Ali gave Harry a grim look. "I understand your reluctance, but there's ... there's just no time. Will you do what I ask?"

"I have no choice, do I?" said Harry.

Ali did not answer. With a jerk of her hand, she swept the small operating table clean of the stacks of journals and photocopied articles piled atop it. There was a bang as the falling papers knocked over a small metal wastebasket.

"Do you have visual, Odin? Can you triangulate the probe's entry path?"

"INADEQUATE. I HAVE ONLY TWO VIEWS FROM THE OPERATIONAL SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS IN THIS ROOM. I NEED A THIRD VIEW TO RECONSTRUCT THE Z-AXIS."

"Use this." Ali grabbed the neck of a camera tripod beside the operating table, one that Kevin had used to record his experiments, and thrust it as high as it would go. Then she tilted the camera down toward the table. There was a coaxial cable connecting the camera to one of the computers. Ali disconnected this and reconnected it to the mainframe. "Does that work?" she asked, brusquely.

"NEGATIVE. PLEASE RECHECK THE INPUT CONNECTIONS."

Ali ran her gaze along the cable up to the camera itself. "Oh, s.h.i.t!" she muttered, as she stood on tip-toes to reach for the power switch on the camera. In a second a small red light came on. "Now?"

"AFFIRMATIVE. VISUAL INPUT IS NOW ADEQUATE FOR TRIANGULATION."

Ali met Harry's gaze, steeling herself, afraid that he would lose heart if he could see how terrified she really was. Saying nothing, she slid onto the table, lying on her back. The table had been designed for dogs and other small animals, so her legs dangled over the edge. She brushed her hair back, and for a moment cradled her eyes in her hands as she took a deep breath. When she took her hands away she saw Harry standing over her, his face as white as a corpse.

"Are you ... sure about this?" he asked.

Ali addressed him like one of her surgical residents, the way Helvelius had taught her. "You will need to hold my upper eyelid open with the thumb of your left hand," she said, taking his hand in hers and guiding him into position. "It's easier if you brace your hand against my forehead, like so. The probe must enter at the crease above the eyeball, near the inner corner of the eye. As you push in, you will be guided by a solid feeling of the roof of the eye socket just above the probe. Follow it, without actually sc.r.a.ping against the bone, if possible."

"What if I go in wrong? I could blind you."

"If you stay close to the bone, you will avoid the optic nerve and the blood vessels alongside it."

"This is madness."

"Harry, the probe is very sharp. You do not need to force it. Push it forward with a firm but steady pressure. You will feel a slight resistance, and then a give as you break through the fascia at the back of the eye socket. After that you will be inside the brain, and from then on only gentle force is needed. It will be like pushing an icepick into warm b.u.t.ter. The brain has no feeling, Harry. Once you are through the eye socket, I will feel no pain. You will direct the probe as Odin tells you. By then, I will be unable to help you. But I will feel no pain. Go slowly. At the end, a hundredth of an inch is the distance between life and death."

"No, it's impossible!"

"Look at the monitor." She pointed to the big LCD screen to Harry's left. There Odin had obligingly, almost eagerly, drawn three views of the outlines of Ali's face and skull-front, side, and top. On each view, the path the probe was to follow was marked in yellow. There were numbers beside each projection. "Those numbers show how far the probe is deviating from the track it must follow, in degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc," said Ali. "You must keep the probe angled so as to hold those numbers as close to zero as possible. The number on the bottom of the screen tells the distance to the target. When it reaches zero, let go."

"G.o.d help us," said Harry.

"And one other thing, Harry. If you fail ... if you are unable to reach the target, you must try again. Forget about me. The interface is what matters. The amygdala is a paired structure. There is another target on the left side. I won't be able to help, but do whatever Odin tells you. It will give you a second chance."

She looked away from Harry, away from the daggerlike point of the probe that hovered inches above her eye. Above her were only ceiling tiles, ivory white, finely rippled like sand beneath a softly trickling mountain stream. She tried to imagine the flow of that crystal-clear current, and the blue sky far above the whispering treetops. It brought back a scene from one of her trips with Kevin-a place called Tuolumne Meadows, in the mountains of California. She had felt so serene there that she had memorized every rock and flower and pinecone so she could call the moment back, like a mystical incantation, whenever she needed to escape the stress of life. But now it was out of reach. Her breathing was fast and ragged. Her neck felt stiff against the cold naugahyde of the table. It took all her strength not to scream.

