Resurrection, Inc.

34

The polished visor hid Jones’s impatient smile as he hurried through the back passageways to the neo-Satanists’ sacrificial grotto. Some of the walls bore graffiti, most of it influenced by the cult. Reddish mood-light poured from fluorescent panels above, but the place stood empty so early in the morning. He knew Nathans would be there.

Jones couldn’t wait to tell the other man. He’d never imagined he could discover something so important, so incredible all by himself—certainly not in the barracks, certainly not on a community Net terminal. The knowledge made him proud with a happy self-confidence he had never experienced before. He had done something, accomplished something, completed a meaningful and important purpose.

Because of Nathans’s insistence on absolute secrecy regarding his connections to the Guild, Jones was forbidden to show his Elite Guard colors in any area frequented by the neo-Satanists, though the man’s public involvement with the cult itself was murky at best. The precautions seemed a bit extreme to Jones, but he knew Nathans must have his reasons.

Jones wore his old white uniform, a plain Enforcer again, strangely out of place. He felt he was lowering himself now that he had earned the right to wear Elite Guard blue, but, on the other hand, the white armor brought back a spark of nostalgia. The old uniform had made him comparatively unobtrusive, even at dawn, when he’d entered the mass-trans station. The outbound cars were nearly empty, with most commuters traveling the opposite direction, streaming into the Metroplex for the workday.

Sitting alone, Jones looked at the scratched transplastic window, fidgeting in his armor and staring up at the sky. As curfew finished for the night, one late patrol hovercar rushed silently overhead, making for its Guild hangar.

At the destination-request terminal Jones entered the confidential code used by the neo-Satanists, ensuring that a special transport would be waiting for him when he reached the last stop on the fringe line. He sat and waited, drumming his fingers on the seat as a stream of darkness and light passed the window.

When forming the cult, Nathans had diverted his own workers from their regular labor to the construction of a spectacular secret ceremonial chamber deep at an unknown end of the mass-trans system. Later, anyone initiated into the cult received the special destination code that allowed them to enter the grotto.

As he disembarked, Jones’s skin crawled in unconscious reaction to his own superstitions. The Guild served a purpose, and now that he knew more he could respect that; he could see the importance of the Enforcers, especially the Elite Guard—but neo-Satanism was something else altogether. He didn’t understand why Nathans would bother with it.

Breathless, Jones brought himself to the bottom of the stairs and stopped short in front of the doorway that led into the High Priest’s private chambers. The chronometer on the lower right-hand corner of his visor said “6:13 a.m.”; he was a few minutes late already.

A mere handful of people knew the password to enter the private chambers, and Jones hummed the mnemonic to himself, “Roy G. Biv Deserves Fudge.” Nathans had trusted him with the password, though Jones was uneasy with his increased amount of assistance in neo-Satanist activities. In his stiff white gloves Jones punched the letters one at a time.

The iron-studded door crawled open, protesting. Clouds of grayish-brown smoke curled upward from the doorway, reeking of sulfur. Jones automatically switched on the mask filters behind his visor and stepped into the room, baffled. Had something caught on fire? He tensed—was Nathans all right?

Low orange lights suddenly came on, and an impossibly heavy footstep thundered down as a huge figure came into view.

Jones took a step backward in utter disbelief. The figure was a nightmare, a demon nine feet tall with bulbous muscles and brick-red skin. Curved horns like massive construction tools rode on its forehead, and a purple glow stabbed from its eyes as the creature gazed at Jones. It opened its mouth in a snarl as it stomped forward, exposing white fangs like sharpened pencils.

Though it walked on cloven hooves and ungainly animal-like legs, it moved with frightening speed and fluidity. Blue arcs of electricity skirled up and down its swishing arrow-tipped tail.

Jones yelped and in one liquid motion he drew a pocket bazooka in one hand and a projectile weapon in the other. He crouched and aimed—

“Stop!”

Both Jones and the monster froze. Nathans emerged from the shadows, laughing. He flicked on the fluorescent lights and opened air ducts to draw away the brimstone smoke.

“Relax Jones—meet Prototype.” The man smiled with childish delight. “He’s a completely autonomous, fully functional android.”

Astonished, the Enforcer stuttered to himself, but could not find his voice. Nathans continued, talking like a proud father, “Maybe you thought androids were impossible? That’s what Resurrection, Inc. always implied, and gave us Servants instead.” He dismissed that thought with a wave. “Never impossible, though—simply not cost-effective. It’s a hell of a tedious process to duplicate every single nerve and muscle fiber in a biological body. ‘Servants for Mankind—Freeing Us from Tedium to Pursue Our True Destiny’ and all that rot. Prototype here is just to show it can be done, although I’ve taken the liberty of embellishing his body.”

Nathans tapped one of the curving horns. “Okay, Prototype, you can go back to the chamber and continue your inventory.” Obediently the android turned and shuffled with a strange grace out of the room and into the large neo-Satanist storage vaults. “He is, after all, still like a Servant, so I’ve put him to work back there.” Nathans adjusted his orange-red hairpiece, long and kinky this time. “Please take off that helmet, Jones—no need to keep up a charade for me.”

Jones slipped off the lightweight helmet and blinked in the open air. Nathans watched him closely, and the Enforcer realized that his facial expressions were now exposed as he talked.

The room around them was sparsely furnished, intended to give High Priest Vincent Van Ryman space to pace and ponder. Neo-Satanist symbols decorated the walls, with the inverted star-in-pentagram logo prominent. Musty-looking books lined the shelves.

Jones noticed Nathans moving with a carefully hidden sense of anxiety. The Enforcer worried for a moment, but other man maintained a good mask. “Now then, did I want to see you for something? Oh, yes!” Before Jones could spill out his discovery, Nathans continued, “You know that all the Elite Guard have their own specialties, their own turf, you might say. You, on the other hand, are not yet attached, and I have decided that you’re perfect to assist me in my less-than-official Guild duties.”

“You mean helping with the neo-Satanists?” Jones swallowed, and tried to keep a whine out of his voice. He didn’t want Nathans to be angry or disappointed with him. “But, I really—”

Nathans looked squarely at him. “Now, don’t complain. I see you standing there sweating, just waiting for me to turn my head so you can fidget! Stop this knee-jerk nonsense of revulsion toward neo-Satanism. It’s all a fairy tale. Anyone with a brain can see that. I know you understand my reasoning, Jones. You’re certainly intelligent enough, and I’ve explained it to you carefully.” He glanced at his fingernails.

“We have to polish the human race. It’s time to scrape off the scum floating on the human gene pool.” Nathans let his control slip, and his eyes grew too bright; his hands shook. “But this social evolution business takes so damned long! We don’t live forever, you know. And since I’m doing all the work to set the wheels in motion, I want to be alive to reap some of the benefits.”

He sighed, though, and some of the frenzy drained away. “Now that we have no way of knowing the results of the Danal experiment”—Nathans shot a sad and bitter glance at Jones; ashamed, the Enforcer hid motionless behind his armor—“I’ve had to find some other way to hurry us along.

“Tonight is Walpurgis Night, you realize, one of the most important ceremonies of the year. In fact, this could be one of the most important events in the history of mankind. The High Sabbat should be a catalyst of something much more.

“Now, Jones, I trust you completely. I’ll need your assistance with the preparations. This is very important. I’ve got cannisters of a chemical labelled Rhodamine 590 over against the wall. Take that and make sure it gets mixed into the vat of cheap red wine set up in the Sabbat grotto—but be careful not to get any on your hands. I also want you to check the pump systems and make sure all the new Sacred Fonts work properly. I just had them installed.” Nathans’s eyes twinkled beneath the carrot-colored wig.

Be careful not to get any on your hands? “What is this Rhodamine? What does it do?”

Nathans smiled, but it made Jones uneasy. “Ah, I looked long and hard for something like it. It’s a dye used with lasers, a brilliant orange red. But it’s also a mitochondrial poison, extremely toxic and wonderfully fast-acting. Ranks right up there with cyanide. Cyanide’s been done to death, of course, and I wanted something a little more exotic.”

Jones stood motionless, wearing a puzzled and horrified grimace on his face. He wished he could put his helmet back on and hide behind it. “But… poison, sir? What for?”

“For tonight’s communion, of course.” Nathans flicked his eyes at Jones. His gaze had an intensity that made the Enforcer want to cringe, afraid, then the man’s expression changed to one of indirect scorn. He motioned placatingly. “Look, I’m not going to ask them to do anything against their wishes—it’ll be their own choice completely, as it has to be. That’s why I had to find a fast-acting poison. I do feel sorry for the first victim or two, the ones who really don’t know.” He sighed. “But after that, after they all see how deadly it is, surely no rational, intelligent person would partake from a drink laced with poison? Would you? Of course not. But I’m betting that some of them will, and good riddance to them! Surely you don’t feel sorry for people like that?”

Jones didn’t answer. He could hardly even move—Nathans couldn’t be serious! He suddenly looked at the man in a different light. No, not Nathans—it had to be some trick, a joke. A joke, right?

Nathans continued, unaware of Jones’s thoughts. He spoke distractedly, as if preoccupied to the point of helplessness, “My problem for the moment is to make sure our High Priest is up to the task. He’s been cringing for weeks, hiding behind his Intruder Defense Systems. A bit emotionally disturbed, as he always has been.” Nathans mumbled to himself, and this alarmed Jones as well. Nathans had never talked to himself before.

The Enforcer interrupted. Maybe by announcing his discovery, he could focus Nathans’s attention again. “I found out something very strange about the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches last night, sir. I bumped into it by accident.”

Nathans regarded him, caught up with his own workings for the evening’s High Sabbat. But his eyes widened in fascination and amazement as Jones described the maintenance openings, the raised city over the water.

“The funny thing is, I know the team of hackers has been trying for weeks to uncover any scrap of information, but they always came up empty-handed. I certainly didn’t expect to find anything myself, but I thought I should at least try. So last night I sat down at the terminal and just punched in a routine query—and I got a direct answer. I read it—I know what I saw. But I tried again this morning, and The Net said it had no information.”

Jones dropped his voice, as if sharing a deep secret. “It’s like someone was tampering with The Net. Diverting my queries and covering themselves so well that no one ever suspected. But I caught them off guard and got the information!”

Fascinated, Nathans stared off into space. “We alter The Net all the time for neo-Satanism: it’s not that complicated if you have the right access and you know what you’re doing. But someone else is doing it, too! And without my knowing it! That’s remarkable—I never even thought… what a blind spot!” He tapped his fingertips together, and his eyes glowed as connections started to form.

“There could be an entire underground world down there,” Nathans mumbled to himself. “If these tamperers are so carefully hiding all information about the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches, we can assume that they live in—or at least attach some extreme importance to—whatever is down there. How much else don’t we know? Damn! That’s frustrating.”

He drew in a quick breath, exclaiming to Jones, “And that means Danal might be alive! If he and that nurse/tech deliberately jumped into the patch, she must have known something. Hmmmm.”

The Enforcer could imagine the mental wheels churning behind Nathans’s forehead; the process fascinated him, but he offered no suggestions himself. The man finally sat up.

“I want you to keep this absolutely confidential, Jones. This could be vital information, depending on who these Net tamperers are… and if they have anything to do with Danal. What would they want with a Servant who had regained his memory?” He scratched his hairpiece.

“I want you to go right away and—” He frowned. “No… damn! You’ll have to wait until dark. But before curfew, it has to be before curfew! Find a deserted street with one of these ‘maintenance openings.’ Take one other Guard to help you, and verify what you’ve just told me—see what’s under there. And you’d better go fully armed—people with an operation this sophisticated won’t take kindly to being discovered.”

Overwhelmed by Nathans’s rush of words, Jones nodded and fitted his helmet back on.

“But most important of all, I must have a report from you before the High Sabbat tonight. I have to know what you find, and I’ll need your help with the final preparations for the ceremony.” He smiled beneath his red mop of artificial hair. Jones’s uneasiness rushed back to him. “It’s really going to be something to watch.”

35

“Elite Guard!” Laina whispered. “What are they doing in here?” Two of the blue-armored Enforcers marched down the dim hall of the hospital complex’s security wing, then vanished around the corner.

“Don’t talk to me!” Danal hissed out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t even look like you’re talking to me!” As he walked beside Laina in her nurse/tech uniform, Danal kept his face blank and lifeless, as any Servant should. Next to them marched burly Rolf in his set of white Enforcer armor, their ‘security escort.’

The checkpoint guard at the entrance to the high-security wing verified their story on his Net terminal. Rikki had come through again, planting the proper story, the proper authorizations.

“I’m supposed to escort them wherever they go,” Rolf said ominously behind his polarized visor. “Orders.” The similarly uniformed guard passed them on, then went back to playing his Net interactive games.

