Mel looked over my shoulder and whistled. It began as a note of alarm but quickly changed into the binary line of an escape spell. Nothing happened. It was like he hadn’t even run the program. He tried again. Ditto. Before I could think to do anything else, the office door opened. I reached for my gun, but my hand stopped halfway.

A goddess stood in the doorway. Persephone, daughter of the Earth and Hades’ consort, the queen of the damned. Hades, the place, is not Hell any more than Hades, the god, is Lucifer. And yet . . .

No one comes to Hades for fun, and only the desperate few visit by choice. Persephone wasn’t one of the latter. Long ago Hades stole her from her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of the Corn and one of the many faces of Gaia. In those days, Persephone was the very embodiment of spring, its beauty made flesh. Hades saw her walking in the world above and kidnapped her, raped her, made her his wife. For Persephone, Hades is indeed Hell. Perhaps all the more so because she is free to leave for nine months each year.

When Demeter discovered that her daughter had been stolen, she ended summer, calling down an eternal winter where no seed could be sown in the frozen ground, no flower would grow on the vine, and no fruit might ripen in the tree. Finally, Zeus forced Hades to give Persephone up to her mother so that winter might end, but not before Hades made her eat three pomegranate seeds from one of the trees of the underworld and bound her to spend three months of each year at his side.

When Persephone returned to Demeter in the youth of the year, she brought the spring with her. When Hades summoned her back to the underworld, winter reigned again.

It’s one of the darker, starker tales of the gods. There’s no sugarcoating it, and even I can’t bear to joke about it. It makes me ashamed that Hades shares my blood. Now I discovered that the scariest part of the whole thing is that you can read the story in her face.

She was every bit as beautiful as ever. Tall, lissome, long dark hair and perfect skin, the classical Greek goddess, only more so. None of that mattered once you’d seen her eyes. They were winter and sorrow bound into living tissue. Ever-changing, yet eternally frozen and monochrome. Gray and bottomless, like the leaden clouds of December one moment, the white that brings ice-blindness the next, and as black as a frozen lake in between. It took a huge effort of will to look away. When I did, all thoughts of weapons had fled. Adding to her pain was something I would not, could not, do. Instead, I placed my hands flat on the desk in front of me.

Long seconds slid past in silence. The Goddess entered the room and closed the door behind her, then leaned against it. More silence. I tried not to meet her eyes but knew it was only a matter of time. The tension visible in her body made me want to see what her face was doing. I glanced toward the screen, hoping to distract myself. Words appeared in the floating IM box, wiping away the older ones.

About time, they said. I was beginning to think you’d never look.

“I . . . What do you want from me?” I asked, keeping my gaze fixed on the box that hovered between me and the screen.

“I’m not Raven,” I said, anger drawing the words from me before I could think. I almost looked at her again but remembered not to just in time. “Fate gave me that name, and Fate is my enemy.”

Even Clotho, who took your side against your grandmother and Atropos? The Goddess’s words splattered across the IM box. The name was a mighty gift. Do you not want it?

“I want to be me,” I said, “simply Ravirn and no more.”

I didn’t want to hear it, or in this case, read it. I’d had this argument too many times with Cerice. I was who I was and not what Fate would make of me. Besides, the clock was ticking, and Hades might return at any moment. I didn’t know what Persephone’s agenda was or what it might cost me, but since my heart was still beating, she obviously wanted more than my life.

I’m fast and tough, a child of Fate and practically immortal, but Persephone’s the real deal, a goddess born. I am to her like a toy-box Mercedes is to the actual car, yet she had chosen to discuss rather than demand. I might as well push my luck.

“Give it a rest, Lady.” I heard Melchior slap his forehead but ignored him. “You want something from me. That’s clear enough. What is it? Come on, speak.” I looked up. It was a mistake.

“Do you really want to hear my voice, little Raven?” she asked aloud. Sorrow washed over me with her words, a wave of pain like the chorus of an undead orchestra. Her face reflected every ounce of that agony.

My hand went to my pistol, but this time it was because I wanted to blow my brains out. I stilled the impulse, but again, it cost me. So did refocusing my gaze on the screen. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that she’d moved closer. Her presence washed over me like the heat of a fire.

“OK,” I said, and my voice sounded shaky even to me, “so maybe that was a little hasty. If you want to keep IMing me, that’s just fine.”

She laughed then, a sound like rain falling on a corpse.

You learn quickly. Perhaps I can make use of you.

