“Oh gods,” whispered Shara, who was peering through the keyhole. “This is the place where . . .”
“Where Hades imprisoned her the first time, preserved like some sort of twisted shrine.”
I felt rage pouring though me. I wanted to reach into the chaos again, to unleash the fury that had scared me so much earlier, to render this place down to its constituent particles. But that wouldn’t do either her or us any good.
“Persephone,” I called, as quietly as I could. She didn’t move. “Persephone.”
She didn’t turn. “Go away.” The words were soft and dead, like a bird shot out of the sky. The pain in them made my joints sag like a rag doll’s, but somehow I stayed on my feet.
“Persephone, please. I’ve come to . . .” I trailed off. How could I ask anything of this woman, this goddess of suffering? What had I done that would give her any reason to help me? But I had to try. “The virus, or whatever it is, that you released into Necessity’s network. What was it supposed to do?”
“Why should I tell you?” Again, the pain.
She turned then, and I cast my gaze down toward the floor. I didn’t want to meet the anguish in her eyes again, or witness her nudity, her vulnerability.
“Aren’t you going to try to bargain with me?” she asked, rising and walking toward the door. “Won’t you offer to free me from this place in exchange for my help in whatever it is that you want?” There were razors in her words, and I felt them bite deeply.
“I don’t know,” I said, forcing myself to look at her, to meet those eyes. It was like seeing the tearing agony of my transformations set in stone, an agony that never ended. “I might have tried that if I hadn’t seen you like this. I did come here to bargain with you, to ask for your help in stopping the destruction. But I don’t know what to ask you now. If you want, I’ll try to get this door open.”
“This cell is only the symbol of my imprisonment. Even if I walked out now, I would still be in Hades and my jailer could put me back here anytime he wanted it. It’s not the cell I want to escape.”
“But that’s all I can promise,” I said. I was learning to live with the dreadful weight of her words. “Shara?”
She whistled a burst of binary. It was a spell of unlocking, similar but not identical to the one I’d programmed with Melchior. The latch clicked, and the door opened. Nothing stood between me and Persephone. Before I could say anything Shara whistled another spell, clothing Persephone in one of Cerice’s outfits.
“Thank you, little one.” Persephone knelt in front of Shara. Reached out. Touched her brow. Winced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would tear your soul like that. I used you.”
“It’s all right,” said Shara. “You were driven to it.”
“No,” said Persephone. “It’s not all right. No thinking being should ever use another. Of all the people in all the worlds, I should know that better than any. I forgot it for a while. I was wrong. I apologize. If I could make it right, I would.”
“What were you trying to do?” asked Shara.
This time Persephone answered the question. “Win my freedom. What else?”
“How does wiping out mweb connections address that?” I asked. It was as much a hacker shop-talk question as it was one about the vital issue. Her tactics baffled me.
“Necessity’s networks govern more than the proper relationships between the worlds. They also dictate the fate and placement of the gods.”
Shara whistled. And well she might. That was two bombshells in one sentence, and I should have figured out the thing about the gods in advance. I’d had all the clues.
“I’d always thought of the mweb as just a way of linking different levels of reality,” I said. “Are you saying it controls their positions as well?”
“Yes and no,” said Persephone. “The part of the mweb run by Fate may control how you get from world A to world B, but it’s Necessity that says where those worlds should be, and even whether they should exist. Not every decision leads to a split in reality, only those that Necessity approves.”
“If she’s that powerful, how could you hope that just erasing the record of where you’re supposed to be would cut you loose?” I asked. “Wouldn’t she just fix it all later?”
“Is she fixing the problems my little virus has already created?”
“No. But now I’m not sure why that is.” I was getting more confused by the second. “If Necessity’s really the final arbiter of everything, why can’t she—I don’t know—just wave her hands and say ‘poof, all better now’?”
“Because she doesn’t have hands anymore,” said Persephone. “The gods are finite, the universe infinite. Surely you’ve heard that before.”
I had. It was practically an axiom in the Houses of Fate. The mweb and the Fate Core had both been created to manage a multilayered reality that had outgrown the control of the children of the Titans, and I said as much.
Persephone nodded. “Good, you’re halfway there. So, if that’s true, how is it possible for even Necessity to handle it all? If only the ever-expanding capacity of a massive computer network is capable of keeping an eye on everything, what does necessity make of Necessity?”
Then I saw it. Necessity wasn’t the Deus Ex Machina of Greek tradition. Not the God-in-the-Machine, but the Machina-Deus, the Machine-God.
“Necessity is the network!”
“She is indeed,” said Persephone. “And if you can once strike something free of her memory, it’s gone forever.”
I suddenly found myself sitting on the floor. I hadn’t just helped Persephone set a virus loose in Necessity’s network. I’d helped her set one free in Necessity’s mind. The Shara clone was messing around with the fundamental management structure of the whole shebang.
