Delafleur seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. He sat down on the crate and fixed a baleful stare at the door where he had come in.

Luke said, “Please, Patron! Let me out!”

Delafleur turned in that direction. In a prim voice he said, “If you speak again, I’ll kill you.”

He sounded like he meant it. Luke fell silent, though if Clifford listened carefully he could hear his labored breathing.

Luke had often been silent in the last few hours. But never for very long. Would Delafleur really shoot him if he made a sound? Clifford was sure of it. The Proctor looked too frightened to make idle threats.

And if he shot Luke, would he then shoot Clifford? It was possible. Once shooting started, who could tell what might happen?

But he didn’t want to think about that. If he thought about it, the cage began to seem much smaller—as tight as a rope around his neck—and Clifford worried that he might make a sound, that the terror might leap uncontrollably from his throat.

Time passed. Delafleur looked at his watch as if he were hypnotized by it. At the sound of each fading gunshot he cocked his head.

“They’re going away,” Delafleur said once—to himself.

More fidgeting with the watch. But the Proctor seemed to regain a degree of composure as the seconds ticked past. Finally he stood up and adjusted his vest. Without looking at the cells, he began to walk toward the FIRE EXIT.

Lukas Thibault panicked. Clifford heard the soldier throw himself against the bars of his cage. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. “DON’T YOU LEAVE ME HERE! GODDAMN YOU!”

And that was the wrong thing to say, because Clifford saw Delafleur hesitate and turn back.

The Proctor shifted the long-barreled pistol into his right hand.

Clifford cowered in the corner of his cell, as far away from the Proctor as he could force himself—which was not very far. He had ceased thinking coherently as soon as Delafleur turned back from the door.

Delafleur walked past him with a steely expression, around the L-bend to where Luke was. Both men were out of Clifford’s sight now. But he could hear them.

Lukas Thibault had stopped shouting. Now his voice was low and feverish and hoarse with panic. “Bastard! I’ll kill you, you bastard!” But it was the other way around, Clifford thought.

Delafleur’s pistol sounded like a cannon in this stony basement room.

Lukas Thibault gave a choked scream. Clifford heard him fall against the cold floor. It was the terrible muted sound of bones and soft tissue striking concrete. A limp, dead sound.

Now the Proctor came back within the compass of Clifford’s sight. Delafleur was pale and grim. The pistol in his hand trailed wafts of blue smoke. His eyes roamed a moment before they fixed on Clifford.

Clifford felt the pressure of that gaze, as dangerous as the gun itself. The eyes as deadly as the weapon. He couldn’t look away.

But then there was another sound, and Delafleur’s eyes widened and he jerked his head toward the door.

FIRE EXIT opened. Dex Graham stepped into the room.

Dex fired a handgun at the Proctor and missed. Now the Proctor’s weapon came sweeping up and Clifford had time to cover his ears before the batteringly loud bang. No telling where that bullet went.

Dex fired a second time and the Proctor sat down on the floor. The pistol dropped from his hand. He slumped against the bars of the cage, moaning.

Dex came striding forward. Linneth Stone came through the door behind him. She picked up the weapon the Proctor had dropped.

Dex found a length of copper piping and used it to pry the lock from the door of Clifford’s cell. The lock burst and the door rattled open and Clifford ran to the schoolteacher without thinking.

He noticed Dex Graham’s eyes, how strangely calm they seemed.

Linneth took the boy to the stairway. Dex lingered a moment longer.

He looked at Delafleur, who was still alive. The bullet had shattered his hip. He was paralyzed below the waist. The wound was bleeding freely into the silk-lined folds of his long winter coat.

“I can’t move,” the Proctor said.

Dex turned to leave.

Delafleur said, “You don’t have time. It’s hopeless.”

“I know,” Dex said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Some of the cinder-block walls of the high-energy laboratory had melted to slag and most of the roof was gone. A sky of blue sheet lightning illuminated a maze of corridors.

Howard walked through the rubble. During the brief intervals when his vision cleared he saw structural rods protruding from concrete forms, broken electrical cables as thick as his arm, ceramic insulators scattered like strange pottery all around him.

When his vision was not clear he saw these things through endlessly multiplied prisms, as if a snow of faceted crystal had filled the air.

He moved toward the heart of the building. He felt its heat like sunlight on his face.

Stern’s last coherent scientific writings had leaned toward the idea of chaotic inflation: a cosmological scenario in which quantum fluctuation, in the primordial void gives birth to universes in endless profusion. Not a single creation but infinite creations. And no universe accessible to any other, except perhaps through quantum tunnels known as wormholes.

In this schema, a universe might even contain a universe. If you could somehow compress an ounce of matter inside the orbit of an electron, it would blossom into a new avenue of time and space—someone else’s Big Bang; someone else’s quarks and leptons and stars and skies.

In other words, it was possible to contemplate the technology of becoming a god.

Stern thought it had already been done. The Turkish fragment was the result of an effort, perhaps, to connect two branches of the World Tree. These ghosts (they moved through Howard and around him with clockwork regularity) might be its makers. Mortal gods. Demiurges. Archons, but trapped: chained to this vortex of creation.

Here at the center of the building the ruins were more chaotic. Howard climbed a bank of broken brick and tile. He was dizzy, or perhaps the world really was spinning around this axis. He fixed his eyes rigidly ahead. Everything he saw seemed to swarm with iridescence.

Blackened walls rose above him like broken teeth. He passed markers and signs, some words still faintly legible: WARNING and AUTHORIZATION and FORBIDDEN.

The core of the building had been a containment unit surrounded by two layers of reinforced steel. This was the matrix into which all the cabling and conduits had run; this was where Stern had focused immense energies on the fragment, particle beams hotter than the surface of the sun.

The containing walls had been breached, but sections were still standing. Everything else—debris, dust; shrapnel—had been scoured away by the explosion. The containment unit stood alone in a sort of black slag crater within the larger ruins of the laboratory building. Howard stepped into that circle, reached the tattered containment room, felt a new wash of terrible heat as he moved through air thick with ghosts and stars, to the crenellated walls, through a vacancy that had once been a doorway, and inside, to the heart of the world: axis mundi.

Inside, Stern was waiting for him.

It was Stern, even though it was not human any longer.

He must have been here when the fragment was bombarded with energy—closer than he should have been, by design or by accident.