Frozen Fury

Andy’s fist was still closed.

For a long moment that was all there was. The hand shut tight at the end of his arm. The knuckles throbbing where they had met something that didn’t give. His shoulders were locked. His weight sat forward on the balls of his feet, where he had planted it among the glass. Every muscle from his calves to his jaw was braced for the blow that ought to be coming back. His breath had caught high in his chest and wouldn’t come down. The mantle Myra had given him that morning hung against his back. The circlet was still on his brow.

He was angry. He was frightened in a way that kept the anger from finding its footing. Under both, low and steady, was grief, and he didn’t understand it, because nothing had happened yet that he knew how to grieve. He was still fighting. There was nobody left in front of him to fight.

He did not look up. It came back to him instead, in order, as the worst of it always did. Nergal’s dead women coming at him from both sides as he broke through their circle, pair after matched pair. The cold of them all down his left side, river cold, November cold. Two strides. His feet set on the blackwood. Then everything he had. Everything he had never let himself use, the strength that had punched handholds into a climbing wall and taken a boulder full in the chest. All of it, driven into a single blow at the man in the middle of it all.

It had landed. He had felt it land—and it had been like hitting the world.

Nergal had taken it standing exactly where he was. He had not stepped back or lifted a hand to meet it. Andy’s fist had been against him. Close enough to smell cold stone and turned earth in the funeral robes. Those flat, stone-colored eyes had looked down at him out of that ashen face. There was no anger in them. There was no surprise. There was only interest, the same unhurried interest Nergal had shown Laura, as a grown man looks at a child who has swung as hard as he can and hit nothing that matters.

It was that look Andy kept coming back to. What came after it had been almost nothing. One low motion of the right hand, off to the side, as if Nergal were brushing crumbs from a table. Then no light. No sound. No falling, no floor rushing up to meet him, nothing to catch himself on. Only this, whatever this was, closed over him where the Dance Hall had been.

His anger went first. It had nowhere to go. He held on to it for a few more breaths anyway, fist shut, because letting it go felt too much like agreeing with that look. Then it ran out of him all at once and left his hand shaking. He made himself open it. The knuckles were white and sore—and whole.

What was left was fear, and it wasn’t for himself.

He had left them there. Emily held down on the blackwood by the arms, her gold-and-pink hair spread across the broken glass. Emi taken round the waist from behind before she could reach her. Claire standing over Liesa with her ears flat and nothing in her hands but her notebook. Sam and Norah and Erin somewhere in the thick of it, and Sumiku’s wings. He hadn’t looked back to see how they were doing. He had been sure there would be time. Riley’s hair wrapped around the one that had come for Laura. The three of Laura behind her. His own voice telling Riley to hold her, and Riley telling him to go. He had gone. He had thrown the best punch he had, and it had done nothing—and now he wasn’t there, and Nergal was.

His breath stuck. He pulled it down by force. In, and out, and in again.

He did not reach for Laura. All night the bond had been a gauge and nothing else: where she was, and how afraid. He was afraid of what it would tell him now. He left it alone, and hated himself a little for it. Only then did he look at where he was.

The ground under his feet was packed dirt, hard and pale, cracked in long straight lines that ran off in every direction as if someone had ruled them. A little of the Hall’s glass had come with him. It gritted under his shoes when he shifted his weight, and there was no other sound anywhere.

He turned in place. The horizon ran flat all the way around him, level as a tabletop, and above it the sky was the color of rust. It wasn’t bright. It glowed dimly and evenly from one edge to the other—no sun in it, no moon, nothing he could point to as the place the light came from. He had no shadow. He couldn’t have said whether it was day or night here, or whether here had either. The air was cold and perfectly still. At the Hall the wind had been screaming through the open dome; here there was none at all, not even enough to stir the hem of the mantle.

“Hello?”

His voice went out flat across the dirt and didn’t come back.

Shapes stood up out of the flatness at uneven distances, some close, some so far off they were only darker marks against the rust. None of them moved. Andy started toward the nearest, because standing still was worse than walking, and because walking at least felt like doing something. It was farther off than it looked, and then all at once it was much closer, as if space itself didn't work correctly here. His footsteps were the only sound he made, and after a while he stopped hearing them.

Fine gray sand had drifted against the shape’s near side, and he was wading into the edge of the drift before the shape made sense. It was a corridor. A whole length of hallway lay on its side in the dirt, its ceiling turned into a wall, a row of doors opening onto the sky. Past it a pair of elevator doors stood upright in the sand with nothing behind them, their brass gone dull. Past those, a long curved counter was canted into the ground, half swallowed, and a chandelier lay on its side in the rubble with its crystals buried to the arms.

