Kolabati could barely meet his eyes. "I wish he were, but he means it. The group over there, the ones wearing the feathers and such, they're the last of the pure-bred traditional Hawaiians from the forbidden island of Niihau. Moki confronted them last night and told them he was Maui."

Jack's eyes widened. "He thinks he's an island?"

"No. He's mad but he's not that mad. Maui was a god who came up here ages ago, right where we're standing, and trapped the sun and forced it to make the days longer. When Moki told them he was Maui, the Niihauans didn't believe him. One of them stabbed him in the chest with a spear."

Jack glanced over to where Moki stood talking with the Niihauan alii.

"You mean tried to stab him in the chest."

"No. The spearhead sank to its full length right here."

She reached out and touched a spot over Jack's heart. She'd been wanting to touch him since her first sight of him, to assure herself that he was really here, truly alive. He was.

Jack gave her a quick look, then stared again at Moki.

"The necklace?"

Kolabati nodded.

"It didn't work that way when I wore it."

"It's never worked that way for anyone. Something's happened to it. It's been activated, stimulated in some way that I don't understand."

"I do," Jack said, still staring at Moki.

"You do? How can you—?"

"That's why I'm here. I need that necklace. There's someone back in New York who might be able to set the world right again. But he needs the necklace to do it."

The thought of giving away the second necklace to a stranger jolted Kolabati. She turned to look at Moki and held her breath as she saw a middle-aged Niihauan rise and step toward him with a raised knife. Moki stood firm, showing no fear. In fact, he gestured the man forward. The Niihauan stepped closer, and in a blur of motion raised the knife and plunged it into Moki's chest.

Jack cried, "Jesus Christ!" while Ba stiffened and muttered something unintelligible.

Kolabati watched the rim with fatalistic distaste as Moki staggered back a step, then straightened. He grasped the knife handle with both hands, and slowly, deliberately, his body shaking convulsively, withdrew the bloody blade from his chest. The Niihauan looked on in open-mouthed amazement, then raised his face and arms toward the sky. Moki gave him a moment, then rammed the dripping blade into his heart.

As the man screamed in agony, Jack turned away, cursing angrily under his breath. Kolabati continued to watch. Human sacrifices had been part of her childhood. When you are born to a priest and priestess of a temple where humans were regularly thrown to the rakoshi, it became a matter-of-fact event. It was a necessity—the rakoshi had to be fed. But this was different. This was obscene, serving no useful purpose other than feeding Moki's delusions.

As she watched Moki lift the Niihauan's corpse and hurl it into the fire, a sacrifice to the false goddess, Pele, Jack turned to her.

"How the hell did you get involved with this maniac?"

"A long, sad story, Jack. Believe me, he was nothing like this before the sun and the earth began to betray us."

Inside she mourned for the Moki who had been, the Moki she sensed was irretrievably lost to her.

"I'll take your word for it," Jack said. "But right now he's got to be stopped. And one way to stop him is to get that necklace from him."

"More easily said than done when you're talking about a man who heals like Moki."

"I might have a way." His eyes bored into hers. "Will you help?"

She nodded vigorously. "Of course."

But don't expect to walk out of here with Moki's necklace when we get it back.

TUESDAY

1 • PASSAGES

WNEW-FM

JO: Hi. We're back. You probably thought we jumped ship just like most everybody else in town, didn't you. But we didn't. We lost our power for a bit there. As we're sure you already know, the whole city's dark.

FREDDY: Yeah, but we've got a generator going now so we're staying on the air, just like we promised.

JO: Trouble is, we won't be able to bring you much news. The papers can't roll their presses and the wire services are shutting down. But we'll stay on the air and do the best we can.

FREDDY: Yeah. You're stuck with us.

DINU PASS, RUMANIA

"I think we're lost, Nick," Bill said.

They were tipping and grinding and scraping along what passed for a road in these parts as Bill fought the wheel of the Rumanian equivalent of a Land-Rover. It was rust streaked, its odometer was in kilometers, it had creaky, ratchety steering, failing brakes, and a leaky exhaust system. But it seemed damn near indestructible, and its thick glass seemed impervious to the bugs that had swarmed over them in the Ploiesti area. Not too many bugs around here, though. Maybe because there weren't many humans or animals in these parts to feed on.

Bill squinted ahead. Sheer mountain walls towered on either side, closer on his left, but the formerly seamless blackness beyond the flickering, dancing headlights was showing some cracks. Morning was coming. Good. Although traveling east had made the night mercifully short, he was tired of the darkness. He had a blinding headache from the carbon monoxide-tainted air as well as the tension growing in his neck, his left leg and right arm burned from fighting the creaky clutch and stubborn gear shift, and he was sure they'd missed a crucial turn about ten kilometers back.

And he'd begun talking to Nick. Nick hadn't deigned to reply yet, but the sound of his own voice gave Bill the feeling that he wasn't completely alone out here in a remote mountain pass in the heart of a benighted country where he spoke not a word of the native language.

"We'll never find our way back home again," he said. "Unless it's in a pine box."

Joe Ashe had piloted them across the Atlantic and Northern Europe in great time, riding the jet stream all the way. The field at Ploiesti had been deserted except for one of Joe's East European pilot buddies—apparently the Ashe brothers had a global network of kindred spirits—who had this beat-up old land-rover waiting for them. They'd assumed Bill would wait until daylight before setting out. But dawn, such as it was these days, had been nearly three hours away. And three hours seemed like a lifetime. Sure, it was 6:02 a.m. local time, but the clock in Bill's body read only midnight. He was too wired to sleep, so why not put the time to good use? The Rumanian land-rover looked sturdy enough—more like a converted half-track mini-tank than a car—so he'd loaded Nick into the passenger seat and headed out into the darkness.

A foolish mistake. Bill realized that now. He glanced at his watch. Eight o'clock. They'd covered thirty miles in two hours—the majority of them coasting along the road north from Ploiesti, the last few crawling along this ridge road. According to the Sapir curve, dawn was due at 8:41, after which there would be eight hours and thirty-eight minutes of sunlight today. Which was about half an hour shorter than the shortest day of the year in the dead of all the Decembers that had preceded the celestial changes.

Bill shivered. A new kind of winter had come. A winter of the soul.

"I know what you're going to say, Nick," he said. "You're going to say, 'I told you so.' And maybe you did, but I guess I wasn't listening. Doesn't matter now, though. We're stuck out here in the middle of nowhere and we'll just have to wait until the light comes and hope to find somebody who can tell us how to get to this keep place."

Nick, ever polite, refrained from an I-told-you-so.

Bill scanned the terrain ahead for a level place to park and noticed the road widening. Great. He could pull to the side and wait for the light. Then he saw the white shapes ahead. As he got closer he realized they were houses. A cluster of them. A village.