"It was Gene," Gaby said in a hoarse whisper. "I could hardly believe it, but it was Gene who jumped out of the buzz bomb before it hit."

"Gaby, you have to take it easy," Chris said.

"I will. I'll sleep in a minute. But I wanted to tell you this first."

There was no way for Robin to tell how long the four of them had been on the stairway. She thought it might have been a full day. She had slept once, only to wake to the sound of Gaby's screams.

Robin could hardly look at her. They had stripped away what was left of her clothing and put her on top of one of their two sleeping bags. Valiha's first-aid kit contained tubes of a salve for the treatment of burns, but they had run out of it long before they had covered all the seared skin. They had not even been able to spare enough water to wash the sand from her adequately, for when the waterskins were empty, there would be no more.

It was merciful that the one lantern, turned low to conserve fuel, cast so little light. Gaby was a mass of second- and third-degree burns, painful to behold. Her entire right side and most of her back were charred black. The skin cracked when she moved and oozed clear liquid. She said she could feel nothing there; Robin knew that meant the nerves had been destroyed. But the reddened areas that surrounded the destruction hurt her terribly. She would doze fitfully for a few minutes, then come to tortured awareness with croaking screams tearing at her throat. She would beg for water, and they would give her a few sips.

But now she seemed calmer, in less pain, more aware of the people around her. She was on her side, legs drawn up, head cradled in Valiha's lap, and she spoke of the minutes before her immolation.

"This was his doing. He contacted the buzz bombs-they're damn intelligent, by the way. He contacted the wraiths, too; only they don't work with outsiders. I knew that, and he knew it, and he tried not to tell me how he got them to cooperate. I persuaded him." She smiled, a terrible sight with half her face ruined.

"I've got to give him credit for one thing. That stunt with the wraiths surprised me completely. He dipped the bastards in plastic. He had them all go through a sprayer that coated them with some gunk, and he marched them out to do battle.

"But then he assumed we were smarter than we actually were, and that's what fouled him up. Remember, halfway to the cable, Rocky pointed out if we'd gone north to the road, doubled back on it, and then struck out for the cable, we'd have had less distance to travel over deep sand? If we had, we'd have run right into his ambush. He had his waterproof army deployed between the road and the cable, and a flotilla of buzz bombs hiding in the north mountains to bomb us to hell after we were pinned down. Where we came through, he had only a small force, not waterproofed. He said the plastic didn't last long, it got worn away in the sand, and he had only the one machine to put it on. He had to station that with his main force."

She coughed, and Robin offered her more water. She shook her head.

"We'll have to make that stuff last," she said. She seemed weakened from talking so long, and Chris again suggested she rest.

"Got to tell this first," she said. "Where was I? Oh. You were right, Chris. We allowed ourselves to get stopped by the small force of wraiths; then we hid when that buzz bomb appeared. That was Gene, looking for us. When he saw us, he radioed his main force to join up with him. If we'd gone then, we'd have been under the cable before the infantry or the air force could have reached us. I don't think Gene would have risked his neck trying to get us from the air, but I could be wrong. He had a pretty powerful motive.

"He was after me," she said, and began to cough again. When she had it under control, she resumed her story. "The whole thing and just about all our troubles on this trip, was Gene trying to kill me. The wraiths and the buzz bombs had orders to go for me first, get the rest later if they could. Cirocco was not to be harmed, but I think Gene had other ideas."

"What do you mean?" Robin asked. "Was he under orders himself?"

"Yes," Gaby said. "Goddamn right. He really didn't want to tell me about that. I told him if he didn't, I'd see to it he lived at least a day and I'd take him apart piece by piece. I had to take off a few pieces to make sure he believed me."

Robin swallowed nervously. She had thought herself no stranger to violence, but the scale of recent events had shaken her. She knew about bloodied noses and broken bones and even death, but war had been just a tale of the forsaken Earth. She did not know if she could have done the things Gaby now described. She could have slit his throat or stabbed him in the heart. Torture was foreign to her, yet she felt the deep current of hatred that flowed in Gaby, with this man Gene as its source. Once again she knew the tremendous gap between her nineteen years in the Coven and Gaby's seventy-five in the great wheel.

"So who was it?" Chris was asking. "Oceanus? Tethys?"

"I wanted it to be Oceanus," Gaby said. "But I didn't expect it to be. Gene was getting his orders from who I suspected all along. It was Gaea who told him I must be killed and Cirocco spared. That's why when Psaltery died, I couldn't help crying out that she had done it to him. I think she heard me and told Gene to step up his efforts. She gave him a source of napalm and explosives."

"Gene was behind that attack, too?"

"You remember what happened? Chris saw the buzz bomb and pushed me off Psaltery. If he hadn't, we both would have been dead. After that Gene had to make it look like an attack on us all because it was necessary that Rocky not know they were after just me." She coughed again, then grabbed Chris by the collar, lifting herself with hysterical strength.

"And that's what you have to tell Rocky when she gets here. She has to know it was Gaea that did it. If I'm asleep when she gets here, tell her the very first thing. Promise me you'll do that. If I'm delirious or too weak to talk, you have to tell her."

"I'll tell her, I promise," Chris said. He glanced at Robin. He thought she was delirious already, and Robin agreed. Cirocco was probably dead, and even if she wasn't, there was little prospect she could move the mountain of stone clogging the stairway above them.

"You don't understand," Gaby said, sagging back. "All right, I'll tell you what we were really doing while we pretended to be taking you two on a little walk in the park.

"We were plotting the overthrow of Gaea."

What Gaby and Cirocco had been doing was more an exploration of ways and means than an actual plot. Neither of them was at all sure it was physically possible to overthrow Gaea or if Gaea the being could be disposed of without wrecking Gaea the body, upon which all of them depended for survival.

As with so many things in Gaea, the situation had its roots in events long past. Gaby had felt an itch to change things at least thirty years before. Robin sat beside her in the flickering darkness and heard her speak of things she had been able to confide to no one but Cirocco.

"Rocky didn't even want to hear about it for a long time," she told them. "I don't blame her. She had a lot of reasons to be satisfied with things the way they were. So did I, for that matter. I didn't find life in Gaea a terrible thing. Every once in a while I found something I didn't like, but hell, it was worse on Earth. The universe isn't fair, and it isn't pretty, whether or not it's governed by a living God. I honestly believe that if the Christian God existed, I'd hate him more than I do Gaea. She isn't even in his league.

"And yet, just because you could talk to this God, just because she was actually there and I had spoken to her and knew that she was responsible, that every injustice and every pointless death was the result of a conscious decision... it made it much harder to take. Cancer is acceptable to me only if I feel it just grew, that no one thought it out and decided to inflict it on people. On Earth, that's the way it was. If an earthquake happened, you suffered and patched your wounds and picked up the pieces and moved on to whatever the universe threw at you next. You didn't rail against God, or at least not many of the people I knew did.