“You knew this when you recoded Shara?” I whispered.
Persephone nodded. “What did I have to lose?”
So she’d deliberately set out to hack the source code of everything. That took moxie. If the full truth of this ever came out, Eris was going to lose her place as the patron of hackers. Well, she would if Persephone’s hack didn’t destroy the universe.
“What’s happening with the world resource locator forks?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Persephone. “It’s not what I intended. Just as tearing this little one’s soul in twain was not what I intended. Something’s gone wrong with the plan.”
I’ll say it had! Big-time. But what to do about it now?
“You mentioned something about making it right,” said Shara. “About my soul, that is. Did you really mean it?”
“I did. It’s the least I can do. But I don’t know how to go about it.”
“Help us get into Necessity’s system,” said Shara. “Into Necessity herself, I guess. If anyone can fix things there, it’s Ravirn.”
Persephone looked at me, her eyes cold and hurting. “Why should the Raven want to do that? What’s the benefit to chaos?”
“None that I know of, but I’m more of an accidental chaos power than an active advocate for disorder.”
“Yeah,” said Shara, “he can do more damage by mistake than most people can manage with careful planning. Still, his heart’s in the right place.”
“All right,” agreed Persephone. “If you ask it of me, I’ll try.” She let out a sigh. “Though, it would be a harder choice if the thing had gone as planned. What do you need me to do?”
As Shara set up an LTP transfer, I filled Persephone in on what we knew about the seals guarding the gateway to Necessity.
“Fair enough,” she said when I was done. Together we stepped into the light of the gate. “But I don’t know that I’ll be able to help. I can’t actually touch Hades’ computer. If I even try, all hell is going to break loose. You know that, right?”
“Let’s call that part my problem,” I said, as we arrived. I crossed out of the gate on my way to the desk where the machine in question sat. “Shara, get your little purple butt over here and run a hard c
onnection.”
She grinned and wiggled her hips. “I thought you’d never ask. My ass and I are at your service . . . for anything.”
“Right,” I answered, “and Cerice would kill us both. Let’s see . . .”
Again, Hades had improved his security but not much. Hades123 didn’t do it, but my third guess, “Cerberus,” did. People should never use the names of their pets as passwords.
“You ready?” I asked Shara, lifting her onto the desk and arranging the cable running from her nose to Hades’ machine.
She looked scared but nodded anyway.
“Then, Shara, Laptop. Please.”
Her flesh flowed and shifted, remaking her from a curvy webgoblin into a curvy laptop. Cerice had taken the idea of clamshell computer design much more seriously than I had when I built Melchior, and it showed in the elegant scalloping and subtle iridescence of Shara’s machine form. I turned my attention to Persephone next, beckoning her over as I inserted an athame cable into one of Shara’s networking ports.
“Come here. Shara’s plugged into the desktop machine, and . . . let me see.” I typed madly on her keyboard for a few seconds, testing my interface with Hades’ system. “I’d normally just plug you and me both directly into Shara, but that’s really just a hard link to the desktop at one remove. I can’t imagine that Hades didn’t take precautions against it.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Assuming Cerice was right about the seal barring the way to Necessity, it needs both your signature and Shara’s to unlock it. If you’re willing, I’m going to provide the bridge between the two.”
“How? It’s not possible to fake a magical signature.”
“No, but I’ve been thinking about this since Cerice told me about the lock. I can’t fake your signature, but if I’m right, I can temporarily tie it to mine using blood as a bridge.”
“I don’t—oh wait. I think I see. You’re going to put the athame through both of our hands.”
“Yes.” I pulled it out of my pouch and connected it to the cable. “Through mine first, then yours. The blood link should bind your magical signature to mine as I go into the machine. Putting my flesh physically between you and the interface cable should block your soul from actually entering the system and triggering whatever it is that Hades uses to prevent your access.”
“Interesting. That might work. But if it does, I’m going to be sitting here with a dagger stuck through my hand.”
“Yeah, I was going to mention that part in a second. It’s going to hurt like all get-out, but I don’t see any way around it.”
Persephone laughed a small hard laugh, barely more than a cough. “I think I can handle the pain. The question is, can you?”
It was my turn to say, “Huh?”
“The link you’re talking about is going to temporarily tie our souls together. What I feel, you’ll feel. The pain of the blade is going to be the least of it. Can you handle it?”
I hadn’t thought about that, but she was probably right. Normally, you lose track of your body when you enter the world of the mweb, but I was going to have a doubled link back to the world of the physical, plus all of Persephone’s other issues.
“I don’t have much choice. I want to fix the mweb. We both want to fix Shara. Neither of those things is going to happen unless I can get into Necessity’s mind.”
