“It’s all right,” she said. “Jesus. What did he do to you?”

I looked down. Elena was cutting the zip ties restraining me.

“Is—is it just me, or is it cold in here? I’m cold. And hot,” I said as they lifted me out of the chair. “And where is here?”

“One of the buildings around Russell Street Industries,” Elena said. She stripped Valentino Hayes of his long black coat and wrapped me in it. Then she pulled his unlaced boots onto my feet. A little small. Never trust a cop with small feet.

My arms were draped across their shoulders as we found our way out of the crumbling industrial wasteland.

On the street, Tatina shoved me into the back of Elena’s Prius.

I laughed. “Holy shit. We—we’re making a getaway in a—a Prius.”

“Stay with me, August!” Tatina said. “Baby, please! Honey? Honey, stay with me! Aaau . . .

“. . . gust . . .

“. . . staaaay . . .

“. . . with . . .

“. . . meeeee . . .”

And then the lights went out.

25

25

Marine First Sergeant Michael “Doc” Thornhill took two Taliban bullets: one ripped through his intestines; the other ricocheted off the top left side of his skull, leaving a small portion of his brain exposed.

Nobody thought he was going to make it.

His first words upon awakening after surgery were: “I saw Him. I saw God.” After that he wept.

My spotter, Corporal Maximillian “Maxie” Avadenka, took IED shrapnel that tore through his right lung. A shard measuring one-sixteenth of an inch by one-eighth of an inch stopped two centimeters from his beating heart.

Nobody thought he was going to make it.

When I called him two weeks later at the hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, he said, “I didn’t see God or Abraham, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Shiva or the human maker. Sorry to be the one to tell you, altar boy, but after you check out there’s just a whole lotta nothin’.”

Then there was that cold winter’s evening I died in Detroit.

No left or right, up or down, east or west.

Just . . .

. . . the sensation of simultaneously expanding and contracting. Falling through invisible arteries where liquid electricity vibrates, spins and flows.

And silence.

The silence of long-past millennia, unheeding and crushing in its loneliness. Then, a whisper to whatever was left of me: “Goodbye . . .”

I am subatomic singularities, superheated and no longer in need of forgiveness in the shell of Homo sapiens sapiens.

A pinprick of light growing in the indeterminate distance.

The birth of a scent . . . a river or waterfall . . .

“What the hell you doin’ here?”

In my formless, unbound state, I say, “Dad?”

I turn.

See him.

His form is that of a greyish-blue stingray shimmering with bioluminescent light; tendrils float from his belly, and at the tip of his sinuous tail is a pulsing blue spike. Still, he is without question my father.

There’s another.

“Octavio?” my mother says. “Does this mean—”

“Of course that’s what it means, woman,” my father says impatiently.