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I wasn’t in a good bargaining position, and time was most definitely not my friend. “Look, as much as I’d love to keep up the charming banter, your husband might come by at any minute. That would cause us both some problems.”

I nodded.

“That’s great,” I said. “I can use all the help I can get.”

“Truth,” mumbled Melchior.

I ignored him. “I’ll take what you can give. I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. But I would like to know what I’m going to have to do for you in exchange.”

Emoticons and my preferred name. Fabulous. Why did I suddenly think this was going to cost way more than I could afford? Experience perhaps. Goddesses are never nice to you unless they feel they have to be, and payback’s the stuff of Greek tragedy.

“Right. Great. I’m sure I’m going to love every minute of it. In the meantime, we’ve got a goblin to rescue.” I jabbed a thumb at Shara, who’d very sensibly taken refuge under the desk. Then I pulled her laptop case out of my bag. “Do you know how I can put the one back inside the other?”

I sighed. Story of my life—Atropos making things difficult, that is. “Would one of those precautions involve a spiritual recompile?”

“You want me to e-mail Shara out of here?”

“I’d best get on it then.” My fingers began to fly as I composed one of the stranger notes I’d ever put together. A few minutes later I double-checked the To line, “Cerice@ harvard.edu/mlink/via-Clotho.net,” then reached for the attachments button.

Shara caught my hand. “Wait.”

“What?” I asked.

“Just this.” She planted a big kiss on my cheek, then gave Mel one as well. “For luck. Thanks.”

Her expression belied her words. What she really meant was, “In case I don’t see you again.” Of course, she couldn’t say that. Neither could I. So when I kissed her back and told her to pass it along to Cerice, I didn’t say why. I pulled a networking cable from my shoulder bag and attached one end to the computer and the other to the port concealed in Shara’s nose. A moment later she was gone, sucked down the line in a visual straight out of some crazy cartoon. I wished Mel and I could go out the same way, but that would require us to leave our bodies behind—a fatal and therefore very temporary arrangement.

“Now what?” I asked Persephone.

Now we find out whether you’re a smart enough bird to fly Hell’s coop. Then she was gone, too, leaving me alone with Melchior. Her floating IM box vanished, exposing the more mundane screen behind and the e-mail I’d been reading when she first arrived. Dear Hades, I hope this finds you dead. As always, I hate you . . . On an impulse I forwarded it to myself, being careful to leave no trace of having done so.

By the time I finished that, Melchior had already begun running the spell that would move us from Hades’ office to some more congenial spot in the underworld. This time it worked without a hitch. I hate dealing with goddesses.

As the gate opened, he asked, “Where to?”

Perhaps because my meeting with Persephone had scrambled my brains, or perhaps because it was the only answer that had ever made any sense, I decided to return to my original plan. With the issue of Shara settled, there was no reason not to try it. I would trust to my friendships and my luck.

“Take us back to the front gate.”

“Are you sure about that? What’s the plan?”

“I’m going to play it by ear,” I replied with a smile. It was kind of nice to be one step ahead of my familiar for a change.

“I hate it when you say things like that,” grumbled Melchior. “I just hate it.” But he went ahead and stepped into the gate.

We ended up on a low hill overlooking the underworld gate, with Cerberus stalking back and forth on the other side. My watch said it was coming up on midnight. He hadn’t varied his routine one iota in all the hours I’d been gone. I’d kind of hoped something would come up to distract him, so I could fake my way out. Oh well. I did have an actual Plan A; it just scared the source code out of me.

“Come on,” I said to Melchior. “It’s showtime.” I stood and calmly walked toward the gate. Looking worried, Melchior followed. “Smile, Mel. If this doesn’t work, maybe you can make a break for it while he’s tearing me limb from limb.”

“You don’t have to outrun the cops, you just have to outrun your accomplice?”

“Something like that,” I replied. “It always worked for my older sister when we got in trouble. But I hope it won’t come to that.”

Boy did I hope it wouldn’t come to that! Lyra and I had never had to run from anything fatal, but she had gotten me into a world of hurt on occasion.

“Uh, Boss,” said Melchior.

“Yeah.”

“There’s three of him and two of us. I know no one has a better opinion of you than you do yourself, but despite that remarkable and wholly misplaced egotism, I don’t think he’s going to need to devote more than one head to the Ravirn Squeaky Toy Project. That leaves two free.”

It was just about then that Mort spotted us. Bob and Dave swiveled to look our way an instant later.

“Back so soon?” asked Bob.

I pulled the cards out of my bag. “Want to play?”

