Apparently, Cerice didn’t know what to do either. She just slumped in her chair and looked defeated. “We wait.”

“I hate waiting.”

Me too, said a text box on Melchior’s screen. All right if I go back to goblin now?

I nodded, and Melchior shifted forms. “Why don’t you two head back to the apartment?” He made shooing gestures. “I’ll catch up in a little while.”

“But I’ve got to—” Cerice began.

Melchior didn’t let her finish. “Don’t argue. You’re out on your feet, and you’ve already told us your program’s screwed without Shara’s help. It won’t be any more screwed if you take thirty hours off, and maybe the rest will help you get some fresh perspective.”

“Why thirty . . .” Cerice trailed off as she looked up at the clock. “Oh.” It was a quarter past one. In thirty hours it would be sunrise on Sunday, and the Furies would come to kill me.

“Go,” said Melchior. “I’ll just tidy up around here.”

“Thanks, Mel,” I said. He hates cleaning, probably even more than I do. This offer was entirely about giving Cerice and me some time alone. “I appreciate it.”

I was in the hallway at the front of the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum. In front of me stood my cousin Moric. He wore head-to-toe armor, red and blue, blood and bruises. That couldn’t be right. Moric was dead, eaten by a burst of Primal Chaos that I had unleashed. Yet here he was.

I heard gunshots from outside, and sparks danced on the back of his armor. He didn’t seem to notice, turning to face me instead of looking for the shooter.

“Ah, dear little Raven. How nice of you to come out to meet me. Did you run out of places to hide? Or did you finally remember the nobility of your blood and decide to look your death in the face?”

“Neither,” I said, echoing the words I’d spoken then through the mouth of a doppelganger. I wondered at his use of Raven. He’d died before I’d earned that name. “I decided that if I was going to go, I should at least take you with me.”

Then, just as I had at the time, I braced myself and opened a line into the interworld chaos. What I was doing was a violation of every rule I knew about the proper management of magical power, and the potential cost was terrible. Tapping the raw chaos without taking major precautions was an invitation to end your magical career as a charcoal briquette.

I felt like I’d stuck a needle in my arm and started pumping liquid flame directly into my veins. As I did so, I expected my knees to give way as they had that long year ago, perhaps even breaking the right one anew.

But instead of collapsing or cooking in my own juices, I stood there and took the pain as the fires roared through my circulatory system. The pure raw stuff of chaos filled me until I felt as if I must dissolve from within. I’d never experienced such agony. I’d never experienced such . . . ecstasy. Ecstasy? Yes. Along with the fire came a terrible rush of joy, like a whole-body orgasm. The internal burning didn’t hurt any less, but I found myself wanting it to go on forever. Of course, it couldn’t. After what felt like hours but was truly not much more than the time between blinks, the chaos passed beyond my capacity to contain.

It burst forth from the palms of my hands in twin streamers of wildfire, twisting and coiling along a line that ran from me to a point just above Moric’s heart. His armor protected him briefly, but the power of it knocked him off his feet. Soon he began to burn. Again the scene diverged from my memory. Then, the eyeballs of my doppelganger had melted. Now, I watched in horror as Moric flopped and rolled, trying to fight clear of the fire.

My stomach turned in horror at what I was doing, yet I couldn’t look away, couldn’t even tell myself that if I’d known about this, I would never have done the deed. It had been him or me. As much as it tore at me to see him like this, I knew that if I had it all to do over again, I’d still have to pick me. Seconds ticked by. Finally, Moric died. The flow of chaos did not. It built, rolling back over me and filling the space, eating away at the walls and floor. The power had me in its grip just as it had all those months ago, and it was not letting go.

Then, I’d had to sacrifice my doppelganger and slip between worlds to break free. Even that had only worked because the mweb was temporarily down. This time I had opened the link directly through my own body, not that of a surrogate. There was nowhere to run and no way to escape. The chaos kept flowing. Moric’s body was long gone, completely dissolved. Now the hall followed. I felt the floor give way beneath me, but I didn’t fall. I floated at the heart of a rapidly expanding globe of pure Primal Chaos.

