Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Somehow, that made seeing and thinking easier as well.
A low tuneless whistle found its way between his lips. He held the stone out before him, trying to interpret its subtle tugging. And gradually, over a time of no time, he was guided beneath a huge, vertical sheet that stretched up into high shadow—a warped, bumpy sheet that might have been the size of Manhattan, turned on its nose and hung from a hook, covered with huge, broken ornaments, each with its own distinct cast, a grayish-silver sheen.
What would it mean if he believed that he was actually walking through—or beneath—the suspended ruins of a future city? That people had once lived here, and that what had invaded and sucked the life out of Seattle had also sucked away their lives, squeezing it all together, making them equal…?
Jack had never been much for philosophy, but this was a poser. He could walk, whistle, see—wonder—but there wasn’t really anything, including time, that made sense in the old way. There was hispersonal time—he was still making memories—
And wasn’t that how one defined time anyway?
He kept walking, kept whistling, but decided that thinking was almost useless. Humility was easy when mystery threatened to crush you at every turn.
“I am that I am,” he muttered. “I think, therefore I am. I remember, therefore I am. I’ve chosen my own name, therefore I am. I’m hungry, therefore I am. I worry about my friends, therefore I am. I’d like to see what’s about to happen, therefore I am. I want to go on and finish my story—make more memories—never enough memories—therefore I am.”
I am alone, and things haven’t just winked out.
Therefore I am.
I want to set it all right again, therefore…
Far away, he heard a terrible sound—not exactly human. A banshee wail of despair and pain that seemed to drizzle down from above.
“Ginny,” he said, and licked his lips to keep them from cracking.
Something touched his ankles—whiskers or feelers. Thinking of giant earwigs, he jerked and looked down, almost dropping the sum-runner.
A cat rubbed his leg, arched its back, looked up—and opened its mouth as if to make a sound. But the cat, too, was silent. He thought he recognized it—him—one of the cats in Bidewell’s warehouse, and for once did not wonder for an instant what he was doing here. There could be nothing more improbable than Jack’s own presence. He knelt and stroked the soft head, palmed the closed eyes and pushed back the velvety ears, and immediately felt a surge of comfort, normality, self-assurance. Cats could do that. Despite their apparent aloofness, or because of it, simply by their acceptance one acquired solid value.
“Well, maybe I don’t hold everything together all by my lonesome,” Jack said. “Maybe you have something to contribute, too.” The cat purred agreement, then lightly nipped his finger and ran off a few yards, stopped, sat on its haunches; waited. Jack consulted the sum-runner, holding it over his head. The cat ran off.
Cat and stone agreed. Both were leading him in the same direction.
CHAPTER 10
Seattle
A busker must satisfy all of his customers. To women, he must be young, charming, and funny; an amusement hiding a brief yearning. To men, he must appear ragged and clownish—not a threat despite his youth and good looks. To children, he must be like one of them—if they could only sing and dance and juggle hammers and rats.
Jack was making decent money, about twenty-eight dollars in three hours, deposited by members of his occasional audience into a floppy canvas hat planted on the sidewalk outside the downtown Tiffany’s. Today, as he had for two years, Jack was working with live rats. They were used to his tricks and he never dropped them—never. The rats may not have relished flying through the air, twisting their tails and heads, beady black or pink eyes flashing, seeing in spinning succession sky and ground and Jack’s hand, but there it was; they were gently caught and gently tossed, and then they were fed, and there was always something interesting to look at through the mesh of the cage as they groomed themselves. Rats had led worse lives.
By four o’clock the crowds fled the concrete canyons, on their way home, so Jack packed up the cage and impedimenta, hung them on the front and back fenders of his bike, and began the long haul out of downtown, up Denny to Capitol Hill.
He was reluctantly on his way to the Broadway Free Clinic. First, he made a stop at Ellen’s house. Her small gray bungalow was perched behind a slender garden topping a three-foot-high retaining wall, up two flights of concrete steps. She was still on a day trip out of town, so he found the key she had left hidden for him and stashed his rats high in the rafters of the old single-car garage, away from prowling cats.
Jack could be very handsome. He had made himself only slightly handsome around Ellen. Her longing was a puzzle—not motherly, not lustful—not entirely. He liked the attention. It made him feel rooted. She might remember him for weeks at a time—unlike everyone else. Still, he moved some small things around in the living room.
