There was some kind of heroism in the act, Tom thought. It was a faltering, tormented motion that reeked of malfunction, of stripped gears, overheated engines, buckled metal. The marauder stood up and moved his head as if the goggles had clouded, a querulous and birdlike gesture. Then he stripped off the headpiece and looked at Tom.

Tom couldn’t discern much of his features in the dim light, but it seemed to him this was even worse than the mask had been, the revelation of a human face underneath. With what expression on it? Something like despair, Tom thought. He felt a dizzy urge to call time-out. I’m hurt. You’re hurt. Let’s quit.

But the marauder took aim, a little raggedly, with his deadly right hand.

Oh shit, Tom thought. What happened to my gun? He’d left it in the road.

Inadequate lump of polystyrene and impossibility. It hadn’t done him much good anyhow. It was yards away. The yards might have been miles.

The marauder aimed but held his fire, advancing from Tom’s gravel driveway in a crippled but steady lope. If I move, Tom thought, he’ll kill me. If I go for the gun or roll into the gully, he’ll kill me. And if I stay here—he’ll kill me.

He had pretty much decided to go for the gun anyhow, count on surprise and the work of the cybernetics to give him a chance against that deadly right hand—when the miraculous event occurred.

The miracle was heralded by a light.

The light made strange, wide shadows on the pines and the shadows swayed like something huge and alive. Then he heard the sound of the engine, the sound of a car coming down the Post Road from the highway, high beams probing the slow curve south of the Simmons house.

The car was traveling fast.

Tom turned toward it as the marauder did. The lights were blinding. Tom took the opportunity to pitch himself left, into the ditch at the side of the road. He put his head up and saw the marauder dodge toward him as the car seemed at first to veer away … Then tires squealed against blacktop, the car swerved again, and the marauder was fixed in the glare of its lights like a fragment of a dream, motionless until the impact lifted him like a strange, broken bird into the air.

Ordinarily Billy’s armor would have protected him from the impact—at least in part. Maybe it had protected him: the collision hadn’t killed him. Not quite.

But he was broken. Broken inside. Armor broken, body broken.

Blood oozed out of his armor at the broken joints. The gland in the elytra had been crushed, the last of its stimulants dissolved. Billy was only Billy.

Nevertheless, he stood up.

Felt the shifting of ribs inside his chest.

He turned to the house. He ignored Tom Winter, ignored the pinwheel rotation of the night sky, attempted to ignore his pain. He could not fathom a destination but the tunnel, which he had confused with escape or going home.

He hurried through the open door of the house, this bar of light. This door which contained a door which was a door in time which was all he had ever wanted, an unwinding of his life, a way home. He imagined it as a road, pictured it in his mind with sudden clarity. A dusty road winding into dry, distant mountains under a clean blue sky.

Sanctuary. A door into the unmaking of himself.

Billy peeled off the battered fragments of his armor and entered the house.

Past reason, past calculation, Tom picked up his weapon and followed the marauder into the house.

Forced to justify the action, he might have said it was still possible for the marauder to escape, follow the tunnel back to Manhattan, heal himself and repair his armor. The idea that the events he had just endured might not be an ending was too painful to consider. So he rose and followed the marauder into the house under the blinding weight of his own burned flesh. Doug Archer and Joyce and Catherine came around the corner as he was at the door, called out to him to stop, but he barely registered their voices. They didn’t understand. They’d missed the main event.

The house was full of a gray, cloying smoke but the cybernetics had extinguished all the fires. Ben Collier lay bloody and prostrate at the top of the stairs. Tom registered this fact but set it aside, something to be dealt with later.

He felt giddy going down the stairs. He was in pain, but the pain was distant from him; he worried about shock. Probably he was in shock. Whatever that meant or might later mean. It didn’t matter now. He made himself walk.

He found the marauder some yards into the tunnel.

The marauder had collapsed—probably for the last time, Tom thought—against the blank white wall. He was armorless, weaponless, naked, hurt. Tom felt his fingers open, heard the rattle of his own weapon as it fell to the floor. The marauder didn’t look.

Tom reached out a hand to support himself but the wall was too smooth; he lost his balance and sat down hard.

Two of us here on the floor, Tom thought.

He was at the brink of unconsciousness. The pain was very bad. He spared another glance at his ruined left side. His light-headedness lent him some objectivity. Singed meat, he thought. He had never thought of himself as “meat” before. Barbecued ribs. It made him want to laugh, but he was afraid of the sound his laughter might make in this empty tunnel.

This transit in time. Not a tunnel under the earth; something stranger. Strange place to be lying with what might be a mortal wound, next to the man who had wounded him.

He saw the marauder move. Dismayed, Tom raised his head. But the marauder was not hostile, only frightened, trying to back his broken body away from this:

This sudden apparition.

This halo of fight in the shape of a human being.

It came toward the marauder at a terrible speed.

Time ghost, Tom thought, too sleepy to be terrified. Doug had called it that. Ghost of what? Of something native to this fracture in the world. Of a kind of humanity uprooted from duration.

Something too big to be contained by his idea of it. He felt its largeness as it hovered a few feet away. It was large in some dimension he couldn’t perceive; it was many where it seemed to be singular.

He felt the heat of it wash over his face. He felt it consider him … and pass him by. He saw it hover over the marauder, saw it contain that frightened man in a veil of its own intolerable light. And then it disappeared, and the marauder was gone with it.

Tom heard voices calling his name, Joyce’s voice among them. He turned with a feverish gratitude toward the sound, would have stood up but for the darkness that took him away.

PART THREE — Time

Twenty-four

When he woke there was nothing left of his wound but pink, new skin and an occasional phantom pain. The cybernetics had healed him, Ben explained. He’d been asleep for three and a half weeks.

The house had been healed, too. No trace remained of the smoke and fire damage. The windows had been replaced and reputtied. The house was immaculate—spotless.

The way I found it, Tom thought. New and old. A half step out of time.

“There’s someone you need to meet,” Ben said.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen.

Dazed with his recovery and events that seemed too recent, he didn’t recognize her at first; felt only this powerful sense of familiarity, a sort of deja vu. Then he said, “You were in the car … driving the car that hit him.” He remembered this face framed in those lights.