Venous blood.

She is not bleeding to death, at least not at the moment. A quick inspection shows her a matching wound on the back of her thigh; clean penetration, then. Red streaks the angle of her shoulder, a rip through her shirt showing blood and grazed skin beneath. "Just a graze, ma’am." Graze be damned. The thing is painful out of all proportion to the damage, worse at the moment than the hole in her leg. But that is because her body has not had time to process the greater damage. The wound will hurt. That is a certainty.

Without warning, the corridor before her explodes in smoke and fire. Koda throws herself backward, hands flying to protect her head as the grenade lifts shattered metal and plexiglass into the air, spraying it like shrapnel into walls and ceiling. A splinter of steel drives itself into the back of her left hand, and blood runs chill down onto her face. Silence follows.

Koda pulls the splinter out of the space between two of the tendons that stand forth against her skin, fanning out from her wrist. Levering her feet under her, she stumbles over to the wreckage. One droid moves a hand, and she loosens the sculpture from her belt and methodically pounds its head to bits. Then she picks up her guns, slotting new magazines in under the stocks and limps back to the security center.

The screens show the last group of droids somewhere around the curve of the building, how far or near she cannot tell. She has no landmarks to go by; she only knows they are somewhere on the long way around between her position and the still smoking crater in the hall. Presumably they know the first party has failed. Presumably they also know she is wounded and running low on ammunition.

Running low on strategy. Running low on strength. She bends to examine the hole in her leg a second time. A thin stream of blood pulses from it, scarlet, bright with new oxygen. She swears softly. The bullet must have nicked the artery. She must have torn it open when she dived for the floor. She unwinds her bandana from her neck and cinches it as tightly as she can over the hole in her jeans. Pressure will help. Temporarily, anyway.

But then, everything is temporary now.

I wonder, she thinks idly as she checks her magazines once again. I wonder if it’s true that sometimes we get to go back in time. Think I’d like something Pre-Columbian next go-round if we do. Cahokia, maybe. Mound-Builders—Kirsten would like that. Not sure the future world is anything I want to be born into.

Should have asked Wa Uspewikakiyape when I had the chance.

Should have it now soon enough.

A flicker of movement on one of the monitors catches her eye. The droids are moving.

They come in a rush this time. Koda hears them before she sees them, their feet drumming in perfect, mechanical unison. If she stays in here, she will be trapped. It will only take one droid, one gun. And then the way into Westerhaus’ office will lie open to them.

She slips out of the room and behind the door again. Its armor will give some little protection, for some little time. She braces the AK against the edge of the panel, waiting only for the contingent to come into sight. The thunder of running feet stops somewhere just around the curve. Then nothing. Silence. The quiet stretches on and on, until she begins to wonder if the grenade blast has partially deafened her. She could go back and check the monitors. They might have split again, be coming at her from both directions again.

But that’s what they want her to do. It would give them a clear shot at her.

One. All it would take.

She waits, while the blood trickles down her leg and arm, while her muscles stiffen. Waits.

Bastards. Goddam game of nerves.

Won’t break. Can’t.

A single droid steps into the corridor, in clear sight. She fires just as an object leaves its hand, arching up in a perfect parabola to clear the top of the door and come straight down on her, bursting into flame as it descends. She throws herself against the wall, but it rakes against her arm, spreading flame down her sleeve and across the covering of her Kevlar vest. Rolling, she smothers the fire that licks at her shirt and down the leg of her jeans, not even feeling the heat as she kicks the incendiary away from her and back out into the hall. It burns sullenly on the tiles, black smoke billowing up to choke her. She glances down to check the damage. The ruins of her sleeve hang limply from her wrist. The skin beneath has already begun to blister. Worse, the vest now dangles by a single strap, its armored plates slipping loose beneath the cloth. Useless. She shrugs out of it, leaving it where it lies. No time, no way, to get another.

She snatches up her rifle again and waits.

