“After? After, I’ll be gone. Somewhere. Everywhere. Nowhere. A pile of ashes at the base of the towers…”

“And I’ll still be here,” Finch said. It came out like an ache.

Shriek, forceful: “You are a man who did the best he could in impossible circumstances. That’s all.”

After Shriek left, he would be alone. Terribly injured. In an apartment with two dead bodies. In a war zone.

The door lit up. Became a reflecting mirror.

“I’m leaving now, Finch,” Shriek said.

“Wait!” A last burst of curiosity. “Tell me what happened. How did you end up in this apartment?”

Shriek’s features softened. “I tried something dangerous. Something impossible. I tried to use the nexus at Zamilon to go back in time. I tried to change the past so I wouldn’t have to change the future. But you can’t do that. And the past caught up with me. The attempt almost killed me.”

The door had begun to hum. An intense white light shot from it, silhouetting Shriek. The hum became a kind of unearthly music.

“And the gray cap?”

“He got caught in the door I’d made.”

“What does that mean? I don’t know what that means,” Finch said.

“You might ask yourself who Samuel Tonsure really was,” Shriek said. Then nodded at Finch, and stepped through the door. Disappeared into the light.

The light went out.

The rectangle clattered to the floor.

The metal fell in on itself.

Just a bar of metal again, as before.

Finch knew he would never be able to make it do what Shriek had done. Knew that he would never see Shriek again.

4

Sunlight. Warm against his battered face. Curled up on the couch. His ankles and wrists seemed made of broken glass. Could feel the fragile bones shifting. Sending the glass up into his arms, his legs. His whole body hurt. Ached. His jaw was sore. Couldn’t feel his nose anymore.

A vast and formless rush of city sounds from beyond the window. Sporadic gunfire. The thud and shift of something heavier. Like a giant striding across Ambergris. But distant. So distant.

Someone had applied field dressings to the stumps of finger and toe using torn fabric.

Tried to get up. A hand held him down. A voice he knew said, “Don’t get up yet.” The accent more pronounced. As if she were no longer acting.

An arm propped up his head so he could drink from a cup of water. It tasted good. Even though he had trouble getting it down. Even though it mixed with the blood inside his mouth.

Sintra’s face came into view. He looked up at her with what he knew was a stupid, childlike dependence. Everything stripped away from him. Couldn’t raise his arm far enough to wipe his eyes.

“Just lie there,” she said. An oddly clinical concern in her voice. She wore forest green. Camouflage pants and shirt. Brown boots made out of something soft. A long knife sheathed at her waist. A rifle in the crook of her left arm, muzzle pointed toward the floor.