Thuy jumped to one side as a rubber net descended rather slowly upon the spot where she'd been standing. The woman holding it was indeed Gladax, narrow-eyed in concentration. She wore dirty green sweatpants and a cheap T-shirt with a smeared dragon print.

Thuy grabbed her red plaid coat and ran out the back of the patio into an unpaved alley. Gladax did a nimble teleportation hop to head her off, net at the ready, looking two stories tall. But even though Gladax could hop, her physical body moves were slow. Thuy dodged the net, and flung handfuls of sand and broken shells at the old woman. A bit of grit got into Gladax's eye.

"Little brat," said Gladax in a deep, slow Hibraner voice. She set to removing the mote, focusing all her attention on the task. Unobserved for this one moment, Thuy teleported herself to the Hibrane San Francisco.

She landed next to a wet dog sniffing the doorstep of the clothing store. Or, no, that was Azaroth, if you looked at him with your regular eyes. To the telepathic gaze, he was a white and tan collie-beagle with a saddle-shaped orange patch on his back.

Azaroth opened a pinhole window through his umbrella of illusion, letting Thuy see the secret of telepathic camouflage. As a writer, she understood the mental trick right away, but-now Azaroth was telling her to imitate a rat? No thanks. Drawing on her memories of her family's beloved cat, Naoko, Thuy began vibing like a Siamese. Mew.

Colorful, organic cars were rolling by in the light rain, no two of them the same. The battery-powered vehicles seemed alert and sensitive. Right inside the open garage doors of the auto repair shop, a man in overalls was in a wordless conversation with a purple car, assessing its vibes as he fit a knobby rubber tire onto one of its wheels. The shop had almost the feel of a veterinary clinic. The car-healer saw Thuy and slowly smiled. She teeped that he was one of Azaroth's friends.

Azaroth pointed toward the second-floor rooms above the auto clinic. Shrouded by their dog and cat vibes, Azaroth and Thuy teleported up there.

And landed in a giant back room heavy with years of dust. For Thuy, the room was the size of a concert hall. Rain ran down the expanses of a dirty rear window that faced the alley wall and a leafless city tree. The window looked to be some kind of plant membrane rather than actual glass. A single light-bulb in the room's upper recesses fought feebly against the gloom. Oversized organic auto parts languished on shelves that seemed to have grown right out of the walls, the parts marked with teep-tags instead of written labels. Water trickled from a tap in a great porcelain sink. Doggy Azaroth flopped down on a tired old couch: a puffball the size of a patio. Sitting next to him were an ant and a housefly.

Blinking her eyes, Thuy realized she was looking at Chu and Ond. She'd never met them before, but she knew them from a zillion news shows: Ond blond, awkward, middle-aged, slim; Chu blank-eyed with a cute, slightly sour mouth and a dark brown cap of hair.

"Welcome, Thuy," said Ond out loud. "You're doing fine with that cat imitation. I like cats a lot better than dogs." Blessedly he spoke at the same speed as Thuy. "Now grow your illusion to the size of this room. Make it like a cubical soap bubble that we're all inside." In person, Ond's voice sounded warmer than in the orphidnet archives. But-cubical bubble illusion? Thuy wasn't sure what he meant.

"He means paint your cat-self onto the ceiling, the floor, and each of the four walls," said Chu, his voice thin and sulky. "Also

the door and the windows."

"Watch us," rumbled Azaroth.

Azaroth, Ond, and Chu pushed their vibes of dog, fly, and ant out to the fringes of the room. Thuy studied what they'd done, tracing the patterns of their minds, and then she followed suit, painting her emulation of Naoko the cat onto the room.

"That's glow," said Azaroth in his slow, oozing voice, then switched to telepathy. "We can touch minds in here now. I don't think Gladax sees us under those animal shields."

"This is our secret lab," added Ond. "We come here to work on our video game and on our plan."

"What about the guys in the garage?" asked Thuy. "They're Azaroth's friends?"

"Yeah," said Ond. "The local Hibraners have gotten used to us. We have the run of the town. And we have jobs. I'm Gladax's tutor and Chu's her good-luck nanteater."

"Nanteater," echoed Chu, telepathically displaying an image of a long-snouted bushy-tailed anteater while he talked out loud. "When Gladax addled the jump-code in my head, she also saw my memory of Nant Day. So she thinks I'm magic against nants. Hibraners don't understand digital computers at all. Did you bring my jump-code?"

"I have the code, yes," replied Thuy. "An image of your Knot. By the way, Jeff Luty's made a new version of the nants. I'm here to ask you guys to save Earth again."

"Teep me my jump-code right now," demanded Chu.

"Okay, okay," said Thuy. "But don't instantly disappear. We need to make a plan."

"The nanteater already has a plan," said Chu in his small, emotionless voice.

Safe inside the dog-cat-fly-ant box of this room, Thuy opened her mind and let the others copy her image of the woven Celtic bracelet. To celebrate the handoff, Azaroth produced the sound of a crowd cheering.

"This seems right," said Chu examining the Knot. "I'm glad to have it back."

"Thank you, Thuy," said Ond, also studying a copy of the Knot. "You say there's more nants? Azaroth told us to expect this, and, yes, we've made a kind of plan. But-are people still mad at me? They wanted to lynch me on Orphid Night."

"Everyone likes the orphidnet fine," said Thuy. "It's been almost a year and a half."

"Over here that comes to two months and twenty four days," said Chu. "Orphid Night was the only time when the dates matched."

"First the Lobrane was behind us and now they're ahead of us," teeped Azaroth. Image of two parallel time-lines with a matching time-zero, and with the days along the lower line more densely spaced. "I saw time-zero coming, and I told Gladax," continued Azaroth. "The singularity. That's why she jumped to the Lobrane and chased down Chu." Image of Chu in a rubber net. "Gladax worries about the Lobrane infecting us with nanomachines. Fortunately our smart air currents ate your orphids right away." Image of a microscopic tornado tearing a nanomachine asunder.

"Gladax tied up Chu and blocked his telepathy with her harp, and addled the jump-code out of him," said Ond. "I made a deal so she wouldn't do worse. I showed her how to erase the jump-code from the Lobrane orphidnet, and I'm pretending to help improve her search abilities. Actually I'm making her more confused. If Gladax ever got organized, it'd be hell on the San Francisco Hibraners. She'd be nosing into everyone's business all the time."

"How come you know my Knot?" Chu asked Thuy.

"I was watching you when you did your first jump," answered Thuy. "At first I couldn't quite remember the details, but eventually I did. It's a long story: a metanovel called Wheenk ."

"Teep Wheenk to them," messaged Azaroth. "All of it. You're not really opening your mental gates, Thuy. Our telepathy band is broader than you realize. Sit down with us on the couch and relax."

So Thuy settled in and let herself do a full mind-merge with the others. They became like four eyestalks on a single mollusk. Everything that Thuy had seen and done since Orphid Night flowed over to Ond, Chu, and Azaroth. In return, she saw all the things that Ond and Chu had experienced up here.