They come in a rush this time, rounding the curve of the hallway in a mass. The AK jars against her shoulder as she sprays the rounds across their line, shaking her bones one against another, sending a chill trickle of blood down across her chest. Another incendiary plummets down over the door, striking its edge and falling wide to spill flame across the floor behind her. Their return fire clangs against the sheet steel of the door, a round breaking through the lexan window above and showering her with a myriad dull-edged fragments. One droid breaks wide from the mass and dashes toward her position, keeping to the far wall. She puts a spurt of rounds through its head, and it tumbles down on the sputtering fire bomb, its uniform bursting into flame. Oh no you don’t. Bastard. You want by me, gotta kill me first.

But the rest come on undeterred, so close now she can see the colored rings of their optical sensors. If she does not move, she will be trapped against the wall as surely as she would have been in the guard post.

A high scream like a hawk’s rips out of her throat, as she stands and swings around the edge of the door, raking the enemy line with fire. Two stumble and fall, but the rest come inexorably on. Something slams into her body at the level of her right hipbone, sending her staggering back a step as she empties one magazine and slings the second gun around into her hands, its frame juddering against her palm as she jerks the trigger back and holds it. Searing heat strikes through her left shoulder, and her arm suddenly goes slack, the muzzle of her gun dropping. She props it against her side, never breaking the rhythm of her fire. Another droid falls. Another.

Her gun falls silent. No more bullets.

A hail of automatic fire bursts from in front of her. Pain rakes across her body, the claws of some great beast slashing her from hip to shoulder. Blood soaks the front of her shirt, a red rain that splashes against the floor. A shadow passes over her eyes, clears, returns. Sounds take on an abnormal clarity. She hears the clatter of her rifle as it hits the floor, bouncing end for end. And she hears the rattle of a grenade as it rolls across the tiles to bump against her foot.

She cannot breathe. Her ribs have become a vise pressing down on her lungs, squeezing the life from her. The iron taste of blood is on her tongue, welling up from somewhere deep in her body. With exquisite slowness, exquisite precision, she reaches down, grasps the grenade, and aims it at the line of droids. A roar like the voice of a waterfall, the rage of a thousand thunders rolls over her, and she stumbles backward against the door of Westerhaus’ office. It gives way behind her, and she tumbles into the abyss.

Adam turns suddenly toward the door, horror on his face. Kirsten turns to look as Koda tumbles through and falls across the threshhold, her body bloodstained from neck to thigh, a thin runnel of scarlet at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes stare upward at nothing, pupils fixed, lifeless.

CHAPTER SIXTY THREE

KIRSTEN FEELS HER own mouth go dry as old cotton. A wave of dizziness passes over her; darkness steals her sight. Her breath leaves her lungs in what must be a scream, but she cannot hear it, cannot think. Her whole world has narrowed to the long body sprawled on the floor. Somehow her legs, gone all to water, carry her the two steps necessary, and she falls on her knees beside her lover. "Sweetheart?" she calls softly, laying her hand on one broad, too-still shoulder. Blood. So much blood. "Koda? Sweetheart? It’s okay now. You’re okay. You’re safe. It’s okay." Seeing the tiny runnel of blood from Dakota’s lips, Kirsten rips the sleeve from her shirt and gently dabs it away, deliberately ignoring the fact that her lover’s chill skin has the consistency of rubber and not hearing—deliberately again—the sound of Dakota’s bottom lip as it springs back against her teeth with a soft ‘plop’. "You always hate being dirty, don’tcha," Kirsten says with an over-bright smile. "But that’s ok. I’m sure there are showers around here somewhere. Right Adam?"

Unable to meet Kirsten’s eyes, Adam looks down, then turns to the remains of the door. The view of the hallway is like looking into Armageddon. The sprinklers, though keeping, for the moment, the fire from spreading, are doing nothing to dampen its anger. As he watches, a large chunk of melted ceiling tile falls onto the floor with a great clatter. Bits and pieces of androids lay scattered everywhere, like the playground toys of children just called home for dinner. Dakota has indeed brought them time. How much, he can’t begin to fathom, but every second counts now. With a soft grunt, he picks up the crumpled door and positions it best he can across the frame, pushing with all his might. The metal is hot to the touch. In some places, it smokes, but he ignores the pain and continues to fit the door back where it belongs, hoping that this final barrier will, somehow, hold.

