JAZZ FELL FROM nowhere, face-down onto the white sands of a sun-washed beach. She rolled to her side, squinting as she looked around; the beach sparkled like powdered diamonds. She closed her eyes, letting the bright sunlight sink into her silver shell. The tiny machines that coated her hummed with pleasure as they ate up the free energy. All around her, the air buzzed with nanites not guided by her genie. She exhaled a thin swarm of machines, commanding them to acts of piracy. Given time, she could manufacture more nanites; right now, here in Atlantis, it was simply more expedient to steal them.
The ghost of Jandra's personality shouted somewhere in the back of her mind, but as the power levels of her genie increased, the faint remnant grew quieter. Jazz sat up, wincing from her wounds. The dragon had given her quite the workout. She ran her silvery fingers along the three-inch gash he'd torn in her belly, knitting the wound shut. She turned her attention to her shoulder. The heat of the sword had carbonized much of the tissue. It wasn't going to be as easy a fix. She set her nanites to work on it, then flowed the silver shell of her genie back over the wound to prevent contamination.
Satisfied that her new body was no longer in peril, she paused to look around. She was on the western shore of Atlantis. The sun hung over the waves. In another hour or two it would be night. The ocean lapping the shore was breathtaking, a bright shade of blue that would have looked perfect on the wings of a tropical butterfly. When all this was over, she'd have to whip up a batch of butterflies. She'd design them as flesh eaters the size of small eagles, but they'd still be beautiful. The required DNA chains uncoiled in her mind's eye.
Jazz stood up, wiping the sand from her silvery butt. She craned her neck to see as much of her new body as she could. She looked good in chrome, better than she would have imagined. Despite her high-tech talents, Jazz had always possessed simple, down-to-earth tastes in fashion-blue jeans, cotton blouses, hemp sandals. Her vegetarianism had extended to eschewing leather, but she had to admit that Jandra's calf-high black boots looked good against the mirror-smoothness of her legs. The fact that they were scuffed and worn provided a pleasing contrast to the machined perfection of the rest of her. The rationale for her longstanding vegetarian ethics rested on shaky ground, anyway. She was honest enough to admit she'd long ago lost the moral high ground when it came to killing the creatures who shared the planet with her. Jandra had eaten meat her whole life. Her brain brimmed with cells programmed to enjoy the taste of fish. Perhaps it was time to try sushi.
Jazz looked up and down the beach. Not a sushi vendor in sight. In fact, the beach was empty. Six billion people lived in Atlantis, and not one could be bothered to come down to the beach on this perfect day. Of course, this beach was perfect every day. That had always been the fatal flaw of the city. After a thousand years of paradise, even the most innocent souls grew bored.
She looked up at the towers behind her. The tallest spires stretched into the blue sky, vanishing in haze, their peaks somewhere beyond the edges of the atmosphere. She saw a shadow of movement race along the shell-pink surface of one of the towers, miles up. She had the nanites in her retinas reprocess the photons striking them and the image sharpened. It was a man, falling, flapping his arms like they were wings. He looked as if he was laughing. Quickly, Jazz spotted another man, then a woman, all falling on parallel paths. Now that she was aware of them, she quickly spotted a hundred more. Some were laughing like the first man she spotted, but others were weeping, and still others looked as if they were screaming in terror. One by one the bodies vanished behind the screen of the lower towers surrounding the spires. If anyone was walking below, Jazz hoped they were carrying heavy-duty umbrellas.
"If your friends jumped off a building, would you?" she asked out loud, remembering the question her father had put to her over ten centuries earlier. She shook her head in disgust. It was time to get to work. She said, "Find Cassie."
Her genie responded instantly, hacking the datastream that flowed along the beach like an invisible river. In Atlantis, every cubic centimeter of air was permeated with nanites, waiting to serve the inhabitants. Her eyes zoomed back up the tallest tower, the Bethlehem Spire. A bright green circle of light flashed around a window too far away to be anything more than a speck, even with the fine tuning of the nanites. Still, she had the coordinates, which was all she really needed.
She waited a while longer, stealing more of the microscopic machines, turning in the ever-dimming sun to charge them to their fullest. Soon, her ribs felt better, with no evidence at all that she'd been a sun-dragon's chew toy. Jazz flexed the fingers of her left hand. They were fully under her control now that she'd fortified the nanites clinging to Jandra's nervous system. Her shoulder tingled as the nanites busily worked on cutting away the charred tissue they found there. On the whole, she felt back in control, not only of Jandra's body, but of everything.
