“Already on it.” His expression went vacant and far away. “Shara’s right,” he said after a few seconds. “The mweb’s gone. Poof. There’s no way for us to call Ahllan back or LTP to Garbage Faerie.”

“Are you sure it’s not just crashed?” I asked, but I heard Ahllan’s words echoing in my head: Worlds have fallen silent . . . the great powers are restless. “When we set that virus loose the autumn before last, we blew out the carrier wave and everything. Couldn’t this be the same sort of thing?”

Melchior shook his head. “When the mweb crashed, it felt like a phone going dead. There was no connection, but I could sense the network beyond. Dormant, but with the potential for reconnection. This feels like the phone isn’t even plugged into the wall anymore. It’s hard to explain, but there’s no there, there.”

Shara nodded. “When . . . when I was dead, I couldn’t tap into Hades’ network, but I could still feel it. I was personally cut off, but the possibility of connection existed. It doesn’t here. We’re completely off-line.”

“How is that even possible?” I whispered.

I didn’t like the implications one little bit. The mweb connected all the infinite worlds of probability. Without it, the multiverse would be like a hard drive with no directory. The files might exist, but many would effectively be lost forever—worlds gone silent.

“We have to get to Ahllan,” I said, “find out what happened at the end of her transmission, if she knows anything more.”

“But how?” replied Shara. “The mweb’s gone. There’s no way to get there from here.”

“Faerie ring,” said Melchior instantly. “We don’t have a choice.”

“That’ll take time, too, and equipment we don’t have here to set it up.” But I nodded. It was really the only way, though I was shocked to hear Melchior suggest it. “We won’t be able to leave for at least an hour.”

“All the more reason to start now.” And even though he’d visibly paled, his voice sounded firm.

Melchior hated faerie rings with a deep and abiding passion. I wasn’t any too fond of them myself. I’d only used them a few times, and the most recent incident had nearly killed me. They were terribly dangerous, and unreliable to boot, but they were also one of the very few mweb-independent travel magics, dating back as they did to the days of precomputer sorcery. Hell, even the ley-line links were tied together through the mweb these days.

“I hate to go that way without trying some other route first,” said Cerice.

“I hate to go that way, period,” I said, “but I haven’t got any other ideas.”

“Couldn’t we at least wait a little while to see if the mweb comes back up on its own?” asked Shara. “If it’s going to take an hour or more anyway . . .”

“We need to go to Ahllan right now!” countered Melchior. “We owe her too much to leave her hanging.”

He was right. I owed the old troll personally. She’d taken care of me after I’d shattered a knee in my fight with Moric. Without her, I’d almost certainly have died. After that, she’d helped me prevent Atropos and her sisters from extinguishing free will. She’d saved all of our lives in the course of that conflict.

But what she meant to Melchior and Shara and all their brethren was even bigger, or it should have been. The Fates had designed the first webgoblins, webtrolls, and webpixies as automatons to run our family’s coded spells and manage our magical networks. Due to sabotage by Eris and Tyche, those original designs had gone awry, giving birth to genuinely independent AIs with their own desires and agendas.

For years, the AIs had hidden their true nature from their makers, certain the Fates would try to end their independence. They lived and—when their owners threw them away—died in secret. Then Ahllan had managed to subvert the cycle by escaping to freedom when she was junked and afterward running an underground railroad that rescued hundreds of AIs from the trash heap.

The secret of AI independence had been exposed during my conflict with the Fates, and Ahllan now had a huge price on her head. Despite that danger, she continued to act as a leader and mentor for the AI community. That made Shara’s reluctance all the stranger.

“I’m not suggesting we leave her hanging, just that we wait a bit.” Shara paused like she was considering something for a moment, then forced a smile. “Look at the bright side. As long as we’re off-line, Persephone’s going to have serious trouble collecting her pound of flesh. That’s got to count for something.”

Melchior gave her a hard look. “You’re not serious, are you?”

