“I guess we’re going to have to try hacking Necessity again.”

“Do you think we’ll get anywhere?”

“I don’t know. A lot depends on exactly what we’re up against. Shara? Can you tell us anything more? About what happened to you on the way back from Hades or about the thing that wears your face?”

“Maybe. It’s . . . hazy. I seem to be missing some bits.”

“How could that be?” I asked. “I thought webgoblins had perfect memories.”

“Oh shit,” said Melchior. “Why didn’t I see that before?”

“What?”

“The e-mail version of Shara that we sent from Hades was 2.29 terabytes.”

“And?” I asked.

“The one that we received was only 2.21.”

“So,” I said, “something like eighty gigabytes of Shara went missing on the way home. How much virus do you think we could put into eighty gigabytes?”

That was a lot of memory. I didn’t like the idea much at all, though it would certainly explain a supervirus in Necessity’s core systems.

Apparently, neither did Cerice. “Last year, a twenty-eight-kilobyte worm almost took down the whole internet in my Harvard’s DecLocus. That’s less than one-two-millionth of the size.”

“Hell,” I said. “Scorched Earth was only a few dozen meg, and that’s the program I crashed the mweb with. Sure it was temporary, but . . .”

“I think it’s worse than that,” Shara said very quietly. “The more I think about it, the more I think I must have copied myself into Necessity’s system so that I could fulfill both the commands of Persephone and the needs of friendship. I’ve got no way to prove it, but it would explain why I feel like I’ve been split in two, like half of me, of my soul, is elsewhere. I’m guessing that’s where these weird flashes of memory are coming from. Maybe it’s just lingering aftereffects of being dead but . . .”

“No,” said Melchior. “I think you’re right. That gorgon wasn’t just a construct, not even eighty gigs’ worth. It had real presence and awareness. I told Ravirn that something about it seemed both strange and familiar and that it gave me the deep down creeps. That’s why; because it was Shara and not-Shara at the same time.”

“Tell me that you’re not suggesting that an evil clone of Shara is now in control of security for the servers that run the mweb,” said Cerice.

“Well,” said Melchior, “ ‘evil clone’ sounds pretty trite when you’re talking about souls and software instead of flesh and blood. But I think it’s also mighty close to the truth.”

I sighed. “I guess we’d better have another go at Necessity’s security. We need to rescue Shara again. And this time, we have to get it right.” I looked at her. “What do you suppose the chances are that your duplicate will welcome us with open arms?”

“Like I said, I can’t remember much. But if Persephone programmed this thing in such a way that it’s willing to destroy the whole damn mweb, what do you think the chances are that it’ll blink at killing one of us?”

“That’s about what I figured. So what do we do first?”

“Clear out of this DecLocus.” Melchior made a loop with his finger to include all of our surroundings. “No mweb here. Garbage Faerie is completely cut off. I just wish Ahllan had been here. She’d be a real help, and I’m worried about her.”

“There’s no help for that,” I said with a sigh. “Shara and the mweb come first. I guess that means it’s faerie ring time.”

“Where to?” asked Cerice.

“I guess we just jump around until we hit a DecLocus that’s still on the net.”

“That might not work out so well,” said Shara.

“I know I’m going to hate the answer,” I said. “But why do you say that?”

“What happens if you and Melchior are jacked in, and then the world you’re working from gets cut off?”

I thought about that for a moment, about the possibility of the all-important psychic link back to my body getting severed. “Bad things. Very bad. Melchior might survive as a sort of self-aware subroutine on the server, but probably not.”

“And you’d be dead,” said Cerice.

“Yeah. Anybody got any bright ideas?” I asked. Nobody spoke up. “I was afraid of that, because the only one I’ve got is really stupid and unnecessarily dangerous.”

I wondered again about how much of my current thinking was Raven and how much Ravirn. I was starting to picture the Raven part of me as an invisible entity eternally hovering overhead, a sort of feathery sword of Damocles.

“So,” said Melchior after a while, “are you going to tell us what this idea is?”

“First let me make a last call for other plans,” I said. “Anyone? Nope? Nothing? OK. The mweb servers are located within the Temple of Fate at the foot of Olympus. They’ve got an actual hardwired link from there to wherever it is Necessity keeps her network. It doesn’t matter what happens to the world resource locator forks. The temple computers can’t be taken off-line, not with anything short of dynamite.”

“You want us to sneak into the Temple of Fate?” demanded Melchior. “Atropos probably has wanted posters with our faces on them plastered on the front doors. That’s crazy!”