She knew what she had to do to make sure she'd never lose control again.
Humming "Somewhere over the Rainbow," she opened an underspace gate before her.
A YOUNG WOMAN with golden skin looked up as Jazz stepped from the rainbow. The woman had glossy black hair that seemed to bubble up from her scalp like a fountain and flow down her neck and back in liquid smoothness. The woman frowned.
Jazz smiled, until she felt movement beneath her feet. She looked down. The white sand from the beach falling from Jazz's boots were causing tiny mouths to open in the onyx floor, swallowing the grains, leaving the smooth black tile immaculate.
The entire room possessed the same sterile cleanliness. It was as big as a museum gallery, yet barely furnished-its walls were clear panes of glass, free of any curtains or blinds. The golden woman sat at a black table, or at least table top. The perfectly square polished wood hovered, unsupported by legs. A pearl-white cup and saucer sat before the golden woman, full of fluid as dark as the woman's hair. Jazz wondered why the woman was drinking ink. A memory stirred within her.
"Is that… is that… coffee?" Jazz spoke the last word with in a reverential tone.
The woman's golden eyebrows scrunched together above diamond eyes. Her lips parted to reveal pearl teeth.
"Do I know you?" she asked.
Jazz walked across the floor, trying not to be distracted by the mouths gobbling up sand that fell with each step. The golden woman held her ground as Jazz approached until they were practically touching. Jazz grabbed the cup and sniffed it. The toasted, nutty odor of coffee filled her nostrils.
"Sweet merciful Jesus, I haven't drunk coffee in seven hundred years," she said.
She took a sip. Her lips puckered at the bitterness. The receptors in Jandra's tongue weren't mapped to the parts off her brain that would find the taste pleasant. She set her nanites to work fixing that. For now, there was a mildly pleasant surge of endorphins as the hot liquid scalded her tongue.
"Jazz?" the golden woman asked.
"How'd you guess?"
"One of your identifying traits is taking things that belong to me."
"Ah, Cassie," said Jazz. "Do we really have to launch straight into the old arguments?"
Cassie crossed her arms. Her chair drifted backwards, putting some space between her and her sister. A trickle of the liquid hair ran down the crease in her forehead, over her eyebrow, and down the edges of her nose. She blew it away and the liquid responded as if it was normal hair, falling to the outer edge of her cheek. She said, "I thought you died in that explosion on Mars."
"That's what I wanted you to think," said Jazz. She put the cup down and walked toward the window. Her chrome-plated skin was faintly reflected in the glass. She smiled as she realized how youthful her body looked. Her old body had been more or less frozen in development around the age of forty. Unlike the Atlanteans, she'd never had any particular fetish for looking as if she were barely out of puberty. She'd been comfortable with her body, with its stray hairs and generous curves and the familiar sags and wrinkles. It had looked, and felt, lived in. Still, there was something about this fresh, clean body that made her spirit shiver. It was the same artistic rush she felt when she picked up a sheet of fresh white paper.
Outside the window, the distant horizon curved in a perfect arc. They were on the threshold of space. The blue-gray ocean stretched out beneath them. At the edge of the horizon, the color changed as the ocean met land. She was looking at the eastern seaboard of what had once been the United States. These shores had once been studded with cities; now, it was a wild place, the abode of dragons. It was the crowning achievement of a long life.
Jazz leapt backwards as a man flashed past the window. He was naked, with bright red skin crisscrossed with black zebra stripes. He looked as if he was giggling as he plummeted toward the earth, many miles below.
"Jesus," said Jazz. "He scared the shit out of me. Is there a rash of suicides in Atlantis?"
"Don't be absurd," said Cassie, rising to stand beside Jazz at the window. Cassie was wearing a simple slip of sheer black lace that clung to her almost flat chest and barely noticeable hips. Save for Cassie's unnatural height-she was easily a foot taller than Jazz now-she looked no older than twelve. "The city won't let anyone die. The bodies of the jumpers will be destroyed when they hit the ground, but they'll awaken instantly in a backup copy. The essential part of a person is nothing but information, and information is immortal."
