The two things are tangled up. Until I cripple the system's brain once and for all, I'll never be able to get my hands on the ones who got away from me. But if I cripple it too badly—if I ruin it—they'll be gone, dead . . . escaped.
He could no longer see Jongleur's two monstrous agents on the other side of the barrier. Whatever they had accomplished was over now, but they clearly had not pushed the operating system into surrender since the barrier still stood; neither had they delivered him Martine or any of the others. There were no more copies of the agents inside the barrier. Whatever he did next he would have to do himself.
Wouldn't have it any other way, he thought.
Already the excitement of the hunt was beginning to mount again. He cast his thoughts back into the network controls, searching for some clue to the location of the system's ultimate refuge. There had been a flurry of recent activity but none of it made sense, and as he struggled with the obscurities of network activity logs he had a brief moment of irritation over Dulcie's disloyalty. She would have been useful for this, the bitch. The escapees and the system itself remained hidden from him, both by this virtual barrier in this virtual world and in the immense, trackless confusion of the network. It was infuriating that with all his godlike power he couldn't simply find them—that he was forced to search through virtual landscapes, or listen in on virtual communicator conversations.
Communicators. . . ! He gestured and the silver lighter was in his hand. He opened the communication channel and discovered it was in use, but what he heard was nonsense—faint, unrecognizable voices babbling about strings and sunsets and something called a honey-guide. The communication line was clearly corrupted, and in his anger he considered returning to his loft and using Jongleur's access codes to pull the plug on the entire network, to kill it and then resurrect it with a different and more tractable operating system . . . but that would mean that Renie Sulaweyo and Martine and the Circle people would be granted a far too merciful release.
He stared at the lighter in fury. What use was the damned thing? A communicator that didn't communicate, full of ghost-voices.
But Dulcie Anwin had said it was something else as well. What had she called it? A V-fector. Something that would transmit not just voices, but . . . positional data.
Dread smiled.
He reopened the network's master records. The line was hot, so someone must be using it, even if the transmission itself was corrupted. He quickly found the positional information, but both sides of the current call seemed to have no origination point. Dread fought another flare of rage. Of course, if they were somehow inside the system itself there would be no conventional effector information. But this fairy-tale world had to be somewhere in the no-space of the network; just as he had chased the operating system through its interstices, he would chase the communication link until he found one end or the other.
He reached for it now, feeling with his mind, his twist coming to life like a white-hot filament. The open communication channel was a silver wire, trembling, delicate. He would run down it and find them all. He would find the system and he would hurt it until the barrier fell, and then he would take the others and they would be his, utterly his, until their last gasping breaths.
"I think I can . . . feel !Xabbu," Martine gasped. Sam was terrified by her anguished, death mask grimace. "But he's a million kilometers away—a billion! On the other side of the universe! It is too . . . too far."
Martine Desroubins staggered to her feet, clutching her head. Paul Jonas reached out to steady her but she pulled away with a violent shake.
"Do not. . . !" she begged him. "So difficult . . . so difficult . . . to hear. . . ."
"You must hold the connection open," Sellars said through the boy Cho-Cho. "I am not ready."
"Cannot. . . ." Martine bent at the waist, fingers squeezing her own skull as though she feared it would come apart. "Something terrible . . . ah! Ahhh! The Other! He is in . . . such pain!" Then her knees buckled and she fell forward onto her face.
Paul Jonas ran to her side. When he lifted her up she sagged bonelessly.
"Ready or not." It was Dread, whispering right inside Sam's head. "Here I come!" She cried out in fear.
The others had clearly heard him, too: in his shock, Paul nearly dropped Martine back to the ground. Then reality lurched and stuck in gear again. It lasted only a moment, but when the world around Sam shuddered back into life things were not the same.
It's so cold. . . ! The room-temperature universe had fallen into a deep winter chill. Something else came with the cold, a squeeze of terror that made it hard for her to breathe. She heard several of her companions cry out but she kept her eyes tight shut, every childhood instinct telling her to pull the blanket over her head and stay hidden until the nightmare went away.
But there was no blanket.
"Oh, Christ—it's gone!" Paul said. Sam could barely hear his voice over the rising sounds of terror from the fairy-tale folk scattered along the edge of the Well. Strong fingers curled around her arm and she cried out.
"Get up, Sam," said Orlando. "It's happening."
She opened her eyes. Orlando's Thargor body seemed different, wrong somehow, and it was more than just the strange light. He looked strangely incomplete, as though the top level of reality had been peeled away, leaving only its preliminary designs.
"It's really dying," he said, and she could hear the terror just beneath his words. "The whole thing's dying. Look at us."
Sam stared down at her own familiar tan arm, purple-gray in the pit's dimly smoldering light, now unreal as everything else. The path, the rock walls, her companions, all had lost some vital thing that had made them realistic, had slid back into a more basic state just as the black mountain had devolved beneath her feet during the long climb.
We're not people, she thought, looking at the smooth planes of Paul Jonas' face, at Orlando's stiff musculature. We're really puppets.
She struggled onto her feet, trying to fight back against the pressing fear. No, it's the operating system, the Other, not us. It's losing its grip. It's losing the dream. . . .
"Oh, this is so impacted," Orlando breathed. He held up his sword, not to challenge, but to block out an unwanted sight.
The barrier was dissolving.
At the edge of the encampment the net of iridescent cloud that had covered them was becoming raw mist again, shifting, dispersing. The refugees, who like everything else had lost some critical degree of definition, ran from it like misprogrammed robots, tripping and scrambling and shouting in childish terror. A dark form appeared out of the thinning fog, striding toward the Well as the remains of the barrier swirled around it like cobwebs. Fairy-tale folk caught too close to the disintegrating curtain flung themselves out of the shadow-figure's path and fell on their stomachs, rubbing their faces against the ground in helpless panic. The thing ignored them, walking through the cleared space like some horrible null-light Moses crossing the Red Sea. Fear held Sam pinned in place. Orlando swayed beside her and his sword dropped out of his hand into the dust.