"Garden?" said Kaylene Sorensen before anyone else could. "What garden?"

"I apologize. It is the way I order my information—a metaphor, in a sense, but a very real thing to me as well. If you like, I will show it to you someday. It was . . . really quite beautiful once." He shook his head slowly. "Now it is blighted. Order is gone. Something drastic has happened to the Grail network, and also to the Brotherhood itself. The newsnets tell me that several people I believe to be part of their leadership have all died within the last few days, their empires suddenly in chaos. Is this part of some move toward immortality—of conveying themselves into the virtual universe forever, as I suspected that they planned? If so, it seems odd they would leave such disruption behind, since they must surely still need some kind of economic power to maintain that huge, expensive network."

"You're only guessing about that," said Michael Sorensen. "About a lot of things."

"I am only guessing about almost everything," said Sellars, amused and disgusted, and at that moment finally won much of Catur Ramsey's trust, "But the probability factors are too high to ignore, and have been since I first encountered this ghastly plot. I'm terrified, trying to grope at something behind a big thick black curtain and guess what it is. But I am certain that whatever it might be, it's bad and getting worse—unfortunately, that's the guess I'm most confident about. Do you think I would have involved a child like your daughter if I could believe for an instant I might be wrong? Me, who had his own life ruined by trusting those who should have known better and planned better? Major Sorensen, Mrs. Sorensen, I can never earn forgiveness for endangering your daughter, so I haven't asked. But I can promise you that I only did it because I felt that the stakes were so frighteningly high. . . ." He stopped and shook his hairless head. "No, that would not make it better. She is your child, after all."

"And we won't let anything happen to her," Christabel's mother said fiercely. "That's the one risk I won't allow." She stared at her husband; it was not a gentle look. "Not anymore."

"I think we understand the basic situation." A part of Ramsey was amazed that he was still sitting here, even more amazed to find he was about to take a central part in something that by any rational standard should be considered a mass delusion. "So the question is . . . what can we do?"

"Let me bring you up to date on the poor and probably hopeless measures I began," Sellars said. "My little group of explorers. I still have hopes for them, and until I know otherwise, I'll assume that they are all still alive, still active."

"Oh my God," said Ramsey suddenly. "Sam Fredericks. Orlando Gardiner. They're yours. . . . I mean, I'd almost forgotten, when we first spoke you said you knew something about them. Is that what you meant—you sent them into this network?"

Sellars shook his head. "In a way. But yes, they are part of the small group of people I brought together. I hope they still are."

"Then you didn't know." Ramsey hesitated. "Orlando Gardiner died two days ago."

Sellars did not reply immediately. "No, I . . . I did not know," he said at last, his voice soft as a dove's call. "I have been. . . ." He paused again for a surprisingly long time. "I had feared . . . that it might all be too much for him. Such a brave young man. . . ." The old man shut his eyes tight. "If you don't mind, I will take a moment to use the bathroom."

The wheelchair turned and rolled silently across the carpet. The bathroom door closed behind it, leaving Ramsey to stare at the Sorensens, who stared back.

Christabel was having a bad dream, running from men in black clothes who were chasing her down a long staircase. They were carrying a long fire hose which trailed behind them like a snake, and she knew that they wanted to catch her and point its metal nose at her and choke her with its purple smoke. She tried to scream for her mother and father, but she couldn't get the breath to do it, and when she looked back the pale-faced men were always closer, always closer. . . .

She woke up thrashing in pillows and a sheet and almost screamed again. She twisted herself free, frightened by the strange room, the unfamiliar pictures on the wall, the heavy curtains which only let a tiny bit of light into the room, yellow light with dust bouncing in it. She opened her mouth to call her mother and the face came up over the edge of the bed.

It was worse than her bad dream, and she fell back with a feeling like a cold hand had grabbed inside her, and just like in the dream she couldn't even make a noise.

"Hay-soos, weenit," the face said, "wha's your problem? Trying to sleep down here."

Her breaths were little and small—she could imagine her sides moving fast like a rabbit's—but she recognized the face, the broken tooth, the black hair sticking up. Some of the worst of the being-scared went away.

"I don't have a problem," she said, angry, but it didn't sound very good.

The boy smiled an angry smile. "Know if I had a big ol' nice bed like that one, claro, wouldn't see me havin' no pesadilla, start crying and everything."

He was talking about food, it sounded like. She didn't understand. She didn't want to understand. She got up and hurried to the door that led to the next room and opened it. Her mommy and daddy and the new grown-up, Mister Ramsey, were all talking to Mister Sellars. They all looked tired and something else, too, like the time that her parents and Ophelia Weiner's parents had thought there was going to be a war about Aunt Artica, which Christabel had thought was a dumb name for a place but not worth having a war about, and all the grown-ups had that same look on their face during dinner.

Mister Sellars was saying, ". . . A South African military program that actually employed a few of the original PEREGRINE designers—they were working with remote aviation, pilots using virtual control modules—but the project was defunded years ago. I found out about it while tracking the PEREGRINE records, and it came in handy. I was able to nudge them into using it, in part because the base was secret and they would be safe there, but somehow the Grail seems to have tracked them down and now they are under siege." He finally noticed her standing in the doorway and gave her a gentle smile. "Ah, Christabel, it's good to see you. Did you have a nice nap?"

"Honey, are you okay?" her mommy said, standing up. "We're just out here talking. Why don't you see if there's anything on the net?"

The fullness and bigness of her parents and Mister Sellars talking about grown-up things, of all of them being somewhere away from home in a strange place, in a motel, suddenly rose up inside her and made her want to cry. She didn't want to cry, so instead she said, "I'm hungry."

"You still have your sandwich from earlier—you only took a bite. Here, I'll pour you some juice. . . ." and her mommy came back with her to the room where she'd woken up and for a little while things were better again. After Christabel had a paper plate with the sandwich and some raisins. Mommy took a bag of cookies out of her purse and gave two to Christabel and two to the boy, who grabbed them fast, like her mommy might decide to take them back again.

"We grown-ups have to talk a while longer," she said. "I want you kids to stay here and watch the net, okay?"

The boy just looked at her like a cat, but Christabel followed her to the door. "I want to go home, Mommy."

"We'll go home soon, sweetie." When she opened the door, Christabel's daddy's voice came through.

"But that doesn't make sense," he was saying. "If the network's harming children, causing this Tandagore thing, then why should the boy be able to get on and offline without being . . . hurt, whatever?"