It was clear he had pushed the Grail operating system to the breaking point, but although he wanted it subdued and broken he did not want to destroy it completely, jeopardizing the whole network, before he had a chance to install a replacement. That might be a little more difficult now that Dulcie was sprawled gut-shot dead on the floor of the loft, but she had cracked Jongleur's house files for him first: the Old Man would have some kind of system backup in place. So the sensible thing to do would be just to wait until he could bring another system online. But what if doing so not only killed this operating system but destroyed Martine and the rest as well? And what if Jongleur was in there with them? The thought that all his enemies might be stolen right out of his grasp by a mercifully swift death was maddening.

And they're right there. . . ! He prowled along the barrier, trying to make sense of what little he could see. As he walked he let his mind wander through the network infrastructure. It was a strange problem, trying to be two places at once, very strange. Here he stood, with the powers of a god, but he could not actually find his own location in the network: he had followed Martine and the others through into this place, but the place itself did not seem to exist on any of the network's schemata.

It's a damn strange environment, whatever it is, he thought. He had even more power here than he did in other parts of the network—the inhabitants had fled screaming from him even before he did anything—but the operating system had more power here, too.

Bloody hell! The insight was sudden and overwhelming. I must be . . . inside the damn thing.

He laughed and the wall of mist rippled back from him like sensitive tissue being poked by a surgical tool. Of course I'm powerful here. It knows who delivers the pain. It's scared of me.

So if it believes in something, he realized, that something comes true here. That explained why the barrier could hold him out—it represented the system's own faith in its last-ditch defenses. But when the last shred of belief that it could resist him died. . . .

It's all make-believe, he thought. A world of ghosts, magic. Like my bloody mother's stories. It was not a thought that went well with his celebratory mood so he pushed it away.

But where is the bloody thing, then? Where is the system hiding? Dread closed his eyes as he walked along the barrier, examining his internal map of the system. The thing, the part of the operating system that thought, must be close. Again he had the strange sense of being in two places at the same time. It worried him just a little—a lifetime's dislike of exposure and a powerful urge toward control made him uncomfortable about being spread between two spheres of operation—but his pride and assurance were growing with his power and he shrugged it off. But he could not shrug off the essential puzzle.

The two things are tangled up. Until I cripple the system's brain once and for all, I'll never be able to get my hands on the ones who got away from me. But if I cripple it too badly—if I ruin it—they'll be gone, dead . . . escaped.

He could no longer see Jongleur's two monstrous agents on the other side of the barrier. Whatever they had accomplished was over now, but they clearly had not pushed the operating system into surrender since the barrier still stood; neither had they delivered him Martine or any of the others. There were no more copies of the agents inside the barrier. Whatever he did next he would have to do himself.

Wouldn't have it any other way, he thought.

Already the excitement of the hunt was beginning to mount again. He cast his thoughts back into the network controls, searching for some clue to the location of the system's ultimate refuge. There had been a flurry of recent activity but none of it made sense, and as he struggled with the obscurities of network activity logs he had a brief moment of irritation over Dulcie's disloyalty. She would have been useful for this, the bitch. The escapees and the system itself remained hidden from him, both by this virtual barrier in this virtual world and in the immense, trackless confusion of the network. It was infuriating that with all his godlike power he couldn't simply find them—that he was forced to search through virtual landscapes, or listen in on virtual communicator conversations.

Communicators. . . ! He gestured and the silver lighter was in his hand. He opened the communication channel and discovered it was in use, but what he heard was nonsense—faint, unrecognizable voices babbling about strings and sunsets and something called a honey-guide. The communication line was clearly corrupted, and in his anger he considered returning to his loft and using Jongleur's access codes to pull the plug on the entire network, to kill it and then resurrect it with a different and more tractable operating system . . . but that would mean that Renie Sulaweyo and Martine and the Circle people would be granted a far too merciful release.

He stared at the lighter in fury. What use was the damned thing? A communicator that didn't communicate, full of ghost-voices.

But Dulcie Anwin had said it was something else as well. What had she called it? A V-fector. Something that would transmit not just voices, but . . . positional data.

Dread smiled.

He reopened the network's master records. The line was hot, so someone must be using it, even if the transmission itself was corrupted. He quickly found the positional information, but both sides of the current call seemed to have no origination point. Dread fought another flare of rage. Of course, if they were somehow inside the system itself there would be no conventional effector information. But this fairy-tale world had to be somewhere in the no-space of the network; just as he had chased the operating system through its interstices, he would chase the communication link until he found one end or the other.

He reached for it now, feeling with his mind, his twist coming to life like a white-hot filament. The open communication channel was a silver wire, trembling, delicate. He would run down it and find them all. He would find the system and he would hurt it until the barrier fell, and then he would take the others and they would be his, utterly his, until their last gasping breaths.

"I think I can . . . feel !Xabbu," Martine gasped. Sam was terrified by her anguished, death mask grimace. "But he's a million kilometers away—a billion! On the other side of the universe! It is too . . . too far."

Martine Desroubins staggered to her feet, clutching her head. Paul Jonas reached out to steady her but she pulled away with a violent shake.

"Do not. . . !" she begged him. "So difficult . . . so difficult . . . to hear. . . ."

"You must hold the connection open," Sellars said through the boy Cho-Cho. "I am not ready."

"Cannot. . . ." Martine bent at the waist, fingers squeezing her own skull as though she feared it would come apart. "Something terrible . . . ah! Ahhh! The Other! He is in . . . such pain!" Then her knees buckled and she fell forward onto her face.

Paul Jonas ran to her side. When he lifted her up she sagged bonelessly.

"Ready or not." It was Dread, whispering right inside Sam's head. "Here I come!" She cried out in fear.

The others had clearly heard him, too: in his shock, Paul nearly dropped Martine back to the ground. Then reality lurched and stuck in gear again. It lasted only a moment, but when the world around Sam shuddered back into life things were not the same.

It's so cold. . . ! The room-temperature universe had fallen into a deep winter chill. Something else came with the cold, a squeeze of terror that made it hard for her to breathe. She heard several of her companions cry out but she kept her eyes tight shut, every childhood instinct telling her to pull the blanket over her head and stay hidden until the nightmare went away.