“Yes. It is. Completely. But I’m not quite there yet. What I’m thinking is that Cerice can go to the temple. She’s still in good standing.”

“Sort of,” said Cerice. “It’s not like Clotho doesn’t know about our relationship. Your thread might have been erased, but mine is still firmly in the hands of Fate. She can look at it any time she wants and see exactly what I’ve been doing.”

“So don’t act suspicious,” I said.

“Oh, that’s very helpful.” She sighed. “But I guess I’m with Mel here—no better idea. So I casually saunter into one of the most heavily guarded computing centers in existence. Then what?”

“Then you plug Shara in and create a virtual network as a back door. We log onto that from one of the computers on Olympus proper, and we’re in.”

“Wow.” Melchior shook his head. “That’s so stupid it just might work. Whose computer were you thinking of using, Zeus’s?” He chuckled. Then smiled. Then, when I didn’t smile along with him, he started frowning. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Come on,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of choice. All of the wireless access on Olympus is controlled directly by Athena, and her security is nearly as nasty as Necessity’s. I’d really rather not add another layer of killer hacking to the job. Besides, how bad could it be? We’ve at least been in Zeus’s office, back when we fixed his little browser problem. He never uses that computer for anything but downloading porn anyway. He’ll never notice.”

“Sure, why not?” Melchior sighed. “Besides, Eris suggested you get the big guy pissed off at you anyway, so you could finish collecting the set of annoyed pole powers. Man, when you become a force for chaos, you really become a force for chaos. Just for the record, I officially hate this plan.”

“But I’m not hearing the word veto.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not, because I really don’t have a better idea. Besides, when you compare the possible consequences of invading Zeus’s personal space with the risks inherent to hacking Necessity, it’s really hard to work up too much of a lather over the former. He’s only going to kill us. Whereas she . . .” Melchior mimed an eagle pecking at my liver.

“Yeah, thanks, Mel. That one’s starting to get a little old. We’ll just have to make sure we don’t get caught.”

“Could somebody just shoot me and save all the suspense?” said Shara. “Hades is no fun, but hey, at least I know my way around now.”

“Which reminds me of something I’ve been worrying about on that front,” I said.

“Oh goody,” said Shara. “Do I want to know about this?”

“Probably not, but it’s only fair that I pay you back for the bit about being cut off from the mweb midhack. Also, I think it’s something you need to be aware of.”

“All right, hit me.”

“If your soul really is split between you and the Shara in the machine, what happens if one of you dies?”

Panic flitted across her face for a second. Then she steadied down. “You’re right. I didn’t want to know that. Why do you bring it up?”

“Because I want all of us to be very careful about how we deal with the version of you that’s running around outside your body.”

“Got it.” Shara gave a crazed little laugh. “Try not to kill myself when I see me, even if I’m not really me but a twisted monster instead. And here I thought this evil clone stuff would just make for a great way to double-date. You know, much as I hate to say it, dead had its pluses, eternal peace high on the list.” She shook her head. “Shall we get this disaster going?”

“Probably. If you’ll all just join me in the faerie ring, I’ll get us moving in the right direction.” Urgh, I was becoming blasé about faerie rings. Not a good sign.

Once more I had the experience of being simultaneously in thousands of different places all at once. This go-round I had a brief moment to wonder how that experience of space related to my internal time. If you experience a tenth of a second spent in ten thousand different places all at once, have you actually burned a thousand seconds of your life?

Then we arrived, and I had more pressing matters to attend to. Our point of entry was a circle of dancing satyrs in a small glade. The sky was overcast, and it was cold and damp. With Persephone in Hades, winter held sway on the slopes of the mountain. Well, The Mountain really. The original Olympus was the first island in the great sea of chaos, where the Titans founded their dynasty. All other mountains everywhere are just reflections of Olympus, or at least that’s the legend. The truth? Who knows? Gods lie all the time, and there was no one else around to bear witness.

The satyrs broke their circle in the instant after we appeared, wandering off to chase nymphs and whatnot. There are no permanent rings on Olympus. Zeus does not allow it. It’s part of a long list of things he doesn’t allow. Guns, for example. Doesn’t like the noise, he says. Too much like thunder, and thunder “belongs to Zeus alone.” I took a moment to make sure my shoulder holster was fully concealed, and Cerice tucked her Beretta deep down in the bottom of her bag. Then it was time to part. Cerice was going down, and I was going up. Trails led in both directions.

