Then the building cracked in half. I heard it.

There was light like white air burning, like a welder’s arc against the eye, like the light in the old military films of nuclear tests. Tom/I screamed; and did it again when the light didn’t wink out. It was his scream in my throat, but I felt it. Somewhere along the tunnel I was disappearing down, there was a remote control for that much of me, if I could just find a button and push… No, it was lips. Just put your lips together…

Silly. Say goodbye. The sound was one I’d heard in movies, when a train thundered down upon the camera like doom.

“Pw? your lips… Nothing to lose.

… and blow.

I had lost sight and hearing. But white fire filled the bottom of my blindness, lapped around my ankles, surged up to my knees, my hips, my rib cage, sliced between Tom’s fingers and my neck, and closed over my head. I thought I heard a shriek, but sound wouldn’t have carried in that medium.

I didn’t know if it was a flat world; there was nothing in it. It was white. It wasn’t warm or cold, welcoming or repellent, sweet or cruel. It was not the place I had come to before. There was nothing in it. No helpful pictographs, no street signs. The natives knew their way around.

Bait, I thought furiously, in a state of nonawareness. You wanted me for bait.

It worked. There were no words formed. The answer was just a part of the void that meant something.

Your timing sucked!

My timing was perfect. The lightning froze him in the midst of possessing you, my whirlwind lit the building and destroyed the barriers that kept me out of Ego, my possession of you consumed him. There was no other possible order.

What did you do to Worecski?

Nothing. I rode you. He was no business of mine, except that you were concerned with him. It was his bad luck that I arrived when I did, and that it’s true what they say, that “Great gods cannot ride little horses.”

Tom… wasn’t your business?

You know my business. If you don’t remember, ask my little sister. Your friend the witch.

You never said you couldn’t get into Ego.

There is no technical manual for the spirit world. You will never know everything.

Why me? Why was it ever me?

Your left foot is in the past. Your right foot is in the present. You hold steel in your left hand, and flint in your right. You are the dancer between the old world and the new, because I made you to be so.

Fuck you! I deny you!

Do you deny your hands and feet?

Silence, in that volumeless space that had never admitted sound.

Let me go back, I said. Frances is dying.

I’m not keeping you here. Go.

I opened my eyes on a room bathed in watery golden light. The Gilded West was still gilded. The wind still roared outside. I was lying on my back. Tom lay three feet away in a half curl, one hand flung out loosely on the carpet, his eyes open and motionless.