clothes and wigs that looked like they might come alive and crawl off their wearers' heads. He wondered what his own portrait would wind up looking like if-When. When they did it.
Nick smiled slightly and headed in toward the doorway on the far side of the entry hall. Past that door was where things got interesting. Six staircases apparently designed by Escher led off toward the roof, and six more toward the basement, though none of them felt particularly like 'up' or 'down' when you were climbing them. Somewhere in this vast pile, in which none of the normal directions mattered, the Maze was hidden-a huge tangle of paths and walkways, arched and open, covering all six of the walls of a great cube of space somewhere in the Keep. Nick had actually found it accidentally, once, when he was first in here and just wandering around in the place trying to get a feel for it. Then he'd lost the Maze again while trying to work out how he'd found it to begin with. A whim of the system, he thought. Never mind. Over the weekend there'll be time to start doing some proper searching-
'Hey, Nick…'
He turned quickly at the sound of a slightly familiar voice. It was Shade again. In here she looked a little less like her name, but only a little less,justa young girl of maybe fifteen, in a long black outer coat, a short dark purple skirt, and a black sweater, dark purple hair, and eyes that shaded from violet to almost black depending on how much light there was. Those big dark eyes, and the somber set of her mouth, suggested some old sorrow hanging over her. She was pale. In this light, almost right under the great chandelier, Nick could see much better how frail she looked, how fragile. Not that Nick was so foolish as to be misled by appearances down here. As in most virtual environments, anyone could look like anything they pleased. For all he knew, up in the Real World, Shade was a six-foot-six, two hundred-and-eighty-pound football player. Somehow, though, Nick doubted it. There was a brittle feel to conversations with her that made him wonder if she was either a plant from Joey Bane Enterprises, someone used to see how players treated each other, or someone who wasn't really cut out for this particular virtual experience, but was just too stubborn to give it up.
'Hey, Shade,' he said. 'You doing okay?'
She sighed. Most of her conversations seemed to start with a sigh, or contain several of them. 'I guess so,' she said. 'It's quiet today… you'd almost think everybody was scared off by something… '
Nick shrugged. 'Not me.' The whole business with the Angels of the Pit had rolled off his back pretty quickly once he got into the Keep and started working on the business of solving it.
'I don't know… ' Shade said. 'I wonder if maybe there's something to it.'
'To what?'
She shrugged, gazing up and about her. 'What they did…' She turned those violet eyes on him. 'I keep wondering if it's really so terrible. When everything's going wrong. '
The way she trailed off, Nick had a feeling that she was about to tell him how everything was wrong for her, if he didn't stop her. He shook his head. 'Some people might think it isn't,' he said slowly. 'I guess there are times when everything really does seem to stink. But that's not where I am at the moment.'
'Things are better for you, then, at home?'
'I don't know about better,' Nick said. 'A little quieter, maybe.' Certainly his father had been letting him alone… whether he was unwilling to restart their fight, or not, Nick wasn't sure. Just the news that Nick had a job lined up for the summer seemed to have quieted things down somewhat. For the rest of it, it was as if his mother and father had declared a truce for the moment. The lightening of the atmosphere in the house had been noticeable. 'I'm not thinking about that right now, Shade. I'm on my way to the Maze… '
'Aren't we all,' Shade said, and laughed a little. 'But I haven't finished exploring the Keep yet. There's still a lot of ground that I haven't covered yet… '
Nick laughed. 'You sound like you enjoy rummaging around in here for its own sake. Not me! I want the music.'
'Oh, I do, too… '
'Well, then, come on and help me find the Maze! That's the way down to Nine, and Nine's where the good music's supposed to be, the 'unknown' lifts. And Joey himself…'
Shade gave him an odd look, almost nervous. 'Oh, I don't mind hanging around up here,' she said. 'Besides, they say that once you leave Eight for Nine, you can't come back.'
That surprised him. 'Who says?'
'Other people up here.' Shade glanced around her, although those 'other people' were not much in evidence right now. 'All the time, in the Upper Circles, you see people from as far down as Eight wandering around. Slumming… helping the newbies, or torturing them with news of the lifts you can get down lower.'
Nick nodded. He'd seen enough of this as he worked his way down. One and Two were pafticularly bad in this regard-a lot of the people from the circles between Three and Six seemed to enjoy coming up there and making the new Banies nuts. 'But have you noticed,' she said, 'that you never see anyone from Nine?'
Nick nodded. This might have been why rumors about Nine were very few and far between. It left another question, of course: If nobody from there comes back to tell us what's happening, then how are there any rumors at all? But rumors didn't need reality to get started. That was one of the things this level was about, as he had been discovering.
'You hear anything else about how to get down there?' Nick said to Shade.
She shook her head. 'Nothing that's done me any good,' she said. 'But I wish you luck.'
'Yeah,' Nick said, 'thanks. Look, I'll see you on the way out, maybe?'
'Maybe you will.'
She turned away.
'Hey, Shade-'
She glanced back at him.
'Thanks for helping, the other day.'
'I didn't help,' she said. 'Not really.' That faint air of sorrow seemed to come down on her again.
Shade headed for the doors, which swung back to let her out into the darkness. Nick watched her go, thinking, Poor kid, I wonder what her problem is? But then, if he asked her, he had the awful feeling he'd find out… and right now, he had enough problems of his own. Besides, tonight was about enjoyment… because he wasn't going to be able to afford much more of it.
Nick turned and made for the door at the back, the entry to the Stairwell of Doom, to pick a stair and see where it took him.
In the doorway a dark shape watched him for a few moments, then shrugged and turned away.
Chapter 6
That evening Charlie was sitting once more in his workspace, with piles of files around him, in the blackest mood he'd been in for days. Part of it was because this session had been delayed. His sandwich with his father, last night, had segued into one of the more ferocious games of cutthroat 'timed chess' they'd ever had, and his father had won-an unusual outcome. Charlie had chalked it up to the fact that he was slightly distracted by his evening out with Mark. Now, though, he was in the midst of analyzing the information that Mark had helped him bring back… and that was accounting for the rest of his dark mood.
Charlie sat leaning back on the bottom-most bench in his workspace, looking into the Pit. It was full of virtual information and exhibits again, so much so that he'd had to move the worktable out of the middle of it. Now the floor of the Pit was occupied by six different sets of information, floating in the air… and what bothered Charlie the most was the similarities between four of them.
They had all been strangulations, of course. That was bad enough. But in four of those suicides-the 'double' suicide of just a few days ago, and the New York and Fort Collins ones-the toxicology reports had turned up something that would have immediately struck the authorities as suspicious, Charlie thought… if they had bothered comparing notes. But they hadn't.
He got up, strolled over to the New York suicide. This had been Renee Milford. Charlie had been through her autopsy, but he had no heart for looking at those pictures of her. He had found one that he preferred in one of the