"Ah, yes," said Jazz. "You Atlanteans change bodies more frequently than I change my hairstyle. Speaking of which, the last four times I've seen you, you've been female. You get that boy phase out of your system?"
Cassie shrugged. "The female body has… aesthetic advantages. It supports a broader palette of colors. The male body has never looked right to me in the brighter shades."
As if to prove her point, as second man fell past the window. He was dressed like a rodeo cowboy in a fringed leather vest and chaps, but had neon pink skin that looked dumb on him. A few seconds after he flashed by, his hat dropped past.
"It's like bungee jumping without the bungee," said Jazz, tracking the hat down as far as she could.
"They say it's the ultimate adrenaline rush. If you've gotten tired of a body and don't intend to use it again, why not dispose of it in style? It's less boring than going to sleep and waking up new."
Jazz shook her head. "This is what's so wrong about Atlantis. You've let the city remove all pain and fear and worry. You've devolved into beings so jaded you have to throw yourselves off buildings to get ten minutes of feeling alive. You've been given the gift of immortality, and except for the moderately ambitious folks who went off to new worlds, you've all turned into bored teenagers looking for the next distraction."
Cassie shrugged. Her hair flowed into a new trickle along her neck. "What great goals are left? There's no hunger. There's no death. There's no fear, or want, or sorrow. Every great challenge of mankind has been solved. How are we supposed to spend our days? There are no more battles to fight."
A leopard-skinned woman in a bathing suit darted past the window, her arms pointed before her in an arrow, her feet held in perfect balance. If they still held the Olympics, this would be a 10. But, of course, any dive-all dives-could be a ten. The muscle memory for doing anything perfectly could simply be borrowed from the Atlantean datastream. Atlanteans could know everything while literally learning nothing.
Cassie pressed her forehead to the window as she looked at the world far below. She sighed. "After the struggle's over, all that's left is entertainment."
Jazz nodded. She felt a flickering pulse of sympathy for Cassie. She thought of the empty beach below. Her sister was fated to eternity in paradise with the promise-or curse-of a billion years more of the same. The rebellious, fire-bombing ecoterrorist who'd once followed in Jazz's footsteps was long gone. How do you rebel against heaven?
As quickly as the sympathy welled up, it ebbed back. Jazz remembered the real reason for her visit.
"If you thought I was dead, why did you send people to kill me?"
Cassie raised an eyebrow. "Come again?"
"Don't act innocent. I'm wearing the body of a girl named Jandra. She had an Atlantean genie and a body full of nanite enhancements. She got them from a sky-dragon named Vendevorex. I don't think Vendevorex invented the technology on his own."
Cassie smiled. "Oh! Vendevorex. Wow. I haven't thought about him in years. How is he?"
"Jandra remembers him dying," said Jazz. "Of course, we both know that could be a false memory. Jandra doesn't have any memories of meeting you, but that could have been edited as well."
Cassie shook her head as she looked out toward the darkness of space that hung over the horizon. "I don't have a clue who Jandra is."
"But you know Vendevorex. How did he get the genie?"
"I gave it to him. I'm part of a debate committee to decide whether or not the dragon species should be regarded as hazardous bio-engineering waste and removed from the ecosystem."
"Atlanteans shouldn't care about that," said Jazz. "You shouldn't be able to care about that, because the city can't care about it."
"I know," said Cassie. "You hacked the city to keep Atlantean technology from spreading. You made the most powerful, benevolent force ever seen on this world turn a blind eye on the continents so they could go feral. But, while the Atlantean master intelligence doesn't care about what goes on beyond these shores, I still do, and so do some others. You didn't hack our memories, Jazz. Some of the people here were involved in creating the dragons. They're concerned about their spread. They were created as novelties. No one anticipated they'd become the dominant sentient species on the North American mainland."
Jazz leaned against the glass wall. "Unintended consequences are what make life interesting. But what does this have to do with Vendevorex?"
"Vendevorex was one of a handful of dragons the committee captured for study. Usually we keep them in laboratory settings, but Vendevorex was clever enough to escape. He eluded capture for three days, this on an island where even the air is sentient. I finally tracked him down. He was frightened, but also defiant. His fighting spirit stirred something inside me. He reminded me of the person I once was."
"I remember when you were a teenager. You were a real hell-raiser." Jazz grinned. "If you'd had a few more years, I bet you could have knocked me off the top of the most wanted list."
