No one noticed Childers enter the village. He set about exploring the place, and the Indians in their white robes would have walked right into him if he hadn't stepped out of their way. But they saw Lupe and me as we approached and came out to meet us on the edge of the machine sea. They all had smiles like Zee, and their speech was rife with platitude and beatific evasion. They were, I decided, the blessed. They had exchanged the illusion of free will for the illusion of peace. They treated us as if we were long-lost members of the tribe, touching us gently, offering food and drink, letting us bathe, and finally ushering us to our own bungalow, a structure not of clay but of reddish brown stone shaped by tools that had left no mark, and inside a cool dark space with a white bed and a kitchen and soft chairs. Then they left us alone. Exhausted, Lupe fell out on the bed. Frankie perched beside her and began displaying footage of our journey on the wall. I sat in one of the chairs, wondering if the village was Montezuma's demonstration model of machine bliss, what he would do for mankind, or if it was simply a casual, off-handed thing, the AI's way of dealing with some ants he had discovered in his back yard. My mind was thronged with images from old films about evil computers who had attempted to enslave humanity, but Childers' notion that the AI wanted to be left alone seemed a much more reasonable representation of what an intelligent machine would want. If Montezuma had played geopolitical and corporate chess in order to position himself so he could then convert the world to that ol' time religion with a brand new twist … well, that made sense, too. Religion had always been the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal, its effectiveness tested over the millennia, and the AI's version, enforced by its microscopic apostles, would be lapse-proof, heretic-proof. Once in the fold, you'd be there for good. Maybe Childers was the good guy, I thought. Maybe I should be helping him instead of plotting to kill him.

Late that afternoon, Lupe sat up in the bed and said, "Shit! Eddie, c'mere!" Then, to Frankie, she said, "Play that last section back."

The images on the wall flickered backwards, steadied, then rolled forward. Frankie's footage showed Childers walking away from the camera into a defile of yellowish rock—it resembled the landscape close to the big boulder beneath which Zee had died. Childers moved along the defile for a couple of hundred yards, then stopped and began stripping off his clothes. He glanced back toward the camera, and Frankie ducked into cover, the footage showing a close-up of a rock. When Frankie peeked out again, a naked Childers was exercising. Doing Tai Chi. I saw nothing that would have excited Lupe. But then his movements became more extreme, and I understood what she had reacted to—Childers' body was changing as he worked out, expanding and contracting with the fluidity of a serpent's body. The camera zoomed in on his face. There were distinct glitters in his eyes that did not appear to be the result of reflected light.

"Magnify one of the eyes and hold," Lupe said. And when Frankie did as ordered, she told him to roll it in slow speed.

Magnified, the eye was proof of Childers' technology. The glitters in Zee's eyes had possessed the same inorganic luster and accumulated with the same rapidity.

"Okay," Lupe said to Frankie. "Normal speed and range."

Childers began to clamber about the rock walls with the agility and quickness of a monkey. I saw that I had absolutely no chance against him in a fight, and this reinforced my feeling that I should align myself with him. Sick fuck though he was, half-machine though he might be, he was likely the closest thing to a good guy in the scenario. But when I made these thoughts known to Lupe, she became angry. "Jesus … Don't you get it?" she said. "The government don't have the technology to do somebody like Childers. AZTECHS is the only one can manufacture that kinda shit."

"What're you sayin'? Montezuma's using Childers to off himself?"

"Your brains musta melted. It's another AI, Eddie. It's gotta be. Another machine's tryin' to take down Montezuma. Childers is workin' for another AI."

"Maybe … I don't know."

"C'mon, Eddie! Think! This whole thing about Montezuma being afraid of the Americans … it's bullshit! If America was going to wipe him out, they woulda done it the second they found out where his mainframe was. The only reason they wouldn't have done it was if they couldn't."

I still didn't understand.