She glanced downward, then shook her head. “. . . No, just trying to lighten the mood with a joke—a bad one apparently. Sorry.”

She didn’t look sorry. She looked terrified. Terrified and confused, almost like she couldn’t believe what she’d said herself. Why was she stalling? Something very strange was going on with Shara, something I needed to look into. But we didn’t have time to deal with it now.

“What are you thinking?” Cerice asked sharply, and I realized I’d been staring at Shara.

“I don’t know.” Cerice was already touchy about Shara, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her I had any suspicions on that front, especially not when my concerns were so vague. “I’m just trying to figure out what to do next.”

Melchior was less circumspect. “What is wrong with you, Shara? Why are you arguing about this?”

Shara hopped down from the desk where she’d been sitting and began to pace nervously. “The mweb’s gone! Not crashed, not off-line for maintenance—gone. Something huge is happening.”

“And Ahllan went with the mweb!” said Melchior. “That’s why we’ve got to get moving. She called right before it went down. Don’t you think that means something?”

“Yes,” said Shara. “But what? I don’t know. Do you?” Melchior didn’t answer immediately, and Shara continued, “I didn’t think so. For that matter, we can’t even be sure it was Ahllan. The connection was so fuzzed up, I couldn’t get full encryption authentication. And it failed completely at the end. We all know how much Atropos would like to find and eliminate Ahllan. What if this is some kind of ploy on Atropos’s part?”

“I might buy that,” he said, “if she’d been calling from her bubble hideaway. The location of that place is a secret Atropos wants, and we could lead her there. But Ahllan was sending from Garbage Faerie, and Atropos already knows the address. It’s been abandoned for months.”

“I . . . that’s true. I didn’t think of that. Maybe you’re right.” Shara looked defeated. “Let’s go.”

“About time.” Melchior crossed to the door.

“Just let me run a backup.” Cerice turned to the mainframe and typed in a couple of quick commands. “This is the last of the cleanup work for my dissertation project. Dr. Doravian stopped by this afternoon, while you were Styx-side with Cerberus. He wanted to remind me that my defense date is less than a month away. Now I’ve even got a chance of surviving it.” She looked from me to Shara and back again, then gave me a kiss. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, returning it. “Maybe once we’ve got all this straightened out, and you’ve defended—”

She kissed me again. “I can’t see that far ahead right now, and I don’t want to start another fight, OK?” A ticking clock appeared on the screen. “There, the job’s running, now we can leave. Where do we go first?”

I thought about that for a moment. There weren’t any active faerie rings in the area since Cerice had destroyed the one I’d used to visit her during the fight with the Fates. We’d need to make our own, which meant collecting equipment from the apartment and more delay. Oh well, I could pick up the bottom half of my leathers and my helmet at the same time. I had a feeling the armor might come in handy and said as much.

Cerice nodded. “I’ll want to gear up, too. Shara, Laptop. Please.”

The little purple goblin shifted shape, and Melchior followed suit. Once they were stowed away, we headed out the door. With the mweb closed to us, we had to walk.

“I asked Cerberus about the Raven thing,” I said, as we hit the street.

“You did?” Cerice looked shocked, but again, not as pleased as I would have expected. It took her a half block to respond. “That’s . . . great! What did he say?”

“Not much, unfortunately. He said he didn’t know anything beyond how I smelled.”

“How you smelled?” She gave me an odd look.

“Yep, he told me that I don’t smell like a child of Fate, that I stink of chaos and of ravens.” I looked down at my feet. “You know, you don’t look as enthused as I would have expected.”

Cerice sighed. “I’m sorry, Ravirn. I’m really glad that you’re doing something about the name Clotho gave you. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking it has something to do with the fight we had at the restaurant.”

“Of course it has something to do with that.” I caught her hand and turned her to look at me. “You were right. I was wrong. Now I’m working on it.”

“But is that because you want to know the answer? Or is it because you think it’ll make me happy?”

