So this is where it ends, Paul thought. All that drifting, all that running. It got narrower and narrower until I reached the end of the trap. He looked at the others, Nandi, young T4b, all of them staring-eyed, their haunted, not-quite-real faces devolving into crude planes, the colors bleeding out of their skin and clothes and even the stones before which they stood. The walls of the pit seemed strangely abstract, like the brushstroked masses of some hurrying Expressionist painter.
"We can still fight," said Orlando. Paul thought it was a statement so patently ridiculous that it was almost comical, a bleak joke for which their pointless deaths would be the only suitable punch line.
Martine shuddered and tried to sit up. "Is th–th–that you, P–Paul?" She was trembling so powerfully that he crouched beside her and held her legs, afraid she would shake herself right over the ledge and down into the deeps. That endless blackness was the only thing that still looked entirely real.
"It's me," he said and gently touched her face. She was cold. He was cold, too. "We're all here, but we need to be quiet. That thing—Dread—is looking for us."
"I h–haven't let go," she said. "I can . . . feel . . . where !Xabbu is—and b–beyond. I can even feel where . . . the Other is. All the way . . . to the end." Her shivering had lessened, though she seemed farther away than ever.
"I'm here."
"Cold. It's so cold. Vacuum cold."
He tried to rub her hand but she pulled it away. "That is so strange—I can feel you touching me but it is like it is happening on another planet. Don't. Let me think, Paul. It's so hard . . . to keep . . . to hold. . . ."
"Hello, chums," Dread's voice crooned. "I know you must be getting tired of waiting for me." The path behind them was still empty, the light bent and strange. "I'd have been with you by now, but I've been playing with the kiddies. Listen." A thin, sobbing shriek echoed through Paul's ears, through all his companions too, making them flinch and cry out, linked by a circuit of horrified helplessness.
"He's taking his time on purpose," Florimel groaned. "Sadist. He wants us to suffer first."
"Smelling us scared, like," T4b said.
"Silence!" hissed Nandi. "We don't know how far away he is—he could be trying to lure us into giving ourselves away."
"How much trouble will he have finding us on this path?" Florimel said with ragged contempt. "I will not crawl."
"Me neither," said Orlando. "I don't care if he's Dracula or the Wolfman or the Wicked Witch of the West—we'll put some pain in his venture before . . . before the end." As the boy spoke, Sam Fredericks climbed unsteadily to her feet beside him, reflected light flickering on her terrified, determined face. Paul felt a swelling in his heart, something he could not name. These poor, brave children. How can this be happening to them?
"Cold. . . !" Martine shouted. Startled, Paul clamped a hand across her mouth. She shook it off. When she spoke again it was barely a murmur. "I can feel the Other—but he's so small! Frightened! The children . . . they aren't crying anymore. They're quiet, so quiet. . . !"
"It is cold where the Other is." Sellars' voice made them all jump.
"He's back," Sam said tunelessly.
"There is no time to waste." Cho-Cho now lay like a fitful sleeper at Sam's feet, Sellars' bizarrely precise voice issuing from the boy's open mouth. "Martine, I will try to reach you—to join my end of the connection to yours. It will be a strange feeling, I'm sure, but please try to not to fight me."
"Can't think. Too cold . . . hurts. . . ."
"The Other is imprisoned in a great coldness, both inside and out," Sellars said, rapping out the words in a great hurry. "If you understand that, you will be less afraid. He is not a machine, or at least he did not begin that way. He was a child, a human child, corrupted by The Grail Brotherhood and made the heart of their great immortality machine."
Paul felt a wash of helpless hatred. The Other, little Gally, Orlando, and Sam Fredericks, the screaming victims beside the Well—all those innocents sacrificed so a man like Jongleur could crawl on through more years of life.
"Frightened. . . ." Martine wept. "He is so small. . . !"
"He always has been, at least to himself. Frightened. Abused. Kept in the dark, metaphorically and literally, because they feared his almost unlimited potential. He affected the minds of those who guarded him, so they exiled him—put him in the crudest, most secure prison they could devise."
"Prison. . . ?"
"A satellite." Sellers spoke quietly, but his words seemed starkly loud on the ledge above the abyss. "The Other is in a satellite, orbiting above the Earth. Cryogenic engines keep his metabolism slow, make him more controllable—or so they thought. They banished him to the emptiness of space, with fail-safe devices on his prison so that if anything went wrong they could fire the rockets and push him out of orbit and into deep space." Sellers' voice was dry, cracked. "The Apep Sequence, Jongleur called it. After the serpent that tried every night to swallow the flying boat of Ra, king of the gods."
Martine gasped. "Hurry! I . . . I can't . . ." She twitched, twitched again—it was strangely rhythmic. Paul looked down to see her hands moving in a strange pattern, the fingers held in front of her chest, weaving in and out. "!Xabbu, too . . . he hurts. . . ."
"I am struggling to make the connection, even as I speak," Sellars said through the sleeping child. "It is . . . like threading a needle . . . with a thread a million miles long. And . . . I am holding the far end . . . of the thread."
Something was moving now on the far side of the Well—a point of darkness so pure that even in this shadowy netherworld Paul could see it striding down the path at a weirdly unhurried pace, winding along the wall of the pit.
"He's coming," Paul whispered, knowing it was useless to say it, knowing Sellars could not work any faster. "Dread's coming." He touched Martine with his hand, the merest featherlight brush of his fingers on her leg. She moaned and writhed.
"No!" Her hands were moving faster now, clenching and unclenching, the fingers almost too swift to see in the weird half-light. "Don't! Hurts!"
"Please don't touch her," Sellars gasped. "Please. It . . . is . . . very close. Very . . . difficult."
The shadow-shape turned along the wall, still following the path. Although it was still far away, Paul could see the gleam of two pale eyes. His heart sped even faster, hammering in his chest. We're feeling what the Other feels, he realized. But that's what I've felt all along when the Twins were chasing me—its fear of them, its terror of Jongleur. I'm not even a real person, I'm just part of the bloody network code. I don't even have my own feelings!
The dark man walked down the path.
What did all this truly mean? Paul's panicked thoughts flared and sputtered. What was the reality here? A murderer, or the devil Himself? A boy who thought he was an operating system? An operating system that thought it was a little boy who had fallen down a well? Madness. Nightmares.
It really is the Red King's dream. It's all true. When the dream's over, when this network dies, Paul Jonas will blow out like a candle.
But I'm not even Paul Jonas, he thought with a sudden, chill clarity. Not really. I'm the residue of the Grail process—a copy, like Ava. I'm just a better copy, that's all.