She had recommended the free clinic. “Even buskers need checkups,” she had said. He thought about last week’s dinner. Ellen had set the table with fine silver, crystal, and antique china, and served up salmon in berry glaze with rice and buttered fennel root. She had regarded him with a peculiar mix of longing and caution when she thought he wasn’t looking, and he’d tried to reward her approval—without being too open.
She was not a hunter—not a spy. But vigilance was essential—especially when he felt safe. As she’d asked, he brought in her mail, sorted and dumped the recyclables, then checked the moisture in her aspidistras and an indoor lemon tree by the broad front bay window. Jack lingered for a few minutes, staring through the window across the street, and noted the distance between streetlights; wondered what the view would be like at midnight, in almost complete darkness, or better yet early in the morning, with all the lights off and just a glimmer of dawn. He could almost see it—the picture swam before him, this time overlaid by something else that could not and certainly should not have been there. The houses across the street seemed made of glass, and through them he spied a plain or desert, black as obsidian, studded with huge, indistinct objects—alive in their way, but full of hatred and envy, unforgiving.
With a groan, he closed his eyes, then shook his head until the afternoon light returned—and quickly drew the drapes.
The clinic waiting room was full. The doctors were dealing with seven moms and their sick children. Jack enjoyed children, but when they were not well or otherwise in real need, they made him feel uneasy, inadequate. With averted eyes, he listened to the coughing and snuffling, the crying, the fighting over toys. He tapped his fingers on the wooden arm of the chair, beating out the same bouncing song he hummed under his breath when he juggled—more a series of tuneful grunts.
An elderly man stood as his name was announced and deposited a Seattle Weeklyon the center table. Jack picked up the tabloid, flipped past the media reviews—he did not much like movies or television—and lingered over the articles on clubs and live music. Always looking for a few good tunes. He was halfway through a formal analysis of a new fusion-Ska-grace band when the words on the page shifted left. His head whirred. Something seemed to hover before his eyes: a cloud of large winged insects, illuminated by a brilliant beam of light. Then they blurred and slipped off, smudging into the paintings on the clinic walls—past the chairs, the little children’s corner filled with toys. A small fish tank bubbled away near the reception desk.
The bubbles froze.
The clinic fell silent.
He could see, but what he saw was skewed—rotating this way, then that, around a center point that expanded and changed color from red to blue to shades of brown and pink.
Then he looked directly into another pair of wide eyes, staring with an expression he could not read. He could not make sense of the face—too many contours—but there was nothing frightening about it. Somehow, he knew that this person was gentle, concerned, interested in him. More than interested.
Behind the face, a receding tunnel opened onto artificial brightness. He became aware that his own face was foolishly slack, lids heavy.
He was dreaming again.
The face: flatter than he was used to, pug nose tipped with pink hairs, thick reddish fuzz reaching to her cheeks, tiny ears.
As one set of biological opinions took over from the other, he found the face attractive, then more than that—beautiful. A hint of concern and sadness became attached to his desire. His own hair felt different—bunched back, spiky and short, more furry bristle than hair. He tried to take control of his lips and tongue, but it was not easy. Whatever sounds he made were bound to be garbled. He fumbled at his ears with questing fingers. They felt like hot button mushrooms. The female with the flat pink nose wiped his forehead with a slender hand. She spoke again. Gabble, gabble, gabble, but pretty. She might be reciting poetry—or singing. Colors in his vision ran riot. He could not tell whether she was blue or brown or pink. Then, like a picture coming into focus, he acquired one frame of language and dropped another, colors became natural, and speaking was easier. Command of his body—at least of face and mouth—became more confident.
“You’re back,” she said. “How wonderful. Do you remember me?”
“I don’t…think so,” he said, well aware neither of them was speaking English, nor any language he had ever heard before.
“What do you remember?”
He looked at the curved ceiling. Large winged insects—bigger than his hand, with shining black cylindrical bodies—hung upside down, crawling. Each had a letter or symbol on its back. They moved into parallel, seemed to want to form rows—and thus make words. He could not read the words. Still, everything around him was real—absolute, with a solid, repeatable feel.
“This isn’t a dream, is it?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. Not on this side.”
“How long…?”
