Axis

He whispered, "A

As if he could summon her from the boy like a conjurer summoning a ghost. But the boys eyes changed in some indefinable way, the corners of his lips turned down as if with distaste, and it was exactly the way A

Then Dvali said a thing he had not anticipated saying, though the words were as logical and as inevitable as the last step on a long road:

"Take me with you," he said.

The boy stepped back from him, shaking his head.

"Take me with you, Isaac. Wherever you are, wherever you're going, take me with you."

Stressed timbers creaked as if the weight of the world was balanced on them. There was a sound like gunshots as the wood fractured.

"No," the boy said calmly, firmly.

And this was maddening. Maddening, because he was so close. So close! And because the voice that denied him sounded so much like A

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Sulean Moi was sprawled on the ground by the hedge of eyeball flowers. Lise swallowed her dread of the Hypothetical growths and pulled her a safer distance from the wind-torn debris field.

Turk leaned over the Martian woman and said, "Where are the others?"

For a moment Sulean seemed unable to answer. She opened her mouth, closed it. She was in shock, Lise thought. "Dead," the Martian woman finally managed. "Diane is dead. A

"What about Isaac?"

"Alive. Dvali is with him—inside, in there. Why won't they come out? It's not safe!"

Turk stood and surveyed the rubble and the small opening the digging trees had made.

Lise held his arm. Because he must not go in there, not into that teetering cavern: no.

He pulled away. She would remember that sensation of his forearm slipping out of her grasp. Like the best and worst memories, it would become indelible. It would haunt her on long nights for the rest of her life.

But she couldn't stop him, and she couldn't bring herself to follow him.

It was dark in the buried stockroom. Turk almost tripped over the body of Diane Dupree before he registered Isaac and Dr. Dvali confronting one another against a wall of broken shelves and fissured cinderblocks. Dvali was grabbing for the boy and Isaac was retreating by steps, not wanting to be touched but not yet willing to run, and Turk could hear Dvali's low begging voice under the roar of this fucking wind that had come out of nowhere and seemed about ready to tip the continent off its hinges. He had seen enough weirdness today to last him a lifetime, but he registered one more eerie miracle: the boy's skin had gone milky white and was faintly luminous, his face a candle-glow around his golden eyes, his body a sort of jack-o'-lantern where his ribs showed through his torn and filthy shirt.

"Isaac," Turk said, and the boy turned to him. "It's okay. The door's open. You can go."

Isaac looked at him gratefully.

Then the wind made a sound like the horn of some monster ship leaving harbor, and all the ruin that had hung suspended above them began to fall.

Sulean Moi held Lise Adams in her arms as the building shifted and compacted. A wave of concrete dust and atomized plaster spilled over them and was carried off by the terrible wind. "Stay down," Sulean said. "You can't help them now."

Lise fought a little longer. Then all the strength spilled out of her, and Sulean held the girl against her shoulder, rocking her gently. There had been a terrible finality about the last collapse, Sulean thought. No one could have survived it.

Then she revised her opinion.

The ocular roses, bent by the wind, refocused their solemn attention.

"Look," Sulean said.

Patiently, the Hypothetical trees had begun once more to dig.

PART SIX — THE ORDINANCE OF TIME

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Then it was over—when there was nothing left of the great glittering forest but a few palsied and rapidly decomposing stems, when the towering Arch had finished its work and turned to dust, when the desert basin of the Rub al-Khali had gone to sleep for another ten thousand years—Lise came back to Port Magellan.

The skies were fair and half a hundred ships lay at anchor in the harbor, though not as many as there used to be, or as there would be again, perhaps, when the oil industry had been reconstructed and the tourist trade revived.

She took a room in a hotel. Genomic Security seemed to have lost interest in her after Dvali's Fourths detonated their bioreactors at Kubelick's Grave, but her name might still be on someone's list. So she rented a room under an assumed name and thought about how she might begin to reassemble her life. And finally, a week after she had arrived—not by trawler, as she had once imagined, but on a bus with forty or fifty other refugees from the Rub al-Khali—she had gathered up her courage, what remained of it, and called Brian Gately.

When his exclamations of surprise and disbelief subsided she agreed to meet him on neutral turf: Harley's, in the mild afternoon, at a table overlooking the hills where the white city tumbled down to the bay.

She showed up early and spent the hiatus considering what she wanted to say to him, but her mind refused to focus. A waiter brought ice water and bread to the table as if to distract her. The waiter's nametag said mahmud, and she asked Mahmud if Tyrell still worked at the restaurant—she remembered Tyrell from the night of the first ashfall, August 34th , when she had brought Turk here to look at the photograph of Sulean Moi. No: Tyrell had gone back to the States, Mahmud said. Many people had left Port Magellan after the strange things fell from the sky. Everything the same, Lise thought, yes, everything different. And as Mahmud left the table she saw Brian come through the door. He smiled tentatively when he spotted her. She nodded.

He came and sat at the table. Brian Gately, no longer of the Department of Genomic Security. That was one of the first things he had told her when she called. I don't work for them anymore, he said, as if establishing his bona fides, solemnly. I quit. He hadn't said why.

"You caught me just in time," he said. "Next week I'm out of the apartment. All I own right now is four packed bags and a ticket home."

"You're going back to the States?"

"No reason to stay. I'll tell you a secret, Lise. I hate this city. By extension, this entire planet."

Because he was no longer with DGS he couldn't help her. But neither could he hurt her. As a threat, he was more or less neutered. So the question was, would she tell him what had happened in the desert? Because he was going to ask. She was certain he would ask.

Hold on, Sulean Moi had told her and that was what Lise had done, even when it seemed like the entire world was tilting under her. All around her the brightly fluorescing globes shook loose from the Hypothetical trees and were drawn toward the central vortex of the temporal Arch. The wind became a gale and the gale became a hurricane, and she braced herself against a concrete pier, too terrified even to scream. She was only vaguely aware of Sulean Moi curled under the same ledge of stone not far away.

The wind was unceasing, and she passed in and out of consciousness, somehow remaining braced where she was, coming to herself time and again as if awaking not from but into a bad dream: and did the night pass? A day, another night?

Eventually it did stop. The wind died to a breeze, the world righted itself, and Sulean Moi was calling her name: "Lise Adams! Are you hurt?"

There were a thousand ways to answer that question, but she couldn't speak.