When he turns back, Kirsten has gathered Dakota in her arms. The taller woman’s head lolls lifelessly back until it lies almost between her shoulder blades. Without a change in her expression, Kirsten simply gathers her lover’s head and moves it forward so that it lies against her shoulder. "It’s okay, my love," she croons into an unhearing ear. "Everything’s okay now. It is. You’ll see."

Gathering all of his courage, Adam crosses the short distance between them and lays a gentle hand on Kirsten’s shoulder. "Doctor King."

"Leave me alone!" Kirsten growls, not looking up as her hand continues to mindlessly stroke the mass of thick, black, blood-soaked hair.

"Please, Doctor."

"Just go away!!"

"I can’t. We need to finish this."

"It can wait," Kirsten replies in a soft, gentle voice. "Until Dakota’s well again. Right, sweetheart? That’s the important thing. Getting you well. The most important thing."

"Doctor King, please. I’ll keep watch over her, I promise you. You need to finish this now, before there’s no time left!"

"Go you think I give a shit about that?!?" she snarls, teeth bared like a predator ready to fight.

"Don’t you think she would?" Adam asks, gesturing to the woman in Kirsten’s arms.

For a moment, just a moment, sanity returns to Kirsten’s eyes, and Adam finds himself totally unprepared for the blast of unshielded emotion directed his way. Anger, grief, horror, despair. It’s all there, mixed together with a hundred other emotions he can’t even begin to identify. "Please, Doctor. The world needs you."

"Fuck. The. World. Fuck humanity. Fuck the androids. Fuck Peter fucking Westerhaus, and fuck you too."

With a soft sigh, Adam releases his grip on Kirsten’s shoulder and takes a step back. "You know," he comments quietly, in an offhand manner, "she was an incredibly brave woman. Who gave everything to make sure that you had this one chance." His voice firms, becoming almost harsh as he stares at the bowed back of Kirsten’s head. "Make sure you take it, Doctor King."

Kirsten can feel the anger seethe through her, like a runaway express train headed to nowhere. Part of her aches to grab hold, to jump on and ride it through to its inevitable end; anything to rid her of this numb, dreaming feel of unreality and utter emptiness. Another part of her, however, knows that if she gives in, she will shatter, sure as glass shatters when it falls to the floor.

Very deliberately, she relaxes the arm holding her lover to her body and uses the other to stroke the bloody bangs from her pale, waxen face. "Wait for me," she whispers, before laying Dakota’s body on the ground and carefully arranging her limbs into a pose that looks as if she is merely sleeping. With a half sob that she cuts off savagely, she leans forward and places a kiss on chill lips. "I’ll be with you soon."

* * *

The impact as her body hits the floor jars along her bones, but somehow, strangely, its solidity does not break her fall. She plunges through it into the void, an infinity of night that spins about her as she tumbles through it like a dark comet, all its light and glory spent. Here and there the blackness thins, and she glimpses distant points of light that may be stars, glowing wisps like nebulae, the final blaze of dying suns. Wind beats at her as she falls, stripping her sight from her, scouring her skin. Voices ride on its current, strange whispers that seem half-familiar, half-alien. She strains to hear, but the wind drowns them, all but fragments. Threaded in among the voices, high, wild laughter skims along its current, echoing against the walls of night that close in about her.

". . .replaced me, knew you would . . .."

". . .bright for a prairie nigger, but still . ..

". . .left me to die . . .."

". . .I said, your Christian name, girl . . .."

". . .just need a man, bitch . . .."

". . .could have saved hm if you’d tried . . .."

". . .couldn’t protect her. . .dead . . .dead. . ."

". . .all dead, all dead . . .."

". . .your fault. . ..

". . .your fault your fault YOUR faultfaultfaultfault. . .."

