Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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“They’ve been looking for people like me, all this time? They would have to be very old,” Ginny said.
“Some still survive and do their work, if we should call it that. There are so many foul currents in these young, deep waters. Were you followed here?”
Perhaps deliberately, he had not asked this question until now. Whatever his peculiarities, Bidewell seemed sensitive to her fears.
Ginny still did not want to remember the Mercedes, the coin-tossing man, the burning woman. “I think so,” she said quietly. “Maybe.”
“Mmm.” Bidewell finished fitting the books back into their gaps and descended the ladder, making small chuck-chuck sounds with lips and cheeks. From the last rung, he glanced over his shoulder and squinted at the broad milk-glass globe light hanging from a bronze ceiling fixture. “I should be changing out those bulbs, shouldn’t I?”
“The ones who place the ads, who scratched this…” She tapped the picture from Oxford. “Are they human?”
Bidewell nodded quickly, like a bird. “That particular inscription was carved by a schoolboy, on the dare of another schoolboy…who was paid by an older man. But to answer your question, most are human—yes.”
“Why don’t they die?”
“They have been touched,” he said. “Their lives improbably extended. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be obscure.”
Ginny was still not clear on these details—not even clear on whether she would just leave Bidewell’s warehouse, abandon any hope of explanations—in due time, in due time—and take her chances outside. At the age of sixteen, Ginny had begun to experience periods of abstraction. When walking, riding on a bus, or just before sleep, she would lose a snip of time and memory. After these lapses, she sometimes experienced a lightness of heart, a sense of returned affection not otherwise found in her erratic adolescence. Other times she felt a suffocating sense of dread, of loss—along with a bad smell of something beyond burning, and a gritty, dusty, bitter taste of something beyond decay. At the same time, she became aware that she could will herself into different situations—though her efforts often seemed to backfire. Since losing her family, Ginny had persisted in making wrong moves—as if determined, at any fork in the road, to take the wrong path. Never quite certain how she accomplished any of this, she began to read books about parallel worlds—and found them fascinating but unsatisfying. She did what she did, but still without explanation as to why and how she could do it.
She had told no one about her ability—until Bidewell took her in. Only last week, listening to her story, for once the old man had opened up enough to render an opinion. “Sounds very like someone lost, enslaved, in the Chaos. Whatever that may be, not to be known, not to be known.”
He had pinched his lips between two thin fingers and reiterated several times that he could only guess, he was no expert.
Exasperating man.
“What doyou know, Mr. Bidewell?” Ginny blurted, slamming shut the heavy book. The clap echoed from the ceiling.
“Call me Conan, please,” Bidewell encouraged. “My fatherwas Mr. Bidewell.”
“And how old was hewhen you were born?”
“Two hundred and fifty-one,” Bidewell said.
“And how old are you?”
“One thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”
“Years?”
“Of course.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Improbable,” Bidewell corrected, pushing up his small glasses and lifting the spine of another book close to his pale blue eyes. “Many things are conceivable, but impossible. Many more are conceivable, yet not probable. A very few are inconceivable—to us—yet still possible.” He hummed to himself.
“Moving stacks does wonders. Look what we have found, dear Ginny—volume twelve of the complete works of David Copperfield. The Dickens character, you see—who was actually a writer. Not the magician—though it would be interesting to meet him, sometime. I wonder what his dreams are like? A few choice questions…My dear, if you have time, could you check for a small fault on Chapter 103?
This print is tiny, and my eyes are not what they used to be.”
He held out the book.
Ginny stood and took it from Bidewell’s outstretched, gnarled hand. She was tiring of this constantly mutating nonsense—how could fictional characters write a book, much less fill a set of twelve or more volumes?—yet she felt safe here. A bitter contradiction.
She remembered when Bidewell had first lightly clasped her fingers, welcoming her to the warehouse and provoking—at once—a shudder and an odd sense of comfort.
“What sort of fault?” she asked.
“Anything, really—a typo, misspelling, lacunae, rivering. We must note the fault—but we must not make any corrections, or try to hide the apparent defects. They could be more important than thou canst know, young lady, to that Citie. Whatever and wherever that Citie may be.”
Another week passed, and Ginny’s restlessness grew. She could feel the foul currents Bidewell had spoken of—and something even more alarming. The river up ahead—her river—seemed to come to an abrupt end. She could not tell how far ahead—weeks, months, a year. But beyond that—nothing. Bidewell refused to tell her more, and most of their conversations ended with his crackling, “Not to be known, not to be known!”
