Sea of Silver Light

  Looking for us, Sam thought. For us! He'll be coming down that path any second. . . . The horror of it made her so dizzy and scared that when she came around a bend into a wider part of the path and ran into Paul Jonas from behind, she almost blacked out.

  "Sam?" he said, nearly as startled as she.

  Martine was lying in the middle of the path where they had set her down, curled in a fetal ball. Orlando stepped around her to grab Sam's arm, then held it as though he didn't plan to let go. "Oh, jeez. . . ." He glanced at the limp form of Cho-Cho as if he didn't quite see it. "Frigging hell, Frederico, I didn't know where you were!"

  "I . . . had to go back," she gasped. "It's the little boy—I mean, it's Sellars. . . ."

  "I cannot stay involved with this." Sellers' fretful voice beside her ear startled her again. "There is too much to do. Tell Martine to keep the connection open at all costs. I will return."

  "Don't go," Paul said. "That thing . . . Dread . . . he's right behind us."

  "I can't do anything more here," Sellars said urgently. "I am sorry, but I still have my side of this to complete. Whatever else happens, Martine must not lose her connection to the heart of the system. She must hold on at all costs!"

  "Damn you, Sellars, don't you dare. . . !" Paul began, then Sam lurched against him and almost fell off the narrow path as the small body draped across her shoulder suddenly began to thrash in panic.

  "Put me down!" Cho-Cho screamed. He got a hand loose and grabbed at her face, making Sam stumble again. For a moment she felt nothing under her left foot, then found the edge of the path with her heel. She swayed, trying desperately to regain her balance.

  "Let me go!" The boy's elbow hit her in the side of the head so hard that her knees went rubbery and she slipped sideways. The boy's weight vanished from her shoulders.

  I dropped him, she thought, and then she too seemed to be tumbling into space until a powerful grip curled in the back of her shirt and yanked her back to the center of the ledge.

  A flare of light from deep in the Well painted dim streaks of silver and blue up the side of Orlando's barbarian form. He held the still-struggling Cho-Cho clasped against his naked chest. "Are you scanned beyond belief?" he barked at the boy, then snapped his chin down hard on top of his head. Unconscious or just educated, Cho-Cho stopped thrashing and hung motionless in the crook of Orlando's muscled arm.

  "You're all down there in the hole, aren't you?" It was Dread again, amused and annoyed, his words crawling through her skull like a trail of ants. Orlando was hearing it too: he grimaced in pain and disgust. "Do you really want me to come get you? Haven't you already played enough games?"

  Paul Jonas had dropped to Martine's side and was trying to lift her again.

  Orlando gave Sam's arm another squeeze. "Now, I might be imagining things, Frederico." His heroic imitation of a casual tone could not hide the tremor in his voice. His hand was probably shaking too, but Sam was shivering so badly herself she couldn't tell. "But our friend, Count Dreadula—is he some kind of Australian?"

  Catur Ramsey burst through the door into the adjoining room in time to hear the last of Sellars' words. The old man sounded worse than ever, weak and faint, as though he were talking through a garden hose from the other end of the galaxy.

  ". . . I have no time to explain it all again," he said. "There are minutes only."

  Kaylene Sorensen stood splay-footed in front of Christabel, fists curled, treating the faltering, disembodied voice from the wallscreen like a physical threat to her daughter. "You must be crazy! Mike, am I the only person here who hasn't lost her mind?"

  "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.

  The lids of two of the pods were rising—slowly and apparently silently. For a moment, Ramsey felt that same sense of helpless, almost sexual horror that he had felt as a child in the darkness of a movie theater. An alien spacecraft, the door opening, something about to come out—but what would it be?

  But this was no movie. This was real.

  A shape lurched in the nearer pod, then began to drag itself upright, bathed by the dim lights around the inside rim of the lid.

  Ramsey had the line open and was shouting at the screen now, but Olga clearly was not receiving his call. He could only shout her name over and over as an immensely fat, horribly naked man climbed out of the glowing pod.

  She slid the Storybook Sunglasses on. It was good to be in the dark behind the lenses. She could hear her mother's voice in the other room. Mommy was really angry—angry at Mister Sellars, angry at Daddy, even angry at Mister Ramsey, who didn't seem to have done anything as far as Christabel could see.

  It was good to be in the dark. She wished she could have sunglasses for her ears as well.

  "Tell me a story," she told the glasses, but nothing happened. The lenses stayed black. There was not even a message from Mister Sellars. It made her sad—he had sounded so tired, so hurt. She almost wished that her mother and father hadn't found out about her secrets with him—her visits, the ways she had helped him, all the things, all the secret things. How he smiled and called her "little Christabel."

  Their secret word.

  "Rumplestiltskin," she said. Light opened out in front of her eyes like a flower.

  "This will be like a call to someone far away," Mister Sellars' voice said in her ears. "Or like going on the net. I'll be with you in just a moment. . . ."

