Exhibits A, B, C: the empty bottles randomly scattered, the heaps of clothes abandoned in corners, the stripped mattresses and tattered paper shrines to the World's Biggest Breasts.

Dvali was talking about Isaac. He had been talking about Isaac for hours, it seemed to Lise, fretting over his absence and what this fresh starfall might mean "to his status as a communicant." It all began to sound more than slightly mad, until she was moved to ask, "If you care so much about him, couldn't you have given him a last name?"

Dvali looked sideways at her. "We raised him communally. Mrs. Rebka named him Isaac, and that seemed sufficient."

"You could have called him Isaac Hypothetical," Turk said. "Given his paternity."

"I don't find that funny," Dvali said. But at least he shut up.

The ash was falling thicker than ever. She could see it outside the window when she pointed a flashlight that way, but only as an undifferentiated wash of glittery gray. More than in Port Magellan, she thought.

More than in Bustee.

She didn't care to consider what might be growing in it.

* * * * *

It took a long while for the air in the poorly-sealed grocery store stockroom to settle, and it never settled completely, but eventually Diane noticed that her lungs were less painful, her throat less raw, her vertigo slowly becoming bearable.

How much time had passed since the storm began? Two hours, a dozen? She couldn't be sure. There was no sunlight anymore, in fact no light whatsoever. There hadn't been time to rescue flashlights from the vehicle, or anything else for that matter. There had only been time to search the narrow stockroom (by touch and from memory) for something to rinse the ash out of their mouths: a cache of carbonated soft drinks in plastic bottles. Warm, the liquid foamed on the tongue and mixed with the inhaled particles until it tasted like charred flannel. But drink enough of it and you could speak, at least.

The three women were gathered around Isaac, who lay on the concrete floor breathing noisily. Isaac had become their touchstone, Diane thought. He had sipped several times from one of the bottles, but he was feverish—a new, frightening heat baked off his skin—and since the ash-fall began he hadn't spoken or been able to speak.

We're like the witches in Macbeth, Diane thought, and Isaac is our cauldron, boiling.

"Isaac," Anna Rebka said. "Isaac, can you hear me?"

Isaacs response was a stirring in his limbs, a faint murmur that might have been assent.