"Thanks," said Cassie, her golden cheeks blushing rose pink.
"I didn't say it enough back then, but I liked you," said Jazz. "You were fully committed to saving earth from mankind. You were a rebel to the bone."
"There's some of that still inside me," said Cassie. "That's why I gave Vendevorex a genie and trained him to use it. I helped him escape back to North America. It was a form of rebellion against Atlantis; more importantly, it was a form of rebellion against you."
"Me? How?"
"You prevented the spread of Atlantean technology by humans. Vendevorex would have no such qualms. I gave him the know-how to build other genies. I thought he would eventually spread the technology, and get around the block you placed on the island."
"Clever," said Jazz. "But there's no way he could have linked into the Atlantean networks to make full use of the genie's potential."
"Vendevorex was smart. Since he couldn't link to a database to guide his nanites, he devoted himself to the study of chemistry and biology. His mind would be the database."
"Ah," said Jazz. "That's why Jandra has the periodic table memorized and can name every bone in the body."
"It's not as efficient as the Atlantean mind, of course," said Cassie, "but it works."
"You said you were on a committee trying to stop the spread of dragons. Why give one such a powerful tool? This is only going to lead to more powerful dragons."
Cassie looked away. However, her reflection was clearly visible on the glass. She had the faintest hint of a smug grin.
Jazz added up all the clues. "Don't tell me. You've buried a code in those genies. Vendevorex was supposed to keep propagating the genies until they reached a critical mass. They'd form their own network, one that would communicate with Atlantis, and wipe out the shackles I programmed. Atlantis would turn all of Earth into a paradise for humanity, wiping out the dragons as an environmental pollutant left over from careless genetic tinkering."
Cassie raised her eyebrows. "Wow. That's quite a guess."
Jazz looked around the big, empty, dustless room. On the opposite wall, the earth was now in darkness, and the stars shone as perfect points, untainted by atmosphere. She spotted Mars and thought about the settlers there, and the good time she'd had two centuries ago intervening in their civil war. All the people worth knowing had long since fled the earth. "Do you remember how mom used to drag us to church?" she asked.
"I haven't thought about that in a long time," said Cassie.
"I recently had a reminder of the fire and brimstone sermons. I was buried in a pit of fire, neither dead nor alive, in constant agony. If things had gone badly, it might have lasted for all eternity. It's sheer luck that I escaped. Luck and my complete lack of any moral qualms about stealing another woman's body."
"Sounds rotten. Have you decided to mend your ways?"
"No."
"No?"
"Let me show you something," said Jazz. She opened her hand. The chrome coating her palm boiled, bubbling up into a silver marble an inch across. She rolled it forward and caught it between her fingers.
"What is it?" said Cassie.
Jazz held it out. "Take a close look at the writing on the surface."
Cassie frowned, leaned forward, and squinted. She picked it up, holding it only a few inches from her face, and turned it slowly.
"I don't see any wri-" she stopped in mid-word as the gold coating her face and lips begin to crack, flaking away like the shell of a boiled egg, revealing pale flesh beneath.
Cassie dropped the marble. It bounced on the floor. A small mouth opened to devour it, then froze. Jagged cracks ran across the surface of the onyx tile.
"What's happening?" The metallic shell that coated her fell away in fine flakes. Her black silk slip now sported a sheet of scaly dust, as if she'd just developed the world's most severe case of dandruff. Her black ink hair stopped seeping from her scalp, leaving her bald, missing even her eyebrows.
"Call for help," Jazz said.
Cassie glared at Jazz, her eyes full of hate. Slowly, her features changed; hate funneled away, leaving only fear.
"It's silent," she whispered. "You've made the city go silent."
"Not yet," said Jazz. "This is only a test run. The marble is a jammer. It emits a coded radio pulse that scrambles the Atlantean datastream. You've vanished from the city's awareness. You can't even use your own genie to communicate with your nanites. I'm immune because I encoded the pulse."
"This is… this is monstrous!" said Cassie, backing away, leaving a trail of dust. He body looked pink and raw. Despite being taller than Jazz, she looked vulnerable in her girlish body, with the absurdly thin limbs that were the fashion in Atlantis. "Disabling my genie is like gouging out my eyes! You've made your point! Turn it off!"