Lupe gazed at the ceiling and said with disgust, "Jesus!" Then she said to me, "Look, man. An AI full of American military secrets, codes, all that, takes off and hides itself out in Mexico. Typical American reaction would be, Kill it'. But they didn't kill it, they left it alone so it could gain more power. Only reason they'd ever let that happen is because Montezuma's already co-opted the government. Congress, the President, generals … I betcha every damn one of 'em's fulla of little glittery machines. Just like Zee. And the enemy Montezuma's afraid of, whoever sent Childers … it's gotta be an AI who's escaped the same as him."

What Lupe said made more sense than my theory. If it was true, there were no good guys left. That, too, made sense.

"What're we gonna do?" Lupe didn't appear to be asking me. It was question asked of the air, the desert, of whatever god—self-anointed or otherwise—that might be listening.

She jumped to her feet, ripped a blanket off the bed and made for the door. "I gotta get out of here!"

I asked what was wrong.

She waved at the smooth reddish brown walls "Where are we, Eddie? What the hell is this place? I wanna be somewhere I know where I am!"

I followed her and Frankie out onto the hardpan to the north of the village—I had no one else to follow and Lupe seemed to have more of a handle on the situation than I. She walked for about a quarter-mile and then spread the blanket and sat down. The sun was lowering, the desert going orange—the fissures in the hardpan had filled with shadows, so it looked as if Lupe and I were situated at the spot where all the cracks started and spread throughout the world. I stood by a corner of the blanket, scanning the horizon. There was no activity in the streets of the village, and no sign of Childers. Off doing one of his techno-workouts, probably. No significant movement anywhere. After a while I sat and stripped off my shirt. I was sweating profusely, a sick drug sweat. I did a syrette and felt instantly better.

Lupe gave me a considering look. "I want you to make love to me. You up to it?"

"I don't know."

"I want you to try!" she said vehemently, petulantly. "I want you to fuck me like you mean it. And I'm talkin' 'bout you, Eddie. Not Sammy."

Put that way, I felt commanded, obliged. It was strange, at first. I wasn't really into it. But as we became more deeply involved, ol' horny, lovelorn Eddie Poe made his way up through the halls of Sammy and took partial control. The sunlight oranged Lupe's body. Orange like the picture of another desert I once saw in a magazine. Gobi orange. My thoughts were moving sluggishly, and the word "Gobi" stuck in my head, making a bloated orange sound. The smoothness of Lupe's skin, unnaturally soft to my enhanced senses, also had a sound, a silky whisper beneath my fingers. We made love for a very long time, while Frankie recorded us for later transmission, riding the sunlight down into crimson and gone, a slow desert fuck that rang crazy changes in my head. One minute I was all Sammy, dutiful in my attentions, noting Lupe's increased respiration and various other reactions; the next I was uncoiling with her, her damp downy patch just the opening of our show, boyfriend-girlfriend deep and dissolving into one another, mainlining emotion. At times I found myself locked between these two states, involved and uninvolved, and I would have odd thoughts that I saw as neon letters against my mental sky, only one of which I can recall—What If The Increase Of The Kingdom Were The Only Significance? The rest were incoherencies. When I looked into Lupe's face, I could read all the feelings she had been hiding from me—they were so clear, it was as if there were words written in Spanish at the corners of her eyes.

Afterward we lay embracing for what must have been an hour, watching the sky go purple and starry, the half-moon slipping up to hang a yin-yang sign above the eastern hills. We had never done that before, never experienced a post-coital coziness—it had always been, Okay, let's get on with business—and even though I would go off to a Sammy distance every so often, alerted by a night-sound or reptilian movement, I had no thought of leaving her. She fell asleep, and I continued to hold her, faithful as a dog on drugs. Eventually, convinced that we were secure, I also fell asleep. The waking dreams I'd been having, flashes of border life, red midnights in which I walked hand in hand with Lupe, easy with her … they flowed seamlessly into a more intricate dream of a similar character. We were on Calle 44, near La Perfidiosa, the blacklight inferno dancehall where I hung when I was fourteen, looking for tourists to rob. Everyone was watching us. Whores, hustlers, vendors. They were smiling and calling out, as if proud of us for some reason, and overhead the red fire of El Rayo no longer seemed a barrier, but a hot fundamental sky beneath which I had come to my maturity.

