Mary Montalban had met a twin of her own mother: not Radmila, but Vera herself, a bony apparition, a literal moving skeleton, towering, vibrating, squeaking. Mary did not shriek in terror at the dreadful sight of her own aunt. Probably, Mary had been carefully trained never to do such things. But whenever Vera stilted nearer, the child shuddered uncontrollably. She was afraid.

This fancy little girl, with her childish walking shoes, her pretty hat, and her beach ball, sincerely was a tourist. She was trying to play with her dad and have some fun at the seashore. That was Mary's entire, wholehearted intention. Mary Montalban was the first real tourist that Mljet had seen in ten long years.

Some fun at the seashore didn't seem too much for a small girl to ask from a stricken world. A pang of unsought emotion surged through Vera. Pity lanced through her heart and tore it, in the way a steel gaff might lance entirely through the body of some large, chilly, unsuspecting fish.

Vera worked harder, stacking the debris in the gathering heat of late morning, but her small attempts to order the massive chaos of this dead town could not soothe her. How much that child looked like Radmila, when Radmila had been no bigger, had known no better. How quickly all that had come apart. How sad that it had all come to such a filthy end. Like this. To rubbish, to rubble, to death.

But a child wasn't rubble, rubbish, and death. Mary Montalban was not the product of some Balkan biopiracy lab. She was just the daughter of one.

That collapse had been waiting for the caryatids; it had been in the wind all along. The collapse started slowly, at first. First, Djordje had run away from the compound, in some angry fit-Djordje's usual selfishness. Their latest tutor, Dr. Igoe, had vanished in search of Djordje. Dr. Igoe never came back from that search. Neither did Djordje, for this time his escape was final.

Two days of dark fear and confusion passed. Vera, Bratislava, Kosara, Svetlana, Sonja, Radmila, Biserka-none of them breathed a word of what they all sensed must be coming.

And as for their mother, their creator, their protector, their inspector…there was not a sound, not a signal, not a flicker on a screen.

Then the earthquake happened. The earth broke underfoot, a huge tremor. After the earthquake, there were fires all over the coastlines, filthy, endless columns of rising smoke.

After the fires, men with guns came to the compound. The desperate militia soldiers were scouring the island for loot, or women, or food. The compound's security system automatically killed two of them. The men were enraged by that attack: they fired rockets from their shoulders and they burst in shooting at everything that moved.

Then sweet Kosara was killed, and good Bratislava was killed, and Svetlana was also killed, with particular cruelty. Suddenly murdered, all three of them. It had never occurred to these teenage girls to run for their lives, for their compound was their stronghold and all that their mother had allowed them to know of the world. Seventeen-year-old girls who had led lives of utter magic-air that held drawings and spoke poetry, talking kitchenware, thinking trees-they all died in bursts of gunfire, for no reason that they ever understood.

Radmila survived, because Radmila hid herself in the dust, smoke, and rubble. Sonja fought, and Sonja killed those who killed. Biserka, howling for mercy-Biserka had thrown herself at the bandits' feet.

Vera herself-she had run away at the first shots fired. Just run, vanished into the woods, like the wind. Vera had always loved the open island much better than the compound.

Lost in the island's forest, truly lost on Earth for the first time in her life, Vera had been entirely alone. The Earth had no words for Vera's kind of solitude.

Bewildered and grieving, Vera had gone to Earth like an animal. She slept in brown heaps of pine needles. She ate raw berries. She drank rainwater from stony puddles.

Her world had ended. Yet the island was still there.

Vera tramped the stricken island from one narrow end to the distant other, climbed every hill she could climb, and there was not one living soul to be found. She grew dirty, despondent, and thin.

Finally Vera heard voices from the sky. Acquis people had arrived with boats, and those rescuers had a tiny, unmanned plane that soared around the island, a flying thing like a cicada, screeching aloud in a brilliant, penetrating voice. It yelled its canned rescue instructions in five or six global languages.

Vera did as the tiny airplane suggested. She ventured to the appointed rendezvous, she found her surprised rescuers, and she was shipped to a rescue camp on the mainland. From there Vera immediately schemed and plotted to return to Mljet, to save her island as she herself had been saved. At length, she had succeeded.

And now, after all that, here, again on Mljet, at last, was the next generation: in the person of Mary. The idea that Mary Montalban existed had been a torment to Vera-but in person, in reality, as a living individual, someone on the ground within the general disaster zone, Mary was not bad. No: Mary was good.

Mary was what she was: a little girl, a little hard to describe, but…Mary Montalban was the daughter of a rich banker and a cloned actress, sharing a junk-strewn beach with her crazy, bone-rattling aunt. That was Mary Montalban. She had a world, too.

Mary was visibly lonely, pitifully eager to win the approval of her overworked, too-talkative dad. Mary was also afraid of her aunt, although she very much wanted her aunt to love her and to care about her. That knowledge was painful for Vera. Extremely painful. It was a strong, compelling, heart-crushing kind of pain. Pain like that could change a woman's life.

Remotely chatting in their lively, distant voices, the father and daughter tossed their big handsome beach ball. The girl missed a catch, and the ball skittered off wildly into the flowering bushes. In the silence of the ruins Vera heard the child laughing.

Vera turned up the sensors in her helmet, determined to spy on them. The ruins of Polace were rather poorly instrumented, almost a blackspot in the island's net. Vera gamely tried a variety of cunning methods, but their voices were warped and pitted by hisses, hums, and drones. The year 2065 was turning out to be one of those "Loud Sun" years: sunspot activity with loud electrical noise. Any everyware technician could groom the signal relays, but there wasn't a lot to do about Acts of God.

Montalban did not know that Vera was eavesdropping on him with such keen attention. His formality melted away. Montalban swung his arms high and low, he capered on the wrecked beach like a little boy.

Now Montalban was telling Mary something about Polace, pointing out some details in the rusting, sour ruins. Montalban was summing it all up for his daughter somehow, in some sober piece of fatherly wisdom. Montalban respected his daughter, and was intent and serious about teaching her. He was trying to instruct her about how the world worked, about its eerie promises and its carnivorous threats and dangers, phrasing that in some way that a five-year-old might comprehend and never forget. A fairy tale, maybe.

Thrilled to be the focus of her dad's attention, Mary twisted her feet and chewed at her fingers.

Montalban had brought his daughter here to Mljet, all this way across the aching planet, for some compelling reason. Vera couldn't quite hear what he was telling his child. Whatever it was, it certainly meant the world to him.

Vera sensed suddenly, and with a terrible conviction, that the two of them had come to Mljet to get far away from Radmila.

Yes, that was it. That was the secret. Montalban had not come here to spy on her, or the Acquis, or the island's high technology, or anything else. Whatever those other purported motives might be, they were merely his excuses.