Bidewell’s warehouse was home to over 300,000 books. Ginny estimated the numbers on the shelves by quick count, and the numbers in the boxes by quicker calculation. Besides the two of them, seven cats called the warehouse home, all polydactyl—with many toes, and two with what appeared to be little thumbs.
These two were black and white. The smaller, a young male just out of kittenhood, silently padded up to her as she sorted and read, and rubbed against her ankles until she picked him up, placed him on her lap,
and stroked him. Warm and loose-rubbery beneath soft fur, with a blaze on his chest and one white paw, he purred approval until she stopped, then leaned up on her chest and tapped her chin with a wide paw. She felt a light pinch.
He would not share any of her sandwich when she offered a bite, but instead, as a kind of hint or example, lay at the foot of her bed that night an intact but very dead mouse. All the cats were independent, and seldom responded to her chit-chits and here-kitties, but during the long nights, she would find one or two or sometimes three on the end of her cot, feet curled under, eyes slitty, watching her with warm, rumbling contentment. They seemed to approve of Bidewell’s new visitor. The cats, of course, were essential to the safety of the warehouse. Bidewell did not consider mouse-nibble edits at all helpful.
Time passed a little quicker after she met the cats. Curled one after another on her lap, they even made up for Bidewell’s suggested reading list: he put aside, near her worktable, a stack of books on mathematics, physics, and several texts on Hindu mythology. Three of the books on physics seemed more advanced than she thought science had progressed so far, discussing faster-than-light travel as if it were a fact, for example, or detailing five-dimensional slices and cross sections of fates in space-time. Next to these he placed five books with mostly blank pages—which he referred to as “culls.” Ginny examined the culls carefully and discovered that each had one letter printed on one page, and nothing more—page after page of pristine blankness.
Whatever mysterious things happened in libraries and bookstores and among the stacked boxes in publishers’ warehouses, it seemed that the mostly blank books were least interesting to Bidewell. “They are at best nulls, voids, spaces between keys. At worst, they are distractions. You may use them for your diary or as notebooks,” he said, and then glanced at the other stack. “Those are for your education, such as it must be, and limited as we are.”
“Are theydefective, too?” she asked. “Should I look for the errors and mark them?”
“No,” Bidewell said. “Their errors are natural, and unavoidable—the errors of ignorance and youth.”
Ginny, in her few years of formal schooling, had always enjoyed math and science—coming to an easy understanding of problems that bewildered her classmates—but had never thought of herself as any kind of nerd. “I’d prefer a television or a computer with an Internet connection,” she said. Bidewell shuddered violently. “The Internet is a frightful prospect. All the world’s texts…all the world’s hapless opinions and lies and errors, mutating endlessly, and why? Who can ever keep track or know? It is not the incredible magnitude of human folly that interests me, dear Virginia.”
She was hardly a prisoner, yet no matter how often she approached the door that led outside, she could not bring herself to pass through. The tension in her head and chest became unbearable, yearning and fear swirling until her stomach knotted. She could not go outside again—not yet.
“Why are you keeping me here?” she cried one morning, as Bidewell carted in another load of boxes filled with books. “I’m sick of it! Just you and these cats!”
Bidewell snapped back, “I do not keep you here. Wherever you go, I’m sure you will find your way home—by the long route. That isyour talent. The cats might miss you.” And then he walked off, knees snicking, and shut the white warehouse door with its oiled groan of counter-weights and pulleys. Ginny kicked at a crate, then turned to see the smallest cat sitting on the floor, watching her with complacent curiosity.
“You’ve got everything you want,” she accused.
The cat’s tail thumped a sealed box. He stood on his haunches and vigorously scratched the cardboard, leaving a catly symbol, like an X with an exclamation mark. Then he marched off, tail high and twitching. Sometimes he even nibbled the corners of the books on the worktable. Bidewell didn’t seem to mind. With the appearance of the girl at his wire gate, Conan Arthur Bidewell had experienced three sharp emotions: irritation, exhilaration, and fear—the last, at his age, almost indistinguishable from joy. The air was thick with change. The girl’s appearance was after all no more miraculous than the condensation of a drop of rain from a moisture-laden cloud.