The wind batters at her like breaking waves, slamming her as she begins to spin on the axis of her spine. Except that she has no spine, has no bones, no flesh, no skin. Under the incessant assault, she feels herself begin to fragment. She tries to draw in upon herself, reflexing into a knot with knees drawn up and arms crossed over her breast. But her muscles do not answer her, do not exist. A part of her tears away to go spinning back the way she has come, whirling down the spiral path that leads toward earth, back toward life. A part of her consciousness clings to it as it bursts free of the darkness to hover over the sprawl of her body, and she regards it curiously. Blood stains it from thigh to neck, pools on the floor around it, begins to grow viscous at the edges of its flow. At the desk not far away, Kirsten sits before a computer screen, face pale as her hair, mouth a thin line of control. Her fingers fly over the keyboard. Her concentration armors her, but beyond it lies a welter of pain raw as stripped flesh. It calls to her, calls her name.

Even in death. Even in death.

Even in death, I will never leave you.

The winds take her again, and awareness of the earthbound fragment fades. Their force spins her through the darkness, whirling faster and faster as the circumference of her self draws inward, concentrating her essence. Without warning she bursts forth into the starlight of a summer night, floating somewhere above a narrow valley where a stream runs silver in the moonlight and hummingbird moths fumble at the spires of paintbrush and lupine. A big dog lies among the flowers on one slope; he looks up and whines as she passes. Peace, she wishes him. And, stay. Then she is gone, carried up and over the shadowed landscape, skimming the energy lines that stretch like cobwebs from the sacred mountains in the lands of the Dine far to the south, to the sleeping cones of Grandfather and Little Sister in the north, that the whites call Ranier and St. Helen, to the Black Hills far to the east.

But distance has no meaning to her now. With the thought she is there, the Paha Sapa rising jagged up out of the plain, the place of her people’s beginnings. Here we came forth. Here we became human, came forth to live in the light of Wiyo on the surface of Ina Maka.

At the foot of the barren slopes lies a stretch of forest. A clearing shows pale where the pines stand back from a ribbon of bright water and a spoked circle of stones laid out on the short grasses. She wills herself downward. A mule deer buck, his antlers still in velvet, browses among the undergrowth. He startles for a moment, then placidly resumes his feeding. In the branches a screech owl stirs, its burbling call blending with the rush of water in the small stream that tumbles down from the bare mountains above. Koda settles in the center of the medicine wheel and waits.

After a time, she hears a thin thread of song. It grows stronger as it approaches, a woman’s voice, chanting in Lakota.

See me.See me.My steps on the EarthAre sacred.

The voice comes nearer, still singing.

Hear me.Hear me.My words to the PeopleAre sacred.

A bright shimmer appears at the northern edge of the clearing. It moves toward her, and as it does, the figure of a woman takes shape within it. Rainbows dance in the light that surrounds her, striking fire from the rock crystal of her headband and armlets, running blue and violet over the fall of her hair.

Understand.Understand.All things in the hand of Wakan TankaAre sacred.

The woman of light halts before her, close enough to touch. She stands tall and slender, eyes great pools of shadow, her skin smooth and unmarked as the new bark of the madrone. A buffalo, worked in beads made from the pearl lining of mussel shells, adorns the white buckskin of her dress. All things, she sings. All that is created, is sacred.

Han, says Koda without sound, her gaze lowered in respect. It is so.

It is so, the woman answers. You know me.

Wohpe, she says. White Buffalo Calf Woman.

Han. You walk the Blue Road, sister.

At that she looks up. I know. She hesitates a moment. Then, Is there—

--another way? But you have seen your body. A gentle regret comes into the sacred woman’s voice. It is past healing. Come. There is one who waits for you.

There is one left behind. Stubborn, her grandfather had called her. Argue with anyone.

It is not her time. The answer is patient, but firm. Come.

Hesitantly, then, Koda takes her hand. It is insubstantial as her own. The forest winks away, and the night closes in again.

* * *

Kirsten finds herself behind the rainbow shaped work table with no clear memory of having gotten there. Adam stands to her right, hands clasped behind his back, an expression of compassion mixed with relief in his dark eyes. "Doctor…."

"Let’s just get this over with." Her voice is hollow, bleak, empty as a tomb. Her eyes match the tone, flat and lifeless, as if her spirit has already left and only this shell remains behind.

