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She would fail Drake She would fail the gaiaphage

Then: a flash of genius Brittney alhed out loud

She breathed, but she did not need to breathe

Brittney began picking up s theht as she could make it, then droppedher arhed down, she walked into the water As the water rose around her she kept her gaze on the sailboat She walked directly toward it, fixing the direction in her mind

The water rose over her waist, over her chest, to her mouth and nose And then it closed over her head

She was alht was from the moon, and it seemed to reach only a few feet into the lake

Brittney focused all her energy on walking in a straight line The rocks controlled her buoyancy, but still she tended to float just a little, whichwater filled her lungs She could tell that it was cold, but the cold did not bother her What did bother her was the certainty that she was off course How many steps should she take? How far out was the sailboat? It had seemed like perhaps two hundred steps, but she had lost count after stu some of the rocks that held her down

No choice now but to surface She opened the bottom of her shirt and let the rocks fall free Her feet came up off the stony lake botto time She was not very buoyant

All the while she looked around and saw nothing until she was near the surface Then she saw a rope slanting down into the darkness below

She swaripped the rope and began to pull herself upward, careful not to yank on that line

She calinted with reen trim--was directly above her

Brittney wasn’t sure whether it was proper to say a prayer of thanks to the gaiaphage Maybe that was just for her old God But she smiled in the renewed belief that she had purpose, and that she was serving her master well

TWENTY-ONE

15 HOURS, 12 MINUTES

ASTRID’S PLAN WOULD have been brilliant

Except that in distancing herself froet lost

This quasi-desert was not her fa about a road was that froht unless you were seeing streetlights or car lights

The FAYZ had neither

So the gravel road disappeared fro it, she seemed now to be in much less austere countryside than that which the road passed through