I shook Lupe awake, helped her to stand. As soon as the cobwebs cleared, she became disoriented, terrified of the place, and once that fear had abated, she started fretting about Childers, wondering where he was and what we should do.

"He's around." I said. "Chances are he's here already. But we can't worry 'bout that. We need to figure out what the fuck we're gonna do."

I doubt this made here feel any better, but as we approached the pyramid, she began instructing Frankie on what to shoot. We proceeded cautiously, casting glances to either side, seeing no other living soul or thing. No birds or insects or lizards. The place was a still life. It had the pleasant vacancy of a foyer, an environment designed to admit life, but not to be lived in. I was no expert, but the pyramid appeared authentic in its disrepair. The stones were bleached gray, the edges of the separate blocks were worn round, and between the feathered serpents lay chunks of rotten stone that might have fallen from their folded wings. One touch of the inauthentic was a word carved into the lintel above the door: AZTECHS. Beyond the door a darkened corridor led inward. Lupe thought we should explore the other sides of the pyramid, but I said that if we weren't going inside, we might as well leave.

Childers settled the argument for us.

He came walking around the side of the pyramid, carrying his rife and pack in one hand. The sun gleamed on his stubbly head, and despite the coolness, he was sweating heavily. "I can't find the way in," he said with some frustration. "You have any luck?"

Since we were standing at the top of the stairs, in the shadow of a doorway, I found the question puzzling; but Lupe, apparently, did not.

"There's no door around back?" she asked. "We were just goin' to go look."

He stared at us, chuckled, set down his pack and rested the rifle against it. Then he climbed the stairs toward us. "You're fucking with me. around. It's here, isn't it?"

"Right behind us," I said. "Can't you see it.

He stopped on the top step and stared at me flatly. "No, I can't."

"You should go on in, man. It's wide open."

He studied me, those three wavy lines on his forehead deepening.

"What's inside?" he asked.

I stuck a hand in my pocket, fingered a syrette, and jabbed it home through the fabric. Montezuma, I thought, had incorporated something into the door's design that blinded Childers' micro-buddies to its presence the same way Montezuma was blind to Childers. It was the disadvantage I had been hoping for. It stood to reason that if Childers couldn't see the door or the corridor, he wouldn't be able to see anyone standing inside.

"How many more fixes have you got left, Eddie?" Childers asked. "Doesn't matter. Shoot the whole bunch, I'll still kick your ass."

I must have hit a big capillary, because the rush slammed my heart and made me wobble. "It's cool," I told Childers. "There's nothin' there. Just an empty corridor."

He studied me again, indecisive. "You go first."

"I got no reason," I said. "Go ahead, man. Do your little trick."

"All right." He began to unbutton his camo blouse. "We'll handle this your way."

I hoped putting up a front might slow him down. "Know what I figured out?" I said. "You're the same as Zee. You're doin' your Master's work. 'Cept you're like Zee's evil twin."

"Evil? Please! My employer is a friend to all mankind. He likes to poke his finger in and stir up the anthill now and then. But he loves the little critters." He winked at me. "You believe me, don't you, Eddie?"

His chest was hairless, massive, signified by what must have been at least a hundred tattoos of identical cartoonish red ants with goofy popped eyes and oversized feelers. He glanced down at them, apparently admiring their profusion. I took the moment to extract Lupe's handkerchief from my shirt pocket. I hid my hands behind my butt, worked on the knot in the handkerchief.

"Room for a couple more," Childers said, patting his chest. "Then I'll have to start putting them on my back."

I emptied the sand into the palm of my right hand and I closed my fist tightly around it.

Childers did a bodybuilder flex for my benefit. It was impressive, but it didn't affect me. Though I was afraid of pain, I had no fear of death. That's what I was here for, ultimately. Things were very simple. I had a plan, and Sammy with a plan … I felt like my own god.

When Childers rushed me, I pushed Lupe through the door and hurried after her. Childers broke off his charge about six feet beyond the door, baffled. I wanted him to come close so I could get in a clean strike. I was confident in every regard. I would kick him in the groin and hit him with the dust. Then I would keep on kicking him.

