I dropped him, she thought, and then she too seemed to be tumbling into space until a powerful grip curled in the back of her shirt and yanked her back to the center of the ledge.

A flare of light from deep in the Well painted dim streaks of silver and blue up the side of Orlando's barbarian form. He held the still-struggling Cho-Cho clasped against his naked chest. "Are you scanned beyond belief?" he barked at the boy, then snapped his chin down hard on top of his head. Unconscious or just educated, Cho-Cho stopped thrashing and hung motionless in the crook of Orlando's muscled arm.

"You're all down there in the hole, aren't you?" It was Dread again, amused and annoyed, his words crawling through her skull like a trail of ants. Orlando was hearing it too: he grimaced in pain and disgust. "Do you really want me to come get you? Haven't you already played enough games?"

Paul Jonas had dropped to Martine's side and was trying to lift her again.

Orlando gave Sam's arm another squeeze. "Now, I might be imagining things, Frederico." His heroic imitation of a casual tone could not hide the tremor in his voice. His hand was probably shaking too, but Sam was shivering so badly herself she couldn't tell. "But our friend, Count Dreadula—is he some kind of Australian?"

Catur Ramsey burst through the door into the adjoining room in time to hear the last of Sellars' words. The old man sounded worse than ever, weak and faint, as though he were talking through a garden hose from the other end of the galaxy.

". . . I have no time to explain it all again," he said. "There are minutes only."

Kaylene Sorensen stood splay-footed in front of Christabel, fists curled, treating the faltering, disembodied voice from the wallscreen like a physical threat to her daughter. "You must be crazy! Mike, am I the only person here who hasn't lost her mind?"

"I have no other useful options, Mrs. Sorensen." Sellars sounded weary to the point of collapse.

"Well, I do." She turned to her husband. "I told you, it was bad enough that a . . . fantasy like this should drag us all out of our house, make us run for our lives like criminals. But if you think I'm going to let anyone get Christabel involved again in this . . . this . . . fairy tale. . . !"

"It's all true, Mrs. Sorensen," Ramsey interrupted. "I wish it wasn't. But. . . ."

"Ramsey, what are you doing here?" said Sellars with surprising strength. "You were supposed to stay on the line with Olga Pirofsky."

"She doesn't want to talk to me. She said to tell you to hurry up—she's waiting for her son." It had been far stranger than that, of course. The Olga he had spoken to was nothing like the woman he had befriended, detached and frighteningly distant, as though Sellars had somehow connected him to an entirely different person. She had not acknowledged any of his words of pity and commiseration, had not even quite seemed to understand them. Like Sellars himself, she seemed to have receded across interstellar gulfs.

"We have one chance," Sellars said. "If I cannot reach the operating system, all is lost. But even now, with the lives of so many in the balance, I cannot force you."

"No," Christabel's mother said angrily. "You can't. And you won't."

"Kaylene. . . ." Major Sorensen sounded miserable, both angry and helpless. "If no harm can come to Christabel. . . ."

"He never said that!" his wife snapped. "Look at that little boy in the other room—he was under this man's protection, too. Is that what you want for your daughter?"

Sellars spoke like a man climbing a mountain whose summit he already knew he did not have the strength to reach. "No, there aren't any guarantees. But Cho-Cho is different. He is connected directly into the system through his neurocannula. Christabel cannot make that kind of connection."

Ramsey felt like a traitor, but he had to say it. "How about the others who are stuck in the system—some of them didn't have direct neural links. Neither did a lot of the Tandagore children."

"You see!" said Kaylene Sorensen in fury and triumph.

"Different," Sellars said wearily, his voice barely audible. "At least I think so. Operating system . . . Olga's son . . . dying now. Can't close . . . feedback loop."

Because the Sorensens were facing the wallscreen, only Catur Ramsey saw Christabel slide off the bed, her bare feet stretching to touch the floor. So small, he thought. She looked frightened and very, very young.

Good God, Ramsey thought. What are we doing to these people?

The little girl turned and walked silently into the bedroom and closed the door.

It's too much for her—too much. It would be too much for anyone.

"I can't . . . I can't disagree with my wife," Major Sorensen was saying.

"What does that mean?" Mrs. Sorensen snapped. Neither she nor her husband had taken much notice of Christabel's departure.

"Lay off, honey," Sorensen said. "I agree with you. I just feel like shit about it."

"Then there is nothing more to be said," Sellars declared in a dying man's voice. Incongruously, the wallscreen from which he spoke displayed the hotel's in-house node, footage of smiling people enjoying various New Orleans restaurants and tourist parks. "I will do what I can with what I have."

Ramsey did not need visuals to know Sellars had disconnected. The Sorensens stared at each other, oblivious to him or anything else. Ramsey stood awkwardly in the doorway; with Sellars' departure he had changed from participant to voyeur in an instant.

"I have to go," he said. Neither of the Sorensens looked at him.

On the other side of the connecting door he leaned against the wall for a moment, wondering what had just happened and what it actually meant. Could Sellars really do nothing without the help of a girl scarcely out of kindergarten? And if he failed, what did that mean? Things had been happening so quickly that Ramsey was finding it hard to keep up. Just in the last two hours he had committed several major felonies—emptying an office building with a smoke bomb, interfering with the alarm systems for an entire island, putting a data tap on one of the world's biggest corporations. Not to mention the even more bizarre things that had come to light, the abandoned house and forest on top of the skyscraper, the tomblike pod room, the incomprehensible news about Olga's lost child being the operating system for the Grail network.

Olga, he thought. Damn, I have to get back to Olga.

The door to the Sorensens' rooms banged open and almost hit him. Michael Sorensen's face was pale, almost gray.

"It's Christabel." The major's voice, his stunned expression, made Ramsey feel like he wanted to be sick.

Kaylene Sorensen was cradling her daughter on the bed, calling her name urgently, as though the child were half a block away. The girl's ragdoll limbs and the eyes rolled upward until only the white showed told the story, or most of it. A pair of thick black sunglasses lay on the bedcover near Christabel's legs.

"He did this!" Mrs. Sorensen said to Ramsey, a hiss of raw fury. "That monster—he pretended to ask our permission. . . ."

"I'll call a doctor," her husband said, then turned to Ramsey, his face so strange and confused that Ramsey felt nauseated again. "Should I call a doctor?"

"Wait. Just . . . don't do anything. Wait!" Ramsey started back toward his room, then realized that he could call from the wallscreen here and not risk disconnecting from Olga. He barked out the number, praying he had remembered it correctly. "Sellars! Answer me now!"

"Yes? Ramsey, what?" He sounded even worse, if that was possible.