City at the end of time

“Dreamers, all of them,” Polybiblios said. “The same matter—in large part—from many times and many different branches of fate, eager to be rejoined.”

“We’re made of the same stuff?”

“I’d say so. Entangled atoms are reacquainting, exchanging particles of entrainment, which leave photonic traces—faster than the fastest velocity possible in the Chaos. Or anywhere else, now.”

“Then none of the visitors have survived? We’ve failed?”

“Where is that Keeper? He might be able to help us judge the extent of this collection.”

“There are so many—I don’t think I’ve dreamed about all of them.”

“Part of my plan was that shepherds and sum-ru

“Does that mean you’vecome out here thousands of times before, and failed?” Jebrassy asked.

“Excellent question. Would it even be possible to remember?” The epitome considered this problem with apparent relish, then smoothed his face and said, “Most unlikely. This is my first and only path.”

Jebrassy again spread his hand close to the fingers of the embedded other. The ribbons of blue continued to pass. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “It’s almost pleasant.”

Polybiblios pulled him away. “That’s enough. We don’t want to entrain you with the lost. We need to find the one that is still free, still alive…or arrive at a place where he can find you.I doubt very much he would be here.”

CHAPTER 103

Gi

She was in no mood to be strong-armed. She knew she was close, but she was begi

But they had never actually been herdecisions.

Maybe that was because she could not be trusted. She always turned the wrong way. Always stumbled into a path of disaster.

Yet she had come this far, ahead of all the others.

The tu

She’d always been awkward—had alwaysturned left.

Now she crawled out of the tu

Completely alone, in a place no one could call home.

“I’m worn-out,” she said. “I don’t want to be a guided missile anymore.” She felt the stone through the cloth of her pants, then took it out and looked it over in the dim light. Its tug had faded almost to nothing. It turned and rotated freely in her fingers. The knobs and ridges were smooth and cool under the roughened flesh of her fingertips.

The red wolf’s-eye gleam had also dulled.

“If you give up on me, I’ll be stuck here, won’t I?” she asked. She stood and felt the bubble draw in so close it might have been a layer of paint over her skin. The game was ru

Alone. Good. She would make her final wrong turn without anyone clucking their disapproval. Out of the maze, straight into…

A long wall of smoky glass stretched out of sight on both sides. Within the wall, she saw dozens, hundreds…she looked both ways— thousandsof contorted, floating, still figures…all young women.

“Too much,” she whispered, but pressed her bubble in closer, trying to see. Blue lines whipped from her cheeks, chin, and fingers and touched the nearest body locked in the smoky, translucent hardness. Familiar. Eyes blank, hopeless, set in a slack face with an expression neither of pain nor despair but of neutrality. A lot like herself, seen in an awful mirror.

“Is this my other?” she whispered. “Is this Tiadba? She’s trapped somewhere—and this one’s trapped, too.”

But the figure looked nothing like Tiadba, as Gi

The body was holding something in its hand. Or rather, suspended within loose fingers, not quite touching or being touched, the grasp having been loosened in despair or surrender just before the embedding, this floating, timeless preservation.

“You turned the wrong way, you got tired, you gave up,” she said to her alternate self, begi

The blue ribbons of light streamed from her fingers and face, caresses of energy. They tingled. She could get used to that tingling. It was friendly. She was close to the family of all her alternate selves, all the ones who had failed and then…had been forgiven.

She had found her way here to reacquaint.

Somehow, there was a style about this that separated itself from the blundering cruelty of the rest of the Chaos. A kind of pity.

She recognized the sadness, the gentleness combined with the power and strangeness. This was what she had felt when confronted by the whirling storm in the woods, the great, desperate, swirling triangle of seeking.

This was where the Chalk Princess took her captives. Or where they came of their own accord, to join with their lost selves in continuous, never-ending self-pity and empty satisfaction. The ribbons grew brighter. The wall seemed to soften.

The figure directly before her—inches away in the smoky substance—seemed to recede, and Gi

This was her story. Her life finally had a conclusion, however unsatisfying. Perversely, the farther into the glass the other girl receded, the clearer her features and circumstances became—as if the ribbons of blue light were completing her, filling her out. Gi