I could no longer see anything but the wild tumbling colors that fill the place between worlds, but somehow I could feel the stuff eating into the substance of the planet, tearing great chunks out of reality and devouring them whole. I felt the University die. The city of Minneapolis. The continent of North America. The whole damn Decision Locus, reabsorbed by the stuff that had given it birth. Then, when I was alone, a living point in the heart of a chaos, it turned on me and I, too, was devoured.

I woke with Moric’s final throes echoing in my mind and cold sweat running off my forehead. The only light in the little bedroom came from the blinking red LEDs of the clock: 6:30. I’d only slept a few hours. It would already be getting light outside, but Melchior had drawn the curtains for us. I was dead tired, but jangling nerves and the emotional aftershocks of the nightmare were enough to let me know that I wouldn’t be getting back to sleep.

As gently as possible, I disengaged myself from Cerice. She made a tiny noise of protest when I opened the covers and the cold air hit her but subsided when I tucked them back around her neck. I might have had the more strenuous day, but she’d been running on sheer will for weeks. Now that she’d finally let herself collapse, I didn’t expect her to move before noon.

A selfish part of me wanted to get her up, to drag her out in a pell-mell effort to deny my danger. But she really needed the sleep, and I knew deep down that waking her would only serve to drive the awareness of impending doom deeper. Instead, I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and slipped out to the kitchen with the intention of making myself some coffee and breakfast. Melchior was there before me, handing me a cup as I staggered through the arch that led into the hallway.

“Eggs?” he asked.

“Depends, are you cooking them?” Melchior and food preparation made for a bad mix.

“Great Zeus, no!” said Melchior. “I’m going to run down to the hotel on the corner and pick them up from their café like I did the coffee.”

“That would explain the Murray’s Hall logo on the mug, then.” It was a very high-class establishment where Harvard put up visiting VIPs and rich alums. The food was outstanding, and I could avoid any guilt by leaving them the money for breakfast in my will. “Sounds good, Mel. What am I getting?”

“Normally, I’d say ‘whatever’s under the heat lamps when I get there,’ but they just put in a new computerized ordering system, so the sky’s the limit.”

Hacked breakfast and a menu, what more could you ask for? I told Melchior what I wanted, and fifteen minutes later he delivered a set of covered hotel dishes containing a bacon-and-mushroom omelet, crispy hash browns, homemade English muffins, a couple of dark chocolate croissants, a ham steak, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and more coffee. I picked up a place mat and wafted a breakfast-flavored breeze down the hallway. When even this enticement didn’t generate a sound from Cerice’s direction, I tucked in. I’d have to ask Melchior to steal another breakfast when she finally woke up.

Once I’d finished transferring calories from my plate to my stomach and gotten up a good head of caffeine, I asked Melchior to go back to laptop and called up a Graphic User Interface version of the e-mail transfer point Cerice had found. Maybe GUI would show me things that hadn’t been apparent in binary.

Collecting a tiny dagger from a sheath in the sleeve of my leather jacket, I plugged a networking cable into the hilt and connected the other end to Mel’s laptop form. The athame was maybe five inches long and narrow enough to pass for a letter opener, but no letter opener had ever been this sharp. I braced my wrist against the edge of the table, then plunged the blade into my left palm, bearing down until the guard touched my flesh and the tip stood out from the back of my hand. Bitter agony catapulted me out of my flesh and into the world of the mweb, where it left me.

I hung above a sort of crystalline city, the mweb server in all its multicore interconnected glory. I’d had Melchior color the native software in a pale translucent green, remote client apps in a deeper opaque olive, and the internal pathways between programs sea blue. Backbone lines into and out of the server were orange, lesser links yellow. The honking-big pipeline that went directly to the Fate Core I marked in do-not-touch radioactive red. I’d already dodged one death sentence for interfering with it; no sense giving the Furies extra incentive.

Melchior tightened focus on the place where Shara had gone elsewhere. It felt like a slow-motion skydive as I went from a satellite’s-eye city view through neighborhood mode down to looking at a single building. The e-mail routing node was a cube about the size of a six-story office building and part of a big cluster of similar nodes, mostly much larger ones. It also stood out like a cyclops in an optometrist’s shop. Instead of the greens we’d used for software nodes, it was literally a black box, an enigma attached directly to the motherboard. There were no obvious connections leading out of the server. E-mail went in and then it went . . . somewhere else. Then verification of messages received came back from wherever that somewhere was.