He came to a stop on a stretch of tiled floor that had settled almost level. He looked down at the tiles. He looked up at the counter. His stomach dropped out from under him.

He had walked through this before.

He hadn’t walked here. He couldn’t have. But three days ago, in a trance he’d had no business going into, he had seen this exact wreckage: the Hotel broken apart and buried in sand, and himself walking through it alone.

He was standing in it now. Andy felt his fear draw in tight and cold and harden into dread.

He put his hand flat on the counter. It was real. The veneer had split and lifted along the edge, and sand sifted out of the crack over his fingers, dry and cold. He pulled his hand back and wiped it on his trousers without thinking.

“Arabella?”

Nothing. It was her Hotel, or it had been—and she wasn’t in it. Whatever had happened to it, had happened a long time ago. The sand had been drifting into its corners for years, by the look of it, and nobody had ever come to sweep it out. The chandelier’s chain lay coiled beside the counter, rusted through.

If this one had turned out to be a place, he didn’t know what that made the other seven. He thought of the last of them, the one that had never connected to anything else—himself on the footbridge, unaged, waiting through season after season for someone who never came—and shut the thought down before it could finish.

He made himself move. There was nothing in the wreck he could use and nobody in it to find, and every second he spent standing here was a second longer the women were in that Hall without him. He had no idea how to get back to them, or which way back even was. But the shapes went on past the Hotel’s wreckage, dark against the rust, farther than he could see, and walking toward something was better than standing in the middle of his own bad dream.

He climbed out over the drift at the far side of the lobby and kept going. Behind him the elevator doors stood in the sand with nothing behind them. He did not look back at them.

The ground changed under him without any line to show where. The sand thinned and gave out, and the pale dirt came back, and lying in it now was stone—heavier stone than anything the Hotel had ever been built from, great squared blocks gone soft at the corners, laid in courses that ran a few yards and stopped. Columns stood up out of the ground and broke off at different heights, one at his knee, one well over his head, one lying full length in sections where it had fallen. Farther on, a flight of broad steps climbed to a platform with nothing on it but the stumps of more columns and the collapsed frame of a roof, as if someone had set a temple down there and then taken away everything that made it a temple.

None of it was the Hotel, and none of it was anything he knew. He would have given a great deal just then to recognize a single stone. The wreck behind him had at least been his, his own bad dream turned into ground he could stand on. This had no reason to be his at all, and not knowing it frightened him worse than knowing it would have.

He saw the woman among the fallen columns and called out before he could stop himself.

“Hey—hey. Can you hear me?”

She did not turn. He came closer, slower, and still she did not turn. She was a woman in a long dark dress buttoned high at the throat, her hair pinned up in a style he had only ever seen in the kind of old photograph that goes brown in its frame. She stood looking at a place on the ground a few feet in front of her where there was nothing at all. Her hand rose to her mouth and stayed there. Then it fell to her side. Then it rose and stayed, and fell.

“Ma’am?”

Her hand rose. Her eyes stayed on the empty ground. Nothing about her knew he was there, and the longer he looked the surer he was that nothing about her could. She was going through the same half second over and over, and nothing else.

Andy backed away from her a step at a time, without turning his back.

There were more of them. He hadn’t seen them at first against the broken stone, and once he had seen one he saw them everywhere, standing among the ruins at uneven distances, each of them alone, each caught fast in some small moment of its own: a man in a coarse homespun tunic with his arm still raised mid-throw at something long gone; a woman in a stiff gown with the shoulders padded out square, who belonged generations after the woman at the columns; someone farther off in clothes Andy couldn’t place at all, wrapped and worn and foreign to him, older somehow than any of the others. No two of them were dressed alike. No two of them looked to have lived within a hundred years of each other. None of them looked at him.

His skin crawled.

Herman had told him something at the fire last night, after the descent, when the others had gone back to their drinks. Being looked at, down there, was how a thing became real. Andy stood among them and didn’t know whether looking at them was a kindness or a cruelty, or whether it was anything at all to people who couldn’t look back. He made himself stop looking. It didn’t help.

He needed Laura. He reached for her before he could decide not to. Lately the bond had carried only two things. Where she was. How afraid she was.

What came back made no sense. She was here. She was right here. If he turned around she would be standing behind him, close enough to touch. And she was farther away than anything he had ever felt. Farther than he had a word for. Both were true at once. Neither would give way. He tried to push past it, to find at least which way the near half lay. There was no way. She was near in every direction at once.