“We won’t gamble for your lives,” said Mort. “All that dicing with death stuff is a myth.”

“Technically,” I said, “so are you. That’s not why I’m here. No normal person bets on bridge. They just play it. You said we could have a game or two once I died. Now that I’ve seen what death does to people, that seems unlikely. The shades of the dead aren’t exactly high-quality opposition material.”

“Too true,” said Dave with a sigh. “They’re worthless. We just wanted to cheer you up.”

“Thanks for the attempt,” I said, uncasing the cards and stepping up to the very edge of the gate. One foot more, and I’d be through it. “Since my imminent demise is going to render my value as a fourth somewhat suspect, I thought we could go a couple of rubbers before you chewed me to pieces.” I flipped the cards from one hand to the other in a fancy cascade I’d learned while getting fleeced at poker by Eris and Tyche. “What do you say?”

“Sounds good,” said Mort. “It’s going to be ages before we find someone else willing to come down here and play, and it’s not like we ever get time off.”

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “He’s planning something.”

“Of course he’s planning something,” Dave said in exasperation. “You can be such a yap-dog sometimes. I’m all for it.” He turned his gaze on me, and there was a knowing twinkle deep in its black depths. “Still think you can pull an Orpheus?”

“Nope,” I said, smiling at the twinkle. It said I really might have a chance after all. “I’m planning on pulling a Ravirn.”

“Who deals first?” asked Bob.

“High card?” I asked, holding out the deck.

Cerberus’s right paw reached forward to draw but was foiled by the narrowness of the gate.

“That could be a problem,” I said. “Do you want to step in here?”

“Can’t,” replied Mort. “Against the rules. We’re still alive. Hades is very specific about that.”

“How about I come out there?”

All three throats began a low growling. It made my bones itch, but I kept smiling.

“Don’t be like that. I’m not talking about going all the way down to the river or anything. Just give me three steps. No, two. You’ll still be between me and escape. How much harm can there be in two steps?”

“Once you’re on this side, you could hook up to the mweb and gate out,” said Mort.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “A gate takes a good minute to form and another to cycle. You’d rip me to shreds before the spell was half-finished.”

“Oh, what can it hurt?” said Dave, and I thought I heard a wink in his voice. “He’s right about the gate.”

There was some grumbling, but soon the trio backed up. When I stepped through the arch, I was careful to go no more than the two steps I’d specified. Running was not going to do me any good. Cerberus would be less forgiving than Bob, Mort, and Dave.

Mort pulled an ace and dealt the first hand. When the bidding came around to me for the second time I went seven no-trump, the toughest contract in the game. Bob whistled, Mort snickered, and Dave swore. He was the one who was going to have to help me pull it off.

After I took the second trick, I jerked my head at Melchior. “Make a call for me, would you?”

Bob gave me the gimlet look. “Hold it. You said no smart stuff, just cards. Why should we let you call anybody?”

“What can it hurt?” I asked. “You’re the biggest, baddest dog in all creation. About the only thing you could have to worry about is if I had Necessity backing me up via my speed dial. But if that were the case I wouldn’t have had to come in the hard way, now would I?”

“Necessity on your speed dial,” snorted Mort, though he looked a little nervous about the mention of that name. “Good one. He’s got a point, Bob. Why not let him make the call?”

Bob grumbled a bit, then asked, “Who you gonna call?”

“A friend. She’s totally harmless, shorter than your shortest tooth.” I reached out and boldly tapped one of Bob’s canines, pricking my finger. “You boys aren’t afraid of a wee tiny webpixie, are you? I just installed a phone circuit for her, and it seems rude to die without giving it a test. Here.” I pressed my bleeding finger to my lips. “By my blood and my honor I swear she is what I say.”

The twinkle in Dave’s eye returned, brighter this time. “I’m game, if for no other reason than to find out what it is you’re up to.” He raised a questioning eyebrow.

I just smiled and signaled for Melchior to make the call. Kira arrived a few minutes later. She had to be terrified, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at her; as Melchior had said, attitude enough for a herd of webtrolls.

“How’s the hardware working?” I asked her.

“Great.” She landed on my shoulder. “I found this really slick file-swapping software at jollyroger.mag. It’s called Theftster, and I’ve downloaded like nine thousand tunes.”

“Tunes?” asked Mort, his pupils widening in sudden concern. “What’s this?”

Cerberus leaped to his feet.

“Now would be good!” I said to Kira.

She didn’t need my prodding; Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” was already pouring out of her open mouth.

