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remember anything else, but the scene played on, a bare few seconds that changed everything.

"The containment won't last," Lewis said. "You know it won't. I used one fail-safe on her.

We can put in a second one while she's out."

"Not without her consent."

"She already gave consent." That was lawyering the point, but David allowed it to slip past.

"We can't kill her. We can't save her. The best we can do now is to make sure that she can be controlled if this goes bad."

David bared his teeth like a wild thing, and I thought for a second that he really would lunge right for Lewis's throat. " You'renot deciding when she lives or dies," he said. "Not you. "

Lewis closed his eyes in what looked like gratitude and relief. "I don't want to," he said. "I never wanted to. You have to be the one, David. You're the only one she trusts enough to get close at the last moment. If it's Joanne or the world, you have to choose." David froze, and the people clustered around the edges of the tableau shuffled. Cherise was the one who finally spoke.

"She'd want it to be you," she said. "She really would." There were tears shining in my friend's eyes.

"I'll put the fail-safe in place," Lewis said. "You choose the codes." It was a combination, of course. Words, and deeds.

Fides mihi.Trust me.

And his hand, giving me his heart.

Fides mihi.

David's use of the fail-safe should have killed me. If I'd been myself, only myself, it would have turned me off like a light, gone forever.

The Unmaking deflected it from shutting down my body, but it couldn't stop the memory from returning, and the memory brought its own clarity. Its own powerful, unstoppable force.

In the second that passed, the terrible certainties that had filled me since Bad Bob put the Unmaking in my hand began to unravel. No. This is wrong. This is all wrong. I can't do this.

David wasn't the enemy.

This life wasn't a fiction. It was the only reality I had. The only one I wanted, no matter what the creature beyond that portal promised me.

But even though my brain caught up with the realities and horror of being taken over, I couldn't stop the physics of what was already in motion - me. I was already lunging for him, and I was too close to miss him.

David put the Ancestor Scriptures between us.

The Unmaking hit the book, and for a second it pushed deep into the pages, tunneling through toward David's chest. Then it stopped moving, as if it had hit an impenetrable wall.

Then it began to shake in my hands. Not vibrate. Shake.

And then it exploded.

Shards of it flew everywhere - powdery bits, larger fragments. Some hit the rocks around us and gouged out massive craters as they skidded. The powder whipped away on the wind, a radioactive cloud that glowed hot green in the aetheric.

And one fragment - the largest one - flew straight up, into the eye of the storm.

It shrieked its way through the portal in our world, then the aetheric, and then through every plane stacked above it, ripping a hole just large enough for a single drop of darkness to squeeze through.

It trembled pendulously, then fell from the portal - a dozen feet across, maybe.

Directly above us.

I lunged toward David, trying to push him out of the way. He did the same, trying to save me.

We collided at the center, and the black drop came crashing down on us.

I wrapped my arms around David, felt his go around me, and power flared silver through and around us.

Then the darkness hit us, and the world ended.

I never expected to wake up, and I was really sorry I did. I must have been lying on the rocks for hours, cold and wet and cramped; my muscles were so stiff and strained that I whimpered even before trying to shift my position.

Overhead was a clear night sky, thick with constellations, and a bright yellow moon, three-quarters full.

Wind rustled over the island.

"David?"

No answer. I pushed myself up to a painful, staggering walk. In the moonlight, I saw nothing but black rock and sea spray.

"David?"

There was a body lying a few feet away, half hidden behind a boulder.

Bad Bob, not David. He'd died hard and ugly. Something had blown his torso in two, dividing him neatly in half from the crown of his head to somewhere around his navel. He'd been dead for hours. The blood was mostly dried on the