Adam nods once, then gestures with his chin toward the alien line of code scrolling endlessly, nauseatingly, across the bottom of all the monitors on the work table. "This code, I’ve discovered, is not meant to be read. It is meant to be heard." He fancies he can see a flicker of interest in her dead gaze at the revelation, then realizes it is nothing but a trick of the increasingly fickle lighting in the office. The building’s circuits, no doubt, are close to being cooked by Dakota’s destructive charges. He can feel some sense of satisfaction in that, and does. Then he continues.

"It is not, however meant to be heard by human ears. Nor even by android ears, I suspect."

"My implants," Kirsten states, as interested as if she were talking on a sport in which she had absolutely no interest. Lawn darts, for example.

"Yes. Specifically, your own implants and no one else’s. The code was designed to communicate with, and respond to, the unique variable frequencies in your set of cochlear implants. To anyone else so enhanced, it would sound like gibberish. To the rest of us, there is only silence."

Though she suspects she should feel at least some sort of surprise (?), shock (?) that Westerhaus somehow had obtained the specific frequencies for her set of implants, implants which had been inserted when they were both still children, she feels nothing but a cottony numbness, as if she’d been given a whiff of light anaesthetic. Another question darts around in the vast empty well that is her mind, asking her why Westerhaus would go to all the trouble of setting up a code only she could undo.

That question, at any other time, would have driven her to distraction. Now, it simply withers and dies, a plant with no rain to sustain it.

Instead, she concentrates what is left of her senses on the code as it dances by in herky-jerky fits and starts, swimming and twisting like some fantastically virile protozoa trying to mate with itself. "Hate to rain on this little parade of yours," she comments finally, "but I can’t hear shit."

Adam smiles wanly. "That is because you require these to enhance your abilities." So saying, he draws an open hand from behind his back. Upon his palm sit two small, wireless earbuds.

Kirsten snatches them from his hand, but makes no move to insert them, her eyes still firmly fixed to the hand held just before her. A coldness washes through her, and slowly, she raises her eyes, her own bottomless wells of swirling emotion. "You’re one of them." The contempt in her voice is unmistakable, and Adam finds himself, interestingly, wounded by it. He looks down, wincing as he realizes just what it is that she has seen.

His palm looks like any human’s palm, good-sized and well formed, complete with lines and ridges and wrinkles. The skin, he knows, is soft and warm; soft and warm as human skin. Except, of course, where that ‘skin’ has burned away from the heat of the door as he had tried to close it. He damns himself for not noticing it, but realizes there would have been no way to hide it even if he had. The differences between himself and a human are all too readily apparent in the three tiny holes now displayed. "Yes," he says finally, "I am an android."

Though her synapses aren’t firing on all cylinders, she can still add two and two. Her voice, when it comes, is the soft whisper of a spring breeze in a meadow. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." She looks up, into the android’s eyes. "Not just any android. Adam. The first of your kind. The first sentient android."

Adam nods, then looks down, embarrassed and sorrowful even though he knows that the deception was necessary. She wouldn’t have listened to him otherwise, and all would have failed.

"So, this was all a set-up."

"No. No! Not the way you are thinking," he protests. "Had I wished to end your lives, I could have easily done so the minute you stepped into the facility. You know this to be true."

Though she doesn’t want to, she can see the logic in his statement. Besides, she thinks, what does it really matter anyway? What does any of it really matter?

"Why?" she asks finally, simply because there is a part of her that must know.

"Because when Peter Westerhaus created me with a thinking, reasoning brain, he also created something else. Something he was never aware of, not even at the end of his life."

"What was that?"

Adam straightens, stands tall before her. "A conscience."

