Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Paging forward through the book, she came across a long-forgotten story of how, following her stepfather's disappearance, her wicked stepmother had taken the lock-box to a high cliff above the sea and flung it into the waves, destroying any evidence that Princess Nell was of royal blood. She had not known that her stepdaughter was watching her from between the branches of a thicket, where she often concealed herself during her stepmother's rages.

Nell flipped to the last page of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

As Princess Nell approached the edge of the cliff, picking her way along carefully through the darkness, taking care not to snag the train of her nightgown on thorny shrubs, she experienced a peculiar feeling that the entire ocean had become dimly luminescent. She had often noticed this phenomenon from the high windows of her library in the tower and reckoned that the waves must be reflecting back the light of the moon and stars. But this was a cloudy night, the sky was like a bowl of carved onyx, allowing no light to pass down from the heavens. The light she saw must emanate from beneath.

Arriving cautiously at the rim of the cliff, she saw that her surmise was true. The ocean-the one constant in all the world– the place from where she had come as an infant, from which the Land Beyond had grown out of King Coyote's seed, and into which it had dissolved– the ocean was alive.

Since the departure of King Coyote, Princess Nell had supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone only by her own choice.

"'Princess Nell gathered the hem of her nightgown in both hands and raised it over her head, letting the chill wind stream over her body and carry the garment away,' " Nell said. " 'Then, drawing a deep breath and closing her eyes, she bent her legs and sprang forward into space.'

She was reading about the way the illuminated waves rushed up toward her when suddenly the room filled with light. She looked toward the door, thinking that someone had come in and turned the lights on, but she was alone in the room, and the light was flickering against the wall. She turned her head the other way.

The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night. The sphere expanded until it seemed to occupy most of the interval between New Chusan and the Pudong shoreline, though by this time the color had deepened from white into reddish-orange, and the explosion had punched a sizable crater into the water, which developed into a circular wave of steam and spray that ran effortlessly across the ocean's surface like the arc of light cast by a pocket torch.

Fragments of the giant Feed line that had once constituted most of the Causeway's mass had been pitched into the sky by the explosion and now tumbled end over end through the night sky, the slowness of their motion bespeaking their size, casting yellow sulfurous light over the city as they burned furiously in the wind-blast created by their own movement. The light limned a pair of tremendous pillars of water vapor rising from the ocean north and south of the Causeway; Nell realized that the Fists must have blown the Nipponese and Hindustani Feeds at the same moment. So the Fists of Righteous Harmony had nanotechnological explosives now; they'd come a long way since they'd tried to torch the bridge over the Huang Pu with a few cylinders of hydrogen.

The shock wave rapped at the window, startling several of the girls from sleep. Nell heard them murmuring to one another in the bunk room. She wondered if she should go in and warn them that Pudong was cut off now, that the final assault of the Fists had commenced. But though she could not understand what they were saying, she could understand their tone of voice clearly enough: They were not surprised by this, nor unhappy.

They were all Chinese and could become subjects of the Celestial Kingdom simply by donning the conservative garb of that tribe and showing due deference to any Mandarins who happened by. No doubt this was exactly what they would do as soon as the Fists came to Pudong. Some of them might suffer deprivation, imprisonment, or rape, but within a year they would all be integrated into the C.K., as if the Coastal Republic had never existed.

But if the news feeds from the interior meant anything, the Fists would kill Nell gradually, with many small cuts and burns, when they grew weary of raping her. In recent days she had often seen the Chinese girls talking in little groups and sneaking glances at her, and the suspicion had grown in her breast that some of them might know of the attack in advance and might make arrangements to turn Nell over to the Fists as a demonstration of their loyalty. She opened the door a crack and saw two of these girls padding toward the bunk room where Nell usually slept, carrying lengths of red polymer ribbon.