afoul of one of the plants, she could sit on the stone bench and wait for Nick.
She did not doubt for one minute that he would come looking for her.
A few minutes later she stumbled, unscathed, into the clearing that surrounded the grotto. The stone bench was there, just as she had remembered. It would make a cold perch for the night, but at least it was a safe spot to spend the next few hours while she awaited rescue.
She did not see Newton DeForest until she started to sit down.
A scream rose in her throat.
Newton floated face down in the grotto pool, enmeshed in a net of fibrous water plants.
Even as Zinnia stared in horror, several more tendrils snaked out from the shrubbery that clung to the rocks. They drifted across the surface of the water until they reached Newton. When they reached the body, they twined themselves around his legs.
Demented DeForest was feeding his plants one last time.
Nick gazed at the enlarged frame of the microfilmed edition of the New Portland Corporate Registry and felt the last connections click into place. Fire and Ice Pharmaceuticals, the company that had committed to underwriting the Third Expedition through the University of Portland had gone bankrupt a few months after the expedition was supposedly canceled. But that was not what interested Nick the most.
What fascinated him was the name of the CEO of Fire and Ice.
It had taken him a while to find what he needed but his hunch had been correct. Not even a matrix could successfully wipe out all records of a large business that had existed as recently as thirty-five years ago.
The public librarians of St. Helens took their profession seriously. They could give matrix-talents lessons when it came to one type of obsession, Nick thought. They were a passionate lot when it came to the preservation and storage of information. All kinds of information.
It was more than an obsession for librarians, it was a sacred trust. The First Generation colonists had learned the true value of information storage and retrieval the hard way. Shortly after the Curtain closed, stranding them, they had seen their only hope, their computerized databases, start to disintegrate along with everything else that had been manufactured on Earth.
The colonists had known that without the advanced technology of the home world, they would need the ancient skills of a more primitive time in order to survive. The secrets of those old crafts were buried in the history texts stored in their computerized library.
A scriptorium had been set up to copy as much basic medical, agricultural, sociological, and scientific data as possible before the computers failed. Teams working with rough handmade paper and reed pens had labored around the clock for weeks in a frantic effort to record the most essential information before it disappeared. Everyone had understood that the more that was lost, the less chance there would be for survival.
Technologically, the colonists had been thrown back to a period roughly equivalent to the late eighteenth century on Earth.
When the Founders had crafted their vision of a society that would be strong enough to ensure their survival, they had embedded two values most deeply into their design. The first was the value of marriage and family. The second was the value of books.
Librarians, Nick thought with a sense of keen appreciating, had been zealous in honoring the Founders' trust. Because of their commitment to hoarding every scrap of information, including old phone books and corporate registries, he now knew the identity of the person who had murdered his parents.
None of the library patrons bothered to glance more than twice at the sight of a man dressed in wrinkled formal black evening wear running through the book stacks toward the door.
Half an hour later when he broke the lock of Zinnia's loft and slammed into the apartment, Nick was no longer basking in the rush of satisfaction that had hit him in the library. He was fighting a rising tide of fear.
Zinnia was supposed to be home, resting. But she had not answered the door.
He walked quickly through the airy apartment. The bed was rumpled. The towels in the bath were damp. She had been here earlier but now she was gone.
He paused by her desk and picked up the phone to dial Leo's number. Then he noticed the flashing light on the answering machine. He punched the button.
There was a hum and then a click. 'Zinnia? This is your Aunt Willy...'
Nick hit the FAST-FORWARD button.
Another hum and a click. 'Zin? It's me, Leo ...'
He pushed the FAST-FORWARD button again.
Hum. Click. 'Miss Spring? Newton DeForest here. Say, I did some checking in those old files ...'
'Five hells.' Nick ran toward the door.
The connections in the matrix were shatteringly obvious now. Zinnia was not a hapless bystander who had been caught up in the elaborate web of events surrounding the Chastain journal.
She had been the target of the killer all along.
She had to be here. But she was not responding to his psychic probe.
Nick stood at the entrance of the dark maze. Everything in the matrix was designed to draw him into those twisting corridors of grotesque foliage.
He sensed the hunger of the gently rustling plants. He knew that Zinnia was somewhere inside. He could see her purse on the ground near the first turning point. Farther on a bit of khaki cloth dangled from a long sharp spine. A piece of a man's shirt.
Someone had chased Zinnia into the maze.
He shoved the flashlight he had brought with him into the pocket of his tuxedo jacket. He did not need it yet. The sun would not set for another hour. He walked cautiously into the evil green maze.
He was immediately engulfed in a deep perpetual twilight, thanks to the heavy canopy of vines and leaves. An innocent yellow flower caught his attention. He did not see the toothlike thorns inside until he glanced down into the heart of the bloom. A large half-dissolved insect floated in a sticky pool at the bottom.
He went forward, careful not to brush against even the most innocuous-looking leaves. He slipped through the dark halls the way Andy Aoki had taught him to move through the jungles of the Western Islands.
He let his senses expand to full awareness. His matrix-honed instincts for spatial relationships kept him centered in the passageways.
He turned and went along another corridor. Something slithered near his foot. He glanced down and saw a small vine creeping toward the toe of his shoe. He stepped over it and continued on to the next intersection.
It did not matter which way he chose to go, he decided. Zinnia had told him that the design of the maze was such that anyone who entered it ended up at the center.
At each twist and bend in the path, his stomach tightened at the possibility of what he might find around the corner. He told himself that the maze was not deadly so long as one was careful. DeForest had given Zinnia a tour. He had explained to her that as long as she did not provoke the plants, she was safe.
But Zinnia had been fleeing from someone when she had entered earlier. She would have been scared. Her thoughts would have been on escape, not on protecting herself from the foliage.
He rounded another corner and saw the body. It dangled from a vine that was twisted around its throat. Dozens of small spongelike flowers had descended from the canopy and attached themselves to the corpse. They were swollen and dark. They throbbed as they dined.
For an instant Nick could have sworn that his heart stopped. Then he realized that he was looking at the body of a man, not a woman. The person who had chased Zinnia into the maze, no doubt. What remained of the torn khaki clothing matched the scrap of fabric he had seen at the entrance.
There was something familiar about the khaki, he thought. Then he made the connections and realized that he was looking at the second knife man.
Nick got down on his hands and knees and crawled beneath the gently swaying body. His hand brushed against an object lying on the moss. A sheath-knife. He picked it up, closed the sheath, and dropped it into the pocket of his black trousers.
On the far side of the body, he stood and continued along the corridor. He tried another psychic probe. Still no response from Zinnia. She was alive, he thought. She had to be alive. He would know if she were not. And she was here somewhere in this damned maze. Why wasn't she responding?
He moved more swiftly now. The fear that Zinnia might be lying unconscious or hurt somewhere in one of the