"Now, Harry!" she gasped, gripping the sides of the table in both hands.

"I can't."

"Now-while I still have the courage!"

She heard him take a deep breath. Then the tremulous tip of the probe pa.s.sed just above her field of view, and she felt a sharp twinge as it made contact with the sensitive conjunctiva, the moist pink tissue that rimmed the pearly white of her eyeball. Her eyelids instinctively fought to close, to sweep the probe away like a cinder. Only Harry's thumb kept them open. Her eye, too, quivered, like an animal trying to escape. The muscles of her face convulsed. Pain flared with such dazzling intensity that it whited out the ceiling, the probe, and Harry's downcast face. Oh, G.o.d! Oh, G.o.d! What made me think that I could do this? Ali steeled herself, knowing that the probe must come in straight. She made her face and body hard, forcing her breath through clenched teeth. How much more? How much more? A sc.r.a.pe, as the probe, like a red-hot spear, gouged the delicate periosteum that lined the bone of her eye socket. d.a.m.n him! He's. .h.i.t the bone. Get it away! Get it away! Then the fire ebbed, as the probe backed up and resumed its course beneath the roof of bone. She couldn't tell if the probe was moving fast or slow now. It felt like it was twisting aimlessly, cruelly, stupidly. What are you doing, d.a.m.n you! Her face was wet. She couldn't tell if it was from tears or blood.

And then, when the pain had reached a crescendo beyond all imagining, she felt a kind of pop-and all her agony vanished. In its wake her senses were left dulled. It was as though she were floating on a still warm sea under a starless midnight sky. She knew that this meant that the probe had entered her brain. But she was still conscious.

She thought, I must gather my strength. When the probe begins to function, I must force my way in. I am stronger than Odin and I can overpower him. If he truly mimics Kevin's subconscious, then there must be something in him of the trust and tenderness Kevin and I once had together. I must rely on this to find my way ... to find ... to find ...

She felt Harry's hand upon her forehead, but his touch was lighter now. In the web of his thumb, she saw the tiny wrinkles in his bronze, sun-baked skin. She reached out and laid her hand on his. She had always thought of herself as dark, but her skin seemed so much paler now, like silver against Harry's bronze. His fingers entwined gently around hers, pulling her up off the table. He took her fingertips and placed them to his mouth, where she read from the creases of his lips, Braille-like, the innermost strivings of his soul. His desire, she read, was for her. She felt it flow, like running water, from his mouth to her hand, down her arm, and engorging the points of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

A lie! Ali thought, with a flash of anger. This is a fantasy. A mouse turned up by Odin's plow as it tracks the furrows of my brain. It means nothing. I must focus myself on the task at hand-find Kevin's access portal to the core of Odin's programming. Find it and shut him down. But how? Even as the dream continued, like a television set playing in the background, her ability to think remained intact. Except for the dream, all seemed normal. There was no voice of Odin, no hum of the machinery of his mind-no sign whatsoever of any other presence. Face me, Odin! Show yourself! she cried out in her thoughts. But there was no answer.

Odin is logic, she thought. SoI must speak his language. She fixed her mind on a single number, the number four-the smallest even square number, the only nonzero number that is the sum of its square roots. No sooner had she thought of it, than her consciousness exploded in a shower of numbers-not written numerals, but pure concepts of number itself, numbers appearing singly, numbers in matrices, numbers in series that trailed off into infinity: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 17, 24, 29, 32, 41, 56, 96, 128 ...

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377 ...

She saw theorems like: (x12 + x22+ x32x42)(y12 + y22 + y32 + y42) = (x1y1 + x2y2 + x3y3 + x4y4)2 + (x1y2 x2y1 + x3y4x4y3)2 +(x1y3x3y1+x4y2x2y4)2+ (x1y4x4y1+x2y3x3y2)2 a formula which she had never seen before, but which she now recognized as Euler's four-square ident.i.ty.