"Eddie!" he shouted, and edged closer.

I whispered to Lupe, "Stay here … whatever happens."

"What you gon' do?"

"Just stay here!"

Childers shuffled forward, a couple of baby steps, his hands held out before him, fingers slightly curved. He pushed at the air, and it looked as if he thought he had met with some unyielding surface. His face was contorted with fury and he shouted, "Eddie! Where the hell are you?"

I launched my kick.

Later I came to realize that Childers had anticipated my tactics and was standing well back from the boundary that delimited his vision and must have seen my leg emerge from what looked to be a wall of gray stone; but at the moment I couldn't understand what had gone wrong. He caught my leg, dragged me down the stairs and kicked me in the stomach as I tried to stand. He slammed an elbow to the side of my head, kicked me a second time in the side. He leaned down, grabbed my shirt, and said, "I'm going to break your back. Then you can lie there and watch me tear your bitch apart."

I was so dazed, I couldn't muster a reaction. I knew what he was talking about, but at the same time I wasn't sure what had happened or if he was talking to me. I think he was about to carry out his threat when Lupe sailed in from somewhere, jumped onto his back and rode him to the ground, her arms tight about his neck. She shouted something I heard as "And!" Then they rolled out of sight. After a second I heard a truncated scream. My head had cleared to a degree. I wanted to get up, to find out if Lupe was all right, but I was having trouble breathing. From the pain in my side, I suspected Childers had cracked one of my ribs. He hove into view, standing over me. "So much for Plan A," he said. "Huh, Eddie?"

Sand, I told myself. Lupe had said, "Sand."

My right fist was still partly clenched. I could feel the sand in it. I felt it seething against my palm.

"What's beyond the door?" Childers asked.

"Instant death," I said.

"Tell me straight."

"A sandwich shop. They got great chimichangas, man."

Childers squatted beside me, grabbed my shirt front again and hauled me up to a sitting position. "Eddie," he said. "I'm not going to waste any more of your time with threats. I'd prefer to lobotomize Montezuma, but I'll blow the mother up if I have to. So I don't really need you, man. You understand me?"

I brought my right hand up to my forehead, as if to rub it, a weak, faltering gesture, and with a flicking motion, I threw the sand into his eyes.

Childers let me fall, rubbed his eyes, cursed. He felt his way over to his pack, pulled out a canteen. As he tipped back his head and flushed out his eyes with water, I struggled to my feet. Pain stabbed my side, but when I jabbed myself with two more syrettes, the rush washed pain away. My heart was doing polyrhythms, and I was probably close to ODing. But my confidence was supreme—Childers didn't have a prayer. Sammy was in charge of the situation. That the sand had failed to do its job didn't worry me. I could read Childers' muscles. I could predict his every move before he made it.

"That was it?" he said, turning back to me. "I knew you had something working, but that was it?" His eyes were reddened, but he seemed fine otherwise. He came toward me, shaking his right hand as if to free it of tension. "Sorry," he said, and hit me with his left, a straight jab that left my forehead stinging. I staggered back, and he hit me again with the same punch. I wasn't doing such a good job of reading him anymore. His speed was inhuman. Flick. Another shot caught me on my forehead. The skin there was starting to feel puffy, inflated. I summoned all my focus and saw the next one coming. I countered his intent, stepped to the side and landed my right hand on his jaw just as he threw another jab. I kept throwing punches, a flurry that backed him up but—though I hit him cleanly several times—didn't knock him down. A bruise was developing on his cheekbone. Blood trickled from a nostril. He looked amused.

