Haltingly, and to Dvali's astonishment, the boy began to explain.

* * * * *

This wind, Sulean Moi thought: it will kill us yet.

She saw Turk and Lise hurrying toward her through the accumulation of alien growths, a kind of forest—it was almost too much for her to register after hours of blindness in the buried stockroom.

Overhead, a canopy of strangely glittering globes were attached to these… should she call them trees?

And a sort of bramble of ocular flowers had grown nearby, and some of them had turned their mindless eyes in her direction.

The world was obscenely transformed.

And the wind: where had it come from? Its intensity increased almost by the second. It tugged at the ruins behind her, lofting kites of tattered drywall and tar paper high among the alien trees.

She turned her head back and called out, more audibly this time, "Isaac!"

It was the boy who mattered, not the foolish Avram Dvali.

"Isaac, come out!"

As the unstable debris shifted and groaned.

* * * * *

Dvali grasped immediately what the boy was telling him. It was little more than he had long imagined—Isaac had become a conduit to the Hypothetical, but with this astonishing difference: Isaac had been able to acquire the memories of Anna Rebka before she died. She lived in him. As did the Martian child Esh.

He whispered, "Anna?"

As if he could summon her from the boy like a conjurer summoning a ghost. But the boys eyes changed in some indefinable way, the corners of his lips turned down as if with distaste, and it was exactly the way Anna had been looking at him lately.

Then Dvali said a thing he had not anticipated saying, though the words were as logical and as inevitable as the last step on a long road:

"Take me with you," he said.

The boy stepped back from him, shaking his head.

"Take me with you, Isaac. Wherever you are, wherever you're going, take me with you."

Stressed timbers creaked as if the weight of the world was balanced on them. There was a sound like gunshots as the wood fractured.

"No," the boy said calmly, firmly.

And this was maddening. Maddening, because he was so close. So close! And because the voice that denied him sounded so much like Anna's voice.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Sulean Moi was sprawled on the ground by the hedge of eyeball flowers. Lise swallowed her dread of the Hypothetical growths and pulled her a safer distance from the wind-torn debris field.

Turk leaned over the Martian woman and said, "Where are the others?"

For a moment Sulean seemed unable to answer. She opened her mouth, closed it. She was in shock, Lise thought. "Dead," the Martian woman finally managed. "Diane is dead. Anna Rebka…"

"What about Isaac?"

"Alive. Dvali is with him—inside, in there. Why won't they come out? It's not safe!"

Turk stood and surveyed the rubble and the small opening the digging trees had made.