If dawn ever came, Turk thought. If anything like sunlight ever again reached this godforsaken badland.

Lise said, "I hate to be practical here, but I have to pee. Really badly."

Turk swung the flashlight beam toward the adjoining bathroom. "Looks like the throne's intact, but I wouldn't try to flush. And the door's off entirely."

"So look the other way," Lise said, gathering her blankets around her, and Turk thought how much easier all this would be if he didn't love her so much.

* * * * *

"There's light coming in the window," she said an hour or so later, and Turk made his way over there, treading cautiously on the broken glass.

The ash had stopped falling: that much was obvious. Had the dust-fall been as thick as it was yesterday they would have choked on it. But only a few stray flakes had drifted in, and Turk thought the air smelled fresher and less sulfurous, unless he was just getting used to it.

The light to which Lise had drawn his attention was real enough—it became obvious when he switched off the flashlight. But it was too early for dawn, and this light wasn't coming from the sky. It was coming from down below.

From the streets of this little corporate outpost, from the roofs of damaged buildings, the desert, anywhere the ash had fallen. He called Lise and Dvali over to look.

A few nights when he was at sea Turk had seen his vessel's wake glowing where bioluminescent algae had been stirred up by the passage of the ship. Always an eerie thing to see, and this reminded him of it, but what was happening here was stranger still. The desert, or the interplanetary dust that had fallen on it, was aglow with a phosphorescence of many colors: gemstone reds, glassy yellows, glistening blues. And the colors weren't stationary but constantly shifting, like a polar aurora.

"What do you think it is?" Lise asked.

Dr. Dvali's face was bathed in the reflected colors. He said, a little breathlessly, "I think we're as close as anyone has come to seeing the face of the Hypothetical"

Turk said, "So what are they doing out there?"

But even Dr. Dvali couldn't answer that question.

* * * * *

Come dawn, it was apparent that they had been lucky.

Most of the north wing of the building had collapsed. Corridors ended in masses of rubble or open air. If we'd turned left instead of right, Turk thought, we'd be buried in there.

As soon as there was enough light to navigate they made their way downstairs. The structure wouldn't survive another shaking—"And we need to find Isaac," Dvali said.

But Turk was a little uncertain about how to proceed, because another thing was obvious by daylight: the situation on the ground had changed.

Where there had been desert, there was a forest.

Or something like a forest.

* * * * *