The halls of the vast hospital complex were quiet and drowsy in the early morning silence. Outside, a thick blanket of damp fog seeped into all the alleyways as the sun rose, muffling sounds.

“This is wing six. Down that hall—it should be Room 29-A.” As Laina spoke, the heavy makeup made her face look artificial.

Another white-armored Enforcer stood at attention outside Room 29-A. Without hesitation the three imposters walked up to him. The guard tensed, but seemed reassured by Rolf’s presence.

“We have to let them in,” Rolf said gruffly. “The nurse/tech has special treatment for the patient. I’m supposed to escort her and her Servant, but… ah, because of the importance of this patient, I’d feel better if we both watched over them. Cover your ass—get me?”

The other Enforcer agreed. “Good idea.”

Confident, the other guard punched in the electronic combination for the door, stepping aside to let Laina and Danal enter first. Rolf and the guard stepped into the room side by side.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Rolf wrapped his massive armored arm around the other Enforcer’s helmet. With a twist he wrenched off the helmet to reveal the startled face of a pimply youth. Before the exposed Enforcer could speak a word, Laina jammed a hisser into his face. Rolf stuffed the helmet back on the tranquilized guard’s head as he slithered to the floor. He caught the unconscious Enforcer under the arms and eased him down to keep his armor from clattering too much.

Danal paid no heed to this, but stood gawking at the sterile room’s only inhabitant. The neatly made bed bore a quaint patchwork quilt; a lamp and small writing desk added homey but pathetically ineffective touches of comfort.

Sitting in an overstuffed chair and staring at them was the hideously disfigured remnant of a woman. Growths and tumors like rivulets of melted wax tangled her face. Most of the hair on her head had been swallowed up by crumpled ridges of insanely growing skin. But two hardened and intelligent eyes stared coldly at them from between twisted eyelids. When she breathed, air came through her distorted nose and mouth in a whistling, sucking sound.

Yet behind the havoc of her face, Danal could see the ghost of Julia’s appearance, a hint of the woman to whom he had once opened his heart. But the eyes them selves spoke differently. Danal thought he recognized her gaze, but he had seen it only a few times before—eyes set on the face of a woman masquerading as a Servant….

“Zia!” Danal gasped.

She turned her face disbelievingly toward Danal, the Servant, scrutinizing him with sudden interest. As she drew a labored breath to speak, she looked as if all of the questions canceled themselves out in her mind.

“Van Ryman—you were Vincent Van Ryman. I thought you’d come back to haunt us, one way or another.” Zia paused and pulled another sucking breath through the opening of her mouth. She smirked in a hideous grimace. “I take it you’re the welcoming committee for the Francois Nathans Fan Club?”

But Danal didn’t hear her. All words caught in his throat as the implications of Zia’s presence hit him like a sledgehammer. She wasn’t Julia. He staggered, taking half a step backward. Tears flooded his eyes again; his throat burned.

Julia was dead after all, leaving nothing but a walking mindless automaton, empty. Danal’s hope shattered into sharp pieces. He hung his head and shuddered, trying to say her name out loud. He needed to sit down, to collapse, but he locked his knees instead. He barely felt Laina gripping his shoulder. It didn’t matter anymore.

Danal spoke toward the floor. His voice carried a bleak, devastated undertone. “So what happened to you?”

Zia linked her fingers together and cracked her knuckles. Danal saw that even her hands were covered with tumors and malformed growths. “What the hell does it look like happened? Apparently the surface-cloning process doesn’t always work like a charm.” Her fingers jerked convulsively, as if she wanted to tear the fabric of the chair. “The bastard guaranteed it would work.” But then her volatile expression changed, leaving only a dry bitterness.

“And what’s Joey doing now? He must be all high and mighty alone in the mansion. He was a slimer, always more important than the rest of us. I was supposed to be with him—he took your place, and I was supposed to be Julia. Sure! Simple. Piece of cake. Just give us a few weeks of your time, Zia, and we’ll touch up your face a bit. Make you look just like Julia. Surface-cloning, the magic of modern technology. Besides, it was all for the good of neo-Satanism.”

Her bitterness oozed out of the words, making her pathetic. “Joey and I would pick up right where you two left off, and nobody’d know the difference… except for our radical change in philosophy.” Zia shrugged. “But you did that already once before, so we weren’t losing sleep over it.

“Joey’s genotype was a perfect match to yours, a model case for the surface-cloning technique, and we couldn’t hope for anything better. His disguise grew on his face like it belonged there.

“Me, on the other hand… well, I didn’t get along quite so well with Julia’s chromosomes. Something went wrong. The clone infection went rampant, and my new face grew in every which direction.” She snorted, “Not something to write home about.”

Laina’s eyes widened as she listened, but she said nothing. Danal didn’t know whether to resent the malformed imposter because she was not Julia, or pity Zia as another one of Nathans’s victims. “Why does he keep you here? Why bother? Why doesn’t he just kill you”—Danal’s voice cracked—“like he killed Julia?”

Zia made a rude noise with her mouth. “Francois Nathans is too genteel for that. He needs to keep me quiet about his botched plan, but I was one of his favorite tools, remember. Malleable, willing to make the greatest sacrifices for a good cause.” She scowled. “Obviously, I can’t go anywhere. And even without my rather shocking appearance, I don’t have an identity on The Net, since I was supposed to take Julia’s place. I need surgery every week or so, otherwise my nose and mouth grow together, and my eyelids seal shut. But Nathans takes care of me just dandy—what more could I want in the whole wide world?”

Before Danal could say anything, Zia rapped her fingers on the arm of her chair. “I haven’t set off any alarms, you know, but I damn well could. What do you want coming here? This was a big risk… just to visit me? Touching. How come you didn’t bring any flowers or candy or get-well cards?”

Danal mumbled his words through a gauze of grief. “I thought you might be the real Julia.”

Zia shrugged bitterly. “I tried to be. But I ran into some unforeseen complications.” She laughed again at him, a hooting sound from her misshapen mouth, then she stopped abruptly. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

Danal swallowed and clenched his fists, helplessly angry at her. But he would not let it bother him, he would not provoke her—it wasn’t her fault. He said his words through gritted teeth, coming to a decision as he spoke, “I’m going to stop Nathans. I have had quite enough of him.”

“Ah, the brave hero, fighting for what’s Right!” Zia taunted. “Then you’d better hurry up—tonight’s Walpurgis Night. ”

Danal started as he realized she was right. “Walpurgis Night. I forgot.”

Laina met his eyes. “What’s that?”

“A long time ago, back in Eastern Europe, all the witches gathered in the Hartz Mountains and had their greatest Sabbat of the year. May Day Eve—Walpurgis Night. It’s usually a big deal for the neo-Satanists. Nathans will have a sacrifice or two, kill a few more people.” Danal’s voice began to shake. “My imposter will do the sacrifice, pour more blood on the hands of Vincent Van Ryman.”

Zia smiled with her lumpy mouth. “Understatement rears its ugly head—oh, it’s much more than that this time. You’re a great hope for us all if I know more than you do—and I’ve been stuck here in this single room!

“This is going to be the last of the High Sabbats, and Nathans is going to wipe out all the followers of neo-Satanism. He’s lost patience with them and wants to end everything with a bang. He’ll poison them. He’ll trick them, as he always has. Audience participation in a big way… and this time they’ll all die.”

Her voice quavered, and suddenly she looked pathetic, not defiant at all, all traces of sarcasm replaced by defeat. “When Nathans comes to visit every once in a while, he tells me his upcoming plans. He likes to talk about his grandiose schemes, and there’s no way I can shut him up. He thinks I’m interested.”

She scratched absently at one of the waxy tumors on her cheek. “He told me—me!—that anyone who joined such a sham as neo-Satanism was incapable of rational thought. Anybody who couldn’t think for himself didn’t deserve the benefits of society. Do you think it means they’re all incapable of rational thinking? I think it means they were misled by a charismatic leader and some sophisticated gimmicks. I was misled, too—I fell for it. Is that a crime worth dying for?”

“Have you done anything to stop him?” Laina asked.

Zia laughed in a grating, burbling sound. “Me? You’ve got to be kidding! I’m cooped up here with a guard at the door every day. What the hell am I supposed to do? Look at Nathans and turn him to stone? I’m almost that ugly, but not quite.”

Danal swallowed uncomfortably. “Tonight…” He looked at Laina, then at Rolf. The burly Waker had propped the unconscious Enforcer against the wall and stood listening in silence. “Nathans is forcing our hand.”

He bit his bloodless lip and took a deep breath, assuming the role of leader. Anger rode behind his eyes, but he kept it under control. Galvanized, he fixed his gaze on Zia. “Do you want to get out of here? Come with us? There might be something you could help with, when we confront Nathans.”

The malformed imposter looked surprised and suspicious that he’d even ask. She spread her arms to indicate the hospital room. “And take me away from all this?” She stood up, and Danal saw that her slim figure matched Julia’s exactly. She could walk and move unhindered: the surface-cloning disarray had destroyed only her face and hands.

Zia set her jaw. “Yes, I’ll come if I can help kill him.”

36

Zia gazed at the Wakers’ underground world, inhaling details. With her distorted face and stretched eyelids, Danal could not interpret her expressions, but he could sense Zia’s growing awe. She had remained silent as they smuggled her through a sublevel basement entrance, all of her sarcastic bitterness dissolved away. Astonished to be free from the hospital complex, she was intrigued by the very existence of the Wakers and the world they had built under the city; but most of all, Zia was delighted to know that Francois Nathans suspected nothing of the Wakers whatsoever.

She sat by herself, silent and daydreaming on a hammock as the other Wakers discussed the new turn of events. Without bothering to use gloves or a rag, Zia had removed the hot sunlamp bulb above her head, keeping herself in murky shadows, but she wore her deformities without cringing, brandishing them for all the Wakers to see.

Danal locked his fingers behind his smooth head, stretching his elbows back until the joints creaked. He let the silence hang for a moment, turning his gaze on the gathered Wakers.

Gregor sat back on his heels and watched Danal make his case, rubbing his big square jaw and waiting. Danal spoke carefully, gauging their reactions, then decided it was time to let them judge for themselves. Before any of the Wakers could speak, Gregor stood up and faced Danal. “Let me be your straw man for a minute. A devil’s advocate, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

Danal watched him, trying to detect hostility or resentment in the Waker’s eyes, but he saw only disturbed consideration.

“Why should we Wakers give up everything we’ve worked for? You want us to expose ourselves to Nathans and all the neo-Satanists—but that’ll put us at their mercy. Your reasons aren’t good enough to me. It sounds like a personal vendetta.”

The other Wakers watched, tense. Rikki. Laina. Rolf. Forty others. Did they perceive this as a showdown? Julia would be out there somewhere, silent and patient, probably sitting motionless as she had been told to do. Danal did not want to clash with Gregor, but he couldn’t let himself hesitate.

“It’s more than that. If I go by myself, I can’t win—I’m sure of it. And half a victory in this game isn’t worth anything at all. I need your support, all of you. Look at Zia, remember what Nathans intends to do tonight at the High Sabbat—you’re a conscientious person, Gregor. Isn’t stopping him the right thing to do?”

“You tell me, Danal—which is the lesser of the two evils? Saving the neo-Satanists or protecting the Wakers?”

The others began to murmur softly, and Danal knew he had to try a different tack. Water trickled below, and somewhere in the darkness a repair-rat clicked and scuttled. The entire world of girders and pilings seemed alive and waiting, coiled tight. He considered long, forming his argument, then his eyes lit up as he spoke.

“Gregor, if I can defeat Nathans completely and utterly, take away his power… then Resurrection, Inc. will be mine. By right. I think we can do it—with the scandal that’s sure to follow and with my own story.” He paused, measuring the dramatic effect. He felt tense and uneasy. So much depended on this, so much.

“Then the Wakers can perform all the above-board research they want, with the best equipment possible—maybe you can answer all your questions, Gregor. And if we Wakers hold Resurrection, Inc. then we can implement whatever decisions we reach. Should we stop making Servants? We could do that if we wanted. Can we fix the resurrection process so Wakers never happen again, and the lost souls really do rest in peace?” He paused. “Can we find some other way to bring Julia’s memories back?

“We can’t do any of that unless we win against Nathans. Tonight. He’s forcing our hand, I know. But we’ll have to turn that to our advantage. And we can’t win unless I get the help of all the Wakers.”

Danal waited, feeling the regular beat of his synHeart, but Gregor made no further response.

“You have to admit he’s got a damned good argument, Gregor,” Laina interrupted. Many of the other Wakers murmured in agreement.