"When I got to Guatemala," he said, and shook me with yet another jab, "I was just a kid. They transported me into the jungle near the old ruins at El Tamarindo, and I joined up with a small force that had been fighting together the better part of a year." He cracked me again. "Their shit was completely out of control. There was a Mayan pyramid near our camp. A little one. Wasn't much left but a pile of stones. They'd painted it all crazy and tricked it up with a bunch of beaner skeletons lashed to poles sticking out from the sides. It was like their altar." He hit me with a combination that left me spread-eagled. "Things got slow, they'd use the pyramid to play King of the Hill, and this one guy, Corporal Rusedski, Corporal David Rusedski, he won most of the time. He kicked my ass every day for a month, and I got fucking sick of it. It wasn't the ass-kicking that bothered me as much as Rusedski himself. He was Sammy, but he had this citizen streak in him. There was a village nearby, and Rusedski would visit it and befriend the indians. Give them food and supplies. Play with the children. Everybody saw this as a betrayal. We were brothers. We hated everyone but each other, and Rusedski's charity work seemed a violation of principle. But we were afraid of him, so he just kept on doing it."

I got to my hands and knees and Childers put me back on the ground with two right hands, the second smacking into my temple and making me groggy. He was, I noticed, slowing down. But then so was I.

"One morning before we were scheduled to play King of the Hill," Childers said, "I went into the village and captured a family. Mom, Pop, a couple of kids. I staked them out on top of the pyramid. See, Rusedski really pissed me off. I was new to Sammy, but I loved it, man. It was me. It was where I'd always wanted to be. And Rusedski was a distraction. He was messing up how I felt—how I wanted to feel—with all his bullshit kindness."

The remainder of Childers' story, his revenge against Rusedski, the slaughter of the innocents, how he became King of the Hill … I was taking such a beating, it came to seem like a bloody dream I was having. I saw the family burning atop the barbarously defaced ruin, Rusedski maddened and falling prey to a simple trick, his subsequent torment, as if I were part of those events and not involved in what was actually happening. I caught sight of Lupe every so often. She was alive, trying to stand, but she wasn't making much progress. These glimpses inspired me to fight back, but the fight was essentially over. Childers pounded me about with the ease of a tiger swatting a bobcat … though he had slowed considerably. I could see the punches coming, but my arms might have been bags of cement, and I couldn't take advantage of the openings. I derived no encouragement from his slowdown. It might be that he was merely taking his time. And if the machine dust I'd thrown in his eyes was working on him, I didn't believe it would finish the job before I was finished.

"Reason I'm telling you this," Childers said, walking around me as I stood wobbly and dazed, trying to bring him into focus, "is I don't like you. It's not that you remind me of Rusedski. He was ten times the man you are. You're nothing but a little punk hustler … but you've got that citizen streak in you. I really hate that, you know. I hate when people aren't true to themselves. When they refuse to admit what total bags of shit they are. So what I'm saying, Eddie … This is personal."

He knocked me back against the side of the pyramid, and as he stepped close, I wrapped my arms around him. It was reflex. I had no strategy, I just wanted to stop the punching, but Montezuma must have seen it as his opportunity to get involved, deducing—I supposed—that I had wrapped my arms around his enemy. I had a deathgrip on Childers, and as we stood swaying together, birds descended from the sky and began to peck and claw at us. I have no idea how many—hundreds, I think. Maybe more. And I'm not completely sure if they were birds. I heard their wings and felt their beaks, and they smelled dirty. But I had closed my eyes against the attack and never saw them.

Childers' chest swelled to impossible proportions, breaking my grip, and he rolled away. I fell to the ground, face down, covering up as best I could. Even after Childers had put some distance between us, the birds kept pecking at me for a minute or two. If this was all the defense that Montezuma was capable of, I couldn't understand why his enemy hadn't already taken him out. Then I had one of those neon-letter thoughts like one I'd had the previous night, albeit more garbled, something about the expansion of kingdom and something else about my place in it. I didn't get it. When the birds left and I sat up, blood trickled into my eyes. There were wounds on my face, my neck and hands. I fell back against the side of the pyramid, slumped onto my side.

"That was pitiful," Childers said, walking toward me. He had cuts on his face and hands, too, but not so many as mine. He shouted at the pyramid. "You hear me! That was pitiful!" He looked at me—fondly, it seemed—and drove the point of his boot into my side. The pain was a knife thrust, going deep. I heard a lung puncture, the hiss of air escaping inside me.

