Hold on, Sulean Moi had told her and that was what Lise had done, even when it seemed like the entire world was tilting under her. All around her the brightly fluorescing globes shook loose from the Hypothetical trees and were drawn toward the central vortex of the temporal Arch. The wind became a gale and the gale became a hurricane, and she braced herself against a concrete pier, too terrified even to scream. She was only vaguely aware of Sulean Moi curled under the same ledge of stone not far away.

The wind was unceasing, and she passed in and out of consciousness, somehow remaining braced where she was, coming to herself time and again as if awaking not from but into a bad dream: and did the night pass? A day, another night?

Eventually it did stop. The wind died to a breeze, the world righted itself, and Sulean Moi was calling her name: "Lise Adams! Are you hurt?"

There were a thousand ways to answer that question, but she couldn't speak.

* * * * *

She must have slept at least some of the time. The impossible Arch in the west was gone, and most of the Dark Forest with it. All that remained were broken buildings, raw foundations, cracked and tumbled pavement, and the stumps of Hypothetical trees. Here was the desert again, Lise thought. And the intolerable ache of cramping muscles, and the infinitely deeper throb of grief.

Days later she sat at the side of a barren road, hungry and gaunt, in filthy clothing, next to Sulean Moi and not far from a dozen other bone-weary men and women—mostly men—who had weathered the crisis in abandoned buildings or the crevices of the ruined oil facilities. They were waiting for a bus the rescue workers had said would be along any hour now. The bus was supposed to take them to a recovery area on the northeast coast, but Lise and Sulean planned to slip away before that, maybe at Bustee, and make their own way over the mountains.

She turned to Sulean, who sat with her chin on the heels of her hands. "Are you thirsty?"

"Only tired," the Martian woman said, in that ancient voice that made Lise think of a badly-rosined bow abusing the E-string of a violin. "And I was thinking about Dr. Dvali."

Avram Dvali. Dead beyond redemption. "What about him?"

"He was wrong about so many things. But he may have been right about the Hypotheticals." The Martian woman's expression became even more mournful. "I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting."

Lise at this moment couldn't bring herself to care, but it mattered to Sulean, and Sulean had been kind to her, so she said, "Well, isn't that right? What happened here—you're saying it was planned?"