“You’ve been twitching for a while. Less than a…” She used a word he could not capture and hold, so it slipped away.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but there is a protocol. We made it up. Your body-mate is a little…” Another word, embarrassing in whatever context it might have had. “He left you a message, which I have improved upon. To inform you of where you are, and what not to do.”
He could not turn his head, so she raised a square black cloth covered with glittering red and yellow writing—a shake cloth.
“I can’t read,” he said.
“I’ll read it for you.”
“My name is…” But he had already forgotten who he had been and where he had been…before he was here. He tried to stand up, but his body tingled and he fell back.
She touched her ear and then her nose in sympathy. That was like smiling, maybe. “Never mind. Let’s try this first. You appear to come from a time very far from this one. If you are real, and not a trick of the Tall Ones, then you should be taught some facts.”
She turned the square and read the glittering words.
“‘Welcome, polar opposite! I have been going astray of late, and assume you are the culprit. There is little to tell you, other than what you plainly see; I am of the ancient breed, poor enough and adventurous. If you are from the immediate future, please do not leave evidence of our fate; I prefer not to know. If you are from the past, then all I can say is that clocks no longer keep the time. Still, life is happy enough—if you stay humble. Otherwise, the Tiers can be cruel. If you are from the immediate past, and want to walk around, take care of my body—and do not dally with any attractive glows you might meet.’” At this, the female’s face became wreathed in dimples and curves. “‘You may amuse yourself by fighting in the skirmishes.’”
“No, you won’t,” the female added, glancing at him. Then she continued, “‘There have been changes since you were here last. We’re going on a march. And that’s all I know. But I hope to know more.’”
The female looked up, hopeful. “That’s all he managed to set down,” she concluded. “Does it make sense? We’d like to know all you can tell us, of course—anything you want to tell us.”
She was obviously concerned about his reaction to the message, which was already fading in his thoughts. I’ve seen her before. But was that “before” before—or after—this?
No sequence.
Remember, Mnemosyne!
“I’m confused,” he managed to say, his mouth numb again. “If I stay here…for a while—I’ll need to learn. Could you teach me?”
“That would be my delight,” the female answered. “Though you rarely stay long. Are you from the future, or from the past?”
“I don’t know. Is this…the Kalpa?”
“It is!” she cried out in delight. “The Tiers are inside the Kalpa, at the bottom, I think. We are very humble. You doremember!”
“Only some things…I remember you.”
“We’ve never met, until now,” she said, with pretty concern. “But Jebrassy has told me about you…a little.”
“What’s your name? Wait…it’s Tiadba, isn’t it?”
She was even more delighted, but puzzled. “Did he tell you that? What’s your name?”
“I don’t know. This is where I go when I stray, isn’t it?”
“Where you go, and whom you visit. But where do you come from?”
“I don’t remember. It’s all mixed up.”
Tiadba showed concern. He could see that, but the way her face made expressions, the way her cheek and jaw and lip muscles moved, was strange…Strange and lovely. She had such tiny ears and her eyes were large, almost like the eyes of a…
Another word lost.
He squinted at the ceiling. He could almost read what the letterbugs were spelling out. Insect pets that spelled out words. “What are they doing?” He tried to lean forward, get up, stand again. Too fast, too much. His eyes lost focus and his vision skewed. Shutters seemed to clack and close around him. He did not want to leave, not when he was on the brink of learning more, with this beautiful female to help him. He had been so lonely for so long!
He tried to reach out, but his hands wouldn’t move.
“I’m falling. Hold onto me,” he said, angry that his lips were so thick and clumsy.
“Try to stay, try harder!” Tiadba grabbed his hands, his arms. She was surprisingly strong. But all sense was draining from his head and body and limbs. The last thing he saw was her face, her eyes—brown—her flat, expressive nose—
Jack’s awareness squashed down to a fuzzy point, something whirred and snapped—the point expanded—vertigo turned into blurs of light—and he was back.
He blinked at the fish swimming in their tank, listened woozily to the hum of the waiting room’s heating system. Tried to hang onto what he had experienced—especially the face, the female, and the letterbugs, a weird idea—fun, actually—but by the time he realized where he was, everything slipped away except a sense of panic. Someone was in desperate trouble.
Here, there—now, then?
That urgency faded as well.