Gregor looked at Zia’s chaotic features again as she observed them, moving from lighter to deeper shadow as she swayed on the hammock. Danal watched the expressions on Gregor’s face change, and he knew the other Waker had made up his mind.

Danal found a public Net booth and slipped inside. The timekeeper in his head told him that barely an hour had passed since the meeting of the Wakers, and already things had begun in earnest. He breathed deeply, feeling the tense excitement pounding through him. Soon it would all be over. He only wished it had never begun in the first place.

The air was damp and cold, with gray clouds sopping up the skies. Other pedestrians moved quickly along the sidewalks, heads down, and paying little attention to anything else. A mass-trans skipper churned past, stopping at corners, but no one got on or off. Several jobless blues sat next to each other in silence on the poured-stone lip of a dormant fountain. The cold streaked their cheeks with a pink flush.

Danal looked up between the tall buildings to where the jagged gables of the Van Ryman mansion jutted into the grayness. He had picked the particular booth for a specific purpose, so he could keep an eye on the mansion. It would act like fuel for his anger, his determination.

“Nathans destroyed my life and my love,” he said to Rikki beside him, “but the imposter in there stole my identity, myself. That’s a more personal insult, and I’ll confront him alone. This’ll be our first blow.”

Zia had also suggested they confront the false Van Ryman first. “Yeah, Nathans is the guiding force behind neo-Satanism and all their plans. But the imposter is the High Priest. Even if we get Nathans now, Joey’ll still complete the massacre tonight. Why not take him out first, since he can cause the immediate damage? Besides, that’ll make Nathans sweat a little.”

Danal and the boy crowded into the booth, avoiding the cold and damp. They had gone out together, dressed as father and son, to begin the preparations. Rikki reveled in his role and hung close to Danal, asking questions, pointing out things. Back at the Wakers’ camp, Gregor and Laina worked on other plans. Danal wished he could be in both places at once, but he had chosen to be here, on the streets, where he could actively see the mansion, feed his enthusiasm.

In the Net booth Danal logged on as Vincent Van Ryman and then straightened as the main Net menu showed on the screen. He rubbed the back of his head, trying to massage away the knot of tension there. He gracefully moved aside from the keypad. “All yours,” he said and turned the terminal over to the freckle-faced Waker.

Rikki made a show of cracking his knuckles before his fingers flew over the keypad. Occasionally he paused and scrutinized the screen, then set off in another direction. With the speed and intensity of the boy’s finger strokes, Danal lost track of what he was doing.

“I didn’t know there were so many repair-rats in the whole Metroplex!” Rikki cried as the display formed on the screen. “Look at them all!” Danal peered over the boy’s shoulder. Numbers and coordinates scrolled up and off the screen in an endless stream.

“And those are just the ones in this section, too. They’re self-replicating, remember?” Danal tapped on the images. “But we only need a couple of them.”

Rikki found two repair-rats in the vicinity of the Van Ryman mansion, then erased all the others from the display.

“I’ll take over from here,” Danal said.

Rikki looked at him with a touch of condescension. “You sure you don’t need any more help?”

Danal punched the boy in the shoulder. “I’m not a complete idiot. I used to be pretty good on The Net—I can handle some simple controls now.”

As he talked, he set the blips of the repair-rats to work on the wiring of Van Ryman’s Intruder Defense Systems. Danal lost himself in trying to remember details, blueprints, electronic schematics. He opened another window on the screen, trying to connect with other libraries, but the details of Van Ryman’s Intruder Defense Systems were, understandably, impossible to get. He let out a long breath and went back to work, forced to rely on his memory. He had designed the systems—his intuition would be right.

Rikki watched him in fascination, crowding in, but Danal paid no attention. Outside, a middle-aged man pressed his face against the Net booth for a moment, staring at them, but then he left. Rikki switched on the privacy screens.

“Are you going to disconnect the Intruder Defense Systems?” Rikki asked. “So you can get inside?”

“No. I don’t want to do anything he’ll notice. I’m not worried about getting in—I left an escape hatch for myself when I designed the systems. It’s beating the imposter once I get inside—that’s what I’m concerned about.”

Sitting by the fireplace playing cribbage with Julia… relaxing in the sauna and drinking iced tea… feeling like an idiot as he balanced on the gables with a crowbar to remove the gargoyles… flying the hovercopter, swooping down close to the ocean and watching Julia laugh in terrified delight. Those were his memories, from his life—no one could steal them from him. He remembered her image in the hologram over the mantel, and superimposed on that he saw the Servant Julia, mindless and unthinking. Some things are too sacred to steal. It made him look forward to confronting the imposter.

“The repair-rats will take a couple of hours to finish,” he said to Rikki. “I need to stay here and direct them. Why don’t you make sure Gregor isn’t changing his mind about tonight?”

“I want to stay here and help—”

“You’ll help me the most if you go make sure Gregor hasn’t changed his mind. Besides, I need some time alone to… to set my mind, you know? I have to get ready for this.”

Rikki nodded. “Good luck, then.” Awkwardly he gave Danal a quick handshake before he slid open the Net booth and dashed off into the streets. Danal settled back to wait, running thoughts over and over in his mind until it was time. He watched the coordinates of the repair-rats on the screen as they worked out of sight underground.

37

A relentless drizzle hung in the air as Danal stalked toward the Van Ryman mansion. By now the sun had set, marking the beginning of Walpurgis Night, but he could tell little difference in the murky skies.

The repair-rats had finished their work. He was about to begin.

Pedestrians had been driven to shelter from the cold and the rain, leaving the streets hushed and empty. A wind stirred the dead fronds of a nearby palm tree, making it sound like a rattling witch’s broom.

Danal wore his old Servant jumpsuit defiantly, making no attempt to hide his identity. Let the imposter be watching, he thought. Maybe he’s got a guilty conscience. He smiled grimly to himself. He never thought he’d be his own avenging angel.

The drizzle clearly outlined the hemispherical screen of the Intruder Defense field as droplets struck it and flashed into steam. As if he were looking through a distorted fishbowl, Danal could see the ornate spires and reptilian shingles of the mansion. The new gargoyles grimaced down at him from the other side of the invisible wall.

The cold drizzle beaded on his smooth skin and soaked into the jumpsuit. His synHeart had begun to pound, but he stepped it down, calming himself, feeling adrenaline lift him into a clear-minded euphoria.

He edged around the house, around the Intruder Defense field. No one would stop him now. He wouldn’t allow it. He had to focus his attention completely.

Danal looked at the structure of the roof, followed the gables with his eyes until he located the spot under one of the enameled hexagram tiles. Then he crouched on his knees and edged up, ignoring puddles on the ground, until he almost touched the field itself.

The light drizzle would make finding the opening much easier.

He could smell a thick ozone stench from the ionized rain. Danal sat back, opened his perceptions, and stared at the glimmers as raindrops spangled against the field. Looking for the illusion, looking for the hologram projected across the opening. He stepped up his microprocessor, watching, until he finally saw the pattern mirrored. As one succession of droplets struck the invisible wall, an identical sequence—the illusion—was reflected exactly one meter away.

When installing the Systems a lifetime ago, it had taken a great deal of effort to design a distortion in the field for emergency access. But Vincent had insisted on being able to get into his own home regardless of who controlled the Intruder Defense Systems. The imposter couldn’t possibly know about it.

Danal stared a moment longer until he was sure, then pushed his head and shoulders through the unseen doorway, praying he had not misjudged the hologram. Vividly and mercilessly he recalled the blackened corpses of the first demonstrators who had tried to penetrate the field.

Danal froze and breathed an exhausted sigh of relief, then scrambled the rest of the way through. He stood up in the relative shelter and warmth under the field, brushing the mud from his jumpsuit. Up above, he could see the spangles of raindrops as they came down. Both he and the imposter were trapped here—like an arena.

Danal walked down the black poured-stone walkway and purposefully ascended the steps. He felt tall and powerful. He stared up at the eaves, watching the weathervane turn back and forth on its random motor. The gargoyles seemed to cringe from his presence now that he knew their secret. Danal smiled again, but brought his expression under control. The imposter would probably be watching by now.

He opened the front door of the house and stepped into the maw of shadows. The carpeting drowned his soft footsteps, but by the light of the dangling chandelier Danal could see the startled lookalike coming to meet him. The Servant stared at the man’s stolen face and felt disoriented, as if looking into a bent mirror.

Danal turned and closed the door, shutting them both inside.

The imposter came forward two more steps to face him, and stopped, nervous. His face was drawn and haggard, and he looked at Danal with a contradictory mixture of eagerness and dread. The Servant regarded him in cold silence, trying to choose from his handful of accusations.

The false Vincent Van Ryman spoke first, astonished. “Nathans said you might be alive after all.” He drew a deep breath, and a vision-driven fire ignited the man’s resolve. Danal couldn’t answer, choked by his anticipation, his conflicting anger. Though his silence lasted only a second or two, it seemed a long, long moment.

“Very well, alone then,” the imposter muttered and rubbed his hands briskly together. “Follow me, Danal. This is perfect. We’re about to embark on the most important event of the Technological Age.”

The false Van Ryman shuffled down the corridor. Baffled but ready to jump at any trick, Danal followed him past the control room of the Intruder Defense Systems, past the study in which so many events had begun, to the open sitting area overlooked by the upstairs rooms. The locked door beneath the staircase had once haunted Danal’s buried memories, but now the underground chambers beyond, offered only healed nightmares, the private meeting place for the neo-Satanist Inner Circle, where he had been held prisoner as the imposter grew the face of Vincent Van Ryman….

The imposter removed a key hanging from the leather thong around his neck and opened the door. A dank smell wafted upward, and the false Van Ryman drew a deep breath.

“I’m so glad you came back, Vincent—I really did want to see you again.” He turned to lock his gaze with Danal’s. “Will you join me for a little Sabbat of our own? It is Walpurgis Night, you know, and it’s only fitting that things should end this way.”

Without waiting for a response, the imposter turned and descended the stairs. Danal hesitated, confused; he had not expected this at all, and could not tell if the imposter was admitting defeat or if he had some deeper plan for luring Danal ahead. But the Servant realized it didn’t make any difference—he would never consider turning back now. Danal ducked and entered the passageway.

Paint, carefully done to look like moss, lined the cracks of the shallow flagstone steps, and a cassette played the sounds of echoing drips of water in the musty air. Stone benches surrounded a chipped granite pedestal; pentagrams, runes, and demonic symbols had been engraved into the sides of the podium, with the registered star-in-pentagram logo of the neo-Satanists prominent. Flickering electric candles stood like pitchforks in three brass candelabra. A Net terminal was set into two massive stone blocks on the wall, and the white-painted squares on the keypad looked like rows of teeth from a grinning skull.

“Wait here,” the false Van Ryman said confidently as he reached behind the curtains covering an alcove, withdrawing a billowy black High Priest’s robe trimmed with red on the sleeves. He glanced at his chronometer.

“Tonight it’s all coming to the end.” He donned the robe, shrugging his shoulders and straightening the fabric, then took a step toward the Net terminal. “With your sacrifice, Danal, we can set the final wheels of the universe in motion.”

The Servant cast aside the charade as he dropped into microprocessor speed again. Without a word he lunged forward, grabbing the folds of the imposter’s black robe and throwing him up against the stone blocks of the wall. He was careful to check his hand so as not to kill the man, but his fingers still slipped through the fabric and gouged the false Van Ryman’s chest. Friction from the cloth burned against Danal’s fingers. The imposter struggled, but the Servant’s reflexes countered every effort.

“You stole my identity, you bastard!”

“I gave it to you in the first place,” the man spat back, almost amused. The imposter’s eyes narrowed slightly. Too late, Danal realized that this was no mere lookalike— Nathans had selected him for his cunning, his intelligence and resourcefulness. The false Van Ryman barked an order.

“Command: Release me!”

To his horror Danal’s hands automatically withdrew as if he had touched hot wax. The Servant’s legs took two quick steps backward. He let out a helpless cry.

“Command: Stand still!” the imposter snapped.

Smug in his triumph, he collected his dignity, straightening the black robe, and looked at the helpless Servant. He briskly rubbed his hands together again, wiping the nervous sweat from his palms. “You’re still a Servant, Vincent. You have to obey my Commands.” He bent over Danal; his breath smelled of Glenlivet scotch. “Listen.”

With a swish of his robes he went over to the stone pedestal where he snatched up a mammoth leather-bound tome, one of the neo-Satanist holy compendia thrown together by Vincent Van Ryman and Francois Nathans. The imposter flipped to a finger-smeared page and began to quote from memory. His eyes never left Danal’s.