Under the where of her was the other thing the bond still carried, and it was worse. Her fear sat at the very top of the reading, one held note that didn’t waver. It was the same note it had been when Nergal said the word river.

Andy’s knees went. He sat down hard on a fallen block. He put his hands over his face and breathed into them. The stone was cold through his trousers. A few slivers of the Hall’s glass slid out of the folds of the mantle and ticked onto the stone beside him. He couldn’t get to her. He didn’t even know which direction she was in. She was afraid. She was right here, and she was nowhere. He had promised her he would be there.

He stayed like that a while. His breath came ragged through his fingers, then less ragged, and then it only hurt. When he took his hands down, he reached for Claire instead.

He felt the difference at once. She was fainter than he had ever felt her—thinned out by whatever lay between them, like a voice through a wall. But she was whole. She came to him all of a piece, her fright pressed close under his breastbone and, beneath the fright, something that turned toward him and held on, as if she had caught him by the sleeve. Not broken. Only far.

He held on to that as hard as he could. It was the first thing since he got here that hadn’t made anything worse. He was still holding on to it when something moved in his Inventory.

It was not a sound, but a small, restless push from the place that wasn’t anywhere, where the whole household had lately taken to keeping things and pulling them back out of empty air. He had never felt the Inventory at all unless he was reaching into it. Nothing in there had ever moved on its own. Everything else he kept in it sat where he had left it, and this one thing was pressing at him to be let out.

He put his hand out into nothing. His fingers closed on glass.

It was a small vial, no longer than his finger, and warm, as if someone had just been holding it. Light came from inside it, a faint, steady blue-green, from a liquid that stirred when he tilted it and went on stirring when he held it still. He knew it at once. Mildred had given it to him at the end of his birthday party, stepping forward from among the staff with more gravity than he had ever seen on her. “From home,” she’d said. “No one ever asks how I am. But you did.” And then, closing his hand around it: “When darkness takes you, it will remember the way.”

He had never used it. Nobody had ever explained it. She had said more about it only twice since. Once at the masquerade, from behind Emily’s face and a mask. “Keep my gift close,” she’d told him. “You will need it before the next new moon.” And once yesterday morning in the Suite, when he had finally asked her straight out, and she had told him it would find him out of the Inventory when it was needed, and not before.

It went through him so suddenly that for a second he couldn’t see. Somebody had thought of this—of him, here—weeks before any of it happened, and had put something in his hand against exactly this, and had cared enough to warn him twice.

He worked the stopper out with his thumb. It came free with a small, soft sound.

The liquid didn’t spill. It lifted—rose out of the neck of the vial and kept on coming, unspooling into a single thread of light no thicker than a bootlace, and climbed the air in front of his face. It never took a shape. It curled once around his wrist, cool and almost weightless, and ran up the inside of his arm and across his shoulder and around the back of his neck, playfully, in no hurry, as if it were looking him over. Then it let go of him and stretched away into the ruins, thinning as it went, feeling along the fallen stone and into the dark between the columns like a hand feeling along a wall for a door.

It held there.

Then it drew taut in one direction and stayed that way, as steady as a compass needle that has found north.

Andy got to his feet. He put the empty vial back into the Inventory, and it went in and stayed. Then he followed the light. It was the only thing he had met here that seemed to want to help him find something, instead of only showing him how lost he was.

The thread ran out ahead of him at the height of his chest and never slackened. It led him through the broken columns and out past them, over ground that began to rise and fall a little, past more of the still figures, and he kept his eyes on the light and off of them. He didn’t know how far he walked. His stamina made it hard to get tired. There was no sun to measure time by, and nothing overhead ever changed. He was still following it when a voice reached him.

“Hello there.”

It came from somewhere he couldn’t place, low and unhurried and warm, and it was speaking to him. The thread of light went slack all at once. It drew back along his arm and settled around his shoulder, dimming, until he couldn’t have said whether it was still there.

Andy went still. He turned toward where he thought the voice had come from. He did not answer.

The voice gathered itself into a shape as he turned, and there was a man standing where the ground had been empty a second before.

