"Youjumped ?" Wyrdrune said with astonishment. "You little idiot! You could have cracked your

casing!"

"Youjumped ?" Wyrdrune said with astonishment. "You little idiot! You could have cracked your

casing!"

"What is it?" Kira mumbled sleepily.

"It's Archimedes," Wyrdrune replied.

"Archimedes?" She rolled over and opened her eyes slightly. "How did he get in here?" She closed her

eyes again and burrowed back beneath the covers.

Wyrdrune frowned. "Howdid you get in here? The door was closed."

"I came in through the cat door."

"The cat door?"

Wyrdrune stared at the bedroom door, where they had recently installed a pet door for the stray tabby

Kira had picked up somewhere on the streets. It had decided that its place to sleep was at the foot of

their bed and anytime they closed the bedroom door, it sat outside and yowled until they got up and let it

in, so Wyrdrune had installed a pet door for it.

"You were able tofit through there?"

"It was a tight squeeze," said Archimedes. "I think I may have scratched my casing."

"Get up here," Wyrdrune said, reaching down and grasping the little computer by the recessed grip in the

top of its casing. He lifted it up onto the bed and examined it. "No, you're all right. What the hell is so

important you had to jump off the desk and risk getting stuck in Shadow's door?"

"Mona just called."

Wyrdrune's hand reflexively went to his chest and touched the ruby runestone imbedded in the flesh over

his heart. He had another enchanted gem, an emerald, set into his forehead, like a third eye. His long,

curly, shoulder-length blond hair fell over it. At the mention of Mona, he instantly became wide awake.

Mona was a sentient hyperdimensional matrix computer in the service of the General Hyperdynamics

Corporation at Colorado Springs. Compared to little Archimedes, she was a monster, the ultimate in

state-of-the-art, thaumaturgically etched and animated picoprocessors and software. There were only

three others like her in the world, one at Yamako Industries in Tokyo, one at Langley, Virginia, and one

at I.T.C. headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. If Archimedes was an endearing little piece of magically

animated hardware, Mona was an imposing Amazon. Her size, to say nothing of her storage and

processing capabilities, would have dwarfed little Archimedes, but none of them had ever actually seen

Mona. Few people ever had. She was a highly classified piece of equipment, protected by her own

highly sophisticated safeguard programs, state-of-the-art security systems, and a phalanx of armed

guards.

One of Kira's shady friends who operated on the fringes of the New York underworld, a brilliant and

eccentric young computer jockey known as Pirate, had inadvertently played matchmaker between them.