"If I turn it off, you'll be back online, and Atlantis will know what you know."
"But… But…"
"Don't fight this. You had a good run. A thousand years. Try to appreciate the adrenaline rush."
Jazz willed an underspace gate to open in the air near her hand. She grabbed the edges of the rainbow, wrapping her fingers around it. Her nanites generated an electromagnetic field that let her fold the light. At the center of the rainbow, a slender black arc thinner than a human hair curved from her grasp like a scimitar.
"Have you ever seen what happens if you hit something with an underspace gate only a few nanometers wide?" Jazz asked.
Cassie clenched her fists. Despite the thinness of her limbs, Cassie's muscles would be finely tuned, and fast. Her nerves had been created cell by cell in absolute perfection, while Jandra's body still clunked along on the nervous system she'd been born with.
"Jazz, you can't seriously be thinking of killing Atlantis. There are six billion people here! Killing the city is the same as killing them. Not even you are that black-hearted."
"I snapped a baby's neck before I came here," said Jazz. "A scaly baby who bit the shit out of me, but still… I wouldn't place bets about my holding onto any moral limits."
"But… why? Why is it so awful to let the city help people? The city takes care of us."
"Atlantis turned mankind into a race of eternal children," said Jazz. "I'm tired of being the world's only grownup."
Cassie lunged forward, her fist aimed for Jazz's nose.
Jazz stepped aside, twirling the underspace blade into her sister's path. Cassie fell past her, landing with a wet smack on the stone floor. Jazz looked down at her sister's hands, which had fallen near her feet, severed by the world's sharpest scalpel.
Cassie twitched on the floor. Her exsanguination became a dark pool before her. Jazz had little appetite for gore.
She went to the black table, picked up the coffee cup, and took another sip. She was braced for the bitterness now. Jandra's tongue was no longer virgin; this time, the liquid washed across her taste buds with a mix of sharpness and heat that was almost pleasant.
Killing Cassie was an act of mercy. The centuries had left her sister soft; she would have been ill-prepared to face the world to come. The risk Atlantis represented was too great. Maybe Cassie had failed to undo her programming over a thousand years, but what of the next thousand years? Jazz had never learned the true origins of Atlantis. It was obviously an alien construct, but who had sent it here, and why? What would happen if they suddenly showed up to fix it? She had no choice but to kill the city.
Of course, Atlantis was probably a more formidable opponent than Cassie had been. If she was serious about doing this, she needed allies. Her long-wyrm riders had been laughably ineffective. Her best angel had been thoroughly trashed by a sour-faced little man with nothing more than a bow, an arrow, tenacity, and brains.
Bitterwood had killed her, true, but she didn't feel angry about this. Instead, she had a grudging admiration. The people of Atlantis were spineless hedonists. They reminded her of the world of her youth, an entire planet full of people with the mentality of locusts, devouring all the pleasures the world could grow, ignoring the wastelands left in their wake. Bitterwood, born and bred in Jazz's new world, was a true man; fearless, clever, and full of conviction. He was living proof that her world was a better environment for humans than this false paradise. There were more important things in the world than being safe and healthy and entertained.
For a man to be truly great, he must struggle against monsters. With the right weapons, Bitterwood would make a valuable ally.
Darkness crept across the ocean, lapping the shore of North America.
THE SUN WAS low over the hills to the west as Vulpine walked along the Forge Road, admiring the decaying scarecrows Sawface and his Wasters had placed along the highway. Word of the blockade had apparently spread quickly throughout the human population. In recent days, the stream of humans attempting to reach the fort had ended. This meant that humans were staying on their farms. Now that the earth-dragons that had been raiding them were organized once more into an army, home was the safest place for a human to be. In a few weeks, they would go out and plant their crops. Rebellions were easier to sustain in early winter, when food was plentiful following harvests. Once the crops were in the ground, the rebellion would effectively be finished. Few people would abandon crops to join a hopeless cause. By this time next year, the rebellion would be only a bad memory.
As pleasing as the results of the scarecrows were to Vulpine, the stench of the road was unsettling. He lifted into the air, climbing, climbing, till he was almost a mile high. In the dying light, it was difficult to be certain, but it appeared as if activity within the walls of Dragon Forge had greatly reduced. The streets were empty. Only a few spotters remained along the walls with the wheeled bows that caused such terror among the sun-dragons.