“‘And all have their missions, and all will Serve, though they may not know it. The greatest of these will be called Danal, and he is the Messenger. He is the Prophet. He is the Bringer of Change and the Fulfiller of Promises. He is the Stranger whom everyone knows. He is the Awakener and the Awakened. He is the Destroyer. The return of Satan rests in his deeds.’”

The imposter’s eyes widened with fervor, and he spoke so vehemently that droplets of saliva sprayed from his mouth. “Danal. We chose that name while you were still in the vat, because of the Writings, to force fulfillment of the prophecy.” He furiously flung the pages to another spot and quoted again, shoving the book in the Servant’s face. “Look! It says, ‘Sacrifice both the living and the dead,’ Satan said. ‘And I shall return to regain what is mine.’”

He snapped the book shut with finality, and carelessly let it drop to the floor with a thump. “It’s all in the Writings—proof positive. The meaning is clear. You should be sacrificed again, and Walpurgis Night is a perfect time.”

“I wrote most of the damned Writings!” Danal stood like a gargoyle himself, immobile but filled with hatred. He couldn’t move. The Command phrase locked all his muscles.

“I know. I was with you.”

A horrible suspicion crept upon Danal, and the imposter stopped himself, smiling in wonder. “Ah, you don’t know, do you? Nathans wouldn’t have told you.”

Danal stared at the imposter, wide-eyed. The look in the man’s gaze, the build of his body, his mannerisms as he moved—all clicked together like the flash of a switchblade snapping open. Stromgaard.

The man chuckled. “You should see the look on your face, Vincent!”

“You’re dead,” Danal said in a low voice.

“So were you,” the imposter countered, “but my death was only staged.”

Danal recalled the night of the sacrifice, seeing his “terminally ill” father dying and wasting away on the altar stone. He could still feel the nauseating packing sensation, the crunch of bone, as the sacrificial dagger bit into his father’s skeletal chest. Blood sprayed up ward. The heavy stubble on his jaw… covering a faint line of pinpricks from surface cloning?

Stromgaard was dead. He had to be. The muscles in Danal’s neck stood out as he tried to shake his head, to deny it. But the Command phrase kept him motionless.

“I wanted out of your little games,” the imposter continued. “And, frankly, I was getting sick of all the cold cynicism from you and Nathans about our religion. Don’t you have any sense of wonder left in your lives? Can’t you give supernatural events the benefit of the doubt?

“Nathans gave me another face so I could walk unrecognized, and we used one of the neo-Satanist converts to take my place on the sacrificial altar—there were so many willing ones! A pathetic story and some heavy makeup convinced you to do just what we wanted. It was for the best, it was for the good of the religion, because it showed a dramatic change of power from one High Priest to his successor.” Stromgaard Van Ryman scowled as if he had swallowed something bad. “I was there at the Sabbat. Do you know what it’s like to be in the audience while you watch your son kill his own father?”

“You were perfectly willing to murder me when the roles were reversed,” Danal countered.

“No matter.” Stromgaard shrugged. “I traveled, I went on pilgrimages to the original Salem, Massachusetts, to the Hartz Mountains of Eastern Europe, to the Balkans, to Budapest, to Transylvania. I studied the Writings, all of them, with an open mind, not with your rude sarcasm. It was all going so smoothly—I was perfectly content as an ascetic. Until you betrayed us! You and the whore!”

Danal strained until he thought his muscles would burst, but he still could not unlock the invisible binding of the Command phrase.

“That’s why I came back, to save the religion. For the good of neo-Satanism. You deserved everything you got, Vincent. For betraying the hopes of thousands of people, for mocking things you didn’t even try to understand.” He shook his head, sadly, it seemed. “But now we’ve brought you back, all the way back, and you can redeem yourself by unleashing the next Millennium.”

Danal remembered swimming through death—the warm darkness, the comforting light, the chimes, and the final unbreakable wall of memory he could not penetrate. “You don’t know how cruel that was. Bringing my memories back was the worst.”

“It was necessary,” Stromgaard said.

“Why? Why was it necessary?”

“Nathans had his own reasons. And I had mine.” The imposter’s face took on an expression of impatient scorn. “Nathans is afraid of death, even though he surrounds himself with it at Resurrection, Inc. He wants to be alive to enjoy the benefits of the perfect world he’s working so hard to create. Hah! And if a resurrected person can regain all his memories, then Nathans himself can live on as long as he wishes. That’s what he thinks. If he dies, he can just be resurrected, have his memories triggered, and live again. His own kind of immortality. Not realizing, of course, that after tonight when Satan and the New Age have come, all his efforts won’t count for anything at all.”

Van Ryman led the Servant over to the terminal on the wall, commanding him to follow. Danal moved woodenly. He had no choice. Sweat broke out on his forehead; he resisted with every grain of his free mind, but his body paid no attention, listening only to the Commands. Now, at least, he could move. He had a chance, so long as Stromgaard allowed him to keep his voice.

“And your reason for bringing back my memories?” Danal prodded.

“It’s obvious, Vincent—” he snapped. “If you paid any attention to the Writings. ‘Sacrifice both the living and the dead,’ says the Word, ‘And I shall return to regain what is mine.’”

“We sacrificed living victims and even some Servants, to no effect. But I figured it all out—it all fits. ‘Both the living and the dead’—that’s you, a Servant who was once dead and then reawakened to his old life. And you’re Danal, just like the Writings say. We have to sacrifice the same victim, first as a living person, then a second time as a resurrected Servant, a Servant with all his memories, with his own soul back. That’s very important.”

“I wrote that passage!” Danal exclaimed. “It doesn’t mean anything. You know that—we did it right in front of your eyes!”

Van Ryman looked intently at Danal, then spoke in a low awed voice, “And how do you know your hand wasn’t guided? By some greater power?”

Danal could hardly believe what he had heard. “Don’t be absurd.”

“If you have Faith, no answer is necessary. If you have none, no answer is possible.”

Despite himself, Danal made a scornful noise. “That’s exactly the type of invincible ignorance we lashed out at in the first place.”

“But it does make sense. You wrote the truth without even knowing it. Think about it—Satan’s been dormant, sleeping because His followers were too few for too many centuries. But now neo-Satanism has grown strong—and because of Resurrection, Inc., the dead are walking again, just like in a dozen prophecies.

“Now you, Vincent, were sacrificed to Him, and then we brought you back to life. We snatched your soul from Satan, ripping it like candy from His claws. How can He ignore that? He is awakening—I can feel it. He’ll follow you here to reclaim what was given to Him.”

Van Ryman removed a handful of glistening electrodes from the innards of the Net terminal, and turned to look at Danal with bright and distant eyes. “Hold still, now.” Stromgaard positioned the electrodes in a clump at the back of Danal’s head. The Servant tried to clench his fists, but his body refused him even that.

“I had plenty of time to think, to meditate, and I received a Great Revelation. It was wonderful, Vincent—it would make you breathless! You see, for centuries, Satan hasn’t been able to possess anyone because cynical mankind has learned to resist. You know, by materialistic thinking, by skepticism, by forgetting how to fear the unknown. But mankind has created his own downfall, building with his own hands a mind that’ll be Satan’s greatest possession of all! One single mind to dominate the Earth and control everything. The Net!”

Before, Danal had always been too jaded to see the fervor in the eyes of someone who actually believed in the cult. But now Stromgaard’s face showed a beatific, glazed look of anticipation that defied all rational thought. Danal found that frightening.

“The Net has no resistance, no inhibitions, no moral or religious qualms that can dim Satan’s fires!” Stromgaard continued. “Once Satan has possessed The Net, He can control the entire world in a second. All machines, and all men, will have to bow to Him.” He closed his eyes and took a deep, exalted breath.

“Meticulous reasoning, Vincent, carefully thought out. You should appreciate that. We sacrificed you in the traditional manner the first time. Then we stole your soul back from Satan, and now I’m going to offer Him a different type of sacrifice.” The imposter attached the last of the electrodes to Danal’s smooth scalp and straightened the wires leading to the terminal. “I’ll deactivate the microprocessor that keeps you alive, and send the pulse into The Net. If Satan wants your soul back, He’s going to have to follow… and discover the incredible world awaiting Him!”

Danal smirked, playing him along. “And I suppose you’re doing it here, alone, to get all the glory for yourself? If it works, you’ll be the most powerful man in the world, because you alone helped Satan to return?” He needed to manipulate the conversation around to where he could strike back.

“Why shouldn’t I? Nathans stole Resurrection, Inc. from me. You stole neo-Satanism from me, even when we were just developing it. Neo-Satanism was supposed to have been mine, Vincent. For me! Now I’m getting something for myself at last. I’m the only one who truly believes in what the three of us created. You and Nathans think neo-Satanism is just a game, a bunch of parlor tricks. But I know better. When Satan returns, He’ll know me and what I’ve done, and He’ll be grateful.”

Danal laughed in delight. “I don’t think so!” It was almost over. Van Ryman had not Commanded him to silence. He heard the invisible sound of the trap as it sprung.

“What do you mean?” Stromgaard’s eyes narrowed.

He shrugged, almost coy. “Don’t forget, when I regained my memory, I remembered all my Net access codes, too. And now I’ve got the last laugh!”

“What have you done!”

Danal allowed his lips to curl up in a smile, and remained silent for as long as he dared, letting his father’s insecurity and uneasiness build. “I’m a Servant—I don’t have any future in my old life. So I deleted my entire identity from The Net this afternoon. Vincent Van Ryman no longer exists. If Satan does possess The Net, he’s not going to have a single burned-out chip that remembers you!” He laughed again, a full, self-satisfied sound, then turned bitter. “You did the same thing to Julia.”

“No!”

Danal put a smug expression on his face. “Check it for yourself if you don’t believe me. I’m in no hurry.”

Van Ryman’s face writhed in his utter fury and disbelief. He lunged at the white squares on the Net keypad, snarling at the screen. Danal yanked the electrodes from his head, and let them drop to the floor. “Stay where you are!” Stromgaard snapped.

Danal slipped into his stepped-up perception of time, watched Van Ryman’s fingers go through the logon procedure, then hit the thirteen-digit password. The imposter stared at the pixels on the screen until they authorized his link with The Net… activating the trap.

On acceptance of the logon, the incredible power of the entire Intruder Defense Systems poured explosively into the single terminal—following one line of the circuitry rerouted by the repair-rats. The plastic coverplate shattered. A power surge leaped back through the keypad into the imposter’s body. Silver arcs of electricity skittered over Van Ryman’s fingers and hands like the talons of a demon, blasting him. His dark hair lifted with the static discharge, like the puff of a dead dandelion.

Danal dropped back to normal time. Stromgaard Van Ryman toppled backward with the smell of smoking flesh. Wisps of steam rose up from his black robes.

Danal didn’t allow himself a moment’s sadness for his father—Stromgaard had chosen his path long ago. “I would never delete my own identity,” Danal spoke softly to the dead man on the floor. “Not when I expected to win.”

He sat down on one of the stone benches as events caught up with him. Danal felt numb, and his mind whirled. He had just killed Stromgaard, and that would be only the beginning. The momentum behind the wheels he had set in motion would come crashing through them all before the night was over.

When he had buried all the memories in a safe mental place, the Servant went back up the dank stairs into the house, his house, and shut down all of the Intruder Defense Systems. He hoped it would be for the last time.

Then he sent out the signal of his victory that would bring all the Wakers to him.

38

Jones’s dark armor melted into the shadows of the wet street. He and his Elite Guard companion waited. Off in the distance he could hear faint bustling noises as the Metroplex wound down into a coma for the night, but here, in a senior citizen’s area, all was quiet already. As Jones had requested, the two nearby streetlights flickered and went dead, leaving the area in deeper blackness. At the far end of each street, white-clad Enforcers turned back the occasional pedestrians.

With the streetlights out of the way, Jones moved forward and crouched on one knee, afraid to come too close to the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch. The other Elite guard stayed back, pretending to be aloof and annoyed, but noticeably tense. Jones edged closer still.

He expected to hear the “deadly field” humming, but he noted only the muffled silence of the damp evening. It would be curfew in another couple of hours, but already this felt like the dead of night.

Jones could clearly make out the bright green grass blades, luscious and alive, all of them perfect, shimmering. Was it just an illusion? A hologram? Everything he had been told, layer upon layer of rumor said that these patches were deadly disintegrators to peel a man down to the bone in a flash of infinite pain.

Jones had seen one, only one contradictory statement on The Net, and he had never been able to find it again. Nathans was sure someone else was tampering with the computer network, covering up the real explanation of the grass patches. But couldn’t it be just as likely that someone—someone who could indeed tamper with The Net—had planted a fake explanation for Jones to see, to lure him into—

“Give me something to throw,” he said over his shoulder, slamming the door on his fear.

