She is late providing a sequel to her most successful feelie-dream, a romance called Triad, mostly because the idea bores her, and takes a new commission from a mysterious man named Rudolph Kinsey, who makes her uneasy, but the price he offers is too good to pass up. To recharge herself, she travels to the secluded home of her friend Chalmys DuBauer, a spaceship pilot who spent more than a century traveling between Earth and its first off-planet habitat, Beta Colony, and who was rendered obsolete by the technological developments made during that time. She completes the commission, a dark and violent scenario, and gives it to Rudolph in exchange for a bonded check. Before he leaves, he requests a brief feelie-dream for his aunt. When Anias goes to set up her dream synthesizer, she finds it has been sabotaged, and would have killed her if she had used it. Suspecting that Kinsey had tried to kill her, she lures him to DuBauer's Ohio home, which is surrounded by a forest full of lethal creatures.
