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Without a meaningful contribution to our studies, I can't absorb the risk of offending Absolution."
    She sat back. Her stomach rumbled, but she had no appetite. The day's travel and heat descended on her like a smothering hand. What were they doing here? They were woefully unprepared and undersupplied. Toman's losing battle with the politicians of Better Sands was making him desperate. She should have insisted they spend more time readying for the trip.
    Webber stuffed a spoonful of mashed plantains in his mouth. He halted mid-chew, shifting the food to the side of his mouth. "Fell, we may not have the whole book. But what if I can get you some of it?"
    The monk's eyes widened. "Life never arrives fully formed. It grows cell by cell, generation by generation. Any step you can bring us closer to understanding will truly be the Way."
    Webber laid out his idea. Rada had to admit it was brilliant: compile all the extant quotes Fell had, then fire them off to LOTR, who would not only do a comprehensive net search for them, but could also use their bleeding-edge Merlin system to check for keywords and patterns in the prose to search for alternate translations from the text's original Old American English.
    Flinging these queries across the System would take the better part of a day. Dubious of entrusting all their communications to Fell's device, and feeling insufficiently armed after the encounter at the gates, Rada rode her bike back to the car to pick up their gear. By the time she got back, dusk was falling over the jungle. The chirps and trills of the bugs and birds changed, but the temperature refused to budge any lower.
    The monastery had a shower, though, which Rada was ready to commandeer at gunpoint. After she finished, they ate with Fell's fellow monks, who looked mildly curious, but had the patience of their profession and left the guests alone.
    Feeling terribly old, Rada called it a night. They bedded down in a stone room with nothing but mosquito mesh separating them from the outdoors. Rada was unnerved to be exposed to such an uncontrolled environment in her sleep, but she turned out to be too exhausted to care.
    The heat returned hand in hand with the morning. Rada called Toman as soon as she was awake, hoping to catch him before he got embroiled in lobbying.
    "Nothing new," he said. "Trust me, as soon as I have something, so will you."
    "This is starting to feel like a wild goose chase. This ex-employee, is he really that important?"
    "There's no knowing until we've got him. But from what we've dug up, he was one of the key players in FinnTech's involvement with the Swimmers. I'm surprised Finn hasn't had him killed."
    He hung up. She headed to the back patio to eat. After breakfast, they hung around the table, drinking coffee laced with something that tasted like black licorice.
    Webber set down his mug with a clank. "Why's this book so important to you, anyway?"
    Fell looked up from his device. "How much do you know about the Way?"
    Webber shrugged. "I'm not big into fiction."
    MacAdams socked him on the shoulder with a meaty thump. "Have some respect."
    Fell waved a hand. "One man's lack of faith does nothing to diminish my own."
    "Swimmer religion," Rada said. "The struggle of life to persevere and find new ways to go on."
    "It also holds that the universe is here to be filled by life. Thus, anything that would extinguish life rather than expand it stands in opposition to the purpose of existence. You can think of this in a literal sense—nuclear warfare, for instance—or in a more figurative sense—refusing to let yourself grow as a person, whether through ignorance, laziness, fear, and so on."
    Fell paused to sip his coffee. "Mauser's Three Treatises tackle both the figurative and the literal. Chaos is a phenomenon as natural as life, yet it stands in opposition to it. Mauser wasn't a proponent of the Way, but his conclusion—that we must fish our own bits of meaning from the soup of chaos—is deeply