Why wouldn't I be? he'd said to Charlie, and laughed at him. And Charlie had genuinely been concerned. Nick bit his lip. 'Just asking,' he said.
'Yeah, well, thanks.' She tossed her hair back, a shadow in her greater shadow. 'So what are you waiting for? You pass… you might as well go on in and see what's waiting.'
'Pass?' Nick was bemused. 'But I didn't do anything.'
Shade gave him that scornful look again. 'You asked the right question,' she said, and began to fade away in the volcano's feverish light.
'But which one?'
She grinned. 'If you have to ask,' Shade said, 'I can't explain it. Go on, go ahead and see if you get anywhere in the Keep. The way to Nine is through the Keep, they say… if you can figure it out. But I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope.'
She vanished completely.
Nick turned to look at the huge doors of the Keep. Slowly, hauled open by troops of demons singing yo-yo- heave-ho, and pulling on giant bronze ropes, the massive doors swung open before him. Nick stood there feeling a great flush of triumph as Camiun's voice cried out in feedback-fuzzed ecstatic arpeggios all up and down the scale.
The demons stood waiting, standing at attention.
Nick, though, stood still there, thinking.
The way to Nine is through the Keep, they say… if you can figure it out.
Nick stood there, considering, for a while… then deliberately turned his back on the Keep and started to kick his way back through the downfalling ash, back the way he had come.
'Hey,' yelled one of the demons down by the door, 'where ya goin'?'
'Back to help some people,' Nick said, and scuffed off into the darkness, toward the edge of the Eighth Circle again.
From the shadow of the doors, a tall dark form, not a demon, faded back into existence, watching him go… and smiled.
Chapter 5
Mark Gridley's workspace this week looked like the old Vehicle Assembly Building down at Cape Canaveral. This was a new one on Charlie, though it didn't exactly surprise him. On earlier visits he had seen it looking like an underground cave full of stalactites and stalagmites, like a single gigantic floor of an office building towering over the Singapore skyline, like the entrance hall of the Museum of Natural History in New York, like the salt flats outside Bonneville, Utah, and like the surface of the Moon-an area not far from the Lunar Appennines, where some astronauts had left their moon buggy. In his own version of that empty, arid place, Mark had constructed a garage for the buggy, one which had also quizzically sheltered a beat-up lawn mower and a folded-up Ping-Pong table. Charlie had come to believe, both at the sight of those workspaces and during some of the events later associated with his visits to them, that it was entirely possible Mark Gridley might have a hinge loose somewhere.
But whether he did or not, there was no ignoring the fact that Mark was possibly the single most dangerous person on the planet, at least as far as the Net was concerned. Whether heredity had anything to do with it, Charlie wasn't sure. Having the head of Net Force for your father and a talented computer tech/heavy-duty philosopher for your mother could certainly predispose you to think more about the Net than a lot of people did. But just thinking about it a lot couldn't possibly endow anybody with the kind of talents Mark had with computers in general and the Net in particular. He was a genius at getting into any kind of computer system, and exploiting it while there. Maj Green had remarked once to Charlie that the Net Fairy had plainly been present at Mark's christening. Charlie wasn't so sure about that, but there was no keeping Mark out of any system he was interested in… and he was interested in everything.
At least, he always had been before. Today Charlie was banking on the idea that nothing had changed.
Charlie headed across the vast concrete floor of the VAB, looking for signs of life. He didn't see any. The huge space, thirty stories tall, was empty. This by itself wasn't so odd: in the real world it had been a long time since spacecraft had been built there, and mostly the building was kept for its history as the assembly area for the first rockets to take man to the Moon, and because demolishing the VAB would have upset the colonies of pygmy Cape buzzards that nested. There and worked the little 'pocket' weather system inside the building.
Off in one corner, though, about a quarter mile away, Charlie saw where a beam of sunlight came in through the movable cowling in the roof, and shone down on what looked like a conversation area-various chairs arranged in something like a circle, with a big low hardwood desk off to one side. Charlie made his way toward this, listening to the creaks and cheeps of the buzzards above him as they circled in a mini-updraft near the roof.
'WHO DISTURBS THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ?' thundered a huge voice all through the VAB. The buzzards squeaked in protest and flapped over to the sides of the building, perching and shaking their heads at the noise.
'It is I,' Charlie said, rolling his eyes. 'I mean, it's me, Squirt. Lay off the 'great and powerful' trip before I choke myself laughing.'
'I don't think you take me seriously enough,' said a much more normal voice, that of a thirteen-year-old kid again. It echoed in the huge space, but didn't roar as it had a moment before. Mark came into sight now from somewhere behind the 'conversation circle,' his arms full of e-mail images. He was wearing swim trunks and a MoldToYou T-shirt which was presently showing, one phrase at a time, in bold white letters on black, the message SPACE IS BIG / SPACE IS DARK / IT'S HARD TO FIND / A PLACE TO PARK / BURMA SHAVE.
Charlie blinked at that. Mark was part Thai, but he wasn't sure what Burma had to do with anything. 'How is it possible to take you anything but seriously,' he said. 'You busy?'
'Nothing important,' Mark said, dumping the load of e-mails onto his desk of the moment. They scrambled around on the surface of the desk, putting themselves in some prearranged order, and then ascended gently into the air and hovered there, like well-trained bubbles. 'Just trying to get down to the bottom of the In-box before the end of the week.'
'Why? What's the end of the week?'
Mark snickered and brushed his dark hair out of his eyes. He was due for a haircut, or maybe this was just some new style he was trying out. 'My dad's been threatening to take me surf-fishing for about the last year. Well, the stars or whatever must be propitious, because we're going away for the weekend, up to some place on the Jersey shore. Or so he claims.' Mark gave Charlie a knowing grin. 'I'm betting you something'll come up Sat- urday morning and it'll all be off. But I can't absolutely count on it, so…'
'WAAAH,' said something nearby, a raspy upscaling voice that vaguely suggested a soul in torment.
Mark looked over his shoulder. 'Yeah, yeah, it'll be dinnertime soon,' he said to someone Charlie couldn't see.
'What was that?' Charlie said, looking around. It didn't sound like a buzzard.
'The cat. Theo,' Mark said. 'Or, as we call him, The Gut Who Walks.' Another piercing Siamese-cat shout filled the air, suggesting either that Theo didn't appreciate the characterization, or that this conversation wasn't producing food, or that he was testing the acoustics. 'So look, what brings you by? Not that I don't think it's entirely social.'
Charlie grinned. Mark had taken some ribbing from the older Net Force Explorers about his age, and his size- he was short and light even for a thirteen-year-old-until they started to discover that the area in which Mark was decidedly no lightweight was his brain, and that he could outthink, and sometimes outmove, any of them. Those who had christened him the Squirt as a joke had since turned it into a title of honor, and kids five or six years older than he was had soon learned not to treat Mark as if he were too young to be taken seriously. Charlie had never been one of these. He knew entirely too much about what it was like to have people decide because of your background that you weren't worth their time.
'Got a problem, Squirt,' Charlie said.
Mark looked surprised, and eyed him curiously. 'Yeah, you do, don't you?'
'Does it show?'