Jack looked around. The families had been reduced to a lone mother in a sari and her sleeping infant. An elderly couple had taken seats nearby. Embarrassed, he looked at his watch. He had blanked for thirty minutes. Somehow, he had kept turning the pages.
He folded the newspaper and put it in his satchel.
The attending nurse stood in the door to the waiting room. “Jack Rohmer? Dr. Sangloss will see you now.”
CHAPTER 110
Nataraja was disturbing Daniel’s deepest pools. How did he remember that name? Bidewell had never brought it up. Glaucous had never mentioned it. Neither had Jack or Ginny. But he could see it all with a strange clarity, as if he had witnessed its end with better eyes, connected to a deeper and more subtle brain.
For Daniel, the disposition of the False City was strangely familiar, overlaid by the pattern, if it could be called that, of its awful defeat.
He clambered up an immense curtain-wall, leaning at about thirty degrees to the rest of the rubble: thousands of acres shot through with cracks, rippling tears, wide chasms, and faults. Spheres and stretched, twisted ovoids, bent cylinders and curving sweeps, still clung to the sheet, interconnected by thousands of silver walkways or transportation rails, some still supporting what might have been mobile constructs. When it was alive, when it all worked together, Nataraja must have been a marvel…
Of course it had been a marvel. He could see it. The picture was sharp. After all, coming to Nataraja had made a tremendous impression…
As he climbed, he (and a bit of Fred, still curious) tried to imagine the awesome power of something that could discard the rules of reality—and what that would do to a human construct, relying as it did on engineering, gravity, the basic balances of matter and energy. He did not have to imagine much. The results seemed to pop into his head, more vivid than any recent memory. The city had died like an animal set upon by much larger beasts: smashed down, torn open, shooting out gouts of itself—and then collapsing, squished out around its edges as if stomped by huge boots. A hole big enough to push a small mountain through now let in a shaft of gray light from outside. The shaft moved with a will of its own, touching on great heaps of wreckage, merging with other stray shafts, cutting through thin screens of glow falling through huge rents in the crushed outer skin. The angle and intensity of these cheerless lambencies were never the same.
His own mind—what was left of it—had been scrupulously separated into thick, fluid layers, hot and cold—and now, from depths almost frozen with age, upwelling contents seemed ready to help him reconstruct what he could never have actually experienced.
“I don’t dream. I don’t dream of this city or any other.”
Still, recollections of a multitude of historical cities came forward—linked by what circumstance, he did not yet know. Lost to siege or plague, burned to the ground, reduced to rubble, the rubble raked over and sown with salt: moving from fate to fate, and even from life to life and body to body, he might have actually experienced those things—who could deny that possibility?
But not the end of this place, not the doom of Nataraja. That made no sense at all. But he knew. He felt. In its own way, Nataraja had been the greatest city of its age, greater even than the Kalpa…wherever and whatever that was.
“Tell me who I am!” Daniel shouted as he climbed the fallen curtain. “I don’t dream. I never have. When I sleep, there’s just blackness.”
The Chaos had washed across the surface of the Earth in a wave of many dimensions, surrounding the last enclaves of humanity from above, below, and to all sides, cutting off their lines of fate as well as access in space and time. That was how the Chaos transformed, took control—and reduced its conquests to a misery of confusion and lies.
It burned through most of the threads of causality.
And then, as if exhausted—or uncertain what to do with its new domains—it withdrew, concentrating its efforts on the probing wave front, that membrane which intruded and cut across and around the chords, and which Daniel had experienced so often.
What the Chaos had left behind was the hulk of a city charred not by flames, reduced not by physical destruction—but crisped by lost history and eaten through by paradox. Those who lived here had suffered most. The structures that once supported them in security and comfort had struggled to rebuild, or at least to maintain some part of an upright pile, yet were punished over and over again—dying, rotting, resurrecting in awful new ways—and finally the city had given up. The legacy of everything the Chaos touched.
Daniel climbed to the massive edge of the curtain-wall. The pain and exhaustion this body felt did not matter. The upper portion of the curtain—several miles of it—had bent over and broken off and now lay sprawled across and through other structures, the bottom lost in shadow, all the way to the foundations. Where his hands and feet touched, a few faint blue sparks sizzled from skin, bones, and muscle. Atoms, particles—matter astonished, recognizing itself and attempting to correct a perverse bilocation. But this was not the great recognition his new/old memories, his new instructions, told him to expect. He had come very far, over a very long period of time.
