woman, who was also lying on her side, as though she and Calliope were a pair of very disturbing bookends. The face was deathly pale but the eyes were wide. Staring. Staring at her.

The woman who had been shot made a little mewing noise.

Yeah, me too, sister. Calliope struggled to hang onto coherence, fighting without even knowing why against the encroaching darkness in her vision, the blurriness at the edge of her thoughts. We both wanted him, even though I'm guessing your reasons were different than mine. And we both misjudged him.

The other woman's eyes opened wider. She let out another small sigh.

Like she's trying to tell me something. She's sorry? She didn't know he was home? He made her lure me in? What difference does it make?

Then she saw the corner of the woman's pad sticking out from under her chest, spattered with red as though painted by a child. She had fallen on it and her body had hidden it from Dread. The woman's eyes flicked down toward it, then up to Calliope, mutely pleading.

"I see it," Calliope tried to say, but the words came out only as bloody bubbles. It will kill me to get to it, she thought dimly. Then again, I'll die if I don't.

She tried to stretch out her arms, hoping to catch her nails in the carpet and pull herself forward, but she couldn't lift them beyond her chest without a bolt of pain that made her feel as though someone had kicked the hilt of the knife in her back. As shadows gathered before her eyes and even the fibers of the carpet seemed to slip farther and farther away until they seemed like some strange snow-covered forest seen from the window of a plane, she discovered that if she wiggled her legs she could inch forward on her side.

They never taught us this one. . . . She did her best to ignore the scalding pain that came with each movement. The carpet dragged at her like fingers. All that stuff about climbing walls, shooting at targets. They should have taught us . . . how to crawl . . . like a worm. . . .