Zeklos sawr him looking and approached.

Miller snarled. "What do you want?"

"The Heir came to my apartment today."

Miller looked at Cal. "Didn't he say he was going out of town?"

Cal nodded. Yeah, he had. He turned to Zek.

"Why would he want to see you?"

"He talk about MV. He say if he is to join, then he wish to know about it."

"Why didn't he come to us?" Miller said.

Zek eyed him. "You have not been very welcoming."

That was true in Miller's case, but Cal thought he and the guy had connected in some way. He was getting a bad feeling about this. The only reason to go to a guy on the outs with a group was to hear the dirt.

"What exactly did he want to know?"

Miller added, "And what exactly did you tell him?"

"Very little. But I do not think that is why he come." He reached into his pocket. "He brought this."

He held out his hand. Cal felt an electric jolt when he saw the Starfire's filled hollow.

"Oh, shit," Miller said. "Where the fuck did he get that?"

"He did not say. He ran out before I could ask him."

"When was this?" Cal said.

"A little after one o'clock."

"Why did he run out?"

"I do not know."

Zek's eyes said that wasn't quite true, but that would keep till later. Cal didn't want to get sidetracked from the Slarfire. Cyanide tips were what the yeniceri had been taught to use for a hit. And the Starfire was favored because it had such a lame hollow.

"One o'clock," Miller said. "Diana says she heard the commotion of a fight around one-thirty. The guy's in the neighborhood, pumping Zeklos, then he leaves, and a little while later the 0 and everybody else are slaughtered." He looked at Cal. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I can't imagine what you're thinking."

Miller leaned closer. "Maybe this 'Heir' wasn't anything of the sort. For all we know he could have been the Adversary in disguise, and we invited him in. Hell, we dragged him in like a Trojan fucking horse."

"The 0 would have known."

"Yeah? He didn't know he was going to be torn to pieces. Maybe he got fooled."

Cal didn't want to think that, but he had to admit the timing was suspicious.

Miller pounded a fist on the console. "I never trusted that fucker. 1 smelled something wrong from the git-go."

Cal took the Starfire from Zek and pointed back to the computers.

"Finish up so we can get out of here."

He pocketed it as he turned back to Miller.

"We'll worry about the bullet later. Right now we need to decide about the woman and the girl. What do you think we should do?"

He hesitated, then shrugged. "Finish the job."

"How are you—?"

"Uh-uh." Miller was shaking his head. "Not me. I'm not letting our new Oculus out of my sight."

Cal felt the same way. Who knew how many were left in the world?

"So who? It'll be a kamikaze mission."

Miller had that pensive look again. "Kamikaze…"

"What are you thinking?"

"I know just the guy." He straightened and called over Cal's shoulder. "Hey, Zeklos—want to redeem yourself?"

30

As soon as Rasalom disappeared, Jack felt the bench release his body. He sprang to the railing and peered below, but saw only dark, churning water. No sign of him.

Gone.

So what?

He stepped back and slumped into the seat again. He glanced right and saw the lady and her dog still standing there.

"How many of you are there?" he said.

She stepped closer.

"As many as need be."

Women with dogs had been dropping in and out of his life since last year. They all knew more about what was going on in his life than he did. They seemed to be a third force in the shadow war. One had told him that if they had their way, both the Otherness and the Ally would be chased off to do their interfering somewhere else.

"What did you mean about preventing him from feeding?"

"I blocked his access to your pain."

"You can do that?"

"Only on a one-to-one basis. If 1 could block him from all the world's pain, he'd shrivel up and blow away."

Jack sat in silence, wondering at the sick nature of what had become his reality.

Finally he looked up at her. "Is it true what he said—that all this is the Ally's doing?"

She nodded. "I am afraid so."

He felt weak, as if life were oozing out of him.

"But I'm supposed to be on the Ally's side. Is this what it does to its people? Is this any way to treat your troops?"

"You've been told about the war: It's not a battle between Good and Evil, but more like a battle between the indifferent and the inimical. We cannot comprehend their scope, nor understand their motivations, so it's useless to try."

"But I thought the Ally would at least—"

"Obey the rules? Follow a code? Neither force has rules or morality. The concepts are alien to them. When you are so vast and so powerful, you've moved beyond the abstracts of right and wrong. Whatever gets you what you want is right, whatever impedes you is wrong. We can make rules for ourselves, but not for them."

"Then we're pawns."

"Only some of us. You are one."

"Great. Just great."

"The Ally regards us as nothing more than a possession. Let me give you an example. Do you know what sea glass is?"

"Of course."

What did this have to do—?

"Then you know it's simply broken glass that has been worn and rounded by time, tide, and sand. People collect it. The whitish sea glass is the most common and can be found every day on every beach. The colored glass—the red, blue, green—is much more rare and prized by collectors."

"I don't see what—"

"Just bear with me. I'm trying to put this in the most concrete terms possible. Different worlds, different realities are sea glass to the Ally. It collects them and gathers them under its cloak. But the most prized of these are the sentient realities—the equivalent of colored sea glass. Now let's suppose you have a collection of sea glass. How much would you care about the individual pieces? Would you take each out at every opportunity and examine it under a loupe for any new flaws? Would you love it and cuddle it and polish it every day?"

She waited for an answer, so Jack shook his head and said, "No. Of course not."

"Same with the Ally. It devotes only the tiniest fraction of its consciousness to us. But let's say there's a predator out there that eats sea glass and is always on the hunt for more. You're going to protect that collection, aren't you. Not because you care for every single individual piece, but simply because it's yours."

"I've got the picture."

"Not quite. A full frontal assault by the predator won't work because you are virtual equals and you can repel it. That was tried back in the First Age, and it failed. But that doesn't mean the predator has gone away. It hasn't. And it never will. So you've got to worry about sneaky, backdoor moves and—'" She shook her head. "1 feel I'm trivializing this, and I don't mean to."

"I'm following."

"Good. So they battle on a smaller scale."

"Who's winning?"

"The Otherness, I'm afraid. The Ally is an interested collector who wants this world, this reality. The Otherness needs it—needs us. It feeds on worlds such as this. Its hunger is a more insistent drive than the Ally's possessiveness."

"But how's it going to take us away?"

"Through subterfuge. By tricking the Ally into believing this is a nonsen-tient world—that it's dead white glass instead of the colored sort. That is what Rasalom meant about restructuring the battlefield to his liking. The Otherness is counting on the Ally losing interest then and withdrawing—effectively abandoning us."

"Can it do that?"

"It has already started. You know of Opus Omega?"