He looked to be in his middle thirties, a handful of years older than Anna and Arabella looked, and he was built like someone who had spent his life working land or following herds rather than fighting: lean through the shoulders, sun-weathered, with a workman’s broad, square hands. A short, close-cropped beard covered his jaw. His skin was brown from the sun, warm by any measure, and there was none of Nergal’s ashen gray in it; set beside the memory of that stone-colored face, it looked almost ruddy. He wore a plain woven wrap belted at the waist and simple sandals, his feet dusty to the ankle, nothing dyed and nothing ornamented, in a style Andy half remembered from museum placards about ancient Sumer. His face was open and unhurried, the face of a man in no rush to be feared.

The last man who had appeared in front of Andy out of nowhere had put out the lanterns one by one on his way in. Andy found himself looking for the same kind of thing here, some sign of what this one was going to cost, and there wasn’t any. He shifted his weight anyway and let his hands hang ready. He had put everything he had into one man tonight and it had done nothing. He would rather not learn what it would do against this one.

The man looked at him.

It was not the face that stopped Andy cold, but the plain fact that it was looking back. He had been walking among people who looked at nothing for so long that he had stopped expecting anything else, and now something was meeting his eyes and holding them, patiently, as if it had been waiting for him to arrive and was glad he had. He felt the surprise of it before he felt anything else.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” the man said. His voice was gentler than anything Andy would have expected to meet in a place like this. “I’m here to guide you.”

Andy did not move. His hand had closed again at his side without his telling it to. “The people I was with,” he said. “In the Hall. Laura. Do you know if they’re—can you see them?” His voice didn’t hold. “She’s alive. I can feel that much. I just need to know if she’s—”

He couldn’t finish it. The man’s face didn’t change, but he took the question seriously. Andy could see him take it. “I can’t see them from here,” he said. “I’m sorry. I won’t tell you something I don’t know.”

It wasn’t what Andy wanted. It was more honest than he had expected, and somehow that was harder. He had spent weeks asking Arabella things and getting a Host’s answers back—smooth, complete, closed. This one had a hole in it, and the man had shown him exactly where. Andy swallowed and let it go, because there was nowhere else to put it.

“Who are you?”

“Someone who knows the way.”

“That’s not a name.”

“No,” the man said. “It isn’t.”

He left it there. He didn’t add anything to soften it, and he didn’t seem to feel he had to. The silence stood between them, and he let it stand, and he didn’t look away. Somewhere off to Andy’s left, at the edge of what he could see, one of the still figures raised its arm and brought it down, and raised it again. There was still no wind, and no sound at all but his own breathing.

Andy made himself say it. “I’m not going anywhere with somebody who won’t even tell me who he is. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how I got here. The last thing I remember is—” He stopped. He didn’t want to say it out loud in front of a stranger, the fist and those flat eyes and the hand brushing crumbs. “I don’t know you. I’m not just going to fall in behind you because you asked nicely.”

Something in that seemed to please the man rather than trouble him. The skin at the corners of his eyes creased. He looked Andy over, slowly and without any hurry about it, from the circlet on his brow to the glass-scuffed toes of his shoes. “Ama-Bila’s boy,” he said, half to himself, as if the name were a good deal older than the sentence he had put it in. “She always did pick the stubborn ones.”

Andy did not let it go by. “Where did you get that name?” It came out harder than he meant it to, and he didn’t take any of it back. He took a step toward the man instead. “Where did you hear that?”

He had heard it exactly once in his life.

The man did not step back. Nergal hadn’t stepped back either, and it was nothing like the same. This one simply stayed where he was and let Andy come, and waited to see what he would do when he got there. “It’s how I knew her,” he said, untroubled. “A long time ago.”

“She told me that name,” Andy said. “Once. On the beach.”

The man said nothing. He only waited, and let Andy get there on his own.

It had been the day she asked him to remember her after she was gone, with the eleven dark islands out on the water behind her. He had told her she had a soul, and it had moved her more than he had ever seen anything move her, and then she had whispered her true name to him and walked away up the sand. Her brother had given it to her. It was the name she had answered to in the first season she ever ran on Earth, before she was Geshtinanna, before any of the women she had been since.

“She only ran one season under it,” Andy said slowly. “The first Dilmun season.”

He stood very still. At his shoulder, where the light had settled, a faint warmth stayed exactly where it was.

He knew who had been in Dilmun. He had watched them come circling through the wreck of the Dance Hall tonight in matched pairs, dead and howling, and heard Anna’s voice break on it: they were with us, in Dilmun, all of them, and he kept them. Nergal had been that season’s Master. “Nergal never kept anybody but women,” Andy said, working it out loud now, “and you’re not him.”

