"Get me out of here!" the voice shouted. "Not doin' this mierda no more!"

"Cho-Cho," she said.

For a moment, he didn't talk. Christabel hung in the blackness and wondered if this was what it felt like to be dead. "Weenit?" he said at last. "That you?"

"Yes." Mister Sellars' breath was all funny and rough, as though he had stepped away for a moment and then run back. "That is her, Señor Izabal. And we are going somewhere together. You two are going to find a little lost boy. And afterward . . . and afterward I will do my very best to take you both home."

"You all crazy," Cho-Cho's voice said. "Not gonna do nothin'!"

But as the darkness began to turn into light—a gray like a morning sky, but everywhere at once, below as well as above—Christabel felt someone reach out and take her hand.

"You okay, weenit?" Cho-Cho whispered.

"I think so," she whispered back. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said. "Ain't scared of nothin', me."

Whether that was true or not, his fingers tightened on hers as the gray light grew and grew.

Paul and Orlando carried Martine down the twisting ledge until they came to where the others were blocking the path. "Move!" said Paul in a loud whisper. "Didn't you hear that madman? He's coming after us."

"The path is gone," Florimel said. "It has dropped away. Melted. Something."

"Like the mountain," Sam murmured as she staggered up behind Paul and set Cho-Cho down on the stone. "All gone."

So this is where it ends, Paul thought. All that drifting, all that running. It got narrower and narrower until I reached the end of the trap. He looked at the others, Nandi, young T4b, all of them staring-eyed, their haunted, not-quite-real faces devolving into crude planes, the colors bleeding out of their skin and clothes and even the stones before which they stood. The walls of the pit seemed strangely abstract, like the brushstroked masses of some hurrying Expressionist painter.

"We can still fight," said Orlando. Paul thought it was a statement so patently ridiculous that it was almost comical, a bleak joke for which their pointless deaths would be the only suitable punch line.

Martine shuddered and tried to sit up. "Is th–th–that you, P–Paul?" She was trembling so powerfully that he crouched beside her and held her legs, afraid she would shake herself right over the ledge and down into the deeps. That endless blackness was the only thing that still looked entirely real.

"It's me," he said and gently touched her face. She was cold. He was cold, too. "We're all here, but we need to be quiet. That thing—Dread—is looking for us."

"I h–haven't let go," she said. "I can . . . feel . . . where !Xabbu is—and b–beyond. I can even feel where . . . the Other is. All the way . . . to the end." Her shivering had lessened, though she seemed farther away than ever.

"I'm here."

"Cold. It's so cold. Vacuum cold."

He tried to rub her hand but she pulled it away. "That is so strange—I can feel you touching me but it is like it is happening on another planet. Don't. Let me think, Paul. It's so hard . . . to keep . . . to hold. . . ."

"Hello, chums," Dread's voice crooned. "I know you must be getting tired of waiting for me." The path behind them was still empty, the light bent and strange. "I'd have been with you by now, but I've been playing with the kiddies. Listen." A thin, sobbing shriek echoed through Paul's ears, through all his companions too, making them flinch and cry out, linked by a circuit of horrified helplessness.

"He's taking his time on purpose," Florimel groaned. "Sadist. He wants us to suffer first."

"Smelling us scared, like," T4b said.

"Silence!" hissed Nandi. "We don't know how far away he is—he could be trying to lure us into giving ourselves away."

"How much trouble will he have finding us on this path?" Florimel said with ragged contempt. "I will not crawl."

"Me neither," said Orlando. "I don't care if he's Dracula or the Wolfman or the Wicked Witch of the West—we'll put some pain in his venture before . . . before the end." As the boy spoke, Sam Fredericks climbed unsteadily to her feet beside him, reflected light flickering on her terrified, determined face. Paul felt a swelling in his heart, something he could not name. These poor, brave children. How can this be happening to them?

"Cold. . . !" Martine shouted. Startled, Paul clamped a hand across her mouth. She shook it off. When she spoke again it was barely a murmur. "I can feel the Other—but he's so small! Frightened! The children . . . they aren't crying anymore. They're quiet, so quiet. . . !"

"It is cold where the Other is." Sellars' voice made them all jump.

"He's back," Sam said tunelessly.

"There is no time to waste." Cho-Cho now lay like a fitful sleeper at Sam's feet, Sellars' bizarrely precise voice issuing from the boy's open mouth. "Martine, I will try to reach you—to join my end of the connection to yours. It will be a strange feeling, I'm sure, but please try to not to fight me."

"Can't think. Too cold . . . hurts. . . ."

"The Other is imprisoned in a great coldness, both inside and out," Sellars said, rapping out the words in a great hurry. "If you understand that, you will be less afraid. He is not a machine, or at least he did not begin that way. He was a child, a human child, corrupted by The Grail Brotherhood and made the heart of their great immortality machine."

Paul felt a wash of helpless hatred. The Other, little Gally, Orlando, and Sam Fredericks, the screaming victims beside the Well—all those innocents sacrificed so a man like Jongleur could crawl on through more years of life.

"Frightened. . . ." Martine wept. "He is so small. . . !"

"He always has been, at least to himself. Frightened. Abused. Kept in the dark, metaphorically and literally, because they feared his almost unlimited potential. He affected the minds of those who guarded him, so they exiled him—put him in the crudest, most secure prison they could devise."

"Prison. . . ?"

"A satellite." Sellers spoke quietly, but his words seemed starkly loud on the ledge above the abyss. "The Other is in a satellite, orbiting above the Earth. Cryogenic engines keep his metabolism slow, make him more controllable—or so they thought. They banished him to the emptiness of space, with fail-safe devices on his prison so that if anything went wrong they could fire the rockets and push him out of orbit and into deep space." Sellers' voice was dry, cracked. "The Apep Sequence, Jongleur called it. After the serpent that tried every night to swallow the flying boat of Ra, king of the gods."

Martine gasped. "Hurry! I . . . I can't . . ." She twitched, twitched again—it was strangely rhythmic. Paul looked down to see her hands moving in a strange pattern, the fingers held in front of her chest, weaving in and out. "!Xabbu, too . . . he hurts. . . ."

"I am struggling to make the connection, even as I speak," Sellars said through the sleeping child. "It is . . . like threading a needle . . . with a thread a million miles long. And . . . I am holding the far end . . . of the thread."

Something was moving now on the far side of the Well—a point of darkness so pure that even in this shadowy netherworld Paul could see it striding down the path at a weirdly unhurried pace, winding along the wall of the pit.

"He's coming," Paul whispered, knowing it was useless to say it, knowing Sellars could not work any faster. "Dread's coming." He touched Martine with his hand, the merest featherlight brush of his fingers on her leg. She moaned and writhed.

"No!" Her hands were moving faster now, clenching and unclenching, the fingers almost too swift to see in the weird half-light. "Don't! Hurts!"