The other Elite Guard looked around and cursed under his breath. “I can’t see a damn thing with this helmet.” Oddly, he took off his gloves instead, and Jones could see that the other Guard was black as well. The Guard crunched his heel on the street until one of the decorative cobblestones loosened. He pried it out with the blade of his heater-knife and tossed the cobblestone to Jones.

“Quiet, now,” Jones whispered.

“It’s your show. Does it make you feel important or something?”

Jones hesitated at the comment—why would the other Guard mock him?—but decided to ignore it.

The other Guard had not seemed impressed either by the mystery or by Jones’s enthusiasm about the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches. “What’s your name?”

“I’m not going to tell you, that’s for sure. I’m not in a trusting mood tonight.”

“I’m Jones,” he said, puzzled and dismayed at the other Guard’s attitude. Jones did not ask about it, though; as long as the man helped out when he was needed, the Guard’s problems were his own. Since, he was an Elite Guard, it couldn’t be all bad for him.

Underhanded, Jones tossed the cobblestone into the deceptive patch of grass. He expected to see a flash of light, to hear some sound, but the stone simply fell through the grass, swallowed up without a trace. A second later, he thought he heard a muffled thunk as it struck something below.

Jones stood up and withdrew his heater-knife, suddenly wishing he had something longer, a stick or a pole. He looked around, but saw nothing else. Resigned, he leaned over the low barbed fence, stretched his arm out as far as it would go, and touched the tip of the knife to the shimmering grass.

The dark helmet hid his unconscious cringe. With his fingertips he held onto the pommel, ready to let go at any second. The blade vanished into the grass up to its hilt. Looking closely, Jones could almost see a shadow of it through the grass blades. He pulled the knife back out, completely intact.

Final test. He looked back at the other Elite Guard, who had taken one reluctant step closer to watch.

Jones reached his hand out in front of him—the left hand, just in case—and touched the grass. He felt a strange disorientation as he watched his fingertips disappear, but he felt nothing, no pain, not even any change. Hesitant, he withdrew his hand, flexed his fingers, and then recklessly pushed it back through the grass patch up to the wrist.

He stood then, holding his hand up like a trophy and showing the other Elite Guard. “Let’s go. I was right.”

“Hooray for you.”

They anchored their ropes to the street above, and threw down the ends, watching as the strands vanished into the imaginary grass—but now it only looked odd, not frightening. They uprooted the barbed fence from the stones and tossed it aside. Jones grasped the rope and eased himself backward until the green illusion and the darkness below engulfed him completely. As he hung, hooked onto the ropes with special clips on his armor, he looked back up and had the eerie sense of staring through the other side of a mirror.

“I’m all right,” Jones called, “but I can’t see anything.”

He flicked on the vision enhancers embedded in his visor as he continued to descend. The rope twitched a little from above, and Jones saw that the other Elite Guard had begun his descent. As Jones looked around, the night sensors turned the dimness a greenish color.

A few feet below them, a net had been strung out, anchored to the widely separated pilings. A net… to catch anyone who might go through the “maintenance openings,” accidentally or on purpose? The strands were new, not more than a couple years old.

Jones scrambled the rest of the way down to the end of his rope and stepped off onto a crossbeam. Beyond, deeper under the Metroplex, he could see strings of mysterious lights, but he waited for the other Guard before going to investigate.

Together they made painfully slow progress on the narrow walkways; Jones heard his companion swearing to himself. Only occasionally did they encounter a catwalk wide enough for them to move at a steady speed.

“How do they walk on these things?” Jones commented after he had tottered, off balance. “Or maybe these are just for the repair-rats?”

The other Elite Guard grunted and made no further comment.

When they reached the lights, both of them stopped in puzzled amazement. A network of sunlamps dangled down, tapping into the main electrical conduits of the city above. Platforms were scattered about in a complex hierarchy. Boxes and crates of supplies hung suspended from the overhead girders. Small amenities such as books, jewelry items, and treasured knickknacks implied that the place had been inhabited for some time.

But they saw no one. All around them stood the forest of pilings, crossbeams, girders; he heard the sounds of creaking ropes and the lapping of the ocean below. But everything was completely deserted.

“How many do you think live down here?” Jones whispered.

Looking around, his companion paused a moment as if assessing. “Fifty. Maybe a hundred.”

They searched but found only more silent clues—nothing conclusive. Jones checked his chronometer and signaled that it was time to go back.

As they emerged again onto the street, Jones turned and watched the other Guard crawl up through the hologram. Jones fought to contain his pride and enthusiasm. Some of the excitement crept into his voice. “Wait till we report to Nathans! He’ll be very interested in all this.”

The other Guard finally broke his silence and stiffened in frustration, “Don’t feel too smug that you’ve got Nathans’s ear, smartass. You think you’ve been selected for the Elite Guard? Big deal!

“You’re not here because of any special talent, not because you’re the best. You’re here—like we all are—because Nathans holds us over a barrel. He can do anything he wants. But he doesn’t like killing unless it’s absolutely necessary—that’s his big flaw. If someone’s in his way, he doesn’t just get it over with. He finds a new way to use you instead.”

Jones felt as if he were falling off a cliff into ice water. His tongue dried all the way to its root, and he could not answer. No! What did the other Guard know? He was too cynical, too pessimistic—Nathans probably didn’t trust the other man as much, and he felt slighted. That must be it. He had to get back at Jones—it was all so petty. But another part of him admitted that the information was no surprise, no matter how meaningful Jones wanted his work in the Elite Guard to be.

His companion continued, “You’re not important to him. You’ve been duped.”

Jones stood like a statue. He kept denying it to himself, but the knots in his stomach grew larger and larger; the thin ice of security began to crack under his armored feet.

The other Guard reached forward as if to touch Jones’s shoulder, but he stopped himself and let his hand fall back to his side. “Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s go and make our report, like good little soldiers.”

Sluggishly Jones followed, devoid of all self-confidence again.

39

“Where is he?” Nathans demanded of the empty room.

He blanked the Net screen and paced in a furious circle as Jones entered the High Priest’s private chamber. Nathans turned to the Elite Guard and spoke in a distraught voice. “Less than an hour before the greatest Sabbat in history, and our High Priest isn’t here! I haven’t spoken to him all day, and now he won’t acknowledge my direct messages!” He pounded three times on the keypad as if knocking on a door, then turned away in disgust.

Out in the adjacent main grotto, the neo-Satanists had begun to crowd in expectantly. Most of them wore robes that had been freshly cleaned and pressed. A week before, Nathans had transmitted a message describing the vital importance of the Walpurgis Night Sabbat, signing himself as “High Priest Van Ryman.” But he had warned that only “those with no doubts, those with the most unshakable faith” should come—on peril of their own souls.

The response had been overwhelming.

Nathans made a distasteful noise of dismay and then sat down again, putting his elbows on his knees. He looked up at the Elite Guard, and Jones could see that the man’s eyes were etched with red threads.

“At least you’re here,” he said, frustrated. He got up, paced again, burning off nervous energy. “Well, what did you find? And take that damned helmet off!”

Jones answered, but his doubts about Nathans’s ethics, his true reasons for choosing the Elite Guard, diminished his enthusiasm. He didn’t want to look Nathans in the eye, afraid he might be tempted to demand answers to the accusations. Were they true? No matter how much Jones tried to convince himself, it all fit too tightly together. And if he did voice his doubts, Jones feared that Nathans would laugh at him.

“Yes, the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches are just holograms.” In a flat voice he described the shadowy place beneath the city.

“But you didn’t find anyone there?”

“No. No one.”

“The plot thickens…” Nathans mumbled to himself, then he waved it away. He hurried back to stare at the Net screen, then paced again. “I can’t worry about that just now. Where the hell is our High Priest?”

“One other thing,” Jones dutifully added. “When I reported in, I found a message posted for you. News that someone named Zia apparently escaped from the security wing of the main hospital complex this morning. They expect to find her soon.”

Nathans frowned. “Zia? Why in the world would she want to escape?” Baffled, he pushed aside the information with annoyance—it would wait until after the Sabbat.

Jones found himself gathering courage, about to speak up and ask Nathans if the other Guard had meant anything by his deprecating comments about their elite force, when a signal came from the outer corridor. Even before Jones or Nathans could move to answer it, the person on the other side of the door entered the proper password.

“Who the hell?” Nathans whirled, then smiled in relief. “Ah, it must be him.”

Instead the grotesque Zia entered as the door slid open.

Jones looked at her and unconsciously took a step backward. He quickly fumbled to put his opaque helmet back on, self-conscious about his reaction.

Before Nathans could utter a startled comment, Zia turned and barked an order out to the corridor. “Danal! Command: Follow!” Her voice held a sneering tone of condescension.

Head down, the lost renegade Servant sluggishly entered the chambers. He didn’t look around him, didn’t offer any resistance.

“I brought you a present, Francois Nathans,” Zia said.

In an instant Jones also recognized the Servant—Danal the one who had rebelled, caused the riot, jumped into the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch—

“Vincent!” Nathans clapped his hands in delight, then turned offhandedly to the Elite Guard. “Jones, leave us. I want to hear what he has to say.”

At being dismissed so casually, startled anger and distaste washed over Jones again. I want to hear what he has to say, too! he thought. You can’t just send me away—you’re supposed to trust me, remember? (You’ve been duped… you’re not important to him.) Jones hesitated a moment, but Nathans did not retract his order, wholly absorbed in the prodigal Servant. The Elite Guard stiffened and clenched his teeth.

“Give me your scatter-stun weapon, too, Jones. That one.” Nathans took the weapon himself out of the Guard’s armor, and pointed it directly at Danal. He did not let his attention waver, nor did he glance again at Jones.

The Elite Guard’s nostrils flared in disappointed resentment, but the helmet hid it all. With some difficulty he kept control of himself. Without a word Jones strode out of the chamber, making Nathans scramble-seal the door himself.

Danal stood motionless, making sure that he appeared completely cowed by Zia. She played her part with a gloating zeal, but he knew it was only her eagerness to strike back at Nathans. She no longer seemed interested in preventing the massacre merely to save the other converts.

Nathans grinned in amazement as he stood up. “Well, I don’t understand all the details of this situation.” He came toward the Servant, pointing the scatter-stun directly at Danal’s head. His voice held unexpected warmth, as if he wanted to embrace Danal. “But I must say I’m very pleased to see you back, Vincent.”

“He ransacked The Net,” Zia explained, “and somehow got the idea that I was his Julia. He came to the hospital complex and ‘rescued’ me—but I brought him back to you.”

“Zia, you’ve done remarkably well.” Nathans flashed a glance at her from the corner of his eye, but did not take his attention away from the Servant. “I hereby promote you to Coven Manager—that should please you. We’ll see to the details later. Why don’t you go attend the Sabbat? I’ve got some extra robes stored in the wardrobe inset there. Take one, and please be sure the hood covers your face. Sorry about that, but it’s necessary.”

Anger flared in the woman’s lump-shrouded eyes and she seemed ready to refuse, but Danal made a small frantic gesture he hoped Nathans could not see, waving her away. Zia controlled herself and appeared appropriately submissive.

“Thank you, Master Nathans.” Listlessly, she rummaged in the wardrobe until she found a maroon robe trimmed in black. “I’d really like to attend a Sabbat again. Especially this one.” Without looking back, she draped the robe over her arm as she left. Watching her from behind Danal felt an eerie shiver—she seemed so much like Julia, her walk, her actions….

Danal kept a blank face, but he seethed inside. He had waited long for this moment of confrontation. He had planned carefully, but how could he have forgotten so many things? How could he have been so naive, especially where Nathans was concerned? He had not considered that Nathans could hold him so completely at bay with a weapon, nor had he imagined the man would so quickly dismiss Zia. If only he had thought ahead!

He had not at all expected to see an Elite Guard in the private neo-Satanist chambers. Why would a member of the Guild be here? A neo-Satanist convert? No, Nathans hated the Guild—he would never have allowed an Enforcer, especially not an Elite Guard, so close into his circle.

Unless there were schemes even deeper than Danal had ever suspected….

Nathans nodded toward the weapon. “I’m sorry for this, Vincent, but I was watching when you killed my surrogate, you know. I’m amazed at how fast you moved. You’ll have to explain that to me sometime, but right now I don’t want to take any chances.” Then his voice turned inward, with a deeper sadness that Danal believed was sincere.

“Ah, Vincent, I tried so hard to teach you—I gave you every chance to really understand what has to be done. You were supposed to be my successor. But you didn’t learn. You haven’t learned anything. Those two imposter Servants got through all your defenses with no trouble at all. That was a simple trick, Vincent—you should have caught it.” He shook his head and then snapped his gaze back up to look at the Servant. “You didn’t learn.”