Whatever else the man in front of Andy was, he wasn’t Nergal—and he wasn’t one of Nergal’s. There was only one other person Andy could think of who had been there, who would have known her by that name and meant it, and not read it off some record afterward. Arabella had told him that story too, the whole of it. Anna’s husband. The one who went down into the dark so that someone else could come back up out of it.

“Are you Dumuzid?” He watched the man’s face while he said it, for a flinch or a flicker or anything at all. He didn’t get one.

The man did not answer that, not straight. He tipped his head a little to one side, and something like quiet amusement came into his face and stayed there, held back behind a small smile. “What would the name change,” he said, “now?”

Andy opened his mouth and found he didn’t have a good answer. Yes or no, he was still here. The women were still in the Hall without him, and Laura was still at the top of the reading, and none of it turned on what this man was called.

A day ago the name would have mattered to him more than almost anything. He would have had a hundred questions stacked up behind it. Now he was standing in a ruin under a sky with no moon in it, and the only thing he wanted to know was how to get back, and the man hadn’t turned the question aside so much as shown him what was underneath it.

The man did not wait for an answer, and he did not press for one either. He only stood there in the rust-colored light with his hands loose at his sides, as if he had all the time there was and meant to give Andy as much of it as he needed.

Andy let the silence run until he couldn’t stand it. Then he came at it from the side. “Is this hers?” he said. “Ereshkigal’s. Is this her underworld?” The man didn’t answer at once, so Andy gave him the reason. “A friend of mine took a group of us down under the Hotel last night,” he said. “As far as he’d take anybody. He held his lantern up at the end, and there was a thread of red light out past where the ground stopped, the same color as that.” He tipped his head at the sky. “He said it wasn’t Hades. And it wasn’t Irkalla, either. He said it to all of us, like it was just a fact.”

The man’s answer was as gentle as everything else he had said, and just as little help. “A name for this place would do less for you than walking through it will.”

It sounded so much like Herman that Andy almost laughed, and didn’t. Herman had said things like that at the edge of the dark with his lantern up, and they had been true, and they had told Andy exactly as much as this did. He looked at the man for a long moment. The man looked back, and waited.

Andy rubbed his face with both hands. His fingers found the circlet, still sitting on his brow, and for no reason he could have named he left it where it was. “If this is her place,” he said slowly, “and you’re who I think you are, then you’re supposed to be down here paying off a debt. Locked away. That’s how the story goes. So how are you free to be standing here talking to me?”

The man seemed to weigh what he owed the question before he answered. He gave the first half at once. “It isn’t hers,” he said. “It isn’t Irkalla, or Kur, or Hades. Hermes was right about that.”

Andy took it in slowly. Nergal answered to her, and Nergal had thrown him here, and he had been building on that for some time. Now this man was telling him his assumption was wrong, and he couldn’t tell whether that was better or worse. He noticed the name, too. Not Herman. Hermes. Whoever this man was, he knew who had held that lantern.

The man let him have the silence. Then, for the other half, what he gave back was not an answer, but something smaller. “I’m here to guide you,” he said. “That much is true, whatever else I leave unsaid.”

Andy waited for the rest of it. There was none. The man didn’t fill the gap with anything, and he didn’t pretend there was no gap to fill. He had told Andy he was holding something back, and then he had held it back, and the plainness of that was almost worse than a lie would have been. A lie Andy could have argued with.

He let it stand—he didn’t have anything left to push it with, and he was too tired, suddenly, to go looking for more. He looked past the man instead—back the way the light had brought him, toward the broken columns and the still shapes standing among them. When the next question came, it came out lower than the others.

“Then tell me what this is. Those people back there.” He had to stop and start again. “There was a woman by the columns, in a long dark dress. She kept putting her hand to her mouth. Over and over. She didn’t even know I was there.”

The man answered that one plainly and kindly, as if there had never been any reason to make a secret of it.

“This place keeps what’s been forgotten,” he said. “Sets that wore out. Houses that were only ever built to be lived in for one season, and streets nobody walked down again once it was over. Pieces left over from seasons that ended a long time ago, after everyone who played in them had gone home or gone on. And the people who crossed onto her island and never left her all the way. What you saw is the part of them that stayed.” His gaze went past Andy to the columns and rested there for a while, on nothing in particular that Andy could see, before it came back. “The woman won’t know you’re there. None of them will. It isn’t anything you did.”

“Her island,” Andy said. “Arabella’s.”

“Yes.” He said it without any fuss at all, and Andy believed him. “Not only people and places, either,” the man went on. “Things end up here too. Whatever falls through the cracks somewhere else. Nothing is ever lost for good. It only ends up somewhere.”