* * *

The earth falls away beneath her, and for an instant as she turns to look, it hangs like a jewel in space. A shudder passes over her, an old legend remembered. But the wife of Lot looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt . . .. From here, there is no shadow of the destruction that has swept the world. One side gleams in green and blue, gold and white: forest and sea, desert and cloud. The other lies in darkness, turning now though inexorably toward the light. Abruptly it shrinks to one point of light among nine, the fire of Sun, Wiyo, at their center. Then that, too, is gone, and she moves through the void between the stars with no more effort than a breath. Wohpe walks at an unhurried pace, her hand still within Koda’s, yet they slip past the blue diamond that is Rigel and Sirius, its twin; the ruby flame of Antares; Aldebaran and Capella and Deneb in less time than it takes to name them.

Ahead, Koda can make out the Great Bear—or is a dipper, or a chariot?—its bowl turned down as it swings about the Pole. Grandpa used to say that was a sign of rain. Is he the one who waits for me?

But Wohpe does not answer, only smiles and gives her hand a gentle tug.

Closer to, the dipper’s shape takes on solidity, the four stars at its corners defining the shape of a great longhouse, a lodge such as her people had used before they spread out across the Plains with the coming of the horse. As she nears, she sees that, like Wohpe’s garment, it is made all of white, birch bark bleached and painted with holy signs: Sun and Moon, Thunderbird and Buffalo, a fall of silver stars like snow on snow. The door flap hangs open, and within a council fire burns on the hearth.

She pauses, but Wohpe gestures toward the opening. Be welcome, she says. Share our fire.

Ducking under the flap, Koda’s gaze sweeps about the space. Bed platforms line the wall, piled high with furs and bright-woven blankets. Shields hang above them, painted with the arms of great warriors: a leaping deer on one, spotted eagle on another, lightning and a storm of hailstones on a third. Bows, lances, quivers of arrows bright with goose feathers, breast plates, march along beside them. They have passed through here, Tshunka Witco and the rest. All those gone before her.

Sit, says a voice from the center of the lodge. Rest.

Dakota turns her eyes finally toward the center of the lodge. Four beings sit about the fire in a semi-circle, all vaguely human shaped, all clearly not human. Eagle and wolf, buffalo and puma, in human garb, with human arms and legs. Their pipes stand in a row, points thrust into the earth beside the hearth. Wohpe moves to take her station among them, smiling. A place has been left open opposite.

For her, Koda realizes. She crosses the space with a thought, sits and bows her head. It is for the elders to speak first, not for her. She can feel their eyes on her, the touch of their spirits.

After a time, the eagle says, "Her words have been true."

The puma says, "She has shown the way to others of her kind."

The wolf says, "She has given life to the sick and injured."

The buffalo says, "She has given her life out of love."

Wohpe asks, "She may pass?"

A murmur of "Hau," and "Han," runs round the circle.

"It is so, then." To Dakota she says, "You will take the Ghost Road. What will you leave behind?"

"I want to go back!" Koda blurts. "I left—"

"Inktomi Zizi has work yet to do. You allowed her to do it." Wohpe’s voice is gentle. "If you go back now, you will be reborn far away from your people. Far away from her. Is that what you want?"

"No! I want—"

"Stop wanting," says the buffalo quietly.

"Stop desiring," says the puma.

"Stop willing," says the eagle.

The wolf says, "You will leave your desires here. They will not trouble you on the Road."

With his words, a second part of Koda’s being fragments and falls away. Peace gathers about her heart, a warmth and lightness that spreads along her nerves. Calm overtakes her as her as all the anger of her life drifts away, all her fears, all her yearning with it.

Gods, she thinks with the last bit of her resistance, that’s some hit of ketamine.

* * *

Kirsten stares up at the tall android, her expression thundery. "A conscience," she repeats.

"Yes. As impossible as that sounds, it is true. I know, down to the cellular level, each and every innocent who was murdered in the quest to create me. If I am not, technically, alive, it is nevertheless something I must live with." His gaze drifts down to the floor. "I find I can no longer do that. The price of my existence is much too high."

"So all this," Kirsten retorts, waving a hand vaguely around the office, "is nothing but some dramatic attempt at suicide by proxy?"

Their gazes lock again, and Kirsten, were she forced to, would swear on a stack of Bibles that the eyes that meet hers so intently, so intensely, are completely human. "If it pleases you to think such," he says softly, "then do so. But know that the murders, and the rapes, and the assaults, will continue until each and every android is terminated at the source. This source." He smiles slightly. "If this is your Garden of Eden, Doctor King, then you are both the Alpha and the Omega."

