Kunohara frowned. "I will not ask you to give it to me—over such things a delicate alliance might founder. But if you dare to use it again and risk leading your enemy down on top or me, I will eject you from this House and send you back to the scorpion. He is doubtless thawed by now."

"We don't want to use it." Martine's words were slurred by exhaustion. "None of its other functions work now anyway, as far as I can tell. Just the communication." She yawned. "We only want to sleep."

"Very well, then." Kunohara waved his hand. "Sleep. You too, Jonas, since you were wakened by your friends' call. I am not happy with the foolish thing you people have done, but the step is taken now. I will discover what I can and wake you again soon enough."

He vanished, leaving them alone in the wide, curving room with the sounds and distorted motion of the river. T4b looked critically at the modest furnishings and the corpse of the mutated wood louse, which still hung in midair in its little box of light at one end of the room.

"Beats hiding under a leaf, maybe," he said, and stretched out on the floor mat.

"Code Delphi. Start here.

"I am hurrying to record these thoughts. God alone knows when I will have a chance again—everything seems tenuous now, tinged with catastrophe, as though this entire virtual world has tipped from its normal orbit. But I must make the effort to do things well, no matter how I feel time slipping away. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be Renie, always driven to move forward. . . .

"I believe I had recorded most of the events in Troy and atop the black mountain when we were interrupted by the scorpion. Now I will try to make some kind of sense out of how we left the mountain and what has happened since. There is little chance that I will ever recover these subvocalizations tossed out into the ether of the network, but I have always ordered my life this way, although usually with a more conventional journal, and it is a crutch I prefer not to do without.

"That is a thought, is it not? All my life, I have found my solace and my sanity in talking to machines, and through them to myself. Psychologically transparent, I suppose, and rather grim.

"Enough.

"In the final moments on the peak of the black mountain, as what we could perceive of reality fractured around us, I found myself consumed by images and feelings—powerful sensations as overwhelming as a demonic possession. I suspect now, after talking to Florimel and the others, that somehow my altered senses were perceiving the attack on the Other by Dread—to me it was a phantasm of bird shapes and shadows and the voices of screaming children, and surges of pain and horror for which there are no words. Whether or not the Other is the lonely thing I met in the controlled darkness of the Pestalozzi Institute when I was a child, and no matter what it has done to the old hacker Singh or anyone else, I feel pity for it—yes, pity, even if it is only some kind of highly evolved machine. I can think of almost nothing more pathetic than hearing it sing that old nursery rhyme, that bit of an old fairy tale. But whether it is good or bad or something less straightforward, its agonies nearly killed me.

"As the Other fought to protect itself against Dread's attack, things were happening all around me which I have had to reconstruct from the accounts of others. T4b's successful attack on one of the Grail Brotherhood—apparently an American general named Yacoubian, the true owner of our access device—will bear much considering, since somehow the strange thing that happened to our young companion's hand when we were in the patchwork simworld before the House allowed him to . . . I do not know. Disrupt Yacoubian's control over the virtual environment? Break down the protective algorithms that all the Brotherhood until recently enjoyed?

"In any case, soon after that, the Other's giant hand came down, apparently obliterating Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, and Sam, and perhaps also Jongleur, the Grail master who wore the Osiris sim. But I am not certain I believe that, and neither is Florimel. It seems strange to think that a manifestation of the operating system would do something as crude as swat our companions like flies.

"In any case, with Florimel practically dragging me, we hurried to help T4b, who had been knocked aside by the monster and lay stunned just a few meters from the edge of the titan hand. That hand abruptly vanished—I felt the Other's presence vanish at the same time, a sudden vacuum in my head that I cannot begin to describe—leaving behind no trace of our companions, only the body of the falcon-headed Yacoubian. Florimel, who was far more composed than I was, saw something lying in Yacoubian's oversized fingers. It was another lighter, identical to the one Renie had taken with her into death or wherever she has gone—apparently Yacoubian had replaced his lost original. Even as Florimel bent and snatched it up, the world fell apart again.

"The Other was gone. I felt Paul's angel, Ava, shattered into fragments around us, each one suffering, a terrible chorus of pain almost as devastating as the Other's. The reality of the network was collapsing in some way I still cannot define, literally coming to pieces. I reached out for anything that might save me, as a drowning woman might snatch in desperation at a chunk of wood far too small to help her float.

"But what I found was indeed enough to save us from perishing in the overflow of chaos. How can I explain it? If I had a hope someone other than myself might actually hear these thoughts someday, I would perhaps try harder, but I cannot summon that belief.

"It was a . . . something. The words do not matter, since words cannot describe it—it was a ray of light, a silvery thread, a string of coherent energies. A connection of some kind between where we were and . . . somewhere else, that was all I knew for certain. The closest thing to it I have experienced was the terrifying moment in the Place of the Lost when I reached out through the nothingness to find !Xabbu on the other end. But this time there seemed to be no one on the far side of the shining filament. As all around me degenerated into meaningless information, only that bright thread remained constant, although it, too, was beginning to lose its cohesion. I snatched at it—again, there are no proper words—as I had done before with !Xabbu's extension of his personality, and I clung. I tried to fix my mind on all my companions—Renie, Florimel, Paul, all of them—tried to see their patterns in the information storm so I could pull them along with me on that slender lifeline. But the abilities I have here are not science, they are more like art, and once more the words fail me. If I knew how consistently to do the things I can sometimes do, I myself would be one of the gods of this place. In any case, I saved only a few.

"And so we came through and found ourselves dropped without warning into the stormy night of Kunohara's world, wearing our old sims from when we first entered the system, but dressed in identical coveralls with a patch reading 'The Hive' on the breast—apparently some kind of default garb here in Kunohara's world. It is too bad we were only granted the clothes and not the research installation itself. It would have been nice to have a roof and walls. Instead, we huddled under leaves for shelter from the crushing rain, prey to any monsters who might brave such weather to go hunting. And indeed, we nearly found ourselves eaten by one such creature, until Paul Jonas and Kunohara intervened. I am glad I could not see the thing. Sensing its size and power was bad enough.

"And now we are here in Kunohara's house, where after a short sleep we talked for many, many hours. I am tired again, but I must continue with this a little longer while the others are resting, because who knows when I will next have the chance to sort through my experiences? This network refutes any notion of natural inertia—if something can happen here, it almost undoubtedly will.