“We’ve become too unattached, too machinelike. We can’t be rude or crude, though we can still be stupid. But you’re alive, and we’re not.”

Zack pointed to the busy Architect. “He looks alive to me.”

“He’s alive the same way I am.” She paused. “But he’s not the actual Architect. . . . Sorry, this is all mixed together in my brain.” Megan actually took several steps. It was another habit that Zack found heartbreaking in its familiarity . . . he had always joked that his wife was the Sundance Kid, the legendary gunslinger who could hit anything as long as he was in motion. Megan thought better when she moved. “The race of Architects is old. If you think of humans as belonging to the past million years, try a hundred times as long.

“We don’t have bodies anymore. The same technology that allows us to identify and copy souls in these circumstances means we can move a consciousness from one machine to another, or when necessary, to a . . . a reconstruction like this.” And here she gave a girlish bow. “It gives us immortality. But it costs us our ability to fight, to think creatively. To care about failure. To suffer.”

“So he’s a Revenant, too.” Zack stepped back and looked up at the busy Architect. “What is he doing?”

“Setting switches.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know. That’s one of your phrases, isn’t it? ‘Setting switches’?”

“Now you’re channeling me?”

“I lived with you for eighteen years . . . I don’t need to channel you.”

“It means configuring a cockpit. It’s what we did on Destiny.”

“I know.”

“So this building is a cockpit?”

“I think we both know it’s not really a Temple.” She thought for a moment. “How about, a command module?”

“Commanding what? Oh,” Zack said, seeing the answer to his own question. “Keanu.”

“Yeah. There are a lot of systems here. I told you there were other chambers. Some of them are bigger.”

“What’s in them? Uh, samples of these other races?”

“No one is saying.” She pointed at the Architect. “But whatever he’s doing, it’s related.”

Zack reached out, taking Megan’s hand. He wasn’t sure when he had leaped from reasonable skepticism to wholehearted acceptance that this was Megan . . . but he had. “You know what’s funny about this?”

“Not a lot that I can see, darling.”

“Megan, your entire life—you were the one who asked everybody all the tough questions. If you’d actually interviewed this guy, we’d have learned this stuff hours ago.”

At that moment, the giant alien stopped what it was doing. It rose to its feet with a grace Zack found surprising. At full height, it towered over the humans, but only for a moment. “Now he’s doing something else,” Zack said, taking Megan by the arm and pulling her back toward the opening. “Is he leaving?”

The Architect was already halfway across the chamber, headed for what Zack would call the back wall. “Yes,” Megan said. “We’re not the most important thing he has to deal with.”

“What could be more important than dealing with two members of this vital human race? Aren’t we the key to his future survival?”

“The race is important. The two of us, not so much.”

“And after all we’ve given up. Does he know we can’t go home?”

“Oh, he knows.”

The back wall opened, revealing the unchanged chaos outside the Temple. “We should follow,” Megan said.

“Back out there? It looks dangerous.”

“Yes.”

But she wasn’t waiting for him. She slipped out of his grasp and began following the Architect. Zack caught up with her in a few steps, as they found themselves once again outside in the near-darkness and buffeting winds.

To Zack’s horror, the Architect seemed to stagger. The creature’s staggering steps were just like those of the Sentry, before it collapsed.

“Is he all right?”

“No. Come on. We’re running out of time.”

My friends, all I can tell you is this: the wondrous rumors circulating about events on Earth’s new moon portend Great Things. Signs are being fulfilled even as we meet here tonight. The Rapture itself could be at hand. Let us pray.

THE REVEREND DICKIE BOTTOMLEY, GREATER KANSAS CITY ALL-SOULS CHURCH, AUGUST 24, 2019

“This is as far as we go in auto mode,” Harley said.

“Not a moment too soon,” Sasha Blaine said. Rachel agreed. They had left the dirt road and been bumping across muddy grass for the past few minutes. The only thing that kept Rachel from throwing up was their lack of speed.

Harley had stopped the van on the shore of Clear Lake Park, which nosed into Lake Pasadena, the brackish pool of water just south of Armand Bayou. Half a dozen fire and rescue trucks flashed rain-spattered lights from NASA Road One a hundred meters to the south, and to their left. “I think we’re inside the zone,” Sasha said.

Their view toward the Johnson Space Center was blocked by the glowing plasma dome of the Object, doing its slow churn a few hundred meters away, just across the lake. It reminded Harley of the New Orleans Superdome, only illuminated from within—and filled with strange squiggly and angular shapes that seemed to be crawling across its surface.

Or on its inside, trying to come out?

“You did it,” Rachel said. “You got us here.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

Rachel and Sasha helped Harley out of the van, a process complicated by the astronaut’s insistence that he didn’t need help. “Maybe not getting out,” Sasha said, “but you’re not going to get far in the rain and mud without us, so just put a sock in it.”

The moment the wheels of Harley’s chair began to sink into the soggy grass, the complaints stopped. Fortunately, today’s rain hadn’t completely transformed the soil into muck, though in this part of Houston it wasn’t much of a transformation. Once they disengaged the power, allowing the chair’s wheels to turn freely, Sasha and Rachel were able to push Harley forward, toward the road.

They kept to the trees, partly to avoid being seen from the road, partly for shelter from the steady drumming rain.

The slow flashes of light from the Object reminded Rachel of the time she and Amy and several other friends had sneaked into the Harris County Fair. The lights of the midway and the swooping, whirling, rotating rides had blinded them—they’d failed to see a security guard and gotten caught, escaping punishment only by becoming unusually giggly and flirtatious.

“Does it bother anyone,” Harley said, “that the Object seems to have some kind of beacon?”

Sasha considered it. “It’s not very beaconlike, though, is it?”

True enough; as Rachel and Harley watched with Sasha, the lighthouse-like light seemed to pulse in an irregular pattern . . . flash, dark, flash flash, dark. “I hope it’s not a searchlight,” Harley said.

“With a heat ray behind it,” Sasha said.

“Stop it!” Rachel said.

“Sorry,” Harley said. “Sometimes we forget . . . Anyway, we’re here, as close as we can get. Now what?”

The rain had let up, though there was a strong breeze blowing in from the ship channel. “I want to go closer,” Rachel said. She had already decided that the Object was not a weapon—or it would have gone off already. It was sitting there as if waiting. . .

“Assuming that that’s a good idea,” Sasha Blaine said, “and I don’t think it is . . . how? It’s across this lake!”

Rachel pointed. “We can go across the bridge. All the cops and everybody are down the road.”

“Granted,” Harley said. “But then what? We’re here . . . we’ve had as close a look as anyone else. You are not going to touch it.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, okay? But I think we should be closer. I think it’s supposed to give us something or tell us something.”

“It’s a sophisticated piece of alien hardware! Why doesn’t it just send us a signal?”

“I’m going to find out,” Rachel said. “You can come along or wait here.”