Moki's grin widened. "I believe you are right. You are a worthy rival, Repairman Jack. I'll be sorry to see you die."

Not as sorry as I'll be if Kolabati has suckered me.

Moki positioned his knife over his chest, the point indenting the scarred area just to the left of the breast bone. Jack did the same. His sweaty palms were slippery on the handle. The touch of the point sent a chill straight through to the organ beating barely an inch beneath it. It picked up its tempo in response.

This had to work.

"Ready?" Jack said. "On three. One…two…" He shouted the last number. "Three!"

Jack watched as Moki rammed the blade deep into his chest, saw his torso hunch, his grin vanish, his features constrict with the sudden agony, watched his eyes fill with shock, horror, rage, betrayal as the sick realization of what had just happened to him filtered through the haze of pain.

Moki looked down at the knife protruding from his chest. Blood welled up against the hilt and ran down his skin. Then he looked at Jack's blade, still poised over Jack's chest. His lips worked.

"You…didn't…"

"You're the crazy one, pal. Not me."

Moki glanced over to where Kolabati stood in the flame-flickered darkness. The hurt in his eyes was unsoundable. Jack almost felt sorry for him, until he remembered the brave Niihauan who hadn't had a chance against him last night and had died the same way. Jack followed his gaze and saw Kolabati staring at him with unmasked fury. Why? Because he hadn't stabbed himself?

Suddenly pain seared across his chest. He staggered back and saw Moki go down on his knees, blood pumping from the slit in his chest, his bloody knife free in his hand. And across Jack's chest—a deep gash. Moki had pulled his own knife from his wound and slashed Jack.

Jack pressed his hand against the gash but it had already stopped bleeding. The pain, too, was gone. And as he watched in amazement, the wound edges closed and began to knit.

He looked up and saw Moki watching too. Moki reached a bloody hand up to the necklace that encircled his neck. Ashen faced now, he looked at Jack's unadorned neck, his eyes pleading for an explanation. He couldn't speak, but he could move his lips.

They said: How?

Jack pulled up the left cuff of his jeans to show where he'd wound the true necklace around his ankle.

"Just because they call it a necklace doesn't mean you have to wear it around your neck."

Moki pitched forward on his face, twitched, shuddered, then lay still.

Jack looked at the blade in his hand and tossed it onto the hardened lava beside Moki. Another victory for Rasalom, another talented human gone mad, and now dead. Suddenly Jack felt exhausted, empty. Must it have ended like this? Couldn't he have found another way? Was the mad darkness in the air seeping into him as well? Or had he always carried a piece of the darkness within him? Was that what he felt twisting and thrashing against the walls of the cage he'd built for it?

Shouts made him turn. The Niihauans had broken away from Ba and were charging up the slope. Jack backed away, unsure of their intent. But they ignored him, rushing directly to Moki's body. They prayed by it, then lifted him by his hands and feet and tossed his remains into Haleakala's fires.

As the others began to pray, the chief turned to Jack.

"Haleakala," he said, beaming. "The House of the Sun. Now that the false Maui is dead, the sun will return to the path that the true Maui taught it."

"When?" Jack said.

Ba had come up the slope and now stood at his side, looking at the night sky, then at the rumbling crater. He seemed tense.

"Tomorrow," the chief said. "Tomorrow, you will see."

"I hope so," Jack said. He turned to Ba. "But in case he's wrong, I think it's past time we headed back home."

Ba nodded. "Yes. We must hurry. I fear we might already be too late."

"Too late for what?"

A tortured look flickered across his features, all the more startling because of their usual waxy impenetrability.

"I don't know. I only know I must get back to the Missus."

"Okay, Big Guy. We're on our way." He turned toward Kolabati. "All we've got to do is load our lady friend in the Jeep and we're—"

Kolabati was gone.

Jack spun this way and that, searching the darkness. Not a sign of her. The Isuzu was still parked down the slope but no trace of Kolabati. He and Ba searched the entire area but all they found was Jack's shirt, lying on the lava where she had been standing. He pulled it on and hopped into the passenger seat of the car.

"She must have taken off on foot when we were listening to the old chief. You remember how to get back down the trail?"

Ba nodded and started the car.

They picked their way down the trail, Ba driving as quickly as he dared, while Jack scanned the road ahead in the headlights and as far to each side as he could see in the dark. Nothing. Nothing moving but the wind. As they wound down from the crest, the wind abated and the fish and seawater began to rain from the sky, narrowing vision even further. An occasional bug began to harass them.

Finally they came to the house. The lights were on and the generator was running, just as they'd been an hour ago. Jack leapt out and ran inside, stepping over a thrashing tuna and dodging bugs on the way. There weren't many around at the moment. Once inside he ran through the halls, shouting Kolabati's name. He didn't expect her to be here—how could she have beat them back on foot?—but he had to give it a shot, had to assure himself that he'd looked everywhere.

Uncertainty gnawed at him. What if he didn't find her? What if she was hiding from him? Had she lied? Had she had any intention at all of coming back to New York with him? Apparently not.

What a pathetic jerk I am.

He took the stairs to the upper floor, to the great room, but lurched to a stop when he heard the sound. Ahead, bleeding down the hall from the great room, a buzz, the unmistakable sound of over-sized diaphanous wings, hundreds of them, beating madly. Had they caught somebody—Bati perhaps? Were they in the midst of some sort of feeding frenzy?

He wanted to turn and run but forced himself to stand fast. Something about the buzzing…not wild and frenzied…calmer, smoother, almost…placid.

He stepped forward. He had to see what was going on in there. From back here he could see only the front end of the room. The lone lamp that still functioned gave off enough light for him to make out the details of the room. And what he saw sent his skin crawling.

Bugs…the great room was full of them, crowded with them. They obscured the walls, perched on the furniture, floated in the air. All kinds of bugs, from hovering chew wasps to drifting men-o'-war, and all facing the same direction, away from the smashed windows, toward the interior of the room. Jack's legs urged him to get the hell out of here, but he had to see what held them so spellbound.

Jack dropped to his knees and inched forward. The bugs remained oblivious to him. He stretched out on the bare floor and craned his neck around the edge of the entry way to bring the rest of the room into view.

More bugs. So tightly packed he could barely see through the thick of them. Then a gust of wind sluiced through the windows, undulating the hovering mass enough for Jack to catch a look at the center of the great room.

It was the sculpture, Moki's final work. The only object in the room on which the bugs had not perched. Its long, arching wooden spokes were bare for their entire length, from where they seemed to spring from the walls to their common center, the jagged, unwieldy aggregate of black and red lava fragments. The bugs hovered about it, every one of them faced toward its center like rapt churchgoers in silent benediction.

And the lava center…it pulsed with an unholy yellow light, slowly, as if in time with the beat of a massive, hidden heart.