He shook his head. "Nothing lasts forever." He reached out and touched her necklace. "Even with that."
"But so soon? We'd just begun."
He searched her face. Here was the difference. The seemingly impossible had happened. Kolabati, the cool, aloof, self-absorbed, ruthless Kolabati who had sent him out to kill her own brother Kusum, who had walked out with her own necklace as well as Kusum's and left Jack bleeding in a chair because he had refused her offer of near immortality…Kolabati Bahkti had fallen in love and it had changed her. Maybe forever.
Amazingly, she began to sob—deep, wrenching gasps of emotional pain that tore at Jack. He'd come here expecting to find the old, cold, calculating Kolabati and had been fully ready to deal with her. He wasn't prepared for the new Kolabati.
He resisted the impulse to take her in his arms. No telling what Moki-The-Unkillable might do if he saw that. So he settled for touching her hand.
"What can I do?" he said. "What will fix it?"
"If only I knew."
"Maybe it's the necklace. Maybe the necklace is part of the problem—maybe it is the problem. Maybe if you take it off him—"
"And replace it with a fake?" Her eyes flashed as she dug into the pocket of her muumuu. She pulled out a necklace exactly like her own. "This one, perhaps?"
Since Kolabati was wearing one of the genuine necklaces, and Moki the other, this had to be Jack's fake.
He swallowed. "Where'd you get that?"
"From your duffel bag." Her eyes hardened. "Was that your plan? Steal my brother's necklace and replace it with a fake? It never occurred to you that I might have given it to someone else, did it?"
Time to bite the bullet, Jack thought. Let her know the whole story.
"Kusum's necklace isn't enough," he said, meeting her gaze. "We need both."
She gasped and stepped back, her hand clutching at her throat.
"Mine? You'd steal mine?"
"It wouldn't be stealing, exactly. I'd just be returning it to its original owner."
"Don't joke with me about this, Jack. The people who carved the necklaces have been dead for ages."
"I know. I'm not working for them. I'm working for the guy they stole the original metal from. He's still around. And he wants it back. All of it."
Kolabati's eyes widened as she studied him. "You're not joking, are you?"
"You think I could make up a story like that, even if I tried?"
"All those years will rush back upon me without it, Jack. I'd die. You know that"
"I intended to ask you for it."
"And if I refused?"
He shrugged. "I was going to be very convincing."
Actually he'd had no firm plan in mind when he'd come here. Good thing too. He hadn't counted on Moki. Not in his wildest dreams had he counted on the likes of Moki.
Kolabati's hand still hovered protectively over her necklace. She couldn't seem to drag it away.
"You frighten me, Jack. You frighten me more than Moki."
"I know it sounds corny as hell," he said, "but the fate of the whole world depends on this guy Glaeken getting those two necklaces back and restoring them to their original form."
Kolabati gestured to the stinking valley, to the whirlpool beyond. "He can change all this? He can make everything as it was?"
"No. But he can stop the force that's making it this way, that's working to destroy everything we see here. And it isn't bad here, Bati. This is really pretty decent because there aren't many people around. But back on the mainland, in the cities and towns, people are at each other's throats. Everyone's frightened, scared half to death. The best are holed up, hiding from the monsters by night and their fellow humans by day. And the worst are doing what they've always done. But it's the average Joes and Janes who are really scary. The ones who aren't paralyzed with fear are running amok in the streets, looting and burning and killing with the worst of them. You can do something to stop it, turn it all around."
"I don't believe you. It can't be that bad. I've lived for a century and a half. I saw my parents shot down by an English officer, I witnessed the Sepoy rebellion in the 1850s, two world wars, the Bolshevik revolution, and worst of all, the atrocities in the Punjab, Indian killing Indian during the partition. You have no idea what I've seen."
"This is worse," Jack said. "The whole world's involved. And after Thursday it'll be night all over the world, forever. There'll be nowhere to run. Unless you do something."
"Me." The word was spoken in a very small, faraway voice.
"You."
Jack let that sink in awhile, let her stare down at the island she seemed to love so much, let her breathe the reek of its slow death. And then he put the question to her. He'd have never considered asking the old Kolabati, the one he'd known years ago in New York. But this was a new, improved version, someone who'd loved a man, who loved this island. Maybe this Kolabati could be reached.
"What do you say, Bati? I'm not asking you to take it off and hand it to me. But I am asking you to come back to New York with me and talk to Glaeken. He's the only guy on earth who's older than you. Hell, you're a newborn compared to him. You sit down with him and you'll believe."
She turned and leaned against the railing, staring through the door into the great room of her house.
"Let me think about that."
"There's no time to think."
"All right," she said slowly. "I'll come see this man. But that's all I promise you."
"That's all I'm asking," he said, feeling his fatigued muscles begin to uncoil with relief. It was a start. "Now, about Moki's…"
She looked at him sharply.
"He's not going to die," Jack added quickly, "or even age appreciably if someone should manage to replace his real necklace with a look-alike." An idea occurred to Jack. It was wild but it might help enlist Kolabati more firmly as an ally. "Who knows? Could be it's the necklace that's making him crazy. Get it off him and maybe he'll revert to his old self."
Before Kolabati could answer, Moki's voice boomed from within the house.
"Bati! Hele mai! And bring your ex-lover. See what your god has fashioned!"
Kolabati rolled her eyes and started forward. Jack grabbed her arm, gently.
"What do you say?"
"I'll think about it."
She pulled her arm away and dropped the dummy necklace back into her pocket. Jack followed her.
And stopped inside the door, staring.
The great room had been transformed. All the wood and lava from the broken sculptures had been reshaped, combined, coalesced into a single huge assembly that stretched from wall to wall. And where he'd run out of sculpture remnants, Moki had smashed pieces of furniture and added them to the mix. The assorted stained and bleached wooden fragments were arranged so as to appear to spring from the wood paneling of the walls, forming four spokes in a giant lopsided wheel, weaving crooked paths toward a common center. A lava center. Moki had somehow joined all the red and black lava fragments—the gleam of wire, the dewy moisture of still-drying epoxy were visible within the irregular mass—into a new whole, a jagged, haphazard aggregate that had no coherent shape, no symmetry, no discernible intelligence to it, yet somehow was undeniably menacing and implacably predatory.
"What do you think of Maui's masterpiece?" Moki said, standing near the center, hands on hips, grinning like a caricature of Burt Lancaster.