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Jongleur's eyelids slid up and he turned to regard them. Renie wondered if her own sim face would register a guilty flush. "If you have the energy to whisper like schoolchildren," he said, "then you no doubt have the strength to begin walking again." He pushed himself upright and began to limp down the path.
"You seem very disturbed, Renie," !Xabbu said quietly as they stepped out after Jongleur.
"Well, what if it's true? What if the answers to everything—the children, and why we're stuck here, and what's going to happen—what if he already knows everything we've been killing ourselves to find out?"
"I do not think he will help us, Renie. He might trade for information from us, but only if it was useful to him, and we have no idea what he needs."
Renie could not shake a certain sick feeling. "I can't help thinking about what Sam just said. Not trying to crack open his skull, but about using force. If he's stuck in a virtual body like we are, then he's vulnerable—and we outnumber him. Don't we owe it to all those children, to our friends, to find out what he knows? Even if we have to . . . to torture it out of him?"
!Xabbu looked truly disturbed. "I do not like that thought, Renie."
"Neither do I, but what if the fate of the world really is at stake?" Sam had fallen back a couple of paces, and now Renie lowered her voice until her mouth was almost against !Xabbu's ear, which made walking single file even more dangerous. "It sounds so melodramatic, but it could be true! What if that's the only way? Don't we have to consider it?"
!Xabbu did not reply. He looked, if it were possible, more exhausted now than before they had stopped to rest.
Renie certainly understood !Xabbu's reluctance even to talk about the possibility of torturing Jongleur for information—not just in abhorrence of what they would themselves become in taking such a step, but also because of real fear about what might come of it. Jongleur was a hard, ruthless man. Watching his measured pace a few steps ahead, the ropy, hard muscles of his naked body moving beneath the skin, she had the feeling that bending him to their will might not be a process without casualties on their own side—a price Renie was unwilling to pay. And although Ricardo Klement had shown no interest in anything so far, that was no guarantee he would stand passively by and let them attack Jongleur. But even if they managed to subdue the Grail master and threaten him with pain or even death, what then? She did not know for certain that Jongleur really was as vulnerable to virtual execution as she and her companions; perhaps he was only pretending for some reason of his own, and dying in this place would merely fling him into some other sim, or back into his ancient physical body. Then they would have lost any chance at the information, not to mention having become the failed assassins of the most powerful man in the world—not a position with much long-term security.
She would not, could not rule out the possibility of using mortal force on him—not as long as the lives of Stephen and countless others were at stake—but all in all, it didn't seem like a gamble that should be undertaken before everything else had failed.
What else, then? If Jongleur were a normal man, they could bargain, trade something he wanted for information. But the only thing she could see that he needed was escape from this place and revenge on his unruly servant, Dread. Neither of those were in Renie's power to grant.
So what do you give the man who has everything? she thought in sour amusement. Was there something that Jongleur also needed to know? Something that Renie and her companions had to give? What might possibly interest him?
His daughter, she thought suddenly. How does she fit into this? Suddenly Renie knew why the whole thing had bothered her. Whatever she's doing, it doesn't seem meant to help her father. The opposite, if anything. Didn't Paul say Jongleur's goons have been chasing him? But it seems like she's been trying to keep Paul away from the Twins when surely she could just hand him over if she wanted. In fact, he said she was afraid of them, too. So what was her relationship with Jongleur? It certainly didn't appear to be an old-fashioned, Daddy's-Little-Girl scenario.
There was definitely something there. Renie felt a surge of grateful energy. Something to chew on, some useful work for her brain.
We don't really know anything about this Ava. Why was she also Emily, for God's sake—a minor sim in an Oz simulation? Why did she help Orlando and Fredericks in the Kitchen and Egypt, but never did anything for me and !Xabbu? And why has she elected herself Paul's guardian angel when it's her own father who's tearing up the network trying to find him?
She continued her downward march like a zombie, one slow foot in front of the other, but inside she felt alive for the first time in days.
They found a hollow in the mountainside relatively soon after the last stop, but since there was no guarantee another suitable spot would present itself anytime soon, they decided to make camp, which meant nothing more than dragging themselves off the trail to sleep.
Renie was the first to wake. She rolled over and looked at Sam twitching in uneasy slumber. The girl was bearing up as well as could be expected, but Renie was worried: she suspected the teenager's restraint was due mostly to the flattening of exhaustion. Acting on impulse, she gently withdrew the ruined sword from Sam's waistband, then sat back and waited for Jongleur to wake.
!Xabbu and the hard-faced man began to stir at the same time. Felix Jongleur seemed to be having a bad dream—his hands clenched and unclenched, and his lips were moving as though he were trying to speak. It made Renie feel more than a little happy to think that something might be preying on the monster's conscience.
Jongleur started upright, muttering, "No, the glass. . . ." then looked around blearily. His gaze touched on Ricardo Klement, lying a meter away, eyes open but otherwise almost lifeless. Jongleur shuddered and rubbed his face.
"So," Renie said suddenly and loudly. "What's with you and Paul Jonas, anyway?"
Jongleur froze like a startled animal, then his face became as carefully expressionless as the mask he had worn as lord of ancient Egypt. "What did you say?"
"I asked what your problem is with Paul Jonas." She kept her own voice aggressively casual, but her heart was beating fast.
Jongleur was on his feet in an instant, moving aggressively toward her. "What do you know of him?"
Renie was ready. The broken sword blade flashed up, inches from his face. Jongleur froze again, staring, lip curled and showing teeth.
"I don't think you should come any closer," she said. "What are you, anyway—French? There's still a little accent to your English. Maybe you're used to those North African black women, the ones whose husbands tell them what to do. Well, I'm not that kind of African, old man. Back up and sit down."
He moved no closer, but did not retreat either. "Accent? A poor jibe from you, with your school grammar draped over the township patois." His hands were knotted, knuckles like little white eggs. Renie could tell that the autocrat was only one bad decision on her part from trying to use them on her, sword or no sword. "What do you know of Jonas?" he demanded again.
"That's not the way we're going to play this game." She saw that !Xabbu was sitting up now, watching her carefully, silently. "You said before that we weren't going to get any information from you for free. Okay, I suppose that's fair. We know a lot about Paul Jonas. You know a lot about the network. Let's trade."
He had mastered his rage now, although the cords in his neck and arms were still pulled tight. "You think much of yourself, woman."