Carl gripped the hilt of the lance and twisted it through a tight series of clicks until it snapped off. A foam of purplesilver light frothed from the muzzle end of the lance, and Carl quickly placed the weapon on the ground.
He grabbed Evoe, and with Allin they fled from the zotl attack and the jumping clots of sightcramping radiance.
In an eyeblink, the onrushing zotl and the sharp, crisscrossing tracery of their laserfire vanished in a sheeting flow of white incineration that nothinged everything before it.
Allin led the jump to the fallpath. Evoe and Carl leaped after him, hand in hand. They fell through a wind=flapping drop before the fallpath lifted them like a song above the char and the billows of killing smoke. Behind them,, the lance squandered matter to light, and the zotl sphere blustered with white fire. Ahead, the Foke rose out of the ruins on slants of light.
Carl and Evoe clamped their bodies together and sweeled away from Galgul, riding the steep current of a fallpath outward toward flamboyant cloud gorges iridescent with rain.
Epilog
Caitlin, with her grizzled hair hanging over her small shoulders, hooding the ruddy woodgrain of her face, stood at the glass-paned door. She was staring across the patio at the gazebo where Zeke sat motionless in a rocker, watching pillars of rain move across the wide lawns. Stormlight shone slantwise through the aspen, illuminating tall hedgerows powdered with mist. Several months ago, she and Zeke had been brought to this estate on Long Island by the government. There were seventy-two of them then, people with the highest chance of catching light. There were twenty-six now.
At the first letup in the rain, Caitlin opened the door and walked across the glossy flagstones and the sequined grass to the gazebo. Zeke didn't budge his stare from the sky, where the clouds were hitting a cold front and shredding like galactic vapors. His beard and hair had grown back in white goat tufts, and his former
bulls had thinned to a skeletal frame. The zotl clawmarks on his face and neck had faded to smoky bruises in his pale flesh like striations floating in marble.
"Two people in Maryland and one in Vermont have caught light," she reported, sitting herself in the rocker beside him. "The spores can't be contained."
Since their internment, Caitlin had been coming to Zeke, hoping to get from him some hope for her daughter. Instead, she had found peace, the humbling of life to memory and perception when all hope is lost.
"Gentleness and love will survive," Zeke spoke, his voice swollen with silence. He didn't care about the world's plight. The remorseless agony of his zotl possession had purged him of all caring. Pain and pleasure had become for him two ends of the same board, the flimsy plank of his body; floating on a sea of electrons, riding the long currents of time to wherever. .He felt more clarity than any man alive.
"What are you thinking?" Caitlin asked. The storm had frenzied again; and needles of rain prickled her skin.
"Why do people think heaven is up?" he replied. "I mean, look at it. The sky is tearing itself apart. I wouldn't want to go up right now"
Caitlin grinned at that -thought and turned her attention to the wheeling sky. She hadn't had a drink since, she was brought here, yet at that moment power was flushing through her like a shot of whiskey. The drugs that controlled her tremors usually left her dense with torpor. Now, watching the storm clouds stampeding like white bison, she was exhilarated: Something was going to happen.
"I'm leaving soon myself," Zeke said at last, and when his thin black eyes touched hers, she saw the happiness in his harrowed face. His short hair was bristly, and the blue regulation fatigues they both wore
looked wrinkled and ill-fitting. She reached out to touch his mottled hand, and a spark cracked between them. A gasp hissed through her lips.
"You want it?" he asked.
"Yes," the old woman answered.
Zeke peeled o$' a splinter from the arm of his rocker and lanced his left thumb. He offered her his hand and its gem of blood.
Caitlin's forefinger smeared the blood when a spark jumped to it from his thumb. She brought her finger to her mouth, and the taste of iron chilled her.
That evening, one of the residents complained that Zeke was glowing. Guards in bright-orange jumpsuits, hooded goggles, and gasmasks found Zeke in the gazebo grinning with muscular ecstasy.
They took him to a protective chamber monitored only by cameras.
He wrote a note to Caitlin, and fifteen minutes later, he caught light and vanished.
Caitlin received the note the next morning at breakfast. Even among the sinuous fragrances of coffee and toast, she could still smell the blue scent of a windshaken mountaintop on the paper. It read- .
Caity-What goes up is
futileunless it goes
out.
-Z