Yet now he knew: the work of many lonely years was coming to fruition. Why notjoy, along with the inevitable palpitations of coming danger?
For too many decades, far too many, he had been lost in his books, charting the statistics of improbable change. What could be more desperate or more futile? Waiting for the sum-runners to sow their flowers and produce a new family for him and the warehouse. And now—
Bidewell had long been noting the changes in the literary climate. More and more significant finds were being sent his way, from all over the planet. (Pity they could not reach out to other planets! For similar events must be happening Out There, as well, puzzling other scholars—if they were as vigilant.) The moods of his books had darkened and clouded over. This is the way the world ends—not with a bang, but a misprint.
He had noted other changes in the neighborhood—a decrease in mice and an increase in cats. The warehouse contained two more cats than it had before the girl’s arrival. They seemed to get along well with Minimus, his favorite. No doubt they all belonged to Mnemosyne—in their independent way. And now Bidewell and the cats had a girl to keep them company, an unremarkable girl mostly, moody, guarding her emotions, as well she should. She was in a precarious situation. She believed she was eighteen years old. Bidewell knew better, but did not have the heart to tell her. Let them all discover the truth when they came together, for inevitably—despite the predators that searched them out and suppressed them, much as the cats reduced the warehouse’s population of mice—there would be others. Their time had come.
A time of conclusions.
Ginny had survived a downward spiral and a terrible shock. He saw that she needed to recuperate and so did not load her overmuch with chores. The girl performed her jobs well enough. She opened boxes and weeded through the least promising collections, and was becoming a discerning reader, no surprise, considering her origins. She might eventually be of real help, but Bidewell wondered whether they would have the time for her skills to develop to where she could make a real difference. The work in the warehouse proceeded, though he already knew what he needed to know: that the past was responding like a barometer to a tremendous decrease in pressure. So little past remained, and hardly any future.
What one thought one remembered was not a reliable guide to what had actually occurred—not anymore.
History truly was bunk.
CHAPTER 100
The False City
Tiadba had been wrapped in a cocoon of dust and fiber, like sweepings neglected in a corner. Her eyes stung and pricked but she did not dare lift her fingers to wipe them—hands and skin were both crusted with sharp grit.
Often enough, over hours like beads strung on endless necklaces, she had felt the grit crawl on her skin as if alive…Could not imagine what it might be.
Living, consuming decay.
Did not much care.
Here, beyond exhaustion, trapped—one bead of the necklace cold, the next neither cold nor warm—drained and burned to a crisp yet still capable of pain, not caring whether there was pain, only now and then could she rouse memory of her companions—her fellow marchers—and when she did, the grit jabbed all the more sharply. Memories and regrets had become tiny shards, sharp and glassy, caked on her skin and jabbing into her eyes.
Tiadba had seen her marchers carried along the glowing, fluid trod through a hole like spreading lips rimmed with sores, into a great dingy hollowness…had seen bloated, slavering things, long and malevolent, hurry from far walls to dangle from squirming legs and stab with scimitar jaws. Jaws that smoked and sparked.
Grabbing, piercing, and burning, then scurrying back into the hollowness. Tiadba curled. If she curled tight enough, perhaps she would simply fold into herself and vanish. Anything could happen here.
She opened her eyes long enough to lift her hand, crusted over by dried blood. Bits of glove—shreds of dead armor that no longer protected or spoke—tried to glimmer on her fingers. But memory and betrayal pushed the shreds apart, finished the task of peeling them away, leaving her totally naked. All were naked.
She could not tell how long it had been before she was lifted and her eyes were brushed clear. She blinked at the immensity of gloom and shadow and dust.
She stood or had been propped stiffly on what might have been the side of a hill under a great canopy. The limits of the canopy seemed to waver, to rise and fall, uncertain not just in color or brightness, but also in distance and dimension. Still, something was arriving, something coming near promised to give what she was seeing proportion and perspective.
Something—or someone.
“Hello, crèche-born.”
Drops of cool, soothing liquid fell into her eyes and then froze them in place—to stare unblinking at a triangle of unformed whiteness.
A cool, crystalline voice of immense beauty and sadness whirled up and lay on the porches of her ears, then introduced itself word by word, languid, stroking. The words filled her ears and caused a dull, stretching pain.
“I compelled Shapers and Menders to make you. Do you know me?”