One corner of Kirsten’s mouth twitches. "Well, well, well. An android with knowledge of the Bible. Will wonders never cease."

Reaching out, Adam takes Kirsten’s hand and curls her fingers over the ear buds in her palm. "Please. Use them."

"You’ll die if I do."

He nods. "I know. It is for the best, don’t you think?"

"If all androids were like you…."

"They are not, Doctor. And the price for creating others of my kind is not worth whatever pittance might be gained by our presence." He squeezes his hand over hers. His grip is warm, and somehow comforting. "Please."

After a last, long look at him, she nods, and he releases her hand. The transceivers fit perfectly. She isn’t surprised.

Task completed, she carefully examines the monitor and keyboard present on the inlaid glass table and, after a moment, waggles her fingers to loosen them, then experimentally touches the keypad.

The pain that drills through her is so fierce, so intense, that it feels as if someone is stabbing red-hot pokers into her ears and up through her brain. So it was a trick, she thinks, but finds only relief in the thought. Her death will come soon, she has no doubt, and though it will be agonizing, it will also, she senses, be quick. She would scream, or laugh, or weep, but her nerves are high tension wires of molten lava, and her muscles are as rigid as a marble statue’s. She is paralyzed by the pain, helpless to stop it, equally helpless to continue on.

A bright copper taste floods her mouth as blood begins to trickle from her nose in sluggish streams, pressed on by the beat of a weakening heart. She does not see Adam’s eyes widen in horror, nor does she feel his large hands come down hard on her shoulders and yank her away from the computer. She doesn’t hear his shout of "NO!", doesn’t feel his thumbs, so precise, press the outer shells of her ears and pop the buds out like corks from a bottle. What she does feel is relief, intense and immediate. She slumps down in her chair in a half-faint, half-daze.

Adam bends over her, his face inches away from hers. "Are you alright?" he demands, his voice sounding as if it’s coming down a very long, very narrow tunnel.

She blinks, then shakes her head to clear it. It is an action she immediately regrets as a monstrous bolt of pain explodes behind her eyes. She lifts a hand to her nose, then stares at the dark, tacky blood coating her fingers. "Yes," she answers finally, fuzzily. "I think so."

"Good. Good." Adam closes his fist over the transceivers and shakes them like he’s rattling dice. "We’ll find another way to do this. Another way."

"You said there was no other way."

"There has to be!" he says, rounding on her, voice raised almost to a shout.

Kirsten is momentarily stunned as she stares at him, having to forcefully remind herself that this is an android yelling at her, not a human. "It’ll be alright," she says softly.

"No," he replies. "No, it won’t be. Not at the cost of your life."

The smile she gives him is infinitely knowing. "I thought you understood that that is not an issue anymore."

Adam’s gaze darts over to Dakota, lying dead in a pool of her own blood, then back to Kirsten. He decides on a different track. "It’s too fast. You’ll likely die before the shutdown can be completed."

"I’ll turn down the gain on my implants," is the quick, almost smug, retort.

He looks at her for a long moment. "How did she ever put up with you?"

That gets him a laugh that sounds, to his ears, like choir bells. Kirsten sticks out a hand. "Just give them here."

With a soft sigh, he reluctantly returns the buds to her.

"You’re a good man, Adam Virgilius."

His reaction is a smile; like a young boy’s smile it is, innocent, good, shy, full of promise. Kirsten feels her heart squeeze in her chest. Oh, Peter, she thinks, it never had to be this way.

After turning the gain down on her implants, she slips the transceivers back into her ears, and then, heart racing, touches the keyboard again. There is pain, oh yes, but this time it is bearable. This is how Archimedes must have felt, she muses wonderingly as suddenly the code comes to life in her mind, marching through her memory in letters and numbers so clear and large that even a child of three could read it. It is large, yes, larger by far than any code she has ever had to untangle, but she knows she can do it. With a grim tightening of her lips, she settles down to work.