Danal allowed a beatific, all-knowing smile to fall on his face. This would be smooth, simple. He laughed, taunting Nathans with an invincible calmness. “I learned plenty of other things, Francois—things you don’t understand. I’ve looked Death in the face—I know what happens beyond life, all the answers—because when my memories came back, I remembered that, too. All the way through.”

Nathans remained motionless, but the Servant could see him mentally squirming. Before the man could respond, Danal pulled out a second surprise.

“I’ve already removed the imposter, got my revenge on the person who stole my identity. He’s dead now, and he won’t be helping you out tonight. The Van Ryman mansion is mine again.”

Nathans paled, and his mouth dropped open. Then he squeezed his eyes together to force a calm back upon himself. Danal could have taken him then, but made no move. He wanted to see the man defeat himself instead.

Nathans drew a deep breath and stared at the Servant again. Behind his eyes burned a cruelty that caused him to lash back out, as if he were revealing a great and painful secret. “The imposter was your own father. Stromgaard Van Ryman. You killed him—for real this time.”

Danal remained unaffected, not letting Nathans get any satisfaction. He shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, I killed my father years ago. Anything else is just a bad dream.”

Then the Servant struck his third blow; with each successive one, Nathans’s confidence crumbled further and further. “There’s so much you don’t know, Francois, it’s almost sad. While I’ve been in hiding, I discovered the truth about the Cremators, too.”

Nathans’s eyes lit with rage.

“I learned who they are, and why they do what they have to.”

Furious, Nathans sprang to his feet, but the Servant jerked up his hand so violently that it almost startled the man into firing the scatter-stun. “Stop! If you Command me to say what I know about the Cremators, I’ll terminate myself immediately. I’ve already died—it doesn’t mean anything to me.” He narrowed his eyes. “Just wanted you to realize that I know about the Cremators, and you don’t, and you’ll never find out.”

“Traitor!” Nathans whispered under his breath. “Several times over.”

Shattered and impotent, Nathans fell back into his chair and stared at Danal. The Servant stared back. They waited, engulfed in absolute silence for a full minute. The man seemed to be warring with himself, fighting back distasteful decisions.

Nathans heaved a heavy sigh and closed his eyes. He seemed very tired, but maintained his control through a supreme effort. “You served your purpose, Vincent. You’ve answered my question: it is possible to bring back memories and personality intact.”

He cracked his knuckles. “But now you’ve killed our High Priest, Vincent. The Sabbat must go on, you know, especially this one. You’re putting me in the awkward position of having to expose myself as the head of the neo-Satanists.” He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop, keeping his other hand leveled rigidly, pointing the scatter-stun.

“But after tonight, I suppose it won’t matter anyway.” He smiled with a cold smugness. “Enough is enough, Vincent. I thought very highly of you once… but what you did to me… well, even I can’t forgive some things.” He stood up, backing toward the inset wardrobe. With one hand he rummaged among the garments blindly until he drew out a plain white robe, tossing it toward Danal.

“For tonight’s Sabbat, you’re going to replace our scheduled sacrifice.”

40

“Danal, Command: Follow!” Nathans snapped.

The towering ceremonial doors to the Sabbat grotto swung open slowly. The electric candlelight inside the chamber caught and reflected from the intricate carvings on the clonewood. Danal looked into the shifting masses of robed neo-Satanists, all eager to see blood—real blood or synBlood, it made no difference.

High-pitched organ music skirled through the air, without a melody. Somewhere a gong sounded. The crowd made droning sounds, but a hush rippled through them as their new High Priest appeared.

Without looking back at the Servant, Nathans moved gracefully forward, striding and swaying so that his magnificent black robe billowed behind him. The red trim flickered like blood in the shifting artificial torchlight. The man’s bald head was adorned with temporary tattoos of astrological symbols.

A wide aisle between the sections of stone benches led straight up to the altar on its raised platform. Some of the cultists pushed forward, struggling to get a seat on the stone benches near the front, where they could see better.

Danal’s legs jerked him into motion. He strode after Nathans, obedient but defiant, head high with impenetrable confidence. Let Nathans worry about that. Though the white sacrificial robe covered his jumpsuit, Danal’s skin tone identified him as a Servant… but his actions and attitudes marked him as human.

The blocky druidic altar stone huddled in the center of a large pentacle drawn with glistening red paint. Black candles, each as thick as his forearm, had been set at the points of the star, and a circle drawn nine feet in diameter surrounded the entire design. Old bloodstains discolored the altar stone; manacles attached to its head and foot waited to hold an unwilling victim in place.

As Danal stonily walked past the hooded forms, he saw no faces, only the mixture of colors on their robes—Acolytes, Acolyte Supervisors, and Coven Managers. Around him he could smell the gathered musk of tense human beings. Some clutched their printed program leaflets; more leaflets lay scattered on the floor.

The grotto around him looked only superficially different from when he had been the High Priest a lifetime before. The chamber had been expanded to accommodate more cultists, and fountains of sculptured poured stone had been installed all around the perimeter, painted and molded to look like springs from a living cave wall. White, foamy water gushed up with a sighing sound that echoed in the chamber.

Danal could not say anything or make any call for help. Nathans had been very careful, very explicit. “Command: You will be silent during the ceremony, unless I specifically ask you to speak.” Danal felt his vocal cords go dead—it would do him no good to cry out now anyway. He had to have faith in his plan—not irrational Faith like that of the neo-Satanists, but a confidence in his own abilities, a trust in Gregor and Rikki and all the Wakers.

He didn’t move his head, but memories passed in front of him. All the times when he had been here, roles reversed, leading the willing sacrificial victim… all the times he had stood over the altar in the black and red robe, looking down at a trusting face as the crowd waited—

Danal pushed those thoughts away, holding onto the good times, even remembering Francois Nathans and the stimulating discussions they’d had when it had been no more than food for thought. But when Nathans made the ideas real—then it had all changed. Vincent Van Ryman had been too much of a coward to help put those ideas into effect—that was how Nathans must see it.

Danal felt a chill as a new idea came to him, haunted him. For a long time Nathans had treated neo-Satanism as a game, too, disappointed and amused at its surprising success. He had done no greater damage than sanctioning the occasional voluntary sacrifices until Vincent Van Ryman had betrayed him. Vincent: his student, his hope, his apprentice.

And in his anger at that, Nathans had struck back. Danal remembered his dumbfounded disbelief—even while it was happening—that his mentor could do such a thing to him. Nathans had arranged for the murder of Julia, his first real victim; he had killed Vincent and brought him back, while letting Stromgaard masquerade as High Priest. And finally he’d lost patience enough to arrange for the slaughter of all the neo-Satanists. Danal felt certain Francois Nathans would never have done that before Vincent had betrayed him.

But Danal would not accept that blame. He had paid too high a price already.

His obedient legs carried him up to the stage one step at a time. He felt like an animal being led to slaughter. The altar stone spread out before him, cold and waiting. The gathered worshipers crowded closer on the stone benches below… and Danal knew he wouldn’t be the only victim.

Nathans turned to face the crowd, putting on an exalted expression as he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Danal, Command: Lie down!”

Unable to resist, and not wasting energy with the effort, the Servant turned around and slowly lay back, feeling the cool, rough texture of stone against the fabric on his back. The white robe fell open, showing his gray jumpsuit. He stared up and saw the papier mache stalactites hanging down like knives from the ceiling of the grotto. For one disoriented moment he thought he saw the black tunnel of Death opening up for him again. He felt a strange new fear—would Death be the same the second time through? Or did he get only a single chance?

Danal thought about slowing everything down by viewing it through his microprocessor, making his last moments seem like years in subjective time, savoring life. But he decided against it. Not microprocessor speed now. No. This was real, and he would finish out his life in real time.

Nathans gestured, and two Acolyte Supervisors appeared from alcoves beside the altar platform. They took Danal’s bloodless Servant hands and lifted them over his head to meet the manacles; the other assistant then chained his feet.

That wasn’t necessary, Danal thought. He could bind me as effectively with a Command phrase. Nathans still didn’t trust him. The Servant felt a warmth creeping inside. Nathans was afraid.

Before the appearance of the High Priest, one of the ranking Coven Managers had led the neo-Satanists in the elaborate rituals listed in their Sabbat program leaflets, ceremonies that Vincent and Nathans had long ago designed using choreographers and cultural specialists. The crowd was sated with ritual now, brought up to a different fever pitch, waiting for something more.

Nathans raised his hands, and the background noise dropped off as with the chop of a guillotine blade. The organ music ceased.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Walpurgis Night Sabbat!” he called to the crowd. “I am your new High Priest, and I come to you with a promise. I have such confidence in your faith, in the truth behind what we’re doing, that if you believe—we, you and I, can bring Satan back among us with this one last sacrifice!” Coldly he swept his hand behind him to indicate Danal on the altar.

The crowd cheered and whistled.

“It will be tonight—I guarantee it!”

Danal tried to sit up, but one of the assistants firmly pushed his head back down. He could have resisted with his strength, but decided to play passive for the moment.

“You have followed all the rituals, read all the Writings, attended all the Sabbats. I’m proud of you. But tonight, this magic night, is Walpurgis Night, the greatest Sabbat of the year. All the stars and planets are in their ideal positions. Tonight, neo-Satanism will come to its climax, and you’ll all be part of a new age. For the return of our Master!”

More cheering. Nathans strutted back and forth across the stage. He seemed tense, hyperventilating, but Danal could see a well-hidden smugness in the man’s bearing. Nathans refused to turn to meet Danal’s eyes; the Servant couldn’t tell if the man avoided looking at him out of guilt and anger, or if he had simply become too caught up in his role.

Then Danal realized something else, something that might have been useful had he not been under a Command of silence—he didn’t think Nathans had ever killed before, not directly, not with his bare hands. Danal wondered if the man would have the nerve to murder his former student, his apprentice.

“The time is now!” Nathans cried, and his voice cracked in its enthusiasm. “Are you ready?”

The resounding shout from the audience chilled Danal. “Rah hyuun! Rah hyuun!”

Nathans whirled and stepped behind the altar. He was moving too fast; the Servant could tell he wanted to get this over with. The thought surprised him—he had expected Nathans to gloat, to savor the moment of his ultimate victory.

From a slot in the side of the altar stone, Nathans snatched out the wide-bladed arthame, the jeweled sacrificial dagger. He held it up with both hands over his head.

The crowd shouted again. “Rah hyuun! Rah hyuun!”

Danal knew the pain would come, a bright flash of Death, but still he stared up at Nathans to the last. By the look in the man’s eyes, he could see that Nathans didn’t dare hesitate or else his doubts might win through. Nathans’s expression softened for the briefest instant, but he hardened it again, fighting against his feelings. Danal could see infinitely clear droplets of sweat on the man’s scalp, glistening like beads among the painted symbols on his head.

The audience fell completely silent, sitting motionless on their stone benches in hushed anticipation. Nathans cocked the blade and tightened his grip on the hilt until his knuckles whitened. “Ashes to ashes, blood to blood; fly to Hell for all our good!”

Then Julia stood up in the audience, shrugging down her hood and exposing herself as a blank-faced, bald Servant.

Startled and distracted cries broke from the worshipers.

Nathans flicked his gaze up, and his face contorted in angry surprise. “Who has brought a Servant here to our most sacred ceremony!”

Scattered throughout the audience, the Wakers stood up. Only forty-three of them, but they were well dispersed among the hundreds so that the effect was increased. Gregor threw off his Acolyte Supervisor robe, crumpled it in his large hands, and threw it to the ground. He proudly displayed his gray jumpsuit, his pallid skin, his hairless visage.

“You don’t want to lay a hand on him, Mr. Francois Nathans,” Gregor shouted.

The other Wakers exposed themselves, standing up as gray-clad Servants. Nathans stood aghast, staring at the sudden appearance of the Servants—Servants! His mouth hung open just enough that Danal could see the depth of his shock. The ceremony had been interrupted—Danal convinced his Servant programming that Nathan’s Command no longer bound him to silence.

“So many things you don’t know, Francois,” Danal spoke quietly as he lay helpless on the altar, but with a scorn that cut deeply into Nathans’s confidence. “I’m not the only one. I was your great experiment, your guinea pig. But all these other Servants awoke to their memories, awoke to themselves, without any intervention from you. They all remember, Francois. Dozens and dozens of them. Think of how many more must be out there, hiding. Remembering life and death because your resurrection process is flawed.”

Nathans worked his mouth, but only a wordless whisper came out. Even without slipping into microprocessor speed, Danal sensed that all time had stopped. The crowd fell silent, confused, waiting for their High Priest to react. Danal lay back in chains, unmoving.