“Be careful,” I said.

“You too.” She gave me a quick kiss.

I just squeezed her tight for a moment, then let her go and started climbing.

“Are you ever going to get it together?” asked Melchior, once we’d gotten out of sight of the others.

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“I suppose that I do,” I replied. “But honestly, I don’t know. I think that’s more up to Cerice than me.”

He sighed. “That’s a dodge. But I won’t argue with you.” We walked a little farther. “Does Tisiphone really have a thing for you?”

“She says so, and it sure seems like it. But what do I know about Furies?”

He gave me a long, appraising look, then shook his head. “Huh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, but he didn’t answer in the few remaining moments before our path disgorged itself onto a broader road and we reached the gateway to the great Palace of Olympus. I tucked him into the bag as I looked it all over once more.

It was a big, sprawling place on the very top of the mountain, all white marble and fluted pillars, a stereotype of ancient Greece on a grand scale. Like someone had started with the Parthenon and just kept adding matching rooms. Once upon a time it had been painted in a wide variety of bright colors, just like the Greek temples in the world below. But first Rome conquered Greece, then it fell in turn to the barbarians who had ushered in the dark ages, at which point people stopped paying attention to the old temples, and the paint faded away.

I missed all that, of course, not yet having been born, but I hear stories. The big guy was pretty depressed about the rise of Christianity. Oh, he hadn’t been all that happy about Rome devouring Greece either, but that was mitigated somewhat by the Roman adoption of the Greek pantheon. Sure they called him Jupiter instead of Zeus, but at least they kept the sacrifices coming.

I’m told that when Constantine moved the capital and declared Rome a Christian Nation, Zeus just about had a stroke. Who can blame him? It wasn’t until the Renaissance, with its focus on rediscovering the classics, that he came out of his funk. By then all of Greece’s temples and statues were bleached ice white, and the revivalists, not knowing any better, did everything up the same way. That’s when Zeus had the paint scrubbed off everything on Olympus, said he liked it better that way anyway. Pathetic, really.

The main gate was a wide-open doorway in the front of a little classical temple that straddled the road. I was just about to head on through when a large figure in gray stepped between me and the door. Did I say large? Cancel that. Huge.

“Where do you think yer goin’?” boomed a voice from somewhere in the vicinity of the figure’s head.

I looked up, way up. Picture a fat rent-a-cop, complete with silly cap and riding boots. Inflate him to three times normal size. Give him mirror shades. Mirror shade, really, a single bright reflector covering a single eye centered in an enormous sloping forehead. You get the basic picture. I was face-to-belt-buckle with a cyclops, or perhaps cycops would be a better term.

This one was packing heat rather than the more traditional club, a revolver the size of a small cannon. One of his beefy hands lay none-too-subtly on the grip of the pistol. I was frankly surprised, since guns were officially banned from the premises.

“I asked you a question, boy!” bellowed the cyclops. “I expect an answer.”

I pointed toward the door behind him. “Through there, isn’t it obvious?” I hadn’t had many dealings with the various members of the cyclops family over the years, but I recognized the attitude this one was sporting. I knew that if I started backing down, he’d run me right over.

“And I suppose you just expect me to let you by?”

“I do indeed.”

“Not gonna happen. Not without you do some explainin’ about who you are and what’s your business.”

“Fair enough. I was once a child of House Lachesis, the lady who measures out the length of your life. You may have heard of her, sister of the one who snips?” I made clipping motions.

He swallowed hard but came back quickly. “I note youse is speakin’ in the past tense there. Whose House do you belong to now?”

“My own, House Raven. At least that’s what Clotho called me when she named me a power. If you need a reference for that, I suggest you call Tisiphone. She can vouch for my status.”

“Tisiphone, the Fury?” Sweat was beading up along the line where his hat touched his forehead. One fat drop rolled down from temple to jawbone.

“No, Tisiphone, the house cat. Of course Tisiphone, the Fury. What are you? Some kind of moron? Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got business within.” I moved to go around him, but he sidestepped to block my passage. “You’re making me both late and angry. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to do either.”

“Sorry, sir.” The cyclops’s voice took on a sort of oily respect. “It sounds like you’re legit, but I still can’t let you through looking like that.”

“Huh?” I had no idea what he was talking about now.

“Dress code. New orders from Zeus hisself. Nobody gets in without they go classical.” He jerked a fat thumb at a marble statue of a Greek shepherd boy wearing the traditional white, one-shouldered tunic. Beside it was a shepherdess wearing the matching loose dress.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

“Nope, that’s official O-lym-pi-an policy.” He sounded out each syllable.

