"It's Dread," Martine said, her voice a hopeless murmur. "Dread sent them. He knows we're here."

The weight of the wasp-things was so great now that it seemed to Paul the bubble must collapse at any moment: so many had collected already that they crawled across each other in tangled piles. Some of those caught on the bottom and being crushed to death ran barbed stingers out of their abdomens, driving them over and over into the substance of the bubble, which actually tented inward—giving, but not yet breaking.

Paul grabbed at. Kunohara. "Get them off! For God's sakes, freeze them, whatever. They're going to burst through any moment."

Their host was wild-eyed but clearly struggling for calm. "If I blast them with wind or ice, I will destabilize the house as well and destroy it or send it spinning down the river. We would all be killed."

"You and your bloody realism!" Florimel shouted. "You rich idiots and your toys!"

Kunohara ignored her. As Paul watched he began to move through a series of meaningless gestures, like nothing so much as someone practicing tai chi in a quiet park. For a moment he could not help thinking that the man had gone completely mad; then he realized that Kunohara, his mastery compromised, was running through an inventory of commands, trying to make something work.

"Nothing," Kunohara snarled, and turned in cold fury on Martine. "You, with your accusations. I thought you had doomed yourself by using that device, but you have led them here to my house and doomed me as well." He gestured; a view-window opened in midair. For a moment Paul could not make sense of the boiling, lumpy mass depicted in the window, then he saw that it was a bird's-eye view of the bubble-house, so covered now with the wasp-things that it had lost almost all suggestion of its true shape.

"Look," Kunohara said bitterly. "They are building a bridge between us and the land."

He was right. The massed wasps were extending a tangle of their own squirming bodies out across the moving surface of the river, a squad of suicide engineers giving their own lives to connect the free-floating bubble to the riverside. The wasps on the bottom of the growing pseudopod must be drowning by the hundreds, Paul thought, but more kept dropping out of the air to join them and keep the bridge growing.

But growing toward what? Paul struggled to see through the mist to the dark riverbank, alive with blowing grasses. Kunohara must have had the same thought, for he gestured again and the focus of the window changed, bringing the sandy bank into closer view. There was no grass; it was a solid line of beetle shapes, creatures as horribly distorted as the wasps, an army of thousands upon thousands of malformed crawlers waiting for the wasp-bridge to reach them, Even now, hundreds at the front of the clicking, bumping throng were forming a corresponding chain, climbing atop one another and clutching even as they drowned, struggling out to meet the wasps.

But even this horror was not the worst. On a lump of mossy stone at the river's edge stood a pair of contrasting shapes, like generals surveying the progress of a campaign. Kunohara's focus drove closer. Despite the more important threat of the wasps, who now formed a solid wall of carapace and claw all over the bubble-house, Paul could not tear his eyes from the two figures.

One was a massively bloated caterpillar, its pillowy segments the color of corpse flesh, with a face even more disturbingly humanoid than those of the mutant army, tiny porcine eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth. Beside it teetered a cricket white as paper, rubbing its legs together in some unheard music. Its long face was as queerly personalized as the caterpillar's, except for the blank spot where eyes should have been.

"The Twins," Paul said. "Oh, God. He's sent the Twins after us."

"There is another," said Florimel. "See, riding on that beetle."

Paul stared at the pale human shape, bumping on the back of a shiny shell. "Who is it?"

Kunohara was scowling. "Robert Wells, I suspect, A pity the scorpion did not get him, too."

The tiny figure waved his arm, sending another squadron of beetles marching down to the water's edge to give their lives to the growing chain.

"The bastard is having fun." observed Kunohara.

NETFEED/DRAMA-LIVE: "Warrior of Sprootie School"

(visual: Wengweng Cho's practice room)

CHO: Chen Shuo, the time has come for action! My daughter Zia has been stolen by the evil Wolf's Jaw school, and they mean to practice their spiritually incorrect and deadly martial arts style on her.

(audio over: gasps)

SHUO: By the sacred Sprootie, we must not let such a thing happen!

CHO: You are a brave man and a true warrior. Quickly, now, take my treasured throwing stars and go with haste to save my daughter.

SHUO: I will come back to you with the severed head of the Wolfs Jaw master, and with your daughter Zia safe.

(audio over: applause, cheers)

SHUO (to himself): But I must pray that my devotion to the sacred Sprootie will give me strength to achieve this task, because the minions of the Wolfs Jaw school are many and devious. Still—where Sprootie is, bravery is!

(audio over: even louder applause)

Mrs. Sorensen—Kaylene, she had told him her name was—had just come back from checking on the two children in the connecting room, which gave everyone a chance to catch their breath. Catur Ramsey, in particular, was grateful for the pause. He had never had such a strange day in his entire life, which included a college flirtation with psychedelics.

"Christabel seems okay," she reported. "She's sleeping. The little boy's curled up on the floor. I got him bathed again, but I couldn't even get him to use the other bed."

"She's been through a lot," said Michael Sorensen. "If I had imagined . . . God almighty, what have we gotten ourselves into?"

The strange, wizened figure in the rented wheelchair looked up. "I am truly sorry to have involved your family, Mrs. Sorensen. Desperation forces us to do shameful things."

The woman wrestled for a moment against her obvious urge to say something polite, and won. She had clearly not recovered from the horror of hearing Major Sorensen's cleaned-up version of what had happened in Yacoubian's suite. While Ramsey had tried to entertain a shell-shocked Christabel and the rather sullen little Hispanic boy, she had taken her husband to the adjoining room and, as Sorensen put it afterward, "let me know she wasn't very happy about how things were going."

In his own exhausted state, Ramsey was having trouble coping with the tension and unhappiness in the room, not to mention the bizarre story that Sellars had just told, full of the kind of conspiracy theories that even the loopier chat nodes would scorn. He needed a few moments to clear his head.

"I'm going out to grab a soft drink," he said. "Anybody want anything?"

Kaylene Sorensen shook her head wearily, but Ramsey couldn't help noticing the flicker of suspicion across her husband's face. It stung. "Oh, for God's sake, Sorensen, if I were going to bail out on you or betray you or something. don't you think it would be easier for me to wait and do it when I go back to my own motel?"

To his credit, Sorensen looked shamefaced. "I didn't mean to look that way. I'm just . . . it's been difficult, today."

Ramsey forced a smile. "It sure has. Back in a second."

He caught himself as he started to swipe his card through the drink machine's reader.

Sorensen's paranoia is better sense than you've got, he told himself. That was a real brigadier general that had us kidnapped out of a public restaurant Whatever this is, it isn't entirely someone's overheated imagination. He found he had a few coins, and even briefly considered trying to wipe his prints off them before dropping them into the slot.