“All right,” said Persephone. “Consider yourself warned.” Then she smiled. It was a bitter thing that chilled my soul. “I’ll try to think happy thoughts.”
I swallowed. “Let’s do this before I wise up and run for the hills. Or worse, Hades arrives to shut down the party. OK?”
She didn’t say a word, just reached over and covered my left hand with her own. I lifted the blade into the air above the palm of my hand, then stabbed hard and fast. The pain was blinding, and it didn’t end when I left my body as it usually did. If anything, it got worse.
Instead of the sharp sure bite of iron in flesh, it felt like I’d driven a thorn branch through my hand, then lit it on fire. A suicidally depressed thorn branch. I could feel all of Persephone’s pain embedded there in my flesh like a spike of pure emotional poison, and I felt darkness growing around the edges of my vision. I suddenly understood how a wolf caught in a trap could gnaw its own leg off. Yet somehow I found I could bear it. The darkness remained around the edges, but it didn’t take me under.
Whether it was because I’d already learned how to live with the pain of being ripped apart at the atomic level, or because Persephone was thinking her “happy thoughts,” or just the sheer luck that the pain was confined to one finite part of my body, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I was able to force myself to look around and take in the world beyond my agony.
Shara’s anteroom to the mweb appeared as a simple windowless room, its walls lined with bookshelves packed with paperback romances. I was tempted to look through the titles, but what little time we had was fast trickling away so, moving like a man underwater, I passed through the room’s sole door.
It led into Hades’ portal to the mweb, a perfect mirror of his real-world office, with its leather chair and thick carpeting. Apparently the Lord of the Dead didn’t have much more imagination than his younger brother, Zeus. Shara was waiting, an electronic projection of her goblin self on Hades’ desk.
“About time,” she said. “I felt your arrival more than five minutes ago. That’s like a week in mweb time. What took you so . . .” She met my eyes and trailed off rather abruptly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like shit. I can see Persephone’s pain looking out of your eyes. How can you bear it?”
“I don’t know. I think she’s shielding me from most of it somehow. It’s only my hand.”
I tried to raise my left arm, but it wouldn’t move. The thorn branch apparently weighed about five hundred pounds, and thinking about it brought the pain back to the forefront of my mind. I felt my knees sag.
“Can you get us moving?” I asked. “I don’t think I should drive right now.”
“Done,” said Shara.
An instant later she expanded, growing so that she stood about nine feet tall. She stepped closer then and scooped me up as a mother might her child. I wanted to argue about that, but I just didn’t have the energy. Too much of my attention was devoted to the pain. The branch seemed to be growing into a tree and tearing my hand apart in the process. Things blurred out for a while. The next thing I knew Shara had set me down.
Looking around, I found myself in the translucent cityscape of the server where we had originally lost Shara’s e-mailed self. But where the gigantic black cube had stood then, there was only a flat space, like a blacktop parking lot. In its center was a small indentation with three purple pips at its core. I stared blankly at the spot for long seconds.
I knew it was important, but I was having trouble remembering why, remembering anything besides Hades standing over me, his hot eyes staring down as he slowly removed his clothes. I wanted to die, but even then I knew that it would be no escape. I—
A sharp smack drew my attention. I blinked and saw Shara looking into my eyes. I knew that she’d slapped me by the sound, but only by the sound. I was numb to everything but the pain in my hand and the daggers it had driven up my arm toward my heart.
“Ravirn!” she said. “Snap out of it. I need your help in the here and now.”
“Right.” I forced myself to focus, but it was hard. The pain tugged at me, pulling me toward a whirling maelstrom centered in my left hand. “The seal.”
I knelt and tried to press my wounded hand to the mark of the three pips. I couldn’t make my arm respond to my orders. But I had to do something. Turning my whole body, I lowered the torn flesh until it met the purple stain. The thorn tree turned into a terrible tower of chain lightning, and I thought I would die. But I couldn’t. If I died, HE would have me forever. Somehow I forced myself to live even there in the heart of pain. Vaguely, like something through fog or tears, I saw Sh
ara’s hand come down beside my own. The black slab underneath changed then, softening so that we began to sink into it.
As my head dropped beneath the surface, I felt a pressure in my ears and heard a voice, like something coming from a great distance.
“There.” It was Persephone. “You’re in. And I’m gone.”
The thorn tree vanished as if it had never been. The relief was something physical like crashing through a wall of ice water into a world of peace. I almost passed out from the sheer pleasure of not hurting. I felt as though I was falling, then realized I was. Before I could do anything about it, something caught me. Shara, grown even more, from loving mother to colossus, her gorgon locks twisting and writhing, each snake wearing its very own miniature set of mirror shades, echoing the ones on Shara’s huge face. I rolled over and pushed myself to my feet and Shara, returned now to her normal size, did the same beside me. Only then did I realize where I was, and on whose hand I stood.
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