  "Where are you?" she asked, but his voice was still talking, not hearing her. It was another message, a recording, like before.

  ". . . And then I will stay with you, I promise. But I am doing many things, little Christabel, and it may take me a moment to reach you. Don't be frightened. Just wait." The light was moving now, dancing, spinning. It made her head hurt. She tried to reach up and take the sunglasses off but for some reason she couldn't find them. She could sort of feel her head but it seemed to be changing shape—first her hair felt funny under her fingers, then it didn't feel like hair at all. Then the light swept away from her, pulling her with it as if she had been sucked down the drain of the bath, and the light had a noise, too, a moan like the wind or like children crying.

  "Stop it!" she yelled. She was really frightened now. Her voice sounded wrong, close in her head but strange and echoey and far away, too. "I don't want to. . . !"

  The light was everywhere. Then the light was gone. Everything was dark and she couldn't feel herself touching anything. For a few seconds she was all alone, as alone as she had ever been in her life, like in a bad dream, but awake, and there was nobody else anywhere in the whole world, not Mister Sellars, not Mommy, not Daddy. . . .

  But then there was someone else.

  Scared, she held her breath, but it was more like thinking about holding your breath because she couldn't feel her chest get tight. She felt like she was about to pee all over herself, but that didn't feel quite real either. Something was looking for her. Something big. It was in the darkness.

  It touched her. Christabel tried to scream, tried to hit, but she had no mouth, no hands. It was so cold! It was like all the black had frozen, like she was in the refrigerator with the door closed and the light out and she couldn't get out and nobody heard her and nobody heard her and nobody. . . .

  The big, cold something touched her inside her head.

  That story on the net, the one I wasn't supposed to watch, about a giant gorilla that picked up a lady and smelled her and looked at her and it was so scary, and I thought he's going to throw her down on the ground or put her in his mouth and chew her with his teeth, and then I peed my pants and I didn't even know it until Mommy came in and said Ohmygod what are you watching Mike you left the screen on and now she's wet herself and ruined the couch because of your stupid monster I told you she was too young. . . .

  And then it let her go. The big, cold something passed through her like a wind, and she could smell it, but she was smelling how it thought, how it felt, and it was tired and sad and angry and even very very frightened but it didn't care about little girls anymore and it let her go.

  She was hanging in darkness. She was lost.

  "Christabel?"

  When she heard Mister Sellars' voice, his kind, hooty-soft voice, she couldn't help it. She started to cry, then she was crying so hard that she thought she wouldn't stop, not ever, not ever.

  "I w–want . . . Mommy." She could barely make the words.

  "I know," he said. "I'm sorry—I didn't mean for it to happen this way." She couldn't feel him, not like she had felt the freezing dark, but she could hear him, and in all the blackness that was a tiny, good thing. She tried to stop crying. She had hiccups. "I'm with you now," Mister Sellars said. "I'm with you, little Christabel. We have to go. I need your help."

  "I didn't mean to do it. . . !"

  "I know. It was my fault. Perhaps it was meant to be—but perhaps not. In any case, it will all be over
soon. Come with me."

  "I want my Mommy."

  "I know you do. And you are not the only one." Now she wasn't quite as scared as she had been and she could hear how much he was hurting. "Just come with me, Christabel. I'm going to take you to meet someone. I'm sorry this happened but I'm glad you're here, because otherwise I would have had to send your friend off to meet him by himself."

  Then she heard a new voice—a surprising voice, because she knew the person the voice belonged to couldn't be talking, because he was asleep on the bed like a dead person. But Mister Sellars was also asleep like a dead person, wasn't he?

  Am I asleep like that too? Won't Mommy and Daddy be frightened?

  "Get me out of here!" the voice shouted. "Not doin' this mierda no more!"

  "Cho-Cho," she said.

  For a moment, he didn't talk. Christabel hung in the blackness and wondered if this was what it felt like to be dead. "Weenit?" he said at last. "That you?"

  "Yes." Mister Sellars' breath was all funny and rough, as though he had stepped away for a moment and then run back. "That is her, Señor Izabal. And we are going somewhere together. You two are going to find a little lost boy. And afterward . . . and afterward I will do my very best to take you both home."

  "You all crazy," Cho-Cho's voice said. "Not gonna do nothin'!"

  But as the darkness began to turn into light—a gray like a morning sky, but everywhere at once, below as well as above—Christabel felt someone reach out and take her hand.

  "You okay, weenit?" Cho-Cho whispered.

  "I think so," she whispered back. "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah," he said. "Ain't scared of nothin', me."

  Whether that was true or not, his fingers tightened on hers as the gray light grew and grew.

  Paul and Orlando carried Martine down the twisting ledge until they came to where the others were blocking the path. "Move!" said Paul in a loud whisper. "Didn't you hear that madman? He's coming after us."