Then an elderly woman appeared out of the noxious smoke behind them. She was in her sixties or seventies, wearing an immaculate white pantsuit with a paisley print silk scarf and a turquoise brooch. She touched Isobel, who fell asleep on the ground. Then she bent over Patricia and ran the back of her hand over Patricia’s seared forehead, as if checking a child’s temperature. Patricia woke up, none the worse for wear.

“Carmen.” Patricia sat up and looked around at the aftermath, the bodies, the open flames, the rubble. “I’m so sorry, Carmen. I’m sorry. I should have … I don’t know what. But I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” the old lady—Carmen—said. She glanced at Laurence, who said nothing, of course. “None of this is. I got here as fast as I could. I’m terribly sorry about Ernesto and the others. Ernesto was my friend for over forty years, and I will never forget … Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.” She reached out her hand and helped Patricia to her feet. Laurence stood up, too.

“I can’t find Ernesto at all,” Patricia said. “I rescued someone else from that other universe, once. But Ernesto’s just … gone.”

“He’s already lost to us,” Carmen said. “Like so many others, today.”

“How bad is it?” Patricia said, clearly meaning the devastation elsewhere, in all the places Milton’s people had attacked in their coordinated assault.

“Bad,” Carmen said. “Quite bad. They were clever, these ones. But this doesn’t matter. It’s not about us, or all our rules against Aggrandizement mean nothing. This is just what happens. This is what always happens. This is happening everywhere. And it will happen again and again.” She picked up Isobel’s gun and looked at it, then tossed it away. “The hour is coming soon when we may have to act. These sort of things just bring it closer.”

“The Unraveling,” Patricia said. “I wanted to say, the Unraveling is a form of violence, too. And it’s … it’s too soon.”

“It’s always too soon,” Carmen said. “Until it’s too late. In any case, we won’t do anything without deliberating, although Ernesto would have been a voice for caution. And now…” She closed her eyes. “I must go. Prepare for the worst. We’ll talk again soon.”

Carmen wrapped herself in smoke and was gone. Leaving Patricia and Laurence, dumbstruck.

Chapter 34

34

WHEN PATRICIA HAD crammed her fingers into the heart of the killing machine, her vision had whited out and she’d heard sick angels blaring at her, she’d crashed into the sky, and everything blurred into nothing. Carmen’s knuckles brushed Patricia’s head sometime later, and she came back. She felt the euphoria of returning to life, just for a moment, then she remembered that everyone was dead, everything was on fire, and Carmen was saying things like, “The hour is coming soon.”