My eyes burned as if open in salt water. I felt the same tugging in my chest, the same longing that had pulled me down the road. But now I had no hope the yearning could ever be satisfied. I’d lived as a disconnected soul, and I would die as one. I would never enter Charis—how could I? The City of Light was nothing but a cruel joke—a comfort to the ignorant, an insult to the informed.

My body dropped like a sack of grain on rocky ground. My right temple throbbed, even more when I slapped flies from it without thinking. I sought the solace of sleep—a consolation those in the abyss would never know.

Then, my head poised over the side of the chasm, I heard again the desperate voices of the damned, of those who had abandoned hope. Suddenly I heard another cry, much closer and louder, a hideous piercing shriek erupting as if from a wounded animal.

I turned and looked to see where the howl had come from, clutching my raw throat in terror. No one else was there.

In a moment of horror I realized the scream had been my own.

9

WHERE HAD THIS CHASM come from? Had it been carved out in antiquity by erosion from rushing water? There was certainly no sign of water now. Nothing living, nothing growing. No sooner did I think this than I saw at my feet a single desert flower, bright yellow with seven petals, in full bloom. I shaded the miracle with my hands.

I walked away from the lone flower, and as I did, hopelessness resumed its gnawing at my bones. Where could I go? I looked back to the east. I could return to the mountain. But then what? Should I go all the way back to Babel? Should I try another of the dead-end roads? Every path promised the same destination. I’d sampled enough of the roads here in Thuros and back on Earth to believe none of them would take me where I wanted to go. Where I wanted to go was the other direction, beyond the chasm—to Charis, the place for which I was made, for which I hungered more than I’d ever hungered for anything.

No! I corrected myself. Charis wasn’t real—and even if it was, it was a place of relentless demands, of duty without joy, of endless drudgery. Even Erebus was preferable to that.

I felt the battle rage within me, as one moment I believed Charis was the place for which I longed and in the next countered with a dozen reasons why that notion was foolish.

“Nick!” someone shouted. I turned and saw Quon!