“One more thing, Francois,” he continued slowly, savoring the words. “They are the Cremators. Awakened Servants whose goal is to stop you from creating more like themselves!”

That was the last straw for Nathans. His eyes became wild, giving him a hunted look. Helpless and frantically desperate, the man whirled back toward the secret rooms behind the altar platform and shouted—

“Jones!”

The Elite Guard watched, helplessly horrified, at his station in the spy alcove. As the Sabbat continued toward its peak, he grew sick inside, enraged and disgusted—he had helped Nathans in this? How many other things would be clear if he looked at them under a harsher light? He squirmed, sweating and wide-eyed, as Nathans prepared to make the sacrifice of the hapless Servant. He could not see the expression on the man’s face, but Jones imagined any number of them.

Then when the Servant appeared in the audience—Julia! he knew it was Julia—Jones reacted as if someone had struck him a sharp blow. It was utterly incredible even to imagine that she could be here! His world began to swim around his senses again, as if the gears of the universe had just become unmeshed.

Julia!

What was she doing here?

Was this something Nathans had set up? To trap him even further?

“Jones!”

Stunned, he finally heard the frantic tone in the man’s cry. Interminable hours of Enforcer and Elite Guard training overrode his thoughts for a moment, and Jones lurched into motion. He burst out of the alcove onto the stage, fully armored and bristling with weapons.

The crowd gasped again at the sudden appearance of the Elite Guard. Their fear of the Enforcers Guild had nothing to do with their belief in neo-Satanism. And their confusion sank deeper.

“Kill the Servants!” Nathans cried automatically. His voice seemed to be losing its grip on the tone of authority, and it came out with undertones of a manic whimper. The High Priest looked down, as if oddly terrified of the Servant chained on the altar.

Automatically Jones snapped out one of his projectile weapons.

—waiting for the holographic images to come at him, simulated attackers—

Servants. He had done this all before. He turned, crouched, looked at the massed cultists, the scattered Wakers. But these Servants were alert, alive, aware of what Nathans was doing. And this was not the simulation chamber.

“Kill them!” Nathans stretched out his hand, pointing with the arthame, pointing at Julia.

—“You’re not here because of any special talent, because you’re the best… You’re not important to him. You’ve been duped. “—

“Jones!”

—“And who do you think runs the Guild, Mr. Jones?”—

Out in the crowd, Julia stood unlike the other Wakers. She did not seem to recognize him; she didn’t seem aware of anything.

As Jones hesitated, Nathans let out a strange cry and snatched the scatter-stun from the folds of his own robe, brandishing it. “Damn you! Do I have to do this myself?”

—“He finds a new way to use you instead.”—

Jones turned calmly,

—You’ve been duped—

and pointed the projectile weapon directly at Nathans.

He took no time to acknowledge the man’s suddenly startled expression before he fired one round into the High Priest’s chest.

Nathans fell forward, still gripping the scatter-stun like a lifeline, and collapsed across the chained Servant on the altar, sliding slowly to the stage floor. His blood spilled into the center of the pentacle….

Danal watched Nathans die with an overwhelming hollowness inside, as if his own synBlood were pouring out onto the stage instead. All the plans, all the anger—all the pride, all the fascinating discussions—the betrayal, the revenge—how could he possibly feel ambivalent after that?

The two horrified Acolyte Supervisors fought through their paralysis and tried to rush toward Nathans’s fallen body, but the armored Elite Guard snapped up his projectile weapon, pointing it at them. The two assistants scattered and ran. Many of the cultists let out an enraged outcry, rising to their feet. The Elite Guard seemed terrified by the threat of a mob and fired two projectiles at the ceiling. Chunks of papier mache rained down, and the neo-Satanists quieted instantly, stunned and confused.

The Elite Guard pulled off his helmet, breathing deeply of the thick air. He blinked, looking shocked but defiant by what he had done. He dropped the hard black mask with a hollow clatter inside the pentacle next to Nathans’s blood.

The lights in the Sabbat grotto flickered and went dim. A low, almost subliminal tone rumbled through the enclosed chamber, nearly beyond the range of human hearing. But Danal could feel it grinding in his bones; it made an unwanted shudder crawl up his spine.

Jones moved over to the Servant and fumbled with the chains, trying to find some way to free his wrists. He found a hidden catch, and one of the manacles snapped open. Danal sat up and looked into the face of the Elite Guard, the real face, but the emotions he saw were buried several layers deep; Jones was not willing to let them surface just yet. The black man kept flicking his eyes out to the crowd, where Julia stood unmoving.

Gregor started to shout something, but his words were engulfed by a ripping crash of sound that echoed through the chains of microspeakers embedded in the grotto walls—speakers that only recently had been used to augment the chanting of the neo-Satanists.

At the same instant a flash of laser light dazzled across hidden mirrors on the stalactites in a lightning web. A dull orange glow seeped in around the edges of the chamber, strongest on the blank wall of textured rock to the left of the altar. A foul-smelling smoke curled up from cracks in the rock. Sulfur. Brimstone.

Collectively the neo-Satanists let out an awed gasp.

Immensely powerful words clawed at the air, like the sound of the universe tearing at its seams.

“YOU HAVE SUMMONED. AND I HAVE RETURNED.”

Bright orange light stabbed through cracks in the rock wall as the stone began to shift and crumble, exposing a black cavern that seemed to extend to the gullet of the earth. Danal’s eyes stung as sulfur fumes belched forth… and behind the smoke, in ghastly shadows, he saw something move, coming forward, taking shape.

The Servant’s skin crawled, and the audience let out mixed cries of absolute terror and utter delight. They had forgotten everything else now, the Servants, the death of the High Priest—this was the main event.

A hulking demon, mammoth in size, with curved horns and cloven hooves—true to every nightmare and legend of neo-Satanism—emerged from below. Probing, it set one titan hoof forward with a thump! on the stage, and then it strode forward into full view, lashing its arrow-tipped tail and shattering the rock wall. A violent purple glare burned behind the demon’s eyes as it surveyed the gathered worshipers. Deadly fangs filled its mouth as it snarled.

Amazingly, Jones seemed startled but unimpressed, and he muttered something that Danal couldn’t hear over the frenzied confusion of the crowd. But the Servant wasn’t listening anyway—his entire conception of reality rocked back and forth. Impossible! Nathans lay sacrificed within the pentacle. Had Stromgaard been right all along? Danal couldn’t accept that, but the demon stood in plain view, real and tangible, not a hologram.

“You have summoned me! You brought me back. And I am grateful!” The monster ignored the Servant on the altar as Danal freed his other arm and frantically tried to loosen his ankles, fighting his horror. The demon spread his arms and bellowed to the neo-Satanists.

“Your faith has resurrected me. And I will grant your greatest wish! All of you!” The creature drew in a roaring breath. “For all those who truly believe, return with me now—to the wonderful depths of Hell!”

The monster gestured to the fountains mounted along the walls. The bubbling foamy water spewed forth a brilliant scarlet, fluorescent, brighter even than arterial blood.

“This is my blood! Take. Drink. Drink deeply! And join me in Hell!”

“No, don’t!” Jones said. He must have shouted, but his voice sounded utterly insignificant in comparison to the other. “It’s poison!”

Nobody seemed to hear him. After an instant of stunned immobility, some of the awed people tentatively rose from their stone benches and glanced at the fountains.

“Drink!” the demon bellowed.

“This isn’t real!” Jones cried, looking at them, appalled. “That thing is just an android.”

A few people stopped and looked at him questioningly, but the awesome form of the monster reaffirmed their belief. Danal blinked, amazed but relieved to have a rational explanation, no matter how impossible, to clutch at. An android? Androids weren’t feasible, but they were more believable than walking demons.

“Like a Servant. A machine—a trick!”

Jones made a determined sound and pulled out his riot club, striding forward. He struck the demon on the thigh, on the hip, reached up to batter its shoulder. The club made solid, wet sounds as it impacted, but the android took no notice of him and continued to survey the crowd, speaking its programmed summons.

“Come join me! Why do you hesitate? Do you not believe the evidence of your own eyes?”

“But it’s just an android! A prototype, a trick!” Jones insisted.

The first of the worshipers—a chunky man with graying hair—reached the fountains. Breathless and enthusiastic, he plunged his head into the brilliant, glowing liquid, splashed, and turned to look at the others as he swallowed a mouthful… and died in retching convulsions a few moments later. His eyes almost burst from their sockets. Seeing but not seeing, more of them surged forward to drink.

“Hey, stop!” Jones shouted from the stage. Danal added his voice. Many of the neo-Satanists did hang back, frightened and uneasy, but the pressure from the others buffeted them forward.

“Drink! Join me!” Prototype thundered.

More cultists lay dead by the fountains, piling up, but others pushed ahead, some hesitant, some eager. Danal struggled with the last manacle, staring in cold horror at the cultists. Nathans had known exactly how they would react—he had selected them for their gullibility, and only the ones with the most unshakable faith would have come to the Walpurgis Night Sabbat. But how could they not see what they’d gotten into?

“It’s only an android! Prototype!” Jones cried again, softer this time, his voice with an edge of hysteria. “Look!”

He pulled out his heater-knife and stood in front of the demon. Reaching up, he sliced with the hot blade through the rubbery synthetic skin of Prototype’s chest. The Elite Guard slashed across, and down, peeling the corner to expose tendrils of optic fiber, glowing power sources, cables, pulleys, servomotors.

With some self-protective mechanism the android swatted Jones, sending him sprawling. He skidded across the stage, protected by his armor, but he struck his head on the floor and sat back, dazed. Prototype, his innards exposed by the sagging flap of synthetic skin on his chest, turned back to the worshipers. They looked at him, disregarded what they did not wish to see, and continued to press toward the scattered fountains.

In the crowd Gregor moved frantically, trying to pull the worshipers away from the fountains. “Stop them! Wakers!”

The other Servants wrestled with the neo-Satanists. Many stopped by themselves, angry and confused after Jones’s revelation, but the majority clung blindly to their faith and threw themselves at the scarlet poison. The Wakers struggled with them, but they were outnumbered dozens to one.

“I want to take all of your souls back to my realm! Join me! Drink my blood!”

Danal finally freed himself and swung down off the altar stone. He had no time to ponder, but many of the pieces fitted into place in the back of his mind. Prototype—yes, an android, a puppet for Nathans to use, but also an experiment to stretch the capabilities of Resurrection, Inc. And if Nathans had built Prototype, he would only have extended the technology already available to him—

“Prototype!” Danal shouted, “Command: Stop!”

In mid-sentence the android froze, arms upraised, fang-filled mouth open.

“Command: Be silent!” Danal stepped toward the towering monster. He looked up at the demon’s face. “Take it back. Tell them to stop.”

The Satan simulacrum lowered its gaze to look down at the Servant. Its curved horns glistened, but the bright purple glow of its eyes held no menace now.

“I cannot,” the android said. “My programming specifies the words I must speak to the audience. I cannot deviate.”

Danal wanted to scream in desperation at the demon, or break down in tears.

Then, unexpectedly, in the pentacle on the floor beside the altar stone, the body of Francois Nathans stirred and sat up.

The hands twitched, as if trying to orient themselves. The gaping hole in the man’s chest began to trickle red blood once more, splashing anew across his High Priest’s robe. Something had begun to pump in place of a heart.

Danal felt a sensation of eerie horror as Nathans fumbled with his hands, grasped the edge of the altar stone, and hauled himself to his feet. Then Danal noticed the fine-lined scars on the man’s bald scalp—scars that were better healed but otherwise similar to those that all Servants had.

From the implanting of a microprocessor.

Danal gasped as he tried to say something, but his mouth felt too thick. Had Nathans been so frightened of dying, so obsessed with returning to life, to have a standby microprocessor implanted in his head? Ready to switch on after actual brain death? It had been perhaps fifteen minutes, maybe longer—not long, but enough. Without the resurrection process, without that long interim step, perhaps he had believed that his memories, his self would come back with him. It made a cold, logical sense—as if a simple time factor was the only thing that mattered.

Death doesn’t work that way, Francois.

Dead Nathans sluggishly turned and saw Danal. His arm was rigid, still gripping the scatter-stun. He raised his arm. Danal couldn’t move. But Nathans seemed only to be following a reflex action, flexing a muscle, and stood motionless and cold. His eyes didn’t blink. His chest continued to bleed. The expression on his face was slack and cadaverous. Blank. Utterly empty.

Like Julia.

41

Aftermath. Holocaust. The words ran through Danal’s mind as he stood horror-struck, staring into the silent chamber.