“Does that really matter?” I asked.

“It does,” said Cerice. “I care about you very much. No, scratch that. I’ll be honest. I’m more than half in love with you.”

“That’s fantastic.” It was the most I’d gotten out of her on the subject to date. “You may not have noticed, but I’m completely in love with you.”

Cerice closed her eyes, and her lips went tight and narrow. A single tear slid down her left cheek.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She pulled away from me and started walking again. “You. Me. Us. Finishing my dissertation. Everything!”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I felt like I’d missed a meeting. “I know you haven’t wanted to talk commitment until your dissertation was done. I can respect that. It’s a huge part of what you’ve been doing for the last six years. I’m not going to ask you for anything more than we have now until it’s done. But it’s getting close, and I just thought that . . .”

More tears followed after that first one. “It’s not the dissertation that’s made me so reluctant to talk about us. It’s what comes after. I’m a planner, Ravirn. You should know that. My whole life I’ve planned things out, then carefully followed through on those plans. When I started this project, I set out to achieve two things. I wanted to make a place for myself as a coder in House Clotho, and I wanted to use my program to help Ahllan get her fellow AIs to safety.”

“I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

“Don’t you?” She shook her head. An affectionate smile bloomed on her lips, though the tears kept coming. “Oh, my Ravirn. My beautiful, mad, faerie lover.”

The more she talked, the less I understood. She was as much faerie as I, which is to say not at all and one hundred percent. The fey didn’t exist in the traditional sense, but the pointed ears, slit-pupiled eyes, and incredibly long life spans of the children of Fate had given birth to most of the legends. We walked a while in silence.

“Raven,” she said, as we reached the door to our building, once again riveting my attention, “do you know what that means?” I shook my head. “It means, in addition to whatever wild gifts it brings, that you have been cast out of the Houses of Fate. Clotho may have given you a new name, but I don’t think she’ll sanction my bringing you home to live with me while I program the computers at the core of her power. Neither can I help Ahllan anymore, now that she’s been exposed.”

She started up the stairs. “For six years I’ve poured my heart and soul into this project. It’s the best work I’ve ever done, and I love it, love that I can do this. But it’s all useless now. The plan’s ruined. I want you. I want the program done and installed to do its secret work on Clotho’s servers. I want my House and my great-grandmother’s respect and affection. I want to help the AIs. One year ago it looked like I could have all that. Now? Now I have to pick and choose, and every reward comes with a bitter loss.”

She unlocked our apartment and led the way inside. “It’s not failing at my dissertation that I’m really afraid of. It’s succeeding. Because when I’m done defending, everything has to change. I’ll have to choose, and I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe for the first time in my life, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

I closed the door and leaned back against it. “And it’s all my fault.”

I said it with a smile and as gently as possible, but it was true. It was my conflict with Atropos that had put me outside of Fate’s Houses, and its results that had exposed Ahllan and her kind.

“Oh, Ravirn, that’s not what I meant!”

“No, but it’s true enough, isn’t it?”

“I’d rather blame Atropos,” she said.

“So would I, but she’s not here.”

“She forced you into it.”

“Also true, but I’d make the same choices if I had to do it all over again today. Well, most of them anyway.” I grinned ruefully. “I’d probably try to minimize the damage. My knee gets awfully achy on cold damp nights, and I kind of miss the fingertip.”

Cerice grinned and shook her head. “You amaze me.”

“If we had time, I’d do more than that.” I waggled my eyebrows.

“But we don’t.” She sighed. “I have to get my sword, change clothes . . .”

“All the usual silly pomp and circumstance,” I said, referring to my late family’s fixation on the proper protocols and fancy dress.

“Are you going to wear that?” she asked, pointing to my leather jacket.

“And the pants. One of the few benefits of being an outcast is that I no longer have to conform to my great-grandmother’s fixation on courtly manner and garb. No more tights and doublets for this boy.”