The shape within the triangular cloud coalesced. Above the middle arrived a face—well-shaped, eyes large and deep—beautiful and sad and commanding. An emotion rose, swelling within Tiadba: deeprecognition, built into her at birth, ordained for all her kind ages before. She suddenly wanted to feel glad. This was reunion, what should have been a time of joy. “I know you,” she said.
“And I know you. I am proud, young breed. You are rich with dream. You have brought time forward…as you were designed to do. But now your connection with what has gone before is a curse. There is only turmoil and torment to come. But in this, our last moment of peace, I am allowed to ask one question of all who are brought here. That is mytorture—an instant of anticipation and hope.”
Tiadba tried to see more clearly the dazzling white face like softly mobile stone, malleable outlines surrounded by other pieces whirling up and falling back again on chill, dust-laden wafts. The face drew close.
Tiadba tried to pull back—shrink away.
“Do you know what has become of Sangmer, called the Pilgrim?”
The voice, so close to Tiadba’s face, carried no hint of breath or moving air—but a strange sweetness surrounded her all the same in that sensual desolation.
Tiadba felt a stinging shock. She thought of lying beside Jebrassy on the bed, making love and trying to riddle the ancient stories…of moments in the Chaos, reading from the ever-changing books to soothe and inform the marchers—but there had never been a conclusion to those stories, and the words were often obscure.
However, before this cold, frightening beauty, Tiadba could not help but offer hope. “I might have seen him. Maybe I wouldn’t know,” she said, lips numbing even as she spoke. “Tell me what he looks like.”
“I don’t remember.” Sadness and zeroing cold fogged between them. “No time remains, no time at all…” Words like falling and dying insects. “You have brought me nothing.”
“I’m sorry…” Tiadba searched for a word, found it in the memory of her other. “I am so sorry, Mother.
”
“I am sorry, as well, crèche-born. You cannot know my sorrow. It would be a mercy if we both could die.”
CHAPTER 101
“We’re never going to find her,” Daniel said. “We’re crazy to even be out here.”
“Where would you have us go, young master?” Glaucous asked.
“Everything’s different,” Jack said. “It’ll keep getting more different. Maybe it will get better.”
The gap between the monstrous statues—the gap that opened into the bowl where stood the most unlikely city of all—had closed behind them as if it had never been.
“Three choices,” Glaucous said. “This is the best.”
“You said the Chalk Princess is just around the corner, right?” Daniel said. “Why doesn’t she swoop down and take us?”
Glaucous stopped. His breath pumped and hissed like a steam engine losing its push. “She’s here,” he said.
“What do you think will happen?” Daniel asked.
“She’ll release me,” Glaucous said. “No reward, no punishment. Just put me to an end. I deserve no more—and no less.”
He resumed walking like a long-suffering beast.
Daniel could hardly breathe. A feeling of heaviness, and compression, like bricks on his chest…he tried to understand what was going on in terms of physics but only made a bad job of it. “Vacuum energy heading back up toward zero,” he muttered. “Higgs field collapsing. Too small.”
“What?” Jack asked.
“Nothing. We’re lost.”
It did look as if they were out of options.
The land had never made sense. Now it was little more than a succession of silhouettes, trains and trails of pointless shadow. They had long since passed out of the neighborhoods of compressed and crunched history, through mad playgrounds of whatever passed for time outside their bubble—and now they were simply nowhere.
Fortunately, that nowhere was becoming smaller.
Daniel faced them. “The stones still tug. There’s still direction.”
Jack shook his head and took the lead.
They still had up and down, forward but not back, a kind of sideways…the limited movement a blessing in territory otherwise devoid of any particular quality. There was no going back and starting over. Something would not allow it.
“Whole numbers,” Daniel said.
Jack walked into deeper shadow. For a moment Glaucous and Daniel almost lost sight of him, just two or three steps ahead.
“Jack!” Daniel called.
They caught up. Glaucous chuffed and staggered.
“You’re a whole number,” Daniel said. “An integer.”
“Whatever,” Jack said. His fingers tightened on the stone.
“Your call number,” Daniel said. “However long it is, it’s an integer—it’s not irrational, and it’s not infinite.”
