“You who kept the soul and spirit plain, come and set it in its place again,” she said to the circle at large.

There was a big black ceramic pot at her feet. One by one, people came from out of the circle to put things in it. It was a singular, startling procession.

Josh began it. He wore an African shirt so large it might have roofed the sheep pen; he pulled from somewhere in it a paperback book. It was the copy of A Tale of Two Cities that I’d been reading at his kitchen table. He dropped it into the pot with a look at me so full of mingled things that I couldn’t begin to sort them out.

Kris followed him, with — it was. I almost laughed aloud. A leaf of lettuce, and a wink.

Paulo came, with both hands cupped closed around something. He held them over the mouth of the pot and opened them, but the contents went up, not down, and glowed for an instant, gold-green, against the dark sky. A firefly. He looked dismayed for a moment, then caught my eye. For the first time I could remember, he seemed very much the opposite of solemn.

LeRoy dropped in a spare bit of wiring harness I’d made him for the truck. And said, “I have a memory that isn’t mine.”

“Give it,” said Sher.

From a pocket, LeRoy pulled a video-8 format cassette. I couldn’t read the label, but I knew it by the colors and their arrangement. It was achingly familiar. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the best buddy movie ever made. Theo, Theo. Oh, santos, I was going to cry, and in front of everybody.

Then Sherrea leaned forward with something in her hand. A piece of paper… No, a card. The Page of Swords. Joan of Arc, with her boy’s hair and man’s armor, looking down to hell, up to heaven. The card flexed, fluttered, and was gone, into the mouth of the pot.

“You are reborn and remade,” Sherrea said, “and only the strongest and most true went into the making. Now you have to wake. Stand up and receive the spirit of your head.”

I had to do it by myself. I was weak; my legs trembled under me, and my hands shook. But I stood. Sherrea came to me — so small for such a kick-ass bruja — with a glass bowl full of something clear. Water? She dipped her finger in it, and the smell rose: alcohol. With her finger, she drew something on my forehead.

Someone must have fed the fire, because I was blinded with light. Empty whiteness rose around me from my feet to my shoulders to my chin (I saw Sherrea’s face for a last moment, through the thickening haze) and finally closed over my head.

Me, the dog/rabbit, patient and silly in black on white. The dancing flutist with the two feathers, or antennae, or ears. And the woman with the halo of fire. There was no line of other pictographs, and I felt the lack of dimension more strongly than ever.