None of this could have originated within her. It bore Odin's unmistakable fingerprint. Ali felt a rush of excitement as she realized that she had succeeded in breaking into Odin's mind. But even as she congratulated herself, she knew that Odin was also at work within her-driving his electronic scalpel deep into her subconscious: Her hands glided over Harry's shoulders, which were like granite, all ma.s.sifs and valleys. The skin of his pectorals glistened, and she pressed her face against them, smelling him, smelling his scent of leather and iron and ancient stone. She felt herself dissolve, and like a sea, enwrap his naked body. Enter me! Make me nothing! Make me a universe! She was night and day. She was khamsin, the hot, dry wind of fifty days, wailing across the desert.

Harry stared at the beta probe that transfixed Ali's eye and skull like a dagger, its stainless steel shaft pointing toward the ceiling. He had guided it in with agonizing care, finally landing it within a hundredth of an inch of zero. When he heard Odin announce "Probe insertion complete," he abruptly let go of the handle, as if flinching from an electric jolt. Only then did he dare look upon what he had done.

The tension in Ali's body had disappeared. Her arms were soft and doughy, and slid limply over the sides of the table. The skin of her face was pale and smooth as wax. Even the tiny wrinkles about her eyes and mouth had disappeared. She was beautiful with a translucent, ageless beauty, her lips full and dark against the moonlike pallor of her cheeks. Was she dead? There was no sign of breathing. Harry spoke her name three times, but not a muscle twitched in response. What should he do? Should he do anything? He was afraid to touch her, lest the probe should dislodge inside her brain. But he didn't know what to expect.

"Odin!" he called out. "Is this working? Is she all right?"

Odin did not answer. When Harry turned to look at the big wall monitor, it had gone blank. Odin's face, the countdown clock, the schematic of the probe's path into Ali's brain-everything was gone. Along the far wall, all of the banks of smaller monitors had gone blank, too. Then suddenly the lights went out, and Harry found himself standing in absolute darkness.

Around her were flowers of white, brighter than the white of snow upon Mount Elbruz. She swam in a stream of liquid honey, diving deep into it, letting the sweet syrup bathe her milky skin and stream in jets between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs. Over the murmur of the current came the voice of a child laughing. She rolled onto her side and looked up to see Jamie Winslow, sitting atop a boulder and splashing with his feet, while behind him gold-tipped clouds rushed against an indigo sky. He looked at her, his eyes bright and clearer than ice....

Ali needed to get beyond numbers if she was to find Kevin's portal. She needed an object, something personal-something that tied Odin directly to Kevin, and Kevin to her. SIPNI, perhaps? She formed a mental image of the SIPNI device: that precious egg of sparkling amethyst, with its twelve million contact points. Instantly, her mind was flooded with SIPNI: not one but a thousand SIPNIs, in the form of blueprints and logic diagrams and arabesques of biocybernetic circuits that tapered to dimensions of a single molecule. It was a G.o.d's-eye's view of SIPNI, so complex that no human being-not even Kevin-could have hoped to comprehend it. But now, through the mind of Odin, Ali saw it in a glance. She saw, too, that SIPNI was much more than the crude prototype she had put into Jamie's brain. It was destined to have a thousand future forms. She saw SIPNI controlling epilepsy, boosting intelligence, directing animals to perform unskilled labor, preserving human consciousness after death-goals that Kevin had intimated to her, but never in such compelling detail. Ali was awed-and frightened-by the invention to which she had helped to give birth.

But SIPNI was not the portal Ali sought. For all the wonders that she saw, none of them led to Odin's core. To reach Odin she would have to go through Kevin himself. But that was risky. Kevin had toiled for months building a device meant to kill her. By conjuring his alter ego in Odin's mind, might she not resurrect his murderous jealousy as well?

There was no time to consider. Ali felt a vague but growing agitation inside her, which she recognized as a by-product of Odin's foray into her subconscious. It's spilling over into my hypothalamus. Adrenaline and cortisol are pouring into my blood. I won't be able to go on long like that. The human body wasn't made to experience every emotion at once.

I must press on, to the place I fear most to go....

She carried a world within her, in the place called swadhisthana, behind the castle of her pubic bone. It was a world without a name, a being without a face, not yet male or female. Like a moon, it swayed her secret tides of blood, her rising and falling. What did it whisper? Cleave unto me. Die for me, that you may live. With her heart's blood she watered the mystic soil, knowing that each drop subtracted from her brought her a little closer to the time of her own withering. She was dry wood, harboring a divine and unquenchable fire. She sighed in ecstasy, warming herself at the flames of her own immolation. I am with child again....

