A cloud of chilling mist wavered in the air. She could see a single, solitary light burning in one of the second-floor windows of the main building. Everything else in the camp was dark and deserted. The sense of menacing abandonment rushed back, stronger than ever. Even the stars seemed faint.

Anderssen approached, stepping over the ridges of sand. Her movement was odd – jerky, a half-motion slower than expected. The odd doubling and tripling of her vision returned, stronger than before, showing an Anderssen ablaze with the chill blue light or blocky dark or illuminated again. Nothing about her, no matter the wealth of detail in her face and suit and cloak, seemed even remotely human.

Hummingbird sang bravely when they came against him, she remembered, a sharp fragment of the dreadful night under the cliffs of the Escarpment. Damn it, I can't think of any songs! I hate singing. Why would I have to sing?

The shape paused and she saw it had reached the edge of the stone outcropping. Furling the djellaba aside with a deft motion, the shape settled into a crouch, puddled in shadow and darkness. Gretchen swallowed, closing her eyes in concentration. The warmth in the stone seeped up into her fingers, into her hands, filling her arms with strength.

"I am not afraid," she said aloud. The sickly heat returned, beating against her face. She started to sweat, feeling moisture bead on her neck and forehead – and then the dampness froze. Alarmed, Gretchen opened her eyes. The sky had grown fully dark, awash with pale emerald, topaz and carnelian stars, all trace of the blinding sun fled.

A faint blur of light tainted the sand around the crouching figure. As Gretchen watched, the blur thickened, brightened and spread. Slow radiant threads crept across gravel and scattered stone, winding their way onto the rocks. A fierce desire to flee gripped her, seeing the glassy illumination advance, but everything beyond the steady, solid warmth in the rock was cold and remote.

Wait, she wondered. Is this something only visible to my sight, or is it real?

The blur washed closer, now rippling in faint, ghostly waves across the stones.

What do I really see? Is anything really there? What if it's just an echo of myself?

Gretchen let her body become loose again. A stiffness in her arms and legs resisted, but slowly faded as she controlled her breathing. In the brilliant dreams, the turmoil of hallucinogenic visions and uncontrollable sight had been subsumed into a crystalline sense of order. In the perfectly etched world the bitter powder had shown her, there was sight and sight. There was the promise of focus and a diamond-bright perfection of intent.

She groped to recapture the sensation. Memory fled, vanishing in a chaos of confused images, in delirious phantasms. Heat burned suddenly in her fingers. Gretchen jerked back, forcing her eyes open.

The cold blur lapped around her feet and covered her gloves. Stunned, she saw clouds of tiny flickering particles swarming among the broken, dead stone. An effort to lift her hand failed – a steadily growing web of jeweled threads chained her to the ground. Oh, shit!

Gretchen dragged at her leaden arms, trying to wrench free of the spreading jewelstain permeating the glossy black of her suit. Despite straining with both feet braced, she only succeeded in wrenching her shoulder. The sense of steady warmth vanished in the moment of effort, leaving the biting cold of the Ephesian night flooding in around her. A wild glance to either side revealed only darkness and some kind of pit or fissure in the earth. Trapped! Both forelegs in the trap. I can't even gnaw free.

Stomach churning with nausea, she looked across the outcropping, expecting to see the shape looming there in triumph. Instead, she gave a tiny, fierce shake of her head, stunned.

Anderssen rose, bloody feet bare on the gleaming sand. A queer emerald fire licked through her short blond hair, then faded away. The woman shifted her shoulders, letting the djellaba fall properly. Her face was bare to the thin, frigid air – the red welts of a breather mask worn too long were plain on her round cheeks, nose and neck – every tool and gadget was in place, comm and medband clasped around well-muscled wrists.

"Wha -" Gretchen rallied, violently collecting her thoughts. "You don't look like me."

The stance was all wrong, weight evenly distributed, not leaning to one side, favoring the wounded foot; even the face seemed distorted – lopsided – one eye fractionally higher than the other.

Hummingbird will be able to tell. Gretchen found the thought a frail comfort. If he has time to see as she rushes out of the darkness or creeps up behind him.

The chains of jewels dragging at her arms pulsed with delicate, subtle color. Gretchen felt something change and shift in her mind. Half-familiar memories stirred, clamoring for her attention. They felt strange – not soft and faded, burnished by the passage of time – but cold and clear, freshly struck from the die.

A sullen yellow sky filled with hundreds of bright pinpricks loomed overhead, a harsh, claustrophobic vault crushing the breath from her lungs. In every direction endless ranks of vast obsidian towers soared in counterpoint to the sulfurous heavens. She turned, images blurring past – more towers, some shattered and cracked with age, some newly raised from the plain.

In the distance, heat haze shimmered in deserted avenues, yielding the sickly black image of a vast, implacable lake. Somewhere, beyond the horizon, down just such an avenue as this, ringed by the same colossal buildings, the lake was real; oily, infinitely deep, stretching from horizon to horizon, a choking black band wrapped around the wizened throat of an ancient, dying planet.

"No – I was never there!" Gretchen shouted aloud, filled with an all-encompassing fear for her own memories, her own thoughts. Voices roared in her ears, shouting and accusing her of monstrous deeds. "I'm not one of the things in the library! I'm not one of them!"

A cloud of brilliant stars spanned the arc of a blue-green world. Great whorls of white cloud obscured most of the surface, but mottled green and brown continents peeked through. Seas and oceans blazed blue, shining in the light of a dim yellow sun.

Across the face of the void, stars rippled and twisted, distorted by something vast. Space boiled and tore, splitting aside. A shape forced its way through the burning gap, something nearly dwarfing the world shining below. Tatters of space and time flew past, the light of distant suns still reflected in long streamers of darkness. An ebon shape swept across the world, blotting out any view of the green hills or shining seas.

In the passing wake, the fabric of space reknit, stars falling back into their accustomed courses, the glare of the sun once more traveling as it had done for millennia. Yet the spilling, fluid darkness already englobed the world, a tightening black web, shutting out the sun, blocking the light of the stars.

"No…" Gretchen tried to concentrate, to hold back a titanic flood of images – not her thoughts, not things she had done – from overwhelming her mind. They crowded in, pushing aside memories of her friends at the university, time spent hiking in the tall pines behind the steading, the smell of coffee perking in her dorm room, the harsh taint of diesel in the fog as she hurried across the Quad to class. "Give them back!"

But her memories were dying. Wiped away. Replaced by images of a horizon boiling with black ink, of shining silver sparks raining down out of the sky, splashing into the sea, tangling in saw-leafed palmettos. The single burning image of a four-fingered hand lifting a muddy cylinder from a stream.