A greater moment of reunion was out there in the ruins.
Daniel sat on the edge, ignoring the small blue lances and sparks, and took his two stones from their boxes. As always, they would not fit together. One looking older than the other, if that was possible. Similar in shape, but destined for other combinations. One of the stones tugged strongly to the left and then down. Simultaneously, he heard a savage, nasty sound, like a beast in pain, echo from all around, and then—perversely—swoop up with a Doppler howl to echo again.
The ruins seemed to enjoy this. They played with that sound, tossed it back and forth. Hanging structures shuddered and sifted corrosion down the slope of the curtain-wall, and then made an attempt to move, as if in response to that unknown command. They managed to shift a few dozen yards along their silvery connecting rails—and then ground to a halt, dropping chunks the size of the old houses in Wallingford.
He suspected this was not the first time Nataraja had echoed with that pain. Daniel replaced the dormant stone and put the box back into his pocket. The other he kept in his hand, where it grew warm and then hot. He hung his head. Everything hurt. The wail…not a beast. A woman.
The stone tugged again. For now, it was the only part of him that showed decision and direction. He had killed and pushed aside so many to come this far. A meeting was coming—a meeting that would resolve nothing.
Never would.
Never had.
CHAPTER 111
The tangle of old Nataraja quivered above them, and the dreaded, all-too-familiar sound of collisions—mountains falling, caverns collapsing, dust swirling and sifting—announced another compression.
Glaucous felt his body cramp inward, as if he were being pinched between a huge finger and thumb. Whitlow continued to lurch ahead, feeling his way through the city’s deadfall like a cockroach through a festering forest—with the occasional guiding touch of the Moth, a presence of gray authority but no real substance or location. Glaucous finally followed him again, breath stacked upon breath, eyes stinging at the way light and shadow torqued through the high, snarled skeleton of the corpse city. Whitlow stopped and touched finger to chin, scratching stubble. He examined Glaucous critically, as if blaming him. “Smaller still,” he said. “Less of everything. Distances change, and directions. Do you feel it?”
“Yes,” Glaucous said, hunching his shoulders as he imagined miners might in a cave-in, their candles fading, air turning to poison.
“Not done yet,” Whitlow added, shaking his head. “Might squeeze us to the size of a pea. What then?”
It was obvious to Glaucous that all they had to do—Whitlow and the Moth—was lose him in this tangle, and none of his skills would save him. That might be their intent—yet he had no choice but to follow.
“I bear no resentment for being left behind,” Whitlow said, watching his face with darting eyes. “New circumstances, new codes, not to say new honor. Indeed, not to say that.I might have left youbehind, had it been the other way.”
“The Mistress brought you here before?” Glaucous asked.
“Such a question!” Whitlow said. “She might have done so, and I might have forgotten. You might as easily forget that we are here now.”
“I recognize some things,” Glaucous said quietly. “Narrow escapes. Seeing what lay beyond.”
“When I was younger, I imagined this was a sort of afterlife. Didn’t you?”
“Never thought on it much,” Glaucous said, and that was mostly true.
“I had some feeble excuse that our prey might find a satisfactory existence here—render their own extended service, no worse than what we endure, or what the Moth endures, perhaps. Mistakes also deposit themselves. Hunters clumsy enough to fall into a Gape. Many such, over the ages. No going back when that happens. You’ve lost partners—would you like to reacquaint with a few?”
“No thank you, all the same,” Glaucous murmured.
“We may pass them on our way to the Crux. We are the only survivors. Of all the thousands—tens of thousands, I imagine…” Whitlow looked around. There had not been a touch, a guiding blink of gray authority, for some time. He whistled low and steady, as if summoning an invisible dog. “Where is that creature?”
“Does shereside in the Crux?” Glaucous asked.
Whitlow slowly turned, larger booted foot thumping, looked up, and lifted his hands, fingers feeling through the dark spaces as if he might grab a line and haul them up into daylight. “Not hers. Moth found it. Bigger game, now smaller and weaker, everything coming to its minimum. The small will loom large, Mr. Glaucous. Our last chance.”
“I do not know what you mean, Mr. Whitlow,” Glaucous said wearily. “Bad riddles always.”
