hoodie who'd been with Gia and Vicky. That was the way his luck seemed to be running lately.
He lifted Vicky onto his shoulders. His hip protested but he ignored it. This was Vicky.
'Want to go for a ride?'
'Yes!'
He held out his arm to Gia. 'Shall we?'
She hooked an arm around his elbow and they started walking. A couple of hotels waited not half a mile from the terminal. Any other night, it would be suicide to try to cross the Grand Central on foot. But tonight it would be like making their way through a crowded parking lot.
He looked up at the sparkling winter sky and thought of the Lady. With all the concern about Gia and Vicky, she'd slipped his mind.
He wondered how she was doing. It couldn't be good.
22
'Well, it's official. A White House spokesperson has announced that the Internet, that globe-spanning conglomeration of computer networks for the sharing of information, has, for all intents and purposes, crashed. Internet data traffic has come to a virtual standstill. Uninfected intranets-self-contained computer networks with guarded Internet access-still remain functional, as do military and some governments networks, but these form an infinitesimal fraction of what the Internet was. No World Wide Web, no Twitter, no Facebook, no chat rooms, no Usenet-it's all down. The Department of Defense is looking at this as a possible act of war. The Department of Homeland Security has raised the National Threat level to red or 'severe.'
'In further comment, the White House announced-'
Weezy muted the TV.
She hadn't checked on the Lady for a while and was afraid to go see her now. She knew the end was near, maybe had passed.
She pushed herself up to her feet, and forced herself down the hall to the bedroom.
She stopped by the doorway, listening. Again, no breathing. She wasn't used to that, but she expected it. She stepped into the room. The bedside lamp still burned, illuminating the bed The empty bed!
No… no… someone there, under the covers. But she'd left the Lady lying atop the covers.
'Lady?'
Weezy gasped as she realized she was seeing the covers through the Lady. Her brain kept telling her to run, to flee this madness, but she put one foot in front of the other until she was standing at the bedside, looking down at what was left of the Lady.
Her body as well as her clothing had become transparent, or nearly so. What substance she retained had a faint, misty quality about it, just enough-barely enough-to provide a visible form. Weezy wondered at the transparency of her clothing until she realized that what appeared to be clothing on the Lady was really part of her, as malleable as her flesh-or rather, as malleable as it used to be.
Weezy stared at the two holes in that flesh. When Weezy had first met her last year, she'd shown her a tunnel carved front to back through her torso by a previous attempt to extinguish her. After the Fhinntmanchca attack, a second, larger tunnel had appeared on the other side of her navel.
She lay just as Weezy had left her, but… she'd been solid then. As before, her eyes were closed. Still conserving energy, or unable to open them?
She reached a hand toward her and noticed how it trembled. She pushed it toward the Lady's shoulder, finally touching it -and passing through.
She snatched it back. She'd felt something-the best she could describe it was a tepid liquid. The Lady's substance had sublimated to a semi-solid state. Was this how it would end? From solid to semisolid to… what? A vapor, her molecules dissipating into the air? Was that how she would end-a victim of Brownian motion?
And yet… why hadn't that already happened? If the Internet was down, why was she here at all? Weezy could only assume that the damaged noosphere was trying desperately to maintain her existence, and obviously losing the battle.
The mountain lake she'd described was draining dry.
'Lady?'
No motion, no response, not even a flutter of the eyelids. She seemed even less substantial than a moment ago.
Weezy felt a sob building in her chest. No need to suppress it, so she let it burst free. She'd come to love the Lady as a person. She knew she was simply a projection of the noosphere, but she seemed more than that. She seemed to have her own personality. Most likely that was merely a projection as well, but whatever it was, Weezy had come to love it.
She pulled a chair up beside the bed. She didn't want to look at what was left of the Lady, so she turned out the light. But even though the Lady wasn't human, she shouldn't have to die alone. Someone needed to be here to bear witness to her passing.
'I'll sit with you until…'
She couldn't bring herself to say it.
… until there's no more of you to sit with.
SUNDAY
1
Weezy awoke in the dark with a cold left hand. She remembered resting it on the bed next to the Lady's earlier. She must have fallen asleep. A cold weight rested on that hand.
Reaching across with her right, she turned on the light and gasped.
The Lady still lay on the bed as Weezy had last seen her, but she seemed more visible. No, she was more visible. She could no longer see the covers through her. The cold weight resting on Weezy's hand was the Lady's. It had substance now. Last night she'd been reduced to some sort of strange semiliquid, progressing toward vapor. Now she seemed to be gathering mass and moving in the other direction.
Weezy slipped her hand from under the Lady's and touched her arm. Definitely solid now.
But how could that be?
She shook her gently. 'Lady? Lady, can you hear me?'
Nothing. No breath. No movement. But she was still here. And she must have moved sometime since Weezy dozed off, or else how would her hand have come to rest atop Weezy's?
She gave the Lady's arm a gentle squeeze. The flesh rebounded. How was this possible? The Internet was down, and yet she not only survived, she was rebounding.
Unless… had the Internet somehow rebounded just in time? It seemed too good to be true, but…
She looked around for a clock but couldn't find one. She dug out her cell phone and touched a key. The display lit to show no service and no time. She'd left the TV on in the front room and heard it now. She hurried out to see if she could learn anything from the tube.
The time was posted in the lower right corner of the screen: 2:32. A harried looking newsreader on one of the local stations sat at his desk, reading a press release.
'… of Homeland Security says that Jihad-four-twenty, the virus responsible for the crash of the Internet, originated from a server in Tehran. In an unprecedented step, the intelligence services of the world are uniting to hunt down the hacker or cabal of hackers or the terrorist organization responsible.'
He switched to another sheet of paper.
'The DHS has also revealed that shortly after the myriad servers and routers that feed the Internet crashed, terrorists launched a well-organized and widespread attack against the Internet's physical infrastructure. All across
