They both jumped when the figure of a Celestial Servant appeared between them. The man seemed faintly familiar to Danika, but she didn't recognize his name, Myles Blue. She thought she'd probably met him once at an interdepartmental meeting, or during her two weeks of training at Starcraft Technologies.

He looked up from his menus and glared at her. Danika gazed back at him with a puzzled expression until he spoke. "Lin Hao has you marked as trouble for good reason it seems," he stated darkly.

"What? Why?" Danika asked. "And where is he?"

"He's out sick," the man replied briskly, and ignored the rest of her questions as he turned his invisible screen toward the merchant and his child, who had waited patiently for Kit to lay the boundary for the future building. After a moment he heaved a sigh and said, "Well, it looks like your guess was correct, and this is what was bogging down the system. This NPC shouldn't exist. The traveling merchant should really never have been able to marry in the first place."

"That aside," Danika began, and then stopped as she saw Kit's baby vanish from the merchant's arms. "Hey!" she protested, as Kit gasped.

"There, all fixed," Celestial Servant Myles Blue reported with satisfaction. He vanished as quickly as he'd come.

After a moment Kit asked shakily, "Did he just delete my baby?"

They both froze as the traveling merchant said calmly, "Yes, my dearest friend, Kit. And I've tarried here too long and must be going. I wish you luck in the rest of your day."

"Wait," Danika insisted, as Kit stared at the merchant with a horrified expression. "Isn't Kit your wife?"

"No," the merchant replied simply. "I have no wife."

"But you remember having a wife a few minutes ago?!" Danika demanded.

The merchant hesitated, and Kit and Danika waited in breathless silence. "I did have a wife. I do not have one now." He looked toward Kit for a moment, but then he hefted his pack and strode away.

Danika was afraid to turn and look at Kit. She felt like the entire situation must be all her fault, and only the automatic beat of her wings kept her in the air.

"His ring is gone, and mine doesn't work," Kit whispered behind her.

Danika turned to face her reluctantly. "I don't know what to say," she admitted unhappily.

Kit didn't say anything, she just stood there with tears trickling down her face. Danika hadn't known how well the full motion console could convey weeping, but apparently its facial recognition was refined enough to detect silent tears. The occasional shudder of Kit's shoulders told her that she was probably just standing in the console's harness and sobbing silently.

Shrubbery walked up to them where they still faced each other silently across the empty building site. "Okay, what happened?" she asked after glancing between them. "You're both ignoring me, and you're both crying."

"You're late," Kit accused brokenly after another long silent minute.

"I'm sorry," Shrubbery apologized quickly. "I was finis.h.i.+ng my paper so that I'm free tomorrow."

Kit turned her face away from them both and wrapped her arms around herself. Her posture was one that they hadn't seen her take for a long time now.

"I think it's my fault," Danika blurted. It was hard to speak through her tears, but it was too cruel to make Kit explain. "I submitted the bug report, and then someone came and erased her marriage with the traveling merchant and their baby…" She couldn't continue, and she felt like she could barely breathe.

Shrubbery stared at her in open mouthed shock, and Danika covered her face with ZipZing's little clawed hands and sobbed. Shrubbery hurried over to hug Kit, and demanded, "Can't you do anything?! Can't you ask your boss to undo it or something?"

"I, you're right, I'll try," Danika blurted through her tears, and logged out.

--

Danika logged back in through the work application a moment later. Devon Yu wasn't online, nor was Ariana, and of course, neither was Lin Hao. She hadn't even known that he was sick, but her little celestial dragon a.s.sistant repeated that information as it explained, "Lin Hao is not allowed to log in until he has a doctor's release."

"I don't know who else to ask," Danika complained.

Her a.s.sistant suggested primly, "Your friend, the honorable celestial servant of the seventh cla.s.s, Josh Beagle, third among his rank, serving the Jade Emperor in the maintenance of the Living Jade Empire is still logged in on his work account."

"Josh Beagle?" Danika repeated blankly. They were acquainted from her training weeks, but she didn't think of him as a close friend. He was in the programming division though. "Please contact him," she instructed, and wiped at the tears on the human face of her work avatar. She wished that VR weren't quite so realistic and that she could just turn them off.

"He invites you to his work s.p.a.ce," the little dragon reported a couple of minutes later.

--

Josh Beagle stared with a horrified expression as Danika explained the situation through her tears.

When she finished he grimaced and avoided her gaze. He called up the system's logs and the visual log of the event and his expression darkened as the replay showed his department's second, Myles Blue, quickly deleting the infant NPC and removing the merchant's marriage.

"Danika," he said uncomfortably, "he did a pretty rough job of it, but this only went to him because all your bug reports are apparently being forwarded to Lin Hao with the note: 'Number one trouble magnet', which I think Myles misunderstood."

"He didn't have to just delete everything though," Danika protested. "Can't you undo it and fix it properly?" She turned away from him to hide the new tears that sprang up.

"Um," Josh replied a little desperately, "I'm sure he only did it that way because it was the simplest and most obvious solution. I can't even say that it was necessarily wrong, apart from how it affects your friend. And all of Lin Hao's projects are sending Myles their error messages and he's under a lot of stress."

Danika had already suspected that the baby was causing the whole game system problems, but she didn't want to forgive the person who had just deleted him.

"Danika?" Josh asked uncertainly. He waited until she turned and looked at him before he continued, "There's nothing I can do about the NPC deletion. There aren't any backups of ordinary NPCs generated by the system. And the baby was deleted, not killed, so it didn't get processed by the Twins either." He added with painful honesty, "Which is probably a good thing, because the system load really has dropped by about 20% since it was deleted."

"There's nothing we can do?" she asked unhappily, as she rubbed at her face again.

"I'll go ask Lin Hao," Josh replied quickly, and vanished.

Danika stared at the empty seat. At first she had barely noticed their surroundings, but now she had nothing to do but look around. Josh's celestial office s.p.a.ce had windows that each looked out onto a different view of Living Jade Empire.

One of the views looked oddly familiar, and after a long moment, Danika realized that it was the same view that her little stone s.p.a.ce had, only from a different angle. It was looking across Logical Heart's reflecting pool, out toward the distant mountains.

The wait felt like an eternity, and Danika reminded herself that Kit's wait must seem even longer.