“You wouldn’t say that had not all this brought me low. You would listen and smile, obsequious, and I would know there was an understanding. But the chain of command, broken…chain of authority, knotted and clanking. The Moth…”
“I don’t feel him,” Glaucous said, drawing closer to Whitlow. “Where has he gone?”
Whitlow regarded him with momentary apprehension—and then a mask of wry humor. “Tell me about your friend, the bad shepherd, before you decide to take your revenge, Mr. Glaucous.”
“You found him. I followed you.”
Glaucous drew back at another round of creaking and settling. Whitlow held up his fingers, separated by the distance of a pea, and shook them in Glaucous’s face, grinning his threat. “It was rumored ages ago that some shepherds, tormented by the hunt, might acquire certain understandings, certain efficiencies. Threatened, they might leave their personal silken cords and attach to others. Become those others for a while. A desperate ploy. This would disrupt the track of their dreams—and so they would forget. Yet they would still carry sum-runners, still be guided by them…”
Glaucous felt the breezy touch of a huge, soft hand on his back, accompanied by a scent of dry, sweetly irritating powder. The Moth had returned.
Whitlow resumed his off-kilter step. “Better. Shouldn’t wander off like that. What we have found is puzzling,” he said to Glaucous. “Curtains have been pulled aside. Powers have shifted. We suspect the Chalk Princess is no longer actively engaged. We have need of another opinion.”
Glaucous dropped his head.
“She may not know as much yet. More has been reduced than walking distance,” Whitlow said, and pulled Glaucous close, then whispered in his ear, “This does not bode well for the Moth, of course.” He winked and held his finger to his lips.
The Moth moved them again—a wrenching passage, swift but no more brutal than was strictly essential. Glaucous felt the change as a burning, as if his skin were crisping away. That subsided—and then he felt as if he were merely being tattooed all over his body. The pricking sting of predatory fates was something with which he had no previous experience. One normally lived one’s fate; these lived him.Their examination was swift, impersonal, basic. Glaucous had never before been so close to the basement layers of his being, and he found it both terrible and exhilarating. He had also never been so close to an explanation for his life, his existence, and to a last moment of hope—the hope that perhaps there might still be room for correction.
An impersonal offering of grace—a remote and pure shriving.
The pricking passed. Now he was his own powdery thing, still standing, but falling apart and being put back together each split second.
The Moth protected them as best as he could.
“Welcome to the center of the universe,” he heard Whitlow say or think. Their eyes—they no longer seemed to have bodies—saw in some manner a deep black pool in which two large needles churned a thick liquid. The needles met beneath the surface of the pool and spun like the shaft of a gear in a jeweled movement.
“The Crux has no center and no radius,” Whitlow said. “Brace for a nasty residue—a powerful thing once focused its heart of frustration and misery here. It ate our world and spat it out in nasty chunks. You’ll feel it.”
“The Typhon?” Glaucous asked.
Whitlow shrugged. “These steel threads are the last two fates. In one, the Typhon fails and we all pass into nothingness. In the other…there is a kind of success. Who can say which would be better? Now—
“Tell us where we are—draw up the proper thread, and tell us what remains for us to do. That is your talent, is it not?”
Glaucous could not shut his eyes, could not find any private place in which to make his decision—but that did not matter. He had decided long ago.
Fifty years and more had passed since he had decided.
Somehow, in this abstract heart with no center, and without the Moth’s help, he chose the best fate—the last remaining good fate—and drew it down like a fortunate hand of cards, the one lucky flip of a coin. And—always deferent to his employers—he made sure both the Moth and Whitlow approved. Far away, an awful sound echoes again throughout the False City.
And the Dead Gods begin to move.
CHAPTER 112
The False City is quivering, snapping, shrinking. Jebrassy does not know why he is still walking, still seeing.
He looks down on Polybiblios, who has inexplicably collapsed, and then kneels beside him. Some steps away, Ghentun has also fallen. Both are wavering in substance and outline.
“The Kalpa is reaching its end,” Polybiblios says. “The City Prince’s bargain means nothing. I cannot last much longer than my stored fates within the city. All my fate-lines will die with the Kalpa. Finish it well, young breed. You have all you need—but for this.”
The epitome reaches out to give him the thing he has carried since their journey began. Jebrassy holds the small gray box. The epitome of the Librarian winks at him through the armor’s faceplate, then lies back on the black surface.
