Erich’s office looked the same as the last time Amos had been in it – the same wall screen showing the same ocean view, the rubber ball instead of a chair, the desk encrusted with decks and monitors. Even Erich didn’t look different. Maybe better dressed, even. It was the context that changed it all. The screen showed an ocean of gray and white, and Erich’s clothes looked like a costume.

Butch and the four other heavily armed thugs with professional trigger discipline who’d escorted them from the elevator walked out, closing the door behind them. Erich waited until they’d gone before he spoke, but the tiny fist of his bad arm was opening and closing the way it did when he was nervous.

“Well. Amos. You’re looking more alive than I’d expected.”

“Not looking too dead yourself.”

“As I recall the way we left it, you weren’t ever coming back to my city. Open season, I called it.”

“Wait a second,” Peaches said. “He said if you came back here, he’d kill you?”

“Nah,” Amos said. “He broadly implied that one of his employees would kill me.”

Peaches hoisted an eyebrow. “Yeah, because that’s different.”

“If this is about the old man, I haven’t checked to see if he made it or not. Deal was he kept the house, and I did that. More than that, and I’ve got other problems.”

“And I got no trouble to cause,” Amos said. “I figured things had changed enough maybe the old rules weren’t a great fit for the new situation.”

Erich walked over to the wall screen, limping. A few seagulls circled, black against the colorless sky. From the last time he’d been there, Amos knew the buildings that should have provided a foreground. Most of them were still in place close in. Out toward the shoreline, things were shorter now.

“I was right here when it happened,” Erich said. “It wasn’t a wave like a wave, you know? Like a surfer wave? It was just the whole fucking ocean humping up and crawling onto shore. There’s whole neighborhoods I used to run just aren’t there now.”

“I didn’t see anything happen,” Amos said. “The newsfeeds and the mess after were bad enough.”

“Where were you?”

“Bethlehem,” Peaches said.

Erich turned back to them. There was no anger in his face, or fear, or even wariness. That was good. “So you’re headed south, then? How bad is it up there?”

“Not that Bethlehem,” Amos said. “The one in the Carolina admin district.”

“Where the Pit is,” Peaches said, raising her hand like a kid in a classroom. Then a second later, “Was.”

Erich blinked and leaned against his desk. “Where the third strike hit?”

“Close to there, yeah,” Amos said. “Lost that tequila you gave me with the hotel, so that sucked.”

“All right. How are you still alive?”