"What's beyond the door?" he asked.

My eyes were squeezed shut, and each breath made me wince. "It's a fucking corridor … I told you!"

"Hey, I think your girlfriend's ready to check out," Childers said. "You want to take a look?"

He turned me onto my uninjured side with his foot. Lupe was lying on her back in the grass about ten feet away. Her eyes were open but she wasn't moving. Blood filmed her mouth. Grief and rage possessed me in equal measure. I rolled onto my belly, preparing to stand, and registered something black passing among the trees behind Lupe. Childers caught me by the collar and hauled me upright, spun me about to face him, holding me at arms-length. His pupils were dilated, and his lips stretched in a grin. A spray of blood stippled his cheeks—either mine or Lupe's.

"What's beyond the door?" he asked.

He no longer had any leverage with me—I spat in his face.

Childers broke three of my fingers. The shock made me scream, and I blacked out. When I regained consciousness I was staring up through the crown of a ceiba tree. Eye trash confused my vision. My head felt like a bead strung on a thrumming white-hot wire.

"What's beyond the door, what's beyond the door, what's beyond the door?" Childers made a song out of it, and after a moment's thought, he added a new lyric. "It really doesn't matter, 'cause Eddie's going to die."

Then his brutal features grew slack, confused.

"If you …" He stumbled away, put a hand to his throat. "I don't … what did …" He stood wide-legged, clutching his throat now, and took a clubbing swing, as though striking at an invisible enemy, and began to choke. He went heavily to his knees, still clutching his throat.

It took me a while to stand, and by the time I succeeded, Childers had toppled onto his side. Without the birds and the delay they had caused, I realized, I would be dead. I limped over to Childers. The machines were doing their work at a quicker pace. One of his hands was convulsively opening and closing, and his eyes were bugged. The muscles of his chest twitched, making it appear that the tattooed ants were in agitated motion. Tremors passed through his limbs. His mouth was open. I believe he was trying to scream. I doubted he realized I was there, and I wanted to hurt him, to let him understand that I was enjoying the spectacle. But I couldn't think of anything to add to what was happening. Glittering grains of machine life were swarming up from the grass. They filmed across his body and began to consume him. Bloody rents materialized in his skin, muscle strings were exposed and eaten away, as if by acid. His feet drummed the ground, his neck corded, and he made a fuming sound. If it hadn't been for Lupe, I would have been a happy man. I turned away from Childers to tend to her and saw one of the black riders looming above her.

Some things just own you. They're simply too big for your brain to fit around. They steal your mind and heart, they stop your thoughts and freeze your limbs, and they just own you the way the sight of Lupe and the rider owned me. The rider was a huge black silhouette that had been burned through the paper on which the AZTECHS pyramid behind him was printed, and Lupe lay bloody-mouthed and broken, tiny beneath him. It was as if I were seeing it over and over again. Light burned the image into my eyes, and then the image was reconstructed inside my head and grew too large to contain, and then I was forced to re-see and re-reconstruct it, as if it embodied some fact too alien for my senses to interpret. Each time this happened, I felt more vacant and lost. I had no context for the sight, emotional or otherwise, yet it exerted a pull. I dragged myself forward and dropped to my knees beside Lupe. She was still alive. Her breath was labored, and she was straining to speak.

"Gay …" she said.

I realized this was the same syllable that Zee had spoken right before he died, but it wasn't until afterward that I put it together with the word "gates," with Zee's declaration that the gates to eternity were all around us, and the stuff about organic distribution points. What I did, I did because I had nothing else to do, and no reason left not to do it. Lupe was dying, and I was so busted up and broke-minded and stoned on death, I didn't care what happened. I glanced at the rider. He leaned down, displaying that eerie, fluid suppleness, and extended his black hand—it was fingerless, a big mitten of negativity. I could see forever into his chest and the dome of his head. Eternity minus stars and Bible stories. It looked at the time like a fine place to be. With only the slightest hesitation, and also with the sense that a terrible sadness was preparing to spike in me, I gathered Lupe to my chest and reached out to take the rider's hand.