Most importantly, only one of the smokestacks of the foundry was spewing smoke. It was too soon for yellow-mouth to have manifested in many victims yet, but even one or two would be sufficient to spread terror. The foundry was faltering, no doubt because the workers were hiding in their bunks, afraid of encountering anyone with the disease.
Dropping from the sky back toward his camp, he saw the squad of valkyrie engineers still working on the thousands of iron bits spread upon the large tarp near his tent. These were the remnants of the war engine Sawface had destroyed. It was a shame-the machine had looked impressive in its short run. It obviously had design flaws-exploding after the bridge collapsed being chief among them. Still, he could only imagine what the valkyrie engineers and the biologians could accomplish if they'd gotten their talons on a working prototype.
Arifiel was present, speaking with her fellow valkyries. She broke away as she saw Vulpine, flapping her wings for a short flight to his landing target. Arifiel was a veteran of Blasphet's recent attack on the Nest. She still bore a rather unattractive festering burn wound on her shoulder as a reminder. It didn't slow her, however.
"How goes it?" Vulpine asked.
"My engineers are still analyzing the placement of the fragments. We've interviewed the earth-dragons who witnessed it up close, but their capacity for describing a device of this complexity is somewhat limited."
"I value Sawface for his ability to demolish a stone bridge with a hammer blow more than for his verbal prowess," said Vulpine. "Still, the report from Bazanel should be complete any-"
"Bazanel is dead," said Arifiel.
"What?"
"Chapelion's messenger arrived while you were visiting the other checkpoints. I was present when he gave the news to Sagen. A human assassin killed Bazanel and stole the gun. The secret of gunpowder had already been given to a valkyrie. She gave it to Chapelion, who shared the news with his advisors. A few days later, all of his advisors were slain by an assassin too-a young human female. Unfortunately, no copies of the formula survived, and Chapelion didn't bother to memorize the formula."
"Was poison used by the assassins?"
"No. This was my first thought as well. It doesn't appear to be the work of Blasphet."
Vulpine walked over to the tarp. He craned his neck down to see the gears and wheels laid out before him in the dim light that remained. He shook his head as he contemplated this turn of events.
"Why did he delay in sending me the formula?" Vulpine asked, speaking more to himself than Arifiel. "I would have had gunpowder in production within a day."
"The greatest failing of biologians is that they debate all matters endlessly before taking action," said Arifiel. "Chapelion is the ultimate embodiment of this flaw."
Vulpine wanted to scold the female for making such disparaging accusations against his chief employer, yet in his heart, he knew it was true. As well as things were going here, it sounded as if things were in decline at the Dragon Palace. Every few days brought bad news. The Grand Library was burned. A dozen aerial guards and valkyries had abandoned their posts, in contrast to the mere four under his command. Now this.
"The valkyries were to aid in the protection of Chapelion and his advisors," said Vulpine. "Instead they've focused their attention on seducing members of the aerial guard and fleeing."
"I would argue it's members of the aerial guard who are leading the valkyries astray."
Vulpine ground his teeth. "The blame for our setbacks rests upon multiple shoulders, including my own. I've underestimated the humans in the fort. First the new bows, then the guns. Now they've built a war machine capable of rolling under its own power. There's obviously a genius hidden within the walls of the fort. He sent the assassins."
"What do you propose to do about it?"
"You valkyries are the ones who boast of being experts in war," said Vulpine. "What would you do about it?"
"I would load the catapults with barrels of flaming pitch and burn the city to the ground. We can build a new foundry on the ashes of the old."
"We could build a new foundry a few miles up the road without destroying anything," said Vulpine. "There's more to victory than mere destruction."
"Do you have a better strategy?"
Vulpine scratched his chin and gazed at the red sky left by the vanished sun. The black outlines of Sawface's scarecrows ran along the ridge.
"Ah," he said.
"Ah?" asked Arifiel.
"Tell your valkyries to ready their catapults. Have Sawface remove the scarecrows. They've served their purpose on the roads."
He looked toward Dragon Forge. The sky above it was dim in comparison to only a week ago. He said, "Whoever our mysterious genius is, he'll be working in unpleasant weather tomorrow."
Arifiel looked up. "The sky isn't all that cloudy."
"We won't need clouds for the rain I have in mind," said Vulpine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: