She looked back, a bad idea, but she couldn’t help herself. The gray air behind could not completely obscure the sharp bluish glow rising from the warehouse, the only building she could see that had not been destroyed or rearranged like a child’s set of blocks. She wished them well. The warehouse grew smaller too quickly, as if each step she made were a dozen. A new way to walk: tattered running shoes turned into seven-league boots…

Ginny lifted her arms, wondering if she could will herself to fly, but nothing happened. She kept walking. The ground changed from cracked cement and asphalt to soft gray dirt, then to something blacker and harder—a kind of ropy crust like old lava, but thin and crunchy. She hoped the fine gray dust that puffed up from beneath the broken crust would not swallow her feet, or swallow her. Some of her thoughts as she performed this odd journey were taken up with the protests of a rational, practical young woman who told her that leaving the warehouse was worse than suicide—but who also told her that none of this could possibly be real. In the broken, flat, and listless world of Terminus—a thin coat of paint between life and doom—there had to be an answer to the madness, an escape, a door or hatch through which she could crawl and pull herself into real sunlight, real night, walk under real stars, real moon—

Real sleep, normal dreams. And a real city, not this broken-down jumble. But then she looked up from her blur of feet, looked around again. She was no longer in the city. The brown and gray air was reddened by the rise of the flaming arc—all that seemed to be left of the sun, wrapped around a cindery disc. This was accompanied by a deep rumbling and trembling beneath her shoes, the black ground itself rebelling against what now passed for day. And off in the distance she saw the ghostly hint of a sweeping beam, not precisely a searchlight, more like the blade of a huge sword cutting through the sky.

I know that. The Witness.

This made her stop. She found herself actually wringing her hands, a story-time gesture she never would have believed herself capable of. But she took some solace from the repetitive motion and the pressure of her strong, curling fingers.

Her frown deepened, wrinkles and seams growing across her forehead and cheeks until her face felt like an old, old woman’s. The air seemed to be aging her. Terminus might be pulling her up short, abruptly

snipping her world-line like a grim, silent Norn.

Anything could be happening.

And so she had to keep walking.

From the middle of the roof the shelter door creaked and slammed open. Ellen kicked the door again as it swung back, then stepped out onto the wooden pallets. “We weren’t watching her for just a moment…!” she called, and then stopped, sucked in her breath, and lifted her hand to shield her eyes against the aurora glow.

Jack didn’t say a word, just broke into a run over the wooden path to the shelter. His shoulders bounced from the walls, then he swung onto the ladder and scrambled below like a monkey. Daniel followed, more deliberate. Trying to figure an advantage, he thought with the smallest pang. Ellen stared at him as he walked past. She focused on his face—she did not want to see any more of the sky and landscape than she had to.

“The girl took off?” Daniel asked.

Ellen’s face was white with accumulated shock, and now this. She folded her arms tight and nodded.

“We were supposed to protect her.”

“We’ll go find her,” Daniel said. “This place isn’t going to last much longer, anyway.”

CHAPTER 80

Downtown

The witches could not find any street they recognized.

The whole downtown area had been fractured and then tossed into a mishmash chronology. The only structures that seemed familiar were bookstores, some shuttered for decades, yet once again presenting faded signs to empty streets; but their interiors were deserted, empty of both books and readers. Agazutta, Farrah, and Miriam moved on in a tight huddle, exchanging quiet, hollow jokes—the last little encouragements they could muster—but unable to hide their fear at the appalling state of their once beautiful city.

“I never imagined it might be like this. I thought I’d die in bed,” Miriam said.

“Alone and unloved?” Agazutta made a wry face. “Maybe this is better.”

“Speak for yourself,” Miriam said.

“Always have.”

“Girls.” Farrah nudged them around a gray, jagged corner. “This is Fifth Avenue.”

“My God, have we walked that far?” Miriam asked.

“I’m not sure what ‘far’ means now,” Agazutta said.

They stood for a moment, the dusty breeze chilling them like a soft, dead hand.

“That’s north, I think,” Farrah decided. She wiped grit from her eyes and intensified her frown. “What now?”

“I recognize something up the block a ways,” Miriam said. “It’s the central library.”

“Haven’t we had enough of books?” Farrah said.

Miriam said, “I think it’s our little green books that have got us this far. Maybe we can climb to an upper floor and get our bearings.”

“I say we go east, that way,” Farrah said, pointing. “I think that’s still east. The freeway isn’t far, if it’s still there.”

“My house would be north,” Agazutta said.

“I don’t know if we can make it,” Miriam said. “It’s getting much too cold.” She pulled up the collar of her sensible gray wool coat—the sort of coat one wore for many seasons in Seattle. Agazutta turned toward a window crusted into the wall beside her, its frame cracked, pitch-dark behind the dusty glass. Palm-and fingerprints streaked through the dust, as if people had walked by with hands out, touching the walls, the window, anything solid to guide themselves through the murk—before they vanished.

She stared into the glass and realized that the reflection staring back was of another face entirely, not hers—and not a happy one. With a little cry, she backed away, and the face faded. To the southwest, around Bidewell’s warehouse, a pillar of swirling cloud seemed to be gathering, piping out a thin calliope whistle—the voice of a mad mother crooning to her children.

“Let’s get off this street,” Farrah said. “Anyplace will do, even a library.”

They walked through the fragile rubble, crunching like burned meringue beneath their shoes, in the direction that had once been north; toward the big library.

Inside, the library was remarkably intact—deserted, but only loosely touched by the changes beyond its high, staggered glass and aluminum walls. Quiet filled the lobby and stairwells leading to the upper levels—empty quiet.

Agazutta leaned against a desk and coughed into her handkerchief. “We’ll get black lung out there.”

“Dust of ages,” Miriam said, and reached into her cloth bag to pull out her book. She held it up, showed it to her fellow Witches.

They produced their own volumes—the books that Bidewell had given them years ago, when they began working for him.

“Books are special,” Miriam said. “They mean something beyond any value I ever gave them. Not that I don’t love books. I mean, look at this place…it’s hardly been touched.”

Agazutta fumbled with the brass latch on her book, but Farrah reached out and stopped her. With a sigh, Agazutta slipped the book back into her bag.

“Whatever protection books give didn’t seem to mean much to the people who worked here.”

“Maybe they left,” Miriam said doubtfully.

“I’d hate to think that we’re all that special,” Farrah said, and when the others looked her way, puzzled or irritated, she added with uncharacteristic sheepishness, “I don’t want to be the last of anything—especially the last old woman.”