The children began to scream.

The ganger sprang into a ready pose, pistol leveled and eyes searching the room for a threat. Timea whirled to face the kids. They were all sitting bolt upright in their chairs, bodies rigid and trembling. Their mouths were open, their lips pulled back in grimaces that revealed their teeth, the classic grin of fear. And they were screaming. Screaming with a shrill terror that sent a bone-deep shiver through Timea.

And their eyes were still staring straight ahead under closed lids…

Timea ran to the side of the nearest boy, knelt beside him, and pressed two fingers to his throat, searching for a racing pulse or other signs of induced biofeedback. She reached for the cable that connected the boy's electrode net to the cyberdeck on the table in front of him. Should she jack him out? What the frag was happening here?

Timea's mind raced through the possibilities as the children continued to scream. The kids were running cool decks; the sensory input wasn't much more than that of an off-the-shelf simsense unit. They faced no danger from any black IC they might encounter, save for the possibility of being temporarily stunned by it. But they'd be slagged by dump shock if Timea simply unplugged them…

The children continued to scream.

Two more gangers ran into the room, weapons in their fists.

"Whuzzit?" one barked. "Why are the ruggers bawlin'?"

"I dunno," Timea shouted back, slipping into streeter before she could correct herself. "I'd have to jack in to find out."

The ganger that Timea had been flirting with raised his pistol and fired a round into the ceiling, making the other gangers jump. "Hoi! Shut the frag up!" he shouted at the kids.

The children didn't even flinch.

Timea's eyes narrowed. "They can't hear you," she shouted. "They're in the Matrix. Something there is creepin' 'em out."

Weird, that it had hit all of the children at once. The kids' personas should have been scattered far and wide across the Matrix, testing their fledgling decking skills in widely scattered systems. They wouldn't all have blundered into the same node at once. Would they?

The oldest ganger returned his attention to the corridor outside the door. "Chill it," he told the others. "The ruggers may be a distraction. This could be a bang-up."

The cell phone on Timea's hip began to vibrate. In the bedlam, she couldn't hear its soft ring. Instinctively she picked it up and jammed it against her ear, placing a finger in her other ear so she could hear above the din. She recognized the voice of the caller at once. An older man's voice, crisp and precise.

"Timea? What's going on there?"

"Mr. Halberstam?"

"Something's disrupting a number of our… students," the headmaster continued. "It seems to be centered in the Seattle RTG. What reactions are you seeing at your end?"

"I… The kids…" Timea's eyes swept over the screaming children. Their bodies were starting to twist now as their terror pushed the RAS overrides to the limit. What was doing this to them?

There was only way Timea could find out. "I'm going to jack in," she told the headmaster.

"Don't!" Halberstam barked. "We've already lost two deckers who tried to access that RTG. Try-"

Timea lunged forward, dropping the phone. But she wasn't quick enough to stop the ganger who'd fired his gun earlier. Scowling at the children, shaking his head at their screams, he strode over and yanked the electrode net off the nearest child's head-the elf girl. She flailed out of the chair and convulsed across the floor, heedless of the chair and table legs that her limbs were striking.

"No!" the girl screamed. "Get 'em off! They're biting me. Get 'em awaaaaay!"

"You fragging brainwipe!" Timea shouted at the ganger. "Why'd you jack her out?" She shoved him aside before he could repeat the damage he'd done. Then she moved to the girl, tried to get her to stop beating her arms and legs against the wall.

"Get 'em off!" the girl wailed.

"Get what off?" Timea caught hold of the girl's wrists, dodged her kicking feet. "There's nothing on you!"

"Devil rats!" the girl shrilled. Her open eyes darted back and forth as she watched some private horror that only she could see. "They're in the squat, Ma. They're biting me…"

"Timea!" the cell phone squawked from where it lay on the floor. "It sounds as though that subject is suffering from a psychotic episode. What other manifestations of-"

Timea reached for the only cyberdeck in the room with a DNI plug. "I'm going on-line," she shouted at the phone. "It's the only way I'm gonna see what's wrong."

She glared at the ganger, who sneered back at her, his machismo insulted. He didn't look so cute any more. Just stupid.

Timea flexed, and the razors in her arm slid out, then back. "Don't unjack me," she told him grimly. "Unless you want a taste of these."

She jammed the plug into the jack at her temple and logged onto the Seattle RTG in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

The clinic disappeared.

09:48:00 PST

The warm, enveloping tunnel that he had been sliding through suddenly disappeared, leaving Red Wraith suspended in a void. Just a moment ago he'd been experiencing a sense of profound oneness with an intelligence greater than his own, a bond with something larger and more powerful than himself-something that was going to lead him gently by the hand into a beautiful new world.

Now that promise was gone. Red Wraith's feelings of joy and delight were replaced by a sense of intense claustrophobia and fear as the intelligence that had been guiding him somehow changed into something dark and foreboding. Even though he was surrounded by inky darkness, Red Wraith had the sense of something watching him, judging him, sifting through his thoughts and seeking out all that was unworthy and vile…

Lines appeared, startling him out of his fearful reverie.

At first they were nothing more than vague suggestions of gray against the inky black void. Then they grew in luminosity and joined to form a geometric figure that was box-like in shape-a tesseract with Red Wraith at its center. The "rooms" of the tesseract solidified, filled with objects. Each was detailed and distinct: a military office in London, a penthouse overlooking Berlin, the sauna of a private Turkish bath, a parking garage in a Paris condominium, a rooftop garden in the Saeder-Krupp corporate arcology in Essen, the interior of a limousine rolling through the streets of Antwerp, a villa in the hills overlooking Athens-and all of them disturbingly familiar…

Within each of these settings, a shadowy figure moved. They appeared ghostlike at first, and for a moment or two Red Wraith wondered if the tesseract was some sort of node, filled with other deckers. Then the figures also solidified. Although he should have been incapable of remembering them, Red Wraith recognized them at once.

Each was a dead man-a political leader or prominent figure whom the cyberassassin Daniel Bogdanovich had been sent to eliminate. While every one of them was recognizable by his or her build and clothes, each wore Daniel's face like a rubber mask over his own, giving them a terrible and horrifying symmetry.

Red Wraith adopted a defensive posture as the figures approached. They came at him from above, below, and all sides, each closing in from one of the many rooms of the tesseract. Red Wraith spun this way and that, wondering which attack would come first.

Without warning, he felt a dull thump at the back of his neck that sent his head rocking forward. As a wave of blood ran down his back, he realized what had happened. The cranial bomb at the base of his skull had exploded, rendering him utterly paralyzed. He was still upright and on his feet, but all he could do was stand frozen in place, watching helplessly as his attackers approached…