I moved closer, almost touching the node. I couldn’t be sure without entering, but it looked an awful lot like an independent core, a computer within the computer. I reached out toward it and . . . stopped. Something about the node raised the virtual hairs on the back of my electronic neck, and it wasn’t just knowing I was flirting on the edges of Necessity’s business. Accessing Melchior, I had him pull up one of my standard hacking tools, a code weasel, a completely independent program with no connections back to him or me. It appeared in my hand, a small furry thing like its namesake, different only in that it had bat wings. Moving well away from the node, I released it.

It dropped like a hunting hawk, backwinging just before it touched the black surface and landing gently. Before it had time to so much as fold its wings, a ball of black fire emerged from the node and engulfed it, incinerating it instantly. A dark flash and the weasel was gone. The flame, hovering above the node and spinning in place, remained. I decided I’d used up my luck for the day and had better leave. The second I moved, so did the ball. It came after me like an ebony comet with a tail of black sparks glinting behind it like chips of midnight.

I moved as quickly as thought could take me, but it gained steadily. I wouldn’t make—

Sudden searing pain, like I’d put my hand on the burner of a stove. I heard a whimper and realized it had come from my own lips. I was back in my body, and the pain was on this side of the link. The athame embedded in my palm had fresh carbon on it, a loose star of char marks, centered on the networking port, whose delicate contacts were actually glowing a dull red as they melted. The connector itself was gone. Using the tail of my shirt as an insulator, I grabbed the hilt and pulled the blade out.

It didn’t quite burn my fingers through the cloth, but it came close. Almost out of reflex I whistled the binary spell that closed athame-induced wounds. To my surprise it worked, sealing the flesh and soothing most of my pain. I could still feel a dull throbbing, but it no longer dominated my thinking. It was only then that I remembered Melchior. If the security program had done that to my athame, what had it done to my familiar?

I looked up and saw a line burned into the surface of the wooden table. It led from the place where my wrist had rested to the now-empty spot Mel had occupied when I crossed over into the virtual world of the mweb. It was only then that I heard the running water and swearing. Turning, I found my webgoblin. He was kneeling in the sink and swearing a streak as blue as he was. Water from the tap ran across his nose—the location of his networking port in goblin shape—and from there over his right hand, both of which were showing blisters. I rose to help him, then almost went down when the world wavered around me.

“Are you all right?” I asked, my voice sounding tinny and distant.

“I will be,” he answered, “with a couple of minor repairs. I take it from the fact that you’re speaking to me that I pulled the plug in time.”

“What happened?”

“You know how they say that ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, she’s a mother all right.” Melchior shook his burned right hand a couple of times. “Man but that smarts. I don’t know how the security on that black box worked, but it went through my system without leaving a mark until it hit the line out to its target.”

“Me.”

“You. That’s when the networking cable caught fire.” He pointed at the burned line on the table, his pupils huge and black, and shook his head. “It actually caught fire. I didn’t know that was possible. I’ve never shifted shape so fast in my life—burned my nose pretty badly, too, what with the cable being on fire—but it was the only thing I could think of. You got lucky then. Once it got into the cable, it was hot and nasty, but slow. I was able to rip it free of the athame before it nailed you. I’m not sure why it didn’t move faster.”

“Maybe destroying the line as it went degraded the transmission rate?”

“Maybe,” said Melchior. “Whatever the reason, you’d better thank whatever high-ranking cousin of yours is the patron of hackers.”

“Eris,” I interjected.

He nodded. “Of course. I must be feeling more scrambled than I thought. Maybe you should send her some flowers or chocolate or something.”

“Tomorrow, if I’m still alive.” Not that Discord actually ever intervened to help people, but hey, it couldn’t hurt. “What happened to the cable after you pulled it?”

“Consumed.” He pointed at the floor, where a broken circle had burned itself into the linoleum.

“So much for my damage deposit,” I said.

“There’s a surprise.” Cerice’s sleepy voice came through the arch into the hall. “Have you ever gotten a deposit back?”

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“Only that you’re a bit closer to Eris in nature than you are by blood. Chaos and discord follow in your wake. Clotho was right to call you a dark bird.”

I let it pass. This might be my last day on the right side of Hades’ gate, and I didn’t want to spend it fighting with Cerice.

“Feeling a little crabby, are we?” I asked.

