"I have no other useful options, Mrs. Sorensen." Sellars sounded weary to the point of collapse.
"Well, I do." She turned to her husband. "I told you, it was bad enough that a . . . fantasy like this should drag us all out of our house, make us run for our lives like criminals. But if you think I'm going to let anyone get Christabel involved again in this . . . this . . . fairy tale. . . !"
"It's all true, Mrs. Sorensen," Ramsey interrupted. "I wish it wasn't. But. . . ."
"Ramsey, what are you doing here?" said Sellars with surprising strength. "You were supposed to stay on the line with Olga Pirofsky."
"She doesn't want to talk to me. She said to tell you to hurry up—she's waiting for her son." It had been far stranger than that, of course. The Olga he had spoken to was nothing like the woman he had befriended, detached and frighteningly distant, as though Sellars had somehow connected him to an entirely different person. She had not acknowledged any of his words of pity and commiseration, had not even quite seemed to understand them. Like Sellars himself, she seemed to have receded across interstellar gulfs.
"We have one chance," Sellars said. "If I cannot reach the operating system, all is lost. But even now, with the lives of so many in the balance, I cannot force you."
"No," Christabel's mother said angrily. "You can't. And you won't."
"Kaylene. . . ." Major Sorensen sounded miserable, both angry and helpless. "If no harm can come to Christabel. . . ."
"He never said that!" his wife snapped. "Look at that little boy in the other room—he was under this man's protection, too. Is that what you want for your daughter?"
Sellars spoke like a man climbing a mountain whose summit he already knew he did not have the strength to reach. "No, there aren't any guarantees. But Cho-Cho is different. He is connected directly into the system through his neurocannula. Christabel cannot make that kind of connection."
Ramsey felt like a traitor, but he had to say it. "How about the others who are stuck in the system—some of them didn't have direct neural links. Neither did a lot of the Tandagore children."
"You see!" said Kaylene Sorensen in fury and triumph.
"Different," Sellars said wearily, his voice barely audible. "At least I think so. Operating system . . . Olga's son . . . dying now. Can't close . . . feedback loop."
Because the Sorensens were facing the wallscreen, only Catur Ramsey saw Christabel slide off the bed, her bare feet stretching to touch the floor. So small, he thought. She looked frightened and very, very young.
Good God, Ramsey thought. What are we doing to these people?
The little girl turned and walked silently into the bedroom and closed the door.
It's too much for her—too much. It would be too much for anyone.
"I can't . . . I can't disagree with my wife," Major Sorensen was saying.
"What does that mean?" Mrs. Sorensen snapped. Neither she nor her husband had taken much notice of Christabel's departure.
"Lay off, honey," Sorensen said. "I agree with you. I just feel like shit about it."
"Then there is nothing more to be said," Sellars declared in a dying man's voice. Incongruously, the wallscreen from which he spoke displayed the hotel's in-house node, footage of smiling people enjoying various New Orleans restaurants and tourist parks. "I will do what I can with what I have."
Ramsey did not need visuals to know Sellars had disconnected. The Sorensens stared at each other, oblivious to him or anything else. Ramsey stood awkwardly in the doorway; with Sellars' departure he had changed from participant to voyeur in an instant.
"I have to go," he said. Neither of the Sorensens looked at him.
On the other side of the connecting door he leaned against the wall for a moment, wondering what had just happened and what it actually meant. Could Sellars really do nothing without the help of a girl scarcely out of kindergarten? And if he failed, what did that mean? Things had been happening so quickly that Ramsey was finding it hard to keep up. Just in the last two hours he had committed several major felonies—emptying an office building with a smoke bomb, interfering with the alarm systems for an entire island, putting a data tap on one of the world's biggest corporations. Not to mention the even more bizarre things that had come to light, the abandoned house and forest on top of the skyscraper, the tomblike pod room, the incomprehensible news about Olga's lost child being the operating system for the Grail network.
Olga, he thought. Damn, I have to get back to Olga.
The door to the Sorensens' rooms banged open and almost hit him. Michael Sorensen's face was pale, almost gray.
"It's Christabel." The major's voice, his stunned expression, made Ramsey feel like he wanted to be sick.
Kaylene Sorensen was cradling her daughter on the bed, calling her name urgently, as though the child were half a block away. The girl's ragdoll limbs and the eyes rolled upward until only the white showed told the story, or most of it. A pair of thick black sunglasses lay on the bedcover near Christabel's legs.
"He did this!" Mrs. Sorensen said to Ramsey, a hiss of raw fury. "That monster—he pretended to ask our permission. . . ."
"I'll call a doctor," her husband said, then turned to Ramsey, his face so strange and confused that Ramsey felt nauseated again. "Should I call a doctor?"
"Wait. Just . . . don't do anything. Wait!" Ramsey started back toward his room, then realized that he could call from the wallscreen here and not risk disconnecting from Olga. He barked out the number, praying he had remembered it correctly. "Sellars! Answer me now!"
"Yes? Ramsey, what?" He sounded even worse, if that was possible.
"Christabel's in a coma, damn it! A Tandagore coma!"
"What?" He sounded genuinely stunned. "How can that be?"
"Don't ask me—she's lying on her bed. Her parents just found her." He tried to think it through. "There are some sunglasses lying next to her. . . ."
"Oh. Oh, my goodness." Sellars did not speak for a moment. "I had precoded an entry sequence, but . . . but only for use if they agreed to it. . . !" Despite the strain in his voice, the unfamiliar hesitations, he suddenly became focused, sharp. "Tell them not to move her. She must be entering the system now. I have to go." For a moment, there was silence, but before Ramsey could break the connection, Sellars' voice came back. "And tell them I am truly sorry. I did not want this to happen—not this way. I will do whatever has to be done to . . . to bring her back."
Then he was gone.
Ramsey had left them sitting silently in the bedroom, cradling the unmoving body of their little girl. Despite his own vague feelings of responsibility, or perhaps because of them, he could not wait to get away.
He picked up the pad to talk to Olga, wondering whether he should tell her what was happening on his end, thinking that if she remained as she had been the last time they had spoken, she would not even listen. Staring at the screen, his thoughts jumbled, it took him several seconds before he realized what he was seeing.
Olga Pirofsky still sat beside the cluster of massive black pods, swaying from side to side with her face in her hands, a picture of terrible and all-consuming grief. She clearly had no idea what was happening behind her.