It was Pahtun’s.

Denbord and Khren approached her, and then the others. They formed a circle, facing outward, and realized each could see what the others were seeing, allowing better judgment of their surroundings—many eyes combined at once, a strange sensation.

“Did the Tall One squeeze himself into all our suits, or did he just pick up and leave?” Macht asked.

“Let’s hope he was real,” Nico said, “and we’re not laid out on this black stuff, naked, dinner for monsters.”

“Follow your beacons,” the armor insisted. “Much distance to cover, and quickly. All this region is uneasy. Silent Ones always seek what defies the Typhon.”

“March!” Tiadba said, and with greater confidence and greater alertness, they followed the pulsing tones, forming a wavering line that soon drew straight, Tiadba in front, Khren taking up the rear. All of them could see what she saw ahead, around: a low green light that flickered and rose in spikes, as if to touch the sky.

Their steps slowed and they felt oddly heavy. From their right, something loomed and passed too quickly to see—something huge, broad, and flat, flying past on high, slender pillars that pulled up the ground ahead and behind—and then it was gone.

“It had a face,” Khren said. “A human face. Bigger than a meadow…”

“Move quickly,” the armor instructed. “Distance will close in, light will move in unfamiliar ways, and things will seem to burn. Above all, follow the beacon.”

Off to the left, Tiadba saw a swinging gray sword of light, brighter than before: the glowing beam sent out from the Witness.

“We’re right under it,” Nico said. “How did we get so close? Wasn’t it on the other side?”

“We should set up our generator and wait for it to go away,” Macht said.

“No!” the armor insisted. “You are being hunted. There is no shelter here. There is only escape.”

CHAPTER 77

The Green Warehouse

Jack knelt beside Ginny’s bed and put his hand on her arm. She had been sleeping for hours, even after the pewter light of whatever passed for dawn touched the windows beneath the warehouse roof. At his touch, she shifted on the cot, then opened her eyes and looked beyond him. The peace after her time in the room had passed. The gnawing worry and fear were back—especially in sleep. She was sleeping so much now. Jack, on the other hand, was mostly wide-awake. His dreams since being in the empty room had been brief and uneventful.

“They’re huge,” she murmured. “They’re like stingrays, but they have faces on one side. Arms and legs make dimples in the road as they skim along, like water striders on a pond. They shoot by too fast to see, unless they see you first—and if they catch you, it’s over.”

Jack wiped a tear from his cheeks, feeling emotions that were not his own, not yet. “Where are you?” he asked.

“We’re miles from the city—I don’t know how far. It’s always night out here, always dark. The sun doesn’t cast any light—it’s just a glimmer on the edge. We don’t even have real shadows. The armor says the Chaos here is thin—some of the old rules still survive. We can even take off our helmets and breathe the air. But it freezes your lungs if you suck it in. Fur on the nose—good thing.” She looked around, as if trying to locate his face, seeing neither the warehouse nor Jack. “Is anything coming?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his face contorted. “You’re way ahead of me.”

“The beacon still sings in our helmets, so beautiful…that’s the only thing that guides us. Distance is tricky, but we keep walking. I think it knows we’re here, it just doesn’t care. It’s stuffed full. It’s eaten almost everything…but we’re giving it indigestion. It’s won, but it’s keeping an eye on us—a big, big eye. The Witness is always there. God, I hope we don’t get too near it.”

“What’s that?” Jack asked.

“No words for it. The other city isn’t…It isn’t the same. There’s something awful in its place. I know that, but I can’t tell her. Jack… She doesn’t know.”

Jack laid his head on Ginny’s chest, put his hand over her eyes. That searching, distant gaze…

“I’ll be there,” he whispered.

“Too late,” she said. “They’ve found us.”

She fell back on the cot. Jack stroked her forehead, then stood. He couldn’t bear watching her suffer

and being so powerless. He bumped the boxes on his way out of the cubicle. Bidewell was sitting in a chair near the stove, reading a slender green book. The old man’s face looked ethereal, as if it might turn to mist or glass. Ellen stepped out of the main warehouse, carrying a knitted bag with the outline of her own small book weighting one corner.

“Where are the others?” Jack asked.

“There’s nothing they can do here,” Bidewell said. “They’re trying to reach their loved ones.”

“I thought they were alone,” Jack said.

“Only you are ever truly alone,” Bidewell said, with a strange twist of envy. “Our time is almost over, for this cycle. Yours is just beginning.”

Ellen looked at Jack, at once hopeful and stricken. He saw that both of them had been crying and felt uncomfortable, so he moved on and found Daniel sitting under the almost bare shelves in the annex room, paging through a large, thick book. Daniel looked as exhausted as Jack felt. Somehow, that made him more sympathetic.

Daniel put the book aside as Jack approached. “I heard the door open,” he said.

“Three of the women took off,” Jack said. He examined Daniel’s expression, looking for any sign of strangeness, but could not find anything to dislike or even be suspicious of. That was Glaucous’s doing, he suspected. He recognized the symptoms, more subtle but still the same. Why would Glaucous protect Daniel?

Shaping him as a new partner, perhaps?

“I don’t hear much outside,” Daniel said. “And there’s certainly nothing new in here. Let’s go topside for another look.”

For the moment, the curtains and wrinkles above the city had parted, leaving an inky blackness and a sky full of stars, but something was very wrong. The stars, like the moon, had smeared, twisted, wrapped themselves in rainbow-colored rings—and were growing dimmer.

One by one they were winking out like spent fireflies.

“They’re being eaten,” Jack said. “The moon, the stars…”

“You got that right,” Daniel said. “But we have to think it through— what’s being eaten? Whenis it being eaten? I can believe the moon being sucked up by whatever thatis, that ugly sun-arc thing—we’d see that almost right away, but the stars are too distant. Unless…” He wiped his forehead. “Unless the past was chewed up first. That would mean everything behind us has already been eaten, space andtime…Those stars are already gone, the last wave of their light is bouncing off the Terminus—and now it’sfading. We’re like the core of an apple, the seeds, being saved for last.”

“Seeds,” Jack said. “That’s what Bidewell calls the stones.”

“None of what he says makes sense, Jack.”

Jack persisted. “Still, things are reaching back from somewhere.”

Daniel thought this through, brow wrinkled, plump cheeks growing pale. He gave Jack a pinched look, part disbelief, part envy. “Okay, magic boy. You know something.”

“It’s obvious. We’re being messed with—someone sent the stones back, like Bidewell says.”

“Like he hints,” Daniel corrected.

“And the thing that controls the hunters—the Chalk Princess, Glaucous’s Livid Mistress—that could be from the future, too. But what’s messing with us is no longer inthe future. We’re being shoved up againstthe future—what’s left of it. Right?”

“With you so far,” Daniel said, intrigued that Jack was suddenly engaging in theory.