“And what you’re wearing fits into that how?”

“Which side of the door am I on?” he asked.

“And the pistol? Last time I stopped by, carrying that would have gotten you a date with Miss Lightning. ZOT! Instant charcoal briquette.”

“It’s not technically a gun,” he said. “It’s an updated Gyrojet, fires a small rocket rather than a bullet. Subsonic, so there’s no bang, at least at first. It keeps the old man happy.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like you’re splitting hairs.”

“Not me, buddy. That one’s straight from Athena. You can tell her that if you want, but ever since she jumped out of Zeus’s noggin, she’s been a little funny about that particular metaphor. Anyway, I don’t make the rules, I just enforce ’em. That means that out here on duty, I have to wear this.” He tapped a finger on his chest beside the copper badge inscribed with a lightning bolt. “And pack the heat as official Olympian external security. Inside, it’s a loincloth and club, ’cause that’s the way we always gets described in the litera-toor. Given my druthers, I’d let you in as is, but it ain’t happenin’. So, either you put on a tunic, you head back the way you came, or we have to work this out the hard way.”

He did not look happy at the prospect, but neither did he look like he’d back down. So I nodded. Starting a fight with the gate guard was not going to help me sneak into Zeus’s office.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a loaner tunic?”

The cyclops visibly relaxed. “That we do. Tons of ’em.” He gestured for me to follow him into the temple and nodded at a curtained-off alcove in one corner. “In the changing area, every size you could want. Even got one for blue boy there.” He jabbed a finger at Melchior, who had been keeping a very low profile.

“Not really,” said the webgoblin.

The cyclops just nodded.

A few minutes later we stepped out, ready to face the world. Well, not really. In Fate’s family everyone is expected to wear the garb of a sixteenth-century courtier at formal functions. I’d always felt a little self-conscious in tights, but I’d grown up with them. Turns out I hadn’t really understood what self-conscious meant. Now I did.

The tunics were one size fits all. Not in the classic there-was-one-size-and-everyone-wore-it-as-best-they-could way. No, this used magic. You put it on and it adjusted itself to your size. And whoever had decided what constituted “your size” had a very different idea about hemlines than I did. It covered the appropriate bits, but only just. Bending over, a stiff breeze, or, well, a stiff something else, would all endanger my modesty in a serious way. Also, the thing was more than a little on the sheer side. Again, I was technically covered, but only just. I found myself with a powerful desire to keep my bag firmly in front of me, or I would have if I’d been allowed to keep it. Instead, I had a borrowed leather wallet that slung over a shoulder but didn’t hang low enough to be of any use.

“Damn rent-a-clops,” said Melchior, tugging at his own hem as we exited the back door of the temple into Olympus proper. “This thing makes me feel naked.”

“Mel, you don’t wear clothes.”

“Yeah, but that’s different. Being naked and feeling that way are not the same thing at all. One’s natural, the other is exposed. The sandals suck, too.”

I had to agree with him. The pair of loosely foot-shaped pieces of leather held on by a bondage fetishist’s dream of a strapping system might provide some protection for the sole of the foot, but they were shit for traction. This was a problem, since the same idiot responsible for the rest of the décor had decreed the streets be made of gleaming slabs of polished white marble. Pretty? Yes. Practical? Not so much. I missed my boots and leathers, especially with the winter cold.

The shoes meant that most of my attention during our hike up to the top of the mountain and the biggest temple of them all stayed on my feet and not on the scenery. But hey, there’s only so much you can say about an architectural monoculture done up in stark white stone. It gets old fast, and I was glad when we finished our trip.

Another rent-a-clops stood on duty just outside the main door, this time wearing the requisite loincloth and carrying a club, and looking damned cold. He did, however, have a little white earpiece with a wire leading back over his shoulder and down to a suspicious-looking bulge under the back flap of his loincloth. When he gave me a fish eye but waved me inside anyway, I figured that the news from the front gate must have whispered itself in his ear. That put me inside the building, but only as far as the audience hall. I figured I’d have to work a lot harder for Zeus’s actual office, even if he never did go in there except for affairs of state.