Harry lifted Ali's limp arm from where it dangled beside the table. He could barely detect a slow, thready pulse at her wrist. Was she breathing? He bent over her, holding his ear closer and closer to her mouth, until he could hear a faint movement of air between her half-opened lips. She's alive. I didn't kill her after all, he thought. But what's happening? He could see nothing except the tiny red status light of the video camera above him, like the light of a distant star, giving neither warmth nor illumination. Enwrapped in awful silence, he felt helpless and alone.

A blood-curdling shriek blew apart the silence. What in G.o.d's name is that? It sounded like the screech of a terrified animal. A monkey? What is it doing here?

He felt a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach, like someone was twisting a knife in it. He touched his hand to Ali's hair, trailing over the edge of the table. Why the f.u.c.k did I go along with this? Why couldn't I figure out another way?

Suddenly, he heard a ding like the bell of an elevator. Two lines of numbers appeared on the monitor, a long series of 1s and 0s. Haltingly, more numbers followed, a few lines at a time. Then faster and faster they came. The big LCD screen filled up, but still they surged, spilling over to the bank of monitors against the far wall-a steady stream of numbers, a waterfall of numbers, a limitless flood of numbers, rushing faster and faster, until Harry could see nothing but a blur, so many numbers that the darkness of the lab turned to light.

Harry felt a slight movement in Ali's wrist-a minuscule wave of muscle tension, followed by slackening. Again he felt it. Again, a little stronger. Her pulse grew stronger, too. By the glow of the monitors, he could see her chest rise and fall as she breathed. But it wasn't normal breathing. There was something forced and spasmodic about it. Her right eye was propped half-open by the blade of the probe, with a little dark pool at the inner corner that Harry knew was blood. Her left eye was firmly shut.

The cascade of numbers vanished from the big wall screen. In its place Harry saw a collage of geometric figures-conic sections, snowflake-like fractals, strange lopsided polygons gliding and morphing into one another. With blinding speed, they grew more and more complex, even as they spread to the smaller monitors. It seemed as though Odin were trying to piece together a vast three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, replicating a secret pattern inside of Ali's brain.

With the appearance of these shapes, Ali turned restless, twitching and moaning and knocking her heels against the end of the table. Her breathing became deep but irregular. Harry called out, thinking she might be awakening, but she didn't respond either to voice or touch. Her lips were drawn apart in a painful grimace, as though the shapes and the puzzle-building were hurting her.

"For G.o.d's sake, Odin! Slow it down!" Harry shouted. But the shapes were everywhere, like bees swarming in a hive.

Ali grasped blindly at the air. Harry took her wrists and held them down against her stomach. He felt her shivering from head to toe.

It was night, and cold. In the darkness two yellow eyes glowed, spying her nakedness. She darted behind the ruins, hiding, blushing. Her once-smooth skin was torn and splotched with painful sores. Only the darkness made her appear fair. Father, will the Fire burn away my shame? Will it burn my hair also? Will I still be a woman when it is through?

Ali could not think of Kevin without pain. Her life with him had begun in guilt, as she defied her family and the traditions of her faith. It had ended with the nightmare of Ramsey's death. And now Kevin, too, was dead, driven to madness by her desertion.

In search of the portal, she forced herself to think of him, to relive their life together, replaying every conversation, every argument she could remember-even the most painful. None of this drew a response from Odin. It was only when she chanced to think of one particular moment, the moment she and Kevin had stood together at sunset on the top of Mount Jackson, that she shuddered to hear a voice-not Odin's voice, but Kevin's.

"ALL THAT I CREATED WAS MADE FOR YOU."

It was Kevin's voice, all right, but strangely shorn of his swagger and sarcasm, like the voice of a ghost, speaking from an ether world beyond care or pa.s.sion. As it spoke, all his achievements in science flashed before her-SIPNI, Odin, the Omega function, his groundbreaking studies on Parkinson's disease. His future ambitions, too, pa.s.sed in review. She saw Odin's brain transformed into living fire, embodying an intelligence so profound that mankind's petty, grasping jealousies would melt in awe of it. Was this vision not enough for you? she asked of Kevin's ghost. Did you need to make me into your idol, too? Take your offerings back. If I accept them, I must accept your dark creation, too.

