"I'm sure he resisted. I doubt he succeeded, given what I know about their interrogation techniques. I know it hurts you to hear that, Lise, and I'm sorry, but it's the truth. Your father told me what he knew because he believed Dvali ought to be stopped and he believed I had the authority to intervene without doing violence to Dvali or the Fourth community in general. If he told these things to Genomic Security, he would have done so only under duress. But, Lise, it didn't matter. Dvali wasn't on the west coast. He never had been. Genomic Security lost track of him, and by the time I found out where he had truly gone it was far too late—years had passed. Isaac was a living child. He couldn't be called back into the womb."

"I see."

In the ensuing silence Lise could hear the crackle of the smoldering fire.

"Lise," Sulean Moi said softly. "I lost my parents when I was very young. I expect Diane told you that. I lost my parents, but, worse than that, I lost my memory of them. It was as if they had never existed at all."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not asking for sympathy. What I want to tell you is that, at a certain age, I made it my business to educate myself about them—to learn who they were, and how they had come to live beside a certain river before it flooded, and what warnings they might have heeded or ignored. I think I wanted to know whether I ought to love them for trying to rescue me or hate them for failing. I found out a lot of things, mostly irrelevant, including a number of painful truths about their personal lives, but the only important thing I learned was that they were blameless. It was a very small consolation, but it was all there would ever be, and in a way it was enough. Lise—your father was blameless."

"Thank you," Lise said hoarsely.

"And now we should try to sleep," Sulean Moi said, "before the sun comes up again."

* * * * *

Lise slept better than she had in several nights—even though she was in a sleeping bag, on uneven ground, in a strange forest—but it wasn't the sun that woke her, it was Turk's hand on her shoulder. Still dark out, she registered groggily. "We have to go," Turk said. "Hurry up, Lise."

"Why—?"

"The ash is falling again in Port Magellan, more and heavier, and it'll cross the mountains before too long.

We need to get under shelter."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Isaac woke to see the clouds billowing through the passes behind the moving car, clouds shot through with luminous particles, clouds like the clouds of August 34th. But the sudden and breathtaking hurt obscured all that.