A paw the size of a Saint Bernard landed on me, pinning me to the ground. One claw point pricked my throat just over the Adam’s apple, and I knew that I’d lost. I closed my eyes and waited for the end. At least I’d reunited Shara and Cerice.

Seconds went by. Though I could feel a trickle of blood making me a crimson necklace, the pressure didn’t increase, and I didn’t die. Then a new noise joined Kira’s replay, a great rumbling snore. I opened one eye. Mort’s head lay closest to me, its eyes firmly closed, a trickle of drool forming at the corner of his mouth. Slowly and carefully I crawled out from under the paw. Bob was the one snoring. A tiny hint of black fire was just visible under Dave’s left eyelid, as though he were still partially awake. When I looked closer, it flickered closed in what I could have half sworn was a wink.

I turned to Kira, and whispered, “If you’re willing, I’d love to set you up with a triple headset. I know you’re looking for work, and I think Cerberus would make a great boss. He’s loyal and he’s tough and you’ve got a lot in common personality-wise. What do you think?”

She looked the big guy over consideringly, then nodded, not answering with words for reasons too obvious to go into.

“Good enough,” I said. “I’m going to get going now and skip out on the whole rise-and-shine thing. Look me up when you’ve figured out the details, or if it doesn’t work out.”

I turned to Melchior, who was standing perfectly still against the side of the underworld gate. He was doing a pretty good impression of the stonework he’d pressed himself into.

“Gate?” I asked. He jerked his chin toward the water’s edge as if to say, “not here,” put a finger to his lips, and headed in that direction. I left the cards where they were and started after him. I’d barely gone two stops before a question occurred to me, and I turned back to Kira. “Why not Monteverdi’s L’orfeo?”

“Joy to the World” was just ending, and Kira paused a heartbeat before going on to her next track. “Does he really look like an opera fan?” Then she started into Temple of the Dog’s “Wooden Jesus.”

I shook my head and, moving with exquisite caution, followed Melchior to the dock where I’d left my scuba gear. As I slid beneath the waters, I took one last look at the sleeping mountain that was Cerberus.

Orpheus might have been the greatest musician who ever lived: with only a lyre he’d eased the hound of hell’s insomnia. I didn’t have that kind of talent. But I did have a heck of a hardware advantage and a bottomless supply of tunes. Play a song for a hellhound, and you’ll give him music for a day. Teach him to pirate MP3s, and you’ll give him music for eternity. Couple that with Kira’s alarm clock function, and I figured he might even thank me someday.

“You want to read it now?” he asked.

Dear Hades, I hope this finds you dead. As always, I hate you . . . The memory of those words seemed seared into my brain, along with the goddess’s pain. I didn’t need that right now. I wanted to enjoy the high of the ultimate hack job, successfully cracking Hades itself, and I couldn’t think of a bigger downer than reading Persephone’s hate mail and thinking about what she might ask of me later. I shook my head.

“No thanks, Mel. Park it in a password-protected folder for later inspection.”

“Can do,” he said.

Then we headed out. When we got to Cerice’s building, I picked the various locks myself instead of getting Melchior to magic them open for me. I felt fabulous and couldn’t resist the pure mischief of it. I took extra care with the lock on her door, opening it as silently as possible. I wanted to surprise her.

“Ta-dah!” I said, stepping inside.

Cerice was sitting in a chair on the far side of the room, her feet propped up on about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of custom mainframe. She looked even more weary and stressed than the last time I’d seen her and barely seemed to register my presence. Finally, she turned her head my way.

“Ta-dah?” She looked confused. Then hope bloomed in her tired eyes—hope and the first hint of true happiness I’d seen there in a long time—and she leaped to her feet. “Where is she?”

“Isn’t she here?” I could feel the ground under my feet going spongy, lab tile about to turn to quicksand. “I sent her ahead.”

“You what?”

“Sent her ahead.” I glanced at Melchior for support. “We e-mailed her.” Cerice looked at me like I was totally out of my mind. “We did! When was the last time you checked your e-mail?”

Cerice pointed at the monitor hooked to the mainframe. An open mail window was clearly visible. To any normal person it would have looked like another typical UNIX e-mail client, but I recognized an mweb-enabled program originally written by Clotho.

“You’re sure you haven’t gotten an e-mail from Hades with a really huge attachment?” I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe it hit your spam filters and—”

“Ravirn,” said Cerice, “anything over ten meg is going to trigger a query on whether or not I want to download it. How big a file are we talking?”

“I don’t know, a couple of terabytes maybe?”

