in some immense, still space. An empty church. An abandoned theater. A cave. He drew back the pike, placing his free hand on her shoulder for balance. Please, her eyes said.
Then it was over.
The crowd was absolutely still. Peter realized he was shaking. Something irrevocable had happened, beyond knowing. He looked down at the body. He had felt her soul leaving her. It had brushed him like a breeze, only the breeze was inside him, made of words. Thank you, thank you. I am free.
Tifty was waiting for him when he exited the cage.
“Her name wasn’t Sheila,” Peter said. “It was Emily.”
Tifty said nothing, wearing an expression of pure bewilderment.
“She was seventeen when she was taken up. Her last memory was of kissing a boy.”
“I don’t understand.”
Hollis, Michael, and Lore were coming down the bleachers. Peter moved toward them, stopped, then turned back to Tifty.
“You want to know how to kill them?”
The man nodded, slack-jawed.
“Look them in the eye.”
48
Amy’s mind was full of him. Full of Carter and the woman, whose name was Rachel. Rachel Wood.
Amy felt it, felt it all. She felt and saw and knew. The woman’s arms around him, pulling him down and down. The taste of pool water, like demon’s breath. The soft thunk as they reached the bottom, their bodies entwined like lovers’.
How Carter had loved her. That was what Amy felt most keenly: his love. The man’s life had stopped right there, at the bottom of the pool, his mind forever trapped in a loop of sorrow. Oh please, let me, thought Anthony Carter. I’ll die if you want me to, I would die for you if you asked, let me be the one to die instead. And then the bubbles rising as the woman took the first breath, her lungs filling with the awful water, the deep spasm of death moving through her; and then the letting go.
His was the sadness at the center of the world. The Chevron Mariner: that’s what this place was. It was the very beating heart of grief.
Blood was dripping from her as she made her way aft across the tilted deck. Amy could feel the change coming, a rumbling in the hills above. It would sweep down upon her like an avalanche. It would obliterate her, fashion her anew. She descended into the bowels of the ship, its maze of halls, its listing passages of pipe. Her feet sloshed through standing water the color of rust. Rainbow shimmers danced upon its surface. She moved by instinct. She homed in. She was the receiver to Carter’s beacon, which inexorably drew her down and down and down.
The pump room.
They were hanging everywhere, filling the space with their glow. They clung to every surface. They lay curled upon the floor like children. Here was the reservoir, the lair. The nest of Anthony Carter, his doleful legions suspended in abeyance. Where are you? she thought, and as she did her body shook, and in the wake of this convulsive jolt came a massive tightening in her abdomen, as if she’d been clenched by a giant fist. She staggered, fighting to remain upright. Blots of blackness swelled across her vision. It was happening. It was happening now.
I am here.
—Where? Where are you? Please, I think that I am … dying.
Come to me, Amy. Come to me come to me come to me …
A door stood before her. Had she opened it? She stumbled forward, down the narrow passageway beyond. The floor was slick with oil, the blood of the earth, time’s distillate, compressed by a planet. She came to a second portal. T1, it was marked: Tank No. 1. She knew what lay beyond. It had ever been thus. With all her strength she gripped the rusted ring and turned. Space flew open wide around her, as if she’d entered an immense cathedral.
And there he was. Anthony Carter, Twelfth of Twelve. Wizened and small, a wisp of a thing, no larger than the man he’d been and, in his heart, still was. A being of refusal made flesh. He lay on the floor, in the waste of the world; slowly he unfurled himself, rising to meet her. Carter the Sorrowful, the One Who Could Not, locked in the prison that he himself had made.
“Help me,” said Amy, a last great shudder moving through her, taking her over, and she fell into his arms.
* * *
And then she was somewhere else.
She was under a highway overpass. Amy knew this place, or so it