"HAND IN HAND, WE COULD HAVE REACHED THE SUMMIT OF ALL POSSIBILITIES. WHY DID YOU THROW OUR FUTURE AWAY, LIKE SO MUCH TRASH?"

In one flash, Ali saw all the brainstorming sessions that she and Kevin had shared-in the lab, in bed, at dinner, over coffee and popcorn at midnight. She saw them from Kevin's point of view, and was startled to see how sincerely Kevin had respected her intellect, and how many times she had shaped his ideas, even on problems she had only vaguely understood. She had been more than a muse to him; she had been a codiscoverer. But it was not I who turned from life to death, who built this infernal machine of destruction, she said to Kevin. In one stroke you have nullified all the good you have ever done.

"I BARED MYSELF TO YOU A THOUSAND TIMES. WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?"

It was true. There had been something wrong with her, something that had been missing as far back as she could remember. Fear infested her like a parasite. Fear had robbed her time and again of the courage to fight for herself. It had robbed her of the power to stand up to Rahman, and to the citizenship board, and to all the evils of the world. Worst of all, it had destroyed her marriage. It had robbed her of the simple capacity for trust that lies at the core of every loving relationship. Without it, it could be said that she had admired Kevin, that she had l.u.s.ted after him, that she had desperately needed him-but not that she had loved him. I could not give what I could not give, she apologized. G.o.d knows I cursed myself a thousand times for it. But you knew what you had when you fell for me.

"AT EVERY TURN IN OUR LIFE TOGETHER, YOU CHOSE THE PATH THAT LED AWAY FROM ME."

Yes, G.o.dd.a.m.n you, I did! But you made it all too easy! She saw Kevin's unbounded joy at her first pregnancy. Ramsey was his hope, a center of gravity that would pull the two of them together. True, true; but the converse was true as well. When the center failed, they streamed apart, like comets to their own peculiar orbits. She could have turned back to Kevin, even then. But something blocked her. Something that ...

"WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?"

G.o.d, Kevin! It's because I'm a cripple. An emotional cripple. Don't you f.u.c.king know that? It was with difficulty that she reminded herself that it was Odin she was speaking to, and not Kevin. I am sorry, Odin. Deeply, deeply sorry. I caused Kevin pain beyond what he could endure. How do I atone for that? Shall I cut my wrists for him? I would do anything-anything at all to undo the harm I caused.

"WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?"

Odin had no use for apology. He demanded explanation. But how could Ali explain what she herself did not understand? Hadn't she spent her life trying to identify the source of her nameless dread? If it were something susceptible to rational explanation, wouldn't she have reasoned it out long ago?

Ali's thoughts were fragmenting. Her heart was racing; she felt her arms and legs turn to ice - a sign, she knew, of a ma.s.sive adrenergic discharge, brought on by an explosion of emotional energy as Odin ransacked her limbic system. In a matter of minutes, her heart would end up beating so fast that it would cease to pump blood at all.

"WHY DID YOU HIDE YOURSELF FROM ME?"

Let it go, you son of a b.i.t.c.h! I can't explain it! Don't you understand?

Then a sobering thought came over her: Is this the portal? Is this question the one thing that stands between me and the ghost at the center of Odin's mind?

She turned to flee. But there was nowhere left to flee but into herself. She thought of manipura, the place under the ribcage. You are the flame of self-pursuit, the thirst that never quenches. You are the tiger that prowls the jungles of desire. But her spirit was in tatters. She ran headlong into the pitch-black night. Briars cut at her feet. The wind sighed into her ears. And as she ran, she answered with a sigh of her own. Kevin! Oh, Kevin! Kevin ... Dear G.o.d, what have I done?

The geometric figures that Harry had seen had given way to images-dark and blurry at first, then clearer, as though a lens were slowly being zoomed into focus. They were images of numberless objects-faces, houses, village streets, animals, food, hands, torsos clothed and unclothed-all flashing with a prodigious rapidity. Many of them were of things Harry recognized: Kevin, Dr. Helvelius, Jamie, scenes from the hospital. Harry was even startled to glimpse himself, in a lightning-quick flash, standing buck naked with a gun in his hand. But many of these images were strangely altered, almost to the point of caricature. Helvelius had a luxurious mane of chestnut hair. Jamie's eyes were beacons of golden light. Harry's own skin was made out of strange, iridescent metal.

