Lise held his arm. Because he must not go in there, not into that teetering cavern: no.

He pulled away. She would remember that sensation of his forearm slipping out of her grasp. Like the best and worst memories, it would become indelible. It would haunt her on long nights for the rest of her life.

But she couldn't stop him, and she couldn't bring herself to follow him.

* * * * *

It was dark in the buried stockroom. Turk almost tripped over the body of Diane Dupree before he registered Isaac and Dr. Dvali confronting one another against a wall of broken shelves and fissured cinderblocks. Dvali was grabbing for the boy and Isaac was retreating by steps, not wanting to be touched but not yet willing to run, and Turk could hear Dvali's low begging voice under the roar of this fucking wind that had come out of nowhere and seemed about ready to tip the continent off its hinges. He had seen enough weirdness today to last him a lifetime, but he registered one more eerie miracle: the boy's skin had gone milky white and was faintly luminous, his face a candle-glow around his golden eyes, his body a sort of jack-o'-lantern where his ribs showed through his torn and filthy shirt.

"Isaac," Turk said, and the boy turned to him. "It's okay. The door's open. You can go."

Isaac looked at him gratefully.

Then the wind made a sound like the horn of some monster ship leaving harbor, and all the ruin that had hung suspended above them began to fall.

* * * * *

Sulean Moi held Lise Adams in her arms as the building shifted and compacted. A wave of concrete dust and atomized plaster spilled over them and was carried off by the terrible wind. "Stay down," Sulean said. "You can't help them now."

Lise fought a little longer. Then all the strength spilled out of her, and Sulean held the girl against her shoulder, rocking her gently. There had been a terrible finality about the last collapse, Sulean thought. No one could have survived it.

Then she revised her opinion.

The ocular roses, bent by the wind, refocused their solemn attention.

"Look," Sulean said.

Patiently, the Hypothetical trees had begun once more to dig.

PART SIX

THE ORDINANCE OF TIME

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Then it was over—when there was nothing left of the great glittering forest but a few palsied and rapidly decomposing stems, when the towering Arch had finished its work and turned to dust, when the desert basin of the Rub al-Khali had gone to sleep for another ten thousand years—Lise came back to Port Magellan.

The skies were fair and half a hundred ships lay at anchor in the harbor, though not as many as there used to be, or as there would be again, perhaps, when the oil industry had been reconstructed and the tourist trade revived.