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and how her mother reached up to pat his hand. Her mother's eyes were apprehensive, a little guilty, and
her father's were also worried, but a bit less so, she thought, than they had been earlier. Using what
Chime would have considered one of her nonphysical "eyes," Toni-Marie suddenly saw how old things
were-her parents were older, more fragile, their belongings worn and getting shabby; and inside the
cupboards, well, the cupboards had once been stocked to overflowing, but food for the living must now
be exorbitant. Imagine how much more it would take if her parents were trying to support a calf as well?
And yet they'd been ready, under any circumstances, to have her back because she was theirs.
"We must hurry," Chime said. "There are some sick and injured among the living who must be taken to
Shambala as quickly as possible."
"Can't your friend just stay a little longer?" Toni-Marie's mother asked, and Toni-Marie heard the love
and wistfulness in the voice, but also the relief and the hope that maybe her daughter's rebirth would not
be one more horror with which they'd have to cope. "You haven't been here very long."
"I'm sorry, folks," Toni-Marie said gently, giving them each a kiss and as much of a hug as a ghost is
able. "But I'm glad I got to come to see you're okay. I'm sorry about Maybelline and Amy-Renee and I
hope they made it back as people. We got to run now, though. Bye!"
"Bye, honey, we love you," her mother called, waving as Toni-Marie and Mike blended with Chime. A
little lamely she added, "Have a nice life. . . ."
"Soon, baby," Ace added grimly. "I hope it's real soon."
"Soon," his wife echoed.
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CHAPTER XXX
The return journey to Tibet was almost instantaneous, so that one moment Toni-Marie was hearing her
parents say good-bye, the next she was overlooking the ruined monastery with Mike and Chime. Chime
pointed out the small enclave of soldiers without trying to contact them, then showed Mike and
Toni-Marie the nomad encampment and the bunker where the Indian and North American soldiers lived.
Last, she showed them the lifeless city of Lhasa, where only the bitter ghosts still wandered.
Mike looked sad at how little Chime had been able to find, but Toni-Marie was happy, both to have
seen her parents and to have escaped the rebirth they were willing to arrange. She was in the mood to
look at everything else optimistically. "Wow. You really covered this area, didn't you, Chime? No ghosts
I ever talked to knew about these people you found here. I'm impressed. And you must have some kind
of great cosmic connections to be able to bring Mikey and me back here. I thought Meru kicked us out
of Tibet for good."
Chime gave her a smile that was a faded imitation of her usual one. In fact, her astral body was still less
well-defined than their ghost forms were. She didn't seem to be quite all there. "Meru has no control over
anything outside of the valley," she said. "But he has quite a lot of power over spiritual beings within the
valley. That's why I chose a place for my physical body above the valley, outside his control, before I
began my astral journeys."
"Isn't that dangerous?" Mike asked. "What if Meru finds you?"
"I left Mu Mao to guard me and spirit traps around my physical being to protect it from ghosts. Still, I
need to return. I've been traveling quite extensively for a first journey, I believe, and my projection is
beginning to weaken. Besides, I need to regain my physical body to guide the pilot to the survivors and
back to Shambala."
"You can't do that astrally?"
"I don't know. We must return to the valley now. I am having rather strange sensations-sinkingspells, I
would have called them in a former life. I think it is urgent that we return to my body at once."
But when they arrived at the crystal lens embedded in the ridge, all that remained was a few broken
pieces of stick and twine.
Chime's astral body was a little brighter here, but her voice was shaky as she said, "I don't understand
this. Where am I?"
"Chime, there you are," Inez said as the lithe black girl wiggled down from the lens, passed through the
waterfall, and stood blinking, her eyes adjusting to the light inside the cave. "Did the gunshots bust you
out of your trance? I'm sorry, but if you hadn't already woken the dead, what happened here would
have." Inez tried to keep her voice light but her words kept piling up like a train wreck. "Do you want to
stay here with Meru while I go get help, or shall I?"
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"I will," Chime said. "But leave me the gun. He's dangerous."
"The-gun?"Somehow, the idea of Chime Cincinnati with the ugly little weapon Inez had tucked into her
belt seemed as odd as- well, come to think of it, so many odd things had happened in the last few hours
that nothing seemed all that strange anymore.
"You know, the plastic thing you're wearing where you could blow big holes in your cute little ass,"
Chime said. "Hand it over."
Meru was staring at Chime, abandoning his own complaints for the moment to study her. Inez hesitated
as she touched the gun at her side. "Don't do it, Inez."
"Shut up, asshole," Chime said. "I wasn't talkin' to you."
"That's not Chime, Inez," Meru said. "That's Buzz Horn.The man who was just killed. He must have
found some way to possess Chime."
"You're fast, Cao Li. But then, you seem to have been hiding an unexpected aptitude where dead things
are concerned. I'm sure you're going to really enjoy studyin' up on them firsthand. You going to give me
that gun, sugar, or do I take it away from you?"
"Kill him, Inez. Shoot him. He'll take the gun away from you and kill us all otherwise. You heard that
thing that was in Sven. He's a cannibal. No form of depravity is too low. No-"
Inez made her decision. She wasn't sure she could overpower Chime's body, but she could outscream
anybody and she could certainly try to outrun Chime or Buzz or whoever the hell it was. It just took her
an instant to decide which direction to run. Finally she decided to sprint back into the house and alert Art
and the others first. This Buzz guy probably already knew about the people in the house. No matter how
this turned out, she didn't want to let Meru know about the resurrection of the other people, the ones
back in the cave, until she heard from the real Chime.
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