The worshipers had been too many, too intent upon destroying themselves. Those who refused to drink the poison now stood distraught and frightened, but few of them had helped to stop their companions. The efforts of the Wakers alone did little against the tides of people.

Burly Rolf knocked down many of the cultists, sprawling them on the floor as fast as he could stride from one to another—arms swinging, shoulder tackling. Rikki was too small to do much more than distract and harry them, but still he kept a few away from the fountains. Laina became injured when she tried to wrestle with too many of the worshipers at one time; they turned on her, and only microprocessor speed saved her from being torn to pieces.

Stunned and concerned, Gregor knelt beside an old man convulsing in his last few moments. The leader of the Wakers looked deep into the old man’s face, and propped the man’s head on his knee. The victim’s lips, teeth, and mouth were a brilliant scarlet, stained by the dye. Blotches of burst blood vessels spotted his face and hands. The dying man sensed Gregor’s presence and opened his eyes; his limbs jerked spasmodically.

“Why?” Gregor asked, begging for some kind of explanation that would make sense. “You could see it was poison. You knew the demon was just an android. Why would you do this? To yourselves?”

It seemed a rhetorical question, but the dying man became lucid and gasped an answer, “Because I have Faith!”

It all stopped when Jones had finally roused himself and, conquering his own revulsion, snatched the scatter-stun from Nathans’s dead-but-alive hand. The Elite Guard went through the neo-Satanists, stunning them all, dropping them in their tracks….

Other than sobs from some of the Wakers and the nonsuicidal worshipers, the sacrificial grotto now fell silent. The fountains continued to pour forth the bubbling red poison, but Rikki and Rolf had gone to find a way to shut them down.

Danal stood, numb and cold like a ghost. Slowly, he walked down the steps to the main floor of the chamber. He left Prototype behind him, Commanded into silence and immobility on the stage… and the zombie Francois Nathans stood bleeding away his second life.

Though many of the neo-Satanists lay unconscious, crumpled across stone benches, nearly a full hundred had managed to poison themselves. Lost out among the fallen bodies, Jones remained motionless, encased in the midnight-blue armor but without his helmet. His mouth hung open with a thread of saliva connecting his lips; his eyes were wide open and staring.

By now Danal felt almost inured to seeing the bodies. Poisoned—Nathans would have thought of that. Now they were all perfect candidates for Servants. He felt a pang of sadness as he looked back at Julia, still clad in her Acolyte robe, blank and seemingly without a conscious will of her own.

Gregor saw his gaze and spoke by Danal’s ear, startling him. “She stood up by herself. I was beside her, and we couldn’t figure out what to do. I was going to shout or something. But when Julia saw you were going to be sacrificed… well, she stood up. By herself.” A tone of wonder drifted into his words.

In quiet amazement Danal went over to the female Servant, afraid to ask. “Julia. Do you remember anything else?”

She stood in silence, but did not deny what he asked. Danal didn’t feel his hope slip away so quickly this time. A faint mist like the shadow of a tear formed over her eyes. He thought he noticed the faintest tremor in her lips.

“You’d better come over here, Danal,” Laina said huskily, holding her injured wrist.

Reluctantly the nurse/tech took him near one of the fountains, stepping over motionless robed forms on the floor. With her foot she pushed aside several of the dead cultists, revealing a slim female form clothed in a new Coven Manager’s robe.

“Ah, no,” Danal said as he knelt down, but his throat was so dry he doubted if any words had come out. The Servant pushed aside the hood and tried to read an expression on the disfigured lumpy face, but he could not interpret her death mask. Some of the fluorescent red wine lay in a sticky trickle down her cheek. Strangely, Danal discovered he had new depths of grief within him

“Zia,” he mumbled, “you knew better. You knew so much better.”

“Well, what do we do now?” Laina asked. “Who do we tell? The Enforcers?”

Some of the other Wakers looked at Danal, then Gregor, then Danal again.

“Nathans ran the Enforcers Guild,” Jones muttered, almost to himself, and then he strode back out into the main chamber among the fallen bodies, as if running away from what he had just said. Danal stared after him, wide-eyed.

“I’m not sure if I trust that man completely,” Laina muttered.

“He did help. And at a crucial time,” Gregor countered.

“He’s still an Elite Guard. But I’ll keep an open mind.” She frowned uncomfortably. “Choice of trust isn’t exactly a luxury we can afford right now.”

The unconscious neo-Satanists would begin to stir soon. The other Wakers forcibly kept all the nonsuicidal worshipers from leaving the chamber, though many wanted to run into the night and hide from the horrors before them. Only the threat of being caught out after curfew held them back. A few volunteered to help separate the living and the dead from the motionless forms crumpled on the floor.

“Excuse me, folks,” Rikki interrupted in a very mature voice, “but we have to figure out what we’re going to do.”

Danal pondered a long moment, and suddenly nothing seemed at all simple. They had defeated Nathans, effectively stopped neo-Satanism; they should have been having a victory party, but things…

“We’ll tell our story, I guess. Put it on The Net for everyone to see, before it gets distorted. There’s certainly enough evidence, enough proof, enough witnesses.” His voice didn’t contain a great deal of enthusiasm, and none of the others responded until Rikki finally spoke.

“Blaming all this on Nathans alone isn’t going to work. You know that, don’t you? These people lying poisoned, the tricks, the sham—somebody’s going to find a scapegoat. And we all know what great scapegoats a bunch of spooky Servants would make.

“And in a few minutes we’re going to be in a room full of revived fanatics. They’ll be angry, or worse. They’ve already proven they’re missing a few circuits in the CPU.” He tapped his temple and made a face. “Any one of them can make us speak a confession or shut us up forever, with a single Command phrase. We don’t have any way to fight against it.”

The others fell uneasily silent. Gregor looked down at the stained pentacle on the floor.

“Unless—” Gregor stopped, at a loss for words. Danal watched him in desperate fascination, and waited.

“I had an idea a long time ago, but it didn’t seem worth trying. Now, maybe we have to.” He swallowed, then shrugged. “Well, what about a paradox, something that might burn out your Servant programming? Like a Command you can’t possibly obey.”

“Do it,” Danal said without a pause. He immediately knew what Gregor was suggesting. “To me. ”

“Now, wait a minute.” Gregor raised his large hand. “Think about this—it could burn out your programming, or it could just as well put your mind into an infinite loop. Make you worse than him.” He indicated the Nathans-zombie, still silent and motionless. “We can’t lose you, Danal. Your story is a key point in our survival.”

Some of the other Wakers murmured, but Danal silenced them all. “We don’t have time for philosophizing, Gregor. We’ve got to take our best shot. Before it’s too late for us.” Placatingly he added, “Look, I’m not trying to be a martyr—I’ve done that once and it wasn’t very pleasant. But keep in mind, all of you, that I’m not much of a hook to hang your hopes on if I’m bound by Servant programming.

“Look at it this way—the Wakers themselves are undeniable proof that Servants can get their memories back. If your paradox overloads me, you can still tell my story… you can even set me up as your scapegoat, if you like. Say I was burned out in my final battle with Nathans, and leave it at that. They’ll believe it. They’ll want to.”

Gregor looked at the others for some kind of support, but all of them remained silent, ready to accept Danal’s decision. Out in the main chamber, some of the unconscious neo-Satanists started to stir.

“Freedom of choice,” Danal said. “The Command phrase takes that away from me, but right now I choose to take the risk.” He sat down cross-legged on the floor, looking up at the big Waker.

Gregor’s expression turned sullen but resigned. “I pray it works. Now, listen carefully and get this right.” He drew a deep breath, then spoke sharply.

“Danal! Command: Obey no Commands!”

Obey no Commands. Simple enough.

But then he could not obey the Command that forbid him to obey Commands. Therefore he was forced to obey, which compelled him not to obey—

His conscious mind recognized the paradox and dismissed it as unsolvable. But the microprocessor and the Servant programming kept churning away relentlessly, forcing the problem around in circles in search of a logical conclusion… when it had none. Infinite loop.

Danal could not move a muscle, and his vision spiraled in toward black as the Servant programming drew upon more and more of his resources to solve the paradox. His nerves and senses were shut down as extraneous input, irrelevant to the problem.

Once more Danal floated in a blackless void, with nothing, not even the perceptions and violent afterimages of Death to join him. The time continuum passed by outside, but he was isolated from it, deprived of everything.

He felt buried alive, smothered by his sensory vacuum. In between. Between life and death and life again… for the second time. Out of the senseless silence came echoes of lost sounds, the growing hum, the unearthly chimes. The void closed up around him, took substance, and became the tunnel he had traveled once before. Danal knew consciously that this had to be a flashback again, another hallucinatory memory that became all too real in his state of mental siege.

But then a new fear appeared, whistling through his thoughts. What if the paradox had claimed too much of him, demanded all his resources down to the last speck of energy? What if his synHeart stopped pumping, the artificial blood stopped flowing, the microprocessor did burn out and… shut down?

He did not fear the prospect of death again, but he did feel an almost crushing despair to think of all the things left to him, all the doors he had just opened up for himself, for the Wakers, for the future of Resurrection, Inc.

Around him appeared those other spirits again, nameless, formless just behind his ability to perceive them—and yet he did know them, not their names, not their features, but them. Ahead, they pushed him gently along toward a great starburst of dazzling light, waxing pure and brilliant. The bright light welcomed him, pulsed, opened wider, sentient but like a pool of incandescent emotion. He began to remember, finally… this had happened before, and then—

And then the last great impenetrable wall rose up in front of him, blocking him off. The black barrier mocked him, unyielding, irresistible—reinforced by the paradox that burned through his brain, far away in his own body. But unlike when Gregor showed him how to view his death flashbacks by choice, Danal had no way to turn back now. No reality lay behind him, and he could go no farther forward.

He pounded on the barrier, shouting with all his spirit, begging, then angry, then in despair. He knew that on the other side of the impenetrable barrier lay either an escape back to reality or… beyond. He had to break through, or he would be trapped in this hellish limbo for all eternity, whether it lasted an instant or a century in objective time. He had to go back and live, or go forward to Death, but he could not move one way or another.

The guardian spirits had dropped back to the edges of the tunnel, almost out of his perception. They would not help him. All things were bound by their own rules, their own power.

Then Danal knew, and he spoke his phrase with an evenness that belied his eagerness, “Command: Let me pass.”

The wall began to fold and crumble and dissolve.

Danal blinked. Even turning his head slightly seemed an infinite effort; all his muscles had locked, petrified. He wondered blankly how long he had been away.

“Gregor!” Rikki cried. “He’s coming back!”

The images finally made sense in front of his eyes, and Danal saw he had not moved. He still sat cross-legged on the floor of the altar platform, staring down at the pentacle. But everything else had changed. The other Wakers had gone, and only Rikki remained by him.

Gregor came running up the aisle, running, with a look of boyish excitement that made Danal want to laugh. He saw Laina coming, too, and even Jones wore an expression of relief.

“How long?” he asked. His own voice sounded like a madman’s shout in his ears.

“More than an hour,” Rikki answered, looking delighted. “All the neo-Satanists are awake now. Jones had to stun a couple of them again, but most are just dazed. All the fight’s run out of them. See, it hasn’t hit them yet—they don’t seem to realize what they almost did to themselves. And the sad part is, most of them honestly think they’ve missed their big chance at salvation.”

“Danal!” Gregor exclaimed and clapped both hands around the other Servant’s shoulders. Danal felt several of his locked muscles pop free from their stiffness.

“Gregor…” he said breathlessly, “I broke through. The last barrier. I saw all my Death memories.”

This took the big Waker completely by surprise, but he reoriented himself. “And? What did you see?” Gregor clutched his own hands, and then a look of fear came across his face, as if he wasn’t ready for the answers just yet.

“It was like… you know how we can never really describe the first death flashbacks? Because we just don’t have any words? This was more than that, because I was surrounded by things that even my mind couldn’t…” He struggled to express himself, “I had no framework for the perceptions. I don’t remember any of it now, but I know I saw it.”

He paused for a moment as an even greater wonder grew on his face. “And I think—I think I saw Julia there. I’m not sure.” Danal clenched his fist in exasperation. “I can’t remember. The barrier’s gone now, but I simply couldn’t retain any of the experience. Not even while I was there.”

He smiled, though, with a look of blithe amazement that surprised the others around him. “You’ll find something there, too, Gregor. You’ll know what I mean.”

Rikki fidgeted, impatient and not showing much interest in Gregor’s fascination. “But did it work?”

Danal looked at him blankly for a moment, wondering what he meant.

Exasperated, Rikki crossed his arms and snapped, “Danal! Command: Slap your face!”

Smiling, Danal reached forward instead to pat the boy Waker on both cheeks.