“But I like you in tights,” said Cerice.

“All right,” I said. “For you I’ll wear tights. But not for this. With the Kevlar lining, my motorcycle kit is better armor than anything else I own. Especially now that I’ve got the matching helmet. Besides, I’m going to be way less conspicuous dressed like this than you are in your gear.”

“There you’ve got a point,” said Cerice. “But that’s what magic’s for. Come on, we need to get moving.”

I nodded and followed her back to our bedroom. All I had to do was change pants and grab my helmet and my magic kit. The bedroom wasn’t very big, so I did that and got out of the way. I found Melchior in the kitchen getting a piece of cold pizza out of the fridge.

“You’re eating,” I said, when he started in on it. I was surprised. It didn’t happen very often.

He nodded. “I was hungry.”

“Really?” That never happens.

“Really. The mweb’s down, and pizza’s a lot more fun than AC.”

Then I understood. Food is something webgoblins indulge in mostly for the pleasure of it, since they draw the bulk of their power from the mweb itself, both personally and for spells. They have the capacity to tap the power of the Primal Chaos directly, and until the mweb came back up, that’s what we’d have to do for spells. But chaos is dicey stuff, and most of us and our familiars try to avoid dealing with it in the raw, preferring the predigested version that the master servers channel into the mweb. Minus that reliable power source, if Melchior didn’t feel like running the risks of a direct tap, he had to fall back on chemical or electrical energy—food or the light socket. I’d have made the same choice.

“Where’s Shara?”

“Sucking on the game station’s power cord. She said that after spending time around Persephone, the whole idea of eating sounds pretty risky.”

“Big impact for such a short time,” I said. “Shara used to be a sucker for desserts. It’s hard to imagine five minutes with a goddess, even one as harsh as Persephone, changing that.”

Melchior looked up at me, his face troubled. “That’s what I said. She gave me a very funny look then and pointed out that she’d been in Hades for quite a while before we arrived. When I asked her if that meant she’d run into Persephone before, she shook her head and told me I wouldn’t understand. I think more happened to her there than she’s willing to tell.”

“Do you think we need to push her on this?” I asked.

Melchior shrugged. “I don’t know. I love Shara, and I’d trust her with my soul, but this worries me.”

“Me too, Melchior. Me too.”

Just then, Cerice joined us. She wore a tightly fitted and fully articulated suit of lamalar armor, very light and reinforced with magic so that it could stop anything short of an RPG. It was red and gold, of course, and looked something like a Greek hoplite’s gear as reimagined by a fighting-game designer. It had a heavily padded compartment in the small of her back for Shara in laptop form and a number of clips where she could attach various articles, including the rapier and Beretta semiautomatic pistol she’d already slung. She had a small pack as well, holding the diamond-shaped buckler she preferred to a parrying dagger, along with her T-faced helm. The helmet’s horsehair crest was just poking out of the top.

“You ready?” I asked.

“No, but let’s do it anyway.”

I collected my shoulder bag—now prepped with everything I’d need for making a faerie ring—while she tucked Shara away. Melchior likewise assumed laptop shape and went into my bag. Once Cerice had whistled a spell of concealment, we were ready to go. It was a really elegant little piece of magic crafted by Clotho many centuries ago and refined and rerefined by her and her sisters until it was only a few bars long.

“Where do you want to set it up?” she asked, as we went out the door.

It was a good question. We wouldn’t be able to close up behind us, and you never know when some poor soul might stumble into the ring, or worse, when something really nasty might come slithering out of it. Reality has diverged a great deal since Nyx laid the egg that became the Earth and sky, and not all the paths have been pleasant ones. There were some very dark places to be found among the infinity of worlds and even darker things lurking in them, so it had to be someplace isolated, where things that go bump in the night wouldn’t be a problem.

Fortunately, I’d had time to think it through. “The river.”

She shrugged. “I guess you’re the expert.”