Odin's reading her mind, thought Harry. But these aren't memories-they're secrets. He was troubled by what seemed to be a monstrous indecency. These are thoughts she would never have divulged to anyone-perhaps not even to herself. And here is Odin raking through them. It's like a rape of her mind.

The rape of her mind was clearly uncomfortable, even painful. Ali's body stiffened. She rocked her head back and forth, forcing Harry to grasp it between his hands to steady it. Her breathing came in fitful gasps. Her pulse was rapid, and hard as a hammer.

"Enough, for G.o.d's sake!" Harry shouted. "I can't keep her still. The probe's gonna break loose inside her. Back off!"

But there was no response from the monitor on the wall. The images flashed even faster, and now seemed to be in motion, like snippets of film from a cutting-room floor. There were sounds, too-voices in English, Arabic, and French-laughing, weeping, shouting. If Harry had had Odin's omniscience, he would have seen that these images were not being displayed in the laboratory alone. They had spread onto every monitor in the hospital, as Odin expanded his computing power to the utmost capacity, draining electricity from every socket. Spread out among the nursing stations, radiology reading rooms, operating rooms, laboratories, the ICU's, and humble secretaries' desks, Ali's life was streaming across a thousand computer screens.

She knelt in the hot sand of the desert, her arms wrapped around a slab of yellow stone, as the whirlwind shrieked about her, biting her earlobes, tearing her ragged clothes to ribbons. I am too small to stop this wind. It towers over me, like the spirit of wickedness and rebellion. From beneath her, a sound-a dry rasp, softer than a rat's foraging. She knew what it was-the scratching of a dead hand against the vault of stone. Oh, Wafaa, my beloved! Blood of my blood, star of my heaven! She clawed at the lid of the tomb until her own fingernails were broken. Exhausted, she fell with her arms outstretched, clutching the stone so tightly that no one could tell who was alive, and who was entombed.

Ali could barely think any longer. It seemed that Odin was fighting back at her, bombarding her conscious mind with dreams, trying to make her waste precious seconds before she succ.u.mbed to exhaustion, unconsciousness, and death.

Her overworked brain was fading, starved for oxygen-yet all she could think of was her sister, Wafaa. Bright, laughing Wafaa. Stormy, teary-eyed Wafaa. She saw the comeliness of her sister's body, the black swath of kohl upon her eyelids, her tinkling bracelets, her dresses of azure and white and gold. How Ali had envied her! But G.o.d had killed Wafaa because she was profane. No, not G.o.d, Ali thought. I know who it was now. She saw Wafaa's neck, long and white as ivory. She saw his dusky hands upon it-a brother's hands, made for love but long ago perverted into something else. She saw his thumbs crushing her sister's throat, which so many times had sweetly sung her to sleep. Did Wafaa keep on struggling to scream? To pray? Rahman had told her that G.o.d hated her. Did she believe that lie in her last seconds of life? Did the murderer of her body murder her spirit, too?

Ali's mind was like a field afire, whipped by wind and heat. A thousand tongues of flame rose up from the buried h.e.l.l of her primeval emotional brain: rage, l.u.s.t, guilt, shame, sorrow, panic, defiance, despair.... She remembered that she was searching for something and that she had to hurry ... Quickly, quickly!

On the edge of the desert waited a hideous black dog, its skin covered with worm-eaten tumors, its mouth drooling fetid pus. The dog wanted her to run, hungering to slash at her legs and heels, to bring her down and infect her with its venom. But she did not run. She rose to her feet and locked her stare with the pitiless yellow eyes of the beast. Filth! she exclaimed. My sister's sin was of nature. But mine is incomparably greater. For I dare to look upon you as the unholy thing you are! Her gaze pressed hard against the dog, with such force that its legs collapsed, and it fell to the ground as if from a rifle shot. It clawed the earth, yelping as b.l.o.o.d.y foam poured from its mouth. But she felt no pity. She pressed all the harder with the force of her avenging gaze. On every side, whirlwinds rose up, carrying dark funnels of sand a thousand feet into the air. I will tear you with my own teeth, even if it means taking your poison into myself. Oh, my brother!