She smiled sadly. “A little, perhaps. It has something to do with being wakened from a sound sleep by a swearing webgoblin and the smell of my boyfriend’s charred flesh.”

“Hey!” I said. “I’m only a little burned.” I held my hand to my nose. “You can’t even smell it close-up.”

“My mistake, then. Care to tell me what happened?”

“In a moment,” I answered. “First, I need to see to Mel’s injuries. Come here, you.” I lifted him out of the sink and into my lap.

“Melchior, Root Access. Please.”

“Root Access granted,” he replied, his face going a little dreamy.

“Righthand/allfingers/fingertips.source,” I said, “Terminate Signal. Initiate Recovery Cycle. Run Command, Run Command. Nose/networkingport.source Terminate Signal. Initiate Recovery Cycle. Run Command, Run Command. Root Exit.”

“Exiting Root,” he responded. I’d just shut down the pain sensors in the affected areas and initiated a regeneration program for the damage. “Oh, that’s much better. I should have thought of it myself.”

“Good,” I said. “Why don’t you go fetch Cerice breakfast while I fill her in on what happened.”

“Sure,” said Melchior. “That way I get to skip the safety lecture, too.” Cerice shot him a sharp look but didn’t say anything. He bowed low and winked. “What do you want, my lady? Murray’s Hall just put in a computerized ordering system.”

She grinned and asked for a breakfast every bit as big and elaborate as mine. With another bow, he was gone. While we waited, I told Cerice about our little misadventure.

“Interesting,” she said, when I’d finished. “Remind me not to try to hack any of Necessity’s equipment. So what now?”

“Now we check your e-mail and hope that Shara’s come in while we were napping. I can’t really see past that at the moment. The idea that I went through my little encounter with Cerberus just to buy a day pass out of the underworld is a bit too much for me to get around.”

“For you to get around?” asked Melchior, returning with Cerice’s breakfast. “What about me? If you get nailed by the Furies, I’m going to have to break in a new employer. And in case you hadn’t noticed, most of your extended family thinks the solution to free will and the AI is an electronic lobotomy.”

I wanted to laugh—he was making wise to cheer me up—I just couldn’t manage it. I tried instead for light irony. “Somehow, I find that to be a less pressing problem than I otherwise might. I’m sure Cerice will see that you don’t starve,” I replied. “Won’t you, my dear?”

“Of course,” she said, and there was a seriousness to her words that made them a promise and let all the air out of our joking. “But let’s hope it won’t come to that. Mel, would you be so kind as to allow me use you as a webmail terminal? I can see whether Shara’s parked in my account at Clotho.net.”

Melchior nodded and made the transition back to laptop. Cerice brought up his browser and opened a line to Clotho.net. At that point I turned and looked out the window. We were lovers and friends. But we were also hackers and crackers, and it would have been deeply rude of me to watch her type her password. Even with the iris recognition and all the other biometric security we now used, passwords mattered. Like true names, they were not shared lightly.

Besides, I could always get it out of Melchior later if I really needed to.

Cerice knew that of course, but she chose to use him anyway—something she’d never done before. That was a sign of great trust on her part, and to me it said “I love you,” as clearly as the words she hadn’t yet been willing to voice.

Seconds ticked past. “Nothing,” she finally said. “Nothing at all.”

The sky began to lighten. Still no Shara. At this point I began to wonder if it would even be possible to download her in the time we had left and how half returning her might count with the Furies in the matter of my oath. Maybe I could get them to agree to only one Fury chasing me, though I had my doubts. They hadn’t been particularly happy about having to give up on me after our last encounter. They are legendary for their relentlessness, and being called off at the last minute had probably caused them more than a little stress.

Then, just when everything was looking bleakest, I heard the faint “bing” that announced incoming e-mail. I was halfway to the screen without crossing the intervening space, but Cerice was ahead of me.

“There’s nothing here!” she said, as she tapped on the keyboard to wake the monitor. “What the hell?”

But I knew the answer. Turning, I said to Melchior, “Who’s it from?”

He didn’t look at all happy. “Tisiphone@necessity . . .”

Tisiphone, the Fury with wings and hair of living fire. The one who liked to play with her victims. I could actually feel my already pale skin going paler. It was the oddest sensation.

“What’s the header?”

“Save a dance for me.”