“There’s no pavilion,” Harman said aloud.

“Every faxnode has a pavilion,” said Daeman. “There can’t be a portal without a node pavilion. Right?”

“Not in the old days,” said Harman. “There were thousands of private nodes.”

“What’s he talking about?” shouted Daeman. “Let’s get out of here!”

Ada had swung the light back into the space they’d faxed into. There was no portal. They were in a small room with shelves and counters and walls, all covered with ice. Unlike all fax pavilions, there was no faxnode code-plate pedestal in the center of the room. And that meant there was no way out, no way back. A million flakes of ice danced in the flashlight beam. Beyond the walls, the wind howled.

“Daeman, what you said earlier seems to be true now,” said Harman.

“What? What did I say earlier?”

“That we’re trapped. Trapped like rats.”

Daeman blinked and the flashlight beam moved on to the frosted walls. The wind howled more loudly.

“It sounds like the wind in the Dry Valley,” said Hannah. “But there were no buildings there. Were there?”

“I don’t think so,” said Harman. “But I suspect we’re still in Antarctica.”

“Where?” said Daeman, his teeth chattering. “What’s ant . . . antattica?”

“The cold place we were at this morning,” said Ada. She stepped through the doorway, leaving the others in darkness for a moment. They scrambled to catch up and huddled behind her like goslings. “There’s a hallway here,” said Ada. “Watch your step. The floor is under a foot of ice and snow.”

The frozen hallway led to a frozen kitchen, the frozen kitchen opened onto a frozen living room with overturned couches drifted with snow. Ada ran her flashlight beam across a wall of windows triple-glazed with ice.

“I think I know where we are,” whispered Harman.

“Never mind that,” said Hannah. “How do we get out?”

“Wait,” said Ada, lowering the flashlight beam to the icy floor so that everyone’s faces were illuminated by the bounce light from below. “I want to know where you think we are.”

“According to the story I’ve heard, the woman I’m hunting for—the Wandering Jew—had a home, a domi, on Mount Erberus, a volcano in Antarctica.”

“In the Dry Valley?” asked Daeman. The young man kept glancing over his shoulders at the darkness behind him. “God, I’m freezing .”

Hannah moved so quickly over the ice toward Daeman that he staggered back and almost slipped. “Silly, you have to put your thermskin hood on,” she said. “We all do. We’re going to get frostbite if we don’t. Plus, we’re losing a lot of body heat through our scalp right now.” She pulled the green cowl of the thermskin free of his shirt and tugged the hood into place over his head.

Everyone hurried to follow suit.

“That’s better,” said Harman. “I can see now. And hear better as well—the suit earphones damp out the wind howl.”

“You were saying before that this woman had a place on a volcano—near the Dry Valley? Close enough for us to walk to the fax pavilion there?”

Harman gestured helplessly. “I don’t know. I’d wondered if that’s how she had shown up at the Burning Man—just walked there—but I don’t know the geography. It might be one mile or a thousand miles from here.”

Daeman looked at the black, iced windows where the wind flexed the shatterproof panes. “I’m not going out there,” he said flatly. “Not for any reason.”

“For once I agree with Daeman,” said Hannah.

“I don’t understand any of this,” said Ada. “You said that this woman lived here long ago—lifetimes ago—centuries and centuries. How could she . . .”

“I don’t know,” said Harman. He borrowed the flashlight from Ada and started walking down the next hallway. He was stopped by what looked to be white bars. While the others watched, he went back into the drifted living room, picked up the heaviest piece of furniture he could pry free of the ice—a heavy table, the legs snapping off as he tugged it free—and walked back to smash the icicles one after the other, battering a path down the snow-filled hallway.

“Where are you going?” called Daeman. “What good is it going to do to go down there. No one’s been there for a million years. We’re just going to freeze when . . .”

Harman kicked open a door at the end of the hallway. Light poured out. So did heat. The other three moved as quickly as they could across the treacherous surface to join him.

Much like the room they had faxed into, this space was windowless and about twenty feet square. But unlike the other room, this one was warm, lighted, and free of snow or ice. And unlike the other room, this one was almost filled with an oval metal machine about fifteen feet long. The thing was floating silently three feet off the concrete floor, and a forcefield shimmered like a glass canopy over its top surface. On that surface were six indentations with a soft black material lining them; each indentation was the length of a human body with two short grips or controllers near where the hands would be.

“It looks like someone was expecting two more of us,” whispered Hannah.

“What is it?” said Daeman.

“I think it’s a sonie . . . also called an AFV,” said Harman, his own voice hushed.

“What?” said Daeman. “What do those words mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Harman. “But people in the lost ages used to fly around in them.” He touched the forcefield; it parted like quicksilver under his fingers, flowed around his hand, swallowed his wrist.

“Careful!” said Ada, but Harman had already lowered himself first onto his knees and then onto his stomach, then prone and settling into the black material. His head and back rose just slightly above the curved upper surface of the machine.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Comfortable. And warm.”

That settled it for the others. Ada was the first to crawl onto the craft, stretching out on her stomach and grasping the two handgrips. “Are these controls of some sort?”

“I have no idea,” said Harman as Hannah and Daeman crawled onto the disk and settled into the outer impressions, leaving the two rear-center depressions empty.

“You don’t know how to fly the thing?” asked Ada, a bit more shrilly this time. “From the books? From your reading?”

Harman just shook his head.

“Then what are we doing on it?” said Ada.

“Experimenting.” Harman twisted the top off his right handgrip. There was a single red button there. He pressed it.

The wall ahead of them disappeared as if it had been blown out into the antarctic night. Cold wind and flying snow swept around them in a blinding implosion, as if the air in the room had been sucked out and the storm pulled back in in its place.

Harman opened his mouth to say “Hang on!” but before he could speak, the sonie leaped out of the room at an impossible velocity, pressing the bottoms of their boots back against metal and making them each cling wildly to the handgrips.

The forcefield bubble over their heads kept them alive as the sonie, the AFV, the thing, flew out from the white volcano with its ice-crusted and shattered buildings clinging to its seaward side. The night-vision lenses in their thermskin hoods showed them the fir forest along the coast gone back to ice and death, the abandoned and drifted-over robotic equipment along the curve of a bay, and then the white sea—the frozen sea.

The sonie leveled off about a thousand feet above that frozen sea and hurtled out away from land.

Harman released one of the handgrips long enough to activate the direction finder on his palm. “Northeast,” he said to the others over their suit comms.

No one replied. Everyone was clinging and shaking too fiercely to comment on the direction the machine was headed while taking them to their deaths.

What Harman did not say aloud was that if the old maps he had studied were accurate, there was nothing out this direction for thousands of miles. Nothing.