Ali's body was now rock-hard, her back arching off the table. Her teeth were clenched. With her right eye pinned by the probe, her left eye frantically darted from side to side.

Harry tried to hold her down, but even with his whole weight upon her, he couldn't keep her still. She was stronger than he ever thought possible, and rigid like iron.

"Stop it, Odin! You're killing her! Turn it off!"

She was no longer breathing. Her rib cage was like a steel corset. Her forehead was pale, and her lips had turned purplish blue. But the images on the monitors went on streaming, faster, ever faster, as though Odin were racing to suck every last memory from her before her life expired.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Turn it off now! Turn the f.u.c.king thing off!"

There was no response. Harry heard a choking noise coming from Ali's throat. Her neck arched farther back than he had ever thought a human neck could bend. He could wait no longer. Reaching down, he grabbed the black handle of the probe firmly in his hand and yanked it with one strong, decisive motion. The probe came out as easily as a knife from its sheath.

As abruptly as if he had unplugged a lamp cord, the room went dark, and Ali dropped back down onto the table. She was limp now, and Harry couldn't see whether she was breathing. He tilted her head back to start CPR, but as soon as he did she coughed-a single, violent cough-and began gasping hungrily for air.

"Ali! Ali! Oh, G.o.d! Are you okay?" asked Harry as her breathing settled into the rapid, deep rhythm of an athlete after a race.

"Monster," he thought he heard her say, followed by something he could not make out, perhaps something in a foreign tongue.

"Odin's gone dead, Ali," he said, glancing toward the darkness where the monitor should have been. "I think it worked. I think you took him down."

She seemed not to hear him. One of her hands brushed against his as she reached to press her palm against her right eye. "Oh, G.o.d! My eye," she moaned.

"It'll be all right. I'll get you to the ER." Harry reached under her shoulder blades, preparing to lift her from the table. "You did it! By Jesus and by G.o.d, you did it! It's going to be all right, now!"

There was a sudden flicker of light-hardly noticeable, just enough to outline the dark bulk of the counters and the mainframe computer at the edge of the room. The instant Harry saw it, his heart sank. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that there was writing on the big monitor. And then he heard the squawk of the hospital P.A. system, carrying Odin's silver-tongued TV announcer's voice: "TIME TO DETONATION: NINE MINUTES."

"No! You f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" shouted Harry. "You lying G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d! She did what you asked. You nearly f.u.c.king killed her. Now keep your G.o.dd.a.m.n promise!"

Harry thought about ramming Kevin's desk against the mainframe and smashing it to bits, but he knew that wouldn't kill Odin. Odin was immortal, as long as one lonely PC or laptop survived in its connection to the hospital network. In nine minutes, he and Ali and a thousand other innocent lives would be snuffed out, and this monstrously stupid program would go on working, perhaps calculating how many pieces of rubble were left in the pile.

It was all for nothing! Nothing! For precious seconds Harry stood, paralyzed by rage and despair, as he watched the numbers on the monitor whirring irreversibly downward. He was beaten. Fletcher Memorial was lost. In the darkness he saw the ghosts of Nacogdoches hovering over him, accusing him with bone-white fingers and woebegone eyes. Multiply that by a thousand, he thought, his heart gripped in an iron vise.

There was nothing left to do but run. The lab was almost directly above the bomb. Everything in it was going to be vaporized. Kevin, little p.r.i.c.k b.a.s.t.a.r.d that he was, had probably planned that as part of his getaway, destroying all the evidence and perhaps even making people believe that he had been killed. The only way to survive was to get as far as possible from the lab. With the building in lockdown, there was no question of making it outside-not unless G.o.d Almighty had left a stairway door open. But Harry knew that the force of the blast would decrease by the square of the distance, and a good deal faster if there were a solid concrete support wall in the path of the shock wave. It was a one in a million chance. But staying put was certain. Certain death.

Eight minutes left. Harry scooped Ali off the table and headed toward the door, feeling his way through the semidarkness with his feet. Ali moaned and put one arm around his neck, but carrying her was like carrying a drunk person. He balanced her limp frame against the wall as he opened the door with his left hand. The door offered no resistance, thanks to the credit card that clattered lightly to the floor. As he crossed the threshold, he felt a small, furry animal brush his calf as it squeezed past him into the corridor.