Andy thought of Laura before he could stop himself. The river had taken her when they were thirteen, and she had come back. He did not say it. He didn’t know if the man meant anything like it, and he didn’t want to find out that he didn’t.

He turned a little and looked out over the ruins: the Hotel’s wreck somewhere behind them, the heavy stone all around, and farther off, darker shapes Andy hadn’t reached yet, low and broken against the rust.

“That’s why none of it matches,” he said. “It isn’t one place that fell down. It’s a great many of them, from a great many times, left standing wherever they stopped. Some of what you walked past was cut and set before anyone on your side of the water had learned to write their names down. Some of it isn’t old at all.”

He said it as flatly as a man mentioning the distance to the next hill.

Andy tried to picture it and couldn’t. He thought of Arabella on that same beach, telling him she had run more than three thousand seven hundred seasons on this world alone and remembered every one of them. He had nodded at the number without being able to hold it. It was all around him now. He had walked across it to get here, and he hadn’t known what he was walking on.

“The Hotel,” Andy said. It had been sitting under everything else since the lobby, and it came out rough. “Back there. The Hotel was wrecked. I just left it. It was standing, everyone was in it, and then I walked through the lobby and it was buried in sand.” He didn’t know how to ask the rest. “Is that—did that already happen?”

“No.” The man said it at once, and then took a moment over the rest, as if he wanted to get it exactly right. “That isn’t the house you left. It’s an older one. She’s built it more than once, and the old ones end up here like everything else.”

Andy let out a breath he had been holding since the counter. It didn’t make anything else any better. It only took one thing off the pile, and he hadn’t known until it came off how heavy it had been.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s only one place down here worth going to,” the man said.

“Which is?”

“You’ll see it when we’re standing in it. Not before.”

“Why?” Andy said. “Why any of it? Why are you helping me?”

“Because you need to get somewhere,” the man said, “and I know the way.”

Andy waited to see if there was more. There wasn’t. The man didn’t look sorry about it, and he didn’t look pleased with himself either. He had said what he was going to say, and now he had finished saying it.

Andy’s wariness hadn’t moved an inch. He still couldn’t have said what the man was, or what he wanted, or why he would talk so freely about the place and so little about himself. Every answer he had given was true, as far as Andy could tell, and none of them had been the whole thing. But he had said he was sorry for what he couldn’t see. He had told Andy to his face when he was holding something back. Nobody who meant to trick him would have bothered with either. And standing still had gotten Andy nothing since he got here. The light that had brought him this far had gone quiet at his shoulder. The only other thing in this whole wasteland that had looked back at him was standing in front of him, waiting on nothing.

And Herman had done this, too. Herman had led a line of frightened people down into the dark last night and told them almost nothing on the way, and every one of them had come back up whole. At the fire afterward he had said it was his work, the guiding, and had been for a long time. Andy had followed him down without knowing the destination.

The man had already turned to go. He did not look back to see whether Andy was coming.

After a moment, Andy went after him.

He fell into step beside him, close enough to keep him in sight, and matched his pace without matching his ease. He was still dressed for his own wedding. The sash had worked crooked at his waist, and the mantle dragged at his shoulders, and there was grit in his shoes, the Hall’s glass and the Hotel’s sand together. The faint warmth where the light had settled was still there. He didn’t look at it, in case looking made it go. The man walked loose-shouldered and unhurried, as if the ground were a road he had known all his life, and Andy walked with his hand still half closed at his side. Neither of them said anything else. Once they passed close to one of the still figures, kneeling at the edge of a broken wall and going through some small motion of its own, and the man stepped wide around it without breaking stride and without comment, careful not to pass through the space it was using. Andy noticed. He didn’t know what to make of it.

The Hotel’s wreck was well behind them now, and the heavy stone with it. What came next was lower and darker, courses of brick slumped into mounds, a line of posts that might once have held up a roof, and he couldn’t have said from what country or what century any of it had come. Nothing ahead of them seemed to grow any nearer. The ruined ground went on in every direction, stone and sand and wreckage, under a sky that never changed.

Once he reached for Claire and found her where she had been, faint and whole and holding on. He wondered what she was getting from him now. It wouldn’t only be fear anymore, he thought. Something had come in beside it when the man looked back at him, and it had stayed, and he didn’t have a name for it yet that he trusted.

Then, without meaning to, he reached down the bond for Laura again. She was right here. She was farther away than anything. Her fear sat at the top of the reading and didn’t move.

He held on to both halves of it and kept walking.