“We always ask for their numbers,” Glaucous affirmed, looking between them. “Not that we know what we’re asking for. Too long to speak aloud, all folded into trick paper. First seventy-five digits crucial, however.”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong in any library. Books make me uncomfortable. I don’t have a call number. Never did have a folded piece of paper. Or if I do, it’s not an integer—it’s irrational. I don’t have a story. That’s why you didn’t hunt me.”
“Interesting,” Glaucous said.
“I’ve had a long time to think it through,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong. Someone or something sent me back, stuck me there, but I just don’t fit.”
Jack disappeared into the murk.
Again, something spun all around them—the vanes of a gyroscope—and faded.
“Slow down!” Daniel called.
CHAPTER 102
It took Jebrassy a while to realize that he could no longer see or hear the others. He paused and waited. Drifts of sharp grit slid over the rippled black rock. The ripples had grown deeper—they were now channels in a curved maze that stretched to either side as far as he could see. Ahead, the edges of the ripples had risen up, curled over, and joined—creating a low wall of tunnel entrances, and beyond that, another higher rank, and still more beyond them.
He sat on the rim of a channel and waited some more, but neither Ghentun nor Polybiblios seemed anywhere near. Maybe they had gotten in front of him and already entered the holes. He could not wait. This might be another kind of trap—an eternity of indecision. Tiadba was still waiting. He made up his mind to try one of the closest entrances. Only when he was some distance in, stooped, did he think that now that he was committed, the tunnel might be blocked ahead, and if he turned around, it would be blocked behind. It caused a moment of terror—he ran and pushed deeper into the tunnel, wanting to get it over with, to learn for sure that he was trapped, finally and irrevocably. But nothing in the Chaos ever repeated itself, or was ever what he anticipated. The tunnel continued, growing a little in girth, and finally debouched into a larger space; how much larger, he couldn’t tell, even after his eyes had cleared of sweat.
Jebrassy stood at the edge of an interior volume so large he could not see the other side. The only way he could know there was a roof was that the flaming arc was not visible, nor the ice mountain, nor the seethe of the shrinking sky.
Tentative, he stepped away from the wall of tunnel exits. Dimly, larger objects took on detail, then smaller. He seemed to be surrounded by immense piles of things he could not identify—huge spheres strung on massive cables, smooth but dusty round lumps rising from the ground between the spheres—more spheres perhaps, half buried—and jagged parts of things that were almost certainly manufactured but looked as if they had been treated badly—dropped, shattered, and then piled up. Discarded.
He approached one of the suspended spheres, many hundreds of feet in diameter and floating no more than a breed’s height above the floor—and reached out with his gloved fingers—only to be pushed back. The longer he looked, the more he saw on the sphere’s surface, until he realized he was looking at a place,a planet, highly developed, covered with cities, roads, things he could not identify—outside even his dream experiences.
He turned slowly, wondering how these spheres and heaps had come to be brought here. Everywhere, the lost and discarded. He was beginning to think the Chaos was actually a giant litter bin. Determined to keep a line of retreat in sight—if you could still see things, and kept them in periodic view, they didn’t go away as often—he ventured farther into the rubble.
Polybiblios was waiting for him, sitting on a low wall that divided several larger and taller piles. “Good to see you,” the epitome said. “I was beginning to think I had lost my companions.”
“Where’s the Keeper?” Jebrassy asked.
“Somewhere back there. It’s humiliating, how much of a puzzle this is. A wasteland of failed efforts. Consider all these worlds, stored here like shrunken heads in a dusty box. But I might have found something—or someone—more interesting.”
He gestured for Jebrassy to follow. With some misgivings, he did so. Was it possible, having lost sight of the epitome, that a duplicate might have been conjured up, completely different?
“I’ve spent a pretty long while exploring this space,” the epitome said. “Making maps and then adjusting them for changes—not as many changes here as outside, interestingly. Something seemed to want to keep track of whatever is piled up here. Including…this.”
They came to a glassy wall. Embedded within the wall, near the surface, was a figure roughly shaped like Jebrassy—but larger, more robust. He wore no armor and a very different style of clothing than that found in the Tiers.
Farther along, other figures—some much the same, others very different—also lay embedded, caught in moments of shock or anger or surprise. Jebrassy walked from one to the next, then put his gloved hand up against the smooth surface.
“A fate mire, I believe,” Polybiblios said.
“What’s that?”
“Not so easy to conceive of, but perhaps you’ve had enough preparation and training. Tell me what your instincts say.”