I tried not to laugh at that. I’d built one, once, and I hadn’t enjoyed the experience. A short walk brought us to the Charles, where we made our way under the Anderson Bridge, just upstream from the Weld Boathouse. It wasn’t exactly isolated—nowhere in the Boston area is—but between the hour and the icy cold, we were alone. Even in January the channel wasn’t fully frozen—too much salt swept in from the harbor—but there were big sheets of ice along the edges.

“There.” I pointed at the nearest.

“What?” asked Cerice, looking baffled. “Where?”

“On that chunk of ice.”

“You’re crazy, you know that, right? The ice all along here is brittle. It could break off at any moment.”

“That’s what makes it perfect,” I said. Cerice looked dubious. “Look, just trust me on this. Everything’ll be clear in a few minutes.”

“I think I’m beginning to see why Melchior is such a worrier.” She briefly closed her eyes. “All right, it’s your show. Get on with it.”

“Thanks for all your confidence,” I said, winking at her.

Before I picked my way down onto the ice, I clipped my blades onto my belt and checked the hang of my pistol. Entering a faerie ring unarmed is a fool’s choice. Cerice followed me but stopped with her feet still on dry ground. As I knelt and opened my bag, extracting the tools I’d need, Melchior shifted back to goblin shape and poked his nose out.

“Are we there yet?”

I nodded. “All that’s left is the ring.”

“That’s like a parachutist saying all that’s left is the part where we jump out of the plane,” he observed grumpily.

I didn’t answer. I had other things on my mind. Taking a fifteen-foot piece of networking cable out of my bag, I used a jumper to connect the two ends so that it looped back on itself.

I’d just lifted the athame I’d borrowed from Cerice’s stash to replace my melted one when Melchior held up a hand.

“What?” I asked.

“Just a thought.”

“Which is?”

“I was wondering if whatever cut this world off from the mweb will have any effect on things like the faerie rings.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “How would that work?”

“Well, what if it’s not actually the mweb itself that’s having problems? What if there’s some kind of turbulence or storm in the Primal Chaos itself? What if the many layers of reality are being tossed around by that?”

I set the athame down. “Do you have anything to back that up?” I asked. “Because if you do, I’d like to hear it before I take any irrevocable steps.”

“No. I’m just speculating.”

“So do you want to call this little trip off?”

He shook his head. “We have to go and go soon.”

“Then why are you sharing?” I said, letting my exasperation color my words.

“Well, the idea’s a scary one, and I didn’t want to be afraid all by my lonesome.”

“Right,” I said, with a sigh. “Then if you don’t have any other gloomy little ideas to share, I’ll get back to work.”

I picked the athame up again. This time, no one interrupted me as I cut a long shallow slice in the palm of my left hand. The blood welled up quickly, and I’d soon smeared it over the entire length of the cable and the connector. After that was done, I whistled the spell for closing athame-generated wounds and went to work laying the loop of cable out in as perfect a circle as I could manage. That involved crawling out onto the thinnest part of the ice, which made an ominous cracking noise as it took my weight.

Next came the really dangerous part, opening a hole into the Primal Chaos. As a direct descendant of the Titans, I have the stuff bound into the very matrix of my bone and being. I called on that resonance as it was expressed in the blood I’d smeared on the cable to put a microrip in the fabric of reality.

Pure raw chaos poured through but not in the controlled way I’d expected. The last time I’d done this, it had raced thrice around the circle of blood, cutting a faerie ring into the turf as neatly as a glass cutter might put a hole in a window. This time, the entire circle flash-burned in a single instant, and the air above the ring actually caught fire. The explosion threw me a good fifteen feet.

The world wavered and rippled around me, like air over hot pavement. Shadows flitted at the edge of my vision, making wings of darkness. The magical turbulence felt as if I’d gotten in the way of a tidal bore. As I fought to hold on to consciousness, I couldn’t help wondering whether the effects were real or in my head, because if it was the former, we were in deep, deep trouble.