“Two-point-two-nine,” said Melchior, whose silicon memory was much more precise than my own faulty organics. “Sent at 9:38 Olympus Standard Time. And before you ask, yes, we sent it to the right address. Shara double-checked it herself.”

“She did?” I asked.

“She did.”

“Well then where the hell did she go?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Melchior. “Shit. The oath.”

I could feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. I’d always figured that if I could get in and out of the underworld alive, I’d have this caper pretty much sewn up. The possibility that I could be both alive and in violation of my oath had never even occurred to me. Yet here I was. And if Shara didn’t show up mighty quick, I was going to have some unhappy Furies making a house call.

“Melchior. Laptop. Please.”

He hopped onto the desk and shifted shape. I dropped into a chair and started hitting keys. It was at times like this that I most missed the tip of my left pinkie. The loss had cost me a couple of words a minute typing speed. Still, I got a graphic representation of the mweb connections between Hades and this DecLocus’s version of Harvard up pretty quickly.

There were an infinite number of possible routing solutions to get a set of packets from there to here, but only a couple of optimum solutions. For a job the size of Shara, the mweb master servers would be very careful not to take unnecessary steps. The network had bandwidth beyond the wildest dreams of human coders, but it had been designed always to optimize that resource—the hand of Necessity there.

By hacking the tracking system at Clotho.net I was able to get a lock on one big mother of an e-mail coming out of Hades and heading by direct link from there into the Fate’s central routing system . . . where it vanished. Poof! No more packets.

“What the . . .” Cerice was looking over my shoulder. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, madly hitting keys and calling up further information. “She hasn’t been erased or quarantined. There’d be some evidence of that. She’s just gone.”

I pushed my chair back from the desk. I was trying to sound calm. I actually sounded dead, which was fair. I was dead. I’d escaped the Furies once before because I’d gotten very, very lucky. It wasn’t likely to happen again.

“Don’t give up yet.” Cerice took my place in front of Melchior.

His screen shifted, displaying nothing but ones and zeros. I prefer a nice clean graphical interface for computer and spell work. It’s closer to the way I think. Cerice goes straight into the underlying code, and she’s used her own personal magic to enhance her abilities there. Sometimes I think she’s half computer herself. Screen after screen of binary flew by so fast it blurred into complete nonsense for me.

“There!” she cried, bring the show to a stop. “Right there.” Her finger touched the screen, and Melchior obligingly magnified that section of code.

I didn’t know what was around it, so all I could tell was that is was some sort of routing command. “What is it?”

“It’s a hardware-level autofunction,” said Cerice, “and it grabbed Shara.”

“Hardware-level? Are you sure?” That could get really ugly really fast.

While the mweb is administered by the Fates through their individual webtroll servers, I’d learned recently that the actual core architecture is a cluster of multiprocessor quantum mainframes that come preassembled from Necessity herself. When a replacement unit is needed, it’s delivered by the Furies, who are the only goddesses allowed to interact with Necessity directly. More than that, nobody knows.

That’s because no one messes with Necessity. Repeat, no one. Not my grandmother or her sisters, not Zeus, not Hades, not even Eris—and Discord’s flat-out nuts, a friend, but nuts all the same. Necessity is to the gods what Fate is to everybody else.

So if Shara’s trip had been interrupted at the hardware level, it was because of something Necessity had personally built into the system. The very thought made my bones itch.

“Can you find out where she is?” I asked, trying not to get my hopes up. There was nothing at all I could do to affect Necessity, but at the same time the possibility that Shara was still somewhere meant there was a chance she’d end up here.

“I don’t know. As far as I can tell, this”—Cerice tapped the screen for emphasis—“autoforwarded her to an address that should be a null set.”

I closed my eyes. Not good. Not good at all. “I note your use of the word should. Can I take that to mean that it isn’t actually a null set?”

“I don’t know.” Cerice cocked her head to one side, the way she often did when she’d found an absolutely fascinating programming problem. “It shouldn’t be possible for this string to work as an end address, but a file-received message came back to the mweb server in response to Shara’s forward. Take a look.”

I leaned in. Sure enough, there was the standard response string from—I mentally translated the binary—souladmin@necessity . . . Dot, dot, dot? That didn’t make any sense at all. But there it was.

The clear e-trail showed that whatever had happened to Shara made sense to the mweb architecture, but I hadn’t a clue how to do anything about it. Even if I knew where Necessity kept her personal server stack, I wouldn’t dare go after it. There are fates much worse than death. Just ask Prometheus.