“They’re all like my visitor,” Jebrassy said, thinking so hard—and feeling so many strange emotions—that his head hurt. “But there’s too many of them.”
“Definitely ancient forms,” Polybiblios said. “If we had been able to access these when we were designing the breeds, we might have done better. Though they do differ in significant respects.”
Jebrassy saw no signs of life in the embedded figures. “They’re from the past?”
“Many pasts, more likely. How they got here—that’s harder to conceive. I wonder if my full Eidolon self could solve the riddle. At any rate, that one there…Get closer—hold up your hand. Make as if to touch it through the transparency.”
Jebrassy stepped up to the body closest to the shining surface and rubbed his glove against the smoothness. Thin bright ribbons of blue light—hundreds, then thousands of them—curled between the outstretched fingers and his own, penetrating his glove. He could feel a tickle, a slight shock, moving up his arm.
“Dreamers, all of them,” Polybiblios said. “The same matter—in large part—from many times and many different branches of fate, eager to be rejoined.”
“We’re made of the same stuff?”
“I’d say so. Entangled atoms are reacquainting, exchanging particles of entrainment, which leave photonic traces—faster than the fastest velocity possible in the Chaos. Or anywhere else, now.”
“Then none of the visitors have survived? We’ve failed?”
“Where is that Keeper? He might be able to help us judge the extent of this collection.”
“There are so many—I don’t think I’ve dreamed about all of them.”
“Part of my plan was that shepherds and sum-runners would evolve together. But remember, there used to be many world-lines, many pathways leading to the Kalpa. Not to put too fine a point on it, but your visitor has failed to make a connection with you many times before now. Just as marchers have been snared and trapped out in the Chaos. Now the pathways are limited to two. There may be just one opportunity left.”
“Does that mean you’vecome out here thousands of times before, and failed?” Jebrassy asked.
“Excellent question. Would it even be possible to remember?” The epitome considered this problem with apparent relish, then smoothed his face and said, “Most unlikely. This is my first and only path.”
Jebrassy again spread his hand close to the fingers of the embedded other. The ribbons of blue continued to pass. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “It’s almost pleasant.”
Polybiblios pulled him away. “That’s enough. We don’t want to entrain you with the lost. We need to find the one that is still free, still alive…or arrive at a place where he can find you.I doubt very much he would be here.”
CHAPTER 103
Ginny walked and then crawled through the tunnels, feeling the stone in her pocket nudge with a gentleness that seemed almost to speak of understanding and sympathy. Or perhaps a touch of apprehension.
She was in no mood to be strong-armed. She knew she was close, but she was beginning to feel a deep anger, not at the prospect of failure, but at having achieved some measure of success, having made it this far on her own—yet without actually making a decision. She had never chosenany of this. It had all been forced upon her. Stronger persons and circumstances had always directed her, misdirected her, all her remembered life. Others were no doubt trying to find her and save her—from herself, from bad decisions.
But they had never actually been herdecisions.
Maybe that was because she could not be trusted. She always turned the wrong way. Always stumbled into a path of disaster.
Yet she had come this far, ahead of all the others.
The tunnel had branched so many ways, and she had always gone to the left—gauche, sinister, awkward, but the best way out of this sort of maze. And how could she know that?
She’d always been awkward—had alwaysturned left.
Now she crawled out of the tunnel and squatted in the gloom of a cavernous space, listening. Silence. Neither disapproval nor applause.
Completely alone, in a place no one could call home.
“I’m worn-out,” she said. “I don’t want to be a guided missile anymore.” She felt the stone through the cloth of her pants, then took it out and looked it over in the dim light. Its tug had faded almost to nothing. It turned and rotated freely in her fingers. The knobs and ridges were smooth and cool under the roughened flesh of her fingertips.
The red wolf’s-eye gleam had also dulled.
“If you give up on me, I’ll be stuck here, won’t I?” she asked. She stood and felt the bubble draw in so close it might have been a layer of paint over her skin. The game was running down. There might have been some sort of excess of unexpected energy—Bidewell might understand. But now the entire universe, even the dead and dismantled parts ruled over by the Typhon, was closing its books, leaving the final accounts in disarray…because it was all going to be zeroed out anyway. She moved slowly on numb feet toward a gleam in the distance. Ignored the weird stuff piled all around—not enough energy to pay attention, to show curiosity.