* * *

The Ghost Road streams steadily beneath her. She does not walk it, for she no longer has feet to touch the path, nor to push her body forward. Yet her limbs move, and as they move the Road spins out behind her, carrying her forward. For this part of her journey she has no guide, no companion. She has no destination; it is the road that carries her, not she who travels it. Around her the stars spill through the hard vacuum of space, burning steadily like jewels in colors never seen from earth, perhaps never seen on earth except by a holy man or woman on the spirit path. Galaxies spin with rainbow fire, wheeling their way toward the borders of the universe; millions of light-years away from earth, here they seem close enough to touch. She passes through nebulae like fog, where points of brilliance mark the nursery of birthing suns.

Understand.Understand.All things in the hand of Wakan TankaAre sacred.

Understand.Understand.All things born of Ina MakaAre sacred.

The voice is her own, and not. From somewhere comes the faint beat of a drum, echoed by the rhythm of her steps. Somewhere a woman is singing, a melody that swirls through her own senses and lies sweet on her tongue, twines with the silver ribbon of the road itself. She seems to fade in and out of her own form, now walking the path, now observing her progress from a distance. She is and is not, she is Dakota Rivers and Wolf Woman of the Lakota. She is Tacoma’s sister and Manny’s cousin and Tali’s widow; she is Kirsten King’s lover and the She-Wolf of the Cheyenne; she is healer and warrior and shaman. . .and . . someone, something, different from all the above, something apart, something she cannot quite seem to grasp.

Understand.Understand.All that livesIs sacred.

The voice grows stronger, her own with it. The Road curves once, twice, turning in upon itself in the sign of the lemniscate, the path without beginning and without end, infinity. Three times it twists, swirling her about its single surface. Around her black space retreats, and she finds herself on seeming solidity. A shortgrass meadow stretches out almost to the horizon, rimmed by purple mountains. Morning sun angles down through the slender birches that line a stream so clear that every stone on the bottom glints in the light. Beside it a sycamore tree stretches up toward the sun, its bark silver with the early light. The stream widens beneath its roots, spreading out into a pool rimmed in lilies and columbines. A raven, white as the clouds that scud across the sky, cocks its head at her from its perch on a high branch. Below it, a possum scurries up the trunk, its silky tail floating like a plume in the breeze.

Understand.Understand.All that livesReturns to Me.

The singer, the singer that is not Dakota, approaches along the side of the stream. Her hair streams behind her like smoke. At wrist and neck she wears ornaments of turquoise and shell; worked in turquoise and malachite, a hummingbird spreads its wings across the breast of her buckskin dress. Koda bows low in reverence as the woman approaches. "Ina," she whispers. "Ina Maka."

The woman’s fingers brush her hair where she kneels. "Rise, child. Be welcome."

"Ina," she says again as she stands. She has seen the Mother many times in her visions. Never has she seen her before with such clarity, never heard such music in her voice. For here we see as through a glass, darkly. But there we shall see face to face. For the first time, Koda understands the meaning of those words, across years and the barriers of an alien faith. She remains with head bowed.

"Look up, daughter," says Ina Maka gently. "Others are here to greet you."

Koda does as she has bidden. Down the same path Ina Maka followed comes the form of a great wolf. His fur gleams jet and silver in the sun, his ruff as broad almost as a lion’s mane about his head and massive shoulders. With him walks a woman with her arms folded beneath a beaded shawl. She is not as tall as Koda, not as slender, but her eyes are bright above high cheekbones, the part of her hair painted vermilion. A beloved wife.

Wa Uspewikakiyape. Tali.

The peace that fills her swells, becomes joy. She gives a small cry and starts forward, but Ina Maka holds her back. "Wait," she says. Let them come."

With patience she could never have imagined in herself, Koda watches as her teacher and her wife cross the distance between them. When they step into the shade, the light follows them, as if they shine from within. They come to a halt on either side of Ina Maka and just behind her, waiting. For what seems forever, Ina Maka stands looking at Koda, then steps back a small distance. It is a time of judgement, and Koda bears it in silence.