“I don’t know,” he said, his face contorted. “You’re way ahead of me.”
“The beacon still sings in our helmets, so beautiful…that’s the only thing that guides us. Distance is tricky, but we keep walking. I think it knows we’re here, it just doesn’t care. It’s stuffed full. It’s eaten almost everything…but we’re giving it indigestion. It’s won, but it’s keeping an eye on us—a big, big eye. The Witness is always there. God, I hope we don’t get too near it.”
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
“No words for it. The other city isn’t…It isn’t the same. There’s something awful in its place. I know that, but I can’t tell her. Jack… She doesn’t know.”
Jack laid his head on Ginny’s chest, put his hand over her eyes. That searching, distant gaze…
“I’ll be there,” he whispered.
“Too late,” she said. “They’ve found us.”
She fell back on the cot. Jack stroked her forehead, then stood. He couldn’t bear watching her suffer
and being so powerless. He bumped the boxes on his way out of the cubicle. Bidewell was sitting in a chair near the stove, reading a slender green book. The old man’s face looked ethereal, as if it might turn to mist or glass. Ellen stepped out of the main warehouse, carrying a knitted bag with the outline of her own small book weighting one corner.
“Where are the others?” Jack asked.
“There’s nothing they can do here,” Bidewell said. “They’re trying to reach their loved ones.”
“I thought they were alone,” Jack said.
“Only you are ever truly alone,” Bidewell said, with a strange twist of envy. “Our time is almost over, for this cycle. Yours is just beginning.”
Ellen looked at Jack, at once hopeful and stricken. He saw that both of them had been crying and felt uncomfortable, so he moved on and found Daniel sitting under the almost bare shelves in the annex room, paging through a large, thick book. Daniel looked as exhausted as Jack felt. Somehow, that made him more sympathetic.
Daniel put the book aside as Jack approached. “I heard the door open,” he said.
“Three of the women took off,” Jack said. He examined Daniel’s expression, looking for any sign of strangeness, but could not find anything to dislike or even be suspicious of. That was Glaucous’s doing, he suspected. He recognized the symptoms, more subtle but still the same. Why would Glaucous protect Daniel?
Shaping him as a new partner, perhaps?
“I don’t hear much outside,” Daniel said. “And there’s certainly nothing new in here. Let’s go topside for another look.”
For the moment, the curtains and wrinkles above the city had parted, leaving an inky blackness and a sky full of stars, but something was very wrong. The stars, like the moon, had smeared, twisted, wrapped themselves in rainbow-colored rings—and were growing dimmer.
One by one they were winking out like spent fireflies.
“They’re being eaten,” Jack said. “The moon, the stars…”
“You got that right,” Daniel said. “But we have to think it through— what’s being eaten? Whenis it being eaten? I can believe the moon being sucked up by whatever thatis, that ugly sun-arc thing—we’d see that almost right away, but the stars are too distant. Unless…” He wiped his forehead. “Unless the past was chewed up first. That would mean everything behind us has already been eaten, space andtime…Those stars are already gone, the last wave of their light is bouncing off the Terminus—and now it’sfading. We’re like the core of an apple, the seeds, being saved for last.”
“Seeds,” Jack said. “That’s what Bidewell calls the stones.”
“None of what he says makes sense, Jack.”
Jack persisted. “Still, things are reaching back from somewhere.”
Daniel thought this through, brow wrinkled, plump cheeks growing pale. He gave Jack a pinched look, part disbelief, part envy. “Okay, magic boy. You know something.”
“It’s obvious. We’re being messed with—someone sent the stones back, like Bidewell says.”
“Like he hints,” Daniel corrected.
“And the thing that controls the hunters—the Chalk Princess, Glaucous’s Livid Mistress—that could be from the future, too. But what’s messing with us is no longer inthe future. We’re being shoved up againstthe future—what’s left of it. Right?”
“With you so far,” Daniel said, intrigued that Jack was suddenly engaging in theory.
“So we’re just getting the last ripples of aftereffect. Whatever’s going to happen, hashappened—here. Except for the warehouse—and us.”
“Because of the stones, or Bidewell’s weird library?”
They both stared at the fragmented city, beyond shock, even beyond wonder, and then stared at each other, expressing their only remaining surprise: that they were still alive, still thinking, still speaking.
“Maybe both,” Jack said. “We’re saved—for the moment. But that moment is going to be awfully short. And then we’re going to have to do something.”
“What?” Daniel asked.
Jack shook his head.
The cityscape around the warehouse had congealed into a bleakness of broken buildings, sluggish flows of muddy water, torn, ragged clouds barely obscuring the battered sky. The last limb of the hideous arc of fire dropped below the horizon and the clouds glowed blood-red, then dimmed to somber brown, their undersides fitfully illuminated by curling wisps of orange and green.
“The whole city is a grab bag of past and present,” Daniel said. “If you’re right, it could mean this Chalk Princess is still out there—waiting for things to settle before she comes and gets us. Glaucous has a weird confidence.”
“He’s protecting you,” Jack said.
“Is he? How strange. I don’t need protecting.” He poked and rubbed one temple with a thumb. “I don’t see any sign of the women who left. Your friends.”
Glaucous made sure Daniel and Jack were out of the way, then approached Ginny’s cubicle. With batlike acuity, he could hear her moving about from across the warehouse. Ginny blinked and looked confused as he drew back the flimsy curtain. “I don’t want you near me,” she warned, her tongue thickened by the long, hard sleep. “I’ll call for help.”
“Abject apologies for my crude appearance and manners,” Glaucous said. He glanced up. “The young men are on the roof, satisfying curiosity. They seem to be learning to trust each other.”
“Jack knows better,” Ginny said, still blinking—whether from nerves or irritation, she couldn’t tell. Everything felt gritty. Everything seemed to be running down—even her brain.
“Perhaps. At any rate, I am no threat,” Glaucous said softly. “In fact, I eliminated the ones who came here to hunt you. The man with his coin, the woman with her flames and smoke. A dreadful pair. I have my allegiances, of course—and they may not match yours. But with no leadership, I am no more a threat than one of these warehouse cats. You are not mymouse. Whom would I deliver you to? And why?”
“Please go away,” Ginny said.
“Not before I salve my conscience. You have misplaced your trust, and now I fear the worst. Bidewell has hidden himself for many decades, but we—my kind, hunters all—knew him long before that. He was legendary among us.”
“He’s been kind to me.”
“We do have that ability, to be charming when we wish, despite all other appearances. Can you feel that between us, even now?” He looked down, raised his hand to his forehead as if ashamed. “Pardon. It’s an instinct, misplaced no doubt. I will withdraw it immediately.” He shut down the treacle ambience. Ginny stepped back, even more confused.