The interior architecture was almost, though not quite, as monotonous as the exterior. There was lots more white marble, enough to make the place look like the world’s biggest and most expensive executive restroom. Even the cubicles, installed to house Zeus’s ever-growing support staff and tucked in neat rows behind the support pillars, were white marble. I gave them a wide berth as I made my way through the front room and toward the back and the stairs. Zeus’s office is a little miniature temple in the round, sitting like a cupola on the roof of the main temple. Through some magic of Zeus’s, it’s invisible from street level. An esthetic blessing, that—otherwise, it would look like some sort of growth.

When I’d been here last, I’d had time to marvel at the views, since it’s quite literally situated at the top of the world. I’d also wondered briefly about the fact that it was completely open to the elements and yet none of the papers on the desk ever went blowing around and it was a perfect balmy seventy-four degrees. But hey, what’s the fun of being a weather god if you can’t dick with local conditions in your favor?

I was still trying to figure out how I’d talk my way past the secretary and any other security when I stepped through the arch into the outer office. A big square room with no windows, it held a desk—white marble, what else—several really uncomfortable-looking chairs—same again—a stock of out-of-date copies of Modern Mythos Magazine—motto “All the Godsip fit to print”—and not much else besides the locked door leading to the spiral stairs and the big guy’s office.

Now, Zeus tends to hire the dim and curvy for receptionist duty—available in large quantities from the ranks of Olympus’s nymphs—but having one abandon her post just when I needed a break seemed a little too good to be true. It was at this point that I decided that either Tyche—Dame Fortune herself—was smiling on me from her own office, just down the hill a bit—or I was being set up again. Being of a suspicious nature, I figured it was probably the latter, but I really needed to have another crack at Necessity’s network, so I decided to pretend I believed I could have luck that good.

Taking one last look around to make sure I really was all alone, I slipped over to the desk and reached underneath to hit the door release. With a gentle click, the lock opened, and I was on my way upstairs. I’d gotten around one and a half loops of the stair when a third possibility suggested itself to me rather forcefully. Not only was the secretary not missing, but the big guy himself was in as well, and dictation wasn’t on the menu.

There’s something about rhythmic thumping and moans of “Oh Zeusy, give it to me,” that really doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. That was a serious problem. While I might be able to talk a subordinate around to the idea that I was just a repair guy on a call, the ostensible caller was not going to buy it.

“Now what?” whispered Melchior.

“Why don’t you slip up there and see if there’s any chance they’ll be done soon, or if we might be able to use the computer while they’re distracted?”

“Why don’t you do it?”

I raised an eyebrow and held my hands up in a comparison of our relative sizes and stealthiness. Since Melchior isn’t much bigger than a cat, and he’s a whole lot smarter, he had to agree. With a disgruntled snort, he slid out of sight upward. After a very brief interval, he returned, shaking his head.

“Not a chance. The chaise is pulled up right in front of the computer, and they appear to be playing monkey-see monkey-do with streaming video from some site devoted to the better understanding of human fluid exchange. So, what’s Plan B?”

I shrugged. “I guess we’ll have to find another computer. Once we get out of here, we’d better check in with Cerice and see how things are going on her end.”

Melchior nodded, and as soon as we’d found a quiet alleyway, he opened a VOMP line. I wasn’t thrilled about making even that much connection to the local wireless, not with Athena running the network security for Olympus. But VOMP is low bandwidth, and I’d be just one caller among many. Everyone on Olympus uses the system these days. It’s become the standard for the whole great sprawl of our contemporary pantheon. That’s why I’d set Kira up with a VOMP phone. Of course, I’d only remain below the radar as long as I kept my usage at a reasonable level. If I tried to open the multiple channels I’d need to send myself into the system on a hacking jaunt, I’d light up Athena’s bandwidth monitors like Apollo’s chariot rolling into a dark room.

When Cerice picked up the line, I gave her a quick rundown of what had happened and asked how she was doing.

“We’re screwed,” she answered, calmly and very finally.

“Would you care to elaborate on that?” I asked.

“I got bored with waiting for you and jacked in for a quick look-see myself.”

No surprise there. Cerice is every bit as much of a hacker and cracker as I am, and just as likely to succumb to the temptation to explore a bit. “And?”

“You remember that black box we found when we went looking for Shara?”

“The one that sent her off to souladmin@necessity . . . ? Of course I remember it. Who could forget a dot-dot-dot mweb address? What about it?”

“It’s gone.”

“Gone? It can’t be gone. It was part of the hardware architecture.”

“It’s gone, and there aren’t any others either. Shara told me where to find the one that you and Eris cracked. It’s gone, too. There are no links from the mweb’s core architecture to Necessity’s system anymore. We’re locked out.”