“There was a vote on this?”

“One of the Colonel’s votes.”

“Bullshit and gerrymander.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“He claims there was a radio message?”

“Well—the radio blew up.”

“While he was using it?”

“Supposedly.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Nope.”

“You put up with this horseshit?”

“He’s not a stupid man, Tom. He had the Committee rolled up like a carpet. Made me look paranoid.”

“A little paranoia’s not a bad thing. I was careful coming toward camp. Left my camper in back of a billboard and hiked away from the road. I spent most of the afternoon hidden behind a rise south of here watching folks mill around. Am I crazy, or is Joey Commoner standing guard on Abby’s trailer?”

Matt told him about the insect woman, about William’s death and Abby’s altercation with the Colonel.

Kindle listened carefully, eyes wide. “She had wings?”

“I saw her in the air,” Matt said. “Yes, she had wings. They looked like butterfly wings.”

“Oh, Matt… too many fuckin’ miracles,” Kindle said.

“Uh-huh.” That about summed it up.

Kindle held his rifle in his lap. “The question is, what are you planning to do about it?”

“He can’t keep Abby in her trailer indefinitely. Weather or no weather, we’ll have to move on soon.”

“Might not be time. I don’t know why Tyler’s stalling, but I don’t think it matters. That mountain on the horizon isn’t going to wait for us. It’s not just Tyler’s risk. There’s Abby—and that old lady, Miriam—”

And Beth, Matt thought. “But Tyler’s still got the Committee wrapped up.” ^ ^

“I’m not talking about a vote, I’m talking about haying. Bugging out. Soon. Say, tonight.”

“You just got back.”

“I mean everybody. Everybody who isn’t playing handmaiden to Colonel Tyler. I saw Tim Belanger headed east by himself. Obviously he’s got the right idea. So we round up Abby, we get Miriam—”

“Beth,” Matt said.

“And Beth, and we take one of these big RVs and leave before the Colonel gets his act together.”

“It would have to be this camper. I don’t want to leave my medical supplies behind.”

“Okay, this camper. There’s room for everybody until we can find more transportation. We’re only a couple of days from Ohio if we keep moving.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go to Ohio. I thought you wanted to see the Wind River Range.”

“Maybe I just want to see the last of Tyler. Maybe I don’t like the fact that he locked up Abby Cushman.” Kindle lifted his rifle and sighted down the length of it. “Or maybe some asshole talked me into thinking of this fuckin’ trailer camp as a town.”

Beth was ashamed of what she had told Joey… but tantalized by it, too.

He had reacted with an enraged denial, and here was the scary part: she liked it.

She had always liked her ability to rouse Joey from his slumberous complacency—to make him horny; to make him mad. Poke the tiger and see if he bites. Even if it was her he bit. Maybe especially if it was her.

She had left Joey by the dead fire in back of the house, had left him stewing in his own anger, and it was only fair, Beth told herself; not nice, but fair; now they were even.

She was restless in her bed with the memory.

You want to know where I’m spending the night?

In that camper, Joey had said. Like you always do.

Not every night. Not the whole night. Listen—

Remembering it made her weak-kneed. And hot. In every sense of the word.

If she left her camper now… would Joey notice?

He was guarding Abby Cushman. With her cheek pressed against the rear window, Beth could just see the light of the burning Sterno he used to keep himself warm. Joey took his guard duty seriously. He hardly ever slept anymore. He didn’t seem to need to.

He was crouched against the meager light like a troll.

Beth thought, If I leave on the other side of the camper and circle around toward the house…

It might be possible.

She put on her old jeans and a blouse. Then she took three deep breaths and opened the door into cold prairie night. She stepped out barefoot with her long hair loose, like a country girl.

There was more light than she really liked. The moon had just come up. And was it a reflection of the moonlight or was the earthbound Artifact glowing with some subtle light of its own? A pale white pulsation, as if it were storing up some peculiar kind of energy?

Beth moved lightly, silently, in the radiant night.

Miriam, back in her camper, understood that distant glow. It registered on her eyelids and behind them as she lay in bed, her body eroding from within.

Miriam was two places now: here and Home. The neocytes had worked quickly. Miriam at Home was not made of blood and skin, was not even altogether material, and Miriam became more wholly that Miriam with every tick of the clock, as this Miriam—the old and used-up and ailing Miriam—grew increasingly hollow and fragile.

She turned her head to the window and saw Home bathed in a ghostly nimbus, summoning the energies that would lift it free of the Earth.

Summoning the energies, Miriam thought, that would carry it to the stars, a human epistemos in the growing awareness of the galaxy.

Very soon now, Miriam thought.

Colonel Tyler had occupied a downstairs room in the Connor house—a room that once had been Vince Connor’s study, with a filing cabinet full of deeds, insurance documents, and bookkeeping ledgers, and a leather sofa long enough to stretch out on.

Colonel Tyler sat in what had been Vince’s favorite chair: a high-backed recliner finished in olive-green Naugahyde. Although it was very late, the Colonel was awake. He hadn’t slept for three nights now—a bad sign.

He hated the dark. In the dark, Sissy tended to disappear; and as bad as her presence was, to be alone was often worse. The days were all right. In the day there was sunlight, a horizon. At night, doubts came swarming.

Doubts… and sometimes madness.

It seemed to Colonel Tyler that his madness, which had once been a sealed box, had spilled out into his everyday life. Madness was everywhere: in Sissy, whose persistence was probably not normal; in the derangement of the world; in the appearance of the insect woman and the death of the pseudo-child William.

And today Tim Belanger had left camp, and that seemed the worst omen of all, the symptom of a disintegration that had begun to move from the peripheral Tom Kindle to the more central Tim Belanger and would eventually strike at the core: Ganish, Jacopetti, Joey, even himself…

“Colonel Tyler?”

He looked up, startled.

Beth Porter stood in the doorway. He hadn’t heard her knock. He cleared his throat. “Beth?” He summoned up the daylight Colonel John Tyler.

She glanced at him and then at the service revolver he had placed on the arm of the recliner. “Are you okay?”

Who had last asked him that? A. W. Murdoch, he thought. In that little town in Georgia. In Loftus. “Certainly I am.”

“May I come in?”

He nodded. She stepped into the meager light of a single lamp and closed the door behind her. She was not a child, Tyler thought, nor yet quite an adult; she still moved like a teenager, with a teenager’s unconscious coltishness. “What brings you out so late?”

“Just that I was lonely,” Beth said. “I thought it might be warmer in here.”