"I've been there," said Petra. "It's a filthy place."

"Yes, I know," said Bean. "A place of fear and fire. But remember-he lives there all the time."

"Don't tell me I'm supposed to pity him because he has to live with himself!"

"Petra, I spent the whole flight trying to be Achilles, trying to think of what he yearns for, what he hopes for, to think of how he thinks."

"And you threw up? Because I did, twice on my flight, and I didn't have to get inside the Beast to do it."

"Maybe because you have a little beast inside you.

She shuddered. "Don't call him that. Her. It. I'm not even pregnant yet, probably. It was only this morning. My baby is not a beast."

"Bad joke, I'm sorry." said Bean. "But listen, Petra, on the flight I realized something. Achilles is not a mysterious force. I know exactly what he wants."

"What does he want? Besides us, dead?"

"He wants us to know that the babies are alive. He won't even implant them yet. He'll leave little clues for us to follow-nothing too obvious, because he wants us to think we discovered something he's trying to keep hidden. But we'll find out where they are because he wants us to. They'll all be in one place. Because he wants us to come for them."

"Bait," she said.

"No, not just bait," said Bean. "He could send us a note right now if he wanted that. No, it's more than that. He wants us to think we're very smart to have found out where they are. He wants us to be full of hope that we might rescue them. To be excited, so we'll hurtle into a situation completely unprepared for the fact that he's waiting for us. That way he can see us fall from triumphant hope to utter despair. Before he kills us."

Bean was right, she knew it. "But how can you even pretend to love someone so evil?"

"No, you still don't understand," said Bean. "It's not our despair he wants. It's our hope. He has none. He doesn't understand it."

"Oh. please," said Petra. "An ambitious person lives on hope."

"He has no hope. No dream. He tries everything to find one. He goes through the motions of love and kindness, or anything else that might work, and still nothing means anything. Each new conquest only leaves him hungry for another. He's hungry to find something that really matters in life. He knows we have it. Both of us, before we even found each other, we had it."

"I thought you were famous for having no faith," said Petra.

"But you see," said Bean, "Achilles knew me better than I knew myself. He saw it in me. The same thing Sister Carlotta saw."

"Intelligence?" asked Petra.

"Hope," said Bean. "Relentless hope. It never crosses my mind that there's no solution, no chance of survival. Oh, I can conceive of that intellectually, but never are my actions based on despair, because I never really believe it. Achilles knows that I have a reason to live. That's why he wants me so badly. And you, Petra. You more than me."

"And our babies-they are our hope. A completely insane kind of hope, yes, but we made them, didn't we?"

"So," said Petra, grasping the picture now, "he doesn't just want us to die, the way he was perfectly content to let Sister Carlotta die in an airplane, when he was far away. He wants us to see him with our babies."

"And when we realize we can't have them back, that we're going to die after all, the hope that drains out of us, he thinks it'll become his own. He thinks that because he has our babies, he has our hope."

"And he does," said Petra.

"But the hope can never be his. He's incapable of it."

"This is all very interesting," said Petra, "but completely useless."

"But don't you see?" said Bean. "This is how we can destroy him."

"What do you mean?"

"He's going to fall into the pit he dug for us."

"We don't have his babies."

"He hopes we'll come and give him what he wants. But instead, we'll come prepared to destroy him."

"He's going to be laying an ambush for us. If we come in force, he'll either slip away or-as soon as it's clear he's doomed-he'll kill our babies."

"No, no, we'll let him spring his trap. We'll walk right into it. So that when we face him, we see him in his moment of triumph. Which is always the moment when somebody is at their stupidest."

"You don't have to be smart when you have all the guns."

"Relax, Petra," said Bean. "I'm going to get our babies back. And kill Achilles while I'm at it. And I'll do it soon, my love. Before I die."

"That's good," said Petra. "It will be so much harder for you to do it afterward."

And then she wept, because, contrary to what Bean had just said, she had no hope. She was going to lose her husband, her children were going to lose their father No victory over Achilles could change the fact that in the end, she was going to lose him.

He reached out for her again, held her close, kissed her brow, her cheek. "Have our baby," he said. "I'll bring home its brothers and sisters before it's born."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SPACE STATION

To: Locke%[email protected]

From: SitePostAlert

Re: Girl on bridge

Now you are not in cesspool can communicate again. Have no e-mail here, Stones ore mine. Back on bridge soon. War in earnest. Post to me only, this site, pickup nome BridgeGiri password not stepstool.

Peter found spaceflight boring, just as he'd suspected he would. Like air travel, only longer and with less scenery.

Thank heaven Mother and Father had the good sense not to get all sentimental about the shuttle flight to the Ministry of Colonization. After all, it was the same space station that had been Battle School. They were going to set foot at last where precious little Ender had had his first triumphs-and, oh yes, killed a boy.

But there were no footprints here. Nothing to tell them what it was like for Ender to ride a shuttle to this place. They were not small children taken away from their homes. They were adults, and the fate of the world just might rest in their hands.

Come to think of it, that was like Ender, wasn't it.

The whole human race was united when Ender came here. The enemy was clear, the danger real, and Ender didn't even have to know what he was doing to win the war.

By comparison, Peter's task was much more difficult. It might seem simpler-find a really good assassin and kill Achilles.

But it wasn't that simple. First, Achilles, being an assassin and a user of assassins, would be ready for such a plot. Second, it wasn't enough to kill Achilles. He was not the army that conquered India and Indochina. He was not the government that ruled more than half the people of the world. Destroy Achilles, and you still have to roll back all the things he did.

It was like Hitler back in World War II. Without Hitler, Germany would never have had the nerve to conquer France and sweep to the gates of Moscow. But if Hitler had been assassinated just before the invasion of Russia, then in all likelihood the common language of the International Fleet would have been German. Because it was Hitler's mistakes, his weaknesses, his fears, his hatreds, that lost the back half of the war, just as it was his drive, his decisions, that won the front half.

Killing Achilles might do nothing more than guarantee a world governed by China.

Still, with him out of the way, Peter would face a rational enemy. And his own assets would not be so superstitiously terrified. The way Bean and Petra and Virlomi fled at the mere thought of Achilles coming to Ribeirao Preto... though of course in the long run they weren't wrong, still, it complicated things enormously that he kept having to work alone, unless you counted Mother and Father.