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now, at ease with herself, her pre-graduation jitters toned down considerably, perhaps forgotten.
    Outside the fog along the creek behind their property had taken on a glow from the sun. Betts glanced at the digital clock on the wall oven as she sat down to her own breakfast. She thought about the dreambook, and wondered how soon she could get her hands on it without appearing overly anxious to see what Eden had written this morning. It was now twenty-five past six, Pacific daylight time. She turned on the kitchen TV to distract herself, surfed to the Weather Channel. The forecast for northern California was breezy with lots of sun, low seventies by noon. Looked like a perfect day for an outdoor ceremony.

CHAPTER 3
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    EASTBOUND/TRANSPAC 1850 • MAY 28
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    T he TRANSPAC DC-10 that was leased to the Multiphasic Operations and Research Group—better known, to those who had to know or wished they didn't know about its existence, as MORG—took off from Hickam AFB at 0310 hours Honolulu time.
    MORG had been the creation of a man named Childermass, who, like all great demagogues, had a long memory and a lot of patience. He excelled in deceit, intimidation, and persuasion, both silken and bloodcurdling. Childermass liked to say the weakness of a democracy was that it empowered too many fools. The gods (he also would say, quoting Ovid and by implication placing himself within that pantheon) have their own rules. During the Cold War frenzies of the middle decades of the century he used all he knew about the empowered fools and their complex political machineries to maneuver what had been a small entity of the Department of Defense, located in a suite of offices down a humble corridor in a dingy building, into a massive presence in the global business of espionage. Childermass had drowned in his own blood in a bathtub at the age of sixty-two, assassinated (though that was never revealed) by a remarkable adolescent closer to the gods than he could have hoped to be. Gillian Bellaver had imagined, in her fury and heartbreak, that the destruction of Childermass would mean the end of MORG. But bad institutions are like breeder reactors for Childermass's kind. MORG proved to be a self-perpetuating institution that continued to expand and thrive on blackmail, conspiracy, and various kinds of outrage within a developing fascist nation that once had consisted of thirteen proudly independent states.
    The DC-10 flying from the mid-Pacific to southern Montana on the mainland had been expensively refitted for the benefit of one passenger: Kelane Cheng. She had half the plane to herself, in what amounted to an intensive care unit with a team of six doctors and specialty nurses in charge. Finding her still alert, they had added to her medication soon after she was brought aboard. IVs of Brevia, an anesthetic, and succinylcholine to further relax her. She was, according to her activity readout, in a twilight state, although her eyes, mere slits, never closed completely. Portia Darkfeather had been assured that there was no way the Avatar could become a problem.
    Darkfeather ate scrambled eggs and Pop Tarts for breakfast, followed by strong coffee. Then she took a needed nap, reviewing in her only dream the back of Frank Romanzo's head flying apart. Her response was to take Zephyr's throat in her hands until Zephyr was on her knees, her face white and puffy like a huge blister with a tiny red blood spot of mouth, eyes like those of undersea life fragile as apparitions....
    She woke up with dawn light in her eyes, feeling like hammered shit, and went to the bathroom. Then to Kelane Cheng's quarters in the aft section of the huge plane.
    Low lights, the occasional pulse of vital signs monitors. Cheng was restrained on the white hospital bed, as if there could be a possibility of a physical struggle. White patches on her forehead and body, wires, nasal cannula, drip lines. Cheng's heart was beating very slowly. Darkfeather, while not an