“Fly home to Nektar, Chu!” cried Ond, releasing his hold on the harp. Thuy too lost her grip on the golden prize. It sank beneath the surface, just as Gladax had feared.

Thuy screeched to a stop without exactly knowing how she did it. Ond and Chu rocketed heedlessly ahead. To hell with them. Thuy wasn’t coming back to the Lobrane without that freaking magic harp.

Just now there were no subbies to be seen; they were all beneath the foamy, swirling skin of the Planck frontier. Gathering her courage, Thuy took a deep breath and dove through the surface into—more air. There wasn’t water underneath the skin after all. There was air, and a grassy plain, and to make things the stranger, the direction of gravity flipped as Thuy passed through the wavy skin.

She was standing on the underside of the undulating membrane that she’d initially taken for the surface of a sea. From this side, the Planck frontier resembled a rolling landscape of steadily shifting hills and valleys, a lush estuarial parkland studded with Egyptian-style pyramids and monuments.

Animal-headed men and women milled about the river’s marshy edge, some on foot and some hovering above the reeds. And there, climbing the steps of a lotus-columned temple, were the four bird-headed men with the magic harp! Flutes and drums sounded from within the great stone hall; firelight illuminated a blood-stained altar.

Not stopping to ponder, Thuy ran at the subbies, screaming her defiance.

Moments later she was bound hand and foot. Two jackal-headed women slung her from a stick and carried her up the steps behind the bird-men with the harp.

A familiar figure was standing before the firelit altar: Jeff Luty with his ponytail. He seemed to be holding a twitching giant scarab in one hand. The drumming rose to a crescendo, punctuated by shrieks from the flutes. Luty grimaced wetly and extended the scarab toward Thuy. The beetle opened his ragged jaws.

Chapter 12

Lazy Eight

When the nanoslime attacked Jayjay, at first it hurt, but after a few minutes it started feeling good, and then he went into a dream and didn’t even notice when the orphids cleared the slime off him. In the dream he thought he lived a whole lifetime without Thuy, and that at the end of his life his soul flew off to look for her.

What actually happened was that the Big Pig, for reasons of her own, threw Jayjay into a profoundly convincing hallucination that seemed, to him, to last a full sixty years. During the six or seven hours that Thuy was gone, Jayjay lived out an entire simulated life, full of incident and emotion, the sim life ending with death by virus at the deeply hallucinated age of eighty-four.